Will to Power - Can There be "Nothing Besides"?

A Critique of Nietzsche's Self-Relational Philosophy

Despite all of Friedrich Nietzsche’s denouncements of “metaphysical philosophy” in his published works, it is in the privacy of his own notebooks (which, thanks to his Nazi sister, we have the privilege of reading) where he indulges in direct metaphysical speculation. Contrary to what some may think, it is impossible to not have a metaphysics; one always, whether implicitly or explicitly, “takes a stance” with respect to the nature of the world into which we are thrown. And it should be no surprise that Nietzsche’s metaphysics is quite coherent with his understanding of human nature. Just as, for Nietzsche, the most basic reality of the social is power relations, he boldly proclaims (albeit in the privacy of his notebook) that these same power relations are the essence of all reality (what we are to make of his public denouncements of “essentialism” remains an open question). Despite its philosophical (and even scientific) absurdity, I will admit that the following is one of the greatest passages in the history of philosophy and is worth quoting at length: 

And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms striving toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself— do you want a name for this world? A solution for all of its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?— This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!¹

This passage will always have a special place in my heart. The “spiritual” experience I had when I first read it is what originally set my fourteen-year-old self on my philosophical journey. The sublime writings of the self-proclaimed Antichrist ultimately led me to Christ, and for that, I will be forever grateful to the former. 

But we’re left with many questions, the most pressing of which seems to be how we can even speak of identity in the first place–how, out of this “sea of forces,” did Nietzsche emerge to write about them? How did “you yourselves” who are will to power become “you’s”? Even if Nietzsche wants to (and he does) deny the reality of the subject, we’re still left with the problem of some coherent “illusion” of self-identity that persists over time. Oftentimes Nietzsche simply asserts things without rationally justifying them, seeing these truths as only accessible to those who have attained to a higher spiritual state, with everyone else still unable to escape the supposedly world-denying (and, hence, power denying) spirit of Christianity. This is about as mature as my buddies in high school calling my initial interest in philosophy “gay” (and they didn’t use this term the way Nietzsche did, to be clear). There is no rational justification, only the assertion of one’s will, and in this way, Nietzsche’s incoherence is quite coherent. For this reason, I agree with Alain Badiou that Nietzsche is not a philosopher.²

If Nietzsche cared about actually justifying his irrational worldview, he would’ve been led to what is, without a doubt, the most pressing question in modern science; the possibility of “emergence.” How, out of mere particles/strings/forces/waves of forces do identities emerge which are not reducible to their constitutive elements? 

Firstly, it is important to note that Nietzche’s “sea of forces” is by no means a unique idea. What is unique (although there are parallels in Heraclitus and some other marginal figures throughout the history of philosophy) is the affirmation of the sea of forces alone. This notion is quite akin to the “prime matter” or “pure potentiality” of Ancient and Scholastic metaphysics, which find their Biblical equivalent in the image of the primordial waters of Genesis 1. Both hylomorphism and the Bible provide essentially the same answer to the question of the emergence of identity out of the raw potentiality; this potentiality is “formed” into determinate identity through an actuality which transcends it. “Heaven” is the place of fixed identity, symbolized by the fixed movement of the heavenly bodies. Earth is the place of multiplicity, change and growth, but this cannot be a “pure” change/difference. Quantum mechanics has essentially arrived at the same conclusion: quantum systems remain in a state of potentiality i.e. in multiple states, until they are measured/observed. The lower receives its identity from the higher: the heavens “enter into” formless earth, which is the genesis of concrete identities. As J.P. Marceau explains:

Even from the standpoint of the sciences themselves, we have good reason to abandon materialism. These reasons are especially clear following the important revolutions which occurred in the 20th century. Einstein taught us that matter is interchangeable with energy, and much of particle physics today is about fields from which said particles can probabilistically emerge. Bare matter has been looking more and more like the pure potential the hylomorphic tradition was talking about.³

It seems that, despite all of the advancements of modern science, it still cannot escape the Christian Hellenism out of which it emerged. The answer to the question of “emergence” has yet to be discovered by modern science, and I don’t think it will so long as it encloses itself within vulgar materialism. I accept the Biblical revelation (a revelation which can be rationally justified) that every identity in our world is a union of heaven and earth, actuality and potential.

Nietzsche’s world is a self-enclosed world, as he himself says in the above-quoted passage. For this reason, I don’t buy some interpretations of Nietzsche’s “eternal return” as merely a spiritual exercise wherein one “affirms” life even in the face of the mere idea of the eternal repetition of every pain and sorrow. As Nietzsche himself says, if the world is finite and eternal, everything must eternally repeat. I’d ask Nietzsche how this doesn’t undermine his whole shtick about “creativity” (how can there be anything genuinely new/creative in a world of eternal repetition?), but I’d expect he’d just call me something equivalent to “gay” (in the highvschool boy sense of that term) for asking such a plebeian question.

Nietzsche’s world is a self-relational world, but it's also a fully “complete” world i.e. we can speak of it as a “whole” enclosed by nothingness. However, Levi Bryant points out that any conception of reality without transcendence cannot be a self-enclosed “whole” with nothingness on the outside; the “nothing” must be a constitutive feature of this world (Bryant is a Zizekian here). Rather than an ontological “whole,” we have an ontological “hole.” This is because any conception of a self-enclosed “whole” can only take place from outside this whole, as the perceiver is always distinct from the object he/she perceives by necessity. A purely immanent ontology must, therefore, be an ontology of incompleteness: 

The immediate corollary of immanence is the consequence that “the whole is not” or that there is no whole. This is an ontological rather than epistemological thesis. Suppose we claim that the whole is. What are the conditions under which the whole would be possible? In order that there be a whole, it would be necessary that there be some point outside the whole through which the whole could be surveyed like an astronaut might survey the planet earth. But such a point of survey would be transcendent to the whole or world. Yet we have already affirmed that the world is immanent. Therefore such a point of transcendence does not exist.⁴

Nietzsche does not realize that by speaking of the “sea of forces” as a “whole,” he implicitly adopts a transcendent perspective and thereby unknowingly affirms the reality of the transcendental subject. 

Nietzsche’s conception of the highest spirit is equally defined by a sense of “wholeness” in self-relation. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he provides us with three “metamorphoses” of the spirit: the camel, the lion, and the child. The child is the final stage and the highest spirit because the innocence of the child stands for pure self-affirmation, as opposed to the slavish “reactivity” or “self-denial” (which, for Nietzsche, is always a self-deception) of the Christian adult: “The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes.” The problem with this “self-propelling wheel” is the simple fact that only the most utterly psychopathic individuals are truly “self-propelling,” and this very notion negates the possibility of genuine creative development. It is no coincidence that the most famous image of self-relation, the ouroboros, is an image of the eternal repetition of the same and negates the possibility of anything novel. If one were to genuinely develop from one day to the next, one would have to recognize that there was something lesser about one’s self the day prior; it is precisely this recognition that allows us to grow as individuals. But in this case, one would be forced to admit that the “self-propelling wheel” of yesterday wasn’t truly the self-propelling wheel, as this circle has been recognized as incomplete (i.e. not a genuine circle). I write about this problem in Aphesis:

Nietzsche’s entire justification of the spirit of the child is based upon its supposed inability to be undermined. The child, as the “self-propagating wheel,” is a completely closed circle. In its operation of self-affirmation, there is no room for the negativity at the heart of the subject, which has the power to annihilate any particular identity. If the child undergoes a change in its identity‒if a lack is exposed within itself‒from which basis can it construct another identity based upon itself? If it were to say, “I was less of a child yesterday, now I truly embody the spirit of the child,” how could it not experience some serious cognitive dissonance? If the entire justification of one’s identity is a purely self-justifying loop (without any mechanism of sublated repetition such as self-othering, necessitating an absolute fidelity to one particular form), in what manner can one justify oneself after this self-justification is undermined at the most fundamental level, after this self-justifying loop has been ripped open and exposed as naked?⁵ 

Thus, Nietzsche’s self-relational/purely immanent world and his self-relational subject fall into similar problems. The former is, by metaphysical necessity, “incomplete,” and therefore not the eternal “whole” he so passionately defends in his notebook. The latter can only remain “complete” through either serious self-deception or utter stagnation. So I don’t find Nietzsche’s philosophy to be anything approximating a “gay science,” unless we’re speaking as a high school boy. 

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power.

2. https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/nietzsche1313/files/2016/11/WhoIsNietzschePLI11.pdf

3. https://thesymbolicworld.com/content/rediscovering-forms

4. https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2006/05/30/immanence-and-the-big-other/

5. Treydon Lunot, Aphesis: The Impossibility of Subjectivity.