Be-tween the Walls of Past
and Future – The Wille zur Macht in History
and Time
That history is Nietzsche’s main
and most forceful source of material, the “ground” from which nearly all of his
philosophy originates both factually (as Ent-stehung) and thematically (as Her-kunft)
is evinced not just by his philological formation or by his earliest major
study, The Birth of Tragedy, but
above all by the next series of “meditations” in which he provides the first
sketch (Entwurf) of what will be his entire philosophy and in which he proclaims
so early his “divorce” or “breakaway” from the idols of his youth – Wagner and
Schopenhauer. The Unzeitgemasse
Betrachtungen are “un-timely” in a sense very far from that of being
“ana-chronistic” (or “dys-synchronic”, as Deleuze and Agamben [‘What Is An Apparatus?’] construe them,
going even so far as to opine a certain “dis-jointedness” in Nietzsche!), of
being “in-appropriate” (un-gemasse) for their “time” (Zeit). If the
“un-time-liness” of the Meditations
could be con-fined to their being “non-contemporary” or “un-fashionable” (Deleuze
and Agamben again – but they represent an almost ecumenical and platitudinous misinterpretation),
then we would truly deliver Nietzsche to the rank and file of superficial
philosophers (which philosophy is not “untimely”?).
Rather, the meditations are
“un-timely” in a much more meta-physical
sense – because they point to a revolutionary new intuition of time, a new way of understanding “time”. Hand in hand
with the realization of the “eristic” a-spect of all life, which we have
described already, Nietzsche tackles the problem of how it is possible for us to be “conscious” of the
“value-lessness” of life and the world, of how it is “possible” to understand
values – not just “moral”, but also “scientific” - in an “extra-moral” and in a
“trans-valuational” sense.
The Untimely Meditations deal not just or merely with the “confutation”
or rejection of the enlightened optimism implicit in Hegel’s rationalist
trans-figuration of Kant’s “formal logic” (where A equals A, and therefore the
two sides of the equation “annihilate” each other, end up as tautology) into
his “concrete dialectical logic” of the Aufhebung
(supersession), of Being-as-Becoming. They do not merely confute the Kantian and
Schopenhauerian notion of the Freiheit,
the intelligible freedom of the Will. The Meditations
go much, much further than that! They completely revolutionise and invert our
understanding of time itself! Only such an “inversion” (similar to the Verkehrung [reversal] performed by
Schopenhauer on Kant’s metaphysics) can allow us to reach a “viewpoint”, an
“a-spect”, a “per-spective” from which it will be possible to com-prehend life
and the world coherently, “connectedly”. Nietzsche needs an “ontological” standpoint
from which to be able “to view” and com-prehend the historical or “ontic”
status of life and the world as he inter-prets them. Not that he ever pretended
that any theoria could “en-compass”
or en-capsulate” life and the world; but Nietzsche needed an ontological
foundation upon which to justify coherently their “ontic”, intra-temporal and intra-mundane interpretation. He was far too brilliant and coherent a
thinker – despite the apparent disjointedness of his aphoristic style – “to
think disconnectedly”, to leave theory and practice to their separate destinies.
The Meditations are “un-zeit-gemasse” because they “stand outside” our
conventional notion of time: they are “extra-temporal” and “extra-mundane”
because they are the Entwurf
(pro-ject, not “system”!) against which intra-temporal and intra-mundane events
can be com-prehended. Just as Nietzsche’s critique of morality is “extra-moral”
in that it com-prehends the “strategic” ontic status of moral “values”, so his Meditations are “extra-temporal” in the
sense of “un-zeit-gemasse” in that they are not “measurable” (ge-masse, Mass,
measure) by the conventional understanding or “metre” or “unit” of “time”. The
tremendous change of perspective of time that this involves deserves close
attention. Nietzsche seeks to e-nucleate it in what is doubtless one of the
most beautifully enthralling passages in the entire Nietzschean oeuvre. Such is
the disproportionate importance of this fragment of the Meditations for understanding Nietzsche’s philosophy - a passage
more akin to poetry than to prose - that we propose to parse it carefully, “verse
by verse”. (Heidegger will adopt this “a-spect” [Bild] ostensibly to
re-interpret Kant’s epistemology, but in reality to hide the Nietzschean
derivation of his phenomenology – only to avow it nearly ten years after the
publication of Sein und Zeit and of
the Kantbuch with his monumental work
on Nietzsche. For a detailed
discussion of the distinction of intra-temporal and intra-mundane as against
extra-temporal and extra-mundane see our study on ‘Heidegger’s Kantbuch’.)
The reason why it is even
“possible” for us to conceive that there are no “values” in history is that we
have the ability to con-ceive of a “viewpoint” from which we can per-ceive
history as “that which is” (Greek, to on, being) – a history resembling the
a-methodon hyle (form-less matter) of
Greek historiography. Such a perception or perspective of time involves a
“mimesis” (Italian “im-medesimare” – to be at
one, to be as one, to identify
with, to em-body), an “em-bodi-ment”
into life and the world such that “time” is intuited as the hic et nunc – the “now” that is separate
from the moment that has just elapsed and the moment that is just to come.
Consider the herds that are feeding
yonder : they know not the meaning of yesterday or to-day; they graze and
ruminate, move or rest, from morning to night, from day to day, taken up with
their little loves and hates, at the mercy of the moment, feeling neither
melancholy nor satiety.
Man cannot see them without regret, for
even in the pride of his humanity he looks enviously on the beast's happiness.
He wishes simply to live without satiety or pain, like the beast; yet it is all
in vain, for he will not change places with it. He may ask the beast —
"Why do you look at me and not speak to me of your happiness?" The
beast wants to answer — "Because I always forget what I wished to
say": but he forgets this answer too, and is silent; and the man is left
to wonder.
Astounding is the similarity found
here between Nietzsche’s opening lines to the “Historie fur das Leben” in the Meditations (“Betrachte die Heerde, die
an dir voruberweidet; sie weiss nicht was Gestern, was Heute ist…”) and
Cicero’s depiction (one of the rarest in Antiquity) of the “progress” of humanity
from the time when “in agris homines
bestiarum more vagabantur” (“men roamed in the fields like beasts”, De Inventione, I, 2). Contrarily to Cicero , Nietzsche
decries, as he will do in all his future writings, the loss of “happiness”
(Gluck) that the development of memory occasions in the human psyche. The dawn of
“consciousness” in humans and of “the memory of the will”, the forced
abandonment of “forgetfulness” implies the loss for humans of the ability “to
id-entify”, to be “at one” - “the same entity”, as it were [Latin ens, being] - with the world. Just like
our primordial “forgetfulness”, the “a-historical sense” of the Greeks made
“action” possible and a-voided paralysis or the vis inertiae by making human action “spontaneous”, un-reflective, unencumbered and unalloyed
by the burden of memory or the “distance” that consciousness and reflection
inevitably introduce between thought and action. Above all, there is a loss of “innocence”
(Unschuldigkeit [cf. also ‘Der Unschuldig des Wesens’ section of the Nachlass]) that this loss brings about,
together with the parallel rise of “responsibility” (Verantwortlichkeit,
answerability) and “conscience” (Gewissen, resolve) and their “negative”
correlates, “guilt” and “bad conscience”.
Yet this is not to be read in the
sense of a “deterioration” of the type a
perfectione ad defectum that often surfaces in ancient historiography. In
essence, the Eternal Return, opposed to what Nietzsche believed was the
Christian “linear” concept of time, was meant to recuperate this bucolic state
of Unschuldigkeit (the absence of
blame, fault or flaw, in-nocuity rather than ‘innocence’, as the Nietzschean
word is too often wrongly translated) – the mental state of the Ubermensch. What Nietzsche calls “the
historical sense [Geist]” is not the ability to draw “lessons” from history,
the ability to dis-cover a concealed “purpose” in it, either an accidental
“agreement” or “harmony” (homo-noia) or a divine design or a telos (pro-noia),
that attributes its “development” [Entwicklung] to a conscious human
“intention” or “pro-ject”, to a “merit” or “virtue” to which can be op-posed an
accidental “fortune” as in classical historiography. To do this would be to
fall from one error - the reductionist hypostasis of “utility” operated by the empiricist
“English psychologists” -, into another error of opposite sign: - the reading
back into history (understood as the journal of events, the log-book of res gestae, of “happenings” or
Geschehen) of a “sense” or “purpose”, of a “Providence” [pro-noia] or
“meaning”; - it would be to fall into the trap of “Historicismus”.
We discussed already the idea of
“decadence” in Nietzsche as a “corruption”, a Dis-gregation of the “instinct of freedom” – which “instinct” is
“tra-duced” and “mortified” (“le mort saisit le vif” seems the theme of the
“debt” that communities “owe” to their “ancestors” [see below]) and “weakened”
or rendered “power-less” (ohnmachtig) by
the “interiorisation” (Verinnerlichung) operated by communal living and the
erection of a “State”, the Ver-geistigung
– which “interiorisation” or “spiritualization” con-cludes ultimately in the Ent-seelung of “consciousness” and
“memory”, then “bad conscience” (schlechte Gewissen) and the ascetic ideal –
into Nihilism. But again, this parallel
Ent-wicklung (e-volution,
meta-morphosis) is the “onto-geny of thought” that mani-fests the Will to Power as “the rationalization of the world”.
Far from pining for a lost paradise, a tarnished “innocence”, Nietzsche is
warning against the “voluntarism” that such “sentimental illusions” infuse,
this diseased notion of “freedom of the will”, this faith in “the Subject”
which is itself “a sign, a symbol”, indeed a “symptom of decadence”, of a fall
from grace, of a “slavish destiny”.
He wonders also about himself, that he
cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he run, that
chain runs with him. It is
THE
USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY.
matter for wonder : the moment, that
is here and gone, that was nothing before and nothing after, returns like a
spectre to trouble the quiet of a later moment. A leaf is continually dropping
out of the volume of time and fluttering away—and suddenly it flutters back
into the man's lap. Then he says, "I remember . . . ," and
envies the beast that forgets at once, and sees every moment really die, sink
into night and mist, extinguished for ever.
The memory of the will inhibits
forgetfulness and saddles man with the burden of the past even as he would wish
to live in the moment, like the herd.
This “conscious-ness” of the passing of time, this memory, that situ-ates and loc-ates (Ort [locus], not
Raum [space]) our intuition of time also pre-vents our mimesis with nature, the
burying or “sinking” of our be-ing “into night and mist, [where it is]
extinguished for ever”. We cannot learn
to forget; we cannot un-learn memory.
But we still re-tain the “in-tuition” of time – “the moment, that is here and gone, that was no-thing before and
no-thing after”. Time therefore is not the
succession of moments as if they were things: time is “the” moment, the “now” in
which “everything [not “every thing”] happens” – the e-vent or happening (Geschehe). In each moment, in this “intuition”, is
encapsulated the “mimesis” of life and the world, the co-incidence of being and
time – time as the “horizon”, the finest line of being, the “boundary” that
con-tains all being. But this be-ing thus de-fined is a dimension that cannot
be mistaken for a “sequence” or a “succession” of moments, of “nows” – and
therefore in this “instantaneous be-ing”, in this Da-sein (being there), in
this ec-sistence everything, every
event and happening, can re-cur
because there is no “sense”, no meaning in a teleological sense and no
direction (Richtung), no uni-verse to
this “time”, to this be-ing.
It is Christianity that for
Nietzsche uses the Parousia (the coming of Christ) to give a linear “sense” and “direction” to
historical time – as in Augustine’s denunciation of the revolutio saeculorum [the pagan notion of eternity and the one of
the Eternal Return dating from Antiquity] in Book XII of De Civitate Dei. And it is this “linearity” that allows the
“spatial” and “cumulative” intuition of time as “duration”, as chronos rather than aion (Greek for aeon; Latin aevum, era) that Nietzsche confronts. Nietzsche
eschews and refutes this “spatial” interpretation of time through which
Newtonian science “measures” time in “units”. For “normal science”, for
instance, two seconds equal two identical “inter-vals” of time called
“seconds”. Yet it is precisely this “inter-val” that cannot be measured! The
“distance” be-tween two “in-stants” in time is impossible to measure because time itself is
“im-measurable”; it is in a “dimension” or locus
(Ort) wholly distinct and dif-ferent from any notion of “measure” or indeed
even “duration”. In this re-spect, Nietzsche’s vision of being and time differs
significantly and dramatically from the related visions of Kant, Schopenhauer
and Bergson. (Again, we refer to our study ‘Verkehrung:
Schopenhauer’s Reversal of Kant’s Metaphysics’.) For these three, despite their
distinction between physical time and the “intuition” of time (or “duree” for
Bergson), time still ec-sists in a Newtonian and Kantian “physical” or
“spatial” dimension so that “the Body”, as “the objectification of the Will”
and its “operari” are sub-jected to
physical time like everything else in the “physical world” that is “re-presented”
(recall Kant’s phenomena [appearances] and Schopenhauer’s Vorstellungen
[representations]) to the Will. As a “meta-physical” entity, Schopenhauer’s
Will is “the thing in itself” and lies wholly “out-side” the boundary or
horizon of the physical world, of space and time as perceived by human
intuition! (The same is valid for Bergson [Evolution
Creatrice] who takes up entirely Schopenhauer’s approach and ignores
Nietzsche’s contemporary critique.)
But for Nietzsche, instead (and in
this he entirely anticipates Heidegger’s phenomenology) both time and space
dif-fer “categorically” (toto caelo,
he would say, borrowing a Schopenhauerian phrase) from their “scientific” or
“physical” re-presentations (Vor-stellungen),
which are “ontic” and sub-ordinate to a con-ception of life and the world that
wholly e-lides the notion of be-ing as “coming-into-be-ing”, as “be-coming”, as active “dynamis” (Greek for “to be able”, power)
rather than as a “static” essence, as
quid-ditas, as “supreme being” or as
a “chain of causality” ending in a causa
causans, into an Aristotelian Demi-urgos or a “thing in itself”, a qualitas occulta. Nietzsche’s conception of the Eternal Return, of the amor fati, is all here: it is what
allows him to interpret human history and institutions not “sub specie aeternitatis” but certainly
in a “physical” or “physiological” sense, “like a number that leaves no curious
remainder” - where the Greek physis
prevails over nomos, spontaneity over
reflection, action over contemplation, metabolism over stasis, growth over
stagnation and paralysis, Being-as-Becoming (Wesen als Werden) over Nothingness.
Nietzsche reaches his most lyrical
heights as he surveys with nostalgic languor the intransitable mimesis of
philosophy and nature:
The beast lives unhistorically; for it
"goes into" the present, like a number, without leaving any curious remainder.
It cannot dissimulate, it conceals nothing; at every moment it seems what it
actually is, and thus can be nothing that is not honest. But man is always
resisting the great and continually increasing weight of the past; it presses him
down, and bows his shoulders ; he travels with a dark invisible burden that he
can plausibly disown, and is only too glad to disown in converse with his
fellows—in order to excite their envy.
If one considers Nietzsche’s point
that, for instance, the master and slave moralities can “co-exist” in a society
and even in the same individual (!), that certainly does not mean that a
“communion of wills” is possible (cf. his angry tirade against David Strauss
[par7 of homonymous Meditation] on
this very topic and his rejection of Schopenhauer’s Mit-leid and con-scientia!).
Nor does it mean that these moralities can be dis-embodied and exist as “forces”, active and reactive,
independently of their “physiological”, “material”, “historical” carriers (Trager)! (Such is the
absurdity into which the “humanistic” and “bio-political” interpreters of
Nietzsche’s Entwurf, from Fink to Deleuze, ignominiously fall [!], though
Heidegger warns against just such error [v. Nietzsche,
I, ch.7].) It means rather that no “progress”
and therefore no “liberation” is
possible in human history from the manifestation of the Will to Power because
our “perspective” is necessarily “intra-temporal” and therefore “life” can be
“com-prehended” only and absolutely from the individual intuition of time –
through time as the horizon of being - through the affirmation of the Eternal
Return. Be-tween “the first thing” (Genesis, birth) and “the last thing”
(Eschaton, death) (the heading of the first section of ‘Human, All Too
Human’) is the time and place that the Will to Power in-habits in life and the world. Yet there is no “distance”
be-tween these two “places”; their dif-ference must not be perceived as a
“space” (Raum) even though Nietzsche refers meta-phorically to “a happy
blindness between the walls of the past and the future”. For the now is rather a breadthless line, a
dimension (Ort). “ The now, the moment”, the hic et nunc, is not a “point” – it
is an entirely “dif-ferent” dimension from “the sequence of now-moments”
(Heidegger in Kantbuch) – not a space
(Raum) but a place (Ort), a locus, a
“horizon”; the horizon of ec-sistence (Da-sein) that reveals the be-ing of
beings, or better “merely a continual
‘has been’, a thing that lives by denying and destroying and contradicting
itself”.
There is no “authenticity”
for Nietzsche. Knowledge can only be “critical”, it can be only a matter of
correctly interpreting and then utilizing the signs and symptoms of health and,
above all, of disease, even as we are be-aware of the “need-necessity” of what
ec-sists! Outside of or in the absence of such knowledge, all being is
“authentic” because it is the “state-of-being” intra-temporally –
being-in-the-now, that is, be-tween
the now-past and the now-future, Her-kunft and An-kunft, as in the Exordium of
“Use and Abuse of History” in ‘UB’: the
moment, that is here and gone, that was nothing before and nothing after.
Here
it is the “intuition of time”, be-tween memory (a-letheia) and
forgetfulness (lethe) that fixes the “horizon” of Being, like the Wanderer
between the city walls and the desert wilderness, or the “innocence of the
children”, and the Eternal Return.
And so it hurts him, like the thought
of a lost Paradise, to see a herd grazing, or, nearer still, a child, that has
nothing yet of the past to disown, and plays in a happy blindness between the
walls of the past and the future.
Deshalb
ergreift es ihn, als ob er eines verlorenen Paradieses gedächte, die weidende
Heerde oder, in vertrauterer Nähe, das Kind zu sehen, das noch nichts
Vergangenes zu verläugnen hat und zwischen den Zäunen der Vergangenheit und der
Zukunft in überseliger Blindheit spielt.
And yet its play must be disturbed, and
only too soon will it be summoned from its little kingdom of oblivion.
Then it learns to understand the words
"once upon a time," the "open sesame" that lets in battle,
suffering and weariness on mankind, and reminds them what their existence really is, an imperfect tense that never
becomes a present. And when
death brings at last the desired forget-
THOUGHTS
OUT OF SEASON.
fulness, it abolishes life and being
together, and sets the seal on the knowledge that "being" is merely a
continual "has been," a thing that lives by denying and destroying
and contradicting itself.
Und
doch muss ihm sein Spiel gestört werden: nur zu zeitig wird es aus der
Vergessenheit heraufgerufen. Dann lernt es das Wort „es war“ zu verstehen,
jenes Losungswort, mit dem Kampf, Leiden und Ueberdruss an den Menschen
herankommen, ihn zu erinnern, was sein Dasein im Grunde ist — ein nie zu vollendendes
Imperfectum. Bringt endlich der Tod das ersehnte Vergessen, so unterschlägt er
doch zugleich dabei die Gegenwart und das Dasein und drückt damit das Siegel
auf jene Erkenntniss, dass Dasein nur ein ununterbrochenes Gewesensein ist, ein
Ding, das davon lebt, sich selbst zu verneinen und zu verzehren, sich selbst zu
widersprechen.
The child is “nearer still” to
time because, like the adult, it will learn to remember – and yet, like the
herd, like other animals, it is “nearer still” to their mimetic status with
life and the world in that the child has very few memories and does not need
“to unlearn remembering” - “has nothing
yet of the past to disown”. The child “plays
in a happy blindness between the walls of the past and the future”. These
“walls” are very narrow indeed because “being
is merely a continual ‘has been’” because our “existence really is, an imperfect tense that never becomes a present”.
The pre-sent is so fleeting, the
instant now so transitory that it
cannot be described as “being” but only as “has been”.
A million times wrong, therefore, is the expression “Time is a device
to stop everything from happening at once” – because “everything” in time does happen at once! Everything happens now! What stops everything from
happening at once are memory and forgetfulness. Without forgetfulness, life
and action would not be possible; without the memory of the will, history would
not be possible. Children understand best the notion of history as an “Eternal
Return” because they have no mnemonic historical re-cord (Latin, re.cor.dor,
from cor, heart; literally, learning
by heart, re-membering) that can in-duce them to con-fuse the past with a
causal chain and sequence of events. (Similarly, Augustine in De Civitate Dei, will conceive of God’s
perception of time from the outside, extra-temporally, [“ante omnia tempora
tu est”, Bk.XIII] much like the way one recites a poem “recorded”, learnt by
heart, and that therefore can be “re-called” at will in each word or in its
entirety.) That is precisely the reason why children understand far better than
adults the meaning of “once upon a time”:- because in fables “time” is just as
much “past” as it is “future” – that is the meaning of “enchantment”. There is
no “space” (Raum) be-tween historical events, and certainly no causal sequence or chain con-necting them.
History is a locus or a topos (Ort, a place) that belongs to
memory. The real “place” of time is now,
the moment be-tween the walls of past
and present occupied by the oblivious play of children. And when this “play is disturbed… the little kingdom of
oblivion” comes to an end.
If
happiness and the chase for new happiness keep alive in any sense the will to
live, no philosophy has perhaps more truth than the cynic's : for the beast's
happiness, like that of the perfect cynic, is the visible proof of the truth of
cynicism. The smallest pleasure, if it be only continuous and make one happy,
is incomparably a greater happiness than the more intense pleasure that comes
as an episode, a wild freak, a mad interval between ennui, desire, and
privation.
But
in the smallest and greatest happiness there is always one thing that makes it happiness: the power of forgetting, or,
in more learned phrase, the capacity of feeling "unhistorically"
throughout its duration. 'One who cannot leave himself behind on the threshold
of the moment and forget the past, who cannot stand on a single point, like a
goddess of victory, without fear or giddiness, will never know what happiness
is; and, worse still, will never do anything to make others happy.
False, then, are all those
“values”, all those “eudaemonian” delusions that equate truth, virtue and happiness. This “summum bonum”, this “ideal
equation” or con-comitance of the three cannot be found in this life and world
– because the three simply do not co-incide therein, because the very
“contingency” and trans-ience
(passing through) of life and the world negates and nullifies them. Once more
Nietzsche reminds us of his peculiar notion of “history”, which is not a sequence
of conscious and “purposeful” human activity (Vico’s ‘verum ipsum factum’, and least of all Dilthey’s social-scientific research) to which a
“finality” (Ziel) or “sense” (Sinn) or “direction” (Richtung) may be attributed
(pro-noia, pro-videntia), or in which a “con-ciliation”, an agreement, a
“harmony” (homo-noia) can be found or reached. The two “histories” (the double
meaning of the Greek word istorein as
“account” or res gestae and as
“narrative”, historia rerum gestarum)
run parallel but discrete lines of “development or evolution” (Entwicklung) –
not a progressus, but a istoria (an in-quiry, in-quest) of
struggle, synchronic and diachronic at once. The historical record cannot be
“re-searched” with “scientific tools” – it is not an empeiria, a methodical search, but rather an autopsia, an in-quest into a com-pleted happening or action (Latin,
gestum, from Greek bastaso, carry). Better still, history
is a dia-gnosis, an examination
(Italian dis-anima, out-souling) of a
“body of e-vidence” that allows us “to recognize” (see our later discussion of
the relationship between “becoming” and science as “recognition”,
“familiarity”) a human condition or disease, not in an “aetio-logical” sense
(as a tracing of a “causal chain” of e-vents), but rather as a “patho-logy”
(pathos, suffering), in the same way as a disease, a virus is in the historical record but can lie “dormant”
and be “inactive”, and therefore “out of time” for very long periods. From the
dia-gnosis of disease, it is possible to locate and identify the disease itself,
not to discover its “causes” (aetiology) but rather to venture a “pro-gnosis”,
a prognostication as to its future course or even to indicate (anzeichen, sign) a remedy, a cure against its
“symptoms”, the “decadence” of the body.
For Nietzsche, “history” is the
process of tracing out the “deep origins” or “derivation” or “provenance” [Herkunft]
of human “affects” (Affekte, emotions, feelings – see Heidegger’s discussion in
Nietzsche, Vol.1, for his
interpretation of “Wille zur Macht”) back to the “physio-logical” instincts whose real origins [Entstehung,
sprouting] are as inscrutable and in-com-prehensible (un-graspable), in short,
“un-historical” as “life” itself. What Nietzsche means by “history” therefore
is the “un-earthing” of these “fossilized” elemental forces, of a “nature”, a
“physis”, whose “manifestations” or “happenings” [Geschehen] are “embedded” in
and “ex-hibited” by the present conduct and behaviour of human beings, down to
their beliefs, morality and institutions. Not a “history” in the scientific
sense then – a de-finite subject-matter made up of “facts” (pragmata) that can be “researched” using
specific “tools and methods”- is Nietzsche’s Entwurf; but rather an “archaeology of origins”, an “anthropology”
(in ‘WM’ he will compare it to “astrology”; cf. Husserl’s lamenting Heidegger’s
deviation from phenomenology to “philosophical anthropology”). His is above all
a “Genealogie” – a “genetic research” into morals, remembering the “origin”
(Her-kunft) of the word from “gaya” (earth) to “genesis” (birth) to the ancient
dynastic and aristocratic “ghens” or “gens” (English “roots”; the Italian word for
ancestry, “stirpe” [cf. Latin, ex-stirpate, up-root] is also faithful to these
“genealogical roots”). All this is
what makes “the Eternal Return” and the Amor Fati both possible and
com-prehensible – not in a cosmic sense
(the repetition of the exact-same events, palin-genesis)
or in a historical sense (the
recurrence of cycles or ana-kyklosis),
but in an extra-temporal sense.
There is a certain hypostatization
of “instincts” here. But Nietzsche is aiming “to hammer down” those “idols” he
denounced – a task he announced early in the ‘HL’ essay of the “UB” when he
sought to expose Cartesian transcendence and replace it with “immanence”
(“cogito ergo sum” he turned into “vivo ergo cogito”). Indeed, the entire aim
of Nietzsche’s work was to fulfil this task whereby “theory” and “practice”
co-incide in a “history” (Geschichte) that is a “fate and destiny” (Geschick)
and yet is simultaneously “decipherable” or interpretable from its “signs” or
“indications” (Zeichen and Anzeichen) – its Semeiotik - and “symptomatology”
(Symptomatologie). Just like the Etruscan haruspices
who could divine the future from inspecting the entrails of animals, Nietzsche
aims at a “physio-logy”, a Schematismus (Entwurf) or “classi-fication”, a
taxonomy (Her-kunft, pro-venance) of its historical origins (Ent-stehung or
“coming out” in the sense of “sprout” or “physical source ”, fons et origo).
Again, the nexus with Cicero and his treatise De Divinatione with its examination of signs and auguries, of
Chaldeian astrologers and Etruscan haruspices
is hard to overlook.
Nietzsche associates Herkunft with “derivation”
or provenance, and Entstehung (prefixed to Geschichte) with historical and
physical genesis. The Entstehung/Herkunft distinction is reprised in
Schumpeter’s Statik/Dynamik dichotomy in economic theory – the first tracing
the “physiology” or “morphology” and the second the “evolution” [Entwicklung]
of the economy. This perspective on history and historical perspective allows
Nietzsche to combine “critically” (like Hegel and Marx or Schumpeter) the
philosophy of history with the history of philosophy – histoire raisonnee with raisonnement
historique.
There is also a devastating if
implicit critique of Schopenhauer’s Entsagung
(ascetic renunciation). Schopenhauer had made the error of “thinking
historically”, of transforming the Will to Life into “a sleepless man” who is
incapable of happiness because he cannot for-get, because in his denial of life
and exclusive concentration on the “aim” of life, he bears the entire burden of
life and the world – the “sym-pathy”, the “con-scientia”, the “guilt” of living,
“the past to disown”.
The
extreme case would be the man without any power to forget, who is condemned to see "becoming"
everywhere. Such a man believes no more in himself or his own existence, he
sees everything fly past in an eternal succession, and loses himself in the
stream of becoming. At last, like the logical disciple of Heraclitus, he will
hardly dare to raise his finger. 'Forgetfulness is a property of all action;
just as not only light but darkness is bound up
THE
USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. P
with
the life of every organism.' One who wished to feel everything historically,
would be like a man forcing himself to refrain from sleep, or a beast who had
to live by chewing a continual cud.
Thus even a happy life is possible
without remembrance, as the beast shows: but life in any true sense is
absolutely impossible without forgetfulness. Or, to put my conclusion better,
there is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of "historical
sense," that injures and finally destroys the living thing, be it a man or
a people or a system of culture.
Happiness is accessible only to
those who can forget, who therefore can “select” from experience and knowledge
only those “bits” that are needed so that “action”, and “responsible action”
especially, may be possible! Schopenhauer’s Nirvana is in-action, it is in-ertia,
it is satis-faction, not in the
beatific sense but as a ful-filment that paralyses all “activity” because it is
“like a dyspeptic man who cannot forget and therefore assimilate experience”. Or
else Nirvana is complete forgetfulness that, whilst allowing for a “cynical”
happiness, does not admit of any “historical sense” or “action” or change. And
as Hellenic historiography reminds us, the lack of metabole (assimilation, change) leads invariably to stasis (paralysis, stagnation, civil
war) – to No-thingness. We shall turn next to Nietzsche’s “ontogeny of
thought”, that is, to his account and analysis of how consciousness can arise
from the instincts and develop into memory, then thinking, then into “resolve”
(Gewissen, usually if inaccurately translated as “conscience”) and finally
degenerate into “bad resolve” (schlechte Gewissen).
Consider
the herds that are feeding yonder : they know not the meaning of yesterday or
to-day; they graze and ruminate, move or rest, from morning to night, from day
to day, taken up with their little loves and hates, at the mercy of the moment,
feeling neither melancholy nor satiety.
Man
cannot see them without regret, for even in the pride of his humanity he looks
enviously on the beast's happiness. He wishes simply to live without satiety or
pain, like the beast ; yet it is all in vain, for he will not change places
with it. He may ask the beast — "Why do you look at me and not speak to me
of your happiness?" The beast wants to answer — "Because I always
forget what I wished to say": but he forgets this answer too, and is
silent; and the man is left to wonder.
He
wonders also about himself, that he cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the
past: however far or fast he run, that chain runs with him. It is
THE
USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY.
matter
for wonder : the moment, that is here and gone, that was nothing before and
nothing after, returns like a spectre to trouble the quiet of a later moment. A
leaf is continually dropping out of the volume of time and fluttering away—and
suddenly it flutters back into the man's lap. Then he says, "I remember . . . ," and envies the beast
that forgets at once, and sees every moment really die, sink into night and
mist, extinguished for ever.
The
beast lives unhistorically; for it "goes into" the present, like a
number, without leaving any curious remainder. It cannot dissimulate, it
conceals nothing; at every moment it seems what it actually is, and thus can be
nothing that is not honest. But man is always resisting the great and
continually increasing weight of the past; it presses him down, and bows his
shoulders ; he travels with a dark invisible burden that he can plausibly
disown, and is only too glad to disown in converse with his fellows—in order to
excite their envy.
And
so it hurts him, like the thought of a lost Paradise ,
to see a herd grazing, or, nearer still, a child, that has nothing yet of the
past to disown, and plays in a happy blindness between the walls of the past
and the future. And yet its play must be disturbed, and only too soon will it
be summoned from its little kingdom of oblivion. Then it learns to understand the words "once upon a time,"
the "open sesame" that lets in battle, suffering and weariness on
mankind, and reminds them what their existence really is, an imperfect tense
that never becomes a present. And when death brings at last the desired forget-
THOUGHTS
OUT OF SEASON.
fulness,
it abolishes life and being together, and sets the seal on the knowledge that
"being" is merely a continual "has been," a thing that
lives by denying and destroying and contradicting itself.
If
happiness and the chase for new happiness keep alive in any sense the will to
live, no philosophy has perhaps more truth than the cynic's : for the beast's
happiness, like that of the perfect cynic, is the visible proof of the truth of
cynicism. The smallest pleasure, if it be only continuous and make one happy,
is incomparably a greater happiness than the more intense pleasure that comes
as an episode, a wild freak, a mad interval between ennui, desire, and
privation.
But
in the smallest and greatest happiness there is always one thing that makes it happiness: the power of forgetting, or,
in more learned phrase, the capacity of feeling " unhistorically "
throughout its duration. 'One who cannot leave himself behind on the threshold
of the moment and forget the past, who cannot stand on a single point, like a
goddess of victory, without fear or giddiness, will never know what happiness
is; and, worse still, will never do anything to make others happy.
The
extreme case would be the man without any power to forget, who is condemned to see "becoming"
everywhere. Such a man believes no more in himself or his own existence, he
sees everything fly past in an eternal succession, and loses himself in the
stream of becoming. At last, like the logical disciple of Heraclitus, he will
hardly dare to raise his finger. 'Forgetfulness is a property of all action;
just as not only light but darkness is bound up
THE
USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. P
with
the life of every organism.' One who wished to feel everything historically,
would be like a man forcing himself to refrain from sleep, or a beast who had
to live by chewing a continual cud.
Thus
even a happy life is possible without remembrance, as the beast shows: but life
in any true sense is absolutely impossible without forgetfulness. Or, to put my
conclusion better, there is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of
"historical sense," that injures and finally destroys the living
thing, be it a man or a people or a system of culture.
1. Betrachte
die Heerde, die an dir vorüberweidet: sie weiss nicht was Gestern, was Heute
ist, springt umher, frisst, ruht, verdaut, springt wieder, und so vom Morgen
bis zur Nacht und von Tage zu Tage, kurz angebunden mit ihrer Lust und Unlust, nämlich
an den Pflock des Augenblickes und deshalb weder schwermüthig noch überdrüssig.
Dies zu sehen geht dem Menschen hart ein, weil er seines Menschenthums sich vor
dem Thiere brüstet und doch nach seinem Glücke eifersüchtig hinblickt — denn
das will er allein, gleich dem Thiere weder überdrüssig noch unter Schmerzen leben,
und will es doch vergebens, weil er es nicht will wie das Thier. Der Mensch
fragt wohl einmal das Thier: warum redest du mir nicht von deinem Glücke und
siehst mich
nur an? Das Their will auch antworten und sagen, das kommt daher dass ich immer
gleich vergesse, was ich sagen wollte — da vergass es aber auch schon diese
Antwort und schwieg: so dass der Mensch sich darob verwunderte.
Er
wundert sich aber auch über sich selbst, das Vergessen nicht lernen zu können
und immerfort am Vergangenen zu hängen: mag er noch so weit, noch so schnell
laufen, die Kette läuft mit. Es ist ein Wunder: der Augenblick, im Husch da, im
Husch vorüber, vorher ein Nichts, nachher ein Nichts, kommt doch noch als Gespenst
wieder und stört die Ruhe eines späteren Augenblicks. Fortwährend löst sich ein
Blatt aus der Rolle der Zeit, fällt heraus, flattert fort — und flattert
plötzlich wieder zurück, dem Menschen in den Schooss. Dann sagt der Mensch „ich
erinnere mich “
und beneidet das Thier, welches sofort vergisst und jeden Augenblick wirklich
sterben, in Nebel und Nacht zurücksinken und auf immer erlöschen sieht. So lebt das Thier unhistorisch: denn es geht
auf in der Gegenwart, wie eine Zahl, ohne dass ein wunderlicher Bruch übrig
bleibt, es weiss sich nicht zu verstellen, verbirgt nichts und erscheint in
jedem Momente ganz und gar als das was es ist, kann also gar nicht anders sein
als ehrlich. Der Mensch hingegen stemmt sich gegen die grosse und immer
grössere Last des Vergangenen: diese drückt ihn nieder oder beugt ihn
seitwärts, diese beschwert seinen Gang als eine unsichtbare und dunkle Bürde,
welche er zum Scheine einmal verläugnen kann, und welche er im Umgange mit
seines Gleichen gar zu gern verläugnet: um ihren Neid zu wecken. Deshalb
ergreift es ihn, als ob er eines verlorenen Paradieses gedächte, die weidende
Heerde oder, in vertrauterer Nähe, das Kind zu sehen, das noch nichts
Vergangenes zu verläugnen hat und zwischen den Zäunen der Vergangenheit und der
Zukunft in überseliger Blindheit spielt. Und doch muss ihm sein Spiel gestört
werden: nur zu zeitig wird es aus der Vergessenheit heraufgerufen. Dann lernt
es das Wort „es war“ zu verstehen, jenes Losungswort, mit dem Kampf, Leiden und
Ueberdruss an den Menschen herankommen, ihn zu erinnern, was sein Dasein im
Grunde ist — ein nie zu vollendendes Imperfectum. Bringt endlich der Tod das
ersehnte Vergessen, so unterschlägt er doch zugleich dabei die Gegenwart und das
Dasein und drückt damit das Siegel auf jene Erkenntniss, dass Dasein nur ein ununterbrochenes
Gewesensein ist, ein Ding, das davon lebt, sich selbst zu verneinen und zu
verzehren, sich selbst zu widersprechen. Wenn ein Glück, wenn ein Haschen nach
neuem Glück in irgend einem Sinne das ist, was den Lebenden im Leben festhält
und zum Leben fortdrängt, so hat vielleicht kein Philosoph mehr Recht als der
Cyniker: denn das Glück des Thieres, als des vollendeten Cynikers, ist der
lebendige Beweis für das Recht des Cynismus. Das kleinste Glück, wenn es nur
ununterbrochen da ist und glücklich macht, ist ohne Vergleich mehr Glück als
das grösste, das nur als Episode, gleichsam als Laune, als toller Einfall,
zwischen lauter Unlust, Begierde und Entbehren kommt. Bei dem kleinsten aber
und bei dem grössten Glücke ist es immer Eines, wodurch Glück zum Glücke wird:
das Vergessen-können oder, gelehrter ausgedrückt, das Vermögen, während seiner Dauer
unhistorisch zu empfinden. Wer sich nicht auf der Schwelle des Augenblicks,
alle Vergangenheiten vergessend, niederlassen kann, wer nicht auf einem Punkte
wie eine Siegesgöttin ohne Schwindel und Furcht zu stehen vermag, der wird nie
wissen, was Glück ist und noch schlimmer: er wird nie etwas thun, was Andere
glücklich macht. Denkt euch das äusserste Beispiel, einen Menschen, der die Kraft
zu vergessen gar nicht besässe, der verurtheilt wäre, überall ein Werden zu
sehen: ein Solcher glaubt nicht mehr an sein eigenes Sein, glaubt nicht mehr an
sich, sieht alles in bewegte Punkte auseinander fliessen und verliert sich in diesem
Strome des Werdens: er wird wie der rechte Schüler Heraklits zuletzt kaum mehr
wagen den Finger zu heben. Zu allem Handeln gehört Vergessen: wie zum Leben
alles Organischen nicht nur Licht, sondern auch Dunkel gehört. Ein Mensch, der durch
und durch nur historisch empfinden wollte, wäre dem ähnlich, der sich des
Schlafens zu enthalten gezwungen würde, oder dem Thiere, das nur vom
Wiederkäuen und immer wiederholten Wiederkäuen leben sollte. Also: es ist
möglich, fast ohne Erinnerung zu leben, ja glücklich zu leben, wie das Thier
zeigt; es ist aber ganz und gar unmöglich, ohne Vergessen überhaupt zu leben. Oder,
um mich noch einfacher über mein Thema zu erklären: es giebt einen Grad von
Schlaflosigkeit, von Wiederkäuen, von historischem Sinne, bei dem das Lebendige
zu Schaden kommt, und zuletzt zu Grunde geht, sei es nun ein Mensch oder ein Volk
oder eine Cultur.
Did you see Corey Robin's article on Nietzsche and Hayek that was published in The Nation a few months?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.thenation.com/article/174219/nietzsches-marginal-children-friedrich-hayek?page=0,0#axzz2eAClA7IZ
Hi 'Lucidist'. Profuse thanks for bringing Corey's article to my attention. It is an excellent and perspicacious effort - a broad, episodic, almost "anecdotal" summary of what are very complex matters. Of course, I agree with the thrust of Corey's argument, and I may have to congratulate him personally for his efforts in this sphere. One peccadillo, if I be allowed to be obscenely punctilious, is that Nietzsche would gasp at the thought that "value" is a "moral" matter: the whole point to his philosophy is (precisely!) that there are NO values in life and the world!
ReplyDeleteIndeed, this is where Hayek and Nietzsche con-vene (their minds "meet") - that is, the fact that economic "value" as determined by "the market" has no intrinsic "moral value" but is rather the result of "conflict". This is the "extra-moral sense" of "value" for both Nietzsche and Hayek. The difference is that the former did not assign any "rationality" to "the market", whereas the latter did, either in a "democratic" sense (socialism is "the road to serfdom" because it suppresses the "free-dom" of "the market"), or else in an "evolutionary" (but still value-neutral) sense (Hayek's notion of "spontaneous order" or catallaxis).
Corey's is certainly an appreciable, even admirable, presentation. My efforts have been devoted to showing how "the market" is more than a mere mirage, but is rather a concrete historical institutional "pro-ject" (Nietzsche's Entwurf) of capitalist domination of what I call "living labour" or "living activity", where "labour" is meant to underscore the "physio-logical needs" of human beings. Nietzsche himself, of course, was perhaps the first philosopher to remove these "needs" from the sphere of "morality" to that of "physio-logy" with his notion of "instincts for freedom". The same cannot be said of Marx ("the last of the Schoolmen"), who always insisted on some moral-rational "measure of value" in his critique of political economy.
Cheers, and thanks again!