Ethical Nihilism / Moral Skepticism / Existentialism / Speculative Realism... ask away!

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Ethical Nihilism / Moral Skepticism / Existentialism / Speculative Realism... ask away!

Post by NonZeroSum »

Haven't had a discussion on the meta-ethics in general, so fire away questions if you're interested and I'll try my best to answer.

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Internal Existentialist threads on the forum:


Agamben Homo Sacer animatic (Tommie Soro video)
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=3353

Optimistic Nihilism (Kurzgesagt video)
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=3352

I'm Zach ( I eat a vegan diet)
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3348

Post Anarchist and Radical Politics today by Saul Newman
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=3330

Contemporary Anarchism, Animal Liberation and the Implications of New Philosophy by Aragorn Eloff
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3180

The Ethics of Post-Anarchism by Saul Newman
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=3190

Moral nihilism and veganism
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2998

Existential questions raised in ‘Rick and Morty’
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=2973

‘Nailing Descartes to the wall’: Animal Rights, Veganism and Punk Culture,” by Will Boisseau and Jim Donaghey
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3179

Disturbing Places of Inter-Species Violence That Are Hidden in Plain Sight
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3173

Beyond Free and Equal: Subalternity and the Limits of Liberal-Democracy
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=3221

Re: Farmed Animal Sanctuaries: The Heart of the Movement? by Donaldson and Kymlicka
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3305

Between the Species; An Interview with Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3309

Solidarity in diverse societies (Kymlicka)
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3310

Afterword: Realigning Multiculturalism and Animal Rights (Kymlicka paper)
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3306

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External links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_Realism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-structuralism

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-moral/

Quotes from the links above:

Existentialism
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/

On the existential view, to understand what a human being is it is not enough to know all the truths that natural science—including the science of psychology—could tell us. The dualist who holds that human beings are composed of independent substances—“mind” and “body”—is no better off in this regard than is the physicalist, who holds that human existence can be adequately explained in terms of the fundamental physical constituents of the universe. Existentialism does not deny the validity of the basic categories of physics, biology, psychology, and the other sciences (categories such as matter, causality, force, function, organism, development, motivation, and so on). It claims only that human beings cannot be fully understood in terms of them. Nor can such an understanding be gained by supplementing our scientific picture with a moral one. Categories of moral theory such as intention, blame, responsibility, character, duty, virtue, and the like do capture important aspects of the human condition, but neither moral thinking (governed by the norms of the good and the right) nor scientific thinking (governed by the norm of truth) suffices.

“Existentialism”, therefore, may be defined as the philosophical theory which holds that a further set of categories, governed by the norm of authenticity, is necessary to grasp human existence. To approach existentialism in this categorial way may seem to conceal what is often taken to be its “heart” (Kaufmann 1968: 12), namely, its character as a gesture of protest against academic philosophy, its anti-system sensibility, its flight from the “iron cage” of reason. But while it is true that the major existential philosophers wrote with a passion and urgency rather uncommon in our own time, and while the idea that philosophy cannot be practiced in the disinterested manner of an objective science is indeed central to existentialism, it is equally true that all the themes popularly associated with existentialism—dread, boredom, alienation, the absurd, freedom, commitment, nothingness, and so on—find their philosophical significance in the context of the search for a new categorial framework, together with its governing norm.

3. Freedom and Value
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/#FreVal

Existentialism did not develop much in the way of a normative ethics; however, a certain approach to the theory of value and to moral psychology, deriving from the idea of existence as self-making in situation, are distinctive marks of the existentialist tradition. In value theory, existentialists tend to emphasize the conventionality or groundlessness of values, their “ideality,” the fact that they arise entirely through the projects of human beings against the background of an otherwise meaningless and indifferent world. Existential moral psychology emphasizes human freedom and focuses on the sources of mendacity, self-deception, and hypocrisy in moral consciousness. The familiar existential themes of anxiety, nothingness, and the absurd must be understood in this context. At the same time, there is deep concern to foster an authentic stance toward the human, groundless, values without which no project is possible, a concern that gets expressed in the notions of “engagement” and “commitment.”[14]

2.3 Authenticity
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/#Aut

By what standard are we to think our efforts “to be,” our manner of being a self? If such standards traditionally derive from the essence that a particular thing instantiates—this hammer is a good one if it instantiates what a hammer is supposed to be—and if there is nothing that a human being is, by its essence, supposed to be, can the meaning of existence at all be thought? Existentialism arises with the collapse of the idea that philosophy can provide substantive norms for existing, ones that specify particular ways of life. Nevertheless, there remains the distinction between what I do “as” myself and as “anyone,” so in this sense existing is something at which I can succeed or fail. Authenticity—in German, Eigentlichkeit—names that attitude in which I engage in my projects as my own (eigen).

What this means can perhaps be brought out by considering moral evaluations. In keeping my promise I act in accord with duty; and if I keep it because it is my duty, I also act morally (according to Kant) because I am acting for the sake of duty. But existentially there is still a further evaluation to be made. My moral act is inauthentic if, in keeping my promise for the sake of duty, I do so because that is what “one” does (what “moral people” do). But I can do the same thing authentically if, in keeping my promise for the sake of duty, acting this way is something I choose as my own, something to which, apart from its social sanction, I commit myself. Similarly, doing the right thing from a fixed and stable character—which virtue ethics considers a condition of the good—is not beyond the reach of existential evaluation: such character may simply be a product of my tendency to “do what one does,” including feeling “the right way” about things and betaking myself in appropriate ways as one is expected to do. But such character might also be a reflection of my choice of myself, a commitment I make to be a person of this sort. In both cases I have succeeded in being good; only in the latter case, however, have I succeeded in being myself.[12]

Thus the norm of authenticity refers to a kind of “transparency” with regard to my situation, a recognition that I am a being who can be responsible for who I am. In choosing in light of this norm I can be said to recover myself from alienation, from my absorption in the anonymous “one-self” that characterizes me in my everyday engagement in the world. Authenticity thus indicates a certain kind of integrity—not that of a pre-given whole, an identity waiting to be discovered, but that of a project to which I can either commit myself (and thus “become” what it entails) or else simply occupy for a time, inauthentically drifting in and out of various affairs. Some writers have taken this notion a step further, arguing that the measure of an authentic life lies in the integrity of a narrative, that to be a self is to constitute a story in which a kind of wholeness prevails, to be the author of oneself as a unique individual (Nehamas 1998; Ricoeur 1992). In contrast, the inauthentic life would be one without such integrity, one in which I allow my life-story to be dictated by the world. Be that as it may, it is clear that one can commit oneself to a life of chamealeon-like variety, as does Don Juan in Kierkegaard's version of the legend. Even interpreted narratively, then, the norm of authenticity remains a formal one. As with Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith, one cannot tell who is authentic by looking at the content of their lives.[13]

Authenticity defines a condition on self-making: do I succeed in making myself, or will who I am merely be a function of the roles I find myself in? Thus to be authentic can also be thought as a way of being autonomous. In choosing “resolutely”—that is, in commiting myself to a certain course of action, a certain way of being in the world—I have given myself the rule that belongs to the role I come to adopt. The inauthentic person, in contrast, merely occupies such a role, and may do so “irresolutely,” without commitment. Being a father authentically does not necessarily make me a better father, but what it means to be a father has become explicitly my concern. It is here that existentialism locates the singularity of existence and identifies what is irreducible in the first-person stance. At the same time, authenticity does not hold out some specific way of life as a norm; that is, it does not distinguish between the projects that I might choose. Instead, it governs the manner in which I am engaged in such projects—either as “my own” or as “what one does,” transparently or opaquely.

Thus existentialism's focus on authenticity leads to a distinctive stance toward ethics and value-theory generally. The possibility of authenticity is a mark of my freedom, and it is through freedom that existentialism approaches questions of value, leading to many of its most recognizable doctrines.

Postmodernism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism#Postmodernism

Jacques Derrida, whose deconstruction is perhaps most commonly labeled nihilistic, did not himself make the nihilistic move that others have claimed. Derridean deconstructionists argue that this approach rather frees texts, individuals or organizations from a restrictive truth, and that deconstruction opens up the possibility of other ways of being.[53] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, for example, uses deconstruction to create an ethics of opening up Western scholarship to the voice of the subaltern and to philosophies outside of the canon of western texts.[54] Derrida himself built a philosophy based upon a 'responsibility to the other'.[55] Deconstruction can thus be seen not as a denial of truth, but as a denial of our ability to know truth (it makes an epistemological claim compared to nihilism's ontological claim).

Lyotard argues that, rather than relying on an objective truth or method to prove their claims, philosophers legitimize their truths by reference to a story about the world that can't be separated from the age and system the stories belong to—referred to by Lyotard as meta-narratives. He then goes on to define the postmodern condition as characterized by a rejection both of these meta-narratives and of the process of legitimation by meta-narratives. "In lieu of meta-narratives we have created new language-games in order to legitimize our claims which rely on changing relationships and mutable truths, none of which is privileged over the other to speak to ultimate truth."[citation needed] This concept of the instability of truth and meaning leads in the direction of nihilism, though Lyotard stops short of embracing the latter.

Transcendental nihilism / methodological naturalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism#Transcendental_nihilism_.2F_methodological_naturalism

In Nihil Unbound: Extinction and Enlightenment, Ray Brassier maintains that philosophy has avoided the traumatic idea of extinction, instead attempting to find meaning in a world conditioned by the very idea of its own annihilation. Thus Brassier critiques both the phenomenological and hermeneutic strands of Continental philosophy as well as the vitality of thinkers like Gilles Deleuze, who work to ingrain meaning in the world and stave off the “threat” of nihilism. Instead, drawing on thinkers such as Alain Badiou, François Laruelle, Paul Churchland, and Thomas Metzinger, Brassier defends a view of the world as inherently devoid of meaning. That is, rather than avoiding nihilism, Brassier embraces it as the truth of reality. Brassier concludes from his readings of Badiou and Laruelle that the universe is founded on the nothing,[56] but also that philosophy is the "organon of extinction," that it is only because life is conditioned by its own extinction that there is thought at all.[57] Brassier then defends a radically anti-correlationist philosophy proposing that Thought is conjoined not with Being, but with Non-Being.

Anarchism and Animal liberation; Essays on Complementary Elements of Total Liberation
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3180

. . .for Deleuze nomadic ethics requires epistemological humility; it is anti-essentialist and non-normative, situated and contingent and emerges from situations themselves instead of being imposed upon them. It is an immanent ethics of experimentation that appeals to nothing outside of itself, a bio-centered, nonanthropocentric egalitarianism that recognizes our enfolding of and enfoldment within the world around us and a care for the self that is immediately a care for the not-self, for the infinitely complex web of relations within, and which are, our shared habitats. It is a practice of becoming together in constant differenciation, in affirmation of a deeper principle of difference, of differentiation, with an enhanced sense of situated accountability that “enlarges the sense of collectively bound subjectivity to non-human agents, from our genetic neighbours the animals, to the earth as a biosphere as a whole” (Braidotti 2006, p. 136).

From Solitude to Solidarity; How Camus Left Nihilism Behind
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=2973

By late 1942, shortly before he entered the French Resistance, Camus was reassessing the limits of absurdity. What would the world make of a thinker who announced: “Up to now I was going in the wrong direction. I am going to begin all over”? It didn’t matter, he shrugged. He, at least, knew it was proof that “he is worthy of thought.” Absurdity, he saw, was nothing more than a first step toward the truth. In his private journal, he wrote that the absurd “teaches nothing.” Instead of looking only at ourselves, as do Sisyphus or Nietzsche’s superman, we must look to others: We are condemned to live together in a precarious, unsettling world. “The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love. Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it.”

Love saves us from absurdity. At this point, Camus shed Nietzsche: Commitment to others becomes primordial in a world streaked by the absurd. This is the subject of The Rebel, a book conceived during the occupation and published in 1952. The rebel, affirms Camus, rejects not just metaphysical, but also political absurdity: namely, a state’s insistence on giving meaning to the unjustifiable suffering it inflicts on its citizens. The rebel not only says “no” to an unspeaking universe, but also says “no” to an unjust ruler. The rebel “refuses to allow anyone to touch what he is. He is fighting for the integrity of one part of his being. He does not try, primarily, to conquer, but simply to impose”—to impose himself on a meaningless world, as well as on those who deny his humanity.

Most critically, however, the rebel seeks to impose a limit on his own self. Rebellion is an act of defense, not offense; it is equipoise, not a mad charge against an opponent. Ultimately, it requires an active watchfulness in regard to the humanity of others as well as oneself. Just as the absurd never authorizes despair, much less nihilism, a tyrant’s acts never authorize one to become tyrannical in turn. The rebel does not deny his master as a fellow human being, he denies him only as his master; and he resists the inevitable temptation to dehumanize his former oppressor.

For Camus, rebellion lives only as long as does the balance between daring and prudence. Hence Camus’s embrace of a profoundly un-Nietzschean “philosophy of limits.” Since we cannot know everything, this philosophy argues that we cannot do anything we please to others. Rebellion, unlike revolution, “aspires to the relative and can only promise an assured dignity coupled with relative justice. It supposes a limit at which the community of man is established.” Revolution comes easily, while rebellion “is nothing but pure tension.”

Ultimately, rebellion means unending self-vigilance: It is the art of active restraint. At the end of The Rebel, Camus declared that our task is to “serve justice so as not to add to the injustice of the human condition, to insist on plain language so as not to increase the universal falsehood, and to wager, in spite of human misery, for happiness.” His many critics dismissed this phrase as mere grandiloquence, a heroic glibness disguising an absence of deep thought. Yet the truth of the matter is that there is nothing glib or easy about Camus’s claim. Instead, it recognizes the difficulty, doubts, and desperation tied to true rebellion, and the realization we must live with provisional outcomes.

The Politics of Post Anarchism by Saul Newman
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2944

However, can we assume that the possibilities of human freedom lie rooted in the natural order, as a secret waiting to be discovered, as a flower waiting to blossom, to use Bookchin’s metaphor? Can we assume that there is a rational unfolding of possibilities, driven by a certain historical and social logic? This would seem to fall into the trap of essentialism, whereby there is a rational essence or being at the foundation of society whose truth we must perceive. There is an implicit positivism here, in which political and social phenomena are seen as conditioned by natural principles and scientifically observable conditions. Here I think one should reject this view of a social order founded on deep rational principles. In the words of Stirner, ‘The essence of the world, so attractive and splendid, is for him who looks to the bottom of it – emptiness.’ In other words, rather than there being a rational objectivity at the foundation of society, an immanent wholeness embodying the potential for human freedom, there is a certain void or emptiness, one that produces radical contingency and indeterminacy rather than scientific objectivity. This idea has been elaborated by Laclau and Mouffe, who eschew the idea of society as a rationally intelligible totality, and instead see it as a field of antagonisms which function as its discursive limit. In other words, what gives society its definitional limit at the same time subverts it as a coherent, whole identity. Therefore, they argue, ‘Society never manages fully to be society, because everything in it is penetrated by its limits, which prevent it from constituting itself as an objective reality.’ Antagonism should not be thought of here in the sense of the Hobbesian state of nature, as a war of everyman against everyman, but rather as a kind of rupturing or displacement of social identities that prevents the closure of society as a coherent identity.

_______________


Nihil Unbound; Enlightenment and Extinction by Ray Brassier

https://rosswolfe.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/ray-brassier-nihil-unbound-enlightenment-and-extinction.pdf


Preface

Since Copernicus, man has been rolling from the centre toward X.
- (Friedrich Nietzsche 1885)[1]
The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
- (Steven Weinberg 1978)[2]
The term ‘nihilism’ has a hackneyed quality. Too much has been written on the topic, and any sense of urgency that the word might once have com-municated has been dulled by overexposure. The result is a vocable tainted by dreary over-familiarity and nebulous indeterminacy. Nevertheless, few other topics of philosophical debate exert such an immediate grip on people with little or no interest in the problems of philosophy as the claim of nihilism in its most ‘naive’ acceptation: existence is worthless. This book was spurred by the conviction that this apparently banal asser-tion harbours hidden depths which have yet to be sounded by philoso-phers, despite the plethora of learned books and articles on the topic. Although the philosophical literature on nihilism is impressively vast, comprising several important works from which I have learned much, the rationale for writing this book was the conviction that something of fun-damental philosophical importance remained unsaid and buried beneath the learned disquisitions on the historical origins, contemporary ramifica-tions, and long-term implications of nihilism. Indeed, these aspects of the topic have been so thoroughly charted that the simplest way to clarify the intent of this book is to explain what it does not do.

First and foremost, it does not treat nihilism as a disease, requiring diagnosis and the recommendation of an antidote. But neither does it extol the pathos of finitude as a bulwark against metaphysical hubris (Critchley 1997), or celebrate the indeterminacy of interpretation as a welcome liberation from the oppressive universalism of Enlightenment rationalism (Vattimo 1991 & 2004). Nor does it try to reassert the authority of reason in the face of scepticism and irrationalism, whether by defending Platonism from the depredations of Heideggerean exis-tentialism (Rosen 2000), or Hegelianism against the slings and arrows of French post-structuralism (Rose 1984). Lastly, it does not attempt to provide a conceptual genealogy of nihilism (Cunningham 2002), a critical pre-history of the problematic (Gillespie 1996), or a synoptic overview of its various ramifications in nineteenth- and twentieth-century phi-losophy and literature (Souche-Dagues 1996).

Two basic contentions underlie this book. First, that the disenchant-ment of the world understood as a consequence of the process whereby the Enlightenment shattered the ‘great chain of being’ and defaced the ‘book of the world’ is a necessary consequence of the coruscating potency of reason, and hence an invigorating vector of intellectual discovery, rather than a calamitous diminishment. Jonathan Israel’s work provided a direct source of inspiration for this idea and his magisterial recounting of philosophy’s crucial role in what was arguably the most far-reaching (and still ongoing) intellectual revolution of the past two thousand years furnishes a salutary and much-needed corrective to the tide of anti-Enlightenment revisionism with which so much twentieth-century philosophy has been complicit.3 The disenchantment of the world deserves to be celebrated as an achievement of intellectual maturity, not bewailed as a debilitating impoverishment. The second fundamental contention of this book is that nihilism is not, as Jacobi and so many other philosophers since have insisted, a pathological exacerbation of subjectivism, which annuls the world and reduces reality to a correlate of the absolute ego, but on the contrary, the unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality, which, despite the presumptions of human narcissism, is indifferent to our exis-tence and oblivious to the ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable. Nature is not our or anyone’s ‘home’, nor a particularly beneficent progenitor. Philosophers would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity. Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living; indeed, they can and have been pitted against the latter. It is this latter possi-bility that this book attempts to investigate. Its deficiencies are patent, and unfortunately the shortfall between ambition and ability means that it is neither as thorough nor as comprehensive as would be neces-sary to make its case convincingly. Much more needs to be demonstrated in order to field an argument robust enough to withstand the sceptical rejoinders which the book’s principal contentions are sure to provoke. Nevertheless, the themes broached here, however unsatisfactorily, should be considered as preliminary forays in an investigation which I hope to develop more fully in subsequent work.

The book is divided into three parts. Chapter 1 introduces the theme which governs the first part of the book, ‘Destroying the Manifest Image’, by considering Wilfrid Sellars’s distinction between the ‘manifest’ and ‘scientific’ images of ‘man-in-the-world’. This opening chapter then goes on to examine the standoff between the normative pretensions of folk-psychological discourse, and an emerging science of cognition which would eliminate belief in ‘belief’ altogether in order to reintegrate mind into the scientific image. Chapter 2 analyses Adorno and Horkheimer’s influential critique of scientific rationality in the name of an alternative conception of the relation between reason and nature inspired by Hegel and Freud. Chapter 3, the final chapter of Part I, lays out Quentin Meillassoux’s critique of the ‘correlationism’ which underpins the Kantian–Hegelian account of the relationship between reason and nature, before pinpointing difficulties in Meillassoux’s own attempt to rehabilitate mathematical intuition. The second part of the book charts the ‘Anatomy of Negation’ and begins with Chapter 4, which examines how Alain Badiou circumvents the difficulties attendant upon Meillassoux’s appeal to intellectual intuition through a subtractive conception of being which avoids the idealism of intuition, but only at the cost of an equally problematic idealism of inscription. Chapter 5 attempts to find a way out of the deadlock between the idealism of correlation on one hand, and the idealism of mathematical intuition and inscription on the other, by drawing on the work of François Laruelle in order to elaborate a speculative realism operating according to a non-dialectical logic of negation. The third and final section of the book, ‘The End of Time’, tries to put this logic to work, beginning with Chapter 6’s critical recon-struction of the ontological function allotted to the relationship between death and time in Heidegger’s Being and Time and Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. Finally, Chapter 7 recapitulates Nietzsche’s narrative of the overcoming of nihilism in light of critical insights developed over the preceding chapters, before proposing a speculative re-inscription of Freud’s theory of the death-drive, wherein the sublimation of the latter is seen as the key to grasping the intimate link between the will to know and the will to nothingness.


The Truth of Extinction

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twin-kling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of ‘world history’, but never-theless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. – One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illus-trated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. - (Nietzsche 1873)[1]
Let us guard against saying death is the opposite of life; the living creature is simply a kind of dead crea-ture, and a very rare kind. - (Nietzsche 1882)[2]

7.1 Nietzsche’s fable


Nothing will have happened: Nietzsche’s ‘fable’ perfectly distils nihilism’s most disquieting suggestion: that from the original emergence of organic sentience to the ultimate extinction of human sapience ‘nothing will have happened’. Neither knowing nor feeling, neither living nor dying, amounts to a difference that makes a difference – ‘becoming aims at nothing and achieves nothing’.3 Yet Nietzsche’s entire philosophy is dedicated to overcoming this nihilistic conjecture. It is nihilism under-stood as the triumph of indeterminate negation, as assertion of the ulti-mate indifference or convertibility of being and becoming, truth and lie, reality and appearance, that Nietzsche seeks to vanquish by affirm-ing the coincidence of being (identity) and becoming (difference) in a gesture that would simultaneously overthrow both their metaphysical distinction and their nihilistic indistinction. The instrument of this overturning and the focus of this affirmation are provided by the hypothesis of eternal recurrence, Nietzsche’s ‘thought of thoughts’,[4] which is poised at that ‘mid-point’ [5] of (Western) history marking not only the culmination of European nihilism, but also the possibility of its overcoming.

According to Nietzsche, nihilism reaches its apogee in the pivotal moment when truth, hitherto the supreme value, turns against itself – for it is ‘truthfulness’ itself that calls the value of ‘truth’ into question, thereby subverting all known and knowable values, specifically the valuing of reality over appearance and knowledge over life.6 But truth, the venerable guarantor of value, is also the patron of belief, since for Nietzsche every form of belief is a ‘holding-something-true’.7 Consequently, the self-undermining of truth calls the very possibility of belief into question: ‘The most extreme form of nihilism would be the view that every belief, every holding-something-true is necessarily false because there is no true world’ (1968: §15). Yet as Nietzsche recognized, the collapse of belief in the true world also entails the dissolution of belief in the apparent world, since the latter was defined in contradis-tinction to the former.8 Disbelief in any reality beyond appearance can-not be converted into belief in the reality of appearance. Since the collapse of the reality–appearance distinction undermines the intrinsic connection between belief and truth, it is not something that can be straightforwardly endorsed or ‘believed in’. Thus nihilism appears to undermine itself because it is incompatible with any belief – it seems that it cannot be believed in, for if nothing is true, then neither is the claim that ‘nothing is true’. As a self-proclaimed ‘perfect nihilist’,9 Nietzsche refuses to retreat from this aporia and insists that it must be traversed, for nihilism can only be overcome from within. How then are we to think the apparently unthinkable thought that nothing is true, which, for Nietzsche, looms at the nadir of nihilism, yet also harbours the key to its overcoming?

For Nietzsche, this aporia of nihilism is simultaneously crystallized and dissolved in the thought of eternal recurrence.10 The thought of recurrence is at once the ultimate nihilistic conjecture – ‘existence as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness’11 – and what vanquishes nihilism by turning momen-tary transience into an object of unconditional affirmation and thereby into a locus of absolute worth:
Becoming must be explained without recourse to final intentions; becoming must appear justified at every moment (or incapable of being evaluated, which comes to the same thing); the present must not be justified by reference to the future, nor the past by reference to the present. […] Becoming is of equivalent value at every moment; the sum of its values always remains the same; in other words, it has no value at all, for anything against which to measure it, and in rela-tion to which the word ‘value’ would have meaning, is lacking. The total value of the world cannot be evaluated […]

(1968: §708)
Accordingly, the affirmation of recurrence coincides with the transval-uation of all existing values. Transvaluation should not be understood as an operation of inversion, the substitution of the lowest and least valued for the highest and most valued and vice versa. Rather, as Deleuze points out in his ingenious (although controversial) Nietzsche and Philosophy,12 transvaluation points to a fundamental qualitative transformation in the will to power – the ‘differential genetic element’ which produces values. Since all known (and knowable) values consecrated by Judeo-Christian culture are a function of those reactive forces animated by the negative will to nothingness, whose evaluations are governed by the norm of truth, the affirmation of eternal recurrence is at once the annihilation of all known values and the creation of unknown values. It extermi-nates all known values because it is the assertion of absolute eternal indifference, without even a ‘finale of nothingness’ to punctuate the sequence or to distinguish between beginning and end. In this regard, eternal recurrence is a ‘demonic’ hypothesis precisely insofar as it entails the evacuation of all meaning and purpose from existence, and hence the recognition of its ultimate valuelessness.13 Yet at the same time it also marks the discovery of a previously inconceivable kind of value because it asserts the absolute, invaluable worth of every moment of existence as such – it is no longer possible to separate one moment from another or to subordinate the value of the vanishing present to that of a cherished past or longed-for future. The transitoriness of the instant which was considered worthless in the old mode of valuation, where becoming was deemed deficient with regard to the transcendent value of eternal being, becomes the focus of ultimate worth in the new one – transcendence is revoked and with it the possibility of appraising the worth or worthlessness of existence from some external vantage point.

Accordingly, nihilism is overcome through a transvaluation whereby the pointlessness of becoming is embraced beyond its opposition to the supposed purposefulness of true being – aimlessness is affirmed in and for itself, without appeal to extrinsic justification. Thus the affirmation of eternal recurrence marks the coincidence of ‘midday and mid-night’14: it is at once the apex of affirmativeness – the eternalization of transience – and the nadir of negativity – the negation of all purpose-fulness. Yet as Deleuze and Heidegger both underline, despite their oth-erwise incompatible interpretations of Nietzsche, this is a conjunction of opposites which refuses the conciliatory mediation of dialectical neg-ativity: rather, it affirms the immediate, irreconcilable coincidence of absolute value and valuelessness, affirmation and negation, immanence and transcendence. Moreover, this discordant conjunction of opposites finds expression in the antinomy inherent in the attempt to believe in recurrence, or ‘hold-it-as-true’. For the assertion of recurrence claims that the world is nothing but ceaseless becoming, without rest or fixity, and hence that there is no cognizable being underlying becoming, no final truth upon which belief could find a secure footing. Since Nietzsche identifies truth with permanence, and permanence with being, it follows for him that to believe that the world is nothing but becoming, without ever becoming something, is to believe that there is no truth and therefore to ‘hold-it-as-true’ that nothing is true. It is in fact a contradictory belief, one that cancels itself out, and as such is equivalent to the unbelief which refuses to hold anything as true. This is why the thought of eternal recurrence is an expression of what Nietzsche himself calls ‘the most extreme form of nihilism’. Belief in eternal recurrence provides the definitive expression of the nihilistic belief that nothing is true; more precisely, it is the only way of holding-it-as-true that nothing is true. The paradoxical structure of this belief in the impossibility of belief betrays a fault-line in the folk-psychological construal of rationality; one which already prefigures the paradox of eliminativism we encountered in Chapter 1. We saw there how the apparent contradiction inherent in the ‘belief’ that there are no beliefs vanishes once it is understood that belief is neither the substrate nor the vehicle of this assertion. Moreover, it is precisely insofar as the critique of FP introduces a reality–appearance distinction into the phenomenal realm that it becomes possible to distinguish the phenomenological expe-rience of belief from its psychological reality. In this regard, although Nietzsche anticipated, as no one else did, the depth of the crisis of the manifest image, the scanty resources provided by nineteenth-century psy-chology prompted him to transpose what he correctly identified as the impasse in the folk-psychological conception of rationality into a meta-physical register which merely recapitulated the specious categories of the psychology it was supposed to supplant. Thus while Nietzsche’s penetrat-ing critiques of pseudo-psychological categories such as that of ‘intention’15 prefigure the critique of FP, his antipathy towards ‘positivism’ (combined with his debt to Schopenhauer) encourages him to replace it with a meta-physical surrogate – the ‘will to power’ – which exacerbates rather than palliates the poverty of the psychological register which it was called upon to supersede. As a result, the cognitive dilemma engendered by the col-lapse of the folk-psychological conception of truth is transcoded by Nietzsche into an axiological predicament necessitating a metaphysical transfiguration in the quality of the will whose symptom belief is sup-posed to be. In willing eternal recurrence, the will casts off the yoke of truth, which bridled it to those transcendent values that depreciated becoming, and is transformed into a will capable of embracing illusion: ‘the lie – and not the truth – is divine!’16

Deleuze provides a particularly subtle account of this transformation in Nietzsche and Philosophy. In Deleuze’s reading, the thought of recurrence is the focal point for the transmutation of the will to power. Deleuze distinguishes that aspect of the will according to which it is knowable – its ratio cognoscendi – from that aspect through which the will exists as ‘the innermost essence of being’ (Nietzsche 1968: §693) – its ratio essendi. The negative will to power, which underlies the will to nothingness, whose symptom is the ascetic ideal, is simply the will’s ratio cognoscendi, the knowable aspect of the will from which all hitherto known values derive. Nihilism – including Nietzsche’s own active nihilism, insofar as it proceeds by unmasking existing values the better to expose the will to power which produced them – renders the will to power knowable to us, but only in its negative aspect as will to nothingness. This is why for Deleuze’s Nietzsche, the history of human consciousness (and a fortiori, of phi-losophy) is the history of nihilism understood as the triumph of ressentiment, bad conscience, and the ascetic ideal. But the decisive juncture in this history occurs when the negative will to nothing-ness, which is also the philosophical will to truth, turns against truth itself and forces thought to break its alliance with knowing, and a fortiori with those reactive forces which enforced the rule of knowl-edge and the norm of truth. In the thought of recurrence, the will which animates knowing is obliged to confront itself no longer according to its knowable aspect, but rather according to that aspect through which it is. But since, for Nietzsche, ‘will to power’ is a synonym for the world interpreted as a chaotic multiplicity of con-flicting forces – ‘This world is will to power – and nothing besides!’17 – which is to say, a synonym for ‘becoming’, then to think the will in its being is to think the being of becoming in its essentially dissimu-latory, inherently self-differentiating ‘essence’ as a flux of perpetual transformation. Thus, the affirmation of recurrence marks the moment when the will comes to know that it cannot know itself in itself because its knowable aspect necessarily corresponds to nothing – since there is nothing, no aspect of the will ‘in-itself’, for it to correspond to or adequately represent.18 This is Deleuze’s dexterous resolution of a latent dichotomy that threatened to undermine the minimal con-ceptual coherence which even Nietzsche’s denunciation of rationality cannot do without – the dichotomy between the will’s phenomenal aspect, understood as the evaluable and interpretable dimension of becoming, and its noumenal aspect, understood as the chaos of becoming ‘in-itself’, beyond evaluation and interpretation, to which Nietzsche often, but incoherently, alludes.19 This dichotomy can be avoided, Deleuze suggests, once it is understood that the will which affirms recurrence does not affirm becoming as something ‘in itself’, subsisting independently of that affirmation; rather, in affirming becoming without goal or aim, the will affirms itself.

For who else is capable of willing this annihilation of transcendent meaning and purposefulness and of endowing every vanishing instant with absolute worth as an end in itself if not the will to power as such? The ‘overman’ whom Nietzsche proclaims as alone capable of affirming eternal recurrence would no longer be a species of the genus ‘man’ but rather a placeholder for that perpetual self-overcoming which charac-terizes the will to power. Thus – and contrary to what Nietzsche himself often seems to suggest – the selection effected by the test of eternal recurrence would not be between types of human individual – noble versus base, strong versus weak, etc. – but rather between the will sub-ordinated to extrinsic ends, and the will whose only end is itself. Only the will itself is devoid of all those interests and purposes whose satis-faction requires the utilitarian subordination of present means to future ends. Unconditional affirmation of the present is not only incommen-surable with human consciousness, it is incompatible with organic functioning, which is indissociable from the utilitarian trade-off between pleasure and pain, gratification and survival. Only the will to power, which wants nothing other than itself – which is to say, its own expansion, intensification, and self-overcoming – only this will which wants itself eternally is capable of willing the eternal recurrence of everything that is, without regard for the proportion of pleasure to pain:
Did you ever say Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you said Yes to all woe as well. All things are chained and entwined together, all things are in love; if ever you wanted one moment twice, if ever you said ‘You please me happiness, instant, moment!’ then you wanted everything to return! […] For all joy wants – eternity!

(Nietzsche 1969: 332)
Thus the scope of the transvaluation required by the affirmation of recurrence is as profound as it is uncompromising: it entails a will for which a moment of unadulterated joy, no matter how brief, is worth aeons of torment, no matter how excruciating. But two difficulties arise here. First, it is far from clear whether it is possible to commensurate joy and woe in such a way that the former, no matter how fleeting, will always outweigh the latter, no matter how prolonged. Second, there seems to be a latent indeterminacy in the normative claim that the will capable of affirming ‘all woe’ is nobler than the will that is not.

With regard to the first difficulty, Nietzsche seems to disregard a basic asymmetry in the relationship between joy and woe. For however multi-faceted our experience of joy may seem to us, hampered as we are by the rather meagre descriptive resources available within the manifest image, our possibilities for physical pleasure, as well as for psychological enjoy-ment, can be demarcated within boundaries determined by a set of phys-iological and psychological constraints which, however complex the interplay between neurophysiological and psychosocial dynamisms, can-not be assumed to be limitless. Yet when compared with our relatively restricted capacity for experiencing physical and/or psychological ‘joy’, the sheer depth and breadth of our capacity for ‘woe’, both in terms of our vulnerability to physical pain and our susceptibility to psychological suffering, appears nigh-on unlimited. This discrepancy has been given a particularly striking formulation by the writer Jesús Ignacio Aldapuerta:
Consider the capacity of the human body for pleasure. Sometimes it is pleasant to eat, to drink, to see, to touch, to smell, to hear, to make love. The mouth. The eyes. The fingertips. The nose. The ears. The genitals. Our voluptific capacities (if you will forgive me the coinage) are not exclusively concentrated in these places, but it is undeniable that they are concentrated here. The whole body is susceptible to pleasure, but in places there are wells from which it may be drawn up in greater quantity. But not inexhaustibly. How long is it possible to know pleasure? Rich Romans ate to satiety and then purged their overburdened bellies and ate again. But they could not eat for ever. A rose is sweet, but the nose becomes habituated to its scent. And what of the most intense pleasures, the personality-annihilating ecstasies of sex? […] Even if I were a woman and could string orgasm upon orgasm like beads upon a necklace, in time I should sicken of it. […] Yet consider. Consider pain. Give me a cubic centimeter of your flesh and I could give you pain that would swallow you as the ocean swallows a grain of salt. And you would always be ripe for it, from before the time of your birth to the moment of your death. We are always in season for the embrace of pain. To experience pain requires no intelligence, no maturity, no wisdom, no slow workings of the hormones in the moist midnight of our innards. We are always ripe for it. All life is ripe for it. Always. […] Consider the ways in which we may gain pleasure. […] Consider the ways in which we may be given pain. The one is to the other as the moon is to the sun.

(Aldapuerta 1995: 52–3)
This fundamental deficit between our susceptibility to pleasure and our vulnerability to pain vitiates the attempt to commensurate them. Indeed, the assumption that humans possess a limitless sensitivity to physical pleasure, or an inexhaustible capacity for psychological enjoy-ment, is an unfounded spiritualist conceit. In this regard, Nietzsche’s insistence that ‘joy is deeper than heart’s agony’ (1969: 331) implies that in affirming the recurrence of any moment of joy, the finite human organism transcends its own determinate psychophysical constitution. Thus, the affirmation of recurrence is the moment when finite lunar joy eclipses boundless solar pain. Yet Nietzsche provides no explanation of what makes this transcendence possible, other than saying that it is a function of some sort of ‘strength’ and/or ‘power’, while leaving the source of this ‘strength’ or ‘power’ completely indeterminate, apart from attributing it to an inherent ‘superiority’ in the character of the will. But given that the capacity for withstanding and surmounting pain is part of Nietzsche’s definition of ‘superiority of will’ – a ‘will’ whose psychophysical basis remains wholly indeterminate – it is difficult to see how this superiority, which is cashed out in terms of wholly traditional virtues such as fortitude, resilience, and resourcefulness, differs from the venerable definition of spiritual superiority: ‘The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – you do not know that it is this discipline alone which has created every elevation of mankind hitherto?’ (1990b: §225). This is simply to endorse, rather than undermine, the spiritualization of suf-fering; indeed it is difficult to see how it differs from familiar Judaeo-Christian paeans to the spiritually edifying virtues of suffering. Either one ascribes a redemptive function to suffering itself, as does Christian dolorism, or one reintroduces a spiritual economy of means and ends, where the experience of woe is compensated for by some past remem-brance or future expectation of bliss. Neither option can be reconciled with the stated aim of Nietzsche’s transvaluation, which was to over-throw the Judaeo-Christian register of evaluation altogether.

Moreover, to insist that the human organism is always capable of tran-scending suffering in principle, even if it does not do so in fact, is to stip-ulate an ethical norm which implicitly assumes the ‘soul-superstition’ according to which humans have been endowed with an infinite reser-voir of spiritual energy which furnishes them with an inexhaustible capacity for physical resilience. Ultimately, it is difficult to divorce the positive evaluation of suffering from the claim that suffering means something, in accordance with the strictures which the manifest image imposes upon our understanding of meaning. But to invest suffering with the varieties of ‘meaning’ concomitant with the manifest image is to automatically reinscribe woe into a spiritual calculus which subordi-nates present suffering to some recollected or longed-for happiness. By way of contrast, to acknowledge the meaninglessness of suffering is already to challenge the authority of the manifest image, since it is precisely its senselessness that renders woe resistant to redemptive valuation.20 Once the senselessness of suffering has been acknowledged, it becomes more apposite to insist that ‘woe is deeper than heart’s ecstasy’. This of course would be contrary to the explicitly stated goal of Nietzsche’s transvaluation, viz., that suffering no longer be counted as an objection to life. Nevertheless, unlike its affirmative antithesis, to which, as we shall see below, Nietzsche attributes a redemptive function vis-à-vis suffering, it is precisely the refusal to affirm or redeem woe that challenges the authority of the manifest image.

The second difficulty in Nietzsche’s attempted transvaluation of joy and woe follows on from the first. For whether woe is eclipsed by joy, or joy outweighed by woe, the question remains: whose joy; whose woe – mine or others? Construed as a test designed to effect the selection between noble and ignoble varieties of individual will, the hypothesis of eternal recurrence is fatally underdetermined. If the selection is con-fined to the individual level, then it has to be acknowledged that any able-bodied, materially privileged epicure who has successfully maxi-mized pleasure over displeasure in his or her existence will be eager to embrace eternal recurrence. Even the ‘last man’,21 whose ‘miserable ease’ ensures the preponderance of pleasure over displeasure in exis-tence, might prove as likely to opt for eternal recurrence as the overman, whose affirmation of the entwinement of joy and woe is ostensibly an act of self-overcoming. Nietzsche seems not to have envisaged the pos-sibility that the noble individual might not be the only one capable of welcoming the ‘demonic’ hypothesis of recurrence; he did not antici-pate its potential appeal to the bovine hedonist, whose coarseness effec-tively inures him or her to the demonic aspect of the thought. Accordingly, the ethical-psychological interpretation of recurrence as selective hypothesis is only viable if it is the individual’s acceptance of his or her own allotment of suffering that the affirmation of recurrence invites, rather than the suffering of others – otherwise sadists and sociopaths would be as eager to embrace it as the noble types suppos-edly envisaged by Nietzsche. Yet even if we specify that only the indi-vidual is qualified to affirm his or her own suffering, ambiguity persists. For who is to say what proportion of joy and woe affirmed in an indi-vidual life constitutes the appropriate measure of magnanimity and courage required in order to distinguish the noble from the ignoble? How much suffering, and of what kind, should an individual be capa-ble of enduring, without rancour or resentment, in order to qualify as courageous, rather than merely hardened? How much joy should an individual be capable of experiencing, and under what circumstances, for his or her delight in existence to be deemed a sign of spiritual munif-icence, rather than a symptom of indulgent libertinism? So long as the selection effected by the thought of recurrence is construed ethically and/or psychologically, and confined to the individual level, then its selectiveness remains vitiated by indeterminacy. Ultimately, the scope of the affirmation required by the thought of recurrence cannot be commensurated with any apportioning of joy and woe concomitant with the realm of individual human existence. For even when construed as a reformulated categorical imperative, as it is by Deleuze – whatever you will, will it in such a way that you also will its eternal return22 – the doc-trine of recurrence furnishes no criterion that would allow us to dis-criminate between the ignoble will of the privileged libertine, whose affirmation of ‘all woe’ is a symptom of insouciance, and the noble will of the spiritual aristocrat, whose affirmation of ‘all woe’ is a sign of munificence.

This is why Deleuze and Heidegger are right to insist that the differ-entiation operated by the affirmation of recurrence is epistemological and ontological, rather than psychological and anthropological. It does not select between noble and ignoble varieties of human will, but between the willing that is subordinated as a means for the fulfilment of ends, and the willing which abjures the economy of means and ends and has no other object than itself. The will that wills the recurrence of the instant is the will that wills the recurrence of everything, but in will-ing the recurrence of everything, the will simply wills itself: ‘[W]hat does joy not want! It is thirstier, warmer, hungrier, more fearful, more secret than all woe, it wants itself; it bites into itself, the will of the ring nestles within it’ (Nietzsche 1969: 332).23

Accordingly if, as Nietzsche claims, ‘knowledge in-itself in a world of becoming is impossible’ (1968: §617), then the will that evaluates and interprets becoming in the thought of eternal recurrence is no longer evaluating and interpreting under the aegis of truth and knowledge, but rather affirming the intrinsically dissimulatory character of its own ratio essendi – the fact that it has no cognizable essence – and thereby creat-ing itself by overcoming its own will to know. In so doing, the quality of the will undergoes a transformation from negative to affirmative – by willing becoming as creativity,24 the will wills itself and thereby becomes positive. It usurps truth and becomes autonomous or causa sui. Thus the only aspect according to which the will (becoming) is is that of affir-mation. Consequently, for Deleuze’s Nietzsche, it is no longer a matter of affirming what is (in the manner of Zarathustra’s braying ass),25 but rather of creating what is affirmed. Or as Deleuze puts it, it is not being that is affirmed via eternal recurrence, but the affirmation of eternal recurrence that constitutes being.26
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7.2 The turning point


Ultimately, nihilism’s consummation in the affirmation of eternal recurrence rescinds the privilege traditionally ascribed to knowing in favour of a premium on creative affirmation. For only the will that affirms indifference (recurrence as meaningless iteration of the ‘in vain’) is capable of making a difference by producing being, not as an object of representation, but as a creative power worthy of affirmation.27 But as we have seen, the will that affirms being as a creative principle rather than as an object of knowing is the will that wills itself. Thus, in a curiously Hegelian denouement, the point of transmutation through which nihilism overcomes itself corresponds to that moment wherein, by asserting the being of becoming, the will to power shifts from being ‘in-itself’ to being ‘in-and-for-itself’. By affirming itself and undergoing the metamorphosis from negation to affirmation, becoming expels the negative will to nothingness whose symptomatic manifestation was the ‘knowing’ which fuelled the logic of nihilism that eventually under-mined the authority of knowing as such. Accordingly, for Nietzsche, it is the self-affirmation of the will that produces the difference between difference and indifference, affirmation and negation, intensification and disintensification; and it is this difference in turn that validates the creative power of affirmation by engendering the active life that distin-guishes itself from reactive death. For as Nietzsche famously insists, it is precisely because life remains the precondition for all evaluation, that the value of life cannot be evaluated.28 Once we recognize that there are no transcendent cognitive criteria in terms of which we could find life wanting, we must concede that it is always life itself that appraises life; or more precisely, that every evaluation of life is symptomatic of the type of life that evaluates: either healthy or sick, strong or weak. Accordingly, for Nietzsche, nihilism, along with every variety of nega-tive judgement of life, is overcome when the affirmation of life becomes causa sui: the negative will to knowledge, which led to the depreciation of life, eventually turns against itself and is converted into an affirma-tive will which produces itself by affirming the invaluableness of mean-ingless life as an end in itself. Thus the life that affirms being is itself the locus of being, and the affirmation of self-differentiating life (will to power) expels everything that constrained life (reactivity, ressentiment, bad conscience) in what effectively amounts to an autocatalysis of vital difference.29

But as Nietzsche recognized, nihilism is perceived as debilitating pre-cisely insofar as it threatens to collapse those distinctions and categories through which we make sense of existence; not only the difference between meaning and meaninglessness, but also (and perhaps more menacingly) the difference between life and death. Unlike those con-servatives who presume to excoriate nihilism from without in the name of supposedly indubitable values, Nietzsche’s audacious philosophical gambit is the suggestion that the poison is also the cure, that untram-melled negativity harbours the seed of its own metamorphosis into an unprecedented power of affirmation and creativity: when pushed to its ultimate extremity, the destruction of difference unleashed by the will to nothingness turns against itself and yields a hitherto inconceivable variety of difference. Accordingly, Nietzsche’s alleged ‘overcoming’ of nihilism hinges on his claim to have exhausted this logic of indifferen-tiation from within, and to have converted it into a productive logic of differentiation which does not rehabilitate some traditionally sanctified (or ‘metaphysical’) difference. The question then is whether the power of creative affirmation celebrated by Nietzsche (as well as by Deleuze, arguably his most influential philosophical disciple) is in fact a new variety of difference or merely an old kind in a new guise. In what sense precisely does Nietzsche’s affirmative embrace of the meaninglessness of becoming amount to a difference that really makes a difference?

Central to Nietzsche’s narrative about the overcoming of nihilism is the claim that this moment of affirmation marks a pivotal point which ‘breaks the history of mankind in two’.30 Thus, Nietzsche ascribes to it the power of redeeming past time, for by willing the recurrence of what is and shall be, the wills also wills the recurrence of everything that has been, and therefore of the entire temporal series that conditioned this moment of affirmation. In so doing, it effectively wills backward, trans-forming resentment towards the past’s ‘it was’ into a positive ‘thus I willed it’. Accordingly, redemption is no longer projected into the future but rather retrojected into the past: it is the dissolution of the will’s vengefulness towards the ineradicable persistence of what has been.31 We cannot hope to undo the past; we can only embrace it. But in redeeming the past through this embrace, the present has already redeemed itself as well as its future. Thus, redemption is a function of the power of unconditional affirmation. So long as affirmation remains conditional – ‘I will recurrence if…’ – then it is the spirit of revenge that continues to motivate the will. When faced with the prospect of eternal recurrence, it is the negative will that seeks to affirm joy over woe, good over evil – it affirms selectively, separating joy from woe, good from evil. It presumes to be able to split becoming into good and evil. However, in so doing, it fails the test, because it reveals itself to be incapable of affirming becoming unconditionally, or as an indivisible whole. The neg-ative will’s conditional affirmation seeks to operate a selection between good and evil on the basis of interests wherein becoming is reinscribed in an economy of means and ends: ‘I will recurrence if …’ It is not selected by the affirmation of recurrence precisely because it wills a conditional selection. By way of contrast, the affirmative will successfully separates active from reactive forces by unconditionally affirming all of becoming. It operates the selection between active and reactive, difference and indifference, by refusing to select joy at the expense of woe.

Yet there is an underlying difficulty in ascribing this pivotal redemp-tive function to the affirmation of recurrence. For if the latter marks the focal point of becoming, the moment in which activity is prized free from reactivity, and affirmation released from negativity, then how are we to reconcile this axial role allotted to a particular moment of becoming, with the claim that this is also the moment that evacuates history of sense, telos, direction? How can the affirmation which is supposed to render every moment of becoming absolutely equivalent to every other, also be invested with the redemptive power capable of cleaving history in two and transforming the relation between all past and future moments? The affirmation of recurrence is supposed to be the lightning rod for the affirmative will through which all other moments are redeemed, and as we saw above, only the will itself is capable of affirm-ing becoming unconditionally. But since Nietzsche has eliminated the hypothesis of the an sich, the notion of the ‘will itself’ remains empty, just as the idea of ‘becoming-in-itself’ is vacuous, until the will’s ratio essendi is realized in the act that affirms it. For the ‘will itself’ is nothing independently of its realization in this affirmative act. But since the will to power is a synonym for becoming, this implies that becoming only is (in its ratio essendi) insofar as it is reflected into itself through this act – a claim which, as we have already noted, is uncannily reminiscent of the Hegelian thesis according to which essential being is coextensive with the act of its own reflexive self-positing.32 However, if becoming is only insofar as it is posited in this act, then the whole of becoming is con-densed in this affirmative instant – indeed, this is precisely why it is this act that eternalizes becoming. Accordingly, it is time as a whole or eter-nity as such that is reflected into itself through this affirmative instant. But if eternity is compressed and its being is expressed in and through this affirmation (in conformity with the Deleuzean logic of expression discussed in Chapter 6), this is to say that the whole of becoming is redeemed by thought. Thus, and despite having acknowledged ‘how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature’, Nietzsche effectively renders the being of becoming dependent upon the existence of creatures capable of evaluating it. But to construe being as a function of affirmation, rather than an object of representation, is merely another way of making the world dependent upon thought. Since Nietzsche cannot acknowledge the reality of becoming-in-itself, he makes becoming orbit around affirmation, which is to say, evalua-tion. (The reverse, which would consist in making affirmation orbit around becoming, is not an option for Nietzsche since it would require the sort of metaphysical realism which he has abjured.)33

It is this insistence that becoming is not an object of knowledge, but rather a libidinal motor of evaluation, that encourages Nietzsche to translate the epistemological conundrum generated by the inadequacy of the manifest image of truth – a conundrum which Nietzsche himself correctly identifies as a consequence of the Enlightenment will to truth – into an axiological crisis inviting a transvaluation of values. Through this transvaluation, which deposes truth, the enlightened premium on dis-interested knowing is diagnosed as a symptom of the will to nothing-ness, and supplanted by a symptomatology of forces which abrogates the privileging of knowledge – insofar as the latter invoked a world-in-itself indifferent to evaluation – in the name of a genealogy of values. Genealogy proceeds by positing the will to power as guarantor of the correlation between evaluation and a world that is only insofar as it is evaluated: the will is at once evaluating and evaluated, the agent of eval-uation as well as its patient. Accordingly, for Nietzsche, the pivotal moment in the history of nihilism occurs at that juncture when the will’s drive to eradicate value from the world in the name of truth exposes truth itself as just another value. This is the point at which the negative will to truth converts itself into the affirmative and evaluative will to lie; into a will which is willing to fabricate the value it bestows upon becoming:
Our ‘new world’: we have to realize to what degree we are the creators of our value feelings – and thus capable of projecting ‘meaning’ into history. This faith in truth attains its ultimate conclusion in us – you know what that is: that if there is anything that is to be worshipped it is appearance that must be worshipped, that the lie – and not the truth – is divine!

(Nietzsche 1968: §1011)
Ultimately then, Nietzsche’s axiological transcoding of the cognitive crisis generated by the untrammelled potency of the will to truth, and the ensuing suggestion that transvaluation is the key to ‘twisting free’ (Herausdrehen) from nihilism, are predicated upon a generalized irrealism that denies autonomy to becoming as well as to being. Thus, Nietzsche’s defusing of the will to nothingness depends upon his irrealism about becoming: since becoming is nothing in-itself, an act of evaluation suffices to transform it into something worthy of affirmation. But why should the thought that becoming aims at nothing and achieves nothing make a difference in the becoming that it affirms, effectively splitting it into a ‘before’ and an ‘after’? Nietzsche’s response is: because becoming is reflected into itself through this affirmation – since the will to power is at once evaluating and evaluated, becoming evaluates itself through the act that affirms its recurrence and bestows being upon it. This provides the conceptual underpinning for the claim that the eradication of value concomitant with the will to truth can be converted into a will capable of creating new values.

However, whether it is interpreted as the affirmation of identity, or as the affirmation of difference, Nietzsche’s attempt to characterize the affirmation of recurrence as focal point of becoming faces insuperable difficulties. First, Nietzsche’s irrealism about becoming threatens to restrict eternal recurrence understood as repetition of the same to the repetition of the present, for if the being of becoming orbits around its affirmation then it makes no sense to invoke a past or future dimension of becoming subsisting in-itself independently of the moment of its affirmation. The only sense in which the past and future of becoming recur is as fixed correlates of the nunc stans, the eternal now, of affirmation. Consequently, the affirmation of recurrence would render all the moments of becoming equivalent only insofar as it reduced them to this perpetually subsisting moment of affirmation. Second, the thought of eternal recurrence implies that becoming has never started or stopped; it is always repeating itself as what has already recurred an infinity of times. How then can history still harbour the possibility of a decisive turning point which divides the ‘before’ from the ‘after’ if every moment, and therefore this moment in which we are invited to affirm the repetition of the entire series of moments, has already recurred, and is already repeating itself, an infinity of times? What possible difference can affirmation make if it has already recurred an infinity of times? No doubt these and other difficulties attendant upon the interpretation of recurrence as repetition of the same tend to encourage the Deleuzean interpretation of the doctrine as repetition of difference. However, aside from the fact that there seems to be little support for it in Nietzsche’s own texts, Deleuze’s interpretation is vitiated by conceptual inconsis-tencies of its own – inconsistencies which are not just peculiar to Deleuze’s Nietzsche, but inherent in any philosophy that would privi-lege becoming over stasis and creative affirmation over representation. Thus, third and finally, if recurrence is construed as the repetition of difference, then being must be inherently self-differentiating. But if being is essentially active, affirmative, creative, and productive, then why does it ever become alienated from itself in reactivity, negation, sterility, and representation? The claim that the history of nihilism piv-ots around truth’s turning against itself invites the obvious retort: why should the affirmative will to illusion require the negative will to truth to come into its own and attain its maximal potentiation? Moreover, why does affirmation need to make a difference between identity and difference if being as such is nothing but differentiation? The answer to both questions, as we have already suggested, is a direct corollary of Nietzsche’s irrealism: becoming requires affirmation because it is noth-ing until it is reflected into itself via the intercession of an affirmative act. In this regard, Deleuze’s characterization of Nietzsche’s overcoming of nihilism amounts to an inverted Hegelianism, which pits the power of the positive against the labour of the negative only in order to con-vert difference-in-itself into difference-for-itself. Even so, a fundamental difficulty persists, for though affirmation distinguishes itself from nega-tion, and difference from indifference, it was the hybridization of activ-ity and reactivity that provided the precondition for the necessity of this distinction. Yet once affirmation has successfully separated itself from negation, and activity from reactivity, not only does it become impossible to account for the necessity of their intrication, this separa-tion cancels it own precondition, since the very difference through which eternal recurrence affirms the unity of becoming obviates the recurrence of this very unity. Thus the affirmation of recurrence retroactively negates the indivisibility of becoming which was sup-posed to provide its motivation. For it was precisely the premise of the indivisibility of good and evil, noble and base, activity and reac-tivity, that provided the condition for the affirmative redemption of becoming.

Ultimately, the claim that the affirmation of recurrence marks the turning point in the history of nihilism generates more difficulties than it can possibly resolve. The conclusion to be drawn here is that being is no more susceptible to affirmation than to negation: there is no more reason to opt for its differentiation through affirmation than its identi-fication through negation. Being-in-itself – which we characterized in Chapter 5 in terms of a degree-zero of being (being-nothing) – cannot be construed as an object of representation, but this is no reason to try to construe it as a power of affirmation instead. Once we have jettisoned Nietzsche’s irrealist postulate that being can be the correlate of an affir-mative act, it is clear that the becoming that ‘aims at nothing and achieves nothing’ is as heedless of affirmation as it is of negation. It is precisely the realist commitment to the truth of the in-itself, and the concomitant extension of the appearance–reality distinction into the phenomenal realm carried out by the science of cognition (cf. Chapter 1), which countermands the legitimacy of the axiological register with which Nietzsche would disarm the will to nothingness. In this regard, Nietzsche’s claim that life cannot but be privileged over knowing, since it remains its precondition, underestimates the profundity of the chal-lenge posed to life by the will to know. For as Nietzsche himself recognized, the allegedly absolute difference between life and death is among the metaphysical absolutes shaken by the untrammelled will to truth. Yet Nietzsche sides with vitalism in seeking to incorporate death into life, even going so far as to identify living and being: ‘Being – we have no idea of it apart from the idea of “living.” – How can anything dead “be”?’ (Nietzsche 1968: §582).

However, if knowing undercuts the difference between life and death, it is not by reducing the former to the latter, or by privileging entropy over negentropy – a metaphysical gesture as arbitrary as its vitalist antithesis – but by identifying difference and indifference, life and death, without synthesizing them ontologically, as Heidegger and Deleuze do through finite transcendence and psychic individuation respectively. As we saw in Chapter 5, the knowing that is determined by its object can be characterized as a structure of adequation without corre-spondence; one which does not seek to make a difference in becoming, as Nietzsche sought to via affirmation, but rather to identify the objec-tive matrix of order and disorder while unbinding the ontological syn-theses which would reduce the latter to correlates of thought. Thus, there is a knowing of the real (objective genitive) which repudiates the subordination of knowledge to vital and/or organic interests, but also the need to redeem or otherwise justify reality in order to render it com-patible with the putative interests of reason – or ‘rationality’ – as construed within the bounds of the manifest image.


7.6 Binding extinction


Extinction is real yet not empirical, since it is not of the order of expe-rience. It is transcendental yet not ideal, since it coincides with the external objectification of thought unfolding at a specific historical juncture when the resources of intelligibility, and hence the lexicon of ideality, are being renegotiated. In this regard, it is precisely the extinc-tion of meaning that clears the way for the intelligibility of extinction. Senselessness and purposelessness are not merely privative; they repre-sent a gain in intelligibility. The cancellation of sense, purpose, and possibility marks the point at which the ‘horror’ concomitant with the impossibility of either being or not-being becomes intelligible. Thus, if everything is dead already, this is not only because extinction disables those possibilities which were taken to be constitutive of life and existence, but also because the will to know is driven by the traumatic reality of extinction, and strives to become equal to the trauma of the in-itself whose trace it bears. In becoming equal to it, philosophy achieves a binding of extinction, through which the will to know is finally rendered commensurate with the in-itself. This binding coin-cides with the objectification of thinking understood as the adequation without correspondence between the objective reality of extinction and the subjective knowledge of the trauma to which it gives rise. It is this adequation that constitutes the truth of extinction. But to acknowledge this truth, the subject of philosophy must also recognize that he or she is already dead, and that philosophy is neither a medium of affirmation nor a source of justification, but rather the organon of extinction.
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