Philosophy Now Forum

Here's a little essay I wrote well over two years ago, in response to Laurence Lampert's back-and-forth with Heinrich Meier in the issue of Interpretation that had just come out. I have cut off the final paragraph, because that goes beyond my first amendment to Lampert's Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, which is what I want to bring to people's attention here.

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What Is Nietzsche's Sovereign Agent? The Will to Power as Insight

I have always found "Of the Sublime Ones" the most beautiful of Zarathustra's speeches. I associate it, by way of a mind-expanding experience, with the "lower form" of the Beatific Vision, on which Aleister Crowley writes:

"[I]t may be surmised that the Vision arises not from any given action but rather from a subtle suspension of action."¹

The connection between action and the will is not hard to establish. Thus George Grant said:

"That we must speak of two accounts of reason, the ancient and the modern, can be seen in the fact that for the ancients thought was at its height, not an action, but what they called a passion. Whatever the differences in what came to us from Jerusalem and from Athens, on this central point there was a commonness. The height for man was a passion. In modern language we might weakly describe this by saying that thought was finally a receptivity. We can see that this is not true of modern thought because its very form is the making of hypotheses and the testing by experiment, something intimately connected with the acts of our wills, the controlling of the world, the making of history."²

In fact, we find here the phrase "the acts of our wills", which Strauss also uses. (Before I get to that, however, let us note that Walter Kaufmann translates the phrase wollenden Subjekte [lit. "willing subjects"] from Will to Power nr. 569 as "active subjects".) Strauss uses the phrase "acts of the will to power" at the end of paragraph 8 of his "Note on the Plan of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil". And in paragraph 33, he says of the "action" of the philosopher of the future:

"As the act of the highest form of man's will to power the Vernatürlichung ["naturalization"] of man is at the same time the peak of the anthropomorphization of the non-human (cf. Will to Power nr. 614), for the most spiritual will to power consists in prescribing to nature what or how it ought to be (aph. 9). It is in this way that Nietzsche abolishes the difference between the world of appearance or fiction (the interpretations) and the true world (the text)."

Now in his Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, which changed me from a still somewhat Heideggerian Nietzschean into a Lampertian one, Laurence Lampert says of this passage:

"[Strauss] does not mean that the fundamental phenomenon, will to power, is itself an anthropomorphization. That point Strauss had already settled earlier in his essay where the theme was explicitly the will to power."³

It is true that Strauss's "what or how" may at this point be, not "what", but "how". Thus Heidegger wrote:

"The determination 'will to power' replies to the question of being with respect to the latter's constitution; the determination 'eternal recurrence of the same' replies to the question of being with respect to its way to be."⁴

At this point in Strauss's essay, the explicit theme is indeed the eternal recurrence of the same, not the will to power. But why then does Strauss repeat that bit from paragraph 8, about the abolition of the fundamental difference? It is here, in the climactic paragraphs of Strauss's essay, that I cease to be a Lampertian Nietzschean.—About five years ago, I discovered something in Strauss that everyone else seems to have missed about Nietzsche's teaching or doctrine:

"We start again from the premise that reality is will to power and there is no essential difference between men and brutes; there is no nature of man strictly speaking. Given this premise, the doctrine of eternal return—which means, subjectively, transformation of the will into acceptance—is the only way there can be knowledge, as acknowledging of what is, and it is the only way in which there can be nature; that is to say, that which is by itself and not by being willed or posited."⁵

Like Grant's term "receptivity", which is a partial cognate, the term "acceptance" may seem a weak description of this extraordinary result. I identify it, in fact, with nothing less than what Zarathustra calls "something higher than all reconciliation"!⁶ Thus I strongly disagree with Lampert's disparaging view on Meier's "redemption from the need(iness) of redemption": for I understand that redemption to be the attainment of actual, not fictional, sovereign insight.⁷—Strauss's Nietzsche abolishes the distinction between the fictional and the factual by willing the whole present and past⁸ to recur as will to power and nothing besides. This is the action of his philosopher of the future, who is the first man who consciously creates values on the basis of the understanding of the will to power as the fundamental phenomenon, for he is the first to understand that understanding means creating, valuing, willing to power.⁹—It is, however, not necessary for the eternal recurrence of the same to be a fact—that is, for the philosopher's will to power, to that very recurrence, to succeed, to actually attain that mightiest of re-creations. As Meier argues in his sequel, if not in its prequel, the philosopher's essential attainment consists in "attaining a height from which it is possible and permitted to converse with the heaviest task as play."¹⁰

Notes:

1. Crowley, Little Essays toward Truth, "Beatitude". Note that I do not agree with Crowley's Rousseauan(?) harmonism (cf. Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and its Betrayal, page 38). [Then again, I regard Crowley as an exoteric writer who employed mystical esotericism as a filter for his enlightened views.]

2. Grant, "Time as History". I have combined the recorded lecture with the written text.

3. Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, page 100.

4. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume II, chapter 26, translation Krell.

5. Strauss, lecture on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, May 18, 1959.

6. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, "Of Redemption".

7. To be sure, the only reason I could "bear with" Meier on this point was the said discovery. My "sovereign insight" is not free-floating; it is "the subjugation of chance, of nature (Genealogy II. n. 2)", more precisely of the non-sensical and chance subjugation of non-sense and chance, i.e. the (un)natural subjugation of nature: cf. paragraphs 25, 34-35, and 19 of Strauss' "Note on the Plan".

8. Cf. Crowley, Little Essays toward Truth, "Memory": "Consider that we can never know what is happening, but only what has just happened, even when most actively concentrated on what we call 'the present.'"

9. Cf. paragraph 7 of Strauss's "Note on the Plan"—where it is first said that "the most spiritual […] will to power […] consists in prescribing to nature what or how it ought to be (aph. 9)[.]"

10. Meier, Nietzsches Vermächtnis, page 439, my translation. I use "converse" in the sense in which John Milton uses it, e.g. in Paradise Lost Book VII, verse 9, and Book II, verse 184 [and, so I suspect, Crowley in the term "Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel"].

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Addendum

'[F]ar from undercutting what Mahdi suggests—the necessary connection between willing voluntary intelligible notions into existence and knowledge or theoretical understanding of these notions—,[¹] [the philosophy of the will to power] means one must desire and decide to bring any being into existence if one is to understand it! As I wrote [yet elsewhere],

''Strauss starts from the premise that reality is will to power and nothing besides. But Nietzsche did not start from that premise. It's not some kind of axiom. If you want to start from the object of knowledge, not from the subject, you may start as follows: "Knowledge in itself in a world of becoming is impossible; so how is knowledge possible? As error concerning oneself, as will to power, as will to deception."[²] So you start with the (Heraclitean) observation that the world is a world of becoming. You then infer from that that all knowledge must be will to power. But if all knowledge is will to power, the only way there can be a harmony between the knowing and the known is if the known, too, is will to power. More precisely, the knower must will the known to be will to power, for that is the only way he can "know" it, relate to it,—exegete it.—If all exegesis is eisegesis, the only way it may still be considered exegesis is if the exegeted is itself eisegeted to be eisegesis.—And this act can only be directed toward the future: we can only will the past to be will to power by willing it to recur, in the future, as will to power.'

'In fact, I have yet to correct an error I soon discerned. You don't start with an observation, for that would still be a kind of knowledge in itself. Rather, it's as Picht says:

'"Nietzsche does not say, as would have to be said from the side of metaphysics: The will to truth is the will to knowledge of the [stead]fast, the true, the permanent, the being [das Seiende]; he rather says: 'The will to truth is a making [stead]fast, a making true-permanent', a reinterpretation of show [der Schein] into Being [das Sein]. If one first makes what is to be known as true oneself, if one gains Being only thereby that one reinterprets show into Being, then the will which accomplishes that cannot avoid eventually discovering that what it must first make [stead]fast is not yet [stead]fast by itself, and that the permanence which it must first create is not already given by itself in advance. As Nietzsche puts the concept 'will to truth' in place of knowledge of the truth, he has thus carried out the great inversion."[³]'

Notes:

1. Muhsin Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy, page 185.

2. Will to Power nr. 617.

3. Georg Picht, Nietzsche, page 281, my translation, quoting from Will to Power nr. 552.

interesting... but one creates one's interpretation and reaction as an exercise of will... but it is strictly a private event - experienced privately...

any permeance would appear as private recurrence...

only Sisyphus understands the fleeting joy of reaching the summit...

-Imp

Impenitent wrote: ↑Fri Aug 23, 2024 1:27 pminteresting... but one creates one's interpretation and reaction as an exercise of will... but it is strictly a private event - experienced privately...

any permeance would appear as private recurrence...

only Sisyphus understands the fleeting joy of reaching the summit...

Thanks. And yes, as that passage from Strauss I 'discovered' says, eternal recurrence "means, subjectively, transformation of the will into acceptance". It means that an 'actively willing subject' projects itself, in that respect, into everything beyond itself. Thus in another little essay, which I wrote shortly after, I say:

'For Nietzsche, as opposed to the ancients, then, it's not thought but sensation which is a receptivity. Thought is not a passion but an action—though let us note that Grant says "at its height" a passion, and "finally" a receptivity. How can thought, for Nietzsche, become a passion, a receptivity? It seems the understanding would somehow have to be inhibited (by itself) from adapting the material of the senses. Yet this is not what Nietzsche suggests; he suggests, he hypothesizes, that only subjects exist: "active" subjects, to be precise. […] Now as Grant says, the making of hypotheses is intimately connected with the acts of our wills. So we could say that Nietzsche wills the formless unformulable world of the chaos of sensations to consist solely of actively willing subjects.' (Source: my "Nietzsche's Objective Subjectivism and Marx's Obstance Dualism", section 2 b; cf. Will to Power nr. 569 = notebook Autumn 1887 9 [106].)

yet in a sea of subjects, become the artist

-Imp

The Will to Power challenges conventional notions of morality and ethics. You could examine how Strauss addresses the ethical dilemmas that arise from Nietzsche's ideas, particularly the tension between individual power and collective morality.

The point is that the acceptance of the eternal recurrence is itself "active", while the will to power is a pathos, a passion. To "accept" the eternal recurrence" means 'willing the whole present and past to recur as will to power and nothing besides.' And this is the creation of values. As Lampert says,

"The complementary man 'is the first man who consciously creates values on the basis of the understanding of the will to power as the fundamental phenomenon.' Just what those values are Strauss is going to make clear—they are in no way arbitrary, they are not invented or created in order to celebrate mere inventiveness. Such creativity for its own sake counts for less than nothing in Nietzsche, less than nothing because mere creativity is the modern way, the way of the actor, the way Nietzsche most opposes: Nietzsche contra Wagner. Understanding the will to power as the fundamental phenomenon generates values of a precise sort, natural values, naturalizing values. Insight into the fundamental fact gives birth to new highest values." (Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, page 98.)

Now where I disagree with Lampert, and where Strauss might have agreed with me, is that it's the other way round. As I said, 'he is the first to understand that understanding means creating, valuing, willing to power.' But in order to understand that, then, one must create it, value it, will it. In order to understand the will to power as the fundamental phenomenon one must generate values of a precise sort, natural values, naturalizing values; giving birth to these new highest values brings insight into the fundamental fact.