'Nietzsche & Philosophy' Notes - Preface and Chapter 1: The Tragic
Notes taken for Acid Horizon's 'Nietzsche & Philosophy' reading group
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Heraclitus by Johannes Moreelse c. 1630
Nietzsche & Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze
Preface to the English Translation
Introduction -Nietzsche’s very special empiricism and pragmatism
“An arrow shot by nature that another thinker picks up and shoots elsewhere”
Phenomena, things, societies, etc. are symptoms which reflect the state of forces
Nietzsche and Philosophy sets out to define and analyize the dynamics in the typology of these forces. What kind of book is it? It is an attempt at systematic theory of forces: Apollo picking up an arrow shot by Dionysus, an affirmation of a mode of philosophical creativity relegated by Nietzsche but affirmed by Deleuze.
Come back to: the enantiodromia of the philosopher and of philosophy
The two great reactive concepts: resentment and bad conscience.
Totalitarian regimes are the regimes of slaves due to the masters they set up. Totalizers create affective, social, political enclosures around lives under the pretense of totality that excludes differences negatively construed. Acid Horizon’s concept of ‘fascist dividuality’ from Anti-Oculus.
What is meant by the will to power? It is not the seeking of power but a framework for understanding the differential relationship of forces in their confrontation.
The Will to Power
The will to power is not what the will wants or the will seizing upon an object but “the one that wants in the will”.
To want or to seek power is the lowest degree of power. An example would be the desire to be recognized as a king or a god. The desire for recognition is a reactive power, one which turns on the power of judgment and not the power of creativity.
Nietzsche transforms philosophy by shifting the predominant question of philosophy from “what is…?” to questions like “which one is…?” The concern of philosophy is not to uncover “personalist” exemplars through a metaphysics of analogy but rather articulate the set of forces in the event. Consider the way Deleuze privileges a discussion of jurisprudence over and above a transcendent notion of justice. “What forces are at work when a ‘just’ decision is leveled in a court of law?’ Moreover, “how does an idealist conception of justice perhaps factor into jurisprudence in a given case?”
The Eternal Return
The eternal return is badly understood as the will to power. It is not the return of identical arrangements—it is the opposite of this.
The ethics of the eternal return:
1) Only that of which one also wills the eternal return.
2) Only that which becomes in the fullest sense can return—and is fit to return. Only action and affirmation return (the chance to act again, to say yes again to the difference)
3) The negative is the lowest degree of power—it is the opposite of becoming. Why? It says no to the difference that constantly returns in its attempt to affirm the identical.
4) Not a return of the same, but a transmutation
5) Dionysus and Ariadne - The abandonment of the labyrinth’s borders, boundaries, and insularity, abandonment of a self-identical heroic ego
6) Not wanting, coveting, or seeking power, but giving or creating. Not to negatively disavow power, but not to become enamored of it, to understand it as immanently constructed.
Reading Nietzsche
Nietzsche says there is a deep relationship between concept and affect.
A productive relationship with Nietzsche cannot be had if his work is considered from the following (bad) premises:
1. That the “slave” is someone who finds himself dominated by the master and deserves to be
2. That the will to power means seeking power
3. The ER means the return of the same
4. Imagining the übermensch as figure of a “master race”
The movement of history is the triumph of reactive forces, nihilism. Nihilism opposes becoming. The übermensch conquers the reactive forces of resentment and bad conscience.
An aphorism is not a fragment, but a type of modular proposition which only makes sense in relation to forces that it expresses. It is designed to change sense. It functions as an attractor module for other forces.
Overturning “The Image of Thought”
The most important aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy: It changes the image of thought. He rescues the activity of thought from the primacy of discerning the true from the false. He collapses the distinction between thought and concrete movement by showing that thought must produce movements. It moves philosophy from the shallows of judgment into the depths of creativity, reveals it as an activity akin to dance, music, or fine art.
“To think is to create…to cast the dice”
Chapter 1: The Tragic
I. The Concept of Genealogy
Which his contribution to philosophy was that he asserted that a philosophy of sense in value had to be a critique. This was the only way "to philosophize with a hammer”.
All values presuppose an evaluation or “perspectives of appraisal"
Evaluations are ways of being or modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate. The basis of this judgment comes from styles of life and the thoughts and feelings, which inform them.
The notion of high and low or noble and base does not refer to particular values, but “the differential element from which values themselves derive”.
Nature struggles against those who remove values from criticism, those contented with producing inventories of existing values for those who see values as deriving from objective facts about reality.
Nature goes after the "high” idea of a foundation which leaves values a different to their own origins and the ideal that there is a simple causal derivation for values.
Nietzsche: The philosopher is a genealogist and not a tribunal judge
What is a genealogy? It means both the value of origin and the origin of values: nobility versus baseness, nobility, versus vulgarity, etc.
Nietzsche contrasts critique with revenge or resentment. Revenge is reactive, whereas critique is an active attack. Contrast critique with certain forms of complaint.
Sense
All force is appropriation, domination, exploitation of a quantity of reality
History of a thing is a history of the forces which take possession of it. History is the variation of senses.
Search is, therefore a complex notion, a constellation, a complex of succession's, but also coexistence is which make interpretation into an art. (Jungian language)
All subjugation, all domination amounts to a new interpretation. (Consider the interpretosis of philosophy as analogous to political domination).
Pluralism
“Nietzsche’s philosophy cannot be understood, without taking his essential pluralism into account.”
“A thing is sometimes this, sometimes that, sometimes something more complicated depending on the forces (the gods) which take possession of it.”
“There are forces which can only get a grip on something by giving it a restrictive sense and a negative value.”
“A force would not survive if it did not first of all borrow the feature of the forces with which it struggles.”
Example: the philosopher is born from the model of the ascetic priest or monk. The philosopher assumes the contemplative quality of the priest, only to discover the restrictive character of the priestly mould, and then use philosophy as a means to involute that mould.
“We see that the art of interpreting must also be an art of piercing masks of discovering the one that masks himself, and why he does it to the point of keeping up the mask while it is being reshaped”
The challenge of the genealogical method is that the difference in the origin does it not appear at the origin. The inception of an event may be withdrawn in its incipient occurrence.
Philosophy has a destiny that is not evident in its origins, but is only revealed in its differentiation. This can be said for individuals as well (Nietzsche contra Oedipus).
Philosophy shows its true force through the Greeks, and the etymology of the word itself, "friend of wisdom". Zarathustra: the friend is always a third person in between I and me. The real danger of the philosophers to contradict the values that philosophy tends to reawaken that are upheld in religious orders. The figure of the dangerous friend it is the one who is capable of changing the sense, which it tends to the new values which philosophy is capable of creating.
3. The Philosophy of the Will
Nietzsche’s philosophy of nature: The being a force is plural; there is no individual force. We can think about forces as a distribution of power over subjects and objects.
The involution of atomism reveals its dynamism:
Marx: " Atoms are their own unique objects and can relate only to themselves" the basic notion of the atom cannot accomodate the essential relation ascribed to it. Atomism is then a mask for the new mask of dynamism emerging within from its inner tensions.
Nietzsche’s concept of force is that which is related to another force (regimes or registers of forces). Wills exercised on other wills.
Nietzsche denounces the soul, the ego, and egoism as the last refuges of atomism. Egoism is a bad interpretation of the will.
The difference in the origin is hierarchy, the relation of a dominant to a dominated force.
Hierarchy: the identity of difference and origin.
Hierarchy becomes a problem for free spirits.
Sense -> Value
Interpretation -> Evaluation
4. Against the Dialectic
The question is whether nature is a dialectician.
Not all relations between same, and other are sufficient to form a dialectic, everything depends on the role of the negative in this relation.
The concept of the overman is directed against the dialectical conception
Nature never considers the relation of one force to another as a relation of positive to negative.
The negative is passional and therefore derives from the activity of life as an active force.
Practical element of difference over the speculative element of negation
What is a Nietzschean empiricism: “What does a will want? What does this one or that one want?”
Not what is the goal of the will, but how can a will affirm its difference? Affirmation vs. Dialectical Negation: joy vs. labor; lightness vs. responsibilities
What is hierarchy? The feeling of this difference.
What does the dialectician want?
The wheel that wheels, the dialectic does not have the strength to affirm its difference in the face of forces that intend to dominate it. They concedes to those forces who dominated, which brings forward the negative.
The master and slave relationship is not inherently dialectical; it becomes dialectical when the will to power is conceived as a representation of power, or a representation of superiority, that demands recognition of the other
Nietzsche’s master-slave morality is “concepting” of the the master-slave relationship which is not reducible to other senses of master and slave.
How does the slave conceive of power?
1. Achieving power by becoming the object of recognition
2. Understanding power as the content of a representation
3. Construing power as the stake in a competition or within a set of established coordinates.
In each case, the slave of slave morality upholds a set of preset values and the range of judgments which attend to those values.
An interpretation: Slave morality does not mean simply mean occupying a generally weaker position in an arena of combat or having less substantive power per se. A left wing movement, for example, which lambastes the bourgeoisie, but whose will to over come them entails replicating the institutions and forms of domination familiar to their adversaries succumbs to slave morality. Or someone trying to change the mode of governance from inside the system of representative government only to become absorbed into its machinations.
5. The Problem of Tragedy
How to become a Nietzschean thinker: avoid any pretext for making one's thought dialectical
The tragic vision of the world opposes itself to the Christian and dialectical view.
“The contradiction in the Birth of Tragedy is between primitive unity and individuation, willing and appearance, life and suffering. This "original" contradiction bears witness against life, ti accuses life. Life needs ot be justified, that is ot say redeemed from suffering and contradiction. The Birth of Tragedy si developed in the shadow of the Christian dialectic; justification, redemption and reconciliation.”
Dionysus and Apollo are not opposed as the terms of contradiction, but rather as to antithetical ways of resolving it.
Dionysus transforms the antithesis with Apollo into a wonderful but precarious alliance.
Nietzsche’s evolution: First, re BoT, Dionysus affirms the tragic not as the resolution of pain through a kind of individuation, theodicy, or scientism which translates pain into a sublimated resolution, but one which affirms pain in the multiplicity of life.
Easy example: pain and suffering as part of the rhythms of life vs. pain and suffering “building character”. Affirmation versus justification.
Socrates: the first genius of decadence. He opposes life to the idea: life is to be judged and redeemed by the idea. The theoretical man versus the tragic man.
“That which negates aesthetic values is nihilist in the most profound sense”
7. Dionysus and Christ
Nietzsche: The love of Christianity conceals a deeper hatred, which stems from its Judaic origins. “Christian joy is the joy of "resolving" pain" in the manner of internalizing it, offering it to God, and having God carry it.
Dionysus resolves the pain by re-introducing it to the primordial, unity and fast multiplicity, which is life. Life, overcomes judgment, and takes charge of justification. Laceration versus crucifixion. A superabundance of life versus the impoverishment of life. Transvaluaton versus transubstantiation.
The opposition of Dionysus to Christ is not a dialectical opposition, but the opposition to the dialectic itself.
8. The Essence of the Tragic
In short, there is a dialectic where the pain of existence must become justified or redeemed to form the unity. The Dionysian is affirmed when pain and suffering comprise an ecology with the joy of living. No redemption, no telos, no sublation: the affirmation of the primeval unity with a multiplicity of individuations.
Nature of announces the conception of drama, that he articulates in the birth of tragedy as a Christian pathos of contradiction. He calls for a heroic expression against the dramatic expression of tragedy.
Dionysus: Polygethes, the god of a thousand joys.
9. The Problem of Existence
“Nietzsche does not see ressentiment
(it's your fault)and bad conscience (it's my fault) and their common fruit(responsibility) as simple psychological events but rather as the fundamental categories of semitic and Christian thought, of our way of thinking and interpreting existence in general.”
Nietzsche’s critique of the image of thought involves undermining the moralized notion of responsibility.
10. Existence and Innocence
From the Greeks to Christianity: existence is blameworthy but it becomes responsible with a changing of the gods: (Eve instead of the Titans, etc.)
“Alas, we are bad players. Innocence is the game of existence, of force and of will. Existence affirmed and appreciated, force not separated, the will not divided in two - this is the first approximation to innocence”
Heraclitus as a tragic thinker: there is nothing other than becoming or being is the being of becoming.
“Heraclitus went as far as proclaiming ‘the struggle ofthe many is pure justice itself! In fact the one is the many!’”
“Not a theodicy but a cosmodicy, not a sum of injustices to be expiated but justice as the law of this world; not hubris but play, innocence. “
11. The Dicethrow
The dice throw has two moments, two tables, the Earth in the sky
The sky is the purity of the absence of eternal reason, the earth is the dance floor of chance.
Heraclitus returns: death row of the dice is becoming, the landing of the dice is the being of becoming.
The dice throw is analogous to the eternal return in Deleuze’s view of ER: it is not about the eventual return of an exact combination (ERoS) but the matter of a single dice throw which returns the difference expressed in the aleatory nature of the Eternal Return itself
The throw the dice is the affirmation of chance, the landing of the dice is the affirmation necessity
Chance is associated with multiplicity, with fragments, with parts, with chaos
Zarathustra is the “redeemer of chance”
Nietzsche views the affirmation of chance as the ethical lightening of the heart and the loosening of ourselves from the ponderousness of pure necessity.
There is a single way of combining all the parts of chance, which is to say a single combination of chance as such. This is different that the multiple calculations of probabilities and possible combinations. The unity of the multiplicity is realized in the singular affirmation of chance, affirming chance but once to produce the roll which brings back the dice throw.
Ethics: to know how to affirm chance to know how to play. To calculate possible outcomes, to create justifications, to establish reasons to play belies the affirmation of chance. The person who espouses the necessity of purpose or reason to establish the ground upon which life is justified, worthy, livable does not know how to play. A life without a sense of finality in the sense of a cultivated end or purpose: the unlivable life for many.
Nor is it the hope that over a series of chances that a probable outcome will be achieved: all chance at once. “repetition of a dice through by the nature of a federally obtained number we affirm the repetition of every chance ventured in a single dice thrown and that by necessity it will return a single outcome which by necessity restores again every possible subsequent outcome: Amor Fati
12. Consequences for the Eternal Return
In short: the second moment of the dice throw is the return of the first, and all of its implications and glory
There are fragments of chance that are slaves who want to speak as masters
To affirm the number which is not probably but fatal and necessary
Plato’s hubris becoming: an unlimited becoming versus an eternal return. The becoming that is subjected to a transcendent form of law or an ideal which presents a finality which cannot be achieved.
The becoming cannot be judged and possesses a law in itself (nomos).
Heraclitus (Deleuze) see no opposition between “chaos and cycle”. (Chance over causality, necessity over finality) “With the possible exception of Heraclitus they had not seen ‘the presence of the law in becoming and of play in necessity’”
13. Nietzsche’s Symbolism:
The boiling or warming of chance is like the clink of dice in the gambler’s hands: the affirmation of the multiplicity of chance.
Number is present in chance as being and law are present in becoming.
Deleuze: the birth of the dancing star or constellation happens in the affirmation of multiplicity.
Why did Nietzsche choose the figure of Zarathustra? Three reasons:
1. He is a prophet of ER, but not the best
2. He brought morality into metaphysics, construed morality as a force, a cause, and an end par excellence, thus best situated to denounce its mystification.
3. He is the avatar of chance (“star of gold”, the archetype of one who dances amidst chaos)
The images that form the truly Dionysian game:
CHAOS - FIRE - CONSTELALTION
1. Play/The Playthings
2. Multiple Affirmation/Limbs and Fragments
3. Cooking/The Unity of the Multiplicity
4. Constellation/borne by Dionysus, Ariadne Dancing
Deleuze: Nietzsche dreamed of a fire machine different from that of the steam engine, one which reflect an understanding of the thermodynamics of the ER
The game of images versus the game of concepts
The importance of the aphorism: it formulates a news sense.
Poetry is at once an evaluation and a form of evaluating
Sense = the differential element from which significance is derived
Values = the differential element from which value is derived
These elements are always hidden in the poem
On aphorisms: “There are two dimensions of interpretation and evaluation, the second also being the return of the first, the return of the aphorism or the cycle of the poem. All aphorisms must therefore be read twice. The interpretation of the eternal return begins with the dicethrow but it has only just begun. We must still interpret the dicethrow itself, at the same time as it returns.”
14. Nietzsche and Mallermé
There are four similarities between Nietzsche in Mallermé. Deleuze thinks about these similarities in terms of them being “images”
1. To think it's to send out a dice throw. The act of thinking, recapitulates the theory of the dice throw.
2. Men, and even higher men, do not know how to play
3. The act of throwing the dice is a super human act, but it constitutes the tragic attempt and tragic thought par exellence. Consider the way in which the heroism of Wagner prompts the birth of tragedy for Nietzsche
4. The act of thinking, the production of a work of art, or a book where thinking occurs, a kind of creativity, sparks a multiplicity and the multiplicity of meanings is the unity affirmed in that book. Here it's not just that we have the death of the author, but the coexistence and appearance of multiple authors on a plane over eternity. The book for work of art as a unity is the container for that multiplicity of authorship. "The book is the cycle in the law present in becoming" there exists a law, but it's defined by its constant overturning of itself.
Mallermé understood necessity as the abolition of chance. He believe that the intelligible model of the dice throw was to be found in another world, on some higher surface were chance does not exist.
Nietzsche sees in this view an accusation of life, or a nihilism. A view which presupposes life's failure and impotence.
For Deleuze, the dice throat is nothing when detached from innocence in the affirmation of chance. The dice throat is nothing if chance in necessity are opposed in it.
15. Tragic Thought
The spirit of revenge infuses, all dimensions of existence, from psychological to biological to metaphysical.
Resentment is not part of our psychology, but the whole of psychology without knowing it
As a Nietzche's claims that ressentiment is the motor of history from the time of Christianity forward, so to nihilism has been the motor of metaphysics
There is no metaphysics, which does not judge and depreciate life in the name of a super sensible world.
“As soon as man began thinking, he introduced the bacillus of revenge into things.”
“And we do not really know what a man denuded of ressentiment would be like.”
“Nietzsche presents the aim of his philosophy as the freeing of thought from nihilism and its various forms.”
How do we find a philosophy which does not treat existence is blameworthy?
We need to make the distinction that the affirmation of life, as equal to the affirmation of the tragic is the joyous, but this does not preclude pain. The joyous is the affirmation which expels the negative, but does not necessarily expel pain. The dice throw is tragic and therefore joyous.
16. The Touchstone
Deleuze thought Nietzsche asks us to consider the following:
When another thinker or philosopher claims that they are tragic, we should not take that statement at face value. It is not simply a matter of comparing that philosopher to Nietzsche as a tragic philosopher. Deleuze insists that the better question is “How does the other think? And how much ressentiment and bad conscience remains in their thought?
Nietzsche submits that it is from the position of happiness that we must begin philosophy.
Deleuze clarifies that there is a distinction to be made between playing and betting, dancing, and leaping. On the former point, playing does not mean fragmenting the dice throw into probabilities. Leaping is the buffoonery or the depreciation of life which affirms consequence in its willful ignorance of it (it pretends to affirm life by giving oneself to any consequence to all probabilities, which affirms necessity but still negates chance—those who will accept any outcome but do so from the position that diminishes the warming of the dice and hastens to throw it).
“Nietzsche says "Hubris is the touchstone for every Heraclitean. Here he must show whether he has understood or failed torecognise his master" (PTG7p. 61). Ressenti- ment, bad conscience, the ascetic ideal, nihilism are the touchstone of every Nietzschean. Here he must show whether he has understood or failed to recognise the true sense of the tragic.”
In other words, the practice of re-introducing the question of whether bad conscience and ressentiment infects a certain strain of thinking is the essence of a Nietzschean criticism.