I’ve just finished my first read of Nietzsche and Philosophy by Gilles Deleuze, translated by Hugh Tomlinson. It was an enlightening read but probably not in the way that you might think. I’m a strong anti-Nietzschean, I’ve made that pretty clear I think. However, when I make statements, they are not my final word. They are a word I’m willing to stand by as something I said, but I could be wrong. If I figure out that I was wrong, I’m willing to say “Yes, I said that, but I was wrong”. And so I viewed this book as a sort of last chance for me to see if I would be convinced by Nietzsche’s ideas.
Don’t get me wrong. This wasn’t me trying to test Nietzsche’s ideas. I think his ideas are largely bad and I didn’t expect Deleuze to convince me otherwise. However, I did hold out the possibility, and I thought that if anyone was going to do the job, it would be Deleuze. Since he’s one-half of the authors of Anti-Oedipus (along with Felix Guattari), what I believe is a truly great work of philosophy, I felt that he would be the one to bring out parts of Nietzsche I could agree with.
When I say that this was an enlightening read, what it enlightened was my personal project of anti-Nietzscheanism. It helped shed light on what I want to do on a practical basis, or rather, what I feel needs to be done in order to discredit Nietzsche’s arguments. What will be the most effective path forward.
Walter Kaufman, to me, was just a Nietzsche booster. I have only really read his work on Nietzsche but I’ve never gotten the sense that more was being developed. I bring that up to oppose him to Deleuze who, even in this work, does advance interesting lines of thought that I wouldn’t have come to on my first or second readings of Nietzsche. There is something to gain from this work on its own as a particular perspective on Nietzsche rather than a simple expiation of Nietzsche’s thought.
Of course, Deleuze does not criticize Nietzsche in this work, it’s not that kind of thing. I simply feel that there is original and interesting interpretation being done here. For that reason this, more than previous critical appraisal of Nietzsche, has given me more to work with. It’s also illuminated problems in my own analysis of Nietzsche’s reception.
One of my major positions about the Nietzsche’s adoration by leftist intellectuals is that he represents a kind of self-flagellation instinct. While I don’t really disagree with this assessment, it is a very Nietzschean one, by which I mean two things. Firstly, it’s an emotional and affective assessment which passes itself off as being disinterested; it’s a direct insult followed by “hit dogs will holler”. Secondly, it is inadequate.
What Deleuze brings out in his work is that there are specific insights in Nietzsche which are unique to Nietzsche. These are not his Big Ideas of ressentiment, bad conscience, eternal return, amor fati (which Deleuze doesn’t name as far as I recall), etc. His insights are in challenging ideas like truth and morality. I think there is a genuine insight in saying that modern European morality (which we might associate with the western human rights regime) is little more than an extension than Christian theology. Of course, there are limitations in this – could we imagine our modern human rights without the contributions from philosophers in Asia and Africa? – but the suggestion is persuasive, especially since you can also track institutional continuity to support it.
I think that the core appeal of Nietzsche is in asking the question again; I’ve said this before. I didn’t, perhaps, give enough credit to what a monumental moment that may have been. This might be a historical fallacy; that is, because it’s such a common thing now, I assumed it was always the case. Surely there must have always been iconoclasts who went against the philosophical grain.
Also, Nietzsche’s dramatics and poeticizing are aesthetically appealing. It appears to be a much different way of doing philosophy than anyone else, and for that reason it appears to be saying something which is different than anyone else. It seems to demand appraisal on its own terms because it does not easily fit within the run of philosophy as such.
But this leads us towards the fatal flaw of Nietzsche, one which Deleuze gleefully copies and continues. This flaw is what I will call anti-experimentalism. At first, I want to say his issue is anti-empiricism, as empiricism is a trait that Deleuze/Nietzsche specifically decry. The problem with Nietzsche is that he resists being told no. This is an element of his theology of affirmation, obviously, but his affirmations burst past consideration into childishness.
There’s a part which I remember, though I won’t bother quoting (I’ll talk about this later), where Deleuze/Nietzsche is saying that the problem with science is that it’s based on testing hypotheses rather than making affirmative claims. I’m likely mangling the message, but the point is, they are taking issue with the scientific method. And the thing is… that’s just how it works. That’s how you do science and confirm that your answers are useful for other people. To be affronted that science doesn’t work the way you think it should, even though the way you think it should work simply wouldn’t work, is puerile.
This is why Nietzsche is always stronger on topics where there is no concrete knowledge to fall back on, because what he wants to do is simply state his own point and move forward. And he says this in many places. This is an aspect of Nietzsche’s work that makes him incredibly hard to approach: it is all poison-pilled. Despite his claims to hate negativity etc., he is at great pains to tell you that you cannot investigate his work in any way other than what he wants, that if you disagree with him your point of view is “low” and “base”, and further, he refuses to engage in a way that would allow anyone to state their case. Everyone who would challenge him can immediately be accused of acting in bad conscience and, therefore, discarded.
How can I say that it’s bad that Nietzsche simply says what he wants when that’s what Nietzsche says he’s going to do? Clearly, I’ve fallen into the trap of Nietzsche. Again, it’s a childish way to proceed.
Because Nietzsche is allergic to checking his work, he never considers how absurd what he says is. He never thinks again about it. If we take his distinction between active and reactive forces, reading through this book, there is never a concrete stated difference between the two. Again, this is said fairly explicitly, but I have to say: lampshading does not eliminate the problem. It is clear that the only difference between active and reactive is perspective. Many times it is stated that the difference is something innate in forces, that this fact about forces is determining, but there are enough hedges that you can see that there is no difference. The point of differentiating them is to make a value judgment about them: namely, calling the active forces “good” and the reactive forces “bad”.
Possibly the most unconvincing part of Nietzsche’s philosophy is how he constructs the noble and the slave. The noble says “I am good, you are evil”, while the slave says “You are evil, I am good”. I have not stated this exactly, of course. The way that Deleuze/Nietzsche put it, the slave says “You are evil, so I am good”. Why is this? It’s because only if you add that element in can you act as though the second part is contingent on the first part, and by only adding it for the slave, the noble is not making a contingent statement. The noble doesn’t reason, they say, but the slave does.
But why should we see the noble’s statement as one that isn’t coming out of reason or contingency? Why should we accept that a noble person would say “I am good” in a vacuum? Why would they say anything about their quality if they have nothing to compare to? Obviously, going by the logic of the argument, the person who says “I am good” is also making a comparison, so if the slave says “so”, the noble must also say “so”. It is this value judgment which is the difference between noble and slave for Deleuze/Nietzsche, not the specific appellations of good or evil, and it immediately falls apart upon inspection.
Yes, Deleuze/Nietzsche do assert that “good” does not need comparison, but again: they are just saying things. This is what I mean. Nobody else would say that you can understand “good” without “bad”. They only say this for the purpose of making this specious argument. And it’s upon this argument that the rest of Nietzsche’s philosophy is built, because this is the same distinction as that between active/reactive, critique/ressentiment, re-action/reaction, and so on. The distinctions are false and are introduced purely to support the value judgment.
Previously, I have focused on the fact that Nietzsche’s ends are those of a base conservative, and they are. It’s shocking that people continue to fight against admitting this. They will say that he was a conservative, sure, but his ideas were not just conservative. It’s horseshit. Whatever his interesting insights, the main thrust of his work was based on unfounded assumptions. Nietzsche’s affinity for the sophists is very interesting because he is far closer to their stereotype than the practitioners in Plato’s dialogues.
However, I think that to really destroy the credibility of Nietzsche’s work, I need to focus more strongly on the specific elements. I need to read more closely to find out what the concepts that people gravitate towards turn on because they aren’t the concepts that I attack. This is why I haven’t quoted anything directly in this work: this is really just me getting my initial thoughts out, this isn’t the work. This is the starting line.
The people who like Nietzsche primarily, in my opinion, like that he made attacks upon philosophy which exposed anxieties that people had about the supposed certainty of philosophical “truth”. There are elements of procedural thought which are compelling, especially as brought out by Deleuze. As one follows those compelling elements, one then sees how they are built up into Nietzsche’s edifices and one assumes that those edifices are well-built. But they are not. I’ve been saying “Just look at the fucking thing” and, to be honest, this suffices for most people. I’ve said it before but Nietzsche isn’t like a popular guy. There’s a reason he has always been “controversial”, why people always have to rescue his work. “Just look at the fucking thing!”
But engineers don’t always know what the best design is and don’t always know why a building fails. Sometimes they’re too close to the nuts and bolts, admiring a new technique, and not seeing that it’s caused flaws elsewhere. Philosophers are not always going to simply intuit a problem with philosophy. To Nietzsche’s benefit, philosophy has a quality that engineering doesn’t: philosophy is not actual. It doesn’t exist in the actual world, and effects outside of the mind do not affect it. Where the fascinated engineer will eventually have to face the flaws in their design when it collapses, nothing can force the ideas Nietzsche puts forward to collapse, so we’re free to keep believing in them even if they prove to be inadequate.
With things that are actual, we don’t need to worry about the chain of reception. Things happen and that makes the new reality. It doesn’t matter that the most educated engineers say that floating apartments can work; if they don’t float, it didn’t work. Philosophy is not actual so it’s not like that. It does worry about the chain of reception. So the fact that the experts of philosophy still give credence to Nietzsche means that his ideas will keep being studied.
If this was engineering, I wouldn’t need to convince people my plan would work or not (practically speaking), it either does it or it doesn’t. For philosophy, if I want to convince people, I have to begin by convincing the experts. And the way to do that is not to point at the structure, it’s to show that the method they think is fascinating is not actually fascinating, that it has flaws which make it, for whatever its aesthetic quality, worthless as a functional element.
Why do I want to do this? I have said this before, too. It’s because these ideas are conservative ideas. They are the conservative justifications for their political agenda. As such, they have no value for those who want real justice. They have less than no value because they make you second-guess the things you would do to achieve justice. They make you wonder whether even if you got a lot of support if it’s “the right thing”, if you are organizing “without ressentiment“, if you are not determining right and wrong through “slave morality”. It serves only to convince people that they should not seek to redress wrongs and it does this through leaps in logic and disguised interest. Holding onto Nietzscheanism is one of the biggest flaws that leftists have currently and its one they absolutely must let go of.
I am the man of ressentiment. I am the man of bad conscience. I am the slave who triumphs. Nietzsche put the poison pill down and I am swallowing it, and I will shit it out, too. I refuse to be afraid of being accused of the ideas he made up.
I am also the philosopher with the hammer. Nietzsche is the anvil. And I will never stop beating him to produce something better.