Stanza 39: Fracturing the Unknown
Neitzsche’s great claim as a thinker was that he faced down, as very few thinkers have before or since, the consequences of the unknowable. His starting point for thought, is that not only can one not assume that one’s perceptions give one an accurate picture of the external world; but also that external worlds probably do not exist as such. All that we know is real is the fact that we are affected by forces, coming from somewhere else, forces beyond our control, and which require us to respond in some manner to something, as if it were other. It is this image of a force that is only known through its effects in others, which Nietzsche suggests could form the paradigm for thought.
Such a force is very different to conventional ‘things’ in that it is only known in and through its effects within another. Its power is therefore the power to differ others. It lacks any centre of gravity beyond this power, this ability to bend. As such ‘truth’ is moved from being the deep internal property of a thing, and becomes rather defined by surfaces, on which different forces coalesce, dance and struggle. Truth becomes then the lightest and airiest of phenomena. What is accepted as the truth, becomes one and the same with the idea of what worked, or what appeared to work, or what appeared to be able to alter others.
Modern disciplines such as economics, sociology and psychology are born in the light of this understanding of truth. Economics is after all the science of ensuring that people behave in certain manners. It claims effectiveness therefore, as it produces policies which encourage (or force) others to behave in certain ways. Likewise sociology is the science of how the weight of a ‘society’ or a situation moulds human behaviour. And psychology is the discipline which attempts to understand how a mind is patterned both by its context in the world, and by whatever physical elements (genes or neural architecture) built up its brain in the first place. All these modern disciplines take therefore almost as their starting point, that humanity is always caught up with external forces, and must be understood as their partial product.
However at this point Nietzsche adds a further dimension to these forces. The joy of life is that it is neither simply passively moulded by these forces, nor yet does it ever seize control of them. But rather, living things, as they are taken up by other forces, alter those forces, both in themselves and in others. Living things are therefore caught up in a network of differing others (and others which include themselves as other). As such they operate as a force, or more properly a sequence of forces. This affect needs to then be understood across two quite different axes. On the one hand one needs to understand this affecting of others, as it exists within any individual (or series of individual) living things; while on the other hand, one needs to understand this force as it ranges and changes between all individual living things. Moreover these two axes will apply at the distinct levels of individual actions, and also wider societies and communities. That is, they will have a relevance and an effect both on the level of the individual, but also in the wider society. In the rest of this Rant, the first of these levels, the individual, will be considered in detail, while their effect within the wider society is reserved for next week’s Rant. I will consider first the nature of these forces, before coming on to those elements that run between all forces.
Nietzsche’s claim about the nature of force is simple enough. Humanity he says (but really all living things) is not to be understood in terms of a deep nature or soul. It is rather created across a sequence of encounters. Each encounter brings forward an individual response or reaction, and it is these responses that compose different individuals. More than that, these responses build up and inhabit the world. Any one individual can thereby don a whole variety of different masks, which represent and deal with different occasions. I will be kind sometimes, to some people, while at other times might be a pig. Reactions therefore are not to be owned by any one human, but rather are patterned and fall into humans, as individual responses to the world.
Additionally, as Nietzsche pulls these forces away from any concept of individuality (it is these forces that live, not ‘I‘ as such) my ability to have an affect on others, and to be caught up with other is similarly transformed. Some of the forces that I contain will isolate a Me created to be Alone. Other forces will hook a ‘me’ up to other individuals, other times and other places, and thereby open out onto a world. Every individual is therefore caught up in a series of networks, which loop back into each other in strange an erratic ways. This image is akin to the way we understand ourselves, and our friendships in an internet age. The internet in a sense is the paradigm that expresses for modernity this Nietzschian vision. On the internet one has a sequence of different levels of encounters and friendships. Some people one e-mails as oneself, for other’s one dons an alias, or even an alternative ‘personality’ to greet or meet. It opens out ways then, that one’s own power (be it the files one uploads, or the personality donned in Second Life) can respond to others, in a far wider orbit than one would ever achieve in one’s conventional life. And yet in opening this door, the internet of course (and Nietzsche would be very alive to this fact) also restricts how you can touch those others and be caught up in them. One only responds to them through the medium of the computer. One’s power is therefore curtailed, and limited, even as it is apparently expanded.
On the wider level of the mind, individuality has become increasingly understood in terms of different elements, different forces that are not necessarily specific to any one individuality, and need not be drawn into a wider orbit of the individual. To take a very modern example: There is a pointless furore this week about British Gas putting up its standing orders without consulting the individuals involved. The individuals then have complained. They have felt themselves individually powerless, and yet exerted collective power. They have climbed on the highest of moral high horses (and will have an effect). However if one steps back for a minute, there is something wrong here. Any individual could look at their meter’s readings regularly, could work out how much they should be paying a month, could seize direct control (and demand regular bills). These self-righteous individuals, are therefore in a sense, fools. They are the ones who lost control of the process. However this folly does not matter. It is lost in their collective grievance, a grievance which has a power to change the world.
Nietzsche was very aware of this last effect. That is, he was aware that there was a real problem in giving up the idea of the soul, and the dream of personal responsibility that followed on from it. For without such a dream, humanity would be very likely to collapse into petty personal concerns and worries. These concerns would then become all the stronger as they were shared by many different individuals, and would risk always becoming a real and potent force. A Force that endlessly screeches that it was not its fault, it was someone else’s. A scream that of course as it is popular, it is in the collective interest of politicians, but also the media to encourage. The problems with then abandoning truth is not that it becomes hopeless (or hapless) so much as it dissolves into being petty and spiteful: a spite which will have all the more power as it might have no bounds or limits.
Nietzsche proposes a solution to this problem. He says that modernity needs an ethic based upon difference. Every individual needs to act in such a way that they can wish that the difference that they make in that action to perpetually grow and change. Forces therefore need not to be understood in the local effects, but rather through their effects upon others and in other times far distant. If one always acts in the light of this effect, one will, Nietzsche claims, always be acting ethically. (One must act in the light of knowing that one’s action will have unintended consequences, and embrace that fact.) One will moreover, set oneself beyond any individual set of forces, and embrace the world between forces, the world where they make and drive difference. It is this return to difference which the howl of individual protest loses (as it sees only the immediate problem).
Nietzsche would need to go further, and claim that to forget this power of difference is to take one’s mind, but also the wider world into dark, warped, strange places. To give an example: Much of the recent criminal justice acts have been motivated by individual circumstances and effects. The laws have been then passed with one context in mind. The problem comes, when these laws are then lifted beyond that context and specific consequence, and as laws are applied to other circumstances. The Anti-terrorist act an be used for individual oppression, or even to freeze the account of Iceland’s banks; while the image of paedophiles grooming their victims becomes a metaphor for understanding the relationship between a Tory MP, and his contacts in the Civil Service. Legislation therefore breaks down, or even worse, carries us off willy nilly into a far more repressive state, because one has failed to grasp what deep difference that legislation might drive us towards.
This leads to the second aspect mentioned above. There will be numerous elements or organizations or individuality which contain at any one time a whole variety of different forces and different powers. These forces and powers will therefore have an existence whose nature is defined less by what they are, and more by how they respond to, and are differed by, all the forces that are contained within them. This factor Nietzsche calls the Will to Power. Such a Will can be understood as having three distinct levels of its own.
At its most basic level, this Will is firmly pitched beyond every individual. Forces come, and have a power because they have an ability to affect others. A factor which then comprehends this force will move towards these others, and their differences, and take these difference up into its own understanding. The Will to Power represented the attempt to pattern what forces exist elsewhere, and in and through others, forces that then build the world. In the modern world it is given within the concept of spin. A spin is a remark, designed to resonate in the minds of others, either building doubt and uncertainty or confirming a truth, or even opening up the way to look at things differently. In this respect, spin is well named. Its power lies not in being a force, so which as in being that which whirls credulous minds around, and makes them look differently at their own world.
The second level of this Will to Power breaks up the cogency of organizations. Any grouping, such as a political party or a parliament will have a variety of different forces within it. These forces will resonate with one another in different ways and at different times. Sometimes these forces will come together, and demand a collective right, while at others, they will pull radically apart, depending on the throw of events. Take the example this week of the Tory Damian Green and his arrest. This action unites one party (the Conservatives) in a single howl for freedom (a howl that might sit a little oddly with their practice in government).
This howl is made the more real, by the media (who feed on the kind of leaks which Damian Green was arrested for), and so have given their support to the Tories. It poses however a greater problem for the Labour Party, who with its parliamentary hat on agrees with the Tories that the arrest runs against the spirit of parliament; but it also needs to support the government (and has been individually embarrassed by Green’s leaks). Their party unity has therefore come under strain. It poses a different problem with the authorities in Parliament, and yet another for the Police. An event therefore reveals the forces that in this instance pull the collective authorities apart, and pitches them one against the other. However, another week, and a different event would see another combination of forces (or even see them all united against a threat). Any one organization does not contain permanent distinct forces, so much as those forces come springing into life, and coordinate one against the other, as individual events demand. This fact leads to the third level.
Organizations (including the human mind), will change across all these circumstances (and change perpetually). But across this change is a collective demand to be. This demand will become all the more strident as the years go by. The reasons why a newspaper or a university exist now are utterly different to those that created them. And yet it is now unthinkable that they are not. A university irrespective of its ability to be effective (or at least better than the alternatives) in the current world, still demands that it is, and that it has a power. Established organizations will therefore keep on ‘re-inventing’ themselves. That is, they will keep on finding a pretext for their own existence, and their demise becomes almost unthinkable (one of the ‘joys’ of the current recession, is that the unthinkable is happening, at certain times and to Bankers…).
Nietzsche urges us therefore, to embrace on a personal level our very power to differ. The joy of being alive, and its personal ethics lies not in the stodgy ability To Be, so much as our endless and effortless power to become something else. Any system of morality which would then impose upon humanity a straight jacket, in which a specific individuality is necessarily defined and enforced, will, for Nietzsche, lead one to the darkest of places. Such a system will be all very well in the inception, but as it becomes used, that is as it develops across time, it will suffer strains and problems, and its responses to these might well prove blinkered or even catastrophic. On a personal level Nietzche therefore argues that one must accept this world of difference. And yet (as has been seen in the above examples) this still leaves open a very real problem of whether this embrace can include (or be allowed for) within the wider social world. If it cannot, then a deep divide opens out between personal ethics, and wider morality. Whether, and under what circumstance this divide might happen (a divide which runs counter to Nietzche’s deep assumption that the same tools can be used in both worlds), will be the topic of the next Rant.
