Dead Letters to Nietzsche, or the Necromantic Art of Reading Philosophy. Joanne Faulkner
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decided even by the most industrious and most scrupulously conscientious analysis and self-examination of the intellect; for in the course of this analysis the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its own perspectives, and only in these. We cannot look around our own corner.[9]
Physiologists should think twice before positioning the drive for self-preservation as the cardinal drive of an organic being. Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength—life itself is will to power—: self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of this.[10]
With the concept of will to power, Nietzsche attempts to describe the dynamics between various bodily instincts and organisms. Optimally, the organism is a complex arrangement of forces, which are better able collectively to appropriate—that is, form in their image—whatever surrounds them. The body is thereby a composition of “forces” that have formed strategic alliances with one another, and to map its prehistory, one would have to relate a brutal struggle, literally involving death for some of these forces. According to Nietzsche, the arrangement of drives also necessitates a division of labor between them: active, form-giving force, which compels the allegiance of others that it encounters; and reactive force, which strategically obeys active force in order to obtain sustenance only indirectly, after satisfying the force that commands. Significantly, for Nietzsche perspective (interpretation) and the formation of the body (will to power) are only conceptually separable: interpretation expresses the means by which the drives articulate their relations to one another, and thereby also exercise their power.
Nietzsche’s concept of will to power, in addition to describing biological organisms, includes within its scope behaviors and events in the different “spheres” of the organic world: animal, political, social, and philosophical (Will to Power, §423, 227). Will to power (as the material struggle of forces) and perspective (as the effect of relations between these forces) become for Nietzsche a substratum for both body and thought. They are two sides of the one phenomenon: life.[11] When he turns, then, to philosophy, text seems to have become a visceral remainder. Philosophical texts reflect, by Nietzsche’s account, a truth about the philosopher’s body, which provides the “real germ of life from which the whole plant has grown” (Beyond Good and Evil, “Prejudices,” §6, 13). Yet, even here the relation between body and language is not simple; nor is it unidirectional. As he writes in The Gay Science, “I have asked myself whether, taking a large view, philosophy has not been merely an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body” (Preface, §2, 34-5).
Philosophy often relates a fantasy of overcoming the body, and this narrative, also, plays a part in the agonistic drama of a body pitted against itself. What we find in the philosopher’s language is a movement of both revealing and concealing of the drives. The body, which according to Nietzsche is a thriving multiplicity, is inhibited by “reason,” and is thereby forced to conform to a linear and possibly torpid viewpoint. Reason ostensibly provides an imperative that one’s thoughts and values should be mutually coherent—or in other words, that one thought should follow logically from the last—but what reason actually provides is the paradigm for what is recognized as coherent: there is no coherence in itself, apart from the constraints, or form of life, through which it is perceived. As such, philosophy represents for Nietzsche an egalitarianism of the soul: that is, an attempt to render bodies equivalent to one another, by means of “the impartial” discourse of reason. By devaluing bodily differences—“the passions”—the philosopher attempts to master them. For Nietzsche, conversely, difference is the source of the body’s power and creativity.
By continually contrasting the healthy body to “philosophy,” conceived as a degenerate form of corporeality, Nietzsche promotes a notion of the body as a source of power, figured as difference. Nietzsche charges philosophical thought with the disempowerment and normalization of the body, reflected in the metaphysics inherent in grammar. Philosophy renders explicit “truths,” or viewpoints, humanity already tells itself in the very form of language. Language and subjectivity, Nietzsche held, implicitly reduce bodily diversity to sameness: otherwise communication and understanding would not be possible. The root of thought’s movement away from bodily multiplicity can be traced to the advent of consciousness according to Nietzsche. He discusses the possibility of a thinking being without consciousness in The Gay Science. Yet, what he describes is not usually considered as “thought” by philosophers, who tend to confuse thought with consciousness and reason:
[W]e could think, feel, will, and remember, and we could also “act” in every sense of that word, and yet none of all this would have to “enter our consciousness” (as one says metaphorically). The whole of life would be possible without, as it were, seeing itself in a mirror. Even now, for that matter, by far the greatest portion of our life actually takes place without this mirror effect; and this is true even of our thinking, feeling, and willing life, however offensive this may sound to older philosophers. For what purpose, then, any consciousness at all when it is in the main superfluous? (Gay Science, §354, 297)
Nietzsche then attributes consciousness’s superfluous “mirror effect” to the turn to language: “only this conscious thinking takes the form of words, which is to say signs of communication, and this fact uncovers the origin of consciousness” (Gay Science, §354, 298).
According to Nietzsche, the necessity for communication represents a regrettable “loss of contact” with our individual, bodily being. Such a loss, however, is ambiguously situated in this text. For it is not the case that one once had perfect knowledge of the body, and that language and consciousness then intervened and despoiled such perfect knowledge. Rather, the condition of knowledge is precisely this despoiling; consciousness represents the only means of “knowledge,” which Nietzsche defines as essentially a reduction of multiplicity, for the sake of conscious thought (Gay Science, §355, 300). Knowledge is for Nietzsche already the province of the herd animal. Indeed, throughout his oeuvre, the body is figured in excess of our knowledge of it. Nietzsche frequently comments upon the epistemic gap between the body and consciousness. Following Spinoza, he relates that we cannot observe the simplest bodily functions as they occur within us, nor can we understand the vast complexity of our own corporeality with such an inadequate instrument as consciousness.[12]
That knowledge in general is limited is a necessary adjunct to Nietzsche’s perspectivism because, as finite beings, the needs that determine the truth available to us cannot exhaust all potential aspects of “the thing.” But more precisely in the case of knowledge of our own bodies, consciousness necessarily simplifies and conceals in its perceptions of the body. Consciousness exists principally as a simplification of, and mantle for, the body, of which it is merely the most surface aspect. For the sake of the mind’s proper functioning, the life of the body must for the most part remain obscure—otherwise, not only would the mind become overstimulated, but also it would cease to perform its vital role as interpreter of bodily needs. And here Nietzsche’s dual vocations—as philologist and philosopher—come more apparently to work together. For as with texts, so with bodies, interpretation is a selective process in which the work of excluding superfluous material, or information, is equally as important as including what is relevant. Thus, much of the work of consciousness, according to Nietzsche, is actively to forget whatever does not accord to a simplified schema of what the self is.[13]
Yet more significantly, in order to know itself—to become self-conscious—the body undergoes a transformation that renders it unrecognizable “as such.” “The ideal of the self”—for Nietzsche a very limited aspect of “the whole self” (what he calls “the great intelligence” of the body)[14]—acts as a measure for the selection and interpretation of the surrounding environment and, indeed, of the body itself. This ideal through which perceptions are mediated is the “I”: the subject, or “self” to which Nietzsche appeals