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The Ontogeny of Thought – Two
Nietzsche’s Eristic Genealogy
of Law and Political Economy
A. Will to Power As Resolve and
Standard of Value
Not only is “consciousness”, this
simulacrum of “sociability”, this velleity of “humanity”, this patina of
civility, this “everyday self” – this Vermittlung (mediation) of different
“instincts of freedom”, of Wills to Power -, not only is it a “danger”, a
“disease”, but it is so for a far greater reason than the “epistemological” or
even “metaphysical” rodomontades of idealist philosophy, “the toils of grammar”
(subject, object), or the “obscure veil” of “noumena” and “phenomena”, of which
we cannot even speak (cf. Wittgenstein). It is so because this shadowy,
mystified world of “Sprache-Metaphysik” (language metaphysics) and
“reverences”, of “idolatry” and “slave morality” – this “most fatal stupidity
by which we shall one day be ruined” - is “politically
harmful”, because it induces us to accept and even pro-mote the
Demokratisierung, the behaviour of the “Man-Herd”, the “Species”: - a
behaviour, a “politics” that even its
Rationalisierung and its pragmatic “utility” cannot redeem (an allusion perhaps
to Peirce and James) and one that, in its “political manifestations” such as
the Demokratisierung, actually pre-vents or emasculates the grosse Politik.
To be able to act politically, in relation to other humans, man must be able
“to digest” experiences – to select from the totality of past moments, those
that are important and those that are not. Without “memory” action would be impossible because (as
for Benjamin Colton in William Faulkner’s ‘The
Sound and the Fury’) without the power “to retain” experiences, life would
be “a tale told by an idiot, full of
sound and fury, signifying nothing” (Shakespeare’s Macbeth). Yet similarly,
action would also not be possible without forgetfulness, because like a man who
cannot digest, such dyspepsia of the mind would not allow the “meta-bolism”
(Greek for “change and assimilation”) necessary for the “selection” of past
moments now “frozen” in historical time. So the “paradox” arises of how
“memory” is possible, given that forgetfulness must have been, by analogy with
the rest of the animal world, the original condition of human beings.
Ess2,1.
The breeding of an animal that can promise - is not this just that very paradox of a task which nature has set
itself in regard to man? Is that not the very problem of man? The fact that
this problem has been to a great extent solved, must appear all the more
phenomenal to one who can estimate at its full value that force of
forgetfulness which works in opposition to it. Forgetfulness is no mere vis inertiae, as the superficial
believe, rather is it a power of obstruction, active and in the strictest sense
of the word, positive — a power responsible for the fact that what we have
lived, experienced, taken into ourselves, no more enters into consciousness
during the process of digestion (it might be called psychic absorption) than
all the whole manifold process by which our physical nutrition, the so-called
"incorporation," is carried on. The temporary shutting of the doors
and windows of consciousness, the relief from the clamant alarums and
excursions, with which our subconscious world of servant organs works in mutual
co-operation and antagonism; a little quietude, a little tabula rasa of the consciousness
so as to make room again for the new, and above all for the more noble
functions and functionaries, room for government and foresight,
predetermination (for our organism is an oligarchic model) – this is the utility,
as I have said, of the active forgetfulness - which is a very sentinel and
nurse of psychic order, repose, etiquette; and this shows at once why, it is
that there can exist no happiness, no gladness, no hope, no pride, no real
present, without forgetfulness. The
man in whom this preventative apparatus is damaged and discarded, is to be
compared to a dyspeptic, and it is something more than a comparison—he can
"get rid of" nothing. But this very animal who finds it necessary to
be forgetful, in whom, in fact, forgetfulness represents a force and a form of
robust health, has reared for himself an opposition-power, a memory, with whose help
forgetfulness is, in certain instances, kept in check—in the cases, namely,
where promises have to be made;—so
that it is by no means a mere passive inability to get rid of a once indented impression,
not merely the indigestion occasioned by a once pledged word, which one cannot
dispose of, but an active refusal to
get rid of it, a continuing and a wish to continue what has once been willed,
an actual memory of the will,
so that between the original "I will," “I shall do” and the
actual discharge of the will, its act we can easily interpose a world of new strange phenomena, circumstances,
veritable volitions, without the snapping of this long chain of the will.
But
what is the underlying hypothesis of all this? How thoroughly, in order to be
able to regulate the future in this way, must man have first learnt to
distinguish between necessitated and accidental phenomena, to think causally, to see the distant as present and to
anticipate it, to fix with certainty what is the end, and what is the means to
that end; above all, to reckon, to have power to calculate — how thoroughly
must man have first become calculable, disciplined, necessitated even for
himself and his own conception of himself, that, like a man entering into a
promise, he could guarantee himself as a future.
1. Ein
Thier heranzüchten, das versprechen darf — ist das nicht gerade jene paradoxe
Aufgabe selbst, welche sich die Natur in Hinsicht auf den Menschen gestellt
hat? ist es nicht das eigentliche Problem vom Menschen?… Dass dies Problem bis
zu einem hohen Grad gelöst ist, muss Dem um so erstaunlicher erscheinen, der
die entgegen wirkende Kraft, die der Vergesslichkeit, vollauf zu würdigen
weiss. Vergesslichkeit ist keine blosse vis inertiae, wie die Oberflächlichen
glauben, sie ist vielmehr ein aktives, im strengsten Sinne positives Hemmungsvermögen,
dem es zuzuschreiben ist, dass was nur von uns erlebt, erfahren, in uns
hineingenommen wird, uns im Zustande der Verdauung (man dürfte ihn
„Einverseelung“ nennen) ebenso wenig in's Bewusstsein tritt, als der ganze
tausendfältige Prozess, mit dem sich unsre leibliche Ernährung, die sogenannte „Einverleibung“
abspielt. Die Thüren und Fenster des Bewusstseins zeitweilig schliessen; von
dem Lärm und Kampf, mit dem unsre Unterwelt von dienstbaren Organen für und
gegen einander arbeitet, unbehelligt bleiben; ein wenig Stille, ein wenig tabula
rasa des Bewusstseins, damit wieder Platz wird für Neues, vor Allem für die
vornehmeren Funktionen und Funktionäre, für Regieren, Voraussehn,
Vorausbestimmen (denn unser Organismus ist oligarchisch eingerichtet) — das ist
der Nutzen der, wie gesagt, aktiven Vergesslichkeit, einer Thürwärterin gleichsam,
einer Aufrechterhalterin der seelischen Ordnung, der Ruhe, der Etiquette: womit
sofort abzusehn ist, inwiefern es kein Glück, keine Heiterkeit, keine Hoffnung,
keinen Stolz, keine Gegenwart geben könnte ohne Vergesslichkeit. Der Mensch, in
dem dieser Hemmungsapparat beschädigt wird und aussetzt, ist einem Dyspeptiker
zu vergleichen (und nicht nur zu vergleichen — ) er wird mit Nichts „fertig“ …
Eben dieses nothwendig vergessliche Thier, an dem das Vergessen eine Kraft,
eine Form der starken Gesundheit darstellt, hat sich nun ein Gegenvermögen
angezüchtet, ein Gedächtniss, mit Hülfe dessen für gewisse Fälle die
Vergesslichkeit ausgehängt wird, — für die Fälle nämlich, dass versprochen
werden soll: somit keineswegs bloss ein passivisches Nicht-wieder-los-werden-können
des einmal eingeritzten Eindrucks, nicht bloss die Indigestion an einem ein Mal
verpfändeten Wort, mit dem man nicht wieder fertig wird, sondern ein aktives
Nicht-wieder-los-werden-wollen, ein Fort- und Fortwollen des ein Mal Gewollten,
ein eigentliches Gedächtniss des Willens:
so dass zwischen das ursprüngliche „ich will“ „ich werde thun“ und die eigentliche
Entladung des Willens, seinen Akt, unbedenklich eine Welt von neuen fremden
Dingen, Umständen, selbst Willensakten dazwischengelegt werden darf, ohne dass diese
lange Kette des Willens springt. Was setzt das aber Alles voraus! Wie muss der
Mensch, um dermaassen über die Zukunft voraus zu verfügen, erst gelernt haben,
das nothwendige vom zufälligen Geschehen scheiden, causal denken, das Ferne wie
gegenwärtig sehn und vorwegnehmen, was Zweck ist, was Mittel dazu ist, mit
Sicherheit ansetzen, überhaupt rechnen, berechnen können, — wie muss dazu der
Mensch selbst vorerst berechenbar, regelmässig, nothwendig geworden sein, auch
sich selbst für seine eigne Vorstellung, um endlich dergestalt, wie es ein
Versprechender thut, für sich als Zukunft gut sagen zu konnen!
An aphorism this, to ironise
Nietzsche’s reasoning here, of “incalculable” importance! To think causally! It is the interaction with other “wills”, then,
the exchange of promises, that occasions the development of memory; and it is
the measurement and calculability of the surrounding world that allows the
pro-jection of future actions and exchanges (literally, in financial parlance,
of “futures”). In actual fact, as a matter of pure observation or perception, without
“memory” life would be for humans
truly “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury” – and just as lack of
memory is the essential characteristic of “idiocy” (as in William Faulkner’s “The
Sound and the Fury”), equally it is the presence of memory that makes possible
what Nietzsche will occasionally deprecate as the “calculability” and
“regimentation” that industrial and commercial society brings (as in Jason
Colton, to return to Faulkner, the infamously cynical character in his novel
whose mind is “glued” to the Wall Street “ticker”; in BGE Nietzsche will poke fun at this “regimentation” of metropolitan
life in the New World).
The inability “to draw causal
links between events” because of the limited “mnemonic” powers or
“forgetfulness” of the “idiot” (the term is used in its psychological
acceptation, of course) is counterbalanced by the “memory” that can permit the
attribution of calculation and causality – the essential ingredients of “responsibility”.
Only through “forgetfulness” is it possible “to act”: a human being that does
not forget is like one who is not able to sleep or to digest (“Use and Abuse of
History”, ‘UB’, Aph.1, and quotation above). Action requires only so much
“historical sense”. Too much of it and “knowledge will overpower life” and make
action impossible. Forgetfulness is our most “natural state”; and “memory” had
to be “conquered” by an immense effort of will – a “memory of the will” – that enabled human beings “to make promises”,
to become “competent to promise” and
therefore “reliable”, “calculating” and “measuring” – and thereby “to think
causally”!
2. This is simply the long history of the
origin of responsibility. That
task of breeding an animal which can make promises, includes, as we have already
grasped, as its condition and preliminary, the more immediate task of first
making man to a certain extent, necessitated, uniform, like among his like,
regular, and consequently calculable….
2. Eben
das ist die lange Geschichte von der Herkunft der Verantwortlichkeit. Jene
Aufgabe, ein Thier heranzuzüchten, das versprechen darf, schliesst, wie wir
bereits begriffen haben, als Bedingung und Vorbereitung die nähere Aufgabe in
sich, den Menschen zuerst bis zu einem gewissen Grade nothwendig, einförmig,
gleich unter Gleichen, regelmässig und folglich berechenbar zu machen. (GM)
2…If, however, we place ourselves at the end
of this colossal process, at the point where the tree finally matures its
fruits, when society and its morality of custom [Sittlichkeit der Sitte] finally
bring to light that to which it was only the means [Mittel], then do we
find as the ripest fruit on its tree the sovereign individual, that resembles
only himself, that has got loose from the morality of custom, the autonomous " super-moral "
individual (for "autonomous" and "moral" are mutually exclusive
terms),—in short, the man of the personal [eignen, intrinsic], long and independent
will, competent to promise [der versprechen darf] and we find in him
a proud consciousness (vibrating in every fibre), of what has been at last achieved
and become vivified in him, a genuine consciousness of power and freedom [Macht-
und Freiheits-Bewusstsein], a feeling of human
perfection [Vollendungs-Gefuhl] in general….
Stellen
wir uns dagegen an's Ende des ungeheuren Prozesses, dorthin, wo der Baum
endlich seine Früchte zeitigt, wo die Societät und ihre Sittlichkeit der Sitte
endlich zu Tage bringt, wozu sie nur das Mittel war: so finden wir als reifste Frucht
an ihrem Baum das souveraine Individuum, das nur sich selbst gleiche, das von
der Sittlichkeit der Sitte wieder losgekommene, das autonome übersittliche
Individuum (denn „autonom“ und „sittlich“ schliesst sich aus), kurz den
Menschen des eignen unabhängigen langen Willens, der versprechen darf — und in
ihm ein stolzes, in allen Muskeln zuckendes Bewusstsein davon, was da endlich
errungen und in ihm leibhaft geworden ist, ein eigentliches Macht- und
Freiheits-Bewusstsein, ein Vollendungs-Gefühl des Menschen überhaupt. (GM)
And, as already adumbrated above,
the whole genealogy of “retaliation” and “obligation” and “conscience”,
culminating in the notion of “responsibility” calls for a re-examination of the
“freedom of the will” – because the “Will to Power” or “the instinct of
freedom” bears little resemblance to the
Freiheit of Western metaphysics. The
very fact that “responsibility” is a “duty” or a “calling” that represents the
culmination, the apex, of an entire sequence of “physio-logical, natural events”
(the tree bearing fruit) and institutions whose entire ec-sistence (Entstehung,
“origin” as sprouting or “coming-into-being”) was effectively to be a means
(Mittel) so that the person who is “competent to promise”, the “sovereign
individual” can e-merge or “sprout” from such a “soil”, - this very “primordial
fact” (Ur-Faktum) must entail that this sovereign individual musters the
pre-existing or “stored-up force” (aufgestauter Kraft) at his disposal that
pre-conditions the choices available to him! Again, in the Gaya Scienza Nietzsche lays emphasis on this critical “advance” of
his (Fortschritt, forward step; one that will play a central role in Weber’s
political theory):
360.
Two Kinds of Causes which are
Confounded.— It seems to me one of my most essential steps and advances
[Fortschritt] that I have learned to distinguish the cause of an action
generally from the cause of an action in a particular manner, say, in this direction [Richtung], with this aim [Ziel].
The first kind of cause is a quantum of stored-up
force [aufgestauter Kraft], which waits to be used in some manner, for some
purpose; the second kind of cause, on the contrary, is something quite
unimportant in comparison with the first, an insignificant hazard for the most
part, in conformity with which the quantum of force in question
"discharges" itself in some unique and definite manner: the
Lucifer-match in relation to the barrel of gunpowder.
Among
those insignificant hazards and Lucifer-matches I count all the so-called
"aims," and similarly the still more so-called "occupations"
of people: they are relatively optional, arbitrary, and almost indifferent in
relation to the immense quantum of force which presses on, as we have said, to
be used up in any way whatever. One generally looks at the matter in a
different manner: one is accustomed to see the
impelling force [triebende Kraft] precisely in the aim (object, calling,
&c.), according to a primeval error,—but it is only the directing force,
the steersman and the steam have thereby been confounded. And yet it is not
even always a steersman, the directing
force [dirigiende Kraft] .... Is the "aim", the
"purpose," [“Zweck”] not often enough only an extenuating pretext, an
additional self-blinding of conceit, which does not wish it to be said that the
ship follows the stream into which it
has accidentally run? That it "wills" to go that way, because it must go that way? That it has a direction [Richtung], sure enough, but—not a steersman? We still
require a criticism of the conception of "purpose." (GS)
360.
Zwei Arten Ursache, die man verwechselt.
— Das erscheint mir als einer meiner wesentlichsten Schritte und Fortschritte:
ich lernte die Ursache des Handelns unterscheiden von der Ursache des So- und
So-Handelns, des In-dieser Richtung-, Auf-dieses Ziel hin-Handelns. Die erste
Art Ursache ist ein Quantum von aufgestauter Kraft, welches darauf wartet, irgend
wie, irgend wozu verbraucht zu werden; die zweite Art ist dagegen etwas an
dieser Kraft gemessen ganz Unbedeutendes, ein kleiner Zufall zumeist, gemäss
dem jenes Quantum sich nunmehr auf Eine und bestimmte Weise „auslöst“: das
Streichholz im Verhältniss zur Pulvertonne. Unter diese kleinen Zufälle und
Streichhölzer rechne ich alle sogenannten „Zwecke“, ebenso die noch viel
sogenannteren „Lebensberufe“: sie sind relativ beliebig, willkürlich, fast
gleichgültig im Verhältniss zu dem ungeheuren Quantum Kraft, welches darnach
drängt, wie gesagt, irgendwie aufgebraucht zu werden. Man sieht es gemeinhin
anders an: man ist gewohnt, gerade in dem Ziele (Zwecke, Berufe u.s.w.) die
treibende Kraft zu sehn, gemäss einem uralten Irrthume, — aber er ist nur die dirigirende
Kraft, man hat dabei den Steuermann und den Dampf verwechselt. Und noch nicht
einmal immer den Steuermann, die dirigirende Kraft… Ist das „Ziel“, der „Zweck“
nicht oft genug nur ein beschönigender Vorwand, eine nachträgliche Selbstverblendung
der Eitelkeit, die es nicht Wort haben will, dass das Schiff der Strömung
folgt, in die es zufällig gerathen ist? Dass es dorthin „will“, weil es dorthin
— muss? Dass es wohl eine Richtung hat, aber ganz und gar — keinen Steuermann?
— Man bedarf noch einer Kritik des Begriffs „Zweck“.
That is why Nietzsche, when
speaking of this “Steuermann”, places “free” in inverted commas – because it is
a special “kind” [Art] of “freedom” that he considers. “Freedom” is merely a
“store of force”, a “potentiality”, an incalculable energy that can be
“exercised” or “ad-opted” responsibly
by those who have the necessary “resolve” (Ge-wissen, “certainty”, often but
not very accurately translated as “conscience”), who are aware of the “limits”
of their “aim” or “purpose”, those who are “competent
to promise”. And it is precisely this “resolve”, this mixture of certainty and a-wareness – this “responsibility” or “accountability” –, this “resolute
conscience” that determines the ultimate “test” of wills, the “measure” of
force against force, - the measure or “standard
of value”.
2…The “free man”, the owner of a long
unbreakable will, finds this possession his standard
of value: looking out from himself upon the others, he
honours or he despises, and just as necessarily as he honours his peers, the
strong and the reliable (those who can bind themselves by promises),—that is,
every one who promises like a sovereign, with difficulty, rarely and slowly,
who is sparing with his trusts but confers honour
by the very fact of trusting, who gives his word as something that can be relied
on, because he knows himself strong enough to keep it even in the teeth of
disasters, even in the “ teeth of fate,” [“gegen
das Schicksal”] — so with equal necessity will he have the heel of his foot ready for the lean and empty jackasses,
who promise when they have no business to do so, and his rod of chastisement
ready for the liar, who already breaks his word at the very minute when it is
on his lips. The proud knowledge of the
extraordinary privilege of responsibility,
the consciousness of this rare freedom, of this power over destiny [Geschick], has sunk right down to his innermost depths,
and has become an instinct, a dominating instinct - what name will he give to
it, to this dominating instinct, if he needs to have a word for it? But there
is no doubt about it—the sovereign man calls it his conscience [Gewissen]…
Der
„freie“ Mensch, der Inhaber eines langen unzerbrechlichen Willens, hat in
diesem Besitz auch sein Werthmaass:
von sich aus nach den Andern hinblickend, ehrt er oder verachtet er; und eben
so nothwendig als er die ihm Gleichen, die Starken und Zuverlässigen (die
welche versprechen dürfen) ehrt, — also Jedermann, der wie ein Souverain
verspricht, schwer, selten, langsam, der mit seinem Vertrauen geizt, der
auszeichnet, wenn er vertraut, der sein Wort giebt als Etwas, auf das Verlass
ist, weil er sich stark genug weiss, es selbst gegen Unfälle, selbst „gegen das
Schicksal“ aufrecht zu halten —: eben so nothwendig wird er seinen Fusstritt
für die schmächtigen Windhunde bereit halten, welche versprechen, ohne es zu
dürfen, und seine Zuchtruthe für den Lügner, der sein Wort bricht, im
Augenblick schon, wo er es im Munde hat. Das stolze Wissen um das
ausserordentliche Privilegium der Verantwortlichkeit, das Bewusstsein dieser
seltenen Freiheit, dieser Macht über sich und das Geschick hat sich bei ihm bis
in seine unterste Tiefe hinabgesenk und ist zum Instinkt geworden, zum
dominirenden Instinkt: — wie wird er ihn heissen, diesen dominirenden Instinkt,
gesetzt, dass er ein Wort dafür bei sich nöthig hat? Aber es ist kein Zweifel:
dieser souveraine Mensch heisst ihn sein Gewissen…
So this is “the standard of value” – indeed “the measure of value”
[Werthmaass]: it is “responsibility”, the “consciousness of the sovereign
individual [who has] this power over destiny [that] has sunk right down to his
innermost depths, and has become an instinct, a dominating instinct”! This is
the meaning of “resolve” (“conscience”, Gewissen).
It is deceptive here to translate Nietzsche’s word “Gewissen” with
“con-science”. The word “con-science” (con-scientia, common knowledge) is too
redolent of that “inter-subjectivity”, of that universal “oceanic feeling”, of
the “sym-pathy” or “com-passion” (Mit-Leid) that Schopenhauer names and
indicates as the ultimate “root” (Wurzel) of ethics and moral behaviour. Clearly,
Nietzsche would never tolerate such a “universal humanistic” notion. By
“Ge-wissen” Nietzsche intends the “literal” meaning of the word – “certainty”,
firm knowledge. This “Ge-wissen”, this “certainty” represents the opposite of
the “moral com-pulsion” denoted by “con-science”. On the contrary, Nietzsche
wishes to emphasise the “internal im-pulsion”, the “drive” or “motive” that
“im-pels” the maker of a “promise”, the “ower”, from the height of his
“competence to promise”, to be “certain” of being able to keep it!
B. Price As Punishment
Whereas “conscience” preserves the
“intelligible freedom” of the Will, of one’s conscience or “soul”, “Gewissen”
stresses the “certainty”, the necessary awareness and “drive” that comes from
the “instinct of freedom”, from the “Will to Power”.
4… Have these
current genealogists of morals ever allowed themselves to have even the vaguest
notion, for instance, that the cardinal moral idea of "ought"
originates from the very material idea of "owe"? Or that
punishment developed as a retaliation
absolutely independently of any preliminary hypothesis of the freedom or
un-freedom of the will?...
Haben
sich diese bisherigen Genealogen der Moral auch nur von Ferne Etwas davon
träumen lassen, dass zum Beispiel jener moralische Hauptbegriff „Schuld“ seine
Herkunft aus denn sehr materiellen Begriff „Schulden“ genommen hat? Oder dass die Strafe als eine Vergeltung sich vollkommen
abseits von jeder
Voraussetzung
über Freiheit oder Unfreiheit des Willens entwickelt hat?
Throughout the longest period of human
history, punishment was never based on the responsibility of the evil-doer for
his action, and was consequently not based on the hypothesis that only the
guilty should be punished ;—on the contrary,
punishment was inflicted in those days for the same reason that parents punish their
children even nowadays, out of anger at an injury that they have suffered, an anger which vents itself spontaneously
[sich auslasst] on the author of the injury — but this anger is kept in
bounds and modified through the idea that every injury has somewhere or other its equivalent price, and can really be paid off, even though it
be by means of pain to the author. Whence
is it that this ancient deep-rooted and now perhaps ineradicable idea has drawn
its strength, this idea of an equivalency between injury and pain? I
have already revealed its origin, in the contractual relationship between creditor and ower, that is as old as the existence of “legal rights” at all, and
in its turn points back to the primary forms of purchase, sale, barter, and
trade.
Es
ist die längste Zeit der menschlichen Geschichte hindurch durchaus nicht gestraft
worden, weil man den Übelanstifter für seine That verantwortlich machte, also
nicht unter der Voraussetzung, dass nur der Schuldige zu strafen sei: —
vielmehr, so wie jetzt noch Eltern ihre Kinder strafen, aus Zorn über einen
erlittenen Schaden, der sich am Schädiger auslässt, — dieser Zorn aber in Schranken
gehalten und modifizirt durch die Idee, dass jeder Schaden irgend worin sein
Äquivalent habe und wirklich abgezahlt werden könne, sei es selbst durch einen
Schmerz des Schädigers. Woher diese uralte, tiefgewurzelte, vielleicht jetzt
nicht mehr ausrottbare Idee ihre Macht genommen hat, die Idee einer Äquivalenz
von Schaden und Schmerz? Ich habe es bereits verrathen: in dem
Vertragsverhältniss zwischen Gläubiger und Schuldner, das so alt ist als es
überhaupt „Rechtssubjekte“ giebt und seinerseits wieder auf die Grundformen von
Kauf, Verkauf, Tausch, Handel und Wandel zurückweist.
Extraordinary stuff! (Even more
extraordinary is the complete, total, “idiotic” inability of people like
Deleuze or Foucault or Derrida so much as to mention [!] this entire “onto-geny”
[“paradoxical”, Nietzsche calls it],
let alone [psycho]-analyse it!) Not only is there no “freedom of will” involved
here; not only is “retaliation” a purely “mechanical” retributive response –
but also Nietzsche makes obvious again and again that he is not talking about
“history” in the “historicist sense” (!), but rather of “the longest time”, of
“destiny and fate”, of “innermost depths”, of “instincts” – to which, with
ferocious realism and antithesis, he even gives the name of “conscience”
(almost a piercing sarcastic dart thrown at Schopenhauer’s “con-scientia”)!
The notion that “value” or “price” constitutes a “balance or exchange
of utilities” between seller and purchaser is thus exploded! “The price to be paid” refers to the
“penalty” that the injurer (ower) must “suffer” so as to “satisfy” the
“injured” party (the creditor). (Cf. here the Italian “pena”, which stands for
“pain” and “punishment” to compensate for “injury”.) Nor does “price”
constitute a “balance of forces or of values” – for no such “equi-librium” or
“Aquivalenz” is possible with Nietzsche! Once again, Nietzsche understands by “balance of forces” not their
“equi-valence” or “mutual neutralization”, but the active “matching” of one
force against the other as judged by the holder of the “balance”, the “scales”
(Wagschalen) that can be likened also to the “scales of justice”! (With remarkable perspicuity, Merquior detects this
subtle and rare interpretation of Nietzsche’s expression “the balance of
forces” in the Meditations: “Has he
not taught that truth is not objectivity but a will to ‘justice’ [Thoughts Out of Season, II, 6]? Justice,
to be sure, in the hands of hanging judges, strong personalities whose very
vitality puts them high above the mass of mankind” [p.74].)
“Price” and “debt” always and
everywhere must be approached from the “active” side – just as “law” and
“justice” must: and the active side is that of the strong who impose the price
on the weak without the prior intervention or “mediation” of a “free will”: -
“punishment” is a “pain” that is inflicted by the “injured” party (creditor) as
an “anger that vents itself mechanically
on the author (of the “debt”, the “ower” or “Schuldner”, the party at fault)!
No equi-valence, no equality of
“values”, no equi-librium is possible in contractual transactions – for the
simple and overwhelming reason that there is no “sub-stratum of value” that can make such “equi-valence”
possible! There is no “balance-of-forces” because the “forces” do not respond
to a “common” metre or measure, they cannot be “reconciled”. Rather, there is a
“resultant of forces” that “vye with
one another”, that joust incessantly for domination and overpowering that has
no “common” object or stake or prize or “utility” or goal or purpose. Similarly, no “reconciliation”,
however dialectically “mediated” (as in Hegel), or phenomenologically (in Heidegger)
or “bio-politically” (Foucault) is allowed in the act of “consciousness” –
there is no “Aufhebung”, no negation, or negation of the negation, no
“authenticity”, no “liberation” because there is no “inter-esse” over which
different “wills” may hope “to reconcile” themselves or to be reconciled!
The “Will to Power”, the “instinct of freedom”
is a “stored-up force” that is “physio-logical”
in nature, a force that contains in its “material” traits the “genealogy” of
its “destiny” – a “drive” that can be “traced back historically”, like a
“fossil” that is still extant, like a virus neither dead nor living; - not
through its passive “function” or as-signed “utility”, but rather through its
“self-assertion”, its “instinctive-ness”, its irrepressible violence. In this
regard, Nietzsche’s conception of “genealogical history” – and here one is
reminded of his preoccupation with the origins of the Greek “ghens” or
nobility, whence “gene” and “genealogy” – is comparable to psycho-analytic
anamnesis (recollection) or analepsis (flash-back), or even hypnosis used in
the reconstruction and the interpretation of dreams. In this praxis,
“disease/malaise” or “illness” (Erkrankung, Krankenheit) are as “a-historical”
as buried memories, - just like a virus or a gene, they have a “source” and “mutations”
but no “history” because they are not human constructs; they can be “frozen in
time” and hibernate, lie dormant like Camus’s plague. The same goes for the
“history of the instincts”: this is a “force” that is not “com-mensurable” with
any other, except in its “opposition” to others, except in its “conflict”, in
its constant struggle to overwhelm, overturn and dominate another force,
another Will!
5. The
realisation of these contractual
relations excites, of course (as would be already expected from our
previous observations), a great deal of suspicion and opposition towards the
primitive society which made or sanctioned them. In this society promises will
be made ; in this society the object is to provide the promiser with a memory; in
this society, so may we suspect, there will be full scope for hardness,
cruelty, and pain: the "ower," in order to induce credit in his
promise of repayment, in order to give a guarantee of the earnestness and
sanctity of his promise, in order to drill into his own conscience the duty,
the solemn duty, of repayment, will, by virtue of a contract with his creditor
to meet the contingency of his not paying, pledge something that he still
possesses, something that he still has in his power, for instance, his life or
his wife, or his freedom or his body…
5. Die
Vergegenwärtigung dieser Vertragsverhältnisse weckt allerdings, wie es nach dem
Voraus-Bemerkten von vornherein zu erwarten steht, gegen die ältere Menschheit,
die sie schuf oder gestattete, mancherlei Verdacht und Widerstand. Hier gerade wird
versprochen; hier gerade handelt es sich darum, Dem, der verspricht, ein
Gedächtniss zu machen; hier gerade, so darf man argwöhnen, wird eine Fundstätte
für Hartes, Grausames, Peinliches sein. Der Schuldner, um Vertrauen für sein
Versprechen der Zurückbezahlung einzuflössen, um eine Bürgschaft für den Ernst
und die Heiligkeit seines Versprechens zu geben, um bei sich selbst die
Zurückbezahlung als Pflicht, Verpflichtung seinem Gewissen einzuschärfen,
verpfändet Kraft eines Vertrags dem Gläubiger für den Fall, dass er nicht
zahlt, Etwas, das er sonst noch „besitzt“, über das er sonst noch Gewalt hat,
zum Beispiel seinen Leib oder sein Weib oder seine Freiheit oder auch sein
Leben…
Let
us make the logic of the whole
of this equalisation process clear; it is strange enough. The equivalence consists in this : instead of
an advantage directly compensatory of his injury (that is, instead of an
equalisation in money, lands, or some kind of chattel), the creditor is granted
by way of repayment and compensation a certain sensation of satisfaction—the
satisfaction of being able to vent, without any trouble, his power on one who
is powerless,…
Machen
wir uns die Logik dieser ganzen Ausgleichungsform klar: sie ist fremdartig
genug. Die Äquivalenz ist damit gegeben, dass an Stelle eines gegen den Schaden
direct aufkommenden Vortheils (also an Stelle eines Ausgleichs in Geld, Land,
Besitz irgend welcher Art) dem Gläubiger eine Art Wohlgefühl als Rückzahlung
und Ausgleich zugestanden wird, — das Wohlgefühl, seine Macht an einem
Machtlosen unbedenklich auslassen zu dürfen,…
6. It is then in this sphere of the law of
contract [Obligationen-Rechte] that we find the cradle [Entstehungsheerd – spring
or source] of the whole moral world of
the ideas of " guilt," " conscience," "duty,"
the "sacredness of duty," — their commencement, like the commencement
of all great things in the world, is thoroughly and continuously saturated with
blood…
6. In
dieser Sphäre, im Obligationen-Rechte also, hat die moralische Begriffswelt
„Schuld“, „Gewissen“, „Pflicht“, „Heiligkeit der Pflicht“ ihren
Entstehungsheerd, — ihr Anfang ist, wie der Anfang alles Grossen auf Erden,
gründlich und lange mit Blut begossen worden…
In other words, long before our
notions of “justice” and “compensation” and “fairness” became “pacified” with
the “quantitative exchange” of commercial “values” (money, land), the
primordial “equivalence” was the infliction of “violence”, the exertion of one’s
“power” over a power-less “breaker of
the promise” (Ver-brecher, “breaker”, the German word for “criminal”). Again,
“contract” here does not even remotely stand for “agreement”, for a “meeting of minds” (the legal periphrasis
for “contract” is itself most “revealing”), for “conciliation or reconciliation”!
It stands for its opposite – for “obligation”, for “bond”, for “promises”
founded on mutual fear and aggression. Contract is “war pursued by other means”
(to invert VonClausewitz). It resembles in its realism Hobbes’s notion of the
status civilis as a “contractual cessation of hostilities”, a suspension of
civil war: – except that where Hobbes still admitted of a “forum internum” of reason and utility that founded the
individual decision “to alienate” his “natural rights” so as to put a
“contractual” end to civil war, Nietzsche cannot admit of such a “state by
institution” but only of a “state by acquisition”, or rather “a state by violent,
brutal imposition”. The “logic” of
Nietzsche’s “contract” is the ability “to vent power [and punishment] on the
powerless…” The world of morality, “like all great things in the world…is
thoroughly and continuously saturated with blood…”! Far from being the
“consensual fruits” of “utility and adaptation”, “all the great things in the
world” originate from violence and struggle (recall Marx’s description of the
rise of the bourgeoisie, “oozing blood from head to toe”!).
The historical origin of this
“competence to promise”, of this “conscience-as-certainty”, of “resolve” and
“responsibility”, can be found in “the relationship between buyer and seller,
creditor and ower”. It is in this “contractual” and exquisitely “economic”
sphere that “person confronted person”, “person matched himself against
person”! Far from an “agreement” or “co-operation” or “con-sensus”, let alone
“conciliation”, we have “confrontation” and “combat” (“matching against”)!
8. The feeling of "ought," of
personal obligation [Verpflichtung, impellent duty] (to take up again the
train of our inquiry), has had, as we
saw, its origin in the oldest and most original personal relationship that
there is, the relationship between buyer and seller, creditor and ower: here
it was that individual confronted individual, and that individual matched
himself against individual. There
has not yet been found a grade of civilization [Civilisation] so low, as
not to manifest some trace of this relationship. Making prices, assessing values, thinking out equivalents, exchanging—
that is what preoccupied the primal thinking [Denken] of man in such measure
[in einem solche Maasse], that this in a certain sense is thinking itself: it was here that
was trained the oldest form of sagacity, it was here in this sphere that we can
perhaps trace the first commencement of man's pride, of his feeling of superiority
over other animals.
8. Das
Gefühl der Schuld, der persönlichen Verpflichtung, um den Gang unsrer
Untersuchung wieder aufzunehmen, hat, wie wir sahen, seinen Ursprung in dem
ältesten und ursprünglichsten
Personen-Verhältniss,
das es giebt, gehabt, in dem Verhältniss zwischen Käufer und Verkäufer,
Gläubiger und Schuldner: hier trat
zuerst Person gegen Person, hier mass sich zuerst Person an Person.
Man hat keinen noch so niedren Grad von Civilisation aufgefunden, in dem nicht
schon Etwas von diesem Verhältnisse bemerkbar würde. Preise machen, Werthe abmessen, Äquivalente ausdenken, tauschen — das
hat in einem solchen Maasse das allereste Denken des Menschen präoccupirt, dass
es in einem gewissen Sinne das Denken ist: hier ist die älteste Art
Scharfsinn herangezüchtet worden, hier möchte ebenfalls der erste Ansatz des
menschlichen Stolzes, seines Vorrangs-Gefühls in Hinsicht auf anderes Gethier
zu vermuthen sein.
So here is what marks the
difference between Civilisation (Zivilisation) and Culture (Kultur)! The
ability “to fight back” forgetfulness so as to become “competent to promise”,
so as to abide by one’s “resolve” (Gewissen), the e-mergence of a “memory of
the will” is connected with the “antagonism” that comes from a “clash of
wills”. From this “clash”, this “conflict”, from the exertion of the “instinct
of freedom”, human beings are forced to stake out their “need-necessity”
against those of other human beings. And part of the self-preservation of
humans consists in their ability to enter into agreements and therefore “to
bind themselves” by means of “personal obligations” or contracts
(Obligationen-Rechte). Memory or the fight against
forgetfulness plays a vital role in the institutional “out-growth” or “result”
(Folge) of these promises, of this conscience-as-certainty. And the
“out-growth”, the “out-come” or “result” of this process is “Civilisation”.
Every exchange, trade and commerce
and “the market” itself, are not a simple matter of “do ut des” (I give so that you may give), a mutually beneficial
“utilitarian” exchange: there is much more “antagonism of values” than that!
“Exchange” is the “clash” of op-posing wills. Every “sale and purchase”, no
matter how “mutually beneficial” or “con-sensual”, involves a constant
“confrontation of individual against individual” (“Person gegen Person”): “hier
mach sich zuerst…” – here for the first time individual “measured” or “matched”
himself against individual! Society and its institutions are nothing more than
a physio-logical means (Mittel) to
this “outcome” (Folge, result) – like a tree that bears fruit!
Not only! But this constant “measuring and matching” of wills, of
“instincts of freedom”, becomes so intense, it “preoccupies the primal thoughts
of man to such an extent that in a certain sense it is thinking itself”! In other words, the very ability “to think”,
which involves that “struggle against forgetfulness”, that “will to remember”
whereby “memory” introduces “history” to humanity and to that extent re-duces
its ability for “happiness” – that “memory” that enables causal links to be
made from the “measurement and matching” of “Person against Person” – that (!)
is the very origin (Ursprung) of the human capacity for “thought”! And, as we
have seen, also for the ability “to promise”, to enter binding commitments or
“bonds” or “obligations”!
Nietzsche insists on the point so
much that he stresses that not only did this occur in the remotest past, but
also (much more important) it persists to the present: “dass es in einem
gewissen Sinne das Denken ist [!]”) – “that is what in a certain sense
‘thinking’ is…” - to this day! And despite the consequent loss of “happiness”
(Gluck) that memory begets, this complex “evolution” of thought and memory gave
humans their sense of superiority over animals:
8… Perhaps our word "Mensch" (manas)
still expresses just something of this self-pride: man denoted himself
as the being who measures values, who values and measures, as the
"assessing" animal par excellence [das „abschätzende Thier an sich“]. Sale and purchase, together
with their psychological concomitants, are older than the origins of any form
of social organisation and union : it
is rather from the most rudimentary form of individual right that the budding
consciousness [Gefuhl, feeling] of exchange, commerce, debt, right, obligation, compensation was first transferred to the rudest and
most elementary of the social complexes (in
their relation to similar complexes), together
with the habit of comparing, measuring and calculating force with force, [better
translation: zugleich mit der
Gewohnheit, Macht an Macht zu vergleichen, zu messen, zu berechnen]. His eye was now focussed to this
perspective ; and with that ponderous consistency characteristic of ancient
thought, which, though set in motion with difficulty, yet proceeds inflexibly
along the line on which it has started, man soon arrived at the great
generalisation, "everything has its price, all can be paid for," the
oldest and most naive moral canon of justice, the beginning of all "kindness,"
of all "equity," of all "goodwill," of all "objectivity " in the world.
Justice in this
initial phase is the goodwill among people of about equal power to come to
terms with one another [sich mit
einander abzufinden], to come to an “understanding” [“Verstandigen”] again by
means of a settlement [Ausgleich], and with regard to the less powerful, to
compel them to agree among themselves to a settlement.
8.…Vielleicht
drückt noch unser Wort „Mensch“ (manas) gerade etwas von diesem Selbstgefühl
aus: der Mensch bezeichnete sich als das Wesen, welches Werthe misst, werthet
und misst, als das „abschätzende Thier an sich“. Kauf und Verkauf, sammt ihrem
psychologischen Zubehör, sind älter als selbst die Anfänge irgend welcher
gesellschaftlichen Organisationsformen und Verbände: aus der rudimentärsten
Form des
Personen-Rechts
hat sich vielmehr das keimende Gefühl von Tausch, Vertrag, Schuld, Recht,
Verpflichtung, Ausgleich erst auf die gröbsten und anfänglichsten
Gemeinschafts-Complexe (in deren Verhältniss zu ähnlichen Complexen)
übertragen, zugleich mit der Gewohnheit,
Macht an Macht zu vergleichen, zu messen, zu berechnen. Das Auge war nun
einmal für diese Perspektive eingestellt: und mit jener plumpen Consequenz, die
dem schwerbeweglichen, aber dann unerbittlich in gleicher Richtung weitergehenden
Denken der älteren Menschheit eigenthümlich ist, langte man alsbald bei der
grossen Verallgemeinerung an „jedes Ding hat ein Preis; Alles kann abgezahlt werden“
— dem ältesten und naivsten Moral-Kanon der Gerechtigkeit, dem Anfange aller
„Gutmüthigkeit“, aller „Billigkeit“, alles „guten Willens“, aller
„Objektivität“ auf Erden.
Gerechtigkeit auf dieser ersten Stufe ist der gute Wille unter
ungefähr Gleichmächtigen, sich mit
einander abzufinden, sich durch einen Ausgleich
wieder zu „verständigen“— und, in Bezug
auf weniger Mächtige, diese unter sich zu einem Ausgleich zu zwingen. (GM)
C. Nietzsche and the Sphere of Exchange
As we saw earlier, justice is a
“balance of forces”, not at all in the sense that these “forces” have found a
“natural, harmonious and lasting equi-librium” – but in the sense that
“justice” is the “balance” (or “scales”, Wagschalen!) with which the “op-posing
and con-flicting forces” are “weighed”! Justice is likened to the “scales” that
“weigh up”, not the different “rights” of the opposing parties, but their
different, even “ir-reconcilable”, “weight (Wichtigkeit) and strength (Kraft)”!
Justice is therefore only a temporary truce, yet another tactic or stratagem in
the overall “strategies” of the warring factions, imposed by the dominant and
overpowering party to secure the subservience of the dominated and overpowered.
At the core of all the
“metaphysical needs” that Nietzsche denounces even in Schopenhauer’s “reversal” of the Kantian “thing-in-itself”
with his own “Will-to-Life” is this ultimate
goal, this supreme attempt to
find in life and the world a “homo-noia”, an “agreement” and “harmony”, an
“equi-librium” - a “commutative justice”!
– that “homo-logates”, that enables the “translation” and equi-paration of
every element of the cosmos into every other element – a Leibnizian mathesis universalis, a “pre-established
harmony” that is the apex of the Ratio-Ordo. Even Schopenhauer (!), the philosopher of Eris, the prophet of
Heraclitean struggle and conflict, of Strife, had preferred in the end the renunciation (Entsagung) of the endless
irrepressible strife of the Will-to-Life in
the name of this “harmony”, this “homo-noia” – this Nirvana! – that is
nothing other than the absurd “preference” for a metaphysical “Value” that he
himself had agreed could not be found
in life and the world (“Where is it written?” he asked Kant), but that he
nevertheless chooses and wills as the ultimate goal of Life!
Nietzsche sees in this
Schopenhauerian Wille zur Ohn-macht
(Will to Powerlessness) the very same “metaphysical need” that the “English and
French psychologists”, from Darwin
to Spencer and Comte, locate in “Utility” and that the Socialists measure in
“Labour”. Such is their Wille zur
Ohn-macht, pursued in the name of an Objective Truth, a Will-to-Truth, a search
for “Value” that is nothing more that a Will-to-Death, a manifestation of the
Will to Power in its “nihilistic” interiorisation (Verinnerlichung) that
chooses and wills to renounce life
and the world for the sake of a different world, of an “ascetic Ideal”!
In reality, the Instinct of
Freedom, the Will to Power is the only real “need-necessity” of choice, the competence to promise, the
responsibility to decide – it is a “need-necessity” in an “affirmative” sense –
a “resolve” (Gewissen), the resoluteness
of decision!
Contemporaneously with the rise of
the neoclassical theory of marginal utility, both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche devalue and discount even the possibility of “labour” forming the basis of the inter-esse, of the com-unitas, of the social synthesis. Far from being a “Value” or
“the source and measure of value”, for the negatives
Denken living labour is only a means to satisfy a “need-necessity” intended
in a passive, “negative” sense – not as a “utility” but rather as a
“dis-utility” – as the instant gratification of this “need-necessity”! Labour
understood as “bare”, “destitute” living labour separated (Marx’s Trennung
or “alienation”) from its “means of pro-duction or object-ification”, can only work
and thus consume its “object”, its
“means of production” and its “means of subsistence” (Lebensmittel, life-means, food – the classical and neoclassical
“wage fund”). Only those capable of “renouncing” this need, of post-poning it,
of “denying” the Will-to-Life – its agon
or conatus or appetitus – can absolve themselves from the “need-necessity” of the
Arbeit, from its “pain” (Leid), from its “reification” into brute “labour
power” (Kraft; Heinrich Gossen, the founder of marginal utility, will employ
the phrase “Arbeits-leid” interchangeably with “Arbeits-kraft”) by means of
their “endowments” or “wealth” to which they can lay rightful claim of
“ownership” due to their earlier “abstinence” or “sacrifice” or “abnegation”: –
in this consists the A-skesis, the a-scent to and the reward of Nirvana!
In similar vein, in his attempt to
define the “subject-matter” of Economics, Robbins will observe that “Nirvana is
not necessarily single bliss. It is merely the complete satisfaction of all requirements,”
(in Essay, p.13). In other words,
Nirvana is “freedom from want”, the very opposite of the Arbeit with its
“need-necessity”! Nirvana is “not having to choose”! But this is the contrary
of the agon of the Economics: for Robbins, economics is the science of choice between the alternative uses of scarce resources (see
ibid., p.15). It follows that Nirvana is also the “freedom from the hard
choices” to which “scarcity” forces us. Nirvana is freedom from the compulsion
of Economics. Robbins cites Karl Menger’s pathbreaking work introducing the
concept of marginal utility right on this
point (p.13, fn.1). And then, to
stress his point further, he prefers Irving Fisher’s “analytical” definition of
capital as “an aspect of wealth” to Adam Smith’s “classificatory” one as “a
kind of wealth” (ibid., p.16).
From this entirely Nietzschean
“perspective” (one that belongs properly to the negatives Denken), living labour must be dis-placed from its role
as the sole source of “value” in Classical Political Economy to the ancillary
role of “factor of production” in Neoclassical Theory! Already with
Schopenhauer, the operari, the
“striving” for happiness and satisfaction by the Will-to-Life was “de-valued”
(hence the Entwertung) as a
self-defeating exercise because the “pleasure” induced by the achievement of
the Will’s aims was inevitably nullified
in the very act of its satis-faction
(Latin, satis, enough, and facere, to make), in its ful-filment, in
its com-pletion (plenus, full). The
“renunciation” of the Will (Ent-sagung), then, became itself an active operari, an active “quest” or
“a-scension” (A-skesis), a “climbing” toward the Freiheit of the esse, of
Nirvana – “the complete satisfaction of all
requirements”! Whence, to say it again, the “de-valuation” (Entwertung) of the Arbeit, its dis-utility in contrast with
the “utility” of capital, of “already-objectified labour” as “capital”, as a
mere appendage or “aspect of wealth”.
It is obvious that for this
Economics the “Political” of Classical Political Economy has been totally
eclipsed by the abstract quantitative analysis of the adequation of
axiomatically defined means and ends; and so the “advantage” to be derived from
“society” is reduced only to what can
be derived from the ability “to exchange” these endowed resources so as to maximize one’s “requirements”, to ensure
their “complete satisfaction”, to secure one’s Freiheit. But the active “pro-duction” of those “requirements” is
the result of a “science of choice”, an “axiology” or “praxeology” that
ineluctably involves “human action” – importantly, individual action! – considered abstractly, axiomatically. Consequently,
neoclassical theory eliminates “social labour” and its “division” from all
analysis of the Economics. (On all this, we refer to our study on ‘The Pure Logic of Choice’.)
Robbins (at p.19) is quite
explicit in this regard: “it is clear that the phenomena of the exchange
economy itself can only be explained by going behind such [exchange] relationships
and invoking the operation of those laws of choice which are best seen when
contemplating the behaviour of the isolated individual”! In this analytical
framework, (as Robbins implies in this quotation) Walrasian equilibrium will
form only the extension or “generalization” to “the market” of what are
strictly “individual choices and actions” (which explains the expression “general equilibrium analysis”)! In reply
to Schumpeter’s “Walrasian” formulation of “economics” (in Hauptinhalt), Robbins objects: “But it is one thing to generalise
the notion of exchange as a construction. It is another to use it in
this sense as a criterion [of
Economics],” (p.20). (Recall that for Schumpeter, Walras was “the greatest of
economists”. Nevertheless, he himself was to abandon the Walrasian ‘Statik’
analysis in favour of the much more Nietzschean notion of Entwicklung
with its ‘Dynamik’ approach centred on the Unternehmergeist, the
“entrepreneurial spirit” as the source of the capitalist Innovationsprozess.
We discuss this in our ‘Entwicklung: Capitalism as Trans-crescence’, a
study devoted to the Austrian economist.)
This “science of choice” leaves to
one side all considerations of “ownership” and “entitlement” to what it calls
“scarce” – decidedly not “social”! – resources by calling them (individual)
“endowments”! At the same time, however, by “reducing” itself to a “pure logic of choice” (Hayek’s phrase),
to a “science”, such an Economics rapidly loses its “practical” character –
what allows it to be a “choice” (this will be von Mises’s bitter recrimination
against Hayek) – and therefore turns itself into a formal mathematical or
engineering exercise. (In the case of Walrasian equilibrium, for instance,
Hayek will show conclusively that its equations can apply “practically” only to
a single individual who can be taken to process the information they contain simultaneously, like a totalitarian,
omniscient socialist “planner”.)
As Nietzsche notes with customary
sagacity, far from being a purely “negative” state of pure “contemplation”, the
a-void-ance of the Will-to-Life,
Nirvana is the A-skesis, its active operari, the reward for the
deferral of consumption – its abnegation!
The opposite of “hedonism” (Greek hede,
now), its renunciation (Entsagung), is placed thus at the centre of limitless capitalist accumulation, as
the ascetic Ideal – Nirvana, “the complete satisfaction of all requirements”
(Robbins). In effect, the “freedom from
want” that Nirvana represents is freedom from the Arbeit understood as “toil”, as “dis-utility”: it is Will to Power
over living labour! Except that all the “priests”, all the “pessimists”,
all the peddlers of the “ascetic ideal” wish to disguise “ideologically” its
clear “choice” or “resolve” to accumulate social resources as “pious renunciation”,
as “abnegation”, as “entrepreneurship”.
Cf. Weber’s Protestantische
Ethik. Even Weber overlooks, except perhaps at the very end of his
monograph when he alludes to the new thrust of entrepreneurial capitalism, this
dis-guised Will to Power beneath the veil of the religious Askesis whereby the positive urge to accumulate capital, the
Spirit of Capitalism, is camouflaged
as the Protestant Ethic! This is a Will to Power that de Mandeville had exposed
scabrously in The Fable of the Bees as
“Private Vices, Publick Benefits”, and whose “Hobbesian” origins were lately rediscovered by Hannah Arendt, in Vol.I of The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt
fails to detect, however, the infinite superiority, in complexity and
sophistication and philosophical depth and insight, of the Nietzschean
formulation of the antagonistic bases of capitalist social relations of
production. These themes are canvassed in our Catallaxia study.
Conversely, the “socialist” glorification of “labour” in
its alienated form under capitalism becomes the cruel parody of “communist”
aspirations for human emancipation. The “con-fusion” of all “labour” with
“toil” or “alienated labour”, that is, the failure to distinguish the two, is
one of the most disappointing denouements of many recent “left-wing” studies.
As we shall soon see, Nietzsche
understood perfectly this “apory” of neoclassical and classical economic
analysis – their “ideological” Eskamotage to remove all conflict and antagonism
from economic categories. Yet rather than tackle this ideology, he completely
side-steps the corpus of the
relationship creditor-debtor when he considers the relationship between
individual and community – so much so that he even mis-construes “poverty”
(Elend) in the quotation below as the mere “exclusion” by outlawing or
ostracism of the individual from the community! Completely elided or sublated is what surely must be the most essential
“advantage” of human society, of “civil society” – the “expanded reproduction
of needs” by means of the division of social labour! Beyond “civil
society”, Nietzsche ultimately ignores the fact that it is impossible to
conceive of a human being without its “phylogenetic” attributes that turn it
into a “being human”.
9. Measured always by the standard of
antiquity (this antiquity, moreover, is present or again possible at all
periods), the community stands to its members in that important and radical
relationship of creditor to his "owers." Man lives in a community, man enjoys the advantages of a community
(and what advantages! we occasionally underestimate them nowadays), man
lives protected, spared, in peace and trust, secure from certain injuries and
enmities, to which the man outside the community, the "peaceless"
man, is exposed, —a German understands the original meaning of "Elend"
[misery, poverty] (elend) — secure because he has entered into pledges and
obligations to the community in respect of these very injuries and enmities. What
happens when this is not the case? The
community, the defrauded creditor, will get itself paid, as well as it can, one
can reckon on that. In this case the question of the direct damage done by the
offender is quite subsidiary: quite apart from this the criminal*
[Verbrecher] is above all a breaker, a breaker of word and covenant to the
whole, as regards all the advantages and amenities of the communal life in
which up to that time he had participated. The criminal [Verbrecher] is an
"ower" [Brecher] who not only fails to repay the advances and
advantages that have been given to him, but even sets out to attack his
creditor: consequently he is in the future not only, as is fair, deprived
of all these advantages and amenities — he is in addition reminded of the
importance of those advantages. The wrath of the injured creditor, of the
community, puts him back in the wild and outlawed status from which he was
previously protected : the community repudiates him — and now every kind of
enmity can vent itself on him. Punishment
is in this stage of civilisation simply the copy, the mimic, of the normal
treatment of the hated, disdained, and conquered enemy, who is not only deprived
of every right and protection but of every mercy; so we have the martial law
and triumphant festival of the vae
victis! in all its mercilessness and cruelty. This shows why war itself
(counting the sacrificial cult of war) has produced all the forms under which
punishment has manifested itself in history.
9. Immer
mit dem Maasse der Vorzeit gemessen (welche Vorzeit übrigens zu allen Zeiten da
ist oder wieder möglich ist): so steht auch das Gemeinwesen zu seinen Gliedern
in jenem wichtigen Grundverhältnisse, dem des Gläubigers zu seinen Schuldnern. Man
lebt in einem Gemeinwesen, man geniesst die Vortheile eines Gemeinwesens (oh
was für Vortheile! wir unterschätzen es heute mitunter), man wohnt geschützt,
geschont, im Frieden und Vertrauen, sorglos in Hinsicht auf gewisse Schädigungen
und Feindseligkeiten, denen der Mensch ausserhalb, der „Friedlose“, ausgesetzt
ist — ein Deutscher versteht, was „Elend“, êlend ursprünglich besagen will —,
wie man sich gerate in Hinsicht auf diese Schädigungen und Feindseligkeiten der
Gemeinde verpfändet und verpflichtet hat. Was wird im andren Fall geschehn? Die
Gemeinschaft, der getäuschte Gläubiger, wird sich bezahlt machen, so gut er
kann, darauf darf man rechnen. Es handelt sich hier am wengisten um den
unmittelbaren Schaden, den der Schädiger angestiftet hat: von ihm noch
abgesehn, ist der Verbrecher vor allem ein „Brecher“, ein Vertrags- und
Wortbrüchiger gegen das Ganze, in Bezug auf alle Güter und Annehmlichkeiten des
Gemeinlebens, an denen er bis dahin Antheil gehabt hat. Der
Verbrecher
ist ein Schuldner, der die ihm erwiesenen Vortheile und Vorschüsse nicht nur
nicht zurückzahlt, sondern sich sogar an seinem Gläubiger vergreift: daher geht
er von nun an, wie billig, nicht nur aller dieser Güter und Vortheile verlustig,
— er wird vielmehr jetzt daran erinnert, was es mit diesen Gütern auf sich hat.
Der Zorn des geschädigten Gläubigers, des Gemeinwesens giebt ihn dem wilden und
vogelfreien
Zustande
wieder zurück, vor dem er bisher behütet war: es stösst ihn von sich, — und nun
darf sich jede Art Feindseligkeit an ihm auslassen. Die „Strafe“ ist auf dieser
Stufe der Gesittung einfach das Abbild, der Mimus des normalen Verhaltens gegen
den gehassten, wehrlos gemachten, niedergeworfnen Feind, der nicht nur jedes
Rechtes und Schutzes, sondern auch jeder Gnade verlustig gegangen ist; also das
Kriegsrecht und Siegesfest des vae victis! in aller Schonungslosigkeit und
Grausamkeit: — woraus es sich erklärt, dass der Krieg selbst (eingerechnet der
kriegerische Opferkult) alle die Formen hergegeben hat, unter denen die Strafe
in der Geschichte auftritt.
There is no “satisfaction” of the
opposing forces in this “balancing act”, there is no extinction of antagonism –
there is only a dynamic “vying and wrestling with and against one another” to
produce a “resultant force”, a result
that is a success and a succession (a play on Folge, result, and
Erfolg, success, and Aufeinanderfolge, succession, that is, a fresh outcome) –
an overpowering (Uberwaltigung) that is a “commandeering”, a “putting to new
use”. This applies not merely between individual and individual, but first and
foremost between individual and community – from antiquity to the present, and
is “again possible at all periods”. (For all this section, see our fundamental
study, ‘Catallaxia: Philosophical
Antecedents of the Sphere of Exchange’.)
The notion of “equal and free exchange”
or “barter”, in fact turns out to be much more complex than what it sounds in
the sense that “equal” denotes “commutative justice” which, as Nietzsche
demonstrates, is a far from straightforward concept:
92… Justice (fairness) originates among
approximately equal powers [Gleichmachtigen], as Thucydides (in the
horrifying conversation between the Athenian and Melian envoys)30
rightly understood. When there is no clearly recognizable supreme power and a
battle would lead to fruitless and mutual injury, one begins to think of
reaching an understanding and negotiating the claims on both sides: the initial
character of justice is barter.
(HATH)
Barter or exchange involve a
notion of “equal powers”, of “value”, whether this be use value or exchange
value: exchange is a “relation” between people. Because Nietzsche always sees
the world sub specie individui,
“ontogenetically” and not “phylogenetically”, he can see only the “exchange”
but not its “basis” (even “biological”!), not its “inter-esse”, not the
division of social labour. Therefore he fails to see that the
“inter-dependence” of the “exchange” need not be “destructive”, depending on
how this “exchange” takes place. Even the entire basis of knowledge,
communication and consciousness is not immune to these eristic forces (the same
“Gesichtspunkt” or “gene-alogy” characterizes
Schopenhauer’s “social” philosophy and Freud’s psychoanalysis).
This element comes out weightily
in the “inter-esse” that is required to ensure that a “market” is
“competitive”. The market is the “place” where “competing parties”, just like
competing “impulses” or “drives”, gather so as to exchange their “endowments”
or “values”. Whether or not “the market” remains “competitive” depends entirely
on the kind of “relations” that obtain between the parties. It is meaningless
therefore to insist on “free and fair competition”, on “free and equal
exchange” because these terms “pre-suppose” an agreement on the “rules” of the “com-petition” that is not
“natural” or “automatic” or “objective”, but one that is eminently “social” –
because “exchange” involves “equal powers” which involve a “social relation”.
Yet this social relation, this “value”, is for Nietzsche the “valor”, the antagonistic “strength” of
the “relating” or competing parties, as in a knightly mediaeval joust.
Quite perceptively, Nietzsche’s concept
of “barter” or “agreement” makes absolutely clear that the “market exchange” of
classical political economy (its “utilitarian” version) which assumes the
“equality” and “freedom” of commutative justice, is simply not possible if the “individuals” involved in the
exchange are presumed to act on the basis of their “self-interest” alone! Because
otherwise these “unmediated” self-interests would quite simply annihilate one
another or not be capable of any “exchange” at all! Even the antagonism of
com-petition must have an agreed foundation on which it can proceed without mutual
annihilation. But this can be the case only if we define “self-interest”
further, because “self interest” on its own cannot be “enlightened”: by
definition, it can only be “one-sided” [einseitig] and therefore
“irreconcilable”!
“Competition” is the one “activity”
that is supposed to lead to “growth” through greater specialization. Now, first
we would need to specify what “the aim” or “goal” of competition is. Even
assuming that it is “utility maximization” until equilibrium is reached, the
insurmountable problem remains that if “self-interested individuals” seek to
exchange their goods to maximize their private “utilities”, then it is obvious
that because they are “self-interested” they will seek to hide market
information or engage in other conduct that will give them a “competitive
advantage” over other self-interested individuals. But then, either no-one
obtains any “advantage” out of this “competitive activity”, in which case
competition cannot lead to “growth” or trans-crescence; or else some
individuals do succeed in obtaining an advantage, but in that case their
“competitive activities” will eventually lead to the establishment of a
“monopoly”, which is the antithesis of “competition” and leads us therefore to
an insoluble “antinomy”! (Note, by the way, that the term “monopoly” itself
presumes the existence of a “market” that has been “monopolized”. This means
that the concepts of “market” and “competition” in economic theory live or die
together!)
“Enlightenment” or “intelligible
freedom” when applied to “self-interest” pre-supposes what remains to be
established, namely, the “agreement” and therefore the “inter-esse” of the
“self-interested individuals”! This “impossible” aspect of “competition”, free
trade or “market” theory, is discussed by Nietzsche in ‘HATH’, where he draws
the analogy with Kant’s Categorical Imperative:
25 Private- and World-Morality…The older
morality, namely Kant's ,25 demands from the individual those
actions that one desires from all men--a nice, naive idea, as if everyone
without further ado would know which manner of action would benefit the whole
of mankind, that is, which actions were desirable at all. It is a theory
like that of free trade, which assumes that a general harmony would have to
result of itself, according to innate laws of melioration. (HATH)
25. Privat- und Welt-Moral. — Seitdem der Glaube aufgehört hat, dass ein
Gott die Schicksale der Welt im Großen leite und, trotz aller anscheinenden
Krümmungen im Pfade der Menschheit, sie doch herrlich hinausführe, müssen die
Menschen selber sich ökumenische, die ganze Erde umspannende Ziele stellen. Die ältere Moral, namentlich die Kant's,
verlangt vom Einzelnen Handlungen, welche man von allen Menschen wünscht: das
war eine schöne naive Sache; als ob ein Jeder ohne Weiteres wüsste, bei welcher
Handlungsweise das Ganze der Menschheit wohlfahre, also welche Handlungen
überhaupt wünschenswert seien; es ist eine Theorie wie die vom Freihandel,
voraussetzend, dass die allgemeine Harmonie sich nach eingeborenen Gesetzen des
Besserwerdens von selbst ergeben müsse. Vielleicht lässt es ein zukünftiger
Überblick über die Bedürfnisse der Menschheit durchaus nicht wünschenswert
erscheinen, dass alle Menschen gleich handeln, vielmehr dürften im Interesse
ökumenischer Ziele für ganze Strecken der Menschheit specielle, vielleicht
unter Umständen sogar böse Aufgaben zu stellen sein. — Jedenfalls muss, wenn
die Menschheit sich nicht durch eine solche bewusste Gesamtregierung zu Grunde
richten soll, vorher eine alle bisherigen Grade übersteigende Kenntnis der
Bedingungen der Kultur, als wissenschaftlicher Maßstab für ökumenische Ziele,
gefunden sein. Hierin liegt die ungeheure Aufgabe der großen Geister des
nächsten Jahrhunderts.
In the
absence of an “inter-esse” that allows us to agree on the “rules of
competition” in the “market”, no “self-regulating market” is possible. A
meaningful notion of “com-petition” must therefore set out “the inter-esse”,
the agreement or “the goal” (Zweck) of the competitive game, even when the
inter-esse remains antagonistic at any given historical stage. But this runs
counter to economic theory, both Classical and Neoclassical, because the
“spelling out” of these rules would presuppose a real political foundation of “inter-ests” between the market
participants that precedes market
exchange and competition and that fundamentally distorts and vitiates the putative “equality” of “self-interested
individuals” that underpins bourgeois economic theory! This is what Cacciari
would call “politics without foundation”. (The entire project of the Freiburg School
Ultimately,
in the absence of such an “inter-esse”, the economic notion of “competition”
cannot form the basis of the “self-regulating market” and its “free and equal exchange”,
which are therefore unmasked as specific antagonistic historical institutions.
In Nietzsche’s words, these concepts are analogous to “a snake that bites its
own tail” – in our own words, they are “autophagous”, they “eat themselves” –
because either we say that they are “purposeless” (abulic) in that they have
“no aim or goal” outside themselves
(!), in which case they cease to be “com-petitive” (Latin for “seeking the same
things”), or else we say that the goal of competition is… “to destroy the
competition” (!), in which case it is an “aporetic” notion, one that cannot
sub-sist practically as “self-regulationg”! Here is Nietzsche’s identical
conclusion by analogy with the pursuit of “art for art’s sake”:
24. L’Art pour l’art…When the end of the ethical preacher and
improver of mankind has been excluded from art, it does not at all follow that
art in itself is without an end, without a goal, meaningless ; in short, L’ art pour L’ art is a serpent
which bites its own tail. ‘No end at all, rather than a moral end!’ - thus
speaks pure passion. A psychologist [Nietzsche means himself as the analyst
examining art as an activity], on the other hand, asks, what does all art do?
does it not praise? does it not glorify? does it not select? does it not bring
into prominence? In each of these cases it strengthens or weakens certain valuations [Werthschatzungen] ... (ToI)
Wenn
man den Zweck des Moralpredigens und Menschen-Verbesserns von der Kunst
ausgeschlossen hat, so folgt daraus noch lange nicht, dass die Kunst überhaupt
zwecklos, ziellos, sinnlos, kurz l'art pour l'art — ein Wurm, der sich in den
Schwanz beisst — ist. „Lieber gar keinen Zweck als einen moralischen Zweck!” —
so redet die blosse Leidenschaft. Ein Psycholog fragt dagegen: was thut alle
Kunst? lobt sie nicht? verherrlicht sie nicht? wählt sie nicht aus? zieht sie
nicht hervor? Mit dem Allen stärkt oder schwächt sie gewisse Werthschätzungen
...
An activity that does not make
explicit its “goal” (Ziel) and therefore its “premises” will inexorably be
without an “end” – without “target”, aim or purpose (Zweck) – Nietzsche
incorrectly speaks of “meaning” in this quotation. Indeed, the very fact that human
beings “engage” in the “activity” of exchange and barter, sale and purchase,
and “promising” (through contracts or obligations or bonds) – that fact itself
(!) shows that there is a “need-necessity” in the “exchange relationship”
itself – because there would be no “exchange or barter” without a
“need-necessity” behind it as a “motive”, as an “impulse”, a “drive” – an
“instinct”! It cannot be said therefore that “exchange and barter” can ever be
“free”. The “freedom of the will” is brought into question ipso facto – by the very deed!
Remember that Adam Smith
attributed the division of labour to the “act” or “propensity” of human beings
to exchange, truck and barter. Similarly, Nietzsche begins his entire analysis of “Value” – indeed, of the entire “onto-geny
of thought”! - from this primordial “exchange and barter”. Like Smith, he
treats the division of labour as the product of “individual actions”, even
though unlike Smith he does not believe that these “individual actions” are
“free”. Both Nietzsche’s as well as Smith’s analyses of “exchange and barter”
are founded entirely on an “ontogenetic” conception of human being – one that
excludes ab initio and absolutely the
“phylogenetic” notion of “species-conscious being-human”! For Adam Smith, it is
the natural human tendency to truck,
barter and exchange that induces “specialization” and the division of labour
(see the famous Ch.2 of The Wealth of
Nations).
But Smith misses the obvious objection that no “truck, barter, and
exchange” is possible without a pre-existing “specialization”, that is to say,
without the “division of social
labour”! In other words, and
contra Adam Smith, not only is the activity of “exchange and barter” not
“free”, as Nietzsche correctly perceives; not only is it not “equal”, as Nietzsche
also explains; but above all this lack of “freedom and equality” in human
interaction arises from the “phylogenetic inter-dependence of human beings” –
from our existence as “species-conscious being-human”!
Little wonder then that
equilibrium analysis with its notion of “pure competition” excludes any and all
activities that come under the definition of “competition” (Hayek in Individualism & Economic Order,
discussed by Demsetz in “Competition”) so that, like Kant’s thoughts
without human intuitive senses, it
remains an “empty category”. Empty and blind - in fact purposeless, because given that self-interested individuals are not
at equilibrium, it is impossible for them to know how to price their endowments
for exchange. (Purposeless but not meaningless, pace Myrdal, because the very “mathesis” of reality that
equilibrium analysis carries out is itself a “strategy” that allows its
practitioners “to act effectively” on that reality. This fundamental insight is
enucleated in our Pure Logic of Choice
and in our Catallaxia.) This is so
because there are no “rules” to agree on the “valuation” of these endowments,
which can be valued only if their “prices” are already known! - The classic circulus vitiosus.
Little wonder also that
equilibrium analysis cannot admit of “time” – because “everything” must happen
“at once”! (See Hayek, ‘I&EO’, on this.) Expressed in terms of “equilibrium
analysis”, market participants would need to have all the information available
at equilibrium for them to fix their prices accordingly. – Which is why Hayek
correctly points out that Walrasian equilibrium can really apply only to one individual, not to a
“market” case with separate individuals in competition with one another! Because
the “self-interests” of these theoretically separate
individuals co-incide by definition,
and therefore they are axiomatically
already at equilibrium (!), which defeats the purpose of the whole analysis – namely, to determine the “content” of prices not as simple exchange-ratios
or relative prices but rather in
terms of “what makes the goods
commensurable” and therefore what the basis
and purpose, the “value” of the exchange is! As with Robbins, the bourgeois
“hypostatization” of economic relations ends up “devouring” their
“materiality”, their corpus, their
“practical object and substance”, literally, their “subject-matter”:
“For
it is not the materiality of even material means of gratification which
gives them their status as economic goods; it is their relation to valuations.
It is their form rather than their substance which is significant,” (Essay, p.21)
For Nietzsche, this “circularity” of “science”, this “auto-phagy” or
“anti-nomy”, this loss of “sense” as direction [Richtung] and purpose [Ziel,
Zweck], of “will” (a-bulia) – indeed, of “materiality”, and therefore their
“hypostatization” - not in a “voluntaristic”, “decisionist” or “arbitrary”, but
in a “physiological” sense as Will to Power - , is the ultimate meaning of
scientific “Nihilism”! The very “pursuit of truth”, the “search for objectivity”,
for “value-neutrality”, undermines the very “(interested!) motive” or “impulse”
of the quest! What Nietzsche does here, his greatest service even to us, is to
un-mask the “metaphysics of utility”, the fact that marginal utility theory is
itself pure metaphysics, just as much as the labour theory of value that it was
supposed to replace!
In a study we are preparing (The Pure Logic of Choice), where we examine these matters
systematically, we discuss how Wittgenstein likened the “impossibility” of this
concept to that of “moving” a vector (a car, a wheel, or simply walking) on a
perfectly smooth surface: it cannot be done without “friction” (in Philosophical Investigations, par.107).
And the “friction”, far from being “exogenous” or “accidental” or
“adventitious” to the analysis, constitutes the very “meaning and purpose” of
“competition”: the “friction”, that is
to say, the conflict of interests, the antagonism of values, the clash of
impulses or instincts is what we need to study! Frank Hahn, quoted in T.
Lawson, ‘The (Confused) State of Equilibrium Analysis’, concedes that
equilibrium analysis involves the setting of conditions that can yield a given
outcome, namely, the existence of equilibrium: in other words, the “game” is
“rigged” from the outset. But the essential point, the one that Lawson fails
completely to appreciate despite his honest efforts, is that, as we shall soon
see in Part Two extrapolating Nietzsche’s reflections on logic to
Wittgenstein’s on language, the outcome
of general equilibrium analysis is “inexorable”! (For a full discussion of
these themes, see also our Catallaxia
study.)
Because “self-interest” can never
be the foundation of “equal exchange”, of commutative justice in the
“self-regulating market”, Nietzsche genially re-defines “exchange”, “sale and
purchase” or “barter” as the “settlement” of “equal powers”, as an unresolved
and irresoluble “antagonism of values”, a “clash of impulses, instincts or
wills’ to which only a “temporary truce” is applicable in an unending struggle
for supremacy, for “overpowering” and “domination”. For him, only this “friction”, this ongoing,
incessant “conflict” can give “meaning” (we would say “purpose”) to the act of exchange, sale and purchase,
or barter - never as a “final extinguishment of the “need-necessity” in the act
of “exchange”, but only as a “trans-formation” (Veranderung) of these
“Antagonistic Values” or “impulses”, this continuous “ordering of rank”
(Rangordnung) of values! Once again, as we quoted above, the “temporary”,
“precarious”, “critical” result (Folge) is
a sort of justice and
agreement: for in virtue of the justice and agreement all those impulses [Triebe,
drives] can maintain themselves in existence and retain their mutual rights.
95 Morality
of the mature individual. Until now man has taken the true sign of a moral
act to be its impersonal nature; and it has been shown that in the beginning
all impersonal acts were praised and distinguished in respect to the common good [allgemeinen Nutzen,
utility]. Might not a significant
transformation of these views be at hand, now when we see with ever greater
clarity that precisely in the most personal respect [personliche
Rucksicht, personal hindsight] the common good [Nutzen fur die
Allgemeine] is also greatest; so that now it is precisely the strictly personal
action [streng personliche Handeln] which corresponds to the current concept of
morality (as a common profit [allgemeinen Nutzlichkeit])? To make a whole person of oneself
and keep in mind that person's greatest good [hochstes Wohl] in
everything one does--this takes us further than any pitying impulses
[mitleidigen Regungen] and actions for the sake of others. To be sure, we all still suffer from too slight a regard for our own
personal need; it has been poorly developed. Let us admit that our mind has
instead been forcibly diverted from it and offered in sacrifice to the state,
to science, to the needy, as if it were something bad which had to be
sacrificed. Now too we wish to work for our fellow men, but only insofar as we
find our own highest advantage [Vorteil, share] in this work [Arbeit]; no more,
no less. It depends only on what one understands by his advantage.
The immature, undeveloped, crude individual will also understand it most
crudely. (HATH)
95.
Moral des reifen Individuums. — Man hat bisher als das eigentliche Kennzeichen
der moralischen Handlung das Unpersönliche angesehen; und es ist nachgewiesen,
dass zu Anfang die Rücksicht auf den allgemeinen Nutzen es war, derentwegen man
alle unpersönlichen Handlungen lobte und auszeichnete. Sollte nicht eine
bedeutende Umwandelung dieser Ansichten bevorstehen, jetzt wo immer besser
eingesehen wird, dass gerade in der möglichst persönlichen Rücksicht auch der
Nutzen für das Allgemeine am größten ist: so dass gerade das streng persönliche
Handeln dem jetzigen Begriff der Moralität (als einer allgemeinen Nützlichkeit)
entspricht? Aus sich eine ganze Person machen und in Allem, was man tut, deren
höchstes Wohl in's Auge fassen — das bringt weiter, als jene mitleidigen
Regungen und Handlungen zu Gunsten Anderer. Wir Alle leiden freilich noch immer
an der allzugeringen Beachtung des Persönlichen an uns, es ist schlecht
ausgebildet, — gestehen wir es uns ein: man hat vielmehr unsern Sinn gewaltsam
von ihm abgezogen und dem Staate, der Wissenschaft, dem Hilfebedürftigen zum
Opfer angeboten, wie als ob es das Schlechte wäre, das geopfert werden müsste.
Auch jetzt wollen wir für unsere Mitmenschen arbeiten, aber nur so weit, als
wir unsern eigenen höchsten Vorteil in
dieser Arbeit finden, nicht mehr, nicht weniger. Es kommt nur darauf an,
was man als seinen Vorteil versteht; gerade das unreife, unentwickelte, rohe
Individuum wird ihn auch am rohesten verstehen.
As we have emphasised, no
“Automatik”, no “general harmony”, no “co-incidence” of “personal action” or
“self-interest” and “common profit” is possible for Nietzsche. Yet he is
advocating the supremacy or paramountcy of “the person’s greatest good… [which
has been] forcibly diverted… and offered in sacrifice to the state, to science,
to the needy”. It is not a utilitarian summum
bonum that he seeks, then, but rather a system of “strictly personal action
which corresponds to the current concept of morality (as a common profit)”.
Nowhere does he discuss or explain how “the person’s greatest good” can
simultaneously lead to “a common profit”. Nietzsche here as in the discussion
of “justice and equality” seems to believe that self-assertion and
self-interest may still lead to each person’s “own highest advantage in this work”,
so long as this is not understood “most crudely” as it is bound to be by “the
immature, undeveloped, crude individual”. There is the seed here of the “ideal”
that Nietzsche will seek to articulate later: - the yearning for an “unanswerable
state of blamelessness” or “irresponsible state of innocence”. Again, such
“spontaneous order” or even “settlement” (Ausgleich) could never be more than a
chimaera.
In order to go “beyond good and
evil”, Nietzsche has to posit history, not as a “pro-gress”, an evolving
“inter-esse”, but rather as a “physis” as manifest “nature” (Wesen als Werden)
in-comprehensible to human beings who are “within life”, “in the world”,
intra-mundane, and therefore incapable of “valuing” life and the world. And
yet, for humans to be aware of this need-necessity of physis and to accept and
affirm the need-necessity of this awareness, it is evident that history must
either remain “meaningless” or else “repeat itself indefinitely”,
“ana-logically”. Even in a purely “pragmatical” sense, it can be argued that
Nietzsche is wrong “in the e-vent” (!), in the historical “e-venience” or
“de-velop-ment” or “e-volution” of material forms of inter-dependence through
“social labour” – be it “mechanical” (“soul-less”, “dis-enchanted”
Rationalisierung) or “organic” (communal solidarity or sym-biosis). (We are
reversing here, of course, the Durkheimian terminology of “solidarity” in the
division of social labour.)
And
although he is able to show the “historicity” of human traits and connotations
both physical and mental, he is never quite equal to the task of focusing on
their “phylogenesis” as opposed to “ontogenesis”. His historical remarks refer
almost exclusively to a stage of human evolution that belongs clearly to homo
sapiens and even then are restricted to the documented phase of our history
(especially from pre-Socratic times).
35. Critique of the morality of decadence. -- An
"altruistic" morality--a morality in which self-interest wilts
away--remains a bad sign [Anzeichen, indication] under all circumstances.
This is true of individuals; it is particularly true of nations. The best is
lacking when self-interest begins to be lacking. Instinctively to choose what
is harmful for oneself, to feel attracted by "disinterested" motives,
that is virtually the formula of decadence. "Not to seek one's own
advantage"--that is merely the moral fig leaf for quite a different,
namely, a physiological, state of
affairs: "I no longer know how to find my own advantage." Disintegration [Disgregation] of the instincts!
Man is finished when he becomes altruistic. Instead of saying naively, "I
am no longer worth anything," the moral lie in the mouth of the decadent
says, "Nothing is worth anything, life is not worth anything." Such a judgment always remains very dangerous,
it is contagious: throughout the morbid soil of society it soon proliferates
into a tropical vegetation of concepts--now as a religion (Christianity), now
as a philosophy (Schopenhauerism). Sometimes the poisonous vegetation which
has grown out of such decomposition poisons life itself for millennia with its
fumes.
35.
Kritik der Décadence-Moral. — Eine „altruistische” Moral, eine Moral, bei der
die Selbstsucht verkümmert —, bleibt unter allen Umständen ein schlechtes
Anzeichen. Dies gilt vom Einzelnen, dies gilt namentlich von Völkern. Es fehlt
am Besten, wenn es an der Selbstsucht zu fehlen beginnt. Instinktiv das
Sich-Schädliche wählen, Gelockt-werden durch „uninteressirte” Motive giebt
beinahe die Formel ab für décadence. „Nicht seinen Nutzen suchen” — das ist
bloss das moralische Feigenblatt für eine ganz andere, nämlich physiologische Thatsächlichkeit: „ich
weiss meinen Nutzen nicht mehr zu finden” ... Disgregation der Instinkte! — Es
ist zu Ende mit ihm, wenn der Mensch altruistisch wird. — Statt naiv zu sagen,
„ich bin nichts mehr werth,” sagt die Moral Lüge im Munde des décadent: „Nichts
ist etwas werth, — das Leben ist nichts werth” ... Ein solches Urtheil bleibt
zuletzt eine grosse Gefahr, es wirkt ansteckend, — auf dem ganzen morbiden Boden
der Gesellschaft wuchert es bald zu tropischer Begriffs-Vegetation empor, bald
als Religion (Christenthum), bald als Philosophie (Schopenhauerei). Unter
Umständen vergiftet eine solche aus Fäulniss gewachsene Giftbaum-Vegetation mit
ihrem Dunste weithin, auf Jahrtausende hin das Leben ...
The time
fast approaches when we must ask what this “actual man” is: what can be the
object of the “gaya
scienza”? For does not the obliteration of “trans-valuation of values” leave a
vacuum, moral as well as material? What Zivilisation
do we choose to have? For after all, living is “necessarily” evaluating! Or is
it that we do not have a “choice”? Nietzsche seems to fall back on a curious
mixture of “naturalism” and “spontaneity” (spontaneous order?) in the
concluding aphorism of “First and Last Thing”:
34 Some
reassurance. But does not our
philosophy then turn into tragedy? Does not truth become an enemy of life, an
enemy of what is better? A question seems to weigh down our tongues, and yet
not want to be uttered: whether one is capable of consciously remaining
in untruth, or, if one had to do so, whether death would not be
preferable? For there is no "ought" anymore. Morality to the extent
that it was an "ought" has been destroyed by our way of reflection,
every bit as much as religion. Knowledge can allow only pleasure and
unpleasure, benefit and harm, as motives. But how will these motives come to
terms with the feeling for truth? These motives, too, have to do with
errors (to the extent that inclination and disinclination, and their very
unfair measurements, essentially determine, as we have said, our pleasure and
unpleasure). All human life is sunk deep in untruth; the individual cannot pull
it out of this well without growing profoundly annoyed with his entire past,
without finding his present motives (like honor) senseless, and without
opposing scorn and disdain to the passions that urge one on to the future and
to the happiness in it. If this is true,
is there only one way of thought left, with despair as a personal end and a
philosophy of destruction as a theoretical end?
I believe that a man's temperament
determines the aftereffect of knowledge; although the aftereffect described
above is possible in some natures, I could just as well imagine a different
one, which would give rise to a life much more simple, more free of affects
than the present one. The old motives of intense desire would still be strong
at first, due to old, inherited habit, but they would gradually grow weaker
under the influence of cleansing knowledge. Finally one would live among men
and with oneself as in nature, without praise, reproaches,
overzealousness, delighting in many things as in a spectacle that one formerly
had only to fear. One would be free of appearance 32 and would no
longer feel the goading thought that one was not simply nature, or that one was
more than nature. (HATH)
“A spectacle that one formerly had to fear”: Nietzsche seems to
distinguish between institutions that allow the affirmation of life and those
that seek to repress it. He even seems to be tempted by “enlightened
self-interest” at times, for providing the “spontaneity” he seeks: “to be free
of appearance”, “no longer [to] feel the goading thought that one was not
simply nature, or that one was more than nature”. Nietzsche is almost
“physiologically” impelled to read “physis” or “nature” as a “destiny” of
conflict and strife, as “Will to Power” - not over life itself, but “at one”
with life, in mimetic unison and harmony with it. Yet it is his “perspectivism”
and “naturalism” that become problematic – engender a nostalgic paralysis, even
nihilism – because it is impossible to evaluate “life” out of “need-necessity”
or “fate”, and then “to be conscious or aware” of such need-necessity – and
then again believe in the necessity of such evaluation or even will it! Whilst Nietzsche may well
refrain from evaluating “life” in the
past, as it has transpired historically, he must then decide whether to
accept the present as it is – and therefore “preserve” it as “substance”, as
permanence, against the “becoming” he exalts -, or else to trans-form it by pro-jecting (dia-noia) its
“ad-vantageous” elements into the future.
There are times when he clearly
wishes he did not have to make a “choice” – and is tempted, cosmically, to
affirm the “cyclical” returning of the Dyonisian mysteries to which all life is
bound and, socially, to accept the “automaticity”, the “self-regulation” of the
“market mechanism”.
3… This
tremendous inward tension then discharged itself in terrible and ruthless
hostility to the outside world: the city-states tore each other to pieces so
that the citizens of each might find peace from themselves. One needed to be
strong: danger was near, it lurked everywhere. The magnificent physical suppleness, the audacious realism and
immoralism which distinguished the Hellene constituted a need, not
"nature." It only resulted, it was not there from the start. And
with festivals and the arts they also aimed at nothing other than to feel on
top, to show themselves on top. These are means of glorifying oneself, and in
certain cases, of inspiring fear of oneself…
For it is only in the Dionysian
mysteries, in the psychology of the Dionysian state, that the basic fact of the
Hellenic instinct finds expression - its "will to life." What was it
that the Hellene guaranteed himself by means of these mysteries? Eternal life, the eternal return of life, the future
promised and hallowed in the past; the triumphant Yes to life beyond all death
and change; true life as the overall
continuation of life through procreation, through the mysteries of sexuality.
(ToI)
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