...is Heidegger up to with his odd terms "readiness-to-hand" and "presence-at-hand?" Since my posts have been getting tedious and long lately, I'll keep this short and to the point. I'll explicate these terms and what they do in probably three posts, and, if we take them together, we'll hopefully get a full sense of what he means.
First, the "ready-to-hand." This horrible neologism is a translation of another horrible neologism in the German: Zuhanden. Let's break it down. "Zu-" means "to," or "towards," while "Hand" means "hand," in the sense of one's anatomical appendage as well as something more like one's ability to grasp either with the hand or with one's potential to use or manipulate. So, we have Zu-handen: towards the hand. "Zur Hand" is the German expression for "at hand" or "readily available," and this is the sense that the word really has. Towards the hand: whatever is available and in a sense comes towards my ability to manipulate or use it or involve it in my existence is what possesses Zuhandenheit. In English, we say that something is "ready at hand" whenever it is there where we want it to be when we are in need of it: my gun was ready at hand when the robber came into my home and because it was so, it allowed me to fend him off successfully. My (military) general was ready at hand to deploy my orders--therefore they were carried out efficiently. This is why the translators adopt the stilted phrase "ready-to-hand," running all the words together to make them seem to signify a more integrated phenomenon.
But despite the good work of the translators here, this new word can be a bit misleading--and this is simply because Heidegger's word itself is also misleading and doesn't really get at what he means by it. Let's trace its genealogy and then specify what it really relates to.
Now, the word comes into use while Heidegger is explaining what he calls "Being-in-the-world," and specifically in the chapter of Being and Time in which Heidegger is trying to specify the "worldhood of the world." Let's establish this context concretely, then. Being-in-the-world is the mode in which we exist for the most part. It is the most basic "state" in which we carry out our lives. As beings that interrogate our own existence and our various possibilities of existence--this is what Hedegger specifies as "Dasein," what he determined as the basic type of being that can grasp Being, or what makes existence possible--as this being we produce and inhabit this basic state as the primary way in which we can be those beings--that is, as the primary way in which we can interrogate our existence. Being-in-the-world is a sort of state of our understanding of ourselves at any particular moment. But this understanding is not a superficial kind of understanding. Indeed, it is the understanding that makes possible all superficial understandings of ourselves. What is a superficial understanding? Well, "what I want," "what is making me angry," "what I feel like:" all these understandings, while essential to who we are, do not really get at who we are essentially. If one was to characterize oneself completely and fully and to only be considered as someone who characterized her or himself thus, then one would be understanding oneself more in this way of understanding that Heidegger specifies: Heidegger calls this state of understanding a laying-out of one's "mine-ness," one's most essential essence as oneself. Now it becomes clear that Being-in-the-world is the way that we go about understanding ourselves in this essential way. We interrogate ourselves as to why and how our existence is possible on the basis of our being-in-the-world. Now, what is being-in-the-world? Nothing other than what we might call "living out our life." We construct a world in which we live, an environment in which we are always, out of the various ways we see and understand our possibilities for existing, our possibilities for answering the question as to how and why our existence is possible. Put differently, we answer the question "what is Being," what makes existence possible, not through any formalized answer, but through existing. While we pursue this answer, we construct a world in which we exist and move such that it too is part of the answer. Thus when Heidegger himself asks about Being, he has to go to look at what the world is, and what being in it would be like for mostly everyone.
We haven't really specified yet what a "world" is, however. I mean, what isn't an answer to or understanding of Being if that answer articulates itself through existence? Well, the world is most basically characterized as that which is not Dasein but which nonetheless is what Dasein has constructed for itself in order to be itself. It is what is necessary for "mineness," for understanding. It is nothing like what we normally mean by saying "world:" it is not the planet Earth, it is not what is objective and outside subjectivity, it is not any immaterial and idealistic Spirit-world of various ideas and cultures which we specify by the words "world of ideas." Rather, it is what is, most fundamentally, familiar to Dasein, to the being that understands itself in order to interrogate itself as to why and how it is possible for it to exist. As Heidegger says, "'I am' means in its turn 'I reside' or 'dwell alongside' the world, as that which is familiar to me in such and such a way" (Being and Time, 80). It is this "in such and such a way," this qualifying of the world that constitutes it as a world, as what is specific to any particular Dasein and indeed constitutes any Dasein as Dasein. In other words, we all understand ourselves differently (and sometimes similarly) and what is familiar to us then, what constitutes the place where our existence seems to dwell most at home, reflects this fact and is produced as a way of bringing that understanding to the fore. The spatial metaphor of "dwelling" is apt: Heidegger indeed will use this later to characterize being-in-the-world instead of that particular term (cf. "Being, Dwelling, Thinking"). Why is this apt? Because the world is "where" Dasein understands itself, "where" Dasein is familiar to itself such that it can successfully penetrate into its own essence and bring its own existence to the fore as an answer to the question posed by Being. When Descartes says "I am," he says it after supposedly abstracting himself away from what he considered his world--and yet, for Heidegger, Descartes in that moment was most thoroughly grounded in his own world, was dwelling in it most comfortably and appreciating it profoundly, because it was that space that actually allowed him to really assert that he was, that he existed. What appeared as the world to Descartes was not really the world--this was the world of thought, of cogitation. Descartes was being-in-the-world most fundamentally when he said "I am," cogito ergo sum. it was indeed this lack of attention to the world that made Descartes so blind to his own existence and his proof of his own existence so weak for Heidegger. Interrogating his existence through this world, is what would have ensured a more grounded idea of existence for Descartes, holds Heidegger, and this interrogation through the world is precisely what is specified by the term "being-in-the-world."
So, that clarified, how do we get to the ready-to-hand? In order for Heidegger to show that specific way of interrogating existence that is and that occurs through a world, Heidegger must characterize what that world consists of. It consists of the ready-to-hand. Now, all Heidegger is getting at here is that we go through our lives essentially oblivious to and yet always answering the question that Being puts to us, namely, why and how is is possible that we should exist--let us not complicate things for ourselves too much with all this terminology. The world is what allows this answer, is what allows us to understand ourselves, is what is around us always throughout this process of being oblivious and yet of answering the question of Being. This is composed of what is ready-to-hand. Now, what the hell does this mean?
Well, Heidegger uses the example of walking into a room (97-98). Let us take it over to show concretely what he means. At any point in my life, I can walk into a room. Now, at this point, I am obviously walking into the room for a reason--I can be done with a day of work and walking into my home, I can be ready to get fit at a gym and walking into it, I can be pensive and viewing art in a particular room at a gallery, I can be a worker and rushing into a place where a crucial part is when it is needed elsewhere. All these various reasons for entering the room are my particular answer to the question of Being, that is, as to why my existence is possible. It is possible because of the way I exist: I constitute an answer by existing, by going to the gym ("I exist to get fit"), by viewing the art ("I exist to understand existence through art"), by rushing into the room with the part ("I exist to build that structure"). Now, the room itself will get constituted in accordance with this particular answer such that it will allow this answer to be. In other words, the room will become part of my world, it will appear to me and even exist for me in such a way that it conforms itself to this particular answer that I am constructing in my existence. For example, if I am urgently seeking one part I need to build a structure outside, I will enter a room and it will constitute itself such that I only see, only grasp, only understand the particular bolt which is necessary. After grabbing it, I will leave the room, and it will disappear from my intentional field, the field in which things come before me in order to allow me to exist in a particular way, the field that is my world. The room will become my world, and it will then disappear from my world. Similarly, I will enter a room in an art gallery that is dedicated to the paintings of Monet, and I will do so slowly, pensively, such that the space itself becomes my world in such a way as to reflect my intention to exist and answer the question Being poses to me. I might notice the stillness of the room, the sombre tones of its walls: all these things will constitute my world for me and will be taken up into my existence. When I come to view a painting, it will be there before me as part of my world, as something that I will use and utilize in order to construct a mode and a way of existing: I will take over whatever it represents and even see only that in it which is necessary for me to do this, to exist with it--I may only see one water-lily out of all those represented because it perhaps speaks to me more than all the others. I will then leave the room with this world there, with my world as it were added on to, made richer or enhanced, and I will carry this world with me into other rooms where I will use it and construct it to exist as well. It should be obvious that the world has no relationship to anything like "objective reality:" what is there might not be what enters into my existence. Being-in-the-world is a lot like walking through an unlit room at night: you bump into objects and they (as Heidegger says) light up for you, reveal themselves to you as there, as part of a space and a place you should be attentive to and would like to be attentive to in your trek to get some water from the fridge.
If we understand being-in-the-world a bit better, then, we can finally grasp what is ready-to-hand as what makes up this world, as that of which this world consists--and do so in the appropriate way. Let's continue using our examples. When you bump into something at night and then grasp its presence there in the form of a sort of basic awareness (that is, not explicitly in a reflective, fully-conscious way), what do you grasp? Obviously not the object as it is, but rather a perspective on the object shaded and colored and constructed to fit your intention and your relationship to it. That is, when you bump into a table in the middle of the night, you might only perceive or feel the corner of the table--in fact, you might only grasp that there is a corner there, not even that it is a corner "of the table." By no means do you instantly perceive the entire object such as it appears and is in daylight, and it is impossible to grasp as an object present there in its full presence, with all its dimensions available to you and all of its possible orientations, like in a carpenter's plan or a scientific rendering of the table in Cartesian space. You are simply getting up to get some water, and... corner. It is there. You orient yourself towards it as you continue to the fridge. You may even forget about it on your way back, or not remember exactly where it is, and bump into it again. Again it is only a corner, this time approached from a different angle. Refreshed, you go back to bed. What you have just encountered was in your world, as you existed in order to go get the water. As what composed that world, the corner was ready-at-hand, simply there, part of the means with which you attained your goal of getting to the fridge. The fridge itself and the glass of water were ready-at-hand too. At any point you approached and appropriated these things into the trajectory or path of your existence as it made its way towards its projected goal, and could access them again and again as these types of things, as means. Thus they were ready there for your hand, for your potential to manipulate on your way of forming and shaping and witnessing your world, the reflection and condition of your existence.
Now, for Heidegger, all our grasping of the world occurs in this type of manner, and always encounters this type of thing, the ready-at-hand: indeed, one could be at the height of their awareness at noon and the way one makes her or his way through the world would not differ essentially from this example. Turning to the other examples we have used (which all take place during the day and with varying moods of high awareness) should make this more than clear--that is, should make it clear that the sort of structure of this nighttime experience isn't necessarily connected to the night but, phenomenologically, is similar to the way it is with Being-in-the-world always. That is, it isn't the case that our vision is always impared such that we cannot fully conceive of the object fully. But it is the case that our awareness of things even in the daytime only extends so far--that is, only extends about as far as it does in this nighttime situation. The night reveals us for what we are, in this way--Maurice Merleau-Ponty continually uses it (and primarily nighttime sleepiness) for a setting to demonstrate his own take on Heideggerian Being-in-the-world in his Phenomenology of Perception. But let us look at the other examples.
When I am running into the room or warehouse to get the bolt necessary for completing the metal structure I am building outside, the bolt is my concern and in fact I never really become aware of the room that constructs itself around my rush to the bolt. I simply grab it and run out: the bolt appears there before me, it drops into my purview, and the objects in the room drop into my purview as objects that are merely obstacles on my way to getting that bolt to drop there before me. The bolt and the room have no existence beforehand, and they disappear afterwards. The only way I become aware of it and the room is if the bolt is not present to me in some way, if I drop it, if my intention and my existence is hampered by it or another object suddenly being there. In a similar way, I only become aware of the artwork insofar as it fails in some way to my discerning eye: integrated in an intention and an existence towards the work that seeks to take it up and be with it, it is only available to me as something there in the world when it becomes a problem for me. We will return to this precise aspect of the ready-to-hand later, but for now the point is that the objects get integrated into my world in a hazy and concealed way that is fused with my various intentions and modes of existence. I do not perceive the bolt acutely because it is merely something that is there to be included in the work I am producing outside--I need the bolt to complete my larger intention, that to which I am devoting my existence as an answer to the question posed by Being. The room too falls into place on the basis of this intention or devotion, and gets oriented obscurely around my rush to the object. A series of boxes on the left of me as I rush to a table there in the room do not really exist for me explicitly even if I see them there. My concern is the bolt, and they become merely things that are there in such a way as they compose a general space that acts as a means for my grasping it. The boxes and the room more generally are a big misty haze of means as I pass them, a blur that does indeed exist--we are not denying what is not "important to us" the right of existence--but which merely exists in a particular way that is such that they are in the background. This "way" is the way of the ready-at-hand: the room as part of my world gets oriented towards my existence and experienced by it in this way. More precisely stated, my world gets constituted as a world in its being ready-at-hand there. The ready-at-hand, then, is as we said what constitutes the world, and we understand this verb "constitute" now in the right way: those things that exist as ready-at-hand for me throughout my world do not make up this world as parts get combined together one by one into a whole, but rather they exist as a world when they exist in the particular way of the ready-at-hand. Being ready-at-hand, they are the way the world is experienced and thus the way in which the world is.
This should clarify some of the relationships between the world and the ready-at-hand, but it still isn't clear what the hell Heidegger is getting at here. Though we showed what a ready-at-hand thing could be experienced like--namely, various rooms--we don't understand what this has to do with an inquiry into Dasein and its ability to grasp Being. Still less do we understand why objects in the world have to exist in this fuzzy and intentional manner rather than as objects like we normally see them. But all these questions arise and persist because we have stuck to the term "ready-at-hand" and elaborated what it meant without paying attention to our original reservations about it--namely, that it was a cruddy neologism. What we have to turn to in order to get a real understanding of what Heidegger is doing with the ready-at-hand is this reservation.
Why would Heidegger coin this new word? It is not merely because Heidegger does this a lot--indeed it is one of the main techniques of his particular hermeneutic, his way of engaging with philosophy. Heidegger is doing this here for a more basic reason. We read in Being and Time the following right before Heidegger characterizes the ready-at-hand through his example of entering a room, where Heidegger is simply trying to give a name to those basic things that exist within the world:
The Greeks had an appropriate term for "things:" pragmata--that is to say, that which one has to do with in one's concernful dealings (praxis). But ontologically the specifically "pragmatic" character of the pragmata is just what the Greeks left in obscurity (96-7).
There is a word that is better than Zuhanden, "the ready-at-hand," a Greek word. It is because this better word exists that Heidegger feels he should make a word in German that would bring its Greek sense back into modern times. Now, Heidegger does not believe that the Greek time was any better than modern times, though many still characterize him in this way. Heidegger is not another Winkelmann nostalgic for the age in which "real men" lived; he does not wish he was Greek. Heidegger conducted an intense study of the Greek and early Greek writings in the years before and during the composition of Being and Time in seminars and privately because he realized that the Greeks had a closer understanding of the real ground of ontology than many throughout history. It is not that this understanding allowed them to grasp it better and define it concretely. Indeed, it is often their misunderstandings of Being that Heidegger finds most informative as to what Being is. What is crucial for Heidegger about the Greeks is that they brought Being, the ground of ontology and metaphysics, to words more explicitly than the rest of Western history. Indeed, this did not make them better in any way, but made them engage with philosophy in a way Heidegger thought was particularly important for his time. Their language reflects this closer understanding and misunderstanding of Being, and so it brings into the sphere of signification more subtleties in the characterization of Being and beings that relate to Being (like Dasein) than a more modern vocabulary. This simple difference is, at bottom, why they are valuable, and why they can have a word for something that we must create a neologism for.
We might see, then, the passages on the ready-at-hand in Being and Time as merely explicating in a language more rigorously interrogating the phenomenon of Being that which the Greeks meant by pragmata--specifically that which was produced in the relationship of praxis and physis, what Heidegger calls "world." I will get into this in my next entry--this is enough for now.
Showing posts with label Descartes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Descartes. Show all posts
Monday, July 16, 2007
Saturday, July 7, 2007
Nietzsche and Hegel: breaking the dialectic...
Nietzsche breaks with the Hegelian dialectic by more rigorously conceiving the Hegelian "subject," or that aspect of "what actually is" in Hegel that becomes, that negates: there is a negativity that is greater and more powerful than Hegelian negativity, a type of becoming that is more true and more fundamental than Hegelian becoming, and thus a different type of movement and structure of the actual than the dialectic.
When we say "subject," we are of course referring to the famous and crucial phrase from the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit that essentialy sums up Hegel's philosophical position:
In my view, which can be justified only by the exposition of the [Hegelian] system itself, everything turns on grasping and expressing the True [what is real, actual], not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.
-Phenomenology of Spirit, §17.
Essentially, this means that what is actual, is only because it is both 1) being, existence (this is what is meant by "Substance," a thing that has attributes), and 2) becoming (this is what is meant by "Subject"). That which really or actually is, not only is (that is, not only exists), but also becomes or incorporates becoming into its existence. In fact, by saying "equally" Hegel says that what is actual is indeed actual only to the extent that it also becomes: becoming and being only effect actuality insofar as they occur equally, insofar as becoming incorporates itself into being just as much as being exists. Now, this becoming that is incorporated into the Substance that is actual Hegel calls "negativity." Thus he says a little later on in the Preface:
The living Substance is being which is in truth Subject, or, what is the same, is in truth actual only insofar as it is the movement [read: becoming] of positing itself, or is the mediation [read: becoming] of its self-othering with itself. This substance is, as Subject, pure simple negativity.
-Phenomenology of Spirit, §18.
"Pure negativity" Hegel says a little later, is, "when reduced to its pure abstraction [or the most general concept which will encompass it], simple becoming" ("Preface", §20). Thus, when being (Substance) is "in truth," as Hegel says here, when it is actual, it negates, it becomes. Linking negation up with the concepts of becoming and being, subject and substance, we can see then why Hegel calls becoming "negativity:" becoming is the absence of being, and therefore, conceived purely, is not. It is the "not," pure and simple--what does not exist but what makes something actual. We can also see that the statement about the True as substance and equally as subject responds essentially to Descartes, who thought the True, the actual, was only insofar as it was Substance.
For Descartes, the cogito, when it grasped its actuality, was a res cogitans, "thinking thing," a thing that possessed the attribute of thinking. For Hegel, conceiving of actuality as guaranteed by the mere attribute of a thing did not seem concrete enough: reality and actuality conceived only as the adequate possession of a particular attribute seems too flimsy. Cartesian truth, Hegel thinks, would only be a matter of determining whether something possessed the right attribute and so was a substance--it was no more profound than this, this determining what is essentially already priveliged to be a substance (since it already possesses the attribute). The whole method of Descartes, the whole taking away of all that was supposedly real to reach what was actual, is essentially meaningless, since it only finds out what was already there. For Hegel, this whole process of abstracting away from reality essentially and necessarily effected the grasping of actuality that Descartes found--it did something, it had to do something, otherwise the truth that Descartes found would merely be superfluous, would not govern reality or essentially be true. Thus, whatever was true also had to be a "subject," had to be not merely an attribute but a predicate that determined the thing it was asserted to be the possession of.
Calling this predicate of the substance "subject" essentially means: the "I think" is not indifferent to the "I am," the thinking itself of Descartes effectuates the being that the thinking supposedly proves; or, put differently, the "cogitans" is not merely an adjective modifying "res," but essentially determines "res" as a verb. The "res," is what it does. This "doing" is not merely being, but is in fact a going beyond being into a realm where being is not. Conceived adequately, this "doing" is, for Hegel, a becoming. Thus he says, essentially of the res cogitans, that for it not to be a mere empty phrase, a mere truth that is indifferent to the everyday world that it supposedly governs, in order for it to govern that world as its actual nature, it must become, must enter into an other state that is not being--that in fact is not-being itself, negation: "whatever is more than... a word... contains a becoming-other that has to be taken back [into the word itself as its action, as what it does]" ("Preface" §20).
Now that this is cleared up, where does Nietzsche fall with respect to all of it? We said that Nietzsche breaks with the Hegelian dialectic by more rigorously conceiving the Hegelian "subject." We now see that implied in this is a radicalization of how Hegel, too, more rigorously conceived the Cartesian cogito: Nietzsche too is reacting to Descartes. Essentially, then, how Hegel conceives of actuality as effected by a becoming--becoming as negativity being the essence of the "subject"--will have to be just as inadequately conceived for Nietzsche as Descartes' substance was for Hegel.
Let us see what Nietzsche says:
What are attributes?-- We have not regarded change in us as change but as an "in itself" that is foreign to us... and we have posited it, not as an event, but as a being, as a "quality"--and in addition invented an entity to which it adheres; i.e. we have regarded the effect as something that effects, and this we have regarded as a being. But even in this formulation, the concept "effect" is arbitrary: for those changes that take place in us, and that we firmly believe we have not ourselves caused, we merely infer to be effects, in accordance with the conclusion "every change must have an author";--but this conclusion is already mythology: it separates that which effects from the effecting. If I say "lightning flashes," I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, is, and does not "become."-- To regard an event as an "effecting," and this as being, that is the double error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.
-The Will to Power, #531 (composed 1885-1886)
Now, first of all, we should clarify what Nietzsche means by "attribute" in this note, for the question "what are attributes?" is that to which the whole rest of the note responds. Nietzsche means by "attribute" both attribute in the Cartesian sense, as that which is a property of a substance, but also "predicate" in the Hegelian sense, as that which is the subject of a substance. This is the upshot of the paragraph: we see not only that attributes are attributes, but that things that are asserted as predicates are attributes. It is not even a matter of a misnomer: Hegel does not use "predicate" when what he "really means" is "attribute," for Nietzsche--Hegel is not merely mistaken in taking something that is an attribute to be a predicate. What Nietzsche is getting at here, what he essentially determines the "attribute" to be, is something that is also signified by "predicate"--using "predicate" does not outstrip or go beyond what is essentially signified by "attribute," as Hegel thinks it does. That is, Nietzsche destroys Hegel's assumption that in making the attribute into a predicate, he is accurately conceiving actuality. Niether attribute nor predicate can do this for Nietzsche: actuality is something that exceeds the grasp of both these concepts, and thus are just as effective in grasping actuality as we now know (after Hegel) the attribute was--we can therefore lump them together under one name.
The main thrust of the paragraph thus made visible, we can turn to the actual statements themselves to determine how indeed the Hegelian predicate is just like an attribute. For wasn't the predicate subject, and the subject negativity, that is, becoming? How is becoming in Hegel only an attribute?
Because, says Nietzsche, it is not adequately conceived as becoming. In other words, it is covertly conceived as being. This is what Nietzsche means when he says, "We have not regarded change in us as change but as an 'in itself' that is foreign to us... and we have posited it, not as an event, but as a being, as a 'quality.'" "Change" here is becoming. "Not regarding change as change" means not conceiving becoming as a becoming that is adequate to the nature of becoming. What is this nature? Well, as we already determined when looking at Hegel, the nature of becoming is not-being: becoming is what happens when being stops being and changes into a different type of being. While a being is changing into a different type of being, it engages in a process where it turns into its opposite and negation--it becomes, it engages in not-being. Thus, if becoming is the opposite of being, to not regard becoming as becoming is essentially to pass off something as becoming that is not really the full and pure opposite of being, but only approximates this opposite. This pseudo-opposite would therefore be something that appears to change, appears to become, but does not really become. In fact, it would still be being. This is what Nietzsche means by "we have posited it [change, becoming] not as an event, but as a being." Now, what remains to be explained is the crucial part of this statement: how is this pseudo-becoming a pseudo-becoming because it is "regarded.. as an 'in itself' that is foreign to us?" Indeed, this "foreign-ness" of becoming is proffered as the essential thing that makes it lack actuality in the paragraph. How could becoming be in itself something foreign, and as this not really be actual becoming?
Well, let us reflect on what Hegel said becoming was. Hegel said "the living Substance is being which is in truth Subject, or, what is the same, is in truth actual only insofar as it is the movement of positing itself, or is the mediation of its self-othering with itself." Notice that Hegel describes what is in effect becoming--Subject--as a type of "self-othering with itself." Is not this "self-othering" of which Hegel speaks what Nietzsche refers to as the "foreign?" Indeed, what is "other" is what is foreign: what is other is whatever is not-itself, what is not-here (but there, over and against oneself, in the foreign). Indeed, the German "fremd" carries this meaning of "other" with it much more than the "foreign" with which we translate Nietzsche: in German "other" is "anderes", a conjunction of "an", meaning "on," "apart from and yet related to," "an aspect of a thing that is not it but is added onto it," "on top of and against," and therefore essentially "not" in a privative way similar to the Latin prefix "a-" when it is used as a prefix, and the word "da," which means "here"--thus we say what is other is what is not-here. Indeed, Hegel himself often plays on this meaning, implying that what is other is also what is foreign. What this part of the passage of Hegel's means, then, is what we have just explained when we were explaining becoming: "self-othering" is what is necessary for something not just to merely exist as a substance, but also as subject. In order for something to really exist, it must in a sense go out of itself and change such that it becomes its own other. This is what Hegel means by "mediation:" something mediates insofar as it traverses a path in which it engages in a process where it becomes foreign, other than itself. Now, when we were explaining becoming and its opposition to being, we did not give it this sense of "becoming-foreign"--but indeed we can see that this is what we meant. Becoming is not just becoming for Hegel, it is becoming-other, becoming-foreign. It is becoming something that, while it "is" not, is indeed something that is set up as in opposition to being--that is, substance proper. This is so much the case that we can say the following: what does not become other, what does not become foreign to itself as being, does not become at all for Hegel. What does not set itself up in opposition to being when it becomes is only still merely being, merely substance without being subject, and fails to attain actuality or Truth.
Now we understand what Nietzsche means by regarding change or becoming "as an 'in itself' that is foreign to us." For Hegel, becoming is, in itself, what is foreign to being. As soon as something engages in becoming instead of being, it must be foreign or other to being, because becoming is in itself something different, foreign and other to being, to existence.
Now, Nietzsche says this regard for becoming as in itself foreign to being makes becoming or change into being. Why is this the case? Is not becoming something that is foreign to being? Hegel seems to be on the right track here: Nietzsche suddenly looks as if he is ruthlessly undermining something that most, if not all, would agree upon. But let us hear Nietzsche out. Why does Nietzsche assert becoming is being when it is regarded as the other of being? Because this makes becoming into "a 'quality.'" What is a quality? we must ask. Well, a quality is a quality of being. It is something that being does not have as an attribute or (what is the same for us now) a predicate, but which is commensurable with the character that being itself has. Being of the same quality as being means that one is commensurable with, adequate with, equivalent with being. Being a quality of being means that one can be substituted for being without any change effecting itself within the character of being. Thus, we see how what we agree upon fails us, along with Hegel. For it is obvious that if becoming, according to Hegel, is something that is commensurate with being, can be exchanged with being without making being change, well, as change itself becoming can no longer really be called becoming. What Nietzsche is getting at is this: if becoming can be something that being can just enter into, well, then it is not really becoming because it does not force that being to become, to change. The only question left to us, then, is whether Hegel holds this. If we reflect on what we have heard Hegel say, namely, that becoming is negation this will prove the case. Simply by negating itself, by being not-being, being itself can become what is other to it--becoming. Nietzsche is right. If being can be other than itself and thereby be becoming, becoming is commensurable with the character of being, and is therefore its "quality." When being negates itself, then, it is still being. All this comes down to one fundamental insight: Nietzsche effectively claims here that as long as becoming is the other of being, then it is not actually becoming.
Before specifying what actual becoming would be (presumably a becoming that is not the other of being), we might take a moment to show how immense this claim is. For its power is such that it effectively "breaks" the dialectic of Hegel. Furthermore, it does not break it from the outside by specifying something wrong with the points Hegel begins his dialectic at and ends it with (nature and Absolute Knowledge, respectively), in the manner of Strauss, Feuerbach, and the early Marx. What Nietzsche does is much more radical, and only the late Marx and Kierkegaard approached it prior to him: Nietzsche breaks the dialectic from the inside, from the movement of the aufheben or negativity that constitutes it.
So, what is the dialectic, and how does it get constituted by negativity? This is an immense question, but we can state what it is quite simply from what we have already determined. The dialectic is the name we give for the process of negation that makes a being or substance attain its actuality through its becoming. It is essentially the process of "mediation" we described earlier--a substance's taking up of its own opposite (the opposite remaining its becoming) in its becoming. When this substance is determined as all of actuality, all of the world and its meaningful events, or, to call it by its Hegelian name, Spirit--when this is the case we have the "dialectic" proper: it is the totality of world-meaning or Spirit mediating itself, going through the process of its becoming actual. This huge global movement is, then, what is broken by Nietzsche. No longer can we look at the history of the world and of its meaningful events as a process of the becoming-actual of being, or the subjectivization of its substance, for this becoming-actual or subjectivization is what is already there, what is superfluous about its deeper essence. Thus, what Hegel hated about Descartes, namely, that he was saying something that did not really say anything, can be applied back to Hegel by Nietzsche. Any process of negation, the becoming other of a thing, doe not necessarily have to proceed the way that Hegel specifies it will because he conceives of this becoming merely as a quality of being. We can see how this might change our perception of things when we look at the example of the lightening that Nietzsche gives: "lightning flashes."
Now, for Hegel, the substance of the lightning is actualizing itself or realizing itself in the sky because as it is ceasing to merely be and instead become not just merely itself but what is foreign to itself--its becoming. The lightning flashes: the flashing is the sign of the becoming of the substance that is lightning. We see how intertwined this perspective is with our normal conception of things when we merely begin to think of even more every day examples: the tree grows--it ceases being a tree and realizes itself as a growing-tree; the dog walks--the dog ceases to just merely be a dog by being a walking dog, by becoming something other. These are dialectical interpretations of events because they specify a structure of reality that the events supposedly coincide with. But how does Nietzsche view these events? "If I say 'lightning flashes,' I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, is, and does not 'become.' What this means is that Nietzsche sees the lightening dialectically and looks at its flashing not as an activity of the lightning but merely as something that the lightning instantiates itself as for the dialectician. The flash is not a unique event. It is merely an unfolding of what was always already present in the lightning just simply being lightning. This is because the flashing is not becoming, but being. We can see why Nietzsche says that this view posits the flash twice: the flash is supposedly something that is supposed to be other than being and yet at the same the activity that has made it other. While this first thing is specified by what Hegel calls "becoming," the actual activity, the flashing itself, is not grasped by this type of "becoming" since it is something that really truly excludes being (unlike Hegel's "becoming," which, let us repeat it, is only a being's "quality"). What actually makes the lightning flash is something that is not its becoming. According to Hegel, what makes the lightning flash is its not-being. But this only makes it into something that is a "subject" (as Nietzsche says) over and above its substance. It does not make it flash. Thus we come back to what we first specified as the upshot of this entire passage: what Hegel determined as predicate is just as good as the Cartesian attribute--they both miss the real issue, the real activity that is in complete opposition to being. What this is we have yet to specify--though Nietzsche does indeed specify it--but already we can use a more poignant example in order to hit home how incadequate this Hegelian view of things is: "I murder." The murder is not a consequence of any actual activity on my part according to Hegel--it is only the consequence of my not-being-myself. Now, Nietzsche allows us to see that I am myself insofar as I am not myself, because this murder was indeed me acting in accordance to my character as a substance, as an "I." But as far as Hegel is concerned, the activity of this action extends only so far as to show that I was acting as something that was not myself, but an application of myself, a becoming-other of what-once-was the substance that was myself. We indeed subscribe to this view in the courts, where we think an action is the application of the subjectivity of the subject: Hegel would say that it is the subjectivity of the subject. But this is, according to Nietzsche, missing the point. The action itself is never touched: the real becoming is pawned off as this pseudo-becoming, this mere predicate or attribute of being. This is what Nietzsche means when he characterizes this as a mere dogmatic adherence to the naive believe that "every change must have an author." Every becoming, every lightning flash, every murder, is only as it is because it is the effect of an intention, an authoring, a being that has become by negation or not-being. We have to ask: is this always the case? Especially of nature--how does lightning "intend" a flash?
What is the real action according to Nietzsche? We can look at how he describes this pawning-off in order to specify it. "We have regarded the effect as something that effects," Nietzsche says. That is, we regard an effect as a cause. In order to perceive the real essence of becoming, the activity of becoming, that which we mistakenly think we grasp when we call it this mere "effecting" that is really in essence an effect--in order to get at this we have to reverse cause and effect here. That is, in order to grasp actual becoming, we have to consider what we call a cause here--being, the lightning--and see this as the effect of a different cause. What is this different cause? Nothing other than what is effected by this "effecting," that is, the flashing, what we called the becoming of the being, the negation of the being. Put differently, in order to properly conceive becoming, we have to reverse cause and effect as we normally see it. This means not only that we have to reverse the priority of being over becoming that determines the particular relationship of becoming and being, for it is this priority of being over becoming that makes becoming the "other" of being. In other words, becoming is what it is for Hegel only insofar as it is is not-being. This implies that it has no real essence apart from being merely the cessation of being: where being stops, there becoming is; becoming is only the consequence of being, its effect.
Reversing this priority means reversing cause and effect. Therefore we have to conceive of being itself, existence, as a consequence of what we call becoming, such that being is merely not-becoming. This reversal effectuates a conception of the actual--which we remember is the mediation of the effecting and the effect, what we called being and its negation--that is one in which becoming as activity is genuinely conceived. Becoming in this actual sense is what becomes such that in not becoming it is being. Only when becoming is something that can be (exist) when it stops becoming--and not the mere consequence of a cessation in things being--only when this is the case have we properly conceived becoming. What does this look like? We have hinted at it: instead of seeing the lightning effectuating the flash, or causing it, we see the flash causing the lightning. How can this be?
Well, we regard the lightning as something that serves as the vessel or embodiment for the particular event (becoming) that is the flash. This is perhaps better seen in the example of murder. Where murder was something that was merely the extension and application of the substance or existing person, for Nietzsche, the person is a mere vessel for the act of murder, no matter what she or he intended. And while this may be more troubling, and make it universally harder to assign guilt, looking at events this way will make them more accurate, make them more actual. It is the ability to think this, to think of what is merely as the vessel for the mighty process of becoming (a will to power) that sustains in fact brings it as it is about, that allows us to say we have adequately forged a realm for thought beyond the dialectic and the shoddy interpretation of becoming as something lacking action--that is, it allows us to say we have adequately gone beyond Hegel. We have only hinted at how this beyond is to be really thoroughly conceived, but hopefully the break with the dialectic itself will be clear--and that is what is important in knowing the thrust and the importance of both Nietzsche and Hegel.
When we say "subject," we are of course referring to the famous and crucial phrase from the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit that essentialy sums up Hegel's philosophical position:
In my view, which can be justified only by the exposition of the [Hegelian] system itself, everything turns on grasping and expressing the True [what is real, actual], not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.
-Phenomenology of Spirit, §17.
Essentially, this means that what is actual, is only because it is both 1) being, existence (this is what is meant by "Substance," a thing that has attributes), and 2) becoming (this is what is meant by "Subject"). That which really or actually is, not only is (that is, not only exists), but also becomes or incorporates becoming into its existence. In fact, by saying "equally" Hegel says that what is actual is indeed actual only to the extent that it also becomes: becoming and being only effect actuality insofar as they occur equally, insofar as becoming incorporates itself into being just as much as being exists. Now, this becoming that is incorporated into the Substance that is actual Hegel calls "negativity." Thus he says a little later on in the Preface:
The living Substance is being which is in truth Subject, or, what is the same, is in truth actual only insofar as it is the movement [read: becoming] of positing itself, or is the mediation [read: becoming] of its self-othering with itself. This substance is, as Subject, pure simple negativity.
-Phenomenology of Spirit, §18.
"Pure negativity" Hegel says a little later, is, "when reduced to its pure abstraction [or the most general concept which will encompass it], simple becoming" ("Preface", §20). Thus, when being (Substance) is "in truth," as Hegel says here, when it is actual, it negates, it becomes. Linking negation up with the concepts of becoming and being, subject and substance, we can see then why Hegel calls becoming "negativity:" becoming is the absence of being, and therefore, conceived purely, is not. It is the "not," pure and simple--what does not exist but what makes something actual. We can also see that the statement about the True as substance and equally as subject responds essentially to Descartes, who thought the True, the actual, was only insofar as it was Substance.
For Descartes, the cogito, when it grasped its actuality, was a res cogitans, "thinking thing," a thing that possessed the attribute of thinking. For Hegel, conceiving of actuality as guaranteed by the mere attribute of a thing did not seem concrete enough: reality and actuality conceived only as the adequate possession of a particular attribute seems too flimsy. Cartesian truth, Hegel thinks, would only be a matter of determining whether something possessed the right attribute and so was a substance--it was no more profound than this, this determining what is essentially already priveliged to be a substance (since it already possesses the attribute). The whole method of Descartes, the whole taking away of all that was supposedly real to reach what was actual, is essentially meaningless, since it only finds out what was already there. For Hegel, this whole process of abstracting away from reality essentially and necessarily effected the grasping of actuality that Descartes found--it did something, it had to do something, otherwise the truth that Descartes found would merely be superfluous, would not govern reality or essentially be true. Thus, whatever was true also had to be a "subject," had to be not merely an attribute but a predicate that determined the thing it was asserted to be the possession of.
Calling this predicate of the substance "subject" essentially means: the "I think" is not indifferent to the "I am," the thinking itself of Descartes effectuates the being that the thinking supposedly proves; or, put differently, the "cogitans" is not merely an adjective modifying "res," but essentially determines "res" as a verb. The "res," is what it does. This "doing" is not merely being, but is in fact a going beyond being into a realm where being is not. Conceived adequately, this "doing" is, for Hegel, a becoming. Thus he says, essentially of the res cogitans, that for it not to be a mere empty phrase, a mere truth that is indifferent to the everyday world that it supposedly governs, in order for it to govern that world as its actual nature, it must become, must enter into an other state that is not being--that in fact is not-being itself, negation: "whatever is more than... a word... contains a becoming-other that has to be taken back [into the word itself as its action, as what it does]" ("Preface" §20).
Now that this is cleared up, where does Nietzsche fall with respect to all of it? We said that Nietzsche breaks with the Hegelian dialectic by more rigorously conceiving the Hegelian "subject." We now see that implied in this is a radicalization of how Hegel, too, more rigorously conceived the Cartesian cogito: Nietzsche too is reacting to Descartes. Essentially, then, how Hegel conceives of actuality as effected by a becoming--becoming as negativity being the essence of the "subject"--will have to be just as inadequately conceived for Nietzsche as Descartes' substance was for Hegel.
Let us see what Nietzsche says:
What are attributes?-- We have not regarded change in us as change but as an "in itself" that is foreign to us... and we have posited it, not as an event, but as a being, as a "quality"--and in addition invented an entity to which it adheres; i.e. we have regarded the effect as something that effects, and this we have regarded as a being. But even in this formulation, the concept "effect" is arbitrary: for those changes that take place in us, and that we firmly believe we have not ourselves caused, we merely infer to be effects, in accordance with the conclusion "every change must have an author";--but this conclusion is already mythology: it separates that which effects from the effecting. If I say "lightning flashes," I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, is, and does not "become."-- To regard an event as an "effecting," and this as being, that is the double error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.
-The Will to Power, #531 (composed 1885-1886)
Now, first of all, we should clarify what Nietzsche means by "attribute" in this note, for the question "what are attributes?" is that to which the whole rest of the note responds. Nietzsche means by "attribute" both attribute in the Cartesian sense, as that which is a property of a substance, but also "predicate" in the Hegelian sense, as that which is the subject of a substance. This is the upshot of the paragraph: we see not only that attributes are attributes, but that things that are asserted as predicates are attributes. It is not even a matter of a misnomer: Hegel does not use "predicate" when what he "really means" is "attribute," for Nietzsche--Hegel is not merely mistaken in taking something that is an attribute to be a predicate. What Nietzsche is getting at here, what he essentially determines the "attribute" to be, is something that is also signified by "predicate"--using "predicate" does not outstrip or go beyond what is essentially signified by "attribute," as Hegel thinks it does. That is, Nietzsche destroys Hegel's assumption that in making the attribute into a predicate, he is accurately conceiving actuality. Niether attribute nor predicate can do this for Nietzsche: actuality is something that exceeds the grasp of both these concepts, and thus are just as effective in grasping actuality as we now know (after Hegel) the attribute was--we can therefore lump them together under one name.
The main thrust of the paragraph thus made visible, we can turn to the actual statements themselves to determine how indeed the Hegelian predicate is just like an attribute. For wasn't the predicate subject, and the subject negativity, that is, becoming? How is becoming in Hegel only an attribute?
Because, says Nietzsche, it is not adequately conceived as becoming. In other words, it is covertly conceived as being. This is what Nietzsche means when he says, "We have not regarded change in us as change but as an 'in itself' that is foreign to us... and we have posited it, not as an event, but as a being, as a 'quality.'" "Change" here is becoming. "Not regarding change as change" means not conceiving becoming as a becoming that is adequate to the nature of becoming. What is this nature? Well, as we already determined when looking at Hegel, the nature of becoming is not-being: becoming is what happens when being stops being and changes into a different type of being. While a being is changing into a different type of being, it engages in a process where it turns into its opposite and negation--it becomes, it engages in not-being. Thus, if becoming is the opposite of being, to not regard becoming as becoming is essentially to pass off something as becoming that is not really the full and pure opposite of being, but only approximates this opposite. This pseudo-opposite would therefore be something that appears to change, appears to become, but does not really become. In fact, it would still be being. This is what Nietzsche means by "we have posited it [change, becoming] not as an event, but as a being." Now, what remains to be explained is the crucial part of this statement: how is this pseudo-becoming a pseudo-becoming because it is "regarded.. as an 'in itself' that is foreign to us?" Indeed, this "foreign-ness" of becoming is proffered as the essential thing that makes it lack actuality in the paragraph. How could becoming be in itself something foreign, and as this not really be actual becoming?
Well, let us reflect on what Hegel said becoming was. Hegel said "the living Substance is being which is in truth Subject, or, what is the same, is in truth actual only insofar as it is the movement of positing itself, or is the mediation of its self-othering with itself." Notice that Hegel describes what is in effect becoming--Subject--as a type of "self-othering with itself." Is not this "self-othering" of which Hegel speaks what Nietzsche refers to as the "foreign?" Indeed, what is "other" is what is foreign: what is other is whatever is not-itself, what is not-here (but there, over and against oneself, in the foreign). Indeed, the German "fremd" carries this meaning of "other" with it much more than the "foreign" with which we translate Nietzsche: in German "other" is "anderes", a conjunction of "an", meaning "on," "apart from and yet related to," "an aspect of a thing that is not it but is added onto it," "on top of and against," and therefore essentially "not" in a privative way similar to the Latin prefix "a-" when it is used as a prefix, and the word "da," which means "here"--thus we say what is other is what is not-here. Indeed, Hegel himself often plays on this meaning, implying that what is other is also what is foreign. What this part of the passage of Hegel's means, then, is what we have just explained when we were explaining becoming: "self-othering" is what is necessary for something not just to merely exist as a substance, but also as subject. In order for something to really exist, it must in a sense go out of itself and change such that it becomes its own other. This is what Hegel means by "mediation:" something mediates insofar as it traverses a path in which it engages in a process where it becomes foreign, other than itself. Now, when we were explaining becoming and its opposition to being, we did not give it this sense of "becoming-foreign"--but indeed we can see that this is what we meant. Becoming is not just becoming for Hegel, it is becoming-other, becoming-foreign. It is becoming something that, while it "is" not, is indeed something that is set up as in opposition to being--that is, substance proper. This is so much the case that we can say the following: what does not become other, what does not become foreign to itself as being, does not become at all for Hegel. What does not set itself up in opposition to being when it becomes is only still merely being, merely substance without being subject, and fails to attain actuality or Truth.
Now we understand what Nietzsche means by regarding change or becoming "as an 'in itself' that is foreign to us." For Hegel, becoming is, in itself, what is foreign to being. As soon as something engages in becoming instead of being, it must be foreign or other to being, because becoming is in itself something different, foreign and other to being, to existence.
Now, Nietzsche says this regard for becoming as in itself foreign to being makes becoming or change into being. Why is this the case? Is not becoming something that is foreign to being? Hegel seems to be on the right track here: Nietzsche suddenly looks as if he is ruthlessly undermining something that most, if not all, would agree upon. But let us hear Nietzsche out. Why does Nietzsche assert becoming is being when it is regarded as the other of being? Because this makes becoming into "a 'quality.'" What is a quality? we must ask. Well, a quality is a quality of being. It is something that being does not have as an attribute or (what is the same for us now) a predicate, but which is commensurable with the character that being itself has. Being of the same quality as being means that one is commensurable with, adequate with, equivalent with being. Being a quality of being means that one can be substituted for being without any change effecting itself within the character of being. Thus, we see how what we agree upon fails us, along with Hegel. For it is obvious that if becoming, according to Hegel, is something that is commensurate with being, can be exchanged with being without making being change, well, as change itself becoming can no longer really be called becoming. What Nietzsche is getting at is this: if becoming can be something that being can just enter into, well, then it is not really becoming because it does not force that being to become, to change. The only question left to us, then, is whether Hegel holds this. If we reflect on what we have heard Hegel say, namely, that becoming is negation this will prove the case. Simply by negating itself, by being not-being, being itself can become what is other to it--becoming. Nietzsche is right. If being can be other than itself and thereby be becoming, becoming is commensurable with the character of being, and is therefore its "quality." When being negates itself, then, it is still being. All this comes down to one fundamental insight: Nietzsche effectively claims here that as long as becoming is the other of being, then it is not actually becoming.
Before specifying what actual becoming would be (presumably a becoming that is not the other of being), we might take a moment to show how immense this claim is. For its power is such that it effectively "breaks" the dialectic of Hegel. Furthermore, it does not break it from the outside by specifying something wrong with the points Hegel begins his dialectic at and ends it with (nature and Absolute Knowledge, respectively), in the manner of Strauss, Feuerbach, and the early Marx. What Nietzsche does is much more radical, and only the late Marx and Kierkegaard approached it prior to him: Nietzsche breaks the dialectic from the inside, from the movement of the aufheben or negativity that constitutes it.
So, what is the dialectic, and how does it get constituted by negativity? This is an immense question, but we can state what it is quite simply from what we have already determined. The dialectic is the name we give for the process of negation that makes a being or substance attain its actuality through its becoming. It is essentially the process of "mediation" we described earlier--a substance's taking up of its own opposite (the opposite remaining its becoming) in its becoming. When this substance is determined as all of actuality, all of the world and its meaningful events, or, to call it by its Hegelian name, Spirit--when this is the case we have the "dialectic" proper: it is the totality of world-meaning or Spirit mediating itself, going through the process of its becoming actual. This huge global movement is, then, what is broken by Nietzsche. No longer can we look at the history of the world and of its meaningful events as a process of the becoming-actual of being, or the subjectivization of its substance, for this becoming-actual or subjectivization is what is already there, what is superfluous about its deeper essence. Thus, what Hegel hated about Descartes, namely, that he was saying something that did not really say anything, can be applied back to Hegel by Nietzsche. Any process of negation, the becoming other of a thing, doe not necessarily have to proceed the way that Hegel specifies it will because he conceives of this becoming merely as a quality of being. We can see how this might change our perception of things when we look at the example of the lightening that Nietzsche gives: "lightning flashes."
Now, for Hegel, the substance of the lightning is actualizing itself or realizing itself in the sky because as it is ceasing to merely be and instead become not just merely itself but what is foreign to itself--its becoming. The lightning flashes: the flashing is the sign of the becoming of the substance that is lightning. We see how intertwined this perspective is with our normal conception of things when we merely begin to think of even more every day examples: the tree grows--it ceases being a tree and realizes itself as a growing-tree; the dog walks--the dog ceases to just merely be a dog by being a walking dog, by becoming something other. These are dialectical interpretations of events because they specify a structure of reality that the events supposedly coincide with. But how does Nietzsche view these events? "If I say 'lightning flashes,' I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, is, and does not 'become.' What this means is that Nietzsche sees the lightening dialectically and looks at its flashing not as an activity of the lightning but merely as something that the lightning instantiates itself as for the dialectician. The flash is not a unique event. It is merely an unfolding of what was always already present in the lightning just simply being lightning. This is because the flashing is not becoming, but being. We can see why Nietzsche says that this view posits the flash twice: the flash is supposedly something that is supposed to be other than being and yet at the same the activity that has made it other. While this first thing is specified by what Hegel calls "becoming," the actual activity, the flashing itself, is not grasped by this type of "becoming" since it is something that really truly excludes being (unlike Hegel's "becoming," which, let us repeat it, is only a being's "quality"). What actually makes the lightning flash is something that is not its becoming. According to Hegel, what makes the lightning flash is its not-being. But this only makes it into something that is a "subject" (as Nietzsche says) over and above its substance. It does not make it flash. Thus we come back to what we first specified as the upshot of this entire passage: what Hegel determined as predicate is just as good as the Cartesian attribute--they both miss the real issue, the real activity that is in complete opposition to being. What this is we have yet to specify--though Nietzsche does indeed specify it--but already we can use a more poignant example in order to hit home how incadequate this Hegelian view of things is: "I murder." The murder is not a consequence of any actual activity on my part according to Hegel--it is only the consequence of my not-being-myself. Now, Nietzsche allows us to see that I am myself insofar as I am not myself, because this murder was indeed me acting in accordance to my character as a substance, as an "I." But as far as Hegel is concerned, the activity of this action extends only so far as to show that I was acting as something that was not myself, but an application of myself, a becoming-other of what-once-was the substance that was myself. We indeed subscribe to this view in the courts, where we think an action is the application of the subjectivity of the subject: Hegel would say that it is the subjectivity of the subject. But this is, according to Nietzsche, missing the point. The action itself is never touched: the real becoming is pawned off as this pseudo-becoming, this mere predicate or attribute of being. This is what Nietzsche means when he characterizes this as a mere dogmatic adherence to the naive believe that "every change must have an author." Every becoming, every lightning flash, every murder, is only as it is because it is the effect of an intention, an authoring, a being that has become by negation or not-being. We have to ask: is this always the case? Especially of nature--how does lightning "intend" a flash?
What is the real action according to Nietzsche? We can look at how he describes this pawning-off in order to specify it. "We have regarded the effect as something that effects," Nietzsche says. That is, we regard an effect as a cause. In order to perceive the real essence of becoming, the activity of becoming, that which we mistakenly think we grasp when we call it this mere "effecting" that is really in essence an effect--in order to get at this we have to reverse cause and effect here. That is, in order to grasp actual becoming, we have to consider what we call a cause here--being, the lightning--and see this as the effect of a different cause. What is this different cause? Nothing other than what is effected by this "effecting," that is, the flashing, what we called the becoming of the being, the negation of the being. Put differently, in order to properly conceive becoming, we have to reverse cause and effect as we normally see it. This means not only that we have to reverse the priority of being over becoming that determines the particular relationship of becoming and being, for it is this priority of being over becoming that makes becoming the "other" of being. In other words, becoming is what it is for Hegel only insofar as it is is not-being. This implies that it has no real essence apart from being merely the cessation of being: where being stops, there becoming is; becoming is only the consequence of being, its effect.
Reversing this priority means reversing cause and effect. Therefore we have to conceive of being itself, existence, as a consequence of what we call becoming, such that being is merely not-becoming. This reversal effectuates a conception of the actual--which we remember is the mediation of the effecting and the effect, what we called being and its negation--that is one in which becoming as activity is genuinely conceived. Becoming in this actual sense is what becomes such that in not becoming it is being. Only when becoming is something that can be (exist) when it stops becoming--and not the mere consequence of a cessation in things being--only when this is the case have we properly conceived becoming. What does this look like? We have hinted at it: instead of seeing the lightning effectuating the flash, or causing it, we see the flash causing the lightning. How can this be?
Well, we regard the lightning as something that serves as the vessel or embodiment for the particular event (becoming) that is the flash. This is perhaps better seen in the example of murder. Where murder was something that was merely the extension and application of the substance or existing person, for Nietzsche, the person is a mere vessel for the act of murder, no matter what she or he intended. And while this may be more troubling, and make it universally harder to assign guilt, looking at events this way will make them more accurate, make them more actual. It is the ability to think this, to think of what is merely as the vessel for the mighty process of becoming (a will to power) that sustains in fact brings it as it is about, that allows us to say we have adequately forged a realm for thought beyond the dialectic and the shoddy interpretation of becoming as something lacking action--that is, it allows us to say we have adequately gone beyond Hegel. We have only hinted at how this beyond is to be really thoroughly conceived, but hopefully the break with the dialectic itself will be clear--and that is what is important in knowing the thrust and the importance of both Nietzsche and Hegel.
Monday, June 4, 2007
What Heidegger gives us
The basic merit of Heidegger is that he develops a reading of the Greeks that is latent in all of Western philosophy, and only barely peeks out its head in Nietzsche. This is a reading that, essentially, focuses on the Idea in Plato as a development of the concept of Being, which whas developed by Parmenides. Thinking the Idea as Being means thinking against the tradition of interpretation of Plato which, since Plato, has thought of the Idea as something like the "standard," the ideal. Thinking of the Idea as a "standard" means conceiving of all things as relative to this standard, in the way that "we are all made in God's image," as is often said by the Christian scholars. The standard is something identical to itself, something that is factually existent as it is, and cannot change. This idea of the Idea as a "standard" eventually develops and reifies itself, moving farther and farther away from any notion of potential or power or activity and towards ever more refined and self-subsistent perfection in factuality through Christianity and through Descartes. Eventually it becomes something like "the formative conditions for subjective experience"--the "category" of Kant--when, as Heidegger points out, it was really never something that was definitively factual at all. Indeed, it could just have equally been considered a power (potere, in Latin--to be able).
In short, Heidegger revolutionizes (and still revolutionizes) philosophy in one fundamental thrust of his thought: interpreting the Platonic Idea not as a standard from which various "copies" derive, but as something that is what makes possible all meaning within the world. For Heidegger, the Idea is the supreme limit of the possibly meaningful, what makes the possible, to the extent that it is possible, possible. In short, it is actual (i.e. real) potential--or at least could be considered as this with as equal legitimacy as something like a "standard."
In short, Heidegger revolutionizes (and still revolutionizes) philosophy in one fundamental thrust of his thought: interpreting the Platonic Idea not as a standard from which various "copies" derive, but as something that is what makes possible all meaning within the world. For Heidegger, the Idea is the supreme limit of the possibly meaningful, what makes the possible, to the extent that it is possible, possible. In short, it is actual (i.e. real) potential--or at least could be considered as this with as equal legitimacy as something like a "standard."
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