On Nietzsche - Preface by Georges Bataille Lyrics
1
MOTIVATING THIS writing—as I see it—is fear of going crazy.
I’m on fire with painful longings, persisting in me like unsatisfied desire.
In one sense, my tension is a crazy urge to laugh, not so different in its way from the ravaging passions of Sade’s heroes but close, too, to the tensions of the martyrs and saints . . .
On this score, I have few doubts—my delirium brings out human qualities. Though by implication an imbalance is there as well—and distressingly I’m deprived of all rest. I’m ablaze, disoriented—and finally empty. Whatever great or necessary actions come to mind, none answers to this feverishness. I’m speaking of moral concerns—of discovering some object that surpasses all others in value!
Compared to the moral ends normally advanced, the object I refer to is incommensurable. Moral ends seem deceptive and lusterless. Still, only moral ends translate to acts (aren’t they determined as a demand for definite acts?).
The truth is, concern about this or that limited good can sometimes lead to the summit I am approaching. But this occurs in a roundabout way. And moral ends, in this case, are distinct from any excesses they occasion. States of glory and moments of sacredness (which reveal incommensurability) surpass results intentionally sought. Ordinary morality puts these results on the same footing as sacrificial ends. Sacrifice explores the grounding of worlds, and the destruction realized discloses a sacrificial laceration. All the same, it’s for the most banal reasons that sacrifice is celebrated. Morality addresses our good.
(Things changed in appearance when God was represented as a unique and veritable end. Now, some will say the incommensurability of which I speak is simply God’s transcendence. But for me transcendence is avoiding my object. Nothing radically changes when instead of human satisfaction, we think of the satisfaction of some heavenly being! God’s person displaces the problem and does not abolish it. It simply introduces confusions. When so moved or when circumstances require—in regard to God—being will grant itself an incommensurable essence. By serving God and acting on his behalf we reduce him to ordinary ends that exist in action. If he were situated beyond, there would be nothing to be done on his behalf.)
2
An extreme, unconditional human yearning was expressed for the first time by Nietzsche independently of moral goals or of serving God.
Nietzsche can’t really define it, but it motivates him and it’s what he unreservedly makes his own. Of course, ardor that doesn’t address a dramatically articulated moral obligation is a paradox. In this context there is no preaching or action that is possible. The result from this is something disturbing. If we stop looking at states of ardor as simply preliminary to other and subsequent conditions grasped as beneficial, the state I propose seems a pure play of lightning, merely an empty consummation. Lacking any relation to material benefits such as power or the growth of the state (or of God or a Church or a party), this consuming can’t even be comprehended. It appears that the positive value of loss can only be given as gain.
Nietzsche wasn’t entirely clear on this difficulty. He must have known he failed, and in the end knew he was a voice crying out in the wilderness. To be done with obligation and good, to expose the lying emptiness of morality, he destroyed the effective value of language. Fame came late to him, and as it did, he thwarted it. His expectations went unanswered.
Today it appears that I ought to say his readers and his admirers show him scant respect (he knew this and said so). 2 Except for me? (I am oversimplifying). Still . . . to try, as he asked, to follow him is to be vulnerable to trials and tribulations similar to his.
This total liberation of human possibility as he defined it, of all possibilities is, of course, the only one to remain untried (I repeat by way of simplification, except perhaps by me?). At the current historical juncture, I suppose each conceivable teaching preached has had its effect. Nietzsche in turn conceived and preached a new doctrine, he gathered disciples, aspired to found an order. He had contempt for what he received—vulgar praise!
I think it is appropriate today to state my confusion. Within myself I tried to draw out consequences of a lucid doctrine impelling and attracting me to it as if to the light. I’ve reaped a harvest of anguish and, most often, a feeling of going under.
3
Going under, I don’t abandon the yearnings I spoke of. Or rather they don’t abandon me. And I die. Even dying doesn’t silence me: at least that’s my belief. And I want those I love also to undergo—to go under also.
In the essence of humanness a fierce impulse seeks autonomy, the freedom to be. Naturally, freedom can be understood in many different ways—but is it any wonder that people today are dying for it? On my own, I’ll have to face the same difficulties as Nietzsche—putting God and the good behind him, though all ablaze with the ardor possessed by those who lay down their lives for God or the good. The discouraging loneliness he described oppresses me. But breaking away from moral entities gives such truth to the air I breathe, I’d rather live as a cripple or die than fall back into slavery!
4
As I write, I’ll admit that moral investigations that aim to surpass the good lead first of all to disorder. There’s no guarantee yet I’ll pass the test. Founded on painful experience, this admission allows me to dismiss those who, in attacks on or exploitations of Nietzsche, confuse his position with that of Hitler.
“In what height is my abode? Ascending, I’ve never counted the steps leading to myself—and where the steps cease, that is where I have my roof and my abode.”
Thus a demand is expressed, one not directed at some comprehensible good—but all the more consuming to the degree that its experienced.
I lose patience with crude equivocations. It’s frightening to see thought reduced to the propaganda level—thought that remains comically unemployable, opening to those whom the void inspires.
According to some critics, Nietzsche exercised a great influence on his times. I doubt it: No one expected him to dismiss moral laws. But above all he took no political stance and, when pressed to, refused to choose a party, disturbed at the possibility of either a right- or left-wing identification. The idea of a person’s subordinating his or her thinking to a cause appalled him.
His strong feelings on politics date from his falling out with Wagner and from his disillusionment with Wagner’s German grossness—Wagner the socialist, the Francophobe, the anti-Semite . . . The spirit of the Second Reich, especially in its pre-Hitlerite tendencies—the emblem of which is anti-Semitism—is what he most despised. Pan-German propaganda made him sick.
“I like creating from tabula rasa,” he wrote. “It is in fact one of my ambitions to be imputed a great scorner of the Germans. Even at the age of twenty-six, I expressed the suspicions that their nature had aroused in me” (Third Jeremiad). “To me, there is something impossible about the Germans, and if I try to imagine a type repellent to all my instincts, its always a German who comes to mind” (Ecce Homo). For the clear-sighted, at a political level Nietzsche was a prophet, foretelling the crude German fate. He was the first to give it in detail. He loathed the impervious, vengeful, self-satisfied foolishness that took hold of the German mind after 1870, which today is being spent in Hitlerite madness. No more deadly error has ever led a whole people astray and so terribly ordained it for destruction. But taking leave of the (by now) dedicated crowd, he went his way, refusing to be part of orgies of “self-satisfaction.” His strictness had its consequences. Germany chose to ignore a genius so unwilling to flatter her. It was only Nietzsche’s notoriety abroad that belatedly secured the attention of his people . . . I know of no better example of the wall of incomprehension existing between one person and his or her country: for fifteen years a whole nation remaining deaf to that voice—isn’t this a serious matter? As witnesses to that destruction, we ought to look in admiration at the fact that while Germany took the path leading to the worst developments, one of the best and most passionate Germans turned away from his country with feelings of horror and uncontrollable disgust. Taken all round in any case, in their attempts to evade him as much as in their aberrations, doesn’t hindsight let us see something vulnerable in this inconclusiveness?
In their opposition to each other, at last both Nietzsche and Germany will probably experience the same fate: both equally, aroused by demented hopes, though not to any purpose. Beyond this tragically pointless confusion, lacerations, and hatreds governed their relations. The resemblances are insignificant. If the habit of not taking Nietzsche seriously did not exist, the habit of doing what most annoyed him, giving him a cursory reading to exploit him, without even putting aside positions which he saw as being incompatible with his, his teaching would be seen for what it is—the most violent of solvents. To view this teaching as supporting causes it actually discredits not only insults it but rides roughshod over it—showing that his readers know nothing at all about what they claim to like. To try, as I have, to push the possibilities of his teaching to the limit is to become, like Nietzsche, a field of infinite contradictions. Following his paradoxical doctrines, you are forced to see yourself as excluded from participating in current causes. You’ll eventually see that solitude is your only lot.
5
In the helter-skelter of this book, I didn’t develop my views as theory. In fact, I even believe that efforts of that kind are tainted with ponderousness. Nietzsche wrote “with his blood,” and criticizing or, better, experiencing him means pouring out one’s lifeblood.
I wrote hoping my book would appear in time for the centenary of his birth (October 15, 1844). I wrote from February through August, counting on the German retreat to make publication possible. I began with a theoretical statement of the problem (this is part 2, p. 29), but that short section is essentially only the account of a personal experience, an experience which continued for twenty years and came to be weighted in fear. It might prove useful here to dispel an ambiguity. There exists an idea of Nietzsche as the philosopher of a “will to power,” the idea that this is how he saw himself and how he was accepted. I think of him more as a philosopher of evil. For him the attraction and value of evil, it seems to me, gave significance to what he intended when he spoke of power. Otherwise, how can passages like this be explained?
“WET BLANKET. A: You’re a wet blanket, and everybody knows it! B: Obviously! I’m dampening an enthusiasm that encourages belonging to some party, which is what parties won’t forgive” (Gay Science).
That observation, among many others, doesn’t in any way square with the type of practical conduct or politics derived from the “will to power” principle. In his lifetime Nietzsche had a distinct dislike for anything the expression of that will produced. If he was drawn, felt it necessary, even, to trample on received morality it’s equally certain that methods of oppression (the police) aroused his disgust too. He justified his hatred of the good as a condition for freedom itself. Personally, and with no illusions concerning the impact of this attitude, I am opposed to all forms of coercion—but this doesn’t keep me from seeing evil as an object of moral exploration. Because evil is the opposite of a constraint that on principle is practiced with a view toward good. Of course evil isn’t what a hypocritical series of misunderstandings makes it out to be: isn’t it essentially a concrete freedom, the uneasy breaking of a taboo?
Anarchy bothers me, particularly run-of-the-mill doctrines apologizing for those commonly taken to be criminals. Gestapo practices now coming to light show how deep the affinities are that unite the underworld and the police. It is people who hold nothing sacred who’re the ones most likely to torture people and cruelly carry out the orders of a coercive apparatus. I can only feel intense dislike for muddled thinkers who confusedly demand all rights for the individual. An individual’s limit is not represented simply by the rights of another individual but even more by rights of the masses. We are all inextricably bound up with the masses, participating in their innermost sufferings and their victories. And in our innermost being, we form part of a living group—though we are no less alone, for all that, when things go wrong.
As a means to triumph over significant difficulties of this kind and over the opposition between individual and collective or good and evil, over the exasperating contradictions from which, generally speaking, we are able to disentangle ourselves mostly through denial—it seems to me that only certain chance movements, or the audacity that comes from taking chances, will freely prevail. Chance represents a way of going beyond when life reaches the outer limits of the possible and gives up. Refusing to pull back, never looking behind, our uninhibited boldness discovers that solutions develop where cautious logic is baffled. So that it was only with my life that I wrote the Nietzsche book that I had planned—a book in which I intended to pose and resolve intimate problems of morality.
Only my life, only its ludicrous resources, only these made a quest for the grail of chance possible for me. Chance, as it turned out, corresponded to Nietzsche’s intentions more accurately than power could. Only “play” gave me the possibility of exploring the far reaches of possibility and not prejudicing the results, of giving to the future alone and its free occurrence the power usually assigned to choosing sides (which is only a form of the past). In a sense my book is the day-to-day record of what turned up as the dice were thrown—without, I hasten to say, there being a lot by way of resources. I apologize for the truly comical year of personal interests chronicled in my diary entries. They are not a source of pain, and I’m glad to make fun of myself, knowing no better way to lose myself in immanence.
6
Nonetheless, I don’t want my inclination to make fun of myself or act comic to lead readers astray. The basic problem tackled in this chaotic book (chaotic because it has to be) is the same one Nietzsche experienced and attempted to resolve in his work—the problem of the whole human being.
“The majority of people,” he wrote, “are a fragmentary, exclusive image of what humanity is; you have to add them up to get humanity. In this sense, whole eras and whole peoples have something fragmentary about them; and it may be necessary for humanity’s growth for it to develop only in parts. It is a crucial matter therefore to see that what is at stake is always the idea of producing a synthetic humanity and that the inferior humans who make up a majority of us are only preliminaries, or preparatory attempts whose concerted play allows a whole human being to appear here and there like a military boundary marker showing the extent of humanity’s advance.” (The Will to Power)
But what does that fragmentation mean? Or better, what causes it if not a need to act that specializes us and limits us to the horizon of a particular activity? Even if it turns out to be for the general interest (which normally isn’t true), the activity that subordinates each of our aspects to a specific result suppresses our being as an entirety. Whoever acts, substitutes a particular end for what he or she is, as a total being: in the least specialized cases it is the glory of the state or the triumph of a party. Every action specializes insofar as it is limited as action. A plant usually doesn’t act, and isn’t specialized; it’s specialized when gobbling up flies!
soldier, a professional, a man of learning, not a “total human being.” The fragmentary state of humanity is basically the same as the choice of an object. When you limit your desires to possessing political power, for instance, you act and know what you have to do. The possibility of failure isn’t important—and right from the start, you insert your existence advantageously into time. Each of your moments becomes useful. With each moment, the possibility is given you to advance to some chosen goal, and your time becomes a march toward that goal—what’s normally called living. Similarly, if salvation is the goal. Every action makes you a fragmentary existence. I hold onto my nature as an entirety only by refusing to act—or at least by denying the superiority of time, which is reserved for action.
Life is whole only when it isn’t subordinate to a specific object that exceeds it. In this way, the essence of entirety is freedom. Still, I can’t choose to become an entire human being by simply fighting for freedom, even if the struggle for freedom is an appropriate activity for me—because within me I can’t confuse the state of entirety with my struggle. It’s the positive practice of freedom, not the negative struggle against a particular oppression, that has lifted me above a mutilated existence. Each of us learns with bitterness that to struggle for freedom is first of all to alienate ourselves.
I’ve already said it: the practice of freedom lies within evil, not beyond it, while the struggle for freedom is a struggle to conquer a good. To the extent that life is entire within me, I can’t distribute it or let it serve the interests of a good belonging to someone else, to God or myself. I can’t acquire anything at all: I can only give and give unstintingly, without the gift ever having as its object anyone’s interest. (In this respect, I look at the other’s good as deceptive, since if I will that good it’s to find my own, unless I identify it as my own. Entirety exists within me as exuberance. Only in empty longing, only in an unlucky desire to be consumed simply by the desire to burn with desire, is entirety wholly what it is. In this respect, entirety is also longing for laughter, longing for pleasure, holiness, or death. Entirety lacks further tasks to fulfill.)
7
You have to experience a problem like this to understand how strange it ‘really is. It’s easy to argue its meaning by saying, Infinite tasks are imposed on us. Precisely in the present. That much is obvious and undeniable. Still, it is at least equally true that human entirety or totality (the inevitable term) is making its initial appearance now For two reasons. The first, negative, is that specialization is everywhere, and emphasized alarmingly. The second is that in our time overwhelming tasks nonetheless appear within their exact limits.
In earlier times the horizon couldn’t be discerned. The object of seriousness was first defined as the good of the city, although the city was confused with the gods. The object thereafter became the salvation of the soul. In both cases the goal of action, on the one hand, was some limited and comprehensible end, and on the other, a totality defined as inaccessible in this world (transcendent). Action in modern conditions has precise ends that are completely adequate to the possible, and human totality no longer has a mythic aspect. Seen as accessible in all that surrounds us, totality becomes the fulfillment of tasks as they are defined materially. So that totality is remote, and the tasks that subordinate our minds also fragment them. Totality, however, is still discernible.
A totality like this, necessarily aborted by our work, is nonetheless offered by that very work. Not as a goal, since the goal is to change the world and give it human dimensions. But as the inevitable result. As change comes about, humanity-attached-to-the-task-of-changing-the-world, which is only a single and fragmentary aspect of humanity, will itself be changed to humanity-as-entirety. For humanity this result seems remote, but defined tasks describe it: It doesn’t transcend us like the gods (the sacred city), nor is it like the soul’s afterlife; it is in the immanence of “humanity-attached . .” We can put off thinking about it till later, though it’s still contiguous to us. If human beings can’t yet be consciously aware of it in their common existence, what separates them from this notion isn’t that they are human instead of divine, nor the fact of not being dead: It’s the duties of a particular moment.
Similarly, a man in combat must only think (provisionally) of driving back the enemy. To be sure, situations of calm during even the most violent wars give rise to peacetime interests. Still, such matters immediately appear minor. The toughest minds will join in these moments of relaxation as they seek a way to put aside their seriousness. In some sense they’re wrong to do so. Since isn’t seriousness essentially why blood flows? And that’s inevitable. For how could seriousness not be the same as blood? How could a free life, a life unconstrained by combat, a life disengaged from the necessities of action and no longer fragmented—how could such a life not appear frivolous? In a world released from the gods and from any interest in salvation, even “tragedy” seems a distraction, a moment of relaxation within the context of goals shaped by activity alone.
More than one advantage accrues when human “reason for being” comes in the back way. So the total person is first disclosed in immanence in areas of life that are lived frivolously. A life like this—a frivolous life—can’t be taken seriously. Even if it is deeply tragic. And that is its liberating prospect—it acquires the worst simplicity and nakedness. Without any guile I’m saying, I feel grateful to those whose serious attitudes and life lived at the edge of death define me as an empty human being and dreamer (there are moments when I’m on their side). Fundamentally, an entire human being is simply a being in whom transcendence is abolished, from whom there’s no separating anything now An entire human being is partly a clown, partly God, partly crazy . . . and is transparence.
8
If I want to realize totality in my consciousness, I have to relate myself to an immense, ludicrous, and painful convulsion of all of humanity. This impulse moves toward all meanings. It’s true: sensible action (action proceeding toward some single meaning) goes beyond such incoherence, but that is exactly what gives humanity in my time (as well as in the past) its fragmentary aspect. If for a single moment I forget that meaning, will I see Shakespeare’s tragical/ridiculous sum total of eccentricities, his lies, pain, and laughter; the awareness of an immanent totality becomes clear to me—but as laceration. Existence as entirety remains beyond any one meaning—and it is the conscious presence of humanness in the world inasmuch as this is nonmeaning, having nothing to do other than be what it is, no longer able to go beyond itself or give itself some kind of meaning through action.
This consciousness of totality relates to two opposed ways of using that expression. Nonmeaning normally is a simple negation and is said of an object to be canceled. An intention that rejects what has no meaning in fact is a rejection of the entirety of being—and it’s by reason of this rejection that we’re conscious of the totality of being within us. But if I say nonmeaning with the opposite intention, in the sense of nonsense, with the intention of searching for an object free of meaning, I don’t deny anything. But I make an affirmation in which all life is clarified in consciousness.
Whatever moves toward this consciousness of totality, toward this total friendship of humanness and humanity for itself, is quite correctly held to be lacking a basic seriousness. Following this path I become ridiculous. I acquire the inconsistency of all humans (humanness taken as a whole, and overlooking whatever leads to important changes). I’m not suggesting that I’m accounting for Nietzsche’s illness this way (from what we know, it had some somatic basis), though it must be said, all the same, that the main impulse that leads to human entirety is tantamount to madness. I let go of good. I let go of reason `(meaning). And under my feet, I open an abyss which my activity and my binding judgments once kept from me. At least the awareness of totality is first of all within me as a despair and a crisis. If I give up the viewpoint of action, my perfect nakedness is revealed to me. I have no recourse in the world, there’s nothing to help me—and I collapse. No other outcome is possible, except endless incoherence, in which only chance is my guide.
9
Now clearly, such an experience of helplessness can’t be effected till all other experiences have been attempted and accomplished—till all other possibilities have been exhausted. So it can’t become the fact of human entirety until the last minute. Only an extremely isolated individual can attempt it in our day, as a consequence of mental confusion and at the same time an undeniable vigor. If chance is on such a person’s side, the individual can determine an unforeseen balance in this incoherence. Since this audaciously easy and divine state of balance again and again translates into a profound discordancy that remains a tightrope act, I don’t imagine that the “will to power” can attain such a condition in any other way. Given this, the “will to power” considered as an end is regressive. Taking such a course would return me to slavish fragmentation. I’d assign myself another duty, and the good that chooses power would control me. The divine exuberance and lightheartedness expressed in Zarathustra’s laughter and dancing would be reabsorbed. And instead of happiness at the brink of the abyss, I’d be tied to weightiness, the slavishness of Kraft durch Freude. If we put aside the equivocations of the “will to power,” the destiny Nietzsche gave humankind places him beyond laceration. There is no return, hence the profound nonviability of this doctrine. In the notes compiled in The Will to Power, proposals for activity and the temptation to work out a goal or politics end up as a maze. His last completed work, Ecce Homo, affirms absence of goals as well as the author’s complete lack of a plan. 4 Considered from the standpoint of action, Nietzsche’s work amounts to failure (one of the most indefensible!) and his life amounts to nothing—like the life of anyone who tries to put these writings into practice.
10
I want to be very clear on this: not a word of Nietzsche’s work can be understood without experiencing that dazzling dissolution into totality, without living it out. Beyond that, this philosophy is just a maze of contradictions. Or worse, the pretext for lies of omission (if, as with the Fascists, certain passages are isolated for ends disavowed by the rest of the work). I now must ask that closer attention be paid. It must have been clear how the preceding criticism masks an approval. It justifies the following definition of the entire human—human existence as the life of “unmotivated” celebration, celebration in all meanings of the word: laughter, dancing, orgy, the rejection of subordination, and sacrifice that scornfully puts aside any consideration of ends, property, and morality.
The preceding introduces a necessity to make distinctions. Extreme states, either individual or collective, once were motivated by ends. Some of these have lost their meaning (expiation and salvation). The search for the good of collectivities today no longer is pursued via recourse to dubious means, but directly through action. In previous conditions, extreme states came under the jurisdiction of the arts, though certain drawbacks existed. People substituted writing (fiction) for what was once spiritual life, poetry (chaotic words) for actual ecstasies. Art constitutes a minor free zone outside action, paying for its freedom by giving up the real world. A heavy price! Rare is the writer who doesn’t yearn for the rediscovery of a vanished reality; but the payment required is relinquishing his or her freedom and serving propaganda. Artists who limit themselves to fiction know they aren’t human entireties, though the situation isn’t any different for literary propagandists. The province of the arts in a sense encompasses totality, though just the same, totality escapes it in all aspects.
Nietzsche is far from having resolved the difficulty, since Zarathustra is himself a poet, in fact a literary fiction. Only he never accepted this. Praise exasperated him. He frantically looked for a way out—in every direction. He never abandoned the watchword of not having any end, not serving a cause, because, as he knew, causes pluck off the wings we fly with. Although the absence of causes, on the other hand, pushes us into solitude, which is the sickness of a desert, the shout lost in the silence . . .
The understanding I encourage involves a similar absence of outcome and takes a similar enthusiasm for torment for granted. In this sense I think the idea of the eternal return should be reversed. It’s not a promise of infinite and lacerating repetitions: It’s what makes moments caught up in the immanence of return suddenly appear as ends. In every system, don’t forget, these moments are viewed and given as means: Every moral system proclaims that “each moment of life ought to be motivated.” Return unmotivates the moment and frees life of ends—thus first of all destroys it. Return is the mode of drama, the mask of human entirety, a human desert wherein each moment is unmotivated.
There are no two ways about it, and a choice has to be made. On one side is the desert, on the other, mutilation. Misfortune can’t just be left behind like a package. Suspended in the void, extreme moments are followed by depressions that no hope can alleviate. If, however, I come to a clear awareness of what’s experienced along such a path, I can give up my search for a way out where none is to be found (for that reason I’ve retained my criticism). Can we believe that the absence of a goal inherent in Nietzsche’s outlook wouldn’t have certain consequences? Inevitably, chance and the search for chance represent the single applicable recourse (to the vicissitudes he described in his book). But to proceed rigorously in such a fashion necessarily implies dissociation in the impulse itself.
Even if it’s true that, as it is usually understood, a man of action can’t be a human entirety, human entirety nonetheless retains the possibility of acting. Provided, however, that such action is reduced to appropriately human (or reasonable) principles and ends. Human entirety can’t be: transcended (that is, subdued) by action, since it would lose its totality. Nor can it transcend action (submit it to its ends), since in this way it would define itself as a motive and would enter into and be annihilated by the mechanism of motivation. It’s important to distinguish between the world of motives on the one hand, that is, things making sense (rational), and the (senseless) world of non-sense on the other. Each of us sometimes belongs to one, sometimes to the other. We can consciously and clearly distinguish what is connected only in ignorance. Reason for me is limited only by itself. If we act, we stray outside the motivation of equity and a rational order of acts. Between the two worlds only a single relationship is possible: action has to be rationally limited by a principle of freedom. The rest is silence.
MOTIVATING THIS writing—as I see it—is fear of going crazy.
I’m on fire with painful longings, persisting in me like unsatisfied desire.
In one sense, my tension is a crazy urge to laugh, not so different in its way from the ravaging passions of Sade’s heroes but close, too, to the tensions of the martyrs and saints . . .
On this score, I have few doubts—my delirium brings out human qualities. Though by implication an imbalance is there as well—and distressingly I’m deprived of all rest. I’m ablaze, disoriented—and finally empty. Whatever great or necessary actions come to mind, none answers to this feverishness. I’m speaking of moral concerns—of discovering some object that surpasses all others in value!
Compared to the moral ends normally advanced, the object I refer to is incommensurable. Moral ends seem deceptive and lusterless. Still, only moral ends translate to acts (aren’t they determined as a demand for definite acts?).
The truth is, concern about this or that limited good can sometimes lead to the summit I am approaching. But this occurs in a roundabout way. And moral ends, in this case, are distinct from any excesses they occasion. States of glory and moments of sacredness (which reveal incommensurability) surpass results intentionally sought. Ordinary morality puts these results on the same footing as sacrificial ends. Sacrifice explores the grounding of worlds, and the destruction realized discloses a sacrificial laceration. All the same, it’s for the most banal reasons that sacrifice is celebrated. Morality addresses our good.
(Things changed in appearance when God was represented as a unique and veritable end. Now, some will say the incommensurability of which I speak is simply God’s transcendence. But for me transcendence is avoiding my object. Nothing radically changes when instead of human satisfaction, we think of the satisfaction of some heavenly being! God’s person displaces the problem and does not abolish it. It simply introduces confusions. When so moved or when circumstances require—in regard to God—being will grant itself an incommensurable essence. By serving God and acting on his behalf we reduce him to ordinary ends that exist in action. If he were situated beyond, there would be nothing to be done on his behalf.)
2
An extreme, unconditional human yearning was expressed for the first time by Nietzsche independently of moral goals or of serving God.
Nietzsche can’t really define it, but it motivates him and it’s what he unreservedly makes his own. Of course, ardor that doesn’t address a dramatically articulated moral obligation is a paradox. In this context there is no preaching or action that is possible. The result from this is something disturbing. If we stop looking at states of ardor as simply preliminary to other and subsequent conditions grasped as beneficial, the state I propose seems a pure play of lightning, merely an empty consummation. Lacking any relation to material benefits such as power or the growth of the state (or of God or a Church or a party), this consuming can’t even be comprehended. It appears that the positive value of loss can only be given as gain.
Nietzsche wasn’t entirely clear on this difficulty. He must have known he failed, and in the end knew he was a voice crying out in the wilderness. To be done with obligation and good, to expose the lying emptiness of morality, he destroyed the effective value of language. Fame came late to him, and as it did, he thwarted it. His expectations went unanswered.
Today it appears that I ought to say his readers and his admirers show him scant respect (he knew this and said so). 2 Except for me? (I am oversimplifying). Still . . . to try, as he asked, to follow him is to be vulnerable to trials and tribulations similar to his.
This total liberation of human possibility as he defined it, of all possibilities is, of course, the only one to remain untried (I repeat by way of simplification, except perhaps by me?). At the current historical juncture, I suppose each conceivable teaching preached has had its effect. Nietzsche in turn conceived and preached a new doctrine, he gathered disciples, aspired to found an order. He had contempt for what he received—vulgar praise!
I think it is appropriate today to state my confusion. Within myself I tried to draw out consequences of a lucid doctrine impelling and attracting me to it as if to the light. I’ve reaped a harvest of anguish and, most often, a feeling of going under.
3
Going under, I don’t abandon the yearnings I spoke of. Or rather they don’t abandon me. And I die. Even dying doesn’t silence me: at least that’s my belief. And I want those I love also to undergo—to go under also.
In the essence of humanness a fierce impulse seeks autonomy, the freedom to be. Naturally, freedom can be understood in many different ways—but is it any wonder that people today are dying for it? On my own, I’ll have to face the same difficulties as Nietzsche—putting God and the good behind him, though all ablaze with the ardor possessed by those who lay down their lives for God or the good. The discouraging loneliness he described oppresses me. But breaking away from moral entities gives such truth to the air I breathe, I’d rather live as a cripple or die than fall back into slavery!
4
As I write, I’ll admit that moral investigations that aim to surpass the good lead first of all to disorder. There’s no guarantee yet I’ll pass the test. Founded on painful experience, this admission allows me to dismiss those who, in attacks on or exploitations of Nietzsche, confuse his position with that of Hitler.
“In what height is my abode? Ascending, I’ve never counted the steps leading to myself—and where the steps cease, that is where I have my roof and my abode.”
Thus a demand is expressed, one not directed at some comprehensible good—but all the more consuming to the degree that its experienced.
I lose patience with crude equivocations. It’s frightening to see thought reduced to the propaganda level—thought that remains comically unemployable, opening to those whom the void inspires.
According to some critics, Nietzsche exercised a great influence on his times. I doubt it: No one expected him to dismiss moral laws. But above all he took no political stance and, when pressed to, refused to choose a party, disturbed at the possibility of either a right- or left-wing identification. The idea of a person’s subordinating his or her thinking to a cause appalled him.
His strong feelings on politics date from his falling out with Wagner and from his disillusionment with Wagner’s German grossness—Wagner the socialist, the Francophobe, the anti-Semite . . . The spirit of the Second Reich, especially in its pre-Hitlerite tendencies—the emblem of which is anti-Semitism—is what he most despised. Pan-German propaganda made him sick.
“I like creating from tabula rasa,” he wrote. “It is in fact one of my ambitions to be imputed a great scorner of the Germans. Even at the age of twenty-six, I expressed the suspicions that their nature had aroused in me” (Third Jeremiad). “To me, there is something impossible about the Germans, and if I try to imagine a type repellent to all my instincts, its always a German who comes to mind” (Ecce Homo). For the clear-sighted, at a political level Nietzsche was a prophet, foretelling the crude German fate. He was the first to give it in detail. He loathed the impervious, vengeful, self-satisfied foolishness that took hold of the German mind after 1870, which today is being spent in Hitlerite madness. No more deadly error has ever led a whole people astray and so terribly ordained it for destruction. But taking leave of the (by now) dedicated crowd, he went his way, refusing to be part of orgies of “self-satisfaction.” His strictness had its consequences. Germany chose to ignore a genius so unwilling to flatter her. It was only Nietzsche’s notoriety abroad that belatedly secured the attention of his people . . . I know of no better example of the wall of incomprehension existing between one person and his or her country: for fifteen years a whole nation remaining deaf to that voice—isn’t this a serious matter? As witnesses to that destruction, we ought to look in admiration at the fact that while Germany took the path leading to the worst developments, one of the best and most passionate Germans turned away from his country with feelings of horror and uncontrollable disgust. Taken all round in any case, in their attempts to evade him as much as in their aberrations, doesn’t hindsight let us see something vulnerable in this inconclusiveness?
In their opposition to each other, at last both Nietzsche and Germany will probably experience the same fate: both equally, aroused by demented hopes, though not to any purpose. Beyond this tragically pointless confusion, lacerations, and hatreds governed their relations. The resemblances are insignificant. If the habit of not taking Nietzsche seriously did not exist, the habit of doing what most annoyed him, giving him a cursory reading to exploit him, without even putting aside positions which he saw as being incompatible with his, his teaching would be seen for what it is—the most violent of solvents. To view this teaching as supporting causes it actually discredits not only insults it but rides roughshod over it—showing that his readers know nothing at all about what they claim to like. To try, as I have, to push the possibilities of his teaching to the limit is to become, like Nietzsche, a field of infinite contradictions. Following his paradoxical doctrines, you are forced to see yourself as excluded from participating in current causes. You’ll eventually see that solitude is your only lot.
5
In the helter-skelter of this book, I didn’t develop my views as theory. In fact, I even believe that efforts of that kind are tainted with ponderousness. Nietzsche wrote “with his blood,” and criticizing or, better, experiencing him means pouring out one’s lifeblood.
I wrote hoping my book would appear in time for the centenary of his birth (October 15, 1844). I wrote from February through August, counting on the German retreat to make publication possible. I began with a theoretical statement of the problem (this is part 2, p. 29), but that short section is essentially only the account of a personal experience, an experience which continued for twenty years and came to be weighted in fear. It might prove useful here to dispel an ambiguity. There exists an idea of Nietzsche as the philosopher of a “will to power,” the idea that this is how he saw himself and how he was accepted. I think of him more as a philosopher of evil. For him the attraction and value of evil, it seems to me, gave significance to what he intended when he spoke of power. Otherwise, how can passages like this be explained?
“WET BLANKET. A: You’re a wet blanket, and everybody knows it! B: Obviously! I’m dampening an enthusiasm that encourages belonging to some party, which is what parties won’t forgive” (Gay Science).
That observation, among many others, doesn’t in any way square with the type of practical conduct or politics derived from the “will to power” principle. In his lifetime Nietzsche had a distinct dislike for anything the expression of that will produced. If he was drawn, felt it necessary, even, to trample on received morality it’s equally certain that methods of oppression (the police) aroused his disgust too. He justified his hatred of the good as a condition for freedom itself. Personally, and with no illusions concerning the impact of this attitude, I am opposed to all forms of coercion—but this doesn’t keep me from seeing evil as an object of moral exploration. Because evil is the opposite of a constraint that on principle is practiced with a view toward good. Of course evil isn’t what a hypocritical series of misunderstandings makes it out to be: isn’t it essentially a concrete freedom, the uneasy breaking of a taboo?
Anarchy bothers me, particularly run-of-the-mill doctrines apologizing for those commonly taken to be criminals. Gestapo practices now coming to light show how deep the affinities are that unite the underworld and the police. It is people who hold nothing sacred who’re the ones most likely to torture people and cruelly carry out the orders of a coercive apparatus. I can only feel intense dislike for muddled thinkers who confusedly demand all rights for the individual. An individual’s limit is not represented simply by the rights of another individual but even more by rights of the masses. We are all inextricably bound up with the masses, participating in their innermost sufferings and their victories. And in our innermost being, we form part of a living group—though we are no less alone, for all that, when things go wrong.
As a means to triumph over significant difficulties of this kind and over the opposition between individual and collective or good and evil, over the exasperating contradictions from which, generally speaking, we are able to disentangle ourselves mostly through denial—it seems to me that only certain chance movements, or the audacity that comes from taking chances, will freely prevail. Chance represents a way of going beyond when life reaches the outer limits of the possible and gives up. Refusing to pull back, never looking behind, our uninhibited boldness discovers that solutions develop where cautious logic is baffled. So that it was only with my life that I wrote the Nietzsche book that I had planned—a book in which I intended to pose and resolve intimate problems of morality.
Only my life, only its ludicrous resources, only these made a quest for the grail of chance possible for me. Chance, as it turned out, corresponded to Nietzsche’s intentions more accurately than power could. Only “play” gave me the possibility of exploring the far reaches of possibility and not prejudicing the results, of giving to the future alone and its free occurrence the power usually assigned to choosing sides (which is only a form of the past). In a sense my book is the day-to-day record of what turned up as the dice were thrown—without, I hasten to say, there being a lot by way of resources. I apologize for the truly comical year of personal interests chronicled in my diary entries. They are not a source of pain, and I’m glad to make fun of myself, knowing no better way to lose myself in immanence.
6
Nonetheless, I don’t want my inclination to make fun of myself or act comic to lead readers astray. The basic problem tackled in this chaotic book (chaotic because it has to be) is the same one Nietzsche experienced and attempted to resolve in his work—the problem of the whole human being.
“The majority of people,” he wrote, “are a fragmentary, exclusive image of what humanity is; you have to add them up to get humanity. In this sense, whole eras and whole peoples have something fragmentary about them; and it may be necessary for humanity’s growth for it to develop only in parts. It is a crucial matter therefore to see that what is at stake is always the idea of producing a synthetic humanity and that the inferior humans who make up a majority of us are only preliminaries, or preparatory attempts whose concerted play allows a whole human being to appear here and there like a military boundary marker showing the extent of humanity’s advance.” (The Will to Power)
But what does that fragmentation mean? Or better, what causes it if not a need to act that specializes us and limits us to the horizon of a particular activity? Even if it turns out to be for the general interest (which normally isn’t true), the activity that subordinates each of our aspects to a specific result suppresses our being as an entirety. Whoever acts, substitutes a particular end for what he or she is, as a total being: in the least specialized cases it is the glory of the state or the triumph of a party. Every action specializes insofar as it is limited as action. A plant usually doesn’t act, and isn’t specialized; it’s specialized when gobbling up flies!
soldier, a professional, a man of learning, not a “total human being.” The fragmentary state of humanity is basically the same as the choice of an object. When you limit your desires to possessing political power, for instance, you act and know what you have to do. The possibility of failure isn’t important—and right from the start, you insert your existence advantageously into time. Each of your moments becomes useful. With each moment, the possibility is given you to advance to some chosen goal, and your time becomes a march toward that goal—what’s normally called living. Similarly, if salvation is the goal. Every action makes you a fragmentary existence. I hold onto my nature as an entirety only by refusing to act—or at least by denying the superiority of time, which is reserved for action.
Life is whole only when it isn’t subordinate to a specific object that exceeds it. In this way, the essence of entirety is freedom. Still, I can’t choose to become an entire human being by simply fighting for freedom, even if the struggle for freedom is an appropriate activity for me—because within me I can’t confuse the state of entirety with my struggle. It’s the positive practice of freedom, not the negative struggle against a particular oppression, that has lifted me above a mutilated existence. Each of us learns with bitterness that to struggle for freedom is first of all to alienate ourselves.
I’ve already said it: the practice of freedom lies within evil, not beyond it, while the struggle for freedom is a struggle to conquer a good. To the extent that life is entire within me, I can’t distribute it or let it serve the interests of a good belonging to someone else, to God or myself. I can’t acquire anything at all: I can only give and give unstintingly, without the gift ever having as its object anyone’s interest. (In this respect, I look at the other’s good as deceptive, since if I will that good it’s to find my own, unless I identify it as my own. Entirety exists within me as exuberance. Only in empty longing, only in an unlucky desire to be consumed simply by the desire to burn with desire, is entirety wholly what it is. In this respect, entirety is also longing for laughter, longing for pleasure, holiness, or death. Entirety lacks further tasks to fulfill.)
7
You have to experience a problem like this to understand how strange it ‘really is. It’s easy to argue its meaning by saying, Infinite tasks are imposed on us. Precisely in the present. That much is obvious and undeniable. Still, it is at least equally true that human entirety or totality (the inevitable term) is making its initial appearance now For two reasons. The first, negative, is that specialization is everywhere, and emphasized alarmingly. The second is that in our time overwhelming tasks nonetheless appear within their exact limits.
In earlier times the horizon couldn’t be discerned. The object of seriousness was first defined as the good of the city, although the city was confused with the gods. The object thereafter became the salvation of the soul. In both cases the goal of action, on the one hand, was some limited and comprehensible end, and on the other, a totality defined as inaccessible in this world (transcendent). Action in modern conditions has precise ends that are completely adequate to the possible, and human totality no longer has a mythic aspect. Seen as accessible in all that surrounds us, totality becomes the fulfillment of tasks as they are defined materially. So that totality is remote, and the tasks that subordinate our minds also fragment them. Totality, however, is still discernible.
A totality like this, necessarily aborted by our work, is nonetheless offered by that very work. Not as a goal, since the goal is to change the world and give it human dimensions. But as the inevitable result. As change comes about, humanity-attached-to-the-task-of-changing-the-world, which is only a single and fragmentary aspect of humanity, will itself be changed to humanity-as-entirety. For humanity this result seems remote, but defined tasks describe it: It doesn’t transcend us like the gods (the sacred city), nor is it like the soul’s afterlife; it is in the immanence of “humanity-attached . .” We can put off thinking about it till later, though it’s still contiguous to us. If human beings can’t yet be consciously aware of it in their common existence, what separates them from this notion isn’t that they are human instead of divine, nor the fact of not being dead: It’s the duties of a particular moment.
Similarly, a man in combat must only think (provisionally) of driving back the enemy. To be sure, situations of calm during even the most violent wars give rise to peacetime interests. Still, such matters immediately appear minor. The toughest minds will join in these moments of relaxation as they seek a way to put aside their seriousness. In some sense they’re wrong to do so. Since isn’t seriousness essentially why blood flows? And that’s inevitable. For how could seriousness not be the same as blood? How could a free life, a life unconstrained by combat, a life disengaged from the necessities of action and no longer fragmented—how could such a life not appear frivolous? In a world released from the gods and from any interest in salvation, even “tragedy” seems a distraction, a moment of relaxation within the context of goals shaped by activity alone.
More than one advantage accrues when human “reason for being” comes in the back way. So the total person is first disclosed in immanence in areas of life that are lived frivolously. A life like this—a frivolous life—can’t be taken seriously. Even if it is deeply tragic. And that is its liberating prospect—it acquires the worst simplicity and nakedness. Without any guile I’m saying, I feel grateful to those whose serious attitudes and life lived at the edge of death define me as an empty human being and dreamer (there are moments when I’m on their side). Fundamentally, an entire human being is simply a being in whom transcendence is abolished, from whom there’s no separating anything now An entire human being is partly a clown, partly God, partly crazy . . . and is transparence.
8
If I want to realize totality in my consciousness, I have to relate myself to an immense, ludicrous, and painful convulsion of all of humanity. This impulse moves toward all meanings. It’s true: sensible action (action proceeding toward some single meaning) goes beyond such incoherence, but that is exactly what gives humanity in my time (as well as in the past) its fragmentary aspect. If for a single moment I forget that meaning, will I see Shakespeare’s tragical/ridiculous sum total of eccentricities, his lies, pain, and laughter; the awareness of an immanent totality becomes clear to me—but as laceration. Existence as entirety remains beyond any one meaning—and it is the conscious presence of humanness in the world inasmuch as this is nonmeaning, having nothing to do other than be what it is, no longer able to go beyond itself or give itself some kind of meaning through action.
This consciousness of totality relates to two opposed ways of using that expression. Nonmeaning normally is a simple negation and is said of an object to be canceled. An intention that rejects what has no meaning in fact is a rejection of the entirety of being—and it’s by reason of this rejection that we’re conscious of the totality of being within us. But if I say nonmeaning with the opposite intention, in the sense of nonsense, with the intention of searching for an object free of meaning, I don’t deny anything. But I make an affirmation in which all life is clarified in consciousness.
Whatever moves toward this consciousness of totality, toward this total friendship of humanness and humanity for itself, is quite correctly held to be lacking a basic seriousness. Following this path I become ridiculous. I acquire the inconsistency of all humans (humanness taken as a whole, and overlooking whatever leads to important changes). I’m not suggesting that I’m accounting for Nietzsche’s illness this way (from what we know, it had some somatic basis), though it must be said, all the same, that the main impulse that leads to human entirety is tantamount to madness. I let go of good. I let go of reason `(meaning). And under my feet, I open an abyss which my activity and my binding judgments once kept from me. At least the awareness of totality is first of all within me as a despair and a crisis. If I give up the viewpoint of action, my perfect nakedness is revealed to me. I have no recourse in the world, there’s nothing to help me—and I collapse. No other outcome is possible, except endless incoherence, in which only chance is my guide.
9
Now clearly, such an experience of helplessness can’t be effected till all other experiences have been attempted and accomplished—till all other possibilities have been exhausted. So it can’t become the fact of human entirety until the last minute. Only an extremely isolated individual can attempt it in our day, as a consequence of mental confusion and at the same time an undeniable vigor. If chance is on such a person’s side, the individual can determine an unforeseen balance in this incoherence. Since this audaciously easy and divine state of balance again and again translates into a profound discordancy that remains a tightrope act, I don’t imagine that the “will to power” can attain such a condition in any other way. Given this, the “will to power” considered as an end is regressive. Taking such a course would return me to slavish fragmentation. I’d assign myself another duty, and the good that chooses power would control me. The divine exuberance and lightheartedness expressed in Zarathustra’s laughter and dancing would be reabsorbed. And instead of happiness at the brink of the abyss, I’d be tied to weightiness, the slavishness of Kraft durch Freude. If we put aside the equivocations of the “will to power,” the destiny Nietzsche gave humankind places him beyond laceration. There is no return, hence the profound nonviability of this doctrine. In the notes compiled in The Will to Power, proposals for activity and the temptation to work out a goal or politics end up as a maze. His last completed work, Ecce Homo, affirms absence of goals as well as the author’s complete lack of a plan. 4 Considered from the standpoint of action, Nietzsche’s work amounts to failure (one of the most indefensible!) and his life amounts to nothing—like the life of anyone who tries to put these writings into practice.
10
I want to be very clear on this: not a word of Nietzsche’s work can be understood without experiencing that dazzling dissolution into totality, without living it out. Beyond that, this philosophy is just a maze of contradictions. Or worse, the pretext for lies of omission (if, as with the Fascists, certain passages are isolated for ends disavowed by the rest of the work). I now must ask that closer attention be paid. It must have been clear how the preceding criticism masks an approval. It justifies the following definition of the entire human—human existence as the life of “unmotivated” celebration, celebration in all meanings of the word: laughter, dancing, orgy, the rejection of subordination, and sacrifice that scornfully puts aside any consideration of ends, property, and morality.
The preceding introduces a necessity to make distinctions. Extreme states, either individual or collective, once were motivated by ends. Some of these have lost their meaning (expiation and salvation). The search for the good of collectivities today no longer is pursued via recourse to dubious means, but directly through action. In previous conditions, extreme states came under the jurisdiction of the arts, though certain drawbacks existed. People substituted writing (fiction) for what was once spiritual life, poetry (chaotic words) for actual ecstasies. Art constitutes a minor free zone outside action, paying for its freedom by giving up the real world. A heavy price! Rare is the writer who doesn’t yearn for the rediscovery of a vanished reality; but the payment required is relinquishing his or her freedom and serving propaganda. Artists who limit themselves to fiction know they aren’t human entireties, though the situation isn’t any different for literary propagandists. The province of the arts in a sense encompasses totality, though just the same, totality escapes it in all aspects.
Nietzsche is far from having resolved the difficulty, since Zarathustra is himself a poet, in fact a literary fiction. Only he never accepted this. Praise exasperated him. He frantically looked for a way out—in every direction. He never abandoned the watchword of not having any end, not serving a cause, because, as he knew, causes pluck off the wings we fly with. Although the absence of causes, on the other hand, pushes us into solitude, which is the sickness of a desert, the shout lost in the silence . . .
The understanding I encourage involves a similar absence of outcome and takes a similar enthusiasm for torment for granted. In this sense I think the idea of the eternal return should be reversed. It’s not a promise of infinite and lacerating repetitions: It’s what makes moments caught up in the immanence of return suddenly appear as ends. In every system, don’t forget, these moments are viewed and given as means: Every moral system proclaims that “each moment of life ought to be motivated.” Return unmotivates the moment and frees life of ends—thus first of all destroys it. Return is the mode of drama, the mask of human entirety, a human desert wherein each moment is unmotivated.
There are no two ways about it, and a choice has to be made. On one side is the desert, on the other, mutilation. Misfortune can’t just be left behind like a package. Suspended in the void, extreme moments are followed by depressions that no hope can alleviate. If, however, I come to a clear awareness of what’s experienced along such a path, I can give up my search for a way out where none is to be found (for that reason I’ve retained my criticism). Can we believe that the absence of a goal inherent in Nietzsche’s outlook wouldn’t have certain consequences? Inevitably, chance and the search for chance represent the single applicable recourse (to the vicissitudes he described in his book). But to proceed rigorously in such a fashion necessarily implies dissociation in the impulse itself.
Even if it’s true that, as it is usually understood, a man of action can’t be a human entirety, human entirety nonetheless retains the possibility of acting. Provided, however, that such action is reduced to appropriately human (or reasonable) principles and ends. Human entirety can’t be: transcended (that is, subdued) by action, since it would lose its totality. Nor can it transcend action (submit it to its ends), since in this way it would define itself as a motive and would enter into and be annihilated by the mechanism of motivation. It’s important to distinguish between the world of motives on the one hand, that is, things making sense (rational), and the (senseless) world of non-sense on the other. Each of us sometimes belongs to one, sometimes to the other. We can consciously and clearly distinguish what is connected only in ignorance. Reason for me is limited only by itself. If we act, we stray outside the motivation of equity and a rational order of acts. Between the two worlds only a single relationship is possible: action has to be rationally limited by a principle of freedom. The rest is silence.