Tag Archives: Nietzsche

Time Dependance

This is part 3 of 3 in the Meditations on Time series

We begin with time by reducing it to causality. In various forms of logic, this can be reduced to the equation ‘if p, then q‘. Yet, this is known to be problematic as there is no proof for p, it is always assumed. The quest for p is an old one. Perhaps the most famous resolution is that attributed to Aquinas: there must be a first step that is uncaused (which he then attributes to God). Generalising on these, time becomes a linear progression from God through innumberable events to p which finally causes q. Of course, the reply to Aquinas has been made, what caused God? The answer to this, however,  is lacking: God caused God.

To follow the critique of Aquinas, we can go on to infinity and never find an original cause without assuming one of two things: either the first cause is itself uncaused or self-caused (a la Aquinas) or there is no first cause (e.g. ‘turtles all the way down’). However, there is a third option: to reject the logic of time. To do this, we must first resurrect the time paradox of chicken or egg. In turning to science fiction, we can find that this paradox is not one at all because time is a play of nonsense.

In the series finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation (‘All Good Things’), the time paradox is realised by Captain Picard while he is trying to understand what he is experiencing (thanks to the almighty Q). Picard’s answer to the time paradox is that the past is caused by the future. Similarly, in at least one serial of Doctor Who (‘Terminus’), it is discovered that Event One (i.e. the big bang) was caused by a starship freighter caught in the far future in a vortex at the centre of the universe ejecting its fuel reserves as an attempt to escape that vortex. In both cases here, the future directly causes the past and even time itself to exist. It is here that the paradox of time foils the notion of linear and logical time. Yet, how can we understand time?

It is through a reading of Deleuze’s syntheses of time and Nietzsche’s amor fati that time itself can be understood. Here, destiny is not the determination of future events nor the divination of future events in the past. Destiny is the interpretation of the past such that the present has become inescapable. It is a synthesis of the past in the future and a recreation of the future in the past simultaneously. I was destined to write this, not because some thing (be it God or otherwise) declared it so millenia ago (or even ‘beyond time’). Nor was I destined to write this because a fortune teller saw me doing so months ago. I was destined to write it because, as I write this, my past has been altered such that past events lead to my writing here and now. In other words, destiny is not an act of future determination but of past possibilities. It is this kind of destiny that Nietzsche called Fate and embraced.

Yet, now what of the paradox of time? Was the big bang caused by a starship unloading its fuel reserves? Probably not. However, it is also not necessary to presuppose that the uncaused God caused everything. There is no logic to time, and either we impose our own creation over time (i.e. we cause our own destinies) or we accept that we exist. In either case, existence does not need a reason to exist.

Ideological Delusions

Nietzsche writes in one of his better-known fragments, On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense, that the concept of ‘truth’ is an illusion which we have forgotten as such. This forgetting of the illusion is driven by the desire for knowledge; in other words, it is the desire for truth that transforms illusions into knowledge and masks them further by calling them ‘truths’. The power of desire turns against all possible opposition by declaring that lies are deceptions of the real that utilise real words to fabricate a false image. Nietzsche’s larger focus here isn’t an attack on epistemological frameworks but on the language that already validates those frameworks:

In a similarly limited way man wants the truth: he desires the agreeable life-preserving consequences of truth, but he is indifferent to pure knowledge, which has no consequences; he is even hostile to possibly damaging and destructive truths. And, moreover, what about these conventions of language? Are they really the products of knowledge, of the sense of truth? Do the designations and the things coincide? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?

Our language formulates arbitrary abstractions that rarely (if ever) ‘really’ exist. Take for instance, the concept of ‘leaf’: it exists as an abstract class that is always instantiated differently. The qualities of ‘leafness’ are made so that one can say a lettuce leaf is a leaf just as much as a maple leaf even though the two have different qualities as well. Another example would be that of ‘worm’ in which its definition is slippery enough that it could be twisted to also designate the concept ‘snake.’ In other words, the language of ‘truth’ is at best metaphors. The cynic in Nietzsche sees in that language something a bit more sinister, that which will become the Will to Power breaking through language. Correct perception can only be an aesthetic relation; that is, perception is art. It follows from this that powerful speakers will be able to paint perceptions and to mask them as something more than perceptions–as ‘truth’. It is in this vein that I wish to turn to the primary focus of this article: concepts we (Americans and possibly the West in general) have deluded ourselves in believing.

Free Propaganda

Three concepts which the US has consumed wholeheartedly are the illusions of freedom, its cousin democracy, and capitalism. These began to be consumed en masse after WW2 during the beginnings of the Cold War, but it must be kept in mind that these are strictly arbitrary and their influence can be found much earlier. In order to paint America and the West as being radically different from the USSR and communism, we began to market to ourselves these differences. It is during this time that the phrase ‘under God’ was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in order to differentiate America from atheist Russia. However, all of this was a marketing ploy, much like the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ for the actions in Iraq. We’ve been able to see the fruits of this marketing in the last 20 years once the Cold War ended. We’ve deluded ourselves further into thinking that our military actions in various places (post-collapse Russia, Yugoslavia, Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc) as spreading freedom and democracy (oh, and capitalism, of course). Ironically, we have never been a free nation. Our freedom has always had qualifications, some quite reasonable (e.g. restricting murder) and some less reasonable (e.g. restricting ‘free speech’ obscenities). The way the marketing works is that our ‘freedom’ is only a relative measure typically used in comparison to what is perceived as the most oppressive nations (e.g. USSR, mainland China, East Germany, etc). We’ve then taken this relative comparison and made it an absolute statement: not only are we more ‘free’ than (insert oppressive nation) but we are truly ‘free’ and all that the concept contains. What this rhetoric produces is not only the belief that ‘we’ are ‘free’ but that there cannot be anyone more ‘free’ because we ourselves are already ‘free’. By utilising this language and forgetting the relative nature of the original claims, we have created a situation in which one cannot think of ‘freedom’ outside of the restricted concept we’ve been marketed. While the US is not as overtly oppressive as Oceania from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, we’ve created the paradigm of the perversion of fascism it utilised.

The same also goes for the concept of ‘democratic.’ There are countless occasions in which we’ve elected one president under the guise of repairing the problems of a previous president (e.g. Obama’s election), but what we’ve failed to notice collectively is that the executive branch uses this in order to further abuse its privileges and abridge ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ in order to give us a ‘better’ place (e.g. the original PATRIOT act). As long as people continue to vote reactively, we will continue to see the restriction of ‘freedom’ under the guise of a ‘good-natured’ president that is trying to restore ‘freedom.’ In contradistinction to this, the ‘restoration of freedom’ is a re-interpretation of the concept of ‘freedom’ in light of the new, limited ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. Another useful example is the American Civil War in which we quickly discovered that a state cannot peacefully leave the union (further echoed in Texas v White). We may begin to see this issue rise again in cases like Montana and Georgia. The US Constitution names the government as a republic (and only a ‘democracy’ with qualifications) and requires/guarantees all states within to have the same kind of government.  In other words, we’ve created our own definition of ‘democratic’ so that we ourselves are the epitome of such and there can never be another who is more ‘democratic’. We have forgotten how we became ‘democratic’ and refuse to allow others that same path.

Our last illusion is that of ‘free market capitalism’. In some ways, we can never have a ‘free market’ society because we are only human and it will be abused however which way possible. We have also been able to paint the West as the only source of ‘free market’ capitalism even though mainland China (which is still ‘communist’) has allowed ‘capitalist’ growth beyond what the US could imagine. In a ‘free market’ system, there are no absolutes except the abstract concept of value. Everything has a value and this is always in flux and depends on the production of desire (through marketing techniques). Capitalism is the believing machine that believes in humans who, in turn, provide for its very survival. Yet we have forgotten that even capitalism is an illusion created in the past few centuries. Capitalism subsists in the world by managing the production of desires through marketing and advertisement; ‘You need that $50,000 car to feel happy‘ which then leads to ‘you need that $75,000 car to really feel happy.’ This process of a never satisfied desire is very familiar to psychoanalysis, as it is a manifestation of the unchecked ego. It is by its very nature never satisfied for the satisfaction of its desires implies the end of its existence. The unchecked ego transforms its process of desire by desiring desire itself; this provides the vehicle for it to exist indefinitely as the desire of desire is one that can never be satisfied. Capitalism is able to survive by tapping into this process and equating objects (e.g. cars, food, phones, computers, etc) with that desire–but only temporarily. The team of capitalism and ego have wreaked havoc on the individual and, by extension, society by reducing the individual to a set of desires and an illusion of freedom. You are free to do what you desire, as long as you are happy in doing it! Fortunately for capitalism, the means to enjoy desire also includes the proliferation of capitalism.

Escaping Freedom

In short, we are slaves to our own desires. Capitalism abuses this enslavement and has helped us delude ourselves into thinking we are free. We have never been free; but we willingly delude ourselves into thinking such and ignoring it by buying things to satisfy our displaced desires. And it is this distinct lack of freedom that we find in Paul’s letter to the Romans:

Did that which is good, then, become death to me? Absolutely not! But sin, so that it would be shown to be sin, produced death in me through what is good, so that through the commandment sin would become utterly sinful. For we know that the law is spiritual – but I am unspiritual, sold into slavery to sin. For I don’t understand what I am doing. For I do not do what I want – instead, I do what I hate. But if I do what I don’t want, I agree that the law is good. But now it is no longer me doing it, but sin that lives in me. For I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh. For I want to do the good, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but I do the very evil I do not want! Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer me doing it but sin that lives in me. So, I find the law that when I want to do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God in my inner being. But I see a different law in my members waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that is in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.

Paul’s escape from this ‘freedom’ is servitude, slavery by choice. It is a wonderful working of rhetoric of Paul here in that he short circuits the concepts of freedom and slavery by arguing to be free is to be enslaved and to be enslaved is to be free. Because of ideology, mankind is never free…and because of this, whichever ideology is the most prevalent will always be the most corrupt and it will always delude us into thinking we are free.

Returning now to Nietzsche, who sees the rhetoric in Paul; Nietzsche also sees in Paul the very reactive nature that continues the cycle of ideology (cf The Antichrist). For Nietzsche, the real escape isn’t choosing another ideology (e.g. religion) but moving past ideology altogether and returning to active thinking. In other words, freedom is to actively shape one’s own reality by taking controlling of one’s own ideology. That is the true power of the overman in Nietzsche (cf Thus Spoke Zarathustra). It is with this purpose in mind that the mad man in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science proclaims the death of God. It is not because some entity known as God is killed by Nietzsche (for that already happened 2000 years ago at the hands of Jewish ressentiment according to Nietzsche) but that the ideological Master that was erected in place of that God is now dethroned and revealed to be the powerless creature of ressentiment. Freedom is the power to create values, something which mankind has long since forgotten. This is the same power that capitalism wields over us now and the revolution isn’t finding a better ideology (e.g. socialism, communism, etc) but the radical revaluation of ideology itself to show the chains that always bind us.

Down the rabbit hole

This is part 1 of 4 in the Logic of Sense series

It has been a few years since I read Deleuze’s Logic of Sense.  Since that first reading, I have wanted to read it closely, as I believe it is undervalued (or even unknown!) in hermeneutics. After much reading elsewhere, I feel comfortable enough to provide a close reading of Logic of Sense. I will not stop at every “chapter”, that is series (Deleuze has a mastery of breaking traditional authorship manners), but will instead concentrate on Deleuze’s framing of sense in hermeneutical terms, one of the larger points I believe he makes in the text. In the short preface, Deleuze provides some insight into what his focus is:

We present here a series of paradoxes which form the theory of sense. It is easy to explain why this theory is inseparable from paradoxes: sense is a nonexisting entity, and, in fact, maintains very special relations with nonsense. (Logic of Sense, xiii)

This resonates very well with Nietzsche’s concept of truth as “an army of metaphors:

What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms — in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. (from The Portable Nietzsche, 46-7).

Deleuze’s tactic, however, differs from Nietzsche’s.  While Nietzsche focused on genealogical analyses, Deleuze is instead insterested in seeing it relationally where “certain points of one figure in a series refer to the points of another figure” (xiv) but without depth. Deleuze’s concept of sense aims to be one of purely surface structures without any kind of hidden meaning or depth underneath it all.

Postmortem Epistemology

This is part 5 of 5 in the Knowing series

What would a “postmodern” look like? Some turn towards language because they believe epistemology cannot be “solved” until we can be sure that we’re talking about the same thing. Some reject any attempt at epistemology because it is simply beyond our reach. took up an argument similar to Kierkegaard’s in opposition to Hegel and through him comes the “latest” theories of knowledge.

Truth as

Possibly Nietzsche’s greatest contribution to the study of knowledge focused on the of epistemology. In his essay titled “On truth and lie in an extra-moral sense,” Nietzsche describes his position nicely:

What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms — in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. (from The Portable Nietzsche, 46-7).

Simulated Truth

The message is clear: truth as a concept derives from the usage of language and is based solely on language. In reality, there is no Absolute Knowledge; there is no access to an undifferentiated knowledge of truth. Because of language, there cannot be knowledge of any kind of “objective” truth. For Nietzsche, truth and knowledge are really just forays into what is now called deconstruction. It’s all about interpretations of interpretations. To borrow Baudrillard, the language of truth is a set of simulacra that create and re-create a false notion of truth that has been accepted as the real thing. In reality, however, this notion of truth is the lack of the real thing. Slavoj explains how Coke is a great example of this:

We drink Coke — or any drink — for two reasons: for its thirst-quenching or nutritional value, and for its taste. In the case of caffeine-free diet Coke, nutritional value is suspended and the caffeine, as the key ingredient of its taste, is also taken away — all that remains is a pure semblance, an artificial promise of a substance which never materialized. Is it not true that in this sense, in the case of caffeine-free diet Coke, we almost literally “drink nothing in the guise of something”? (from The Fragile Absolute, 23)

Conclusions

There is no “postmodern epistemology” because it requires us to move beyond the confines of language. 20th century philosophy was obsessed about language until it slowly began to realize it cannot be comprehended. Language, as the vehicle of “truth,” cannot be transcended or reduced in order to provide insight into knowledge and truth. Truth and knowledge are embedded in language, the thing to which we humans are bound and chained. The best description we can have of truth and knowledge can be seen in Deleuze’s work The Logic of Sense. In this work, speaks of knowledge as a polymorphic surface on which we oscillate between sense and nonsense, between understanding and non-understanding. There is no “deeper” meaning to language because it is all “surface” level; it would be better to picture it as moving away towards the edges (nonsense) and less as some kind of hidden “deep” structure (yes, Deleuze’s work here is a critique of people such as Noam Chomsky).
This brings the end of this series to an anticlimatic moment. The most recent theories of knowledge only undo the ones before it, bringing us back oddly close to ‘s position in the Meno: we cannot know truth in its unadulterated form. Truth as a concept is buried in our usage of language and neither it nor we can overcome language. We cannot overcome ourselves.

The War-Machine

There is something that is absolute difference.  Deleuze sees it in what he calls the War-Machine.  It is without respect or reason, without emotion or attachment.  It borders on the suicidal and self-defeating.  It is always and absolutely conflictive difference.  It does not accept “community” or the contemporary notion of “diversity.”  It rejects the Hegelian subsumption of difference under identity.  It does not believe in “unity in diversity.”  It engenders hate.  It follows no rules, no laws, no structures.  It does not act for some “good.”  It does not even act for some “evil.”  It simply acts.

Deleuze believes that the best example of the War-Machine is Genghis Khan and his Mongolian warriors.  Even though they conquered the Chinese empire and large portions of the Muslim one, they slept in tents.  They razed cities, drove around the Great Wall, and killed for kicks.  Yet they never built (or rebuilt) cities, did not institute a new government, nor even made it mandatory for the people they destroyed to adhere to their laws.  This is because they had none.  There was no hierarchy.  They were rhizomatic….like weeds.  Yet, because of their lack of respect for laws, rules, and structures, they were also suicidal.  At any moment, they could have brought about their own destruction.  Yet they would still act without remorse.

Another example is that of Geronimo.  Here was a man upset at the Spanish.  Along with just two troops, he snuck past the guards and into the center of the Spanish encampment…and opened fire.  They were able to shoot 20 people dead.  It was a massacre by three.  That is the intensity of the War-Machine.

Today, there are many groups surfacing in this mode.  I say “mode” because it is not something one can always avoid.  Currently, the Christian Right, as well as other groups of neofundamentalists (e.g. the al Qaeda brand), are becoming machinic.  They are moving towards that suicidal grasp.  The recent problem with Ted Haggard is one such example.  One cannot become the War-Machine without losing control, ethics, and morality.  The War-Machine is pre-philosophic, pre-ethical, pre-morality.  It is passion and intensity.  It deterritorializes its past (i.e. removes the context of its past in which it is situated) and creates a new context which disregards both its contemporary locality and its historical context.  As Nietzsche said (On the Genealogy of Morals, of which Deleuze quotes often), “They come like fate, without resaon, consideration, or pretext…”  The War-Machine becomes the face of the other: a blank wall with two dark eyes.  It is the completely unknown.