John Milbank takes on the entire horde of Nietzchean genealogists, we start with his critique. He writes in Theology and Social Theory, Beyond Secular Reason :
“The key to the deconstruction of these stories is simply this: how can the understanding of the event as such, of every event, as a moment of combat, justify itself in merely historicist, genealogical terms? Supposedly, the genealogist is quite neutral with respect to the different sorts of value promoted by different historical cultures: he should be equally suspicious of them all.
Yet in fact, if the transcendental event, every possible event, is a military ploy of assertive difference over against ‘the other’, then cultures closer to realizing this truth will come to be celebrated as more ‘natural’, more spontaneous cultures. Hence Nietzsche celebrates a Homeric nobility delighting in war, trials of strength, spectacles of cruelty, strategies of deception. Unless it is clear that this really is a more ‘natural’ form of life, then the general thesis must fall into doubt, and Nietzsche’s genealogy will appear as itself but another perspective: an account of the rise of Christianity, written from the point of view of the paganism which it displaced.
And, of course, this cannot possibly be made clear. Nietzsche does not even claim that universal human warfare is the upshot of a utilitarian necessity of the struggle to grow stronger and survive, but rather that it is a concomitant of the pure creative will to difference, to self-assertion.
This preference for originality, even at the cost of danger, is purely (as Nietzsche admits) a matter of taste, and Nietzsche is not able to demonstrate that such a taste is more primordially lodged in human existence than the despised desires for security, consolation, mutuality, pleasure and contentment. It follows that only in terms of Nietzsche’s own unfounded hierarchy of values is the primitive noble who tramples upon or patronizes the weak free from blame.
Nietzsche argues that the weak fail to realize that they are dealing, not with a deliberating will, but with a natural force: an activity which is no more culpable than the eagle swooping down upon its prey. In the moment of their invention of a new ‘slave morality’, the weak falsely imagine a subjective doer standing behind the deed, an impossible noble who would be capable of refraining from his noble nature.
And, of course, this cannot possibly be made clear. Nietzsche does not even claim that universal human warfare is the upshot of a utilitarian necessity of the struggle to grow stronger and survive, but rather that it is a concomitant of the pure creative will to difference, to self-assertion.
This preference for originality, even at the cost of danger, is purely (as Nietzsche admits) a matter of taste, and Nietzsche is not able to demonstrate that such a taste is more primordially lodged in human existence than the despised desires for security, consolation, mutuality, pleasure and contentment. It follows that only in terms of Nietzsche’s own unfounded hierarchy of values is the primitive noble who tramples upon or patronizes the weak free from blame.
Nietzsche argues that the weak fail to realize that they are dealing, not with a deliberating will, but with a natural force: an activity which is no more culpable than the eagle swooping down upon its prey. In the moment of their invention of a new ‘slave morality’, the weak falsely imagine a subjective doer standing behind the deed, an impossible noble who would be capable of refraining from his noble nature.
The implication here is that the weak are already ‘Platonists’, that they already imagine that the strong noble possesses essentially their own set of supposedly abiding values. In response to these values he should ascetically restrain his baser, aggressive impulses. However, Nietzsche is quite wrong to suppose that the notion of a ‘moral interval’, of a possible doing or refraining, arises only through the metonymic displacement which substitutes a subject behind the action for the subject which is the action.
For within the latter subject there is already an interval, which is one of necessary metaphoric tension: not only is his action akin to that of the eagle – or the lion, dog or whatever – it consists, precisely, in a totemic identification with the eagle’s swooping flight. The behaviour of the strong man is never spontaneous, it is always imitative of a cultural paradigm of strength, and he never exercises a natural power, or the power of a man which is ‘like’ that of the eagle, but always an invented, simulated power, which is that of the man-becoming-eagle. Moreover, the strong man is already an ascetic, for he is already organizing his natural energies towards the achievement of this single goal.
Given the dedication of the strong to a narrative which invents their strength, it is possible for the weak to refuse the necessity of this strength by telling a different story, posing different roles for human beings to inhabit. This might, indeed, be a questionable, metaphysical story about a disembodied, characterless soul always free to choose, but it could also be a story which simply changed the metaphors: which, for example, proposed a humanity becoming sheep-like, pastoral.
“Because he conceived of a new sort of ‘giving’ virtue that acted non- reactively out of the plenitude of power, St Paul, as Alain Badiou has pointed out, was already more Nietzschean than Nietzsche.He refused the idea that goodness begins in a weak ‘resistance’ to evil (this is why, for him, nomos cannot redeem), whereas Nietzsche failed to see that even the affirmation of the strong over the hordes of the weak was a mode of ‘weak’ resistance to weakness. St Paul also realized that a true metaphysics of power must entail a primacy of unthreatened peace, and of the collective over the individual, since only a reciprocal ‘weak’ receptivity will build a real, shared strength.
Nietzsche declares to be universal a certain condition of primitive humanity: in this case a society which celebrates the agon or playful, competitive struggle. However, Nietzsche’s picture of paganism is also overdone. One can certainly characterize Homeric morality as not clearly distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘success’, between demonstrations of strength and the achievement of what we should think of as ‘moral’ goals.
Yet this is not to say that it did not possess codes governing what constituted a fair display of strength. Such codes insisted that magnanimity, protection of dependents and hospitality to strangers were the duty of the strong, rather than merely one possible manifestation of their power. A heroic society characteristically ranks different degrees of achievement, has scales of value, and requires certain specific performances from different social strata. Yet these emphases find very little place in Nietzsche’s account: what one gets
Like positivism too, it does not simply privilege and universalize the standpoint of the primitive, it also claims to understand the primitives better than they understood themselves. Thus Nietzsche, first of all, celebrates primitive nobility, but secondly, makes agonistic struggles, understood ‘economically’, the real defining characteristic of their existence.
Nietzsche conceives of the ‘natural’ human state as one of the active flow of a ceaselessly inventive power (not so much the deliberate willing of the subject as, rather, an impersonal force of willing which brings the subject into being).
By contrast, the perverse, merely reactive condition of the Christian subject defines itself, negatively, as a refusal of this natural strength. Clearly, however, this is not how Christianity understands itself: for Christian self-understanding, the primary receptivity of ‘weakness’ is in relation not to the strong, but to God, the source of all charity. And this receptivity is a paradoxical, active reception, because the lover of God is authenticated by the love which she actively transmits to her neighbour. But then one may ask, why should the natural, active, creative will not be understood, as it is understood by Christianity, as essentially the charitable will, the will whose exercise of power is not a will to dominate, or to condescend, but rather to endorse, raise up, increase the capacity of, the human other.
The will to power ? Based on difference?
On the other hand, the Nietzschean understanding of the positive act as the will-to-power is equally problematic. As Gilles Deleuze stressed, the will- to-power negates nothing, and is not entailed by any dialectic of negation, but is rather a pure affirmation of difference.
However, no action ever re- mains safely within the sphere of the doer, but always already emanates beyond the doer, affecting those others by whom he is surrounded. It is at this point that, for a Nietzschean philosophy, difference is defined as oppos- itional difference, a difference which enters the existing common cultural space to compete, displace or expel. Yet if the objective effect of affirmative difference is aggression and enmity, then even if the noble will is ‘without malice’, even if, like the bird of prey, it has no conception of its victim, then there is a transcendental assumption of a negative relation persisting between all differences.
Now, quite clearly we do not live in a world where differences just lie benignly alongside each other, without mutual interference, but, rather, every difference is in itself an ‘overlap’, a disturbance within some area of common space. Yet does one need to interpret every disturbance, every event, as an event of war?
Only, I would argue, if one has transcendentally understood all differences as negatively related, if – in other words, one has allowed a dialectical element to intrude into one’s differential philosophy. If one makes no such presupposition, then it would be possible to understand the act of affirmative difference, in its passing over to the other, as an invitation to the other to embrace this difference because of its objective desirability. At the same time, it would have to be admitted that the reception of this difference by the other itself effects a further displacement, a further differentiation.
The ‘commonness’ which now embraces them both is not the commonplace of the given neutral terrain, nor of the act in its initial concep- tion, but instead of the new differential relationship. The question of the possibility of living together in mutual agreement, and the question of whether there can be a charitable act, therefore turn out to be conjointly the question of whether there can be an ‘analogy’ or a ‘common measure’ be- tween differences which does not reduce differences to mere instances of a common essence or genus. In other words a likeness that only maintains itself through the differences, and not despite nor in addition to them.
To argue that the natural act might be the Christian (supernatural) charit- able act, and not the will-to-power, is therefore to argue that such an ‘ana- logical relation’ is as possible a transcendental conception as the positing of an a priori warfare. And what is more, the former conception permits a purer ‘positivism’, a purer philosophy of difference, still less contaminated by dialectics. For a priori warfare not only supposes an ineradicable presence of the negative, it also supposes its dominance, as giving the only possible meaning-in-common.”
For within the latter subject there is already an interval, which is one of necessary metaphoric tension: not only is his action akin to that of the eagle – or the lion, dog or whatever – it consists, precisely, in a totemic identification with the eagle’s swooping flight. The behaviour of the strong man is never spontaneous, it is always imitative of a cultural paradigm of strength, and he never exercises a natural power, or the power of a man which is ‘like’ that of the eagle, but always an invented, simulated power, which is that of the man-becoming-eagle. Moreover, the strong man is already an ascetic, for he is already organizing his natural energies towards the achievement of this single goal.
Given the dedication of the strong to a narrative which invents their strength, it is possible for the weak to refuse the necessity of this strength by telling a different story, posing different roles for human beings to inhabit. This might, indeed, be a questionable, metaphysical story about a disembodied, characterless soul always free to choose, but it could also be a story which simply changed the metaphors: which, for example, proposed a humanity becoming sheep-like, pastoral.
“Because he conceived of a new sort of ‘giving’ virtue that acted non- reactively out of the plenitude of power, St Paul, as Alain Badiou has pointed out, was already more Nietzschean than Nietzsche.He refused the idea that goodness begins in a weak ‘resistance’ to evil (this is why, for him, nomos cannot redeem), whereas Nietzsche failed to see that even the affirmation of the strong over the hordes of the weak was a mode of ‘weak’ resistance to weakness. St Paul also realized that a true metaphysics of power must entail a primacy of unthreatened peace, and of the collective over the individual, since only a reciprocal ‘weak’ receptivity will build a real, shared strength.
Nietzsche declares to be universal a certain condition of primitive humanity: in this case a society which celebrates the agon or playful, competitive struggle. However, Nietzsche’s picture of paganism is also overdone. One can certainly characterize Homeric morality as not clearly distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘success’, between demonstrations of strength and the achievement of what we should think of as ‘moral’ goals.
Yet this is not to say that it did not possess codes governing what constituted a fair display of strength. Such codes insisted that magnanimity, protection of dependents and hospitality to strangers were the duty of the strong, rather than merely one possible manifestation of their power. A heroic society characteristically ranks different degrees of achievement, has scales of value, and requires certain specific performances from different social strata. Yet these emphases find very little place in Nietzsche’s account: what one gets
Like positivism too, it does not simply privilege and universalize the standpoint of the primitive, it also claims to understand the primitives better than they understood themselves. Thus Nietzsche, first of all, celebrates primitive nobility, but secondly, makes agonistic struggles, understood ‘economically’, the real defining characteristic of their existence.
Nietzsche conceives of the ‘natural’ human state as one of the active flow of a ceaselessly inventive power (not so much the deliberate willing of the subject as, rather, an impersonal force of willing which brings the subject into being).
By contrast, the perverse, merely reactive condition of the Christian subject defines itself, negatively, as a refusal of this natural strength. Clearly, however, this is not how Christianity understands itself: for Christian self-understanding, the primary receptivity of ‘weakness’ is in relation not to the strong, but to God, the source of all charity. And this receptivity is a paradoxical, active reception, because the lover of God is authenticated by the love which she actively transmits to her neighbour. But then one may ask, why should the natural, active, creative will not be understood, as it is understood by Christianity, as essentially the charitable will, the will whose exercise of power is not a will to dominate, or to condescend, but rather to endorse, raise up, increase the capacity of, the human other.
The will to power ? Based on difference?
On the other hand, the Nietzschean understanding of the positive act as the will-to-power is equally problematic. As Gilles Deleuze stressed, the will- to-power negates nothing, and is not entailed by any dialectic of negation, but is rather a pure affirmation of difference.
However, no action ever re- mains safely within the sphere of the doer, but always already emanates beyond the doer, affecting those others by whom he is surrounded. It is at this point that, for a Nietzschean philosophy, difference is defined as oppos- itional difference, a difference which enters the existing common cultural space to compete, displace or expel. Yet if the objective effect of affirmative difference is aggression and enmity, then even if the noble will is ‘without malice’, even if, like the bird of prey, it has no conception of its victim, then there is a transcendental assumption of a negative relation persisting between all differences.
Now, quite clearly we do not live in a world where differences just lie benignly alongside each other, without mutual interference, but, rather, every difference is in itself an ‘overlap’, a disturbance within some area of common space. Yet does one need to interpret every disturbance, every event, as an event of war?
Only, I would argue, if one has transcendentally understood all differences as negatively related, if – in other words, one has allowed a dialectical element to intrude into one’s differential philosophy. If one makes no such presupposition, then it would be possible to understand the act of affirmative difference, in its passing over to the other, as an invitation to the other to embrace this difference because of its objective desirability. At the same time, it would have to be admitted that the reception of this difference by the other itself effects a further displacement, a further differentiation.
The ‘commonness’ which now embraces them both is not the commonplace of the given neutral terrain, nor of the act in its initial concep- tion, but instead of the new differential relationship. The question of the possibility of living together in mutual agreement, and the question of whether there can be a charitable act, therefore turn out to be conjointly the question of whether there can be an ‘analogy’ or a ‘common measure’ be- tween differences which does not reduce differences to mere instances of a common essence or genus. In other words a likeness that only maintains itself through the differences, and not despite nor in addition to them.
To argue that the natural act might be the Christian (supernatural) charit- able act, and not the will-to-power, is therefore to argue that such an ‘ana- logical relation’ is as possible a transcendental conception as the positing of an a priori warfare. And what is more, the former conception permits a purer ‘positivism’, a purer philosophy of difference, still less contaminated by dialectics. For a priori warfare not only supposes an ineradicable presence of the negative, it also supposes its dominance, as giving the only possible meaning-in-common.”
Finally, Milbank writes
"Nietzsche is often pushing liberal theses to their logical conclusions in order to subvert them, and also that, in his bitter opposition to socialism (the ultimate real target of his hostility), Nietzsche was driven to conclude that socialism was grounded in the deepest Western legacy of Platonism and Christianity.
Most recent thinkers on the left (Badiou, Zizek, Negri amongst others) seem to concur that Nietzsche was right in this realization and that Marx failed fully to realize its importance."
In this, he is also referencing the work of the great Marxist thinker Losurdo, and his massive bio - Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel, over 1,000 pgs long...
It's interesting because many Marxist historians note that both the modern state and capitalism are born out of christianity....
Well, yes, but such wasn't inevitable, as if secretly Christianity WAS capitalism just waiting millennia to reveal it's "true" nature...
All these developments are empirically verifiable, but this does not mean that they somehow belong to the ‘essence’ of Christianity. On the contrary, they seem more connected to the management of a failure of the Christian ethos.
David Hart has also made similar critiques of Nietzsche, which I blogged about HERE
"Nietzsche is often pushing liberal theses to their logical conclusions in order to subvert them, and also that, in his bitter opposition to socialism (the ultimate real target of his hostility), Nietzsche was driven to conclude that socialism was grounded in the deepest Western legacy of Platonism and Christianity.
Most recent thinkers on the left (Badiou, Zizek, Negri amongst others) seem to concur that Nietzsche was right in this realization and that Marx failed fully to realize its importance."
In this, he is also referencing the work of the great Marxist thinker Losurdo, and his massive bio - Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel, over 1,000 pgs long...
It's interesting because many Marxist historians note that both the modern state and capitalism are born out of christianity....
Well, yes, but such wasn't inevitable, as if secretly Christianity WAS capitalism just waiting millennia to reveal it's "true" nature...
All these developments are empirically verifiable, but this does not mean that they somehow belong to the ‘essence’ of Christianity. On the contrary, they seem more connected to the management of a failure of the Christian ethos.
David Hart has also made similar critiques of Nietzsche, which I blogged about HERE
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