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]