Lovers of Sophia

Home > Other > Lovers of Sophia > Page 20
Lovers of Sophia Page 20

by Jason Reza Jorjani


  for the first time. Interestingly, he concludes by calling it “the most extreme form of nihilism” and a “European form of Buddhism.” It

  is against this background that in entry 7 of the same notebook, he

  wonders whether pantheistic affirmation is possible in the face of

  eternal recurrence. He asks himself whether it is still possible to

  affirm life once it has been revealed to be purposeless and amoral.

  He concludes that: “This would be the case if something within that

  process were achieved at every moment of it – and always the same thing. Spinoza attained an affirmative stance like this insofar as every moment has a logical necessity: and with his fundamental instinct for logic he felt a sense of triumph about the world’s being constituted

  157

  lovers of sophia

  thus.” It seems from these notebook entries that Nietzsche might have first gained the courage for the ultimate affirmation of fate, or amor fati, that stands at the heart of his later philosophy, by means of Spinoza.

  Attacking Judeo-Christian morality, Spinoza argues that: “we

  do not strive towards, desire or long for a thing because we deem

  it to be good; but on the contrary, we deem a thing good because

  we strive, desire or long for it.”21 A morality of “good and bad” is

  not metaphysical y rooted in the nature of the world, but is whol y

  relative to individual subjects and their particular desires and aims.

  For Spinoza the only ‘good’ is that which is useful, while the only

  ‘bad’ is that which is disadvantageous.22 Nietzsche’s vision of an ethic of ‘will to power’ is well known. In section 149 of the Will to Power, Nietzsche writes: “Justification, as function of a perspicacious power which looks beyond the narrow perspectives of good and evil, thus

  has a wider horizon of advantage – the intention of preserving something that is more than any given person.”

  For Spinoza, the idea that God engages in punishment and

  reward is absurdly ridiculous; He neither hates nor loves anyone

  in particular.23 Rather, we punish ourselves with despair when we

  act in a way that is not true to our own nature. Nietzsche, the great

  ‘immoralist’ also believes in an ethics of conscience or the instinct

  to adhere to one’s own nature. In section 270 of the Gay Science, Nietzsche writes:

  “What does your conscience say? – ‘You shall become the person

  you are.’”

  He continues in section 275:

  “What is the seal of liberation? – No longer being ashamed in

  front of oneself.”

  21 Spinoza,

  Ethics 3:9.

  22 Ibid., 4: Definitions 1 and 2.

  23 Ibid., 5:17, Corol ary.

  158

  jason reza jorjani

  In section 7 of Chapter 12 of Book 3 of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche contrasts moral ethics with his ethics of conscience:

  “To be true – only a few are able! And those who are still lack the wil . But the ‘good’ have this ability least of al . Oh, these good

  men! Good men never speak the truth, for the spirit, to be good in this way is a disease. They give in, these good men, they give

  themselves up; their heart repeats and their ground obeys: but

  whoever heeds commands does not heed himself.”

  Final y, in section 906 of the Will to Power, Nietzsche describes the

  “strong man” as one who “is led by a faultless and severe instinct

  into doing nothing that disagrees with him.”

  In entry 131 of Notebook 2, Nietzsche discusses Spinoza in the

  course of an outline for his never-to-be-realized magnum opus, “The

  Will to Power.” Nietzsche deems “Spinozism extremely influential”

  in “the devaluation of all values up to now.” He praises Spinoza for

  an attempt to accept the world as it is, to “rid oneself of the moral

  order of the world”, and to realize (perhaps for the first time) that

  “Good and evil are only interpretations, by no means facts or in-

  themselves.” Nietzsche concludes by commenting that: “one can

  track down the origins of this kind of interpretation [so as to] slowly liberate oneself from the deep-rooted compulsion to interpret

  moral y.” This suggests that Nietzsche’s characteristic method of the

  genealogy of morality proceeded from out of Spinoza’s move beyond

  good and evil. In section 15 of Essay II in On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche says that Spinoza “banished good and evil to the realm of

  human imagination” He praises Spinoza for viewing punishment as

  an unfortunate consequence of transgression, not as a sign that one

  should have done differently or as a cause for guilt, but simply as

  something having unexpectedly gone wrong, leading to an emotion

  that is the opposite of joy. He quotes Spinoza on this, citing Ethics

  III, proposition XVIII, Schol. I.II. He favorably identifies this view of Spinoza with the outlook of Pre-Christian societies who believed in

  corporal punishments, having the dignity to discipline the criminal

  rather than make him feel guilty.

  159

  lovers of sophia

  For Spinoza, though human liberty is il usory, this does not

  mean that human freedom is impossible. Spinoza claims that in

  so far as we use our Reason to comprehend what is necessary and

  then consciously affirm this in action, we are acting freely. The

  degree of our freedom depends on the degree to which we rational y

  comprehend the necessary causes of our actions, so that our act is

  free in consciously following from the truly free will of God. In this sense Spinoza’s amor intel ectualis Dei (“intellectual love of God”), is an amor fati (“love of [one’s own] fate”), which fil s one with joy.24 By affirming Necessity we cease to be passive and we gain power over

  that which affects us, not ‘power’ in the sense of “force”, but power

  as elevation or perspective.25 Spinoza equates ‘virtue’ and ‘perfection’

  with power in this sense.26 He argues that the source of our pleasure is to constantly increase our power, while true pain is a lapse into the weakness of negative passions born of ‘narrow-mindedness’.27 Mental

  states are an expression of a degree of power, wherein a greater or

  lesser awareness and affirmation of one’s bodily processes is present.

  In this sense in which Power actualizes one’s ‘bodying-forth’ in the world, Spinoza equates it with ‘Reality’. Degrees of power are degrees of reality and of the enhancement of one’s conatus.28

  If by wil e zur macht, Nietzsche means a (free) will to

  empowerment, then the similarity with Spinoza’s metaphysics and

  ethics of power would be merely superficial. However, as suggested

  above, Nietzsche does not believe in an effective and free wil . If he also does not believe in a positive definition of power, we are forced to completely reevaluate what he means by ‘the will to power’. In

  sections 633-634 of The Will to Power, Nietzsche writes:

  Two successive states, the one “cause”, the other “effect”: this is

  false. The first has nothing to effect, the second has been effected 24 Ibid., 5:15.

  25 Ibid., 5:6.

  26 Ibid., 4: Definition 8.

  27 Ibid., 3:11.

  28 Ibid., 3: Appendix.

  160

  jason reza jorjani

  by nothing. It is a question of a struggle between two elements of unequal power: a new arrangement of forces is achieved

  according to the measure of power of each of them. The second />
  condition is something fundamental y different from the first

  (not its effect): the essential thing is that the factions in struggle emerge with different quanta of power... A quantum of power is

  designated by the effect it produces and that which it resists. The adiaphorous state is missing, though it is thinkable.

  The “adiaphorous state” which is missing, though readily conceivable

  as an intellectual abstraction, is the positive quality of “power.”

  Nietzsche explicitly defines this “power” as nothing but the difference of power between two states of two or more entities in respect to

  each other. If he then also defines the essence of these entities or

  ‘beings’ as “power” – he is implicitly stating that every ‘being’ defers it’s being to the others in terms of which it exists at all and also

  defers its present to its past conditions of existence. To speak of the difference of two quanta of power is redundant, for it is to speak of

  the difference of difference. This differentiation is the structure of the creative matrix.

  In German, wille (“wil ”) is derived from the verb wollen, meaning “to want”, even in the sense of ‘to be lacking’ in such

  and such. Furthermore, macht (“power”) is derived from the verb machen, “to make” or “to render”, in the sense of dynamic creation rather than a static locus of ‘power-in-itself’. Final y, zur is a contraction of zu der, which means “towards the…”. So that wil e zur macht, suggests perpetual y moving “towards”, but never arriving at

  “the making” or the creation of the world. As Nietzsche writes in

  section 796 of the Will to Power: “the world as a work of art that gives birth to itself.” This is not very different from Spinoza’s idea that to say we aim at the increase of power is to say that we strive to understand and knowingly affirm the will of Deus sive Natura.

  According to Spinoza, the execution of mathematical or logical

  proofs is the only activity in which we are likely to be able to attain the comprehensive knowledge of necessary causes required for

  161

  lovers of sophia

  total freedom. However, in this light, Spinoza believes that we can

  increasingly bring our hitherto unconscious emotions within the

  grasp of our conscious power by treating them “geometrical y”,

  that is, by analyzing them (and their effect on us) in a cold, almost

  mathematical y rigorous calculus.29 By means of this “emendation

  of the passions”, emotions cease to be something in respect to

  which we are passive.30 Thus the love of knowledge and the pursuit of understanding is the path to the serene blessedness of freedom,

  and Spinoza equates following this path with the realization of our

  essential “human nature” (that which differentiates us from other

  beings).31

  All of these notions are basical y present in Nietzsche’s thinking

  as wel , even if they are not related in the same way as they are for

  Spinoza. In section 490 of the Will to Power, Nietzsche writes that:

  “‘the important main activity [of the human mental and emotional

  life] is unconscious’ and… consciousness is the effect of forces

  whose essence, ways, and modalities are not peculiar to it.” Though

  Nietzsche does not insist that these unconscious drives be rendered

  conscious, he does speak of taming the chaos of human affects or

  emotions into something obeying cold mathematical and logical

  necessities. In section 530 of the Will to Power, Nietzsche writes: “All human knowledge is either experience or mathematics.” In section

  842, he elaborates: “To become master of the chaos that one is; to

  compel one’s chaos to become form: logical, simple, unequivocal; to

  become mathematics, law – that is the grand ambition here.”

  Superficial readers of Nietzsche would be surprised to learn that,

  like Spinoza, he values the quest for knowledge above all else. In

  his July 30th 1881 letter concerning Spinoza, he writes: “…his whole

  tendency [is] like my own – to make knowledge the most powerful

  passion…” These few lines make a subtle but very important point.

  Nietzsche interprets Spinoza’s view of knowledge, as something that

  conquers the passions not by neutralizing them (as is commonly 29 Ibid., 3: Preface.

  30 Ibid., 5:3, Corol ary.

  31 Ibid., 4: Appendix.

  162

  jason reza jorjani

  supposed), but by dominating them as the strongest passion. For lack of agency, in both Spinoza and Nietzsche’s systems, there is no

  way that the passions could be neutralized because they can never

  become the object of action for a non-existent subject.

  In section 2 of Book 1 of the Gay Science, entitled “The Intellectual Conscience”, Nietzsche praises the conscientious pursuit of certainty

  as “that which separates higher human beings from the lower.” He

  writes: “… what is good-heartedness, refinement, or genius to me,

  when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his

  faith and judgments and when he does not account the desire for

  certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress…” This “desire for certainty” is the essence of Spinoza’s quest for knowledge as a

  means to affirm necessity. While Nietzsche values it as much or

  more than Spinoza does, he realizes that it is ultimately no more

  than another affect without a traceable cause, as Spinoza does not,

  but should realize, given the implications of his metaphysics.

  Final y, Nietzsche, like Spinoza, equates this transformation of

  consciousness both with a sense of serene blessedness and with the

  realization of an essential humanity. In section 799 of The Will to Power, Nietzsche describes “the highest feeling of power” as: “...calm, simplification, abbreviation, concentration…To react slowly; a great

  consciousness; no feeling of struggle.” In section 337 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche describes the realization of our true nature (by affirming the will of “the whole”), as the “divine feeling” of “humanity”:

  He who knows how to regard the history of man in its entirety as

  his own history feels in this immense generalization all the grief of the invalid who thinks of health, of the old man who thinks of

  the dream of his youth, of the lover who is robbed of his beloved,

  of the martyr whose ideal is destroyed, of the hero on the

  evening of the indecisive battle which has brought him wounds

  and the loss of a friend. But to bear this immense sum of grief of

  all kinds, to be able to bear it, and yet still be the hero who at the commencement of a second day of battle greets the dawn and

  his happiness as the one who has a horizon of centuries before

  163

  lovers of sophia

  and behind him…to take all this upon his soul, the oldest, the

  newest, the losses, hopes, conquests, and victories of mankind:

  to have all this at last in one’s soul, and to comprise it in one

  feeling: – this would necessarily furnish a happiness which man

  has not hitherto known – a God’s happiness, full of power and

  love, full of tears and laughter, a happiness which, like the sun

  in the evening, continual y gives of its inexhaustible riches and

  empties into the sea – and like the sun, too, feels itself richest

  when even the poorest fisherman rows with golden oars! This

  divine feeling might then be called – humanity.

&n
bsp; We have seen how almost every major ‘innovation’ of Nietzsche’s

  doctrine is already to be found in Spinoza’s thought, more than

  two hundred years earlier. We have also seen evidence that, at least

  in some instances, Nietzsche probably inherited these uniquely

  paradoxical and iconoclastic ideas from Spinoza. Nietzsche follows

  Spinoza in abolishing the materialist/idealist division between

  mind and body, in denying agency while discerning a will to self-

  preservation as characteristic of beings, in finding an ecstatic

  freedom or realization of the human potential in the denial of

  free will and the affirmation of fate, and final y, Nietzsche, the self proclaimed “first immoralist”, follows Spinoza in opposing the

  reactive moral opposition of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ with a positive ethics

  based on the enhancement of perspectival power. Where do the two

  thinkers real y diverge?

  It may be that Nietzsche’s most serious departure from Spinoza is

  not in his doctrine, but in his attitude. In section 157 of Human, All-too-Human, Nietzsche speaks of Spinoza, together with Kepler, as a

  ‘learned genius’, contrasting him with the type of the artistic genius.

  The latter type, which Nietzsche sees as characterizing himself,

  laments of his greater sorrows and privations (in proportion to

  other men), whereas a learned genius like Spinoza does not, because

  “he can count with greater certainty on posterity and dismiss the

  present.” In section 37 of the Gay Science, Nietzsche cal s Spinoza’s faith in the benign nature of Science and the “unselfish, harmless,

  self-sufficient, and truly innocent” character of genuine scientific

  164

  jason reza jorjani

  inquiry, one of the three errors on account of which science has

  been promoted over the last several centuries.

  In section 5 of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche criticizes Spinoza for having clad his philosophy in a “mail and mask” of “hocus-pocus

  of mathematical form” in order to intimidate those who would

  challenge it, to scare them off from defiling it, as if his doctrine were the goddess Athena protected by her armor. Spinoza is not singled

  out for this, but cited as an example of philosophers in general,

  who are dishonest in pretending that their wisdom is the product

 

‹ Prev