4.5—
Becoming and Nietzsche's Naturalism

We now have an answer to the question, "Who is Nietzsche's Heraclitus?" With this, we have also begun to answer the main question, "What is Nietzsche's 'becoming'?" We can further pursue this question by focusing on the traits of becoming outlined above. It is evident that neither Heraclitus nor Nietzsche takes the world of "becoming" to be a metaphysical, noumenal world. On the contrary, their notions of "becoming" are consistent with a thoroughgoing naturalism. Nietzsche's Heraclitus "denie[s] the duality of totally diverse worlds" and "no longer distinguishe[s] a physical world from a metaphysical one" (PTA 5, P. 51). The world of becoming that both philosophers take to be the only reality is simply the physical, natural world that we inhabit and with which we are familiar. As Nietzsche remarks in his lecture course on the Presocratics, "becoming" is "the most ordinary phenomenon"; it "[lies] in front of everyone's nose."^[55] Rather than discovering

[55] This passage is found in the introduction to Nietzsche's lectures on the Presocratics (KGW II/4, pp. 215–16), quoted in Breazeale's "Introduction" to Philosophy and Truth, xliv.

reality in the abstract realm of concepts, names, and mathematical or logical forms, Heraclitus and Nietzsche find it in "the present manycolored and changing world that presses upon us in all our experiences" (PTA 5, P. 52), in "[a]ll the multiplicity and colorfulness of the world known to experience, [with] all the changes of its qualities" (10, p. 79). That is, the world of becoming is the sensuous world, the world available to the senses, a world of myriad and ever-changing appearances.^[56] "Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change," Nietzsche writes, "they do not lie at all" (TI "Reason" 2).

Not the product of a speculative metaphysics, then, the notion of becoming is drawn from an empirical examination of the world around us. It simply marks the fact that, within the physical world, nothing is exempt from alteration; and those entities that appear stable differ only in their slower tempo of change or the degree to which it is apparent to the unaided senses (see WP 521, 552, 568, 580, and GS 112). What common sense takes to be a solid object, the physicist considers a more or less stable swarm of molecules. And while common sense has a pragmatic justification for treating this swarm as a single enduring entity, Nietzsche and Heraclitus remind us that this is a simplification. As an illustration, Heraclitus offers the image of the bow or lyre,^[57] to which W. K. C. Guthrie provides this helpful gloss:

Look at a strung bow lying on the ground or leaning against a wall. No movement is visible. To the eyes it appears a static object, completely at rest. But in fact a continuous tug-of-war is going on within it, as will become evident if the string is not strong enough or is allowed to perish. The bow will immediately take advantage, snap it and leap to straighten itself, thus showing that each had been putting forth effort all the time.^[58]

Such is the case with every natural entity—the only ones to which Nietzsche and Heraclitus grant existence. Every "thing" is but a tension of forces and materials that soon enough alter, becoming other. Tables,

[56] If Nietzsche later chides Heraclitus for doing an "injustice" to the senses ("he rejected their testimony because they showed things as if they had permanence and unity," TI "Reason" 2), it is only to remind him, and us, that it is not the senses themselves that are to blame but the falsification of their testimony by a reifying conceptual apparatus. Nietzsche and Heraclitus are not far apart, here. See the discussion of Nietzsche's empiricism above, in §§2.2.4–2.3.1, and Heraclitus's empiricism below, in §4.5, and in Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, 1:429ff.

[57] See fr. 51: "They [ordinary people] do not grasp how by being at variance it [the Logos, cosmos, or natural order] agrees with itself, a backward-turning adjustment like that of the bow or lyre" (trans. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, 1:439).

[58] Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, 1:440.

hands, cups, water, doorknobs, trees, stones, and all other natural things expand, contract, grow, decay, fuse, divide, solidify, melt, evaporate, and so on.^[59] And none of this is mysteriously unavailable to the scrupulous and patient inquirer.^[60]

Indeed this notion of becoming is the conclusion of a thoroughgoing empiricism that accepts the evident ubiquity of change in the universe without viewing it as issuing from, or tending toward, some being. We have already seen that both philosophers reject the notion that becoming's appearances and accidents are rooted in some underlying substratum. So, too, do they reject the supposition that being is the arche^[*] or telos of the process of becoming. Against the Milesians, Heraclitus rejects cosmogony in favor of a perpetual becoming ("[t]his world-order [ . . . ] none of the gods nor of men has made, but it was always and is and shall be");^[61] while, against Hegel and Kelvin, Nietzsche maintains that "[t]he world [ . . . ] becomes, it passes away, but it has never begun to become and never ceased from passing away" (WP 1066).^[62] For both Heraclitus and Nietzsche, the world is a perpetual agon that witnesses periodic victories but "endures in all eternity" (PTA 5, PP. 54–55).

This empiricism and naturalism of Nietzsche and his Heraclitus is directed against an idealist tradition that stretches from Parmenides and Plato through Christianity to Kant and Schopenhauer. If the idealist tradition travels Parmenides' "way of Truth," which leads it toward spirit, mind, thought, and being,^[63] Nietzsche and his Heraclitus tread

[59] See Heraclitus, fr. 126: "Cold things grow hot, hot things cold, moist dry, dry wet" (trans. Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, 1:445).

[60] See WP 688: "It is simply a matter of experience that change never ceases ."

[61] Fr. 30, trans. Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, 1 :454. For a discussion of this rejection of cosmogony, see Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers: From Thales to Aristotle (New York: Harper and Row, 1950), 45, and History of Greek Philosophy, 1 :441. Like Nietzsche, Guthrie rejects interpretations that read Heraclitus as hypothesizing "alternate states of harmony and discord, unity and plurality," maintaining that, for Heraclitus, "tension is never resolved. Peace and war do not succeed each other in turn: always in the world there is both peace and war. Cessation of struggle would mean the disintegration of the cosmos" (p. 437). See also Guthrie's rejection of the attribution to Heraclitus of a notion of ecpyrosis (the periodic destruction of the world by fire) in History of Greek Philosophy, 1:454ff.

[62] See the rest of this note, as well as WP 708, 1062, 1064, and 1067. That Nietzsche maintained this idea throughout his career can be seen by comparing these passages to PTA 13, written more than a decade earlier, and the notes from 1873 presented by Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 39ff.

[63] See Parmenides, frr. 2–8, and Presocratic Philosophers, ed. Kirk and Raven, 269–78. Though Kant carves out a limited domain for experience and natural science, his real concern, too, lies outside this domain: in the sphere of morality, the universal and necessary presuppositions of which are the products of pure reason "scrupulously cleansed ofeverything empirical" (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton [New York: Harper and Row, 1948], 56).

the opposite path, "the way of seeming,"^[64] which leads them back toward nature, body, sensation, and becoming. Contrary to Plato's claim that "[t]hat which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason is always in the process of becoming and perishing and never really is,"^[65] Nietzsche and his Heraclitus maintain that there is only the world of nature, life, history, becoming, and appearance and that "any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable" (TI "Reason" 6). If Parmenides and Plato discover "absolute reality" in mental entities that "remain always constant and invariable never admitting any alteration in any respect or in any sense,"^[66] Nietzsche and his Heraclitus, as we have seen, maintain that these mental entities are secondary to—"are in fact derived from"—the world of nature, experience, and becoming (PTA 12, p. 87).