Nietzsche and Philosophy by Gilles Deleuze
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Nietzsche and Philosophy Nietzsche and Philosophy Gilles Deleuze Translated by Hugh Tomlinson continuum • ••LONDON • NEW YORK Continuum The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX 370 Lexington Avenue. New York 10017-6503 First published in Great Britain 1983 by The Alhlone Press Paperback edtion 1986 Reprinted 1992, 19%, 2002 Originally published in France in 1962 as Nietzsche et la philosophic by Presses Universitaires de France © Presses Universitaires dc France, 1962 Preface and this translation © The Athlone Press. 1983 The publishers acknowledge the financial assistance at the French Ministry ol Culture and Communication in the translation of this work Published in the USA and Canada by Columbia University Press British Library Cataloguing in Publicalion Data Deleu/e, Gilles Nietzsche and philosophy. I. Nietzsche, Friedrich I. Title II. Nietzsche et la philosophie English 193 B3317 ISBN 0-8264-6150-6 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Printed and bound in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press. Trowbridge, Wilts Contents Preface to the English Translation ix Translator's Note xv Abbreviations of Nietzsche's Works xvi 1. The Tragic 1 1. The Concept of Genealogy 1 2. Sense 3 3. The Philosophy of the Will 6 4. Against the Dialectic 8 5. The Problem of Tragedy 10 6. Nietzsche's Evolution 12 7. Dionysus and Christ 14 8. The Essence of the Tragic 17 9. The Problem of Existence 19 10. Existence and Innocence 22 11. The Dicethrow 25 12. Consequences for the Eternal Return 27 13. Nietzsche's Symbolism 29 14. Nietzsche and Mallarme 32 15. Tragic Thought 34 16. The Touchstone 36 2. Active and Reactive 39 1. The Body 39 2. The Distinction of Forces 40 3. Quantity and Quality 42 4. Nietzsche and Science 44 5. First Aspect of the Eternal Return: as cosmoligical and physical doctrine 47 6. What is the Will to Power? 49 7. Nietzsche's Terminology 52 8. Origin and Inverted Image 55 9. The Problem of the Measure of Forces 58 10. Hierarchy 59 11. Will to Power and Feeling of Power 61 12. The Becoming-Reactive of Forces 64 13. Ambivalence of Sense and of Values 65 14. Second Aspect of the Eternal Return: as ethical and selective thought 68 15. The Problem of the Eternal Return 71 3. Critique 73 1. Transformation of the Sciences of Man 73 2. The Form of the Question in Nietzsche 75 3. Nietzsche's Method 78 4. Against his Predecessors 79 5. Against Pessimism and against Schopenhauer 82 6. Principles for the Philosophy of the Will 84 7. Plan of The Genealogy of Morals 87 8. Nietzsche and Kant from the Point of View of Principles 89 9. Realisation of Critique 91 10. Nietzsche and Kant from the Point of View of Consequences 93 11. The Concept of Truth 94 12. Knowledge, Morality and Religion 97 13. Thought and Life 100 14. Art 102 15. New Image of Thought 103 4. From Ressentiment to the Bad Conscience 111 1. Reaction and Ressentiment 111 2. Principle of Ressentiment 112 3. Typology of Ressentiment 114 4. Characteristics of Ressentiment 116 5. Is he Good? Is he Evil? 119 6. The Paralogism 122 7. Development of Ressentiment: the Judaic priest 124 8. Bad Conscience and Interiority 127 9. The Problem of Pain 129 10. Development of Bad Conscience: The Christian priest 131 11. Culture Considered from the Prehistoric Point of View 133 12. Culture Considered from the Post-Historic Point of View 135 13. Culture Considered from the Historical Point of View 138 14. Bad Conscience, Responsibility, Guilt 141 15. The Ascetic Ideal and the Essence of Religion 143 16. Triumph of Reactive Forces 145 5. The Overman: Against the Dialectic 147 1. Nihilism 147 2. Analysis of Pity 148 3. God is Dead 152 4. Against Hegelianism 156 5. The Avatars of the Dialectic 159 6. Nietzsche and the Dialectic 162 7. Theory of the Higher Man 164 8. Is Man Essentially "Reactive"? 166 9. Nihilism and Transmutation: the focal point 171 10. Affirmation and Negation 175 11. The Sense of Affirmation 180 12. The Double Affirmation: Ariadne 186 13. Dionysus and Zarathustra 189 Conclusion 195 Notes 199 Preface to the English Translation to Hugh Tomlinson It is always exciting for a French book to be translated into English. It is an opportunity for the author, after so many years, to consider the impression he would like to make on a prospective reader, whom he feels both very close to and very cut off from. Nietzsche's posthumous fate has been burdened by two ambiguities: was his thought a forerunner of fascist thinking? And was this thought itself really philosophy or was it an over-violent poetry, made up of capricious aphorisms and pathological fragments? It is perhaps in England that Nietzsche has been most misunderstood. Tomlinson suggests that the major themes which Nietzsche confronts and battles against - French rationalism and German dialectics - have never been of central importance to English thought. The English had at their theoretical disposal an empiricism and a pragmatism which meant that the detour through Nietzsche was of no great value to them. They did not need the detour through Nietzsche's very special empiricism and pragmatism which ran counter to their "good sense". In England therefore Nietzsche was only able to influence novelists, poets and dramatists: this was a practical, emotional influence rather than a philosophical one, lyrical rather than theoretical. Nevertheless Nietzsche is one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century. And he alters both the theory and the practice of philosophy. He compares the thinker to an arrow shot by Nature that another thinker picks up where it has fallen so that he can shoot it somewhere else. According to him, the philosopher is neither eternal nor historical but "untimely", always untimely. Nietzsche has hardly any predecessors. Apart from the Pre-Socratics of long ago he recog nised only one predecessor - Spinoza. X Nietzsche and Philosophy Nietzsche's philosophy is organised along two great axes. The first is concerned with force, with forces, and forms of general semeiology. Phenomena, things, organisms, societies, consciousness and spirits are signs, or rather symptoms, and themselves reflect states of forces. This is the origin of the conception of the philosopher as "physiologist and physician". We can ask, for any given thing, what state of exterior and interior forces it presupposes. Nietzsche was responsible for creating a whole typology to distinguish active, acted and reactive forces and to analyse their varying combinations. In particular, the delineation of a genuinely reactive type of forces constitutes one of the most original points of Nietzschean thought. This book attempts to define and analyse the different forces. This kind of general semeiol ogy includes linguistics, or rather philology, as one of its parts. For any proposition is itself a set of symptoms expressing a way of being or a mode of existence of the speaker, that is to say the state of forces that he maintains or tries to maintain with himself and others (consider the role of conjunctions in this connection). In this sense a proposition always reflects a mode of existence, a "type". What is the mode of existence of the person who utters any given proposition, what mode of existence is needed in order to be able to utter it? The mode of existence is the state of forces insofar as it forms a type which can be expressed by signs or symptoms. The two great human reactive concepts, as "diagnosed" by Nietzsche, are those of ressentiment and bad conscience. Ressentiment and bad conscience are expressions of the triumph of reactive forces in man and even of the constitution of man by reactive forces: the man-slave. This shows the extent to which the Nietzschean notion of the slave does not necessarily stand for someone dominated, by fate or social condition, but also characterises the dominators as much as the dominated once the regime of domination comes under the sway of forces which are reactive and not active. Totalitarian regimes are in this sense regimes of slaves, not merely because of the people that they subjugate, but above all because of the type of "masters" they set up. A universal history of ressentiment and bad conscience - from the Jewish and Christian priests to the secular priest of the present - is a fundamental component of Nietzsche's historical perspectivism (Nietzsche's supposedly anti-semitic texts are in fact texts on the original priestly type). The second axis is concerned with power and forms an ethics and an Preface to the English Translation xi ontology. Nietzsche is most misunderstood in relation to the question of power. Every time we interpret will to power as "wanting or seeking power" we encounter platitudes which have nothing to do with Nietzsche's thought. If it is true that all things reflect a state of forces then power designates the element, or rather the differential relationship, of forces which directly confront one another. This relationship expresses itself in the dynamic qualities of types such as "affirmation" and "negation". Power is therefore not what the will wants, but on the contrary, the one that wants in the will. And "to want or seek power" is only the lowest degree of the will to power, its negative form, the guise it assumes when reactive forces prevail in the state of things. One of the most original characteristics of Nietzsche's philosophy is the transformation of the question "what is .