4.7—
Chaos and Necessity

4.7.1—
From Chaos to Chaosmos

Nietzsche alternately describes this world of becoming or différance as a "chaos" [Chaos ]. No less than "becoming," this notion has been subject to a misunderstanding of its ontological status. Like "becoming," Nietzschean "chaos" has been taken to name a primordial ground, a world in itself that surges beneath the regular and ordered world of our experience and knowledge. Nietzschean "chaos" is thus construed in the traditional manner, as describing a lack of order, form, discernibility, stasis, intelligibility; and Nietzsche is read in the manner of Kant, as maintaining that, though the world in itself comes to us as a chaos (Kant speaks of a "manifold" or "mass" of sensations), we impose form upon it and thus make it intelligible.^[92] In our discussion of "becoming," we saw that Nietzsche severely criticizes this sort of Kantian dualism. This gives us prima facie evidence against a Kantian reading of Nietz-

[90] Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 88.

[91] Derrida ("Différance," trans. Allison, 135–36, 130) writes that différance is "the theme most proper to think out [ . . . ] what is most characteristic about our 'epoch'," that, in différance, we "see the juncture [ . . . ] of what has been most decisively inscribed in the thought of what is conveniently called our 'epoch.'" Indeed, we can see this conception of différance at work in contemporary art and science as well. For suggestions along these lines, see Umberto Eco, "The Poetics of the Open Work," in The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 57ff.; Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), 111, 136; and Alistair Moles, "Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence as Riemannian Cosmology," International Studies in Philosophy 21 (1989): 21–40.

[92] Heidegger reminds us of this in Nietzsche, 3:77. For this reading of Nietzsche on chaos, see Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 96–98; Granier, "Perspectivism and Interpretation" and "Nietzsche's Conception of Chaos"; Taylor, "Foucault on Freedom and Truth," 93; Young, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art, 96–97, 160–61; and Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science, 107, 149, 152ff.

sche's notion of "chaos." And, indeed, a close reading of the passages in which this notion appears reveals that Nietzsche construes the notion otherwise.

Nietzsche defines his terms in use, and so, to understand his conception of "chaos," we need to examine how the term functions within the textual networks in which it, and associated terms, appear. In the published work, Nietzsche speaks of "chaos" most frequently and poignantly in The Gay Science . The most famous passage is the by now familiar one in which the project of "naturalizing humanity" and "dedeifying nature" is introduced. Having criticized a number of world-interpretations, and before proceeding to criticize others, Nietzsche writes, "[t]he total character of the world [ . . . ] is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms" (GS 109).^[93] At first glance, one might well take this passage as an assertion of the Kantian thesis that none of our conceptions adequately comprehend the world as it really is, for this world is an ungraspable "chaos." Yet the appearance of the term elsewhere shows that this sort of paradoxical noumenon is not at all what Nietzsche has in mind.

Gay Science §277 asks that we "face [ . . . ] up to the beautiful chaos of existence and den[y] it all providential reason and goodness." As in §109, the notion of "chaos" is here contrasted with a conception of the world as divinely created and unfolding according to a grand plan. Instead, Nietzsche contends that "becoming" is "innocent," that it is not the product of divine intention and its movement does not have any particular direction or destination.^[94] The term "chaos" also appears in §322, where Nietzsche writes: "Those thinkers in whom all stars move in cyclic orbits are not the most profound. Whoever looks at himself as into vast space and carries galaxies within himself, also knows how irregular galaxies are; they lead into the chaos and labyrinth of existence."^[95] Here, Nietzsche all but repeats a few lines from §109: "Let us beware of positing generally and everywhere anything as elegant as the

[93] The passage is quoted in full in section §2.3.2, above.

[94] Cf. GS 357, quoted in §1.2. This passage is also quoted in GM III:27. See also TI "Errors" 8; WP 340 and 1062.

[95] This notion of human beings as containing a "chaos" appears frequently in Nietzsche's writings of the 1880s. See, e.g., Z: Prologue 5; BGE 224–35; KSA 10:5[1]; WP 842 and, especially, WP 83: "'Without the Christian faith, ' Pascal thought, 'you, no less than nature and history, will become for yourselves un monstre et un chaos .' This prophecy wehave fulfilled . [ . . . ]" On perspectivism and "the chaos we are," see §3.3.3, above. On the human being as analogous to a solar system, see WP 676.

cyclical movements of our neighboring stars; even a glance into the galaxy raises doubts whether there are not far coarser and more contradictory movements there, as well as stars with eternally linear paths, etc." The later passage (§322) describes human beings as microcosms whose perspectival movements are analogous to the macrocosmic orbits of stars presented in the earlier passage (§109). The later passage also sheds considerable light on the notion of "chaos" presented in the earlier. Read together, these passages suggest that Nietzsche's "chaos" is not characterized by an absolute lack of order but by a set of "irregular," "contradictory" movements. That is, the "chaotic" universe is one that moves not teleologically but errantly; it follows no simple linear or cyclical path but a "labyrinthine" one. So, too, is the "chaotic" person a wanderer and experimenter. As Nietzsche puts it in the final section of Human, All Too Human:

He who has attained to only some degree of freedom of mind cannot feel other than a wanderer on the earth—though not as a traveler to a final destination: for this destination does not exist. But he will watch and observe and keep his eyes open to see what is really going on in the world; for this reason he may not let his heart adhere too firmly to any individual thing; within him too there must be something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transience. (638)

Here we begin to see that "chaos" involves not only an errant or labyrinthine world-trajectory but also a perspectival or interpretive multiplicity. We find further evidence of this in another set of passages from The Gay Science that clearly resonate with those that make more explicit mention of "chaos." In §2, Nietzsche celebrates what he calls "this rerum concordia discors " (discordant concord of things),^[96] "this whole marvelous uncertainty and interpretive multiplicity of existence [Vieldeutigkeit der Daseins ]" and reproaches those who do not, or cannot bear to, see it as such. This is echoed in §373, where Nietzsche chides those who "wish to divest existence of its multiply interpretable character [seines vieldeutigen Charakters ]" in favor of a single mathe-

[96] A particularly Heraclitean formulation. Derrida ("Différance," trans. Allison, 154) is more explicit, referring his notion of différance to "the Heraclitean play of the hen diapheron heautoi, of the one differing from itself, of what is in difference with itself." Derrida alludes to Heraclitus's fr. 51 (trans. Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, 28): "They do not understand how that which differs with itself is in agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre."

matical or mechanistic interpretation. The "chaos and labyrinth of existence" would thus seem to describe the errant and divergent movements of both world and world-interpretation.

This becomes clearer once we see that, like "becoming," this conception of "chaos" follows from the "death of God." If God guaranteed a single world-trajectory and world-interpretation, the "death of God" unleashes a series of "irregular," "contradictory" movements and opens the way for an "interpretive multiplicity." Gilles Deleuze summarizes this situation well and offers perhaps the most Nietzschean characterization of this "chaos." For Deleuze, Nietzsche is a posttheological Leibniz. If Leibniz's God creates an infinity of divergent, incompossible worlds but chooses to actualize only one—"the best"—on which all monadic perspectives converge,^[97] Nietzsche's atheological "perspectivism" and "becoming" deny the existence of any privileged world and worldview and instead affirm the coexistence of divergent, irreducible worlds and worldviews. For Deleuze, Nietzsche's "chaos" describes the complication of these divergent worlds and worldviews, their coexistence within "the same world."^[98] It does not describe some pre-cosmic jumble but a world of difference, the coexistence of irreducibly different and divergent worlds and worldviews. And, because this "chaos" is no longer opposed to a "cosmos" (to the cosmic ordering of the demiurge), because it simply describes the posttheological world, this "chaos," Deleuze suggests, is better termed a chaosmos .^[99]

[97] On God, the infinity of worlds, and the choice of the best, see Leibniz, The Monadology §53, and Theodicy §§225, 414–17. On the multiple monadic perspectives On the same world, see The Monadology §57; Discourse on Metaphysics §9; and Theodicy §357.

[98] In this setting, "the same world" is to be taken not as the point of convergence for all worldviews (Leibniz) but rather as the incongruous assemblage of all world-interpretations and their worlds (Nietzsche). If, for Nietzsche, "a 'thing' is the sum of its effects," the "world" is the sum of its interpretations, and this sum is not convergent but divergent, "incongruent " (WP 568). Cf. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking and Of Mind and Other Matters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), chap. 2; Richard Rorty, "Introduction: Pragmatism and Philosophy," in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xlvii; and §3.4.3, above.

[99] These suggestions are scattered throughout Deleuze's writings of the late 1960s. See, e.g., Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 172–76, 264, 260–66 and Difference and Repetition, 40–41, 46–50, 55–58, 66–69, 123–24, 280, 299. They reappear in his book on Leibniz, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 59–82. The term chaosmos is taken from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which Deleuze sees as an artistic manifestation of our posttheological condition. A similar assessment is offered by Eco ("Poetics of the Open Work," 54, 58), who writes that Joyce "deliberately seeks to offer an image of the ontological and existential situation of the contemporary world," with all its "openness," "multiplicity," "indeterminacy," and "discontinuity." I thank Daniel W. Smith for helpful discussion of these issues.

On Deleuze's view, Nietzsche is also a posttheological Spinoza.^[100] For Spinoza, all entities originate, and converge, in a single substance: God. All of nature expresses God's being; and, in turn, God's being contains all of nature. Thus, Spinoza can say: "Deus sive Natura [God or Nature]."^[101] Like Spinoza, Nietzsche is a naturalist and antidualist. He grants that there is nothing other than nature and that all entities and attributes are natural. Yet, for Nietzsche, nature can no longer be identified with God. After the "death of God," nature is no longer a point of convergence but a zone of divergence, no longer one, but multiple. Thus, Nietzsche reformulates Spinoza's equation: "Chaos sive Natura [Chaos or Nature]" (KSA 9:11[197]). Nature de-deified is "chaos."

This passage returns us to the one with which we began, Gay Science §109, which calls for a "de-deification of nature" and names this nature "chaos." Contrary to the neo-Kantian reading, we have seen that this notion of "chaos" does not describe an ungraspable metaphysical world. Rather, it describes the natural, physical world, the world we know—or rather, the world Nietzsche believes will be disclosed to us once we discard our ontotheological^[102] prejudices: a world of becoming or différance, a world without origin or end, the "true" character, essence, or being of which is incessantly differed and perpetually deferred.^[103]

4.7.2—
Necessity and Chance

A THROW OF THE DICE . . . WILL NEVER
. . . ABOLISH . . . CHANCE
Stéphane Mallarmé (1897)

We can further clarify this conception of "chaos" by examining the notion of "necessity" [Nothwendigkeit ] Nietzsche associates with it. The

[100] See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 40ff. Also see Richard Schacht, "The Nietzsche-Spinoza Problem: Spinoza as Precursor?" in Making Sense of Nietzsche (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).

[101] Ethics, in Works of Spinoza, vol. 2, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover), 188; cf. WP 1062.

[102] The term is borrowed from Heidegger (Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 54: "Western metaphysics [ . . . ] has eminently been both ontology and theology. [ . . . T]his means: metaphysics is ontotheology." On the identity of God and Being in Nietzsche, see §4.6.1, above. For more on this Heideggerian term, see my introduction, §0.3.

[103] Cf. WP 584 on "the properties that constitute [the world's] reality: change, becoming, multiplicity, opposition, contradiction, war." Also see WP 616: "The world with which we are concerned is false [ . . . ] it is 'in flux,' as something becoming, as a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for—there is no 'truth.'"

latter term appears frequently in Nietzsche's presentations of his own cosmological view. To quote it once again, Gay Science §109 maintains that: "The total character of the world [ . . . ] is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, [etc.] Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses [my emphasis]." This language is echoed in two later passages. In Beyond Good and Evil §22, Nietzsche rejects the world-interpretation according to which "nature conforms to law" and proceeds to sketch his own picture of the world as "will to power." Such a world, he writes, "has a 'necessary' and 'calculable' course, not because laws obtain in it, but because they are absolutely lacking, and every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment." Similarly, the section of Twilight of the Idols called "The Four Great Errors" culminates with this statement of Nietzsche's own worldview:

One is necessary, one is a piece of fatefulness, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole; there is nothing which could judge, measure, compare, or sentence our being, for that would mean judging, comparing, or sentencing the whole. But there is nothing besides the whole! That nobody is held responsible any longer, that the mode of being may not be traced back to a causa prima, that the world does not form a unity either as a sensorium or as "spirit"—that alone is the great liberation; with this alone is the innocence of becoming restored. The concept of "God" was until now the greatest objection to existence. We deny God, we deny the responsibility in God: only thereby do we redeem the world. ("Errors" 8; cf. WP 552)

Finally, in two related notes from the Nachlaß, Nietzsche states:

[I]f becoming could resolve itself into being or nothingness [ . . . ] then [given infinite time] this state must have been reached. But it has not been reached: from which it follows [that it cannot and will not be reached]. (WP 1066)

I seek a conception of the world that takes this fact into account. Becoming must be explained without recourse to final intentions; becoming must appear justified at every moment (or incapable of being evaluated; which amounts to the same thing). [ . . . ] "Necessity" not in the shape of an overreaching, dominating total force, or that of a prime mover; even less as a necessary condition for something valuable. To this end, it is necessary to deny a total consciousness of becoming, a "God." [ . . . ] Fortunately such a summarizing power is missing (—a suffering and all-seeing God, a "total sensorium" and "cosmic spirit" would be the greatest objection to being). More strictly one must admit nothing that has being—because then becoming would lose its value and actually appear meaningless and superfluous. [ . . . ] Becoming is of equivalent value every moment; the sum of its val-

ues always remains the same; in other words, it has no value at all, for anything against which to measure it and in relation to which the word "value" could have any meaning, is lacking. The total value of the world cannot be evaluated . (WP 708)

Taken together, these passages present a number of overlapping ideas: becoming is innocent and without beginning, end, intention, or direction; it is lawless yet necessary and fateful; it is incapable of being judged or measured as a whole but is of equal value at every moment. What are we to make of this set of ideas and how do they cast light on the notions of "chaos" and "necessity"?

As with "becoming" and "chaos," Nietzsche's affirmation of "necessity" proceeds from the rejection of God and being. "Necessity" is set against divine "purpose" and human "free will," both of which require the posit of an extra-natural world of uncaused causes (see §3.3.2, above). For Nietzsche, becoming is "necessary" in the sense that it neither originates from nor is directed by the "purposes" and "intentions" of any transcendent being. Rather, its errant movements are solely the result of immanent conditions and forces. But this does not mean that the "necessity" attributed to becoming and chaos sanctions a determinism. Nietzsche sees the deterministic picture of the world as itself theological: a closed system, timeless, static, in equilibrium, governed by universal laws—"the great captious web of causality" behind which lies "God as some alleged spider of purpose" (GM III:9).^[104] Indeed, the deterministic world subordinates becoming to being, time to eternity: past and future are given in every moment, bound together in an eternal Present.^[105] Finally, behind determinism, there lurks that "demand for certainty" condemned by Nietzsche for its willed ignorance of the "whole marvelous uncertainty and interpretive multiplicity of existence" (GS 2).^[106]

[104] Cf. Z: 3 "Before Sunrise" on the "eternal spider" and "spider web of reason." Cf. Gaston Bachelard (The New Scientific Spirit, trans. Patrick A. Heelan [Boston: Beacon Press, 1984], 100): "Terrestrial phenomena are too obviously fluid and diverse to permit, without prior psychological preparation, the elaboration of an objective, deterministic physics. Determinism descended from heaven to earth."

[105] See Prigogine and Stengers, Order out of Chaos, 11, 60, and Stephen H. Kellert, In the Wake of Chaos: Unpredictable Order in Dynamical Systems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 53–54. See also Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 162–68. Ilya Prigogine (From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences [New York: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1980]) describes the deterministic world of classical dynamics precisely as "a world of being," which, since the discovery of thermodynamics in the nineteenth century, has given way to a "world of becoming."

[106] See Kellert, In the Wake of Chaos, 51–55.

In place of both the theological notion of becoming as divinely constructed and purposive and the scientific picture of it as thoroughly calculable and predictable, Nietzsche maintains that becoming is a dice game.^[107] In the language of Zarathustra, the gods are dice players and the earth is their table.^[108] The natural world and everything in it, ourselves included, are combinations that have turned up in this game of chance. But this chance is not opposed to necessity. While the throw of the dice is an act of freedom, it is powerless to determine the resulting combination. Once the dice leave the hand, the rest is left to necessity. And, while, one can retrospectively determine the conditions and forces that led to a particular result, no prospective inference will enable one to determine the results of future throws, each of which will, once again, affirm both chance and necessity.^[109] "Those iron hands of necessity which shake the dice-box of chance play their game for an infinite length of time," Nietzsche writes; and "we ourselves shake the dice-box with iron hands, [ . . . ] we ourselves in our most intentional actions do no more than play the game of necessity" (D 130). Such a game denies transcendent purpose and control and instead affirms "divine accidents" (Z: 3 "Before Sunrise").^[110] It is this sort of nonrational, nonpurposive "necessity" that Nietzsche wants to ascribe to becom-

[107] See PTA 14, 91; D 130; Z: 3 "Before Sunrise," 16; WP 1066. See also Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 25ff.

[108] See Z: 3 "Before Sunrise" and "The Seven Seals." Cf. D 130.

[109] Chaos theory discovers a similar feature in physical systems. On the model presented by Prigogine and Stengers (Order out of Chaos, 177), Nietzsche's "throw of the dice" corresponds to a "bifurcation point," where "deterministic description breaks down." At such points, "fluctuations or random elements would play an important role, while between bifurcations the deterministic aspects would become dominant" (176; cf. 73 and Prigogine, From Being to Becoming, 106). "Both the deterministic character of the kinetic equations whereby the set of possible states and their respective stability can be calculated, and the random fluctuations 'choosing' between or among the states around bifurcation points are inextricably connected. This mixture of necessity and chance constitutes the history of the system" (Prigogine and Stengers, Order out of Chaos, 170). On dice throws and bifurcations, see Prigogine, From Being to Becoming, 203, and Prigogine and Stengers, Order out of Chaos, 162. Prigogine and Stengers (Order Out of Chaos, 111, 136) cite Nietzsche as a philosophical precursor to the move in physics from being to becoming, substance to relation, equivalence to difference, determinism to chance. Neither these authors nor I want to claim that Nietzsche is a chaos theorist avant la lettre . Rather, Nietzsche's attempt to provide a rigorously atheological conception of nature leads him to philosophically anticipate features of the world that resemble those later experimentally discovered by chaos physics.

[110] Nietzsche shares with Hume the notion that the world (human beings included) operates neither according to "chance" nor "necessity," in their strict senses. It does not operate according to pure "chance," because there appears to be some order and regularity in our experience; nor does it operate according to "necessity," whether transcendent orimmanent, because divine providence is indemonstrable or superfluous and induction can, at best, provide only probabilities.

ing.^[111] Becoming is seen as a series of dice throws, each of which is complete in itself ("justified at every moment") and has no further end beyond sparking an interest in new throws and different combinations.

This game of chance and necessity, this nonpurposive becoming, is what Nietzsche elsewhere calls "chaos." Thus, at one point, Zarathustra speaks of "that heavenly need that constrains even accidents to star dances" (Z: 3 "The Seven Seals"); while, at another point, echoing Gay Science §322, he says that "one must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star" (Z: Prologue 5). That is, Nietzschean "chaos" is not some arbitrary jumble from which we, like the demiurge, create order. Rather, it is a redescription of the world we know and in which we exist, an image of what our world would look like were we to eliminate all the "shadows of God." Whether dubbed an "innocent becoming" or a "chaos," such a world is without origin, purpose, aim, unity, or total character. And it is precisely this that makes it a world of play, for there is nothing to halt this becoming and differing, no transcendent principle to direct or constrain it, no calculation that could totalize it once and for all.^[112]

[111] See PTA 19, 116: "But absolute free will can only be imagined as purposeless, roughly like a child's game or an artist's creative play impulse." See also HH 107: "Everything is necessity—thus says the new knowledge; and this knowledge itself is necessity. Everything is innocence: and knowledge is the path to insight into this innocence."

[112] Cf. Derrida ("Différance," trans. Allison, 135): "on the eve and aftermath of philosophy, [the concept of play] designates the unity of chance and necessity in an endless calculus."