Nietzsche’s Argument Against Re-presentation Through The Lenses Of Deleuze And Heidegger
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Title: Nietzsche’s Argument Against Re-presentation Through The Lenses Of Deleuze And Heidegger
“The notion
of representation poisons philosophy (Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 81)
Abstract:
The early 1960’s
were a monumental time in the history of Nietzsche studies, as two philosophers
who would go on to be considered, arguably, the most important continental
philosophers of the twentieth century, Deleuze and Heidegger, both published
their major book length interpretations of Nietzsche at that time. Their approaches are very different. Deleuze takes the Nietzschean image of the
playful dice throw and necessity of chance to help re-interpret beings as
non-representational symptoms of an underlying play of forces. Heidegger, on the other hand, interprets
Nietzsche in the traditional metaphysical light of eternal return as existentia
and will to power as essentia. Though
these two approaches to the core of what Nietzsche was trying to do are very
different, this essay attempts to show both Deleuze’s and Heidegger’s
interpretations are very complimentary in the way they invoke Nietzsche’s
thought to dismantle re-presentational philosophy.
Key Words: Re-presentation;
Deleuze; Heidegger; Nietzsche; Criteria; Interpret; Evaluate
INTRODUCTION
This essay is
meant as a critique of representational philosophy, the tradition of philosophy
that has its beginnings with the Greeks.
Representation is Heidegger’s schema for organizing the history of
Western Philosophy. Representational
thinking is so ingrained in the way we look at life, that any attempt to argue
against it has some steep cliffs to climb.
For instance, Dutilh Novaes says
“In particular,
arguments that threaten our core beliefs and our sense of belonging to a group
(e.g., political beliefs) typically trigger all kinds of motivated reasoning
(Taber & Lodge 2006; Kahan 2017) whereby one outright rejects those
arguments without properly engaging with their content. (Dutilh Novaes, 2021)”
First, we look
at the Greek understanding of the essence of present beings as being re-presented
in the light of their Being, with the critique of Antisthenes. Next, we see the birth of Modern
representational philosophy with the turn to the subject with Descartes. Finally, we see representation expanded with
Kant’s transcendental idealism. Given
this background/context, we will then look at how Nietzsche is going to disrupt
this re-presentational philosophy.
Firstly, Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche will center around how things
and phenomena are actually non-representational symptoms of an interplay of
forces (also see Deleuze, Nietzsche’s Burst, 129): “The artist in general must
treat the world as a symptom (Deleuze, On Nietzsche, 140).” After presenting Deleuze’s reading of
Nietzsche contra representation via radical empiricism, Heidegger will be shown
in his reading of Nietzsche how eternal return wipes the canvas of beings clean
to then allow will to power to stamp becoming with Being. In both these cases, Deleuze’s and
Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, a powerful critique of the philosophy of
“essence” is proposed: substituting out “what is” for “which one” with Deleuze,
and substituting out knowing for schematizing out of utility for Heidegger
(Also see Deleuze, “Nietzsche” in Pure Immanence, 65ff).
(i)
Plato’s laugh
Heidegger points
out that Antisthenes denied the possibility of addressing something as
something, or, more specifically, something as something else (cf
Aristotle's Topics A, chapter 11). In other words, Antisthenes denies the
possibility of addressing something in the form kataphasis (affirmation) and
apophasis (denial), in the 'as' form, which also implies there can not
be a contradiction, since a mere phasis (showing) cannot be false. The only
manner Antisthenes allows for addressing things is by tautological naming, man
is man. In this regard, Antisthenes denied the possibility of delimiting the
essential content of a thing in a definition, because the definition is macro,
containing many words, so it attempts to exhibit one thing in terms of many things,
in that the thing itself as a one is not addressed but rather is addressed in
terms of what it is not. Antisthenes thought a being cannot be properly
exhibited in a definition. We shall now
make this more explicit and show how the birth of representational philosophy
is to be found here.
The kind of
logos under discussion, as Aristotle understands it, can have two
possibilities. It is either the definition that supposedly properly shows the
being, or one of the manifold determinations of beings, "[fjor in a
certain sense every being coincides with itself as itself and with itself as it
is qualified (Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 350)." The latter manner is in a
sense derivative because it involves a synthesis, a joining together with that
which already is in itself to something it is not in itself. Antisthenes, Aristotle says (cf Metaphysics,
V, chapter 28, 1024b32f ), believed only in addressing a being in the logos
proper to it because he did not distinguish between addressing the thing in
itself and addressing the thing 'as' something. For Antisthenes, a
definition was not possible because it did not, following what was said above,
address the thing, and hence a tautology, positing one and the same thing in
relation to itself, was the only proper logos. Hence, the addressing of
something as something (else) is excluded in Antisthenes doctrine.
Plato, in the
Sophist, called Antisthenes doctrine "the most laughable,
katagelastotata (252b8)," because it denied that something was to be
understood by appealing to something beyond the thing itself, while Antisthenes
himself tacitly adopted a whole slew of ontological structures even in mere
naming that go beyond the mere entity at hand, such as einai, Being, choris,
separate from, ton allown, the others, and kath auto, in itself. Thus, to be a being for Plato means something
is what it is in its specificity (eg a bachelor), and not what it isn’t (a
tree), and not nothing at all. This is the birth of metaphysics: ta meta ta
physica, beings understood in their Being.
So, for Plato man must always have Being in view by the mind’s eye.
Hence, we could not have the experience of beings that we do unless we had in
view such things as variation/equality by the mind’s eye in order to
encounter various things; a view of sameness/contrariety to encounter
ourselves as self-same in each case; a view of symmetry and harmoniousness
allow us to arrange and construct things; etc. It is also specifically
understood by Aristotle from the point of view of a being’s “what being (the
table as hard),” and its “how-being (the table as badly positioned),” this
second sense of Being referring both to how the observer encounters the being
(it looks badly positioned) and the context of the being. In this second sense,
a table is (i) at-hand if we need to resolve a dispute about its colour,
and (ii) badly positioned in the corner of the lecture hall during
a lecture vs well positioned in the corner of the stadium when
the game is going on.
This was Plato’s
thrown gauntlet: The addressing something as something, the very
entity-hood of the entity, implies a kataphasis/apophasis, because it addresses
a being in terms of what is beyond it, namely its Being. To be present as a
being means to be present in such a way that it is “re-presented” in
the light of Being. And, following what was said
about Plato, a being, something as something, shows the mind
schematizing beings in something like the form of a predicative judgement. “To be” means to be re-presented.
(ii)
Descartes and Re-presentation as Subject-hood
Initiating the
modern period of re-presentational philosophy, Heidegger argues the
inception was with Descartes’ interpretation of the subject:
“Because [with Descartes] man essentially has become the subjectum, and
beingness has become equivalent to representedness, and truth equivalent to
certitude, man now has disposal over the whole of beings as such in an
essential way, for he provides the measure for the beingness of every
individual being (Heidegger, Nietzsche vol 2, 121).”
Heidegger
argues thinking or cogitare for Descartes is more specifically percipere
(per-capio), a term Descartes does substitute for cogitare, the seizing or
taking possession of something so as to place it before oneself or presenting
it to oneself, re-presenting. So we have the two poles of
representation as (i) represented and (ii) representing, just as we have
perceptio as percipere and perceptum. For Descartes every ego cogito is a
cogito me cogitare, every “I represent something” simultaneously “always
already represents myself.” Human consciousness is self-consciousness,
though not that the self is an object for consciousness like the tree or house,
but rather the essence of the subject is re-presenting in the light of the
essence of truth. What does this mean?
Lifeless
nature in principle is interpreted as res extensa as a consequence of the Sum
res cogitans, which is a principium or ground, meaning self-representing
representation. This stands in relation to truth. Let’s explain
this.
Since
the ancients, truth meant agreement of knowledge with beings. But this
understanding is quite fluid and varies depending on what is understood by
“knower” and “beings.” Consequently, Descartes’ interpretation of
knowledge only recognizes as [recall the ‘as’ with Antisthenes
and Plato] a true being that which, in relation to cogitare/percipere,
is secured in re-presentation that presents it to a subject as
indubitable and can be reckoned with as such at all times.[1]
Specifically,
the res extensa or extended substances are re-presented in terms
of shape and motion as what is “really real”
in them, location and mobility, that which makes
the res extensa predictable and controllable.
For Descartes this made us “the masters and possessors of nature (Descartes, Opp.
VI, 61 ff).” This is made possible for Descartes via the structure of the
cogito as that which, in re-presenting, unconsciously creates for beings the conditions
for presentability: indubitability and certitude. On the basis of
this error is possible, when in re-presenting, something is presented to the
one representing that does not satisfy the conditions of presentability: indubitability
and certitude.
For
Nietzsche, inasmuch as representing re-presents beings as fixed (predictable
and controllable), it denies the reality, the realm of becoming. The
fixed is seen as what “is,” while becoming is what “is not.” Cartesian
truth for Nietzsche is an error some beings cannot survive without.
(iii)
Kant and Transcendental Idealism as Re-presentation
The
next great figure of representational thinking for Deleuze is Kant. Deleuze says:
“We
recognize here the development of a mystification which began with Kant. By making will the essence of
things or the world seen from the inside, the distinction between two worlds is
denied in principle: the same world is both sensible and super-sensible
(Deleuze, NP, 83).”
Let
us consider Kant’s philosophy of Will, which is not what we usually mean by
Will, but rather unconsciously self-legislating rules that make scientific
experience/judgments possible, as well as moral experience/judgments
possible. Kant says his critical period
was sparked by Hume’s skepticism. For instance, Hume said we only ever
experience an ever-changing manifold of thing following upon thing (one ball
hits and moves another) or state following upon state (steam following upon
heating liquid water). We simply experience a constantly changing
manifold: this, then this, then this, etc, not B following A necessarily, that
is, according to a rule. Therefore, for Hume we don’t
experience cause and effect, just the mind associates A with B as cause and
effect because we see them together all the time.
Kant
agreed, but then made a distinction between sense and experience,
saying that while we only ever sense a manifold of thing
following upon thing or state following upon state, the mind re-presents this
manifold from sense to itself as “understanding experience,” and
so we understandingly experience cause and effect as the
manifold presented in sense re-presented in something like the form of a
language, re-presented to us in terms of the framework of
the rule of temporal irreversibility of the varying
degrees of the experienced causal sequence: So, we experience temporal
irreversibility (1) Positively as change of place where form
is unchanged (one ball hits another and moves it); (2) Comparatively
Greater as temporary change of form (boiling water, that then returns
to starting form when the heat source is removed); and (3) Superlatively creating
a self-standing new form (the cooked egg can’t be uncooked). We do
indeed understandingly experience the various degrees of the irreversibility of
the causal sequence even if we don’t sense it. For Kant,
obviously Hume was right that we don’t “sense” the “according
to a rule,” but do “understandingly experience” it.
Heidegger
says in his lecture course on Kant’s practical philosophy that Kant redefines
Descartes “I Think” as “I Will,” in that through the unconscious
self-legislation of rules the Will re-presents the world and self to itself out
of a causality of freedom (man being founded on himself), which Heidegger says
is not a freedom-from, but a freedom-for that “makes
possible”: So, man unconsciously legislates to himself that he
morally accompanies all his actions, making moral judgments/moral
experiences possible, which can be phenomenalized in contrast to
certain mentally challenged people, or animals, who are not attached to their
actions morally in the way we are (the dog isn’t evil because he bites
you). Similarly, the way man re-presents the sensory manifold to
himself in understanding experience makes scientific causal
experience and causal judgments possible. Man unconsciously
obeys these self imposed rules/imperatives categorically, which is to say as a
function of being human.
(INTERLUDE)
So, with
representational thinking, we have some of the cornerstones of western
thought. Beings are substances with
properties, standing over and against a person, whose mind unconsciously and
rationally organizes experience for her.
It is precisely this moral, rational person and her world that will be
argued against in the next two sections.
1 Deleuze’s
Nietzsche And The Critique Of Re-presentation
·
This section is not meant as a presentation of
Deleuze’s philosophical position, but rather his interpretation of Nietzsche
(mainly in his “Nietzsche and Philosophy”)
Deleuze’s
general orientation toward Nietzsche is the point of view that things and phenomena
are not the ontos on / alethos on, the really/truly real, but are in fact signs
or symptoms that express interior and exterior forces and interactions between
forces (Deleuze, NP, xvi). Traditionally
in Western thought, inquiry into Being is divided between what-being, essentia,
and how-being or existentia. With
Nietzsche, Deleuze says the question of essence or “what is” is transformed
into the question “which one is,” such as “who is capable of uttering such a
proposition,” although no personalism is implied here. The “which one” is Will to Power. So, for instance, we might ask of the Christian
position of “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a
rich person enter the kingdom of God (Mark 10:25” what reactive forces are at
play in such a statement.
Deleuze argues
thinking for Nietzsche progresses beyond the dichotomy of truth/falsity as criteria
and instead concerns itself with interpretation/weighting of forces and
evaluation of power (Deleuze, Conclusions, 118). So, the issue is not “For Descartes truth is
certainty, in the sense of freedom from doubt,” but genealogically uncovering how
Descartes’ conception of truth was birthed in the tradition stretching from
Thomas and realized in Luther that what needed to be certain as freedom from
doubt for Luther was the salvation of the soul, and the consequences of such a
conception of truth being our basic stance toward the world. Heidegger noted elevated levels of anxiety in
moderns because life is being lived as securing against doubt, which of course
exacerbates anxiety/doubt just as obsessing about eating healthy when you are
on a diet can easily exacerbate the problem because you are thinking about food
all the time. As Foucault said, “[T]ruth isn’t outside power, or lacking in
power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further
study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted
solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating
themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of
multiple forms of constraint (Interview, “Truth and Power” 131).” Foucault isn’t being particularly
controversial here, and is just elaborating on Nietzsche’s point that
assessment and evaluation criteria (such as the sour grapes criteria of slave
morality used in assessing and evaluating actions as Good vs Evil) don’t simply
appear ready made from heaven, but are historical and reflect culture, taste,
bias, evolutionary history, preference, power dynamics, etc (cf. Deleuze NP,
94ff; 103ff).
Key to Deleuze’s
exposition of Nietzsche is that evaluations are given of phenomena using criteria
of assessment and evaluation, but further there is evaluation of those criteria
themselves are also made – the principles according to which judgments are made
(Deleuze, NP, 1-2). Deleuze argues things
are sometimes this, sometimes that (eg., The sense “good” has depending on
whether you are looking at it from the point of view of master (the good bird
of pray), or slave (the good, meek missionary), morality. Analogously, Deleuze gives the example of a
factory door that is sometimes for entering, others for leaving; sweet freedom;
gateway to mind numbing tedium; and these senses can be multiplied in a way
that is only limited by our imaginations (eg, what it means for a local film
crew doing a documentary on local businesses, etc): a multiplicity of aspects. The object is not the really real, but an
expression of ever-changing forces. Similarly, considering the woman as
beautiful is grounded, not in a static characteristic of the woman, but in her
“becoming beautiful” as she emerged from a cute or ugly duckling child into
adulthood, the charms of which, as Marilyn Monroe said, will eventually
fade. Deleuze argues forces for Nietzsche are
threefold: A dominating force, dominated force, and distance as the
differential element. Forces are
essentially relational,[2]
what Nietzsche calls Will, Will being the differential element, in distinction
to atomism which posits simple unities with no way to account for
interrelation. Nietzsche sees the most
usual understanding of atomism as the ego, and posits instead forces that have
multiple switching masks as their expression (eg., some days feeling adamantly liberal,
others adamantly conservative - also see Holland, Deleuze and Psychoanalysis,
307).
As a simple
example, regarding beings (a “being” meaning anything that “is” in some way or
other) as expressions of forces rather than self-contained atoms, educators now
know on submitted student products there is no such thing as a “B” level
student essay in isolation, but rather a grade of “B” is an interpretation of a
child’s skill level or collection of skill levels, the essay being a symptom or
sign that expresses a child’s level of skills which are being interpreted and
evaluated as belonging within or measuring up to certain criteria in a rubric,
the criteria themselves standing in differential relation with other criteria [usually
criteria at level 1, 2, 3, 4] in the rubric.
Let’s clarify and unfold this:
At one time
educators said, for instance, a student narrative paper is at a “75%” level
because that’s “what it feels like,” a simplistic reward/punish
assessment/evaluation model,[3]
whereas now teachers say “The paper is 75% level if interpreted in the light of
various criteria in a rubric, such as the famous 6+1 Traits of writing criteria.[4] This promotes student learning/metacognition
and facilitates further teaching and student next steps. Theoretically, there is no end of the number
of criteria you could come up with to analyze the student’s performance in
terms of. The rubric presents the
criteria as a hierarchy of levels that the student was trying to achieve – The
criteria are not absolute, but are ideally created with the students and depend
on what you want to assess/evaluate. As
teachers, in terms of our Philosophy of Education, we're really pushing for an
(i) active meaningful feedback (so the students really understand where
they are), (ii) "Next Steps" model of teacher/student assessment and
evaluation interaction, rather than the traditional reactive
Reward/Punish interpretation of marks and grades, and the Nietzsche/Deleuze
model really provides a helpful philosophical foundation for this progressive,
postmodern interpretation of education. We also want students to become
metacognitive about these issues, so they can become their own advocates about
their learning.
Importantly, the
rubric and its criteria for assessment/ evaluation are not
neutral, and so a “C” level performance criteria can either be phrased reactively
(reacting to the faults), such as “student performs poorly at …,” or the
“C” can be expressed in the criteria out of affirmation, healthily phrased “the
student is beginning to” if the focus is active in the sense of interpreting in
terms of (i) what the child can do and (ii) next steps (rather than what the
student is struggling with): “Every thing is referred to a force capable of
interpreting it (Deleuze, NP, 22).”
The crucial
elements in scholastic assessment and evaluation rubrics of criteria are that
the interpretations/evaluations are referred back to linguistic modifiers of
quantity and quality (in linguistics: quantifiers and qualifiers). So, in terms
of evaluation using criteria, a “B” level of achievement for a grade one
student in writing may include the phrase that “the student routinely [quantity]
and effectively [quality] creates simple sentences in subject/predicate
form in line with the achievement standard for that grade level.”[5] Analogously, the criteria we use to evaluate
the relative health/sickness in master vs slave morality isn’t based on an
assessment of a state of affairs, but rather considering how the positions
stand in relation to forces. Hence,
regarding employing evaluative criteria Deleuze argues: “This is why we cannot
measure forces in terms of an abstract unity, or determine their respective
quality and quantity by using the real state of forces in a system as a
criterion … Strength or weakness cannot be judged by taking the result and
success of struggle as a criterion. For,
once again, it is a fact that the weak triumph (Deleuze, NP, 58-61).”
Another helpful
example of how this works is hermeneutics.
Regarding hermeneutics, in order to see the inherent polysemy it is
helpful to see the problems currently going on in religious studies trying to
reconstruct and retrodict a portrait of the historical Jesus based on New
Testament evidence. The field has gone
so far as to even have a series of criteria of authenticity trying to separate
the historical Jesus from the textual elements that can’t be reliably considered
as historical (eg the criteria of embarrassment: Jews of that time wouldn’t
have invented a crucified messiah; the disciples being violent at the arrest;
etc).
The issue here
with hermeneutic historical reasoning is quantitative, since the reasoning is
probabilistic, in that historian are trying to construct the “most likely”
accurate portrait of the historical Jesus (as most hermeneutics aims at a “most
likely” interpretation). The problem is
that there is little consensus about the various historical Jesus portraits,
and often readers are accused of simply projecting their theology, or lack
thereof, on Jesus. There is little
scholarly agreement on the portraits, or the methods used in constructing them. The problem isn’t a shortage of portraits,
but an embarrassment of riches. The
portraits of Jesus that have been constructed in the quest for the historical
Jesus have often differed from each other, and from the image portrayed in the
gospel accounts. These many attempted portraits
include that of Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, charismatic healer, Cynic
philosopher, Jewish Messiah, prophet of social change, and more recently even
as a mythical being who was later historicized (euhemerized). New Testament scholar Dr. Richard Carrier has
rightly accused the religious studies field of the possible therefore
probable logical fallacy, that is, concluding from the fact that one’s
interpretation is a possible construction of the evidence to the
conclusion that it is therefore a probable construction. The problem is that there is ambiguity
inherent in the evidence, as in all such textual evidence, and so it can be
seen in multiple ways. In general traditional
hermeneutics aims at “the most likely message the author was trying to convey,”
while a more contemporary approach is to interpret and evaluate from pre-established
criteria searching for themes such as Marxist, Feminist, Psychoanalytic, etc.,
but it is still generally probabilistic (eg., what is the “most likely main” psychoanalytic
theme to be taken away from the reading).
But if
hermeneutics is probabilistic, what is the core of what probabilistic reasoning
is doing? Deleuze gives the Nietzschean example
of probability in a dice throw (Deleuze, NP, 22ff). Common understanding sees probabilities as
real features of things and processes, and science supposedly bears this
out. So, the likelihood of flipping tails
with a coin is ½, and in fact experiments have been done with massive amounts
of flips and the result is generally around 50/50. So, where’s the problem? For example, you can have a list tallying the
results of 10 000 previous coin tosses, but this list is completely useless in
predicting the outcome of the next specific toss you are going to make because there
is no connection in reality between this toss right now and anything that has
come before (also see Holland, Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, 18).
Probability is a
useful rule of thumb used to make predictions at the macro level, that is “in
general,” but shows itself to be an illusory fiction in the here and now. So, Deleuze says “Not a probability
distributed over several throws but all chance at once (Deleuze, NP, 27; cf.
44; 50).” Eternal return is interpreted/affirmed here by Deleuze as eternal
return of the same difference (Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and
Repetition, 212), the dice throw is always new and an event unto itself.
Kant himself
failed to meet Hume’s challenge in this regard on causality, because to say we
experience cause and effect, making scientific causal judgments possible, this
does nothing to the problem that it is a paralogism to conclude from the fact
that water has boiled at 100 degrees in the past that it will do so in the
future. Just as the applicability of the
laws of probability/averages and causality break down at the level of the “haecceity/thisness”
of a being, so too, as physicist Carlo Rovelli shows (2018), does the
applicability of time as a concept break down at the level of the very small
(the quantum level).[6] Traditional descriptive categories such as
“substance with properties” become less useful the more empirical and smaller
we go (eg., unusualness at the quantum level in physics[7]
and the challenge of muons to standard theory[8]). Similarly,
while there is “weirdness” at the quantum level appears when we try to describe
it in terms of traditional categories like “Temporal” and “Substance with
properties,” the less we try to force reality into these schema the less
“weird” the quantum world actually is.[9] The more empirical we become the harder it is
to deny chaos through the old way of affirming the super-sensible. In many respects what makes the usual
understanding of science possible is positing “the object in general” as its
content, re-presentedness, not the being in its “thisness/haecceity,”
and hence we do this to get useful predictions and categorizations in relation
to time, cause/effect, probability, morality, etc.
This applies to
thinking too. To think is not to defend
sides mindlessly like partisan lawyers and politicians irrespective of the
merits of the position, unaware or quiet about what their positions presuppose,
but is a dice throw, putting in play to interpret and evaluate (Deleuze, NP,
32; 37): For instance, it is often quite easy to come up with examples and
analogies to illustrate incompossible positions, like pro life vs pro choice,
and so we watch partisan politicians and lawyers endlessly debating and
claiming victory. Deleuze refers to
Nietzsche that “There are no moral facts or phenomena, but only a moral
interpretation of phenomena (Deleuze, NP, 90).” Similarly, ethics understood as using good
and evil as criteria to evaluate actions, while useful rules of thumb in
general, can break down in terms of usefulness and applicability at the
specific level when we try to apply them to actions in their thisness. There is certainly a logic of mixed
opposites, where the holiest is also the most evil, depending on your point of
view. For instance, many regarded 9’11
as an act of pure evil, while many Palestinians at the time celebrated it as
the most glorious and holy. Similarly,
the relative value of Christians being fed to the lions in ancient Rome or
cultural cannibalism etc depends on the criteria you are using to pass moral
judgement on the issue (For Deleuze on Nietzsche and thinking so-called
disgusting things, see Deleuze, Nomadic Thought, 258). Nietzsche gave the example of the sour grapes
of the criteria of slave morality used to assess and evaluate actions as good
or evil.[10] The clash between pro life advocating against
killing a child just to prevent a mother from going through 9 months of
discomfort, vs pro choice arguing the fetus is in no sense a person, is an
example of edifices of argumentation grounded in personal taste. Nietzsche proposed new criteria for valuation
beyond Good/Evil, namely, whether something represents a healthy, or rather
sickly approach to life. In the next
section on Heidegger’s Nietzsche we will see love as godless agape is
paradigmatic here.
Evaluation
criteria are provisional in this way.
For instance, a wine connoisseur can come up
with a rubric of criteria to assess and evaluate what makes “true
wine.” So, the actual
glass of wine is not the really real thing in itself, but is a symptom
expressing an underlying interplay of forces/criteria such as the absence of
off-odors and off-flavors, and in general, the positive aspects of
aroma/bouquet, taste/texture, acidity, bitterness, sweetness, astringency, body,
and balance. However, as I said at the
beginning of the section, we can ask here, not what wine tastes the best,
but who could create such a rubric. Clearly, if you really don’t like the taste of
wine, the rubric is meaningless. Wine Connoisseurs
may respond that you haven’t developed your palate sufficiently enough, but
this is empty elitism, since another perfectly normal “way of being” is not
liking classical music. Plato talks about how
the idea of the Beautiful shines alongside all other ideas. So, the category
“House” may be presencing to you incarnate in the presence of the
mansion, less so through the average dwelling, and hardly at all through the
shack. Since the mansion may be
appearing magnificently to you, but in a gawdy manner to the next person, the
mansion in front of you is not the “really real,” but is a symptom expressing
an underlying interplay of forces as assessment/evaluation criteria, which
itself is perspectival. Even in Plato’s
time there was an ambiguity in the meaning of essence, so that the essence
of “house” may aim at what is general, while the essence of
Socrates may aim at what is specific and ownmost (eg, his gadfly-ness).
Heidegger’s
Nietzsche
-
“The two fundamental terms
of Nietzsche's metaphysics, "will to power" and "eternal return
of the same," determine beings in their being in accordance with the
perspectives which have guided metaphysics since antiquity, the ens qua ens in
the sense of essentia and existentia” …
The essential relation between the "will to power" and the
"eternal return of the same" must be thought in this way; however, we
cannot yet represent it here directly because metaphysics has neither
considered nor even inquired about the origin of the distinction between essentia
and existentia. (Heidegger, Nietzsche’s Word God is Dead in “Off The Beaten
Track,” 177-8)
(1)
Eternal return as Existentia
- This section
is not intended as an interpretation of Heidegger’s Philosophy as such, but
rather his interpretation of Nietzsche.
Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence has been
subject to a plethora of interpretations. It is the idea Nietzsche
sometimes calls his central idea, and indeed the “heaviest weight.”[11] Recently, Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence has
been interpreted as a hypothetical, in terms of visualizing such a thought to
see what impact it would have on us regardless of whether it is true or not (Gillespie
2017/Johnson 2019). This aspect is certainly in Nietzsche’s writing,
but is not the whole story. It is
difficult to understand why Nietzsche would think eternal recurrence to be the
heaviest thought and the cornerstone of his Philosophy if it was just a “what
if” that, if you actually think it, isn’t really bothersome or burdensome at
all: I can imagine infinite cosmological
repetition, but it doesn’t bother or affect me in any way. Rather, following Heidegger, eternal
recurrence for Nietzsche also means the actual twofold circular way in which we
experience beings, which is tragic for the weak/sickly, and joyous for the
healthy/creative/strong.
Nietzsche said the teaching of eternal
recurrence most definitely brings with it the possibility of driving someone to
insanity or suicide (Nietzsche: NL, KGW VII 1:16). This speaks
powerfully against the currently popular interpretation of eternal recurrence
as merely being a “what if,” although it is this too. Heidegger, by contrast, stresses the “terrifying”
character of eternal return (Heidegger, 1991 vol2, 21).” Nietzsche
says “Incipit tragoedia,” the tragedy begins, and suggests we will be going
after our supreme suffering and supreme hope alike (Heidegger, 1991 vol 2, 29;
Deleuze, Conclusions, 121). The overman will come in response to the
last man for whom everything has become universally bland (Heidegger 1991 vol2,
33; On taedium vitae, see Deleuze, NP, 148; also on the last man, see Deleuze,
Nietzsche in Pure Immanence, 99).
Let us consider
eternal recurrence as the existentia, the way or manner in which beings as such
and as a whole appear to us. Regarding
the potential horror of this eternal infinite, Nietzsche gives the example of a once free bird that has become so
agitated with cabin fever[12]
in the confines of its cage that it is banging its head (Nietzsche, GS,
124).
Regarding this
homelessness/homesickness for the land that has vanished for the bird,
Heidegger says of Nietzsche’s position that Nietzsche talks about 'this most
uncanny of all guests' (Nietzsche, The will to power, Outline. Werke, vol. XV,
p. 141). It is called the 'most uncanny' [unheimlichste] because, as the
unconditional will to will, it wills homelessness [Heimatlosigkeit] as such.
This is why it is of no avail to show it the door, because it has long since
been roaming invisibly inside the house (Heidegger, 1998, 292; also cf
Heidegger, 1998, 257). Heidegger says
due to its instantiated nature, "[h]omelessness is coming to be the
destiny of the world (Heidegger, 1998, 258).”
The ancients called this horror loci, revulsion at
one’s place and state of being.[13] So, analogously, as an explanation of what
Nietzsche’s once free, now caged bird was going through, we can consider that
simply through confinement, a battery hen will go through listlessness, then
anger and self directed violence, finally repetitive and self destructive motor
acts and eventually death. We see
similar things from killer whales in captivity.[14]
This underlying state hidden in human
life has become quite conspicuous in
people through Covid isolation.
So, eternal return for
Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche thus refers to the manner in which beings
appear, which is: they appear as though they’ve been
encountered countless times before, and so lose their luster for us simply as a
function of our spending time with them, that is unless we are artistic and
creative. Nietzsche knew this experience well even before he articulated eternal
return as a concept, and so in a letter to Overbeck he talked about how he was
oblivious to the cabin fever affecting his friends at a rainy cottage as he
joyously worked on his Third Untimely Meditation (Nietzsche,
1975,: 11.3 382). And, there are numerous interesting historical
analogies for the idea of tragic eternal return. Nietzsche’s
innovation was finding the fundamental joy in it. Some examples are
from (1) Ecclesiastes, (2) Seneca, and (3)Schopenhauer:
(1) “All things are
wearisome; more than one can express; the eye is not satisfied with
seeing, or the ear filled with hearing. 9 What has been is
what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is
nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes)
(2) “26.
Some people suffer from a surfeit of doing and seeing the same things. Theirs
is not contempt for life but boredom with it, a feeling we sink into when
influenced by the sort of philosophy which makes us say, ‘How long the same old
things? I shall wake up and go to sleep, I shall eat and be hungry, I shall be
cold and hot. There’s no end to anything, but all things are in a fixed cycle,
fleeing and pursuing each other. Night follows day and day night; summer passes
into autumn, hard on autumn follows winter, and that in turn is checked by spring. All
things pass on only to return. Nothing I do or see is new: sometimes one gets
sick even of this.’ There are many who think that life is not harsh but
superfluous. (Seneca ep. mor. 24. 26).”
(3) “He
who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in
the conjurer’s booth at a fair, and witnesses the performance twice or
thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once;
and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their
effect is gone.” (Schopenhauer, “Essays on Pessimism”)
- To which (3 above) Nietzsche
responds to Schopenhauer regarding the performance from the point
of view of the creative and artistic individual:
“56. Anyone like
me, who has tried for a long time and with some enigmatic desire, to think
pessimism through to its depths and to deliver it from the half-Christian,
half-German narrowness and naivete with which it has finally presented itself
to this century, namely in the form of the Schopenhauerian philosophy; anyone
who has ever really looked with an Asiatic and supra-Asiatic eye into and down
at the most world-negating of all possible ways of thinking – beyond good and
evil, and no longer, like Schopenhauer and the Buddha, under the spell and
delusion of morality –; anyone who has done these things (and perhaps precisely
by doing these things) will have inadvertently opened his eyes to the inverse
ideal: to the ideal of the most high-spirited, vital, world-affirming
individual, who has learned not just to accept and go along with what was and
what is, but who wants it again just as it was and is through all eternity,
insatiably shouting da capo not just to himself but to
the whole play and performance, and not just to a performance, but rather,
fundamentally, to the one who needs precisely this performance – and makes
it necessary: because again and again he needs himself – and makes himself
necessary. – – What? and that wouldn’t be –circulus vitiosus deus? (Nietzsche,
Beyond Good and Evil)
Eternal return wipes
away meaningfulness from beings, and so this is tragic for the eros of the sick
and weakly, but an opportunity for creation for the transfiguring godless agape
of the artistic and healthy. Hence, Heidegger quotes Nietzsche twice: “To
stamp becoming with Being, that is the highest form of will to power.”
For Nietzsche, the higher types are
distinguished from the lower types in terms of two different kinds of
love/desire, because the higher types do not need to find value in the world,
such as in God, “eros,” like the lower types like Ecclesiastes, but rather
bestow a healthy meaning onto the world in transfiguring godless “agape.” For
Nietzsche, agape allows for a glass half-full amor fati and dancing in your
chains. In Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount
Jesus redefines love saying “You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love
(agapēseis) your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love
(agapāte) your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Nietzsche said, “‘I have never desecrated the
holy name of love’ (1888, LN1 [286]),”
Eros as filling a “lack” nurses on the luster of its object, whereas
agape transfigure its object to be loveable.[15]
Nihilism is a problem when we have an
"eros/erotic" approach to beings like glory seeking Achilles (eg I
love her because she is beautiful), Achilles who was devastated by the tedious,
boring and meaninglessness in the Greek interpretation of the afterlife
(Achilles needed his obstacles to be overcome in the name of glory) – but
rather we need an approach akin to a godless kind of Christian transfiguring
agape (eg I have a transfiguring spirit of loving, regardless of whether the
other be widow, orphan, stranger, or enemy).
That higher type is what Nietzsche calls “Caesar with a soul of Christ -
the overman (KGW VII 2:289).” It is a Christ-like Caesar, conquering not with
might but rather love, a transfiguring, glass half-full approach to life.
Nietzsche went so far to say that even the
gods struggle against boredom in vain, (TI, Chapter 48) and that the usual
approach to life is to avoid boredom any way possible. (GS, First Book, 42.
Work and Boredom) A well known Science
Fiction example of this is the Star Trek Voyager episode where the Q continuum
Philosopher Quinn (a god-like being) wants to commit suicide because he has
been devastated by the boredom of having been everything and done everything
countless times. This God not only
died, but wanted to die (there is a similar theme in a play by Karel
Čapek). This TV episode may have been a
response to Nietzsche’s call to depict the boredom of God after creation had
been finished (HH: The Wanderer and His
Shadow, 56. INTELLECT AND BOREDOM). Heidegger
comments regarding twofold eternal recurrence, “Everything is nought,
indifferent, so that nothing is worthwhile – it is all alike. And on the other side: Everything recurs, it
depends on each moment, everything matters – it is all alike … The smallest
gap, the rainbow bridge of the phrase it is all alike, conceals two things that
are quite distinct: everything is indifferent and nothing is indifferent
(Heidegger, 1991 vol 2, 182).”
2 Will to Power as Essentia
Nietzsche’s overcoming of re-presentational
thinking is a move away from knowing/learning about the world, to schematizing
as imposing form on the chaos. On
Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche will to power forms the chaos into the being
of beings as essentia. Nietzsche says: “The
answer to the question ‘What is that?’ is a process of fixing a meaning
from a different standpoint. The “essence”, the “essential factor”, is
something which is seen as a whole only in perspective, and which presupposes a
basis which is multifarious (Nietzsche 168: 556).” So, as Gericke points out, for instance,
Aristotle found it (i) useful and (ii) appropriate in the context
of his system of thought to view essence from the point of view
of genus; for Porphyry it was essence as species; for Boethius essence
vs. existence; for Avicenna essence as quiddity/whatness; for
Abelard essence as semantic feature; for Scotus essence as haecceity/thisness;
etc. How does Nietzsche understand
this? Nietzsche says “Not ‘to know’
but to schematize, to impose upon chaos as much regularity and form as
our practical needs require WTP 515 (March-June 1888).” Heidegger gives the
example of not simply "recognizing" or encountering or abstracting to
the category of “living thing,” but imposing it, such as is negatively phenomenalized when we hear a “living thing”
in the forest, only to look down to see we “mis-took” rustling dead
leaves in the wind at our feet to be a “living thing.” In life we are in the business of imposing
structure on the chaos, "taking as," as is phenomenalized when
we "mis-take:" When will to power fails to usefully stamp
becoming with Being (the rustling leaf example), we explicitly see that the
default human condition is living as will to power in the schematizing or
bringing order to chaos, like a sculptor with his clay. Similarly, the sexual and romantic qualities
of something reflects the way we impose form, as is clear in the case of
objectophilia with romantic and sexual attraction to objects such as towers and
bridges. Heidegger quotes Nietzsche that
"To stamp Becoming with the character of Being - that is the
supreme will to power" (WM 617, 1888). Heidegger says “for Nietzsche art is the
essential way in which beings are made to be beings … the creative,
legislative, form-grounding aspect of art (Heidegger, 1991, 131).” Nietzsche argues the true artist doesn’t
imitate Nature but gives form to the chaos: “A man in this state transforms
things until they mirror his power–until they are reflections of
his perfection. (TI, SKIRMISHES OF AN UNTIMELY MAN, 8-9).”
So while representational philosophy treats
categories like Unity like they belong to beings, either really or ideally, such
as when we generalize and abstract, or to use Hegel’s example tearing a sock
negatively produces the category of Unity for our mind’s eye “as a lost
Unity,” this dialectical sleight of hand is actually like a child who cries
after another child takes her toy to play with, one the first child never
thinks about or plays with: absence makes the heart grow fonder.
For instance, we see this in the portrayal
of love in Dicken’s “David Copperfield” where Dickens plays with the concept of
Unity. Dickens poetizes how the category of Unity taken in a strict scientific
sense that "a being is one" can evaporate in Love. He writes "I was sensible of a mist of
love and beauty about Dora, but of nothing else ... it was all Dora to me. The
sun shone Dora, and the birds sang Dora. The south wind blew Dora, and the wild
flowers in the hedges were all Doras, to a bud.
(Dickens, David Copperfield 2015, ch 33, Blissful)." It is purely
arbitrary will to power that affirms "scientific oneness
being" as "most real (ontos on / alethos on)," rather than Copperfield’s "plurality of a being”
when one is in love. The category of
Unity wasn’t always, already there as Hegel would have it, but is
produced/invented at the tearing of the sock.
This has clear implications.
We can see a whole series of arbitrary,
groundless presuppositions that must be in place for analytic judgments to
retain their force: Heidegger argues
analytic or tautological judgments, the so- called purely formal judgment which
supposedly contains no more in the predicate than is in the subject, also imply
metaphysics and our being with beings because, following Plato’s critique of
Antisthenes mentioned above, addressing a being can’t be mere naming because
this ignores that something is to be understood by appealing to something
beyond the thing itself, whereby Antisthenes argues for mere naming, but
himself tacitly adopted a whole slew of ontological structures that go beyond
the mere entity, such as Einai,
Being, choris, separate from, ton allown, the others, and kath
auto, in itself (also cf Heidegger, Nietzsche 1, 193). What is the application?
Heidegger says analytic judgments are not
purely formal as is commonly supposed, but implicate our being with
beings. Why? In “A is A,” like “All bachelors are
unmarried,” “A” is not unspecified, because then it would mean “anything is
anything,” in which case “A is B” could be analytic. Rather, the analytic judgment tacitly implies
that, for instance, the first term bachelor carries with it the additional metaphysical
presuppositions that a bachelor is being considered/viewed from the perspective
of its specificity and unity, and is not what it isn’t (eg., a tree), and is
not nothing at all. These are all very
particular metaphysical projections from representational philosophy and
interpretations of what it means to be a being within the context of a
particular understanding of the question “what is a being.” And, “How” a being is, which is as I argued
above implied as also belonging with the “what question of essence,” is also
simply ignored. The
representational/metaphysical foundation analytic judgments like “All bachelors
are unmarried” must rest on in order to maintain their apodicticity is
illusory: smoke and mirrors.
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____________________________________________________________________
[1] Note here there is an ambiguity in the concept of “truth,” such as
a “true” judgment vs a “true friend.” We
will consider this below when we question what it means to be a “true” glass of
wine. For instance, a child may memorize
a true/correct multiplication sentence, but it will remain opaque for them
until modelled or dis-closed (“a-letheia”) to them with manipulatives. So, there is an un-veiling to truth, like
when you struggle with a hidden gestalt picture until suddenly you see the
hidden image, and then can’t unsee it.
[2] As we will see below with the way linguistic modifiers of quality
and quantity function in rubrics of assessment/evaluation criteria.
[3] The mark served no further purpose than to reward good work and
punish bad work, and so when the child brought the mark home they either got
rewarded with a video game if the grade was good or had their toys taken away
if the mark was bad.
[4] Traditional educational judgements simply evaluate without
grounding the evaluation by saying "The child is reading at a B
level" because that’s what it “feels like” to the teacher. Such grading is the reward/punishment model
of giving grades. Proper educational judgments
interpret the student product in light of criteria as a symptom or sign of what
is going on with the student’s skill level, and then spatially plotting the child
on a developmental continuum to then decide future teaching and next steps. In this regard a child’s actual narrative
writing piece in itself is a matter of indifference from an educational point
of view, and only functions as something to be interpreted to identify the
child’s skill level and plan next steps.
In this regard, many different types of “Multiple Intelligence” products
can be used to demonstrate the same skills, such as student theatre,
gamification, or mind/concept maps, etc.
See, for instance https://coachkessler.weebly.com/uploads/2/9/2/3/2923442/product_grid.pdf
. For a helpful example of a grade 6
rubric, see here: https://www.pearsoncanadaschool.com/media/canada/reachingreaders/media/Rubric_ON_Gr_6.pdf
[5] The quantifiers and qualifiers give the rubric of criteria sense,
although, for instance, the quantifier by itself is meaningless in that
it can both present itself and its opposite.
So, for example, if in making my rubric I choose the quantifiers “sometimes; usually; practically always” –
there is no inherent hierarchy: eg. I could counterintuitively say I “sometimes
was my hands,” meaning maybe a few times a day, and “practically always
get dentist check ups,” meaning once a year. Here, “sometimes” is much more
frequent than “practically always.” Quantity is often represented as a fiction,
such as getting a child to know 3X2=6 by rote without showing them with
manipulatives this means having groups of 3, and 2 groups of these, and count
these to make 6 total things. Qualifiers
alone are similar and reference sense independently of the actual state of
something. So, we can speak of a
“genius” painting by a 4 year old, as opposed to an uncharacteristically
“shoddy mental abortion” painting by a great Master, even though the Master’s terrible
painting still far outshines the 4 year old’s genius painting.
[6] For a short blog post on "The Physics and Philosophy of Time
with Carlo Rovelli, Heidegger, and Aristotle" see: https://darthdidactus.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-physics-and-philosophy-of-time-with.html
[7] See “The quantum world is mind-bogglingly weird” : https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/quantum-world-mind-bogglingly-weird
[8] See “New experiment hints that a particle breaks the known laws of
physics” : https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/ultra-precise-experiment-finds-hints-of-unseen-particles-in-the-universe
[9] See Rovelli, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24933250-500-quantum-weirdness-isnt-weird-if-we-accept-objects-dont-exist/
[10] Moral preferences are aesthetic, like listing reasons for
preferring a cabernet to a merlot. And
this makes good sense neurologically, since Aesthetics and morality judgments
share cortical neuroarchitecture. See: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010945220301714
[11] The idea has been interpreted as cyclical time cosmological
speculation from Simmel [1907] 1920 to Jaspers [1936] 1965, a line of
interpretation that has found equally long criticism from Soll 1973; to
Anderson 2005. Catanu in “Heidegger’s
Nietzsche” wrongly argues with eternal recurrence in Nietzsche Heidegger
primarily understands a naturalistic/cosmological notion (Kindle loc 446).
[12] A similar state can be induced with a child sitting facing the
corner in a time out.
[13] For a 2021 blog post outlining the history of the horror loci, see https://darthdidactus.blogspot.com/2021/01/care-vs-deprived-of-care-heideggerian.html
[15] See also Deleuze, NP,
143-4 on what is admirable in Jesus and how Paul poisoned Christianity by
declaring the agape teaching moot in that if Christ is not raised, Christian
faith is useless. For the meaning of
Nietzsche’s question “Have I been understood?
Dionysus versus the crucified,”: see https://infidels.org/library/modern/john_macdonald/justified-lie.html
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