>This, I suggest, just begs the question of what power and weakness are. I
>know that sweet Lambda C will argue vociferously that this question has
>been answered by Nietzsche's discussion of active and re-active forces. I
>don't think this distinction as N. makes it valid, but let us for the sake
>of argument say that it is. Since N. assigns different values to active
>and re-active forces, his use of these terms, I would suggest, amounts to a
>re-naming of good and bad and good and evil. Re-naming is hardling an
>overcoming of metaphysics, it is just a silly game of semantics.
>Paul S. Rhodes
The following is in response to Mr. Rhodes' latest intervention.
The question arises as to whether active and reactive are synonymous or not with good
and bad, which Mr. Rhodes promptly identifies with Good and Evil.
An affirmative response, such as Mr. Rhodes suggests, would reduce the question to a
problem, not of semantics - as he pretends, but of mere transposition of terms or
substitution. Semantics in fact concerns the meaning of terms, and if there were no
semantic problems with the notions of good and bad, or Good and Evil, then one man's
good would surely not be another man's evil, would it? If this much can be agreed
(can it?), then there are indeed many problems with Mr. Rhodes reductionistic
approach to the matter of active versus reactive (forces, affects, etc). To begin
with there is the very connotation of force - does it mean that a force is bad when
it is reactive? If reactive denotes a subjected force, what would become of active
forces without object-forces that they could subject? One can certainly treat the
quality of a digestive force as reactive, but can one seriously hold that digestive
forces are 'bad' or 'Evil'? It is apparent the kind of nonsense one falls into when
one reduces good and bad (adjectives) to Good and Evil (nouns), and then moves on to
reduce active and reactive (as qualities of forces) to Good and Evil.
The problem is that when one performs such a reduction and then dismisses Nietzsche's
distinction between forces with the papal slight of hand that it is mere moralistic
transposition one has brought Nietzsche back to the old problem of the judgement of
God, exactly what he spent his life combating. Active and reactive are a matter of
evaluation of forces, a matter of genealogy, not parameters of a moral judgement
against life, as Good and Evil are. Certainly the German type is digestive, just as
the entire Christian dualism of Good and Evil is reactive, is a tool of reactive
life. But thereby organismic forces of digestion have not become German, anymore
than reactive life is Christian per se!
Mr. Rhodes' reductionistic suggestion also glosses over the evolution of morality.
Already the distinction between good and bad is characteristic of originary culture,
a savage invention: "it is the exalted, proud states of soul which are considered
distinguishing and determine the order of rank" (BGE, §260). The first type of
morality concerns the determination of values and good and bad designate noble and
ignoble as qualifiers of human beings, not actions. An act is neither good nor bad,
let alone Good or Evil. To remind you of Spinoza's position on this matter, as it is
precisely confluent with Nietzsche's, an action in itself cannot be said to be either
good or bad; an act can be said to be good only if it compounds the relation of a
body with other bodies, and bad only if it decomposes it. It is bad that which
weakens my desire, the force of my will.
At the limit, when savage culture yields to nomadism (our unbarbered berbers...), one
can discern the full extent of the active forces moving this first moral
determination from within: the fundamental statement of the Achean nobility of
ancient Greece is - "I am good, therefore you are bad!" (Theognis poem). Hence, for
a master morality, "the cowardly, the timid, the petty, and those who think of narrow
utility are despised" (ibidem). In the age of Asiatic and City-States, the problem
was not one of judging life, decrying life in order to promote values superior to
life. It was already the problem of combating reactive life.
Altogether different is the second type of morality, slave-morality, the morality of
reactive life. Here the great inversion of values is brought about: what is good
becomes the image of Evil, and what is bad becomes the source of Good. The arts of
the Priest and the Despot. Such is the caricature of will to power, its becoming
lust for power, will for power, will to debase the other: "You are evil, therefore I
am good!" How not to find in this triumph of reactive forces, the herd morality that
weakens desire? For that is precisely the seat of all illusions, the roots of the
dominion of Church, State and Capital! Good and Evil are both thoroughly reactive
notions, the implements of an entropic morality, the implements of a weak life.
Spinoza would argue that there is no Evil as such, as there is no adequate idea
possible of bodies that disagree; the only existence Evil could take would be with
respect to the affections of sadness (hatred, anger, resentment) that result from
inadequate ideas and the repression of desire. Much as we have argued about the
cosmological and ontological meaning of the Eternal Recurrence, (following Deleuze's
thread, undoubtedly!) to know that what returns is not reactive life, nor reactive
forces, but active affections, Spinoza held that "from the standpoint of nature or
God" and "their eternal laws" only relations that compound exist. Your depressing
problem in reading Nietzsche stems precisely from your inability to realize that Evil
exists neither in the order of essences nor in the order of relations. Evil is
nothing.
But then, eh bien, parlons-nous en du Mal! One cannot but wonder what attracts you
to Nietzsche, who you so vehemently abhor and denounce! Clearly, Nietzsche does not
compound with you, he rather decomposes your body, threatens your faith in
Christianity, saddens you. Can you not find in him that Great Outdoors, a breadth of
fresh air sweeping through the stale chambers of academic scholarship and the
judgement of God, a hurricane rendering utterly meaningless the regurgitated
neo-modern snippets of this List and its cloacal extension? Do you hate idiosyncrasy
(Deleuze's, Nietzsche's, etc) so much that you not only ignore it but must destroy
it, reduce it, crumple it, caricaturize it?
Is that why you speak of Evil then, to make this world yet more sinister? Aren't
there enough of us basing our power upon the sadness we can inflict upon others, upon
the diminution of the power of others? Hasn't Nietzsche been demeaned enough by
students of Philosophy, unable to befriend knowledge? What makes this list so
uninviting? What is so tempting about its idiocy? Is it not the impotence to
communicate, the incapacity to take Nietzsche seriously, the need to recuperate and
reduce all disputes and rob them of their essence, that rules its threads? The
legacy of the Priest and the Despot: to convince us, to program us to act as if
sadness was the promise of happiness, as if the cult of death, the cult of weakness,
the cult of sadness were already a joy in and of themselves!
Yes, Mr. Rhodes, it is bad all that proceeds from weakness, all that weakens one's
desire even further. After all, the cure of reactive life lies not in throwing it
back to more unbridled reaction. What is bad is not reactive forces, but their
triumph when they cease being enacted by active forces, when resistances cease being
overcome. What is bad is negative, passive, reactive life, not reactive forces, but
reactive forces that have subtracted themselves from the mastery of active forces.
Fortunately, human beings have not yet succeeded in assassinating the last redoubt of
active forces, their own unconscious activity; for the triumph of Good, as pure
entropy of spirit, would surely preclude any possibility of freedom. But they have
come darn close.
Bad is-
"The ones who don't enjoy themselves even when they laugh..." The ones who say- you
know what I mean but cannot say what they mean... "The ones who believe in
everything, even in God. The ones who keep going, keep going , just to see where it
all ends. Oh Yeaah!"
When is the last time that our moralists adopted Nietzsche's concept of ethics? We
don't recall...et pour cause.
Good night ladies, ladies good night-
Lambda C
PS1 - "In this sense, existence is a test. But it is a physical or chemical test, an
experimentation, the contrary of a Judgement. (...) This is the ultimate difference
between the good man and the bad man: the good or strong individual is the one who
exists so fully or so intensely that he has gained eternity in his lifetime, so that
death, always extensive, always external, is of little significance to him."
(Deleuze)
PS2 - "Combat is not the judgement of god, but the way to finish with both god and
every judgement. No one develops one's power by judgement, but by combat - which
implies no judgement whatsoever. Five characteristics seem to us to oppose
existence to judgement: cruelty against infinite suffering, vigil or drunkenness
against dreams, vitality against organization, will to power against a want to
dominate, combat against war." (Deleuze)
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