Chapter Four—
Becoming and Chaos, or Différance and Chaosmos
[Heraclitus] denied the duality of totally diverse worlds. [ . . . ] He no longer distinguished a physical world from a metaphysical one.[ . . . ] And after this first step, nothing could hold him back from a second, far bolder negation: he altogether denied being.[ . . . ] Heraclitus proclaimed: "I see nothing other than becoming."
Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks §5
Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The "apparent" world is the only one: the "true" world is only added by a lie.
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols "Reason" 2
4.1—
Nietzsche and the "Battle of Giants Concerning Being"
From his early study of the Presocratics through the writings of his last productive year, Nietzsche relentlessly criticizes the philosophical obsession with being and asserts the priority of its conceptual opposite: becoming. Viewing the history of philosophy as a protracted celebration of Parmenides' victory over Heraclitus in what Plato called the "battle of giants concerning being," Nietzsche aims to revive this ancient agon and reverse its outcome.[1]
Nietzsche's ontological sympathies and fondness for Heraclitus are well known. But this alone tells us little, for Nietzsche's great nineteenth-century rival, Hegel, also fancied himself a disciple of Heraclitus.[2] The
[1] "Gigantomachia peri tes[*] ousias" (Plato, Sophist, 246a).
[2] Thus, Hegel writes, "there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic" (Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 1, Greek Philosophy to Plato, trans. E. S. Haldane [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995], 279).
crucial questions remain: "What is Nietzsche's 'becoming'?" and "Who is Nietzsche's Heraclitus?" These questions are commonly answered by reading Nietzsche as a Kantian skeptic and metaphysician for whom "becoming" names a sort of unknowable noumenon. After presenting and criticizing this view, I suggest another. I maintain that, as with Nietzsche's other doctrines, "becoming," too, must be seen through the twin lenses of naturalism and interpretation: that is, on the one side, Nietzsche's "becoming" is a naturalistic doctrine intended to counter the metaphysical preoccupation with being, stasis, and eternity by fore-grounding the empirically evident ubiquity of change in the natural world; on the other, "becoming" describes the incessant shift of perspectives and interpretations in a world that lacks a grounding essence.
4.2—
Becoming as Noumenon:
Nietzsche Among the Neo-Kantians
The story is often told: Nietzsche was drawn from philology to philosophy by his discovery of Schopenhauer in the mid-1860s. Attracted by Schopenhauer's tragic pessimism—so much at odds with the optimism of Hegel and the positivists—Nietzsche also absorbed Schopenhauer's Kantian dualism, which distinguishes the phenomenal from the noumenal world, the realm of appearance from that of things in themselves. Nietzsche's first published book, The Birth of Tragedy, explicitly pays homage to Kant and Schopenhauer and centers on what appears to be a dualistic schema: the Dionysian swarm of becoming, chaos, and indefiniteness that is represented by us as an Apollinian gallery of being, order, and definition. Yet whereas Schopenhauer was repulsed by the surging chaos he saw at the heart of things, Nietzsche and his tragedians were allured by it. Increasingly struck by this difference in attitude, Nietzsche became dismayed with Schopenhauer's crypto-Christian rejection of the physical world and retreat into the metaphysical solitude of timeless forms. By the late 1870s, this dismay had developed into outright repudiation.
Here the story becomes more controversial. Nietzsche is often read as implicitly maintaining a Kantian-Schopenhauerian framework even in his later writings. He is said to have supplemented Kant and Schopenhauer with Heraclitus, Boscovich, Darwin, and Lange to arrive at a conception of the world in itself as a "becoming," "chaos," or "will to power"—a fluid, impermanent, and undifferentiated Urwelt to which
the categories of knowledge (identity, substance, causality, etc.) do not apply. This reading of Nietzsche was advocated early in Nietzsche studies by the prominent neo-Kantian Hans Vaihinger and has continued to find supporters, among them Arthur Danto, and, more recently, Julian Young and Stephen Houlgate.[3]
This interpretation of becoming proceeds from a skeptical epistemology, which it traces throughout Nietzsche's corpus.[4] Thus, from the
[3] "Neo-Kantian" here refers to the skeptical version presented in the previous chapter, not to its realist variant, which has little to say about becoming. For versions of this interpretation of Nietzsche's epistemology and ontology, see Hans Vaihinger, "Nietzsche and His Doctrine of Conscious Illusion," in Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert C. Solomon (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973); Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity, trans. Charles F. Walraff and Frederick J. Schmitz (South Bend, Ind.: Regnery Gateway, 1979); Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 3, The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, trans. Joan Stambaugh et al. (San Francisco: Harper, 1987); Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 80, 95–97; Jean Granier, "Perspectivism and Interpretation" and "Nietzsche's Conception of Chaos," trans. David B. Allison, in The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977); John T. Wilcox, Truth and Value in Nietzsche: A Study of His Metaethics and Epistemology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974), 132–34; Rüdiger Grimm, Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1977), 30, 53, and passim; George J. Stack, "Nietzsche's Critique of Things-In-Themselves," Dialogos 36 (1980): 50ff., Lange and Nietzsche (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1983), and "Kant, Lange, and Nietzsche: Critique of Knowledge," in Nietzsche and Modern German Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (London: Routledge, 1991); Willard Mittelman, "Perspectivism, Becoming, and Truth in Nietzsche," International Studies in Philosophy 16 (1984): 3–22; Eric Blondel, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture, trans. Seán Hand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 98; Julian Young, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 3, 41, 96–97, 160–61; and Stephen Houlgate, "Kant, Nietzsche, and the 'Thing in Itself,' " Nietzsche-Studien 22 (1993): 133, 135.
[4] For instance, Arthur Danto (Nietzsche as Philosopher, 38) writes: "In a precocious essay, written in 1873 [ . . . ] Nietzsche asks the old, cynical question, What is truth? It was to be a question that occupied him throughout his entire philosophical life, and the answer he gave it here [ . . . ] was one he never saw fit to modify in any essential respect." Daniel Breazeale concurs: "it is not only true that, as Arthur Danto has contended, Nietzsche never modified 'in any essential respect' the theory of truth which he advanced in his unpublished writings of the early 1870's, but it is also true that these same writings contain by far his most explicit, detailed, and sustained treatments of basic epistemological issues. Not only are most of his later published remarks on this subject compatible with these early discussions, they actually seem in some cases to presuppose them" ("Introduction," Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale [Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979], xlvi). While disagreeing with Danto that Nietzsche's epistemological position remained unchanged over the course of his career, Wilcox (Truth and Value in Nietzsche, 127) writes: "[Nietzsche] denies that anything is 'true' or that we 'know' anything in any sense which presupposes insight into the thing in itself, the transcendental reality which Kant thought had to be distinguished from appearance or phenomena. Doubt about that kind of truth or knowledge was not uncommon in the nineteenth century, largely because of the efforts of Kant. [ . . . ] That kind of intellectual pessimism, despair about that kind of truth, wasone of Nietzsche's concerns from early to late." In a similar vein, George Stack ("Nietzsche's Critique of Things-In-Themselves," 50) writes that Nietzsche "never really retreats from [the] theme" that "knowledge, especially of the Kantian variety, entails 'falsification.' " Note that my presentation of this skeptical interpretation is a composite that brings together the many different textual and historical strands of this interpretation as it is found among a host of commentators on Nietzsche.
early essay "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" (which maintains that "truths are illusions that we have forgotten are illusions" [p. 84]) through the notes on epistemology in the later Nachlaß (one of which claims that "truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live" [WP 493]), Nietzsche is seen as consistently holding the Kantian position that our knowledge is limited to the phenomenal world of our own construction and can say little if anything about things as they are in themselves. Thus, we can hope for no correspondence between our language or thought and the world as it really is.[5]
For Kant, this restriction of knowledge to phenomena is no cause for despair. On the contrary, it serves two of his aims. Insofar as it rejects as useless speculation any claim to knowledge concerning metaphysics and morality, this limitation can be said to place philosophy on a more firm, scientific foundation. Moreover, Kant's view can claim to "make way for faith" concerning those metaphysical and moral concerns that are now judged to lie beyond the scope of knowledge but within reach of Reason. Yet, for Nietzsche, who held no such faith in God, reason, or morality, this skeptical insight is said to have led to a more deeply felt sense of our fundamental ignorance about the world.[6] Thus, in an early text, he claims that
despair of truth [ . . . ] attends every thinker who sets out from the Kantian philosophy, provided he is a vigorous and whole man in suffering and desire and not a mere clattering thought- and calculating-machine. [ . . . ] If Kant ever should begin to exercise any wide influence we shall be aware of it in the form of a gnawing and disintegrating skepticism and relativism; and only in the most active and noble spirits who have never been able to exist in a state of doubt would there appear instead that undermining and despair of all truth. [ . . . ] (SE 3, P. 140)
[5] On this point, see Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 72ff.; Grimm, Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge, 44–65 and passim; George Stack, "Nietzsche's Evolutionary Epistemology," Dialogos 59 (1992): 83; and Young, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art, 41.
[6] See Wilcox, Truth and Value in Nietzsche, 125–27; Stack, "Nietzsche's Evolutionary Epistemology," 83. In Nietzsche as Philosopher, Danto deems Nietzsche's view an epistemological and ontological "nihilism."
Similarly, toward the end of his career, Nietzsche describes the Copernican revolution in astronomy and epistemology[7] as "the self-belittlement of man":
Alas, the faith in the dignity and uniqueness of man, in his irreplaceability in the great chain of being, is a thing of the past—he has become an animal, literally and without reservation or qualification, he who was, according to his old faith, almost God. [ . . . ] Since Copernicus, man seems to have got himself on an inclined plane—now he is slipping faster and faster away from the center into—what? into nothingness? into a "penetrating sense of his nothingness"? (GM III: 25)
According to the neo-Kantian view, Nietzsche places himself among those "most active and noble spirits" who are overcome by Kantian "skepticism." Beyond the island of our knowledge, we see only "a blind, empty, structureless thereness" "tossing blackly like the sea, chaotic relative to our distinctions and perhaps to all distinctions, but there nonetheless."[8]
This reading is aided by historical investigations into the sources of Nietzsche's putative skepticism. George Stack has done the most to promote the view that the later Nietzsche's perspectivist epistemology is an outgrowth of his early acceptance of the skeptical position held by many nineteenth-century neo-Kantian philosophers of science, particularly F. A. Lange.[9] According to Stack, Lange followed Kant in claiming that we have only a mediated knowledge of the world and that what performs this mediation is a conceptual apparatus that arranges the world for us in terms of substance, cause and effect, unity, identity, continuous and irreversible time, and so forth. Kant took this intuitional and categorial framework to be given in our cognitive constitution. His transcendental arguments sought to show the necessary and universal
[7] Nietzsche clearly intends his description of the Copernican revolution to cover not only Copernicus's "defeat of theological astronomy" but also "Kant's victory over the dogmatic concepts of theology." Indeed, his discussion of astronomy moves directly into a discussion of Kant's critique.
[8] Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 96. This view has been endorsed more recently by Young, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art, 96–97. The island analogy is presented by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1929), 257.
[9] This argument is made in many of Stack's books and essays on Nietzsche. See, e.g., Stack, Lange and Nietzsche, and "Kant, Lange, and Nietzsche." For more on the importance of Lange to Nietzsche, see Vaihinger, "Nietzsche and His Doctrine of Conscious Illusion," 83–84, 104, and Robert Nola, "Nietzsche's Theory of Truth and Belief," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47 (1987): 528–33 and passim .
operation of the forms of sensuous intuition and categories of the understanding in human thought and experience. Lange, however, rejected Kant's transcendental account in favor of an evolutionary account of the existence and scope of the categorial system. What Kant took to be logically and conceptually a priori Lange viewed as having only a temporal and evolutionary priority. That is, what Kant maintained to be necessary and universal for rational thought and experience Lange saw as only the contingent product of a particular "physico-psychological organization,"[10] itself a result of the natural selection of traits that have proven their practical value for the survival of the species.[11]
Lange's neo-Kantian evolutionism, the story continues, was taken up by Nietzsche, who argued in similar fashion that "the world of which we can become conscious is only a surface and sign-world" (GS 354), a world determined by "those primeval basic errors" "which were continually inherited, until they became almost part of the basic endowment of the species" (GS 110).[12] Such "errors," for both Lange and Nietzsche, define the parameters of our "perspective," construed as a species-concept and not as an individual point of view.[13] Due to their different "physico-psychological" constitutions and organizations, different species are supposed to have different "perspectives."[14] According to the skeptical interpretation, this is what leads Nietzsche to claim that
the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its own perspectives, and only in these. We cannot look around our own corner: it is hopeless curiosity that wants to know what other kinds of intellects there might be. [ . . . ] But I should think that today we are at least far from the ridiculous immodesty that
[10] See Stack, "Nietzsche's Critique of Things-In-Themselves," 33–37, and "Kant, Lange, and Nietzsche," 39. Other commentators, such as Mary Warnock, "Nietzsche's Conception of Truth," in Nietzsche's Imagery and Thought: A Collection of Essays, ed. Malcolm Pasley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 41ff., have argued that what determines the parameters of our "perspective," for Nietzsche, is our language and grammar.
[11] Stack, "Nietzsche's Critique of Things-In-Themselves," 33–35.
[12] Cf. HH 16: "That which we now call this world is the outcome of a host of errors and fantasies that have gradually arisen and grown entwined with one another in the course of the overall evolution of the organic being, and are now inherited by us as the accumulated treasure of the entire past—as treasure: for our humanity now depends upon it." Cf. also GS 57. Houlgate, "Kant, Nietzsche, and the 'Thing in itself,' " 145–46 and passim, offers an interpretation similar to Stack's, though on exclusively textual, rather than historical, grounds.
[13] Stack, "Kant, Lange, and Nietzsche," 39–40.
[14] Ibid., 44–45. Cf. Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 40–41. For a critique of this conception of perspective, see §3.3.1, above.
would be involved in decreeing from our corner that perspectives are permitted only from this corner. (GS 374)[15]
This skeptical account of Kant's, Lange's, and Nietzsche's epistemologies is also an account of their ontologies. If the phenomenal world—the world as it exists for a particular perspective—is a "mediated" world, a world of "representations" or "appearances," by inference there must be some "real," "unmediated," "original" world that these perspectives distort, filter, or represent. For Kant, this is the noumenal world, the realm of things in themselves that is apprehended by the sensuous intuition and worked up by the categories of the understanding before it can be considered knowable. For Lange, this "original" world is the "evanescent stream" of " 'unknowable' becoming," a "presumed chaotic 'manifold' of sensory impressions."[16] Finally, according to this view, Nietzsche is said to maintain that the world in itself is a "becoming," "chaos," or "will to power," a world devoid of definition and organization.[17] The categories of knowledge, which define the pa-
[15] An earlier statement of this view appears in "On Truth and Lies" (p. 79), where Nietzsche writes: "how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. [ . . . T]his intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life. Rather, it is human, and only its possessor and begetter takes it so solemnly—as though the world's axis turned within it. But if we could communicate with the gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself." Pages later (p. 86), he continues: "If but for an instant [man] could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his 'self-consciousness' would be immediately destroyed. It is even a difficult thing for him to admit to himself that the insect or the bird perceives an entirely different world from the one that man does, and that the question of which one of these perceptions of the world is the more correct one is quite meaningless, for this would have to have been decided previously in accordance with the criterion of the correct perception, which means, in accordance with a criterion which is not available. " Cf. WP 616.
[16] Stack, "Nietzsche and Boscovich's Natural Philosophy," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 62 (1981): 80. Stack, "Kant, Lange, and Nietzsche,"35.
[17] This formulation appears explicitly or implicitly in: Vaihinger, "Nietzsche and His Doctrine of Conscious Illusion," 84 and passim; Jaspers, Nietzsche, 212–13, 321, 351–52; Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1, The Will to Power as Art, trans. David F. Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1979), 3–6, and Nietzsche, 3:3–9, 64ff.; George A. Morgan, What Nietzsche Means (New York: Harper and Row, 1941), 267ff.; Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 80, 96–97; Granier, "Perspectivism and Interpretation" and "Nietzsche's Conception of Chaos"; Sarah Kofman, "Appendix: Genealogy, Interpretation, Text," in Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans. Duncan Large (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 138–39; Peter Heller in the "Discussion" following Paul De Man, "Nietzsche's Theory of Rhetoric," Symposium (Spring 1974): 46; Wilcox, Truth and Value in Nietzsche, 132–33; Grimm, Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge, 30 and passim; Bernd Magnus, Nietzsche's Existential Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 25–32; Stack, "Nietzsche's Critique of Things-In-Themselves," 50ff., and "Kant, Lange, and Nietzsche"; Mit-telman, "Perspectivism, Becoming, and Truth in Nietzsche"; Charles Taylor, "Foucault on Freedom and Truth," in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 93; Houlgate, Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Criticism of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 56–95, and "Kant, Nietzsche, and the 'Thing in itself,' " 133, 135; Nola, "Nietzsche's Theory of Truth and Belief"; Barry Allen, "Government in Foucault," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21 (1991): 423, and "Nietzsche's Question: 'What Good Is Truth?' " History of Philosophy Quarterly 9 (1992): 238; and Babette E. Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 87 and passim . A more novel interpretation is presented by Blondel (Nietzsche: The Body and Culture, 98), who argues that "Nietzsche gives a reality, as a thing 'in itself,' to the body ."
rameters of our "perspective," impose order on this becoming and thus help us to cope with it and increase our chances for survival. Yet, for Nietzsche, "the categories are 'truths' only insofar as they are conditions of life for us" (WP 515). And "[i]t is improbable that our 'knowledge' should extend further than is strictly necessary for the preservation of life" (WP 494). As Karl Jaspers succinctly puts it: "Life quite properly believes in being, and were it to believe in becoming instead, it would perish. . . . [B]ecoming [is] a doctrine that [Nietzsche] considers 'true, but deadly.' "[18]
4.3—
A Critique of the Neo-Kantian View
Without a doubt, then, there exists some textual, historical, and critical support for the neo-Kantian interpretation of Nietzsche's ontology. Yet this interpretation is problematic, for it is deeply inconsistent with positions central to Nietzsche's work, particularly his resolute antidualism. The claim that Nietzsche endorses a skeptical epistemology and a metaphysical ontology does not fit well with his explicit rejection of Kant's notion of the "thing in itself" and the very distinction between a "real" and an "apparent" world. This distinction is rejected in the very passage in which the notion of perspectivism is introduced. Having claimed that "the world of which we become conscious is only a surface- and sign-world," Nietzsche writes:
You will guess that it is not the opposition of subject and object that concerns me here: this distinction I leave to the epistemologists [Erkenntniss-theoretikern ] who have become entangled in the snares of grammar (the metaphysics of the people). It is even less the opposition of "thing in itself" [»Ding an sich «] and appearance [Erscheinung ]; for we do not "know"
[18] Jaspers, Nietzsche, 351.
[»erkennen «] nearly enough even to be allowed to distinguish in this way. (GS 354)
This may sound like a skeptical argument. Yet it actually amounts to a rejection of skepticism. Nietzsche's point is that, without access to a God's-eye view capable of confirming the existence of a thing in itself and distinguishing it from its appearances, we have no basis for making such a distinction at all and thus no basis for skepticism. Earlier in The Gay Science, Nietzsche makes a similar point: "What is 'appearance' [»Schein «] for me now? Certainly not the opposite of some essence [eines Wesens ]: what could I say about any essence except to name the attributes of its appearance! Certainly not a dead mask that one could place over an unknown x or remove from it!" (GS 54).
This critique of the distinction between appearance and its putative opposites (and of the subordination of the former to these latter) is taken up again in later texts. For example, in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche writes:
The reasons for which "this" world has been characterized as "apparent" [scheinbar ] are the very reasons which indicate its reality [Realität ]; any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable. . . . The criteria which have been bestowed on the "true being" [»wahren Sein «] of things are the criteria of not-being, of naught; the "true world" [»wahre Welt «] has been constructed out of contradiction to the actual world [wirklichen Welt ]. (TI "Reason" 6; cf. WP 584)
The true world [wahre Welt ]—we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent [scheinbare ] one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one . (TI "World" 6; cf. "Reason," 2)[19]
These points are underscored in Nachlaß notes from the same period:
The antithesis of the apparent [scheinbaren ] world and the true [wahren ] world is reduced to the antithesis "world" and "nothing." (WP 567)
The antithesis "thing in itself" [»Ding an sich «] and "appearance" [»Erscheinung «] is untenable; with that, however, the concept of "appearance " also disappears. (WP 552)
[19] Reading this passage against the background of a dualistic, Kantian interpretation of Nietzsche's epistemology and ontology, Daniel W. Conway ("Beyond Realism: Nietzsche's New Infinite," International Studies in Philosophy 22 [1990]: 103) construes it as a "warning" rather than a celebration. Yet Conway's reading is implausible, especially since the passage goes on to characterize this event of abolition in a highly affirmative tone: "Noon; moment of briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA" (TI "World" 6).
Of course, these passages do not employ a consistent terminology: at times, Nietzsche explicitly refers to Kant's distinction between Ding an sich and Erscheinung while, at others, he refers to the Platonic or Christian distinction between die wahre Welt and die scheinbare Welt . Yet I think this vacillation is not mere terminological carelessness. Rather, Nietzsche wishes to equate the Kantian distinction between the thing in itself and appearance with the Platonic-Christian distinction between the true world and the apparent world:
Any distinction between a "true" [»wahre «] and an "apparent" [»scheinbare «] world—whether in the Christian manner or in the manner of Kant (in the end, an underhanded Christian)—is only a suggestion of decadence, a symptom of the decline of life. (TI "Reason" 6)[20]
Taken together, these passages present the following naturalistic argument. Kant's distinction between the thing in itself and appearance is merely a version of the Platonic-Christian distinction between the true world and the apparent world (the un-earthly world of pure, unlimited knowledge, goodness, beauty, and peace versus the earthly, sensual world of ignorance and suffering). According to Nietzsche, this latter distinction is unjustified, because the only world with which we are acquainted [erkennen ] is the "apparent world." How, then, does the notion of "the true world" (and thus the "thing in itself") arise? Nietzsche sees it as "constructed out of contradiction to the actual world," that is, as originating out of a hatred of this world on the part of a this-worldly creature, a hatred that has led to the fictitious fabrication and elevation of "another world," which, as the antithesis to this "merely apparent" world, is deemed a "true world," a world "in itself."
This argument is pervasive in Nietzsche's later writings. How, then, can such passages and arguments be squared with the neo-Kantian interpretation according to which Nietzsche is a skeptic who maintains that there is a world in itself of becoming? One might argue that Nietzsche does not object to Kant's notion of a noumenal world but only to the characterization of that world as a world of "things in themselves" or a "true world." Nietzsche might be said to parallel Kant in claiming that the world of becoming, like the world of things in themselves, is unknowable. Thus, following Kant's claim that "knowledge has to do
[20] Recall that Nietzsche also calls Christianity "Platonism for 'the people' " (BGE P), thus completing the equation between Platonism, Christianity, and Kantianism. On Kant's "underhanded Christianity," see also GS 335 and GM III: 25.
only with appearances and must leave the thing in itself as indeed real per se, but as not known by us,"[21] Nietzsche writes:
Knowledge and becoming exclude one another. (WP 517)
Knowledge in itself in a world of becoming is impossible. (WP 617)
A world of becoming could not, in the strict sense, be "comprehended" or "known"; only to the extent that the "comprehending" and "knowing" intellect encounters a coarse already-created world, built out of nothing but appearances [Scheinbarkeiten ] but become firm to the extent that this kind of appearance [Schein ] has preserved life—only to this extent is there anything like "knowledge." (WP 520)[22]
In these passages, it would seem that Nietzsche is making the Kantian argument that what is available to our knowledge is only a world of appearance—the noumenal world filtered through the forms of intuition and categories of the understanding (Kant) or our "physico-psychological" apparatus (Lange).[23] Were this the case, Nietzsche's only objection would be that Kant conceives of this noumenal world as a world of "things" that exist "in themselves." Perhaps Nietzsche disapproves of this conception only insofar as it falsely attributes the intraphenomenal notions of unity, individuation, and duration to a world that is really "a sheer, undifferentiated flux"[24] or "an ever-flowing, ever-changing, chaotic 'reality.' "[25] For the same reason, one might argue that it is wrong to characterize the world of becoming as a "true" world, because truth and knowledge require states of affairs that remain distinct and durable over time.[26] Thus, Nietzsche might be said to argue that there is an ultimate, noumenal reality (the world of becoming); but, contrary to the Kantian and Platonic-Christian views,[27] it is not a
[21] Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 24.
[22] Mittelman, "Perspectivism, Becoming, and Truth in Nietzsche," 5, and Stack, "Nietzsche's Critique of Things-In-Themselves," 52–53, draw upon these passages in support of their skeptical interpretation.
[23] See §3.4.1, above, for a different reading of these passages.
[24] Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 89, see also 96–97.
[25] Grimm, Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge, 18, see also 2, 30, 53, 67–68. Magnus (Nietzsche's Existential Imperative, 25, 196, xiv) writes of "the [ . . . ] unintelligible flux of becoming," "the radical flux of becoming," "an [ . . . ] incoherent stratum" upon which we "impose form."
[26] See Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 75; Grimm, Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge, 46–47 and passim; Mittelman, "Perspectivism, Becoming, and Truth in Nietzsche," 4–5.
[27] Of course, Kant never calls the world of things in themselves (or of noumena) a "true" world. Nevertheless, the noumenal world is, for Kant, the realm of those supreme Ideas—God, freedom, and immortality—which it is the purpose of the first Critique to"make way for" (Critique of Pure Reason, 29). In this sense, then, Nietzsche has some justification for calling Kant an "underhanded Christian" (TI "Reason" 6) and for claiming that Kant's Copernican revolution is "the straightest route to—the old ideal" (GM III:25; cf. GS 335).
"true" but a "false" world, insofar as it is a "self-contradictory world of becoming and change."[28]
Yet this version of the skeptical interpretation no more adequately solves the problem. Once again, it has Nietzsche both asserting the unknowability of becoming and positively characterizing it. But even if we leave aside this difficulty, other problems remain. In the above-cited passages from The Gay Science, Twilight, and the Nachlaß, it is clear that Nietzsche is not merely opposed to characterizing the noumenal world as a "true" world of "things"; rather, he is opposed to the very notion of a noumenal world and to every dualistic view that contrasts "appearance" with something other than "appearance." "The 'apparent' world," he maintains, "is the only world"; "any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable" (TI "Reason" 2, 6). We must recall that, with his rejection of Kantian, Platonic-Christian, and all other dualisms, Nietzsche proposes to abolish the very notion of "appearance" (TI "Reason" 6, "World" 6; WP 567, 552), for this notion has only ever functioned in opposition and subordination to "that which appears," namely, the world as it is in itself.[29]
Indeed, Kant had to posit the "thing in itself" for just this reason. In the preface to the second edition of the first Critique, he writes:
[A]ll possible speculative knowledge of reason is limited to mere objects of experience . But our further contention must also be duly borne in mind, namely that though we cannot know these objects as things in themselves, we must yet be in position to at least think them as things in themselves; otherwise we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that there can be appearance without anything that appears.[30]
Thus is Kant led into the notorious "problem of affection."[31] He maintains that, for thought to have any content, our faculty of sensibility
[28] Mittelman, "Perspectivism, Becoming, and Truth in Nietzsche," 5.
[29] This point is also made by Alan D. Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (New York: Routledge, 1990), 190–91.
[30] Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 27. Other relevant passages are collected and discussed in Henry Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 238ff, and 363 n 15.
[31] See Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism, 247ff., for a nice discussion of this problem.
must be affected from without. That is, the world of phenomena or appearance, with which our knowledge is concerned, must have something outside it as its "cause" or "ground."[32] This "something" cannot be an appearance, since Kant rejects the idealist thesis that a representation—that is, something in us—is the cause of our representations; but neither can this "something" he a thing in itself, for that would mean extending to things in themselves the category of causality, which, Kant himself claims, has only intraphenomenal validity.
We need not discuss in detail either this problem as it arises in Kant or the various solutions to it offered by Kant's commentators. I raise the issue only because Nietzsche joins the host of Kant's critics on this point, and because this criticism helps us to see that Nietzsche holds no skeptical or dualist position with regard to epistemology and ontology. In the Nachlaß Nietzsche criticizes Kant on precisely this issue:
The sore spot of Kant's critical philosophy has gradually become visible even to dull eyes: Kant no longer has a right to his distinction "appearance" and "thing in itself"—he had deprived himself of the right to go on distinguishing in this old familiar way, in so far as he rejected as impermissible making inferences from phenomena to the cause of phenomena—in accordance with his conception of causality and its purely intra-phenomenal validity. (WP 553)[33]
Nietzsche's point here is clearly that, if Kant's only justification for positing a thing in itself is that it is a necessary causal corollary to the notion of appearance, then he is unjustified in making this posit according to his own view that causality cannot apply to things in themselves.
Yet, as Nietzsche is well aware, Kant provides another justification
[32] See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 441ff.
[33] Nietzsche mounts this critique of Kant even in Human, All Too Human . In a section entitled "Appearance and Thing in Itself [Erscheinung und Ding an sich]," he writes: "Philosophers are accustomed to station themselves before life and experience—before that which they call the world of appearance—as before a painting that has been unrolled once and for all and unchangeably depicts the same scene: this scene, they believe, has to be correctly interpreted, so as to draw a conclusion as to the nature of the being that produced the picture: that is to say, as to the nature of the thing in itself, which it is customary to regard as the sufficient reason [zureichende Grund ] for the world of appearance. Against this, more rigorous logicians, having clearly identified the concept of the metaphysical as that of the unconditioned, consequently also unconditioning, have disputed any connection between the unconditioned (the metaphysical world) and the world we know: so what appears in appearance is precisely not the thing in itself, and no conclusion can be drawn from the former as to the nature of the latter" (16). Nietzsche clearly agrees with this logical critique of the thing in itself, though he goes on to mount another, evolutionary, critique of the notion.
for positing a realm of things in themselves or noumena. The passage from the first Critique quoted above continues as follows:
Now let us suppose that the distinction, which our Critique has shown to be necessary, between things as objects of experience and those same things as they are in themselves, had not been made. In that case all things in general, as far as they are efficient causes, would be determined by the principle of causality, and consequently by the mechanism of nature. I could not, therefore, without palpable contradiction, say of one and the same being, for instance the human soul, that its will is free and yet is subject to natural necessity, that is, is not free. For I have taken the soul in both propositions in one and the same sense, namely as a thing in general, that is, as a thing in itself [Sache selbst ]; and save by means of a preceding critique, could not have done otherwise. But if our Critique is not in error in teaching that the object is to be taken in a twofold sense, namely as appearance and as thing in itself [ . . . ] then there is no contradiction in supposing that one and the same will is, in the appearance, that is, in its visible acts, necessarily subject to the law of nature, and so far not free, while yet, as belonging to a thing in itself, it is not subject to that law, and is therefore free .[34]
We see here the more fundamental reason that Kant posits a world of things in themselves or noumena: to save the metaphysical Ideas of God, freedom, and the soul from their elimination by a thoroughgoing empiricism and naturalism.[35] Nietzsche recognizes this and criticizes Kant on this account as well. From early on (see BT 18–19), he admires Kant for having dismissed metaphysical talk as unintelligible, for having restricted knowledge to "appearance," and for having granted that the objects of our knowledge are constructions. Yet, in his later work, Nietzsche is more critical of what he takes to be the real motivation behind Kant's critique—the restoration of those metaphysical, anti-natural specters: God, free will, and the soul. Nietzsche writes, in The Gay Science:
And now don't cite the categorical imperative, my friend! This term tickles my ear and makes me laugh despite your serious presence. It makes me think of the old Kant who had obtained "the thing in itself"—another very ridiculous thing!—by stealth and was punished for this when the "categorical imperative" crept stealthily into his heart and led him astray —back to "God," "soul," "freedom," and "immortality," like a fox who loses his way and goes
[34] Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 27–28.
[35] See Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977), 103.
astray back into his cage. Yet it had been his strength and cleverness that had broken open the cage! (335)[36]
This critique is reiterated in the 1886 preface to Daybreak:
[T]o create room for his "moral realm" [Kant] saw himself obliged to posit an indemonstrable world, a logical "Beyond"—it was for precisely that that he had need of his critique of pure reason! In other words: he would not have had need of it if one thing had not been more vital to him than anything else: to render the "moral realm" unassailable, even better incomprehensible to reason. (3)
Thus, while Nietzsche praises Kant's critique of the possibility of metaphysical "knowledge," he criticizes the antinaturalistic motivation that lurks behind this critique: Kant's attempt to reinvigorate "faith" and metaphysics via the opposition between appearances and things in themselves.
Nietzsche's criticism of Kant, then, is not merely a critique of the notion of "things in themselves." It is a criticism of the very dualism between appearance and something other than appearance. Neither in his criticism of Kant's notion of "affection" nor in his criticism of Kant's metaphysical designs does Nietzsche object to the characterization of noumena as individual items: "things in themselves." Rather, he objects to the very distinction between noumena and phenomena. Indeed, Nietzsche's objection to the notion that phenomena are "affected" by things in themselves would apply equally well to the notion that "becoming" is the ontological ground of perspectival knowledge. For, were Nietzsche to claim that an unknowable becoming is the cause or ground of appearance, he would be subject to the same criticism he levels against Kant: namely, that nothing in our experience of the world, not even the notion of causality, can lead us to an extra-phenomenal world. "For we do not 'know' nearly enough even to be allowed to distinguish in this way" (GS 354).
For Nietzsche, as for Kant, we are led to this distinction only through the desire to justify such theological and metaphysical notions as God,
[36] Cf. A 55. Also cf. GM III:25, where Nietzsche argues that the Copernican revolution, though superficially antitheological, is really theological and ascetic through and through. Also cf. WP 578: "Moral values even in theory of knowledge: [ . . . ] the transcendent world invented, in order that a place remains for 'moral freedom' (in Kant)."
free will, soul, and immortality. Yet, unlike Kant, Nietzsche has no faith or belief in such ideas. Indeed, his naturalism aims to get rid of them altogether. He argues that, just as the notion of God is a manifestation of certain human beings' desire to be other than they are, so "things in themselves" and "essences" are manifestations of a desire that there be a world beyond that of "mere appearance." Nietzsche staunchly maintains, however, that there is no such world. For Nietzsche, the origin of the "true or real world" is not to be found outside appearance but within it. In naturalistic fashion, he argues that the noumenal world has only ever been a guise of the phenomenal world: the human fantasy that there is "another, better world." This is the meaning of Nietzsche's aphorism: "The 'real world,' however one has hitherto conceived it—it has always been the apparent world once again " ( WP 566).[37] For Nietzsche, the question is not "what 'things in themselves' may be like, apart from our sense receptivity and the activity of our understanding. [ . . . ] The question is whether there could not be many other ways of creating such an apparent world " (WP 569, my emphasis). That is, the question is not what "other world" is indicated by our metaphysical ideas but rather what "this -worldly" features could have given rise to such ideas.
4.4—
Nietzsche, Becoming, Heraclitus
Whatever "becoming" is, for Nietzsche, it does not characterize some ineffable noumenal realm. Rather, it must describe something about the world we inhabit and know: the natural, physical world, the world of "appearance" (if this term can still function free of its discredited conceptual opposite).
To begin to answer our question, "What is Nietzsche's 'becoming'?" we must turn to our other question, "Who is Nietzsche's Heraclitus?"; for it is from Heraclitus that Nietzsche inherits the notion of becoming and to whom he often turns when discussing it. Moreover, while Nietzsche's infatuation with Schopenhauer and Kant was brief, his allegiance to Heraclitus is as evident in his first writings as in his last. Thus,
[37] Cf. TI "Reason" 6: "Any distinction between a 'true' and an 'apparent' world [ . . . ] is only a suggestion of decadence, a sign of decline of life. That the artist esteems appearance higher than reality is no objection to this proposition. For 'appearance' in this case means reality once again, only by way of selection, reinforcement, and correction. The tragic artist is no pessimist. [ . . . ]"
in one of his final statements—Ecce Homo 's discussion of The Birth of Tragedy —he writes:
I [ . . . ] understand myself as the first tragic philosopher, that is, the most extreme opposite and antipode of a pessimistic philosopher. Before me [ . . . ] tragic wisdom was lacking; I have looked in vain for signs of it even among the great Greeks in philosophy, those of the two centuries before Socrates. I retained some doubt in the case of Heraclitus, in whose proximity I feel warmer and better than anywhere else. The affirmation of passing away and destroying, which is the decisive feature of a Dionysian philosophy; saying yes to opposition and war; becoming, along with the repudiation of the very concept of being —all this is clearly more closely related to me than anything else thought to date. ("Books" BT:3)
And in another text from the same year, having criticized "the philosophers' [ . . . ] hatred of the very idea of becoming," "the senses," and "appearance" in favor of "being" and "what does not become," Nietzsche writes:
With the highest respect, I except the name of Heraclitus . When the rest of the philosophic folk rejected the testimony of the senses because they showed multiplicity and change, he rejected their testimony because they showed things as if they had permanence and unity. Heraclitus too did the senses an injustic. [ . . . ] [38] But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. (TI "Reason" 2)
These passages recapitulate the conclusions of Nietzsche's early work on Greek philosophy, where the justification for them is presented in much greater detail. For a characterization of Nietzsche's Heraclitus, we must turn to Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, a study of the Presocratics Nietzsche left unpublished but to which he returned throughout the 1870s.[39] This text is significant for a number of reasons.
[38] On this passage, see p. 194n. 56 below.
[39] The text seems to have been left unpublished primarily because it was to be included in the "historical" half of a larger "historical-theoretical" study, Das Philosophenbuch (The Philosopher's Book ), the second half of which was never completed but which was to include "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense." (See Grossoktavausgabe, 2d ed., vol. 10, Nachgelassene Werke [Leipzig: Naumann, 1903], which collects together all the texts, fragments, and plans for the proposed Philosopher's Book .) Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks was written in 1873 and based on a series of lectures first delivered in 1872 and repeated, with revisions, in 1873 and 1876. A fair copy of the text was made the next year, and minor corrections and additions were incorporated in 1879. For a discussion of this and related texts, see Breazeale's "Introduction" to Philosophy and Truth . Breazeale writes that Nietzsche "devoted great care to the preparation of this course of lectures" (liii), which were "clearly his personal favorite" (xviii). Breazeale goes on to de-scribe Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks as a "polished text" (liii n 4), "a relatively finished historical survey of the development of ancient philosophy" (xxii. In his "Nachwort" to the first volume of the Kritische Studienausgabe, Giorgio Colli calls the text Nietzsche's "central work" of the period immediately following The Birth of Tragedy (p. 916).
It provides Nietzsche's most sustained treatment of Heraclitus, clearly the text's protagonist. Not surprisingly, then, it is also a text in which the notion of becoming figures centrally.[40] Moreover, far from displaying the reverence toward Schopenhauer and Kant one is supposed to find in Nietzsche's early work, the text is highly critical of these philosophers, with Heraclitus playing Nietzsche against Anaximander and Parmenides, whose interpretations of becoming and being are glossed with quotations from Schopenhauer and Kant. Indeed, instead of revealing a juvenile Nietzsche, this text shows him advancing positions and views that are central to his later work: naturalism and antidualism; a repudiation of "being" in favor of an "innocent becoming"; the characterization of becoming as a perpetual "artist's agon " or dice game; the promotion of an aesthetic versus a moral interpretation of the world; praise of an aphoristic and esoteric philosophical style; an empiricist and nominalist critique of the notions of substance and essence, and so on.
The text begins with a discussion of Thales. But this is only a prologue to the main drama, which stages a contest among the interpretations of becoming and being proposed by Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides. The problem of becoming first appears in the discussion of Anaximander, "the first philosophical author of the ancients" (4, P. 45), for whom "all becoming [is] an illegitimate emancipation from eternal being, a wrong for which destruction is the only penance" (4, P. 46).[41] "Enigmatic proclamation of a true pessimist," Nietzsche
[40] In his introductory lecture for the course, Nietzsche claims: "This is the true. distinguishing mark of the philosophical drive: wonder concerning what is lying in front of everyone's nose. The most ordinary phenomenon is becoming, and with it Ionian philosophy begins. The problem reappears in an infinitely intensified form in the Eleatics. [ . . . ] All subsequent philosophies struggle against Eleaticism" (cited in Breazeale's "Introduction" to Philosophy and Truth, xliii–xliv).
[41] Nietzsche's interpretation is based on the only extant fragment of Anaximander, which Kirk and Raven translate into English as follows: "And the source of coming-to-be for existing things is that into which destruction, too, happens, 'according to necessity; for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice according to the assessment of Time'" (The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, ed. G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957], 117). Though they tell us much about the interpreter himself, Nietzsche's interpretations of the Presocratics are surely a matter for debate. Even so, his reading, particularly of Heraclitus, accords with such canonical accounts as that of W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 1, The Earlier Presocratics and Pythagoreans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962). It bears mentioning that Nietzsche's heir, Heidegger, alsorevisits the Presocratics in an attempt to reassess the foundations of European philosophy. Unlike Nietzsche's, however, Heidegger's analysis has less clearly defined protagonists and antagonists. See Heidegger's collection, Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984).
declares and immediately likens Anaximander's doctrine to that of "[t]he only serious moralist of our century" (4, P. 46), Schopenhauer, whose Parerga Nietzsche quotes in support. On the next page, Anaximander's distinctions between being and becoming, the indefinite and the definite, are presented as parallels to Kant's distinction between the thing in itself and appearance: "This ultimate unity of the 'indefinite,' the womb of all things, can, it is true, be designated by human speech only as a negative, as something to which the existent world of becoming can give no predicate. We may look upon it as the equal of the Kantian Ding an sich " (4, P. 47).[42]
Those who view Kant as a sober epistemologist will have trouble making sense of this strange affiliation of Kant with Anaximander. Yet recall that Nietzsche does not read Kant this way. Rather—and not implausibly—he sees Kant as one for whom epistemology and metaphysics are means to an end. Nietzsche perceives that, at bottom, what motivates Kant, Schopenhauer, and Anaximander is a metaphysicalmoral interpretation of the world . Thus, with the names "Schopenhauer" and "Kant" still resonating, Nietzsche remarks that:
Anaximander was no longer dealing with the question of the origins of this world in a purely physical way. Rather [ . . . ] he grasped with bold fingers the tangle of the profoundest problem in ethics. [ . . . ] From this world of injustice [ . . . ] Anaximander flees into a metaphysical fortress from which he leans out, letting his gaze sweep the horizon. (4, P. 48)
Thus far, one might still read this text in the way that The Birth of Tragedy is often read: as supporting a Kantian dualism and a Schopenhauerian pessimism. Yet the entrance of Heraclitus quickly disconfirms this reading. For Heraclitus appears bearing a new world-interpretation with which Nietzsche is clearly in sympathy:
[Heraclitus] denied the duality of totally diverse worlds—a position which Anaximander had been compelled to assume. He no longer distinguished a physical world from a metaphysical one, a realm of definite qualities from an undefinable "indefinite." And after this first step, nothing could hold him back from a second, far bolder negation: he altogether denied being. For this one world which he retained [ . . . ] nowhere shows a tarrying, an indestruc-
[42] Note that, in this passage, becoming is contrasted with, rather than assimilated to, "the Kantian Ding an sich ."
tibility, a bulwark in the stream. Louder than Anaximander, Heraclitus proclaimed: "I see nothing other than becoming. Be not deceived. It is the fault of your short-sightedness, not of the essence of things, if you believe you see land somewhere in the ocean of becoming and passing-away. You use names for things as though they rigidly, persistently endured; yet even the stream into which you step a second time is not the one you stepped into before." (5, pp. 51–52)
This passage tells us much about Nietzsche's Heraclitus and the view of becoming these two philosophers share. Unlike Anaximander (and Kant and Schopenhauer), Nietzsche's Heraclitus is an antidualist and antimetaphysician for whom there is only "one world," a world of "becoming" that is entirely physical and evident to those who are not swayed by the conceptual and linguistic reifications that convince the "shortsighted" of being and persistence.
This antidualism and critique of the concept of being also leads Heraclitus to deny the distinctions between substance and accident, essence and appearance. Just as Nietzsche himself later proclaims that "a 'thing' is the sum of its effects [Wirkungen ]" (WP 551), Nietzsche's Heraclitus declares that "the whole nature of reality [Wirklichkeit ] lies simply in its acts [Wirken ] and [ . . . ] for it there exists no other sort of being" (5, P. 53); "[t]he many perceivable qualities are neither eternal substances [ewige Wesenheiten ] nor phantasms of our senses [ . . . ] neither rigid autonomous being nor fleeting semblance flitting through human minds" (6, p. 58). Rejecting these oppositions, Nietzsche asserts that there is only the empirically evident world of becoming, a vast and shifting assemblage of effects, forms, appearances, and perspectives.
Heraclitus' world of becoming and appearance is characterized by Nietzsche in a network of images and figures that recur throughout the Nietzschean corpus: the images of the agon and the game, the figures of the artist and the child.[43]
Ordinary people think they see something rigid, complete and permanent; in truth, however, light and dark, bitter and sweet are attached to each other and interlocked at any given moment like wrestlers of whom sometimes one, sometimes the other is on top. [ . . . ] The strife of opposites gives birth to all
[43] Preference for these figures and images, and for figurative, imagistic, or "intuitive" language in general, is not the only stylistic trait Nietzsche inherits from Heraclitus. He also shares a penchant for the terse, dense, and provocative aphorism that offends common sense but strikes "those with ears to hear." For Nietzsche's own praise of Heraclitus's style, see PTA 7, PP. 64–65. For an analysis of Heraclitus's style and mode of thought that bears an uncanny resemblance to Nietzsche's discussion of these issues, see Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, 1:437–39. Cf. PTA 5, PP. 52–53.
that becomes; the definite qualities which look permanent to us express the momentary ascendancy of one partner. But this by no means signifies the end of the war; the contest endures to all eternity. (5, PP. 54–55)
In this world only the play of artists and children exhibits becoming and passing away, building and destroying, without any moral additive, in forever equal innocence. And as artists and children play, so plays the ever-living fire, building up and destroying, in innocence. Such is the game that the aeon plays with itself. [ . . . I]t builds towers of sand like a child at the seashore, piling them up and trampling them down. From time to time it starts the game anew. A moment of satiety, and again it is seized by its need, as the artist is seized by the need to create. Not hybris but the ever-newly-awakened impulse to play calls new worlds into being. (7, P. 62)[44]
Here, Nietzsche pauses to acknowledge that Schopenhauer, too, presents an image of becoming as an everlasting struggle. Yet, after quoting a representative passage from Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, he notes that "the basic tone of [Schopenhauer's] description is quite different from that which Heraclitus offers," because, for Schopenhauer, becoming is "a self-consuming, menacing and gloomy drive, a thoroughly frightful and by no means blessed phenomena" (5, P. 56).[45] Here we find the crucial difference between the Anaximandrian-Kantian-Schopenhauerian and the Heraclitean—Nietzschean interpretations of becoming: the former is a moral interpretation that paints a "thoroughly gloomy" picture of guilt and penance, while the latter is an aesthetic interpretation that sees becoming as "blessed" and "innocent."[46]
[44] This passage seems to allude to Heraclitus' fr. 52: "Time is a child playing a game of draughts; the kingship is in the hands of a child" (Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, trans. Kathleen Freeman [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948], 28). Yet it more closely approximates an epic simile in Homer that unites the figures of agon and game: "[The Trojans] streamed over / in massed formation, with Apollo in front of them holding / the tremendous aegis, and wrecked the bastions of the Achaians / easily, as when a little boy piles sand by the sea-shore / when in his innocent play he makes sand towers to amuse him / and then, still playing, with hands and feet ruins them and wrecks them" (The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951], 319). In "On the Pathos of Truth," an 1872 "preface to an unwritten book," Nietzsche calls upon Diogenes Laertius's description of Heraclitus "watching the games of noisy children [ . . . ] pondering something never before pondered by a mortal on such an occasion, viz., the play of the great world-child, Zeus, and the eternal game of destruction and origination" (in Breazeale, ed. and trans., Philosophy and Truth, 64). Cf. BGE 94 and WP 797.
[45] Recall the 1886 preface to The Birth of Tragedy, in which Nietzsche maintains that this book "tried laboriously to express by means of Schopenhauerian and Kantian formulas strange and new valuations which were basically at odds with Kant's and Schopenhauer's spirit and taste!" (BT SC:6).
[46] Cf. TI "Errors" 7: "there is in our eyes no more radical opposition than that of the theologians, who continue with the concept of a 'moral world-order' to infect the innocence of becoming by means of 'punishment' and 'guilt'."
"'It is a game,'" Nietzsche's Heraclitus says. "'Don't take it so pathetically, and—above all—don't make morality of it!'" (7, P. 64): "Becoming is not a moral but an aesthetic phenomenon" (19, P. 113).[47]
With the entrance of Parmenides, the Heraclitean interpretation of becoming is provided an even starker contrast. In these sections, Nietzsche casts aside the mode of explication and adopts a stridently critical tone. Moreover, the language and content of this critique are nearly identical to those found in a text written fifteen years later—the section of Twilight of the Idols entitled "'Reason' in Philosophy," in which Nietzsche criticizes the basic traits that have hitherto dominated the philosophical disposition. Indeed, in Nietzsche's Parmenides, we find the archetype of the philosopher, a condensation of Plato, Descartes, and Kant. Here we discover the true origin of that philosophical "hatred of the very idea of becoming" (TI "Reason" 1); for Parmenides is the first to proclaim "the doctrine of Being," a position that Nietzsche deems "un-Greek as no other in the two centuries of the Tragic Age" (PTA 9, p. 69). With "purest absolutely bloodless abstraction, unclouded by any reality" (9, P. 69), Parmenides declares:
That which truly is must be eternally present; one cannot say of it that "it was," or "it will be." What has being cannot have become. [ . . . ] It is the same with passing-away. Passing-away is just as impossible as becoming, as is all change, all decrease, all increase. In fact the only valid proposition that can be stated is "Everything of which you can say 'it has been' or 'it will be' is not; of what has being you can never say 'it is not.'" (10, p. 78)[48]
Along with this denial of becoming, Nietzsche's Parmenides rejects the testimony of the senses—which deceive us into believing in becoming—and draws a fateful distinction between the mind and the body:
"Whatever you do, do not be guided by your dull eyes," is [Parmenides'] imperative, "nor by your resounding ears, nor by your tongue, but test all things
[47] Nietzsche attributes this view to Anaxagoras, who, however, is seen as following Heraclitus. See PTA 19, 112–13
[48] Cf. TI "Reason" 1: "You ask me which of the philosophers' traits are really idiosyncrasies? For example, their lack of historical sense, their hatred of the very idea of becoming, their Egypticism. They think that they show their respect for a subject when they de-historicize it, sub specie aeterni —when they turn it into a mummy. All that philosophers have handled for thousands of years have been concept-mummies; nothing real escaped their grasp alive. When these honorable concept-idolators worship something, they kill it and stuff it; they threaten the life of everything they worship. Death, change, old age, as well as procreation and growth, are to their minds objections—even refutations. Whatever is does not become ; whatever becomes is not."
with the power of your thinking alone."[49] Thus he accomplished the immensely significant first critique of man's apparatus for knowledge, a critique as yet inadequate but disastrous in its consequences. By wrenching apart the senses and the capacity for abstraction, in other words by splitting up reason as though it were composed of two quite separate capacities, he demolished the intellect itself, encouraging that wholly erroneous distinction between "mind" and "body" which, especially since Plato, lies upon philosophy like a curse. All sense perceptions, says Parmenides, yield but deceptions.[ . . . ] All the multiplicity and colorfulness of the world known to experience, the transformations of its qualities, the orderliness of its ups and downs, are mercilessly cast aside as mere semblance and delusion. (10, p. 79)[50]
If Anaximander was criticized for "flee[ing] into a metaphysical fortress" (4, P. 48), Parmenides retreats even further and solicits from Nietzsche an even stronger reproach:
When one makes as total a judgment as does Parmenides about the whole of the world, one ceases to be a natural scientist [ein Naturforscher ], an investigator into any of the world's parts. One's sympathy toward phenomena atrophies; one even develops a hatred for phenomena including oneself, a hatred for being unable to get rid of the eternal deceitfulness of the senses. Henceforth truth shall live only in the palest, most abstracted generalities, in the empty husks of the most indefinite terms, as though in a house of cobwebs. And beside such "truth" now sits the philosopher, as bloodless as his abstractions, in the spun-out fabric of his formulas. A spider at least wants blood from his victims. The Parmenidean philosopher hates most of all the blood of his victims, the blood of empirical reality which was sacrificed and shed by him. (10, pp. 79–80)[51]
Thus do we also find in Parmenides the origin of "the other idiosyncrasy of the philosophers," which "consists in confusing the last and the first": "They place that which comes at the end—unfortunately! for it ought not to come at all!—namely, the 'highest concepts,' which means
[49] See Parmenides, frr. 7–8.
[50] Cf. TI "Reason" 1: "Now [the philosophers] all believe, desperately even, in what has being. But since they never grasp it, they seek for reasons why it is kept from them. "There must be mere appearance, there must be some deception which prevents us from perceiving what has being: where is the deceiver?'—'We have found him,' they cry ecstatically; 'it is the senses! [ . . . ] Moral: let us free ourselves from the deception of the senses, from becoming, from history, from lies. [ . . . ] And above all, away with the body, this wretched idée fixe of the senses, disfigured by all the fallacies of logic, refuted, even impossible, although it is impudent enough to behave as if it were real!'"
[51] Cf. TI "Reason" 2: "Today we possess science precisely to the extent that we have decided to accept the testimony of the senses [ . . . ] The rest is miscarriage and not-yet-science. [ . . . ]"; also see n. 50, above.
the most general, the emptiest concepts, the last smoke of evaporating reality, in the beginning, as the beginning" (TI "Reason" 4). Nietzsche's Parmenides
flee[s] from an over-abundant reality [ . . . ] into the rigor mortis of the coldest, emptiest concept of all, the concept of being. [ . . . ] Instead of being corrected and tested against reality (considering that they are in fact derived from it) the concepts, on the contrary, are supposed to measure and direct reality and, in case reality contradicts logic, to condemn the former. (PTA II, pp. 80–81; 12, p. 87)[52]
To the two presented in Twilight, we might add a third "idiosyncrasy" that Nietzsche exposes elsewhere: "the demand for certainty."[53] According to Nietzsche, it, too, has its source in Parmenides:
What astonishes us is the degree of schematism and abstraction (in a Greek!), above all, the terrible energetic striving for certainty [Strebens nach Gewißheit] in an epoch which otherwise thought mythically and whose imagination was highly mobile and fluid. "Grant me, you gods, but one certainty," runs Parmenides' prayer, "even if it be but a log's breadth on which to lie, on which to ride upon the sea of uncertainty. Take away everything that becomes, everything lush, colorful, blossoming, deceptive, everything that charms and is alive. Take all these for yourselves and grant me but the one and only, poor empty certainty." [ . . . ] Experience nowhere offered him being as he imagined it, but he concluded its existence from the fact that he was able to think it. (II, pp. 81–82)
It is Descartes, not Schopenhauer, who is the fruit of this Parmenidean seed.[54] And Nietzsche takes pains to distinguish this form of ascetic world-denial from the mystical, ecstatic form found among "the Hindu
[52] Nietzsche's struggle against the philosophical tendency "to confuse the last and the first" helps to explain some of the puzzling language of PTA 11 and TL, both written in the same year. In these texts, Nietzsche appears to lapse into the skeptical, metaphysicalrealist view that words and concepts can never "touch upon absolute truth," "that knowing and being are the most opposite of all spheres" (PTA 11, 83). This language is surely misleading. Yet I think that what motivates these claims is simply the point that words and concepts are only pragmatic simplifications and reifications of the rich, sensual, world of becoming and that—contra the rationalist—the former are derived from the latter rather than the reverse. Thus, too, we find Nietzsche, both early and late, supporting the claims of "intuition" over those of "reason," his somewhat idiosyncratic terms for "sensuality" and "conceptuality," respectively. Cf., e.g., WP 488: "All our categories of reason are of sensual origin: derived from the empirical world"; and TI "Reason" 2: "[The senses] do not lie at all. What we make of their testimony, that alone introduces lies. [ . . . ] 'Reason' is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses."
[53] See GS 2, 347; BGE 10; and the discussion of these passages above, in §1.6.2.
[54] Cf. W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 2, The Presocratic Tradition from Parmenides to Democritus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 20.
philosophers" (11, p. 81) of whom Schopenhauer was a disciple. Yet, despite important differences among the Hindu, Buddhist, Platonic, Christian, Cartesian, Kantian, and Schopenhauerian world-interpretations, Nietzsche sees in them a basic similarity: they are all forms of what he would later call "the ascetic ideal," that "hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from longing itself" ( GM III:28). This "ascetic ideal," this "moral interpretation of the world" in its various guises, Nietzsche asserts, "has hitherto dominated " not only "all philosophy" (III:24) but all of "[humanity's] existence on earth" (III:28). "Apart from [it], man, the human animal, had no meaning so far" (III:28). Consequently, "the death of God," which signals the eclipse of this world-interpretation, leads to the profound crisis of "nihilism." As diagnostician and physician of this condition, Nietzsche heralds a new interpretation. All but alone, he draws strength and inspiration from that world-interpretation foreclosed by the Parmenidean-ascetic: the Heraclitean view that "becoming is not a moral but an aesthetic phenomenon" (PTA 19, p. 113).
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).
4.6—
Becoming, Appearance, and Interpretation
4.6.1—
Beyond God and Being:
The Affiliation of Becoming and Appearance
This conception of becoming as perpetual alteration and movement is certainly the best-known and most obvious characterization of the notion as it appears in Heraclitus and Nietzsche. But there is also another facet to their conception of becoming. If we examine this aspect, we find that Nietzsche's becoming does not name the primal ontological ground that no epistemological perspective can grasp but rather is a feature of his "perspectivism" itself.
We have seen that the world according to Heraclitus and Nietzsche is a "becoming" in the sense that no part of it is exempt from change. A commitment to naturalism and empiricism leads both philosophers to this view. Yet we have also seen that Nietzsche is no traditional empiricist. He rejects the positivistic notion that there are "brute facts" and
[64] See Parmenides, frr. 8–19, and Presocratic Philosophers, ed. Kirk and Raven, 278–83. On "the way of seeming," see chapter 1, above.
[65] Plato, Timaeus 27d–28a, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 1161. Robert Bolton ("Plato's Distinction between Being and Becoming," Review of Metaphysics 29 [1975]: 67) writes that this passage is, "[b]y general agreement, the definitive statement of the distinction [between being and becoming in Plato's work]."
[66] Plato, Phaedo 78c–78d, in Collected Dialogues of Plato, 61.
instead espouses a holistic or hermeneutic view, according to which sense evidence is always relative to one or another background interpretation (see §2.3.1, above). Neither is Heraclitus a traditional empiricist. While acknowledging a preference for "[t]he things of which there is seeing and hearing and perception,"[67] Heraclitus also warns that "eyes and ears" are "evil witnesses [ . . . ] for men if they have souls that do not understand their language."[68] That is, for Heraclitus, as for Nietzsche, there is no simple perception; perception is always already interpretation.[69]
This insight is tremendously important to Heraclitus, for one who neglects it might succumb to the illusion that simple sense perception directly reveals the way the world really is. In a number of the fragments, Heraclitus rejects this realist view: "The sea is the purest and most polluted water, drinkable and salutary for fishes, undrinkable and deadly to men" (fr. 61); "Pigs like mud [but men do not]" (fr. 13); "Donkeys prefer rubbish to gold, [men gold to rubbish]" (fr. 9); "cutting and burning [which are normally bad] call for a fee when done by a surgeon" (fr. 58).[70] These observations about ordinary life aim to remind us that every description is relative to an interpretation and that every interpretation is rooted in a set of interests, desires, needs, capacities, and standpoints. Given the absurdity of declaring some one set of these to be absolutely true and right, we are to conclude that there is not one "true" description of the world but many.
[67] Fr. 55, Presocratic Philosophers, ed. Kirk and Raven, 189. Cf. Sextus Empiricus's presentation of Heraclitus's view: "in sleep, when the channels of perception are shut, our mind is sundered from its kinship with the surrounding. [ . . . ] But in the waking state it again peeps out through the channels of perception as through a kind of window, and meeting with the surrounding it puts on its power of reason" (quoted and discussed in Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, 207–8). On this passage, also see Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, 1:430.
[68] Fr. 107, trans. Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, 189.
[69] Cf. Heidegger: "What we 'first' hear is never noises or complexes of sounds, but the creaking wagon, the motor-cycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the fire crackling" (Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson [New York: Harper and Row, 1962], 207).
[70] Fr. 61, trans. Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, 1 :445; frr. 13, 9, and 58, trans. Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, 190. Cf. Nelson Goodman's remark: "If I were asked what is the food for men, I should have to answer 'none.' For there are many foods. And if I am asked what is the way the world is, I must likewise answer, 'none,'" ("The Way the World Is," in Problems and Projects [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972], 31). Indeed, Goodman writes: "The pre-Socratics, I have long felt, made almost all the advances and mistakes in the history of philosophy" (Ways of Worldmaking [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978], 97). Later in the same text, he refers to Heraclitus in support of the notion that "worlds seem to depend on conflict for their existence"(119).
We have already seen this to be the upshot of Nietzsche's perspectivism (see chapter 3). But the Heraclitean source is important for our discussion of becoming. Terence Irwin has shown that, according to both Plato and Aristotle, Heraclitean becoming must be seen as more than simply the view that "everything undergoes constant local movement and qualitative alteration."[71] In addition to this notion of becoming, which Irwin calls "self-change," Heraclitean becoming must also be taken to involve what Irwin calls "aspect-change," "things with compresent opposite properties," "especially the compresence resulting from dependence on different situations," for example, "the road up and down, the straight and crooked writing, the food which is good (for some people) and bad (for others)."[72] Irwin's analysis follows that of Guthrie, who remarks that the two central Heraclitean doctrines, "everything is in continuous motion and change" and "harmony is of opposites,"[73] are "only different ways of explaining the same truth."[74]
But how is this the case? How are these seemingly different notions related? Self-change involves transformation over time, aspect-change need not. The former seems to describe the alteration of a particular object, the latter a change in the viewpoint from which it is considered.[75] Despite these differences, what joins these two kinds of change is the rejection of being, in its many forms.[76]
If self-change concerns "becoming" in the usual sense, aspect-change concerns what is usually termed "appearance," variation in the way an
[71] Terence Irwin, "Plato's Heracleiteanism," Philosophical Quarterly 27 (1977): 4. Like Irwin, Guthrie maintains that there is good reason to accept Plato's account of Heraclitus. For Guthrie (History of Greek Philosophy, r :436–37), Plato was "perhaps the first to appreciate the full boldness of [Heraclitus's] thought" and Plato "warrants confidence in anything that he has to say about this difficult thinker." This confidence is in part due to the fact that Plato and his contemporaries "possess[ed] either Heraclitus' book or at least a much more comprehensive collection of his sayings than we have" (p. 452n). I thank John Richardson for pointing me toward Irwin's essay.
[72] Irwin, "Plato's Heracleiteanism," 4, 5.
[73] Guthrie (History of Greek Philosophy, 1:435ff.) notes that the term "harmony" is "misleading" "because it carries psychological overtones which are biased in a Pythagorean direction." That is, we tend to take the term as naming a calm resolution of tension and struggle, which, for Heraclitus, is impossible. The Heraclitean doctrine is perhaps better described by Gilles Deleuze's phrase "the affirmation of difference." See, e.g., Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 172–73.
[74] Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, 1:435.
[75] See Irwin, "Plato's Heracleiteanism," 4. We will quickly see that this opposition of object and subject, known and knower is problematized by the conception of becoming under discussion here.
[76] For Nietzsche's endorsement of Heraclitus' rejection of being, see PTA 5, 51–52, TI "Reason" 2 and EH "Books" BT:3, all three of which are quoted in §4.4, above.
object can seem or appear. But "becoming" and "appearance" are intimately related to one another. From its inception, the philosophical tradition has associated "becoming" and "appearance" as forms of alterity, of that which does not remain the same but constantly becomes-other. Thus, Parmenides arrived at his concept of Being through a rejection of both becoming and appearing (or seeming). This association was later taken up and canonized by Platonism and Christianity, which took the natural, empirical world as a derivative realm of mere becoming and mere appearance in relation to the meta-physical world of true being.[77] It is not surprising, then, that Nietzsche's naturalism—that is, his rejection of ontological dualism and his revaluation of the natural world—comes to privilege becoming not only in the sense of self-change but also in the sense of aspect-change (i.e., his perspectivism).
Yet Nietzsche's rejection of being connects "becoming" and "appearance" in a deeper sense as well. In the metaphysical tradition, true being serves as origin, aim, essence, and substance for the rest of existence. Thus, the Platonic Form is both a template for empirical entities and that which renders intelligible these entities by distilling the essence from their various guises. The Form also provides an absolute standard by which to judge true and false claimants (who is the true statesman? the true lover? the true philosopher?) and thus establishes a hierarchy of the more or less real that measures each entity according to its distance from true being.[78] So, too, for the Western tradition, has God been synonymous with Being itself: at once creator, providential director, essence, substance, and end of all existence. The Christian tradition, too, produces a hierarchy of entities, at the top of which stands "man," created "in the image of God," and at the bottom of which stands inanimate nature. Moreover, for modern rationalism, God is that which guarantees all knowledge (Descartes), sorts out better from worse and actual from merely possible worlds (Leibniz), exists as the sole substance, of which all else is expression or attribute (Spinoza),[79] and serves as the ultimate unity and ground of all possible experience (Kant). In
[77] For Nietzsche's critique of philosophy's obsession with true being and its rejection of becoming, appearance, and the senses, see TI "Reason" 1. Note that Nietzsche's critique of the philosophical tradition excepts only Heraclitus (TI "Reason" 2).
[78] For an analysis of Plato along these lines, see Deleuze, "Plato and the Simulacrum," in Logic of Sense, 253–66, and Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 59–69.
[79] Of course, Spinoza is a special case, since, for him, "God is Nature" rather than some meta-physical entity. Nietzsche praises Spinoza for this, as do Nietzscheans such as Deleuze. Nonetheless, Spinoza still follows the metaphysical-theological tradition in us-ing "God" to name this essence and source of all existence. This idea is discussed further in §4.7.1, below.
short, true Being has always been that which guarantees the existence, unity, necessity, completeness, continuity, and hierarchy of all knowing and being.
Consequently, "the rejection of being" or "the death of God" (the two phrases are nearly synonymous)[80] means a fragmentation of this unity and continuity, a withdrawal of this origin, a subversion of this hierarchy, a deviation of this teleology. Of the two tasks that are to follow God's death (see GS 109 and chapter 2, above), "the naturalization of humanity" means a rejection of the hierarchy that places human beings closest to God and establishes "a false order of rank in relation to animals and nature" (GS 115).[81] "The de-deification of nature" means the rejection of any simple and absolute origin, the denial of providence and teleology, and a repudiation of the model-copy relationship and the associated distinctions between substance and accident, essence and appearance, identity and difference. For Nietzsche, following Heraclitus, "being is an empty fiction. The 'apparent' world is the only one" (cf. TI "World" 6). If being finds its ideal and sanction in God, "the death of God" inaugurates the reign of becoming and appearance. In place of the opposition of being (or essence or substance) and appearance, there remain only "degrees of apparentness and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance" (BGE 34). In short, the rejection of being amounts to a rejection of every transcendent grounding principle, any form of—what, following Derrida, we could call—" beingpresence": origin, aim, unity, essence, substance, and so on.[82] Cast adrift from these anchors, the world becomes .
Thus, just as the two central Heraclitean doctrines—"everything is in continuous motion and change" and "harmony is of opposites"—are "only different ways of explaining the same truth," so, too, are the two Nietzschean doctrines, "becoming" and "perspectivism." The terms
[80] Compare PTA 11 with TI "Reason" 4. See also TI "Reason" 5, where Nietzsche writes that "every word we say and every sentence speak in [ . . . ] favor" of "the error concerning being" and concludes that "we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar."
[81] Cf. GM III: 25: "Alas, the faith in the dignity and uniqueness of man, in his irreplaceability in the great chain of being, is a thing of the past—he has become an animal, literally and without reservation or qualification, he who was, according to his old faith, almost God ('child of God,' 'God-man')."
[82] For some representative passages, see GS 54, 109, 285, 357; TI "Errors" 7–8; WP 552, 556, 561, 567, 1062–67.
of this latter pair are not related to one another as object to subject, known to knower. Rather, they describe different facets of a world beyond being. Such a world "becomes" not only in the sense that, natural in its entirety, it is subject to incessant alteration over time. It "becomes" also insofar as "essence" has been dissolved into "appearance," the "world 'in itself'" into "a world of relations." "It has a differing aspect from every point," and thus "its being is essentially different from every point."[83] Hence, any characterization of the world as a whole or any entity within it will be perpetually displaced by another—"and the sum of these is in every case quite incongruent " (WP 568).
4.6.2—
Becoming and the Contest of Interpretations
Let us pursue this further. To account for the ubiquity and perpetuity of change in the world, both Heraclitus and Nietzsche call upon the metaphor of war and struggle: "war is the father of all" (fr. 53),[84] says the former; "[t]he world [ . . . ] is 'will to power' and nothing besides" (BGE 36), declares the latter, explaining that:
every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (—its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the parts of other bodies and ends by coming into an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they conspire together for power . And the process goes on. (WP 636)
"[T]he process goes on" because these unions are unstable, each part bent on power; and so "the contest endures in all eternity" (PTA 5, P. 55). This contest could not have had a simple beginning, because it requires at least two contestants and the difference and tension between them. And the projection of an end to this struggle Nietzsche views as merely the dream of those for whom this world of becoming ought to be other than it is (see WP 708).
[83] Cf. GS 54, 335; WP 556ff.; and WP 625 ("there is no 'essence-in-itself,' it is only relations that constitute an essence").
[84] Nietzsche quotes this fragment in GS 92 and celebrates war and warriors throughout his writing: see, e.g., HC ; GS 283, 285, 377; Z: 1 "On Reading and Writing," Z: 3 "On Old and New Tablets"; BGE 76; GM I: 5, I: 7, II: 9, II: 24, III: epigram, III: 10, III: 25; TI "Morality" 3, "Skirmishes" 24; EH "Wise" 7; and WP 1040.
Moreover, for Nietzsche and Heraclitus, there is no place outside this struggle:
While Heraclitus' imagination saw this restless motion of the universe, this "reality," with the eyes of a blissful spectator who is watching innumerable pairs of contestants wrestling in joyous combat and refereed by stern judges, he was overcome by an even greater idea: he could no longer see the contesting pairs and their referees as separate; the judges themselves seemed to be striving in the contest and the contestants seemed to be judging them. (PTA 6, P. 57)
That is, we who witness this becoming are ourselves a part of it; our interpretations are contestants in the game or agon . Rejecting the notion that the world simply reveals itself as it is, Nietzsche and Heraclitus maintain that the world always appears under the aegis of one or another interpretation. Yet, lacking both a fixed essence and a detached judge who could determine it, no one of these interpretations can ever be granted ultimate priority. While surely there are "momentary ascendanc[ies]" during which particular interpretations dominate, the contest continues without end. "A thing would be defined," Nietzsche writes, "once all creatures had asked 'what is that?' and had answered their question. Supposing one single creature, with its own relationships and perspectives for all things were missing, then the thing would not yet be 'defined'" (WP 556). Thus is any final characterization of a "thing"—and, indeed, of the world as a whole—forever contested and, hence, deferred.
4.6.3—
Becoming as Différance
We can summarize the discussion thus far by calling upon a notion the inspiration for which is both Heraclitean and Nietzschean: Jacques Derrida's conception of différance .[85] Derrida provides this gloss:
The verb "to differ" [Fr. différer ; L. differre ] seems to differ from itself. On the one hand, it indicates difference as distinction, inequality, or discernibility; on the other, it expresses the interposition of delay, the interval of a spacing and temporalizing that puts off until "later" what is presently denied, the pos-
[85] See Jacques Derrida, "Différance," in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 148ff, and 154, where Nietzsche and Heraclitus are cited as having foreshadowed the notion of différance . On the Nietzschean inspiration, see also Derrida, "Implications," in Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 9–10.
sible that is presently impossible. Sometimes the different and sometimes the deferred correspond [in French] to the verb "to differ." [ . . . ] In the one case "to differ" signifies nonidentity; in the other case it signifies the order of the same . Yet there must be a common, although entirely differant [différante ], root within the sphere that relates the two movements of differing to one another. We provisionally give the name différance to this sameness which is not identical: by the silent writing of its a, it has the desired advantage of referring to differing, both as spacing/temporalizing and as the movement that structures every dissociation.[86]
Derrida's neologism (or neographism) is perhaps a better name for the complex notion of "becoming" we have been discussing. It captures both senses of "becoming" we have found at work in Heraclitus and Nietzsche: becoming as "self-change" and as "aspect-change." As "self-change," différance designates difference within "the order of the same ": the one that, in time, becomes-other, postponing any definitive characterization. As "aspect-change," différance "signifies non-identity," "difference as distinction, inequality, or discernibility": the one that is simultaneously other—"the road up," which both is and is not "the road down." Furthermore, it serves to highlight several features not immediately evident in Nietzsche's and Heraclitus's notion but that we have seen are central to it. First, it discards the image of becoming as a fluid, primary, pre-formed plenum and instead figures it as an assemblage of differences, of forces in struggle, as "a 'productive,' conflictual movement which cannot be preceded by any identity, any unity, or any original simplicity."[87] It thus serves to remind us that, if Nietzsche and Heraclitus at times picture becoming as a "river," it is one in which "different and different waters flow."[88] Second, différance describes "an allergic or polemical otherness," "the 'active,' moving discord of different forces, and difference of forces," thus highlighting the agonistic quality we have seen to be so crucial in Heraclitus's and Nietzsche's notions of becoming.[89] Third, it emphasizes that becoming is not something that happens to beings but rather constitutes the rejection of
[86] Derrida, "Différance," 129–30. Note that David B. Allison's translation of "Différance" includes a brief introduction (from which I quote above) that appeared in the original version of the essay, published in Théorie d'ensemble (Paris: Editions Seuil, 1968), but was omitted in the version reprinted in Marges de la philosophie (Margins of Philosophy ).
[87] Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 6.
[88] Heraclitus, fr. 12, trans. Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, 217.
[89] Jacques Derrida, "Différance," in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 8, 18.
being, "the operation of differing which at one and the same time both fissures and retards [being-] presence, submitting it simultaneously to primordial division and delay."[90] Finally, if Heraclitus's "becoming" has lost some of its force through its long service in the metaphysical vocabulary, Derrida's neographism restores this force and draws attention to what both Nietzsche and Derrida see as the decisive feature of our modernity (or postmodernity): the differing and deferring of being and presence that follows the "death of God."[91]
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."