Open Letter to Bret Davis: Letter on Egoism: Will to Power as Interpretation
2015; Penn State University Press; Volume: 46; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/jnietstud.46.1.0042
ISSN1538-4594
Autores Tópico(s)Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel
ResumoDear Bret,Some thought it shouldn't be done this way, that it wouldn't work, but I'm going ahead anyway. It wasn't feeling right, to be writing about someone I've known for so long things like “Davis misunderstands the role of the ego… .” So here goes, with my response to your lengthy essay “Zen after Zarathustra: The Problem of the Will in the Confrontation between Nietzsche and Buddhism,” which appeared in these pages almost ten years ago.1As I've said already in public, I think the essay is a landmark in comparative studies of Nietzsche and Zen, with an appropriate focus on Keiji Nishitani's insightful reading of Nietzsche on the topic of nihilism and its self-overcoming. The treatment of the relevant Buddhist and Zen ideas is, not surprisingly, exemplary and richly instructive. But it's also a questionable essay: you begin with a series of five questions, end with a series of six, and drop in another seventy question marks along the way (some of them in quotations), which often make it difficult to determine what you really want to say about the relations between Zen and Zarathustra. Your decision to enact a confrontation between Nietzsche and Buddhism leads to a confrontational reading of Nietzsche as advocating “the egoism of the will to power” (113), which of course distances him from Buddhism and Zen.2 This procedure highlights the contrasts between the two sides, which are only to be expected in view of Nietzsche's quite different historical, cultural, philosophical, and personal situation from that of, say, Dōgen or Nishitani. An investigation of parallels or consonances, by contrast, often reveals the unexpected, and prompts the question of how on earth Nietzsche keeps coming up with ideas about how to live that are so like the Buddhists'.But before I get down to my response, let me say something general about readings of Nietzsche. In view of the size of the corpus, Nietzsche must be regarded as one of the larger elephants in philosophy, and we blind men consequently give many differing accounts of how he really is. There's the Nietzsche according to analytic philosophers, the postmodern/deconstructionist Nietzsche, Nietzsche as interpreted by the Chinese, and so forth. But there are two that are of particular interest here: let's call them Nietzsche A (short for Nietzsche as the Antibuddha) and Nietzsche B (Nietzsche as advocate of the Bodhisattva ideal). I've published a fair amount advocating Nietzsche B, not claiming that's the whole or only Nietzsche, but presenting a coherent view of Nietzsche that's in the spirit of what we know of the man's life as well as his work.3 The multiple pairs of questions your essay keeps posing—Is Nietzsche A? or is he B?—tend to come down on the side of A, dismissing the B-like aspects as peripheral or insignificant. Although your interpretation is based on a comprehensive reading of his texts, you consistently overlook or ignore key aspects of his thinking that are consonant with Buddhist ideas, and on occasion misread his writings.Not being sure that readers of JNS are ready for many more pages on this topic before they even get to your response, I'll focus on two key issues that I think you misrepresent: the status of the “I” (das Ich), or ego, and the nature of will, willing, and will to power. At the end I'll discuss a few consonances between Nietzsche and Zen that I think deserve further thought.Toward the end of your section “Buddhism Contra Nietzsche as Will-full Nihilism,” you say, “we need to ask whether a decisive gap remains between Nishitani's standpoint of Zen and Nietzsche's philosophy of the will to power over the question of egoism” (111). Good question. You begin to answer it by remarking, correctly, that “the ‘ego’ as a given substantial entity, to be sure, exists for Nietzsche no more than it does for Buddhism,” and that Nietzsche regards the subject as a “multiplicity” that needs to be organized somehow (112). So far, so good. But then, with respect to Beyond Good and Evil aphorism 19, you write, While “our body is but a social structure composed of many souls,” the ego is constructed by subjecting weaker “under-souls” or “under-wills” to a stronger ruling will… . In short, while for Nietzsche there is no ego as a given, there is the task of constructing an ego, of organizing the plurality of disparate impulses by submitting them to the rule of a commanding will to power. / Buddhism, on the other hand, speaks directly against the willful construction of an ego. Here's a confrontation, then: while Nietzsche is intensely concerned with “the task of constructing an ego,” Buddhism is dead against such a project. But where do you get this idea about Nietzsche? He never talks about the task of constructing an ego, and the passages you cite in support of this idea instead portray the ego as a philosophically unhelpful fiction.For example, in BGE 17 Nietzsche writes that “the honest old I” has evaporated into the little “it” that we are misled into positing when confronted with some kind of action: seduced by grammar, we think there must be some subject doing the acting, when in fact there isn't any such thing. In KSA 12:9[98], Nietzsche demonstrates the vacuity of the idea of the “ego as substance.” And the “I” is mentioned only once in BGE 19, in connection with “what is most strange about willing.” Insofar as “a human being who wills commands something in him that obeys, or that he thinks obeys […] we are always both the commanders and the obeyers”; and yet we tend to dismiss and deceive ourselves over this duality “by means of the synthetic concept of the ‘I.’” This little word I is what misleads us into regarding the complexity of the will “as a unity,” rather than a more or less organized interaction among multiple members of the society of souls that each of us is. There's no need to worry that a strong will in this context will harm others, since all the commanding and obeying are going on within the individual.You go on to argue that for Nietzsche—in contrast to Buddhism, which aims at a “disintegration of the willful ego”—this would be “a decadent ‘disintegration of the instincts,’ and decadence paves the road to nihilism.” You're surely right to say that Nietzsche is concerned that the “disintegration of the ego” may lead to decadence: he often warns against the chaos, weakness, and mediocrity that can result—what I have called, adapting Hegel, “bad multiplicity.”4 And the way to avoid bad multiplicity is indeed to “organize the plurality of disparate impulses”—but it's misleading to say this is done by “submitting them to the rule of a commanding will to power,” which also misses the interesting question of who's doing the submitting. To overcome nihilism, according to your Nietzsche, there is a need for “the willing of a new organization for the ego and its world,” as well as an “affirmation of the egoism of the will to power” as “an egoistic force that expands the domain of the ego by subjugating others to its rule” (112–13). I usually try to be a Yes-sayer, but in this case I have to say: No, no, and no.Unfortunately you were laboring here under the immense disadvantage of not having consulted the comprehensive discussion of this topic in a book called Composing the Soul, which devotes over a hundred pages to this issue.5 Nietzsche does in a sense take the I “as a given”: but it's something we acquire willy-nilly through being socialized, and which helps us cope with life in society. But for Nietzsche this “pale fiction” (as he calls it in an aphorism titled “Sham-Egoism”) is a mere “phantom of ego formed in the heads of those around us and then communicated back to us.” And in “The So-Called ‘I’” he characterizes the I as a fallacious “opinion about ourselves” (D 105, 115). Throughout his career Nietzsche regards the I as something that stands in the way of one's “becoming what one is.” Let me cite just three examples, from early, middle, and late periods.In The Birth of Tragedy he writes of the “I-ness” of the “waking, empirically real human being” as a defense against the influence of Dionysus, and as something that prevents one from living creatively (BT 5). In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “On the Despisers of the Body,” Zarathustra aims to reduce his audience's pride in the “I” by characterizing its subjection to the body, as “the Self”: the body is “ruler of the I”; it mocks the I for its “proud leapings … of thought”; it is “the leading-reins of the I and the prompter of its conceptions” (Z I: “Despisers”). And in Twilight of the Idols he gives a distinctly Buddhist-sounding account of the parallel development of the concepts of the “I” and of things: “[Human reason] believes in the ‘I,’ in the I as Being, in the I as substance, and projects its belief in the I-substance onto all things—thereby creating the concept of ‘thing.’ […] These days we know that [will] is only a word” (TI “Reason in Philosophy” 5).6 When this belief in the I-substance is undermined, the concept of the “thing” is correspondingly weakened, and what comes to the fore as substance recedes is (as in Buddhism) relationships. As we free ourselves from “the error of the I,” we come to appreciate “the affinities and antagonisms among things, multiplicities therefore and their laws.”7 All this corresponds to the idea of “no-self” (anatman) that is central to Buddhism and which, on the basis of a radically relational ontology, applies equally to the I and to things.In the average case, Nietzsche would admit, the organization is effected well enough by the sham or phantom ego that we get from the process of socialization. But this pale fiction cramps one's style and stifles creativity, and “one becomes what one is” by seeing through it, deconstructing the controlling ego in favor of a richer psychical regime that does justice to the soul's multiplicity. This is why it's not a matter of “subjecting weaker ‘under-souls’ or ‘under-wills’ to a stronger ruling will”—or at least not to any kind of ego-will. A notebook entry from the time when Nietzsche was first deconstructing the ego as ruler reads: “The I is not the attitude of one being to several (drives, thoughts, etc.) but the ego is a plurality of personlike forces, of which now this one now that one stands in the foreground as ego and looks at the others.”8 Plurality, or multiplicity, rules. Within the “mortal soul” understood as a “subject-multiplicity” or “social structure of the drives and the affects,” where the intellect is “only a certain disposition of the drives toward each other,” various groups of drives acting as “regents at the head of a community” (an idea found in Herder) can order the rest of the drives under a regime of what I've called “serial tyranny by committee” (because the composition of the ruling group changes over time). In the final phase, which Nietzsche styles “Dionysian,” the regime can be relaxed and the will unharnessed, so that protracted self-discipline gives way to a “natural” spontaneity.9You end your section on “Will-full Nihilism” by citing this notorious passage from Beyond Good and Evil: “Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering what is alien and weaker, suppression, hardness, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation… . Life simply is will to power” (113).10 I hope it's becoming clear by now that your gloss on this—“the will to power [is] an egoistic force that expands the domain of the ego by subjugating others to its rule”—while it has some support in the text, is misleading in its introduction of the ego. Yes, it's a jungle out there, some of it, and life as will to power does involve appropriation and so forth—but this doesn't mean that Nietzsche is advocating a human life, especially a philosophical one, dedicated to mugging, raping, and pillaging. The interesting question, which I'll address shortly, concerns the way to a creative and fulfilling life in the context of life as will to power; and Nietzsche's answer is certainly not that we expand the domain of the ego.In a note from 1881 he recommends understanding ourselves not as individuals but as “life-systems” [Lebenssysteme], radically multiple beings with a whole lot going on beneath the level of consciousness. The note ends in an uncharacteristic explosion of emphases and exclamation marks. “One must stop feeling oneself as a phantastical ego! Learn step by step to get rid of the supposed individual! To detect the errors of the ego! To see through egoism as an error! Not to understand its opposite as altruism! That would just be love of other supposed individuals! No! Get over ‘me’ and ‘you’! Feel cosmically!”11Kosmisch empfinden! Phew.Some have dismissed this fragment as an aberration, but Nietzsche's insistence on the fantasy of the ego and the error of the individual persists to the end. In Twilight of the Idols he emphasizes that “[t]he individual […] is after all an error: it is not anything in itself [… but] is rather the entire line of humanity all the way up to itself” (TI “Forays of an Untimely One” 33). And as the entire line of humanity it will be inextricably related to all other humans and others.In your next section, “Elevated Egoism and the Ambivalent Self-Overcoming of the Will to Power,” you turn for a while to a kinder, gentler aspect of Nietzsche, and discuss some affinities between this side of his thinking and Buddhism. You acknowledge a “whole and holy” selfishness in Nietzsche, which Zarathustra calls “the bestowing virtue” (Z I: “On the Gift-Giving Virtue”), and ask whether this virtue doesn't “remind us of the first of the ‘perfections’ of the Bodhisattva, the ‘perfection of giving’ without return” (114). It certainly does (and I'll say something about this later). You go on to acknowledge that there are various forms of egoism for Nietzsche, some of which “depict only degenerative forms of the will to power,” and then you quote these passages from “On Those Who Are Sublime” (Z II), emphasizing all the right parts: [The sublime one] must still unlearn even his heroic will; he shall be elevated for me, not merely sublime: the ether itself should elevate him, the will-less one! …To stand with relaxed muscles and unharnessed will: that is most difficult for all of you sublime ones… .And there is no one from whom I want beauty as much as from you who are powerful: let your kindness be your final self-conquest [or, better, “your ultimate self-overpowering”]… .For this is this soul's secret: only when the hero has abandoned her is she approached, in a dream, by—the over-hero. (116–17) You remark, aptly, that this is “surely one of the high points of Zarathustra's teaching”—but then a few pages later you wonder whether it might not be just another “fable song of madness” after all (117, 122). You wonder this because you misconstrue the passage as characterizing “the ‘elevated egoism’ of Nietzsche's overhero” (118)—but why the quote marks around “elevated egoism,” when the German equivalent (gehobener Egoismus?) doesn't appear anywhere, as far as I can tell, in Nietzsche's texts?This high point of Zarathustra's teaching invalidates your reading of will to power as ego-driven. What Zarathustra is saying is that the “heroic will”—associated with the ego—has to be unlearned, that the sublime one has to get over his sublimity and become “will-less,” which he can do by relaxing his hero's muscles and unharnessing the will from the reins of (and the reign of) the ego.12 When will to power no longer needs to overpower others physically, it becomes beautiful and—through having overpowered itself—even kind. Zarathustra as Bodhisattva. An unpublished note from the period reveals that the soul is Ariadne, who has to be abandoned by Theseus, the hero, before Dionysus, “the Loosener,” can arrive.13 When Dionysus takes possession of the soul, the heroic ego is gone.You appreciate that Nietzsche is aiming at letting “a plurality of perspectives” prevail, but because of your attachment to the “elevated egoism” of the overhero you can't imagine that he could be willing to “let them be” (118). The question arises only if you assume that Theseus doesn't leave, and that the ego can survive the arrival of Dionysus—but of course he does leave, and the I must disappear in the face of the God of radical multiplicity. When the overhero takes over, the vanished ego isn't there to “throw its ring around” anything, nor to “subjugate other perspectives,” however subtly.You go on to worry about “an ambivalence [that] infects the doctrine of ‘perspectivism’ itself,” insofar as “Nietzsche's perspectivism is explicitly aligned with egoism.” Whoa—wait a minute: the aphorism you cite in support of that last remark (GS 162) doesn't support it at all. It says simply that egoism is a perspectival law of human perception, whereby things close to us appear “large and heavy,” and smaller and lighter with increasing distance. Perhaps you imagine this alignment with egoism because you only see one aspect of Nietzsche's perspectivism, regarding the validity of the manifold perspectives of other people and creatures (118–19). But if we understand perspectivism in connection with his “experimentalism,” which concerns the way the multiple drives that comprise us interpret the world, and can be best imagined and engaged as persons, another aspect emerges regarding the validity of the perspectives of the manifold persons and creatures within each individual. “I have discovered for myself that ancient humanity and animality, indeed the entire primal age and past of all sentient being continues in me to create, to love, to hate, to infer […]” (GS 54).This idea is developed in a number of passages from the middle period works, of which this one is representative: We must deal with things experimentally, now angry with them and now kind to them, being just, passionate, and cold toward them in succession. One [person/drive] addresses things as a policeman, another as a father confessor, a third as an inquisitive wanderer. Something can be wrested from them now through sympathy, now through force; one person progresses to insight through reverence for their secrets, another through indiscretion and roguishness in explaining their mysteries. (D 432; see also 539, 569)14 As I've pointed out elsewhere, this dimension of Nietzsche's perspectivism is remarkably reminiscent of Zhuangzi's Daoism, and of the distinctly Zhuangzian perspectivism that Dōgen develops in the Shōbōgenzō.15 For none of these do we ultimately need an ego to orchestrate the various approaches; once the self-discipline is complete, the appropriate persons and perspectives play themselves out on their own.You write many good things about the killing of the ego and the Great Death in the Zen tradition, citing wonderful passages from the literature to demonstrate the power and reach of that process (121–22). But here you overlook a corresponding theme in Nietzsche: there isn't space to go into here, but I've engaged it at some length elsewhere, through topics such as “The Thought of Death” (GS 278), the switch from the “life” to the “death perspective,” “a death with open eyes,” and the “festival of crossing over to the ‘dead’ world.”16Toward the end of your section on “Elevated Egoism” you remark on the openness inherent in Nietzsche's perspectivism, and cite with approval the aphorism in The Joyful Science 374, where he invites us to entertain the possibility that the world “may include infinite interpretations” (119). Indeed: if each individual is capable of interpreting from innumerable perspectives, and we multiply those by the number of individuals… . But then you qualify your approval straight away by saying, “Yet, once again, we are told that ‘interpretation is itself a means of becoming master of something’ (The Will to Power 643) and that the ‘organic process’ of the will to power demands that other perspectives be brought under the command of a ruling will.” This brings us back to the same old “ruling will” refrain—which is a pity because you were almost on to a better alternative just there.You apparently overlooked the beginning of the passage, which reads, “The will to power interprets” (KSA:2[148] emphasis in original). And at the beginning of The Joyful Science aphorism you quoted about “infinite interpretations,” Nietzsche wonders whether “existence without interpretation doesn't become ‘meaningless,’ or ‘nonsense,’” and so “whether all existence isn't essentially interpreting existence [ob nicht alles Dasein essentiell ein auslegendes Dasein ist].” There we have it: “the world as will to power” (BGE 36)—and it's all interpreting.Nietzsche emphasizes that will to power as self-overcoming is essentially a matter of interpretation and reinterpretation in his last extended discussion of the notion, in On the Genealogy of Morality. There he proposes that things are again and again interpreted by a power superior to them according to new estimations, requisitioned anew, re-formed and converted for new uses; that all goings-on in the organic world are an overcoming, a conquering, and that in turn all overcoming and conquering is a re-interpreting. […] All purposes, all cases of being useful, are evidence that a will to power has become master of something less powerful and has imposed on it the meaning of a function [… which gives rise to] a continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations. (GM II:12) And then, against Herbert Spencer and his emphasis on reaction and adaptation in evolution, “This misunderstands what is essential to life, its will to power; and it overlooks the primacy of the spontaneous forces that seize, encroach, interpret anew, order and shape anew.” These spontaneous forces are evident in all the physical overpowering that goes on in the biosphere, where creatures live by consuming others below them in the food pyramid. But this can also be construed as “interpreting existence.” A plant that through its roots absorbs and incorporates minerals from the soil is basically asserting its interpretation of them: “This is now what it means for these to be, or become.” And the pyramidal rock on the shore of Lake Silvaplana where Nietzsche was struck by the thought of eternal return is similarly an interpretation, or laying out (Auslegung), of the molecules of which it is composed. It's this fundamental aspect of will to power as interpretation—all conquering is a reinterpreting—that you continue studiously to ignore, even after I assure you of its centrality.I note that your citations of ego in connection with will to power are from the unpublished notes, so let's look at how Nietzsche treats the idea of will to power in his published writings. The term first appears in a speech of Zarathustra's, “On the Thousand Goals and One,” which begins with his announcing that he has traveled to many lands, and seen what different peoples regard as “good and evil.” “A tablet of things held to be good hangs over every people. Behold, it is the tablet of its overcomings; behold, it is the voice of its will to power” (Z I: “On the Thousand Goals and One”). A people's will to power grounds its self-understanding, its interpretation of the world as good and evil, and this has to do with its self-overcomings: what is good is “what is indispensable and hard” for the people. Will isn't individual but collective; not a people's domination of others but its mastery of itself.Will to power comes up next in Zarathustra's speech addressed to the great philosophers, “you who are wisest” (Z II: “On Self-overcoming”). What the wisest call their will to truth, Zarathustra calls their will to power, because they interpret the world in terms of good and evil, creating a world before which they can then kneel. He tells them what he has learned about life, from Life herself: that life is will to power, and as such is willing to sacrifice itself for the sake of power. You acknowledge that in Zarathustra “the idea of the will to power is developed in connection with the idea of ‘self-overcoming’” (116), but this key connection gets lost in your enthusiasm for Nietzsche's “elevated egoism.” There's nothing ego-driven about will to power, which sacrifices and overcomes itself rather than striving for self-preservation: “The authentic basic life-drive […] aims at expansion of power, and in this will it often enough calls self-preservation into question and sacrifices it” (GS 349).Zarathustra claimed earlier to have found “no greater power on earth” than will to power as “praising and blaming” (Z I: “On the Thousand Goals and One”). Now we hear him say to the wisest, “Good and evil that are not transitory––there is no such thing! From out of themselves they must overcome themselves again and again.” Although powerful interpretations of the world may hold for a while, they are always superseded.The last time Zarathustra speaks of will to power is in his pivotal speech “On Redemption” (Z II). You're right to say that Nietzsche calls the traditional revenge against the temporal world as comprising suffering and punishment, which takes the form of “not-willing,” a “fable song of madness” (122). What he is dismissing here is a Schopenhauerian program of denial of the will, or the early Buddhist project of extinction of desire: willing doesn't need to be annihilated but rather to be liberated from such vengeful behavior and expanded beyond the egoistic. This happens through the creative will's saying to the past, “But thus do I will it”—an absurdity for “the will” as normally understood, which can be exercised only in the present with regard to the future. Such a transformation of willing brings joy, by achieving even more than a reconciliation with impermanence and the unalterable nature of the past: “Something higher than any reconciliation the will that is will to power must will––yet how shall this happen? Who has yet taught it even das Zurückwollen?” Zarathustra will later show how the will can learn to “will backward,” by “wanting back” as well.You read this speech of Zarathustra's in connection with a note from 1888 that advocates a philosophy that's “a Dionysian Yes-saying to the world as it is, without subtraction, exception, or selection,” and which “wills eternal circulation,” the formula for which is “amor fati” (KSA 13:16[32]). But then you return to the eternal worrying: “The question is whether this ‘love of fate’ twists free of the will to interpretive power over the play of multiple perspectives, or whether it is the triumph of the will to power that has learned even to ‘will backwards,’ to say to everything: you are thus only because thus I will you to be” (123). Quite a provocation there—the allusion to Riefenstahl and Hitler—but never mind. As for the dismal alternative: willing backward is creative not in a megalomaniacal way (everything is only because I will it to be) but rather in an artistic or poetical mode. The past need no longer be understood as “fragment and riddle and cruel coincidence” because as a human being Zarathustra can become “a composer-poet and riddle-guesser and the redeemer of coincidence.” As a Dichter he can compose and condense the fragmentary chaos of the past into something that makes sense, insofar as he understands how “all things are knotted together” (Z III: “On the Vision and the Riddle” 2).It's the parts in this context that don't fit, what we reject, that need to be willed in retrospect—those aspects of life, and the self, to which one has to say “Thus do I will it.” Nishitani explains this well in his discussion of amor fati in The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism. “Even that which negates and obstructs life is affirmed as useful for life… . To call this innermost nature wherein one becomes oneself amor fati means that what is not oneself—what has prevented one from being oneself—is appropriated into the self and transformed into something uniquely one's own (eigen).”17 Those people and events that prevented us from becoming ourselves, blocked us, stood in the way, and which we therefore rejected, dismissed as not ourselves, as absolutely other rather than own—they all need to be acknowledged as belonging, as indispensable to our having become who we are; they need to be loved, as our fate.As for the less dismal alternative, you present it as “whether this ‘love of fate’ twists free of the will to interpretive power over the play of multiple perspectives.” No, not quite—since nothing can twist free from the world “as will to power and nothing besides” and still be. It's rather a transformation of the interpreting will to power that opens the personal out into the impersonal: once I realize that everything that has brought me to this point, everything that has led up to this moment (and that's the entire past), is now poised to further interpret itself, I can allow the full range of appropriate perspectives to play itself out spontaneously. Again, Nishitani expresses this well: “Every action of the self in this context is influenced by all things and in turn influences all things. All things become the fate of the self, and the self becomes the fate of all things. At such a fundamental level the world moves at one with the self, and the self moves at one with the world.”18 As Nietzsche himself puts it in Twilight of the Idols, “The fatality of one's being cannot be separated from the fatality of all that was and will be. […] One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole” (TI “The Four Great Errors” 8).You pose another double question about love of fate: “Is this love the shattering transformation of the will to power or is it its consummation?” As expected, It would appear to be the latter insofar as: “To impose upon becoming the character of being—that is the supreme will to power… . That everything recurs is the most extreme approximation of a world of bec
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