Thread by @deontologistics

One small thought for the evening: I rag on Nietzscheans a lot, but there's a peculiar hermeneutics of power that is broader than Nietzsche's influence, even if he is a representative figure in it. I also don't think this hermeneutics is worthless, just that there are excesses.

I could, and probably should, write a book about these excesses, but I see the sort of Tory history Nietzsche specialised in as a useful corrective to the sort of Whig history that Hegel is famous for (cf. my piece on Hesse's Glass Bead Game - glass-bead.org/article/castal…).

But the excess that concerns me this evening concerns the relation between power and joy. Nietzsche is often, quite rightly, compared with Spinoza, the other great thinker of the conjunction of power and joy (cf. Deleuze). There's obviously a significant relation here.

For Spinoza, this isn't a matter of power over others, which is conceived as an external limitation placed on them, but a matter of the exercise of our own capacities for action, and the complete realisation of their inner potential. Joy is the feeling of self-actualisation.

For Nietzsche, this self-actualisation takes on a cruel, competitive edge. He decries the reactive deployment of capacity, in favour of the active, but the will to power has no compunction regarding which other wills it bests in its evolutionary quest. Power implies dominance.

This is at the heart of Nietzsche's critique of Christian slave morality. It is weakness turned into strength, a priestly configuration driven by the same thirst for dominance as its aristocratic precursors, but less honest about its motives. This dishonesty is its deepest sin.

I've written about this investment in the virtue of honesty and its pathologies quite a lot recently, especially in contrast to my investment in sincerity (cf. deontologistics.co/2019/10/29/tfe…). But I haven't said as much about the pathologies of its tacit hermeneutics.

I do provide an abstract analysis and critique of what I call 'egoistics hermeneutics' in my 'Beyond Survival' talk (deontologistics.co/2019/01/31/sur…), but this doesn't really look at concrete examples or address the way these assumption colour our communicative interactions.

On the left, the following pragmatic contradiction is surprisingly common: in one breath someone denounces neoliberal subjectivity as patterned upon the egoistic model of 'Homo economicus', and in the next interprets their opponents as driven by purely selfish motivations.

It's not that this hermeneutic frame isn't explanatorily useful, as one sees in Marxist class analysis, but rather that, as with the rest of Marxist economics, it's supposed to be deployed at the macro rather than the micro level, and becomes less useful the smaller the scale.

In particular, one thing that gets erased by forcing interpersonal interactions into this mould is the extent to which social power, both in the sense of capacity and dominance, can be distinctively joyless. There are those that enjoy it, but pretending everyone does is... sad.

I'm hardly the first to make this point, but creating the solidarity necessary to build egalitarian movements involves connecting the interests of those who lack power they would like and those who possess power they would rather not have. An affinity between sadnesses.

There are many feminists who argue (correctly) that patriarchy often hurts men as well as women, even if these hurts are neither the same nor as severe. Even though its far from sufficient, solidarity can be built on the back of such sympathy, even when empathy is impossible.

It is a well worn literary trope that great power breeds great misery ('Heavy is the head that wears the crown.'). I'd argue that this is proportional precisely to the extent that the agent in question wills Stan Lee's maxim, as it's great responsibility that breeds great misery.

This is less an apologia for kingly authority than a case for peaceful transfers of power. Whenever power is wielded both badly and reluctantly we should encourage its release, by whatever means are appropriate to the case (deontologistics.co/2019/09/30/the…).

It's also important to note that prioritising reform over retribution (for which 'revolution' is a common synedochal substitute) is not necessarily to 'forgive and forget':

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1362686783297884165?s=20

To bring this back to Nietzsche though, The Genealogy of Morals contains all the resources one needs to understand the above point: we miserable monkeys were ensouled by the internalisation of those practices of critique and sanction through which responsibilities are maintained.

The conscience is a source of shame, anxiety, and anguish. It is the cursed fruit of the tree of knowledge that is equally poison and cure. The ur-pharmakon. The other great thinker of conscience here is Luther, whose life and work is founded upon such internalised torment.

For Luther, the key promise of Christ, as articulated by St. Paul, was less the life eternal than freedom from guilt, not so much heavenly compensation for the sufferings of the world as liberation from that which composes these natural evils into a hell of our own making.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Nietszche's story lines up fairly faithfully with Luther's: that which supposedly separates us from animals is the transformation of our fundamentally selfish motivations into fundamentally selfless ones. We cannot choose this, it is simply done to us.

Of course, for Luther this is literally for God to be in the libidinal driving seat, edging out the influence of Satan; while for Nietzsche this ascetic ideal is simply the means through which we are bound by another earthly, if more abstract will to power - a will to some truth.

The excessive Nietzschean move is to see such commitments as inherently suspicious, as opposed to self-actualisation, or worse, to oppose the very selfhood that they make possible, to toe the line between self-actualisation and self-dissolution:

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1365344575544586249?s=20

Though I don't agree with the formulation of the death drive that Ray provides in Nihil Unbound, I think he is one of the few thinkers to take Nietzsche's injunction to articulate a genuinely *active* nihilism seriously: deontologistics.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/ray-br…

But this essentially involves negating Nietzsche's negation of the will to truth, or defending the force of commitment as such, be it thought as Badiouian fidelity or Sellarsian normativity. Solidarity begins by turning natural complicity back upon itself:

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1350406367148994563?s=20

Our task is to put ourselves in the saddle, by engineering selves capable of supporting commitments whose consequences exceed mortal understanding and biological finitude in equal measure. And this means disentangling the webs of complicity that sap our every responsibility.

Our aim is to build a better conscience. One that feels, but is not paralysed by the misery of power. One that enjoys self-realisation, but despises domination. The difficult question is where bespoke self-engineering is sufficient, and where mass production is necessary.

If there's anything on which rationalists can have solidarity with Nietzscheans, it's this: the priestly production line of internalised shame and its associated systems of calibration and maintenance is both unsustainable and undesireable. No more factory farmed sadness, please.

So, maybe we should let up a little on the egoistic hermeneutics and its consequent micropolitics. Let's try to see the misery implicit in the conflicting bundles of drives walking the world about us, because, instrumentally if nothing else, it offers us much needed leverage.🖖