Nietzsche (Gilles Deleuze)

Nietzsche is a book of Gilles Deleuze published in 1965 bearing on the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The theses of Deleuze on Nietzsche today are very disputed.

The spirit becomes camel (it carries the values and the culture in the desert), then lion (it destroys these values), then child (it reinvents them). Humain, too human corresponds to the age of the lion (1878).

The ideal nietzschéen of the philosopher: the artist-doctor, the legislator presocratic

The Philosophe must be at the same time Médecin (he interprets the facts) and Artiste (he evaluates them), therefore legislator. Such is the presocratic philosopher besides. There is unit of the thought and the life: the lifestyles inspire in the ways of thinking, the ways of thinking create ways of living. The working life the thought, the thought affirms the life. This unit is forgotten, lost today: there are the choice between poor lives (Kant) and insane thinkers (Hölderlin).

The socratic revolution

But philosophy appeared masked (the young Greek philosopher has something of the old Eastern priest) and was let take with its mask. Starting from Socrate, the thought is opposed to the life by judging it and by depreciating it, which puts an end to the presocratic unit between the thought and the life. By separating the gasoline and appearance, Socrate invents the higher metaphysics and values (divine, true, beautiful, well) which judge the life.

The philosophy of Socrate with Hegel

The virtues of the philosopher (legislator) consist in criticizing the established values (i.e. values higher than the life) and creating new values: hammer and transmutation. Instead of that, the philosopher becomes the conservative of the allowed values; of a poet, he becomes public professor. He says himself subjected to the requirements of truth, of the reason; but under these requirements one recognizes forces which are not so reasonable: States, religions, values in progress. Philosophy becomes the census of all the reasons which the man is given to obey. The creator is the opposite of the carrier. To create, it is to discharge the life, to invent new possibilities of life.

The death of God brings a change (values which was in God “go down” in the man), but it is always a question of denying the life, to subject itself: it is not enough to kill God to transmute the values.

The direction

Interpretation consists in determining the direction of a phenomenon. The direction is a power struggle: certain forces act, others react.

Will for power

The will is the relationship of the force with the force. The Will for power does not consist in taking but creating and giving. The power is not what the will wants but what wants in the will. The will for power is the differential element from which derive the involved forces: it is by the will for power that a force orders, but it is also by the will for power which a force obeys. Assertion and negation are the qualia will for power, like credit and reagent is qualities of the forces. The assertion is multiple and pluralist, contrary to the negation which is heavily monist.

Historical triumph of the nihilism

Historically, the negation carries it in the will for power! This victory of the reactive forces and the will to deny, Nietzsche calls it “Nihilisme”, or triumphs over the slaves. The weak ones do not triumph by addition over all their forces, but by reduction in that of the forts. The weak ones triumph while making all the forces reactive (i.e. by the degeneration). The natural selection supports the weak ones and the reagents, the “secondaries”, and this with stronger reason in the human history. The reactive forces, by carrying it, do not cease being reactive: the weak one with the capacity is always weak. When the nihilism triumphs, then only the will for power means to wish to dominate (to accept the established values and to want the honor, the capacity, etc): it is the will for power of the slave.

Stages of the triumph of the nihilism :

1) Resentment : “it is your fault”. The reaction any more “is not acted” but is felt: the weak one does not fight any more, it complains. The life marked, is separated from its power. The lamb known as: I could do all that the eagle does, I have of the merit to me to prevent some, that it makes like me.

2) bad conscience : “it is my fault”. The reactive forces return to themselves, but thus they give the example and become contagious.

3) Ideal ascetic . The weak life or reactivates wants finally the negation of the life: its will for power is will of nothing. One judges the life according to values known as higher which are opposed to it, condemn it, deny it. These stages of the nihilism correspond to the Judaism then with Christianity, this last being prepared by Greek philosophy (IE, degeneration of philosophy in Greece).

4) Died of God . The divine values are replaced by human values, too human (utility, progress, history). But nothing is changed: it is the same reactive life, same slavery, the same weight which is exerted by the human values.

5) the last man and the man who wants to perish . It is the result of the nihilism: the reactive forces claim to do without will, and the last man known as: “All is vain, rather to die out passively! Rather nothing of will that a will of nothing! ” But the will of nothing is turned over against the reactive forces and inspires with the man the desire for being destroyed actively: it is the man who wants to perish. At this point, all is ready for a transmutation of all the values.

The transmutation of all the values

The transmutation of all the values is defined by becoming active forces, a triumph of the assertion in the will for power. The assertion becomes the gasoline or the will for power itself. The negation remains, but it is with the service of that which affirms and creates. The " oui" mean to create and either carry, while the " non" translated creative aggressiveness and either the resentment.

The transmutation is not possible that at the conclusion of the nihilism, when the negation, being turned over finally against the negative forces, becomes itself an action and passes to the service of a higher assertion. The nihilism is overcome by itself. What the nihilism denies, it is not so much the being (which resembles nothing) only the multiple, to become it. The first figure of the transmutation makes multiple and to become the object of an assertion. The assertion of the multiple conceals the joy practices the various ones. The valorization of the negative feelings or sad passions, here is the mystification on which the nihilism bases its capacity (Lucrèce and Spinoza shares this point of view and conceives philosophy like assertion).

To become and the multiple are themselves of the assertions. The assertion of the assertion, unfolding, the divine couple Dionysos - ARIANE, that constitutes the second figure of the transmutation. The true opposition is not between Socrate (judge life) and Dionysos (known as that the life does not have to be judged), but between Dionysos (assertion life) and Crucifié (negation of the life).

The Being and one take a new direction: one says multiple as a multiple, To be it is said to become as becoming: it is the third figure of the transmutation. One does not oppose any more to become it with the Being, the multiple with the One (these oppositions are the categories of the nihilism); one affirms one of the multiple, the Being of becoming, the need for the chance.

The eternal return

To return is precisely the Being of becoming, one of the multiple, the need for the chance. It is not Same which returns (because the Same one does not preexist to various), it is to return it which is the Same one of what becomes.

The eternal return is selective, and doubly:

(1) Selective thought: the eternal return gives a law for the autonomy of the will released from any morals: no matter what I want, I “must” want it in such a way that I want of them also the eternal return. That eliminates the “half-vouloirs” which one wants only once.

(2) To be selective: only returns the assertion, the joy. The negation is expelled by the movement even of the eternal return, as a centrifugal force which drives out the negative one.

But in much of texts of Nietzsche the eternal return is a cycle where any cost, where the Same cost. In fact, the eternal return is the object of two exposed: in one Zarathoustra is sick, precisely because of the idea of the cycle, the idea that all returns, which is only one assumption banal and terrifying (because it implies the return of the meanness and the nihilism); in the other, Zarathoustra is convalescent and almost cured, because it includes/understands the selective character eternal return. Deleuze thus did not understand that the Eternal return was selective as a political thought.

The Superman

The fourth and last aspect of the transmutation are that it implies and produces the Surhomme. The man is a reactive being, but the eternal return expels the nihilism. The Superman indicates the meditation of all that can be marked, the type which represents the selective Being. On the one hand, it is produced in the man, via the Last man and of the man who wants to perish, but beyond of them, like a transformation of the human gasoline. In addition, it is not produced by the man: it is the fruit of Dionysos and ARIANE.

Thus, the figures of the transmutation are: Dionysos or the assertion; Dionysos-ARIANE, or the duplicated assertion; the eternal return, or the redoubled assertion; the Superman, or the type and the product of the assertion.

Reference

Editor: PUF , ISBN: 2130434215

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