Download Campbell 1 Cody Campbell Aphorism, Genealogy, Metaphor

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Cody Campbell
Aphorism, Genealogy, Metaphor: Towards a Left Nietzscheanism
Arriving at the point at which we can confidently say that Nietzsche was or was
not a thinker of the Left is a battle fought in vain. What we can say – and what we must
say – is rather that Nietzsche was an impetus for radical critique in the West, and that his
style and form of writing provide a privileged position to interpret philosophical and
cultural discourse. He gave us a vocabulary and a style from which a radically new form
of social hermeneutics emerged. The importance of understanding Nietzsche in this light
is not to place him in a feminist/misogynistic, progressive/conservative, left/right
spectrum – but to clearly ascertain the tools he gives us to perform radical or leftist
critiques. In other words, a left Nietzsche is not nearly as important as a Left
Nietzscheanism.
In Philosophy in the Age of the Tragic Greeks, Nietzsche’s first published work,
he says that the “Greek masters” gave us “archetypes of philosophic thought.”1 In other
words, they gave us styles of thinking, acting, and being philosophically. Because Thales,
for example, was the first to formulate the postulation that “all things are one” through
his “water-hypothesis,” what he gave us was a form of philosophic thought that
dramatically broke with tradition. Consequently, the content of Thales’ arguments were
not as important as the personality that exploded out of his thought. Indeed, in Philosophy
in the Age of the Tragic Greeks Nietzsche is less concerned with accurately representing
1
Friedrich Nietzsche. Philosophy in the Age of the Tragic Greeks, 31.
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the logical arguments of the Greek masters than with artistically (re)presenting their
philosophic personalities, a la Nietzsche.
Nietzsche saw his culture as decadent, his time unhealthy, and the philosophy
coming out of it as sick. His diagnosis:
A period which suffers from a so-called high liberal education but which
is devoid of culture in the sense of a unity of style which characterizes all
of its life, will not quite know what to do with philosophy and wouldn’t if
the Genius of Truth himself were to proclaim it in the streets and the
market places. During such times philosophy remains the learned
monopoly of the lonely stroller, the accidental loot of the individual, the
secret skeleton in the closet, or the harmless chatter between senile
academics and children.2
And it was in the ancient Greek masters that Nietzsche found modernity’s salvation; he
looked to the past in the service of the future. Inevitably, what Philosophy in the Age of
the Tragic Greeks gives us is a picture of Nietzsche’s style, philosophy, and “personality”
– less so a picture of Ancient Greek philosophy.
Analogously, what I am concerned with here is less the content of Nietzsche’s
thought, and more its form – and thus the historical uses of that form. I will read
Nietzsche’s form and style through and up against his interpreters, drawing out the tools
that he provides for a leftist critique. This reading will provide more insight into
Nietzsche’s interpreters than into Nietzsche himself and, by extension, more about the
present state of philosophic discourse than about 19th Century, German philosophy. More
importantly, however, it will illuminate a Left Nietzscheanism while obscuring the need
for a left Nietzsche.
1.
2
The Aphorism
Ibid. 37.
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In her essay, “The Genealogy of Morals and Right Reading: On the Nietzschean
Aphorism and the Art of the Polemic,” Babette Babich details how the aphorism, one of
Nietzsche’s primary stylistic forms, has a powerful effect upon the reader – as well as
Nietzsche himself. “The aphorism seems to cut philosophy down to size – bite size,” she
says. “Armed with teeth, as Nietzsche might have said, the cutting edge or, even, the
violence of the aphorism is manifest in the case of Nietzsche, nor is this less in evidence
with respect to Heraclitus, his antique antecedent…”3 She goes on to argue that the
aphorism has the unique capability to “implicate the reader,” while, at same time,
“absolving Nietzsche as author.”4
This dichotomy – implicating the reader but absolving Nietzsche – is crucial to
our discovering of a Left Nietzscheanism. Rather than a Hegelian dialectic wherein
Nietzsche’s reader (thesis) enters into a relationship with Nietzsche (anti-thesis),
mediated by the aphorism, and is thus transformed into a new subject (synthesis) – in
Babich’s reading, Nietzsche falls away and the reader is faced only with the aphorism-asanti-thesis. This interpretation is important for two reasons. First, the aphorism as a
stylistic form thus acts as a tool of individuation. This means resuscitating the particular
in relation to the universal: in Hegelian terms, the subject can now act against the forces
of history. Babich goes on to say that the aphorism is “preternaturally
phenomenological…[and] this is why Nietzsche favored it as a stylistic form, it
accomplishes, it achieves, or effects an epoché or bracketing of the phenomenon.”5 Such
3
Babbette Babich. “The Genealogy of Morals and Right Reading: On the Nietzschean
Aphorism and the Art of the Polemic”. Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical
Essays. pp. 178.
4
Ibid. 179.
5
Ibid. 182.
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a move shifts a reader’s perspective, loosens the grip of universal contingency, and aims
the subject in the direction of critique. There is a radical potentiality latent in a tool that
individuates with an eye towards the possibility of a subversive social hermeneutics.
The second reason Babich’s reading is so important is that by removing Nietzsche
from the dialectic he can be absolved of the content of his aphorisms. This can be must
be stressed, though. No writer can ever be fully absolved of what she has written, of
course – but in terms of the formulaic functioning of the aphorism, the reader is faced
with partial or unfinished facts, context, and argumentation, which is (at least in the case
of Nietzsche) rhetorically formulated; indeed, it must not be forgotten that The
Genealogy of Morals is subtitled a polemic. This explains, at least in one way, the
contradictory nature of many of Nietzsche’s aphorisms. The responsibility to flush out
the aphorism’s entire context, fill in its meaning, and piece together what is left out, all
while taking much of the polemic with a grain of salt – this responsibility is placed on the
reader’s shoulders. Through the act of exegesis, the reader is constantly being resituated
in terms of culture and history – the phenomenon is bracketed; spatial and temporal
relations are ruptured.
Taking his cue from the ancients, particularly Heraclitus, Nietzsche reinvigorated
the aphorism in the Western philosophical and literary tradition by making it directly
susceptible to the political. From Ernst Bloch’s Traces to Theodor Adorno’s Minima
Moralia, twentieth century thinkers of the left have followed Nietzsche’s suit, and
employed the aphorism as a subversive tool. We mustn’t forget Walter Benjamin’s call to
arms: to the fascist’s aestheticization of politics, “communism replies by politicizing
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art.”6 Indeed, the aphorism has the potential to do just this. Writing through and up
against Hegel, whose dialectical theory “opts for the liquidation of the particular,” 7
Adorno fashions the aphorism towards the subject: “If the subject is disappearing today,
aphorisms take on the weighty responsibility of ‘considering that which is disappearing
as itself essential.’”8 Again, this points us back in the direction of individuation. The
aphorism’s ability to remove itself from the flow of narration is not only analogous to the
individual removing herself from the flow of universal history: the aphorism also has the
capacity to refer back to and encapsulate the rest of the narration, the whole of the work
being contained in it – while the individual has the capacity to refer back to society as a
whole and is a means to glimpse the movement of history, rather than vice a versa.
Like Adorno, Bloch, too, upends Hegel’s dialectic – but he does so by radically
reversing the relationship between the subjective and the objective. He explains it thus:
only after we transform ourselves can we transform our community. Before any solutions
to social and economic disparity can be approached, in other words, an individual needs
to understand his own relation to both social and historical forces; we need to rethink our
relationship with the external world. In Estrangements, Bloch re-conceptualizes Hegel’s
notion of the objective and subjective, reversing their relationship and making the
objective subservient to the subjective. “No striving has ever changed of its own accord,”
Bloch asserts. “But the external conditions of such striving also cannot change without
first being made (so to speak) fertile. External conditions have always been set in motion
by people, no matter how much their later development may exceed people’s
6
Walter Benjamin. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility.”
Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913-1926. 42.
7
Theodor Adorno. Minima Moralia: Reflections from the Damaged Life. 9.
8
Ibid.
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comprehension.”9 In other words, Hegel missed the mark. “Once its impetus has gained
social acceptance, the striving of this new consciousness will be determined forthwith by
social being and its objective tendencies; these factors will then have absolute
primacy.”10 In this way, Geist is reflective of the inward subjectivity of individuals, of
their active striving. There is a “relative freedom,” Bloch says, of the subjective in terms
of modifications in the objective.11 He expands: “circumstances certainly shape
humanity, but humanity also shapes circumstances.”12 We all have the potential of
turning our inward subjectivity outward; similarly, we can accept the subjectivity of
others and thus make it objective and externalized—but we can also deny that objectivity
and, instead, make objective our own internal striving. Because inward subjectivity can
manifest itself outwards and become objective, the individual has the power to change his
objective conditions through subjective striving. This points to the opportunities latent in
external conditions.
This is exactly what Bloch does in the aphorisms of Traces (as well as in other
places): he makes external conditions sufficiently fertile for change. The exegesis of one
aphorism is necessary for an understanding of the whole – but the whole only makes
sense after particular aphorisms have been interpreted and understood in relation to
others. The meaning of each aphorism is thus in flux, as it is seen through the lens of
other aphorisms; similarly, a social hermeneutics or a critique of history begins with the
subject – for it is within the internal striving of the subject that external conditions are
fashioned. This brings us back to Babich and the dichotomy of the Nietzschean aphorism:
9
Ernst Bloch. “Estrangements,” Literary Essays. 397.
Ibid.
11
Ibid. 398.
12
Ibid. 364
10
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the implicated reader and the absolved Nietzsche. The (re)presentation of historical
contradictions in aphoristic form forces the reader into positions outside of historical or
national discourses – thus highlighting the fact that there is a historical subject embodied
with a specific historical-phenomenological consciousness. Critique now takes a whole
new role. No longer can we assume, for example, that capital influences the subject the
same way now as it did three hundred years ago, nor that relationships of power exert
themselves in the same fashion throughout historical epochs. The bracketing of the
epoché that Bacich speaks of illustrates exactly this – the reader of an aphorism can bear
witness to the historical formation of the subject, along with all of its contradictions,
disjunctions, and ruptures. An aphorism unsettles the interpretative historicity of the
reader.
2.
Genealogy
Through a reading of Foucault, I would like to posit that the aphorism, as it has just been
understood, is a literary performance of genealogy. In other words: if genealogy is one of
Nietzsche’s primary methodologies, the aphorism – one of his primary stylistic forms – is
a performative function of that methodology.
In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault unpacks the methodological
framework that separates Nietzsche from traditional historians. If the aphorism unseats its
reader from the comfortable illusion of linear universal history, then genealogy upends
the historians search for the metaphysical origins of all things. The traditional historian
takes comfort in the ability to trace the linear development of things – morals, values,
liberty, reason. His methodology rests upon the assumption that every instance of the
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historical development of mankind can be tracked – finding breadcrumbs strewn here and
there – all the way back to an originary impulse. The search for this impulse “is an
attempt to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their
carefully protected identities; because this search assumes the existence of immobile
forms that precede the external world of accident and succession. This search is directed
to ‘that which was already there,’ the ‘very same’ of an image of a primordial truth fully
adequate to its nature, and it necessitates the removal of every mask to ultimately disclose
an original identity.”13
Genealogy, on the other hand, goes in search of constellations – the manifold
phenomena that exert pressure upon historical movement. Turning away from Hegelian
metaphysics – and western philosophy’s fetishization of reason, for that matter – and its
corresponding notions of universal history, the genealogist shines a light upon those
spaces that are usually left dark: instances of rupture and chasms in development,
instincts and passions and sentiments. Genealogy “rejects the metahistorical deployment
of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search for
origins.”14 Blind grasps at theodicy, for example, or desperate attempts to uncover a
thing’s “true essence” are ignored; the lens is rather focused on difference and dispersion
as befits the relationship between actors, motives, and events. A genealogy, therefore,
will never confuse its goal with the historian’s quest for 'origins' but will cultivate the
details and accidents that are coextensive with every beginning.
The relationship of genealogy-as-methodology to aphorism-as-form is best
illustrated by Foucault’s differentiation between two types of “origins” that genealogy
13
14
Michel Foucault. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” From Black Board. 371.
Ibid. 370.
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seeks. The first, Herkunft, can be roughly translated as descent, and has a resemblance to
the tracing of “bonds of blood, tradition, and social status.”15 Unlike traditional
genealogy of familial or racial relations, though, Herkunft “seeks the subtle, singular, and
subindividual marks that might possibly intersect…to form a network that is difficult to
unravel.”16 It sets apart different traits and allows for the “disassociation of Me”17 – or
rather the dissolution of my identity as the natural effect of a series of historical causes
that were breed into the fabric of my formation as a subject. Genealogy as a study of
descent, then, does not essay to discover the “destiny of a people,” nor the evolution of a
species. On the contrary, is seeks to maintain “events in their proper dispersion.”18
Herkunft shakes the foundations of historical discourse; it grabs hold of the heterogeneity
of historical accumulation, and has the capacity to investigate each instant in its
singularity – to view it from multiple vantage points, under numerous conditions.
Specifically, though – and finally – the object of Herkunft’s domain is the body: “Its task
is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of
the body.”19 The body is, after all, marked by past experience – “diet, climate, soil”20 –
and gives rise to the desires, instincts, and errors that will mark the future.
The second type of origin that a Nietzschean genealogy seeks is Entstehung: an
emergence. Just as Herkunft is not the search for a linear continuity, Entstehung does not
excavate for the “final term” but rather the way that a “particular state of forces” establish
15
Ibid. 373.
Ibid.
17
Ibid. 374.
18
Ibid.
19
Ibid. 376.
20
Ibid. 375.
16
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systems of subjugation.”21 Forms of domination – how they battle against one another,
transgress meanings, establish values, and, of course, subject the body to their forces –
these are the object domains of Entstehung. “Emergence is the entry of forces,” Foucault
says – it is the “non-place” that separates forces as they face each other.22 And it must be
in this non-place, for particular historical forces do not share a “common space,” and thus
cannot be viewed from standing at single vantage point within one of the forces.
Remember the historical-phenomenological consciousness discussed above: it would be a
fallacy to superimpose the logic of one dominating force upon another. Because these
forces play off of and up against each other, one eventually subsuming another through
domination, the subsumption of one or more forces by another requires along with it the
interpretation of a new history, of new values – and a new series of forms of subjugation
will thus follow. This is why Foucault can make the radical claim that “the development
of humanity is a series of interpretations.”23
These two types of genealogy – descent and emergence – reevaluate and resituate
the site of the subject in western, philosophical discourse, moving away from both the
Hegelian subject/object formation and Platonic ideational rationality. Like Bloch and
Adorno do with Hegel, Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche gives primacy to the subject’s
striving over universal historical development. The genealogist’s advantage is mobility.
To effect change in the world, critical interpretation is necessary –since the development
of humanity is a series of interpretations – and a hermeneutics of society, history, power,
morals, values, etc., is anything but critical from within the immobile space of an
21
Ibid. 376.
Ibid. 377.
23
Ibid. 378.
22
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enclosed discourse. Indeed, Foucault tells us that “every origin of morality from the
moment it stops being pious – and Herkunft can never be – has value as critique.”24 This
does not mean only that once every origin of morality ceases to be pious it becomes
subversive – though it certainly does do that – but that once origins of morality are not
conducted through Christian discourses, a shift has occurred and a space for a critical
attitude has been opened. In his lecture, “What is Critique?” Foucault describes it thus:
“critique will be the art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability.
Critique would essentially insure the desubjugation of the subject in the context of what
we could call, in a word, the politics of truth.”25
Genealogy – in undoing the historian’s assumptions about the flatness of
historical consciousness, the linearity of subject development and morality, and the
metaphysical origins of cause and effect as singular impulse – effaces cultural and
national discourse. Temporal and spatial linearity is ruptured. This is, again, the effect the
aphorism has upon its reader. Ruptured from the traditional flow of philosophical or
literary narrative, the aphorism continually places its reader in numerous places, both in
terms of the text at hand and in terms of historical documents that have informed it,
creating a slippage in received opinion – and inaugurating a space for a critical attitude to
take hold.26
3.
24
Metaphor
Ibid. 374.
Michel Foucault. “What is Critique?”. The Politics of Truth. 46.
26
I understand that I am taking for granted a certain type of reader – as did Nietzsche.
Not only did he demand that his readers be more than familiar with the entirety of his
work, but he also – as Babich details well – assumed a reader who was versed in how to
both read and write aphorisms.
25
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Sarah Kofan draws our attention to one Entstehung in particular: an anthropomorphic
transposition of the external world onto the internal, making all of language a metaphor.
Human desires and drives make a logic of the internal that mirrors the external. Again,
this is going to bring us back to the formal qualities of the aphorism, for the
metaphoricity of language also helps to elicit the individuating aspects of the aphorism.
As I have alluded to above, Nietzsche shattered the belief in a linear historical
time – indeed this is one of the reasons why Nietzsche decides to undertake a non-linear
genealogy. Because of this, the forgetting of metaphor is not a particular historical event.
On the contrary, it “is originary, the necessary correlate of metaphorical activity itself:
man has always already forgotten that he is an ‘artist from the beginning,’ and that he
remains one in all his activities.”27 Kofman thus takes as her starting point the way in
which Nietzsche sets intuition against the concept. The originary, instinctive activity –
prior to language, the concept, and society – allows man to “remake the world in his own
image.”28 As external stimuli encounter internal physiological mechanisms, there occurs
an “anthropomorphic transposition,” one in which man likens the external to the internal
– in other words, the world becomes personified. This is all an unconscious activity
necessitated by man’s drives: his need to master the world. There is thus a set of
oppositions given to us here at the beginning: instinct is set against the concept, drives
against the intellect, the conscious against the unconscious. These oppositions are not
absolute, though. On the contrary, their relationality is meant to remove the opposition
between body and soul. “The body and consciousness are two systems of signs which
signify each other reciprocally, the language of the one expressing the writing of the
27
28
Sarah Kofman. Nietzsche and Metaphor, 25.
Ibid.
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other in ‘abridged’ form, and at the same time deforming it.”29 The first hint at a
forgetting, then, is the forgetting that occurs when the unconscious, anthropomorphic
transposition is effaced by the conscious, conceptual intellect. The unconscious drives
require that man master the world for conscious thought – thus he forgets that
consciousness is merely a transposition of an unconscious activity, a metaphor of a
metaphor.30
Art and rhetoric both serve as models for the activity of the unconscious – but
they are models taken from consciousness. Artistic activity is itself possible because of a
transposition, one stemming from the unconscious. Art thus idealizes the world, though
this is not necessarily a bad thing – rather, it means that artistic activity “highlights some
principle features [of the world] and makes others disappear.”31 This points to an
important moment in the activity of the unconscious – it accentuates certain aspects of
experience while darkening others. Moreover, artistic activity is a good model for
unconsciousness because it corresponds to an internal necessity of both: the transposition
of forms and the production of images based on free play. Just as our unconscious must
transpose into consciousness and onto the external world what it gathers from sensory
impressions, so too must the artist create forms and images from the senses. The artistic
model, a metaphor itself, “allows the opposition between reality and appearance to be
unequivocally effaced,” but the rhetorical model points to something different.32 The
rhetorical model has the affect of generalizing impressions, turning them into a unity, and
transposing schemata from them onto the world. Consequently, rhetoric (which we can
29
Ibid. 26.
Ibid. 27.
31
Ibid. 29.
32
Ibid. 32.
30
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think of in relation to the concept and intellect) helps, again, to efface originary metaphor
because it institutes a paradigm of logic into the world. Rhetorical activity is itself
nothing more than metaphorical activity, but a “metaphoricity…that implies the loss of
individuality and the reduction of differences”33
This brings us to the ever-effacing concept. The concept in Nietzsche, Kofman
says, “plays the role of anticathexis which sustains repression.”34 In other words, the very
nature of the concept reinforces the forgetting of metaphor as the originary transposition
– the concept keeps hidden the fact that it is itself merely a metaphor of a metaphor. The
danger of the concept, then, is not just that it induces us to forget (as Kofman will later
point out, forgetting is a good thing) but rather that the concept tells us to actually reject
the metaphor, and to organize the world into “ordered logical categories.”35 We must
remember, nevertheless, that generalization and mummification of the concept was
achieved through a “series of metaphors.” First, sensory impressions are themselves
metaphors, transpositions of stimuli into sensation-images. Then, through repeated
imitation, each sensory impression is reduced, generalized, and analogously likened to so
many other sensory-impressions; through this constant anthropomorphic transposition,
impressions begin to appear similar. Finally, the third moment, “marked by the
imposition of the word, is the transition to the concept; a transition from the analogous to
the identical, from the similar to unity, implying both the intervention of language and
society and an ‘unjust’ application of the principle of reason and substance.”36 These
three moves (impressions, transpositions, and language) institute a lens through which to
33
Ibid. 34.
Ibid. 35.
35
Ibid. 35.
36
Ibid. 36.
34
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see the herd-perspective of society, for in their processual generalization they obliterate
difference and efface that from which they came. Thus the anticathexis, the repression
and forgetting of metaphor, points us in the direction of logical schemata that have been
forced upon our consciousness and the world. The world is broken up and delimited into
categories, all of which comes from a false understanding of willing and causality. To
name something, to explain it is already part of a necessary reduction and generalization
of impressions and transpositions by language. These categories are, again, just
anthropomorphic metaphors -- metaphors that we subdivide again and again, generalizing
and delimiting each in its turn. This is a violent force, one that cuts and binds the
metaphor; it kills and mummifies it.
A defining example that Kofman continually comes back to is of one money and
value: all of this forgetting is analogous to the metaphor that money becomes worn and
loses its original efficacy over time and use. Man, the metaphorical animal, is a
measuring creature, a weighing creature – and from this measuring and weighing comes
his notions of justice, the great equilibrium. In the same way that it is forgotten that
concepts are metaphors, it is also forgotten that value, in both economic and social terms,
has been handed down to us through an evaluation. “Just as man’s forgetting of metaphor
allows him to believe that the concept is an a priori idea, pure and cut off from anything
sensory or violent, so he has the illusion that a ‘just’ action is disinterested because he
forgets its genesis.”37 The ‘just’ action is not a disinterested one, though; on the contrary,
it comes from a series of violent interventions, all of them done for specific, historical
reasons. Here Kofman reminds us of Nietzsche’s genealogy of Abrahamic religions, and
37
Ibid. 45, 46.
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the way in which they restructured social norms, morals, and values to suit a particular
crisis – survival. “The new evaluations, though a distinctive violence, serve as an
anticathexis of earlier ones, which are re-evaluated retroactively.”38 The conceptual
mummification that results from this anticathexis brings any dialectical movement to a
stop at the antithesis, and particular perspective – artistic, ascetic, Dionysus, Christ –
wins out the day. The conceptual and moral, Kofman concludes, are natural allies. In
violent manner, they both generalize and reduce – they have the distinctive capacity to
hide that from which they came, the metaphor.
By undoing the traditional, formal models of philosophical discourse, the aphorism
disrupts linear narrativity and universal history. Recognizing the metaphoricity of all
language, the aphorism –which is either one half of a truth or one and a half truths –
leaves itself to be completed or dismantled by the reader – thus revealing the fragility of
language and the historicity of logic. On the one hand, then, as Kofman says, rhetorical
activity “implies the loss of individuality and the reduction of differences.”39 On the other
hand, the metaphoricity of the aphorism can undo the herd-perspective that society, via
the ordered logic of language and reason, enforces, and help to institute a space of
individuation.
It is important, as well, to note the erotic nature of repression that Kofman
demonstrates – and thus the pregnancy of the aphorism. Cathexis, according to Freud,
was the release of psychic and/or sexual energy – anticathexis, on the other hand, is the
repression of such drives and urges. In mirroring the internal world of our psyche on the
external world, our own instinctual drives become more and more repressed, and, thus,
38
39
Ibid. 50.
Ibid. 34.
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the energy coextensive with the drives gets pushed further into our unconscious. Put
another way, the more that language orders and delimits our instincts, the more that we
suppress the nature of our language, the more intense cathexis can be. Releasing such
pent up sexual/instinctual energy thus has the potential to birth radically new forms of
subjectivity, ones that have been freed from the domination of rhetoric. The aphorism, as
a stylistic form, does exactly that – it utilizes the web of metaphoricity inherent in our
language, rather than effacing it with concepts, thus releasing our repressed instincts, and
birthing an individuated subjectivity that embodies a critical attitude.
4.
An Example by Way of Performance
“How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable: the History of an Error,” from The
Twilight of the Idols, illustrates well the power an aphorism can harness. In 6 short steps,
Nietzsche brings his reader on a genealogical journey from the beginnings of Plato’s
Idealism up to the revolution of the subject – latent in the Nietzschean aphorism and
represented by Zarathustra.
Nietzsche pinpoints a series of historical events – all of them an amalgamation of
competing forces -- and deconstructs Plato’s allegory of the cave, placing the reader not
outside of the cave, but outside of the allegory itself. He begins thus:
1. The true world – attainable for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man; he
lives in it, he is it.
(The oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, and persuasive.
A circumlocution for the sentence, “I, Plato, am the truth.”)
In this very first step, we see the institutionalization of an error – or rather, of a lie. Plato
not only divides the world into real and illusion, “true” and “false,” but he grants access
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to the “true world” only to the sage, the virtuous man, the pious man. Neither Plato nor
Socrates accepted money for their teachings, and searched for the truth for the sake of the
truth – pious men, indeed! In other words, Plato has granted access to this so-called true
world only via himself: from this point on, anybody wanting to escape the cave will have
to go through him: “I, Plato, am the Truth.” The world is thus fictionalized, a duality
constructed – the world of illusion and the true world – and authority over this duality
given to a mystic, Plato the Pious.
The aphorism continues on, bringing the reader through the major, historical
transformations of Platonism:
2. The true world – unattainable for now, but promised for the sage, the
pious, the virtuous man (“for the sinner who repents”).
(Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, insidious,
incomprehensible – it becomes female, it becomes Christian.)
Augustine and other early Christian scholars inherited Plato’s dual world, yet temporally
delayed one’s ability to get there. Since the “real” is yet to come, “I” can no longer be the
source of truth. The “real world” is “out there,” while I am merely illusion. This is, in a
way, Platonism for the masses. All those who repent are “promised” the true world – just
not yet. Platonism is then secularized:
3. The true world – unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the
very thought of it – a consolation, an obligation, an imperative.
(At bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea
has become elusive, pale, Nordic, Konigsbergian.)
No longer merely delayed, the real world is not even understandable. By separating the
nominal and the phenomenal, Kant makes the real world unattainable. Between our world
of illusion and the real world of reason exists an impasse: there is a metaphysical abyss
Campbell 19
within the subject, who is little more than an empty will to universality. The duality that
Plato gives us – by the time it gets to Kant, the subject is wholly cut off from itself. But
how does something only postulated hold sway over me?
4. The true world – unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being
unattained, but also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming
or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us?
(Gray morning. The first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.)
From Kant’s divided subject comes the division of morality and knowledge, and this, in
turn, opens the door to positivism. Now Kant’s thing-in-itself does not continue to make
any sense.
As the utility of Plato’s divided world seems to have run its course, the last two
parts of the aphorism are devoted to Nietzsche and Zarathustra:
5. The “true” world – an idea which is no longer good for anything, not
even obligating – an idea which has become useless and superfluous –
consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it!
(Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato’s
embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.)
6. The true world – we have abolished. What world has remained? The
apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also
abolished the apparent world.
(Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high
point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)
Again, the error inaugurated by Plato was to divide the world into reality and
appearance. The last part of the aphorism, then: is this “noon” and “high point of
humanity,” indeed, is Zarathustra still part of the same error? We can think of Nietzsche’s
Eternal Recurrence of the Same in terms of: what is real is becoming and what is
becoming is real. Since this collapses the distinction between the true world and the
Campbell 20
world of appearances, we can understand Nietzsche as the end of the history of the error
– and Zarathustra as standing outside of it, looking back in. But because what is real is
becoming and what is becoming is real, we cannot actually differentiate between
Nietzsche and Zarathustra. Indeed, since universal history has been upended, and we can
no longer sanction off specific events as originary and unique, it becomes impossible to
distinguish between where Nietzsche ends and Zarathustra begins. Moreover, the mystic
authority given to Plato is defunct in Nietzsche’s genealogy. Therefore, it also becomes
impossible to distinguish where I end and Zarathustra begins; there is the potentiality for
radical new forms of subjectivity latent within all of us.
In the aphorism, Nietzsche wants to do something similar to Plato. They both
want to get their readers to leave this allegorical cave; the difference being that while
Plato wants us to escape the bonds of appearance and bask in the sunlight of the forms,
Nietzsche wants us to escape the bondage of Platonic Idealism, and witness – from an
entirely new perspective – the unfolding of an error, and the fictionalization of our world.
In Plato’s account, all things (ontology, epistemology, a theory of art, politics, etc.) are all
rolled into one fictionalized allegory; it is the role of the philosopher to tell people that
they only see appearances, and his mystic authority is wrapped in his strive towards truth
for the sake of truth. In this account, we have a fable of a philosopher who has returned to
the cave to liberate the rest of us. Zarathustra, on the other hand, liberates us from our
being liberated by pointing towards a new type of subjectivity. He deconstructs the
allegory of the cave, as well as its historical transformations, placing both himself and his
reader outside of its logic.
Campbell 21
We can now look back into Platonism as a cave; and we can do so with an
embodied approach to social hermeneutics, one that has a subversively critical posture.
Outside the cave, temporality itself flows differently, the logic of rationality loses its
foundations, and the metaphysical search for origins, both religious and secular,
evaporate as we undergo a genealogical descent and witness nothing more than the
clashing of forces, the slow organization of ordered reason, and the colonization of the
mind and body by logic.
“The History of an Error” is thus a genealogy wrapped in metaphor and presented
as aphorism. The exegesis of the aphorism is what places me outside of the allegory of
the cave and its corresponding fictionalized world. Birthing new subjectivities requires
being outside, at least temporarily, current social, cultural, and cognitive formations – but
critically grappling with those formations necessitates a genealogical understanding of
them. The aphorism as a stylistic form thus individuates its reader by disassociating her
from the logic of historical and cultural discourse.
5.
Towards a Left Nietzscheanism
In terms of Nietzsche’s relationship with Plato, it may be prudent to return to Kofman’s
reading of metaphor and the concept. She had told us that the very nature of the concept
reinforces the forgetting of metaphor as the originary transposition – that the concept
keeps hidden the fact that it is itself merely a metaphor of a metaphor. It will serve us
well to think of this in relation to knowledge and the Forms in Plato, particularly when it
comes to discussions of art. A painting of bed, for example, is merely the representation
of a representation of true knowledge of a bed. Nietzsche inverts this idea, and argues
Campbell 22
that conceptual knowledge is merely a metaphor of a metaphor, three times removed
from the originary activity from which it comes. From this perspective, then, the painting
of a bed is an incredibly valuable thing, for both in its creation and its reception it elicits
the free play and transposition that is analogous to the originary metaphorical activity
from which the concept is born. In this way, art can allow us to, at least momentarily,
inhibit the concept from totally effacing metaphorical activity. The error of “Truth” was,
then, a necessary error. It started as a fable, and thus gave to us the very tool that we need
– art – to escape its bondage. Remember Nietzsche’s admonition: “We have art in order
that we do not die of the truth.”40
We can now understand what Nietzsche means when he says that his own
philosophy is an inverted Platonism. Not just in the above aphorism but also throughout
his writings, Nietzsche seems to have stood Plato on his head, dissolving the duality of
the true world and the illusory world, and reinstating the importance of art as a political
tool. What can be more subversive than upending thousands of years of tradition!
Granted, the revaluation of all values can lead to fascist political projects just as
easily as it can to leftist projects. Heidegger’s work on Nietzsche illustrates this, as does
the general belief in popular culture that Nietzsche can be equated to fascism – that he is
the originary Nazi. From a neo-liberal perspective, Ofielia Shutte has said that
Nietzsche’s “overcoming of nihilism required the crushing of democracy,”41 and Steven
Hicks’ film, Nietzsche and the Nazis,42 argues that Nietzsche’s writings provided the
perfect foundation for Hitler and National Socialism.
40
Friedriech Nietzsche. The Will to Power, sec. 882.
Ofelia Shutte, “Nietzsche’s Politics. From Blackboard. 161.
42
Stephen J. Hicks. Nietzsche and the Nazis. (N2 Productions, 2006).
41
Campbell 23
Where both Hicks and Shutte falter, though, is in their taking Nietzsche’s
statements at face value. They both roundly ignore the radical form that his philosophy
took, and are thus incapable of seeing what he has to offer the Left. One concrete
example of this is feminism. As a socio-political movement, feminism requires critique
from an engaged and partisan perspective – one that begins from the body. It was
Nietzsche – and his form and method – which provided feminism a formal and theoretical
framework from where it could critique masculine epistemologies, for it was through
Nietzsche that the West was first given the opportunity to disengage itself from its
historical discourses. From the critical perspective, then, gendered norms can now be
seen as social constructs. Whether or not Nietzsche himself was actually a feminist is, in
a sense, entirely superfluous. Indeed, much of his writings do come off as misogynistic,
and this is both recognized by thinkers of the Left, as well as explained away.43
This does not seem to discount the vast array of tools that Nietzsche gives to the
Left, though. As illustrated above, Nietzsche’s use of the aphorism has influenced
thinkers such as Benjamin, Bloch, Adorno, and Babich; Foucault has taken up his
genealogy; and Derrida and his student, Kofman, have refined deconstruction. The
aphorism itself, as a stylistic form, can disrupt received values, while genealogy as a
method gives teeth to critique. The aphorism, as a philosophical tool, thus seems to give
to the subject much more power to e/affect the world than does the enlightenment’s
notion of liberty – which still finds itself in the long history of an error. Getting outside of
43
See Frances Nebsitt Oppel’s Nietzsche and Gender. Though she does a great job of
showing that Nietzsche was, indeed, doing his best to abolish gender norms as they have
been constructed throughout Western history, it seems to me that she ends up instituting
gender difference, just in different terms. Her chapter on Zarathustra’s Whip, for
example, seems to set apart the feminine as mythic – which may return some respect to
the feminine but it still separates it as Other.
Campbell 24
such a history in no way necessitates the founding of a Leftist political project – but it
certainly opens up an expansive future that would be incredibly more delimited from
within the framework of universal history.
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Campbell 25
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