Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle - Softcover

Klossowski, Pierre

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226443876 ISBN 13: 9780226443874

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1998

Synopsis

A landmark explication of Nietzsche's work from one of the most prominent experts on the philosopher's thought

Long recognized as a masterpiece of Nietzsche scholarship, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle is made available here for the first time in English. Taking a structuralist approach to the relation between Nietzsche's thought and his life, Klossowski emphasizes the centrality of the notion of Eternal Return (a cyclical notion of time and history) for understanding Nietzsche's propensities for self-denial, self-reputation, and self-consumption.

Nietzsche's ideas did not stem from personal pathology, according to Klossowski. Rather, he made a pathological use of his best ideas, anchoring them in his own fluctuating bodily and mental conditions. Thus Nietzsche's belief that questions of truth and morality are at base questions of power and fitness resonates dynamically and intellectually with his alternating lucidity and delirium.

About this title

About the Author

Klossowski, brother of the painter Balthus, is widely rcognized as a central figure in the contemporary French avant-garde.^Daniel W. Smith is an associate professor in philosophy at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. He specializes in contemporary 19th and 20th century philosophy from Europe, particularly the thought of Gilles Deleuze on whom he has published his renowned Essays on Deleuze, and translation of Essays , Clinical and Critical and Logic of Sensation. His essays are also published in numerous academic journals such as Continental Philosophy Review and Deleuze Studies.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle

By PIERRE KLOSSOWSKI

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 1969Edition Mercure de France
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-44387-4

Contents

Translator's Preface...............................................................................................................viiIntroduction.......................................................................................................................xiv1 The Combat against Culture.......................................................................................................12 The Valetudinary States at the Origin of a Semiotic of Impulses..................................................................153 The Experience of the Eternal Return.............................................................................................554 The Valetudinary States at the Origin of Four Criteria: Decadence, Vigour, Gregariousness, the Singular Case.....................745 Attempt at a Scientific Explanation of the Eternal Return........................................................................936 The Vicious Circle as a Selective Doctrine.......................................................................................1217 The Consultation of the Paternal Shadow..........................................................................................1728 The Most Beautiful Invention of the Sick.........................................................................................1989 The Euphoria of Turin............................................................................................................20810 Additional Note on Nietzsche's Semiotic.........................................................................................254Notes..............................................................................................................................262Index..............................................................................................................................274

Chapter One

The Combat against Culture

1. Is the 'philosopher' still possible today? Is the extent of what is known too great? Is it not unlikely that he will ever manage to embrace everything within his vision, all the less so the more scrupulous he is? Would it not happen too late, when his best time is past? Or at the very least, when he is damaged, degraded, degenerated, so that his value judgement no longer means anything? In the opposite case, he will become a dilettante with a thousand antennae, having lost the great pathos, his respect for himself - the good, subtle conscience. Enough - he no longer either directs or commands. If he wanted to, he would have to become a great actor, a kind of Cagliostro philosopher. 2. What does a philosophical existence mean for us today? Isn't it almost a way of withdrawing? A kind of evasion? And for someone who lives that way, apart and in complete simplicity, is it likely that he has indicated the best path to follow for his own knowledge? Would he not have had to experiment with a hundred different ways of living to be authorized to speak of the value of life? In short, we think it is necessary to have lived in a totally 'antiphilosophical' manner, according to hitherto received notions, and certainly not as a shy man of virtue - in order to judge the great problems from lived experiences. The man with the greatest experiences, who condenses them into general conclusions: would he not have to be the most powerful man? - For a long time we have confused the Wise Man with the scientific man, and for an even longer time with the religiously exalted man. Only now has it dawned on humanity that music is a semiological language of affects: and later we will learn how to recognize clearly the impulsive system of a musician through his music. In truth, he did not intend to betray himself in this manner. Such is the innocence of this type of confession, as opposed to every written work. Yet this innocence also exists in the great philosophers: they are not conscious that they are speaking of themselves - they claim it would be a question of 'the truth' - when at bottom it is only a question of themselves. Or rather: their most violent impulse is brought to light with all the impudence and innocence of a fundamental impulse: it wants to be sovereign and, if possible, the aim of every thing and every event! The philosopher is only a kind of occasion and chance through which the impulse is finally able to speak. There are many more languages than we think: and man betrays himself more often than he desires. How things speak! - but there are very few listeners, so that man can only, as it were, chatter on in the void when he pours out his confessions: he squanders his 'truths', as the sun does its light. - Isn't it rather a pity that the void has no ears? There are ways of seeing that make man feel: 'This alone is true and just, and truly human; whoever thinks otherwise is making an error' - ways of seeing we term religious and moral. It is clear that what is speaking here is the sovereign impulse, which is stronger than man. In each case, the impulse believes it holds the truth and the supreme concept of 'man'. Undoubtedly there are many men in whom an impulse has not become sovereign: they have no convictions. This then is the first characteristic: every coherent system of a philosopher demonstrates that one impulse directs it, that there is a fixed hierarchy in it. This is what is then called: 'truth'. - And the felt sensation [can be described] thus: with this truth I am at the height [of] 'man'; the other person is of a lesser kind than myself, at least in terms of knowledge. In rough and naive men, one conviction also predominates in their mores, and even in their tastes: they are the best possible. In cultured people there reigns a certain tolerance in this respect: but one holds all the more rigorously to one's own criterion of Good and Evil: according to which one wants to have not only the most refined taste but also the only legitimate one. This is the commonly reigning form of barbarism: that one doesn't even realize that morality is a matter of taste. For the rest, there is in this domain a maximum of imposture and lying. Moralizing and religious literature is the most full of lies. The dominant impulse, whichever it may be, resorts to ruse and lying to prevail over the other impulses. Alongside religious wars there is always a moral war going on: that is, one impulse wants to subjugate humanity; and as religions gradually die out, this struggle will become all the more bloody and visible. We are only at the beginning!

What then does the behaviour of the philosopher amount to? Is he a mere spectator of events, at once lucid and impotent? Or, if all commentary is useless, will he have to intervene directly? But how can he make a direct intervention? Through analyses, declarations, warnings, or incentives? Does he have to win over people's consciences in order to provoke an 'event' (breaking the history of humanity in two)? Or rather, does not this event, which the philosopher apprehends (the consequences of the disappearance of a unique God, the guarantor of identities, and the return of multiple gods), first have to be mimed, in accordance with the gestural semiotic of the Soothsayers and Prophets?

We must break with the classic rule of morality, which - on the pretext of realizing a human potential - makes humanity dependent upon habits adopted once and for all. Instead, we must behave in accordance with the strict demands that follow from relentless reflection. If a demand of thought can arise in an unforeseeable manner, it is because it can arise from behaviour itself, thereby opening up that same behaviour to the disparagement of a contradictory attitude. Behavior can never be limited by its regular repetition, nor can it limit thinking itself. A mode of thought that would restrict behaviour, or a mode of behaviour that would restrict thought - both comply with an extremely useful automatism: they ensure security. In reality, any thought that experiences the uneasiness of this provisional state reveals its own lassitude. By contrast, any thought that allows itself to be called into question, whether by an internal or external event, reveals a certain capacity for starting over. Either it retreats from, or it goes beyond, the statements made in the interval. It is on the basis of this lassitude or this capacity, this retreating or this going beyond, that Nietzsche will judge previous philosophers.

Neither Descartes, nor Spinoza, nor Kant, nor Hegel would have been able to construct their systems if, by some chance, they had renounced a teachable coherence in order to speak of existence from their own lived experience. (Though Descartes came close to doing so and seems to have concealed this intention.) Nietzsche maintains that they have only complied with a secret concern to express the movements of their own moods: 'They claim it is a question of "the truth" - when at bottom it is only a question of themselves. Or rather: their most violent impulse is brought to light with all the impudence and innocence of a fundamental impulse: it makes itself sovereign and, if possible, the aim of every thing and every event. The philosopher is only a kind of occasion and chance through which the impulse is finally able to speak.' What then did Spinoza or Kant do? Nothing but interpret their dominant impulse. But it was only the communicable part of their behaviour that could be translated into their constructions.

What this means is that Nietzsche rejected, purely and simply, the attitude of the philosopher-teacher. He made fun of himself for not being a philosopher - if by that we mean a thinker who thinks and teaches out of a concern for the human conltion. Nietzsche here acted ruthlessly, disruptively, and wound up acheving, one might say, a 'smashing' success [il 'casse la baraque'].

Nietzsche rejected any thought that was integrated into the function of thinking because it is the least efficacious. For what are the thoughts and experiences of a philosopher worth if they serve merely to guarantee the society from which he comes? A society believes itself to be morally justified through its scientists and artists. Yet the very fact that they exist - and that their creations exist - is evidence of the disintegrating malaise of the society; and it is by no means clear that they will be the ones to reintegrate the society, at least if they take their activity seriously.

Since Nietzsche was thnking and writing in a solidly bourgeois society - some thirty to forty years before its first fractures appeared - his manner of seeing still seemed to conform to the initiatives undertaken by that same society. It is only today that we are able to measure the impact of his words and of his rejection. 'Bourgeois' society no longer exists, but something much more complex has been substituted for it: an industrialist organization which, while maintaining the appearance of the bourgeois edifice, reorganizes and multiplies the social classes in accordance with the increase or decrease of ever more diversified needs, and which, because of its automatism, disturbs the sensitivity of individuals.

What Nietzsche meant to say through his own rejection of the system was that if philosophy merely concerns itself with a transmission of 'problems', it will never get beyond the general interpretation a particular social state gives of its own 'culture'. For Nietzsche, to make an assessment of Western culture always amounts to questioning it in the following manner: what can still be created from the acquisitions of our knowledge, our practices, our customs, our habits? To what degree am I the beneficiary or the victim or the dupe of these habits? With regard to his contemporaries, Nietzsche's own manner of living and writing - and of thinking - was the answer to these diverse questions.

For Nietzsche, the moral question of knowing what is true or false, just or unjust could now be posed in the following terms: What is sick or healthy? What is gregarious or singular?

The first shoots of fecundity, insofar as they are a sign of health and promote vigour and resistance, initially have the character of sickness. This first explosion of force and will to self-determination is a sickness that can destroy humanity; and even more sickly are the first, strange, and wild attempts of the mind to adjust the world to itself, to its own authority.

It seemed to Nietzsche - who was himself subject to valetudinary variations, and constantly feared that his own thought showed the effects of his depressive states - that it would be equally revelatory to examine the forms of thought put forward by previous thinkers from the viewpoint of their relation to life, to the living, that is, from the viewpoint of the rises and falls of intensity in all their various forms: aggressiveness, tolerance, intimidation, anguish, the need for solitude; or on the contrary the forgetting of oneself in the midst of the turmoil of an epoch.

Nietzsche therefore judged morality to be the principal 'metaphysical virus' of thought and science: 'I see all philosophers, I see science kneeling before a reality that is the reverse of the struggle for existence as taught by Darwin's school - that is to say, I see on top and surviving everywhere those who compromise life and the value of life.' The mediocre dominate those surplus natures whose overabundance of life is a threat to the security of the species. There are therefore two powers: the levelling power of gregarious thought and the erectile power of particular cases.

This allowed Nietzsche to identify those metaphysical systems commanded by moralities whose only aim is to perpetuate the reign of gregarious norms and instincts: any system that does not receive their approval cannot survive. But there also exist systems that are impracticable to the greatest number, and which are consecrated to a particular case (Heraclitus, Spinoza); and others that form a code reserved purely for a limited group (La Rochefoucauld). The metaphysics of a Kant, by contrast, harbours a behaviour that Nietzsche summarized in the image of the fox who returns to his cage after having broken out of it.

To construct systems (in the very epoch where we see science beginning) is pure childishness. In return: we must make long-term decisions regarding methods, for centuries! - for one day the direction of the future will have to pass into our hands! - Methods, however, that themselves come from our instincts, in regulated habits that already exist; for example, the exclusion of ends.

But in Nietzsche's mind, these methods amounted to a reproduction of the very conditions that have formed and favoured his vision of the world - and which therefore had given his type of feeling and thinking a chance of success.

One day, these isolated cases wd come into possession of their own methods for 'directing' the future of humanity. Did Nietzsche believe in the efficacy of these methods? Or rather, did he simply want to transmit the states of his own soul in order to make sure others would have the means of reacting and acting under the worst conditions, thereby enabling them not only to defend themselves but also to counter-attack?

At the end of this first inquiry, Nietzsche posed a new question in a tone of voice that was completely foreign to all previous speculation: Who is the adversary, who is the enemy to be destroyed? For the more thought can circumscribe its adversary, the more it can concentrate its strength. In determining the enemy, thought is able to create its own space, to extend it, to breathe freely. The enemy was not only Christianity, nor was it morality in itself, but a complex amalgam of the two; 'philistinism' is too weak a term, nor does 'bourgeoisism' adequately describe the monstrous hydra, for it is made up of extraordinarily diverse tendencies and deceitful practices. It is in all things, and in each thing. And Nietzsche himself had to struggle to free himself from the enemy, to eradicate all its germs, which he bore in himself like a hereditary sin. That was his first task.

To explore the foundation of Western culture, and especially 'bourgeois' culture, under the pretext of going deeper into it and making it bearable, always amounts to legitimating it in 'human' terms. But any possible legitimation was undermined in advance once Nietzsche denounced a society founded on the ideological disavowal of the external constraints it necessarily exerts. The ideological disavowal of constraints is expressed through the concept of culture - and thus, through a false interpretation of culture in a concept. The fact that modem society has merely formed a concept of culture is the proof of the disappearance of a lived culture.

The conception of the Greek state formed by the young Nietzsche became a phantasm that was all the more obsessive in that it was incompatible with the concept of culture. 'That slavery belongs to the essence of a culture is a truth that leaves no doubt as to the absolute value of existence. For the Promethean instigator of culture, it is the vulture that gnaws at the liver.'

A lived culture, according to Nietzsche, can never have a gregarious foundation. It is the fact of the particular case-and thus, from the viewpoint of the bourgeois concept of culture, a monstrosity. Though himself dependent on this concept, Nietzsche would nonetheless destroy it. Now the concept of culture is like the concept of freedom: both tend to cover over a specifically modern fact-the fact of experimentation. We will see later how experimentation restores the servitude that the concept of culture conjures away. Nietzsche summarized this in the following manner: there are forces present at the heart of an individual, struggles and externalizable constraints; which of them will be made into masters, and which into slaves? Experimentation always involves an inventor, an experimental object, failures, successes, victims, and sacrificers.

In 1871, well before he had passed through all the phases of his thought and discovered his own way of conceiving the meaning of successive Western cultures, Nietzsche had seen in the report of the burning of the Tuileries during the Commune an untenable argument for a traditional culture. He had written to Gersdorff (21 June 1871):

If we could discuss this together, we would agree that precisely in that phenomenon does our modern life, actually the whole of old Christian Europe and its state, but, above all, the 'Romanic' civilization which is now everywhere predominant, show the enormous degree to which our world has been damaged, and that, with all our past behind us, we all bear the guilt that such a terror could come to light, so that we must make sure we do not ascribe to those unfortunates alone the crime of a combat against culture. I know what that means: the combat against culture [emphasis added]. When I heard of the fires in Paris, I felt for several days annihilated and was overwhelmed by fears and doubts; the entire scholarly, scientific, philosophical, and artistic existence seemed an absurdity, if a single day could wipe out the most glorious works of art, even whole periods of art; I clung with earnest conviction to the metaphysical value of art, which cannot exist for the sake of impoverished people, but which has higher missions to fulfil. But even when the pain was at its worst, I could not cast a stone against those blasphemers, who were to me only carriers of the general guilt, which gives much food for thought.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Nietzsche and the Vicious Circleby PIERRE KLOSSOWSKI Copyright © 1969 by Edition Mercure de France . Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226443876
• ISBN 13: 9780226443874
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 302