On Definition: Nietzsche and Others
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula… to give a facade to the void. -Emil Cioran
In the middle of the 2nd essay in Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche takes on the question of human punishment. He goes to great lengths to distinguish between the origins and the purpose – or interpretations – of those various actions and happenings which are called “punishment.” He chastises those of his contemporaries who seem hell-bent on conflating these two separate inquiries, he notes that many who question the origins of punishment try to seek this out by chasing its teleology: in the same way a theist may say that a hand is made to grasp (and thus, its origin is its creation for grasping), Nietzsche castigates those that attempt to find the origins of punishment in its creation for the purpose that they interpret it to have. Nietzsche offers many contrary examples of the myriad roles and purposes that punishment has played throughout history (section 13) and thus tries to bring to light the contingency of interpretation vis a vis the actions and “drama” understood variously as punishment in different times, places, and contexts. Punishment then, is not defined because it is not invented for singular purpose: it is instead a label placed on something existent: an amorphous signifier that should be traced back through history in its usage.
Nietzsche uses history and genealogy mostly negatively to demonstrate the idiocy or futility of various philosophical and theoretical attempts at conceptualization or categorization. Nietzsche treads a fine line between deconstruction and careful reconstruction: his ideas about the genesis of the concepts he criticizes (generally those deified and essentialized by modern philosophy) are arguably more informed than his targets, his historical counterexamples and examples serve to open up a space for his more naturalistic, biological, and irrationalistic explanations. In this it is apparent that even though historical counter-example helps Nietzsche to tear down discursive idols, historical example must be supplemented by his further philosophy (including the ideas of the will-to-power, ressentiment, et al) in order to rebuild.
Nevertheless Deleuze & Guattari fill in what is unsaid in Nietzsche’s negative genealogies: (p23) History is always written from the sedentary point of view and in the name of a unitary State apparatus, at least a possible one, even when the topic is nomads. What is lacking is a Nomadology, the opposite of history.
But where Deleuze and Guattari’s Nomadology is a resistance to territorialization and hegemonic powers in the area of theory and politics, it seems Nietzsche exposes essentialistic theory and embraces a perspectivism and nominalism in theory while remaining ambivalent towards, or perhaps in some interpretations celebrating, the very efforts of will and power towards subjugation. But it is perhaps the novel expressions of life which only later become hegemonic that Nietzsche celebrates most: the many manifestations of man’s will are “too subtle, too marvelous, too paradoxical to be played senselessly unobserved on some liducrous planet! From now on, man is included among the most unexpected and exciting lucky throws in the dice game of Heraclitus’ “great child,” be he called Zeus or chance…” (p.521) In this way, despite Nietzsche’s more bourgouis and aristocratic tendencies, Deleuze & Guattari and Nietzsche are not so far apart as they may perhaps seem. Indeed, at the point when the once avant-garde and the once novel becomes “molar“ to use the terms of Deluze and Guatarri, that Nietzsche looks to renewed fluctuations that will inevitably upset a system: a new beauty, a new force of fluctuation, that, if powerful enough, will become a new force of territorialization auto-entrenched as a great leech or censor to feed off of and silence less powerful discourses: a great leech that will inevitably fall to novelties of force once again; to a new “way, an episode” (p.521). This can be seen in Nietzsche’s coy admirations for the historic Judaic role in coming to power via what he considers to be the 2nd stage of morality in “Beyond Good and Evil”, a once ingenious strategy of power via ressentiment that has now become something to be overcome: overcome presumably by the great and open valuations of Nietzsche’s new man: the artist who will find new ways to paint over the canvas, or simply throw the canvas out the window in affirmation of what goes unrepresented on its surface. Nietzsche, like Deleuze, is a philosopher of proliferation over stratification. It is only that Nietzsche’s philosophy must take place on the backdrop of his “will to power” thusly complicating the picture in a way that a philosophy of immanence does not have to specifically address.
These sort of philosophical endeavors are blithely hostile towards the terroristic forces of concrete definition. Definition acts as a still, it acts as a way in which to colloquialize a contexts’ contingent interpretation or discourse into an essence that may then be applied to any happening thought to fit under its loose and ever-transforming rubric. In Nietzsche’s system, definition tries to take an interpretation and make it the concentration of the events it refers to: events that are chosen according to the interpretation (definition) itself. In this way, definition as such is simply territorialization, whereas genealogical inquiry is an exploration of the history of definitions and their referents. To tie Deleuze back in: “Languge is not life; it gives life orders.” [1]
A judgment about life has no meaning except the truth of the one who speaks last, and the mind is at ease only at the moment when everyone is shouting at once and no one can hear a thing. –Bataille
After his clarifications regarding the important distinction between origin and purpose (the latter a highly contextual interpretation not to be superimposed on the former), Nietzsche goes on to talk about how this distinction relates to punishment. The diversity and differences of the purposes, usages, histories, and institutionalizations of punishment is seemingly impossible to untangle for Nietzsche on account of the fact that it has been homogenized via definition. Counter-example and marginalized perspectives arm Nietzsche with the only means to disentangle the concept. Before he does so, Nietzsche polemicizes with memorably terse prose against essentialisms: “Today it is impossible to say for certain why people are really punished: all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history is definable”(emphasis added) (p.516). According to Nietzsche, in order for one meaning to “come to the fore”, it must do so at the expense of others; he even says that it “dominates” to other interpretations’ expense. This sort of meaning, always to the preclusion of other meanings, is actually the best possible scenario: it is the fate of the clearer and less entangled attempts at definition, and not the fate of the gnomic “punishment” that Nietzsche is concerned with.
The entire length of Genealogy of Morals is full of conceptual de-thronings similar to the above. In section 11 Nietzsche argues that justice and injustice are not the foundations of law, but in fact law is the necessary foundation of these very concepts. Once again, it is the definitions that rely on present understanding and interpretation and not the definitions which spur the genesis of human institution. To suppose otherwise is unfoundedly anthropomorphic and assumes that humans are some sort of deific causa sui: instigators of reality as opposed to responders: unconditioned rather than not. Nietzsche corrects this sentiment: “the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility…lie worlds apart; … whatever exists … is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it” (p.513).
In section 8 of the same work Nietzsche postulates that “valuation”, that is, determining equivalences and values is perhaps a predicate of man’s thinking as such: insofar as Nietzsche is concerned, history bears this out, even in the most primitive people: valuation is perhaps what thought is at its base. He goes on to further say that “understanding” comes about either by consensus or coercion: that it is an outworking or epiphenomena of power and will. Definition and classification then, are for Nietzsche, inherent and integral aspects of human thought: they are weapons to “compel” or to bring about “settlement[s]” among the powerful. Nietzsche’s genealogies purport to strip definitions and knowledge claims of their facades as untouchable objects of “truth” and “falsity” and to reinstitute a clear vision of the discursive, hegemonic, and contingent aspects of these. For Nietzsche, the force behind definition is power, just as for Cioran it is despair and for Adorno a “hatred of the complicated.”
Everyday the sovereignty of the moment is more foreign to the language in which we express ourselves, which draws value back to utility: what is sacred, not being an object, escapes our apprehension. There is not even, in this world, a way of thinking that escapes servitude, an available language such that in speaking it we do not fall back into the immutable rut as soon as we are out of it. -Bataille
In the wake of continental rationalism, transcendental idealism, scholasticism and Platonism among other things, Nietzsche’s dictum “only that which has no history is definable” rings out as a dissonant chord amidst the carefully orchestrated if superfluous symphony. The reminder here is that though the “ultimate” concepts and axioms and definitions of western philosophy pose as timeless knowledge, even these have a “history”, and they rely fully on their histories.
[1] A Thousand Plateaus (p.76)
3 comments
Comments feed for this article
July 16, 2007 at 9:39 am
Corbin
I’m not sure Nietzsche is saying that law is the foundation of justice and injustice as much as it is the embodiment of the disenfranchised’s will to power or of the masters’ desire to secure their will to power. Law is no foundation, but rather an outcropping of latent desires that are then later “justified” with concepts such as justice.
I definitely enjoyed his ideas about language and definition as well–but I feel extremely anachronistic reading so much Derrida into it. It’s hard for me not to grasp on to what is familiar and question what is uncomfortable. There’s so much feeding ground for existentialism, poststructuralism, deconstructionism, etc., that it’s difficult to remember the world of science and materialism in which he’s writing…
July 22, 2007 at 11:55 am
skeps
Corbin, here is a quote for you:
” ‘Just’ and ‘unjust’ exist, accordingly, only after the institution of the law … . To speak of just or unjust in itself is quite senseless…”
Nietzsche then goes on to make his point regarding the endeavors of forming ‘legal conditions’: that, like almost everything else, they are activities of the hegemonic will.
In light of the emphasis on both of these aspects, I encourage you to not form a false dichotomy based on a misunderstanding of the text: When Nietzsche talks about justice and injustice he always refers back to the “institution of law” (p.511-512). The law then is the foundation of justice and injustice as such: it dictates what justice should mean and how it will be enforced. It does not exist in itself, but it does come into existence with the law, albeit contingently and contextually varied.
This analysis in no way precludes the role of the “will to power” in governance of action and desire: when Nietzsche speaks of the genesis of an institution of law itself, he of course refers to the will to power as the driving force behind such motion. Like you say, this is not to be ignored.
However, I don’t think I ignored this, and so far as I can tell, simply limited the scope of my comment to the immediately relevant: law as the foundation of justice/injustice — this is what I focused on for a short aside to be made about the concept of justice and how this relates to historical definitions and iconoclastic Fritzean debunkings of definitions which anachronistically conflate origin and utility. Never mind the fact that at bottom action is motivated by will to power: of course the institution of law is just such an expression! Rather, because of issues of relevance, I chose to explicate a point that is also very much there in the 11th essay: justice and injustice do not exist without the law.
Therefore:
“I’m not sure Nietzsche is saying that law is the foundation of justice and injustice as much as it is the embodiment of the disenfranchised’s will to power or of the masters’ desire to secure their will to power.”
It is both, no holds barred.
“Law is no foundation, but rather an outcropping of latent desires that are then later “justified” with concepts such as justice.”
Law indeed is a foundation, it is the will to power solidifying itself to operate more effectively via founding the concepts of justice/injustice via an “imperative declaration of … what counts as permitted”.
All of this comes from the latter half of essay 11 and the first half of essay 12.
-Michael
July 30, 2007 at 4:05 am
Corbin
I was certainly careless in my statements, and presumed an inappropriate meaning for “(in)justice)” in my criticism. I would like to qualify a bit, however:
1) Law is only a foundation for a concept of justice (notice the indefinite articles and the reduction of justice to a concept). Moving beyond a mathematization of justice (as in debt and credit, accounting, the justice of law and pennance) permits other concepts of justice which may have other “foundations”, or may be realizable outside of a foundational history. In relations, for instance, we can talk about justice/righteousness because it is not a quantitative but rather a qualitative notion, and even less a notion than a way of being/becoming.
2) My real concern is with the notion of “foundation”, rather than cause or consequence. We may speak about origins, cause and effect, or dependency, but foundation implies a bottom rung which seems difficult to prove, unlikely in history from a finite perspective, and lodged in an inappropriate epistemology.
But I do thank you for your thoughtful and respectful response, which did show that I commented like a jackass.