#wollenberg

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[athousandgateaux]

Understanding morality as a consequence of the degree to which one can successfully express one’s power of acting makes clear that, while involuntary, there is nothing inherent or immutable in individuals that typecasts them as a slave or noble. If the slave morality has been victorious, it is not because masters chose to adopt the new alternative values scheme, but rather it must reflect some change in humanity that renders individuals unable to express their power as adequately as nobles once did. Hence Nietzsche’s claim, in the concluding note to GM I, that ‘every table of values, every ‘thou shalt,’ . . . requires first a physiological investigation and interpretation.’ Slave morality is not merely false: it is better described as a kind of sickness. (As he puts it later in the book, this moral shift is ‘the true calamity in the history of European health.’) Where slave morality has been able to dominate a culture’s thinking, it becomes effectively impossible to pursue power in an adequate manner, with the result not that men abandon this natural pursuit, but rather that they do so in the inadequate ways of self-deception and hatred of those who act otherwise. While Nietzsche would not simply accept Spinoza’s solution to this problem by itself (namely an increase in rationality), it does seem that Nietzsche offers the method of genealogy, an attempt at a kind of enlightenment of the origins of our social norms and practices, in the hope of spurring a new thinking that could lead to such a liberation from slavery

David Wollenberg, “Nietzsche, Spinoza, and the Moral Affects” in Journal of the History of Philosophy 51.4: (2013), pg. 639-40

[athousandgateaux]

Just as Nietzsche identifies activity with will to power, Spinoza identifies it with the conatus, the striving for self-preservation and increase in power. The conatus must be understood not as a possession of an individual but rather as its very definition, its actual expression. It is what defines a grouping of parts as a single coherent individual, a single unified drive, rather than as a multiplicity. It individuates an actor as a coherent whole. Insofar as that common drive is maintained, it makes sense to speak of a single mode, one which strives toward certain ends, which has a mind, and which engages in actions (or is subdued in its attempts to act). Though such a mode is never free from the causal chain of nature, it nevertheless can be understood as acting for itself, and ‘in its action the nature of the thing appears in its complete plenitude of power [ganzen Machtvollkommenheit], so far as it extends.’ Hence an ontology of nature as activity does not preclude making sense of individual actors with specific differences, as Bittner asserts it must. I believe this to be, mutatis mutandis, very close to what Nietzsche is trying to express in GM I.13. To define a thing by its action does not eliminate the possibility of speaking of a thing as such. A unified will to power can itself individuate, and, even if properly understood as action rather than as substance, still allow us to speak of an enduring identity through time.  Because wills can manifest themselves in so many alternative ways, human diversity can be accounted for, and it is even possible to speak to some degree of types.

David Wollenberg, “Nietzsche, Spinoza, and the Moral Affects” in Journal of the History of Philosophy 51.4: (2013), pg. 632-33

[athousandgateaux]

while activity should not be understood as controlled by a free agent, its manifestations are not therefore arbitrary. Just as Nietzsche claims in I.13 that strength necessarily desires to ‘overcome’ and ‘become master,’ Fischer writes that according to Spinoza we always strive to become ‘more powerful [mächtiger], stronger [kraftvoller], more capable [tüchtiger].’ The popular mind, however, believes otherwise, and holds individuals accountable or responsible for their deeds. Hence, Fischer writes, we hate a man who has done us even a small injury, but not the lightning bolt that has destroyed our house. The bolt was not free to do otherwise.

David Wollenberg, “Nietzsche, Spinoza, and the Moral Affects” in Journal of the History of Philosophy 51.4: (2013), pg. 631-32

[athousandgateaux]

The false belief in the free actor is arguably even more fundamental to what Nietzsche defines as slave morality than is the ‘good and evil’ distinction, as this is one of the prime factors behind that distinction to be made: the slave believes the master could choose to act otherwise, and condemns him for not doing the ‘right’ thing. Nietzsche illustrates what he means here with a metaphor: though the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash (Leuchten), this flash is not in fact an action of a subject. Rather, this flash, this expression of power, is the lightning. The same holds for human activity. One cannot separate ‘strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum . . . which was free to express strength or not to do so.’ There is no ‘could have done otherwise’ and it is thus absurd to demand of strength that it express itself as weakness, or vice versa. No doer exists ‘behind’ the deed, who expends his power according to his whim: the deed is everything.

David Wollenberg, “Nietzsche, Spinoza, and the Moral Affects” in Journal of the History of Philosophy 51.4: (2013), pg. 630-631

[athousandgateaux]

An 1884 note [from Nietzsche], for example, complains about Spinoza’s hypocrisy (Heuchelei) in saying that we can overcome our affects (an interpretation that will find public expression a few years later in GE, where he polemicizes Spinoza’s ‘naïvely advocated destruction of the affects through their analysis and vivisection’). His complaint concerns not Spinoza’s picture of a combative struggle of the affects, but rather the implication that there is a subject independent of those affects, a will which can judge, dissect, and replace those affects with ‘better’ ones. Our power is supposed to be always fully actualized, and moreover this actualization is the subject: how can it therefore maintain an objective self-image, in order to change itself toward some conception of the good? The independent subject is a fiction: really ‘the will to overcome an affect is ultimately only the will of another, or of several other, affects.’

David Wollenberg, “Nietzsche, Spinoza, and the Moral Affects” in Journal of the History of Philosophy 51.4: (2013), pg. 627

[athousandgateaux]

A human being is constituted by this endless struggle of various drives, and there is no naturally superior resolution as Spinoza implies. The apparently tranquil nature of understanding or intelligere, which Spinoza valued so highly, stems not from its being a higher power but rather from its representing a kind of ‘reconciliation’ or ‘final accounting’ at the end of a long internal struggle. Because it reflects a certain calm after the storm, as it were, it is viewed as something ‘conciliatory, just, and good’—and hence Spinoza is erroneously led to his claim that human beings are united in reason and divided by passions. Knowledge is not to be scorned—Nietzsche in this phase of his thought saw it as quite valuable, and even pleasurable—but not because it is the ultimate achievement of tranquility; it too embodies and produces struggle, and offers no promises of a conclusive peace. The reasonable harmony, the overcoming of conflict, that Spinoza viewed as the best life is in Nietzsche’s eyes not life at all: ‘concord and lack of struggle—that would be death!’ In short, Nietzsche’s initial reading of Spinoza embraced but recharacterized that thinker’s depiction of an agonistic struggle of the affects, while remaining open to the possibility, so crucial to Spinoza’s overall project in the Ethics, that the affects can be successfully rearranged and reordered. Hence one’s philosophical project can be, as Nietzsche’s postcard called for, making knowledge the most powerful affect.

David Wollenberg, “Nietzsche, Spinoza, and the Moral Affects” in Journal of the History of Philosophy 51.4: (2013), pg. 626-627

[athousandgateaux]

While Nietzsche was drawn to [Spinoza’s] definition of the human soul as an endless competition of affects for dominance—in BGE he too would call the soul a ‘social structure of drives and affects’—he could not accept the latter’s sharp distinction between the affects of passion and reason. In his notes, Nietzsche immediately objects to Spinoza’s ideas about the inherent goodness of reason and knowledge— not because he himself prefers un-reason and ignorance, but rather because Spinoza has mischaracterized what reason is. According to Spinoza, reason itself is something harmonious, a peaceful repose above the turbulent passions, and to achieve our greatest good, we must orient ourselves toward achieving it. But for Nietzsche, this is Spinoza’s fundamental error (Grundirrthum): there is nothing essential about human nature that makes reason inherently more valuable: the drive for knowledge and reason is just one more affect among all the others, and it is a prejudice to isolate any one of these as our ‘true’ nature.

David Wollenberg, “Nietzsche, Spinoza, and the Moral Affects” in Journal of the History of Philosophy 51.4: (2013), pg. 626