Pli 1 1 .(200 1 ), 1 - 1 1 .

Who is Nietzsche?
ALAIN BADIOU

What is the true centre of Nietzsche's thought? Or: what is it that

Nietzsche calls "philosophy"?
I believe it is essential to understand that, for Nietzsche, what he calls
"philosophy" is not an interpretation, is not an analysis, is not a theory.
When philosophy is i nterpretation, analysis, or theory, it is nothing but a
variant of religion. It is dominated by the nihilist figure of the priest. I n
The Antichrist, Nietzsche declares that the phi losopher i s "the greatest of
all criminals." We should take this declaration seriously.
Nietzsche is not a phi losopher, he is an anti-philosopher. This
expression has a precise meaning: Nietzsche opposes, to the speculative
nihilism of philosophy, the completely affirmative necessity of an act.
The role that Nietzsche assigns himself is not that of adding a
philosophy to other philosophies. I nstead, his role is to announce and
produce an act without precedent, an act that will i n fact destroy
philosophy.
To announce the act, but also to produce it: this means that Nietzsche
the anti-philosopher is literally ahead of himself. This is exactly what he
says in the song from Thus Spake ZLzrathustra entitled: "Of the Virtue
that Makes Small". Zarathustra introduces himself as his own precursor:

Among these people I am my own forerunner, my own cock-crow

through dark lanes.
Thus what comes i n philosophy is what the philosopher bears witness to.
Or, more accurately: the philosophical act is what philosophy, which
nevertheless coincides with it, can only announce.
Straight away, we are at the heart of our examination of Nietzsche.
For his singularity is entirely contained in his conception of the

Pli 1

1 (2001 )

philosophical act. Or, to use his language, in his conception of the power
of philosophy. That is to say, of anti-philosophy.
In what do this act and thi s power consist?
It is by failing to place this question at the threshold of any
examination of Nietzsche that both Deleuze and Heidegger partially
missed his absolute singularity, the one that ultimately both fu lfils and
abolishes itself under the name of madness.
Deleuze begins his book, Nietzsche and Philosophy, with this
declarati on: "Nietzsche' s most general project is the introduction of the
concepts of sense and value into phi losophy." Now, I believe that the
philosophical act according to Nietzsche does not take the form either of
a project or of a program - rather, as in Sarah Kofman 's title, it could
be called an explosion. Nei ther is it a question for Nietzsche - of
introducing concepts. For the name of the philosophical event can be
nothing other than a figure, and ultimately a proper name. The proper of
the event deposes the common of the concept. To do this, it supports
itself on the opacity of the proper name. Nietzsche' s phil osophical
thought is given in a primordial network of seven names: Christ, or the
Crucified, Dionysus-Ariadne, Saint Paul, Socrates, Wagner, Zarathustra,
and finally the most obscure of all the names, the name "Nietzsche",
which recapitulates the others.
Of course, Deleuze is aware of these names, the meaning of which he
interprets. One can, as he does with virtuosity, read in these nominal
series the coding of types of force, analyse them according to the grid of
the active and the reactive. But in thi s case, the network of proper names
is brought back to the commonality of sense, and Nietzsche is absorbed
i nto the stream of interpretation. What is lost in Deleuze's strong reading
is this: it is through the opacity of the proper name that Nietzsche
constructs his own category of truth . This is indeed what assigns the
vital act to i ts nonsensical, or inval uable, dimension. Nietzsche ' s last
word is not sense, but the inevaluable.
The common name of the supreme act, the one that puts an end to
Christian enslavement, is "the reversal of all values," or the
transvaluation of all values. But the reversal of all vahws does not itself
have a value. It is subtracted from evaluation. < 'n1ai11ly, ii is life itself
against nothingness, only that, as Nietzsche will say i11 1'l1<' Twilight of
the Idols , and it is a decisive axiom:

The value o.f life cannot be csti11111t1il

Alain Badiou

enter into N ietzsche, one must therefore focus on the poi nt where
evaluation, values, and sense all come to falter in the trial posed by the
act. Thus where it is no longer a question of values or of sense, but of
what actively surpasses them, what philosophy has always named
"truth".
In my view thi s is what Heidegger fails to grasp when he thinks that
Nietzsche's program of thought is the institution of new values. We
know that Nietzsche anal yses the old values as a triumph of the will to
nothingness. They exist in virtue of a pri nciple that for Nietzsche is the
supreme principle, which is that man prefers to will the nothing, rather
than not to will at all. For Heidegger, Nietzsche, in reversing the old
values, in proposing the noon of affirmation over against the will to
nothingness, actually intends to overcome nihilism. Now, Heidegger will
say that by so doing, by wi lling to overcome nihilism, Nietzsche's
thought separates itself from the very essence of nihilism, which is not in
fact the wil l to nothingness. Thi s is because for Heidegger, i f nihilism is
the will to nothingness, it is then intelligible in its essence on the basis of
the figure of the subject. But in truth nihil ism is not a figure of the
subject; nihilism is the hi story of the remaining-absent of being itself, as
historiality. Nihilism is a historial figure of being. It is this that comes to
be concealed within a Nietzschean program of thought, which consists in
the overcoming of nihilism. As Heidegger will say: "The will to
overcome nihilism [which he attributes to Nietzsche] does not know
itself, because it excludes itself from the evidence of the essence of
nihilism, considered as the history of the remaining-absent and thus
prohibits itself from ever knowi ng its own doing."
ls Nietzsche real ly so ignorant of his own doing? We find ourselves
brought back to the question of the act. We must begin by asking if this
N ietzschean doing represents itself as an overcoming, in the
metaphysical form of the subject. It seems to me that there is here, on
Heidegger's part, a critique which Hegelianises Nietzsche before judging
him. Because I believe that for Nietzsche the act is not an overcoming.
The act is an event. And this event is an absolute break, whose obscure
proper name is Nietzsche.
It is to this link between an act without concept or program and a
proper name, a proper name that is his own only by chance, that one
must refer the famous title of one of the sections of Ecce Homo: "Why I
am a Desti ny." I am a destiny because, by chance, the proper name
"Nietzsche" comes to link its opacity to a break without program or
concept.

To

Pli 11

(2001)

I am strong enough to break up the history of mankind in two.

(Letter to Strindberg of the 8th of December 1888)

I conceive the philosopher as a terr(fying explosive that puts the

entire world in danger. (Ecce Homo )
Nietzsche' s anti-philosophical act, of which he is at once the prophet, the
actor, and the name, aims at nothing less than at breaking the history of
the world in two.
I would say that this act is archi-political, in that it intends to
revolutionise the whole of humanity at a more radical level than that of
the calculations of politics. Archi-political does not here designate the
traditional philosophical task of finding a foundation for politics. The
logic, once again, is a logic of rivalry, and not a logic of foundational
eminence. It is the philosophical act itself that is an archi-political act, in
the sense that its historical explosion will retroactively show, in a certain
sense, that the political revolution proper has not been genuine, or has
not been authentic.
It follows from this that in Nietzschean archi-politics the word
politics is sometimes reclaimed and validated, and sometimes
depreciated, in a characteristic oscillation. In the draft of a letter to
Brandes from December 1888, Nietzsche writes:

We have just entered into great politics, even into very great
politics I am preparing an event which, in all likelihood, will
break history into two halves, to the point that one will need a
new calendar, with I 888 as Year One.
...

Here Nietzsche proposes an imitation of the French revolution. H e

assumes, a s a fundamental determination of philosophy, the word
"politics". Moreover, this imitation will go so far as to include images of
the Terror, which Nietzsche will adopt without the least hesitation. Many
texts bear witness to this. Let us cite the note to Franz Overbeck from the
4th of January 1889, where Nietzsche declares:

I am just having all anti-Semites shot ...

On the other hand, in the letter to Jean Bourdeau from the 17th of
December 1888, the word politics i s suhjcc1cd lo niliquc:

Alain Badiou

My works are rich with a decision with regard to which the brutal
demonstrations
of calculation in contemporary politics could
prove to be nothing more than mere errors of calculus.
And, in a draft letter to William II, Nietzsche writes thi s:

The concept of politics has been completely dissolved in the war

between spirits, all power-images have been blown to bits, there will be wars, like there have never been before.
The Nietzschean anti-philosophical act, determined as archi-political
event, thinks the historico-political, sometimes in the figure of its
broadened imitation, sometimes in the figure of its complete dissolution.
It i s precisely this alternative that gives legitimacy to the act as archi
political.
If the act i s archi-political then the philosopher i s an over
philosopher. Letter to Von Seydlitz of February 1888:

It is not inconceivable that I am the first philosopher of the age,

perhaps even a little more. Something decisive and doom-laden
standing between two millennia.
Nietzsche is first of all the chance name of something, something like a
fatal uprising, a fatal, archi-political uprising, which stands between two
millennia. But what then are the means of such an act? What i s i ts point
of application? And finally, what is an anti-philosophical event that
would be archi-political in character?
To address this problem, we must examine the Nietzschean critique
of the Revolution, in its political sense. This critique consists in saying
that, essentially, the Revolution did not take place. What we should
u nderstand by this is that it has not happened as revolution , in the sense
that archi-politics conceives it. It has not taken place, because it has not
truly broken the history of the world in two, thus leaving the Christian
apparatus of the old values intact. Moreover, the equality to which the
Revolution lay claim was nothing more than social equality, equality as
the idea of being the equal of another. And this equality, in Nietzsche's
eyes, is always commanded by ressentiment.
In The Antichrist we can read the following:

Pli 1

1 (2001 )

'Equality o,f souls before God', this falsehood, this pretext for the
rancune o,f all the base-minded, this explosive concept which
finally became revolution, modern idea and the principle o,f the
decline o,f the entire social order - is Christian dynamite.
It is not at all for Nietzsche a question of opposing some sort of wisdom
to Christian dynamite. The fight against Christianity is a fight amongst
artillerymen, or amongst terrorists. In October 1 888, Nietzsche writes to
Overbeck:

This time - as an old artilleryman - I bring out my heavy guns. I

am afraid that I am blowing up the history o,f mankind into two
halves.
Archi-pol itics is thus the discovery of a non-Christian explosive .
Now, it is at this juncture that N ietzsche will have to pay with his
person, for it is clear that he will apply himself to the radical impasse of
any archi-politics of this type. But he will apply himself the more deeply
and the more sincerely because he has defined archi-politics not as a
logic of foundation, but as the radicality of the act.
Here everything rests on N ietzsche 's conception of the arch i-political
event, of the event in which anti-philosophy breaks the history of the
world in two.
At this point it must be said that this event does not succeed in
distinguishing itself from i ts own announcement, from its own
declaration. What is declared philosophically is such that the possibility
of its declaration alone proves that the history of the world is broken in
two. Why is this? Because the truth at work in the archi-political act is
exactly what is proh ibited, and prohibition is the Christian law of the
worl d. To pass beyond thi s prohibition, as the declaration attests, is
enough to make one believe in an absolute rupture.

One day my philosophy will win, because until now no one has, in
principle, prohibited anything but truth. (Ecce Homo)
But all of a sudden, since what Nietzsche decl ares is also the event itself,
he is caught, ever more manifestly, in a circle. 1 poinlcd out, above, that
Nietzsche says: "I prepare an event". But 1he declaration concerning the
preparation of an event becomes progressively more indiscernible from
the event i tself, whence an oscillation characteristic of Nietzsche

Alain Badiou

between i mminence and di stance. The declaration will shatter the world,
but that it is goi ng to shatter it is preci sel y what it declares:

Foreseeing that I will shortly have to address to humanity the

gravest challenge that it has yet to receive, it seemed to me
indispensable to say who I am. (Ecce Homo)
This book belongs to the ve1y few. Perhaps none of them is even
living yet. ( The Antichrist)
On one side the radical i mminence that constrains me, as the onl y living
proof, to decl are who I am. On the other, a stance that leaves in suspense
the question of knowing whether a witness of this act has been born yet
or not. I think that this circle is the circle of any archi-politics
whatsoever. Since it does not have the event as its condition, since it
grasps it - or claims to ,grasp it - in the act of thought itself, it cannot
discriminate between i ts reality and its announcement. The very figure of
Zarathustra names this circle and gives the book its tone of strange
undecidability with regard to the question of knowing whether
Zarathustra is a figure of the efficacy of the act or of its prophecy pure
and simple. The cen tral episode in this respect is the song entitled "On
Great Events." This song is a dialogue between Zarathustra and the fire
dog. But who is the fire-dog? Rapidly, i t becomes clear that the fire-dog
is nothing but the spokesperson , the agent, or the actor of the
revolutionary political event itself, of revolt, of the collective storm. Let
us read a passage of the dialogue wi th the fire-dog.
Zarathustra speaks:

"Freedom," you all most like to bellow: but I have unlearned

belief in "great events" whenever there is much bellowing and
smoke about them. And believe me, friend Infernal-racket! The
greatest events - they are not our noisiest but our stillest
hours. The world revolves, not around the inventors of new noises,
but around the inventors of new values; it revolves inaudibly.
And just confess! Little was ever found to have happened when
your noise and smoke dispersed. What did it matter that a town
had been mummified and that a statue lay in the mud!
The oppos ition here is between din and silence. The di n is what attests
externally for the political event. The silence, the world pregnant with

Pli

1 1 (200 1 )

silence, i s in stead the name of the unattested and unproved character of

the archi-political event. The archi -political declaration misses its real
because the real of a declaration, of any declaration, is precisely the
event itself. Thus it is at the very point of this real, which he lacks and
whose presence and announcement he cannot separate, that Nietzsche
will have to make himself present. And it is this that will be called his
madness. Nietzsche ' s madness consists in this, that he must come to
think of himself as the creator of the same world in which he makes his
silent declaration, and in which nothing proves the existence of a break
in two. That in some way he is on both sides; that he is the name, not
only of what announces the event, not only the name of the rupture, but
ultimately the name of the world itself.
The fourth of January 1 889, Nietzsche si tuates himself as
"Nietzsche", as a name:

After [and this after is necessary] it has been averred as

irrevocable that I have properly speaking created the world.
A sincere archi-politics madly unfolds the phantasm of the world,
because it is the process of the undecidability between prophecy and the
real . It mimics, in folly, the intrinsic undecidabi lity of the event itself; it
is this undecidability turning upon itself in the figure of a subject.
Whence this harrowing declaration from the last letter, the letter to Jakob
Burckhardt of January 6, 1 889, after which there is nothing more:

Actually, I would much rather be a Basel professor than God; but

I have not ventured to carry my private egotism so far as to omit
creating the world on his account.
Yes indeed, this statement is a statement of madness, but of madness
coming at the real point of a lack, when the announcement fai ls. This
ordeal takes place in three stages: the ambition of radical rupture, of
archi-politics, is indeed that of creating a world, of creating the other
world, the world of affirmation, the world which in fact is no longer the
world, or the man that is no longer man, and whose name is "overman ."
But to create this world, the everyman must also be seized by its
creation. Only this everyman can certify the appearance of the overman.
And what would have been preferred, or preferable, is that the professor,
in Basel, be seized as such and traversed by this u11attested event. But
since this is not the case, since this lcgiti111a11 preference is not verified,

Alain Badiou

the anti-phil osophical hero is forced to decl are that he will create this
world. That he will create it, and not that he has been sei zed by its
triumphal appearance. This world is thus a program, but one that
antecedes i tself. And so one is a captive of the circle. And in the end to
break this circle one needs the disinterested fiction of an integral
creation, not only of a new world, but of the old world as well.
At th is point, nothing but madness.
Upon what does archi-politics itself come to break? Upon the
unavoidable necessity of politics. Of politics, which demands patience.
Which knows that it is pointless to announce the event. That one must
think and act with chance, and i n circumstances that one does not
choose. Of a politics which has had to renounce the idea of breaking the
history of the world in two. A politics that is content - which is already
a lot, and very difficult - with being faithfu l to a few new possibilities.
Equally, anti-phi losophy comes to break upon the permanence, upon
the resistance, of phil osophy. Philosophy, which knows that its act, as,
act of truth, does not have the power of abolishing the values of the
world. And that the labour of the negative may not be dissolved in the
'
great Dionysian affirmation.
Is this to say that Nietzsche 's force, his si ncerity, his sacri fice, are of
no use? That the idea of an archi-politics is a vain folly? 1 do not think
so.
For there is in Nietzsche an extremely precious i ndication. An
indication concerning a decisive question for any philosophy
whatsoever. The question of the relationship between sense and truth.
On this question of sense and truth there are, I think, three primordial
stances. First, there is the stance that holds the idea of a rigorous
continuity between truth and sense. I call this stance religion. There is a
stance that unilaterally establishes the su premacy of sense and attempts
to destroy the rel igious stance. Thi s is Nietzsche 's struggle. And finally
there is the philosophical stance. It is in rupture with anti-philosophy
because it both retains and develops, by means of a rational critique, the
idea of truth. But it is also in rupture with religion, because it refu ses to
identify truth with sense; it even willi ngly declares that in any truth there
is always something of the nonsensical.
But what happens hi storically is that the second stance, the anti
philosophical stance, is almost always what points the third stance, the
phi losophical stance, towards its own modernity. Anti-philosophy puts
phi losophy on guard. It shows it the ruses of sense and the dogmatic
danger if truth. It teaches it that the rupture with religion is never

10

Pli

1 1 (200 1 )

definitive. That one must take u p the task agai n. That truth must, once
again and always, be secularised.
Nietzsche was right to think that his primordial task could be named
the Antichrist. He was right to call himself the Antichrist. And in his role
as radical anti-philosopher he poin ted philosophy to the very place of its
modem task. From Nietzsche, we need to retain what he designated as
the task of philosophy: to re-establish the question of truth i n its rupture
with sense. Nietzsche puts us on guard against hermeneutics.
Therefore, 1 believe that Nietzsche is someone that one must at once
discover, find, and lose. One must discover him in his truth, discover
him in the desire of the act. One must find him, as he who provokes the
theme of truth towards a new demand, as he who forces the
philosophical stance to inven t a new figure of truth, a new rupture with
sense. And finally, of course, one must lose him, because anti
philosophy must, when all is said and done, be lost, or lost sight of, once
philosophy has established its own space.
This discovery, this find , this loss: I often feel them with regard to all
of the century's great an ti-phi losophers; with Nietzsche, with
Wittgenstein, and with Lacan. I think that all three - but Nietzsche' s
case is without doubt the most dramatic - i n the last instance sacrificed
themselves for philosophy. There is in anti-philosophy a movement of
putting itself to death, or of silencing itself, so that something imperative
may be bequeathed to philosophy. Anti-philosophy i s always what, at its
very extremes, states the new duty of philosophy, or its new possibility
in the figure of a new duty. I think of Nietzsche's madness, of
Wi ttgenstein 's strange labyrinth, of Lacan ' s final muteness. In all three
cases anti-philosophy takes the form of a legacy. It bequeathes
something beyond itself to very thing that it is fighting against.
Philosophy is always the heir to anti-philosophy.
This is why I am so touched, in one of the last notes to Brandes, by
this very Pascalian phrase of Nietzsche, which i mmediately speaks to me
of this singular and intricate relationship to the .real a111i ph ilo sophers of
the century.

Once you discovered me, it 11<1s 1111

difficulty is now to lose 1111 ...

1:1r'11f

/1'1/f to /iwl

me:

the

And it is true that the i,rcal ddl1111lrv '"'"".ill, 111;11 which demands of u s
a creation, i s 1101 hi d1;n1vn .111d 111 1111d11.1.1111I Nw11sd1e. The difficulty
is to know, philosopl11rnllv, li11w ' " 111.1 111111

Nietzsche:
Revenge and Praise

Revenge in Praise. - Here is a page written over with praise, and

you

call

it shallow:

but

when you

divine that revenge

lies

concealed within this praise you will find it almost too subtle and
take great pleasure in the abundance of little bold strokes and
figures. It is not man but his revenge that is so subtle, rich and
inventive he himself is hardly aware of it.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak (Aphorism 228)

Pli 1

1 (200 1 ), 1 2-3 1 .

The Repetition of Eternal Return,

or the Disastrous Step

JASON WINFREE

And what would eternal return be, 1f we fo rgot that it is a

vertiginous movement endowed with a fo rce: not one which
causes the return of the Same in general, but one which selects,
one which expels as well as creates, destroys as well as produces?
Gilles Deleuze'
Everything is played ou t in the manner in which the thought of
Eternal Return is communicated.
Maurice Blanchot'

Has Deleuze unmasked the repetition at the heart of eternal recurrence,

deciphered Zarathustra's most burdensome thought, and so too passed
the test of the vicious circle ' s selection? What masks are worn in
Deleuze' s encounter with that field of disparity, displacement, and
repetition, that "multiple" field recognized all too hastily under the
rubric of eternal recurrence? Are they masks of joy, affirmation, parody,
irony, masks of the theatre? And which masks would lie behind these?
the question must be posed even if il is eventual ly refused. Are they
those most familiar lo philosophy, those of lhe sage, the ascetic ideal, the
systematician, perhaps shadowed hy the pallor of an old Nordic sun?
What indeed "would eternal rt't1m1 '"' (( we forgot that it is a
vertiginous movement endowed with t1 Jinn"'! Let us see if we cannot
I ( iilk.\ lkl<-111.-. /11//1111111

ll111w1.,11yl'11",., 1'1''1),JI
1\11111111

111111 1 .11 y

l\111111 "" '

"'

I\''""'

1111.J u. .,.,1111011. li;111.\. l'a11l l'atton (New York: Columbia

II lt1d11.11111w llnc;illncilc<lasDR.

1111 111/111111 '"111.,1.\/1/w11,

"" ' '' I ' in-..

1 11 \ ).

tra11s. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis:

I' .'/It. l lneal'icr cited as /C.

Jason Winfree

13

reintroduce with the repetition of th is question a maximal modification,

or if, in fact, we do not come too late.
Difference and Repetition is a philosophical text in the strictest sense.
For in spite of and perhaps because of its insistent agon with the law and
the rule of identity, its critique of the good will of thought and common
sense, its "opposition" to the dialectic and the world of representation,
and its insi stent encounter with the ontological problematic, its most
rigorous engagement occurs at the edge of the question of the
transcendental. And Deleuze reminds us on more than one occasion that
everything happens al the edge. Perhaps, then, it can even be said that
this edge becomes the transcendental condition of transcendentality
itself, the condition of its reality and not merely a condition of its
possibility, as Deleuze likes to say, or in other words, the point of a
maximal modification of the philosophical form of the question par
excellence. The institution of this thought occurs as difference and
repetition are understood as signifying the domain of that "more
profound game" by which identities are fabricated or produced, by
which, we might say, phenomena are birthed. Following Ni etzsche, it is
now a matter of sense (sens) and phenomena (phenomene), no longer
'
appearance (apparence) and essence (essence). More importantly,
though, appearance and essence are themselves phenomena to be
accounted for by way of the more subterranean movements and
displacements of difference and repetition . In this sense, Difference and
Repetition would overturn the moral law (which is to say the telos and
constraint of philosophy itself) by ascending toward the principles that
would govern it, challenging the primary status of philosophical
di scourse by challenging, displac ing, repl acing and repeating its
fundamental principles. This movement of ascent, which is understood
by Deleuze as the movement of irony, is concomitant with a movement
of descent, or humor, one that laughs in the face of the consequences of
the law, its i mpotence and self-denial, i ts inabi lity, properly speaking, to
think and to move. Everything happens as the ground rises to the
surface, the lightning dragging the sky behind it, the abstract l i ne
d istributing itself in a space in accordance with no rule, the death of the
father, the explosion of the sun. Following the significance of the last in
this series of articulations, we might say everything happens in a space
of disaster. And yet we must ask if i n the course of Difference and
Repetition, in the midst of the selective account of eternal return, the
3

Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1 983), p. 3. Hereafter cited as N.

14

Pli

1 1 (200 1 )

di saster has not been re-placed, situated so as to be accounted for, re

paired with a repetition of form and i nquiry which i ndeed repeats, albeit
under the ill usion of maximal modification. I n raising these questions,
are we forced to account for this failure, and thereby perhaps repeat i t
once again? I t seems already that "the di saster ruins everything in
'
leaving everything intact."

I.

Beginning(,) the transformation of grounds

With these words we return to the begi nning of the wntmg of the
disas ter, a beginning which is no doubt properly philosophical, even if it
is already multiple, invoking the names of Deleuze and Nietzsche, but
also, as we will see, the fragment signified by the name of Blanchot.
How does the proper philosophical beginning stand in relation to eternal
return, and what is the significance of this question?
Although eternal return begins in a certain sense with the rejection of
the possibility of ever beginning, ' or of ever having begun, we cannot
overlook the fact that the heart of D(fference and Repetition, the chapter
entitled "The Image of Thought", begins with the question of begi nning.
Is the proper philosophical beginning thereby repeated, or is repetition
the only philosophical beginning? To be sure, Deleuze affirms the latter,
and that by which he begins must be understood as a repetition of the
destruction between the true and the apparent worlds announced by
Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols. More precisel y, Deleuze's repetition
of Nietzsche' s beginning concerns that text entitled "How the True
World Finally Became a Fable'', wherein Nietzsche recounts the series of
beginnings that belong to the history of philosophy, each one repeating
the deterioration of Platonism and the malignancy of the world of
representation. Of course, these beginnings do not really properly begi n ,
but this i s not simply because they are instituted b y way o f repetition.
Rather, they do not do so because they fail to meet the demand that a
proper philosophical beginning be presuppositionless, as for example
Descartes would have us believe. More precisely, they fail to properly
4

Maurice BJanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, NE:
University of Nebraska Press, 1 986), p. I . Hereafter cited as WU I. Trans. modified.
See Maurice Blanchot, L'ecriture du desastre (Gallimanl, t'l89), 7.
5 See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walin Kaufmann and R.J.
Hollingdale (New York: Vin tage Books, 1968), nu. 10<>2, IO<i<>. llcrcafter cited as
WP.

Jason Winfree

15

begin because they presuppose both common sense and the good will of
thought, a sort of prephilosophical i m age that determines the conformity
of thought to a principle that at once prohibits i ts genesis. And in this
sense, these "beginnings" do not even begin i mproperly, a failure that i s
concomitant with the sterility of their repetition. "[A]s a result,"
according to Deleuze, "the conditions of a phi losophy which would be
without any kind of presuppositions appear all the more clearly: instead
of being supported by the moral Image of thought, it would take as its
point of departure a radical critique of this I mage and the 'postulates' i t
implies" (DR 132). But in what sense would this new critique condition
phi losophy? As we will see, it is a question of grounds.
In the strictest sense, critique has never done anything except
condition philosophy, del imit its possibilities and legitimate the scope of
its deployment. Unfortunately, this scope has been too narrowly
determined, and the reflexivity or the power of critique, which is
supposed to account for itself in critiquing itself, and which would
thereby have to step outside itself, has proved to be but a slave to the
rule of identity that is abstracted from insignificant facts such as
recognition. The transcendental critique that is supposed to provide the
conditions of all possible experience in fact provides only the conditions
of banal experience, even if thi s proves to be the only experience
properly speaking, namely, the experience of an epistemic continuity
that is moral to the core. For insofar as it would take its point of
departure from the familiar, cri tiq ue would li terally never do anything
other than understand itself by way of what it presupposes and knows all
too readily. To be sure, in this self-understanding, critique would submi t
itself to itself, thereby fulfilling its fu nction, but at the expense of never
ascending to the level of the more rigorous transcendental question
whose rumor echoes below its foundations and towards which it aspires.
Instead, it aspirates on i tself, its transcendentali ty not merely accounting
for the banality of experience, but itself reproducing this banality in its
very fu nction. Although critique would critique itself, it would do so
without accounting for itself in the sense that it would fail to open the
question of its ground. And that is to say, i t would critique itself
preci sely in accounting only for itself, and so would remain defective in
proportion to the degree that it would suffice, its exercise synonymous
with the work of solipsism. Critique, in short, would be nothing more
than the activity of self-identity, and so wou ld remain self-enclosed,
bearing no relation to the outside, bearing, in fact, nothing. Critique-as
conservative as the habit from which i t is drawn, a game without risk,
not even the simulacrum of thought.

16

Pli 11

(2001 )

Opposed to this determination of thought, the critique that would

alone condition philosophy in the sense indicated by Deleuze is best
understood in terms of the extension of the critique of self-identity to its
limit, a limit the transgression of which shatters the very demarcation of
philosophy, and which is consummate with the production or genitality
of thought. Far from the requirements of a critique of reason, be it pure
or practical, that would grant to reason i ts legitimate scope of
application, "we require a genesis of reason itself, and also a genesis of
the understanding and its categories: what are the forces of reason and of
the understanding? [ . . .) What stands behind reason, in reason itself?" (N
91) Such, according to Deleuze, is the genealogical question raised by
Nietzsche, and the function of genealogy in this sense i s double. First, it
unmasks the law, driving it beneath its own grounds, and second, i n so
doing, it reinstitutes the movement that is quelled or excluded by every
law. Genealogy is therefore fu ndamentally revolutionary, and especially
insofar as it revolves around the question of the fundament. Its task: a
diagnostics of creation, both active and reactive, and a creative
diagnostics. Otherwise put, critique and affirmation are bound together
in the activity of genealogical inquiry. And it is in this sense that
Deleuze insists concern ing Nietzsche that "the differential element [in
genealogy) i s both a critique of the value of values and the positive
element of creation" (N 2). Or agai n, from Difference and Repetition,
that "the conditions of a true critique and a true creation are the same
[les memes]: the destruction of an image of thought which presupposes
itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself' (DR 139,
my italics). The condition of the production of thought is thus
synonymous with the destruction of critique understood as the critique of
self-identity. In this way, Deleuze's insistence upon what we have called
the solipsism of critique, its determi nation by the good will of thought
and common sense, opens onto more subterranean and disquieting
movements. Would the open ing of this field itself be constituted as or by
such movement? Our response to thi s question requires an attentiveness
to the manner in which the passage through the critique of self-identity
occurs.
The transition takes place by way of the quest. i on of what lies behind
reason, and indeed of what lies in reason itself. What, in other words,
remains dormant in the very ground of critique? The activity of
grounding is understood from the outset as the operation of the logos, or
of sufficient reason, where lo ground is to determine the i ndetermi nate
(DR 272-74). And every grou nd, which is 10 s;iy every determination,

Jason W infree

17

oscillates between the stability i t i nstitutes and the indeterminacy it

staves off. The genealogical question therefore asks what sort of
indetermination or chaos might i nhabit the self-identity of critique, what
indeed might fragment the self-identity so carefully guarded by the
world of representation. According to Deleuze, the dispute between
Descartes and Kant concern ing the determination of the subject, and so
too the rule of identity, is particularly instructive. Taking his departure
from common sense, from the "everyone knows, it cannot be denied,"
Descartes determ ines the subject as the thinking subject. Everyone
knows what it means to exist and to thi nk, and as soon as I conceive of
this existence, I surely must be said to exist as a thinking being, this
above all being clear and distinct. In this way, the prephilosophical
image of thought is raised to the level of principle. Kant's objection
consists in the observation that Descartes' determination of the
undetermined-his grounding of the "I" by what he calls th inking-is
unfounded insofar as it provides no clue as to how the determi nation of
being by thinking would take place. Simply put, although I am conscious
of myself in thought, "noth ing in myself is thereby given for thought"
other than the indeterminate fact of my being. 6 Descartes' 'Cogito ergo
sum ' is therefore analytically correct, indeed cannot be denied, but the
cogito does not thereby determine the sense of the sum. A third
"category" i s required as a sort of supplement by which determination
would be effected, namely, that of the form of time. ' Moreover, the
introduction of the form of time alone accounts for the discovery of the
transcendental, since without the distinction between what determines
and determi nation as such, a distinction made possible first of all by the
transcendental aesthetic, no determi nation or grounding properly
speaking could be accounted for at all .' But this means that Kant's
6

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London:
Macmillan, 1 965), B 429. Hereafter cited as CPR.
7 Kant writes, "The proposition 'I thi nk' , in so far as it amounts to the assertion, 'I
exist thinking', is no mere logical function, but determines the subject (which is then
at the same time object) in respect of existence, and cannot take place without inner
sense, the intuition of which presents the object not as thing in itself, but merely as
appearance. There i s here, therefore, not simply spontaneity of thought, but also
receptivity of intuition, that is, the thought of myself applied to the empirical intuition
of myself' (CPR B430).
8 In that case, the identity of the determined and the undetermined would collapse into
a sort of formless identity, a sheer indeterminacy that could just as easily be
understood in terms of an undetermined difference. From this position, Descartes'
cogito would therefore be determined only by the fiat of the Third Meditation.

18

Pli

1 1 (200 1 )

breakthrough arrives at the cost of a fractured self. To the spontaneity of

the Cartesian cogito, Kant adds the passive self which experiences that
acti vity rather than ini tiates it, the minimal requirement for a
transcendental account of the determination of the self. The fractured
self is, in other words, the necessary condition for the grounding of
critique, what is required for the very determi nation of critique, and it is
in just this sense that the grou nd always osci llates, begi nning i n fact to
give way. Si mply put, "the world of the ground i s undermined by what it
tries to exclude, by the simulacrum which draws it in only to fragment it.
[... ] An entire multiplicity rumbles underneath the 'sameness' of the
Idea" (DR 275).
That this multiplicity is opened by the question of the form of time i n
the transcendental aesthetic is of the utmost significance. A n d yet w e
cannot fail t o note that i t arises only within - and ultimately promotes
- the common sense and dogmatic image it would shake, constituting
for Kant a necessary but temporary detour in the return of critique to the
service of identity from which it is born. For the attempt to account for
the compatibility of the moral and the phenomenal is itself a moral
enterpri se, an exercise that guarantees the very identity it presupposes by
securing for it a space free from fracture, independent of the form of
time. In this sense, we can say that Kant wants not so much to unify the
first two critiques by way of a third as he desires to maintai n the unity of
a self-same subject across disparate fields. He therefore merely
multiplies common sense across the l i nes of the three critiques (DR 137),
the harmony of the faculties always resting in the unity of the subject,
even i f this subject experiences its own dissolution as it stands before the
sublime. And this is to say that the epistemological dispute between
Kant and Descartes that proves so illustrative is ultimately formed from
the same moral soil, Kant' s fractured subject redeemed by the
presupposition of the moral law. For Kant, in short, the ground is moral.
B ut to the extent that every grou nd is undermined by what it attempts to
exclude, we can say that the fom1 of time inhabits thi s ground, mining
beneath the surface. As we will see, the explosivity of this form opens
onto the simulacrum of eternal recurrence.
How do we interpret the fracture that undermines the rule of identity?
Does it signify a duplicity of grounds, and so a tra11sfonnation of
ground? Would transformation ( i tself) then he the rondilion of the
ground, the activity of critique transformed hy awl i1110 the activity of
transfomiation? I nsofar as the ground would osrillalt: in bei ng
undermined, i t would continually shift, and so 11111ai11 i11 so111e sense
groundless, dying in being born, belonging to llll' rndl'I of becoming

Jason Winfree

19

even in res isting it. For Deleuze, this constitutes nothing less than "the
di scovery of a ground behind every ground, the relation between the
grou ndless and the ungrounded, the immediate reflection of the formless
and the superior form which consti tutes the eternal retu rn" (DR 67 ,
italics mine). Behind the ground of critique, then, beneath critique as the
activity of grounding and self-identity, lies another ground, one that
consists in the relation between the groundless and the now u ngrounded
or fractured. And this relation is further determined as the coexistence of
the reflection of formlessness and a superior form. Understood in terms
of this coexistence, the ground would indeed be transformed, constituted
by what would be. excluded from it by the strict sense of critique. And
this is to say that the activity of determination not only presupposes the
indeterm inate in the formal sense that would be required in order for
determination to function at all - a claim that ultimately belongs to the
logic of origin(s) - but also that the very functioning of determination
would repeat that which it excludes, and that it would do so precisely i n
i t s activity of exclusion. The determination of the formless must
therefore be heard in the double genitive, the work of determination
always the reflection of formlessness, its welling up beneath the
"ground", its emergence constituting the very activity of determination.
Surely, it is in this sense that Deleuze insists that "to ground is to
metamorphose" (DR I 54). The conception of ground that belongs to
critique in the strict sense would therefore not only come to be through
such transformation - it would in fact be nothing more than a particular
di stribution of this becoming, albeit one that has long domi nated the
hi story of the West. It is to just this metamorphosing that the fracture
would point, but also to its double, becoming and the being of becoming.
With this we arrive again at Nietzsche's impossible beginning, the
eternal return, what Deleuze refers to as the form of formlessness (DR
55). It is the eternal return that rumbles beneath the surface.
When N ietzsche poses the question of the value of critique, this
i ntensification of the question must not only evidence the fracture that
permeates critical i nquiry from the outset, but it must also expose the
manner in which resistance to the fracture inhibits philosophical
movement. And Deleuze ' s own treatment of the question of repetition
and the failures of the rule of identi ty-its inability to account for
di fference, repetition, individuation, stupidity (betise), creation-must
be u nderstood as critique in just this sense, as opening thinking to the
power of an aggression which has i n fact always threatened to tear i t
apart. The fragmentation towards which i t i s drawn is demanded from

20

Pli 1 1 (2001)

the outset insofar as the metamorphosing of the ground outstrips the law
of identity. And this is to say that this transformation marks a change in
the same, and thereby forces the same outside of itself, forces the
difficulty of its non-identity. Determination is always the determination
of difference, and according to Deleuze the challenge of eternal return
arises in conjunction with the demand that this difference be repeated.
He states,
That identity not be first, that it exist as a principle but as a second
principle, as a principle become; that it revolve around the
Different: such would be the nature of a Copernican revolution
which opens up the possibility of difference having its own
concept, rather than being maintained under the domination of a
concept in general already understood as identical. Nietzsche
meant nothing more than this by eternal return (DR 4 1 ) .
Eternal recurrence and yet another Copernican revolution-whatever
else might be said concern ing this coupling, we cannot ignore the force
of Deleuze ' s insistence that the poverty of representation makes itself
felt at every turn. For the difference that lies under every determination
cannot be illuminated by the work of analogy, as if the groundless and
the ungrounded were related not only by way of something they held in
common , but also as if the identity of that by which they would be
related could be presupposed. What then would it mean for di fference to
have its own concept? We should not be surprised if we do not recognize
such a concept, nor if it turns out to be impossible.
In fact, a concept of difference in Deleuze ' s sense requires above all a
constant redistribution of the transcendental and the empirical. We have
already seen how the rule of identity is abstracted from the form of
common sense and the good will of thought, raised to the level of
principle that secures the dominance and transcendental status of its
meagre empirical ori gins. The world of representation thereby achieves a
prominence that secures a structural blindness, restricting thought to a
circulation within its vicious circle. The economy of thi s circulation
retreats m both the question of the outside and that of the fracture,
reducing the former to madness, the latter to error. The transcendental
function of representation, therefore, not only fails lo account for its own
genesis, as we noted above, bu t it fails to accounl for this fail ure, one
which accordingly both belongs to it and exceeds it. Arni it is in just this
sense that "we always discover the necessity or reversing l h e supposed
relations or divisions between the empirical and I Ill' r r:insccndental"

Jason Winfree

21

when we encounter the limits of representation in this way (DR 167). Jn

fact, it is this very failure that forces Deleuze to redistribute the
transcendental in terms of difference and repeti tion: What is the "more
profound" repetition behind that which proceeds by generality? What is

the concept of difference behind every merely conceptual difference?

What is the condition of the ground? Each of these questions repeats the
transcendental structure of the question by way of an intensification and
proliferation, each repetition selecting from the transcendental the
possibility of repeating its form and raising it to a new level, all the
while destroying the rule of its former deployment. According to
Deleuze, the elevation of the transcendental cannot be understood as the
movement of Au.fheben, for nothing of the former distribution i s
preserved. To constantly reverse the relation of the transcendental and
the empirical does not mean that we now begin with one, later the other;
such a reversal is nothing more than a repetition of the economy of
representation and its circularity. I t means rather that these rel ations
constantly be encountered otherwise than by way of representation, such
that everything has to with the encou nter that representation would
prohibit, and that nevertheless haunts th is very prohibition.
That which is experienced in the encounter situated at the l imit of
representation is nothing less than the principle of a superior
transcendental empiricism, the problem of the ontological in all its
difficulty. "Empiricism truly becomes transcendental, and aesthetics an
apodictic discipline, only when we apprehend directly in the sensible
that which can only be sensed, the very being of the sensible" (DR 57).
To better understand this, it is helpful to juxtapose it with yet another
passage from Nietzsche and Philosophy, one where Deleuze states that
"[w]ithin critique it is not a matter of justification, but a different way of
sensing: an other sensibility" (N 94). '0 And this other sensibility is
understood by Deleuze as a sort of category shift that opens within the
space of the fracture, and that is ex pressed elsewhere in terms of the
displacement of the possible by the virtual, the general by the universal,
the particular by the singular. To be sure, each of these formulations
9

"Our problem concerns the essence of repetition," writes Deleuze. "lt is a question
of knowing why repetition cannot be explained by the form of identity in concepts or
representations; in what sense it demands a superior 'positive' principle" (DR 18).
10 Translation altered. See Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie (Presses
Universitaires de France, 1962), I 08. "Dans la critique, ii ne s' agit pas de justifier,
mais de sentir autrement: une autre sensibili te." Tomlinson translates this: "The point
of critique is not justification but a different way of feeling: another sensibility" (N
94).

22

Pli 1 1 (2001 )

testifies both to the domain and the difficulty of Deleuze ' s inquiry. Stil l,
we miss the force of th is though t-movement entirely if we u nderstand it
in terms of the institution of a new set of categories, and for this reason
we must avoid fetishizing the language of transformation at all costs. It
is not a matter of establ ishing the virtual, the universal or the singular: it
is certainly not a matter of the reification of that which i s expressed in
these shifts, but rather concerns going to the heart of the space that this
langu age attempts to hold open. For aside from the fact that such an
understanding would quite literally be impossible, the understandi ng
belonging to a predetermined distribution and legiti mation of the
"proper" categories, what interests Deleuze is the structure of the shift
itself, and we are already in it in a certain sense. "It is not enough,
therefore, Lo propose a new representation of movement; representation
is already mediation. Rather, it is a question of producing movement,
making movement itself a work, without interposition ; of substituting
direct signs for mediate representations," states Deleuze (DR 8, my
i talics). Can this structure be written in such a way that it is not
smothered by its very articulation? Can writing bear the eternal return?
What is presupposed in our posing these questions in terms of capacity
or capability? "It is [i ndeed] a matter of knowing what it means to
'produce movement,' to repeat or to obtain by repetition" (DR 1 1 ) .
I n the "Preface" to Difference and Repetition, Deleuze describes h i s
work a s a sort o f philosophical collage. The names o f Plato and
Aristotle, Descartes and Kant, Leibniz and Hegel, Kierkegaard and
Nietzsche, to mention but a few, mark intensities within this complex,
the points at which images border one another producing the contrasts
and voicing the differentials by which the whole comes into view. And
the same can be said for the two quotations we have just cited. In the
first, Deleuze speaks directly of the question of producing movement,
while in the second he places this production in quotation marks,
suspending or interrupting)its work, at least temporari ly. The entire text
is in fact constituted by such claims and their withdrawal, statements
repeated by virtue of their suspension, always operati ng within the space
of this give and take. If we are to understand what it means to repeat, or
to obtain repetition, we must be attentive to this tension, the difference
that substitutes direct signs for mediate representations, and the
suspension of these direct signs in favor of what they would signal, this
suspension itself repeating the withdrawal of that which exceeds
representation, even at the risk of reinscription. The difference is situated
along the lines of the being of the sensible and the problem of passage,

Jason Winfree

23

or of the passage of the being of the sensible into thought, its eru ption,
interruption, and corruption within the world of representation . We must
therefore pay heed not only to the movement of Deleuze' s text, but its
very disappearance.
The being of the sensible, the object of encounter that forces thought
and that alone constitutes the proper "object" of philosophical inquiry, i s
indeed imperceptible, inaccessible t o the world o f representation. This is
because representation encounters the sensible only where it bears
directly upon the senses in an object that can also be recalled, imagined,
or conceived. In short, for representation, the sensible is that which
cannot only be sensed, but rather that which can in principle be
accounted for by faculties other than sense, for example by way of
analogy or judgment, always presupposi ng the exercise of the senses and
the other faculties in a common sense. Within representation, sensibility
does indeed grasp what is given , but it does not aspire to that by which
the given is given. Although Deleuze says for this very reason that the
whole of phenomenology is constituted as a mere epiphenomenology
(DR 52), we cannot help hearing at this point at least a distant resonance
with Heidegger. As Deleuze puts it, "It is not a sensible being but the
being of the sensible" that we are after. "It is not the given bu t that by
which the given i s given. It is therefore in a certain sense the
imperceptible [insensible]" (DR 1 40). And like Heidegger's Being and
Time, which opens with the perplexity of the Sophist, Deleuze insists
that this being moves the soul, 'perplexes' it, forces it to pose a problem
(ibid.), and that it does so only when encountered in its strangeness.
The "object" of philosophical di scourse, the being of the sensible, is
then that which i s unsaid in critique, that which critique in the strictest
sense cannot even say, that which in its very exclusion comes to the fore
as forgotten. To be sure, it is not empirically forgotten, something that at
one time must have been seen, heard, imagined or thought. What is
encountered in the heart of critique is instead a sort of transcendental
forgetting, and it is in this way that the encounter is itself raised to the
level of the transcendental. The fracture of critique is therefore not
merely the point of access to the tra nscendental, as if one could choose
to proceed further or decline to do so, but rather the very force of the
transcendental, the point of its intensification. Confronted with such an
"object," and unaware of this confrontation precisely insofar as the
"object" is imperceptible, the faculties find themselves before their
limits, forced into a transcendental exercise drawn not from the
empirical, but from that which is, strictly speaking, transcendent. In this

24

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

sense, "the transcendental form of a faculty is indistinguishable from its

disjointed, superior or transcendent exercise" (DR 1 43). And this means
that the forgetti ng here at issue i s itself a positive power, that which
forces a thought outside of representation. We must therefore return to a
passage cited earlier, where Deleuze states: "the conditions of a true
critique and a true creation are the same: the destruction of an image of
thought which presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in
thought itself' (DR 1 39). With th is Deleuze indicates not so much that
the conditions of true critique and true creation would be the same, but
that insofar as this is the case, the destruction of the image of thought
that presupposes itself is itself the genesis of the act of thinking in
thought. Nietzsche puts the point more succinctly when he describes the
Dionysian as "the eternal will to procreation, to fruitfulness, to
rec urrence; the feel ing of the necessary unity of creation and
destruction" ( WP 1 050). Or agai n , when he writes in Ecce Homo that
"
"negating and destroying are conditions of saying Yes ! (Jasagen)"
With this, we return to the question with which we began, the
question of the condition, or rather, the question of the condition is
returned to us i n the form of an affirmation. According to Nietzsche,
eternal return is that by which all other modes of thought will perish ( WP
1 053), and by which thinking and life will be returned to the innocence
of amor.fati. We in fact witness the destruction of the dogmatic image of
thought throughout Nietzsche' s work, especially when he di agnoses the
need to believe in being, unity, the subject, cause and effect, the moral
life, or grammar - in short, the necessity of the work of illusion in the
preservation and constitu tion of a certain kind of life. But it is when his
texts turn upon themselves, diagnosing their own restrictions and
excesses that Nietzsche' s work is at its most revolutionary . One such
text he refers to as the high-point of his meditation, and it i s no doubt the
startin g point for Deleuze' s understanding Qi; eternal return. It is found in
The Will to Power no. 61 7, where Nietzsche writes: "That everything
recurs is the most extreme approximation of a world of becoming to a
world of being" ( WP 617, trans. modified). To say that eternal recurrence
approximates a world of being, even in this most extreme manner, in no
way indicates an identification of the world of being with that of
becoming. Two points of extreme i mportance follow. First, i nsofar as the
world of being is nothing more than a useful fiction, eternal return
approximates a necessary illusion. And the approximation of an il lu sion
1 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage
Books Edition, 1 989), "Why I am Destiny," 4. Italics mine.

Jason Winfree

25

is not even ill usory, although perh aps no less necessary. More
importantly, though, insofar as the usefulness of this fiction is
proportionate to a condemnation of and discontent with becoming,
eternal recurrence would be the approximation by which becoming
would resist itself, contesting i ts own identity. Deleuze has something
like this mind when he states, "It is not the same which returns, it is not
the similar which returns; rather, the Sarne is the returning of that which
returns, - in other words, of the Different; the similar is the return ing of
that which returns, - in other words, of the Dissimilar" (DR 300). J n
short, it is difference that returns, return ing each time in all its
difference.
Difference and Repetition sets out to account for just thi s difference,
and so too the necessity of the approximation indicated in the high-point
of Nietzsche's meditation. But if eternal return marks the deferral of
difference and thereby repeats it, could we even understand this marking
as an account of the movement of d i fference? What would be the
difference between difference and repetition, on the one hand, and the
thought of eternal return as an approximation thereof, on the other?
Might this difference be disastrous, situated at the very limit of writing?
According to Deleuze, of course, eternal recurrence is selective.
Whether it functions as a cosmological or physical doctrine, or as an
ethical test, Deleuze understands this selection in terms of an
intensification of the transcendental, as the repetition by which the
transcendental encounters the ontological. Under both aspects, selection
at once names the transcendental forgetting at the heart of critique and
the force of affirmation. What is affirmed is the repetition and
distribution of difference, or more precisely, the distribution of
difference in repetition is i tself the affirmation and being of becoming, a
formula Deleuze does not hesitate to invoke. 1 2 He means by this above
all that the return here at issue is not the return of a preformed,
presupposed identity. Instead, what returns is nothing more than
returning itself, the recurrence of becoming that is required if becoming
is to become at al l. It is for this very reason that Deleuze insists on the
selection of eternal return, indicating that such a thought would be
contradictory if the reactive returned as well as the active (N 72). We
miss this point altogether if we insist upon the fact that Nietzsche is
expl icit that everything returns, active and reactive, and that Deleuze's
interpretation fails insofar as it does not take this into account. For such
an insistence would require that we conceive of the return as the return
12

"The eternal return is the being of becoming" (N 7 1 ).

26

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

of existing identities, a s the bare repetition of what already exists, and so

in turn, as the closure and impossibili ty of becoming. It would, in other
words, return us to the economy of representation. And even if such a
return eventually proves necessary for Deleuze, it will occur along other
lines. Neither the importance nor the failure of Deleuze's account of
eternal recurrence has anything to do with its adherence to the letter of
Nietzsche's text. Rather, the significance of Deleuze' s account lies in its
repetition of the approximation of a world of becoming to a world of
being, in its pursuit of the most extreme ontological question and the
expression of becoming therein. Indeed, according to Deleuze, eternal
return expresses nothing less than the attainment of the univocity of
being. It is the form of formlessness, the form of change or
transformation itself, the unity of the univocity of being and the
difference of which this being is univocally said. Such difference is
realized only through repetition, and repetition produces only the
real ization of difference. It is no doubt in this sense that Deleuze says
that "the only realized Ontology - in other words, the univocity of
being - is repetition" (DR 303). Repetition in the eternal return
expresses the univocity of being precisely insofar as retu rning i s
understood a s the being o f becoming, that which is only insofar as i t
continues to become. Repetition is o n this account synonymous with
selective being, for the repetition of becoming requires that much be
forgotten , left behind, destroyed (DR 298). With the eternal return,
difference is di scovered, but behind difference there is nothing (DR 56).
It is at this point that everything collapses, although not because the
selective account fails, but rather because it works all too well . If the
selection of eternal return is to succeed, surely eternal return must
submit itself to this selection, for Deleuze is emphatic that nothing that
denies the selective principle returns. Otherwis put, if the repetition of
eternal recurrence is understood as "the formles being of all differences,
the formless power of the ground which carries every object to that
extreme 'form' in which its representation becomes undone" (DR 57),
surely such a repetition would have to undo its own account, contesting
every form that arises, including its own. But this is to say that the
selective doctrine of eternal return cannot pass the test of its own
selection, or that it can do so only at the cost of its destruction. If the
selective account of eternal recurrence returns, then its selection will
have failed, proved illusory, sending hack only itself, returning with its
identity in tact. If it does not return, however, we still cannot affirm its
selection in any fashion, since ii wo uld leave no trace of "itself," since

Jason Winfree

27

there would be nothing left to be affirmed. The selection of eternal return

therefore confronts us as what Benjamin refers to as a purple passage,
"one which is more successful than everything else and after which you
suddenly do not know how to go on. Something has gone awry. It is as if
there is such a thing as bad or unfruitful success . . . ". " Such would be the
success and the force of Deleu ze' s repetition of the transcendental,
perhaps closing down that which it would open. And the structure of
selection would thereby repeat the force of critique, si tuating itself
within its own unravelling, disappearing in the midst of its very
constitution. The eternal return of eternal return as the most burdensome
thought, the repetition of oblivion, an impossible affirmation. Or to
quote Nietzsche: "' Change' belongs to the essence, therefore also
temporality: with this, however, the necessity of change has only been
posited once more conceptually" (WP 1 064). Our language and our
thinking would bear the eternal return only in its effacement and
disillusion.

II .

... I nto Fragments ...

With this remark, Nietzsche calls our attention once again to the
extremities of the ontological problematic, the limit where 'change' and
essence, transformation and being, are said to belong together. In
assigning 'change' to essence, Nietzsche indicates that its necessity is
only posited once again, reduced to a conceptual necessity. But what is
the necessity of this 'once more', and what of the qualification that
accompanies it, the "only [ .. . ] once again" upon which Nietzsche insists?
How does the necessity of change stand in relation to the need to repeat
it conceptually? Could there be another sort of positing, one that would
not be conceptual, or, on the other hand, perhaps a relation to 'change'
outsid s,.of discursivity? Is this what would be indicated by the quotation
marks that Nietzsche places around this most elusive word, suspending i t
such that its movement would be effected i n its effacement and effaced
in its effect? This question is indeed situated at the limits of language.
While both Deleuze and Bl anchot insist upon the necessity of plural
speech, however, it is for Blanchot a necessity that "constitutes" the

1 3 Walter Benjamin, "Once is as Good as Never," in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, 19271934, trans. Rodney Livingstone, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary
Smith {Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1 999), p. 739.

28

Pli 11

(200 1 )

exigency of the fragment. A n d i t i s t o this exigency that we now turn, to

the fragment of a conversation (entretien) or relation between . . . .
The text comes from The /Jfinite Conversation, the section entitled
"On a Change of Epoch: The Exigency of Return," and it is situated
within a dialogue concern ing the end of history and eternal return, the
closure of metaphysics and the openness of the future. B l anchot suggests
that we should be attentive to what is said with "the end of history,"
since the eternal return borrows its formulation from this end, even in
exceeding it. For from a certain point of view, that everything returns
presupposes a completed total ity. The conversation begins with the
question of how this returning might be said otherwise, with how the end
of history might be marked differently.
"Saying it differently", what exceeds the whole, what (forever)
exceeding the whole, can "say" itself "differently"?
" We know by hypothesis that this-this speech or this nonspeech-still belongs to the whole.
--Certainly, by hypothesis.
--But, by hypothesis, it marks itself off.from it.
-- Yes, by hypothesis
- - We therefore have something that is of the whole, that
totalizes itself therein, and, as such, marks itself offfrom it. "
Is thi s not what the Eternal Return says (neither hypothetically
nor categorically)? (JC 276)
From the outset of thi s entretien, what is at issue is the possibility of a
different kind of saying. And in the very first lines, Blanchot attempts to
let this difference be said, doubling it by way of a repeti tion, but a so
withdrawing it. "Saying it differently," the first clause of the fragment, is
at once pulled in two directions. It refers to both what would be said
differently in repeating the question of h istory as eternal return, but also
indicates that this different way of saying is expressed in what follows,
in the phrase which says differently in its specific repetition of the
question. For in the midst of the question that would say differently, both
the saying and the difference it would bear are suspended in quotation
marks, never to be returned to transparency. They are suspended because
the question of a different way of saying, a saying situated outside the
whole, is precisely what is i n question.
The conversation that follows repeats the fragility that this language
would bear, a repetition whose insignificance will be of the utmost

Jason Winfree

29

importance. From the outset it indicates that the speech that would "say
differently" - and so too, then, the very speech in which we would now
find ourselves - is known to belong to the whole by hypothesis . I ndeed,
"[c]ertainly, by hypothesis." And this is to say that the manner in which
this speech would be known to belong to the whole would itself be
uncertain, since no hypothesis i s the bearer of certainty. To the extent
that it is opened within the hypothetical, though, even this uncertainty
belongs to the economy of calculation, throw ing the dice only in
accordance with the probability of a favorable return, and so offering no
relief to the different way of saying that would belong to the cruelty and
risk of eternal return. The conversation continues within this circuit, and
suggests that at the same time, by hypothesis, such a saying would mark
itself off from the whole, thereby indicating this saying as both
belonging and not belonging. Insofar as this too is u nderstood by way of
the hypothetical, though, the insufficiency of the conversation to voice
thi s difference becomes all too apparent. This inadequacy is marked as
the conversation ends, and at the same time is repeated in this phrase,
which (we will not say hypothetically) neither belongs nor does not
belong to the conversation: "Is this not what the eternal return says
(neither hypothetically nor categorically)?" writes B lanchot. The eternal
return would then say what no communication could bear, bearing itself
in thi s impossibility, in the failure of the language that would be drawn
from it and that it draws along with it, such that " ' the everything comes
again' has already ruined itself." " The exigency of return would arise in
the space of the failure of its expression, its expression noth ing but the
failure that (cannot) bear(s) it, the expression of a neuter, un pas au-de la.
Therefore, Blanchot repeats once again the exigency of repeti tion:
'"Saying it differentl y ' , to write the return, i s always al ready to affirm
detour, just as it is to affirm by repetition difference without beginning
or end" (IC 277).
What is the character of this affirmation, the affirmation of detour
that B l anchot says is affirmed just as difference is affirmed by its
repetition? If difference is affirmed by repetition, i ndeed affirmed in (all)
its difference, the affirmation of detour that would be affirmed in the
same way would necessarily be affi rmed differently. Or, to put it
otherwise, if the affirmation of difference in repetition is such that each
repetition must differ in order to bear this difference, then surely the
affirmation of detour must repeat this differentially. This differential is
1 4 Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany, N Y : State
University of New York Press, 1 992), p. 1 5 . Hereafter cited as SNB.

30

Pli

1 1 (200 1 )

marked i n Blanchot ' s repetition of eternal return in the form of

hesitation, an uncertainty that is by no means certain. He writes, "Let us
gamble on the future: let us affirm the indeterm inate relation with the
future as though this indetermi nacy, by the affirmation that confirms it,
were to render the thought of return active" (JC 280, my i talics). The
differential of this repetition is marked by the 'as though ' , a hesitation
that does not precede the dice throw, but rather accompanies it i n
awaiting the fall of the dice t o the earth. Blanchot ' s affirmation, in short,
hesitates to affirm the being of becoming, what Deleuze also refers to as
the becoming-identical of becoming (DR 4 1 ). It hesitates, in other words,
to affirm Deleuze ' s affirmation, and perhaps thereby repeats it. As !f we
do not know what it would mean for return to return as active, our
relation to the return a relation constituted by what B lanchot calls the
"greatest power of lack" that belongs to the future. In thi s sense, "[o]ne
cannot [even] believe in the eternal return. This is its only guarantee, its
'verification"' (SNB 14 ). Such would be the difference of eternal return
as deferral, affirmation coming always too late or too early, the
affirmation of the impossibility of affirmation.
To forget that eternal return is a vertiginous movement endowed with
force would therefore be to return to the return the force of forgetting.
Saying this, to quote Blanchot, "we say almost nothing," but neither do
we simply repeat Deleuze ' s claim that eternal return indicates that
difference lies behind everything, and behind difference there is nothing.
Rather, we repeat it differentially , and so take from it the lesson i t would
give, all the while leaving it behind. It is in this sense that the exigency
of the fragment opens within the failure of the selective doctrine,
reminding us that this failure perhaps says almost nothing. And we
should not underestimate the weakness of thi s conditional, which
entreats (entretien) the thought of eternal return to the point of t
collapse, returning to it the fragmentation of its expression. To forget
that eternal return is a vertiginous movement endowed with force is thus
also to remember, although without repairing or putting back together,
Nietzsche' s notes from The Will to Power 1 057, where he indicates not
only the need for a means by which eternal return would be endured, but
also the necessity of its disposal . To forget that eternal return is such a
movement is to return the return to the space of the fragment, the neuter,
to enter into the destructive element. Almost nothing opens from the
space of the eternal return of the fragment - this, perhaps, we have
almost said. And so to repeat once again, "everything is played out in the

Jason W infree

31

manner i n which the thought of eternal return i s communicated," and so

in the obl ivion that this communication in all its repetition would bear.

Pli 1 1 (2001 ) , 32-35.

Nietzsche, or, The Parting of the Waters

ERIC ALLIEZ

It is impossible not to make out Nietzsche 's figure (and Michel

Foucault's reading of the philosopher from Sils Maria) behind the
intense polemic provoked in Germany by Peter Sloterdijk 's conference,
entitled "Rules for the Human Park ". Question: will the charge of neo
conservatism, which yesterday was thrown at Nietzsche (and Foucault)
and today is renewed against Sloterdijk, suffice to block any questioning
regarding both the unthoughts of humanism and its forms, liberal ones
included, of "taming the species " ?
I n a recent article, Bruno Latour celebrated by way of a "Sloterdijk
'
Affair" the appearance of A New Nietzsche. Daring and provocative as
this suggestion may be, it is worthy of interest on two counts:

it indirectly recalls the fact that Sloterdijk is above all a great reader of
Nietzsche, this thinker who takes you from behind and gives you a
child, as Deleuze put it, giving one the taste for speaking "by affts,
intensities, experiences, experiments ... " - and anyone will be able to
judge for himself by glancing through this work which was translated
into French a dozen years ago: Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche 's

2
Materialism;

it directly situates Nietzsche at the point of crystallization of the

"S loterdijk Affair" - indissociable in my eyes from the "Habermas

1 Le Monde des Debat.s, n 8, November 1 999.

2 Peter Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche '.1 M11taio/i.1111
University o f M innesota Press, 1 989).

(Minneapoli s :

E ric Alliez

33

Case" and this for reasons which go beyond the framework of said
affair. 3
So, Nietzsche or modernity's parting of the waters?
As good genealogists, we'll begin by an all too certain end.
This end i s that of Critical Theory such as it will have, de .facto,
coincided historically with the liquidation of its Nietzschean component,
the de jure prelude to the liquidation of the legacy of the Frankfurt
School by Habermas himself. I n a "Return" (how could he not?)" to Kant
4
and Fichte". For it could not be denied that Nietzsche provided the
initial impetus behind the project of an experimental philosophy - of an
Experimentum Mundi to use Bloch 's term - demanded by the
deconstruction of a Dialectic of Enlightenment (whose subtitle is not
5
without its Nietzschean ring: Philosophical Fragments ). What followed
is well known. Noting that the Dialektik der Aufkliirung "owes more to
Nietzsche than the mere strategy of a critique of ideology which turns on
itself' on account of a confused "rhetoric" which tends to associate
reason and domination, power and ratification-legitimation; seeing in the
critique of instrumental reason a negation of universal morality insofar
as it masks "imperatives whose end is to guarantee both self
conservation and domination" - which cannot but lead one back to a
Nietzschean "unbridled scepticism" (and to its Foucauldian echoes) Habermas will make it his mission to finally have done with this
Nietzschean legacy. As we know, this will involve extricating the
"universalistic foundations of law and morality" from the per.formative
contradiction which haunts a reason that denies itself with its own
instruments ... And to establish through this logic of the One the rights of
a communicative rationality transcendent to any "theory of power",
6
superior to any "aesthetic glorification" of force.
It follows that any Why we are Habermasians is declined into a
ringing Why we are not Nietzscheans. Its manifesto-value depends on the
intersection, behind the scenes, of read ings of Nazism and Stalinism
(destruction of Reason
destruction of Democracy), whilst the stage is
=

3
See my article in Le Monde des Debats : "L' Affaire Slocertlijk ou le Cas Habermas?"
4 Cf. J. Habermas, Knowledge and Huma11 /11terest (Cambridge: Policy, 1 994), Ch. 9

[Suhrkamp, 1 968].
5
M . Horkheimer, T. Adorno, The Dialectic of E11lighte11me11t (London: Verso, 1 997)
[First Edition: 1 944].
6Cf. J. Habermas, The Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1 987),
Ch. 5 [Suhrkamp, 1 985].

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

34

occupied by the Installation-Opposition of tradition and argumentation .

Carried to the heights of the "ethics of discussion'', Nietzschean
philosophy is finally revealed for what it was all along: a neo
tradi tionalism and a neo-conservatism. 7
Whereby we refer less to Sloterdijk than to the Affair destined to bear
his name. Let us now imagine a reader who had not let himself be
blinded by the extreme clarity of these arguments, who perhaps was even
alerted by the more "performative" than "pu blic" nature of the Trial, 8
and who, tradition oblige . . , in the half-light of his study is holding a
book between his hands, the very one mentioned above, with its slightly
pre-destined title: The Thinker on Stag e. Well, this reader will have the
luck of discovering a rare text, a model of commentary, or rather, of
accompanimen t, which in order to think the dramatic structure of
Aufkliirung brings to bear on Nietzsche' s first work, The Birth of
Tragedy, an empathy that one is tempted to call "rhythmic". So that the
"dictatorship of transparency", to which some have attempted to reduce
Aujkliirung, will be replaced by the dramaturgy of forces, Appolonian
and Dionysian, at work ever since its centauresque birth. (Here one
should, like Baudelaire, think of Delacroix, this pai nter drunk with
music, as the leader of the modern school.) Through the intensity of the
projection of Nietzsche upon a largely halluci natory antiquity, through
the method of dramatization to which Sloterdijk submits the text to
extract from it an "original hi story of subjectivity" (which is not yet the
doctrine of the will to power), this play of forces counts as a definition of
a model of truth which undoes the identity of representation and throws
existence into self-experimentation, in a tragic theatre whose pri nciple
states: "the unbearable imposes the constraint of art".
Or, life considered sub specie artis.
Now, what Sloterdijk shows masterfully, is that the genius and
actuality of Nietzsche depend, from The Birth of Tragedy onwards, on
the excess of this proposition with regard to its seconda(Y
manifestations, whether Romantic, Schopenhaurian, Wagnerian, etc . , but
also with regard to the idea of a way towards the historical compromise
between Apollo and Dionysus, the sufferi ng God. After Nietzsche thi s
excess has a name, a name both new and ancient which fastens onto the
.

7 Cf. L. Ferry, "La critique nietzscheenne de la democratie", Les Critiques de la

Modernite Politique, ed. by Alain Renault (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1 999).
8lncluding Der Spiegel which did not hesitate to put on the cover of one of its issues a
rather amusing photomontage joining Nietzsche, Sloterdijk . . . and Dolly, the cloned
sheep!

E ric Alliez

35

"Dionysianism of the ordinary" and onto the transmutation of the

sufferi ng of individuation: philosophy. Or, how to make the unbearable
bearable by tran.forming it into a gay science in which life is first and

foremost its own poetization - not the object of se(f-reffoxive

deconstruction. "Authentic philosophy" - writes Sloterdijk - "appears
therefore as the Dionysian calm after the storm. It is the ceremony of the
ordinary in the light of excess."
Against the worn-out Aufkliirung of modernity's protestant wing, the
Nietzschean Aujk!iirung presents itself as a somatic aesthetics wagering
on intelligence as the dramaturgy of thought: open to what may happen
in the form of a challenge to the present time. Against "common values"
therefore, but not through the aristocratism of a desocialized body
flirting with the abyss, as the parti sans of Critical Theory feared; instead,
by virtue of the most sensitive problematic of modernity, according to a
"nocturnal concept of politics which brings attention to the hidden
ecology of the world's pain", a concept making its own, with Nietzsche,
"the proto-political ground of pain and pleasure, which precedes any
action and any reaction on the level of everyday politics."
'
This pressing urgency, what Sloterdijk sees as our task, is that of a

dionysiac materialism .

Translated by Alberto Toscano

P/i 1 1 (2001 ), 36-61 .

The Method of Nature, The Crisis of Critiq ue

The Problem of Individuation
in Nietzsche's 1 867/1 869 Notebooks

ALBERTO TOSCANO

This is the real problem of philosophy, the unending

purposiveness of organisms and the unconsciousness in their
coming to be.
Nietzsche, On the Origins of Language
Everywhere, and even in the history of materialism, the principle
holds that the straight path is not always the shortest.
Nietzsche, Notes for an Essay on Democritus

1 . April 1 868

In the midst of a period of convalescence following a riding accident

during his military service in Naumburg, the 23-year old Nietzsche
undertakes a project for an academic dissertation entitled The Concept of
the Organic since Kant. ' By May, the project, preceded by extensiv
notes on Democri tus and Schopenhauer, is abandoned, and gives way to
a period of sustained inquiry into the field of philology, centring around
the work and sources of Diogenes Laertius and the relationship between

1 See the letters to Paul Deussen (May-April 1 868) and Erwin Rohde (May 3rd or 4th)
dating from this period. Friedrich Nietzsche, Briefe in Historisch-Kritische
Gesamtausgabe (Vol. JI) (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1 938).

Alberto Toscano

37

philology and Homer.' One could comfortably argue that nothing has
taken place; that the young Nietzsche, armed with a vague intuition
regarding a hotly contested area within post-Kantian philosophy, merely
fashioned a collage of quotes and fragmentary insights, never attaining
anything l ike the groundwork of a thesis , or even a problem.' Needless to
The texts examined below, save the brief fragment 011 the Origin of Language
(which appears in Crawford, see below), are to be found in the third volume of
Friedrich Nietzsche, Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Beck, 1 933-1 940), under
the heading Philosophische Notizen. For the purposes of this essay I have made use of
the only available English translation, which appears as an appendix to Claudia
Crawford' s The Beginnings of Nietzsche 's Theory of Language (Berlin: de Gruyter,
1 988). This text also contains a very competent treatment of the notes on Kant and
teleology, to my knowledge also the only one in the English langu age (See Crawford,
Ch. 8). All page numbers in brackets within the text refer to Crawford ' s translations,
which I have only amended in their translations of the term Zweckmaj]ig, which she
renders as "expedient" and which I have changed to "purposive" in order to be
consistent with current translations of Kant. I have also taken into consideration the
translation and critical apparatus in the Italian edition of the Notizen, edited by
Giuliano Campioni and Federico Gerratana: Friedrich Nietzsche, Appunti Filosofici
1867- 1869 I Omero e la Filo/ogia Classica (Milano: Adelphi, 1 993).
3 Since he grasps the notebooks as the very exhibition of the impossibility of the
philosophical act and/or discourse in Nietzsche, in Jean-Luc Nancy's reading this is
ultimately the judgement passed on Nietzsche's encounter with Kant's treatment of
tel eology. We are faced with a veritable paradox i n the interpretation which is
embodied in the following two theses: I ) the 1 868 notebooks are nothing but the ill
informed pastiche of an immature student, cobbled together from some neo-Kantian
sources, whilst ignoring the work of Kant himself; 2) the 1 868 notebooks are the
dramatisation of Nietzsche's experience of the impossibility of (academic?)
philosophy, exemplary of the thinker's encounter with the ineluctable limits of his
supposed discipline. I would argue that the co-presence, the interweaving, of these
two theses is symptomatic of the deconstructive reading's myopia, its peculiar
inability to capture the individuality of the problematic deployed in Nietzsche's texts.
See Jean-Luc Nancy, 'La these de Nietzsche sur la Teleologie' in Nietzsche
Aujourd 'hui (Paris: UGE, 1 973) Vol. I [The English translation which I've used here,
'N ietzsche ' s Thesis on Teleology', appears in L.A. Rickels, ed., Looking after
Nietzsche (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1 990), pp. 49-66]. For my part, I shall try to show
that, even if, with some reservations, we might accept thesis ( I ), we can nevertheless
navigate between the Scylla of complete dismissal and the Charybdis of over
dramatisation by isolating in the early notebooks the threads of a very specific
problematic, one that will periodically resurface in Nietzsche's work. It is blindness
to this problematic (a surprising one, given Nancy's highlighting of the relationship of
the thesis to work undertaken by Nietzsche on Democritus, Schopenhauer, and
Lange) that finally allows Nancy to state: "The draft of 1 868, in effect, does not
harbour the first of Nietzsche's mature thinking; we will find nothing in i t , which
2

38

Pli

1 1 (200 1 )

say, the possibility of rebutting such an initial impression demands some

sort of justification from a reading that would claim any kind of higher
status for Nietzsche's early notebooks. In my view, there are three
interpretive paths that could be called upon to deploy the reasons for
such a claim. 1 ) Internal sign(ficance. The 1 868 Notebooks read as
precursors of Nietzsche's later engagement with the natural sciences,
with the questions of teleology and individuation. 2) Conjunctural
significance. The notebooks read as symptoms of a contemporary
engagement with the question of teleology. Nietzsche's notes would be
the distant and somewhat inexpert trace of the debate on indi viduality
that sustained the i ntercourse between the biological sciences and
4
philosophy all throughout the German nineteenth century.
3)
Conceptual significance. The notebooks read as a singular concatenation
of three conceptual elements into a veritable philosophical problem. The
three elements are materialism, individuation, and teleology, and the
problem can be initially transposed into the general question: What
would constitute a materialist (i.e. non-anthropomorphic and non
representational) theory of individuation that would account fo r the
evidence of teleology ? The philosophical stance indicated by such a
question, which F.A. Lange baptised as that of a 'Materialism after Kant'
or materiale ldealismus could receive a further series of names: critical
materialism, materialist critique, or even transcendental materialism.
In what follows my approach will consist of a hybrid of ( I ) and (3).
The nature of the notebooks is such that they are almost wholly tributary
of F.A. Lange's own reception of the sciences of the day, so that unlike
Nietzsche' s later independent forays in the natural and particularly the
biological sciences they afford little in the way of an ori ginal insight or
even an idiosyncratic refraction of the transformations undertaken by the
might allow us to assess, laterally, some simple difference vis-a-vis the later texts.
Something else must be at stake." [49] I hope this essay will show that Nancy'li
judgement is all too hasty, depending as it does on a typical dismissal of Nietzsche' s
post-Kantian sources, as well as what is in my view a complete disregard of the
novelty that the intersection of Schopenhauer and Lange's theses on individuality
brings to the becoming of Nietzsche's thought.
4 A masterful genealogy of this debate can be found in Andrea Orsucci 's Dalla
bio/ogia cel/ulare a/le scienze de/lo spirito. Aspelli de/ diba//ito sul/ 'indivdiualita
11ell '011ocento tedesco. (Bologna: ii Mulino, 1 992). Orsucci places both Lange and
Nietzsche firmly within the biophilosophical fray, in dialogue and divergence with
figures such as Trendeleburg, Yirchow, and von Baer. One of the most commendable
traits of Orsucci's fine book lies precisely i n laying out how t hese debates took place
in a fertile climate of indiscernibility between the spcrnlative ;11 1 d the experimental.

Alberto Toscano

39

concepts of indi vidual and purpose in the second half of the ni neteenth
century. What the notebooks do register in a striking manner are the
effects of two veritable events in Nietzsche 's intel lectual biography,
taking the form of two books whose ideas, in quite heterogeneous ways,
will haunt his work to the very end: Arthur Schopenahauer' s The World
as Will and Representation and Friedrich Albert Lang e ' s History of

Materialism.
With regard to the former, we are all famil iar with the narrative of the
disciple's painful sloughing off of his educator's influence. This is an
often linear narrative, beginning with Nietzsche's ultimately doomed
attempt, in the Birth of Tragedy, at transforming the Schopenhaurian
framework i nto the basis of a philosophy of a tragic affi rmation, and i s
pu nctuated b y later reflections and self-critiques in N i etzsche' s work
bearing on his relationship to the phi losopher of the wil l . The dominant
themes in this approach are those of pessimism and affirmation. As we
shall shortly see, the unfinished draft of an essay On Schopenhauer,
which immediately precedes the notes on Kant and teleology, is enough
to problematize this received stance and to belie Nietzsch e ' s own claim,
in 'Schopenhauer as Educator' ( 1 874), that he had never found any
paradoxes in the great man' s work, only minor errors.' Indeed, there is
someth ing striking in seeing to what extent the reasons for the eventual
divorce with Schopenhauer's metaphysics is contained in nuce in these
very early reflections. Of course, these are reasons that will only truly
emerge once questions regarding the being of becoming and
individuation become much more decisive for Nietzsche and override the
initial role of Schopenhauer as exemplar. For several years the
embryonic insights contained in these notes will be buried, deferred by
the focus on the philosophical life and on the poetizing, dramatic nature
of philosophy as an affi rmative art.
Within the bounds of Anglophone scholarship, there has been far less
recognition of Lange's arguably equivalent formative influence on the
character and development of Nietzsche's work. This is mainly to be
accounted for by the relative paucity of Nietzsche's explicit references to
Lange and by the fact that the nature of this influence is quite different
from that of Schopenhauer. I n deed, it is only in terms of a
5 Friedrich Nietzsche, Unfashionable Observations (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1 995), p. 1 80.
6 The only English text of note, one that is extremely persuasive in its case for
Lange's influence, is George J. Stack, Lange and Nietzsche (Berlin: de Gruyter,
1 983).

40

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

comprehensive view o f Ni etzsche' s work that w e can recognise the long

term 'subterranean ' effects that Lange ' s great book had on his concepts
of matter, f orce, evolution and critique. Even when Nietzsche has put
considerable distance between hi mself and Lange's agnostic materio
ldealism - his agnosticism vis-a-vis the thing in itself - traces of the
positions of The History of Materialism can sti ll be identified in
Nietzsche's relation to authors and problematics he first encountered,
thanks to Lange, in 1 866.
It is in the unstable and tentative intersection of these two names,
these two books, that the 1 867- 1 869 notebooks deploy themselves,
exploring Schopenhauer's paradoxes in the spirit of Lange ' s agnosticism
and testing the limits of Lange by trying to determine an interiority in
individuation (Life) that would nevertheless not fall i nto the muteness
and sterility of the Schopenhaurian pre-individual (x=x). It is not
surprising that insofar as the notebooks are dominated by the i nfluence
of these two eminent traitors of critique, they could be dismissed as not
truly bearing upon Kant, even or especially when they are engaged in the
project of assessing the contemporary import of Kant's theses on
teleology in the notes towards The Concept of the Organi:c since Kant. 1
It is indeed undeniable that in 1 868 Nietzsche's knowledge of Kant was
scanty and derivative. Lange, Schopenhauer, and Kuno Fischer (from
whose book stem most of the quotations and misquotations of the
Critique of Judgment) serving as his main sources, the Critique of
Judgment remained, at the time of the cessation of the project on the
Organic, one of the books in the list headed 'Read the Following' .
Imprudent as this may be, I would counter that Nietzsche's hasty,
'opportunistic' scholarship, a trait that could be said to mark his entire
work, is here accompanied by a singular insight into the philosophical
nerve-centre of his age.
If read in light of his encounter with Lange and Schopenhauer, the
choice of the Organic as the object of his dissertation is by no means
arbitrary. I nstead, it identifies the point at which the li mits of J/oth
materialism and critique make themselves felt most acutely, thus
allowing the question of individ uation to arise as a fundamental
challenge to any philosophy that would consider the fate of ' Materi alism
After Kant'. Whilst it is undeniable that this brief e pisode in Nietzsche's
formative period gives us l i ttle purchase on the subtler aspects of Kant ' s
masterlul 'su spension' o f the problem of teleology it does register, in its
7 See Nancy's dismissal in 'Nietzsche' s Thesis on Tdcol!11'.Y' . "I'

cit .

Alberto Toscano

41

treatment o f the Organic, a confrontation with a problematic field which

cannot but elicit our participation, as readers of Nietzsche as well as
phil osophers still struggling with the modernity of critique and the
injunctions of materialism. The c laim which commands this paper is that
with regard to both critique and materialism it i s in the problem of
individuation, i n its specifically modern guise, that phi losophy ' s
speculative limitations are revealed. If individuation is such an impasse,
then much of Nietzsche's effort, beginning with these notebooks, can be
read in terms of a transvaluation of these two great orientations of
philosophical modernity, materialism and critique, into an experimental
ontology that would escape the clutches of the princ1jJium
individuationis. And thu s, to begin with, from Schopenhauer's ultimately
sterile paradoxes.

2. x = x
Schopenhauer wanted to find an equation for the x: and it revealed
itself out of his calculation that it = x .
Nietzsche, On Schopenhauer
From Schopenhauer' s appropnat10n of Kant, Nietzsche inherits the
effects of a peculiar short-circuit, the one that equates, in 23 of The
World as Will and Representation, objectification with individuation.
The consequences of this move are not to be underestimated. To begin
with, they entail a generalisation of critique's original concern with the
constitution of objects of knowledge to an approach that would
i ndiscriminately cover the matter of both possible and 'impossible'
experience. By.the l atter, I indicate preci sely the problem of the Organ ic,
which in Kant marks the disjunction between object (or the individuated)
and i ndividual (or self-individuating, and therefore 'chimerical',' entity).
As the title of Schopenhauer' s magnum opus makes clear this equation
exasperates a dichotomy that Kant negotiates with the greatest of care,
i nto a tragic confrontation between the phantasmatic tyranny of
Vorstellung and the foreclosed univocity of Wille. This confrontation
8

The chimerical nature of the organism or natural purposes is declared in Kant's

Opus Postumum (Cambridge: CUP, 1 993), p. 1 3 1 : "[ ... ) for the very possibility of
such concepts founded on purposes would only be chimerical, were experience not to
teach it [to us]."

Pli

42

1 1 (200 1 )

elides the complex articulations between the many strata of critique into
a philosophy in which representation is built, quite seamlessly, on the
sole basis of the spatio-temporal principium individuationis. Jn
Schopenhauer unilateral expression (jrom Will to Representation) i s
postulated, i n which I deas are degrees of the objectification of Will i n
Representation. Again the problematic difference i n ki nd through which
a veritable problem of i ndividuation emerges in Kant's Critique <?f
Judgment is obscured, making the Organic yet another link in the chain
of Ideas that begi ns with the principium individuationis and passes
though the other "degrees of visibility which belong to the
objectification of the Will" ( WWR I 25). For Schopenhauer,
representation is both homogeneous and hegemonic, never encountering
in phenomenal experience anything which would problematize its
hegemony over that domain. Two further consequences result from
Schopenhauer's equation. Firstly, a drastic cut i s made between
individuality and individuation, or, to use terms more redolent of
contemporary debates, between allonomy and autonomy.' As Nuno
Nabais remarks, in the only essay which to my knowledge engages
philosophically with the question of i ndividuation in Nietzsche:
The
essential
incommunicability
between
individuality
[Individualitiit] and individuation [Individuation] constitutes one
of the central paradoxes of Schopenhaurian metaphysics and the
one that posed the greatest difficulties to the autonomous
development of the Nietzschean theory of the individual. '0
Secondly, a parallel distinction is made, in Schopenhauer, between two
types of u nity: ( I ) unity of a multiplicity; (2) unity without multiplicity.
9 See
10

Francisco Varela, Autonomie et Connaissance (Paris: Seuil, 1 989).

Nuno Nabais, 'Indivfduo e lndividualidade em Nietzsche' i n Metaffsica do
Tragico. Estudos sabre Nietzsche. (Lisboa: Rel6gio D' agua, 1 9 97) The pres 91 t paper
was in part inspired by this fine and insi ghtful piece. Much of what follows can be
read in the way of an indirect response to the theses proposed by Nabais. Given that
my divergence with these theses is carried by a reading of texts not explicitly
considered by Nabais, and whose value, as I've remarked in l , is certainly up for
debate, I would at most want to aim al a problematisation of Nabai s' reading of
Nietzsche's inner struggle with Schopenhauer. With regard to the second, and most
daring, part of his paper, on the eternal recurrence as a transformation of the problem
of individuation, I have very little to contribute, save perhaps a certain di sagreement
with regard to the speculative impetus behind some of Nietzsche's conceptual
inventions.

Alberto Toscano

43

Or, Representation as the objectal exteriority and dissemination of the

individuated and Will as the perfect interiority of a non-phenomenal
One. All of the above is contained in a passage from 23 of The World
as Will and Representation, which I here present as exemplary of the
paradoxes which Nietzsche's early critique will seek to isolate.
The will as a thing in itself is quite different from its phenomenal
appearance, and entirely free from all the forms of the
phenomenal, i nto which it first passes when it man ifests itself, and
which therefore only concern its objectivity, and are foreign to the
will itself. [ . . .] I shall call time and space the principium
individuationis, borrowing an expression from the old schoolmen,
and I beg to draw attention to this, once and for all. For it is only
through the medium of time and space that what is one and the
same, both according to its nature and to its concept, yet appears
as different, as a multiplicity of co-existent and successive
phenomena. [ . . ] According to what has been said, the will as
thing i n itself l ies outside the province of the principle of
sufficient reason i n all i ts forms, and is consequently completely
groundless, although all its manifestations are entirely subordinate
to the principle of sufficient reason. Further, it is free from all
multiplicity, although i ts manifestations in time and space are
innumerable. It is itself one, though not in the sense in which an
object is one, for the unity of an object can only be known in
opposition to a possible multiplicity; nor yet i n the sense in which
a concept is one, for the unity of a concept exists only in
abstraction from multiplicity; but it is one as that which lies
outside time and space, the principium individuationis, i .e., the
possibility of multiplicity.
.

To a considerable extent, the objections posed by Nietzsche will be

familiar to anyone acquainted with critiques of Schopenhauer. However,
what makes Nietzsche ' s stance i nteresting is that he is essentially caught
between two responses to Schopenhauer. The first, with which we are all
familiar, sees i n Schopenhauer's 'di scovery' of the will, in his subreption
of the Kantian limits, a fundamental starti ng-point for any philosophy
which would finally go against the Socratic and the Christian grain,
wedding philosophy to art i n (tragic) affirmation. The concept becomes
poetic and the task of affirmation is dramatised in the struggle between
the worl d ' s two halves, Will and Representation, Dionysus and Apollo.

44

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

The second response, whilst maintammg its sympathy towards

Schopenhauer's indication of an i n ner life of the phenomenon, an
interiority of the object, is ultimately cognisant of the severe limitations
of its approach. It recognizes that the relationship between the domain of
the pre-individual and that of the individuated-in-representation is
insufficiently determined by the terms of the dichotomy between the One
Will and the multiplicity of its spatio-temporal objectification s.
Moreover, that the introspective immediacy which reveals the presence
of this One in us is the most precarious of evidences. In the notebooks it
is the second approach that takes precedence, revealing that Nietzsche' s
later and t o some degree superficial faith i n Schopenhauer a s the
exemplar of a dramatic ph ilosophy took place in spite of Nietzsche 's
very early grasp of the speculative untenability of the philosophy of the
will.
Still, Nietzsche affirms that 'Wil l ' , as a subreption of the Kantian
prohibition placed upon the predication of the noumenal, is of the
greatest import. Though, as he remarks:
It is a clumsily coined, very encompassing word, when with i t
such a n important thought, going well beyond Kant, i s to be
labelled differently. [227]
Of course, much of Nietzsche's later philosophy can be seen as an effort
at just such a different 'labelling ' . " What then are the objections against
thi s label and its implications? In the 1 868 notes, Nietzsche rehearses
four of them. ( 1 ) The will is a hidden category. (2) The will can only be
grasped through a "poetic intuition" [228], never demonstrated. (3) The
predicates of the will are merely the product of its radical opposition to
representation. (4) The will presumes the identification of "the borders
of individuation". It is this last objection that, for Nietzsche himself,
recapitulates the other three and which ultimately exposes the severe
shortcomings of Schopenhauer's position. As he writes:

_!Y

Whether this world is will? - Here is the point at whic we must

make our fourth attack. The Schopenhaurian warp and weft gets
11
It is perhaps of some interest that in the beginning of his notes on Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche will use the term "drive" [Trieb]: "The dark drive brought about through a
representation mechanism reveals itself as world. This drive is nol included under the
principium individuationis".

Alberto Toscano

45

tangled in his hands: in the smallest part as a result of a certain

tactical clumsiness of its author, but mostly because the world
does not let itself be so eas ily fastened into the system as
Schopenhauer had hoped in the first i nspiration of his discovery.
In his old age he complained that the most difficult problem of
philosophy had not been solved in his own. He meant the question
concerning the borders of individuation. [229]
What is meant here by "borders of individuation"? Nietzsche is here
directing us towards an essential aspect of Schopenhauer's doctrine, the
circumscription or delimiting of the domain of representation. By posing
itself as the unilaterally expressive (or asymmetrical) essence of
representation, the positing of will functions to assign a determinate area
upon which representation (i .e. the principium individuationis and the
degrees of objectification constructed upon it) legislates. This area, of
course, is both everything and nothing. It includes the totality of possible
experience (what can be known as an object for a subject) and, at one
and the same time, is rad ically inessential. Now, the impasse produced
by this radical disjunction has the effect of turning the will, the
interiority of being, i nto a completely phantasmatic entity, so much so
that it can only be 'attained' via a kind of negative ontology, one which
depends on founding the predicates of will on the mere negation of the
predicates of representation. In Nietzsche's colourful image, this leads to
[... ] a species of extremely important and hardly avoidable
contrad ictions, which to a certain extent while still resting under
their mother's heart arm themselves and, scarcely born, do their
first deed by killing her. They concern themselves collectively
with the borders of individuation and have their :rrpowv (v8os)
i n the poi nt considered under 3. above [i .e. the merely negative or
derivative character of the predicates of will, AT]. [229]
In Nietzsche's view Schopenhauer only succeeds, with "dictatorial
tone", i n making it so that "a completely dark and ungraspable x is
draped with predicates" [230). This constant tracing of the will upon the
predicates of representation has two effects (or one effect with two
aspects, depending on one's image of the transcendental): the
"transcendental evaporates" [230] and the problem of the origin of the
intellect is rendered l i terally incomprehensible.

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

46

The first effect concerns the fact that even the very pred icate of unity ,
o r unity without multiplicity, is borrowed, b y way o f a phantasmatic
subtrac tion of multiplicity itself, from the principium individuationis.
What the groundless, transcendental will is meant to ground and hence
del imit turns out to be its very source. The supposed transcendental is
itself conditioned or traced ; "it i s continually required to borrow from
the world of appearance" [230]. The second effect, a coroll ary of the
first, is that no accou nt can be given of the genesis of the i ntellect, given
that it precedes or presupposes i tself at all times. Si nce "even before the
appearance of the will we see the principium individuationis in fu ll
effect" [23 1 ], since the world of appearance equals the system of
representation, we are left with two equally unsavoury and ill egitimate
options: ( 1 ) "the intellect must rest as a new predicate conjoined with the
th ing i n itself', or (2) "there can be no intellect because at no time could
an intellect have become" [232]. In the first case the whole edifice
collapses, given that it would follow that Will
Representation. In the
second, any basis for intelligibility disappears, as Will
Will (which
could also be written One
One). What Nietzsche comes to real ise, in
his focus on the "borders of i ndividuation", on "the dark
contradictoriness in the region where individuality ceases to be" [226], is
that the Schopenhaurian Will is unable to both delimit and generate the
=

individuated, thus collapsing into a negative ontology traced upon the

domain of representation. In Schopenhauer, the disjunction between the
pre-individual instance and the individuated domain of representation
results precisely in the eli sion of the question of individuation, or of
genesis, itself. The transcendental evaporates.
The immediate effect of this analysis is clear. Having temporarily
abandoned the speculative domain, Nietzsche will transform the world,
understood as the untenable opposition between the One and the
princ1p1um individuationis, into the terrain of the dramatic
transfiguration of existence through the agon of Apollo and Dionysus.
This dramatisation proving insufficient, three interlaced questions
initially sketched i n these very early notes on Schopenhauer will persist
as a driving force behind Nietzsche's experiments in ontology. The
question of critique : Can representation be delimited, 'bordered ', and, if
so, by what? The question of production : Can we iden tify a pre
individual, non-representational domain that would accoun't for
i ndividuated representation? The question of asymmetry : I s there an
interiority, an i nner life of the will, 'behind' lhc mere exteriority of
representation?

Alberto Toscano

47

It is plain to see that all of these questions point to the relationship

between the transcendental, the process of individuation, and the status
of representation. They organize two general tendencies in Nietzsche's
thought, which become indi scernible at its highest points. The first
responds to the impasse of the philosophy of the will by declaring a
closure of representation. Whilst not necessarily denying the existence
of a pre-individual realm, it remai ns agnostic with regard to its being as
well as its character. Given that, as we saw above, the del imi ting of the
realm of representation demands some sort of outside or other, this
closure can have no truly transcendental status and ultimately results, as
in Lange, in a position which makes the hold of representation and the
principium individuationis over us a function, both relative (only our
experience is at stake) and ineluctable (the li mits are set), of our
organisation. The second tendency affirms Schopenhauer's subreption of
the Kantian proscription in order to seek an account of non
representational interiority which, whilst accounting for the origin of
the intellect as a representing mechanism, would not be founded on a
tracing of representation itself. Of course, the asymmetry demanded by
such an account cannot be that of two worlds. Whilst it is true that
Nietzsche will only realise much later that the realm of appearance (or
representation) comes to vanish as a separate realm with the destitution
of essence, it is nevertheless already the case that its definite, Kantian,
boundaries are blurred. In fact, the very condition for an escape out of
the Schopenhaurian bind is precisely the relativisation of representation.
Representation is denied i ts completeness and closure in order to re-open
the question of its origin. The boundaries of individuation, of which
N ietzsche wrote in On Schopenhauer, are rendered porous, as the
p rincipium individuationis is demoted to the status of a physiological
constant and the problem becomes not that of the possibility, but that of
the constitution of individuality. This step on Nietzsche 's part depends
on a certain appropriation of Lange's naturalisation of the transcendental
and will be the object, in our conclusion, of a treatment aimed at defining
a certain critical or transcendental materialism running through
Nietzsche 's work and having as i ts source the issues confronted in these
early notebooks.

3. All unity is relative

Pli

48

1 1 (200 1 )

Chronologically, the notes on Schopenhauer and Kant are preceded by a

much more fragmentary set of notes on Democritus." One could argue
that here Nietzsche is engaged in testing his philological talent with
regard to the i ndications offered by Lange' s History of Materialism. In
the latter Democritus is not only the first of the materialist philosophers,
he is also their archetype. His adherence to scientific method, contempt
for the merely sensual, and heretic status all contribute lo a definite
physiognomy, one that Nietzsche will aim to fully reconstruct in notes
for an essay that could have well received the title, after Althusser's late
fragment, of Portrait of a Materialist Philosopher. It is of some interest
to see Nietzsche the philologist approach materialism by way of
biography, seeing in Democritus the invention of "a new principle of
life", a new mode of scientific exi stence, characterised by "nomadism"
and "disquiet". Behind this portrait lies the core of the Democritean
philosophy: the denial of teleology. It is this that for Nietzsche ultimately
accounts for the (apocryphal) plan hatched by Plato to i ncinerate the
totality of Democritus' works, as well as his treatment at the hands of
medieval monks as a man possessed. Likewise, i t i s what, for Nietzsche,
brings him close to Empedocles and Darwin , for whom purposiveness
stands as an objective ill usion generated by a non-intentional process.
On this matter Nietzsche' s sympathies will steadfastly remain with the
materialist inspiration throughout his work. His objections, in these
notes as elsewhere, will be directed against the uncritical belief in the
transparency of matter, as evidenced by atomism," as well as against the
attendant ethical conservatism produced by such a belief. It is to counter
the epistemic naivete and the ungrou nded ethics that follows from such a
materialism that Nietzsche will follow Lange i n his general principle,
that materialism must be followed by, and subjected to, critique, that
12

In

his Che cosa ha delto Nietzsche (Milano: Adelphi, 1 999) Mazzino Montinari
makes the interesting remark that in Nietzsche Democritus should be read as an "anti
Schopenhaurian cipher", a claim which, as we will see, is certainly justified in the
notebooks.
13 At the early date of these notebooks, Nietzsche's critique of atomism, which is
essential to his refu tation of a transparently mechanistic materialism, is yet to make
its appearan ce, and thus will not be discussed herein. When it will appear in later
work, it will be heavily indebted both to Lange's materiale ldealismus and, more
specifically, to the work of Ruggero B oscovich. On the latter' influence on
Nietzsche's critique of atomism see Keith Ansell Pearson, 'Nietzsche's Brave New
World of Force' , Pli: The Warwick Journal r!( Philosophy 9 (2000), 6-35. See
specifically the account of Section l 2 of Bcyo11d Good and Evil and Nietzsche' s
attack on 'materialistic atomism' , p . 25ff.

Alberto Toscano

49

each Democritus must have his Protagoras . The influence of this idea on
Nietzsche can hardly be underestimated. We will retu rn to it in 5.
Rather than examine Lange's materiale Idealismus,'" I will immediately
turn to the effects of this stance on Lange 's brief treatment of
individuality and individuation in the chapter of History of Materialism
on 'Darwinism and Teleology ' , arguably the primary i nspiration for
many of Nietzsche ' s remarks on Kant and teleology.
Lange begins by invoking a question "which is of the highest interest
in the history of Materialism, - the question of the nature of the Organic
i ndividual". It was perhaps in this very sentence that the plan for
Nietzsche' s eventually aborted dissertation took root, appearing as a
point of convergence for his determination of the limits of materialism
and for his questioning regarding the 'borders of individuation ' . What
fol lows i n Lange's text is of the highest interest with regard to our
object, and could be seen to accompany the long passage by
Schopenhauer presented in 2 as a basic text for Nietzsche's thinking on
individuality:
We have seen how ancient Materialism fell into absolute
contradiction by regardi ng the atoms as the only existent, though
they cannot be the bearers of a higher unity, because without
pressure and collision no contact takes place between them. But
we also saw that precisely this contradiction of manifoldness and
unity is peculiar to all human thought, and that it only becomes
most obvious in Atom.i sm. The only salvation here, too, consists
in regarding the opposition of manifoldness and unity as a
consequence of our organisation, in supposing that in the world of
things in themselves it is resolved in some way unknown to us, or
rather does not exi st there. I n this way we escape the inmost
ground of the contradiction, which lies in the assumption of
absolu te unities, which are nowhere given to us. If we conceive all
unity as relative, if we see in un ity only the combination of our
thought, we have i ndeed not embraced the inmost nature of things,
but we have certainly made possible the consistency of the
scientific view. It fares ill indeed with the absolute unity of self-

14 For which I refer the reader to the extended di scussion of this position in Ch. V of
Stack' s Lange and Nietzsche, entitled 'Materio-Idealism'.

50

Pli 1 1

(2001 )

consciousness, but it is not a misfortune to get rid of a favourite

idea for some thousand years . "
I n Schopenhauer, a s we saw, the attempt to circumscribe the domain of
representation, to trace, on the edges of the world of appearance, the
'borders of i ndividuation ' , depended on the irreducible dichotomy of a
unity without multiplicity and a unity of multiplicity. Lange ' s peculiar
brand of neo-Kantianism, his blurring of the boundary between the
physiological and the transcendental, played heavily into Nietzsche' s
critique o f Schopenhauer.16 To begin with, rather than being delimited
and subjected to the hegemony of the principium individuationis, the
domain of representation and experience is both relativized (as a
"consequence of our organisation") and unmoored from its dependence
in the last instance on an unrepresentable and groundless unity without
multiplicity, whether this be conceived as will or as the "absolute unity
of self-consciousness". The ascription of unity becomes an objective
i llusion generated by a physico-transcendental constitution, but there is
no actual necessity in this. There is no claim that we have here a
determination of the possible per se; rather we are merely in the presence
of a contingent property of our thought, its propensity to combine
appearances into objects and count them as one. The literally utopian
resolution of the binding contradiction of unity and multiplicity in a non
phenomenal realm is gestured at, as characteristically it is i n all post
Kantianism, but not in favour of a Schopenhaurian unity without
multiplicity. Instead, in the knowledge that such a unity would merely be
a tracing made upon the constitutive 'illusions' of experience (the 'I', the
'object'), Lange opts for an agnosticism with regard to things-in
themselves that in the position to state that ultimately there might be
nothing to resolve, the opposition of unity and multiplicity being a
chimerical effect of 'our organisation' .
This naturalisation o f the transcendental in Lange (his
'psychologi sm') serves to counter the Schopenhaurian impasse vis-a-vis
the question of the genesis or origin of language. Once the domain of
representation is no longer coextensive with that of possibility, once the
principium individuationis is no longer of the order of the always
already, the question of the non-representational ground of
15
11'

Friedrich A l ber! Lange, History o/Matcriali.rn1 (New York: Arno Press, 1 974).
As wd l a s into Nict1.srhr's laler rrfl cct io n s on the merely adaptive or utilitarian
11al 1 1 1 t "I 1 1 1 ; 1 1 1 ,, l " " l '1 1 1 i t y to i 1 1 d i v i d 1 1atc appearances into objects.

Alberto Toscano

51

representation, o f the pre-individual sources o f individuation, can once

again be asked. It can be asked because the non-representational is no
longer drowned in the black night of the will 's immediate unity. Indeed,
it even seems that the predicate of unity is to be banished from the pre
individual insofar as "all unity i s relative". Are we then in the presence
of an inversion? Is Lange indicating that we think that what is prior to
the combinations of our intellect is multiplicity itself? This question
cannot receive a positive answer. Neither Lange nor Nietzsche presents
us with a concept of multiplicity without unity, a concept that could
come to operate in a non-representational, non-objective ontology. They
do however tend to reverse the Schopenhaurian stance whereby the
principium individuationis is the condition of multiplicity. Instead, for
Lange and for the Nietzsche of the 1867 - 1 869 notebooks, the
relativisation of unity, which depends heavily on the farewell given to
that "favourite idea", self-consciousness, makes the infinite proliferation
of multiplicity, its availability as the material upon which the intellect
carves its relative unities, into the condition of unity itself. Thus, in what
is as yet a very tentative consideration of the One and the Multiple, in
light of the legacy of critique, we could summarise Lange's and
Nietzsche' s stance in the following dictum: a multiplicity is a unity for
another multiplicity. Or, to introduce the problem of the Organic: a

multiplicity is an individual for another multiplicity.

4.

Life Force

Chance can find the most beautiful melody.

Nietzsche, On Teleology
The critique of Schopenhauer awoke Nietzsche to the urgency of the
question of individuation, specifically configured in terms of the critical
relationship between the intellect as a representational mechanism and
the question of its own origin, or, in other words, the relationship
between representation and production. Schopenhauer's deficient
treatment of the 'borders of individuation' created a dichotomy which
effectively foreclosed the question of individuation itself, by positing a
non-representational One over against the hegemony of the principium
individuationis in the phenomenal or representational realm. With
Lange, as we saw, individuation is relativised by a naturalisation of the
transcendental which, with Goethe and Virchow, proclaims the primacy

52

P/i 1 1 (200 1 )

of multipl icity. I would now like to turn to the notes On Teleology

understood in terms both of a con vergence and an extension of the
thematics ari sing out of Nietzsche's assimilation of Lange and
Schopenhauer.
We are now in a position to see that there is nothing arbitrary in
Nietzsche' s intention to write a thesis on The Concept of the Organic
since Kant. After all, it is in the problematic demand posed by the
evidence of the Organic that the thought of representation first
encounters the question of material production or ontogenesis, and it
does so precisely in terms of a modal ity of individuation which is not of
the order of the principium individuationis. 11 Or, to put it i n terms of
Nietzsche' s notebooks, it encounters the problem of l!fe, of a life which
is heterogeneous to the Kantian power of desire (i .e. the life of the
intellect). Let us call this the crisis of critique. Of course, as with all
crises of critique, and especially the sublime, this is a deeply functional
and largely u nthreatening crisis, in which the organism is employed to
symbol ise the unrepresentable unity of system and i ts supersensible
destination. Nietzsche himself is deeply sensitive to this symbolic u sage
of organic teleology. Indeed, he will engage in a series of 'reductions'
that will displace the crisis from the question of organic teleology to its
true locus, that of production itself, or, as Nietzsche names it in these
early notes, life. Thus, the problem of the Organic will first be i solated
from its function within the critical system, then examined i n terms of
the thematics of individuation outlined above, and ultimately dissol ved
i nto the question of life as infinite productive multiplicity.
This passage, from a crisis which is internal and fu nctional to
critique, to the crisis of critique itself, takes the form of four steps, four
reductions: ( 1 ) the expulsion of the theological; (2) the denial of external
purposiveness; (3) the relativisation of individuality; (4) the dissolution
of the antithesis of mechanism and teleology.
What I here call the expulsion of the theological concerns the
symboli sm which, in critique, links the problematic concept of the
organism to the equally problematic concept of an entity endowed with
intell ectual i ntuition, a truly divine being for whom the organism would
represent an intelligible causality, of the whole over its parts. I n stark
opposition is the materialist injunction which determines Nietzsche 's
1 7 This crisis can be precisely located within Ka11 1 ' s work, in 64 of the Critique of
Judgemem, entitled 'On the Characler Peru li:ir lo Thi ngs Considered as Natural
Purposes'.

Alberto Toscano

53

position: "One must sever every theological interest from the question"
[239]. Now, as Nietzsche already realises, this theological referent is
inseparable from an anthropomorphic analogy, an analogy specifically
founded on a certain understanding of human poiesis. ln a passage which
originates in Schopenhauer and prefi gures Bergson ' s critique of
evolutionary theory, Nietzsche writes: "We are astonished then at the
cornplicated and conjecture (after human analogy) a special wisdom i n
it" [ 24 1 ] . " Once this anthropomorphic propensity t o isolate objects as
purposive in terms of a technical analogy is suspended, so is the
necessity of a reference to a higher reason which would account for
indi vidualities which cannot merely be ascribed to the effects of the
principium individuation is. In a deeply materialist vein, Nietzsche will
claim that there i s "no question, which necessarily can be solved only
through the acceptance of an i ntelligible world" [240]. In other words,
just as the Kantian necessity to think organisms as premeditated
disappears for us moderns under the influence of Darwinism, so does
that of accepting the contradictions engendered by representation and
viewing them as pointing to their resolution in a realm of supersensible
intel ligibil ity. The anthropomorphic foundations of a theological
interpretation of teleology thus give way to "a purely human standpoint:
the Empedoclean, where purposiveness appears only as an instance
among many non-purposivenesses" [239]. This Empedoclean, or
Darwinian, standpoint allows one to remove the presupposition of
intelligibility. The polemical statement, "purposiveness is chance" [239],
points once again to the denial of any analogy with the intentionality of
technical production, to the need to think the production of the purposive
in non-representational, non-intentional, and non-anthropomorphic
terms, to think "a power which unconsciously creates the purposive"
[239]. Lange's reduction of the transcendental to a question of our
organisation allows Nietzsche to acknowledge our propensity to an
anthropomorphic and consequently theological understanding of organic
teleology at the same time as it points to the possibility of thin king
otherwise. When Nietzsche writes that the "necessity of which Kant
speaks [i.e. the "necessity [ ... ] that we think organisms as premeditated"]
no longer exists in our time" [238], he is pointing to the possibility of
thinking the Organic without any reference whatsoever, not even a
problematic one, to a realm of transcendent purposes and i ntentions. The
18

For an effective summary of Bergson ' s stance, see Vladimir JankeJevitch, Henri
Be rgson (Paris: P.U.F., 1959), Ch. 5: 'La Vie ' .

54

Pli 1 1 (2001 )

Empedoclean essence of the Darwinian revolution in the natural sciences

allows at least the speculative idea that the teleological appearance of the
Organic may have been produced by what Nietzsche names "co
ordinating possibility" [ coordinirte Moglichkeit] [240]. The latter, which
unfortunately Nietzsche leaves i nsufficently unexplained, can be thought
of as the convergence and complexity of non-intentional, non-ideal
mechanisms giving rise to the appearance of teleology .
The second 'reduction ' i n Nietzsche's shift o f the crisis of critique
from the organism to production i nvol ves a further step away from the
aims of the Kantian approach. Having severed any explicit symbolism
of, or reference to, a higher reason, Nietzsche proceeds to eliminate any
trace of divi ne i ntelligibility by questioning the necessary postulate of
external purposi veness. The general idea of co-ordinating possibility,
which allows for the isolation of purposiveness as a mere instance within
the enveloping context of non-purposiveness, comes to be expressed in a
more specifically Darwinian concept of a non-intentional mechanism for
the production of purposiveness. Indeed, the presupposition of an
"overarching teleology" [239] is obviated by the very idea of a survival
of the fittest. Thus, against any harmonisation of the realm of
appearances by means of a Schopenhaurian will or a Kantian system of
ends, against any attempt to posit an external purposiveness which
would be a symbol of the purposi veness and unity of the intellect itself,
Nietzsche remarks that, "the opposite to the whole theory arises in that
terrible struggle of individual s [ . . ] and the species" [239]. Once again,
the attempt to find in the realm of the Organic a symbol of the unity,
systematicity, and purposiveness of the intellect (or of the will) is
declared illegitimate. There is no necessity in the position that posits,
even problematically, an external and systemic purposiveness. Neither
the demiurge of fi nality nor the harmony of nature has any rights over
the Organic. We are thus left with the phenomenon of inner
purposiveness alone. It i s on this level of the Kantian problem of the
Organic, and only on this level, that Nietzsche' s inquiry places itself. For
i t is the level which cannot be easily dismissed by a sheer i nvocation of
Darwinist materialism or science in "our times". Let us now turn to a key
passage in the notes:
.

Teleology:
inner purposiveness. We see a compl i calcd rnachine, which
maintains itself and cannot devise anolher slnwturc which could
construct it more simply, that means o n l y :

Alberto Toscano

55

the machine maintains itse lf, thus it is purposive. A judgement

about "highest purposiveness" is not ours to make. We can at best
decide upon a reason, but have no right to indicate it as higher or
lower.
External purposiveness is a deception.
But we are acquainted with the method of nature, how such a
"purposive" body arises, a senseless method. Accordingly,
purposiveness demonstrates itself only as ability to Jive, that is, as
cond. sine qua non. Chance can find the most beautiful melody.
Secondly we know the method of nature which would maintain
such a purposive body. With senseless fri volity.
Teleology however raises a multitude of questions which are
insoluble, or have been u ntil now.
World organism, origin of evil do not belong here.
However, for example, the origins of the intellect.
Is it necessary to oppose teleology with an expl..i 0/ted world?
It is only necessary to establish another reality on a demarcated
realm. [240]
Any dismissal of Nietzsche 's thesis on teleology, such as Jean-Luc
Nancy 's, must overlook the originality of the insights proposed in
passages such as this. To reduce the question of purposiveness to that of
its internal variant is to place scientific materialism before a veritable
problem, to test its ability to prevail precisely there, where it declares
that the Kantian theses are merely anachroni stic. Let us first unpack this
reduction. To begin with, the Kantian stance wi thers away as we realise
that to posit, however problematically, however critically, the idea of the
whole as the necessary ground of the correlation of its parts is premature.
Nietzsche separates the purposive from the supposed evidence of the
Organic as a symbol of creation and brings it down to its defining, one
could even say formal, characteristics. Whence the ability of the term
machine to name the form of purposiveness. 19 Nietzsche's insight, which
could be said to prefigure one of the fundamental theses of contemporary
complexity theory, is that there is no need to postulate the idea, the
representation, of the organism as a whole, that is, to introduce a
19 Nielzsche can thus be seen Io extend the realm of the purposive far beyond the
organic, and perhaps indefinitely so. For example, the fol lowing prescient remark: "In
fact, we are also required to ask after final causes in a forming crystal. In other words:
teleological reflection and ex amination of organisms are not identical" [250].

56

Pli 1 1

(200 1 )

representational analogue founded o n the human power o f desire to

account for the 'unitotality' of the organism. Instead, without recourse to
any transcendence of representation, we can simply state that the
organism is immediarely ifs own idea. No transcendent idea of totality
could account for this instance of organisation for the precise reason that
we "cannot devise another structure which could construct it more
simply" [240). A forriori, no representation transcendent to the
functioning of the organism itself could account for its self-maintenance
(which Nietzsche here seems to equate with construction). At this point
in the inquiry it can only be said that i nner purposiveness, detached from
any representation of totality, is reduced to the ability to exist. We call
purposive an entity whose organisation means that it can maintain itself
in existence. Having thus eliminated what seemed to be the necessary
link between organisation (of self) and representation (of totality),
Nietzsche is once again able to argue that there i s no compulsion in
thinking that the source of these products of nature needs itself to be
intentional or representational. The method of nature is senseless,
frivolous. That it gives rise to entities whose organisation at first seems
to imply a causal role for the representation of totality is a fu nction of
our speculative limitations and not of anything which inevitably inheres
i n the being of an organism. What must be absolutely forestalled, and
here Nietzsche is once again in the polemical thrall of a materialist
injunction, is the "leap" from the evidence of organisation to the positing
of a necessaril y representing, or represented, cause. To do this, to
symbolise the organism, i s nothing but a "bad analogy".2

20

Indeed, contrary to Nancy's remark according to which Nietzsche completely

ignores the prob lematic status given to teleology in Kant, and produces a dogmatic
misreading of the third Critique, Nietzsche quotes Kant on this very point, only to
conclude that this problematic status itself, based as it is on a strict dichotomy of
purposive (teleological) and unpurposive (mechanical), should be put into question.
The quote from Kant: "It is something different to consider a thing according to its
inner form as purposive and to regard the existence of a thing as an end of nature", is
followed by this reflection from Nietzsche: "Therefore there is no conflict between
the unpurposive method of maintenance and reproduction of an organism with its
own purposiveness" [247]. Elsewhere, he also writes: "[Kant] was right:
purposiveness lies only in our idea" [25 1 ]. Om:c we realise that purposiveness is
nothing but the ability to exist and not a product of a representation of totality acting
upon a system then we are not obliged to look for a resolution in the supersensible.
We do not need to postulate any rel ationship whatsoever between an analogue of
representation and the capacity for sclln1aiute11a11cc.

Alberto Toscano

57

The third moment, or aspect, of Nietzsche ' s reduction of

purposiveness to the problem of life as production entails the
rel ativisation of indi viduality, and the consequent relativi sation of
purposiveness itself. In 3 we deall with Lange's i nfluence on Nietzsche
with regard to thi s question and will not repeat ourselves here. In l i ne
with Lange ' s defi nition of the status of the contradiction of unity and
mu ltiplicity, Nietzsche is i n the position to attack lhe subordination of
the organism to lhe idea of the whole as a merely relative imposition of
the intellect over the material world. As he indicates, "[t]he simple idea
is shattered in a multiplicity of parts and conditions of the organism, but
remains intact in the necessary joining of parts and functions. This is
accompli shed by the i ntellect" {239]. But this necessity is itself put into
question, according to the principle, stated above, thal a multiplicity is
an individual for another multiplicity. This of course entails a second
principle, which i s that individuation precedes teleology. I n effect, all
ascriptions of purposiveness imply the preliminary isolation of a
purposive entity, of a whole, which could then be said to fu nction
according to an end. However, as Nietzsche remarks in l i ne with Lange:
The concept of the whole however is our work. Here lies the
source of the representation of ends. The concept of the whole
does not lie in thi ngs, but in us.
These unities which we call organisms, are however again
mutliplicities.
There are i n reality no individuals, rather i ndividuals and
organisms are nothing but abstractions. [244]
These reflections, in turn, are based on a passage by Goethe, quoted by
Lange from Virchow (father of cellular theory and inventor of the notion
of the Cell-state) in the History of Materialism, which will prove crucial
for Nietzsche' s ideas on teleology:
Every living thing i s not a singularity, but a plurality: even though
it appears to us as an individual, it remains a collection of living,
i ndependent beings. [242]
As we can see, however, there is a notable radicalisation, in Nietzsche,
of Goethe' s dictum. For Nietzsche, there i s no reduction to cellular
i ndividuals that would ultimately ground the organism. Of course, this
reduction can and does take place, but il holds no absolute status. As in

58

Pli

1 1 (200 1 )

Lange, there are no absolute unities. For this very reason, purposiveness
itself, which depends on the absolute nature of a certain type of unity
(i .e. a self-maintaining one) is itself relative.21
This i s the ground of the fourth reduction, the last step which takes
the crisis of critique from purposiveness to production, from the
organi sm to life. Whilst the notes on teleology often repeat the familiar
Kantian position whereby we can only know mechanism, the position
which legitimates considering the organism as a crisis, the three
reductions outlined above lead Nietzsche ineluctably into the fourth and
fi nal reduction. This consists i n declaring that the an tithesis of
mechanism and teleology is false." Once the two modalities of
individuation which dominate these supposedly opposed realms objects of representation in mechanism, purposive indi viduals in
teleology - are reduced to forms of our propensity to individuate and
thereby put on the same plane, that of our organi sation, the Organic is
definitively demoted as the i nstance of a cri sis of critique. Together with
"force , matter, law, atom" it is nothing but a "reflected judgement", or,
as Nietzsche remarks, "final causes as well as mechanisms are human
ways of perceiving" [246]. Which returns us to the question of what in
these notes, Nietzsche will repeatedly call the method of nature.
In another colourful use of the mother and child image already
applied to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche writes: "The method of nature in the
handling of things is indifferent, she i s an impartial mother, equally hard
with organic and inorganic children" [248]. Thi s method is nothing but
production, l!fe, i ts children nothing but forms. The reduction of the
difference between organic and inorganic to a difference in the habits of
our intellect, that is, the denial of its status as a constitutive ontological
difference, paves the way for a generalisation of the problem of
individuation and a renewed concern with the pre-individual. And
specifically, with the pre-individual as infinite multiplicity. That this is
done i n terms of a distinction between life and its forms should not lead
2

As Nietzsche writes "Purposiveness is no absolute, rather a very relative

purposiveness: seen from other sides, often unpurposiveness" (250].
22 Overcoming the antithesis between mechanism and teleology (or vitalism) was an
abiding concern for Nietzsche. He perhaps only achieved the means for this
overcoming in his encounter with Wilhelm Roux's embryology and its account of
self-regulation in ontogenesis. This is dealt with at length in Wolfgang Miiller
Lauter' s 'Der Organismus als innerer Kampf. Der Einfluss von Wilhelm Roux auf
Friedrich Nietzsche' Nietzsche-St11die11 7 ( 1 978): 1 89-223. See especially section 5,
on 'Mechanical and Teleological Explanations of Nalurc ' .

Alberto Toscano

59

us to the premature conclusion that we are here before a sort of

Schopenhaurian vitalism. For two reasons. Firstly, because the concept
of life is brought back to the i nfinite prodigality of nature's senseless,
fri volous method. Thus the limits and prejudices of representation are
nullified, as Nietzsche declares that: "L(fe is possible under an
astonishing number of forms" [248]. No ontological primacy is to be
given to those forms that our organisation chooses to isolate in this vital
sea of possibilities. Secondly, as was already noted in 3, primacy is
given to multiplicity, so that life is not considered as the mere
predicative negation of representation (Schopenhauer ' s negative
ontology) but rather as the non-representational source of representation
itself. We are now in a position to introduce what is perhaps the most
singular passage of the notes for The Concept of the Organic since Kant

We grasp about a living thing nothing but forms. The eternally

becoming is life; through the nature of our intellect we grasp
forms : our intellect is too dull to recognise continuing change:
what is knowable to it, it calls form. In truth there can be no form,
because in each point sits infinity. Every thought un ity (point)
describes a line.
A concept similar to form is the concept of the individual.
Organ isms are called unities, goal-centres. But unities only exist
for our intellect. Each individual has an infinity of living
indi vidual s within itself. It is only a coarse perception, perhaps
taken from the human body.
All "forms" can be thrown out, but life ! [249]
Having traversed the four reductions of the Kantian problem of the
Organic, Nietzsche thus returns to the question of the borders of
individuation which had dominated his earl ier critique of Schopenhauer.
It is not the Organic which indicates the crisis of the critical
apparatus, but rather life, understood as the infinite multiplicity of the
pre-individual. This is a pre-individual arrived at through the
consideration of the "method of nature", a method which reduces inner
purposi veness to a limited case, opening up the problem of individuation
to the question of ontogenesis. It is precisely to the degree that it cannot
but presuppose this ground of productive multiplicity, of infinite
becoming, that, as Nietzsche remarks, "[t]he individual is an insufficient
concept" [25 1 ]. Nevertheless, it is not enough to make the shift from the

60

Pfi 1 1 (200 1 )

organism and to indicate the encounter with pre-individual production as

the true crisis of the critical project. When Nietzsche writes: "The
organism i s a form. I f we look away from the form, it is a multiplicity"
[243), we cannot take this as a mere denial or subreption of critique.
There i s no denying for Nietzsche the 'formati ve' efficacy of
representation,
the
'relative'
hegemony of
the
princtpzum
individuationis. Neither can Nietzsche deny his fidelity to that aspect of
critique which seeks to account, i n an immanent inquiry, for the illusions
of anthropomorphism and the construction of objectivity. Rather, the
recourse to the concepts of life and multiplicity aims to confront the fact
that representation cannot account for itself on its own terms, that its
closure is unsustainable. Moreover, it aims to do this without falling into
the fatal snare of negative ontology, of the pre-individual conceived of
as the sterile negation of the predicates of the represented.

5. Chladni's Sound Figures, or,

A Materialism without Matter?
Nietzsche's engagement with Lange, Schopenhauer, and Kant on the
question of individuation ultimately leads him to the question of the pre
i ndividual, of life as infinite productive multiplicity. To this problem he
applies what could be termed a critical or transcendental materialism,
maintaining materialism's demand for an asymmetry of prod uction individuation as representation must be accounted for in non
representational terms - and critique' s vigilance against the illusions of
the anthropomorphic - the pre-i ndividual cannot be simply reduced to
matter if the latter is conceived of in line with the objective illusions
which are constitutive of representation itself (e.g. the atom as
principium individuationis). Thus, a transcendental materialism for
which matter i s not transparent to intellect, a paradoxical materi alism
without matter, will necessaril y be concerned with the problem that
Nietzsche saw as the foremost of those left unsolved by the reduction of
teleology to production: the origin of the intellect. The problem of
indi viduation as production will thus find itself caught up with the
apparently circular question: How is the intellect as representing
mechanism, and thus as primary agent of individuation, itself
individuated? In the gap between indi viduation by the intellect and
individuation as production, initially opened in Kant by the organ ism as
the first crisis of critique, Nietzsche's e ffort after the impasse of tragic
,

Alberto Toscano

61

affirmation, o f the struggle against "the pain o f individuation", will b e to

produce an experimental ontology to address thi s very question, that of
the origin of the i ntellect, .from the point ()f view ()fproduction.
In his 1 872 notes for an essay to be entitled Th e Philosopher:
Reflections on the Struggle Between Art and Knowledge, Nietzsche
encapsulates this problem with a conceptual image he was quite fond of,
that of Chaldni ' s 'sound figures'." These were patterns drawn onto a
sand-covered plane by an experimental device that used sound vibrations
to determine the movements of a string affixed below the sand ' s surface.
It is the asymmetry and lack of resemblance between the productive
dimension of the vi brations and the represented patterns that for
Nietzsche identifies the problem and the task of a non-representational
account of representation, one based on a concept of i ndividuation as
ontogenesis. It is precisely because of this asymmetry at the heart of
individuation that materialism can never have done with the vigilance
characteristic of a certain Kantianism, with the critique of a dogmatism
of matter which would be nothing other than the return of representation
in disguise. Due to this insistence of critique the words life and
multiplicity, as they appear in the notes on teleology, do not attain the
status of veritable concepts; they remain, as Nietzsche remarks, "dark".
What they do indicate, in a manner which is of great significance both
for Nietzsche' s later experiments in ontology and for any further
reflections on the fate of materialism and critique, is the persistence of
the problem of individuation at the core of any treatment of the
mechanisms of representation, in the passage from the first crisis of
cnt1que, which opposed the principium individuationis to the
indivi duality of the Organic, to the second crisis of critique, which
discovers the method of nature, or life as infinite multiplicity, at the heart
of any individuality wh atsoever.

23

Friedrich N ietzsche, Philosophy and Truth. Selections from Nietzsche 's Notebooks
of the Early 1870's, ed. and trans. by Daniel Brazeale (New Jersey: Humanities Press,
1 979), pp. 24-25.

Pli

1 1 (2001 ), 62-78.

Deleuze and Nietzsche:

On Frivolous Propositions and Related Matters

ELIE

DURING

"I a m never trying t o raise contradictions. Help m e rather

formulate the problem !" (Nietzsche, The Will to Power)

What is the point?

"Frivolous propositions," in the sense given to this expression by XVIlth

century phi losophers such as Locke and Leibniz, does not primarily
imply any moral evaluation: it sets a special kind of epi stemological
standard. A proposal can be fri volous but not extravagant at all; a
1
proposition can be frivolous and yet quite certain. It is just as frivolous
to observe that an oyster is an oyster, as it is false to deny it by saying
that an oyster is not an oyster. Whether one's statement is merely verbal
or contains any clear and real idea, "it shows us nothing but what we
must certainly know before," as Locke puts it, and no contribution i s
thereby made to the enlarging o f our knowledge. The statement i s
1

See for example Locke,

Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book Ill ,

chap.VD, 15, and Book IV, chap.Vlll, "Of trifling propositions": "there are universal
propositions, which, though they be certainly true, yet they add no light to our
understanding; bring no i ncrease to our knowledge". What is at stake is the status of
the sophisticated but purely verbal propositions of ontology, to the extent that they
can be reduced to identical or analytically true propositions (or
language of the scholastics). Leibniz's chal leugc i11 the

nugatoriae, to use the

Nouveaux Essais consists in

showing that metaphysical statements abou t subst ances are not always frivolous

(Nouveaux Essais sur / En tende m en t lb111111i11, Book IV, chap.II, 2 and chap.VIII,
'

"Des propositions fri voles").

Elie During

63

certain, but not i nstructive in any sense. It is as useless as it is irrefutable,

and those who make it are merely "trifling."
Regardless of how one measures the use of a proposition, and putting
aside the question of the adequacy of Locke' s particular (empiricist)
epistemological standard (the growth of knowledge) as well as of any
epistemological standard in general , one thing at least clearly emerges
from this hi storical insight: frivolity has nothing to do with falsehood (or
truth, for that matter), it only concerns the need, the use, the necessity,
the relevance or the point of something. But in philosophy the suspicion
or accusation of frivolity may involve a more ambitious claim about the
evaluation of statements i n general, whether "analytic" or not. Deleuze
takes that further step in a fai rly straightforward manner:
What we are plagued by these days isn't any blocking of
communication, but pointless statements [propositions qui n 'ont
aucun interet]. But what we call the meaning of a statement is its
point [l 'interet qu 'elle presente]. That's the only definition of
meaning, and it comes to the same thing as a statement's novelty.
You can li sten to people for hours, but what's the point? ... That's
why arguments are such a strain, why there' s never any point
arguing. You can 't just tell someone what they're saying is
pointless. So you tell them it' s wrong. But what someone says is
never wrong, the problem isn't that some things are wrong, but
that they're stupid or i rrelevant. That they've already been said a
thousand times. The notions of relevance, necessity, the point of
something, are a thousand times more significant than the notion
of truth. Not as substitutes for truth, but as the measure of the
truth of what I ' m saying. It's the same in mathematics: Poincare
used to say that many mathematical theories are completely
irrelevant, pointless. He didn 't say they were wrong - that
2
wouldn't have been so bad.
Thi s line of argument is by no means an isolated in stance in Deleuze 's
writings. It comes in different shades and variations, and in more or less
philosophically articulate ways, which reminds us of Alain B adiou 's
point about Deleuzian thought being essenti ally monotonous (in the
sense that it relies on a limited set of themes which keep recurring i n
2

'Mediators' , in Negotiations, trans. M . Joughin, Columbia University Press, New

York, 1 995, pp. 1 29- 1 30.

Pli 1

64

1 (200 1 )

relation t o different "cases o f the concept"). Thus, in one of the most

famous passages of Difference and Repetition, a similar reference to
mathematics comes in support of the criticism of the "dogmatic image of
3
thought." But What is Philosophy ? puts things even more bluntly:
Phi losophy does not consist in knowing. I t i s not inspired by truth :
rather, categories such as the Interesting, the Remarkable or the
Relevant determine its success or failure. [ . . . ] Of many
philosophical books one does n ' t want to say that they are false,
which amounts to saying nothing, but that they are irrelevant and
pointless . . . [ .. ] Only teachers sometimes write the word 'false' in
margins, but readers are rather inclined to have doubts about the
relevance or the point [l 'in teret], in other words the novelty of
what they are given to read.4
.

Two things cannot but strike us here.

First, the Nietzschean thread that runs through the whole issue of
frivolity and pointlessness. What is at stake is i ndeed the possibility of
considering the meaning and value of statements "beyond true and
false," even if this implies giving up the epistemological standard
altogether (inasmuch as i t essentially relies upon a "dogmatic"
determination of truth and falsehood). For frivolous propositions now
include every fact that is conceived under an interpretation of knowledge
as mere recognition, and of truth as rectitude or exactness. This move, as
we shall see, is inseparable from the idea that it is both possible and
necessary to reach a genetic account of truth and falsehood in terms of
problems (and conversely of problems in terms of truth and falsehood badly posed or d istorted problems).
Second, the mention of Poincare, and more generally the persistent
Deleuzian reference to science in relation to fri volity, raises the question
of the status of science from a Deleuzian (and Nietzschean) viewpoint.
There is nothing more plain and less exciting than "2+2=4," but
everyone knows that this is not what science is about. This ambivalence
3

"We doubt whether, when mathematicians engage in a polemic, they criticize one
another for being mistaken in the results of their calculations. Rather, they criticize
one another for having produced an insignificant theorem or a problem devoid of
sense." (Gilles Dclcuzc, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, Columbia
University Press, New York, 1994, p 1 53).
'1 I lckut. and < luallari, <Ju 'cst-ce que la philosophie ?, Editions de Minuit, Paris,
J 'l'I I . p. HO ( 1 1 1y own translation).
.

Elie During

65

is an indication that science cannot easily fit i n the epistemological

framework that is being challenged. It seems it must be condemned, and
at the same time be vindicated. At any rate, thi s difficulty underscores
the necessity of a philosophical reappraisal of Nietzsche ' s own view of
science and scien tific method.

Frivolous propositions, false problem s:

variations on a N ietzchean theme

The point of course, as Deleuze acknowledges, is not to substitute

"interest" or "relevance" for the classical notion of truth, but only to
impose new standards of truth - or at least to emphasize the need of
such standards, and the fact that they cannot be simply derived from
truth itself. That such a position should drive us beyond a merely
p,sychological or "subjective" appreciation of the "interesting" and the
"uninteresting," of the relevant and the frivolous, i s obvious from the
following aphorism:

Age and truth. Young people love what is interesting and odd,
no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is
interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, final ly,
love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the
ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its
5
highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.
-

How the "interesting aspect" (or on the contrary the frivolity) of a

proposition is supposed to "measure" the truth of what one is asserting,
and how this may not necessarily involve getting rid of truth, are
questions that remain to be clarified. But they are certainly Nietzschean
questions. They address the conceptual foundations of Nietzschean
perspectivism, they condition the overcoming of the distinction between
reality and appearance, as well as between truth and falsehood. For just
as "only degrees and subtleties of gradation" seperate truth from
falsehood, there i s "no criterion of 'reality,"' but only "grades of
appearance measured by the strength of the interest we show in an
appearance" (The Will to Power, 588).

Human, All too Human, 609; see also HTH I, 3.

Pli 1

66

1 (200 1 )

Taken u p by Deleuze, this Nietzschean theme is reformu lated and hence

interpreted anew. Let us consider what such an operation reveals and
what it leaves aside.
It has rarely been noted that the chapter on "The image of thought" in
D(fference and Repetition is a direct remix or extension of a section from
the earlier Nietzsche and Philosophy entitled "A new image of thought."
All the major elements of Deleuze ' s own view are already present in the
1 962 study on Nietzsche: meaning and value as more i mportant than
truth, the negative of thought found in stupidity rather than falsehood,
the chi ldish examples that support the classical doctri nes of error ( 'Good
morning Theodoru s' when it is in fact Theaetetus who passes by), the
notion of a "typology" or "topology" of thought that may account for all
determinations in terms of truth and error (an intuition which is later
given a precise meaning with reference to the Kantian problematic Idea
and Lautman ' s interpretation of mathematical structures), thought as
triggered by a force from outside, the i mportance of culture and training
as opposed to method, etc. Although Nietzsche's name is mentioned only
once in the long section of Difference and Repetition devoted to the
image of thought, his presence can be fel t on every page.
Providing "a new image of thought," to quote Deleuze, implies that
one understands the following: the proper element of thought is not
truth, but meaning and value. Once this is granted, it is plainly absurd to
keep on measuring the truth of propositions in terms of their mere
contribution to positive knowledge, according to an epistemological
presupposition that remains unchallenged. Valuing necessarily implies
grading. High and low, instead of true and false, must now play the role
of the basic categories in the evaluation of propositons. Nowhere is this
intuition more clearly exposed than in the foreword to Human, All too

Human:
Granted that it is the problem of hierarchy which we may call our
problem, we free spirits; only now, in the noonday of our lives, do
we understand what preparations, detours, trials, temptations,
disguises, were needed before the problem was pemlitted to rise
6
up before us.
Such is Nietzsche's problem: the highest problem of all, the problem of
hierarchy. But as it appears this general praise of hierarchy cannot be
" l/'111, foreword, 7.

E lie During

67

separated from the idea that some problems are more i nteresting or more
valuable than others: "As for me, I am not a sceptic - I still believe in
the hierarchy of men and problems . . [ . ]" (Nachlass Herbst, 3 5 [43]).
Thus the problem of hierarchy unfailingly brings us back to the hi erarchy
of problems as its precondition. Propositions have as much relevance as
their underlying problems allow them to have; but problems themselves
are not all equally relevant. This may constitute the basic tenet of a truly
anti-positivist epistemology, one that does not seperate the object of
knowledge from the "problematic" or "discursive process of instruction"
to which it belongs. This characterization is borrowed from Bachelard,
but Deleuze might as well have subscribed to it7
Nietzsche viewed his own contribution to philosophy in terms of the
destitution of old problems and the creation and promotion of new
problems. For instance, evaluating moral problems implies that one
critically examines "the reduction of problems to questions of pleasure
and displeasure," (Will to Power, 64) in other words the conditions under
which "pleasure and pain become foreground problems" ( WP 43) . It is in
th is sense, as an optical transformation imposed on traditional problems,
that one must understand Nietzch e's ambition of "changing the whole
perspective of moral problems" ( WP 4 1 ).
But let us come back to Deleuze. Difference and Repetition, as has
already been said, is entirely dependent on the N ietzschean decision of a
radical re-evaluation of truth. As often, Deleuze ' s mt1mate
reappropriation of an author' s thought seems to entitle him to total ly
dispense with any explicit reference (Deleuze has a name for this habit:
"free indirect discourse"). The same remark applies to his use of
Bergson, whose name does not appear once in "The Image of Thought"
although several passages are obviously heavily inspired by La Pensee et
le Mouvant. 8 The structural ist i mport, when one reads this chapter
closely, plays a relatively minor role in comparison with the i mportance
of the B ergsonian theme of a criticism of problems, which already
.

..

7Bachelard, Le Rationalisme applique, PUF, Paris, 1 949, p. 55. This book is in fact
quoted by Deleuze in support of his denunciation of the recognition model in
philosophy (see Difference and Repetition, note 9, p 320 ) .
8Compare for instance p. 158 of Difference and Repetition (the master' s questions to
the pupil, the problem conceived after the model of a radio-quiz or newspaper
competition) with Bergson 's description of false problems: "ready-made solutions"
kept "in the city's administrative cabinets," philosophy as a "puzzle," the pieces of
which are handed to us by society (La Pensee et le Mouvant, in Oeuvres, PUF, Paris,
1 959, p. 1 292).
.

P/i 1 1 (200 1 )

68

constituted the bulk o f Deleuze's 1 966 Bergsonism Much of Difference

and Repetition 's specific twist actually results from the accommodation
of Bergson's conception of false problems wi thin a Nietzschean frame.
One gets a sense of this operation by bringing two statements together.
The first is extracted from Nietzsche and Philosophy, the second from
Bergsonism: "We always have the kind of truths we deserve according to
10
the meaning of what we conceive and the value of what we believe in"
- " a problem always has the solution it deserves, in terms o f the way i t
i s stated (i.e., the conditions under which i t is determined as problem),
and of the means and terms at our disposal for stating it." 1 1
The specific "synthesis" or "assemblage" resulting from this parallel
reading is in fact displayed in several passages of Difference and
Repetition. For instance: "A solution always has the truth it deserves
according to the problem to which it is a response, and the problem
always has the solution it deserves in proportion to its own truth or
12
falsity - in other words, in proportion to its sense." For "sense is
13
located in the problem itself." This assumption alone is enough to put
an end to the infinite regress which would result from having to first
determine the value of the problem itself in order to be able to determine
the value of the corresponding proposition or solution: the problem,
according to Deleuze, bears its own immanent norm of truth and
falsehood, it concentrates in itself all evaluative possibilities. "A
speculative problem is solved as soon as it is well posed ," Bergson says
in the Creative Mind; a corollary to this claim is that identifying a
problem as a pseudo-problem is not fundamentally different from posing
it or trying to pose it. In other words, the point of view that corresponds
to problems (the problematic stance) is the point of view of value itself,
so that evaluating propositions in terms of problems is the same thing as
evaluating problems.
It is as if what Deleuze identified in N ietzsche as the source of all
value and meaning now came to be attributed entirely to problems
themselves, to the extent that the conditions for a genuine, intrinsic
genesis of truth lie at their heart. Similarly, the view - already present
9 I have dealt with this issue of Bergsonian pseudo-problems in "Fant6mes de
problemes" ( Ber gson,"Magazine Littiraire, n386, april 2000, pp. 39-42).
10
Nietzsche et la philosophie, op.cit., p. 1 1 8 (my own translation).
1 1 Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, New York, Zone Books, 1 99 1 ,
p . 16.
1 2 Difference and Repetition, op.cit., p. 159.
13 Ibid., p. 157.
"

E lie During

69

in the book on Nietzsche - that thought is put into motion by some

external encounter, is transposed into a new register as the formative
violence of the encounter comes to be described as a trigger that forces
us to pose a problem, and the object of the encounter itself is presented
14
as the bearer of a problem, or indeed a problem itself.
Deleuze remarks in the closing lines of the central chapter of

Difference and Repetition:

From the point of view of thought, the problematic distinction
between the ordinary and the singular, and the nonsenses which
results from a bad distribution among the conditions of the
problem, are undoubtedly more important than the hypothetical or
categorical duality of truth and falsehoods along with the 'errors'
15
which only arise from their confusion in cases of solution.
H e goes on t o call for an extension of our creative powers to the level of
problems. This stance is of course thoroughly Nietzschean:

The fact of determining what is 'true ' and what is '.false, ' the fact
of determining states of 0;tfairs in general, is fundamentally
different from the creative act of posing, giving form and
structure, overcoming, mastering, willing, that is implied by the
essence of philosophy. 16
Frivolous remarks devoid of any interest or relevance, banalities
mistaken for profundities, are our ordinary lot. They are expressions of
our inability to distinguish between ordinary points and singular ones,
fal se and real problems, in other words "our inability to constitute,
comprehend or determine a problem as such" . 1 7 Thus a new
determination is given to the Nietzschean i mperative: to consider the
point of a proposition, the aspect that makes it interesting or trifling, is
not different from evaluating its truth from the point of view of the
problem that gives it its meaning and value, but to raise oneself to the
level of problems implies that the test of true and false be applied to
problems themselves. The idea that in philosophy there is no criticism of
1 4Ibid., p. 1 40.
15Ibid., p. 1 63.
16

Nachlass Herbst, 9[48].

1 7 Difference and Repetition, op. cit., p. 1 59.

70

Pli 1 1 (2001 )

solutions, but only of probl ems, was of course already present in

18
Deleuze ' s study on Hume. It was omnipresent though implicit in the
book on Nietzsche. But i t i s only after the encounter with Bergson that
Deleuze systematically favoured a formulation of the Nietzschean theme
i n terms of problems and pseudo-problems. Whether he thereby
produced a "monstruous heir" (and was therefore justified i n avoiding
quoting Nietzsche altogether), or on the contrary merely unfolded
Nietzsche ' s problem, is yet another question. In any case, the continuity
of Deleuzian thought is such that every step in the direction of an
assessment of the nature of problems brings us back to the Nietzschean
problem of the value of truth itself (Genealogy (f Morals, III, 24).

Deleuze on Nietzsche and science

The second point that deserves to be discussed concerns the strategic use
Deleuze makes of scientific references in relation to the issue of
fri volity. The unexpected mention of Poincare in the passage from
Negotiations quoted earlier is interesting in many respects. It perfectly
suits Deleuze's purpose, which is to prov ide a kind of a fortiori
argument in favour of his view, because i t suggests that even in those
fields where truth would seem to be an exclusive concern, the problem of
pointlessness plays an essential role. But if Deleuze' s intention was
indeed to lay that claim, almost any mathematician other than Poincare
would have done quite as well. It is common knowledge that
mathematical research (even more clearly in the domain of "pure"
mathematics) is concerned with the interesting aspects of certain
structures rather than with the mere possibility of adding new truths to a
stock of older truths. Truth for its own sake has never been the aim of
mathematics (this was indeed one of the points u nder discussion in the
violent polemics triggered by the construction of non-Euclidean
geometries, to which Poincare contributed in a decisive way). At any
rate, Poincare' s view on the matter of pointlessness, when taken out of
its context, does not strike us as highly original. Although Deleuze, who
18
"En philosophie, [. . . ] ii n'y a pas de critique des solutions, mais seulement une
critique des problemes." (Empirisme et Subjectivite, PUF, Paris, 1 953, p. 1 1 9). And
also: "En verite, une seule espece d 'objections est valable: celle qui consiste a
montrer que la question posee par tel philosophc n'cst pas une bonne question, qu'elle
ne force pas assez la nature des choses, qu'il fallail aulrcment la poser, qu'on devait la
poser mieux ou en poser une autre" (p. 1 20).

Elie During

71

i s obviously quoti ng from memory, does not give us any bibl iographical
clue, it is quite l ikely that what he has in mind is a text from a collection
of epistemological essays entitled Science et Methode, in which Poincare
develops his views concerning what he takes to be the principles of
mathematical invention:
What is, i n fact, mathematical invention? It does not consist r n
forming new combinations out of previously known mathematical
entities. This could be achieved by anyone, but the resulting
combinations would be infin i tely numerous, and for the most part
they would be absolutely pointless [depourvu d'interet] . Inventing
implies that one does not form useless combinations, but rather
useful ones, and these constitute a very small minority. Inventing
means to discern, to choose. 1 9
It i s worthwhile noting that what i s a t stake here i s not theories per se, as
Deleuze seems to believe, but rather the underlying combinations of
mathematical forms that may lead to the construction of mathematical
theories. The rest of Poincare' s demonstration consists in prov iding
autobiographical insights into this unconscious sorting mechanism, thus
showing how the process of selection is in fact guided by an intuition of
an aesthetic kind. It will be interesting to come back to this text in
relation to Nietzsche. But what we should be concerned about at this
stage i s that Poincare' s name is generally attached to another, apparently
much more radical statement to the effect that in science one choses
certain rules or principles not because they are true, or even interesting,
bu t because they are the most convenient. In particul ar, it follows from
such an interpretation of scientific constructs (traditionally l abeled as
"conventionalist") that "experience does not tell us which geometry is
true, it tells us which i s the most convenient. " This quote from
Poincare's "Space and Geometry" finds many echoes i n Nietzsche's
conception of the role of "regulative fictions" in common scientific
practice. 20 The appeal to utility or convenience only rei nforces this
19
Poincare, Science et methode, Flammarion, Paris, 1 909, p. 48 (my own translation).
20
See for example The Gay Science, V, 344: our beliefs should be held not as ultimate
convictions but as "hypotheses, provisional points of view for experiment, or
regulative fictions." Nietzsche's standard form of "fictionalism" is in fact much closer
to the criticist tradition than he would like to believe. The comparison with Poincare
falls short of identifying Nietzsche as a proponent of instrumentalism or
conventionalism (see volume one of Rene Berthelot's debatable essay Un

72

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

impression, opening the way to an interpretation of Nietzsche's account

of scientific truth along prag matic lines. But that is precisely the
direction to which Deleuze's rath er awkward use of Poincare does not
seem to point.
Quite consistently, Deleuze's treatment of Nietzche, while aiming at
what he identifies as the core of his philosophy, deli berately avoids any
direct engagement with the intricate problem of Nietzsche' s relation to
science. In the section of Nietzsche and Philosophy entitled "Nietzsche
and science," he gives credance to the received view according to which
Nietzsche would simply dismiss science as an expression of ascetic
ideals. Such a reading is supported by many passages where Nietzsche
explicitly draws a link between science and the nihilism of modern
thought. But when Deleuze remarks that Nietzsche had "little
21
competence and little taste for science," he is being partial, and a little
philological probity is in order. It is a well-established fact that
Nietzsche at one point seriously considered studying science at a
university level. 22 The keen interest he took in the natural sciences did
not reduce to his desire to find empirical evidence or speculative models
in support of his own doctrine of eternal recurrence, nor was it confined
to the so-called "positivistic" phase during which he took a rather
23
positive attitude toward "science."
Nietzsche was fed scientific
literature by his friends Paul Ree and Peter Gast. According to his sister,
he had read Riemann. Whether this is true or not, he had for sure read the

Roma1Itisme utilitaire: Le Pragmatisme chez Nietzsche et Poincare, Akan, Paris,

1 9 1 1 ). His gesture in fact consists in folding the categories of the understanding unto
the regulative principles of reason. The Kantian reference is explicit in the following
fragment: "'The basic Jaws of logic, the law of identity and the law of contradiction,
are forms of pure knowledge, because they precede all experience.' - But these are
not forms of knowledge at all ! they are regulative articles of belief." ( WP 530). See
also GS, V, 357: "we Germans agree with Kant in doubting the absolute value of
scientific knowledge ... ". On this issue, see Ruediger Hermann Grimm, Nietzsche 's
Theory of Knowledge, Walter de Gruyter, New York, 1 977, pp. 98- 1 10 and 1 33- 1 37.
2 1 Nietzsche et la philosophie, PUF, Paris, 1 962, p. 5 1 .
n
see the letter to Peter Gast of June 1 9th, 1 882, where Nietzsche states his intention
to start a new student's life at the University of Vienna, in order to learn the basis of
physics and atomic theory in particular.
23See the passage of Ecce Homo where Nietzsche describes the context in which he
set out to write Human, All too Human: "ever since then, I have attached myself
exclusively to the study of physiology, medicine, and the experimental sciences ... "
This should answer the objection that the scope of the word "Wissenschaft" is much
broader than its English equivalent.

E lie During

73

wntmgs of the astrophysicist Friederich Zollner with great attention.

Uber die Natttr der Kometen ( 1 872) introduces a cosmology embodying
a non-Euclidean conception of space, which certainly appealed a great
24
deal to Nietzche. He was also familiar with the work of Helmholtz, if
not from first-hand reading, at least through Lange's account. 25 As for
Ernst Mach, it is not unlikely that he may have had access to some of his
26
writings.

Nietzsche and the scientific method

Now the real question of course is: i n what sense should this affect our
reading of Nietzsche? As we have seen, the priority of what is interesting
over what is true cannot be reduced to a mere valorization of states of
sensual or even intellectual excitement. The notions of interest or
significance point more profoundly to the problematic dimension of all
statements. The Nietzschean praise of the interesting side of things
nevertheless immediately brings science into focus. For in all likeli hood,
the products of scientific inquiry, once they have been established on
solid grounds and stated in the form of valid results, cannot retain their
interest for a very long time. As Nietzsche says, we are still living in the
youth of science and are used to follow truth as if it were a pretty girl,
but what will happen when science takes on the grim appearance of an
old woman (HTH I, 257)? The i mportant truths of science are bound to
degenerate sooner or later into ordinary and common matters of fact,
raising less and less interest as the amount of pleasure taken in them
dimini shes (HTH J, 25 1 ). Nietzsche is of course not reproaching science
for producing pointless truths: he is merely emphasizing a more general
process according to which science inevitably comes to be perceived as a
rather tiresome accumulation of "facts" or "results". "What is familiar is
what we are used to; and what we are used to is most difficult to ' know'

24 See Alistair Moles, Nietzsche 's Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology, Peter Lang,
New York, 1 990, p. 281 .
25 See Paolo D'Iorio's detailed examination of Nietzsche's scientific sources in
"Cosmologie de l ' Eternel Retour," Nietzsche Studien, band 24- 1 995, Walter de
Gruyter, New York, 1 995, pp. 6 1 - 123.
26 See Klaus Spiekermann's review of Gunter Abel (among others) in "Nietzsches
Beweise fiir die ewige Wiederkehr," Nietzsche Studien, band 1 7 - 1 988, Walter de
Gruyter, New York, 1 988, pp. 496-538.

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

74

-that i s , t o see a s a problem; that i s , lo see as strange and distant, as

'outside us'" ( The Gay Science, V, 355).
However, the kind of training involved in culture and scientific
method leaves open the possibility of taking an interest in the simplest
things, the most modest of truths (HTH l , 3). "As his culture increases,
everything becomes interesting for man, and he knows how to quickly
find the instructive side of things, the aspect through which they may fi ll
a lack in his thought or confirm some idea. Hence boredom progressively
di sappears, along with the excessive i rritability of the heart." (HTH I,
254 ). The general feeling of boredom and tediousness aroused by
science is the surest symptom of nihili sm. Against this symptom of
decadence, the task of the philosopher, in accordance with scient(fic
methods, is to introduce disharmonies and problems i nto things that
would otherwise seem unproblematic ( WP 522): "new questions" arise
"new question marks" (Nachlass Herbst,
I O[ I 02]). Nietzsche
ackowledges his "profound aversion to reposing once and for all in any
one total view of the world," his "refusal to be deprived of the stimulus
of the enigmatic." ( WP 422; see also 600). Yet, even i f the content of
science menaces to fossilize into a rigid, all-encompassing view of the
world, one of the most obvious benefits of the scientific method i s
precisely t o sustain the sense o f the enigmatic. The world is "not riddle
enough to frighten away human love, not solution enough to put to sleep
human wisdom" (Thus Spoke 'Zarathustra, III, l 0). As it renders all
necessary processes interesting to the highest degree, says Nietzsche,
science spares us the task of raising man above necessity in order to find
him interesting (Nachlass Herbst, 4 [ 1 2 1 )). This is so because in
opposition to the d ilettante approach to science that tends to reduce it to
a provider of hypotheses and world-views, sci entific methods draw our
attention to the fact that the value of science does not reside in its results
but in its actual practice. 27
All in all , scientific methods are at least as important as any other
result of inquiry; for the scientific spirit is b ased on the insight
into methods, and were those methods to be lost, all the results of
science could not prevent a renewed triumph of superstition and
8
nonsense. 2
27On

the importance of method, see HTH 1, 25 1 and 256, as well as The Antichrist 1 3

and 59.
28

(HTH I, 635).

Elie During

75

But what exactly is operative in scientific methods? It teaches us the art

of handling hypotheses and explanations.
Clever people may learn the results of science as much as they
like, one still sees from their conversation, especially from their
hypotheses in conversation, that they l ack the scientific spirit.
They do not have that instinctive mistrust of the wrong ways of
thinking, a mistrust which, as a consequence of long practice, has
put i ts roots deep into the soul of every scientific man. For them it
is enough to find any one hypothesis about a matter; then they get
fired up about it and think that puts an end to it. [... ] Therefore
everyone should have come to know at least one science in its
essentials; then he knows what method is, and how necessary is
the most extreme circumspection. 29
One may wonder why, in spite of all the efforts spent on arguments over
the stafus of truth and fal sehood (or "fal sification"), so little attention has
been paid so far to the philosophical use of philological method. For it is
there that Nietzsche' s praise of scientific method finds its most direct
and effective appl ications. Philology is at bottom nothing but an art (or
science) of hypotheses. One of its most essential tools (at least in
Nietzsche's time) is the so-called critical or conjectural method, which
consists in fill ing the gaps in a text or a doctrine by devising conjectures.
If Nietzsche distanced himself from the mechanical use of what he
someti mes refered to as the conjectural loom (Konjecturenwebestuhl), he
nevertheless laid strong emphasis on the special kind of "philological
i ngenuity [Witz]" required for the "finding of hidden analogies," as well
as on the "capacity to raise paradoxical questions"30 and to operate with
"i nterlocking possibilities."31 The notion that the conjectural method is
intimately tied to the "sense of facts" should onl y strike as paradoxical
those who confuse Nietzschean perspectivism with a sophisticated fonn
of relativism. One may naturally object that "the same text admits of
innumerable interpretations: there i s no 'correct' interpretation"
(Nachlass Herbst, I [ 1 20]), or that there are "no facts, onl y

29
30

HTH I, 635
Letter to Rhode of december 9th, 1 868, quoted in Charles Murin, Nietzsche

Probleme: Genealogie d'une Pensee, Vrin, Paris, 1979, p. 264.

31 lbid.,

p. 265.

76

Pli

11 (2001 )

interpretations" (WP 48 1 ). These statements are by no means

incompatible with Nietzsche's vindication of the "incomparable art of
reading well," and of the accompanying "sense of facts, the last and most
precious of all senses" (Antichrist, I, 59). To be sure, philologists are
"excl usi ve" types used to drawing "straight l i nes." Their methods are
responses to "the desire of simply understand i ng what an author has
said" (HTH I, 270; see also Daybreak, I, 84). "Here I take 'philology' in
a very general sense, namely to know how to decipher facts without
distorting them according to our interpretations" (Nachlass Herbst,
1 4[60)). The point is that there are some facts (admittedly, certain kinds
of interpretations) which one cannot overlook but at the price of
embracing a perspective of a lower kind, a more comfortable conviction
according to which truths are thinned down, veiled, sweetened - not to
say blunted or falsified. The philological method outsmarts these
interpretative tricks. The facts it aims at are meant to debunk. They
unrivet fossili zed beliefs and act as incentives for the shaping of new
ones. It is in the light of this special kind of "cruelty" that the question
"how much truth can one take?" can start making sense.
What one gets from the rigorous apprenticeship of an exact science,
namely a feeling of "increased energy" (HTH I, 256), a clearer
"conscience of one ' s force," just as when one practices gymnastics (HTH
I, 252). But this feeli ng is in exact proportion to one's capacity to
constantly look for new interpretations, new forms of life. Free spirits are
described as "economical in learning and forgetting, i nventive in
schemas, occasionally proud of [their] tables of categories, occasionally
pedants, occasionally night owls of work even in broad dayl ight"
(Beyond Good and Evil, 44). By disciplini ng and directing our creative
powers, the practice of scientific methods may sustain in us the lively
awareness that all practice is i nterpretative and value laden. It embodies
the constant possibility of readjusting our perspectives and reframing the
schemes, categories or "regulative fictions" we impose upon our world.
Thi s is the reason why Nietzsche is more inclined to stress the playful
conscience of conventions (examplified in Poincare's treatment of non
32
Euclidean geometries),
than the pragmatic i nterpretation generally
attached to the account of truth (or falsehood) as a condition of life.
32

Nietzsche does not seem to ignore the debates over non-Euclidean space: "The

categories are 'truths ' only in the sense that they are conditions of life for us: as
Euclidean space is a conditional "truth." (Between ourselves: since no one would
maintain that there is any necessity for men to exist, reason, as well as Euclidean

Elie

Du ring

77

At this point one should wonder what is lost and what is gained from
leaving the details of these issues aside in order to focus on the shift
from truth to value, from propositions to problems. Undoubtedly,
Deleuze's reformulation of the N ietzschean concern in terms of
problems, true and false, is effecti ve in the sense that it bypasses a
certain number of fri volous debates. Once the fictitious character of all
intellectual construct is acknowledged, the door lays open to generalized
scepticism and nihili sm. Every thought amounts to a falsfication, and
truth is forever at bay. But the notion of "degrees and subtleties of
gradation" between truth and falsehood can only be understood in
relation to the problems or in terpretations under which specific truths
and falsehoods happen to fall. And the sceptical stance itself shares its
essential features with the dogmatic image of truth: it holds the
impossibility of our access to truth as a problem, when it is in fact the
very will to truth that should be questi oned. Focusing on problems
preserves us from the unwelcome nihilistic consequence of lucidity. The
fact that we live by representations, N ietzsche says, is not a problem, it is
a fact. The real underlying problem is to understand what one represents
and how this is done, i n other words to reconstruct the particular "optical
device" that makes a certain life possible. In the same way, the problem
of N ietzsche ' s pragmatism is not well posed as long as one considers
knowledge in terms of its relevance for life in general. If it is true that
"perspectivism is nothing but the complex form of specificity" (WP
636), then one should ask: what life? what knowledge? The so-called
problem of pragmatism (that truth should be viewed as a useful and vital
error) is thus transformed i nto a specific query: what is the amount of
truth that one can take? Nietzsche explicitly rejects the pragmatist
cri terion according to which success, convenience, efficiency or any
kind of vi tal advantage would speak for the truth of something. Such a
creed is in fact the surest symptom of a diminished life. As Deleuze puts
it: "Now Nietzsche reproaches knowledge, not for viewing itself as its
own end, but for making of thought a mere i nstrument in the service of
l i fe." 33 The measure of vitality is the capacity to embrace new truths, to
invent new conditions and possibi lities of life, to create and state new
problems - not contradictions.

space, is a mere idiosyncracy of a certain species of animal, and one among many ... )"
(WP 5 1 5).
33 Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 1 1 4.

78

P/i 1

1 (200 1 )

Understanding how truth can be thought to i nvolve a "fundamental

falsification" (WP 5 1 2) and yet retain a kind of "regulative" function i n
the determination o f the relative degrees of power i mplied by competing
perspectives, and thus in the determination of problems themselves,
would probably necessitate a close examination of the various
philological strategies at play in the Nietzschean critique. But what about
the inspiration Nietzsche derives from the consideration of the scientific
methods at work in the natural sciences? How do these methods,
originally designed to aim at truth, stand i n relation to the process of
selection and simplification (in short, falsification) in which knowledge
essentially consist, at least according to Nietzsche' s linguistic (or should
we say criticist) 34 paradigm? These are the non-fri volous tasks that await
any further investigation of the Nietzschean philosophy of problems.

34 See Nachlass Herbst, 9[48]: "If we are not sceptics then, should we say we are
critics, or 'criticists'?" The label does not suit Nietzsche any better thathat of
sceptic (even if he sometimes recommends a kind of "experimental scepticism "). It
nevertheless underlines what the Nietzschean philosophy of science owes to the
Kantian critique, under the form of a not-so-original theory of "regulative fictions"
which is reminiscent of Vaihinger' s phil osophy of als ob [as if].

Pli

1 1 (2001 ) 79- 1 02.

,

Nietzsche' s J ustification of the Will to Power

TSARINA

DOYLE

1. Introduction
Much of the literature concerned with N ietzsche' s views on
epistemology and metaphysics has focu sed on his perspectivism as a
rejection of metaphysical realism and the God ' s Eye View. It has been
generally agreed that N ietzsche' s perspecti vism rejects the metaphysical
correspondence theory of truth in favour of an anti-foundationalist
conception of knowledge. It has equally been agreed, at least amongst
those commentators who wish to save Nietzsche from the clutches of
metaphysical realism and the ontological and epistemological
foundationalism that ensues from it, that the ontological doctrine of the
wiJJ to power is a thorn in Nietzsche's overall philosophical project.
Commentators argue that the doctrine of the will to power ei ther needs
to be eliminated and discounted as untrue,' or, that it is to be understood
as an example of Nietzsche' s philosophical wavering between a
metaphysical and an anti-metaphysical position. Thus the view has been
that the ontological doctrine of the wi ll to power is incompatible with
Nietzsche' s perspectival anti-foundationalist conception of knowledge.
This consideration derives from the view that, if true, the ontological
doctrine of the wiJJ to power represents a foundationalist doctrine and
thus an extra-perspectival claim to knowledge. Few commentators,
however, have attempted to read the ontological doctrine of the wiJJ to
power as an i mportant vehicle i n N ietzsche ' s overcoming of
metaphysical realism and thus as working i n tandem with his

1 See George Stack, 'Kant, Lange and Nietzsche' , in Nietzsche and Modern Gennan
Thought, ed. K. Ansell Pearson (London: Routledge, 1 991), and Maudemarie Clark,
Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 994).

80

Pli

1 1 (2001 )

'
perspecti vism. This paper will examine the manner in which it can
justi fiably be said that Nietzsche' s ontological doctrine of the will to
power represents an overcoming of metaphysical realism. I n so doing,
the paper will explore the manner in which the doctrine of the will to
power is compatible with Nietzsche ' s perspectivism to the extent that it
can be said that the former derives from the latter. This inquiry will
restrict its focus to Nietzsche' s justification of the ontological doctrine
of the will to power rather than examine the content of the ontology
itself. Thus my main concern will be with the manner in which
Nietzsche arri ves at the ontological doctrine of the will to power and not
with an analysis of his ontological theory of forces. This will involve
recognition of Nietzsche' s two main interests in proposing the doctrine
of the will to power. The first is his concern with philosophical method.
The second is his proposal of an ontological theory of forces. The
permi tted scope of the present line of inquiry permits us only to examine
the first interest. With this in mind we will embark upon our exploration
by setting up the problematic of metaphysical realism and the
requirements that Nietzsche must meet if he is to properly overcome it. It
is to thi s problematic that we now turn.

2. Metaphysical Realism
Metaphysical realism for Nietzsche assumes ei ther a cogmtIV1st or a
non-cognitivist guise. The cognitivist maintains that reality as it is in
itself i s cognitively accessible to us whilst the non-cognitivist denies this
possibility . The cognitivist metaphysical realist fails to see that the
given, as an appeal to a foundationalist conception of justification, is i n
fact a myth. Thus the cognitivist holds that the j ustification of our
epistemic claims resides in "confrontations" with the world.
Metaphysical reali s m is, in this sense, a form of criteriological reali sm.
This type of realism maintains that "the correctness of a representi R{\ or
system of representings consi sts i n its adequacy to a world (i.e., to that
2 John Richardson attempts to demonstrate the importance of the doctrine of the will
to power in relation to Nietzsche' s perspectivism. However, Richardson sees the
doctrine of the will to power as preceding and grounding Nietzsche's perspectivism.
The difficulty with such an approach, however, is that it fails to show how Nietzsche
arrived at the doctrine and in so doing, it appears as an unjustified foundationalist
thesis. See John Richardson, Nietzsche's System (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1996).

Tsarina .Doyle

81

'
which it represents)". The distinguishing feature o f this type o f real i st
lies in the view that "adequacy to the world is the criterion of
correctness for our representings." ' The issue of correctness is
determi ned from "outside" our internal perspectival practices of
justification. The metaphysical realist considers the world to be radical l y
i ndependent o f theory and thus o n l y captured adequately from a n extra
perspectival God ' s Eye View. However, this account of justification
ultimately collapses with the dem i se of the viability of the God 's Eye
View. This conception of knowledge maintains that justification is extra
perspectival and extra-conceptual. This is, as John McDowell points out,
an incoherent position. McDowell states:
The idea of the Given is the i dea that the space of reasons, the
space of justification or warrants, extends more widely than the
conceptual sphere. The extra extent of the space of reasons is
supposed to allow it to incorporate non-conceptual impacts from
outside the realm of thought. But we cannot real ly understand the
relations in virtue of which a judgement is warranted except as
relations within the space of concepts: relations such as
implication or probabilification, which hold between potential
exercises of conceptual capacities. The attempt to extend the
scope of justificatory relations outside the conceptual sphere
'
cannot do what it is supposed to do:
The non-cognitivist metaphysical realist wavers between the conflicting
desires to posit a real ist constraint to our epistemic claims and to avoid
the incoherency of criteri ological realism. In response to this difficulty ,
the non-cognitivist adopts a theory-internal conception of justification in
place of the extra-perspectival conception put forth by the cognitivist
metaphysical realist. In so doing, however, the non-cognitivist is faced
with the d ilemma of how our i nternal practices of justification capture
the world. The problem is then how one avoids confinement within
one's conceptual scheme. Kant, who in Nietzsche's view is a non
cognitivist metaphysical realist, attempts to escape such confinement by
holding on to the given in the form of the thing-in-itself. In this way
1 J. F. Rosenberg, One World and Our Knowledge of It: The Problem of Realism in
Post-Kantian Perspective (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company,
1 9 80), p. 89.
4 Ibid., p. I 1 3.
5 J. McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1 996), p. 7.

82

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

Kant attempts t o retain an element of constraint from a reali st core. Th us

Kant is unwilling Lo take the idealist route i n response to the dilemma.
He attempts to retain a realist constraint without appealing to the God ' s
Eye View conception of justification by positing the thing-i n-itself as an
object of thought rather than as an object of knowledge. He states:
though we cannot know these objects as things in themselves, we
must yet be in position al least to think them as things in
themselves; otherwise we should be landed in the absurd

conclusion that there can be appearance without anything that

b
appears.
However, in Nietzsche ' s view, Kant's attempts to retain a reali st
constraint ultimately fail because the thing-in-itself is both ineffable and
uncognizable. As such it lacks any power to act as a constraint.
Nietzsche states:
stricter logicians, after they had rigorously established the concept
of the metaphysical as the concept of the unconditioned and
consequently unconditioning, denied any connection between the
unconditioned (the metaphysical world) and the world we are
familiar with . So that the thing-in-itself does not appear in the
world of appearances, and any conclusion about the former on the
basis of the latter must be rejected.7
Thus Nietzsche maintains that the non-cognitivist form of metaphysical
realism operates within an appearance-reality distinction that
distinguishes how objects are for us from how they are in themselves.
This
disti nction
represents
an
oscillation
between
a
criteriological/metaphysical real ist response and an idealist response to
the problem of the compati bility of maintaining a realist constraint
whilst adopting a theory-internal conception of justification. This
oscillation can be detected i n Kant's retention of the unknowable thing
in-itself as an attempt to ward off idealism. However, Kant inadvertently
leans towards idealism when he claims that the unknowable thing-in6

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (London:

Macmillan Education Company, 1 990), Preface to Second edition Bxxvi. p. 27 [my
italics].
7 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human-All-Too-Human, translated by M arion Faber and
Stephen Lehmann (London: Penguin, 1 994), 16 [my italics]. Hereafter cited as HAH.

Tsarina Doyle

83

itself can only be defined negatively (that is, as non-temporal and non
spatial). This suggests that the world as i t is independently of the
conditions of our knowledge (conceptual imposition) is ontologically
indeterminate. The world is only rendered determinate and given a
positive definition when we i mpose concepts and a spatio-temporal
setti ng. In this way it can be said of the Kantian metaphysical realist that
"to a degree we create the world we live in."8 Thus the thing-in-itself is
deemed to be an indeterminate th ing that can be ontologically carved up
in multiple ways. Hilary Putnam captures this aspect of metaphysical
realism when he states:
Now, the classical metaphysical realist way of dealing with such
problems is well known. It is to say that there is a single world
(think of it as a piece of dough) which we can slice into pieces in
different ways.9
Nietzsche suggests that Kant's idealist leanings, coupled with the failure
of the thing-in-itself to provide the sought-after realist constraint, deliver
the non-cognitivist metaphysical realist i nto the hands of the radical
sceptic - whereby as knowers we are confined within our internal
practices of justification. '0 This confinement leaves open the possi bi lity
that our knowledge may differ radically from how the world is,
unbeknownst to us, in itself." I n tum th is sceptical possibility reinstates
the criteriological realists' "Myth of the Mind Apart". Rosenberg
articul ates this myth when he states
The Myth is a polymorphic one, but its central element is the
supposition that the world is a thing which is ontologically alien
8 M ichael Devitt, Realism and Truth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 997), p.
60
9 Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces Of Realism (LeSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1987),
p. 1 9 . Hereafter cited as MFR.
' Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, translated by Duncan Large (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1 998), 4. "How the True World Finally became a Fable",
section 3. Hereafter cited as Twilight.
1 1
This sceptical possibility is articulated by Kant himself when he says that a non
sensible intuition of the noumenal world (as the thought of the thing-in-itself) would
constitute "a field quite different from that of the senses [ ... ] a world which is thought
as it were in the spirit (or even perhaps intuited) and which would therefore be for the
understanding a far nobler, not a less noble, object of contemplation" (Critique of
Pure Reason, A250 p. 269 [my italics]).
.

84

Pli

1 1 (200 1 )

to u s a s we are, t o u s a s representers and as knowers - a thing

which stands somehow outside us, and which challenges us to
12
bring the i nner life of our thinkings into harmony with it.
From this we can see that Kant is caught in the dilemma that he can
retain a real ist constraint only by accepting the foundational ist
(dogmatist) i mplications of the given. Similarly, he can avoid the
i ncoherence of the appeal to the given only by relinqui shing a real ist
constraint and adopti ng a form of sceptical idealism.
In what follows I will argue that Nietzsche rejects both the cognitive
and non-cognitive forms of metaphysical realism by attempting to
overcome the sceptical implications of Kant's idealist leanings wi thout
succumbing to the temptation to "recoil back into appeali ng to the
Given". " He aims to overcome the sceptical idealist position that he
attributes to Kant by rejecting the appearance-reality distinction. In so
doing, he argues that our perspectives are perspectives on the world
rather than being constitutive of the world. Thus, he claims that our
perspectives capture the world in some adequate sense. He states
There is no question of "subject" and "object," but of a particular
species of animal that can prosper only through a certain relative
rightness; above al l, regularity of its perceptions (so that it can
accumulate experience) [ . . . ] The meaning of "knowledge": here,
as i n the case of "good" or "beautiful," the concept is to be
regarded in a strict and narrow anthropomorphic and biological
sense. In order for a particular species to maintain itself and
i ncrease its power, its conception of reality must comprehend
enough of the calculable and constant for it to base a scheme of
behaviour on it. The utility of preservation - not some abstract
theoretical need not to be deceived - stands as the motive behind
the development of the organs of knowledge - they develop i n
such a way that their observations suffice fo r our preservation. In '\
other words: the measure of the desire for knowledge depends
upon the measure to which the will to power grows in a species: a
species grasps a certain amount of reality in order to become
"
master of it, in order to press it into service.

1 2 Rosenberg, One World and Our Knowledge ofIt, p. 1 89.

1 3 McDowell, Mind and World, p. 9.

14
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, transl ated by Walter Kaufmann, (New
York: Vintage Books, 1 968), 480 ( 1 888) [my italics]. Hereafter cited as WP.

Tsarina Doyle

85

However, if Nietzsche' s rejection of metaphysical realism in both its

cognitive and non-cognitive guises is to be successful, his conception of
adequacy must be achieved without appeals to the criteriological
realist's extra-perspectival conception of justification. If he is to succeed
in this then he must fulfill two tasks. Firstly, he must avoid the charge
that our internal practices of justification are cut off from the world. This
requires that he overcome the non-cognitive metaphysical realist's
uncognizable and ineffable conception of world. Secondly, he must
show that the world plays a role in constraining our epistemic claims to
the extent that it can be said that the world features in our appearances.
The satisfaction of both demands requires that Nietzsche adopt a form of
realism that is compatible with his rejection of metaphysical real ism. He
achieves the first task by conceiving the world as theory-dependent. In
other words, the world cannot denote for Nietzsche a theory-i ndependent
thing-in-itself, but rather, i t must be grasped under some description or
other. In so doing, Nietzsche can avoid the metaphysical realist idea that
there is an Archimedean point "or a use of 'exi st' inherent in the world
itself' " independently of our choice of theory or description. We will see
that Nietzsche succeeds i n fulfilling the second task, and thus in securing
a real ist constraint, by positing the ontological doctrine of the will to
power as a perspectivist absolute truth. This maintains that questions of
"adequacy" to the world are worked out from "within" a conceptual
scheme rather than from an extra-perspectival position. Nietzsche
prioritizes epistemology over ontology to the extent that, properly
speaking, questions of adequacy to the world are, contrary to the
metaphysical real ist, questions of correctness. 16 By this we mean that
questions of adequacy are not determined by extra-conceptual or extra
perspectival "encounters" with the world, but rather, that the correctness
and truth of a statement is determined by justification. " In this way
Nietzsche can retain the notion of adequacy without commitment to any
form of gi venness or foundationalism. " With this in mind let us now
direct ourselves to Nietzsche's justification for the doctrine of the will to
power.

15

Putnam, MFR, p. 20.

See Rosenberg, One World and Our Knowledge of It, p. 1 14.
17
Ibid., p. 1 1 7.
18
Ibid., p 1 1 5.
16

86

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

3. The J ustification of the Wi l l to Power

In this section 1 will argue that Nietzsche arrives at the ontological
doctrine of the will to power from the point of view of what we can
know and justify rather than from a desire to articulate a fundamental
ontology. Thus, I will concur with Lanier Anderson who describes
Nietzsche' s ontological doctrine of the will to power as a derivative
ontology. My examination here has two principal aims. Firstly, 1 want to
determine that N ietzsche gives priority to the epistemic doctrine of the
will to power. This will involve an examination of Nietzsche' s claims
with regard to the issue of philosophical method. Secondly, I will test the
extent to which Nietzsche' s reflections on method curb any pretensions
to extra-perspectival conceptions of j ustification and truth . In so doing, I
am concerned to establish the thesis that for Nietzsche epistemology is
prior to ontology to the extent that ontological claims must be justified
within the parameters of our perspectival manner of justification.
Furthermore I want to demonstrate that this allows Nietzsche to maintain
a realist constraint. This real ist constraint consists in the idea that there is
one world to which our epistemic claims are more or less adequate. '"
Rosenberg captures this idea when he states:
We remain free, in other words, to hold both that the correctness
of our representings does not consist in their adequacy to the
world and that, nevertheless, our representings are correct if and
only if they are adequate to the world.20

19 It may be argued that there is a multiplicity of perspectives and thus that

justification is relative to a particular perspective or conceptual scheme. However,
this relativity claim does not cater for discovery and conceptual change. By
maintaining that justification is "relative" to a perspective I maintain that there is no
qualitative difference between perspectives. Thus I put forth the view that n'Qne
perspective is better or more correct than any other. However, it would seem thal
Nietzsche thinks that some interpretations are better than others. Nietzsche thus
claims that his own affirmative philosophy is better than the philosophy of resentment
that it replaces. Thus he sees his own philosophy as an improvement and rejection of
Christianity and Platonism. Furthermore, Nietzsche maintains that each interpretation
emerges from a predecessor. It is for this reason that he calls for the "purification"
(GS. 3 3 5 ) of values and not their replacement as such. The idea of better or worse
perspectives carries with it the implication that there is "one" world to which these
interpretations are more adequate.
20
Rosenberg, One World and Our Knowled1:e o(/I, p. I 1 3 .

Tsarina Doyle

87

I will achieve this aim by demonstrating the manner in which the

ontological doctrine of the will to power is most properly understood as
a perspectivist absolute truth in the sense of something that is true in all
perspectives rather than true outside all perspectives. The ulti mate
hallmark of such an absolute truth will be its "coherent" character or the
extent to which it is responsible for the diachronic synthesis of our
individual beliefs. Rosenberg articulates this character of perspectival
absolute truth when he says:
to make sense of the realist view that there is only one world [ . . . ]
we need someth ing more than all those time-bound, "internal",
synchronic "correctnesses" which appertain to representings
successively as they are elements of successive conceptual
schemes. We need also an absolute sense of "correctness" - a
sense in which an entire system of representations can, as a whole,
be said to be correct or incorrect."
In this way we will see that Nietzsche can uphold his internal realist
thesis that justification and truth are not determined by "confrontations"
with the world in the manner of criteriological realism whilst
simultaneously maintaining a real ist constraint. Thus it will be seen that
Nietzsche can overcome the Kantian oscillation between criteriological
realism and sceptical idealism and consequently that he succeeds in
overcoming both the cognitive and non-cognitive forms of metaphysical
realism. We will proceed, then, by turning to Nietzsche's articul ation of
the epistemic version of the will to power.
In order to achieve our aims we will return to Beyond Good and Evil,
section 36, where Nietzsche articulates the ontological doctrine of the
will to power. Here Nietzsche introduces the doctrine as an experiment
in method. The experiment centres around the question of whether we
can posit the will to power as a fundamental explanatory principle.
Nietzsche is here making a plea for the principle of expl anatory
economy. He states:
"Assuming, finally, that we could explain [my italics] our entire
instinctual life as the development and differentiation of one basic form
of the will (namely the will to power, as my tenet would have it);
assuming that one could derive all organ ic functions from this will to
power and also find in i t the solution to the problem of procreation and
21

Ibid.

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

88

alimentation ( i t is al l one problem), then we would have won the right to

"
designate all effective energy unequivocally as: the will to power."
Nietzsche maintains that his experiment regard ing economy of
principles is demanded by the conscience of philosophical method. He
argues:
In the end, we are not only allowed lo perform such an
experiment, we are commanded to do so by the conscience of our
method. We must not assume that there are several sorts of
causality unti l we have tested the possibility that one alone will
suffice, tested it to its furthest lim its (to the point of nonsense, if
you ' ll allow me lo say so)."
B GE 36 presents the will to power as both an ontological and
epistemological thesis. That is, the will to power is concerned to
articulate both a theory of knowledge and an ontological doctrine of
forces. However, Nietzsche gives priority to the epistemic thesis. He
states that the "most valuable insights have arri ved at l ast; but the most
"
valuable insights are methods ". His concern with the question of
method centres around the manner in which we justify our truth claims.
Nietzsche's conception of an absolute truth that is true in all perspectives
rather than an extra-perspectival truth that is true outside all perspectives
is reflected in his conception of the will to power as the methodological
unity of both the natural and the human sciences. That Nietzsche i s
concerned t o establish such an explanatory principle that unifies both the
human and the natural sciences can be seen from Human-All-Too
Human where he maintains that
H i storical philosophy [ . .] the very youngest of all philosophical
methods [ ... ] can no longer be even conceived of as separate from
the natural sciences [. . . ]."
.

His notion of philology as the "art of reading well" also expresse this
concern with method. This art of reading well, according to Nietzsche,
contains "the presupposition for the trad ition of culture, for the unity of
22 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, translated by M arion Faber (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 36. Hereafter cited as BCm.
23 Ibid.
24 Nietzsche, WP, 469 ( 1 888).
25 Nietzsche, HAH, I .

Tsarina Doyle

89

science"."' With regard to N ietzsche's understanding of science, Lanier

A nderson points out that
Nietzsche's intellectual cli mate [ .. ] had a richer conception of
science than we do - one which included the human sciences, or
Geistewissensch(lften, as well as the natural sciences."
.

As a doctrine of the unity of science, Lanier Anderson argues that the

will to power is "a v iew about our way of knowing the world".'8
Nietzsche's emphasis on method is an important element in his rejection
of foundationalism and in his proposal of an anti-foundational ist
epistemology that is compatible with ontological truth.29 Lanier
Anderson captures Nietzsche ' s perspectivist anti-foundationalist
concerns when he states that Nietzsche
wants to replace the traditional , ontological conception of the
unity of science with a methodological and interpretive
conception. For Nietzsche, the unity of the sciences is not located
in their reducibility to a common set of laws, or in the
composition of their objects from a common 'stuff', e.g., matter,
but rather in a unity of method which allows them to be
in terpreted as a coherent whole. '0
Nietzsche's methodology introduces two constraints that ensure that all
warranted truth claims will be articulated within the confines of theory.
The first constraint is the methodological demand for economy of
principles. Nietzsche warns us in BGE 1 3 that "the dictates of our
method [ .] demand that we be frugal with our principles". The second
constraint is an empiricist demand. Schacht articulates this demand as
follows:
..

26

Nietzsche, The AntiChrist, translated by R.J. Hollingdale, (London: Penguin,

1990), 59. Hereafter cited as AC.
27 Lanier Anderson, "Nietzsche's Will to Power as a Doctrine of the Unity of
Science" in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 25, 5 (October 1 994), pp.
729-50, p. 745.
28 Ibid., p. 73 1 .
29 John Richardson argues that Nietzsche's power ontology "stands prior to this
perspectivism as (something like) its objective precondition" (Richardson, p. 35).
However, this view takes little account of Nietzsche 's concern with method and the
manner in which we justify our epistemic claims.
'0 Lanier A nderson, op. cit., p. 733.

90

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

It consists in the idea that the meaningful ness and hence the
legitimacy of such notions is established only upon the
identification of something within the realm of actual experience
[. . .]."
It is important to note here that Nietzsche is n o t a foundationalist
empiricist to the extent that his perspectivism precludes the possibility of
appealing to uninterpreted self-j ustifying empirical facts. We can
however explain Nietzsche 's empiricist constraint by appealing to his
doctrine of the unity of science. Lanier Anderson captures this notion of
an empirical demand when he states that our theories are constrained by
the data of the various sciences. He states that the results of the various
sciences act "as data for any proposed account of the unity of science,
and such accounts must be evaluated as i nterpretations of these data" .'2
Thus it seems that the results of the various sciences act as some form of
empirical constraint. According to Lanier Anderson the d ata of the
various sciences are given priority over the theory of the will to power.
If some science gives rise to well-supported theories which cannot
be understood in terms of the will to power, the proper response
would not be to throw out the scientific results. On the contrary,
we would be forced to admit failure i n our attempt to unify the
sciences under Nietzsche's doctrine. We would then try to find
some other unifying principle, or, i f things seemed sufficiently
hopeless, give up the pursuit of u ltimate explanatory economy.33
By i ntroducing the notion of empirical constrain t Nietzsche disallows a
priori metaphysical speculation. It seems that we are now in a position to
explain Nietzsche's description of the will to power as "The world
viewed from inside, [my i talics] the world defined and determined
accoding to it "intelligible c aracter" - i t would be "will to powr" a'\d
,
nothing else": Al though this passage has frequently been cited i n
support of the reading of the will t o power a s a speculative metaphysical

31

Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Routledge, 1 995), p. 2 1 4.

Lanier Anderson, op. cit., p. 753.
33 Ibid., p. 73 5.
3 4 Nietzsche, BGE, section 36.
32

91

Tsarina Doyle

thesis," i t c a n n o w b e seen that the will to power is a non-foundationalist

internal realist thesis. I t i s internal realist to the extent that any
ontological claims that Nietzsche makes here and expects to be taken as
"true" are postulated from within the realm of theory and constrained by
the data of the various sciences. However, such data themselves cannot
be non-propositional sensory claims but rather they must be
perspectivally oriented claims. They are perspectival in character
because they are the results of particular scientific i nquiry. Thus the very
"data" themselves are theory laden. Christoph Cox captures this l ine of
thought when he argues that Nietzsche's "empiricism" does not amount
to "verificationism". Cox maintains that
Nietzsche is not a verificationist who can do away with
metaphysical and theological beliefs simply by pointing to a lack
of empirical evidence for them. On Nietzsche's view, as we have
seen, i n terpretations can be criticized only on the basis of other
interpretations, not by recourse to some bare, uninterpreted fact.36
This can be seen from Nietzsche' s criticism of positivism ' s appeal to
"facts",'1 and his claim that perceptions "are already the result of [ . . . ]
assimilation and equalization with regard to all the past in us; they do
not follow directly upon the i mpression"." Cox therefore describes
Nietzsche's empiricism as a "holistic empiricism" that, according to
Cox,
maintains that, while all knowledge is generated
affection, the unit of empirical significance
individual sensation nor the isolated statement
theory or interpretation as a whole in which
statements are lodged.39

out of sensuous
is neither the
of fact but the
sensations and

Nietzsche ' s doctrine of the will to power, in the context of its concern
with the methodological unity of the sciences, may, then, be described as
a second order belief. A first order belief can be articulated as "beliefs
35 Keith Ansell Pearson, 'Nietzsche ' s Brave New World of Force' , Pli 9 (2000), p.
26.
3 6 Christoph Cox, Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (London: University of
California Press, 1 999), p. 1 00 n. 43.
3 7 Nietzsche, WP, 48 1 ( 1 883-1 888).
8
3 Ibid., 500.
39 Cox, op. cit., p. 99.

92

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

about objects in the world", whilst second-order beliefs are " 'epistemic'
beliefs about those beliefs".4 Williams explains this distinction as
follows:
since any rational system of beliefs must allow for its own change
and development, and for the j ustification of the beliefs i t
contains, it i s clear that such a system cannot contain only first
order beliefs but must also contain second-order beliefs about
techniques for acquiring beliefs."
Thus second order beliefs explain how our first order beliefs "hang
together"." By opting for a coherence theory of justification of our
epistemic claims, Nietzsche avoids appeals to foundationalist self
justifying beliefs that in turn j ustify the rest of our beliefs. Nietzsche
claims
An isolated judgment is never "true," never knowledge; only i n
the connection [Zusammenhange] and relation [Beziehung] of
many judgments i s there any surety [Biirgschaft]. "
Thus the guiding principle behind the epistemological doctrine of the
will to power is to demonstrate how the resu lts of the various sciences
"hang together" as a coherent whole. Nietzsche maintains that
the results of science do acquire a perfect strictness and certainty
in their coherence to each other [in ihrem Zusammenhange mit
44
einander].
Nietzsche therefore argues for the cogency of absolute truths. Such
truths may be described as cross-perspectival truths that are true in all
human perspectives. Hales and Welshon capture this sense of absolute
perspectivist truth in the following:

40

Michael Williams, Groundless Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1999), p. 1 06.
4 1 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 N ietzsche, WP, 530 ( 1 883- 1 888).
44 Nietzsche, HAH, 19.

Tsarina Doyle

93

in characterising absolute human truths it is not claimed that they

are true outside of perspectives or true extra-perspectivally.
Rather, the claim is that there are truths that are truths within all
human perspectives, that is, that there are cross-perspectival
truths. The attempt to talk about truth values (indeed, the attempt
to talk of anything) outside of human perspec ti ves is to talk
nonsense or to commit a category mistake.'s
In this way, it seems that for Nietzsche absolute truths are compatible
with his perspectivist thesis. This compatibility can be further
demonstrated by reflecting on Nietzsche's contextualist account of our
truths whereby truth is indexed to a perspective. The contextualist
account maintains that standards of j ustification vary across, and are
determined by, particular contexts. Hales and Welshon articulate the
contextualist view in the fol lowing way:
it is possible under contextualism for a proposition to be true, a
person to believe it, for that person to have reasons for their
belief, and for that person to still lack knowledge, even though
another person may believe the same thing, have the same reasons
for their belief, and have knowledge. According to DeRose, this i s
n o different than a person standing in a yellow-painted room,
saying "this room is yellow," and then walking to a gray-painted
room and saying "this room is yellow." Even though they say the
same thing both times, only the first utterance is true; in moving
to the gray room, the context o f utterance (to which "this" i s
sensitive) changes. According to contextualists, "know" i s an
indexical (like "here," "now," and "this") because the truth
sensitivity component of knowledge is indexical!6
Nietzsche considers our individual truth claims to be warranted
contextually. However, this is not incompatible with absolute truths as
defined above. This can be seen more clearly if we consider absolute
truth not in the sense of transcending context but rather in the sense of
being intra-contextually warranted. In other words, Nietzsche's absolute
truths are also contextual truths to the extent that they must be warranted
i n each particular context. They are absolute because they are true i n all
45 S teven D. Hales and Rex Welshon, Nietz.sche 's Perspectivism (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 2000), pp. 33-4.
46 Ibid., p. 1 2 1 .

94

Pli 1 1 (2001 )

human perspectives. Thus, as an internal realist, any ontological

conclusions that N ietzsche reaches using this method of inquiry will be
derivative. Thus they will be neither foundationalist nor metaphysical
realist in character. However, there are two possible objections to
Nietzsche ' s internal real ist thesis that must be addressed here. Both
objections challenge the compati bility of Nietzsche's brand of realism
with his perspectival notion of justification. The first objection claims
that realism is not compatible with justification "from within". This
objection threatens Nietzsche' s retention of a realist constrai nt. The
second objection does the same thing by threatening our one world
reading of Nietzsche. It does this by claiming that since truth is a
contextual matter and so relative to a perspective or conceptual scheme
there are multiple possible worl ds, rather than one world that constrains
our epistemic claims and to which those claims are adequate. Let us
address each of these objections in turn.
The initial objection is one often levied at the coherence theory of
truth . I t claims that our second order truths fail to capture the world and
thus that the coherentist, which is essentially what Nietzsche i s when i t
comes to the question of truth, cuts justi fication off from the world. I t i s
important for our purposes that Nietzsche can meet this challenge
successfully. For, if the charge is correct and Nietzsche is guilty of
divorcing j ustification and truth from the world then he will have
deprived himself of any appeal to the realist constraint that we have
argued is a necessary component of his overcoming of metaphysical
realism.
In response, however, Nietzsche can overcome the above objection if
we can show that the foundationalist's notion of world as outlined above
is a vacuous one and that the idealist alternative is equally i ncoherent.
Allow me to probe this a l ittle. It seems that Nietzsche 's perspectivism
disallows all forms of foundationalism and appeals to nonpropositional
knowledge. Michael Williams argues, correctly I believe, that any
theory-independent claims regarding how the world is constituted n
itself entail foundationalist appeals." Such claims appeal to knowledge
outside of all perspectives which is, for Nietzsche, an incoherent
position. Furthermore, such foundationalist appeals are epistemically
47

Michael Williams, op. cit., p. I 0 I . The foundationalist takes truth to consist in

unmediated contact with the world whether i n the form of pure a priori cognition or
noninferential acquaintance with lhe sensory given. The notion of "world" that is
presupposed in this charge is that or a theory independent world that may di ffer
radically from our epistemic claims.

Tsarina Doyle

95

impotent. Non-propositional claims to knowledge cannot play any

epistemic role in the j ustification of our beliefs. Thus, any appeal to how
the world is in itself, that is independent of any theory or description, is
vacuous. Williams articulates both the objection to theory laden truths
and what he considers to be the fundamental emptiness and incoherence
of the objection. He states:
One can become haunted by the picture of one's belief system
incorporati ng all sorts of i nternal relations of justification while,
as a whole, floating above the world with no point of contact. But
this worry is incoherent, because the concept of ' the world' which
is operative here is completely vacuous. As soon as we start
thinking of that with which belief has to make contact as
congeries of elementary particles, patterns of retinal irradiation, or
relational arrays of sensuous colour-patches, we are operating
within some particular theory of the way the world is, and the
question of how belief relates to the world no longer seems
puzzling. The question can exert its paralysing effect only as long
as (and indeed because) the notion of 'the world' is allowed to
remain as the notion of something completely unspecifiable."
Thi s objection that a coherence theory cuts ju stification off from the
world partakes in the oscillation between criteriological real ism and
sceptical idealism. I t does this by maintaining that if one rejects
foundationalism then one has no alternative but to embrace idealism
whereby justification is cut off from the world and all attempts to retain
a realist constraint are forfeited. However, the sceptical idealist
alternative is equally incoherent. It too adopts the notion of a theory
independent world. With this view we merely return to the metaphysical
realist conception of the thing-in-itself. Michael Williams captures this
point when he argues that
The charge that [... ] justification would be cut off from 'the world'
fails because either the notion of 'the world ' in play here i s the
notion of something completely unspecifiable, an unknowable
thing-in-itself, i n which case the charge is unintelligible, or. else
we are dealing with the notion of 'the world' as it is according to
some particular theory, in which case the charge i s not true.49
48
49

Ibid.
Ibid., p. I 03.

Pli 1

96

1 (200 1 )

From this we can see that Nietzsche can avoid the osc ill ation between
criteriological realism and sceptical idealism by adopting a theory
dependent conception of world. This conception of world allows
Nietzsche to retain a realist constraint from within a theory-internal view
of justification and truth.
It is at this point, however, that we turn to the second objection put
forth by Cox . Cox argues that the above appeal to the notion of "world"
according to some particular theory or other succeeds in overcoming the
metaphysical realist commitment to the thing-in-itself only by embracing
ontological relativity. Cox argues that Nietzsche 's contention that the
notion of world is meaningful only under some description or other,
coupled with what he takes to be Nietzsche ' s further claim, that all
perspectives are "incongruent" in the strong sense of bei ng
"incompati ble"'0 with one another, results in the view that we most
correctly speak of "world" i n the plural rather than i n the singular.
This view proceeds from the naturalistic premise that we never
encounter "the world as it is in i tself' but always "the world as it
appears under a particular description." Because there is no
comparing "a description of the world" with "the world as it is
under no description at all," this latter notion turns out, at best, to
be superfluous. All we ever can do i s compare descriptions with
other descriptions. And because there is no One True World, there
is no description that could show itself to be the One true
Description by "corresponding to" that World. Thus there will
always be many descri ptions and no single, independent world
that they all describe. Each description, then, is actually a
prescription that constructs a world, leaving us with no World but
many worlds."

What is most trou bling about Cox 's reading is his view that the vari s
descriptions of the world are i ncompatible with one another. It i s
i mportant for our purposes that w e can overcome this reading because i t
serves to undermine our thesis in two pri ncipal ways. Firstly, it denies
the idea that the world constrains our epistemic claims. It does this by
entertaining the idea of a plurality of possible worlds and the consequent
denial that some i nterpretations are more correct or adequate than others.
5
.I

Cox, op. cit., p. J 56 .

Jbid.

Tsarina Doyle

97

We want to retain the notion of empirical constraint here to facil itate our
claim that Nietzsche overcomes the metaphysical real ist commitment to
the thing-in-itself and the related oscillation between cri teriological
real ism and sceptical idealism. Secondly, by arguing that the various
perspectival appropriations of the world are incompatible with one
another, Cox denies the possibility of absolute perspectival truths. In so
doing, Cox ' s reading renders Nietzsche's perspectivism incompatible
with absolute truth and consequently with the ontological doctrine of the
will to power. We will address each of these queries in tum.
The lack of constrain t entailed by this reading can be seen from
Cox 's claim that each "description" of the world is in fact a
"prescri ption"." From this it seems that Cox puts forth a constitutive
reading of Nietzsche's perspectivism according to which the world is
organized in multiple i ncompatible ways. That this entails that the world
places no constraint on our perspectival truths can be further seen from
Cox 's claim that the possibility of a plurality of incompatible
interpretations "follows not from 'the world ' being too much but from i ts
being too l ittle"." However, this lack of empirical constraint emerges
from what seems to me to be Cox 's conflation of "interpretation" with
"the world". According to Cox 's reading the world is not ontologically
i ndependent of the multiplicity of interpretations. However, we can
overcome th is objection by appealing to two particular passages from
Nietzsche's writings that suggest that Nietzsche is concerned to maintain
the very ontological i ndependence that Cox denies. The first passage to
which we tum is BGE 22 where Nietzsche insists on the independence of
the world from its interpretation. Here Nietzsche considers the
physicist's notion of conformity to law as an example of bad interpretive
practice. Of this interpretation Nietzsche argues that
it is not a factual matter, not a "text," but rather no more than a
naive humanitarian concoction, a contortion of meaning that
allows you to succeed in accommodating the democratic instincts
of the modem soul ! [ . ) But, as I say, this is interpretation, not
text; and someone could come along with the opposite intention
and interpretative skill who, looking at the very same nature and
referring to the very same phenomena would read out of i t the
ruthlessly tyrannical and unrelenting assertion of power claims."
..

52

Ibid.
Ibid., p. 1 52.
54 M y italics.
53

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

98

It i s important to note that it is not a theory ' s status as an interpretation

that Nietzsche is questioning here but rather it is the epistemic merit of a
particular interpretation as a claim to absolute truth that is at i ssue. This
can be seen from the fact that Nietzsche refers to his own doctrine of the
will to power as an interpretation whilst presenting it as a true
ontological doctrine. '' We have already seen the manner in which
Nietzsche thinks that his interpretation of the will to power can be
awarded greater epistemic status than its predecessors, due to what
Ni etzsche considers to be the methodologically more scrupulous birth of
his own doctrine. His desire to retain the ontological independence of the
world from its interpretations can be further witnessed in h i s account of
philology as the art of readi ng well. Nietzsche states that
Philology is to be understood here in a very wide sense as the art
of reading well - of being able to read off a text without
fal sifying it by interpretation, without losing caution, patience,
subtlety in the desire for understanding. Philology as ephexis
[indecisiveness] in interpretation."
Alan D. Schrift captures Ni etzsche's argument here when he states:
in his transvalued notion of philology, the world becomes a text
that Nietzsche exhorts us to read well (see, for example, RAH, 8,
where Nietzsche discusses what is needed for metaphysicians to
apply the philological method establ ished for books to 'the
writing of nature [die Schrift der Natur]). All the while, moreover,
the philological demands of honesty and justice require that we
keep the text separate from its in terpretation."
Furthermore, Sch rift cites a passage from one of Nietzsch e ' s '(in al
notebooks, Spring 1888, where he exclaims "The lack of philology: one
continually confuses the exegesis with the text - and what an

55 See WP, 1 067 where Nietzsche maintains "the world is will to power - and

nothing besides". Cf. BGE, 36.

56 Nietzsche, AC, 52.

" Alan D. Schrift, NieLzsche and the Question of Interpretation (New York:
Routledge, 1 990). p. 1 65.

Tsarina Doyle

99

'exegis' ! "58 We must remind ourselves very briefly here that the fact that
Nietzsche separates the world from i ts interpretations is not problematic
for our anti-metaphysical real ist and anti-sceptical reading of Nietzsche.
The fact that our truths are indexed to perspectives does not entail the
sceptical argument that we are radically in error. Rather it has been our
contention that this sceptical scenario is dependent upon acceptance of
the indeterminacy of the theory-independent notion of the thing-i n-itself.
With this in mind we will now turn to Cox ' s rejection of the possibility
of absolute truths.
I will begin to address Cox ' s claim that Nietzsche's rejection of the
thing-in-itself entails the rejection of the possibility of absolute truth by
citing Cox's four-point summary of his argumen t:
In a general sense, the doctrine of "ontological rel ativity" holds:
( 1 ) that it makes no sense to give an absolute description of "what
there is"; (2) that it only makes sense to say "what there is"
relative to a background theory, which will have its own purposes,
pri nciples, and criteria of individuation; (3) that there ex ist a host
of such theories, many of which are equally warranted but
incompatible with one another; and thus (4) that there is no
uniquely correct "way the world is" but rather as many "ways the
world is" as there are warranted theories.'"
Here Cox seems to conflate absolute truth with truth as it is outside of all
perspectives. Thus he conflates absolute perspectival truth with the
metaphysical criteriological real ist notion of absolute ex tra-perspectival
truth. He considers contextually indexed truth or truth as it is relative to
a particular theory to entail a relativist conception of truth. However, we
can overcome this reading by re-ex amining the passage to which Cox
appeals in support of his claim regarding the incompatibility of
perspectives. In WP 568 Nietzsche argues that the multiplicity of
perspectives is "incongruent". Cox interprets this as a strong claim that
argues for the incompatibility of perspecti ves. However, it is possible to
read Nietzsche as making the weaker anti-metaphysical realist point
which claims that the multiple perspectives are non-red ucible to each
other. This would then entail the view that there is no one true extra
perspectival description of the world to which all other descriptions are
58 Nietzsche, Nietzsche Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, VIII , 3 : 1 5 [82), cited in

Schrift, ibid., p. 1 65.

5 9 Cox, op. cit., pp. 1 55-6.

1 00

Pli 1 1 (2001 )

ultimately reducible. The notion o f one true description entails the

criteriological realist idea of justification "from outside". This in turn
entails the idea that justification involves "confrontations" with reality
independently of any particular description or theory. In this way this
view maintains, contrary to Nietzsche' s anti-metaphysical realist view,
that ontology precedes epistemology. Thus Nietzsche must maintain that
perspectives are non-reducible to one another. However, the non
reducibility of perspectives does not entail their essential
incompatibility. It merely stipulates that truth is essentially a contextual
issue in the manner in which we outlined the contextualist thesis earlier.
The doctrine of the will Lo power as an absolute truth that is true in all
perspectives does not violate this clause because as an intra-contextual
truth it respects the priority of context. This can be seen when we
consider that the ontological doctrine of the will to power, as an absolute
truth, emerges as a doctrine of unity of the various sciences and that the
articulation of the doctrine is dependent upon the theory bound data of
the respective sciences. This fact brings to our attention the non
reducible character of the doctrine of the will to power. The will to
power as an absolute perspectivist truth does not stand over and above
the various sciences molding their data to the doctrine. Rather the
ontological doctrine of the will to power emerges from within a
reflection upon these data and how they hang together as a
methodological unity. Thus we return Lo Nietzsche' s concern with
economy of principles. It seems that the cross-perspectival conception of
absolute truth, which stipulates that a perspective is absolutely true if i t
is true in all human perspectives, i s , despite Cox ' s claims L o the contrary,
demanded by Nietzsche's doctrine of economy of principles.
In responding to the above objections we have shown how
Nietzsche' s conception of the ontological doctrine of the will to power,
as an absolute truth, is justified within the parameters of his perspectival
theory of knowledge and his overall anti-metaphysical realist paradigm.
Rudiger Grimm argues that the will to power is an inclusive principle for
Nietzsche that embraces all the traditional philosophical categories of
ontology, epistemology, axiology, anthropology etc. Thus Grimm
maintains that the characterization of the will to power "as a way of
knowing"' is only one of the many aspects of the will to power. Whilst I
concur with Grimm that the will to power does indeed embrace all of the
traditional philosophical categories, it seems that, within the context of
60 H . Rudiger Grimm, Nietzsche 's Theory of Knowledge (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
1 977), p. i x .

Tsarina Doyle

101

Nietzsche' s
anti-foundationalisl
and
anti-metaphysical
realist
commitments, the will to power as a way of knowing must be priori tized.
In this way, we have seen, the ontology of the will to power derives from
the epistemic doctrine of the will to power as a reflection on
philosophical method and knowledge. It is precisely in this way that
Nietzsche avoids making foundationalist claims about what the world is
like in i tself, that is, independently of our perspectival takings. Thus the
doctrine of the will to power is an absolute truth to the extent that it is
justified as a cross-perspectival truth and not through recourse to ex tra
perspectival claims to knowledge. My argument, then, has been that
Nietzsche prioritizes epistemology over ontology. In so doing, he
maintains, contrary to the criteriological realist, that justification is
properly understood as a theory-internal or perspectival matter.
Furthermore, we have witnessed Nietzsche's view that al though
justification does not involve confrontations with the world it is still
possible to put forth perspectival absolute truths. From this we have seen
that ju stification, for Nietzsche, remains a perspectival issue without
succumbing to the sceptical idealist' s problem of confinement.
In further conclusion, Nietzsche emphasizes the notion of realist
constraint by claiming that absolute truths remain open Lo the possibility
of revision and further refinement. With regard to the doctrine of the will
to power he states:
1

Granted this too is only interpretation - and you will be eager

61
enough to raise the objection? - well, so much the better. Here Nietzsche draws our attention to his view that although
epistemology precedes ontology when it comes to the justification of our
epistemic claims, epistemology does not constitute ontology. Our
perspectives in this sense do not literally shape reality. They merely
shape our knowledge of it. Thus Nietzsche aims to avoid the weaknesses
that Donald Davidson detects in idealism and verificationism. According
to Davidson a view of this type attempts to "read out of existence
whatever it decrees lies beyond the scope of human knowledge". Thus it
tries "to trim reality down to fit its epistemology". 62 In rejecting such a
6 1 BGE, 22.
62 Davidson cited by Rorty in "Realism, Anti-Realism and Pragmatism: Comments on
Alston, Chisholm, Davidson, Harman and Searle" in Realism/Anti-Realism and
Epistemology, ed. Christopher B. Kulp (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers,

1 997), p. 1 49.

1 02

Pfi

1 1 (200 1 )

view Nietzsche allows for d iscovery and conceptual revision and thus
for the much sought-after real ist constraint. It further suggests that, for
Nietzsche, the will to power does not represent the end of the story. How
the story will progress is beyond the scope of our inquiry . What is
important for us is that the will to power is compatible with N ietzsche' s
perspectivism and that it plays a substantial role i n facilitating
Nietzsch e ' s need for a realist constraint that is compatible with his
overall anti-metaphysical realist commitments. I conclude by citing
Nietzsch e ' s articulation of his multi-perspectival conception of truth and
justification.
There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival
"knowing"; and the more affects we allow to speak about a thing
[ ... ] the more complete will be our 'concept' of the thing, our
'objecti vity'.6'

63

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, translated by Maudemari e Clark and

Alan J. Swensen (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1 998), III, 1 2.

Pli 1 1 (200 1 ) , 1 03-1 2 1 .

'The Animal That May Promise ' :

Nietzsche on the Wi l l , Natu ra l ism, and Duty
THOMAS BAI LEY

I t is often thought that Nietzsche simply denies that agents rational ly and
consciously determine their actions, and that they can legitimately be
held responsible, and morally evaluated, for their actions. This is perhaps
unsurprising, given that in Twilight of the Idols, for instance, he
identifies 'the error of free will' as one of 'The Four Great Errors ' . 'One
has stripped becoming of its i nnocence ' , he writes there, 'if being this or
that is traced back to will, to intentions, to responsible acts: the doctrine
of will was essentially invented for the purpose of punishment'. Such
statements can be found throughout N ietzsche's writings and are often
explained as symptoms of his ontology, which is standardly interpreted
as reducing agency, evaluation, and being to the 'becoming' of natural
forces. In this regard, appeal is often made to the section in the first
essay of On the Genealogy of Morality in which Nietzsche writes, 'A
quantum of force is just [ . . . ] a quantum of drive, will, effect - more
precisely, it is nothing other than this driving, willing, effecting itself,
and it can appear otherwise only through the seduction of language (and
the fundamental errors of reason petrified in it), which understands and
misunderstands every effecting as conditioned by an effective thing, by a
"subject'" . He continues, 'there is no "being" behind the action,
effecti ng, becoming; "the doer" is merely imagined into the action, - the
action is everything' . '
The purpose o f this paper, however, is t o suggest a n al ternative
interpretation of such statements. That is, this paper attempts to
demonstrate that the target of Ni etzsche's criticism of 'free wil l ' and
1 Tl VI 7, GM I 1 3 . Translations of Nietzsche's texts are my own, and references
employ the standard English abbreviations.

1 04

P/i

1 1 (200 1 )

moral evaluation i s a restricted one, and that his cnt1c1sm is

accompanied, without contrad iction, by a positive account of the will
and of evaluation. Th is positive account is shown to i mply substantial
revisions of the standard in terpretation of his ontology and to reveal a
positive ethics which has received l i ttle attention in the literature. The
paper is, therefore, divided into three parts. The first part considers the
particular target and nature of Nietzsche's criticism of 'free will' and
moral evaluation. The second part considers the principle features of his
positive account of the will, including the revisions of th e standard
i nterpretation of his ontology that i t implies. The third part considers the
positive ethics that he grounds upon this accou nt.

I.

To maintain that Nietzsche simply denies that agents rationally and

consciously determine their actions, and that they can legitimately be
held responsible, and morally evaluated, for their actions, is, firstly, to
ignore the particulari ty of the notion of 'free will' and of evaluation that
he denies. This notion identifies the will with a peculiar kind of cause or
causal agent, one that can provide a complete causal explanation of
certain events, namely, human actions. Thus, in his discussion in The
Genealogy, Nietzsche is concerned with the notion of the will that
identifies it with 'an effective thi n g [ein Wirkendes] ' , or 'a doer [ein
Tater] ' , lying 'behind' action. Such 'doers' serve to 'double the doing ' ,
h e writes, such that ' the same event i s posited first as cause and then
once again as its effect ' . In his discussion of 'The Four Great Errors' in
Twilight of the Idols, he also identifies our belief in the will with the
belief ' that we ourselves were causal in the act of will: we thought that
there, at least, we were catching causality in the act'. He identifies the
same notion of the will in Beyond Good and Evil when, in his critical
discussion of the belief in ' immediate certainties ' , he asks whethey'
willing need be thought of as 'an activity and effect on the part of a
being thought of as a cause' . In another section of Beyond Good and
Evil, he equates the notion of free will with the notion of causa sui and
the employment of it with 'the desire to bear the whole and ultimate
responsibil i ty for one's actions and to absolve God, world, ancestors,

Thomas Bailey

1 05

chance, society from responsibility for them ' .' Indeed, the same critical
concern is crucial to all of his critical discussions of ' free wi l l ' . ' Related
to it is Nietzsche's concern with the belief that this peculiarly complete
causation of the will and the motivations upon which it acts are always
intelligible and transparent to consciousness. I n his discussion of 'The
Four Great Errors ' , for example, he is concerned with the 'il lusions and
will-o' -the-wisps' of the "'inner world"' , including the belief 'that all the
an tecedentia of an action, i ts causes, were to be sought in consciousness,
and could be discovered there if one searched for them - as "moti ves"' ."
Furthermore, Nietzsche observes that this particular notion of 'free
will' is a necessary condition of a particular form of moral evaluation.
That is, he observes that attributing a peculiarly complete causation to
agents provides a ground for holding them responsible for, and morally
evaluating, any aspect of their 'being this or that ' , as he expresses it in
his discussion in Twilight of the Idols. In The Genealogy, he describes
this in terms of the morality of the 'weak' or the 'lambs' - that is, of
those who say, '"[ . . . ] good i s everyone who does not violate, who
injures no one, who does not attack, who does not requite, who leaves
revenge to God, who keeps himself hidden as we do, who avoids all evil
and in general desires little from life, like us, the patient, humble, just"'.
I t is these 'lambs ' , Nietzsche writes, who 'exploit this belief for
themselves and basically even maintain no belief more ardently than this
one, that the strong one is free to be weak, and the bird of prey to be a
lamb: - with this they win for themselves the right to hold the bird of
prey accountable [zurechnen] for being a bird of prey ' .'
Nietzsche also provides an accou nt of the origins and development of
this particular notion of the will and the form of evaluation of which it is
a necessary condition. It originated, he maintains, under 'the morality of
custom [die Sittlichkeit der Sittej' , a primitive period of morality which
he consistently refers to as 'Sittlichkeit' , 'Sitte ' , and 'sittlich ' . This
morality was, according to Nietzsche, crucial to the development of
post-customary morality, the form of moral evaluation which he is
concerned to reject and for which he reserves the terms 'Moral' ,
'Moralitat', and 'moralisch ' . As he writes in his discussion of 'The Four
2

GM I 1 3 , Tl VI 3, BGE 16, 2 1 . Nietzsche's discussion in BGE 1 6 is directed at the

statement, 'I think', but the first sentence makes clear that he intends it also to
concern the statement, 'I will ' .
3 See also G S 1 27, BGE 1 7 and 1 9, Tl Ill 5 and VI 7 and 8 , and A 1 4 and 1 5 .
4 Tl VI 3. See also D I I 5 , I 1 6, 1 1 9, 1 29, and 1 30, and GS 335 and 360.
5 Tl VI 7, GM I 1 3 . See also BGE 21 and Tl VI 8.

Pli 1 1

1 06

(200 1 )

Great Errors' , the errors o f morality have their origins in ' the oldest and
longest-lived psychology' , a psychology that was origi nally applied not
only to human behaviour, but also to every natural event. For primitive
man, he writes,
every event was an action, every action the consequence of a will,
the world became for it a multiplicity of doers, a doer (a 'subject')
was pushed underneath every event. Man projected outside
himself his three ' inner facts' , that in which he believed most
firmly, will, spirit, I, he first derived the concept being from the
concept I, he posited ' things' as existing in his own image,
according to his concept of I as cause.6

This animistic conception of nature allowed primitive man to

attribute his misfortunes and discomforts to the actions of natural
'spirits', actions and 'spirits' which were, in turn, thought to be
intelligible in terms of, and manipulable through, man' s maintenance or
infringement of superstitious customs. The maintenance of these
customs, Nietzsche claims, was thus the ground of the first 'morality '
and o f the first communities. Significantly, i t established the form of
moral evaluation which Nietzsche is concerned to reject, since it held,
firstly, that any aspect of man's existence could be of concern to the
'spirits' ; secondly, that man was responsible for any such aspect, by
virtue of the peculiar kind of causation which he was supposed to share
with the 'spirits ' ; and, thirdly, that i nstances of this cau sation and the
motives upon which it acted were transparent to consciou sness and
intelligible in terms of their relation to the maintenance of customs.'

TI VI 3. See also HH 1 1 1 and TI III 5 .

On the morality of custom, see, in particular, HH 96 and 1 1 1 , D 9, I 0, 1 2, 1 3, 1 5 ,
1 7, 23, 3 1 , 3 3 , 40, 103, 1 04, 105, 1 30, and 1 42 , GS 84 and 1 27, TI III 5 and VI 7 , and
A 25 . Nietzsche's conception of the morality of custom owes much to his readings in
philosophy and anthropology. Among the philosophical texts which provide accounts
of primitive morality and of the relation between morality and custom which are
comparable with Nietzsche 's, and which he had read or read secondary material
about, are Spinoza's Ethica, Pascal ' s Pensees, Montaigne's Essais, S chopenhauer's
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and Uber die Griindlage der Moral, Mill 's On
Liberty, and Ree ' s Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindungen. He also benefited
from the anthropological accounts of primitive customs and animism in Walter
Bagehot's Physics and Politics and John Lubbock's The Origin of Civilisation and
the Primitive Condition of Man, both of which he first read in transl ation in the mid7

Thomas Bailey

1 07

Nietzsche claims that these customs and this relation to nature were
undermined by the modern conception of natural events as subject to
causal necessity.' But he insists that primitive psychology, and the form
of evaluation associated with it, nonetheless persisted in metaphysical
form. lndeed, he maintains that metaphysicians recognised the
incompatibility between, on one hand, primitive psychology and
evaluation and, on the other, the modern conception of nature. But he
claims that they nonetheless continued to be convinced by primitive
psychology and evaluation, which had become embedded in grammar
and in 'reason ' . They therefore thought it necessary to posit ' free will ' as
a supra-natural, but nonetheless real, cause of events, and to posit the
related notions of a supra-natural I, spirit, and being and a supra-natural
source of moral value. As Nietzsche writes i n the chapter, "'Reason" in
Philosophy ' , in Twilight of the Idols,
Language belongs in its origin to the time of the most rudimentary
form of psychology: we come into a crude fetishism when we
bring to consciousness the basic presuppositions of the
metaphysics of language, to put it plainly: of reason. That sees
agents and actions everywhere: that believes in will as cause in
general; that believes i n 'I', i n I as being, in 1 as substance and
projects the belief in the I-substance onto all things - with this it
first creates the concept 'thing' . . . Being i s thought into, put onto,
everywhere as cause; from the conception ' l ' follows first,
derivatively, the concept 'Being' . . . At the beginning stands the
great fate of the error that the will is something that effects, that
will is an ability . . . Today we know that it is merely a word . . .
Very much later, i n a world a thousand times more enlightened,
reliability, subjective certainty in the handling of the categories of
reason came with surprise to philosophers' consciousness: they
concluded that these could not have come from the empirical, indeed the entire empirical stands in contradiction to them. From
where do they come, there.fore ? And in India as in Greece one
has made the same mi stake: 'we must have already have once
been at home in a higher world (- i nstead of in a very much lower
-

I 870's, and in W.E.H. Lecky's History of European Morals, which he had read in
translation by 1 8 8 1 .
8 See HH 1 1 1 , GS 46, and Tl VI 3.

1 08

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

one:

which would have been the truth !), w e must have been
divine, .for we have reason ! ' "

With th is, then, agents could continue to be held responsible for any
aspect of their 'being this or that' - an agent's actions could be
understood as the effects of a peculiarly complete, and now supra
natural, kind of cause, and as transparent to a supra-natural kind of
consciousness, and could be evaluated according to moral values which,
in order to maintain their appl icability to any aspect of man 's existence,
were also endowed with a supra-natural origin (in the Christian God, for
example).
Nietzsche' s objection to this metaphysical form of 'free will' and
evaluation, and to the other metaphysical notions related to it, i s the
incompatibilist one that they, like the primitive psychology and
evaluation upon which they are based, are i ncompatible with the causal
necessity of natural events. He consistently criticises the notion of 'free
wil l ' on incompatibilist grounds, and reserves some of his sharpest
rhetori c for metaphysicians and their continued positing of primitive
psychology and evaluation despite their recogmt10n of its
incompatibility with natural causal necessity."' His similarly venomous
rejection of morality is directed at those forms of evaluation which
demand that an agent radically differ from what he already is or, even,
from what he naturally could be - by demanding that the 'bird of prey'
be a 'lamb' , for example, or that man transcend his natural existence in
the name of 'a higher world ' . Demands such as these, Nietzsche
recognises, rely upon attributing to agents the peculiarly complete
causation involved in the incompatibilist notion of the will and upon
evaluating them accord ing to values grounded in something other than
their natural existence.

9 TI III 5. See also D 3 1 , GS 1 27 and 1 5 1 , BGE 2, 5, 20, and 2 1 , D P 3, GM ill 25, TI

III 6, IV, and VI 3 and 8, A 14, 1 5 , 25, 38, and 39, and EH IV 8.
1

For Nietzsche's incompatibilist criticism of 'free will ' , see HH 39, 70, 9 1 , 99, 1 02,
1 05, 106, 1 07, 1 33, 144, 1 60, 208, and 376, AOM 33, 50, 5 1 , and 363, WS I, 1 1 , 1 2
23, 24, 28, 43, 52, 6 1 , 69, 8 1 , and 1 83, GS 99 and I IO, BGE 2 1 and 22, TI III 8, and A
14 and 1 5 . Examples of Nietzsche's remarks regarding metaphysicians can be found
at BGE 5, D P 3, TI III 6 and IX 16 and 42, and A I O, 12, and 52. Nietzsche also
rejects that fatalism which confuses causal necessity with a compulsion, command, or
constraint. For this, see AOM 9, WS 6 1 , GS 1 09, and BGE 2 1 and 22. He provides the
other standard incompatibilist criticism of 'free will ' , regarding its making action
unintclligblc. at W.S' 23.

Thomas Bailey

1 09

It is often thought that Nietzsche, having rejected the metaphysics of

'free will ' , 'consciousnes s ' , 'moral ity ' , and 'bei ng' , aspires to articulate
'becoming' without appeal to any notions of ' free will ' , 'consciousness ' ,
'morali ty ' , o r ' being ' . This ' becoming' is therefore often thought o f a s a
necessary flux of natural forces or drives, conceived as radically
excluding free will and moral evaluation, along with consciousness and
'bei ng'. But Nietzsche does not articulate such a flux or aspire to, and
nor should he. For him to reduce agency, evaluation, and ontology to a
necessary flux of forces or drives, without free will, consciousness,
moral ity, or being, would be for him to employ a typically metaphysical
understanding of nature and of opposites, requiring free will,
consciousness, morality, and being to be entirely excluded from nature.
Such an exclusive relation between opposites is crucial to metaphysics,
which constructed a '"real world'" 'out of the contradiction to the actual
worl d', as Nietzsche writes in Twilight of the Idols. " Metaphysics
consequently holds that fu ndamental opposites such as freedom and
unfreedom, morality and immorality, consciousness and the
unconscious, and truth and falsehood have distinct ontological origins,
that they originate from distinct 'real ' and ' apparent', metaphysical and
natural, worlds. Nietzsche, however, explicitly rejects such exclusive
oppositions and conceives his project as one of accounting for 'how
something can originate from its opposite', as he writes at the beginnings
of both Human, All Too Human and Beyond Good and Evil. 12 Thus he
does not deny the metaphysical "'real world'" while retai ning
metaphysics' conception of the 'apparent ' , natural world, and does not
deny freedom in the name of unfreedom, morality in the name of
immorality, consciousness in the name of the unconscious, or truth in the
name of falsehood. He simply denies those conceptions of freedom,
moral ity, consciousness, and truth that appeal to an origin or world
distinct from the natural, and attempts to account for them and their
opposites without such an appeal.
Nietzsche's non-metaphysical naturalism therefore provides room for
h i m to offer a positive compatibilist alternative to the particular notion
of the will which he rejects on i ncompatibi list grounds, a naturalistic
alternative to the form of evaluation of which this notion of the will is a
necessary condition, and a more sophisticated ontology than he is
standardly interpreted as offeri ng. The following parts of this paper
attempt to demonstrate that he does offer such alternatives, beginning
II

12

T/ IlJ 6 .

HH I and BGE 2. See also TI III 4 and 6 .

1 10

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

with his alternative account o f the will and its significance for his
ontology.

II.

Nietzsche offers h i s pos1t1ve compatibilist account of the will a t the

beginning of the second essay of The Genealogy. There he conceives
willing as the disti nctive ability of 'the animal that may [dii1fen]
promise' . This ability to will or promise, he maintains, is the
manifestation of a hierarchical organisation of other abilities
(Vermiigen), in particular the abi lity to remember and the ability to
forget, and an inability, the inability to forget. These particular abilities
and this inability therefore conflict with each other, but their hierarchical
organisation ensures that, in cases of willi ng, the ability to remember
overcomes the ability to forget, which, in turn, has overcome the
inability to forget.
Thus Nietzsche claims, firstly, that the inabili ty to forget consists of
the inability to ' "cope [literally, finish, fertig]" with ' , or 'digest' ,
experiences and desires, and the processes o f "'inanimation
[Einverseelung]'" through which they are 'digested ' . By overcoming this
i nabil ity, therefore, ' active forgetful ness' limits consciousness - it
'digests ' , or ensures the ' inhibition' of, experiences and desires, and the
processes through which they are 'digested'. Forgetfulness therefore,
Nietzsche writes, provides a 'present ' , 'a little stillness, a l i ttle tabula
rasa of consciousness, so that there i s again space for new things, above
all for the nobler functions and functionaries, for ruling, foreseeing,
predeterm ining (for our organism is arranged oligarchically )'. In other
words, forgetfulness acts as 'a doorkeeper' of consciousness, restricting
it so as to make room for willing."
But willing also requires 'an opposing ability, a memory ', a second
active abi lity that opposes and overcomes forgetfulness. For willing
involves, Nietzsche writes, 'an active willing-not-to-be-rid-of, a
continuous willing of something once willed, a real memory of the will'.
I n cases of willing, therefore, a willing is actively not finished with, no
digested, not forgotten. This ensures that 'a world of strange new things,
circumstances, even acts of will may be safely put between the original
"I will", "I will do" and the actual discharge of the will, its act, without

13

GM II I .

Thomas Bailey

111

this Jong chain of will breaking ' . That is, although new experiences and
desires affect the willer, he is nonetheless able to remember and to act
upon what he once willed. He i s, Nietzsche wri tes, 'able to stand security
for himself as future ' . This also presupposes, Nietzsche observes, a
number of other, subsidiary abilities: 'In order to dispose of the future in
advance in this way, man must first have learned to distinguish
necessary from chance events, to think causally, to see and anticipate the
di stant as i f i t were present, to fix with certainty what is the purpose and
what the means to i t , i n general be able to calculate, compute ' . "
Nietzsche therefore offers a compatibilist account of the will - that is,
an account that does not appeal to the peculiar kind of cause or causal
agent that he rejects on incompatibilist grounds. His account is also
distinguished by its insistence on a reductive form of naturalism, its
provision of a physiological and hi storical account of the being which is
able to will, and its accounting for the agent's ability not to be
determined to actions by its desires. These three distinctive aspects of
Nietzsche' s compatibilism will be considered i n turn.
Firstly, Nietzsche consistently insists that apparently mental events,
including those concerned with willing, are in fact physiological ones,
and that mental descriptions are to be reduced to physiological ones.
This is clear not only from the first sentence of the second essay of The
Genealogy, in which he writes that 'to breed an animal that may
promise' is 'the paradoxical task that nature has set itself with regard to
man' . " He also makes the following statement in a parenthetical
discussion of the ability to forget in the third essay of The Genealogy.
I do not regard 'mental [seelisch] pain ' itself as a factual
existence, but only as an interpretation (causal interpretation) of
factual existences that have not yet been exactly formulated: thus
something that still hangs entirely in the air and is not
scientifically binding [ . . . ]. If someone cannot cope with his
'mental pai n ' , that is due, crudely put, not to his 'soul [Seele] ' ;
more likely to his stomach (crudely put, as said: which i n no way
expresses a wish also to be heard crudely, understood crudely . . . )
A strong and well -formed human digests his experiences (deeds,
misdeeds included) as he digests his meals, even if he has hard
bites to swallow. If he 'cannot cope' with an experience, then this
kind of indigestion is as physiological as the other - and in many
14
15

GM II I .
GM II ! .

112

Pli

1 1 (200 1 )

cases only one of the consequences of that other. - With such a

conception one can, speaking between ourselves, still be the
strictest opponent of all materialism . . . ' "
Nietzsche therefore maintains that apparently mental events are i n
fact physiological ones, and that descriptions of mental pain and
forgetfu lness, particularly descriptions which attribute 'causal ' features
to them (presumably regarding their causing or being caused by physical
facts), are not descriptions of mental facts, but merely inadequate
descriptions of physiological ones. Indeed, his physiology is primarily
concerned with providing adequate physiological descriptions of
apparently mental events, and particularly with providing a
physiological description of willing. This not only explains why he
strictly opposes that materialism which would reduce every apparentl y
mental event to an event in the stomach (a reduction which can be found
in some of the popular German materialist texts of the 1 850s and
1 860s). " It also explains why he does not simply deny the mental or
reduce i t to a manifestation of a u n iversal and necessary flux of forces or
drives, as the standard interpretation of his ontology maintains. Instead,
although he rejects conceptions of the mental which conceive it in terms
which are incompatible with natural causation, he opposes 'clumsy
naturalists who can hardly touch "the soul" without losing it' , as he
writes in the first part of Beyond Good and Evil. He continues, 'the way
to new forms and refinements of the soul-hypothesis stands open: and
concepts such as "mortal soul'' and "soul as multiplicity of the subject"
and "soul as social structure of drives and affects" want henceforth to
have civic rights in science ' . " With these concepts, Nietzsche maintains,
a description of the mental can be provided which is compatible with
natural causation but which does not 'lose' the mental. His physiology of
'life' or 'spirit ' , and, in particular, of the ' life' or 'spirit' that can will, is
intended to provide such a description.
Thu s , in a section slightly later in the first part of Beyond Good and
Evil, Nietzsche again rejects the notion of the will that conceives it as a
16

GM III 1 6.
For example, Jacob Moleschott, in his Physiologie des Stoffwechsels in Pjlanzen
und Thieren and its popular companion volume, Lehre der Nahrungsmittel, both
published in 1 850, and Ludwig Biichner, in his Kraft und Stoff, published in 1 855,
make such reductive claims. Nietzsche knew of them through F.A. Lange 's
(l1'.w liicli11' 1frs Materi11/is111us, which he read soon after it was published in 1 865.
IH
JI( a,: 1 :i .
17

Thomas Bailey

1 13

peculiar kind of cause or causal agent. But here he also describes willing
as revealing, in the affects that it gives rise to, that 'our body is only a
social structure of many souls ' . I n willi ng, he claims, 'we are at the same
time commander and obeyer, and as obeyer, we know the feelings of
constrai nt, compu lsion, pressure, resistance, motion which usually begin
immediately after the act of wil l ' . If these affects of obedience are
ignored, and only 'the affect of command' is attended to, then, Nietzsche
writes, 'the willer believes wholeheartedly that willing suffices for
action ' , that action can be attributed to "'freedom of will'" . But this
misinterpretation of willing in terms of the notion of a peculiar kind of
cause or causal agent ignores 'the feeli ngs of pleasure of the successful
executive instruments, the serviceable "under-wills" or under-souls'
which are also required to explain the ability to will. Nietzsche maintains
that a physiology of this 'social structure of many souls' and its ability to
will can be provided, and, indeed, that it is these 'relations of mastery
under which the phenomenon "life" results ' . 19
Ni etzsche returns to this 'life' i n a later section of Beyond Good and
Evil. Here he again insists on his reductive form of natural ism, expressed
here as a 'task ' : 'to translate man back into nature [ . . . ] to make man
henceforth stand before man as he today stands, hardened by the
discipline of science, before other nature ' . This requires, he maintains,
that mental descriptions such as 'honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom,
sacrifice for knowledge' be rejected as 'flattering colours and over
painti ng' that obscure the 'basic text homo natura' . But he also insists
here that 'the "spirit [ Geist]" ', a 'commanding something [ . . which]
wills to be master in and around itself and to feel itself master' , can be
accounted for in terms of 'needs and abilities [ . which] are the same as
physiologists posit for everythi ng which l i ves, grows, and multiplies
itself' . Again claiming that 'the "spirit" is more like a stomach than
anything else ' , he here describes its 'will to be master in and around
itself' in terms of its epistemological 'digestion' of the external world.
This manifests, he writes, 'a strong tendency to assimilate the new to the
old, to simplify the diverse, to overlook or push away the wholly
contradictory ' . He continues, 'Its intention in this is the incorporation of
new "experiences", the classification of new things under old divisions,
- growth, therefore ; more precisely, the feeling of growth, the feeling of
increased force ' . A spirit may also manifest 'a suddenly erupting
decision for ignorance' and hence restrict its 'digestion' of the external
world. It may also 'let itself be deceived' or 'deceive other spirits' .
.

. .

19

BCE 1 9.

114

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

Nietzsche maintains that 'all this is necessary according t o the degree of

its force of appropriation, its "digestive force", to speak in metaphor'. "'
These outlines of a physiology of 'life' or 'spirit' are therefore
concerned with describing a natural being which manifests a tendency to
maintai n itself over time, an ability to will and to know, and conscious
events such as those involved in willing knowing. Although this self
maintenance, will ing, and knowing give rise to affects of increased force
or of the command and obedience of its 'souls' which can be understood
as this being's fundamental 'i ntention' , Nietzsche does not understand
this 'intention' as i rreducibly teleological. Similarly, he does not
understand apparently mental descriptions such as those attributing
'i ntentions' to willing as comprising i rreducibl y teleological descriptions
of actions, as comprising an irreducible psychology. To claim that, for
example, ' metaphysicians posited "free will" as a complete and supra
natu ral kind of causation in order to defend pri mitive psychology and
evaluation from the recognition of natural causal necessity' would,
according to Nietzsche, not provide an adequate naturalistic description
of an event. He i nstead endeavours to provide reductive, physiological
descriptions of such apparently mental events and of the fundamental
'i ntentions' of certain organic beings, descriptions that are concerned
only with natural causation.
This is revealed in the section of Beyond Good and Evil in which
Nietzsche insists that 'life itself is will to power' . Here he also criticises
conceptions of life that appeal to ' superfluous teleological principles ' .
'Will to power' i s , then, not a principle of ontological or psychological
teleology, but is, rather, a principle of 'morphology' or 'physio
psychology', the terms that Nietzsche employs at the end of the first part
of Beyond Good and Evil to distinguish his reductive fonn of natural ism,
his physiology, and his principle of 'will to power' from the ' moral
prejudices' that have informed psychology h itherto. 2' With this,
N ietzsche ins ists on a naturalism that does not deny the mental, but that
is committed to describing it and the physiology of the being that
appears to man ifest it without teleology. Similarly, his description of the
fundamental 'i ntention' of certain organic beings is concerned only with
identifying the tendency of such beings to manifest self-maintenance, t e
ability to will and to know, and consciousness.
N ietzsche also provides a historical account of the development of
this kind of organic being, an account which also is not teleological and

20
21

BGE 230. On spirit, knowledge, and the ability to will, see also TI VITI 6 .
BGE 1 3 , 23. See also GS 1 09, BGE 22, GM Ill 7, and A 2.

Thomas Bailey

1 15

which, once again, concerns the morality of custom. In Beyond Good

and Evil, he writes of the morality of custom that, 'this tyranny, this
arbitrariness, this severe and grandiose stupidity has rrained the spirit; it
seems that slavery, in the cruder and in the more refined sense, is the
indispensable means also for spiritual discipline and breeding [geisrigen
Zuehl und Ziichrung] ' . In The Genealogy, he is more specific, claiming
that the morali ty of custom trained man in promising according to 'the
oldest and most primitive relation among persons that there is, [ . . . ) the
relation between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor' . Regarding this
relation, he writes, 'Precisely here promises were made; precisely here a
memory was made for him who prom ises; precisely here, one may
suspect, will be found a place of hard, cruel, and pai nful things ' .
Nietzsche maintains that this relation informed relations between
individuals, between the community and individuals, and between the
"
community and the 'spirits ' of nature. By providing a training
according to this relation, the moral ity of custom overcame the
s ingularity and arbitrariness of the primitive 'human animal ' - for the
morality of custom, Nietzsche writes in Daybreak, "'evil" signifies the
same as "individual", "free", "arbitrary", "unusual", "unforeseen",
" incalculable' " . Thus the morality of custom, and the relation between
creditor and debtor, overcame forgetfulness, the 'partly dull, partly
scattered understanding' of the primitive 'human animal' , and made man
'calculable, regular, necessary, also in his own representation of
'
h imself' and able to promise. 2
Nietzsche's compatibilism is therefore reductively naturali stic and is
accompanied by a historical physiology of the ability to will. The third
d istinctive aspect of his compatibilism is its allowing for an agent's
action not to be determined by the agent's desires. That is, Nietzsche
does not follow many compatibilist accounts in maintaining that action
can be provided with an adequate explanation, merely in terms of desires
and beliefs about the means to their satisfaction . Correspondingly, he
22

BGE 1 8 8, GM II 8. On the relation between creditor and debtor as the rel ation
between community and individual, see GM II 3, 9 and JO, and on this re lation as the
relation between the community and the 'spirits' of nature, see HH I I I, D 23 , and
GM II 1 9, 20, 22, and 23.
23 GM II 3, D 9, GM U I . On the impersonal ity of the morality of custom, see also HH
99, AOM 89, WS 40, D 1 4 and 496, GS 46, 76, 1 1 7 , 1 43, and 328, and GM II 2, and,
on the training of the ability to will under the morality of custom, see GM II I , 2, 3, 4,
6 , 8 , and 15. On Nietzsche's distinction between 'breeding [Ziichtung]' , which alters
nature, and 'taming [Ziihmung] ' , which suppresses it, see BGE 1 8 8, GM II I , 2, 3, and
1 5 , TI VJI 2, 3, 4, and 5, and A 3.

1 16

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

does not conceive practical reasoning merely a s i nstrumental reflection

regarding the ranking of desires and the truth of beliefs about the means
to their satisfaction. Rather, he allows for motivations that are unrel ated
to these desires and beliefs, and accounts for them in terms of the agent's
abil i ty to 'forget' its desires and experiences. Indeed, this ability to
'forget' not only enables the agent to act upon motivations which are
unrelated to its desires, but also entails that, even for it to engage merely
in instrumental reflection regarding its desires, it must temporarily
'forget' them and can act upon a motivation related to them only by an
'active willing ' . This 'active willing' is an element of action that is, for
Nietzsche, additional to the agent's desires, beliefs, and instrumental
reflection even in cases when the agent acts upon motivations related to
its desires.
This third distinctive aspect of Nietzsche' s compatibilism can
therefore be understood as its 'Kantian ' aspect, in two senses. Firstly,
Nietzsche identifies two kinds of freedom which parallel those which
Kant calls 'negative' and 'positive ' : the 'negative' freedom to act upon,
but not be determined by, motivations related to one ' s desires, and the
'positive' freedom to act on motivations unrelated to these desires.
(Kant's distinction is, of course, closely related to his distinction
between 'heteronomy' and 'autonomy'. )" Secondly, Nietzsche' s account
of 'active willing' as necessary for both kinds of freedom , although it
does not follow Kant in appealing to a 'transcendental ' spontaneity, is
paralleled by Kant's claim that both require the ability 'not be
determined to an action by an incentive except so far as the human being
has incorporated [aufnehmen] it into his maxim, (has made it into a
uni versal rule, according to which he wills to conduct himself)' . 25
Nietzsche' s account of the will is therefore significant i n articulating a
conception of agency and practical reason that is both compatibilist and
' Kantian' in these two senses. The ethical significance of his allowing
for motivations which are unrelated to the agent's desires will be the
concern of the following, concluding part of this paper.

24 See Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5:29, 5 : 32, 5:33, and 5 : 1 1 7- 1 1 8.

Translations of Kant's texts are my own, and references are to the Akademie ition,
except the reference to the Critique of Pure Reason, which refers to the first (A!) and
second (B) editions.
25 Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 6:24. See also Critique of
Pure Reason, A534/B562, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:446, Critique
of Practical Reason, 5 : 3 3 , 5:60, 5:62, and 5 : 1 1 7- 1 1 8 , and Religion within the
Boundaries of Mere Reason, n. to 6:57.

Thomas Bailey

1 17

Ill.

As the first part o f this paper has demonstrated, Nietzsche rejects that
form of moral evaluation which makes, at least, unrealistic, and, at most,
impossible, demands regarding any aspect of an agent's 'being this or
that' . But that Nietzsche does not thereby reject all ethical evaluation,
and that he in fact grou nds a positive ethics upon the ability to will, is
clear from the following passage, once again from the beginning of the
second essay of The Genealogy.
The 'free' man, the possessor of a long un breakable will, also has
in this possession his measure of value: looking out from himself
upon others, he honours or he despises; and just as he necessarily
honours his equals, the strong and reliable (those who may
promise), - therefore, everyone who promises like a sovereign,
weightily, seldom, slowly, who is stingy with his trust, who
distinguishes when he trusts, who gives his word as something
that can be relied upon because he knows himself strong enough
to uphold it against accidents, even 'against fate' -: just as
necessarily he will hold his kick ready for the feeble wi ndbags
who promise but may not, and his switch for the liar who breaks
his word at the very moment he has it in his mouth. The proud
knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility
[ Verantwortlichkeit], the consciousness of this rare freedom, this
power over oneself and fate, has in him sunk down to his lowest
] 26
depths and become instinct, the dominating instinct [ . .
.

According to Nietzsche, therefore, the abil ity to will provides the being
that is able to will with a 'measure of value ' . This can be understood in
terms of Nietzsche' s physiology of 'l ife' or 'spirit', and, in particular, of
'will to power' as the tendency of certain organic beings to manifest
self-maintenance, the ability to will and to know, and conscious events.
The consciousness of this tendency, Nietzsche maintains, is an 'instinct,
the dominating instinct' of such organic beings, and he writes in the next
section of The Genealogy that this tendency, particularly in the form of
the ability to will, entails 'that one may affirm oneself' . 27 It is this
necessary self-affirmation of the being with the ability to will which is,
26
27

GM II 2.
GM II 3.

1 18

Pli 1 1 (2001 )

for Nietzsche, the ground of a form of the 'noble' ethics that he describes
in the first essay of The Genealogy and i n Beyond Good and Evil. This
"
involves characteristically noble self-affirmation. But, by 'looking out
from hi mself upon others' , the being with the abili ty to will also uses his
measure of value to distinguish and affirm those who are equally able to
0
will . ' The noble willer therefore does not merely evaluate action ' s
consequences for h i s o r others' interests, b u t also evaluates agents of
'0
actions according to his measure, the ability to will. By distinguishing
his equals in willing, he also establishes a sphere of those to whom he
has duties and regarding whom he has rights, duties and rights that are
also given content by the constant mutual measurement of the ability to
will. Thus, i n a typical passage from Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche
writes,
egoism belongs to the essence of the noble soul, I mean the
immovable faith that to a being such as 'we are' other beings must
be subordinate by their nature, and sacrifice themselves to us. [ . . ]
Under circumstances which make it hesitate at first, it admits that
there are equals-in-rights with it; as soon as it is clear as to this
question of rank, it moves among these equals and equals-in
rights with the same certainty in modesty and tender reverence as
it has in i ntercourse with itself [ . ] it honours itself in them and in
the rights it concedes them, it does not doubt that the exchange of
honours and rights, as the essence of i ntercourse, l ikewise belongs
to the natural condition of things. The noble gives as it takes, out
of the passionate and sensitive instinct of requital that lies in its
ground. "

..

Nietzsche frequently refers to, but does not elaborate on, th is ' instinct of
requital ' in Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy. But, in the
Preface to The Genealogy, he refers to two sections which analyse it i n
some detail : the section of Human, A ll Too Human in which h e first
distinguishes noble from slave moral ities, and one of two successive

)
28
29
:io
31

See BGE 2 1 , 260 and 287, GM I 2 and 1 0, and Tl vm 6.

Sec BGE 224, 259, 260, 262, 263, 265, 272, and 293, and GM I I 0 and 1 1 .
Sec GS 3, JJGE 32, 1 90, 1 9 1 , 260, and 287, and GM I 2 .
/JGH 265.

Thomas Bailey

119

sections in Daybreak in which he provides lengthy analyses of requital

in terms of the abi lity to wiII. '2 The section of Daybreak begins,

On the natural history of dwy and right. - Our duties - are the
rights of others over us. How have they acquired these rights? By
taking us to be capable of contracting and of requi ting, positing us
as similar and equal to them, and consequently entrusting us with
something, training, reproving, supporting us. We fulfil our duty that is: we justify that representation of our power according to
which everything was shown to us, we give back i n the measure
in which one gave to us. It is th erefore our pride which bids us do
our duty, - when we do something for others in return for
something they have done for us, we will the restoration of our
autocracy, - for they have intervened in our sphere of power and
would have continued to have their hand in it if we did not
practise, with 'duty ' , a requital , that is, intervene in their power. "
Thus Nietzsche holds that one's duties and rights are determined by the
power that one is 'posited' as having by oneself and by others. He also
insists here that this posited power concerns precisely the ability to will.
He writes, 'the feel ing of duty depends upon our having the same belief
in regard to the extent of our power as others have: that is, that we are
able to promise certai n things and bind ourselves to perform them
("freedom of will") ' . One's duties and rights thus correspond precisely
with one's posited ability to will, and to determine these duties and
rights 'constantly needs the refined tact of a balance', to weigh the
shifting degrees of one ' s own and others' posited ability to will.
Nietzsche includes benevolence among these duties and rights, as a
concern with maintaining a 'sphere of power' extended to i nclude the
spheres of subordinate, unequal others, but he insists that duties and
rights extend no further beyond one' s equals than this."
Nietzsche locates the origins of this 'instinct of requital' in the
relation between creditor and debtor under which the morality of custom
trained the spirit with the ability to will. It was under this relation, he
writes, that 'person first kicked out at person, here person first measured
In GM P 4, Nietzsche refers to, among other sections, HH 45 as prefiguring GM 's
analysis of the noble and the slave, D 1 1 2 on justice, and HH 96 and 99, and A OM 89,
on the morality of custom.
33 D 1 1 2.
3 4 D 1 1 2. On requital, see also HH 44, D 1 1 3, and GS 1 3.
32

Pli 1 1

1 20

(2001 )

himself against person ' . He maintains that this relation resulted in

fundamental value of the person who was able to will, and that this value
has been carried over into a post-customary ethics. Thus he writes at the
beginning of the second essay of The Genealogy that the morality of
custom 's 'ripest fru it is the sovereign individual, like only to himself,
liberated again from the morality of custom, the autonomous and
iibersittlich i ndividual (for "autonomous" and "sittlich" are mutually
exclusive), in short, the man who has his own independent long will,
who may promise
and in him a proud consciousness, quivering in
every muscle, of what has at length been achieved and become flesh in
him, a consciousness of his own power and freedom, a feeling of
35
mankind's completion .'
Nietzsche' s positive ethics therefore does not, as i s often claimed,
affirm the 'autonomy' of the radically singular i ndividual, beyond both
community and duty, or the indi vidual ' s 'freedom' to discharge its
drives and forces, unencumbered by culture, moral ity, or conscience.
Rather, the 'responsibility' that Nietzsche identifies, and that, he claims,
'the sovereign man calls [ . . ] his conscience' , grounds duties that
necessarily govern the being with the ability to will. 3" In this, Nietzsche
is once again ' Kantian' . Thal is, he grounds duties in the 'positive'
freedom of the will such that, just as in Kant's reciprocal re lation
between freedom and duty, the fulfilling of duties proves the 'positive'
freedom of the will.37 These duties are therefore valid for the agent
irrespective of the agent ' s particular desires and interests - they are, i n
Kant ' s terms, 'categorical imperatives ' .38 Nietzsche's account is also
'Kantian' in relating these duties to a form of mutual respect among
equals, equals who are identified precisely by the 'positive' freedom of
their ability to will.39 Ni etzsche differs from Kant, however, i n
maintaining that the ability to wi ll i s a matter of degree and that i t and
the duties that govern it are determined by constant mutual measurement
and positing. According to Nietzsche, therefore, duties govern only those
whose ability to will they are posited to prove. This explains why he
refers to 'the doctrine "equal rights for all'" as a 'poison ' . This doctri ne,
-

GM II 8, 2.
GM II 2.
3 7 See Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5:28-30.
38 See Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:4 1 4-4 1 6, and Critique of
Practical Reason, 5:20-2 1 and 5:3 1 -32.
39 See Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:429 and 4:433-434, and
Critique of Practical Reason, 5:76-77.
35

36

Thomas Bailey

121

h e writes i n Twilight (f the Idols, 'appears to be preached b y justice

itself, whereas it is the end of j ustice . . . "Equal for equals, unequal for
unequals"
that would be the true voice of justice: and what follows
from it, "Never make u nequals equal'" .'0
Nietzsche therefore claims not only that agents can rationally and
consciously determine their actions, but also that they can legitimately
be held responsible, and morally evaluated, for their actions. Thi s
evaluation is, o f course, not a n instance o f the form of moral evaluation
which would make unrealistic or impossible demands regarding any
aspect' s of an agent' s 'being this or that'. It is, rather, an evaluation of an
agent in terms of the motivations, and therefore the ability to will , which
his actions are posited to manifest. At the very least, this positive ethics,
l ike the positive account of the will upon which i t is grounded, reveals
that Nietzsche' s moral philosophy is much more sophisticated than it is
often thought to be.
-

40 A

43, TI IX 48. See also HH 92, WS 26, and GM II 8.

Pli 1 1 (2001 ) 1 22-1 70.

,

The Genealogy of Normativity

AUSTIN H I LL & JONATHAN R U B I N

Introduction
The area of concern of this paper is certain contemporary approaches to
the phi losophy of mind. The immediate question that arises is: why bring
Nietzsche into this? Firstl y, we believe that Nietzsche's discussion of
promising in On the Genealogy of Morality (henceforth, the Genealogy)
foreshadows the two contemporary approaches we are in terested in, but
secondly and more importantly , the Genealogy offers two theoretical
tools which are lacking from the current debate. The first is that of
genealogy itself. With its emphasis on material practices, discontinuity,
change and the resistances to such changes, genealogy makes central the
problem of the evolution of social systems. Secondly, the way in which
N ietzsche's elaboration of the institution of promising is based on a sub
intentional mechanism: mnemotechnics.
The two approaches to the philosophy of mind we will look at are
firstly, a variety of representationalism namely teleosemantics as
theorised by Daniel Dennett and Ruth Millikan and secondly a variety of
the in.ferentialist approach as offered by Robert Brandom in Making It
Explicit. The definitions of these terms will become clear in sections 2
and 3. The appropriation of some of Brandom's ideas by Tim Schroeder,
who nonetheless classes himself as a teleosemanticist, will also be
looked at. His attempt to employ a certain type of cybernetic explanation
offers an immediate and decisive demarcation point from the view that
we hold. Both of these approaches see the issue of normati vity as central
to any philosophy of language. Both see the virtues of giving a sub
intentional description of normative mechan isms as being a possible
solution to the question of how non-intrinsically intentional systems can
give rise to intentional behaviour. The amount of attention given to tne

Austin Hill & Jonathan Rubin

1 23

characterisation of these mechanisms is, however, variable. We believe

that in many ways thi s is the most crucial part of the exercise and will
argue against their characteri sation of these mechani sms.'
It seems to us vital that any description of the mechanisms of
normative instantiation must be able to account for the alteration of these
mechanisms. Teleosemantics comes with such an account built i n , as i t
relies o n phylogenetic evolution as the ground for intentionality.
However, this reliance upon evolution for the generation of norms
(where natural selection works as the normative mechanism) is
according to Schroeder, (who, as a self-confessed teleosemanticist is
obviously sympathetic) "[teleosemantics'] greatest present difficulty".'
We will argue that each of the approaches to normativity considered in
light of this difficulty (Brandom ' s account in Making It Explicit and
Schroeder' s attempt to rescue teleosemantics by appropriating and
adapting Brandom ' s social-practice account of norm-generation) are
defective in that they fail to provide a basis for the explanation of how i t
is that such normative systems could change.
It is then claimed that it is the emphasis placed on such changes
within normative systems by Nietzsche which provides one of his most
forceful and instructive contributions to this line of inquiry. This is
because the project of genealogy makes central the claim, to be
elaborated on in this paper, that social-normative systems (and, indeed,
evolutionary systems more generally) are characterised by a strong
degree of functional disequilibrium. Consequently, the mechanisms
which Nietzsche appeals to in his description of the instantiation of
normativity in social practice (the puni tive practices of mnemotechnics)
are read so as to provide some hints (if not a fully-fledged theory) as to
how to model change i n socio-cognitive normative systems. A crucial
aspect of the mechanisms touched on here is that they can be seen to
incorporate in their functioning a nascent capacity to generate what
1 Whilst both Brandom and Nietzsche would fall into an inferentialist camp, broadly
conceived, Brandom is primarily concerned with the formal processes of making
explicit the implicit statuses of practices, whilst Nietzsche is concerned primarily with
the practices themselves.
2 "According to contemporary teleo-semanticists, the norms which go into creating
minds come from processes of natural selection, which may operate on evolutionary
timescales [ . . . ] The teleosemantic conclusions have struck more or less everyone not
theoretically committed to them as terribly implausible. Furthermore, the problem has
been seen as a sort of tragic flaw, because while teleosemantics has its appeal , no one
has seen a way of i ntroducing sub-psychological norms into a theory without an
appeal to evolution." (Schroeder 1999)

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

124

might b e termed a surplus value within the systems i n which they

operate. As such they provide the basis for an account of norm
generation in which the tendency to mutation is integral to the system.
Before proceeding, it is perhaps advisable to provide a preliminary
clarification of some of the terminology just touched upon before going
on lo examine in more detail Nietzsche' s approach lo the relationships
between the normative and the intentional, and between social practice
and evolution , as this appears in the Genealogy. This can be done by
drawing a somewhat artificial (and crude) distinction between two
opposing traj ectories in the analysis of material and cul tural systems. On
the one hand there are those who give cen tral place in their ontology and
methodology lo the existence of linear, mechanical, or autopoetic
systems where equilibrium, equivalence and homeostasis are
fundamental explanatory term s. ' On the other are those who emphasise
not just the dynamism of systems, but who believe that the appearance of
equili brium and equivalence is in fact what needs explaining - when it is
not a totally misleading concern (as the study of systems which show no
tendency towards an equilibrium, or have multiple equ ili brium states,
yet are still stable, or properly, meta-stable, has shown). This distinction
is a caricature but vi tal nonetheless. For the latter camp the term
'functional diseq uilibrium' must be taken for a tautology: as Deleuze
and Guattari put it in Anti- Oedipus: "it is in order to function that a
social machine must not function well [ . . . ] The dysfunctions are an
essential element of its very capacity to function". 4 This caricature can
be best diagrammed in terms of a constellation of three opposing
concepts, which although probably familiar to many, we will explicate
so that the sense (and therefore the importance) of these oppositions will
be expl icit:

Column 1
l i near
equivalence
equilibrium

Column 2
non-linear
SUDJ!Us value
fu nctional diseauilibrium

The two most important things that need to be born in mind are that:
firstly, non-linear systems will not necessarily have a single solution
3

As supporters of 'constructivist' approaches to ontology, we do not believe that the

line between ontology and methodology is anything other than arbitrary.
4 Deleuze and Guattari 1 984: 1 5 1 [italics in original]

Austin Hill & Jonathan Rubin

1 25

(mu lliple-equilibriums) and that in any systems other than those

characterisable by single point attractors, the systems will never settle
down to a steady state but will not (necessarily) thereby break down
(hence: meta-stable); secondly, the control parameters of the system are
themselves part of the system - and these parameters can themselves
change at a 'bifurcation' point (systems may have many such points)
should the system be driven to one. This second point, concerning
whether the controlling parameters are part of the system or external to
it, creates a l ink to cybernetic theory, at least as employed by Schroeder.
Very loosely: systems where the con trol parameters are external to the
'
system are characterised as first order cybernetic systems; those where
the control parameters are part of the system are second order systems.
The pair equ ivalence I surplus value does not appear to be such a
simple opposition. As a first point, we are not using the term surplus
value in its strict Marxian sense (where it is tied to the extraction of
surplus labour power i n a capitalist econom y). It is at this point that
Nietzsche' s insights come in. In the second essay of the Genealogy,
Nietzsche's genealogy points to the notion of debt as fundamental to any
understanding of the concept of guilt. He postul ates an 'equation' of
'injury done
pain to be suffered ' which rejects any i nterpretation
whereby this equation should be understood as relying on a common
unit, for instance utility (which had already been thorou ghly rejected as a
useful explanatory term in the first essay of the Genealogy) or a cash
nexus .6 This is the first point to be understood in our use of surplus value
- it functions via heterogeneous terms without any common 'currency'
that would establish a unit of equivalence. As a direct consequence of
this heterogeneity, this lack of equi valence, we use the term surplus
value.' The final term in each column fu nctions as consequences of the
first two terms. Systems in fu nctional disequilibrium will be both non
li near and involve a heterogeneity of parts or terms with no common unit
of equivalence. Why should one choose to characterise social systems
=

Thal thi s is not as neat a pattern as we may have wished is due to the fact that a first
order cybernetic system may employ either negative or positive feedback and positive
feedback first order systems are explosive - equilibrium is not a term that they call to
mind.
6 Marx ' s rejection of money as an a priori unit of equivalence is as crucial as
Nietzsche's rejection of utility.
7 Bataille's The Accursed Share must be taken as a vital precursor to this way of
thinking, but there is in sufficient space to fully develop this.

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

1 26

using the terms in the left hand column?8 I t i s necessary t o real ise that
both money and uti lity are themselves normative and normal ising
functions and thar therefore an appeal to them as explanatory terms in
the functioning of normative mechanisms would be completely circular.
We believe that it is only through the realisation that social systems
are not and could not be in equilibrium that any progress towards
understanding either the persistence of social systems or their mutation
is possible. We must elimi nate the prejudice which claims that
persistence equals equilibrium and cl arify the counter claim that ir is
only through disequilibrium that social systems function.

Section

1.

Genealogy: from morality to normativity

On the Genealogy of Morality could for the purposes of this paper be

renamed 'The Genealogy of Normativity' (what, after al l, are morals but
norms mistaken for transcendent Jaws?). It is important to be clear about
the order of explanation which Nietzsche is pursuing in the Genealogy.
In particular, the relationship between two pairs of explanatory concepts
must be clarified: firstly, there is the co-implication of the normative and
intentional idioms; secondly, there is the question of the i nter
relationship between social practice and evolution, both of which
Nietzsche appeals to i n seeking to give an explanation of the emergence
of the first set of concepts.
That these are the crucial pairs of concepts in Nietzsche ' s account can
immediately be seen in the way in which Nietzsche poses the question
which is to orientate the project of genealogy:
To breed an animal which is able to make promises - is that not
precisely the paradoxical task which nature has set herself with
regard to humankind? Is it not the real problem of humankind?
[ ] This necessarily forgetful animal, in whom forgetting is a
strength [ . . . ] has bred for himself a counter-device, memory.
(Genealogy II I )
. . .

For the most obvious reason, that the alternative simply fails to accurately
characterise social systems, see Ormerod 1 994 which takes great pains to show how
neo-classical economics (which can be regarded as the paradigm instantiation of a
social science employing notions of equivalence and equilibrium as basic explanatory
categories) should indeed be regarded as the 'dismal science' if only for its failure to
make successful predictions.

Austin Hill & Jonathan Rubin

1 27

Whilst Nietzsche ' s overall concern is with the genesis of specifically

and therefore (in some sense) normative, di scourses, it is equally
clear that, for him, the investigation of this emergence cannot but be, at
the same ti me, an exploration of the intentional more generally.'' I t is
precisely because of this co-implication between the normative and the
i ntentional that Nietzsche can treat the evolution of the capacity for
moral (i .e. normative) action and judgement as of such demarcational
significance. In this respect, Ni etzsche is here consonant with a
substantive tradition in the philosophy of mind which treats
intentionality as the distinguishing demarcational feature of humanity.
Shifting the focus of investigation in this way has the effect of
positioning Nietzsche' s account of the terms i n play here within the
purview of the phil osophy of mind and language, rather than an
explicitly ethico-moral one. The form of intentionality therefore focused
on is one which stands in a proprietary relation to rationality, rather than
moral,

freedom.
The sense in which the institution of promising leads to intentionality
in this form can be explicated as follows: the capacity to entertain and
produce promises both entails and presupposes the capacity to entertain
and produce other 'cognitive' attitudes and abilities which are
characterised as intentional owi ng to their propositional form. Thus the
ability to produce a performance which could be claimed to exemplify a
grasp of the content of the concept of promising (and thus to count as
satisfactorily having promised) entails and presupposes certain other
propositional attitudes; for example, that one 'believes that' one has
made a particular kind of promise rather than another one (e.g. that one
has promised to meet a friend at two o' clock outside the bus station,
rather than at three o' clock outside the record shop); that one 'desires
that' one should keep one ' s promises, and so on. The ability to make a
promise, then, is the abi lity to produce a proposition (in the form of a
speech act or an assertion, or in the form of producing a performance
which 'counts as' having made such an assertion - e.g., signing a
contract) the content of which is determined by the ways in which it
stands in certain relationships to other states, statuses and attitudes
which are intentional . That is to say, it is in vi rtue of the fact that a
9

The sense in which we, following Quine, use 'intention' is aboutness. What is
crucial is the necessity for sentences or ideas to fail to be about what they intended to
be about. It is this possibility of either failure or success which introduces the
inescapably normative dimension to intentionality as it used here.

1 28

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

promise stands i n the 'appropri ate kind' of relation to these other states,
statuses and attitudes that determines that the promising performance
has a content at all.
For Nietzsche, the question of promising marks man out as that
which is simultaneously the subject of a moral discourse and as that
which employs a mode of di scourse which is ch aracterised by
intentional ity. At the same time, however, while these characterisations
of man are accurate (in that they designate a determinate reality of man ' s
experiences o f others and itself) they are not t o b e taken as descriptive of
an ahi storical, metaph ysically determined conception of a transcendent
subjectivity. The whole point of the genealogical proj ect is to destroy
such a conception of transcendent subjectivity by showing how that
conception is itself the product of an historically si tuated processes of
evolution, where the latter term must be taken to encompass not only
natural but also social and cultural processes (in as far as Nietzsche will
insist on attributing this emergence not only to 'natural ' processes but
also treat them as being, in an i mportant sense, products of man's own
activity - the vast 'labour of man on himself').
With this in mind, a crucial constraint on this genealogical
demystification of transcendence becomes evident. It is not permissible
for such a project to treat the conception of subjectivity with which it
deals as though i t were a merely empirical form of error, or simply an
i l lusion. In as far as this conception of subjectivity is the product of
historical processes, it is produced as real; that is, it has effects which
are real (not the least of which is making a major contribution to man ' s
status a s 'the sick animal ' , but also as the one which because of that
sickness becomes, for the first time, 'interesting'). We do entertain moral
judgements, just as we do effectively employ intentional vocabulary.
What genealogy calls for, then, is that the moral and the intentional (with
which we are primarily concerned) are explained, not just explained
away. This amounts to the commitment to not treat these categories as
primitive terms in a genealogical account (since they are in fact just what
needs to be explained), but to show how their employment arises from
the features of a set of more fundamental explanatory concepts.
Nietzsche proceeds to destroy the pretensions of transcendence i n
moral discourse b y showing how it i s dependent o n a more fundamental
normative basis (and hence shows that morals are really norms mistaken
for transcendent laws). He does thi s by showing how th e employment of
particular semantic and intentional terms (for example, the slave' s
employment of 'Good and Evil ' a s contrasted with the noble use of

1 29

Austin Hill & Jonathan Rubin

'Good and Bad ' ) is dependent upon an intrinsically normative set of

constraints (what Nietzsche calls a system of 'evaluation ' ) which govern
how it is appropriate to use such terminology, and thereby also govern
how it is appropriate to treat such employments of that terminology (i.e.,
as a correct or incorrect application of the concept, or as according or not
according with the ' rules' governing the employment of that concept,
where the rules need not be explicitly stated but may be i mplicit in the
practices which impart the normative constraints).
By contrast, according to Nietzsche, the fundamental norms
governing the application of intentional concepts in the previous moral
regime (the moralities of custom, or of Good and Bad) are those which
govern the proprieties of treating someone as standing in a relation of
"debt" to another. As Nietzsche puts it:
Have these genealogists of morality up to now ever remotely
dreamt that, for example, the main moral concept, 'Schuld' (guilt)
descends from the very material concept of 'Schulden ' (debts)? or
that punishment, as retribution, evolved quite independently
about freedom or the lack of freedom of the will? [ . ] That
i nescapable thought, which is now so cheap and apparently
natural [ .. ] is actually an extremely late and refined form of
human judgement and i nference; [ . ] And where did this [ ... ]
perhaps now ineradicalbe idea gain its power, this idea of an
equivalence between injury and pain? [ . ] In the contractual
relationship between creditor and debtor, which is as old as the
very concept of a 'legal subject' and itself refers back to the basic
forms of buying, selling, bartering trade and traffic. (Genealogy ll
4)
..

..

The fact that it is these different constellations of norms which govern

practice in the moralities of custom, as opposed to those of ressentiment
( i .e. that the former derive from the norms and practices implicit in a
commercial context, whereas in the latter these derive from a religious
context) i s , for Nietzsche, what determines the different ways in which
the intentional and semantic terms 'Good ' , 'Bad' and 'Evil ' have content
i n their respective settings.
To summarise, on this normative reading of Nietzsche's text, what
makes a particular intentional proposition (such as "I believe that this
man is evil") contentfu l is the way in which its employment is governed
by norms which i ndicate how it is correct to use that proposi tion ; what i s

1 30

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

distinctive in intentionality i s the way i n which i t answers to these

conditions of normative employment. It is in this sense that
i ntentionality is constituted by normativity.
I n the case of prom ising, the normative constraints are the
specification of how one ought to behave in light of that intentional
performance (including not just the actions, but also the other intentional
attitudes which are appropriate to that concept). Whilst the way in which
one is assessed as having, in practice, satisfied those (implicitly
acknowledged) commitments consti tute the processes of normalisation.
These in tum explain how i t is that those norms come to actually obtain
(whether they are always conformed to in practice or not).
Th is strategy for delineating the specifically normative nature of the
intentional capacity for promising can be seen in Nietzsche's account
through the roles which he assigns to memory and practice in the
explanation of th is (intentional) institution. The fact that Nietzsche
immediately invokes memory in relation to promising is a clear
indication of his normative and practical approach to that concept. The
ability to remember what one has promised (or, indeed, that one has
promised) is not just another i n tentional competence which one must
possess i f one is to effectively produce promising-performances; nor i s it
just part of the causal mechanism to which one must make reference in
explaining how a particular promising-performance came to come about.
Rather, it is indicative of the fact that the putative intentional state of
'promising' is more fu ndamentally a normative notion. For the
memorising of a status or performance is something which itself can be
done correctly or incorrectly - and as such it is liable to normative
assessment in just the same way that one's actual performance with
respect to the commitments undertaken in a promise are. Stressing the
intimacy between memory and promising is a way for Nietzsche to draw
attention to the fact that the employment of an intentional term such as
promi sing is saturated in, and in fact dependent for its content on,
normative constraints. IL is in a particul arly normative sense "that he, as
someone making a promise is, is answerable for his own future!"
(Genealogy II, 2) and it is this normative sense which provides the
intentional aspects of promising with its content.
Moreover, drawing attention to the role of memory in this way also
serves to highlight the inel imi nably practical dimension of the
intentional. Committing something to memory is something which can
be done, just as the assessment as to whether or not it was done correctly
is something which can be done. This highlights not only the fact that

Austin Hill & Jonathan Rubin

1 31

the normative constraints which are taken to be fundamental to the

intentional are manifested in the proprieties of practice which dictate
how it is appropriate to use a concept (and that intentionality, via i ts
grounding in normativity, is above all a matter of practice) but that
certain normative constraints obtain with regard to conceptual
employment only because they function as a result of practices which
institute and rei nforce them in turn. Not only normative constraints but
processes of normalisation are req uired in the elaboration of a
genealogical investigation.
Nietzsche can clearly be seen to appreciate this point in his insistence
that memory (and thus the intentional capacities which depend on this
kind of normative notion) is someth ing which in an important sense has
to be produced (i.e. instituted in practice).
That particular task of breed ing an animal which has the right to
make promises includes, as we have already understood, as
precondition and preparation, the more immediate task of first
making man to a certain degree undeviating, unifo rm, a peer
amongst peers, orderly and consequently predictable. (Genealogy
II 2)
The mechanisms which Nietzsche then appeals to as instituting the
required processes of normalisation via a practical application are the
punitive practices of mnemotechnics, or the system of cruelty.
'How do you give a memory to the animal man? How do you
impress something upon this partly dull, partly idiotic, inattentive
mind, this personification of forgetfulness, so that it will
stick' ... This age-old question was not resolved with gentle
solutions and methods, as can be imagined; perhaps there is
nothing more terrible and strange in man ' s pre-history than his
technique of mnemonics. ' A thing must be burnt in so that it stays
in the memory: only someth ing which continues to hurt stays in
the memory' - that is a proposition from the oldest (and
unfortunately the longest-lived) psychology on earth . [ . . ] With
the aid of this sort of memory, people fi nally came to 'reason ' !
.

( Genealogy II; 3)
Nietzsche's explanatory strategy runs as follows. His point with regard
to the priority of promises in investigating the genesis of moral

1 32

Pli 1

1 (200 1 )

discourses i s not that this institution i s itself the fundamental u n i t of

explanation for such a project, but rather that the institution of promising
is a parad igmatic case of that which is in need of explaining, if one is
seeking to provide such a genetic account. That is to say, Nietzsche
reads the institution of prom ising as itself being emblematic of an
intentional level of description and then insists that this level stands in
need of an enumeration of material conditions of realization - this being
the whole point of the project of genealogy.
This more fundamental level of explanation, then, is that of
normativity. Nietzsche's claim is that the abi lity to engage in and with
intentional (and, by implication, moral) vocabul ary and behav iour is
dependent upon the further capacity to engage in rule following (rather
than rule governed) behaviour: i .e. to be subject to systems of
normativity via processes of normalisation. '0
By treating i ntentional content i n this way, Nietzsche fulfils one of
the first requirements of genealogy as a method : to explain the
intentional in terms of some more fundamental category, thereby
warding off (for the time being) the possibility that the moral and the
intentional would be taken as ahistorical, transcendent determinations of
subjectivity. At the same time, however, this appeal to the normative
does not entail that the intentional is merely explained away. Rather, it is
properly accounted for. This preserves the second constraint on
genealogy: not to treat the forms of (normatively circumscribed)
subjectivity which genealogy encounters as though they were merely
illusions. Rather, they must be accounted for as determinate productions
of historical processes of evolution (encompassing both natural and
socio-cultural processes). This in turn, though, imposes a third
req uirement on genealogical analysis: to account for the particular ways
in which normative systems function to confer the intentional contents
that they do. The satisfaction of this requirement necessi tates that an
account be given of how normative constraints come to be instituted by
practices which actually do serve to impart the particular intentional
contents that they govern. This is in effect a demand that a genealogy
should investigate the mechanisms which are in play in the processes of
10

The need to keep open the possib ility of error in acting in a normative relation to a
rule (if one is to construe that relation as nonnative) is a fundamental point of
Wittgenstein's i n the Philosophical Investigations. As he puts it there, "One would
like to say, whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that
here we cannot talk about 'right'." [Pl: 258]. The possible ways in which an account
of normative mechanisms can count as maintaining a distinction between correct and
i ncorrect performance is a subject for discussion later in the piece.

Austin Hill & Jonathan Rubin

1 33

normalisation which subtend the effective imposition of normative

constraints.
Secondly, it follows from the explanatory strategy to which
genealogy is committed that the mechanisms appealed to as instituting
norms in practice must be characterised in sub-intentional terms, on pain
of introducing circularity into the explanatory programme. One cannot
appeal to intentional terms as part of an explanation of how normative
constraints are instituted, since the notion of normative constraint is
itself being employed to provide an explanation of intentional content.
Nietzsche 's explanatory strategy in the Genealogy, then, is to explain
the content of intentional level phenomena by reference to their
normative character and then to explain how systems of normative
constraint are introduced to the employment of intentional terminology
(in such a way that they confer that content on those performances) by
reference to the operation of mechanisms of normal isation which
institute normativity in practice. These mechanisms in turn must be
understood as functioning at a sub-intentional level .
These points need to be borne in mind as we proceed, in the next
section, to compare Nietzsche's approach to socio-cognitive explanation
with some other con temporary approaches in the philosophy of mind.
Here, the i n i tial clarification of Nietzsche ' s construal of the relationship
between intentionality and normativity (as presented in this section)
provides the basis for an identification of the way in which Nietzsche' s
project is consonant with the methodology o f two contemporary schools
in the philosophy of mind: teleosemantics (which will be discussed
primarily by reference to the work of Dennett and Mill ikan) and
Brandom's version of an inferentialist normative pragmatics. The issues
of the relationship between social practice and memory will then provide
a basis from which to differentiate Nietzsche' s approach from these
contemporary positions. Delineating what is distinctive of Nietzsche' s
project i n this way then clears the ground for the explication o f what we
take to be his most significant contributions to these debates.

1 34

P!i 1 1

(2001)

Section 2. Normativity in the phi losophy of mind

The main respect in which Nietzsche ' s approach to intentionality in the
Genealogy coheres with those of teleosemantics (Dennett, Dretske,
Millikan, for example) and Brandom' s inferentialism is in seeing
intentionality as constituted by normativity. This shared conception
entails that a crucial constraint comes to apply on each of the differing
ways in which they then come to elaborate a further expl anation of the
relationship between the normative and the i ntentional: that any
subsequent theorising must not make appeal to intentional terminology
as an explanatory primi tive since this is just what stands in need of an
explanation in the first place. The manner in which this obligation i s
discharged i s , o f course, different in each case; indeed, i t could b e said
that it is the differing approaches to discharging this explanatory
commitment which are constitutive of the parti cularity of
teleosemanticism vis-a-vis a normative inferentialism.
The major divergence between teleosemantics and Brandom ' s species
of inferentialism lies in what they consider to be the ulti mate source of
the norms which are taken to be constitutive of intentionality in each
case. For teleosemantics the ulti mate grounding for a normative
approach to the intentional is evolution. For Brandom, it is the normative
pragmatics implicit in "the game of giving and asking for reasons"
which, when conjoined to his specific variety of semantic inferentialism,
provide an account of "deontic scorekeeping practices" which suffice,"
he claims, to confer propositional (i.e. conceptual) content onto the
states, attitudes and performances of those who engage in them. To
confer propositional content to such states is, for Brandom, to give an
account of their intentionality.
This substantive disagreement between the two stances yields a
number of other aspects in which their accounts di verge. Two of these
are of particular importance for thi s piece. Firstly, there is the way in
which these different conceptions of the ultimate source of normativity
lead the two camps to formulate differing approaches to the question of
the status of representation in theories of intentionality. Secondly, there
is the way in which they are led, by the selection of the grounding of
normativity, to offer contrasting accounts of the mechanisms which are
11
This is shorthand for describing the commitments and entitlements to commitments
which are undertaken oneself and attributed to 01hcrs in the context of specifically
linguistic assertions.

Austin Hill & Jonathan Rubin

135

to be appealed to a s instantiating and maintai ning norms i n an

intentional population or system.
Consideration of these di vergences in turn allows the possibility of
deli neating the alternative ways in which each camp might be led to treat
the questions inherited from the Genealogy (as discussed in the previous
section): namely, how is the term ' memory' to be understood and in
what relation does it stand to (social) practice, particularly in an
'evolutionary' context? This then provides a point at which Nietzsche 's
ini tial similarity to these two approaches can be sharpened such that the
areas in which his position diverges can be ascertained - this in turn
making visible the poi nt at which his most distinctive contribution to the
debate can be made.
The upshot of the clearer demarcation of Nietzsche's position is to
see him as, perhaps surprisingly, i nitially closer to a Brandomian line
than that of the teleosemanticists as regards the questions of
representation, evolution, memory and practice (and their inter-relation).
However, a substantial difference between them lies in the way in which
they approach the mechanisms which instantiate normativity in practice
specifical ly, the differing ways in which they construe sanctions. This
issue is in turn clarified when we come, i n a later section, to consider
Schroeder's criticism of Brandom (which seeks, in part, to rehabili tate
the teleosemantic project by restructuring its account of the source of
normativity along more Brandomian lines whilst also attempting to
preserve its naturalistic sense rather than opt for his full-blown social
i nferential account of intentional content). It is at this point that the
aspects of Nietzsche ' s project (flagged in the introduction) which stress
functional indeterminacy and phenomena of surplus value as being
fundamental to the mechanisms of punitive practice come to bear critical
frui t .
Having brought i n this point, it is pertinent to note the presence of a
fu rther conceptual issue which is to be crucial in delineating the
Nietzschean approach from the other theories being considered. Both
teleosemantics and Brandom ' s inferentialism adopt broadly functionalist
approaches to the attribution of intentional content (this being a
consequence of their shared appreci ation of the ineliminably normative
dimension of functional analysis). As will be seen, the domains which
are taken to be the proper object of such functional analysis differ in
each case in accordance with their differing locations of the source of the
sort of normativity which is taken to matter for intentionality. For
teleosemantics the relevant functional roles to be individuated pertain to
the proper functioning of the cognitive and material architectures
-

1 36

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

subtending intentional performances; they are to be located within the

organism in the context of its phylogenetic hi story. For Brandom the
relevant fu nctional roles are the deontic statuses which are kept track of
in undertaking and attributing inferentially articulated commitments to
oneself and others; these functional roles are to be located amongst an
interconnecting web of publ ic assertions or speech acts (and their
inferentially relevant neighbours) and, cruci ally, in the proprieties of
essentially social practice which govern when and how i t is appropriate
to treat someone as committed or entitled to those assertions. The
conceptual role semantics which Brandom pursues in his work (in which
conceptual role is defined primarily by proprieties of inference) takes the
proper domain of functional analysis to be the social systems in which
they are implicated in the game of giving and asking for reasons.
Besides these specific differences in the selection of appropriate
domain for their varieties of functionalism, there is an implicit division
as to how functional analysis itself should proceed. This concerns not
just which systems are taken to be the fu nctionally relevant ones for the
attribution of intentional content but also how one should decompose the
relevant functional parts of, or roles within, that system. This issue is to
be brought out more fully in the following, bu t for the time being it can
be noted that there are two different approaches to this kind of functional
anal ysis: decomposition by function (or, structure) and decomposition
"
by activity. This distinction will be seen to be crucial in what follows in
that the two different methods for the decomposition of a functional
system have considerable implications for the issue of where the
boundaries of an intentional system are to be drawn and thus as to how
such systems are to be individuated at al l. It will be seen that part of
what is meant by the terms functional indeterminacy and surplus value
depends upon the way in which this decomposition and i ndividuation of
intentional systems proceeds .
An examination o f the teleosemanticist's approach t o intentionality
and normativity can be provided through a brief discussion of the salient
elements of Dennett' s and Millikan ' s work." Both authors see the
1 2 Following Hendriks-Jansen 1 996.

13

Whilst this discussion will undoubtedly fail to register some of the subtleties of
Dennett and Millikan's theorising, including some of the points on which their own
viewpoints diverge, it remains the case that there is considerable agreement between
them - enough for the following broad brush treatment to avoid inflicting excessive
distortion to their philosophical positions by running them together in this context.
For a discussion of the affinities and divergences between Millikan and Dennett on
these topics see Millikan 1 993 and Dennett 1 993.

Austin Hill & Jonathan Rubin

1 37

intentional as properly accounted for in normati ve, rather than simply

causal, terms. They therefore seek to explain intentionality in terms of
this more fundamental level, firstly, in Dennett ' s case, by offering a
primarily normative account of what it is to be an intentional system and,
secondly, in both cases, by offering an explanation of the functioning of
the relevant normative mechanisms by appeal lo evolu tionary theory. In
explicating this latter aspect we shall concentrate on Millikan 's account
of the "proper functioning" of "intentional icons".
The core of Dennett's classic paper ( 1 97 1 ] 'I ntentional Systems' is
the claim that the status of 'being an intentional system' is, more
fundamentally, a qu estion of having a certain normative status. He
explicates this claim at two levels. The strong part of the claim is that
there is, for Dennett, nothing more to being an i ntentional system than
being appropriately treated as one. This means that the question of
whether or not a candidate system is an intentional system cannot be
settled by an appeal to a metaph ysical fact of the matter. This amounts to
the claim that there is no such thing at all as ' i ntrinsic' or 'original '
intentionality.
Giving up on the notion of intrinsic intentionality does not, however,
mean giving up on the idea of any account of a notion which is so crucial
to philosophical approaches to cognition, intelligence and rational ity. It
simply entails that the notion of intentionality is to recast in normative
terms: there is intentionality, and since it cannot be treated in
straigh tforwardly factual terms (either metaphysically or by appeal to the
"causal powers of brains to give rise to intentional states"") it is to be
treated normativel y. To be an intentional system just is to be
appropriately treated as one, where the force of 'appropriately treated'
derives from the normative constraints which hold on such intentional
i nterpretation. This explanatory strategy obviou sly commits Dennett to
offering an account of the normative employment of the intentional
terminology (e.g., propositional attitudes and the like) to be used in that
i nterpretation.
Dennett (and teleosemanticism more generally) construes the
intentional in normative terms. How, then, does the normative level itself
come to be explai ned? It is clear that it stil l does stand in need of
explanation since even once it is defined in normative terms it remains
the case that it is "vacuous as psychology" since it still presupposes that
which it is the job of a mature and materi alistic psychology to explain:
1 4 A move made by John Searle [ 1 980) and repeatedly derided by Dennett as an
appeal to "wonder tissue" (see, e.g. Dennett 1 980, 1 987 chs.8 and 9, 1993)

1 38

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

rationality and i ntelligence. The intentional stance can provide a

normative account of the functional roles and competencies of a
cognitive system only in so far as it satisfies the conditions of rationality
(or optimal functioning in a particular environmental context which
constitutes the 'intentional ity of the system) in the first place. It is this
which makes sense of using intentional level attri butions as reliable
indicators of design specs in the first place. Such a substantive
assumption of rationality must itself be cashed out at the material level
and, for the teleosemanticists, thi s cashing out is ultimately rendered in
terms of design.
The warrant for an assumption of rationality when applied to natural
intentional systems is not just that this is a requirement for intentional
stance predictions to gain any purchase on the target system. It is, rather,
parasitic on an evolutionary argument. It makes evolutionary sense to
attribute to a natural intentional system the beliefs, desires etc. that i t
ought to have given i t s present circumstances, interest i n survival and
reproduction etc. precisely because if it persistently failed to attain these
appropriate normative states in its day to day i nteracti ons with the world
it would simply not be a candidate for survival and, therefore, it would
not be here. The substantive rationality assumption which underwrites
intentional attribution i s i tself discharged at the level of the design
stance. If a creature's v isual system were not connected to its motor
responses in such a way that it either systematically failed to register the
presence of predators or conspecifics or failed to act appropriately i n
light o f this i nformation (e.g. b y either setting i n motion responses of the
fi ght or fl ight variety), then it would not last very long as a viable
species. According to this approach to Darwi nism, the persistence of a
species constitutes evidence that i t is, to some degree, optimally
designed by the processes of natural selection.
The rel iability of attributing intentional content to a natural system
such that this can play a normative role, in the development of
materi alist orientated cognitive science by helping to establish the
competencies and functional roles which would have to be realised at the
sub-personal and sub-intentional level, is underwritten by the
assumption of the (relative) rationality of the system. This is in turn
derived from an assumption of relative optimi sation of design dictated
by processes of natural selection. This is a first sense in which evolution
is the primary source of normativity in Dennett ' s teleosemantic project.
It is the processes of normalisation provided by selection pressures
operating over the evol utionary time scale which instantiate and
maintain a normative reading of both the i n tentional stance and design

Austin Hill & Jonathan Rubin

1 39

stance levels of Dennett ' s explanatory framework. Jn each case it is

evolution which is the source of the conviction that the system works as
it ought to. At the global, intentional level of the system, i t i s evolution
which provides the warrant for attributing to the system the
competencies which it ought to have (and which therefore confer
intentional content on those competencies). Equal ly, at the sub-personal
mechanistic level of the system, it i s evolution which dictates that the
mechanisms function as they ought to in order to instantiate the
competencies observed at the i ntentional level. It is evolution which
therefore underwrites the inferen tial moves between the normative
attribution of intentional content in the intentional stance and the
normative attri bution of fu nctional content at the design stance level.
That the design stance is itself to be read normatively in terms of an
account of the correct functioning of sub-personal cognitive mechanisms
is the second sense in which evolution is the ultimate source of
normativity in the teleosemantic project. For i f a particular sub-personal
cognitive mechanism is to be endowed with a particular function (in
order to discharge an intentional level competence at the sub-intentional
level) this too is a normative matter. A sub-personal , sub-intentional
cognitive mechanism can be said to perform a certain function (and so
i nstanti ate an intentional level functional competence by standing in
certain relations to other parts of the cognitive mechanism) only if i t is
construed teleologically - as having the purpose of serving that function.
Such a specification can only be deli vered in normative terms since such
a construal of a functional mechanism funds a distinction between a
cognitive mechanism ' s performing its function correctly or incorrectly
(where that notion of correctness is to be cached out at the level of the
contribution the operation of that mechanism makes to the correct or
i ncorrect performances at the intentional level).
For example, one might seek to give an explanation of a particular
intentional system 's failing to discriminate certain environmentally
significant (and therefore potentially intentionally contentful) state of
affairs by appealing to a malfunction in the cognitive mechanisms
subtending that performance (e.g., that i t failed to discriminate the
presence of potential mates due to a malfunction in its symmetry
detection mechanisms). In this case the functional relation between the
sub-personal cognitive mechanism and the intentional level competence
is construed in normative terms. One explains the incorrect performance
at the i ntentional level (that it did not have the intentional content that it
ought to have had in that failed to discriminate a potential mate) by
appealing to an incorrect performance at the sub-personal level (that the

1 40

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

mechanism i s fu nctioning i ncorrectly relative to the performance which

it ought to prod uce, i .e. the one which it is its function to perform, the
one which it was designed to perform). Talk of function presupposes
both the notion of purpose and the notion of malfunction, of incorrect
performan ce of its function, of behaving contrary to how it ought to
perform. For teleosemantics to engage in inferential transitions between
the functional performances of the intentional and sub-intentional levels
(which is an essential requirement for the theory if it is to be able to
discharge attributed i ntentional contents at the level of mechanisms, and
so count as offering an explanation of those contents at all ) it has to be
able to provide a principled normative reading of the fu nction of
cognitive mechanisms. Thi s is a theoretical challenge tackled head on in
the work of Ruth M il l ikan.
Millikan seeks to provide an account of the (explicitly normative)
"proper function" of a cognitive mechanism by appeal to its evolutionary
"hi story of use' ' (Millikan 1 984 and 1 993) . She provides a definition of
an "intentional icon" (from which she goes on to construct a naturalised
notion of representation) in terms of the proper functioning of a
cognitive mech anism in relation to an environmental feature. The
content of this proper function is determined by the contribution it
makes to the organism ' s fitness when it operates in its normal conditions
of use. Thi s i s in tum defined by the way in which two specific
mechanisms (one which produces the intentional icon and one which it
consumes it) co-operate in latching on to a relevant environmental
feature in accordance with what Millikan calls a "mapping-rule". The
first mechanism bri ngs about the effect of the icon produced mapping
the relevant environmental feature, as it has been adapted to do: "[For
example] images on the retina of the eye are formed due to the structure
of the eye lens. And the eye lens was designed by evolution for the
purpose of bringing about such systematic mappings between certain
environmental structures and these images. The patterns are thus
intentional icon s; the lens is their 'producer' . " (Millikan in Dahlbom
1 993 p.99) The second mechanism is one i nternal to the consumer of the
icon. This mec hanism is one which is guided to perform its normal
fu nction when the icon and the environment are mapped by the relevant
rule when produced by the first mechanism. An example of these would
be the mechanisms which activate nectar-gathering in bees when lone
bees return to the nest and in their dancing produce the intentional icon
which maps onto the current environmental location of some nectar. The

Austin Hill & Jonathan Rubin

141

content of such intentional icons i s determined strictly by their proper

function in terms of contribu tion to .fitness:
Consider the content to be that mapped feature to which the icon
specifically adapts the user(s) of the icon. It is that feature which,
if removed from the environment or incorrectly mapped, will
guarantee failure for its users. It will guarantee fai lure, that is,
granted there occur no coincidental interventions, no helpful
contingencies not historically normal for performances of the
user's functions. Suppose then that in the normal case the bee
dance maps not only the location of the nectar but also the
direction from which the dancing bee last approached the hive. Its
content concerns the location of the nectar, not the direction of the
dancer' s approach. This i s because it is only if the location of the
nectar is mapped wrongly that the watching bee's normal
reactions to it will fail , barring miraculous intervention, to fulfil
their proper functions. If the location of the nectar is correctly
mapped, but in fact the dancing bee's last approach to the hive
was from an unusual direction, this won' t affect the success of the
watching bees. ( 1 993: 1 0 1 )
Millikan, then, provides a definition o f normal function which i s tied
strictly to its history of use in the evolutionary adaptation of a species.
The content of intentional icons is derived solely from the phylogenetic
hi story of a species. Millikan extends this conception to both the notion
of internal representation and to 'language devices' such as sentences
and words such that these have their meaning conferred on them by their
own h istory of use rather than from the intentions of those who utter
them. These language devices are in turn regulated by the employment
of internal representations such as consistency tester mechanisms which
are modelled on analogy with focusing which develops in infant's
acquisition of vision.
This concludes an examination of some of the relevant aspects of
teleosemantics nonnative approach to the relationship between
intentionality and normativity. We have seen that this research
programme pursues the explanatory strategy so far marked out as
central, of taking intentionality to be explicable at a more fundamentally
normative level. Then of approaching an explanation of the operation of
these nonnative constraints by reference to a sub-intentional mechanism.
The ultimate source of this nonnativity, on the teleoseman tic accou nt,
are the processes of evolution in that i t is norms derived from this sou rce

1 42

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

which underwrite the possibility of conceptualising the relationship

between the i ntentional level and the sub-intentional level of cognitive
mechanisms in functional terms. What sort of conception of the role of
representation is provided by the teleosemantic picture? What sort of
account of the mechanisms which instantiate and maintain the crucial
normative constraints does it envisage? Finally how do these issues
reflect on the question of what sort of conception of memory does this
contribute to investigation of Ni etzsche ' s position in the Gen ealogy'?
What are the possible relations between forms of social practice and the
generation of memory? And how does this reflect on how Nietzsche
should be seen as approaching the question of evolution more generally,
but in particular on the question of the 'evolutionary' treatment of social
practices?
This overall account of representation and of the sub-intentional
mechanisms which explain the normative dimension of intentional
content yield the following sort of (fairly familiar) picture of memory.
On this account memory is essentially a cognitive structure cen tred
inside the organism. IL has various functional components which
correspond to the different roles which i t has to play in relation to other
cognitive performances. These fu nctional components fu nction as they
do because they have the necessary structure to enable the kinds of
performances which constitute adaptations to the environment; as such
their structure is taken to be derived from natural selection. In all
probability the function of one (or more) of its mechanisms will be to
store, retrieve and produce representations of what is held i n memory these may take the form of sentences. In short, the teleosemantic account
suggests a facultative conception of memory. The relationship between
the social practices of punitive mnemotechnics and memory which is
Nietzsche' s problematic in the Gen ealogy (on the teleosemantic reading
of the normative status of intentional content) can only figure in terms of
the way in which these practices function as a culturally based selection
pressure. This gives rise to adaptations at the sub-personal level of
cognitive mechanisms resulting in the emergence of memory as a
specifically cognitive faculty.
The main points at which to find possible sites of di vergence between
Nietzsche ' s approach and that of teleosemantics (and so provide grounds
from which Nietzsche ' s own approach can be clarified) are to be located
in the varying ways in which the relationship between memory and
social practice are to be construed. As was seen above, the detai ls of the
teleosemantic approach lead to a particular construal of the nature of
such memory in terms of a functionally defined cognitive faculty in

Austin Hill & Jonathan Rubin

1 43

which the ultimate source of normativity is to be found in evolution ' s

design of the structure o f sub-personal cognitive mechanisms such that
they can support the competencies required at the intentional level i n
accordance with their proper function (and therefore confer content on
that intentional level by the imposition of the norms of evolutionary
fu nctioning which are instanti ated at a sub-i ntentional level). The
corollary to this conception of memory in teleosemantics is to see the
social practice of mnemotechnics as acting as a selection pressure
leading to the emergence of the faculty of memory at the sub-personal
level of cognitive arch itecture.
Finally, it was also seen that the teleosemantic approach to
normativity and intentionality resul ted in a certain conception of
representation as well as a certain conception of the mechanisms
involved in the instantiation and maintenance of normativity (i .e. that
they are fundamentall y taken to be structures selected by an evolutionary
process of design which derive their normative force from their history
of use in contributing to the adaptation of an organism). A crucial aspect
of this formulation is the way in which its approach to the decomposi tion
of function required in its account depends upon a strong commitment to
treating the evolutionary process form which its normative force derives
in terms of design. This involves treating the structure of the relevant
cognitive mechanisms teleologically - the mechanism ' s have a particular
(adaptive) purpose and it is this purpose which accounts for their
structure. Functional decomposition is defined in terms of a purposive
functional analysis eliciting an account of fu nction in terms of an
invariant structure. This is what was called above an account of
decomposition by function or structure (which is to be contrasted in
what follows with a decomposition by activity) and its intelligibility
depends significantly on treating the process of evolution by analogy
with a foresigh tful designer of artefacts. This is a conception of
evolution explicitly embraced by both Dennett and Millikan."
It follows that i f Nietzche' s conceptualisation of the relationship
between memory and social practice is taken to be divergent from the
picture presented here by the teleosemantic approach then he must also
be taken to be committed to taking a different approach to the
relationship between normativity and intentionality from that offered by
teleosemantics. This then also requires that he provide alternative ways
of conceptualising the roles to be played by representation and the
mechanisms taken to be relevant to the instantiation of normativity at the
15

See Dennett 1 995 for a detailed exposition of this treatment of evolution.

1 44

Pli 1

1 (2001 )

sub-intentional level. As a corollary to this, he would also need to be

seen as offering an al ternative account of the way in which evolution is
to figure in his explanatory project.
By turning now to a discussion of the way in which Brandom ' s
approach t o the question of the relationship between intentionality and
normativity is developed we can provide some points at which an
alternative approach to that taken by teleosemantics can be drawn out.
Brandom ' s conception of these issues lead to a very different picture of
the relationship between memory and social practice and, consequent
upon this, an alternative construal of the other concepts involved in this
discussion. This alternative conception then provides a platform from
which Nietzsche' s own approach can be delineated.

Section 3. Brandom: Norms as Implicit in Practice

The major point of contrast between Brandom ' s project and that of
teleosemantics lies in that fact that, for Brandom, the ultimate source of
normativity is not derived from evolution but from the normative
constraints i mparted by the implicit proprieties of practice involved in
the game of giving and asking for reasons. On this account specifically
linguistic forms of discursive practice (which, for Brandom are the only
kinds of practices which can impart propositionally contentful states on
those engaged in them and thereby impart properly intentional content to
those states) implicitly i nstitute practical attitudes towards the
normative statuses of those engaged in such discursive practices. These
attitudes and statuses relate to the commitments and entitlements to
commitments which are implicitly acknowledged in the assertional
practices of linguistic discourse.
B random takes it that the fundamental unit of language is the
assertion and these stand in necessarily inferential relations to other
assertions (i.e. those that are the inferential consequences of it). It is this
inferential articulation of assertions which implicitly institute the
normative statuses of commitments and entitlements to commitments
which in turn serve to confer (intentional) propositional content on the
speech acts and performances of linguistic practitioners. A particular
performance i s propositionally contentful just in so far as i t satisfies the
normative constraints which obtain on the commitments and
entitlements to commitments to perform further performances which are
the inferential consequences of the assertion made. Thus, as in the
example given earlier, one' s promissory locution has propositional

Austin Hill & Jonathan Rubin

1 45

content just in so far as one implicitly acknowledges the further

commitments which follow inferentially from the content of that
promise. It is by standing in the right sort of inferential relation to its
consequences and antecedents that a performance has the conceptual
content that it does and it is this conceptual content which makes a
performance propositionally contentful. The proprieties of inference
provide the normative constraints which suffice to confer content on
intentional level performances. It is these proprieties of inference which
instantiate the normative constraints which come to structure intentional
content by implicitly instituting the normative statuses of commitment
and entitlement to commitments which provide the key to fundamentally
normative employment of intentional contents.
Such implicitly acknowledged commitments impart normative
constraints on how it is appropriate to use certain concepts such that one
may count as having engaged in a correct application of that concept in a
proposition and so come to impart propositional contentfulness on that
performance. Intentional content is therefore more fundamentally
viewed as being instantiated by nonnative considerations. These
normative constraints in effect provide rules for the correct employment
of (potentially intentionally contentful) concepts and propositions
sufficient to impart content to those performances. However, Brandom is
also concerned not to commit what he tenns the 'intellectualist-regulist'
mistake of taking it that such a conception of normativity must be
formulated by reference to explicitly stated rules or principles. Instead he
wants to provide a pragmatist account of norms being implicit in
practice. 16 Consideration of this strand of his project leads to his account
of the way in which mechanisms of normalisation work to instantiate
and maintain systems of nonnative constraint by being implicit in the
practices of a community. This latter point is the key to his conception of
the way in which these mechanisms can be appealed to as part of an
explanation couched in terms of a sub-intentional level.
The way in which norms come to subtend intentional employment so
as to confer content on these performances requires consideration not
only of the implicit acknowledgement of commitments already alluded
to but of the implicit attitudes of assessment in regard to those
commitments and entitlements to commitments on the part of the
members of a community of language users. This is the essentially
16

The motivation for this move is Brandom's appreciation of Wittgenstein's regress

of rules argument in the Investigations. Brandom discusses this at some length in
Ch. I , pp. 1 8-33 of Making It Explicit ( 1 994]

1 46

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

social-inferential aspect of Brandom's account of normativity. Norms

are i mparted on the deployment of propositional contents by the
assessments of correctness or i ncorrectness in accordance with the norms
by other members of a community. Such assessments, however, are
conceived as being implicit in the essentially social practices of treating
a performance as correct or incorrect rather than as explicitly stated rules
or principles which are consulted by the community in applying these
norms. This form of implicit treatment of performances as correct or
incorrect bears on the way in which assessors do certain things so as to
reinforce the acknowledgement of the commitments and entitlements to
commitments which structure the normative employment of conceptual
vocabulary (and so work to confer propositional content on such
performances). The particular form of social-practical activity which
Brandom highlights as playing the role of constituting normative
assessment as implicit i n practice is the practice of sanctions.
Brandom puts the point as follows:
The approach being considered distinguishes us as norm-governed
creatures from merely regular natural creatures by the normative
attitudes we evince - attitudes that express our grasp or practical
conception of our behaviour as governed by norms. These
normative attitudes are understood in turn as assessments,
assignments to performances of normative significance or status
as correct or incorrect accord ing to some norm. The assessing
attitudes are then understood as dispositions to sanction,
positively or negatively . Finally , sanctioning is understood in
terms of reinforcement, which is a matter of the actual effect of
the sanctioning or reinforcing responses on the responsive
dispositions of the one whose performances are being reinforced,
that is sanctioned, that is assessed. (Brandom 1 994: 35)
To sanction (either positively or negatively) correct or incorrect
performances according to a norm is a way in which norms can come to
subtend conceptual employment by being implicit in the practices of a
community . Sanctions (as forms of normative assessment implicit in
practical attitudes of treating performances as correct or incorrect in
accordance with a norm) are, for Brandom, the mechanisms wh ich
instanti ate and maintain the normative employment of concepts (which
then confer propositional content on those employments). Since they are
taken to be implicit in practice, the mechanisms of sanctioning can be
seen to operate at a sub-intentional level because they work to impart

Austin Hill & Jonathan Rubin

1 47

specifical ly normative constraints which are prior in the order of

explanation to intentional terminology (given that they in fact structure
and impart content to the latter) and, moreover, do so at the implicit level
of social practice rather than the explicit level of a stated intention
(since, again, they are the condition of possibility, on Brandom's story,
of making such a content explicit in the first place). They provide a clear
way in which Brandom can answer his essentially pragmatist question of
how:
the capacity to entertain principles, and so know that something is
the case, arises out of the capacity to engage in practices - to know
how to do something in the sense of being able to do it. What
must practitioners be able to do in order to be able to thereby say
that things are thus and so - that is, to express something
explicitly? the expl anatory force of a response to this question can
be judged by the constraints which are acknowledged on the
vocabulary in which those practical capacities are specified;
normative vocabulary is employed here, but intentional
vocabulary (which would permit at the outset the ascription of
propositionally contentful states, attitudes and performances) i s
not. The first level o f the account o f expression accordingly
consists in explaining - making theoretically explicit - the implicit
structure of l inguistic practices in virtue of which they count as
making anything ex plicit at al l. ( 1 8)
B random offers two different forms in which sanctions can be applied in
relation to the commitments and entitlements to commitments which
provide the normative inferential structure which is ultim atel y to be
appealed to in attri butions of intentional content. In the first case, the
sanction is external to the system of normati vity in that it may be
specified in non-normative terms. Brandom 's example here is of
someone performing an action which they are not inferentially entitled to
(e.g., they broke a promise) and consequently being "beaten with sticks",
and thereby having their behaviour negatively reinforced. On the other
hand, the sanction attendant upon incorrect performance may itself be
further specified in normative terms (i.e. by further consequences for
other normative statuses). In this case the sanction is defined by
Brandom as an internal one.

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

1 48

But other cases are possible [from those of external sanctions] , for
instance ones i n which the assessing response is to punish by
making other actions inappropriate - one who violates the norm is
not permitted to attend the weekly festival . I n such a case, the
normative significance of transgression is itself specified in
nonnative terms (of what is appropriate, of what the transgressor
is entitled to do). The punishment for violating one norm is an
al teration in other normative statuses. Acting i ncorrectly al ters
what other performances are correct or incorrect. (4 3)
This picture obviously allows for the possibility of interlocking systems
of external and internal sanctions (e.g. a case in which subsequent
attendance at a festival when barred from so doing as a consequence of
the application of a previous internal sanction elicits the external
sanction of being beaten with sticks) thereby "making sense of complex
webs of interdependent normative statuses" (44).
It is important to note, however, that even in the cases where an
external sanction is describable by reference to non-normative terms (as
is the case in the example of being beaten with sticks), Brandom' s
account does not call fo r a further reduction o f a l l normative
consi derations to natural ones; indeed, this is a move which he explicitly
rejects. The real point of i nvoking sanctioning behaviour, for Brandom,
is not to describe natural istically how it is that nonns come to be
conformed to but to give an account of the way in which deontic statuses
can be acknowledged implicitly in practice as part of a wider theory of
normative constraint. Ultimately, for Brandom, the point of external
sanctions is still to be construed in normative terms.
I t is by reference to the attitudes of others toward the deontic
status (attributing a commitment) that the attitude of the one
whose status is in question (acknowl edging or un dertaking a
commitment is to be understood. So all that is required to make
sense of the nonnative significance of the performance as an
undertaking of a commitment to do something. The possibility of
sanctioning failure to perfonn appropriately - that is, as one is
(thereby) taken to be commi tted to do -offers a way of construing
this fundamental practical deontic attitude [ ... ] For undertaking a
commitment can be understood as authorising, licensing, or
entitling those who attribute the commitment to sanction non
perfonnance [ . ] Thought of this way, the effect of undertaking a
commitment is not a matter of in fact eliciti ng punishment if one
. .

Austin Hill & Jonathan Rubin

1 49

does not fulfil the commitment but rather of making such

punishment appropriate. It is not a matter of the actual
conditional dispositions to sanction of those who attribute the
commitment but a matter of the conditional normative status of
such sanctions. ( 1 62- 163)
'

Th is is part of B random' s general resistance to strategies which seek to

further reduce the normative to the non-normative and as such
constitutes part of the generalised anti-naturalism of his project. Other
aspects of this commitment can be seen in his claim that the
(normatively constrained) intentional interpretation of non-language
using systems (or 'simple' as opposed to 'interpreting' intentional
systems), such as non-human animals and artefacts, is parasitic on the
form of intentional interpretation of linguistic communities which his
theory describes. Equally , B random is resistant to the natural istic claim
of Dennett that there is no such thing as original intentionality (a claim
which was seen to be motivated by Dennett' s theoretical commitment to
Darwinism).
Consideration of these points makes i t clear just how far Brandom ' s
conception of the relationship between intentionality and norrnativity i s
from that offered b y the teleoseman ticists. Brandom trades his normative
social-i nferential pragmatics for teleosema ntic's conception of
representational-functional naturalism. Before going on to see just where
Nietzsche's approach might be taken to be with regard to these two
alternative conceptions of normativity, it is necessary to eluci date a few
further features which differentiates Brandom's approach from that of
teleosemantics.
The contrast between Brandom and teleosemantics on the question of
the status of representation is clear. Teleosemantics depends upon some
form of representation h aving expl anatory priority over inference. This
can be seen, for example, in both Millikan ' s account of "mapping rules"
for i ntentional icons and in the way in which the project more generally
is committed to naturalising the representational competencies derived
from the intentional level by functional analysis. In other words, by
seeking sub-personal cogni tive mechanisms which can discharge these
competencies only by having a certain structure, so that the
representational capac1t1es postulated by the i ntentional level
competence theory are deli vered by the system, where that structure is

1 50

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

selected and designed by evolution for just that purpose. " Such a
reliance on representation can be seen to be nascent in teleosemantic's
overall conception of memory in terms of a cognitive faculty. Brandom,
on the other hand , is clearly and explicitly commi tted to the explanatory
priority of inference over that of representation in his normative account
of intentional conten t."
An equally vivid contrast is the way in which the two theories
approach the question of the mechanisms which in stantiate normativity.
For teleosemantics the relevant mechanisms reside at the level of the
sub-personal cognitive architecture and are again considered
naturalistically. They reside within the organism and, crucially, its
evoluti onary phylogenetic history. This defines the proper function of
these mechanisms by reference to their contribution to the fitness of the
system being considered. Brandom' s approach takes the relevant
mechanisms to be the implicit social practices of sanctioning, which he
makes no attempt to render in naturalistic terms. As was seen above,
sanctions continue to play a specifically normative role in tracking the
assessments of normative status within the context of social "deontic
scorekeeping practices". What matters for Brandom is not the
mechanistic details of sanctioning practice but the overall contribution
which sanctioning is assumed to make to providing the implicitly
normative s tructure of linguistic practice such that this can support the
inferential articulation of commitments and entitlements to commitments
which suffice to confer content on intentional performances.
Finally, the differing formulations of the decomposition of the
functional systems which are taken to be relevant by the two camps can
be noted. It was seen above that teleosemantic strategy in respect of this
issue was to decompose fu nctional roles by their teleological ly defined
function or purpose, with natural selection being invoked to naturalise
such a notion (as in the case of Milli kan ' s account of proper fu nction
17

A clear accounJ of this form of explanatory cascade from intentional systems theory
as a competence theory to sub-personal cognitive psychology as a theory of the
implementation of these representational competencies is provided in Dennett 1 987,
Ch.3. A forceful critique of the project of attempting to naturalise a representational
theory by functional analysis of intentional level competencies, backed by appeals to
a process of evolutionary design, can be found in Hendriks-Jansen 1 996 (some
features of this critique will prove to be important in the development of this piece).
18
Brandom's attempt to elaborate a theory of the explanatory priority of inference and
then to reconstruct a notion of representation as derivative from this more
fundamental basis is an absolutely crucial aspect of his overall project. It is not one,
however, which can be further discussed in this context.

Austin Hill & Jonathan Rubin

151

defined i n terms of history of use). A s a result, a cognitive architecture

comes to be defined in terms of an in variant proper structure capable of
i mplementing a competence discerned at the level of intentional
in terpretation.
Brandom' s account of the functional rol es required in his theory,
however, do not make reference to the structure of cognitive
mechanisms residing in the behavioural economy of an individual
organism (or its phylogenetic hi story). Consequently they are not
defined by appeal to an evolutionary account of proper function or a
conception of natural selection working as a designer. Instead, the
relevant fu nctional system envisaged in Brandom ' s project is the social
system in which normative constraints are imparted to propositional
contents. Intentional content is defined functionally in that it is seen as
being conferred as a consequence of the inter-actions of various parts of
that system which specify the conditions of use which make an
application of a concept a correct or incorrect one (in accordance with
the way in which the relevant commi tments and entitlements to
commitments are discharged); as such, intentional content is conferred
as a result of the 'proper functioning' of that system. But here that
proper functioning is defined in terms of the satisfaction of normative
conditions obtaining on the differing kinds of use of a system rather than
on i ts structure. Moreover, the particularly relevant functional roles
within that system are played by the social-practical activities of
assessments and acknowledgements of deontic statuses and the
consequent application of sanctions rather than by the material structure
of the system. Taken together these considerations yield an account of
functional decomposition in terms of activity or interaction rather than
by function or structure.
What overall picture of the relationship between memory and social
practice (i.e. Nietzsche ' s problematic in the Genealogy) is suggested by
the Brandomian accoun t of normativity as implicit in social practice? It
is clear that memory as such need not, on this line, be defined as being a
cognitive faculty - and it certainly need not be defined as a faculty which
lies within the material structure of an individual organism and its
phylogenetic history. Rather, the term ' memory' might be taken to
apprehend certain proprieties of practice which regul ate how it is
appropriate to proceed to act (to "go on" in Wittgenstei n's sense) in light
of commi tments which one has undertaken antecedently. For example,
what matters in the relationship between memory and promising, on this
story, is not so much that one holds in memory (perhaps in the form of

1 52

P/i

1 1 (200 1 )

a n internal sentence) the locution made i n the act o f promising; what

matters is that one exhibit a practical mastery of the concept of
promising by implicitl y acknowledging in one's practice that one is
commi tted to proceed to act in a certain way and that one is liable to
assessments of correctness or incorrectness i n light of the performances
one actual ly goes on to exhibit.
O n this picture memory is not an internal cognitive structure but an
externalised system of practices (including those of sanctioning) which
encompass a whole social field rather than the behavioural economy of a
single individual. It is just thi s externalisation in a set of practices which
give normative force to the notions of memorising and promising. J n
such a conception the connection between memory and social practice is
particularly intimate and direct (rather than being ind irect as in the case
of the teleosemantic notion of practice only impinging on the generation
of memory as a culturally derived selection pressure) since, on this
account, to change the system of social practices is to change the system
of memory. It remains now to see which of these two conceptions of the
relationship between memory and social practice best accords with the
course which Nietzsche can be seen to be following in the Genealogy.

Section 4. N i etzsc he: Between Teleosemantics and

Inferential ism

The task facing the present section is to begin to delineate the specific
approach taken to the relationship between the intentional and the
normative in Nietzsche. This in turn has been seen to revolve around the
different ways in which it might be possible to conceptualise the
relationship between memory (understood as a site in which the
normative dimension of the intentional is particularly evident, as
Nietzsche approach to the example of promising makes clear) and the
practices of punitive mnemotechnics (understood as a site in which a
specifically social set of normative constraints come to obtain on an
intentional performance such that they give content to intentional
capacities).
Two different possible approaches to this rel ationship have been
illustrated: a teleosemantic reading and a Brandomian normative
pragmatic reading. Each reading was seen to entail a number of
theoretical approaches to the concepts which thinking about how to
formul ate this relationship brought into play. For example, the two

Austin Hill & Jonathan Rubin

1 53

readings encompassed contrasting accounts of the way representation,

normative mechanisms and .function should be conceptualised. These
differing formulations were seen to feed into a resulting picture of the
way in which memory and its rel ation to social practice were to be
viewed by these theories. This position provides the possibility of
clarifying Nietzsche's approach to these issues (and by doing so opens
up the ground for locating his specific potential contribution to the
debate) in that an examination of which of the two overall conceptions
of the relationship between memory and practice is most attractive from
a Nietzschean point of view, then provides grounds to illu strate his
approach to the constellation of concepts (such as function and
representation) which attach to these pictures.
Taking the teleosemantic conception first, it was seen that this
resulted in a picture of memory as a functionally defined cognitive
structure in which the internal storage and manipulation of
representations played a significant role. The normative constraints
operating on this system were derived from evolution by a functional
analysis of an intentional competence (where the normative account of
that intentional content was in large part itself derived from an appeal to
evolutionary considerations) yielding a normative account of how the
underl ying cognitive mechanisms "ought" to work in order to implement
that competence; the cognitive mechanisms thus specified are then given
a normative reading by appealing to evolution as providing a
justification for viewing these mechanisms as serving the proper
function of contributi ng to the implementation of that competence (i.e. it
is clai med that the mechanism has the structure that it has because it was
desi gned by evolution to serve the purpose of implementing the
competence). This explanatory strategy of transferring the source of
normative constrai nts subtending an i ntentional system to evolution is a
fundamental part of the process of discharging the 'loans of i ntelligence'
taken out in the construction of the theory. Finally, it was also seen that
this 'facultative' account of memory as a functionally defined cognitive
structure resulted in the picture of the relationship between the genesis
of memory and social practices (i.e. Nietzsche's problematic) in which
the l atter act as a form of selection pressure leading to the evolutionary
emergence of that particular cognitive structure.
How does this conception of the relationship between memory and
social practice accord with a Nietzschean approach to these issues?
There are a number of good reasons to say that it is a picture which he
would reject (and these also provide good reasons to see him as rejecting

1 54

Pli 1

1 (200 1 )

the formulations of the constellation of other concepts which

teleosemantics draws on in developing this picture).
A first point in th is regard is that Nietzsche is immediately suspicious
of any kind of 'facultati ve' account of cognition. In Beyond Good and
Evil ( I 1 ) he says of Kant's ahistorical transcendent mechanism of a
faculty of judgements
Kant asked himself: how are synthetic judgements a priori
possible'? - and what, really did he answer? By means of a .faculty
[ Venndge eines vermiigens] . . But is that - an answer? An
explanation? Or i s it not rather merely a repetition of the
question?
.

Nietzsche, then, cannot (or rather, should not) conceive of either

forgetting or memory as an ahi storical essentially psychical faculty (i.e.
as if it were transcendent of material conditions of effectuation). Can he
therefore be taken as offering a more biologically grounded accou nt of
the emergence of memory as the substrate of normativity which is i n
turn to serve as the basis for the i ntentional level?
An obvious way to construe such a biologism in Nietzsche would be
to take him as arguing that memory emerges in man as a cognitive and
organic faculty in response to the selection pressure exerted by the
cultural practices of the "torture and sacrifice" of mnemotechnics. Thi s
is just the picture of the relationship between memory
and social practice
.
suggested by teleosemantics.
The sheer biological implausibility of this should, however, be
immediately evident. Firstly, there is a distindly Lamarckian flavour to
such a line of reasoni ng: if the claim is that memory, for Nietzsche, is to
be taken as a biologically grounded cognitive feature, then there exists
no mechanism by which its emergence in a subject, as a response to the
horrors of the 'festivals of punishment', could be passed on to that
subject's descendants. Moreover, it i s not at all clear that the kinds of
cultural practices which Nietzsche sees i n the early stage of
mnemotechnics can fulfil the minimal conditions required for something
to count a selection pressure at the biological level. For instance, as
unpleasant as they are, there is no reason why the tortures of these
pri mitive practices should stand in a necessary relationship to the
differential survival of organisms (as the bearers of genes which are the
unit of selection). It is not necessary that the subject of the early juridical
puni shments should die (it is even preferable i f in certain situations they

Austin Hill & Jonathan Rubin

1 55

do no die, but only suffer). And there is still less reason to think that
these procedures carry sufficiently direct consequences for the
differential survival of offspring for there to be an appreciable genetic
advantage to be derived from the development of memory in response to
punitive practice, even if it were possible to i nherit such a trait. The
punitive practices which Nietzsche describes do not make it a further
condition of a man ' s death on the rack that he also die childless. The
above are entirely necessary conditions of an environmental feature
counting as a selection pressure, whether i t i s 'social' in origin or not.
Finally, even if these cultural practices could count as a selection
pressure, and if there were a mechanism of transmission for genotypic
level responses to this pressure, there is a further reason to doubt the
viability of such an appeal to evolution for Nietzsche in order to derive a
hard-ware solution to the problem of memory with which Nietzsche is
dealing: the problem of time. As has been regularly noted (see for
example Dennett' s Darwin 's Dangerous Idea), the grindingly slow pace
of the evolutionary time-scale makes it extremely unlikely that any
mutations in the genome (which might be construable as adaptations to
culturally derived selection pressures) could have spread sufficiently
through the population to make the kind of difference which Nietzsche is
concerned with i n the Genealogy.
There are, therefore, convincing grounds to reject any moves which
would seek to ground a hard-wired, organic and cognitive conception of
the faculty of memory by appeal to the effects of cultural mnemotechnics
acting as an environmental selection pressure. Equally, however, there
are a number of good reasons to suppose that such a hard-wired account
of memory is not what Nietzsche is after in his discussion of
mnemotechnics His focus is behavioural plasticity at the phenotypic,
rather than genotypic, level in which the relevant class of behaviours are
the normative structures implicit in social practices.
A first point to make in this regard is that Nietzsche would be
unlikely to offer such a direct appeal to natural selection in order to
ground the biological faculty of memory, given his ambiguous
relationship to Darwinian theori sing generally. 19 Further support for the
view that Nietzsche' s conception of memory does not run along such
reificatory lines can also be taken from the observation that such a h ard
wired and biological reading of memory would remain as much a faculty
as a more nebulously characterised psychic one, and we have already
1 9 For a discussion of Nietzsche's approach to the theory of natural selection see
Ansell-Pearson 1997: 85- 1 1 2 and references.

1 56

P/i 1

1 (200 1 )

given reasons to doubt that h e would have sympathy with any such
conception of faculty psychology.
This point emerges with more clarity when we consider one of the
more forceful of Nietzsche' s contributions to hi storical and evolutionary
theorising: his insistence on the fundamental role played by functional
indeterminacy in such accounts:
[ . . . ] there is no more important propos1t1on for all kinds of
historical research [ . . . ] that the origin of the emergence of a thing
and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and
incorporation i nto a system of ends, are toto coelo separate; that
anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually
[our emphasis] interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed
and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it [ . . ] for
people down the ages have believed that the obvious purpose of a
thing, its utility, form and shape are its reason for existence.
(Genealogy II 1 2)
.

Given this stress on functional indeterminacy it would seem superfluous,

i f not self-defeating, for Nietzsche to insist on a hard-wired or genetic
account of memory as a cognitive faculty. The place in which to look for
Nietzsche's analysis of the normative structures apprehended under the
term 'memory ' , then, would appear to be in the phenotypic level of the
particular behaviours (i .e. specific forms of social practice) which are
capable of consti tuting normativity at a sub-intentional level. Without an
understanding of fu nctional indeterminacy as lying at the heart of
genealogy, the ways in which new forms of social practice (new forms of
'the will to power') could emerge in a process of cannibalisation of
components of the previous mechanisms would be utterly unintelligible
and the changes in moral systems (i .e. normative systems) from a
morality of custom generated by mnemotechnics to moralities of utility ,
o r ressentiment would be impossible. What is i mportant therefore about
promising, is not some kind of story about the overcoming of man ' s
essential forgetfulness, nor even the fact that this i s a story told about
promising but rather an examination of the mechanisms necessary to get
this particular kind of social practice off the ground.
It would seem that Nietzsche cannot be taken as endorsing the
teleosemantic conception of the relationship between memory and social
practice. Moreover, this rejection of the teleosemantic account would
seem to bring Nietzsche ' s conception closer to that of Brandom in that

Austin Hill & Jonathan Rubin

1 57

dispensing with an account of memory as a specifical ly cognitive faculty

opens up the possibility of Nietzsche viewing the relationship between
memory and practice in terms of i nterlocking webs of normative social
practices which provide sufficient constraints to i mpart content to
intentional performances.
Such a conception sees intentionality and normativity as a distributed
system externalised into the social field. On this reading Nietzsche
should not be taken as saying that memory is created once and for all in
response to the early forms of punitive practice; rather it is continually
constructed in different forms by the shifting patterns of normative
mechanisms as they come to instantiate and maintain di fferent systems
of normativity (and so, intentionality) in populations. Memory should
not be mistaken for a something localisble inside one ' s head: it takes a
lot of effort to internalise man - and this process is never complete and
always reliant upon the body. Mnemotechnics, is nothing other than (a
specific historical example of) a mechanism whereby a collection of
norms is both maintained and instantiated. Memory must be understood
as a collective term for all the (historicall y given) mechanisms whereby
normalised behaviour is produced.
This point becomes clearer when proper attention is paid to
Nietzsche's insistence upon the fact that considerations of functional
indeterminacy apply just as much to forms of social practice as they do
to organic and cognitive structures. As remarked earlier, a 'morality of
custom' is not the only normative system that mnemotechnics can
instantiate. It is vital not to conflate beating, or torture with punishment.
As Nietzsche makes perfectly clear in his discussion of punishment i n
1 3 o f the Genealogy:
[ . . . ] we have to distinguish between two of [punishment's]
aspects: one is its relative permanence, 20 [ ] a fixe d form of
action, a 'drama' , a certain strict sequence of procedures, the other
is its fluidity, its meaning [Sinn], purpose and expectation, which
is linked to the carrying out of such procedures.

An article by Pierre Clastres, 'On Primitive Torture' has the double

advantage of illustrating not just this point but also offering some
relatively contemporary ethnographic illustration of pnm1tive
mnemotech nics {should one have ever entertained any doubts about
Nietzsche's reliability as a historian). In it he describes not just the
20

That is to say the beating.

1 58

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

various tortures involved in pnm1lJve m1tiat1on ceremonies, which

involve scarification and/or tattooing but also certain practices in the
Soviet gulags during the 60's where prisoners had their foreheads and or
cheeks tattooed with slogans such as: "Slaves of Khrushchev", "Slave of
the C.P.S.U". The crucial poin t that Cl astres makes i s that whereas
primitive mnemotech nics are designed so as to prevent the possibility of
the tribe breaking apart and the i nternal formation of a group of masters
and slaves, as the tattoos in the gulags eloquently demonstrate,
mnemotechnics can also be used in order Lo instantiate that very
division.
If Nietzsche ' s project i s to be seen as closer to the form of normative
pragmatics found in B random ' s work than to teleosemantic explanation
of the relationship between normativity (particularly norm instituting
social practices) and intentionality how does this effect the way in which
Nietzsche should be seen as approaching the other crucial concepts
employed in the development of such a theory? Of particular interest
here are the approaches to representation, normative mechanisms and
function.
In as far as Nietzsche can be seen to accord with the Brandomian
conception of memory as instituted by the distributed patterns of socially
normative practices and as viewing intentional content as being thereby
externalised into the social field, il is clear that he need not accord a
major role to representation within his theory. This is not, of course, to
say that Nietzsche must be taken as being necessarily completely
sympathetic to Brandom ' s fully blown inferential account of intentional
content - a point which shall be returned to shortly. Nevertheless it is
significant to see that the picture which Nietzsche presents in the
Genealogy is one which can be taken as hav ing a critical engagement
with the concept of representation.
Perhaps the most importance sense, in which Nietzsche makes a
decisive break from the teleosemantic reading i s the opposition to a
notion of function as structure which is i nherent in his stress on
functional i ndeterminacy. This equally requires that evolution be
conceptualised otherwise than on analogy with a anticipatory and
rational process of the design of natural artefacts. There is already a
substantial body of l iterature (of which Hendriks-Jansen i s one of the
more notable cases) which argues that such a conception of evolution is
i n any case an u nfortunate one in that i t is led to down play the
complexities of the interactions among varying systems which contribute
to the evoluti onary process. Nietzsche, then, is on solid theoretical
ground when he objects Lo a notion of deriving a fixed function for a

Austin Hill & Jonathan Rubin

1 59

feature of a system by an appeal to its evolutionary purpose, as derived

from its design by natural selection. The alternative approach to function
in a system which Nietzsche expl icitly draws on is to decompose
function by the activities or inter-actions of a system. As the section in
which he introduces the notion of functional indeterminacy makes clear,
such a decomposition by activity exp licitly allows for the fact that a
system ' s own activity may produce changes in the way i n which it
interacts with other parts of the system and in so doing gives rise to the
emergence of new capacities for that system whilst the overt structure of
the system may stay the same. Thus a conception of function
conceptualised in terms of patterns of activity allows for the possibility
of the self-organisation of a system, or what Hendriks-Jansen calls
"inter-active emergence". This capacity for the self organisation of
functional systems will play a crucial role in locating Nietzsche's
specific contribution to this discussion in that i t flows directly from his
stress on the need to take functional indeterminacy seriou sly in the
analysis of normative systems.
Whilst these considerations provide grounds to conclude that
Nietzsche must also be taken to reject the teleosem antic conception of
specifically cognitive mechanisms it i s also at this point that his
contribution can be seen to di verge from the approach taken by
Brandom. It was noted above that Brandom is not ultimately that
concerned with investigating the details of the mechanisms involved in
the practices of sanctioning which he nevertheless highlights as playing
an absolutely crucial role in the social-pragmatic instantiation of
normativity as implicit i n the practices of a community. Even in the
cases where sanctions fu nction externally, and so are construable in non
normative or naturalistic terms, he is resistant to the possibility of this
being the proper level at which to treat such sanctions. Instead he insists
that even such non-normative forms of sanction must ultimately answer
to the purely normative - as in the case where the application of
sanctions is best rendered in terms of it being appropriate to apply such
sanctions. Nietzsche, however, i s concerned with the details of the
mechanisms involved i n sanctioning practice.
A related feature of Brandom ' s conception of normativity which does
not sit easily with a Nietzschean orientation is its excessively rational
structure, as exemplified by the fact that it is the implicit normative
structure of the game of giving and asking for reasons which is taken by
Brandom to be the crucial normative structure fo r the conferral of

P!i 1 1 (200 1 )

1 60

intentional content. " Such a conception combines well with Brandom ' s
anti-naturalistic stance (though perhaps n o t with his pragmatist one) and
his insistence on the foundational status of specifical ly li ngui stic forms
of normativity and intentionality (especially since it provides the warrant
for taking the inferential articulation of assertions as being the
fu ndamental form of linguistic practice) but it is not a picture which i s
easily acceptable from a N ietzschean standpoint. This i s particularly the
case gi ven the essentially harmonious and co-operative model of social
relations which it draws upon. A version of normative pragmatics more
suited to Nietzschean tastes does emerge, however, from the potential
alterations brought to the theory by the criticisms of Brandom pursued
by Tim Schroeder.

Section 5. Brandom and Schroeder: N o rms and Cybernetic

Explanation

I n an unpubli shed conference paper, 'Troubling Foundations For

Cathedral Semantics' , Ti m Schroeder makes the claim that what
Brandom has in fact described is an instance of a cybernetic system: that
norms are instantiated as the resu lts of feedback mechan isms. Norms are
nothing other than the regularities of conduct produced by auto
reinforcing systems. " As the norms that Brandom is concerned with are
sub-intentional (as i t is the production of intentionality that Brandom i s
trying to give a n account of), Schroeder points out that h e can make n o
principled distinction between h i s norms and any other resulting stability
generated by some other cybernetic system. Any attempt to reintroduce a
distinction would have to reinstate what Brandom is trying to explain ,
namely the mental o r intentional.
[A] beating is something which, even when everything is
characterised physically, still has a regular tendency to curb
certain tendencies to produce particular outcome-types. It is the
fact that certain sorts of stimuli reliably increase or decrease an
21

The idea that we are 'deontic-scorekeepers' sits uneasily with the psychological
literature demonstrating that people are reliably terrible about making consistent
inferential judgements, or that people will violate the most basic of transitive
preferences.
22
It is this proviso that is absolutely necessary for Schroeder to escape the
gerrymandering problems that Brandom identifies with simple regularity theories.

Austin Hill & Jonathan Rubin

161

organism' s tendency to produce particular classes of movements

(which are perspicuously describable only at the psychological
level, " true, but which have cumbersome physical or biological
descriptions as well) to which Brandom ulti mately appeals .
Certain social practices are normative because, a t base, society
actually takes steps which effectively reduce those behaviours
which are banned and which increase those behaviours which are
required. (Schroeder 1 999)
Schroeder sees this criticism a s opening u p the possibility of a reformed
naturalism that cannibalises Brandomian norms i n order to reinstall a
functional cognitivist account of normativity. Specifically he argues that
such a conception of norms as being instantiated by the auto-reinforcing
feed-back structures of cybernetic systems allows for cognitive
structures (such as neural structures) to be viewed as providing sufficient
normativity to impart intentional content. This does not, however, then
have to make cumbersome (and theoretically unconvincing) appeals to
evolu tionary h istories of use in order to derive a normative status for
such mechanisms. This i s because the cybernetic regularities involved
already count as norms. He is i n effect claiming that such a cybernetic
approach to norm-generation can redefine the functional roles of
cognitive systems such that they are no longer derived from a
decomposition by function or structure (which then necessitates an
.
appeal to evolution in order to endow that function with normative
content) but from a decomposition into patterns of activity (where the
rel evant activities or inter-actions of the candidate system are the auto
reinforcing dispositional properties of the system to produce particular
outcome types). The patterns of activity of the system itself are sufficient
to give rise to norms without an appeal to evolutionary history or proper
function being requi red to underwrite this claim. Schroeder claims that
such a possibi lity opens up the ground for a rehabilitation of a reformed
teleosemantics.
Another possibility opened up by such a cybernetic account of norm
generation is alluded to by Schroeder in the closing stages of the above
23 It is vital not to conflate beating with punishment. As Nietzsche makes perfectly
clear in his discussion of punishment in 13 of OGM
we have to distinguish between two of its [punishment's] aspects: one i s its relative
permanence, [ ... ] a fixed form of action, a 'drama' , a certain strict sequence of
procedures, the other is its fluidity, its meaning {Sinn], purpose and expectation,
which is linked to the carrying out of such procedures

1 62

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

quotation. l t is this which is to concern us in the remainder o f this paper.

Such an approach suggests the possibility of coming to treat social
systems of normativity as being themselves cybernetic systems rather
than having to conceptualise normativity (with Brandom) as being
essentially a feature which belongs lo linguistic practice alone. A reading
of normativity along these li nes provides a possible means by which to
simultaneously undercut Brandom' s anti-naturalism (because it focuses
attention on the actual details of the mechanisms of sanctions which
instantiate normativity) and his Discursive Rationalism (by showing how
systems of normativity can be effectuated in contexts other than the
inferential practices of giving and asking for reasons). It will also be
seen that such an account of social systems provides a basis from which
to adopt a less harmonious vision of social practices: an attrac tive
possibility for a theorist of the will-to-power.
For an initial example of such an approach to systems of social
normativity we can turn to a Nietzschean theorist who raised the
possibility of treating social systems as comprising cybernetic
sanctioning mechanisms operating at a sub-intentional level long before
Schroeder came to appreciate the point: Michel Foucault. Foucault's
detailed examples of the application of technologies of the body to a
docile surface (especially his exemplification of the di verse forms of
sanctions found in disciplinary societies) are paradigmatic instances of
the instantiation of systems of norms which operate at the sub
i n tentional level and whose functioning is broadly cybernetic i n
character.
To take just one example: the minute specification of bodily posture
and movement i nstilled in the military train i ng of the use of the rifl e,
coupled with the assessing gaze which is typical of disciplinary practice,
are a clear case of the sub-intentional i nstantiation of a system of norms
by reference to sanctions and the cybernetic feed-back mech anism
holding between the man and the weapon. Moreover, this context is very
different from the inferentially articulated moves of discursive practice
on which Brandom bases his accoun t. Another notable feature of such a
reference to the cybernetic characteristics of discipl i n ary societies is that
it draws attention to the way in which systems of normativity and
sanctioning evolve - something which Nietzsche insists must be dealt
with in accounts of social normativity. Before some further aspects of
such a cybernetic account of normative systems can be returned to, it i s
necessary to clarify the way i n which Nietzsche' s approach to the
mechanisms of sanctioning practice d iffer from those of Schroeder and
Brandom.

Austin Hill & Jonathan Rubin

1 63

Schroeder's account of norm generation suffers from two major

flaws. In our brief discussion in the introduction of the type of
explanatory entities we believed necessary to understand social systems
we pointed out a l i nk (though not an exact correspondence) between the
terms in the first column and first order cybernetic systems. Both
Schroeder and Brandom never consider the possibility that 'the ones
doing the beatin g ' (or those who apply sanctions more generally) must
themselves be considered as part of the system in question, not merely as
the external governors of a set of normative constraints. That is to say,
on both Brandom ' s and Schroeder' s conception of normati ve
mechanisms the controlling parameters (the governors, the beaters) are
external to the system of norm generation . This lacuna means that both
of their theories must fall into the first column as regards what they
consider to be explanatory.
Nietzsche does not make this mistake. Indeed, whilst discussing the
creditor/debtor relation, he considers at some length just what are (or
have been - these are, after all, transcendental material conditions) the
necessary conditions for his 'equation ' "injury done
pain to be
suffered" to actually hold. It i s precisely because the creditor derives
pleasure from the causing of pain to a defaulting debtor that this system
works. This is why festivity and punishment were inseparable. For
Nietzsche, if the 'governor' of the system were to be unaffected by the
process of normalisation then the system itself would be utterly
inexplicable. This i nexplicability is just the recognition that social
systems can only be understood via the terms in the second column (i.e.
as operating outside of conditions of equilibrium and in accordance with
procedures of functional indeterminacy and surplus value). It is
Nietzsche's understanding of social systems of normativity i n these
terms which marks his most significant contribution to the debate.
In order to iIIustrate this point it is necessary to further explicate the
claim that Brandom ' s account of normativity in social systems i s
rendered i n terms of equivalence and equilibrium. A first point i n this
regard is that Brandom ' s account is not at all concerned with the
question of how it is that normative systems come to change along with
the forms of implicitly normative social practices which instantiate them.
That it is to say, Brandom' s conception offers no scope for describing
how the practices of instantiating normative constraints themselves give
rise to changes in those practices. Despite being functionally defined i n
terms of activity, Brandom' s normative pragmatics includes n o account
of how such a system can come to give rise to the emergence of changes
=

1 64

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

i n that system as a result (f its own activity. Jn just the same way,
Schroeder's account of auto-reinforcing cybernetic systems provides no
purchase on the question of how such systems, or inter-locking
assemblages of such systems, can give rise to new capacities or produce
changes in the effects which they deliver (except for the possibility of
malfunction, that i s) . The ability to accou nt for how it is that such
systems can come lo mutate was, however, cited in the introduction as
one of the fundamental criteria of adequacy against which a formulation
of social normativity should be assessed. Jn the case of Brandom this
kind of theoretical conservatism runs very deep.
The inherently conservative nature of B random ' s formulation of
sanctioning (as the locus of implici t normative constraint) can be seen i n
the fact that its prime focus is o n the subject of a sanction (i.e. the one
whose performance is being subjected to normative assessment) and in
as far as i t does concern the effects on those who apply these sanctions
(the assessors), it does so only at the level at which that system of
governing norms is maintained intact. Thus a subject of assessments is
sanctioned positively or negatively j ust to the extent to which it accords,
or does not accord, with the normative standards of those who
administer the sanctions. Notice, however, that since the application of
sanctions is something which is itself subject to normative assessment,
there must be a positive or negative reinforcement of that sanction
applying behaviour of the community of assessing sanctioners. But this
is possible just to the extent that the application of the sanction has the
effect of bringing the subject of assessment-performances into
conformity with the normative standards of the community (by correctly
applying either positive or negative reinforcement of the performances
engaged in by the subject of assessment).
Brandom is therefore led to postulate an in principle equality or
equ ivalence amongst the members of a normative community. That is to
say, although there are divergences of performance w i th respect to a
normative standard (and i t is just thi s possibility of d ivergence from the
standard which makes the system normative rather than simply causal)
and that there is, therefore, a qualitative difference in the treatment of
members of that community with respect to the extent to which they do,
or do not, accord w i th those normative standards, it is nevertheless the
same set of norms which is to be rein forced i n each case. Earlier it was
stated that the claim that Brandom is working with the framework of a
conception of normative systems i n terms of equilibrium revolves
around the view that the governor of a system (in this case, the

Austin Hill & Jonathan Rubin

1 65

sanctioners) remains unaffected by the way in which it actually governs

the system; this can now be seen to reduce to the claim that both the
sanctioners and the sancti oned have their behaviour reinforced by the
same standards of normati vity.
The point here is not that Brandom allows no room for differential
statuses within a normative community but that the convergence of
sanctioned and sanctioner on the same normative object implies a
transparency of the normative process as such to the rationality of a
community. The standards laid down by a community are inherently
rational, not in the sense that they are necessarily the 'correct' norms for
that community to hold from the perspective of an observer from outside
the system (who might comparatively evaluate these norms against
particular optimisation strategies - such as the ' best' norms for that
system to hold for the purposes of maximising reproductive success for
that community), but in the sense that, once they have been specified, the
standards for the evaluation of performances are transparently clear to
"
that commu nity. The claim being made is that Brandom' s position
entails that, for a community to function so as to i nstantiate certain
normative standards, it must be explicitly aware of just what norms it is
actually inculcating - even if the mechanisms by which it instantiates
those norms are only implicit in actual practices.
This conception of normative mechanisms can now be contrasted
with the approach suggested by Nietzsche's discussion of the
mechanisms involved i n the punitive practices of mnemotechnics. The
primary point of contrast is the way in which Nietzsche conceptualises
these mechanisms (and the social-practical activities in which they are
involved) in terms of functional indeterminacy and surplus value, as
against Brandom ' s more conservative approach centred on equilibrium
and equivalence.
24

This is not the claim that Brandom is making the sort of mistake which McDowell
( 1 984) accuses Kripke and Wright of making in their approach to Wittgenstein - that
they make a community incorrigible as to "what is to count as right" and thereby lose
the possibility of any objective considerations settling what is right. Brandom goes to
enormous lengths to avoid making this mistake (which he describes as "allowing
q uestions of normative statuses to collapse into those of normative attitude" [ 1 994:
54] and so collapsing the status of being correct onto that of being taken as being
correct. The issue here is the more subtle one that, although Brandom is not
committed to treating a community as though it w ere authoritative about what is
correct, he is nevertheless committed to the view that the community is authoritative
about what they take to be correct (i.e. about just which forms of normative
constraints they are actually imparting in their assessing practices).

1 66

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

For Nietzsche, the application of negative rei nforcement i n the

practice of sanctioning a performance has itself a positive feedback guile
distinct from the Brandomian convergence upon the same, communal
standards of normativity. This positive feedback is, of course, that of the
pleasure taken in the suffering inflicted upon the body of the one who
fail s to satisfy their normative obligations (particularly in the economic
sphere). Instead of Brandom ' s generalised equivalence in the structure of
normative commitments, implying the in principle exchangeabi lity of
positions as to the roles occupied within a normative framework, all of
which is underwritten by the normative closure of a community around
those structural equivalences coupled with the explicit acknowledgement
of just what the relevant norms are, Nietzsche offers the profoundly non
pain to be
equivalent and non-exchangeable equation of "injury done
suffered".
On Nietzche' s account, the punishments of norm-breakers are not at
all equivalent in the sense of reinforcing a convergence around the same
normative standard which is equally applicable to both parties; rather,
they embody a surplus value appropriable from a creditor-debtor
relationship in which the terms and rel ation of that debt were never
equivalent. The feed-back accrui n g to those who administer sanctions is
not equivalent to the positive reinforcement conferred upon those who
do behave to the normative standard, as is the case with Brandom; rather,
it i s the radical asymmetry between the two orders which entails that the
feed-back to the governors of the system takes the form of a surplus
which is the basis of a profound differentiation between those whose
behaviour is made to conform to a normative standard and those who
i nstantiate that standard by their actions of sanctioning. Such a
conception shatters the convergence and normative closure of the
community, contrary to Brandom's account, and indicates the possibility
of thinking the mechanisms underlying normativity not in terms of the
equivalence of commitments but in terms of surplus value.
The claim here is that the activities of sanctioning behaviour need not
be construed, as both Schroeder and B random ' s account of mechanisms
of normativity have it, as producing equivalences which simply maintain
the system in equilibrium ( i .e. that the reinforcement or feed-back
accrued by those who administer sanctions is of the equivalent order to
the reinforcement visited upon those who are subject to sanctions - that
they are reinforced in relation to the same set of norms). It is possible to
view the very activity of engaging in sanctioning practice as itself giving
rise to a divergence of normative constraints in that the practice of
administering sanctions may yield a surplus to those who administer
=

Austin Hill & Jonathan Rubin

1 67

sanctions over and above the reinforcement provided by having correctly

applied a sanction and thereby maintained the equilibrium of the
normati ve system. In Nietzsche's case this is the surplus value of the
pleasure taken in the infliction of pain - other normative systems than the
system of cruelty may extract other surpluses.
The point here is that the activity and inter-actions within a system
provide for the possibility of its se(f-organisation in that the actual
activities involved in certain normative practices may give rise to
additional features than the ones which simply maintain the normative
system in equilibrium; these features may then inter-act with other
aspects of the normative system and bring about mutations in the overall
nature of the system. Because the functional roles in a pragmatic
normative system are not defined as invariant structures but as patterns
of activity and inter-action there is always the potential for different
forms of inter-action to give rise to new patterns of activity which can
then drive the system in directions other than that seemingly found in its
normal fu nctioning. This potential for the inter-active emergence of new
patterns of activity entails that there is frequently a nascent surplus value
available within a system which can be released when the parameters of
a system change - the appropriation of this form of surplus value can
then form part of the way in which the system is governed.
This explicit acknowledgement of the necessity that the governor of a
system is affected by the way in which it governs the system, or that the
practices of instantiating normative constraints itself gives rise to
changes in those practices, or that the system may be changed by its own
activity, follows directly from Nietzsche's insistence on functional
i ndeterminacy and surplus value. If one accepts thi s, one must define the
functions of a normative system in terms of its capacities for activity
rather than its structure.
The fact that such forms of surplus value arise from out of the
system's own activities entails that the self-organisation of the system
which results from such emergences will not necessarily be kept track of
by the practitioners who re-produce the system - this is particularly the
case if the self-organisation of the system is driven by the processes of
appropriation of these surplus values. That is to say, although the
implicit normative practices of a community may give rise to the very
conditions under which a surplus value comes to change the operation of
the system overall this need not be acknowledged (implicitly or
explicitly) by these very same practitioners: so that they may continue to
perform the same sort of practices wi thout being aware these contribute
to the way in which the system works in a completely new way. In this

1 68

Pli 1 1 (2001 )

way the self-organisation of a system as result of the emergence of

surplus values within that system (which arise out the activities of the
system itself) produces a different kind of functional indeterminacy - the
practitioners whose activities make up the functioning of the system may
fail to track the way in which the system as a whole now operates. I t
follows that the community o f normative practitioners may then no
longer know just which norms they actually are i nstituting in their
normative practice.
Such a conception of functional indeterminacy and surplus value as
lying at the heart of normative systems contrasts markedly with a
principle commitment of Brandom ' s version of normative pragmatics that the community is authoritative about which norms it actual ly does
instantiate in its practices. Given the operation of functional
indeterminacy, i t may prove no more possible to read off from the
implicit structure of normative practices just what norms are actually
being inculcated than it was to tell from the original purpose of a thing
and its structure just which function it now serves. This situation
produces a paralogism which is deeply threatening to Brandom's project,
that, as Deleuze and Guattari have it "one cannot go from the fact that
there is a prohibition to what is actually prohibited.' "5
We shall conclude by looking briefly at an example from Foucault
which illustrates these points and, in particular, draws attention to the
role of functional i ndeterminacy and disequilibrium in normative
systems (which we take to be Nietzsche's fundamental contribution to
the debate). Foucault's stress on the ubiquity of Panopticism i n
seemingly different social and norm-generating institutions (in which
each would seem to have their own specific normative practices)
suggests a functional indeterminacy inherent to sub-i ntentional norm
generating mechanisms in that a variety of i nstitutional practices and
social cybernetic systems can have the same overall effect on the norms
generated from them. In the end, the school, the factory, the hospital and
the barracks all come to resemble one another: all clustered around the
appropriation of surplus value (of efficiency, of hygiene, of forcible
insertion into the apparatus of production) and the associated systems of
norms which go to make up the twin system of delinquency and
discipline. Under these circumstances, it becomes very difficult to see
how a particular institution or community of norm-instillers can ever be
explicitly aware of just what norms they are actually inculcating by
theory practices. It is not the community which is responsible for our
25

Deleuze and Guattari 1 984: 1 14.

Austin Hill & Jonathan Rubin

1 69

norms, or our lack of them, but the myriad machi nes installed in every
pore of the social body to which we are answerable and which make us
mean.

References
Ansell Pearson, K. ( 1 997). Viroid L!fe. London: Routledge.
Bataille, G. ( 1 99 1 ). The Accursed Share. Cambridge, MA: M I T Zone
Press.
Brandom, R. ( 1 994). Making It Explicit. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Un iversity Press.
Clastres, P. ( 1 977). Society Against the State. Oxford: Blackwell.
Dahlbom, B . ( 1 993). Dennett And His Critics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Deleuze, G . and Guattari, F. ( 1 984). Anti- Oedipus. London: The Athlone
Press.
Dennett, D. ( 1 97 1 ) . ' Intentional Systems' . Reprinted in Dennett, 1 978.
London: Penguin.
Dennett, D. ( 1 978). Brainstorms. London: Penguin.
Dennett, D. ( 1 980). 'The Milk of Human I n tentionality' in Behavioural
and Brain Sciences, 3: 428-430.
Dennett, D. ( 1 987). The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: Bradford
Books/ The MIT Press.
Dennett, D. ( 1 99 1 ). Consciousness Explained. London: Penguin.
Dennett, D. ( 1 993). 'Back From The Drawing Board' in Dahlbom 1 993.
Dennett, D. ( 1 995). Danvin 's Dangerous Idea. London: Penguin.
Foucault, M. ( 1 977). Discipline and Punish. London: Penguin.
Hendriks-Jansen, H . ( 1 996). Catching Ourselves in the A ct. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
McDowell, J. ( 1 984). 'Wittgenstein on Following a Rule' in Synthese,
58: 325-363.
Millikan, R . ( 1 984). Language, Thought and Other Biological
Categories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Millikan, R. ( 1 993). 'On Mentalese Orthography' in Dahlbom 1 993 .
N ietzsche, F. ( 1 974). The Gay Science. New York: Random House.
Nietzsche, F. ( 1 979). Twilight of the Idols. London: Penguin.
Nietzsche, F. ( 1 994). On The Genealogy of Morality. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Ormerod, P. ( 1 994 ). The Death ofEconomics. London: Faber.

1 70

Pli 1 1 (2001 )

Schroeder, T. ( 1 999). 'Troubling Foundations for Cathedral Semantics'

[http:/home.cc.manitoba.ca/-BrandomPaper.h tml].
Searle, J. ( 1 980). 'Minds, Brains and Programs' in Behavioural and
Brain Sciences, 3: 4 1 7-45 8.
Wi ttgenstein, L . ( 1 953). Philosophical Investiga tions. Oxford:
Blackwel l .

P/i 1 1 (2001 ) , 1 7 1 - 1 99 .

Love Without Mercy

SLAVOJ

ZIZEK

Against the Digital Heresy

In the Larry King debate between a rabbi, a Catholic priest and a

Southern Baptist, broadcast in March 2000, both the rabbi and the priest
expressed their hope that the unification of religions is feasible, since,
irrespective of his or her official creed, a thoroughly good person can
count on divine grace and redemption. Only the Baptist - a young,
well-tanned and slightly overweight, repulsively slick Southern yuppie
- i nsisted that, according to the l etter of the Gospel, only those who
"live i n Christ" by explicitly recognizing themselves in his address will
be redeemed, which i s why, as he consequently concluded, "a lot of
good and honest people will bum i n hell." In short, goodness (appl ying
common moral norms) which is not directly grounded in the Gospel is
ultimately just a perfidious semblance of itself, its own travesty. Cruel as
this position may sound, if one is not to succumb to the Gnostic
temptation, one should unconditionally endorse it. The gap that separates
Gnosticism from Christianity is irreducible -- it concerns the basic
question of "who is responsible for the origin of death":
If you can accept a God who coexists with death camps,
schizophrenia, and AIDS, yet remains all-powerful and somehow
benign, then you have faith [ . . . ]. If you know yourself as having an
affinity with the alien, or stranger God, cut off from this world,
then you are a Gnostic.'
These, then, are the minimal coordinates of Gnosticism: each human
being has deep in himself a divine spark which unites him with the
' Harold Bloom, Omens of Millenium (London: Fou nh Eslalc, 1996), p.
252.

1 72

Pli 1

1 (200 1 )

Supreme Good; i n our daily exi stence, we are un aware of this spark,
since we are kept ignorant by bei ng caught in the inertia of material
real ity. How does such a view relate to Christianity proper? ls it that
Christ had to sacrifice himself in order to pay for the sins of his father
who created such an i mperfect world? Perhaps this Gnostic Divinity, the
evil Creator of our material world, i s the clue to the relationship between
Judaism and Christianity, the "vanishing mediator" repressed by both of
them: the Mosaic figure of the severe God of the Commandments is a
fake whose mighty apparition is here to conceal the fact that we are
dealing with a confused idiot who botched up the job of creation. In a
displaced way, Christianity then acknowledges this fact; Christ dies in
order to redeem his father in the eyes of humanity. Along the same lines,
the Cathars, the Christian heresy par excellence, posited two opposed
divinities: on the one hand, the infinitely good God who, however, i s
strangely impotent, unable to CREATE anything; o n the other hand, the
Creator of our material universe who is none other than the Devil
himself (identical to the God of the Old Testament) - the visible,
tangible world in its entirety is a diabolical phenomenon, a manifestation
of Evil . The Devil is able to create, but is a sterile creator; this steri lity i s
confirmed b y the fact that the Devil succeeded i n producing a wretched
universe in which, despite all his efforts, he never contrived anything
lasting. Man is thus a split creature: as an entity of flesh and blood, he i s
a creation o f the Devil. However, the Devil was not able to create
spiritual Life, so he was su pposed to have asked the good God for help;
in his bounty, God agreed to assist the Devil, this depressingly sterile
creator, by breathing a soul into the body of lifeless clay. The Devil
succeeded in perverting this spiritual flame by causing the Fall, i.e. by
drawing the first couple into the carnal union which consummated their
position as the creatures of matter.
Why did the Church react in such a violent way to this Gnostic
narrative? Not because of the Cathar's radical Otherness (the dualist
belief in the Devil as the counter-agent to the good God; the
condemnation of every procreation and fornication, i .e. the disgust at
Life in its cycle of generation and corruption), but because these
"strange" beliefs which seemed so shocking to the Catholi c orthodoxy
"were precisely those that had the appearance of stemming logically
from orthodox contemporary doctrine. That was why they were
,,
considered so dangerous.' Was Cathar dualism not simply a consequent
development of the Catholic belief in the Devil? Was the Cathar
1 Zoe

Oldenbourg, Massacre at Motl/segur (London: Orion Books, 1 998), p. 39.

Slavoj Zizek

1 73

rejection of fornication also not the consequence of the Catholic notion

that concupiscence is inherently "dirty," and merely has to be tolerated
within the confines of marriage, so that marriage is ul timately a
compromise with h uman weakness? In short, what the Cathars offered
was the inherent transgression of the official Catholic dogma, its
di savowed logical conclusion. And, perhaps, this allows us to propose a
more general definition of what heresy i s : in order for an ideological
edifice to occupy the hegemonic place and legitimize the existing power
relations, it HAS to compromise its founding rad ical message - and the
ulti mate "heretics" are simply those who reject this compromise,
sticking to the original message. Recall the fate of Saint Franciscus: by
insisting on the vow of poverty of the true Christians, by refusing
integration into the existing social edifice, he came very close to being
excommun icated - he was embraced by the Church only after the
necessary "rearrangements" were made, which flattened this edge that
posed a threat to the existing feudal relations.
Heidegger's notion of Geworfenheit, of "being- thrown" into a
concrete historical situation, could be of some help here. Geworfenheit i s
to be opposed both to the standard humanism and t o the Gnostic
tradition. In the humanist vision, a human being belongs to this earth, he
should be fully at home on its surface, able to realize his potentials
through the active, productive exchange with it - as the young Marx
put it, earth is man' s "anorganic body." Any notion that we do not
belong to this earth, that Earth is a fallen universe, a prison for our soul
striving to liberate itself from the material inertia, is dismissed as life
denying alienation. For the Gnostic tradition, on the other hand, the
human Self is not created, it is a preexisting Soul thrown into a foreign
and inhospitable environment. The pain of our daily lives is not the
result of our sin (of Adam ' s Fall), but of the fundamental glitch in the
structure of the material universe itself which was created by defective
demons; consequently, the path of salvation does not reside i n
overcoming our sins, but i n overcoming our ignorance, i n transcending
the world of material appearances by way of achieving the true
Knowledge. What both these positions share is the notion that there is a
home, a "natural" place for man: ei ther thi s world or the "noosphere"
from which we fell into this world and for which our souls long.
Heidegger points the way out of this predicament: what if we effectively
are "thrown" into this world, never fully at home in it, always dislocated,
"out of joint," in it, and what if this dislocation is our constitutive,
primordial condition, the very horizon of our being? What if there is no

1 74

Pli 1 1 (2001 )

previous "home" out of which we were thrown into this world, what if
this very dislocation grounds man ' s ex-static opening to the world?
As Heidegger emphasizes in Sein und Zeit, the fact that there is no
Sein without Dasein does NOT mean that, if the Dasein were to
disappear, no things would remain. Entities would continue to be, but
they would not be disclosed within a horizon of meaning - there would
have been no world. This is why Heidegger speaks of Dasein and not of
man or subject: the subject i s OUTSIDE the world and then relates to it,
generating the pseudo-problems of the correspondence of our
representations to the external world, of the worl d ' s exi stence, etc.; man
is an entity INSIDE the world. Dasein, in contrast to both of them, is the
ex-static relating lo the entities within a horizon of meaning, which i s i n
advance "thrown" into the world, i n the midst of disclosed entities.
However, there still remains a "naive" question: if entities are there as
Real prior to lichtung, how do the two ultimately relate? Lichtung
somehow had to "explode" from the closure of mere entities - did not
Schelling struggle with this ultimate problem (and fa il) in his Weltalter
drafts, which aimed at deploying the emergence of logos out of the
proto-cosmic Real of divine drives? Are we to take the risk of endorsing
the philosophical potentials of modern physics, whose results seem to
point towards a gap/opening already discernible in pre-ontological
nature itself? Furthermore, what if THIS is the danger of technology:
that the world i tself, its opening, will disappear, that we will return to the
prehuman mute being of entities without lichtung'?
It is against this background that one should also approach the
relationship between Heidegger and Oriental thought. In his exchange
with Heidegger, Medard Boss proposes that, in contrast to Heidegger, i n
Indian thought, the Clearing [lichtung] i n which beings appear does not
need man [Dasein] as the "shepherd of being" - human being is merely
one of the domains of "standing in the clearing" which shines forth i n
and for itself. Man unites himself with the Clearing through h i s self
annihilation, through the ecstatic immersion into the Clearing. ' This
difference is crucial : the fact that man is the unique "shepherd of Being"
introduces the notion of the epochal historicity of the Clearing itsel f, a
motif totally lacking in Indian thought. Already in the 1 930s, Heidegger
emphasized the fundamental "derangement" [ Ver-Rueckheit] that the
emergence of Man introduces into the order of entities: the event of
Clearing i s i n itself an Ent-Eignen, a radical and thorough distortion,
'

See Martin Heidegger, Zollikoner Seminare, herausgcgehen von Medard Boss

(Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1 987), pp. 223-225.

Slavoj ZiZ:ek

1 75

with no possibility of "return to the undistorted Order"

Ereignis is co
substantial with the distortion/derangement, it is NOTHING B UT i ts
own distortion. This dimension is, again, totally lacking in Oriental
thought - and Heidegger' s ambivalence is symptomatic here. On the
one hand, he repeatedly insi sted that the main task of the Western
thought today is to defend the Greek breakthrou gh, the fou nding gesture
of the "West," the overcoming of the pre-phil osophical mythical
"Asiatic" universe, against the renewed "Asiatic" threat - the greatest
opposite of the West is "the mythical in general and the Asiatic in
particular."' On the other hand, he gave occasional hints as to how his
notions of Clearing and Event resonate with the Oriental notion of the
primordial Void.
The philosophical overcoming of the myth is not simply a letting
behind of the mythical, but a constant struggle with(in) it: philosophy
needs the recourse to myth, not only for external reasons, in order to
explain its conceptual teaching to the uneducated crowds, but inherently,
to "suture" its own conceptual edifice where it fails to reach its
innermost core, from Plato's myth of the cave to Freud's myth of the
primordial father and Lacan's myth of lamella. Myth is thus the Real of
logos: the foreign i ntruder, impossible to get rid of, impossible to remain
fu lly within. Therein resides the lesson of Adorno's and Horkheimer's
Dialectic
of Enlightenment:
Enlightenment
always
already
"contaminates" the naive immediacy of the mythical. Enlightenment
itself is mythical, i.e. its own grounding gesture repeats the mythical
operation. And what is "postmodernity" if not the ultimate defeat of the
Enlightenment in its very triumph: when the dialectic of Enlightenment
reaches its apogee, the dynamic, rootless postindustrial society directly
generates its own myth. The technological "reductionism" of cyberspace
(mind itself is ultimately reduced to a "spiritual machine") and the pagan
mythic imaginary of sorcery, of mysterious magic powers, etc., are
strictly the two sides of the same phenomenon: the defeat of modernity
in its very triumph.
The cyberspace ideologists ' s notion of the Self liberating itself from
the attachment to its natural body, i .e. turning itself into a virtual entity
floating from one contingent and temporary embodiment to another, can
thus present itself as the final scientific-technological realization of the
Gnostic dream of the Self getting rid of the decay and inertia of material
reality. That is to say, is the notion of the "aetheric" body we can
-

'

Martin Heidegger, Schelling 's Treatise on Human Freedom (Athens: Ohio

University Press, 1985), p. 1 46.

1 76

Pli 1 1 (2001 )

recreate for ourselves in Virtual Reality not the old Gnostic dream of the
immaterial "astral body" come true? So what are we to make of this
seemingly convincing argument that cyberspace functions in a Gnostic
way, promising to elevate us to a level in which we will be delivered of
our bodily inertia, provided with another ethereal body? Konrad Lorenz
once made the ambiguous remark that we ourselves ("actually existing"
humanity) are the sought-after "missing link" between animal and man
- how are we to read this? Of course, the first association that imposes
itself here is the notion that "actually existing" humanity still dwells in
what M arx designated as "pre-history," and that true human history will
begin with the advent of the passage between animal and overman. Does
the cyberspace ideology not resuscitate the same notion?
These paradoxes provides the proper background for Michel
Houellebecq ' s Atomized (Les particules elementaires), the story of
radical DESUBLIMA TION, if there ever was one: in our postmodern,
"disenchanted", permissive world, sexuality is reduced to an apathetic
participation in collective orgies. Les particules, a superb example of
what some critics perspicuously baptized "Left conservatism," tells the
story of two half-brothers: Bruno, a high-school teacher, is an
undersexed hedonist, while Michel i s a brilliant but emotionally
desiccated biochemist. Abandoned by their hippie mother when they
were small, neither has ever properly recovered; all their attempts at the
pursuit of happiness, whether through marriage, the study of philosophy,
or the consumption of pornography, merely lead to loneliness and
frustration. Bruno ends up in a psychiatric asylum after confronting the
meaninglessness of permissive sexuality (the utterly depressive
descriptions of the sexual orgies between forty-somethings are among
the most excruciating readings in contemporary literature), while Michel
invents a solution: a new self-replicating gene for a post-human
desexualized entity. The novel ends with a prophetic vision: in 2040,
humanity is replaced by these humanoids who experience no passions
proper, no intense self-assertion that can lead to destructive rage.
Almost four decades ago, Michel Foucault dismissed "man" as a
figure in the sand that is now being washed away, introducing the (then)
fashionable topic of the "death of man." Although Houellebecq stages
this disappearance in much more naive and l i teral terms, as the
replacement of humanity with a new post-human species, there is a
common denominator between the two: the disappearance of sexual
difference. In his last works, Foucault envisioned the space of pleasures
liberated from Sex, and one is tempted to claim that Houellebecq ' s post
human society of clones is the realization of the Foucauldian dream of

Slavoj Zizek

1 77

Selves who practice the "use of pleasures." Perhaps the best way to
specify the role of sexual love which is threatened here is through the
notion of reflexivity as the movement whereby that which has been used

to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become

part ()f the system it generates. This reflexive appearance of the
generating movement within the generated system, in the guise of what
Hegel called the "oppositional determination," as a rule takes the form of
the opposite: within the material sphere, Spirit appears in the guise of the
most inert moment (crane, formless black stone); in the later stage of a
revolutionary process when Revolution starts to devour its own children,
the political agent which effectively set in motion the process is re
negated into the role of its main obstacle, of the waverers or outright
traitors who are not ready to follow the revolutionary logic to its
conclusion. Along the same lines, is it not the case that, once the socio
symbolic order is fully established, the very dimension which introduced
the "transcendent" attitude that defines a human being, namely
SEXUALITY, the uniquely human "undead" sexual passion, appears as
its very opposite, as the main OBSTACLE to the elevation of a human
being to pure spirituality, as that which ties him/her down to the inertia
of bodily existence? For this reason, the end of sexuality in the much
celebrated "posthuman" self-cloning entity expected to emerge soon, far
from opening up the way to pure spirituality, will simultaneously signal
the end of what is traditionally designated as the uniquely human
spiritual transcendence. All the celebrations of the new "enhanced"
possibilites of sexual life that Virtual Reality offers cannot conceal the
fact that, once cloning supplements sexual difference, the game is over.
Incidentally, with all the focus on the new experiences of pleasure that
lie ahead with the development of Virtual Reality, direct neuronal
i mplants, etc., what about new "enhanced" possibilities of TORTURE?
Do biogenetics and Virtual Reality combined not open up new and
u nheard-of horizons for extending our ability to endure pain (through
widening our sensory capacity to sustain pain, through inventing new
forms of inflicting it)? Perhaps the ultimate Sadean image of an
"undead" victim of the torture who can sustain endless pain without
having at his/her disposal the escape into death also waits to become
reality. Perhaps, in a decade or two, our most horrifying cases of torture
(say, what they did to the Dominican Anny Chief of Staff after the failed
coup in which the dictator Trujillo was killed - sewing his eyes
together so that he wasn't able to see his torturers, and then for four
months slowly cutting off parts of his body in most painful ways, like

1 78

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

using clumsy scissors to detach h i s genitals) will appear as naive

children ' s games.
We all know of Alan Turing's famous "imitation game" which should
serve to test if a machine can think: we communicate with two computer
i nterfaces, asking them any imaginable question; behind one of the
inteJiaces is a human person typing the answers, while behind the other
there is a machine. I f, based on the answers we get, we cannot tell the
intelligent machine from the intelligent human , then, according to
Turing, our failure proves that machines can think. What is a little bit
less known is that in its first formulation, the issue was not to distinguish
human from machine, but man from woman. Why this strange
displacement from sexual d ifference to the difference between human
and machine? Was this simply due to Turing' s eccentricity (recall his
well-known troubles because of his homosexuality)? According to some
interpreters, the point is to oppose the two experiments: a successful
imi tation of a woman' s responses by a man (or vice versa) would not
prove anything, because the gender identity does not depend on the
sequences of symbols, while a successful imitation of man by a machine
would prove that this mach ine thinks, because "thinking" is ultimately
the proper way of sequencing symbols. What if, i nstead, the solution to
this enigma is much more simple and rad ical? What if sexual difference
is not simply a biological fact, but the Real of an antagonism that defines
humanity, so that once sexual diffe rence i s abolished, a human being
effectively becomes indistinguishable from a machine?
Does, then, the full formulation of the genome effectively foreclose
subjectivity and/or sexual difference? When, on June 26, 2000, the
completion of a "working draft" of the human genome was publicly
announced, the wave of commentaries about the ethical, medical, etc.
consequences of this breakthrough rendered manifest the first paradox of
the genome, the immediate identity of the opposite attitudes: on the one
hand, the idea is that we can now formulate the very positive identity of
a human being, what s/he "objectively is," what predetermines his/her
development; on the other hand, knowing the complete genome - the
"instruction book for human life," as it is usually referred to - opens up
the way for the technological manipulation, enabling us to "reprogram"
our (or, rather, others' ) bodily and psychic features. This new situation
seems to signal the end of the entire series of traditional notions:
theological creationism (comparing human with animal genomes makes
it clear that human beings evolved from animals - we share more than
99 percent of our genome with the chimpanzee), sexual reproduction
(rendered superfluous by the prospect of cloning), and, ultimately,

Slavoj Zizek

1 79

psychology or psychoanalysis - does the genome not realize Freu d's

old dream of translating psychic processes i nto objective chemical
processes?
Here, however, one should be attentive to the formulation which
repeatedly occurs in most of the reactions to the identification of the
genome: 'The old adage that every disease with the exception of trauma
has a genetic component is really going to be true."' Although this
statement is meant as the assertion of a triumph, one should nonetheless
focus on the exception that it concedes, the impact of a trauma. How
serious and extensive is this limitation? The first thing to bear in mind
here is that "trauma" is NOT simply a shorthand term for the
unpredictable chaotic wealth of environment influences, so that we are
lead to the standard proposition according to which the identity of a
human being results from the interaction between his/her genetic
in heritance and the influence of his/her environment ("nature versus
nurture"). It is also not sufficient to replace this standard proposition
with the more refined notion of the "embodied mind" developed by
Francisco Varela": a human being is not just the outcome of the
in teraction between genes and environment as the two opposed entities;
s/he is rather the engaged embodied agent who, instead of "relating" to
h is/her environs, mediates-creates his/her life-world - a bird l i ves in a
different environment than a fish or a man. However, "trauma"
designates a shocking encounter which precisely DISTURBS this
i mmersion into one's life-world, a violent intrusion of something which
does n ' t fit. Of course, animals can also experience traumatic ruptures:
say, is the ants's universe not thrown off the rails when a human
intervention totally subverts their environs? However, the difference
between animals and humans is crucial here: for animals, such trau matic
ruptures are the exception, they are experienced as a catastrophy which
ruins their way of life; for humans, on the contrary, the traumatic
encounter is a universal condition, the intrusion which sets in motion the
process of "becoming human." Humans are not simply overwhelmed by
the impact of the traumatic encounter - as Hegel put it, they are able to
"tarry with the negative," to coun teract its destabilizing impact by
spinning out intricate symbolic cobwebs. This is the lesson of both
'

Maimon Cohen, Director of the Harvey Institute for Human Genetics at the Greater
Baltimore Medical Center, quoted in International Herald Tribune, June 27, 2000, p.
8.
'
See Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1 993).

1 80

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

psychoanalysis and the Jewish-Christian tradition: the specific human

vocation does not rely on the development of man ' s inherent potentials
(on the awakening of the dormant spiritual forces OR of some genetic
program); it is triggered by an external traumatic encounter, by the
encounter of the Other' s desire in its impenetrability. In other words
'
(and pace Steve Pinker), !here is no inborn "language ins/incl ". There
are, of course, genetic conditions that have to be met if a living being is
to be able to speak; however, one actually starts to speak, one enters the
symbolic universe, only by reacti n g to a traumatic jolt - and the mode
of this reacting (i.e. the fact that we symbolize in order to cope with a
trauma) is NOT "in our genes."
The ongoing decoding of the human body, the prospect of the
formulation of each indi vidual ' s genome, confronts us in a pressing way
with the radical question of "what we are": am I that, the code that can
be compressed onto a single CD? Are we "nobody and nothing," just an
illusion of self-awareness whose only reality is the complex interacting
network of neuronal and other links? The uncanny feeling generated by
playing with toys like tamagochi concerns the fact that we treat a virtual
non-entity as an entity: we act "as if' (we believe that) there i s, behind
the screen, a real Self, an animal reacting to our signals, although we
know well that there is nothing and nobody "behind," just the digital
circuitry. However, what is even more d isturbing is the implicit reflex ive
reversal of this insight: if there is effectively no one out there, behind the
screen , what if the same goes for myself! Whal if the "!," my self
awareness, is also merely a superficial "screen" behind which there is
only a "blind" complex neuronal circuit?" Or, lo make the same point
from a different perspective: why are people so afraid of airplane
crashes? It' s not the physical pain as such - what causes such horror are
the two or three minutes while the plane i s fal ling down and one i s fu lly
aware that one will die shortly . Does the genome identification not
transpose us i nto a similar situation? That is to say, the uncanny aspect
of the genome identification concerns the temporal gap that separates the
knowledge of what causes a certain disease from the development of the
technical means to intervene and prevent this di sease from evolving the period of time in which we shall know for sure that, say, we are
about to get a dangerous cancer, but will be unable to do anything to
7

See Steven Pinker, The Language lnstincr (New York: Harper Books, 1 995).
' It is, of course, the work of Daniel Dennett which popularized this version of the
"selfless" mind - see Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (New York:
Little, Brown and Company, I 99 1 ) .

Slavoj Zizek

181

prevent it. And what about "objectively" read ing our IQ or the genetic
ability for other intellectual capacities? How will the awareness of this
total self-objectivization affect our self-experience? The standard answer
(the knowledge of our genome will enable us to intervene into our
genome and change for the better our psychic and bodily properties) still
begs the crucial question: if the self-objectivization i s complete, who is
the "I" that intervenes into "its own" genetic code in order to change it?
Is this intervention itself not already objectivized in the totall y scanned
brain?
The "closure" anticipated by the prospect of the total scanning of the
human brain resides not only in the fu ll correlation between the scanned
neuronal activity in our brain and our subjective experience (so that a
scientist will be able to give an impulse to our brain and then predict to
what subjective experience this impulsive will give rise), but in the much
more radical notion of bypassing subjective experience as such: what
scanning will make it possible to identify DIRECTLY will be our
subjective experience, so that the scientist will not even have to ask us
what we experience - he will be able to READ IMMEDIATELY on his
screen what we experience. There i s further evidence which points in the
same direction : a couple of milliseconds before a human subject "freely"
decides in a situation of choice, scanners can detect the change in the
brain ' s chemical processes which indicates that the decision was already
taken - even when we make a free decision, our consciousness seems
just to register an anterior chemical process. The psychoanalytic
Schellingian answer to it is to locate freedom (of choice) at the
unconscious level: the true acts of freedom are choices/decisions which
we make while unaw are of it - we never decide (in the present tense);
all of a sudden, we just take note of how we have already decided. On
the other hand, one can argue that such a dystopian prospect involves the
loop of a petitio principii: it silently presupposes that the same old Self
which phenomenologically relies on the gap between "myself' and the
objects "out there" will continue to be here after the completed self
objectivization.
The paradox, of course, is that this total self-objectivization overlaps
with its opposite: what looms at the horizon of the "digital revolution" i s
nothing else than the prospect that human beings will acquire the
capacity of what Kant and other German Idealists called "intellectual
i ntuition" [intellektuelle Anschauung], the closure of the gap that
separates (passive) intuition and (active) production, i.e. the intuition
which immediately generates the object it perceives - the capacity

Pli

1 82

1 1 (200 1 )

hitherto reserved for the infinite divine mind. O n the one hand, i t will be
possible, through neurological implants, to switch from our "common"
reality to another compu ter-generated reality without all the clumsy
machinery of today ' s Virtual Reality (the awkward glasses, gloves ... ),
since the signals of the virtual reality will directly reach our brain,
bypassing our sensory organs:
Your neural implants will provide the simulated sensory inpu ts of
the virtual environment - and your virtual body - directly in
your brain. [ . ] A typical 'web site' will be a perceived virtual
environment, with no ex ternal hardware required. You 'go there'
9
by mentally selecting the site and then entering that world.
.

We will thus reach a kind of omnipotence, being able to change from

one reality to another by the mere power of our thoughts, to transform
our bodies as well as the bodies of our partners: "With this technology,
you will be able to have almost any kind of experience with just about
anyone, real or imagined, at any time." '0 The question to be asked here
is: will this still be experienced as "reality"? Is not, for a human being,
"reality" ONTOLOGICALLY defined through the minimum of
RESISTANCE? - real is that which resists, that which i s not totally
malleable to the caprices of our imagination.
As to the obvious counter-question: "However, everything cannot be
virtualized - there still has to be the one 'real reality ' , that of the digital
or biogenetic circuitry itself which generates the very multiplicity of
virtual universes!", the answer is provided by the prospect of
"downloading" the entire human brain (once it will be possible to scan it
completely) onto an electronic machine more efficient and less awkward
than it. At this crucial moment, a human being will change i ts
ontological status "from hardware to software": it will no longer be
identified with (stuck to) its material bearer (the brain in the human
body). The identity of our Self is a certain neuronal pattern, the network
of waves, which, in principle, can be transferred from one to another
material support. Of course, there is no "pure mind", i.e. there always
has to be some kind of embodiment - however, if our mind is a
software pattern, it should be in principle possible for it to shift from one
to another material support (is this not going on all the time at a different
level: is the "stuff' our cells are made of not continuously changing?).
' See Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines (London: Phoenix, 1 999), p. 1 82.
"' Op.cit., p . 1 88.

Slavoj Zizek

1 83

The idea is that this cutting off of the umbilical cord that links us Lo a
single body, this shift from having (and being stuck to) a body to freely
floating between different embodiments will mark the true birth of the
human being, relegating the entire hitherto history of humanity to the
status of a confused period of transition from the animal kingdom to the
true kingdom of the mind.
Here, however, philosophical-existential enigmas emerge again, and
we are back at the Leibnizian problem of the identity of the
indiscernibles: if (the pattern of) my brain is loaded onto a different
material support, which of the two minds i s "myself'? In what does the
identity of "myself' consist, if il resides neither in the material support
(which changes all the time) nor in the formal pattern (which can be
exactly replicated)? No wonder Leibniz is one of the predominant
philosophical references of the cyberspace theorists: what reverberates
today is not only his dream of a universal computing machine, but the
uncanny resemblance between his ontological vision of monadology and
today' s emerging cyberspace community in which global harmony and
solipsism strangely coexist. That is to say, does our immersion into
cyberspace not go hand in hand with our reduction to a Leibnizean
monad which, although "without windows" open to external reality,
mirrors in itself the entire universe? Are we not more and more monads
with no direct windows onto reality, interacting alone with the PC
screen, encountering only the virtual simulacra, and yet immersed more
than ever into the global network, synchronously communicating with
the entire globe? The impasse which Leibniz tried to solve by way of
introducing the notion of "preestablished harmony" between the
monads, guaranteed by God Himself, the supreme, all-encompassing
monad, repeats itself today, in the guise of the problem of
communication: how does each of us know that s/he is in touch with the
"real other" behind the screen, not only with spectral simulacra? Therein
resides one of the key unanswered enigmas of the Wachowski brothers '
film The Matrix: why does the Matrix construct a shared virtual reality
in which all humans interact? It would have been much more economic
to have each subject interacting ONLY with the Matrix, so that all
humans encountered would have been only digital creatures. Why? The
interaction of "real" individuals through the M atrix creates its own big
Other, the space of implicit meanings, surmises, etc., which can no
longer be controlled by the M atrix - the Matrix is thus reduced to a
mere instrument/medium, to the network that only serves as a material
support for the "big Other" beyond its control.

1 84

Pli 1

1 (200 1 )

More radically even, what about the obvious Heideggerian counter

thesis that the notion of the "brain i n the vat" on which this enti re
scenario relies, i nvolves an ontological mistake: what accou nts for the
specific human dimension i s not a property or pattern of the brai n, but
the way a human being is situated in his/her world and ex-statically
relates to the things in it; language is not the relationship between an
object (word) and another object (thing or thought) in the world, but the
site of the historically determinate disclosure of the world-horizon as
such. To this, one is tempted to give a cynical outright answer: OK, so
what? With the immersion into Virtual Reality, we will effectively be
deprived of the ex-static being-i n-the-world that pertains to the human
finitude - but what i f this loss wil l open up to us another, unheard-of,
dimension of spirituality?
The paradox - or, rather, the antinomy
of cyberspace reason
concerns precisely the fate of the body. Even advocates of cyberspace
warn us that we should not totally forget our body, that we should
maintain our anchoring in "real life" by returning, regularly, from our
immersion in cyberspace to the i ntense experience of our body, from sex
to jogging. We will never turn ourselves into virtual entities freely
fl oating from one to another virtual universe: our "real life" body and its
mortality i s the ul timate horizon of our existence, the ul timate, i nnermost
impossibility that underpins the immersion in all possible multiple
virtual universes. Yet, at the same time, in cyberspace the body returns
with a vengeance: in popular perception, "cyberspace IS hardcore
pornography," i .e. hardcore pornography is perceived as the predominant
use of cyberspace. The literal "enlightenment," the "lightness of being,"
the relief/alleviation we feel when we freely float in cyberspace (or, even
more, in Virtual Reality), is not the experience of being bodiless, but the
experience of possessing another - aetheric, virtual, weightless
body, a body which does not confine us to the inert materiality and
fini tude, an angelic spectral body, a body which can be artificially
recreated and manipulated. Cyberspace thus designates a turn, a kind of
"negation of negation," in the gradual progress towards the
disembodying of our experience (first writing instead of the "living"
speech, then press, then the mass media, then radio, then TV): i n
cyberspace, we return t o bodily immediacy, but t o a n uncanny, virtual
immediacy. In this sense, the claim that cyberspace contains a Gnostic
dimension is fu lly justified: the most concise definition of Gnosticism is
precisely that i t is a kind of spiritualized materialism: its topic i s not
-

Slavoj Zizek

1 85

directly the higher, purely notional, reality, but a "higher" BODILY

real ity, a proto-reality of shadowy ghosts and u ndead entities.
2 . " Father, why did you forsake me?"

What, then, does the Christian tradition oppose to this Gnostic legacy?
Let us start with Gilles Deleuze's exemplary analysis of Chaplin's late
fil ms:
Between the small Jewish barber and the dictator [in The Great
Dictator] , the difference is as negligible as that between their
respective moustaches. Yet it results in two situations as infin itel y
remote, as far opposed as those of victim and executioner.
Likewise, in Monsieur Verdoux, the d ifference between the two
aspects or demeanours of the same man, the lady-assassin and the
loving husband of a paralysed wife, is so thin that all his wife's
i ntuition is required for the premonition that somehow he
'changed.' [ ... ] The burning question of Limelight i s : what is that
' nothing,' that sign of age, that small difference of triteness, on
account of which the funny clown ' s number changes i nto a
tedious spectacle? "
The same imperceptible "almost nothing," of course, also accounts for
the difference between the two Veroniques i n Kieslowski 's Double Life.
The paradigmatic case of this "almost nothing" are the old paranoiac
science-fiction fi lms from the early 1 950s about aliens occupying a
small American town: they look and act like normal Americans, we can
di stinguish them only via the reference to some minor detail. It is Ernst
Lubitsch's To Be Or Not To Be which brings this logic to its dialectical
climax. In one of the funniest scenes of the film, the pretentious Polish
actor who, as the part of a secret mission, has to impersonate the cruel
high Gestapo officer Erhardt, does this impersonation in an exaggerated
way, reacting to the remarks of his interlocutor about his cruel treatment
of the Poles with a loud vulgar laughter and a satisfied constatation, "So
they call me Concentration Camp Erhardt, hahaha!" We, the spectators,
take this for a ridiculous caricature - however, when, later i n the fi lm,
the REAL Erhardt appears, he reacts to his interlocutors in exactly the
" Gilles Deleuze, L 'image-mou veme11t (Paris: E<litions de Minuit, 1983), pp. 234-236.

1 86

Pli 1 1 (2001 )

same way. Although the "real" Erhardt thus in a way imitates his
imitation, "plays himself," this uncanny coincidence makes all the more
palpable the absolute gap that separates him from the poor Polish
impersonator. In Hitchcock ' s Vertigo, we find a more tragic version of
the same uncanny coincidence: the low-class Judy who, under the
pressure exerted from and out of her love for Scottie, endeavours to look
and act like the high-class fatal and ethereal Madeleine, turns out to BE
Madeleine: they are the same person, since the "true" Madeleine Scottie
encountered was already a fake. However, this identity of Judy and
Judy-Madeleine, this difference between the two fakes, again renders all
the more palpable the absolute otherness of Madeleine with regard to
Jud y - the Madeleine that is given nowhere, that is present just i n the
guise of the ethereal "aura" that envelops .Judy-Madeleine. The Real is
the appearance as appearance, it not only appears WITHIN appearances,
but it is also NOTHING B UT its own appearance - it is just a certain
GRIM ACE of reality, a certain imperceptible, unfathomable, ultimately
illusory feature that accounts for the absolute difference within identity.
So, with regard to the grimace of real/reality, it is crucial to keep open
the reversibility of this formulation. In a first approach, reality is a
grimace of the real - the real, structured/distorted into the "grimace" we
call reality through the pacifying symbolic network, somehow like the
Kantian Ding-an-sich structured into what we experience as objective
reality through the transcendental network. However, at a deeper level,
the real itself is nothing but a grimace of reality: the obstacle, the "bone
in the throat" which forever d istorts our perception of reality,
introducing anamorphic stains in it, or the pure Schein of Nothing that
only "shines through" reality, since it is "in itself' thoroughly without
substance.
A homologous inversion is to be accomplished by way of the
"illusion of the real," the postmodern denunciation of every (effect of)
the Real as an illusion: what Lacan opposes to i t i s the much more
"
subversive notion of the Real of the illusion itself Consider the
fashionable argument according to which Real Socialism failed because
it endeavoured to impose onto reality an illusory utopian vi sion of
humanity, not taking into account the way real people are structured
through the force of tradition: on the contrary, Real Socialism failed
because it was - in its Stalinist version - ALL TOO "REALISTIC,"
because it underestimated the REAL of the "illusions" which continued
to determine human acti vity ("bourgeois individualism," etc.), and
" I borrowed this notion from Alenka Zupancic.

Slavoj Zizek

1 87

conceived of the "construction of socialism" as a ruth lessly "rea listic"

mobilization and exploi tation of the individuals in order to build a new
order. One is thus tempted to claim that, while Lenin still remained
faithfu l to the "real of the (Commu nist) illusion", to its emancipatory
utopian potential, Stalin was a simple "realist", engaged i n a ruthless
power-struggle.
Each of the two parts of Freud ' s inaugural dream on I rma's injection
concludes with a figuration of the Real. In the conclusion of the first
part, this is obvious: the look into Irma's throat renders the Real in the
guise of the primordial flesh, the palpitation of the life substance as the
Thing itself, i n its disgusting dimension of a cancerous outgrowth.
However, in the second part, the comic symbolic exchange/interplay of
the three doctors also ends up with the Real, this time in its opposite
aspect - the Real of writing, of the meaningless formula of
trimethylamine. The difference hinges on the different starting point: if
we end with the Imaginary (the mirror-confrontation of Freud and Irma),
we get the Real in its imaginary dimension, as a horrifying primordial
image that cancels the imagery i tself; if we start with the Symbolic (the
exchange of arguments between the three doctors), we get the signifier
itself transformed into the Real of a meaningless letter/formula. Needless
to add, these two figures are the very two opposite aspects of the
Lacanian Real: the abyss of the primordial Life-Thing and the
meaningless letter/formula (as in the Real of the modern science). And,
perhaps, one should add to them the third Real, the "Real of the
illusion", the Real of a pure semblance, of a spectral dimension which
shines through our common reality.
A homologous reversal i s to be accomplished if we are to properly
conceive the paradoxical status of the Real as impossible. The
deconstructionist ethical edifice is based on the IMPOSSIBILITY of the
act: the act never happens, it is impossible for it to occur, it is always
deferred, about to come, there is forever the gap that separates the
impossible fullness of the Act from the limited dimension of our
contingent pragmatic intervention (say, the unconditional ethical demand
of the Other from the pragmatic political intervention with which we
answer it). The fantasy of metaphysics is precisely that the impossible
Act CAN or COULD happen, that it would have happened if i t were not
for some contingent empirical obstacle; the task of the deconstructionist
anal ysis is then to demonstrate how what appears (and is misperceived)
as a contingent empirical obstacle actually gives body to a proto
transcendental a priori
such apparently contingent obstacles HA VE
to occur, the impossibil ity is structural, not empirical-contingent. For
-

1 88

Pli 1 1 (2001 )

example, the illusion of anti-Semitism is that social antagonisms are

introduced by the Jewish intervention, so that, if we eliminate Jews, the
full y realized non-antagonistic harmonious social body will take place;
against this mi sperception, the critical analysis should demonstrate how
the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew simply gives body to the structural
impossibility constitutive of the social order.
It seems that Lacan also fits this logic perfectly: does the illusory
fullness of the imaginary fantasy not cover up a structural gap, and does
psychoanalysis not assert the heroic acceptance of the fundamental gap
and/or structural impossibility as the very condition of desire? Is this
not, exactly, the "ethics of the Real" - the ethics of accepting the Real
of a structural impossibility? However, what Lacan ul timately aims at is
precisely the opposite. Let us take the case of love. Lovers usually dream
that in some mythical Otherness ("another time, another place"), their
love would have found its true fulfi lment, that it is only the present
contingent circumstances which prevent this fulfilment; and is the
Lacanian lesson here not that one should accept this obstacle as
structurally necessary, that there is NO "other place" of fu lfilment, that
this Otherness is the very Otherness of the fantasy? NO: the "Real as
impossible" means here that THE IMPOSSIBLE DOES H APPEN, that
"miracles" like Love (or political revolution: "in some respects, a
revolution is a miracle," said Lenin in 1 92 1 ) DO occur. From
"impossible TO happen" we thus pass to "the impossible HAPPENS" this, and not the structural obstacle forever deferring the final resolution,
is the most difficult thing to accept: "We 'd forgotten how to be in
readiness even for miracles to happen.""
And it's exactly the same with belief: the lesson of Graham Greene's
novels is that religious belief, far from being the pacifying consolation,
is the most traumatic thing to accept. Therein resides the ultimate failure
of Neil Jordan' s film The End of the Affair, which accomplishes two
changes with regard to Greene' s novel upon which it is based: it
displaces the ugly birthmark (and its miraculous disappearance after a
kiss by Sarah) from the atheist preacher to the private investigator's son,
and it condenses two persons (the atheist preacher whom Sarah visited
after her shocking encounter with the miracle, i.e. the rising of her lover
from the dead, and the older Catholic priest who tries to console
Maurice, the narrator, and Sarah ' s husband after her death) into one, the
preacher whom Sarah is secretly visiting and who is mistaken by
" Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T. (New York: Farrar, Giroux and Strauss,
1 979), p. 24.

Slavoj Zi:lek

1 89

Maurice for her lover. This replacement of the agnostic preacher by a

priest thoroughly misses the point of Sarah ' s visits: in a dialectic of faith
that is Greene's trademark, she starts to visit him precisely because of
his ferocious anti-theism: she wants desperately to ESCAPE her faith,
the miraculous proof of God ' s existence, so she takes refuge with the
avowed atheist - with the predictable resul t that not only does he fail in
delivering her of her faith, bu t that, at the novel' s end, he himself
becomes a believer (TH I S is also the reason why the miracle of the
di sappearing birthmark has to take place on HIS face !). The
psychoanalytic name for such a "miracle," for an intrusion which
momentarily suspends the causal network of our daily lives, is, of
course, trauma. In his Zollikoner Seminare, edited by Medard Boss,
Heidegger dismisses Freud as a causal determinist:
He postulates for the conscious human phenomena that they can
be explained without gaps, i .e. the continuity of causal
connections. Since there are no such connections 'in
consciousness, ' he has to invent 'the unconscious,' in which there
have to be the causal li nks without gaps ."
Here, of course, Heidegger completely misses the way the Freudian
"unconscious" is grounded in the traumatic encounter of an Otherness
whose intrusion prec isely breaks, interru pts, the conti nuity of the causal
link: what we get in the "unconscious" is not a complete, uni nterrupted,
causal l ink, but the repercussions, the after-shocks, of traumatic
interruptions. " Although there is a similarity between this Lacanian Real
and the notion of the "priority of the objective" elaborated by Adorno,
Heidegger' s most embittered critic, it is thi s very similarity that renders
all the more palpable the gap that separates them. Adorno' s basic
endeavour is to reconcile the materialist "priority of the objective" with
the idealist legacy of the subjective "mediation" of all objective real ity:
everything we experience as directly-immediately given is already
mediated, posited through a network of differences; every theory that
asserts our access to i mmediate reality, be it the phenomenological
Wesensschau or the empiricist perception of elementary sensual data, is
14

Martin Heidegger, Zollikoner Seminare, p. 260.

" For a more detailed elaboration of this key feature, see Chapter I of Slavoj i ek,
Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism ? (London: Verso Books, 2001), where I rely on
Jean Laplanche's exemplary account in his Essays on Otherness (London: Routledge,
1 999).

1 90

Pli 1 1 (2001 )

false. On the other hand, Adorno also rejects the idealist notion that all
objective content is posited/produced by the subject - such a stance
also fetishizes subjectivity itself into a given immediacy. This is tl1e
reason why Adorno opposes the Kantian a priori of the transcendental
categories which mediate our access to reality (and thus constitute what
we experience as reality): for Adorno, the Kantian transcendental a
priori does not simply absolutize the subjective mediation - it
obliterates its own h istorical mediation. The table of Kantian
transcendental categories is not a pre-historical "pure" a priori, but a
historically "mediated" conceptual network, i.e., a network embedded in
and engendered by a determinate historical constellation. How, then, are
we to think TOGETHER the rad ical mediation of all objectivity and the
materialist "priority of the objective"? The solution is that this "priority"
is the very result of mediation brought to its end, the kernel of resistance
that we cannot experience directly, but only in the guise of the absent
point of reference on account of which every mediation ultimately
FAILS.
It is a standard argument against Adorno's "negative dialectics" to
reproach i t for its inherent inconsistency. Adorno's answer to thi s is
quite appropriate: stated as a defi nitive doctrine, as a result, "negative
dialectics" effectively IS "inconsistent" - the way to properly grasp it is
to conceive of it as the description of a process of thought (in Lacanese,
to include the position of enunciation involved in it). "Negative
dialectics" designates a position which includes its own fail ure, i .e.
which produces the truth-effect through its very failure. To put it
succintly: one tries to grasp/conceive the object of thought; one fails,
missing it, and through these very failures the place of the targeted
object is encircled, its contours become discernible. So what one is
tempted to do here is to i ntroduce the Lacanian notion of the "barred"
subject and the object as real/impossible: the Adornian distinction
between immediately accessible "positive" objectivity and the
objectivity targeted in the "priority of the objective" i s the very Lacanian
distinction between (symbolically mediated) reality and the i mpossible
Real . Furthermore, does the Adornian notion that the subject retain s its
subjectivity only i nsofar it is "incompletely" subject, insofar as some
kernel of objectivity resists its grasp, not point towards the subject as
constitutively "barred"?
There are two ways out of the deadlock where Adorno's "negative
dialectics" ends, the Habermasian one and the Lacanian one. Habermas,
who correctly perceived Adomo's inconsistency, his self-destructive

Slavoj Zifok

191

cnt1que of a Reason which cannot account for itself, proposed as a

solution the pragmatic a priori of communicative normativity, a kind of
Kantian regulative ideal presupposed in every intersubjective exchange.
Lacan, on the contrary, elaborates the concept of what Adorno deployed
as dialectical paradoxes: the concept of the "barred" subject that exists
only through its own impossibility - the concept of the Real as the
inherent, not external, li mitation of reality.
At the level of theology, this shift from external to inherent limitation
is accompli shed by Christianity. In Judaism, God remains the
transcendent irrepresentable Other. As Hegel was right to emphasize,
Judaism is the rel igion of the Sublime : it tries to render the suprasensible
dimension not through the overwhelming excess of the sensible, like the
Indian statues with dozens of hands, etc., but in a purely negative way,
by renouncing images altogether. Christianity, on the contrary,
renounces this God of Beyond, this Real behind the curtain of the
phenomena; it acknowledges that there is NOTHING beyond the
appearance - nothing BUT the imperceptible X that changes Christ,
this ordinary man, into God. Jn the ABSOLUTE identity of man and
God, the divine is the pure Schein of another dimension that shines
through Christ, th is miserable creature. It is only here that iconoclasm is
trul y brought to its conclusion: what i s effectively "beyond the image" is
that X that makes Christ the man God. I n thi s precise sense, Christianity
inverts the Jewish sublimation into a radical desublimation: not
desublimation in the sense of the simple reduction of God to man, but
desublimation in the sense of the descent of the sublime Beyond to the
everyday level. Christ is a "ready made God" (as Boris Groys put it), he
is fully human, inherently indistingu ishable from other humans in
exactly the same way Judy is indistinguishable from Madeleine i n
Vertigo, o r the "true" Erhardt i s i ndistinguishable from h i s impersonator
in To Be Or Not to Be - it is only the imperceptible "something", a pure
appearance which cannot ever be grounded in a substantial property, that
makes him divine. THIS is why Christianity is the religion of Jove and of
comedy: as examples from Lubitch and Chapli n demonstrate, there is
always something com ic in thi s unfathomable difference that
undermines the established identity (Judy IS Madeleine, Hynkel IS the
Jewish barber). And love is to be opposed here to desire: desire is always
caught in the logic of "this is not that," it thrives in the gap that forever
separates the obtained satisfaction from the sought-for satisfaction,
while love FULLY ACCEPTS that "this IS that" - that the woman with
all her weaknesses and common features IS the Thing I unconditionally

1 92

P/i 1 1 (200 1 )

love, that Christ, this miserable man, I S the l i ving God. Agai n, to avoid a
fatal misunderstanding, the point is not that we should "renounce
transcendence" and fully accept the limited human person as our love
object, since "this is all there is": transcendence is not abolished, but
rendered ACCESSIBLE - it shines through in this very clumsy and
'"
miserable being that I love.
Christ is thus not "man PLUS God": what becomes visible in him is
simply the divine dimension i n man "as such." So, far from being the
Highest in man, the purely spiritual dimension towards wh i ch all men
strive, "divinity" is rather a kind of obstacle, a "bone in the throat" - it
is something, that unfathomable X , on account of which man cannot ever
fully become MAN, self-identical. The point i s not that, due to the
limitation of his mortal sinful nature, man cannot ever become fully
divine, but that, due to the divine spark in him, man cannot ever fully
become MAN. Christ as man=God is the unique case of full humanity
(ecce homo, as Pontius Pilatus put it to the mob demanding the lynching
of Christ). For that reason, after his death, there is no place for any God
of the Beyond: all that remains is the Holy Spirit, the community of
believers onto which the unfathomable aura of Christ passes once it i s
deprived of i t s bodil y i ncarntion. To put i t in Freudian terms, once i t can
no longer rely on the Anlehnung onto Chri st ' s body, it has the same
sense as the drive which aims at the unconditional sati sfaction and which
always has to "lean on" a particular, contingent material object which
acts as the source of i ts satisfaction.
The key distinction to be maintained here can be exemplified by the
(apparent) opposite of religion, the intense sexual experience.
Eroticization relies on the in version-i nto-self of the movement directed
at an external goal: the movement itself becomes i ts own goal. (When,
instead of simply gently shaking the hand offered to me by the beloved
person , I hold to it and repeatedl y squeeze it, my activity will be
automatically experienced as - welcome or, perhaps, intrusively
unwelcome - eroticization: what I do is change the goal-oriented
activity into an end-in-itself.) Therein resides the di fference between the
goal and the aim of a drive: say, with regard to the oral drive, its goal
may be to eliminate hunger, but its aim is the satisfaction provided by
the activity of eating (sucking, swallowing) itself. One can imagine the
two satisfactions entirely separated: when, in a hospital, I am fed
intravenously, my hunger is satisfied , but not my oral drive; when, on
" I am borrowing this formula of love as the "accessible transcendence" from Alenka
Zupancic, to whom this whole passage is deeply indebted.

Slavoj Zizek

1 93

the contrary, a small child rhythmically sucks a pacifier, the only

satisfaction he gets is that of the drive. This gap that separates aim from
goal "eternalizes" drive, transforming the simple instinctual movement
which finds peace and cairn when it reaches its goal (say, the full
stomach) into the process which gets caught in its own loop and insists
on endlessly repeating itself. The crucial feature to take note of here is
that this inversion cannot be formulated in the terms of the primordial
lack and the series of metonymic objects trying (and, ultimately, fail ing)
to fill in its void. When the eroticized body of my partner starts to
function as the object arou nd which drive circulates, this does NOT
mean that his/her ordinary ("pathological", in the Kantian sense of the
term) flesh-and-blood body is "transubstantiated" into a contingent
embodiment of the sublime impossible Thing, holding (filling out) its
empty place. Let us take a straightforwardly "vulgar" example: when a
(heterosexual male) lover is fascinated with his partner's vagina, "never
getting enough of it," prone not only to penetrate it, but to explore and
caress it in all possi ble ways, the point is NOT that, in a kind of
deceptive short-circuit, he mistakes the piece of skin, hair and meat for
the Thing itself - his lover' s vagina is, in all its bodily materiality, "the
th ing itself', not the spectral appeari ng of another dimension. What
makes it an "infinitely" desirable object whose "mystery" cannot ever be
fully penetrated is its non-identity to itself, i .e. the way it is never
directly "i tself." The gap which "eternalizes" drive, turning it into the
endlessly repetitive circular movement around the object, is not the gap
that separates the void of the Thing from its contingent embodiments,
but the gap that separates the very pathological object FROM ITSELF,
in the same way that, as we have just seen, Christ is not the contingent
material ("pathological") embodiment of the suprasensible God: his
"divine" dimension is reduced to the aura of a pure Schein.
We all know the phrase "the devil resides in the details" - implying
that, in an agreement, you should be attentive to the proverbial small
letter specifications and conditions at the bottom of the page which may
contain unpleasant surprises, and, for all practical purposes, null ify what
the agreement offers. However, does this phrase hold also for theology?
Is it really that God is discernible in the overall harmony of the uni verse,
while the Devil sticks in small features which, while i nsignificant from
the global perspective, can mean terri ble suffering for us individuals?
With regard to Christianity, at least, one is tempted to turn this formula
around: God resides in details
in the overall drabness and indifference
of the uni verse, we discern the divine dimension in barely perceptible
details - a kind smi le here, an unexpected helpful gesture there. The
-

1 94

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

Turin Shroud with the alleged photographic imprint o f Christ i s perhaps

the u ltimate case of this "divine detail," of the "little bit of the real" the very hot debates about it neatly fall into the triad IRS: the Imaginary
(is the image discernible on it the faithful reproduction of Christ?), the
Real (when was the material made? Is the test which demonstrated that
the l inen was woven in 1 4th century concl usi ve?), the Symbol ic (the
narrative of the Shroud's complicated destin y through the centuries).
The true problem, however, resides in the potential catastrophic
consequences for the Church itself if the tests will i ndicate again that the
Shroud is authentic (from Christ's time and place): there are traces of
"Christ's" blood on it, and some biochemists are already working on its
DNA - so what will this DNA say about Christ's FATHER (not to
mention the prospect of CLONING Christ)?
And what about the Jewish assertion of the unconditional iconoclastic
monotheism: God is One, totally Other, with no human form? The
commonplace position is here that pagan (pre-Jewish) gods were
"anthropomorphic" (say, old Greek gods fornicated, cheated, and
engaged in other ordinary human passions), while the Jewish religion
with its iconoclasm was the first to thoroughly "de-anthropomorphize"
divinity. What, however, if things are the exact opposite? What if the
very need to prohibit man making the images of God bears witness to the
"personification" of God discernible in "Let us make humankind in our
image, according to our likeness" (Genesis 1 : 26)
what if the true
targets of Jewish iconoclastic prohibition are not previous pagan
religions, but rather its own "anthropomorphization"/"personalization"
of God? What if Jewish religion itse(f generates the excess it has to
prohibit? In other words, making images has to be prohibited not
because of the pagans; its true reason is the premonition that, if the Jews
were to do the same as the pagans, something horrible would have
emerged (the hint of this horror is given in Freud's hypothesis about the
murder of Moses, this traumatic event on the denial of which the Jewish
identity is raised).
In pagan religions, such a prohibition would have been meaningless.
Christianity then goes one step further by asserting not only the likeness
of God and man, but their direct identity i n the figure of Christ: "no
wonder man looks like God, since a man [Christ] IS God." According to
the standard notion, pagans were anthropomorphic, Jews were radicall y
iconoclastic, and Christianity effects a kind o f "synthesis", a partial
regression to pagan ism, by introducing the ultimate "icon to erase all
other icons," that of the suffering Christ. Against this commonplace, one
should assert that i t is the Jewish relig ion which remains an
-

Slavoj Zizek

1 95

"abstract/immediate" negation of anthropomorphism, and, as such,

attached to i t, determined by it i n its very direct negation, whereas it is
only Christianity that effectively "sublates" paganism.
Thus in iconoclasm Judaism fights ITS OWN EXCESS. That is to
say, apropos of the standard opposition between the Cartesian self
transparent subject of thought and the Freudian subject of the
unconscious (which is perceived as anti-Cartesian, as undermining the
Cartesian "illusion" of rational identity), one should bear in mind that
the opposition through which a certain position asserts itself is its own
presupposition, its own inherent excess (as is the case with Kant: the
notion of diabolical Evil which he rejects is only possible within the
horizon of HIS OWN transcendental revolution). The point here is not so
much that the Cartesian cogito is the presupposed "vanishing mediator"
of the Freudian subject of the unconscious (a thought worth pursuing),
but that the subject of the unconscious is already operative in the
Cartesian cogito as its own inherent excess: in order to assert cogito as
the self-transparent "thinking substance", one HAS to pass through the
excessive point of madness which designates cogito as the vanishing
abyss of substanceless thought. And does the same not go for Jewish
iconoclasm? It does not prohibit/fi ght pagan i mages, but the image-like
power of ITS OWN founding gesture. It is the JEWISH God who is the
FIRST fully "personalized" God, a God who says "I am who am." I n
other words, iconoclasm and other Jewish prohibitions d o not relate to
pagan Otherness, but to the violence of Judaism' s OWN imaginary
excess. In this sense, Christianity - with its central notion of Christ as
man-God - simply makes "for itself' the personalization of God in
Judaism. And is this prohibition of images not equivalent to the Jewish
"
disavowal of the primordial crime? In Moses and Monotheism, Freud
already implies this ultimate identity: the primordial parricide is the
ultimate fascinating image. What, then, does the Christian reassertion of
the unique image of the crucified Christ stand for?
So how are Judaism and Christianity related? The standard Judeo
Lacanian answer is that Christianity is a kind of regression to the
imaginary narcissistic fusion of the community that forsakes the
trau matic tension between Law and sin (its transgression). Consequently,
Christianity replaces the logic of Exodus, of an open-ended voyage
without any guarantee as to its fi nal outcome, with the messianic logic of
the final reconcil iation - the idea of the "perspective of Last
Judgement" is foreign to Judaism. Along these lines, Eric Santner i s
"

See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1 994).

1 96

P/i 1 1 (2001 )

fully justified in claiming that, while Judaism i s a religion whose public

discourse i s haunted by the spectral shadow of its obscene uncanny
double, of its excessive transgressive founding violent gesture (it is this
very disavowed attachment to the traumatic kernel which confers on
Judaism its extraordinary chutzpah and durability), Christianity does not
possess another, its own, obscene disavowed supplement, but simply has
none." The Christian answer is that, precisely, the tension between the
pac!fying Law and the excessive superego is not the ultimate horizon <!f
our experience. That is, it is possible to step out of this domain, not into
a fake imaginary bliss, but into the Real of an act; it is possible to cut the
Gordean knot of transgression and gui lt. Antigone i s thus effectively the
precursor of a Christian figure, insofar as there is no tension whatsoever
in her position between Law and transgression, between transgression
and guilt, between the unconditional ethical demand and her inadequate
answer to it.
So, perhaps, the difference between Judaism and Christianity is, to
put it in Schelling ' s terms, the difference between contraction and
expansion: Jewish contraction (perseverance, enduring i n the status of a
remainder) lays the ground for the Christian expansion (love). If Jews
assert the Law without superego, Christians assert love as jouissance
outside the Law. In order to get at jouissance outside Law, not tainted by
the obscene superego supplement of the Law , the Law itself has first to
be delivered from the grip of jouissance. The position to adopt between
Judaism and Christianity is thus not simply to give preference to one of
them, even less to opt for a kind of pseudo-dialectical "synthesis," but to
introduce the gap between the enunciated content and the position of
enunciation: as for the content of the belief, one should be a Jew, while
retaining the Christian position of enunciation.
Herbert Schnaedelbach's essay ' Der Fluch des Christentums' '9
provides perhaps the most concise liberal attack on Christianity,
enumerating its seven (not sins, but) "birth-blunders": ( I ) the notion of
the original sin that pertains to humanity as such; (2) the notion that God
paid for that sin through a violent legal settlement with himself,
sacrificing his own son' s blood; (3 ) the missionary expansionism; (4)
anti-Semitism; (5) eschatology with its vision of the final Day of
Reckoning; (6) the import of the Platonic dualism with its h atred of the
" See Eric Santner, "Traumatic Revelations: Freud's Moses and the Origins of Anti
Semitism," in Renata Salecl, ed., Sexuation (Durham: Duke UP, 2000) .
"
See Herbert Schnaedelbach, 'Der Fluch des Christentums', Die Zeit 20, 1 1 . Mai
2000, pp. 4 1 -42.

Slavoj

Zi:lek

1 97

body; (7) the manipulative dealing with hi storical truth. Although, in a

predictable way, Schnaedelbach puts most of the blame on Saint Paul, on
his drive to institutionalize Christianity, he emphasizes that we are not
dealing here with a secondary corruption of the ori ginal Christian
teaching of love, but with a dimension present at the very origins.
Furthermore, he insists that - to put i t bluntly - all that is real ly
worthwhile in Christianity (love, human dignity, etc.), is not specifical ly
Christian, but was taken over into Christianity from Judaism.
What is perce ived here as the problem i s precisely Christian
universalism: what this all-inclusive attitude (recall Saint Paul ' s famous
"There are no men or women, no Jews and Greeks") involves is a
thorough exclusion of those who do not accept to be included into the
Christian community. In other "particularistic" religions (and even in
Islam, in spite of i ts global expansionism), there is a place for others,
they are tolerated, even if they are condescendingly looked upon. The
Christian motto "All men are brothers," however, ALSO means that
''Those who are not my brothers ARE NOT MEN." Christians usually
praise themselves for overcoming the Jewish exclusivist notion of the
Chosen People and encompassing the entirety of humanity - the catch
is here that, in their very insistence that they are the Chosen People with
the privileged direct link to God, Jews accept the humanity other people
who celebrate their false gods, while Christian uni versalism tendential ly
excludes non-believers from the very universality of humankind.
The question nonetheless remains (if such a quick dismissal does not
fail to account for the momentous dimension of the Paulinian agape) as
to the "miracle" of the retroactive "undoing" of sins through the
suspension of the Law. One usually opposes here the rigorous Justice of
Judaism and Christian Mercy, the inexplicable gesture of undeserved
pardon: we, humans, were born in sin, we cannot ever repay our debts
and redeem oursel ves through our own acts - our only salvation lies in
God' s Mercy, in His supreme sacrifice. I n this very gesture of breaking
the chain of Justice through the inexpli cable act of Mercy, of paying our
debt, Christianity imposes on us an even stronger debt: we are forever
i ndebted to Christ, we cannot ever repay him for what he did to us. The
Freudian name for such an excessive pressure which we cannot ever
20
remunerate is, of course, superego. M ore precisely, the notion of Mercy
is in itself ambiguous, such that it cannot fully be reduced to this
superego agency: there is also Mercy in the sense Badiou reads this
'" One should not forget that the notion of Mercy is strictly correlative to that of
Sovereignty: only the bearer of sovereign power can dispense mercy.

1 98

P/i 1 1

(2001 )

notion, namely the "mercy" of the Event of Truth (or, for Lacan, of the
act) - we cannot actively decide to accomplish an act, the act surprises
the agent itself, and "mercy" designated precisely this unexpected
occurrence of an act.
Usually, it is Judaism which is conceived as the religion of the
superego (of man ' s subordination to the jealous, mighty and severe
God), in contrast to the Christian God of Mercy and Love. However, it is
precisely through NOT demanding from us the price for our sins,
through paying this price for us Himself, that the Christian God of
Mercy establishes itself as the supreme superego agency: "I paid the
highest price for your sins, and you are thus indebted to me FOREVER."
Is this God as the superego agency, whose very Mercy generates the
indelible guilt of believers, the ultimate horizon of Christianity? Is the
Christian agape another name for Mercy?
In order to properly locate Christianity with regard to this opposition,
one should recall Hegel ' s famous dictum apropos of the Sphynx: "The
enigmas of the Ancient Egyptians were also enigmas for the Egyptians
themselves." Along the same lines, the elusive, impenetrable Dieu
obscur also has to be impenetrable to Himself, He must have a dark side,
something that is in Him more than Himself. Perhaps this accounts for
the shift from Judaism to Christianity: Judaism remains at the level of
the enigma OF God, while Christianity involves the move to the enigma
IN God Himself. The Christian logos, the divine Revelation in and
through the Word, and the enigma IN God are strictly correlative, the
two aspects of one and the same gesture. It is precisely because God is
an enigma also IN AND FOR HIMSELF, because he has an
unfathomable Otherness in Himself, that Christ had to emerge to reveal
God not only to humanity, but TO GOD HIMSELF - it is only through
Christ that God fully actualized himself as God.
What is incomprehensible within the pre-Christian horizon is the full
shattering dimension of this impenetrability of God to Himself,
discernible in Christ' s "Father, why did you forsake me?'', this Christian
version of the Freudian "Father, can ' t you see that I am burning?". This
total abandonment by God is the point at which Christ becomes FULLY
human, the point at which the radical gap that separates God from man
is transposed into God himself Here, God the Father himself stumbles
upon the limit of his omnipotence. What this means is that the Christian
notion of the link between man and God thus inverts the standard pagan
notion according to which man approaches God through spiritual
purification, through casting off the "low" material/sensual aspects of his

Slavoj Zi2:ek

1 99

being and thus elevating himself towards God. When /, a human being,
experience myself as cut a.ff.from God, at that very moment of the utmost
abjection, I am absolutely close to God, since I find myse(f in the
position of the abandoned Christ. There is no "direct" identification with
(or approach to) the divine majesty: I identify myself with God only
through identifying myself with the unique figure of God-the-Son
abandoned by God. In short, Christianity gives a specific twist to the
story of Job, the man-believer abandoned by God - it is Christ (God)
himself who has to occupy the place of Job. Man's identity with God is
asserted only in/through God ' s radical self-abandonment, when the inner
distance of God towards himself. The only way for God to create free
people (humans) is to open up the space for them in HIS OWN
lack/void/gap: man ' s existence is the living proof of God ' s self
Iimitation. Or, to put it in more speculative-theological terms: man ' s
infinite distance from God, the fact that h e i s a sinful, evil being, marked
by the Fall, unworthy of God, has to be reflected back into God himself,
as the Evil of God the Father Himself, i .e. as his abandonment of his
Son. Man ' s abandonment of God and God' s abandonment of his Son are
strictly correlative, the two aspects of one and the same gesture.
Thi s divine self-abandonment, this impenetrability of God to himself,
thus signals God' s fundamental impeifection. And it is only within this
horizon that the properly Christian Love can emerge, a Love beyond
Mercy. Love is always love for the Other insofar as he is lacking - we
love the Other BECAUSE of his limitation, helplessness, ordinariness
even. In contrast to the pagan celebration of the Divine (or human)
Perfection, the ultimate secret of the Christian love is perhaps that it is
the loving attachment to the Other's imperfection. And THIS Christian
legacy, often obfuscated, is today more precious than ever.

Pli 1 1 (2001 ) 200-229.

,

Platonic Meditations: The Work of Alain Badiou

JUSTIN CLEMENS

Across the span of Western thought, i nfinity has been a

notoriously troublesome idea, difficult to pin down, full of
paradox, and seemingly connected in some way or other with the
divine. But whatever its philosophico-theological obscurities and
contradictions, infinity in mathematics, as a phenomenon and an
effect, is neither difficult to pi n down nor hard to come by . . . it is
the founding signified, the crucial ontological term, in
contemporary mathematics' description of itself as an infinite
hierarchy of infinite sets. - Brian Rotman 1

1.

Prefatory Remarks

The work of Alain Badiou is still almost unknown in English-speaking

countries, if now almost unavoidable on the continent itself.2 Following
1 B. Rotman, Ad Infinitum: The Ghost in Turing 's Machine: Taking God Out of
Mathematics and Puf/ing the Body Back In: An Essay in Corporeal Semiotics
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1 993), p. ix.
2 To my knowledge, only two of his books and a handful of articles have so far been
translated, including: Manifesto for Philosophy; Deleuze: The Clamour of Being;
"Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque," in C. Boundas and A .
Olkowski, eds, Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy (New York: Routledge,
1 994), pp. 5 1 -65; "On a finally objectless subject," in E. Cadava et al., eds, Who
Comes After the Subject? (New York; Routledge, 1 99 1 ), pp. 24-32; "What is Love?"
in R. Selacl, ed., Sexuation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). As an index of
Badiou 's creeping influence, one could cite the (usually minimal and enigmatic)
references to and uses of his work proliferating in the writings of theorists perhaps
already better known in the Anglophone world. Sec, for instance, S. Zizek, The
Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political 011tology (London: Verso, 1 999),

Justin Clemens

201

the publication of his magnum opus, L 'etre et l 'evenement, in 1 988,

Badiou has continued to el aborate a philosophy which rejects the still
dominant post-Heideggerean belief that the era of Western metaphysics
is effectively over.' As Bruce Fink puts it, "rather than accepting the
view that the philosophical project has come to a definitive close in the
twentieth century, [Badiou] sets himself the task of defining the
conditions and aims of a philosophy that is not simply red uced either to
its own history . . . or to a 'rigorous' theoretical approach to other
disciplines such as art, poetry, science, and psychoanalysis. Philosophy,
accord ing to Badiou, has its own proper field and conditions and is
anything but dead."4
Against the widespread perception that twentieth-century philosophy
underwent a "linguistic tum," B adiou affirms that, on the contrary, the
century has wi tnessed the return of ontology. The claim that ontology
has indeed made such a self-dissimulating "(re)tum" is extremely
interesting, and not only because the very possibility of the abiding
in terest of ontology remains enigmatic. As Badiou implies, the question
of Being has always necessitated interrogating the status of appearances
esp. chapters 3 and 4, as well as his article "Psychoanalysis in Post-Marxism: The
Case of Alain Badiou," The South Atlantic Quarterly, 97 : 2, 1 998, 235-26 1 ; Tarrying
With the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1 993), p. 4; Keith Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life: The Difference
and Repetition of Deleuze (London: Routledge, I 999), pp. 1 3 1 - 1 32; Giorgio
Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. M. Hardt (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 76, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans.
D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1 998), pp. 24-25, 90, and
Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. with intro. D. Heller-Roazen
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1 999), p. 22 1 ; J-F. Lyotard, Postmodern Fables,
trans. G. van den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1 997), p.
248; J-L. Nancy, The Muses, trans. P. Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1 996), p. I JO, n. 47. See also P. Hallward, "Generic Sovereignty: the philosophy of
Alain Badiou," Angelaki, No. 3, Vol. 3, 1 998, pp. 87- 1 1 , as well as his illuminating
interview with Badiou in the same issue, pp. 1 1 3- 1 33 ; Jean-Jacques LeCercle,
"Canto, Lacan, Mao, Beckett, meme combat: The Philosophy of Alain Badiou,"
Radical Philosophy 93, Jan/Feb 1 999, pp. 6- 1 3 ; and UMBR(a) l, 1 996, one of the
early Anglophone journals to have devoted space to translations and discussions of
Badiou's work. My own paper will restrict itself to presenting the more pronounced
and insistent motifs of Badiou 's work. I would also like to thank Keith Ansell
Pearson for his incisive comments on an earlier version of this paper. All translations
in the text are my own.
3 A. Badiou, L 'etre et l'evenement (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1 988).
4 B. Fink, "Alain Badiou," in UMBR(a) 1, 1 996, p. 1 I .

202

P/i 1 1

(200 1 )

and their relation to the real; hence, even the recent attempted
displacement of the opposition "Being/ Appearance" by way of an
attention to "simulacra" remains thoroughly ontological. Given that an
ontology must begin by questioning appearances, its techniques and
idiolects will always require that it break with the "commonplace," even
if it then proceeds towards, or concludes with , a meta-ontol ogical
affirmation of the current, tri vial fictions of just such a fiction. Within
philosophy itself, the di spute regarding Being primarily turns on the
question of an appropriate method : that is, should one go the way of
language, literature, law, logic, mathematics, intuition, experience, or
something else? It is primaril y by recourse to mathematics - more
precisely, post-Cantorian set-theory - that Badiou aims to ground his
claim that there i s a historically inv ariant definition of philosophy that
can nevertheless confront the multiple eruption of those unprecedented,
aleatory worldly events upon which it is philosophy's task to reflect.
Given the sophistication and novelty of his thought and its current
obscurity in the Anglophone world - not to mention the available space
- my paper will restrict itself to presenting the more pronounced and
insistent motifs of Badiou ' s work. My presentation will thus emphasize
the explicitly topological slant of his mathematical ontology, which
chiefly adumbrates itself through such categories as: situation, state, site,
place, point, inhabitant, event, void, and so on.5

2. Pernicious Sophistries
But I will begin with Badiou ' s challenges to the thinkers that he terms
"contemporary sophists," among whom he includes - perhaps
surprisingly - such apparently disparate writers as Nietzsche,
Wittgenstein, Foucau lt, Derrida, and Lyotard (although Lacan, despite
declaring himself to be an "anti-philosopher," is notably exempted from
thi s charge) .6
5 This necessary restriction is already too simple. For, as Badiou points out, since the
seventeenth century it has not been possible to situate a mathematical concept simply
on one side of the opposition arithmetic/geometry, Le Nombre et /es nombre (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 1 990), p. 2 1 .
6 However, this i s also too simple: the evidently related categories of the "sophist"
and "anti-philosopher" are not quite the same for Badiou, although the differences
between them are complicated and remain somewhat obscure. It also seems that the
objects of Badiou's polemics can shift categories as his own work changes. As Sam

Justin Clemens

203

Crucially, B adiou 's objections here by no means constitute a simple

rejection. Indeed, he is ex tremely sensitive to the force of the
"deconstruction of metaphysics," and his own rejoinder thus begins with
an affirmation: yes, the era of philosophical theories of Presence is in the
process of its interminable completion. What he does not affi rm is that
philosophy can in any way be identified, as Derrida, for example, has at
times seemed to argue, with such a desire (or even with the inevitable
fai lure of such a desire) . For Badiou, on the contrary, Presence is an
essentially ineradicable trap into which philosophy is persistently li able
to fal l, when - under the pressure of various hi storial factors - it
mi stakes itself for a discourse that has a privi leged access to truths, and
thereby comes lo consider itself the only legiti mate tribunal of Being.
Such a situation entails what Badiou will name "disaster": however, it is
not philosophy as disaster or terror itself (which is, at least Lyotard 's
early pos1t1on, for example in Duchamp 's Transformers), but
philosophy's own abdication and ru in.7 More precisely, philosophy
succumbs to "disaster" when it mistakes itself for a discourse which
itself produces truths, and thereby overflows its own proper l i mits,
i nducing a triple effect of ecstasy, terror, and sacralisation (this disaster
will be expl icitly related by Badiou to the generic procedure of love).8
For Badiou, philosophy precisely ruptures or interrupts presence, and
Gillespie puts it, "Badiou suggests that it is not phi losophy which Lacan argued
against as much as an anti-philosophical trend that inhered in philosophy itself,"
"Subtractive,"in UMBR(a) I , 1 996. p. 7. See, for instance, Badiou's essay,
"Antiphilosophie: Lacan et Platon," in Conditions (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1 992),
pp. 306-326, or his (rather strange) take on Wittgenstein's Tractatus, "Silence,
solipsisme, saintete: L'antiphilosophie de W ittgenstein, in Barca!, No. 3 (Nov. 1 994),
pp. 1 3-53, in which Badiou defines "antiphilosophy" as relying on three conjoined
operations: I ) a linguistic critique of philosophical categories, which destilutes
philosophy's pretensions to truth and to systematicity; 2) a stripping-bare of what
remains of philosophy beyond its derisory garments (e.g. Nietzsche 's discovery of the
reactive figure of the priest behind the lie of the "truth"); 3) an appeal to an a- or
trans-philosophical act (e.g., Wittgenstein's evident drive to personal sanctity by way
of an ethico-aesthetics). See note IO below.
7 Cf. J-F. Lyotard, Les Tra11sformateurs Duchamp (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1 977), for
example: "l'homme de savoir pretend mettre fin a la sophistique au nom du vrai, d'un
art de ce qui est reellement vraisemblable, et enfin d'une science. lei commence la
terreur, c'est-a-dire discours et actions commandes par le desir d'avoir le dernier mot
et accompagnes de conviction...." pp. 48-49.
8 Cf. A. Badiou, Co11ditio11s, esp. pp. 7 1 -72. See also the essay "Qu'est-ce que
!' amour?" in the same volume, which can now be found translated into English as
"What is Love?" in both the journal UMBR(a) and the anthology Sexuation.

204

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

philosophy's primary category, Truth - with a capital T - i s not a

plen itude but rather utterly void. Philosophy neither produces nor
pronounces Truth; it deploys the category, but does not fil l it with any
content. As Badiou himself puts it: "who can cite a single phi losophical
statement of which it makes any sense to say that it is 'true ' ?"9 But it is
also because this philosophical relation between the function and the
meaning of Truth is obscured (or tends to be obscured) in the elaboration
of philosophy itself that the possibility - and hence the necessity - of
this confusion is irreducible.
This point will then come to provide a fundamental dictum for
Badiou ' s philosophical ethics: the philosopher must tolerate sophists, for
the latter, despite their sarcasms and rhetoric, not only thereby provide
the arguments that philosophy necessarily takes as its own, but
constantly remind philosophy that the category of Truth is indeed
empty. 10 I ndeed, perhaps the only error that the sophists succumb to is
mistaking the nullity of this category for the fact of its meaningless
disi ntegration or violent fictionality. Against a "sophist" like Derrida,
then, Badiou would make at least three prefatory challenges: 1 )
Philosophy i s the interruption of Presence by Truth; i t is not the
exemplification of the desire for Presence, however one evaluates this
desire, and despite the persistent possibility of the confusion of Presence
and Tru th; 2) Derrida is not simply wrong then about philosophy;
however, his own attribution is founded on a historial misrecogni tion
that ultimately remains Romantic at the very moment his own work
gestures towards the closure of Romanticism; 3) The crux of this
misunderstanding hinges on the philosophical status accorded to poetry,
as opposed to certain other practices of thought, notably mathematics. 1 1
9 A . Badiou, Manifeste pour la philosophie (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1 989), p. 1 6 .
1 Cf. Badiou ' s remarks regarding the relation between sophistics and philosophy in
Conditions. For example: "Philosophy, or a philosophy, founds its place of thought
on challenges [recusations] and on declarations. In general, the challenge of the
sophists and the declaration that there are truths," p. 255. Very summarily, the sophist
claims: 1 ) that there are no truths, only linguistic techniques and disparate sites of
enunciation (language-games); 2) that Being-insofar-as-it-is is thus utterly
inaccessible to thought. Nevertheless, the rhetoric of the philosopher and the sophist
is the same. Cf. also pp. 74-75 of the same volume.
1 1 In a recent book, Badiou claims that the task facing philosophy today is a "triple
destitution" of God: the God of religion, metaphysics and Romantic poetry
"II est
done imperatif, pour s 'etablir serei nement dans !'element irreversible de la mort de
Dieu, d'en finit avec le motif de l a finitude, qui est co111mc la trace d' une survivance,
dans le mouvement qui confie la relevc du Dicu de la religion et du Dieu
-

Justin Clemens

205

Indeed, it is this th ird point that will prove crucial for Badiou: on his
account, philosophy i s concerned with Truth (capitalized, singular): it
produces no truths (small t, plural) of its own. For Badiou, there are only
four discourses capable of such a production; they are poetry, love,
mathematics, and politics, and are, and will eternally remain,
philosophy 's sole conditions Each of these generic conditions is an
exercise of thought, but they think in heterogeneous ways: love is the
foundation of sexual difference and the regime of the passions; poetry
the creativeness of language; politics involves the collective,
"revolutionary" transformations of social situations; and mathematics i s
the place o f the very inscription o f Being itself. Philosophy's task is:
to envisage love only according to the truth that weaves itself on
the Two of sexuation and only on the Two, but without the
tension of pleasure-unpleasure that is sustained by the object of
love. To envisage politics as a truth of the i nfinity of collective
situations, as treating in truth of this infinite, but without the
enthusiasm and sublimity of these situations themselves. To
envisage mathematics as the truth of being-multiple i n and of the
letter, the power of literalisation, but without the intellectual
beatitude of the resolved problem. Finally, to envisage the poem
as the truth of the sensible presence deployed in rhythm and
image, but without the corporeal captation by this rhythm and
image. 1 2
Philosophy requires all and only these four i n order that i t itself can take
place [avoir lieu] : its own job is to deploy the purely logical, operational,
void category of Truth in order to gather, shelter, and verify that the
contemporaneous truths engendered by its four conditions are all
"compossible in time." 1 3 Philosophy does this by constructing a "place"
which at once enables it to pronounce on Being insofar as i ts conditions
metaphysique au Dieu du poeme," Court Traite D 'Ontologie Transitoire (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 1998), p. 20.
12 Conditions, p. 1 02 .
I J Fink glosses this as ''true together, simultaneously true, all true i n the same
historical era," p. 1 1 . Hence, as he proceeds to point out, "As such, philosophy is one
discourse among others, not the final or meta-discourse which provides the Truth
about the various truths," pp. 1 1 - 1 2 . Or, as Badiou puts it, "Elle [philosophy]
configure les procedures generiques, par un accueil, un abri, edifie au regard de leur
simultaneite disparate," Conditions, p. 1 8 .

206

Pli 1 1

(200 1 )

permit, and ensures, b y way o f the Truth, that none o f the conditions'
truths are themselves i llici tly elevated to the place of Truth itself. Truth,
for Badiou, thus at once "signifies a plural state of things (there are
heterogeneous truths)" and "the unity of thought." 14 And if philosophy's
plural conditions are i ndeed genuine experiments and experiences of
thought, they do not themselves think in categories, concepts, or Ideas,
for this is the space of philosophy alone. 15 For Badiou, philosophy has
no object; it is simply a particular torsion of an active thought - an act
of philosophy - which i nvolves the grasping of new possibilities of
existence in the course of their production. 16

14 Conditions, p. 65. Or, as Badiou puts it in L'etre et l 'evenement, in philosophy

there are no truth-procedures or a One-Truth, "but the construction of the concept of
the being-multiple of all truth," p. 393.
15 B adiou will sometimes refer to this philosophical realm as a "space" (espace), and
sometimes "place" (lieu), but tends to prefer the latter, presumably for idiomatic and
Mallarmean reasons (e.g., "ii y a lieu," "avoir eu lieu," and so on): I am as yet
uncertain whether these terms are (or can be) used synonymously, or whether Badiou
himself would like to make legitimate contextual or procedural distinctions between
them. Incidentally, one can also immediately see why Deleuze and Guattari complain
that Badiou thereby returns to "a very old idea of philosophy," Qu 'est-ce que la
philosophie? (Paris: Editions de minuit, 1 992), p. 145. Or, as Chris Feik remarked to
me in a personal correspondance: "still, Badiou' s philosophy is about rounding up the
strays."
16 Cf. A. Badiou, Abrege de Metapolitique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1 998), pp. 7 1 - 72.
As Ansell-Pearson has pointed out to me, this sounds very Deleuzian, especially in
regards to "new possibilities of existence." I would essentially agree with this point
- given that both Deleuze and Badiou are attempting to think "affirmatively" - but
with a double proviso: I ) for Badiou, philosophy itself is not involved in the invention
and production of such possibilities (this is the realm of its four generic conditions);
2) the modal categories of logic are reconfigured by both in very different ways with
very different vocabularies (traditionally, for instance, the "contingent" is defined as
"neither impossible nor necessary"). Indeed, if anything links the heterogeneous work
in contemporary philosophy (both "continental" and "Anglo-American"), it is the
conviction that the possible, necessary, impossible and contingent must all be
completely re-thought (c.f. the deconstructionists on "impossibility," Deleuze on the
"virtual," Agamben on "potentiality" and the analytic enthusiasm for "counter
factuals"). For Badiou's part, mathematical ontology deals with actually-existing
mul tiplicities, and truths - always contingent - involve the production of
impossibilities (from the point of view of Being) which condition new possibilities,
i.e., a truth is both impossible and contingent, but the breach in Being it effects makes
actual new possibilities; the transition from possible to actual engages the subject in a
work of fidelity, etc..... But this is a huge question, whose necessity [sic.] I can only
acknowledge here.

Justin Clemens

207

But this is why B adiou ' s philosophy proclaims itself Platonic, at least
in form. 1 7 Badiou will further hold, against Heidegger and the neo
Heideggereans, that Plato does not mark the origi nary forgetful ness or
repression of Being. On the contrary, it is only with Plato that the
question of Being - which is not even, strictly speaking, a question achieves the dignity of the ldea . 1 8 Hence one of Badiou 's fundamental
(and memorable) i njunctions to contemporary philosophy is to "forget
the forgetting of forgettin g ! " 1 9 Badiou proposes that the task of
philosophy today is not central ly or primaril y to speak of Being; rather, it
must currently circulate between ontology, modern theories of the
subject (i.e. psychoanal ysis), and its own history, without ever
congealing around any one of these poles.20 Thi s third point is absolutely
crucial, insofar as it communicates with one of the non-mathematical
axioms that founds Badiou 's own project: philosophy's place has been
destinally fixed fro m i ts foundations, ever since Plato's "speculative
parricide" of Parmenides . 2' It is also necessary to mention here that
B adiou believes - as did Althusser, whom he often cites on this point
that the effects of philosophy always remain strictly intra
philosophical.

3. A Mathematical Ontology of the M ultiple

1 7 Cf. Manifeste pour la philosophie, p. 78. Furthermore, Badiou's is a

"deconstructed" Plato, and bears little resemblance to the pariah figured condemned
by various influential contemporary accounts - such as Deleuze's - which, in the
wake of Nietzsche, call for "an overturning of Platonism."
1 8 With regards to the complexities of the Idea: in an essay entitled "Le (re)tour de la
philosophic elle-meme," Badiou analyses the interrelated functions of the Platonic
'Good beyond Being,' which designates: 1 ) beyond ousia, that Truth is a limit; 2) that
there is no Truth of Truth; and yet 3) cannot completely expunge "an illegitimate
function," whereby Truth itself is confounded with Presence, Conditions, p. 72. By
the way, Being is not, in Badiou 's terms, a "question" - precisely because its
apparition is founded on a decision. If, as Badiou holds, mathematics is ontology,
Being is neither a question for mathematicians themselves (who ignore Being), nor
for philosophers (who rely directly on the mathematicians); on the other hand, if a
philosophy decides for a vitalist paradigm, then Being may well appear as a question
- on the basis of this prior decision.
19 Conditions, p. 59.
20 L'etre et / 'evenement, pp. 7-27.
21 Conditions, p. 277.

Pli 1 1 (2001 )

208

But if Badiou 's thou ght is Platonic in form, in content, of course, things
are quite different.22 Because there is something else that B adiou must
take from the great sophists of the twentieth century: the recognition of
the irreducible multiplicity of Being, and the irremediable default, or
failure of the One. 2) The problem is this : how is i t possible to think
multiplicity when metaphysics has always held that, in Leibniz's phrase,
"what is not one being is not a being"? The problem, apparently, of the
millenia. Obviously, if any number of contemporary wri ters might be
cited in this context, the qualitative multiplicities of Bergson and his
inheritors, notably Deleuze, would certainly be amongst the most
prominent. And for almost all these thinkers, multiplicity - correctly
understood - is inaccessible to the ill-suited tools of strict logical or
mathematical analysis. I ndeed, Bergson's work always and everywhere
says nothing else: "What is duration within us? A qualitative
multiplicity, with no likeness to number; an organic evolution which is
yet not an increasing quantity; a pure heterogeneity within which there
are no distinct qualities. In a word, the moments of inner duration are not
external to one another."24 Furthermore, this antagonistic rel ation
between "mathematics" and "intuition" with regards to the problem of
the multiple will continue to govern the hosti lity between B adiou and
Deleuze: "our epistolary controversy of 1 992- 1 994 had the notion of
'multiplicity' as its principal referent. He argued that I confounded
'multiple' and 'number,' whereas I held that it was inconsistent to
maintain, in Stoic fashion, a virtual Totality, or what Deleuze called the
'chaosmos. ' With sets there is no universal set, neither One nor All."25
I n other words, with respect to multiplicity, Badiou could not
disagree with Deleuze more. Indeed, much of his own originality
22 Cf. Man (feste pour la philosophie, p. 70.

2J

"Ce qu'un philosophe moderne retient de la grande sophistique est le point suivant:
l'etre est essentiallement multiple," Manifeste pour la philosophie, p. 85.
24 H. Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the immediate Dara of
Consciousness (Kila: Kessinger, n.d.), p. 226.
25 A . Badiou, Deleuze: "La clameur de l 'Etre ", (Paris: Hachette, 1997), p. 1 1 . Cf.
also pp. 6 9 70, and Badiou, "Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque,"
and Deleuze and Guattari ' s own response in Qu 'est-ce que la philosophie?, pp. 1 431 44. On the one hand, this dispute seems irreducible (matheme vs. animal, the
destitution of the One vs. its transfiguration, ex teriority vs. intensity, etc.); on the
other hand, both positions teeter on the brink of inverting into their other. . .l will
briefly suggest below how Badiou's position on the subject i s symptomatical ly shaky
on precisely the question of the living animal ("the human") that provides its
privileged support ....
-

Justin Clemens

209

devolves from his deployment of another fundamental axiom:

mathematics is the only effective ontology. 26 Which is not at all to say
that Being itself i s mathematical, but rather that mathematics crystallizes
and literalises what can be said of Being insofar as it is. 27 Furthermore,
"the question of the exact relation of mathematics to being is . . . entirely
concentrated - for the epoch which is ours - i n the axiomatic decision
which authorises set-theory." 28 In the "dictionary" which concludes
L 'etre et l 'evenement,, Badiou will even remark that the development of
set theory is, to date, the greatest intellectual effort ever accompl ished by
humanity ! 29 But he also speaks elsewhere of one of set-theory' s modern
rivals in the realm of fou ndational mathematics, "category theory,"
devel oped in the forties by Eilenburg and M acLane. Category theory, a
fundamentally intuitionistic geometry which deals with the dynamic
interrelationships holding within different topoi, is fi nally for Badiou "a
description of possible options for thought. It does not itself constitute
such an option. I n this sense, it is itself a logic: the virtual logic of onto
logical options."30
26

Which means that the differences between "logic" and "mathematics" are
themselves critical to an understanding of Badiou 's work: "a philosophy is today
largely decided by the position that it takes on the relation to the two other summits of
the triangle, mathematics and logic," Court Traite D 'Onrologie Transiroire (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 1 998), p. 1 20. As Badiou points out, the tendency of language
phi losophy (whether of a Wittgenstinian or Heideggerian type) is to reduce the
di fferences between the two. Badiou 's position in this regard has no doubt been
influenced by Lacan's i ncessant invocation/production of topological figures and
mathemes i n his re-elaboration of psychoanalysis, if the relative status the two
thinkers accord to mathematical formalisation is ultimately very di fferent. On the
fraught question of Lacan 's relation to mathematics, see, for instance, J-A Miller, "To
Interpret the Cause: From Freud to Lacan," in Ne wslarrer of the Freudian Field, 3, 1 2 , ( 1 989), B . Fink, Th e Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance
(Princeton: Pri nceton Un iversity Press, 1 995), D. Macey, Lacan in Contexts (London:
Verso, 1 988), and J. Dor, "The Epistemological Status of Lacan' s Mathematical
Paradigms," in D. Pettigrew and F. Raffoul (eds.), Disseminating Lacan (Albany:
State University of New York, 1 996). Badiou himself dedicates an essay, "Sujet et
infini," to a number of apparent contradictions in Lacan's "mathematics," cf.
Conditions, pp. 274-305. See also his "Complementary note on a contemporary use of
Frege" (a discussion of J-A M iller's work), in Le Nombre er /es nombres, pp. 36-44
(translated as "On a Contemporary Usage of Frege", UMBR(a) 2000, pp. 107- 1 1 5 ).
27
L 'etre er l 'evenemenr, p. 14 .
28
L 'erre et l 'evenement, p. 1 2.
29
L 'etre et l 'evenement, p. 536.
30 Topos: Ou logiques de l 'onto-logique: Une introduction pour philosophes. Tome
1 . , course-reader, p. 1 53 . And also: "The categorial concept of the universe situates

210

Pli 1 1 (2001 )

But why mathematics at all, and, given that, why this mathematics in
particular? According to Badiou, the effectivity of mathematics as it has
been bequeathed to philosophy by Plato has historically received three
very different determinations: I ) Mathematics is conceived as the
primary pedagogical mode, and a necessary condition for thinking
according to first principles; Badiou terms this "the ontological mode of
the relation of philosophy to mathematics."3 1 2) Mathematics is
considered as a regional discipline of knowledge in general, and inserted
into a hierarchy or taxonomy of sciences which philosophy alone can
oversee. This determination i s epistemological. 3) Mathematics is
excluded from philosophical knowledge altogether: this is a critical
treatment of the relation. 32
As Badiou points out, this third mode is the Romantic philosophical
gesture par excellence, and remains dominant today. Even the apparent
enthusiasm of analytic philosophy and various positivisms for the hard
itself beyond the opposition between classical and non-classical logic. It exhibits a
consistency that leaves this opposition undecided. The decision on this point makes
us enter into the plurality of universes, into the logical spaces that its generality
subsumes," p. 1 28 . I would suggest that the mathematics of set-theory provides the
basis for Badiou 's ontology, whereas he treats category-theory as providing a logic for
subjectivity.
3 1 Conditions, p. 1 57.
32 Conditions, p. 1 58. Hegel 's hostility to mathematics i s well-known. As he puts i t in
the "Preface" to the Phenomenology, "In mathematical cognition, insight is an
activity external to the thing; it follows that the true thing is altered by it. The means
employed, construction and proof, no doubt contain true propositions, but it must
none the less be said that the content is false ...The evident character of this defective
cognition of which mathematics is proud, and on which it plumes itself before
philosophy, rests solely on the poverty of its purpose and the defectiveness of its stuff,
and is therefore of a kind that philosophy must spurn," Phenomenology of Spirit,
trans. A.V. Miller, analysis and foreword. J.N. Findlay (Oxford: Ox ford U niversity
Press, 1 977), sections 43 & 45, p. 25 (sections 42-48 of the Preface are relevant in
this context). Paradoxically enough, the Hegelian exclusion of mathematics from
philosophy is effected by way of an identification or assimilation, cf. Conditions, pp.
1 7 1 - 1 75 . And see also Badiou' s absolutely stunning reading of Hegel in L 'etre et
l 'evenement, pp. 1 8 1 - 1 90 (reprinted in UMBR(a), pp. 27-35), which hinges on
Hegel 's discussion of quantitative and qualitative infinity in the Logic. See Hegel 's
Science of Logic, trans. AV. Miller (Atlantic Highlannds: Humanities Press
International, 1 969), esp. chapter 2, "Determinate Being," pp. 109- 1 56. As Badiou
comments: " the nominal equivalence that [Hegel] proposes between the pure
presence of the supersession in the void (good qualitative infini ty) and the qualitative
concept of quantity (good quantitative infinity) is a trick of the eye ... " ("Hegel" in
UMBR(a), p. 34).

Justin Clemens

21 1

sciences, have, since Hegel ' s decisive severance of the mathematico

philosophical bond, only "reali sed the inversion of the speculative
Romantic gesture." u I n its positive dimensions, this gesture is eminently
hi storicist, tending to "oppose Time, life as temporal ecstasy, to the
abstract and void eternity of mathematics"; it i nvariably concludes with
the judgement: "if time is the 'being-there of the concept, ' then
mathematics is inferior to this concept.' "4 Once again, Badiou ' s
conception i s utterly opposed to a Romanticism, which, i n its
temporali sation of the One, represents limits as temporal horizons and
sutures itself to poetry. 35 By contrast, mathematics thinks li mits as
present-points, and its own place as infinite. Romanticism, for Badiou ,
thereby reverses the Platonic determination in which the matheme i s
central to thought and poetry i s excluded. And the central theme of
Romanti cism - the interminable meditation on finitude - thereby
(whether covertly or explicitly) subjects the concept of infinity to the
ultimate dominance of the One. The major problem for Badiou is to find
33 Conditions, p. 1 59. As Heidegger, i n the wake of Hegel writes, "there is need for
another logic, but not for the sake of providing more entertaining and appealing
classroom material. We need another logic solely because what is called logic is not a
logic at all and has nothing in common anymore with philosophy.... this is the
challenge: logic should change; logic should become philosophical !" Th e
Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. M. Heim (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1 984), p. 5. Badiou adds: "It is striking to remark that Heidegger
and Carnap disagree on everything, except the idea that we must frequent and activate
the end of Metaphysics. What both designate by the name of metaphysics is the
classical era of philosophy, in which mathematics and philosophy were still intricated
in a general representation of the operations of thought. Carnap wishes to isolate the
scientific operation, and Heidegger opposes to science, the nihilist avatar of
metaphysics, a way of thought that rests upon the poem. In this sense, both of them,
from d ifferent banks, are tributaries of the romantic gest ure of disintrication,"
Conditions, 1 60. For a more detailed reading of what Badiou will call "the age of
poets," see Man ifeste pour la philosophie, especially pp. 2 1 -26 and pp. 49-58.
34 Conditions, p. 1 6 1 . See also the historico-conceptual discussion of varying attitudes
towards infinity (Greek/Scholastic/Galilean/Cantorian) in L 'etre et l 'evenement, pp.
1 6 1 - 1 79.
35
S tanley Rosen - another self-confessed Platonist - is another contemporary
writer who would substantially agree with Badiou on these points, e.g., "the great
revolution of modern philosophy, carried out in the name of certitude against the
mixture of superstition and empty speculation practiced by the ancients, ended
paradoxically in a philosophy of radical historicity, of poetry rather than of
mathematics," Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1 969), xvi. However Rosen's "return to Plato" d iffers from Badiou' s , insofar as the
former insists on a return to classical ethics as a solution to the historicist dilemma.

212

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

an exit from Romanticism without succumbing to neoclassical nostalgia

(for example, the innumerable con temporary calls for "a return to
Kant"); his solution is, as aforementioned, to turn to set-theory. Why?
Post-Cantorian set-theory postulates the actual exi stence or infinity,
and a ri gorou sly defined infinity at that. This i s , in fact, uni versally
considered to be Cantor' s fu ndamental innovation: "It is to the undying
cred it of Georg Cantor ( 1 845- 1 9 1 8) that, in the face of conflict, both
in ternal and external against apparent paradoxes, popular prejudices, and
phi losophical dicta (infinitum actu non datur) and even in the face of
doubts that had been raised by the very greatest mathematicians, he
dared this step into the realm of the infinite."36 Furthermore, set-theory
proves that there are infinitely many infinities of different sizes: a
unending if immobile sequence of infinities. For Badiou, not only does
set-theory thereby strip infinity of all Romantic pathos - infinity is now
just a number, not an unachievable destiny - but i t also unleashes
number from the jurisdiction of the One. Infinity, far from being the
forever proximate-distant home of a sacralised presence, is thus rendered
utterl y banal and indifferent, and mathematics, in an absolutely li teral
fashion, can be reactivated by radical phi losophy as fu ndamental
ontology.37
Hence the justification for B adiou ' s polemical call for a "Platonism of
the multiple," which, l i ke Plato's, wi ll insist on the primacy of the
eternal and immutable abstraction of the mathematico-ontological Idea.
Furthermore - albeit in a different but obviously related sense - for
Badiou a truth commences with an absolute forgetting of time itself; i t is
an in terruption or abolition of time.38 The question thus becomes: what
are the self-imposed strictures regimenting philosophy's own
deployment of mathematics? Now, for Plato, mathematics is the only
discourse that permits the possibili ty of a thoroughgoing rupture with

36 F. Hausdorff, Set Theory, trans. J.R. Aumann et al. (New York: Chelsea
Publishing, n.d.), p. 1 1 .

37 By contrast, a thinker such as Levinas - who proselytizes for the infinite as the
non-logical overflowing of all limits exemplified in the ethical experience that is the
welcome of the face - explicitly considers the idea of infinity to be essentially
theological. See E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1 969).
38 That is, "time" considered as the product of established knowledges. In his
monograph on Deleuze, Badiou will even suggest that time is "the being-not-there of
the concept," Deleuze, p. 96.

Justin Clemens

213

common opinion, which i t violently contests and rebukes.09

Nevertheless, it is still a constrained or restricted rupture, that must in
turn be con tested by dialectics, which "alone can establish thought in the
principle of this discontinuity ... It founds a peace of the discontinuous."40
Mathematics i s thus located by philosophy between the immediacy of
doxa and the effortless space of pure thought. As Badiou will put it:
"mathematics is the interval [ entre-deux} between truth and the freedom
(}f truth."41 (This determination is not, of course, necessaril y of any
interest to "working mathematicians" themselves, who, for Badiou, must
be ontologists without knowing it. 4 2)
This is a critical delimitation on Badiou 's part: it at once dictates that
mathematics functions as a necessary condition for philosophy and
ensures that philosophy does not mi stake itself as merely ancillary to the
sciences. This latter error - which would in volve what Badiou call s,
following Lacan, a "suture"- is the principal way in which philosophy
forecloses its own possibil ities, forgetting its own proper l i mits and
fu nctions. It thereby forgets itself. A suture transpires when "philosophy
delegates its functions to one or another of its conditions, and thus
delivers all thought over to one generic procedure. Philosophy then
09 Badiou' s reading is thus utterly opposed not only to the standard interpretations of
Plato, but also to every interpretation that would identify mathematics with the dream
of a representation purged of noise. Michel Serres would be an excellent
contemporary example of this tendency. See, for example, the essays collected in
Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. J.V. Harari and D.F. Bell (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins, 1982). For Badiou, mathematics represents nothing - to speak
Lacanese, its terms are Real, not Imaginary or Symbolic; furthermore, mathematics is
the only possible basis of a rupture of common sense, and is hence genuinely
egalitarian and aristocratic at the same time. It must be said that Badiou arrives at this
insight relatively late in his career; in such pre- Be in g and Event books as Peut-on
penser la politique? (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1 985) and Theorie du sujet (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 1 982), mathematics is still being invoked in a fundamentally
metaphoric sense.
4 Conditions, p. 1 69.
41 Conditions, p. 170. For Badiou, classical philosophy everywhere oscillates between
the ontological and epistemological treatment of mathematics, that is, the latter is
either considered "too violently true to be free, or too violently free (discontinuous) to
be absolutely true," p. 1 7 J .
42 L'etre et l 'evenement, p. 20. Indeed, Badiou will say that "it i s of the essence of
ontology [qua mathematics] to effectuate itself in the reflexive foreclosure of its
identity," L 'etre et l 'evinement, p. 1 7 . Or, as he also puts it, mathematics - contra
Heidegger - is at once "the forgetting of i tself, and the critique of this forgetting," p.
486.

214

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

effectuates itsel f in the element of i ts own suppression to the profit of

this procedure."43
But the ineradicable possibility of this occurring is the reason why
Badiou can declare that philosophy does not and cannot always take
place. On the contrary, philosophy is a rare, or even a sporadic,
discipl ine, utterly dependent on the compossibility of its conditions.
And, for Badiou, without a return to "Platonism" and hence to
mathematics, it would remain impossible today.
4. N i ne Axioms and Four Events: Some Deta i l s

Set-theory itself i s by no means a unified field: there are foundational

and anti-foundational varieties, varying numbers and types of axioms
depending on one ' s inclination, and ramifying paradoxes at every step. 44
B adiou 's own decision i s to opt for a full version of Zermelo-Fraenkel
set-theory, with its nine foundational axioms. 45 These are:
Extensionality, Separati on, Pairing and Empty Set, Power Set, Union,
Infinity, Foundation, Replacement and Choice. Each of these axioms
43 Manifeste pour la philosophie, p. 4 1 .
44 The obscurities in the following account n o doubt derive, at least in part, from the
fact that the empirical details of the genesis of set-theory are themselves of immense
importance with regard to its elaboration. For instance, though Cantor is credited as
the inventor of set-theory in the late nineteenth century, the immediate difficulties that
the theory ran into (especially with regards to the so-called "General Comprehension
Hypothesis," or Frege' s axiom of abstraction), derived from its then unaxiomatized
presuppositions. Later analyses demonstrated that Cantor' s work implicitly relied on
three axioms: extensionality, abstraction, and choice. Following a famous letter of
Russell to Frege, which Frege first published as an addendum to the second volume o f
hi s Foundations of A rithmetic in 1 903, it became clear that the axiom of abstraction
needed to be refounded, and a number of very famous figures subsequently
contributed to set-theory's redevelopment: Zermelo, Skolem, Fraenkel, Godel, Von
Neumann, Bernays, Ramsey, Cohen, to list only a few. In any case, my own
presentation of the mathematics follows Badiou 's reasonably closely, if the necessity
to shuttle quickly beJween mathematics and philosophy may itself require certain
minor modifications and simplifications.
45 As David Odell notes in an unpublished paper, when set-theory moves into the
infinite, "there is no longer any intuition which would distinguish a 'standard' set
theory from a ' non-standard' one, so that we could say that what's actually true is
what is the case in the standard set theory ... There are many di fferent Set Theories
depending on how these issues are negotiated, and they di ffer in particular in how
'fat' the power sets of infinite sets are deemed to be."

Justin Clemens

21 5

will be treated by Badiou in a strictly meta-ontological fashion, as if they

each functioned to delimit a specific realm of Being and/or dictated the
mode of its philosophical treatment. Fi nally, these axioms are
supplemented with an account of Paul Cohen' s technique of "forcing,"
which provides B adiou with the self-proclaimed dominant motif of his
entire enterprise: the "indiscernible," or "generic" nature of truths
themselves. 46
Obviously, space limitations preclude any satisfactory account of
Badiou ' s sytem, which is both enormous and complicated. In the most
summary fashion imaginable, we can quickly state that the
aforementioned axioms authorise a number of associated mathematical
dicta, which include:
I) according to the so-called "principle of purity," there are no objects in
this set-theory; everything is a set.
2) These sets are defined on the basis of their elements alone; the central
characteristic of ZF is that there is only one relation, that of
"belonging-to." This is thus also a "first-order logic," the basic
principle of which is that the two quan tifiers (universal, "for al l," and
existential, "there exists") bear only on the terms and not on the
properties of these terms, i.e. properties cannot have properties in their
turn (which would require a second-order logic.)
3) This "belonging-to" is not an existential affirmation; that is, it makes
no claim as to the being or non-being of the entities with which it
operates. Rather, it conditionally discerns the limits of arbi trary
multiples. No set can belong to itself.
4) Every set is not only multiple, but a multiple of multiples. As
aforementioned, every situation is infinite for Badiou, and there is no
Universal Set, there is no One, there is no Whole.
5) However - and here is another absolutely crucial point - for a
multiple to be registered as a multiple, it has to be counted as one. But
if such a structuring act of enumeration i s the only way in which a
multiple can be recognised as multiple, it means that the one is
reduced to nothing more exalted than a product or result of a count,
without any genuine existence of its own. Hence Badiou can declare
that the One of Philosophy is not and has never real ly been an Idea or

46

Cf. P.J. Cohen, Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis (New York: W.A.
Benjamin, 1 966).

21 6

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

a Being in its own right, but simply the by-product of a n operation of

thought. 1t is merely a number.
6) But if everything is a multiple of a multiple, how can it be counted
for-one, when the one does not exist except as a result, and hence
cannot satisfactoril y function as the foundation of a consistent
arithmetic? And given that the mu ltiple must be counted in order to be
registered as such, i t is then surely retroactively undecidable whether
it was, strictly speaking, a mu ltiple in the first place. The theory here
has recourse to the so-called "empty set" (in French, ensemble vide).
I n Badiou ' s words, "the only point of arrest of the multiple, which is
always a multiple of mul tiples (and not a multiple of Ones), can onl y
be the multiple of nothing [rien]: the empty set."47 This unique set can
be defined in a number of ways, and has a number of peculiar
properties; for example, it is a set without members, ii is itself a subset
of every set including i tself, and so on.
7) It is thus on the basis of the empty set - signified by a "zero afflicted
with the bar of sense" - that infinite infinities can be generated.
But these points are purely introductory. The step into philosophy comes
for Badiou when the axioms of set-theory are taken as the li teral
foundations for an ontology. This step thus requires a sh ift i n
terminology. Let u s begin with what Badiou calls the "situation," that is,
presentation i n general ("situation" ought to be understood here outside
of its more familiar Sartrian context). Now if mathematics is itself only
concerned with the multiples of multiples that are sets, this can be
refigured in ontology as the realm of pure presentation.
However, there is immediately a difficulty. For if presentation
subsists, without presence, without objects, there is as yet nothing to
guarantee its consistency (that is, anything and nothing can be predicated
of it, with equal legitimacy). And if there is presentation, this is not
necessarily the (self-) presentation of a primord ial One. However Being,
for Badiou, cannot really be either one or multiple: as aforementioned, a
multiple can only be recognised as such when submitted to the
exigencies of structure. I n his own words, "the multiple is the inevitable
predicate of what is structured, because structuration, that is to say the
counting-for-one, is an effect."48 So all presentation itself must be, or
must have been, structured by an act (of enumeration).
4 7 Deleuze, p. 70.
48 L 'etre et l 'evenement, p. 33.

Justin Clemens

217

This immemorial act thereby in troduces a fissure i n presentation;

through retroaction, it generates an inconsistent initial multiple - whose
existence is, hence, undecidable - at the very moment that it guarantees
the final consistency of the structured presentation, i.e., '"Multipl e ' is an
effect of the presentation, such as is retroactively apprehended as not
one from the moment that being-one is a result. But 'multiple' says also
the composition of the count, being the multiple as 'several-ones'
counted by the action of the structure. There is a multiplicity of inertia,
that of presentation, and a multiplicity of composition, which is that of
number and of the effect of the structure."4 9
This imperceptible presentative division is what Badiou will call the
nothing (rien), which is global, but obviously cannot manifest itself
within the situation i tself.5 It is, necessarily, the "unpresentable of the
situation," a nothing which is not simply a "not" (pas) or non-being. An
unpresentable which - being everywhere - must somehow affect the
presented situation. For Badiou, as it turns out, the unpresentable comes
to be presented within the situation as an unlocalisable void point, an
"errant cause," which verifies that "the situation is sutured to being."51 It
is therefore not exactly presented, but presented in its subtraction. This
is the void of being that mathematics formalises as the empty-set.52 The
void of being must not, furthermore, be confused with the void category
of Tru th : the first is, obviously, ontological; the second purely logical.53
And neither void must be identified, as Lacanians tend to do, with the
subject itself.5 4 But it also provides Badiou with another notable
49 L 'etre et l'evenement, p. 33. Badiou adds that this division between "inertia" and
"composition," of "retroactive obligation" and "anticipatory authorisation," is a law
of thought. As regards philosophy itself, Badiou will hold that the ontological
situation is "the presentation of presentation ... ontology can only be a theory of
inconsistent multiplicities insofar as they exist," p. 36.
50 "Toute situation implique le rien de son tout. Mais le rien n'est ni un lieu ni un
terme de la situation," L 'etre et l'evenement, p. 67.
5 1 "The insistence of the void in-consists as delocalisation," L 'etre et / 'evenement, p.
92.
52 Hence Badiou can hold that "there is no structure of being," L 'etre et l 'evenement,
p. 34.
53 See Conditions, p. 66.
54 This conviction has extreme consequences for the Lacanian doctrine of the subject:
as Badiou remarks of Jacques-Alain Miller's coupling of Frege's logic with Lacan's,
"The doctrine of Frege would be an analogon pertinent to Lacanian logic. For which
we have nothing to say since, in this case, the text of Miller would not be a text on
number. It would not be on two counts: initially because it regards not number, but

218

Pli

1 1 (2001 )

polemical motif: philosophy does not deal i n abstractions, but in

subtractions . And it thereby also permits the recasting of Heidegger' s
ontico-ontological difference (between Being and beings) as the
difference between the presentati on of presentation (inconsistent
multiples) and presented-presentation (existent, consistent multiples).
I t is for the above reasons that B adiou will identify the empty-set as
the proper name of Being, and the axiom of the empty-set as the only
genuinely existential axiom of mathematics. The empty set is thus also
the name of Being qua inconsistency, and its axiom might also be
translated into phi losophical terms as: "there is a multiple not under the
Idea of the multiple."" And, given that it is out of the empty-set that
infinite infinities are generated, Badiou ' s ontology is a genuine atomism,
albeit an atomism with a difference. For rather than there being plural
atoms of matter that are in constant movement through the void, there is
here only one immobile atom - the empty set i s unique - and it is
woven out of the void itself....
If 1 have been dealing above with B adiou's meta-ontological
translation of set-theory' s basic operation, that of belonging, into the
problem of presentation and the void, there is another crucial distinction
to be made here, which bears on the question of subsets and of inclusion.
This is li nked by Badiou to the so-called "power set axiom," which states
that, given an arbitrary set, there is a set at hand which is the set of all
the subsets of the given set, including the set itself. Every set is a
member of its own power set, as is the empty set. (In finite arithmetic, if
a set A has n elements, its power set wi ll have 2" elements, but this
quantitative relation - crucially - does not necessarily hold in the
infinite.) Now whereas elements belong to sets, subsets are governed by
the relation of inclusion: the power set operation thus turns subsets into
elements by producing a set that is demonstrably larger than the initial
set. 56 For Badiou, this relation between a set and its power set can be

rather Frege's doctrine of number (without giving a pos1t1on on the validity or

consistency of that doctrine); and also because it proposes the series of number as a
didactic vector for the logic of the signifier, and not as an effective example of the
function of the subject's implication in the series of number. . . " Le Nombre, 3 . 1 2
(English translation in UMBR(a) 2000, p . l l 1 ) . I n fact, for Badiou, a true thought of
number is absolutely indifferent to the question of the subject.
55 L 'etre et I' evenement, p. 8 1 .
56 There are two different determinations o f number that should be remarked here:
cardinals and ordinals. A cardinal is a number that names a set in terms of the latter's
sheer size, and two sets are equipollent (equal) if they have the same cardinal number;

Justin Clemens

219

rewritten as the rel ation between presentation and the re-presentatio11 of

this presentation. A n d whereas he will consider presentation as the
regime of pure multiples, structure, counting-for-one - all up, the
situation
representation involves the re-counting of the initial count:
it generates the state of the given situation.57
There are three possible types of relation between a presentation and
its state: I) si11gularity (an element is presented but not represented); 2)
normality (if an element i s presented, it is also represented: for B adiou,
this is the schema of a homogeneous nature, and is founded on the
mathematical construction of ordinal numbers); 3) excrescence (a term is
represented but not presented). Unfortunately, there is no space here to
expand on this critical question of the relations between presentation and
representation: for B adiou, there are three major philosophical ways in
which mathematics-philosophy has attempted to li mit or define the play
between presentation and representation: 1) constructibility, i.e. if
something cannot be said by or in a well-formed language, it doesn 't
exist (e.g. Leibniz, Godel); 2) genericity, i .e. truth is indiscernable and
commands the state of representation, thus functioning only in its
anonymous subtraction (e.g. Rousseau, Beckett and Cohen); 3)
transcendence, i.e. thought affirms an ascending hierarchy of B eing (e.g.
theology). Badiou also, somewhat ambiguously, designates a fourth way,
"transversal" to these, which is "historial," and associated by him with
the names of Marx and Freud.
-

ordinal numbers are sets well-ordered by the epsilon relation. In the finite, ordinals
and cardinals coincide, but diverge in the realm of the infinite. The first infinite
ordinal is represented as co. But it is also a cardinal, because every smaller ordinal is,
by definition, not equipollent to it. As a cardinal it is called Aleph-zero. However
(co+ ! ) is equipollent to co itself, and so they share the same cardinal number (as does
every other ordinal produced arithmetically from co). Now Cantor's Theorem shows
that no set is equipollent to the number of its subsets, and so the power set of co has
larger cardinality than Alep h-zero. However, it is not necessarily a larger cardinal,
because we are not entitled to say that every set corresponds to some cardinal unless
the Axiom of Choice is at hand (which ensures cardinal comparabi lity). The
continuum hypothesis will in fact propose that the power set of aleph-zero is equal to
aleph-one (the generalised version will put the power set of aleph-n as equal to aleph
n+ I ). Cohen has proven that the continuum hypothesis and the Axiom of Choice are
independent of ZF.
57 Badiou then re-poses his terms: the "one" is the "nonexistent" result of structure;
"unicity" a predicate of the multiple thereby counted; "putting-in-one" is a (second)
counting of the initial count, i.e. its representation.

220

Pli 1 1

(200 1 )

For Badiou, set-theory thus founds a rigorous ontology which can

quantify and compare various i nfi nities, and effect various operations on
the diverse multiples presented by the situation or represented by its
state. However - and thi s is, as aforementioned, the central motif and
summa of Badiou' s system - such an ontology finds itself exceeded and
rebuked by the paradoxes of event-truths. An event can be either
scientific, amorous, political, or artistic. An event begins locally, in what
Badiou will call a "site" (or poi nt-site at the edge of the void);58 it effects
a completely unprecedented transformation in the situation; it is
therefore an aleatory i nterruption and an absolute beginning; it gives rise
to a truth which is an i nfinite process, and hence final ly indiscernable
from within the situation itself; such a truth is thus - as for Lacan, but
in a different sense - a hole in knowledge. To use Badiou ' s
terminology, the event, intervention, and fidelity are the external
qualities on the side of truth, whereas precise nomi nation in an
established language is the hal lmark of encyclopaedic knowledge. And
whereas auto-belonging is strictly prohibited by the axioms of set-theory,
the event has the singular property of belonging to itself.59 This property
ensures that "there is no acceptable ontological matrix of the event," and
that, "of the event, ontology has nothing to say."60 Being and truth are
originarily disjunct, and the event is undecidable.
interven e, in a fashion that
But a subject can still - in fact, it must
is at once "illegal" and disruptive (the subject cannot construct a viable
justification for its own decisions in this regard), and which, despite its
very illegality, ultimately ensures the restitution of order. Such an
intervention decides whether a putative event has in fact taken place, that
is, if it belongs to the situation at hand.61 If it decides affirmati vely, the
-

58 The event-site is always i n a situation, but there are no event-situations.

59 Badiou will explicitly un-chain the event from the Axiom of Foundation (or
Regularity), which states that, given any non-empty set A there is a member b of A
such that their in tersection is empty, Allb=0, hence A A because then the set { A ]
would have n o foundation, since A E An{ A } . But Badiou insists that a n event has
absolutely no foundation in Being.
60
L'erre et / 'eve11eme11t, p. 2 1 2.
6 1 "The intervention's ini tial operation is to make a name of an unpresented element
of the site in order to qualify the event by which this si te is the site," L'etre et
/'eve11eme11t, p. 226. The intervention is also linked both to the Axiom of Choice and
to the Empty-Set/Pair Set axiom, given that the sets the intervention "chooses" and
upon which it decides cannot be effectively discerned (e.g. Russell's paradox of the
left sock), and given that it touches upon a foundational "Two without concept," i.e.
an unpresented or absent element and its supernumerary name. An i ntervention is

Justin Clemens

221

event is determined as an uncanalisable excess and i ndexed to a

supplementary, arbitrary signifier (the "name" of the event); if
negatively, there has been no event and nothing has taken place. Either
way, the event is necessarily annulled as event, but an affirmative
intervention nevertheless thereby holds out the possibility that there is a
being of truth that is not truth itself, and that being and truth - i f
disjunct - are still compatible.62 A subject can, at best, "force" a
veridical knowledge of a truth, but the truth "itself' - being infinite and
indiscernible - will necessarily always elude it. Or, to cite Badiou ' s
own rather lapidary "definition": "that which decides an undecidable
from the point of an indiscernible."61 The affirmative subjective moment
involves, moreover, a difficult continuing engagement with the vanished
event; Badiou names this subjective work of incessant material
questioning "fidel ity."64 Slavoj Zizek has glossed its complex structure
thus:
For Badiou (in his anti-Platoni c mode, de spite his love of Plato),
Necessity is a category of veracity, of the order of Being, whi le
Truth is inherently contingent, it can occur or not. ... For Badiou,
Truth itself is a theologico-pol itical notion: theological in so far as
religious revelation is the unavowed paradigm of his notion of the
Truth-Event; political because Truth is not a state to be perceived
by means of a neutral intuition, but a matter of (ultimately
political) engagement. Consequently, for Badiou, subjectivization
designates the event of Truth that disrupts the closure of the
hegemonic idelogical domain and/or the existing social edifice
(the Order of Being) .. 6
.

subtracted from the law of the "counting-for-one." Hence, even if an intervention

decisively decides, it itself remains undecidable, and another intervention would be
required to pronounce on the first: an event can thus never be apodictically
assimilated to, or subsumed under, the heading of being.
62 L'etre et l 'evenement, p. 39 1 .
63 L'etre et l'evenement, p. 445.
64 As Badiou puts it, "Being faithful to an event is to move (oneselt) in the situation
that this event has supplemented, in thinking (but all thought is a practice, a putting to
the test) the situation 'according' to the event," L 'ethique: Essai sur la conscience du
Mal (Paris: H a tier, 1 993 ), p. 38.
65 Z i:Zek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 1 83. lt is worth noting here that Z izek's translation
of Badiou's vocabul ary into Z iiek's own terms is already (to my mind, il licitly)
attempting to evade the mathematical foundations of Badiou's thought (l would add
that Zizek' s claims, as always, are suggestive but rely very heavily on chains of

222

P/i

1 1 (200 1 )

There is unfortunately n o space here t o discuss Badiou' s metaontological

reformulation of Cohen's technical innovation of "forcing": suffice it to
say that the necessari l y belated ontological enquiries upon the singularity
of an i ndiscernable-generic truth by way of strings of conditions i s
i ntegrall y linked b y B adiou to h i s reformulation o f the subject of
philosophy and its possible knowledge of this truth. The subject is, for
Badiou, neither substance, nor constituting agency, nor recurrent
structural exigency, but rather an evanescent local effect, i.e., "the
subject is nothing other, in its being, than a truth grasped at its pure
point; it is a vanishing quantity of truth, a differential eclipse of its
uncompletable infinity. This vanishing is the in-between of the
u ndecidability of the event and the indiscernability of truth."66 A subject,
like a truth, is rare, and takes place under the aegis of one generic
procedure: it is always the subject of art, politics, science or love. A
subject is thus always absolutely singular in its production of matter, but
only thinkable .formally according to its genre.
Badiou 's "subject" makes truths true, precisely by "forcing" the
present indi scernibility of truth into being qua knowledge: the subject is
the si ngular-in-finite of a (one) point-of-truth, a moment i n a truth ' s
sporadic becoming. A truth is thus thought a s a sequence or
concatenation of those subjects who produce themselves as vanishing
quantities of that truth: each subject as a singular "idea," and an idea (or,
again, an idea-being) for Badiou is the subject itself insofar as it can be
registered by phi losophy. "Fidelity" to an event therefo re means that the
subjects produced i n the wake of the "same" event can - even must
be radically d(fferent, and an integral component of philosophical
practice is the construction of a site of Truth in which the (often
-

analogies that obliterate specific logical, terminological and rhetorical differences).

Certainly, Zizek 's remarks with regards to the possible theologico-political aspects of
Badiou's notion of truth deserve further exploration (see also Lecercle on this point),
but Zizek ignores Badiou's very careful formalisations of the numericity of the
political procedure and therefore reduces the generic specificity of subjects, e.g.
"What singularises the political procedure is that it goes from infinity to the I .In
this sense ...politics is the inverse of love. Or: love begins there where politics
finishes," A. Badiou, Abrege de Metapolitique (Pari s: Editions du Seuil, 1 998), p.
1 66.
66 Conditions, p. 286. Cf. the entire chapter "Theory of the S ubject," in L'erre et
l 'evenement, pp. 429-445.
...

Justin Clemens

223

antagonistic or heterogeneous) disparity of subjects can be configured as

belonging, precisely, to the same sequence of an event-truth.
Being, for Badiou, is fundamentally knowable; its paradigm is
mathematical literalisation. Truths, on the other hand, are precisely
indiscernible; they are not Being, but that which participates i n the
transformation of Being, by way of the subjective super-addition of
infinite strings of what was hi therto a sort of dark matter. This is also
why truths begin as an abolition of time: each truth has its own singular
temporality, which i s the complex rhythm produced by those spectral
beat-punctuations that are its subjects. "Ti me" is thus itself irreducibly
multiple, infinite, sporadic - and constantly reinvented. And because
there is no Uni versal Time, no God, no Whole, in which every time
would ultimately find its Time, the "time" of a truth can only be
expressed oxymoronical ly: to use a phrase that is perhaps not Badio u ' s, a
truth is both an "infinite process" and an "immortal transience." A truth
qua truth, can only be subjecti vely inscribed in actuality by forcing it
into a future-perfect without present or presence. I n Badiou ' s un
totalisable universe, "death" is therefore a senseless denomination.
Badiou has produced, in other words, what might be called a techno
phi losophy of the infinities . . . .

5 . The Lighthouse of the Bride

Despite the necessarily truncated account of Badiou's work offered here,
his radical differences from such contemporary philosophers as Derrida
and Deleuze should now be evident. Badiou 's hostility to the diagnosis
of "nihilism," his return to Plato and to pure mathematics, his expulsion
of poetry from the domain of philosophical effectivity, his reformulation
of the subject as a vanishing point in an infinite process of truth, the
extremely specialised, technical (and hence difficult) nature of his work,
etc., all place him at some distance from dominant Romantic trends.
Furthermore, Badiou' s anti-Romantic strain does not mean that he gives
up on emancipatory or radical politics, nor does he fall back on notions
of a professional or technical ethics to ground his declarations. On the
contrary - and precisely to the extent that Badiou can mobilise the
definitional precision of mathematics to effect separations between, say,
art and politics - he can successfully evade the Romantic aestheticising
that i nvariably concludes by attempting to re-fold every distinction into
every other.

224

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

If I have any objections t o Badiou ' s work, they are extremely

tentative and perhaps even illicitly aestheticising in their tum. For
instance, it is tempting to suggest that Badiou has oversimplified the
work of a number of the figures whom he critici ses - to the extent that
some of his arguments begin to look like self-serving sophi stic
contortions in their own right. Although Derrida, for i nstance, is merely
a minor figure in Badiou ' s demonology, he evidently remai ns the single
most influential and notorious contemporary French thinker in the
67
English speaking world today. I ndeed, I believe a comparative study of
their methods would be of the greatest interest, given that Derrida's work
still poses the greatest problems for philosophy: if Badiou admires
Lacan, and certainly follows the latter in his insistence on the conti nuing
viability of the concept of the subject, not to mention the foundational
role of the matheme, and if his work opposes itself to that of Deleuze at
every point (e.g. matheme versus animal, the eternal immobility of the
Idea against a nomadology of forces, and so on), Derrida 's arguments
cannot be so easily opposed, extended, or inverted. For despite the very
prevalent misreading of deconstruction as simply the undoing of
binaries, the overcoming of metaphysics qua irreducible desire for
Presence, and the death of the subject, deconstruction is rather the
persistent demonstration that metaphysics and philosophy are never quite
the same, that "Plato" is for instance the retroactive invention of a
tradition that thereby produces its own intervention as a betrayal, that
even the literalisations of formal logic betray their own systematicity
through this litcralisation itself, etc. Certai nly, Derrida thinks of
metaphysics as governed by a necessarily frustrated desire for presence,
an<l that phi losophy's pretensions in this regard can be ruptured by
recourse to li terature; Badiou, on the other hand, considers that the desire
for presence is the persistent threat to genuine philosophizing, and
derives from its suturing to one or another of its conditions - this
situation can currentl y only be contested by way of the matheme. For
67

In an extremely strange footnote to Being and Evelll, in which he speaks of his

contemporaries, Badiou writes: "En ce qui concerne le requisit ontologique et
] ' interpretation de Heidegger, ii faut certainement nommer J. Derrida. Je me sens sans
doute plus proche de ceux qui, apres Jui, ont entrepris de delimiter Heidegger en le
questionnant aussi du point de son intolerable silence sur I' extermination nazie des
juifs d' Europe, et qui cherchent au fond a lier le souci de la politique a l'ouverture de
!'experience poetique. Je nomme done J.-L Nancy, et P. Lacoue-Labarthe," p. 522.
Badiou does not treat the others named here (e.g. Deleuze, Lyotard, Bouveresse,
Ranciere, etc.) so grudgingly.

Justin Clemens

225

Derrida, both subject and object are dissolved and reinstalled in the play
of d(fferance; for Badiou, the Platonic "errancy of being" can be
refigured by ex amining how the floating difference in cardinality is
decided between an infinite set and its subsets, all of which are woven
from the unlocalisable void of the empty set; hence the subject can still
be saved, if one gives up the object. But these already very complex
antagonisms ought not to hide their only apparently minor empirical
complicities: a fondness for Mallarme; a belief that philosophy founds
itself on the attempted mastery of l i mits (even if they evaluate th is
mastery differentl y); a rejection of hermeneutics; an affirmation of the
priority of trans-empirical l iteralisations as the auto-foundation of Being
(whether this is considered mathematically or poetically); an emphasis
on irreducible multiplicity, and so on.
This d!fferend returns us ineluctably to the problem posed by
Badiou 's account of generic subjectivity. As stated above, the subject is
not simply a new version of a human individual: on the contrary, Badiou
will take a great deal of care to expl ai n, say, that the "subjects of the art
genre" are works of art themselves (and not the human animals who
supposedly create them). There is nothing psychological about Badiou ' s
subject and, i n this sense, h i s philosophy is one of the most ex treme of
all anti-humanisms. On the other hand - as always - techno can
become retro in a single beat. For Badiou is then left with such
apparently fatuous, even idiotic problems as: can animals create works of
art (a la monkeys on a keyboard)? Engage in science (other than as
experimental subjects)? Fall in love (didn't the Greeks believe in cross
species Jove)? Do politics (termites and seals)? Badiou's answer is a
definite No! - if human beings are not in and of themselves subjects,
only a human animal is capable of being iced
transfixed and
transfigured - by those events that trigger the very truth-procedures
which subjects play their part in constituting.68 As far as I am concerned,
this is presently the most underworked aspect of Badiou's project, and it
reintroduces so many of the problems that his work is directed against:
what, for instance, does it mean for an "animal of the human species" to
be the only-animal-with-the-potenti al-for-truth?69 On Badiou's account,
-

68 Who can be a subject? "'Quelqu'un' est un animal de l'espece humaine, ce type de

multiple particulier que /es savoirs itablis designent comme appartenant a l' espece,"
L'ithique, p. 4 1 . My emphasis.
69 This is where the question of vitalism raises its ugly head again. Although the
pertinent research on this topic is enormous, permit me to cite here my own collection
of poems, entitled Ten thousand fcuking monkeys (Melbourne: Workshop 3000 ,

226

Pli 1 1 (2001 )

could a "human animal" live its entire "l ife" withou t ever becoming a
subject - for example, by solely and happily pursuing its own self
interest in the realms of opinion ?70 Unlike many other philosophers, the
acquisition of human language for Badiou is not a suffi cient condition
for or evidence of subjectivity; indeed, Badiou ' s hostility towards the
"linguistic turn" requires that he break with every such supposition
(although the role of nomination of course remains i ntegral to the event
truth nexus). But if "death" has nothing to do with truth for Badiou, he is
still left with the problem of "life" . . . about which he necessarily has very
little to say, for his philosophy then runs the risk of i nverting into its
primary adversary - vitalism.
But this difficulty also communicates with another problem for
Badiou: that of accounting for what I will summarily designate as the
d!fference of.forces. Whereas thinkers as different as Deleuze and Harold
Bloom have no difficulty in producing theories that describe, in their
own ways, the processes of domination, captivation, sovereignty, Badiou
is compelled to ignore or reduce su ch processes (th is is li nked with his
anathema towards Nietzsche). And Badiou typically does so in two
ways: 1 ) by working at such a level of abstraction that what precisely
becomes obscured are the specifici ties of events, sites, situations, as if
1 999), which turns on precisely this question (the apparent spelling mistake in the
title is deliberate). Giorgio Agamben has not hesitated to mark this point as well,
notably in an essay dedicated to Gilles Deleuze, the greatest modern philosophical
vitalist: "Alain Badiou, who is certainly one of the most interesting philosophers of
the generation immediately following Foucault and Deleuze, still conceives of the
subject on the basis of a contingent encounter with truth, leaving aside the living
being as 'the animal of the human species,' as a mere support for this encounter,"
Potentialities, p. 22 1 . And see also Agamben 's remarks in The Coming Community,
on the twentieth-century prediliction for set-theory as deriving directly from the
grammatical specificity of the proper name: "While the network of concepts
continually introduces synonymous relations, the idea is that which intervenes every
time to shatter the pretense of absoluteness in these relations, showing their
inconsistency. Whatever does not therefore mean only (in the words of Alain Badiou)
'subtracted from the authority of language, without any possible denomination,
indiscernible'; it means more exactly that which, holding itself in simple homonymy,
in pure being-called, is precisely and only for this reason unnameable: the being-in
language of the non-linguistic," p. 76. Finally - and perhaps most devastatingly for
Badiou's project - Agamben argues in Homo Sacer that Badiou's "event" (the very
foundations of Badiou's anti-statist project) is in fact the originary operation of the
State itself!
70 After all, "Rapporte a sa simple nature, !'animal humain doit etre loge a la meme
enseigne que ses compagnons biologiques," L 'ethique, p. x x .

227

Justin Clemens

what mattered for philosophy was merely that events take place
(Hallward, for instance, speaks of Badiou' s '"extraordinarily vagu e'
notion of a situation"71); 2) the events that Badiou recognises are actually
uncontroversial: the French Revolution , Mal larme, the love of Abelard
and Heloise, etc.72 But, then, how could an essentially quantitative
philosophy such as Badiou 's speak compel lingly of qualitative
difference? After al l , a "relation" for Badiou is only a pure multiple with
a name-number. For Badiou, an event must be infinitely "separated" and
"weak" (annulled, cancelled, foreclosed, undecidable), and a subject
truth essentially incomparable to others, beyond relation (i.e., to which
no name-number can presently be assigned). Yet subjects, it seems, can
attempt to be faithful to two different events simu ltaneously. Badiou's
use of the verb "to force" - playing on a variety of technical
significations of the term - is not enough to resolve the difficulty. For
surely an integral aspect of the singularity of truths depends on their
relative influence within a sequence and to the cross-overs they might
make with other, previously unrelated sequences
the ur-event of
Shakespeare, as Bloom says, makes possible every subsequent writer in
English; likewise, for Badiou, Rousseau establishes the modern concept
of politics. Is there, in other words, a covert hierarchy of events, subjects
and truths, linked to their forcefulness? B adiou, for i nstance, will remark
in passing that there are "big" and "little" events, but it would be absurd
to suggest that he simply translates force into number.
Which makes one wonder: if Badiou 's work is indeed anti
constructivist, that is, it attempts to unfound the state as the ultimate
guarantor of meaning, it also recognises that every truth must come into
conflict with the situation and the state at some point, and it is precisely
the evidence of such confl ict that enables the possible activity of a truth
-

71 Hallward, "Generic Sovereignty," p. 105. Indeed, Hallward makes a great deal of

the problem of the specific for Badiou.
72 Lecercle makes some rather snide remarks about precisely this aspect of Badiou:
"either the radical novelty and exceptionality of the event is preserved, and there is no
way of proving that the sect who recently committed mass suicide in Los Angeles to
join the crew of a UFO were not faithful to a process of truth, or the eventuality of the
event will be assured, but only in terms of an established tradition. .. ," pp. 1 2- 1 3.
Against Lecercle, Badiou might quite rightly object that the alien suicides were being
faithful to a truth-process (even if they succumbed to disaster and evil by treating it as
a moment of presence rather than voiding); however, this doesn 't evade the problem
of the force of any particular truth ....

228

Pli 1

1 (200 1 )

to be discerned within a situation.71 A truth must establish and inscribe

its name in the field of knowledge or it will forever remain a non-being
- that is, a thing with neither truth nor bei ng. If such a thing were
possible within Badiou ' s system, it would then run very close to what he
denounces as the apathy of opinion and simulacral terror, without
necessarily being either. Badiou perhaps has a problem with the various
species of non-being that play about the borders of his work: what his
work, by definition, either interdicts or renders im-possible is a truth
without-effects. Perhaps one could then say that what is missed in the
trajectory of an event-truth from undecidabil ity to indiscernibility to
unnameability is, precisely, imperceptibility.
Furthermore, there are various slippages in Badiou ' s terminology that
are at once minor, and yet seem intensely fraught. For example, with
respect to his generic categories, Badiou will sometimes refer to
"mathematics" and sometimes to "science," sometimes to "art" and
sometimes to "poetry," as if these terms were straightforwardly
substitutable. This procedure immediately provokes such questions as: I s
the poem the exemplary instance of, o r model for, art? A synecdoche for
the entire field of aesthetic production? Or simply a handy example?
What of painting, of which Plato equally has things to say and judgments
to make, and often at the same moments that the Republic elaborates
itself on the basis of metaphors that consistently compare the
philosopher's task to that of the artist (this is a situation, moreover,
which Badiou himself alludes to)? And what of music? (Badiou, for
i nstance, often mentions Schoenberg).
But there are also more profound, if no doubt related, problems which
have to do with Badiou 's own choice of authoritative texts. For example:
why are these events of modernity (Lacan, set-theory) determining? Why
this form of set-theory? - for there are many versions of set-theory,
i ncluding anti-foundational varieties which do not rel y on the empty set.
One might further note with regards to B adiou 's favoured poets
(Hi:ilderlin, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Trakl, Pessoa, Mandelstam, Celan) that
this is an entirely unsurprising philosopher's choice (perhaps that' s the
point), and these are among the most traditional philosophical poets. One
73 "Une verite 'troue' Jes savoirs, elle leur est heterogene, mais elle est aussi l a seule
source connue de savoirs nouveaux. On dira que la verite force des savoirs. Le verbe
forcer indique que la puissance d' une verite etant celle d'une rupture .... Si une verite
n'est jamais comme telle communicable, elle implique, a distance d'el le-meme, de
puissants remaniements des formes et des referents de la communication," L'erhique,
p. 62.

Justin Clemens

229

might well agree with Badiou that those named take on the destiny of
thought in the Romantic era given philosophy's own suturing to its
poetic condition, but surely there are others, of at least equal interest i n
this regard: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Robert Browning, Wallace Stevens,
Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, etc. Perhaps this is a moment
when philosophy's i n-discrimination of its others, and its own socio
historical localisation and determinations of personal taste are most
evident. For Badiou to denominate his selection a "decision" of the
ontology is, in any case, completely unsatisfactory. Finally, as David
Odell has also pointed out, the infinities of set-theory are, rigorously
considered, "an epistemological problem masquerading as an ontological
one," and that "irony is irreducible in the infinite."74 And is not irony the
Romantic trope par excellence . ?
But let me now conclude this already truncated account in the terms
of the topological theme with which I began: Badiou delineates for
phi losophy a precarious place that, confronting a situation and a state of
Being, fi nds itself al the edge of the unlocalisable "black-grey" void and
- affronted by the undecidability of events and the disparity of their
sites - faithfully attempts to ensure their heterogeneous unity in
thought. For Badiou, it is finally only by way of such a painstaking
"work of fidelity" to events that philosophy can ' t go on, must go on, will
go on ....
.

74

Personal correspondence.

Pli 1 1 (2001 ) 230-252.

,

The S i m ple V i rtual : Bergsonism and a

Renewed Thi n king of the One 1
K E ITH ANSELL PEARSON

A static and immobile being i s not the first principle; what we

must start from is contraction itself, the duration whose in version
is rel axation.
Deleuze, 'Bergson ' s Conception of Difference' 1 956

Our starting point is a unity, a simplicity, a virtual totality.

Deleuze, Bergsonism 1 966

I.

I n his Deleuze. The Clamor of Being, Alain B adiou describes the virtual
as the principal name of Being in Deleuze and claims that his thinking
amounts to a Platonism of the virtual. Badiou argues that in Deleuze the
virtual is presented as 'the ground of the actual' , and moreover, that that
it is its own ground as the 'being of virtual ities' . B adiou likes to speak of
the virtual as what lies 'beneath' as in ' "beneath" the simulacra of the
world' . 2 This explains why he has such problems with any talk in
1 I am grateful to Alberto Toscano for reading an earlier version of this essay and
indicating the areas in need of further clarification. Any difficulties that remain are
not simply a reflection of a personal penc hant for obfuscation on my part but have, in
my view, a more objective basis.
2 A. Badiou, Deleuze. La clameur de l 'Etre (Paris: Hachette, 1 997), p. 70; Deleuze.
The Clamor of Being, trans. L. Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2000), p. 46 (abbreviated to CB followed by page reference first to the French edition,
then the English translation).

Keith Ansell Pearson

231

Deleuze of the virtual in terms of an image. Is not the ' image' the status
of the actual only? How can the virtual, conceived by Badiou as the
'power proper to the One ' , be a simulacrum? No doubt, he says, ' the
virtual can give rise to images but it is difficult to determine how an
image can be given of it or how it can itself be an image' (CB p . 78; p.
52). There is a Berkeleyean dimension to Badiou ' s point which serves to
disclose the somewhat peculiar nature of his question. In his Principles
of Human Knowledge Berkeley poses a problem with regard to soul or
spirit in terms that bear a striking simi larity to the way Badiou has posed
the problem of the virtual qua image. If spirit is One, that is, simple and
undivided, and if it is the primary 'active' being, how can an idea or
image be formed of it since i nert ideas/images cannot represent to us that
which acts?' The i ncorporeal and immateri al substance cannot be
represented, cannot itself be an idea or image, since it is their causal
ground.
Badiou is adamant that Deleuze is a classical thinker whose project is
primarily and essentially an ontological one. In Deleuze the task is to
think the real of the One: 'Deleuze's fundamental problem is most
certainly not to liberate the multiple but to submit thinking to a renewed
concept of the One' (p. 20 ; p. 1 1 ) . This means that the multiple is to be
concei ved 'integrally' and in terms of the 'production of simulacra ' .
Badiou is aware that notions o f the ground [fondement] and of
foundation have been taken to task in contemporary thought and that
Deleuze's work can be construed as being at the forefront of these
developments - he does, after all, speak in Difference and Repetition of
a 'universal un-grounding' [/ 'effondement universe!] . ' Nevertheless
B adiou persists with his reading, establishing the notion of ground i n
Platonist terms by speaking of it a s the 'eternal share' o f beings (CB pp.
68-9; p . 45). It i s because Deleuze thinks the virtual in terms of this
eternal share that his thinking demands ' that Being be rigorously
determined as One' (ibid.). 'Ground', therefore, is being identified not
with the (Kantian) noumenon but with the Platonist notion of
participation. Deleuze, as we shall see, opens chapter eleven of his 1 968
book on Spinoza by addressing this very issue of participation (see also
DR p. 87; p. 62).
B adiou opposes Deleuze on account of the latter's deployment of the
two terms, the virtual and the actual, in order to think the question of
3 G. Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowlalxe (London: Fontana, 1 962), p. 77.
4 G. Deleuze, Difference et RepNition (Paris: PUF, 1 968) , p. 92 (henceforth DR);
Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Pallon (London: Athlone Press, 1 994), p. 67.

232

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

Being.' He wishes to discredit the appeal to the virtual and desires that
we speak instead of 'the univocity of the actual as a pure multiple' (my
emphasis) (CB p. 78; p. 52). The multiple of multiples has to be
affirmed, it cannot be posited in terms of the power of a One. The One,
and along with it Life, has to be sacrificed. The two 'classicisms', says
B adiou, are irreconciliable.
Badiou has, without doubt, raised a nu mber of important questions
concerning Deleuze' s project. To deal satisfactorily with the issues they
raise, however, I believe we need more preci sion. What kind of
Platonism of the virtual? Is Deleuze a thinker of the One or is he not
rather a thinker of virtual multiplicity that has gone beyond the
opposition of the one and the many? Badiou knows thi s, of course, but
persists in reading Deleuze as a thinker of the one and not the multiple. I
will argue that Deleuze' s thinking of the virtual does have a link with an
important (neo-) Platonist source and that it is legitimate to describe him
as a thi nker of the One. However, the reading I offer here of
Bergsonism's renewed thinking of the One produces a quite different
image of Deleuze' s thought. Badiou ' s curious affirmation of the
univocity of the actual (as pure multiple) shows that he has inadequately
understood the role of the virtual in Deleuze and discloses a fu ndamental
incoherence in his own thinking.

II.

Deleuze may be a classical thinker i n key respects but he also thinks the
real ity of the virtual in relation to some peculiarly modern problems.
However, while the notion of the virtual is being deployed by Deleuze to
elucidate a specifically modern conception of evolution, its character as
a problematic is of ancient descent. When we think this virtual i n terms
of the question of the One - as the One that is peculiar to a virtual
multipl icity - we encou nter all kinds of philosophical conundrums. A s
Hegel notes in h i s treatment o f the O n e in Plotinus - and it i s a
Plotinian reference we need in order to determine the nature of both
Bergson and Deleuze's encounter with Platonism - the principal
5 Although the matter cannot be treated here, l would dissent from Badiou's claim
that as an essentially ontological thinker Deleuze i s a thinker of the question of Being
where this questions belongs to Heidegger. It is not clear to me that there i s a question
of Being which needs to be considered for Deleuze, where this question also entails a
history of Being, a sending of Being, and a destiny of Being.

Keith Ansell Pearson

233

difficulty, ' known and recognized many years ago' , is 'the

comprehension of how the One came to the decision to determine
itself' . 6 As Deleuze acknowledges in his 1 966 reading of Bergsonism,
we are Jed inevitably to the question of how the One, 'the original
identity ' , has the power to be differentiated' [le pouvoir de se
dfferencier].7
Almost everything at stake in this thinking of the One would seem to
turn on what kind or nature of power i s assigned to it: is it eminent or
simple? In Bergsonism it is neither accidental nor incidental that Deleuze
should repeatedly speak of the virtual as a simple virtual (B p. p. 98, p .
99, p. 1 03 ; p. 95, p. 96, p . 1 00). This i s a simplicity h e had already
outlined in his 1 956 reading of Bergson as a philosopher of (internal)
difference. " Gerson has argued against a straightforward creationist or
emanationist reading of the Plotinian One, and his argument is worth
citing since it brings to light the reasons for Deleuze's designation of the
virtual as a simple power:
. . . Aquinas must say that God is not just virtually all things but
eminently all things as well. That is, every predicate that belongs
to complexes belongs to their simple cause in a higher mode of
being . . . . By contrast, Plotinus is Jess concerned with preserving
omnipotence than he is with preserving the unqualified simplicity
of the first arche . . . by refusing to accept that virtuality in being
entails eminence in being, Plotinus' negative theology constrains
itself in a way that Aquinas' negative theology does not. Plotinus
cannot just infer that the One is eminently whatever its effects are
i n an inferior way. To do so would compromise the simplicity of
9
the One.
Now, although this provides us with an indication of some of the reasons
as to why philosophy might have a desire to appeal to the One in terms
G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 2, trans. E. S .
Haldane & F . H . Simson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1 995), p. 4 1 6.
7 G. Deleuze, Bergsonisme (Paris: PUF, 1 966), p. 1 03 (henceforth B); Bergsonism,
trans. H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1 99 1 ), p. 1 00.
8 G. Deleuze, "La Conception de la Difference chez Bergson", Les Eludes
Bergsonnienes, volume IV (Paris: PUF, 1 956), pp. 77- 1 1 2 (henceforth BCD), here at
p. 93, p. 97; "Bergson' s Conception of Difference'', trans. M. McMahon, in J.
Mullarkey (ed.), The New Bergson (Manchester: Manchester Uni versity Press, 1 999),
pp. 42-66, here at p. 5 1 , p. 53.
9 L. P. Gerson, Plotinus (London: Routledge, 1 994), p. 32.
6

234

Pli 1 1 (2001 )

of simplicity, it does not follow that Deleuze's conception of the

simplicity of the virtual is the same as Ploti nus' insistence that there
"'
'must be something simple before all th ings ' (Enneads V, 4). The
difference with Plotinus can be articulated as follows: in Plotinus the
simplicity of the virtual is thought in strictly negative terms (we cannot
say what it is, only what it is not); " moreover, it is a power that always
withholds from expressing itself i n the beings that i rradiate from it,
which explains why Plotinus insists that this simple must be completely
other to all the things that come after it and exists by i tself, ' not mixed
with the things which derive from it' (V, 4). I n Deleuze, by contrast, the
simplicity of the virtual denotes the positivity of being as a power of
self-differentiation which, in differentiating itself, ceases to be what it i s
'all the while keeping something of i t s origin' (BCD p. 1 00; p. 55). I n
other words, the virtual both ceases t o be a n d continues t o persist.
Admittedly , this is all very paradoxical. On Deleuze's conception of
difference, however, the asymmetry of the virtual and the actual must be
maintained to allow for a thinking of the immanence of Being, of Being
as uni vocal. To proclaim a univocity of the actual, as Badiou does, is to
render one ' s thinking incoherent: the univocity of Being cannot be
upheld by predicating it of actual beings, since such beings are beings
already constituted. " A univocal conception of Being necessarily entails
a notion of the virtual. The power of the simple virtual cannot be
transformed into an eminent one without sacrificing immanence. As a
way of warding off such a move Plotinus adopted a rigorously negative
"
(and ecstatic) approach to the One. The result is a negative theology.
The importance of Plotinus for Bergson has been noted and examined
"
in the literature. The fact that Bergson lectured regularly on Ploti nus i s
1 0 The edition and translation o f the Enneads I have used i s that publi shed i n seven
volumes by Harvard University Press, 1 996, and translated by A. H. Armstrong.
Although the Penguin edition of the Enneads is an abridged one it contains invaluable
editorial material.
11
See J. Bussanich, "Plotinus's Metaphysics of the One'', in L. P. Gerson, ed ., The
Cambridge Companion to Plotinus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 996),
pp. 38-66, pp. 40- 1 .
12
I am grateful to Daniel Smith for drawing my attention to Badiou ' s incoherence on
this issue.
1
3 As Bussanich deftly draws out, this means that the negative way to the One
ultimately contains a superior affirmation.
1
4 W. E. May has suggested that conceived as a 'one-many' the e/an vital can be
compared to the third hypostasis or World Soul of Plotinus (in Enneads, IV, I ). See
May, "The Reality of Matter in the Metaphysics of Bergson", illtemationa/

Keith Ansell Pearson

235

not surprising given the central preoccupations of his thinking (time, free
will, matter, creati vity, etc.). " In his Gi fford lectures of 1 9 1 4 on
'Personality' Bergson goes so far as to claim that modern metaphysics
(Leibniz, Spinoza) is a repetition of Plotinus but in a weaker form (M p .
I 058 ; see also remarks Bergson makes o n Plotinus and moderns like
Spinoza, Kant, and Schopenhauer in a lecture course of 1 907 on
'Theories of the Wil l ' , M pp. 7 1 6-7). The starting-point of Plotinus'
philosophy, which is also its essence for Bergson, i s the attempt to
rediscover a unity that has become lost in time. 'The philosophy of
Plotinus', he writes, 'may be taken as the very type of the Metaphysics
which we are eventually Jed to when we look upon internal time as
pulverised into separate moments, and yet believe in the reality and the
unity of the Person' (M p. 1 056). I n other words, we are two modes of
existence, a de jure one i n which we exist outside time, and a de facto
one in which we evolve 'in' time. Considered in de jure terms we are
Ideas (eternal essences), 'pure contemplation', in contrast to the life of
the sensible world in which praxis takes place. But if the de facto
existence is a diminution or degradation of the eternal then to act or to
desire is to have need of something and thus, consequently, to be
incomplete. Evolving in time 'is to add unceasingly to what i s ' .
However, because the one mode o f existence is a distension o r dilution
of the other, in which an original unity has broken up into a multiplicity,
our actual exi stence can be l i ttle more than that of a 'dispersed
Philosophical Quarterly J O: 4 ( 1 970), pp. 6 1 1 -42, p. 63 1 . Bergson comments on the
three hypostases in the third of his Gi fford lectures of 1 9 1 4 (Melanges (Paris: PUF,
1 972) pp. I 056-60; hereafter cited as M), and a careful reading of what he has to say
therein would show, I believe, that the comparison of the 'elan ' with the third
hypostasis would have to be complicated. This is because in Bergson ' s metaphysics
unity is an an-original virtual multiplicity that can only proceed in terms of a
disseminating or d ispersed multiplicity, there can be no return to unity which is 'unity
only' . This is why Deleuze always insists that the whole is never given and that we
should be glad of this fact. In this essay I am arguing that there are, in fact, two
different figurations of the whole in Bergson and Deleuze, and while the elan is given
as a simple totality the whole of evolution as a creative process can never be given.
Deleuze's 'gladness' is over the second whole. On how it i s possible to have a unity
of multiplicity, and a One and a whole that would be not the principle but the effect of
the multiplicity, see Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans R. Howard (London: Athlone
Press, 2000), p. 1 63.
1 5 Bergson mentions one of the courses of lectures he gave on Plotinus given at the
College de France in 1 897-8 in Creative Evolution where he says he tried to
demonstrate the resemblance between Leibniz's monads and Plotinus' Intelligibles.
Deleuze also makes a link between Plotinus and Leibniz in his text The Fold.

236

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

multiplicity ' always 'indefinitely stnvmg to produce an imitation of

unity in Time' (ibid.). So where Plato construes time as a 'moving image
of eternity' in terms of the figure of resemblance, '" Plotinus construes it
in terms of an imitation. Bergson insists that if the original element is
posited as unity then it is insufficient to say that in Plotinus' system
there is a return to the 'multiplicity which is One ' ; rather the return has
to go further back to 'a Unity which is unity only' (M p. ! 057). This is
how he reads the theory of the three hypostases in Plotinus (God, the
l ntelligibles, and Minds with bodies), in which the movement consists in
the Mind that is i n a body returning to the Intelligible. So although
matter entails division and 'unrollin g ' , Bergson notes, it is the movement
of immateriality as a movement of return to the immaterial which is the
telos of this mode of thinking the One, unity and multiplicity. The
immaterial is conceived as an original unity that is without number
potentially or actually, it has no multiplicity to it whether virtual or
"
actual.
What are we trying to learn from this brief consideration of Bergson
on Ploti nus? It is clear that Bergson' s ambitions are not (neo-) Platonist
ones. Plotinus stands out among the ancients for Bergson because he
considers him to be a 'profound psychologist' and what must be
extracted from his system are its purely psychological elements (p.
I 058). The actual edifice of this system, however, is fragile. It remai ns
instructive in that it brings out an im portant aspect of later metaphysical
systems but which is only implicit, chiefly, the idea that movement is
less than immobility and that duration is divided indefinitely. This
means that to find 'substantiality' it becomes necessary to place
ourselves outside time. Modem metaphysics is a repetition of this view
"
u p to, and even after, Kant, Bergson claims. Bergson wishes us to know
16

Plato, Timaeus, trans. D. Lee (Middlesex : Penguin, 1 977), sections 7, 8, & 1 8 , pp.
5 1 -2, pp. 55-6, pp. 69-70.
1
7 On this see P. Henry, "The Place of Plotinus in the History of Thought", in The
Enneads (Middlesex: Penguin, 1 99 1 ), p. Iii: "Plotinus identifies as a matter of course
the Good of the Republic and the absolute One of the first hypothesis of the
Parmenides. This identification which, in the words of Plato, situ ates the Good
'beyond being' and which denies to the One all multiplicity - be it only virtual and
logical, a multiplicity of names, attributes, forms, or aspects - constitutes the basis
of the 'negative theology' which, in Plotinus and in his disciples, plays so great a part
in the doctrine of God and of the mystical experience".
18
Time and Free Will unfolds a distinction between a "true self' and a "superficial
self' that may initially strike one as either Plotinian or Kantian; but it is important to
grasp that for Bergson the "true self' does not reside outside time but can only

Keith Ansell Pearson

237

that he holds the opposite to be the case (there is no fall into time and
time is not an imitation of eternity) and that, while it is important to give
fu ll weight to certain aspects of Ploti nus' doctrine it also has to be
in verted (ibid.). Badiou does not comment on Bergson ' s attempted
in version of Plotinus, and there is no reason why he should other than
perhaps for the purposes of lending greater precision to his claim that
Bergsonism ultimately amounts to a Platonism of the virtual.
Let us now turn to Deleuze on Plotinus. Important references to
Plotinus can be found in D(fference and Repetition and What is
Philosophy ? (in both it is the notion of 'contemplation ' that is put i nto
effect). The most relevant treatment for our purposes is to be found i n
"
the 1 968 book o n Spinoza and expressionism. I n this work Deleuze
also speaks of Aquinas as thinker of eminence and in the context of a
discussion of how the method of analogy seeks to avoid
anthropomorphism. In Aquinas the qualities that are attributed to God do
not imply a community of form between divine substance and fi nite
creatures but only an analogy, 'a "congruence" of proportion or
proportionality' (SEP p. 46). Deleuze's contention is that Spinozism
effects an inversion of the problem:
Whenever we proceed by analogy we borrow from creatures
certain characteristics in order to attribute them to God either
equivocally or eminently. Thus God has Will, Understanding,
Goodness, Wisdom, and so on, but has them equivocally or
eminently. Analogy cannot do without equivocation or eminence,
and hence contains a subtle anthropomorphism, just as dangerous
as the na"ive variety (ibid.).
For Deleuze the significance of Spinoza's philosophy resides in its
struggle against the equi vocal, the eminent, and the analogical. He
belongs to the 'great tradition of univocity ' . This is the thesis that ' being
is predicated in the same sense of everything that is, whether infinite or
fi nite, albeit not i n the same "modality " ' (p. 63). This means that,

become what it is i n duration. On Bergson on links between Plotinus and modern

metaphysics see also the essay "The Perception of Change'', Oeuvres (Paris: PUF,
1 959), pp. 1 374-6 (hereafter cited as 0); trans. in The Creative Mind, trans. M .
Andison (Totowa: Littlefield, Adams, & Co, 1 965), pp. 1 39-42 (the English
translation leaves out Bergson' s citation from Plotinus).
1 9 G. Deleuze, Spinoza: Expressionism in Philosophy, trans. M. Joughin (New York:
Zone Books, 1 992) (hereafter SEP).

238

Pli 1 1

(200 1 )

although there i s a d ifference between natura naturans (substance) and

natura naturata (attributes), they are not in a relation of hiearchy in
which the former enjoys a power of eminence over the latter. In his
Bergsonism of 1 956 and 1 966 Deleuze will insist on the need to treat
duration as both 'substance and subject' ; indeed, duration is likened to a
'naturing nature' and matter to a ' natured nature' (B p. 94; p. 93) .'0
Moreover, as a power of the virtual, duration is pure immanence (that
which does divide but as a division that always changes in kind). And
we need lo recall Bergson' s own insistence that we err in our thinking of
the immanence of a creative evolution when we think of a thing that
creates and of things that are created (0 p. 705 ; CE p. 248). Moreover,
Bergson insi sts that the divergent creations of evolution are to be treated
not as 'presenting analogies' but rather as ' mutually complementary' (0
p. 578; CE p. 97).
The key chapter from Deleuze' s 1 968 book on Spinoza is chapter
eleven entitled 'Immanence and the Historical Components of
Expression' . We cannot examine the full details of this reading here.
Instead, let us note some key points.
For Deleuze the idea of an 'expressive immanence', the idea by
which the univocity of being is to be thought, can be traced back to the
Platonist problem of participation. In Plato we find different schemes of
participation, such as 'being a part ' , imitating, and even being the
recipient of something from a demon. Deleuze notes that in spite of these
different schemes the principle of participation is always sought on the
side of what participates. In all cases the sensible is forced to reproduce
the terms of the intelligible, while also 'forcing the Idea to allow itself to
be participated by something foreign to its nature' (SEP p. 170). The
attempt to invert the problem is what defines the post-Platonic task. This
is done by locating the principle of participation within the perspective
20

Bergson often "distorts" [detoume], as he puts it, the terms of Spinoza's famous
distinction. See for example 0 p. 1 024; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion,
trans. R. A. Audra & C. Brereton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1 977), p. 58 (hereafter cited as TSMR). It is interesting to note that although Bergson
regularly gave lectures on the history of philosophy he accorded special treatment to
Spinoza by always devoting a separate lecture course to him. For insight into the
critical character of his rapport with Spinoza see 0 pp. 788-95; Creative Evolution,
trans. A. Mitchell (Lanham MD: University Press of America, 1 983), pp. 347-56
(hereafter cited as CE). Both Leibniz and Spinoza are said to present a
"systematization of the new physics, constructed on the model of the ancient
metaphysics"; and in both, but especially in Spinoza, there are "flashes of intuition"
that break through the system.

Keith Ansell Pearson

239

of the participated itself: 'Plotinus reproaches Plato for having seen

participation from its lesser side' (ibid.). In Plotinus participation does
not take the form of a violence, in which it supervenes as a force from
the outside which is then suffered by the participated, but rather as a gift:
'causality by donation, but by productive donation ' . It is emanation that
is this cause and this gift: 'participation occurs only through what i t
gives, and in what it gives' (p. 171). This explains why i n Plotinus the
One is held to be beyond or above Being, since it is above its gifts: 'it
gives what does not belong to it, or is not what it gives' (ibid.). " The
One cannot have anything in common with the things that come from it.
This is a thought of emanation in which an emanative cause is not only
22
superior to its effect but also to what gives the effect. This 'One-above
Being' is inseparable from a negative theology and from a method of
analogy 'that respects the eminence of principle or cause' (p. 1 72).
For Deleuze it i s only on the basis of the kind of movement of
thought we find in Spinozism or Bergsonism that the 'emanative
transcendence of the One' can be transformed into an expressive
immanence of uni vocal Being. The uni vocity of Being requires that the
power of the virtual be a simple one. Indeed, although Plotinus thinks
the virtuality of being in terms of a simplicity this power remains
emanative or eminent for Deleuze (as for other commentators, such as
J aspers for example). " The One remains above and outside what is
explicated since it does not explicate itself: 'the One above Being does
of course contain all things virtually: it is explicated but does not
explicate itse?f (p. 177; here we could readily substitute actualization for
21

As Karl Jaspers notes, the Plotinian One cannot, strictly speaking, be thought and is
not the 'subject' of thinking. It is what 'gives' thinking without giving anything of
itself. This One is neither the number one nor the one contrasted with the other, 'for
any attempt to think the One produces duality and multiplicity', Jaspers,
Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plotinus, Lao-Tzu, Nagarjuna, ed. H. Arendt,
trans. R. Mannheim (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1 966), p. 34.
22
We should note that recent scholarship no longer favours using the term
'emanation' to describe Plotinus' doctrine on account of its Stoic connotations;
rather, the creative process is now seen in terms of 'illumination' or 'irradiation ' . See
J. Dillon, Introduction to The Enneads, Penguin edition, p. xci.
2 3 For a more recent upholding of this reading of Plotinus see Bussanich l 996, p. 60,
where he makes it clear that while there is nothing discrete about the character of the
One in Plotinus the move to univocity is not made: 'the One's properties are [not]
univocally predictable of its products: the One' s l ife is not life in the same sense or
the same degree as Intellect's'. But he also notes that the One's products cannot then
simply be said to be equivocal either. As ever, Plotinus presents his readers with an
real interpretive dilemma.

240

Pli 1 1 (2001 )

explication ) . With the univocity of Being there i s also entailed the

equality of Being in the sense that not only is 'being equal in itself, but it
is seen to be equally present in all beings' (p. 1 73). Causation is no
longer 'remote' or eminent but truly immanent: ' Immanence is opposed
to any eminence of the cause, any negative theology, any method of
analogy, any hierarchical conception of the world'. Once the hierarchy
of hypostases is substituted by an equality of being this means that
participation must now be thought in a completely positive manner and
not on the basis of an eminent gift (say of Being to beings or of the
virtual to actuals).
Jn describing Deleuze as thinker of the One Badiou took many
readers by surprise. But although Deleuze does i ndeed intend to think
beyond the opposition of the one and the many this does not rule out the
possibility of speaking of the virtual multiplicity in terms of a One that is
peculiar to it. Throughout the 1 966 text Deleuze will insist on the need
to posit virtual multiplicity as a single time, and the co-existence of all of
the degrees and levels of Being is said to be virtual and 'only virtual ' (B
p. 95; p. 93). It is precisely because the point of unification is said to be
virtual that Bergsonism is led for Deleuze to the realization that it has an
affinity with ' the One-Whole of the Platoni sts ' : 'All the level s of
expansion and contraction coexist on a single Time and form a total ity;
but this Whole, this One, are pure virtuality' (ibid.) (if such a Whole has
number i t is only potentially). Badiou ' s reading of Deleuze ' s alleged
Platonism of the virtual does not persuade, however, for a number of
reasons. It does not adequately comprehend either the nature of the
commitment to univocity or what is stake in positing a simplicity of the
virtual. On Badiou ' s reading the actual becomes a mere simulacrum of
the virtual and, as such, represents little more than a degraded, and even
expendable, expression of an eminent power. Badiou's reading fails to
distinguish between the different presentations of the virtual in Deleuze.
lt is often overlooked that there are, in fact, two presentations of the
virtual whole in Bergson ' s Creative Evolution: a first one that is to be
understood i n terms of a simple virtual of the vital impetus, and
characterized by interpenetrating tendencies; and a second one which
refers not to a point of origin or an initial impulsion but rather to a
ceaseless becoming to be thought on the level of the open whole of
evolution. This is the whole that Bergson argues science extracts from
when it isolates closed systems for diagrammatic study. 1t is this latter
conception of the virtual whole that Deleuze brings to the fore in Cinema
1 when he speaks of a plane of immanence in terms of a 'machi nism' as

Keith Ansell Pearson

24 1

opposed to a mec hanism. Badiou, I contend, deals on ly with the one

virtual whole, notably in this latter configuration.
After making his point about the One never being given in its totality
Badiou then uses a c itation from Cinema 1 which speaks of the whole
only in terms of the second conception (the open whole in which
duration is said to be immanent to the universe)." Badiou then argues
unconvincingly that because the real of the virtual is not given in its
totality this means that the real 'consists prec isely in the perpetual
actual izing of new virtualities' (CB p. 75; p. 49). This is a very odd
construction of Deleuze's thinking of the virtual. It makes little sense of
Bergson's conception of creative evolution and its uptake in Deleuze's
texts of 1 956 and 1 966 where the movement is from the virtual to
'actuals' (the plural is Deleuze's) and where this movement involves the
self-differentiation of a simple virtual in accordance with divergent lines
of actualization. Badiou has completely reified the power of the virtual.
Badiou ' s neglect of the first whole must surely explain how and why
he is able to turn Deleuze ' s virtual into a power of eminence. Let me
make it clear: the simple virtual refers to the virtual of the vital impetus
and is given not in the sense that it is given once and for all, which
would be to convert time into space, but rather in the sense that it is
given as a limited force (it requires contact with matter in order to divide
and differenciate). I t is, then, given as a limited force but not given with
respect to actualization and differenciation. And what makes it 'simple'
is that it exists as confused, inchoate, and undetermined - the contrast
is not between some absolute conception of the simple and an equally
absol ute conception of the complex, but rather between the tendencies in
one mode of being (fusion and interpenetration) and another mode
{dissociation and divergency in which the tendencies acquire a more and
more specific stress and dominant articulation). Deleuze's affinnation of
the non-givenness of the open whole should not be overlooked or
downplayed. It is, in fact, the principal feature of his Bergsonism in both
the 1 966 text and Cinema 1. As virtual this open whole cannot assemble
24 The citation Badiou makes runs as follows: 'if the whole is not giveable,

ii is
because it is the Open, and because its nature is to change constantly, or to give rise to
something new, in short, to endure' (CB p. 75; p. 49, quoting from Deleuze, Cinema
1 , 1 983, p. 20; 1 986, p. 9). Clearly, this whole that is subject lo, and the subject of,
constant change, can never be given; but this is a different virtual whole from the
whole of the simple vi1tual. The two conceptions of the whole are both articulated by
Bergson and both are at work in Bergson's Creative Evolution (see 1 983, pp. 53-5, p.
87 & p. 257 for a presentation of the firsl whole, and CE pp. I 0-1 1 for a presentation
of the second whole; the two meel in the discussion that takes place on pp. 86-7).

242

Pli

1 1 (200 1 )

i t s actual parts, which are external t o each other. But the assembling or
reassembling of a whole is never the issue for Deleuze: the actual does
not come to resemble the virtual because actualization does not proceed
by rules of resemblance or limitation. So, while it may indeed be odd for
Deleuze to describe the virtual as an image, it is equally strange to
describe the actual i n terms of a projected or produced image of the
virtual, since thi s is preci sely how the relation between the real and the
possible is to be defined, and as a way of highlighting the creative
character of the lines of differentiation that characterize an actualization:
'For, in order to be actualized, the virtual cannot proceed by elimination
or limitation, but must create its own l ines of actualization in positive
acts . . . For while the real is in the image and likeness of the possible that
it realizes, the actual, on the other hand does not resemble the virtuality
that it embodies' (B p. 1 00; p. 97). In the actual, says Deleuze, there
reigns an irreducible pluralism. This is a pluralism that fi lls him with
delight (B p, 1 08; p. 1 04).

Ill.
In order to demonstrate the nature of Deleuze ' s dual commitment to the
One and to plural ism (to the One ()f pluralism) I want to provide a fairly
close and exacting reading of the 1 956 and 1 966 essays on Bergsonism.
Before we commence the analysis of Deleuze' s texts let us consider the
following key citation from Bergson' s Creative Evolution:
While, in its contact with matter, life is comparable to an
impul sion or an impetus, regarded in itself it i s an immensity of
potentiality [ virtualite], a mutual encroachment of thousands and
thousands of tendencies which nevertheless are 'thousands and
thousands' only once regarded as outside each other, that is, when
spatialized. Contact with matter is what determines this
dissociation. Matter divides actually what was but virtually
multiple [virtuellement multiple]; and, in this sense, individuation
is in part the work of matter, in part the result of life's own
inclination (0 p. 7 1 4 ; CE p. 257; my emphasis with translation
modified).
Here we encounter the dual manner in which Bergson approaches the
real : regarded in itself life is a pure virtual and in terms of its contact

Keith Ansell Pearson

243

with matter it is a virtual with divisions. I cite this passage, however, not
simply because it is only the example we have in B ergson ' s text of the
description of l i fe in terms of a virtual multiplicity, but rather because it
signals an issue that is crucial to decide upon, even though there is a
certain undecidable element to it. The problem is this: Deleuze credits
the virtual with the power of self-differentiation. I n this passage,
however, it would seem that what is crucial for Bergson is matter:
'matter divides actually what was but virtually multiple' . Do we have a
fundamental difference here between Bergson and Deleuze's
Bergsonism? Mi ght i t mean that Deleuze has, in some sense, reified the
virtual by positing it in terms of an independent, albeit simple, power?
To respond at all adequately to these questions we must follow the
details of Deleuze' s reading with extreme care. The turns of Deleuze's
thinking in both the 1 956 essay and the 1 966 text are remarkably
nuanced and subtly unfolded.
The 1 956 essay begins by stating that conceived as a philosophy of
difference - the difference between differences in degree and
differences in kind or nature, the difference between the virtual and the
actual, the difference of Being itself qua self-differentiation Bergsonism operates on two levels: a methodological one and an
ontological one. The differences between things lies, ultimately, in their
differences of nature, and it is the task of thinking to demonstrate thi s
and to determine the differences themselves. I t i s not immediately self
evident to thinking what this difference is (the difference of nature)
simply because the natural bent of the intellect is to think in terms of
differences of degree (positing the differential relations between things
in terms of 'more' or 'Jess' ) . The task is to show that the differences of
nature are neither things nor their states but rather tendencies. This
methodological problem, which can only be resolved via the method of
intuition, turns into an ontological one when we real i ze that these
differences of nature suppose the difference ' of' Being itself.
Consideration of differences of nature leads us to thinking about the
nature of difference (BCD p. 79; p. 42). Everything is an expression of
difference but, i n turn, each thing expresses its own internal difference.
The difference 'of' Being resides in the differences of beings.
Deleuze conceives duration as that which 'd(ffersfrom itself'. He then
goes on to treat matter as the domain of repetition (it does not differ
from itself), a distinction between difference and repetition that is
complicated by Bergson in texts such as Matter and Memory and
especially Creative Evolution, and which Deleuze goes on to complicate
in this essay and also in the 1 966 text Psychic life is taken as an

244

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

example of the difference o f nature in which there i s always 'otherness'

without there being 'number' or 'several ' . If movement is qualitative
change and vice versa - movement has to i nvolve alteration if it is to
amount to real change (see Socrates in Theaetetus I 82c) - then this
suggests that duration is a movement of self-differentiation: 'Duration,
tendency is the difference of self from self; and what differs from itself
is immediately the unity of substance and subject' (BCD p. 89; p. 48).
Duration then becomes Bergsonism ' s unconventional designation for the
traditional notion of substance. Against what he regards as the essential
movement of Hegeli anism, Deleuze insists that the difference of nature
is an essential aspect of the internal logic of d ifference itself; it is not,
therefore, external to Being - being does not have to become or
'decide' to become s ince it i s already characterized by an internal
difference as a power of self-differentiation: 'D(fference of nature has
itsef become a nature. Moreover, it was so from the beginning' (BCD p.
90; p. 49). This is un-Hegelian for Deleuze simply because it means that
we do not have to go to the level of contradiction and negation to
account for the productive power of difference:
The originality of the Bergsonian conception is in showing that
internal difference does not go and must not go to the point of
con tradiction, to alterity, to the negative, because these three
notions are in fact less profound than it or are merely external
views of this internal difference. To think in ternal difference as
such, as pure internal difference, to reach the pure concept of
difference, to raise difference to the absolute, such i s the
directions of Bergson ' s event. . . In Bergson and thanks to the
notion of the virtual, the thing differs from itself in the .first place,
immediately. According to Hegel, thing differs from itself in the
first place from all that it is not, such that difference goes to the
"
point of contradiction.
BCD p. 90, p. 49; p. 96, p. 53. This is perhaps the principal theme of Deleuze's
difference from Hegel - the di fference that is at stake in Difference and Repetition
and it is expressed not only in the 1 956 essay on Bergson but also in the 1 954
review of Jean Hyppolite's Logic and Existence: 'can we not construct an ontology of
difference which would not have to go up to contradiction, because contradiction
would be less than di fference and not more? Is not contradiction itself only the
phenomenal and anthropological aspect of difference?' (Dcleuze 's review now
appears as the appendix to the English translation of llyppolitc's lcxt, trans. L. Lawlor
& A. Sen [New York: SUNY Press, 1 997], pp. 1 9 1 -5).
25

Keith Ansell Pearson

245

We have, no doubt, entered into the deepest waters of Deleuze ' s

Bergsonism. These waters, however, are not necessarily murky. Let ' s
seek to swim i n them. How exactly are we to think the virtual and to
conceive of this originary difference of Being? Deleuze's answer i s :
through a thinking o f Life.
'Life is the process of difference ' (BCD p. 92; p. 50). Deleuze refers
not simply to the differentiations of embryology but more to the
differences of evolution, such as the production of species: 'With
Darwin the problems of di fference and life come to be identified in thi s
idea of evolution, even though Darwin himself has a false conception of
vital difference' (ibid.). The vital difference is not a simple
determination but rather an indetermination. The difference is crucial for
Deleuze since only by recognizing the unpredictable character of living
forms is it possible to construe the true nature of evolution, namely that
the etan vital is not a determination but a differentiation. And if life i s
not simply the result o f a subsisting exteriority - the external
mechanism of selection - then it is necessary to think this as a se(f
differentiation. It is here that we can now return to the citation from
Bergson' s Creative Evolution concerning matter dividing actually what
was virtually manifold.
Deleuze is not blind to the role of matter within a creative evolution.
He can, in fact, be seen to be giving a reading of Bergson's text which
does not itself ever make explicit or clear the precise nature of this
relation between the virtual multiplicity of tendencies and the
actualizations of material ity. The passage from Bergson seems to
suggest that it is matter that makes actual what is virtual. This seems to
stand i n contrast to Deleuze for whom differentiation comes about as the
result of the resistance life encounters i n matter but, first and foremost,
'from the internal explosive force that life carries in itself' (BCD p. 93;
p. 5 1 , compare B p. 97; p. 94). The indetermination of evoluti onary life,
therefore, i s a necessary and not an accidental feature of it. How do we
square this with Bergso n ' s stress on the enormous role played by
contingency within evolution? Strictly speaking, Bergson notes, it is
possible to conceive of the evolution of life taking place either 'in one
single individual by means of a series of transformations spread over
thousands of ages' or in any number of individuals succeeding each
other in a unilinear series. In both cases evolution would have taken
place in only the one dimension (0 p. 540; CE p. 53). But in actual terms
we know that evolution has involved millions of individuals spread
across di vergent lines. Is such d ivergency entirely contingent? The list of

246

Pli

1 1 (200 1 )

contingent features within evolution i s o f quite a scale in Bergson ' s

conception; they include the forms of life invented, the di ssociation of
the 'primordial tendency' into complementary tendencies that create
divergent lines that are rel ative to the obstacles that are encountered in a
given place and at a given time, and also the adaptations, arrests and set
backs that characterize it. Only two things are necessary for evolution to
take place, he suggests: (a) a gradual accumulation of energy and (b) an
elastic canalization of this energy in variable and indeterminable
directions. Moreover, although both of these conditions have been met
on our planet in a particular way it was 'not necessary that life should fix
its choice mainly upon the carbon of carbonic acid' (0 p. 7 1 1 ; CE p.
255). We can imagine l i fe evolving in terms of a different chemical
substratum. Now although the 'impulsion' would remain the same it is
highly conceivable that it would split up very differently to the way it
has on our planet which has specific physical conditions (0 p. 7 1 3 ; CE
p. 257).
ln the 1 956 essay Deleuze writes: 'Self-differentiation is the
movement of a virtuality which actualises itself' (BCD p. 93; p. 5 1 ) In
the 1 966 text differentiation is said to take place as an actualization
because it presupposes the unity and 'primordial totality' of a virtual that
is dissociated according to l ines of differentiation but which continues to
show 'its subsi sting unity and total ity in each l ine' (B p. 97; p. 95) . For
example, life becomes divided into plant and animal, the animal
becomes divided into instinct and intelligence, but each side of the
division 'carries the whole with it' (ibid).26 Deleuze l ikens this
persistence of the whole to an 'accompanying nebulosity ' , speaking of a
'halo' of instinct in i ntell igence, a 'nebula' of intelligence in instinct,
and a 'hint' of the animate in plants. Now, could we not recommend
eliminating these vague appeals to halos and nebulae and simply
recognize that what we have is an actual multiplicity of life which does
not require a virtuality in order to account for it? As B adiou asks, is
virtuality 'any better' than the fi nality it is designed to replace? (CB p.
8 l ; p. 53).
On the Bergsonian conception of creative evolution, however, life
cannot be adequately conceived outside of the terms of an i ndivisible
and uniquely historical continuity (one that more than allows for
divergence and heterogeneity). In addition, Deleuze's point about the
.

26

See Bergson 0 p. 585; CE p. I 06: 'There is no manifestation of life which does not
contain, in a rudimentary state - either l atent or potential - the essential characters
of the most other manifestations'.

Keith Ansell Pearson

247

Clan vital needs confronting : although evolution is li ttered with

accidents, abortions, and arrests it would be very strange to say that the
impulsion of life and towards life, supposing we are committed to such a
hypothesis, is itself something entirely accidental. This would indeed be
to sacrifice everything to exteriority, to an external causality. A s
Bergson himself notes, the impulsion would remain what i t is whatever
the conditions of l i fe. The problem is determining just what is and what
is not contingent in this conception of creati ve evolution. The impulsion
is not contingent and nei ther, it seems, is the dissociation; what is
contingent is the particular form this dissociation takes within an actual
hi storical evolution and the kind of divergence that takes place. Bergson
speaks of a ' primordial tendency' of l i fe dissociating itself into divergent
lines which, while divergent, also have to be seen as complementary
(simply because they are the di ssoci ated products of a simple virtual
whole). Moreover, if we think about the 'great scission' of life into the
two major kingdoms of vegetable and animal and the way in which the
two forms of l i fe have sought to utilize and transform energy, it is
possible to see, Bergson holds, that the evolution of life into these two
main forms is not simply the result of 'external intervention' but rather
can be seen as 'the effect of the duality of the tendency involved in the
original impetus and of the resistance opposed by matter to this impetus'
(0 p. 7 1 1 ; CE p. 254). The primordial tendency, then, has duality built
into it and from this scission many others have followed. Claims such as
this do not negate the need to assign a role to contingency but rather
clarify how we m ight more precisely configure it. I f the chemico
physical conditions of a planet were different to our own, and their
consi stency sufficient to generate life, we do not know in any a priori
terms what particular forms and lines of life would evolve; but what we
do know, according to Bergson, i s that the initial impulsion would be
one characterized by a duality, even a multiplicity, of tendencies (of
association, i ndividuation, etc.). The problem here, which is perhaps also
the problem of the virtual, is of speaking of an impulse of life in advance
of any actual evolution and which supposes a separation of the vital from
the physico-chemical. It i s also the same problem we face when we try to
conceive of tendencies, such as those of instinct and intelligence and as
manifested in forms of plant and animal l i fe, in advance of the actual
emergence of particular plants and animals (see 0 pp. 609- 1 0; CE pp.
l 35-6). Nevertheless, and as wi ll become clear, this is precisely what
Deleuze 's phi losophy of difference commits itself to: the difference of

248

Pli

1 1 (200 1 )

Being or of l i fe i s a t the beginning, and only a notion l ike the virtual can
make this clear.
Bergson himself is not unaware of the difficulties his thinking faces.
He insists that 'division ' is what characterizes life, it is not a mere
appearance. Matter plays the crucial role in effecting thi s division (0 p.
1 07 1 ; TSMR p. 1 1 4). Indeed, it is by studying the directionality of the
great lines of evolution, which run alongside paths that have reached a
dead end, that we are able lo formulate the conjecture and hypothesis of
a vital impetus that began by possessing the essential characteristics of
these main lines 'in a state of reciprocal implication ' , such as instinct
and intelligence ' which reach their culminating point al the extremities
of the two principal l ines of animal evolution ' ( 0 p. 1 072; TSMR p. 1 1 5 ).
Such tendencies are not to be abstractly combined into one but rather
taken as given 'in the beginning' and as interpenelrating aspects of the
'simple reality ' . The tendencies are given then not in an actual evolution
but onl y in a simple virtual. They cannot be given in any other way if we
are to take seriously the conception of a creative evolution, in which
'duration is invention or it is nothing at all' and in which hesitation and
indetermination are its positive features. Of any 'original tendency' we
might take and think about it is difficult lo speak of its actual content
simply because we cannot tell in advance what will issue from it (0 p.
1 228; TSMR p. 297). Bergson insi sts that it is impossible to forecast the
actual forms that will emerge 'by discontinuous leaps' and all along the
lines of evolution (ibid.). A more unequivocal affirmation of the
discontinuity entailed by actual ity and materi ality could not be fou nd.
Later in this book, his final text, Bergson will insist that the
materialization of tendencies only comes about through a process of
dichotomy. So although we can posit a 'undivided primitive tendency' it
is equally essential that such a tendency is not reified and viewed
independently of the actual divisions that have taken place: 'we will call
law of dichotomy that law which brings about a materialization, by a
mere splitting up, of tendencies which began by being two photographic
views, so to speak, of one and the same tendency' (0 p. 1 227; TSMR p.
296) . To neglect the different aspects of this ' image' of the vital impetus
is, Bergson argues, taking a stab at Schopenhauer, to be left with an
'empty concept' , like the 'will lo life ' , and presented with a 'barren
theory of metaphysics'. 27
27

In the aforementioned letter to Delattre of December 1 935 Bergson expounds at

some length on the differences between his notion of the Clan vital and both
Schopenhauer's 'will to life' and Samuel Butler's 'life-force'. See Melanges, pp.

Keith Ansell Pearson

249

One reason why Bergson is not a hylozoist is because he insists upon

maintaining a distinction between matter and life conceived as different
tendencies." Matter admits of rel axation, showing 'a certain elasticity ' ,
and on account of which its geometry, inertia, and determinism can
never be said to be complete.'" This co-implication of life and matter is
to be found in duration (Bergson insists that there is a 'becoming of
matter') (0 p. 726; CE p. 273). Duration is the most contracted degree of
matter, while matter is the most expanded degree of duration (ex-tension
is a tension interrupted). On thi s scheme there is no duality of
homogeneous quantity and heterogeneous quality but rather a
continuous movement from one to the other: 'quality is nothing other
than contracted quantity' (8 pp. 72- 3 ; p. 74). Matter is not geometrical
and isolable as a closed system solely as a result of our representation of
it; it has thi s feature itself as a tendency (which explains why Bergson
insists upon a double genesis of matter and intellect).
In the I 956 essay Deleuze argues that the virtuality of the vital
tendency of life 'exists in such a way that it realises itself in dissociating
itself' and that ' i t is forced to di ssociate itself in order to realise itself'
(BCD p. 93 ; p. 5 I ). Deleuze would seem to be argui ng, therefore, that
the di ssociation of the vital tendency into di vergent lines is not
something accidental. Perhaps this point enables us to address the
question of how the virtual can be said to 'd(ffe r from itself' (my
emphasis) when it becomes actualized. If we posit the relation between
the virtual and the actual as asymmetrical then how can the virtual differ
from itself when it differentiates and becomes actualized? The only
possible answer is this: because it is realizing itself and realizing itself in
becoming something other than itself in its very persistence or
endurance (it is this otherness from the beginning, not as number but as
potential). As a movement of actualization evolution i s an actualization
of the virtual, not the brute eruption into being of either preformed or
fu lly-formed actuals. But then we need to ask: what is the character of its
simplicity? Thi s is, in effect, the same kind of issue: self-differentiation
is a necessary characteristic of the s imple virtual; its simplicity consists

1 522-8, especially pp. 1 526-7. I discuss this letter in essay four (on Bergson and
Kant) in my forthcoming Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual.
28 Bergson makes his position clear in a latter to H. Hoffding of March 1 9 1 5, in
Melanges p. 1 1 48. Translations of this letter and the one to Delattre are forthcoming
in Henri Bergson: Key Writings (London: Athlone Press, 2001 ).
29 H. Bergson, 'La Conscience et la Vie', in Oeuvres, pp. 824-5; trans. in Mind
Energy (hereafter cited as M-E) (New York: Henry Holt, 1 920), pp. 1 7- 1 8.

250

Pli 1 1 (2001 )

in the fact thal i t i s operating on the level of inchoate and undetermined

tendencies and although actual species of life evolve in and out of
existence the tendencies they are implicated in persist and continue to be
expressed in new ways.
The virtual defines 'an absolutely positive mode of existence' (B p.
J OO; p. 55). Things differ and differ from themselves (in 'the first place'
and 'immediately ' ) on account of the positivity of this simple power.
This is because it is a simplicity of tendencies that split up and diverge
and that do not follow or conform to a logic of negation and
supercession in which the tendencies could be said to enjoy a
hierarchical development (relations of negation and supercession
between plant and animal, and between animal and man, or a single line
of development from the vegetal to the instinctual and the rational, for
example). When one term is negated by another we have, i n fact, 'only
the positive realisation of a virtuality which contained both terms at
once' (B p. 96; p . 53). We have seen that duration is defined as that
which differs from itself. Deleuze clarifies this by adding that if this i s
the case then 'that from which it differs is still duration ' . So duration
persists in its difference from itself since what differs from duration i s
still duration. Can the same b e said o f the virtual? Deleuze w i l l describe
the virtual in terms identical to duration as that which differs from itself.
Differentiation is the expression of this essential difference of the virtual
with respect to itself: 'What differen tiates itself i s first what di ffers with
itself, which is to say the virtual. Differen tiation is not the concept, but
the production of objects which find their reason in the concept' (B pp.
97-8 ; p. 54).

IV.
'To do philosophy' , Deleuze writes i n 1 956, 'is precisely to start with
difference ' (BCD p. 1 1 1 ; p. 62). This is a truly radical philosophy of
difference simply because difference is said to be there 'from the
beginning' as the very difference of Being. Moreover, in its most
primordial reality this difference entails the differences of beings. These
latter differences are internal ones because they are implicated in the
simple and positive virtual which remains in them while, at the same
time, they themselves are the givers of their own u nique differences.
It is clear that Deleuze, in addition to transforming Bergson into a
radical philosopher of difference, has ontologizcd his conception of

Keith Ansell Pearson

251

creative evol ution. This is evident in the way he seeks to establish a

'rigorous' link between Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution :
while the lines of differentiation are ' truly creative' the forms of
physical , vital, and psychical life they create amount to embodiments of
different ontological levels of the virtual (B p. 1 03 ; p. 1 00). As the 'pure
concept of difference' the virtual entail s the coexistence of all the
degrees, nuances, and levels of being. Matter and duration are the two
extreme levels of relaxation and contraction. This introduces us to the
idea of life being con strued in terms of a cone of virtual memory. 'The
Bergsonian schema which unites Creative Evolution and Matter and
Memory' , Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition, 'begins with the
account of a gigantic memory, a multiplicity formed by the virtual
coexistence of all the sections of the "cone", each section being the
repetition of all the others and being distinguished from them only by the
order of the rel ations and the distribution of singular points' (DR p. 274;
p. 2 1 2). If the virtual has its own peculiar reality, one that can be
'extended to the whole universe ' , this is because it has one that consists
in all the degrees of expansion and contraction that never cease to
coexist. What i s different and has to remain different are the differences
of level (singular points of contraction, etc.). The levels and degrees of
being 'belong to a single Time; they coexist in a Unity; they are enclosed
in a Simplicity; they form the potential parts of a Whole that is itself
virtual. They are the reality of this virtual. This was the sense of the
theory of virtual multiplicities that inspired Bergsonism from the start'
(B p. 1 03 ; p. 1 00).
We have to approach the real and its articulations, therefore, on two
principal levels at one and the same time. From the perspective of the
li nes of di fferentiation that diverge there is no longer any coexisting
whole but merely lines of successive and simultaneous actualization.
However, each one of these lines can be said to correspond to one of the
degrees that coexist in the virtual totality. Obviously, it is only on the
level of the virtual that the coexistence of levels and degrees can be
posited. Each line retain s something of the whole 'from a certain
perspecti ve, from a certain point of view ' . The role of creati vity in all of
this, however, should not be neglected: the l ines of differentiation do not
simply trace the levels or degrees of the virtual, 'reproducing them by
simple resembl ance' (B p. 1 05; p. 1 0 1 ).
While we can concur with Badiou that the virtual is the princi pal
name of Being in Deleuze's thi nking we also wish to stress the
importance of thinking this virtual i n neither emanationist nor eminentist

252

Pli 1 1 (2001 )

terms. Badiou is right to point out that the nominal pair of vi rtual and
actual 'exhausts the deployment of univocal Being' ( CB p. 65; p. 43).
Two names are req uired in order to 'test that the ontological univocity
designated by the pair proceeds from a single one of these names ' . But
on his reading the actual is reduced to bei n g nothing more than the
'function of its virtuality' (ibid. ) . Badiou has successfully drawn our
attention to the importance of a renewed thinking of the One in Deleuze;
what he neglects, however, is the unequivocal commitment to pluralism.
It is not that Badiou simply downplays this commitment to pluralism in
Deleuze; it is rather that he fails to comprehend it and fails precisely
because of the way i n which he has configured the virtual in Deleuze' s
thinking and transformed it into a power o f eminence (the pluralism
Deleuze seeks can only be incoherentl y established on the basis of a
univocity of the actual). We agree with Badiou : Deleuze is a thinker of
the One. But he is also a pluralist and an immanently qualified one.
There are good reasons for positively hesitating in describing Deleuze as
a Platonist of the virtual.

Pli 1 1 (2001 ) , 253-269.

Socraticorum Maximus: Simon the Shoemaker

and the Problem of Socrates

JOHN SELLA RS

Xenophon: Greet Simon the shoemaker and praise him, because

he continues to devote himself to the teachings of Socrates and

uses neither his poverty nor his trade as a pretext for not doing
philosophy.
Aristippus: Simon the shoemaker [. . ] someone who is greater in
.

wisdom than anyone ever was or will be. '

The name 'Si mon the shoemaker' is not one immediately familiar to
specialists in ancient philosophy, let alone to students of philosophy in
general .' This may well be due, in part, to the tendency of many scholars
* My title is a variation upon Aulus Gellius's description of Epictetus as S1oicorum
maximus, the greatest of the Stoics (Noctes Atticoe 1 .2.6).
* * Abbreviations: CAG = Commenlaria in Aris101elem Graeca, 23 vols & 3 suppl.
(Berlin: Reimer, 1 882- 1 909); OCD = Oxford Classical Dictionary; OCT Oxford
Classical Texts; SSR = Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae, ed. G. Giannantoni, 4 vols
(Naples: Bibliopolis, 1 990); SVF = Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenla, ed. H. von Arnim,
4 vols (Leipzig: Teubner, 1 903-24).
1 Both of these passages are quoted in full in the Appendix.
2 The only ex tended treatment in English is R. F. Hock, 'Simon the Shoemaker as an
Ideal Cynic ' , Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 17 ( 1 976), 4 1 -53. This study is
exemplary but little known; C. H. Kahn, for instance, is unaware of its existence
when he discusses Simon in Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use
of a Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 996). R. S.
Brumbaugh's 'Simon and Socrates' , Ancient Philosophy 1 1 ( 1 99 1 ), 1 5 1 -52, although
useful, is only a shon notice primarily concerned with the recent archaeological
discoveries and does not mention Hock either. Note also R. Goulet, 'Trois
=

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

254

both past and present to den y his historical real ity al together.' Ancient
sources refer to a Simon who, it is said, was an associate of Socrates and
who ran a shoe shop on the edge of the Athenian Agora where Socrates
used to come to engage in philosophical discussions with Simon while
he worked." However, the fact that neither Plato nor Xenophon mention
Simon has often been ci ted as an argument against his very existence.'
Moreover, it is reported that the Socratic phi losopher Phaedo wrote a
dialogue entitled Simon," and thus it has been suggested that the l ater
'Simon legend' derived ultimately from a literary c haracter created by
Phaedo.'
The situation has somewhat changed since the discovery of the
remains of a shop near the Tholos on the south-west edge of the Agora,
the floor scattered with hob-nails, containing a base from a pot with
'Simon's ' (LIMONO}:) inscribed upon il.8 Archaeologists commenting
Cordonniers Philosophes ', in M . Joyal, ed., Studies in Plato and the Platonic
Tradition: Essays Presented to John Whillaker (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1 997), pp. l l 925; H. Hobein, 'Li.rov (no. 6)', Paulys Realencyclopiidie, Band III A l ( 1 927), cols
1 63-73; and a handful of earlier works (up to 1 8 1 4) li sted in A. Patzer, Bibliographia
Socratica (Freiburg & Munich: Alber, 1 985), nos 327, 1 95 1 - 1 953.
' See e.g. E. Zeller, Socrates and the Socratic Schools, trans. 0. J. Reichel (London:
Longmans, Green, & Co., 1 868), p. 2 1 0: "He is probably altogether an imaginary
person"; W. D. Ross in OCD (2nd edn 1 970): "His very existence as a real personage
is not quite ce11ain"; Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, p. JO n. l 8: "I can see no
good reason to believe in his historical reality".
4 All of the ancient testimonia are now gathered together in SSR VI B 87-93 (although
see the further references in Goulet, 'Trois Cordonniers Philosophes '). I supply
translations in the Appendix.
5 See e.g. Zeller, Socrates and the Socratic Schools, p. 2 1 0 n. 5, and Ross in OCD
(2nd edn 1 970).
6 See Diogenes Laertius 2. 1 05 and Suda s. v. <t>ai.&rov (both SSR Ill A 8). Note also the
reference to Phaedo's portrait of Simon in Socraticorum Epistulae 1 3 . l ( SSR IV A
224 VI B 92, in the Appendix).
7 See e.g. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, p. I O, following U. von
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, 'Phaidon von Elis', Hermes 14 ( 1 879), 1 87-93; repr. in
his Kleine Schriften IlJ (Berlin: Akademie, l 969), pp. 4 l -48.
8 See D. B. Thompson, 'The House of Simon the Shoemaker', Archaeology I 3
(I 960), 234-240; H. A. Thompson & R. E. Wycherley, The Agora of Athens: The
History, Shape, and Uses of an Ancient City Center, 'The Athenian Agora: Results of
Excavations Conducted by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens'
Volume XIV (Princeton: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1 972), pp.
1 73-74 & pl. 88; J. M. Camp, The Athenian Agora: Exca vations in the Heart of
Classical Athens (London: Thames and Hudson, 1 986; rev. edn 1 992), pp. 145-47.
Note also the 'Excavations of the Athenian Agora Picture Books', esp. no. 1 2 , D. B.
=

John Sellars

255

upon this discovery have been keen to identify its owner with the Simon
mentioned in the li terary sources as a companion of Socrates,9 but
scholars primarily concerned with ancient philosophy have tended to
remain doubtful. ' 0
Simon 's reputation relies principally upon the claim made by
Diogenes Laertius that he was the first to write ' Socratic dialogues'
(:EcoKpanKo1 A.6yot)." Diogenes reports that these were also known as
'shoemaker's dialogues' (CTKUttK6t A.6yot) or simply 'shoemaker' s'
(CTK'lYrtKous) . " These, Diogenes says, were more or less notes of actual
Thompson, An Ancient Shopping Center: The Athenian Agora (Princeton: American
School of Classical Studies in Athens, rev. edn 1 993), and no. 1 7, M. L. Lang,
Socrates in the Agora (Princeton: American School of Classical Studies in Athens,
1 978).
' See the works listed in the previous note. In the light of these finds note also S.
Hornblower's revision of Ross's assessment in OCD (3rd edn 1 996): "He is never
mentioned by Plato or Xenophon, but his existence has now been confirmed by the
discovery of [ . . . ] Simon's cobbler shop". As for the silence of Plato and Xenophon,
Thompson, 'The House of Simon the Shoemaker', pp. 239-40, offers an explanation.
She dates the shoemaking activity in the Athenian workshop to c. 450-4 1 0 BC and
Simon's cup to c. 450-425 BC, suggesting c. 420-4 1 5 BC as the probable time of
Simon's death. While Socrates' pupils who knew Simon - Antisthenes, Alcibiades,
and Phaedrus - were all born c. 450 BC, Plato and Xenophon were both not born
until c. 430. If Simon died around 420 then it is unlikely that either Plato or
Xenophon would have known him personally.
10
See e.g. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, p. 1 0, and D. Clay, 'The Origins of
the Socratic Dialogue', in P. A. Vander Waerdt, ed., The Socratic Movement (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1 994), pp. 23-47, who, although apparently convinced in the
body of his text, writes in a note that the connection between these finds and the
Si mon associated with Socrates is "made at best out of a gossamer web of hope" (p.
32). A more positive assessment is made by Brumbaugh, 'Simon and Socrates' .
11
See Diogenes Laertius 2. 1 23 (= SSR VI B 87, in the Appendix). Kahn doubts the
historical reality of Simon, p. 1 0, and suggests an otherwise unknown Alexamenos of
Teos as the creator of the Socratic dialogue, p. I , citing a fragment from Aristotle's
De Poe/is (Athenaeus 505c fr. 72 Rose 3 in Ross, Fragmenta Selecta (OCT), p. 69;
see also Diogenes Laertius 3.48). However this passage does not say that Alexamenos
invented the Socratic dialogue but simply that he wrote imitative dialogues before the
Socratic dialogues and before Plato.
12
See Diogenes Laertius 2. 1 22-23 ( = SSR VI B 87, in the Appendix), simply
'crKU'tllCO' , and 2. 105 (= SSR ID A 8), 'crK U'tlKouc; Myouc;' (attributed to
Aeschines and, implicitly, Phaedo). In his Loeb edition Hicks translates crKU'tlKouc; as
'leathern' while Brumbaugh, 'Simon and Socrates' , p. 1 5 1 , offers 'the leather
dialogues' . Clay, 'The Origins of the Socratic Dialogue', p. 32, suggests 'Cobbler's
Talk' or 'Conversations at the Cobbler's Shop'. However, I suggest that simply
'shoemaker's dialogues' might be more appropriate,
=

256

Pli

1 1 (200 1 )

conversations with Socrates rather than literary compositions. A total of

thirty-three are named and it is reported that they all fitted into a single
volume or roll (13tl3A.i.ov). It has been noted that for this to be possible
each one would have been equivalent to just under the length of two
Stephanus pages of Plato, making each one shorter than one of the
typical sections of the Socratic Memorabilia of Xenophon ." As with
Simon hi mself, the reality of these lost works has also been doubted,'
but the lack of any order in Diogenes' list and the repetition of some
titles points against it being a later fabrication. '-'
Xenophon reports that because youths were not allowed to enter the
Agora they used to gather in workshops surrounding the Agora and
Socrates used to frequent these shops in order to converse with them. "'
Shops such as Simon 's appear to have functioned as informal classrooms
for Socrates. Euthydemus, Phaedrus, and Alcibiades are all named by the
ancient sources as regular visitors." It is also tempting to speculate that
Socrates enjoyed the company of Simon because, as a craftsman
(tEXVitric;), he was one of the few individuals that Socrates could find
who possessed some form of secure knowledge and expertise (tEXVlJ).
Simon 's mastery of the art of shoemaking would have been just the sort
of expertise that, in the Apology, Socrates held up as the onl y example of
genuine knowledge that he could find ." Thus Simon would have been a
living example of a form of knowledge an alogous to the form of

13 See Brumbaugh, 'Simon and Socrates ' , pp. 1 5 1 -52.

14 See e.g. Zeller, Socrates and the Socratic Schools, p. 2 1 0 n. 5, and G. Grote, Plato,

and the Other Companions of Sokrates, 3 vols (London: Murray, 2nd edn 1 867), vol.
3, p. 470, n. 'k'.
1 5 See again Brumbaugh, 'Simon and Socrates', pp. 1 5 1 -52.
'" See Xenophon Memorabilia 4.2. 1 : "So first of all, realising that because of his
youth Euthydemus did not yet go into the Agora if he wanted to conduct any
business, but took up his position in a saddler's shop close by, Socrates went to the
shop himself with some of his friends" {trans. Tredennick). For 'saddler's shop'
CiivtonotEtov) one might read 'any shop engaged in leather working', from which it is
only short step to 'shoemaker's workshop'. Indeed, Clay, p. 32, suggests this is a
reference to a cobbler's shop. Lang thinks it "most probable" that this is a reference to
Simon. Note also Memorabilia 3 . 1 0. l where Socrates is presented in philosophical
discussion in a painter's workshop.
17 All three are named in Socraticorum Epistulae 1 3 . I (= SSR IV A 224, in the
Appendix). For Euthydemus see Xenophon in the previous note and for Alcibiades
and shoemakers see Aelian Varia Historia 2. 1 (= SSR 1 C 33).
18
See Plato Apologia 22c-e.

John

Sellars

257

knowledge that he h imself was searching for, namely the art (tEXVlJ) of
taking care of one ' s soul (E1tt EA.Efoem 't'Tlt; \j/UXfic;).19
These few remarks constitute probably all that it is possible to say
about Simon. He is an interesting and sadly neglected associate of
Socrates but does not appear to be of any philosophical significance
himself. However, for a number of later philosophers the name 'Simon
the shoemaker' came to be associated with a certain way of life, a
specifical l y philosophical way of life. For these later philosophers,
Simon ' s way of life was considered to be exemplary of what it meant to
be a follower of Socrates."' By examining the ancient traditions
surrounding Simon, then, i t might be possible to learn something about
the nature of Socrates' philosophical project. What follows is offered as
a contribution to the project of uncovering the philosophy of the
historical Socrates , or at least how that philosophy was understood by
some of his immediate followers, in particular the Cynics." In the next
section I shall consider Simon 's role as a Cynic role model. Then, in the
following section, I shall suggest how this Cynic appropriation of Simon
might contribute to the debate surrounding what has come to be known
as 'the problem of Socrates'."

19 See ibid. 30a-b. In the Platonic dialogues the example of shoemaker (crKu1016rn;)
often appears as a example of an expert (u:xv\'tric;); see e.g. Protagoras 3 I 9d,
Gorgias 447d, Republic 333a, 397e, 443c, Theaetetus 1 46d; note also Xenophon
Memorabilia 4.2.22. That Socrates constantly used the example of a shoemaker is
stated explicitly by Callicles in Gorgias 49 1 a and Alcibiades in Symposium 22 le.
20
See for example the letter attributed to Xenophon in the Socraticorum Epistulae
( 1 8.2 = SSR VI B 9 1 , in the Appendix).
2 1 The fragments of the Cynics are also collected together in SSR, Part V. No
anthology in English exists but note the collection translated into French by L.
Paquet, Les Cyniques grecs: Fragments et temoignages, Choix, Traduction,
Introduction et Notes, A vant-propos par Marie-Odile Goulet-Caze (Paris: Le Livre de
Poche, 1 992). For a general survey of the Cynics see D. R. Dudley, A History of
Cynicism: From Diogenes to the 6th Century AD (London: Methuen, 1 937; repr.
Bristol Classical Press, 1 998). The most important recent work in English can be
found in R. B. Branham & M.-0. Goulet-Caze, eds, The Cynics: The Cynic
Movement in Antiquity and its Legacy (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1 996).
22 This is simply the problem of trying to recover the historical Socrates from the
various ancient sources and, in particular, the problem of distinguishing between
Socratic and Platonic ideas as they are expressed by Plato's literary character
.
'Socrates'. For a brief overview and further references see my 'The Problem of
Socrates', Pli 10 {2000), 267-275.

258

Pli 1 1

(2001 )

1 . Simon the Cynic Role Model

In a text entitled That the Philosopher Ought to Converse with Rulers
Plutarch follows the example of Plato and suggests that by associating
with men of power a philosopher may be able to influence legislation
and the admini stration of justice. By doi ng this, he suggests, it will be
possible for philosophy to hav e a direct impact upon the world.
However, Plutarch reports that many contemporary philosophers would
reject such a course of action. Instead he suggests that a more common
thought in the minds of his philosophical contemporaries is the desire to
be transformed into Simon the shoemaker; 'Let me become Simon the
shoemaker so that I might converse with philosophers such as
Socrates' ."
Simon ' s status as an exemplar of a l i fe away from the world of
poli tics can also be seen i n an anecdote preserved by Diogenes Laertius
in which he i s said to have rejected an offer of money from Pericles who
offered Simon a position as his 'court philosopher' . Instead Simon i s
said to have preferred to hold o n t o h i s i ndependence and freedom of
"
speech (napp11aia). ln thi s Simon may be seen to follow the example
of Socrates who is reported to have rejected similar offers from a number
of rulers."
Both Socrates and Simon, then, rejected l i fe at court in favour of the
cobbler' s workshop. Socrates was not the only philosopher to spend h i s
days in conversation with a shoemaker. I nspired by his example, a
number of later philosophers, especially Cynics, started a tradition of
associating with shoemakers.26 Of parti cular importance here is a passage
deri ving from the Stoic Zeno' s collection of anecdotes about his Cynic
teacher Crates.27 I quote the passage in ful l:
See Plutarch Maxime cum Principibus Philosopho esse Disserendum 776b ( SSR
V I B 90). This is a paraphrase; the entire passage is translated i n the Appendix.
24 Diogenes Laerti us 2 . 1 23 (= SSR VI B 87, in the Appendix).
25 See e.g. Diogenes Laertius 2.25 ( SSR I D I ).
6
2 For a detailed account see Hock, 'Simon the Shoemaker as an Ideal Cyni c ' , pp. 4648. Beyond the example of Crates and Philiscus (to be discussed shortl y), another
pairing of Cynic phil osopher and shoemaker can be found in Lucian's Cataplus ('The
Downward Journey'), 14 onwards. Hock presents this as evidence for the existence
of an establi shed literary convention of joining Cynics and shoemakers.
27 Zeno is said to have produced a collection of anecdotes (XpE'im) about Crates; see
Diogenes Laertius 6.91 (= SVF 1 . 272 SSR V H 40).
23

John Sellars

259

Zeno said that Crates was s1ttmg in a shoemaker's shop and

reading aloud Aristotle ' s Protrepticus which he had written for
Themison, the Cyprian king. In it he said that no one had more
advantages (aya0a) for being a ph ilosopher, for he had great
wealth so that he could spend money on this activity and sti ll have
his repuatation (Msav) i ntact. And Zeno said that while Crates
was reading, the shoemaker was attentive but all the while kept on
with his stitching. And Crates said, "I t seems to me, Philiscus, that
I should write a Protrepticus for you, since I see that you have
more advantages for being a philosopher than the man for whom
28
Aristotle wrote".
Three points need to be noted here. The first is that, following the
example of Socrates, the Cynic Crates spent his time engaged in
philosophical conversations in a cobbler' s workshop. The second i s the
reference to Aristotle ' s Protrepticus which informs us that Aristotle
thought that the king Themison was in an ideal position to engage in
philosophy and that Aristotle sought lo befriend the king by dedicating
this work to him. The third, and perhaps most important, point is that
Crates and his shoemaker fri end Phili scus were discussing this text by
Aristotle with reference to the question concerning the ideal conditions
in which one might pursue philosophy.
The contrast between the behaviour of Crates and the advice of
Aristotle is striking. While Aristotle holds up the life of the king as ideal
for the practice of phi losophy and consequently associates with such
i ndividuals, Crates associates with a humble shoemaker, whom he, i n
turn, m a y well have thought had a w a y o f life ideal for pursuing

28 Teles apud Stobaeus An1hologium 4.32 . 2 1 (

fr. IV B, in 0. Hense, Teletis
Reliquiae (Tiibingen: Mohr, 2nd edn 1 909), p. 46.6- 1 4). Text and translation in E. N.
O'Neil, Teles: The Cynic Teacher (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1 977), pp. 48-5 1 . 1
follow O'Neil's translation, slightly modified. This anecdote is reported by Zeno and
is thus SVF I .273. It contains an anecdote about Crates and is thus SSR V H 42. It
3
also includes a reference to Aristotle's Prolreplicus and is thus Aristotle fr. 50 Rose
in Ross, Fragmen/a Selecta (OCT), pp. 26-27. It is cited and transl ated by Dudley, A
History of Cynicism, p. 45 (but incorreclly referenced) and Hock, 'Simon the
Shoemaker as an Ideal Cynic' , p. 47. It is reported in the context of a discussion about
w hether phil osophers should associate with rulers. This is similar to that of Plutarch's
reference to Simon, but Teles and Plutarch stand on opposing sides of the debate.
=

260

Pli 1 1

(200 1 )

ph ilosoph y." The precedents are obvious: Aristotle follows the example
of Plato (with Dionysius) while Crates follows the example of Socrates
(with Simon). While Aristotle courts men of power, Socrates, Simon,
and Crates rej ect such a l ife, preferring instead to spend their time in
private, and thus uncensored, conversation. This clearly reflects the
contrasting attitudes towards external goods held by Aristotle and the
Cynics. For Aristotle the successful philosophical life requires not just
excellence (apE'tij) but also certai n external goods such as wealth and
social standing. The Cynics, on the other hand, affirm that excellence
(apE'ti]) is itself enough to ensure a good life (d:Jomovia), a life that
for them requires nothing more than the strength of a Socrates
"'
(L.wKpmtKf\<; icrxuo<;).
This debate concerning with whom the philosopher should associate
is developed in a series of letters that purport to be by a number of the
Socratic philosophers, the Socraticorum Epistulae. 3' In a correspondence
between Antisthenes and Aristippus the question of whether the
philosopher should associate with rulers is vigorously debated."
M oreover, Simon himself appears in these letters, first as a topic of
discussion, and later as a parti cipant in the correspondence,
exemplifying the Cynic position argued for by Antisthenes. Anti sthenes
opens the debate by attacking Aristippus for courting the ruler
Dionysius:
It is not right for a phi losopher to associate with tyrants and to
devote himself to Sicil ian tables. Rather, he should live in his own
country and strive for self-sufficiency (au'tapKcov).'3

29 For Aristotle see A.-H. Chroust, 'What Prompted Aristotle to Address the
Protrepticus to Themison?', Hermes 94 ( 1 966), 202-07. Hock, 'Simon the Shoemaker
as an Ideal Cynic', p. 47, suggests that Crates' decision to associate with a shoemaker
was a conscious act of protest against Aristotle's behaviour. More likely is that it was
conscious emulation of Socrates.
30 See Diogenes Laertius 6. 1 1 (= SSR V A 1 34), a phrase attributed to Antisthenes.
31 These letters are generally agreed to be spurious. Text and translation in A. J .
Malherbe, The Cynic Epistles: A S1udy Edition (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1 977).
Translations from the letters follow those in this edition (nos 1 -25 are by S. Stowers),
although occasionally modified.
32 See esp. Socraticorum Epistulae 8 & 9. Antisthenes and Aristippus were both
companions of Socrates. The former is often presented as a link between Socrates and
the Cynics; the latter was the founder of the Cyrenaic school .
33 Socraticorum Epistulae 8 (= SSR V A 206).

John Sellars

26 1

A s the cmrespondence continues it becomes clear that Antisthenes'

model for the life of self-sufficiency (a1:mxpKE1a) is Simon. The reply
from Aristippus, supposedly written from the court of Dionysius, is
scathing and ironic. He opens the letter by admitting his 'wretchedness ' :
How could w e not be wretched (KaKo8atovEl:v) since we live
with a tyrant, and daily eat and drink extravagantly, and are
anointed with one of the sweetest-smelling perfumes, and drag
about Jong Tarentine cloaks? And no one will free me from this
cruelty (w<'rt11't0<;) of Dionysius [ . . . ]. Now, moreover, the evil
(KaKov) has become more terrible si nce he has given me three
Sicil ian women of exquisite beauty and a large amount of
money.''
There appears to be l ittle comparison between the unwashed and
barefoot life of Antisthenes and that enjoyed by Aristippus. As
Aristippus puts it a little later in the same letter, Antisthenes is welcome
to his "same filthy cloak summer and winter, as is fi tting for a free man
living democratically in Athens".35 Aristippus admits that he has "no
desire to suffer hunger or cold, or to be held in ill repute or to grow a
long beard".36 However, as Hock notes, Aristippus may well have traded
his freedom of speech (napp11cria) for his food and wine, beautiful
women and money." For Antisthenes, such a trade would have been
unacceptable.
As the debate continues Simon himself is drawn into the
correspondence. It is immediately clear which side of the debate he
supports, sayi ng in a letter to Aristippus that he is happy to cut leather
straps "for admonishing foolish men who think that they are living
according to the teaching of Socrates when they are living i n great
luxury".38 In his reply to Simon, Aristippus draws attention to the irony
of the situation in which the barefooted Antisthenes who exhorts the
youth to follow his simple shoeless way of life spends his time in the

34

Socraticorum Epistulae 9 . 1 (= SSR JV A 222).

Ibid. 9 .2.
36 Ibid. 9 .3.
3 7 See Hock, 'Simon the Shoemaker as an Ideal Cynic', pp. 45-46, who surveys a
number of passages in Diogenes Laertius in which philosophers are shown in conflict
with rulers due to their outspokenness (itappl]crla), often endangering their lives.
38 Socraticorum Epistulae 12 ( = SSR Ill A l 6, full text in the Appendix).
35

262

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

company of a shoemaker.'0 In this Antisthenes was, of course, fol lowing

the example of Socrates himself.4
For some unknown reason, then, there developed a tradition
involving shoeless Cynic philosophers spending their time in the
company of shoemakers. Yet perhaps this is not as odd as it might at first
appear. Whether it was between Socrates and Simon or Crates and
Philiscus, one can see that such a relationship would have been one free
from any ul terior motive, existing purely for the mutual benefit of
philosophical discussion. Socrates, well known for his barefoot lifestyle,
would have at last found someone to talk with in the environs of the
Agora who was not intent upon selling him anything.

2. Simon the Ideal Socratic

So far I have surveyed the ancient sources for Simon and outlined his
role in what appears to have been a primarily Cynic debate concerning
whether philosophers should associate with rulers.4' As we have seen,
their response to this question was an emphatic 'no'; instead
philosophers should associate with shoemakers.
What I take to be the philosophical sign ificance of Simon and his
later role as a Cynic role model is his significance for our understan ding
of the philosophy of Socrates. For the Cynics, the figure of Simon
became so important because they held him to be the true heir to
Socrates.42 Simon ' s l ife of self-sufficiency (cdn:apKna) and freedom of
speech (napp11aia) embodied what the Cynics took to be the core
elements of Socrates' philosophical way of life. These two notions self-sufficiency (airrapx:na) and freedom of speech (nappl]aia)
are
both fairly common Cynic ideas and both are key lo understanding the
significance later attached to Simon.
-

39

See Socraticorum Epistulae 13 .2 (= SSR IV A 224, full text in the Appendix).

See e.g. Plato Phaedrus 229a, Symposium 1 74a. In Aelian Varia Historia 4. 1 1 (=
SSR V B 256) Diogenes the Cynic is reported to have commented that Socrates
occasionally wore sandals. It is unclear whether this is to be taken as a criticism of
creeping decadence or a justification for occasional indulgence.
4 1 To a certain extent I have thus far simply re-traced the ground already covered by
Hock. I make no apology for this given the general lack of familiarity with either
Simon or Hock's study. In the following sections I go beyond his account of Simon as
an ideal Cynic by considering the significance of this for the problem of Socrates.
42 See e.g. Socraticorum Epistulae 1 8.2 (= SSR VI B 9 1 , in the Appendix).
40

John Sellars

263

Central to the Cynic notion of self-sufficiency (afrrapKEta) is the

rejection of dependence upon ex ternal goods and circumstances." For
the Cynics, all that is essential to l ive well is an excellent mental state
(apEti]). In order to overcome such dependence they engaged in a form
of phi losophical training or ascesis (a<JKT]<n<;)," but this was in no way
'ascetic' in the later, primari l y Christian, sense of the word." Instead it
was directed towards the cultivation of well-being or happiness
(Eilomovi.a). Thus when Diogenes engaged in his practice of hugging
statues in the middle of winter, his aim was to train himself to become
indifferent to the cold.4 With such indi fference achieved, he would no
longer have needed to concern himself with extra clothing, heating, and
all of the other various expenses winter can bring. Of course, total self
sufficiency is impossible so Cynic ailt6:pKEta became the task of
reducing one's needs to a bare minimum. As we have already seen in the
Socraticorum Epistulae, Simon is said to have exhibited this Cynic trait,
reducing his material needs to a mini mum and providing for those left by
way of his shoemaking. The Cynics took Simon's ailt6:pKEta to be
something that he had learned from Socrates and it is something
attributed to Socrates by Xenophon."
The ideal of holding onto one ' s freedom of speech, frankness, or
outspokenness (7tappricri.a) was another key Cynic idea." It is perhaps
most clearly illustrated in those anecdotes that bring together Diogenes
the Cynic and Alexander the Great. When asked by the then ruler of the
known world what he would like above all else, Diogenes replied 'for
you to get out of my light' .49 As we have already noted, in Diogenes
43

See e.g. Diogenes Laertius 6. 1 1 , 6.78. For further discussion see A. N. M. Rich,
'The Cynic Conception of avi:apKEta' , Mnemosyne 4th series 9 ( 1 956), 23-29, and
M.-0. Goulet-Caze, L 'ascese cynique: Un commentaire de Dia gene Laerce VJ 70- 71,
Histoire des doctrines de I' Antiquite classique 10 (Paris: Vrin, 1986), pp. 38-40. Note
also the text by Teles entitled On Self-Sufficiency (OEpt ffUtapKEirn;) in Hense,
Teletis Reliquiae, pp. 5-20, and O'Neil, Teles, pp. 6- 1 9.
44 For a thorough treatment of Cynic acrKT)at<; see Goulet-Caze, L 'ascese cynique.
45 Pace Rich, 'The Cynic Conception of aui:apKEta', p. 23, who characterises Cynic
avi:apKEta as "a stern renunciation of the world".
46 See Diogenes Laertius 6.23 ( SSR V B 1 74).
47 See e.g. Xenophon Memorabilia 1 .2. 14, 1 .3.5-8, 4.7. 1 .
48 This topic fascinated Foucault i n his final lectures on Socrates and the Cynics. See
T. Flynn, 'Foucault as Parrhesiast: His Last Lecture Course at the College de France',
in J. Bern auer & D. Rasmussen, eds, The Final Foucault (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1 988), pp. 1 02- 1 1 8.
49 See e.g. Diogenes Laertius 6.38 ( SSR V B 33); with further references to
Diogenes and Alexander in SSR V B 3 1 -49.
=

264

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

Laertius's biography Simon is reported t o have rejected Pericles ' offer of

a position as a court phi losopher by saying that he would not accept
money if it meant he had to give up his freedom of speech (napp11aia)."1
These two Cynic ideals are of course closely inter-connected with one
another. Only those who have achieved self-sufficiency (auiapKna)
can guarantee their freedom of speech (napp11aia), for only those who
are not dependent upon others for their material needs are free to offend
and abuse whomsoever they please. Thus Aristippus - as he is portrayed
in the Socraticorum Epistulae at least - may well have been forced by
the circumstances in which he found himsel f to remain silent in front of
Dionysius precisely because he was dependent upon him for his
luxurious l i festyle.

3. Concluding Remarks
As we have seen, the Cynics held Simon ' s quiet i ndependent life of
making shoes and engaging in private conversation with unwashed and
barefoot philosophers to be an ideal way of life. They attributed to
Simon two qualities that they thought marked out the ideal philosopher,
namely self-suffi ciency (m'.>iapKEta) and freedom of speech
(napp11cria). At the same time they held Simon to be the most authentic
fol lower of Socrates. The figure of Simon is important for the Cynics,
then, because he forms a bridge between their own philosophy and that
of Socrates. If S imon is the most authentic Socratic and his life is
marked by the qualities of self-sufficiency (auiapnta) and freedom of
speech (napp11aia), then these qualities may well have marked the l i fe
of Socrates h imself. This is the implicit argument in the Cynic literary
tradition that grew up around the name of Simon. I n short, the S i mon
tradition attempts to draw one towards the conclusion that it was in fact
Socrates who was 'the first dog'.'
I t is of course readily acknowledged that the Cynics were followers
of Socrates but this is often qualified by drawing attention to the ways i n
which they pushed Socrates' sober and sensible philosophy to an
extreme." Plato's characterisation of Diogenes as a ' Socrates gone mad '
Diogenes Laertius 2. 1 23 (= SSR VI B 87, in the Appendix).
51 I refer to Goulet-Caze's 'Who Was the First Dog? ', in Branham
50

& Goulet-Caze,
eds, The Cynics, pp. 4 1 4- 1 5, which deals the question of who should be credited as
the founder of the Cynic movement.
52 See e.g. Dudley, A History of Cyncism, p. 27.

John Sellars

265

(LroK:pa1ris m v6vos) could well still serve as a summary of the

prevailing consensu s.'' What the trad ition surrounding Simon proposes
is that the specifically Cynic qual ities of self-sufficiency (au1apnw)
and freedom of speech (rcappricria) were not extreme exaggerations of
Socrates' phil osophy but rather faithful expressions of it.'' Th is question
concerning who has the greatest claim to be called the true heir of
Socrates is one of the expl icit themes of the Socraticorum Epistulae,
with Aristippus claiming that he - and not Anti sthenes - is the genuine
steward of the Socratic teachings (A6yrov t':: mEATJ'l:TJV 1&v
LroK:panic&v)." It is within this context that Simon is brought into the
correspondence as a Cynic counter example. It is clear, then, that the
Cynic trad ition surrounding Simon was directly connected with what has
come to be known as ' the problem of S ocrates' .
In order to test the validity of thi s Cynic claim that Simon was the
most orthodox follower of Socrates it would be necessary to consider all
of the surviving sources for Socrates. Although it is not possible to do
this here we can at least note a couple of Socratic testimonia. In
Xenophon 's Memorabilia, for example, one can find a description of
Socrates' way of life that clearly displays the quality of self-sufficiency
(au1apK:Eta).'6 Here Socrates is presented as someone who has reduced
his needs to a minimum so that he needs little to satisfy them and as
someone who ate and drank only according to his needs, both common
Cynic characteristics. The quality of freedom of speech or frankness
(rcappricri.a) is also credited to Socrates in Plato's Laches and can be
seen throughout Socrates' defence speech in Plato's Apology. " Although
it would, of course, be necessary to consider a large number of texts in
some detail, hopefully one can at least see that the ancient trad ition
surrounding Simon the shoemaker forms an interesting yet neglected
strand in the ancient sources for the philosophy of Socrates.

51

See Diogenes Laertius 6.54; also Aelian Varia Historia 1 4.33 (both SSR V B 59).
For further discussion of the Socratic-Cynic genealogy see in particular two studies
by A. A. Long: 'The Socratic Tradition: Diogenes, Crates, and Hellenistic Ethics', in
Branham & Goulet-Caze, eds, The Cynics, pp. 28-46, and 'Socrates in Hellenistic
Philosophy', Classical Quarterly 38 ( 1 988), I SO-7 I . Note also the same author's
contribution to K. Algra et al., eds, The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 999), entitled 'The Socratic Legacy' .
55 Socraticorum Epistulae 9 . 1 ( SSR IV A 222).
56 See Xenophon Memorabilia 1 .3.5-8; note also the explicit references to his
ain:apKEta at 1 .2 . 1 4 and 4.7. 1 .
57 See Plato Laches l 88e- l 89a.
54

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

266

Appendix: Ancient Sources Relati ng t o Simon

The ancient evidence for Si mon can now be found collected together in
SSR VI B 87-93." For the sake of convenience here are translati ns of all
of these 1es1imo11 ia .
87. Diogenes Laertius 2 . 1 22-24
[2. 1 22] Simon the Athenian was a shoemaker:" When Socrates came to
his workshop and began lo converse, he used to make notes of all that he
could remember. And this is why people apply the term ' shoemaker's' to
his dialogues.''" There are thirty-three which circulate in one volume:"'
On the Gods
On the Good
On the Beautiful
What is the Beautiful
On the Just; I and II
On Virtue, that it cannot be taught
5s

Further references t o Simon not in SSR can be found in a number of the Aristotelian

commentators. Hock notes one such reference in Ammonius In De lnterpretatio11e

(Busse, p. 205.4-7, CA G 4.5) which Goulet, 'Trois Cordonniers Philosophes' , p. 1 23
n. 1 5, supplements with others in Ano11ymi in Soph i.Hims Elenchos (Hayduck, p.
1 1 . 1 4- 1 7 ,

CAG

23.4),

David Prolegomena

(Busse,

p.

42.27-32,

CA G

1 8.2),

Philoponus /11 Analytica Posteriora (Wallies, p. 350.3 1 -33, CA G 1 3 .3), and Ps.
Alexander (= Micheal of Ephesus) /11 Sophislicos Elenclzos (Wallies, p. 40.22-27,
CA G 2.3). In De Jnterpretatione 20b35-36, 2 1 a l 4- l 5 and Sophistici Elenchi I 77b 1 41 5, Aristotle uses the example of a shoemaker when discussing predicates ( ' i f
someone is good and a shoemaker i t does not follow that h e is a good shoemaker')
and these commentators identify this as a reference to S i mon. See Goulet, pp. 1 22-23
for further discussion. Goulet also draws attention to a reference to a shoemaker
called 'Heron' in Aelius Theon Progym11asmata which, in the light of an alternative
reading i n an Armenian manuscript, may plausibly be ammended to 'Simon'. See the
new Bude edition by M. Patillon & G. Bolognesi (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1 997), p.
77.
59

For Diogenes Laerti u s I have consulted Hick ' s Loeb translation and the translation

into French with notes i n Diogene Laerce,

Vies et Doctrines des Philosophes

/llustres, Traduction fram;aise sous la direction de Marie-Odile Gou let-Caze (Paris:

Le Livre de Poche, 2nd edn
60

1 999),

pp. 335-37 & 365.

Note the attribution of 'shoemaker's dialogues' (c:nrnttK:oui; AO"(oui;) to Aeschines,

and by implication Phaedo, at Diogenes Laertius 2. 1 05 (= SSR ill A 8).

61

The list in Hick's Loeb text gives 3 1 titles. One of these is in two books and

another in three, making a total of 34 dialogues. Giannantoni's text in SSR omits two
of these titles, giving

total of 32. One of these may have been omited by mistake;

restoring this would give us the stated total of 33.

John Sellars

267

On Courage; I, I I , and Ill

On Law
On Demagogy
On Honour
On Poetry
On Good Passions
[On Love]'
On Philosophy
On Knowledge
On M usic
[On Poetry]"'
[2. 1 23] What is the Beautiful
On Teaching
On the Art of Conversation
On Judging
On Being
On Number
On Care
On Work
On Greed
On Pretentiousness
On the Beautiful
Others are:
On Del iberation
On Reason, or On Expediency
On Doing Ill
He was the first, they say, who wrote Socratic dialogues. When Pericles
promised to support him and urged him to come to him, he said not if he
was to be paid in return for his freedom of speech (1tapprioiav).
[2. 1 24] There was another Simon, who wrote treatises on rhetoric;
another who was a physician i n the time of Seleucus Nicanor; and one
who was a sculptor.
88. Suda s. v. L<OKpai:ric; (:::: SSR I D 2 & I H 7)
Socrates [ . . . ] produced a number of phil osophers: Plato [ . . . ] also Crito
and Simon."'

62
63

ln Hicks Loeb edition and G oulet-Caze but not SSR.

In Hicks Loeb edition but not SSR and bracketed by Goulet-Caze, following its

omission in Long's OCT edition.

268

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

Synesius Dio11 1 4 ( = SSR III A 1 8)

But both Glaucon and Kritias were discussing in agreement with him
[Socrates] ; but nor did Simon the shoemaker think i t right to agree with
Socrates in everything, but he studied the meaning of his every word.
89.

Plutarch Maxime cum Pri11cipibus esse Disserendum 776b

What does an attentive man say who needs philosophy? "Let me change
from Pericles or Cato and become Simon the shoemaker or Dionysius
the schoolteacher, in order that you might sit down and converse with
me as Socrates did with them". "'
90.

91. Socraticorum Epistulae 1 8.2

'Xenophon to the Friends of Socrates' :"" [ . . . ] Greet Simon the

shoemaker and praise him, because he continues to devote himself to the
teachings of Socrates and uses neither his poverty nor his trade as a
pretext for not doing philosophy, as certain others do who do not want to
understand fully or to admire Socrates' teachings and their contents.
( SSR IV A 222-24)
[9.4] 'Aristippus to Antisthenes ' : [ . . . ] With regard to the other things, go
to Simon the shoemaker, in whom you have someone who is greater in
wisdom than anyone ever was or will be, and converse with him.
92. Socraticorum Epistulae 9.4, 1 1 , 13

[ 1 1 ] 'Aristippus to Aeschines ' : The young Locrian men about whom you
wrote to me will be released from prison and will not die, nor will they
lose any of their money, though they came close to dying. Do not tell
Antisthenes that I have saved the friends. For he does not like to have
tyrants for friends, but he rather seeks out the barley meal sellers and
64 The bulk of this text i s omitted because it is not relevanl here. Simon's name comes
towards the end of a lengthy list of disciples of Socrates. The entire passage is
translated in J . Ferguson, Socrates: A Source Book (London: Macmillan for The Open
Uni versity Press, 1 970), pp. 322-23.
6 5 The text of this passage contains a number of disputed readings. See Hock, 'Simon
the Shoemaker as an Ideal Cynic ' , p. 44 n. 1 8 . I take the 'you' in "in order that you
might sit down and converse with me" to refer to a personificruion of Philosophy.
Fowler's Loeb translation ends with "as S ocrates did with Pericles". As Hock notes,
this must be wrong. The context suggests that El\EtVot<; (in SSR) or El\EtV(\l (in
Fowler) refers to Simon and/or Dionysius.
66 All translations of the Socraticorum Epistulae follow those in Malherbe (nos 1 -25
are by S. Stowers), occasionally modified.

John Sellars

269

tavern keepers who sell barley meal and wine honestly in Athens, and
who rent out thick tunics when the winds blow, and he courts Simon.
[ 1 3 . 1 ] 'Aristippus to Simon' : I do not ridicule you, but rather Phaedo,
when he said that you are more excellent and wiser than Prodicus of
Ceos, who said that you refuted him with regard to his Encomium to
Heracles. No, I do admire and praise you, since, though you are but a
shoemaker, you are filled with wisdom and used to pursuade Socrates
and the most handsome and noble youths to sit with you ; youths such as
Alcibiades, son of Clinias, Phaedrus the Myrrhinean, and Euthydemus,
son of Glaucon. Al so, of the men of public affairs, Epicrates,
Sacesphorus, Euryptolemus, and others. I also think that Pericles, son of
Xanthippus, was with you when he did not have to carry out the duties of
a general or there was not a war going on at the time. And now we know
what sort of person you are, for Antisthenes visits you. And you can also
practice philosophy in Syracuse, for leather thongs and straps are valued
here. [ 1 3 .2] Don ' t you know that I, who wear shoes, will constantly
make your trade i nto something to be admired? But as for that barefoot
Antisthenes, what else has he done than to make you idle and without an
income, since he persuades the youth and indeed all the Athenians to go
barefoot? See, then, how much of a friend l am, one who is content with
leisure and pleasure. And though you admit that Prodicus argues
reasonably, you do not realise the consequences for yourself. Otherwise ,
you would admi re m e and ridicule those who have long beards and staffs
for their boasting, who are dirty, louse-ridden and have long fingernails
l ike wild animals and give advice that is contrary to your craft.
1 2 (= SSR III A 1 6)
'Simon to Aristippus ' : l hear that you ridicule our wisdom in the
presence of Dionysius. I admit that l am a shoemaker and that I do work
of that nature, and in like manner I would, if it were necessary, cut straps
once more for the purpose of admonishing foolish men who think that
they are living according to the teaching of Socrates when they are living
in great luxury. Antisthenes shall be the chastiser of your foolish jests.
For you are writing him letters which make fun of our way of life . But
let what l have said to you in jest suffice. At any rate, remember hunger
and thirst, for these are worth much to those who pursue self-control.
93. Socraticorum Epistulae

Pli

1 1 (2001 ) 270-277.
,

Creatures of the N i h il

Keith Ansell Pearson and Diane Morgan (eds.}, Nihilism

Monsters of Energy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000}

Now!

Gary Banham and Charlie Blake (eds.}, Evil Spirits: Nihilism and
the Fate of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester Un iversity Press,
2000)

JOHN APPLEBY

'A nihilist i s a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought

not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that i t does not exist' . 1
'Nihilism i s that historical process whereby the dominance o f the
"transcendent" becomes null and void, so that all being loses its
worth and meaning' . 2
ls nihilism on the upsurge? Are we about to be buried beneath a torrent
of nay sayers howling abuse at the world? The recent publication of two
books on the topic which share a third of the contributors in common
brought forth hope in the heart of this reviewer that perhaps th is was the
public announcement of a nihilist cabal which had for several years been
3
writh ing away at the heart of academia. Such hope being temporari ly
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will To Power, trans. by Walter Kaufmann and R. J.
Hollingda!e, ed. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1 968), 585(A)
(references are to section numbers). Abbreviated hereafter to 'WtP'.
2 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume 4: Nihilism, trans. by Frank A . Capuzzi , in
Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volumes Three and Four (New York: HarperCollins,
1 99 1 ), p. 4.
3 Each book consists of a dozen papers, with four authors (Joanna Hodge, Diane
Morgan, Howard Caygill, and Daniel Conway) appearing in both volumes.

John Appleby

271

fanned by the DeleuzoGuatarrian glee with which the edi tors of

'ls it possible to save thought from its current
degenerative and vegetative state at the hands of a smug and cozy
postmodern academicism? Can we still invent new concepts?' (p. viii).
Hovering over any con temporary discussion of nihilism are, of course,
two figures: Nietzsche, whose analysis of nihilism in The Will 10 Power
arguably opens up more questions than it answers, and Heidegger, with
his massively influential read ing of Nietzsche ' s claim that nihilism is the
devaluation of the highest values as 'the fundamental event of Western
hi story, which has been sustained and guided by metaphysics' .4 Th is to
be fol lowed by a revaluation of values in which rather than a simple
reversal, the very place of values is redetermined . What Nietzsche and
Heidegger also have in common is the conviction that nihilism is
somehow a defining feature of modernity.
Ansell Pearson and Morgan's 'desire in this volume is to inspire a
return to the energetics of Nietzsche's prose and the critical intensity of
his approach to nihil ism' (Monsters, p. ix). Consequently, it is no
surprise that all the papers, with one exception, engage with Nietzsche to
a greater or lesser extent, and that several of these engagements are
5
mediated via Heidegger. Given the nature of the contributions from
Ansell Pearson and Morgan to both volumes, there is no doubting their
enthusiasm for their stated task. 6 However it is not the desire of all their
contributors.

Monsters ask:

Additionally, Keith Ansell Pearson, the co-editor of Monsters, has a paper in Evil
Spirits.
4 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume 3: The Will to Power as Knowledge and
Metaphysics, trans. by Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell, Frank A. Capuzzi, in
Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volumes Three and Four (New York: HarperCollins,
1 99 1 ), p. 203. Nietzsche' s claim may be found in The Will To Power, 2.
5 The exception is a paper by John Protevi: ' A Problem of Pure Matter: Fascist
Nihilism in A Thousand Plateaus' (Monsters, pp. 1 67-l 88). Protevi is careful to begin
by distinguishing Deleuze and Guattari's use of nihilism in A Thousand Plateaus
from Nietzsche's, not least because the former is linked to Nazism. Protevi's
engagement with 'nihilism now' consists of a very careful exegesis of Deleuze and
Guattari 's analysis of fascist nihilism and the currents of microfascism out of which it
still arises in the present day. However, as an added bonus, he also supplies an
astonishingly clear and concise summary of Deleuze and Guattari 's use of the concept
of the body without organs in A Thousand Plateaus, which cannot be recommended
highly enough (Monsters, pp. 1 69- 1 72).
6 Both Morgan's pieces are eminently readable accounts of highly idiosyncratic
characters read through Nietzsche: "Provoked Life': Expressing Nihilism' is a
consideration of 'Gottfried Benn - doctor for skin afflictions, venereal diseases and

272

Pli 1 1

(200 1 )

Richard Beardsworth, for one, appears to have very little sympathy

with nihilism. 7 H i s paper comprises a close reading of On the Genealogy
(?f Morality with a view lo showing that N ietzsche ' s text 'disperses
nihilism ' , and is all the better for it (Monsters, p. 63). Thi s might come
as a surprise to some readers, and would surely surprise the author, who
styled himself 'the perfect nihilist' . 8 Obviousl y one does not have to take
Nietzsche at his word, but Beardsworth ' s claim appears to be that, rather
than coming through the event of nihilism as he believed he had, it i s the
failure of Nietzsche ' s project which shows that nihilism i s a mere
9
phantasm. As such, it i s worth looking at in a little more detail . He seeks
to demonstrate that whilst Nietzsche's explanation of value in the first
essay of On the Genealogy C?f Morality collapses everything i nto a field
of forces rather than being determined by absolute morality, there is still
the risk of 'anthropomorphising the differentiations of energy between
the human and its Umwelt in terms of a purely human force that stands
outside its constitutive relation to technical , economic and social forces '
expressionist poet' (Monsters, pp. ! 42- 1 66 (p. 1 43)). Here she attempts to read
Benn ' s apocalyptic transhumanism against his attempts at collaboration with Nazism,
to show 1hat his 'error' was to temporarily abandon eschatology for teleology. Jn ' 'An
Angel On All Fours ' : 'In verts' and Their Dogs' , she returns to Nietzsche and the
Nazis, considering questions of becoming in both the Nazi purification program and,
in contradistinction, via a consideration of Iran ssexual ity in Djuana Barnes's novel
Nightwood (Evil Spirits, pp. 89-1 06).
Jn 'Spectropoiesis and Rhizomatics: Learning to Live with Death and Demons ' ,
Ansell Pearson considers what happens t o attempts t o think communion with t h e dead
outside of a Freudian Oedipal context (Evil Spirits, pp. 1 24- 1 45). Drawing upon
Deleuze and Guattari and Derrida, he then presents a critique of Simon Critchley's
recent book Very Li11le... Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy and Literature
(London: Routledge, l 997), based around the latter's failure to understand the
possibility of affirming death, not as a personal experience, but rather as an event of
repetition which produces the spectral.
7 Richard Beardsworth, 'Nietzsche, Nihilism and Spiri t ' , Monsters, pp. 37-69.
8 'He that speaks here, [ ... ] [speaks] as the first perfecI nihilist of Europe' (WtP,
Preface, 3).
9 Another author who does not take Nietzsche at his word is Daniel Conway, whose
paper 'Revisiting the Will to Power' sets out to show that Nietzsche 'is not yet the
'perfect nihilist' he takes himself to be' (Monsters, p. I J 8). Conway makes this claim
in the light of a consideration of the possibilities which nihilism offers to transhuman
philosophy, notably as an attack upon teleology and the concept of an absolute moral
order. Following a close reading of relevant sections of The Will to Power, Conway
concludes, in contradistinction lo Beardsworth, that whilst Nietzsche inevitably fail s
to bring the transhuman project to its conclusion, h e opens u p the project t o those,
perhaps more perfect nihilists, who come after him.

John Appleby

273

(Monsters, p. 47, original italics). He makes this claim because he thinks

that the opposition between active and reactive forces breaks down in the
10
second essay. This occurs because the two are anthropomorphically
complicated via Nietzsche' s discussion of promising and memory,
notably the claim Beardsworth finds therein that 'the specificity of the
human in contrast to other animals lies in its ability to make promises'
(Monsters, p. 48, original italics). 1 1 For Beardsworth, this means that the
deferral of force is specific to humans, and so they 'can never be purely
active' (Monsters, p. 49, original i talics). Promising, linked as it is to an
act of memory, removes spontaneity and so goes beyond the notion of
purely active force. Beardsworth' s claim is that it is not therefore
possible to dismiss the categories, as they 'are located here within the
formation of memory' (Monsters, p, 50, original italics). 'Categories'
being Nietzsche's name for the highest values. 1 2 The strong claim here
being that a reval uation of values is not therefore possible and, contra
the nihilist 'phantasm' , the world is in fact how it ought to be.
The fact that the passive forces of memory are always at hand means
that, for B eardsworth, the purity of concepts which he reads as binary
oppositions (such as 'Roman' and 'Chri stian ' ) is destroyed in that each is
implicated i n the other. This seems to indicate that he reads the
revaluation as a simple reversal of the binary. It is not possible either to
do justice to, or thoroughly engage with the argument here, but one
cannot help but wonder how Beardsworth would respond to Joanna
Hodge ' s assertion, in the essay immediately following his own, that such

10

This opposition i s most famously brought to the fore by Deleuze in Nietzsche and
Philosophy (London: Athlone, 1 983). Beardsworth admits that 'one of the aims of
this chapter is to complicate the way i n which a Deleuzian type reading of force
locates force within its immanent determinations' (Monsters, p. 64, n. 1 ). This is a
point which will be returned to below.
11
'To breed an animal which is able to make promises - is that not precisely the
paradoxical task which nature has set herself with regard to humankind? is it not the
real problem of humankind?' (Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality,
trans. by Carol Diethe, ed. by Keith Ansell Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1 994), p. 38). There is only enough space to note in passing that
Nietzsche does not appear to be saying that a// humans can make promises.
Additionally, he opposes promising to active forgetting, thereby making that too a
'specificity of the human ' . This is something which Beardsworth does not consider.
12
See Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume 4, pp. 36-42.

274

Pli 1 1 (2001 )

disti nctions cannot partake of an original purity as that would be

incompatible with the thought of the eternal return. l'.l
Of course, anybody with even a cursory knowledge of the
Phenomenology of Spirit will recognize the move being made here. 1 4
Rather than simply 'complicating' Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche, it
would be more accurate to say that Beardsworth is seeking to bring
Nietzsche closer to Hegel; a fact that he is fairly expl icit about when he
claims to read the economies of force i n On the Genealogy rf Morality
'within an h istorical economy of spirit' (Monsters, p. 63). This raises
two questions: Firstly, what does Beardsworth mean by the Nietzschean
conception of spirit? In a long footnote, he seeks to cl arify this and
justify why he restricts the concept 'to the neuronal complex and its
historical avatars' (Monsters, p. 65, n . 4). Unhappily it is far from clear
what is at stake here, and a claim that the terms of the debate are
becoming clarified i n the light of work by, amongst others, Maturana and
Varela, fai l s to help elucidate it any further. It would perhaps have been
apposite if Beardsworth had i ndicated what aspect of these works was
clarifying the debate. In a fu rther footnote, he claims that he prefers
terms such as spirit and spiritualisation over will to power and eternal
return, because the former are 'more historically rich and flexible, less
homogenising in their articulations of difference' (Monsters, p. 68, n. 1 4) .
If one were being uncharitable, one might like to say that what this
actually means is that they are more nebulous.
The second question is why drag Deleuze into this at all, given that it
i s general ly agreed that he supplies a (to say the least) 'strong' reading of
Nietzsche. 15 If Nietzsche's project fails i n the manner which
Beardsworth claims, i t should stand or fall on its own merits rather than
being read through Deleuze in order to then be re-read back through
Hegel. Unfortunately one is left at the end wondering what the point i s .
It would have been just a s relevant, and perhaps more i nteresti ng, if
Beardsworth had presented his reading i n the light of other Hegelian

13 Joanna Hodge, 'The Monstrous Rebirth of Nihilism ' , in Monsters , pp. 70 85 (p.
75).
14 G.W.F. Hegel , Phenomenology of Spirir, trans. by A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1 977), esp. pp. 1 1 1 - 1 1 9.
1 5 Jn fact Nick Land hits the nail on the head when he claims that Nietzsche and
Philosophy is 'solely about Deleuze' . See The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges
Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (An Essay in Atheisric Religion) (London: Routledge,
1992), p. 1 55.
-

John Appleby

275

interpretations of Nietzsche, such as that of Walter Kaufman n , for

example. 1 6
Like Beardsworth, Banham and Bl ake, the editors of Evil Spirits, are
not looking Lo a return to the critical intensity of Nietzsche ' s approach to
nihilism. Rather, they purport lo in vestigate the repressed relationship
'between nihilism, fate and modernity under the aegis of the demonic'
(Evil Spirits, p. l ). Modernity here being defined as a project of
measurement based upon the assumptions that the nature of the world
allows itself to be in vestigated calculatively, and that the relations to be
discovered by such an investigation are linearly causal. Banham and
Bl ake think this leads to determinism and 'purposes are, as a
consequence, expelled from the world' (Evil Spirits, p. 2). Th is is
apparently 'based upon a transformation of techne into an exact and
exacting mechanism' (Evil Spirits, p. I ) . What techne has been
transformed from is not al all clear, but it seems that for Banham and
Blake modernity represents the culmination of a teleological process
(hence ' project') which ends in the collapse of all teleology, or at least
teleological explanations, leaving causality 'bereft of ultimate references
[as] the economy of existence is reduced to base repetition. This
repetition is what has come to be named nihilism' (Evil Spirits, p. 3 ) . 1 7
The upshot o f this is that rel igion i s displaced from its place as ultimate
referent leading Banham and Blake to draw a political conclusion which
is so surprising that it is worth quoting in ful l :
1f the subordi nation of rel igion to the state i s paralleled by the
final authority on the fate of each individual necessarily residing
wi th the sovereign than there is a practical aspect to nihilism in
the supremacy of executive will even over the will of God (a
political 'death of God'). This practical aspect of nihilism limits
the possible scope i n which political decision is comprehended. It
permits intrigue as a nonnal aspect of relations and sanctions in
principle (if only in conditions of emergency) total mobilization
and a cult of the state. The meaning lost in the cosmos is restored
in politics but its condition of restoration is a displacement of
16 Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th edn.
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, I 974).
17 It is unfortunate that they fail to explain what they mean by 'base repetition ', as it is
far from clear why the collapse of ultimate references for causes which are being
explained in terms of immanent linearity should lead to repetition at all. This is not to
say that it may not, but the necessity for such a move is not at all apparent.

276

P/i 1 1 (200 1 )

religious hope and fear into the machi nery which makes possible
war. This second aspect of nihilism is therefore connected to a
second change in the nature of techne. Political evil may be
understood as a consequence of the fate which governs modernity
(Evil Spirits, pp. 3-4) .
What thi s appears to be saying is that the subsumption of rel igion to stale
(or, indeed the eradication of religion) means that as there i s no longer a
set of transcendent moral laws ( hopefully linked to a telos of 'just
deserts '). Evil stalks the modern world in the guise of political states
which are completely unchecked in their blood lust as, when questioned
about the nature of their actions, they simpl y appeal to the fact that if
they are investi gated thoroughly, it will be seen that they were
determined lo act as they did by way of a l inear chai n of causal forces
.18
which Banham and Blake label 'fate'
A s a n antidote to all this, they propose that philosophy needs to think
in terms of forces which are not entirely subsumable under the terms
'human ' and 'nature' . To this end, they suggest that modernity needs to
be also thought i n terms of spirits; notably demons and angels. Derrida ' s
influence can readily b e d iscerned by the number o f spectres who crop
19
up throughout the book. These labels are to be thought in very loose
18

It would be simply too tedious to trot out the obvious counter arguments, although,
given the fact that Blake in parti cular has course to refer to him, it would be
interesting to orientate such a move around Bataille's analysis of Aztec sacrifice
(Georges Bataille, ' Consumption ' , trans. by Robert Hurley, in The Accursed Share:
An Essay on General Economy, I (New York: Zone, l 99 l ), pp. 45-6 1 ). It is, h owever,
worth mentioning that Spinoza 's Ethics, one of the most brutally necessitarian
materi alist philosophical systems ever developed, carries none of the conclusions
which Banham and Blake point to (Benedict Spinoza, Ethics, trans. by Edwin Curley,
in The Collected Works of Spinoza Volume I, ed. by Edwin Curley (Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, l 985), pp. 408 -6 1 7) .
1
9 N o t a l l the spectres are Derridean, however. Anthony Easthope provides a
sympathetic consideration of Freud in the light of the disjunction between Freud's
claims for psychoanalysis as a science and the spectral nature of his writings.
Unsmprisingly, the text which Easthope privileges for this pmpose is 'The Uncanny'
(trans. by James Strachey, in Sigmund Freud, Art and Literature, ed. by Al bert
Dickson, Penguin Freud Library, 1 4 (London: Penguin Books, 1 990), pp. 335-376).
One of Easthope's avowed aims is to rescue Freud from Deleuze and Guatlari by
showing that he is more demonic than they make him out to be i n 'One or Several
Wolves?' (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (London : Athlone, 1 988), pp. 26-38). This he

John Appleby

277

terms, as Blake makes clear when, following on from a discussion of the

physicist Frank Tipler's theory of the Omega Point, he consi ders the
possibility of communication outside of linear temporality 'with such
entities as we may (for there is no scientific or philosophical reason not
20
lo), describe as the angels or demons who dwell al the end of time ' .
Whether there are scientific or philosophical reasons not to u se such
descriptions is a moot point, but what should be abundantly clear by now
(and as Blake is well aware), is that the decision lo use these labels is a
political one, and i t is not at all certain that all the contributors to this
volume are doing so for the same political reasons. This is not
necessarily a failing however as it allows the one to read the papers off
against each other perhaps giving one a clearer understanding of what i s
actually at stake in each case.
In conclusion, despite there being shared points of reference and
having so many contributors in common, the respective tones of these
two volumes are quite distinct, with Monsters taking a more materialist
approach to questions of nihil ism and modernity, although thi s is not
exclusively the case. In both volumes the papers are varied enough lo
attract quite a wide audience, although the focus appears slightly tighter
in Monsters. Should one wish to choose between them it would have to
be on the grounds of philosophical taste rather than a scholarly
distinction. Given the theological overtones of demon and angelologies,
an immanent philosophy might want to stick to creating monsters.

manages to do, but the reading of Deleuze and Guauari ' s critique of Freud which he
supplies is viciously reductionist.
2 Charlie Blake, 'The Gravity of Angels: Space, Time and the Ecstasy of
Annihilation' , Evil Spirits, pp. 52-7 1 (p. 68).

Pli 1 1

(2001 ), 278-287.

Fodor Encapsulated
J. A. Fodor, The Mind Doesn't Work That Way: The Scope and
Limits of Computa tional Psychology

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

JOHN COLLINS

Evolutionary psychology i s on the rise, both in academia and the publ ic

arena. The governing metaphor is that the mind is a Swiss army knife: it
consists of a set of specialised computational devices (modules) that
subserve our domain specific competencies in language, face
recognition, theory of mind, cheater detection, et al. We might even have
a module dedicated Lo the extirpation of stones from the hooves of
horses. Evolution (natural selection, in particul ar) is the designer of this
mass ively modular architecture: each module is an adaptation to a
problem faced by our hunting and gathering ancestors; we discover the
content of a module by detennining what it was selected .for back on the
Savannah. Fodor, pace Pinker ( 1 998) and a host of others, thinks the
mind doesn 't work this way. We have some good ideas about how some
parts of the mind might work, Fodor avers, but we haven ' t got a clue
about how most of the mind works salva some new scientific insights.
Unlike Dennett, Penrose and Pinker, serious thinkers all, Fodor is not
a populist, as may be judged by h i s happily svelte volume (that popular
books about cognition should also serve as doorstops is regrettable) . The
arguments, in the core of the book at least, are dense and technical; there
is no surfeit of intuition pumps nor (heaven forfend) analogies drawn
from Star Trek. I f, then, you are new to the area, much of the book will
prove difficult, although Ch.5, based largely on Fodor's ( 1 998) review of
Pinker ( 1 998) and Plotkin ( 1 997), is more polemical than its
predecessors.
As with green readers, those who are seeking a manifesto will be
disappointed. Fodor doesn ' t kick God while he's on his knees, still less

John Collins

279

is he concerned to cup his palms around the ineffable spark of humanity

as the blind processes of selection blow all around. One of the great
things about Fodor, like that other contemporary rationalist, Chomsky, i s
that i n matters scientific he cares only for the truth; bother being tough
minded. Putting the boot in, for sure, is fu n, if hardly edifying, but the
truth is much more interesting.
Stil l, 1 recommend Fodor to everyone who is seriously concerned
with cognitive science and the putative fecundity offered by
evolutionary theory. In the seq uel, 1 shall outline the shape of Fodor ' s
argument and then offer some thoughts o f m y own.
For Fodor, Alan Turing is the only guy who has had a good idea
about cognition. The idea is that the rationality (truth preservation)
characteristic of thought can be captured by a syntactically driven causal
process. Whal l inks content to cause is syntax or logical form (not to be
confused with the linguist's LF). Thinking, on this view, is computation
defined over syntactically constituent structures. The syntax of the
structures (shape, size, whatever) determines their causal role; the
semantic interpretability of the structures means that the causal rol e i s
also a rational one that may b e captured b y our familiar intentional
generalisations. If Smith believes that A & B, he will also believe that A
and that B. This is because, so the story goes, to have the first belief is to
token a complex representation with consti tuents corresponding to the
semantically relevant parts of the complement clause, which, ipso facto,
is to token representations with the content of A and B. An intentional
law is thus instantiated by a mechanical (syntactic) process. More
complicatedly, Smith goes for his umbrella when he desires not to get
wet and believes that his umbrella will achieve such an end because
Smith's mind is such that the mental representations about rain,
umbrellas, etc. tokened in Smith ' s belief and desire boxes (think of a
flow chart) have a syntax which realises a causal role that eventuates in
going-for-umbrella behaviour.
In short, a computational theory of mind (CTM) shows us how
content (information) can get its hands on the steering wheel. But, and
this is a big 'but', CTM cannot be true in toto. The problem is this: only
the syntactic properties of a representation determine its effecls.
Consider a vending machine. If you put in a fifty pence piece, out pops a
coke. But the coi n ' s property of being worth 50p didn't cause the coke lo
be deposited. How Coca- Cola corp . wish that it would ! The causally
relevant properties of your coin are its size, shape, density, etc., viz., its
intrinsic (local) properties P, not its extrinsic ones. You need the police

280

Pli 1

1 (200 1 )

and other stale organisations to make i t so that being worth 50p

supervenes on P. But no amount of law enforcement will constitute
nomological necessity. Just so for mental representations, as construed
by CTM . There causal properties are local, not global ; but the mind is up
to its ghostly ears in abduction, context sensitive inference, and the
assessmelll of relevance and overall soundness. This worry is not new to
Fodor, although it i s easily missed, especially by those who didn't gel to
the end of The Modularity of Mind ( 1 983). There Fodor argued that
CTM is good idea about modules because they have a proprietary
database over which the specialised processes are defined; such is what
it means for modules to be domai n specific: they are computationally
local qua encapsulated from the rest of cognition. As for global
cognition . . . Sorry, I haven 't a clue. Try to design a vending machine
that will deposit a coke only if a coin worth 50p is put into its slot.
( Cognoscenti will note that I am conflating external extrinsic properties
with internal ones; the difference does not here matter.)
Massive modularity might seem a veritable boon. Modular processing
is by definition restricted to proprietary databases. CTM provides a nice
theory of the working of the modules, for Turing's story is that
computation is a local process qua determined by representations'
intrinsic properties. Thus, the more restricted the content is to which the
computations have access, the more that content can be understood to
enter into the causal explanation of the system's behaviour. Conversely ,
the less restricted the information i s , t h e Jess w e understand h o w Turing
computations can be defined over it; that is, we don 't have a
computational story of global cogn ition. Someone committed to CTM,
therefore, had better hope that massive modularity is true; for if
modu larity is not the norm, then it would seem that CTM can at best be
the partial truth about cognition. Two problems: the massive modularity
thesis is false and a lot of cognition is global anyhow. Bother Darwin,
there is good reason to think that the mind is not a Swiss army knife
independent of one's favourite story about the phylogeny of cognition.
Such is Fodor's argument.
This is all very deep, and I agree with its general thrust; still, I have
reservations.
Fodor is very good at showing why massive modularity is attractive.
Indeed, Fodor's The Modularity of Mind i s largely responsible for the
popularity of modular theori sing. Fodorian modules, however, are
peripheral input/output systems: fast, dedicated, unreflective, hardwired
devices that respond to stimulus. They trade veridicality and depth of

John Collins

28 1

output for speed and shallowness of output. This makes evolutionary

sense (false negatives are a nui sance, false positives lead to extinction).
For Fodor, the sine qua non of modularity is encapsulation: a module ' s
computations are restricted t o a proprietary database; that i s w h y they are
fast, dedicated, etc. Fodorian modules are not central. Now, one might
say: ' If this is what modules are like, then obviously globality is a real
headache. But the shift to thinking about central modules necessitates a
relaxation on encapsulation; modules co-penetrate, exploiting the
resources of each other. What looks like global cognition is really the
ensemble effect of a whole bunch of modules' . Such a story, 1 think, is
the one any thinking evolutionary psychologist (which is not a
pleonasm) would want to tell. Using M i likan ' s ( 1 984) jargon, adopted
by Gigerenzer ( 1 997) and S perber ( 1 994 ), one distinguishes between a
proper and normal domain. The former is that content for which the
module was selected to compute over; the latter is that content which the
module currently computes over. The idea is that the mind way back
before we even hunted and gathered comprised a whole load of little
dedicated gizmos, each with their proper domains. This ensemble, under
selective pressure, evolved to be an increasingly integrated system.
Alternatively , syntax might have dropped from the sky 1 00,000 years
ago and provided us with a metarepresen tational lingua franca. For all
we know, dogma aside, this might be true (Bickerton ( 1 995); but see
Bickerton and Calvin (2000) for a less catastrophic phylogeny). Either
way, eventually, we end up with minds like ours with normal domains
more or less smeared over sub-ensembles. ls this okay?
Well, anyone who tells thi s tale should be careful. Massive
modularity is meant to be a story about cognition as it is now, not a story
about how it used to be. A module that is totally unencapsul ated just
ain't a module. Fodor (p.63) may be read as saving time by ignoring the
kind of story set out above. What Fodor should not ignore, though, i s the
idea that modules do not need to be totally encapsulated. One can, i t
seems to me, believe that central modules come i n ensembles. A
disciplined multi -path boxology is required lest the theory fall into
vacuity, but everyone has their problems. Furthermore, there are good
cases of putative ensembles.
Consider language. Fodor ( 1 983) thinks of the language module as a
parser, and, to my knowledge, has not retracted the idea. I t is clear,
however, that parsibility is not a condition on the output representations
of the language module. Sentences with centrally embedded relative
clauses (the boat the sailor the dog bit built sank) and 'garden paths'

282

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

(the horse raced past the barn fell) tend not to be parsible, although they
are perfectly grammatical, as can be seen on reflection (hint: insert the
missing complementisers). Even so, only the benighted think that
linguistic competence is not modular based (contra Cowie ( 1 999),
poverty of stimulus considerati ons, inter alia, real ly do show that a
dedicated mechanism armed with universal grammar is the only idea we
have). Yet our language faculty, it would seem, makes use of
information not employed in parsi ng, i .e., it is not quite encapsulated.
More speculatively, I (Collins (2000)) have conjectured that the Theory
of Mind (ToM ) module is interfaced with the language faculty; the thesis
explains some interesting ontogenetic and pathological data and many
features of propositional content (opacity, embeddness, et al.). In
general, the language module appears to take its place within a broader
system of modules.
Fodor really does not consider this kind of modular ensemble story.
He does, however, deploy an argument that should give everyone serious
pause for thought (pp. 7 1 8). Jn a nutshell : we can understand how
peripheral modules are triggered because they are hardwired to our
sensorium, as it were. What of central modules? Presumably, they need
some module(s) to i nput the relevant representations. In simple terms, a
central module needs to know when it is time to do its thi ng . The
problem i s that, by definition, the inputting module(s) will be less
modular than the receiving module; for, however the story is told, the
inputting module(s) must sort between representations that carry
information that is and i s not proper to the receiving module.
Alternatively, the i nputting module(s) may not be less modular, bu t such
a case requires an infinite number of them. This is a splendid argument
and one 1 have pondered myself. I ' l l come to my thoughts presently;
first, however, Fodor adds a twist.
One way to stop the threatened regress of modules is to understand
the sensorium as the ultimate source of all triggers. This move, though,
is only available to the mad dog empiricist; for it amounts to the claim
that every cognitive distinction is an empirical one, i.e., all selective
sorting of representations is made on the basis of empirical features. We
on the side of the angles have long despaired of connectionist groupies
and the anti-Chomskyians for just this reason. As Fodor (p.77) points
out, there appears to be no sensory feature that tells the language
perception module that language is abroad. (Just thi n k about the
perfectly acceptable languages, ASL and varieties of home sign). More
grossly, what on earth is the perceptual feature that tells your cheater
-

John Collins

283

module that you might be being fleeced? If there were such a trigger,
cheating, for good or i l l , would, contrary to fact, be nigh impossible.
As I said, 1 take this argument very seriou sl y, and the massively
modular crowd have not so much as recognised it, still less answered it.
What, then, of my story above? Here ' s a speculation about ToM in
particular (see Collins (2000) for details). What tell s ToM that there is a
cognitive agent abroad is its face recogniser; that is, anything with a face
is, ceteris paribus, apt to trigger the attribution of mental states.
Something like this may explain why we happily attribute mental states
to animals while realising that, say, Rover really does not believe that i f
h e c a n get m e t o think that h e has not been fed, then 1 shall b e duped i n
feeding him extras. Likewise, once the child has fixated o n a grammar,
then sensory i nput will suffice to mark language from non-language. The
real problem for empiricism is that the child cannot fixate on a grammar
in the first place without already knowing the options which need to be
decided. The point in both cases is that the cognitive distinctions
(language or not; cognitive agent or not) aren 't empirical ones; rather,
given enough i nnate i nformation, all we need are cues to downstream
modules that dutifully select as default certain upstream modular
processes. I'm not certain about the soundness of this proposal, but 1
cannot see how it is obviously i ncorrect. That said, this proposal will not
work for many of the proposed central modules, such as a cheater
detector. I can happily live with this ; it has long seemed to me that a
cheater detector module was only slightly less silly than a line dancing
one.
What has any this got to do with the globality of cognition? Well,
quite a lot. The thing about modularised cognition is that it is mandatory ;
but surely, even the least of us thinks occasionall y. Fodor does not stress
this point, although 1 suspect it is behind much of his argument, for a
clear way for thinking not to be mandatory is for it to be global. As we
saw, the central modularist is obliged to ease off on encapsulation and
allow mutual cognitive penetration, but not so much so that modularity
becomes vacuous. To such an end I proposed my disciplined boxology,
yet this also can only realise mandatory processes.
Here ' s another speculation. Global cognition is (reflexively)
conscious; mandatory cognition is unconscious. What makes thinking
global is that i t is Quinean, i .e., any information is potentially relevant to
the assessment of any claim. Only consciousness can realise this kind of
isotropic thinking. Why? Because consciousness is basically off-l ine, we
deliberate for as long as we l ike and then, if at all , act. Mandatory

284

Pli 1 1 (200 1 )

cognition i s b y defin ition immune t o any of our reflective strategies; i t

i ssues its output whether w e like it o r not. Modularity i s a good story
about mandatory cognition, a bad one about global cogn ition. We get
from one to the other via consciousness. Here's what I think
consciousness amounts to. The language faculty enables meta
representational thinking that gives us (partial) non-inferential access to
the i nformation otherwise i nvolved i n mandatory cognition. What makes
the access non-inferential is that the content is l inguistically encoded; for
example, visual representations are not, I should guess, linguistic, but
their content is already apt to be linguistically en coded in as much as i t
can b e the object o f judgement. Put differently, a l l reflexive
propositional thinking i s linguistic. Globality is all to do with the
conscious linguistic exploi tation of a modular ensemble that serves
mandatory cognition.
The reader will have noted that I have heretofore said nothing about
evolution; my silence is pregnant. Evolution (read: natural selection) fits
into the story because it i s often claimed that only massive modularity i s
evolutionarily possible. Lots of other similarly ill-judged conjectures are
made i n the same specious modali ty . I shall leave the reader to the joys
of Fodor' s Ch.5, where he gleefully demolishes such twaddle. I have my
reservations on some points of detail, especially his remarks on
Chomsky towards the end of the chapter, but such quibbles are for
another time. I shall end, in the spirit of Fodor, with what I think is the
real problem with evolutionary psychology.
I t is not to be denied that we should like to know how human
cognition evolved from the mind/brain of the ancestor we share with the
chimpanzee. Further, Jet us assume that natural selection is the only story
we have for the evolution of a system of the complexity of the human
mind. (I ' m as fond of I ' m-the-only-president-you' ve-got arguments as
the next guy, but, pace the zealots, they are not demonstrative; would
that they were.) Somewhere down line , then, we shall be obliged to tell,
as far as we can see, some selectionist story; so, why not tell it now? M y
dispute with this l i n e is not s o much substantive; I do not, for example,
have a story about what happens when you cram I 01 1 neurones into the
volume of a footbal l; for all I know, a human mind might emerge, as
they say, although I really don't think so. The complai nt I have, rather, is
methodological. I shall illustrate this with the case of language.
Three i nteresting questions about language are (i) What does a
speaker/hearer know? (Humboldt' s problem); (ii) How is this knowledge
acqu ired? (Plato' s problem); and (iii) How is this knowledge used?
(Descartes's probl em). Now considerations of evolution simply do not

John Collins

285

impinge on these questions in the sense that we could answer all three
without having a clue as to why, say, Engli sh , but not Italian, has
obli gatory subjects, or why children never regularise auxiliaries, or why
laterali sation of linguistic competence after left-side brain damage
sometimes precludes passivisation. I should not say that an evolution
story fails a priori to shed any light here, but the logic of selection
appears to be the wrong one: we are interested in what computational
system underlies linguistic competence and how it works. I just cannot
see the difference it would make to the acceptability of answers to these
questions i f language gradually evolved or if Alpha Centurions altered
our DNA back when we mainly hunted and gathered. Unsurprisingly,
given the otiosity of evolutionary considerations, when one approaches
language with an evolvability constraint, muddled thinking ensues. This
is the real problem.
When it is asked what language is for, the answer most often returned
is 'communication' . (Incidentally, I don' t think that language is for
anything at all; nor are beliefs. We want our linguistic exchanges to be
communicative, but they are not supposed to be; ditto for beliefs vis-a
vis truth. ) An evolvability constraint tends to lead to an external ist story
about organismic-environmental interaction; it is the environment that
shapes the cognition so that it may better deal with the external demands.
Naturally, thi s leads to external ist accounts of language, such as Clark ' s
( 1 997, 1 998) trading spaces model, where language i s some kind of
environmental feature onto which we can off-load cognitive resources.
Dennett (1 995, 1 997) tells a similar tale. These stories are quite jejune,
fashioned, as they apparently are, in complete ignorance of, or di sregard
for, the findings of linguistics and psycholinguistics. No-one, and I mean
no-one, has the faintest idea how the abstract h ierarchical structure of
language may be encoded into a statistically retrievable phonetic form
(to say nothing of sign language or the developmental alacrity of the
blind). l t seems that if knowing a language is being able to retrieve
structured information from our environment, then we must already
know the s tructure. As it happens, the vast majority of the data points to
such internalism, and the rest is equivocal. I reall y am at a loss at the
presumption of theorists to know what they are talking about when they
turn to language. I would not dream of declaiming about
electromagnetism without tailoring my thoughts to what the physicists
have to say. Why do people think that they can have so much as coherent
thoughts about language without caring what the l inguists have to say?
Evolutionary theory, I am afraid to say, must shoulder much of the

286

Pli

1 1 (200 1 )

responsibi lity. Significantly, Pinker and Bloom ( 1 990), who both know
their linguistics, commend an evolutionary story but do not fall into the
bog of externalism. Such is perhaps why they judge their thesi lo be
"bori ng", for it affects not a jot the practice of linguistics. Th is is as it
should be.
Similar methodological compl aints, I think, can be made against the
imposition of an evolvabi lity constraint to any cognitive domain,
l anguage simply offers perhaps the best example. Let us, then, with
Fodor, eschew all evolvability constraints: bother being tough-minded ;
bother materialism; bother athei sm. Let us pursue the truth.
JCollins42 @ compuserve.com

References

B ickerton, D. ( 1 995). Language and Human Behaviour. London : UCL

Press.
Bickerton, D, and Calvin, W. (2000). Lingua Ex Machina. Cambridge,
M A : M IT Press.
Clark, A. ( 1 997). Being There. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Clark, A. ( 1 998). 'Magic Words: How Language Augments Human
Computation .' Jn P. Carruthers and J . Boucher (eds.), Language and
Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Coll ins, J . (2000). 'Theory of Mind, Logical Form, and El iminati vism .'
Philosophical Psychology, 1 3: 465-490.
Cowie, F. ( 1 999). What 's With in ? Nativism Reconsidered. Oxford :
Oxford University Press.
Dennett, D. ( 1 995). Danvin's Dangerous Idea. London: Allen Lane.
Dennett, D. ( 1 997). 'How to Do Things With Words.' In J . Preston (ed.),
Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge U ni versity Press.
Fodor, J. ( 1 983). The Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, M A : MIT Press.
Fodor, J. ( 1 998). 'Review of Stephen Pinker' s How the Mind Works and
Henry Plotkin ' s Evolution in Mind' . In Jn Critical Condition.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gigerenzer, G. ( 1 997). 'The Modul arity of Social Intel ligence.' In A.
Whiten and R. Byrne (eds.), Mach iavellian Intelligence JJ.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
M i l likan, R. G . ( 1 984). Language, Thought, and Other Biological
Categories. Cambridge, MA: M IT Press.

John Collins

287

Pinker, S. ( I 998). How the Mind Works. London: Penguin Books.

Pinker, S. and Bloom, P. ( 1 990). 'Natural Language and Natural
Selection.' Brain and Behavioural Sciences, I 3: 707-27.
Plotkin, H. ( 1 997). Evolution in Mind. London: Allen Lane.