Abstract
This chapter addresses Nietzsche’s critique of substance ontology when applied to Spinoza’s concept of ‘substance’. The main result of this section is that Spinoza’s understanding of ‘substance’ allows for the existence of genuine multiplicity, the endogenous power of modes, and includes a relational account of power, but that it does not fully escape Nietzsche’s critique because the production of individual essences that are in agreement can only be explained if the activity of substance is governed by reason. A key difference is that Nietzsche places his philosophical discourse in the context of a historical and developmental account of individuals and societies that does not have a parallel in Spinoza.
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Notes
- 1.
Nietzsche also argues that, if we do away with the true world, then the concept of apparent world no longer serves any purpose and must also be abandoned (GD Fable 6). Becoming should therefore not be conflated with the concept of “illusory world” or appearance.
- 2.
“In einer Welt des Werdens, in der Alles bedingt ist, kann die Annahme des Unbedingten, der Substanz, des Seins, eines Dinges usw. nur ein Irrthum sein. Aber wie ist Irrthum möglich?”
- 3.
“ein ursprünglicher, ebenso alter Irrthum alles Organischen.”
- 4.
“welche Alles ‘im Flusse’ sahen”.
- 5.
There is a multiplicity of drives and affects behind the apparent unity of the I.
- 6.
In FW 109 3.468f Nietzsche writes that the concept of substance is a way to deify nature and that his project is to redeem it and to naturalise humanity.
- 7.
Nietzsche wants to offer a naturalised understanding of what Kant called the transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience. He strives to offer a genetic account of our way of thinking. This is why he argues that the concept of substance has been developed (pre-) historically: because it proved useful (Aydin 2003, p. 49).
- 8.
For an account of various possible readings of the notion of subject in Nietzsche, see Lanier Anderson (2012).
- 9.
“Niemand ist dafür verantwortlich, dass er überhaupt da ist, dass er so und so beschaffen ist, dass er unter
diesen Umständen, in dieser Umgebung ist. Die Fatalität seines Wesens ist nicht herauszulösen aus der Fatalität alles dessen, was war und was sein wird. Er ist nicht die Folge einer eignen Absicht, eines Willens, eines Zwecks, mit ihm wird nicht der Versuch gemacht, ein “Ideal von Mensch” oder ein “Ideal von Glück” oder ein “Ideal von Moralität” zu erreichen,—es ist absurd, sein Wesen in irgend einen Zweck hin abwälzen zu wollen. Wir haben den Begriff ‘Zweck’ erfunden: in der Realität fehlt der Zweck …”.
- 10.
Aristotle speaks of three kinds of final causes: “(a) completed natural substances or artifacts as the end results of processes of generation; (b) functions performed by (parts of) natural substances, artifacts, or tools; and (c) objects of desire as the aims of (deliberative) actions” (Leunissen 2010, p. 12).
- 11.
It is important to situate this discussion in an epistemological context: final causes function as answers to the question “why?” (Leunissen 2010, p. 12).
- 12.
“noch die Gesellschaft, noch seine Eltern und Vorfahren, noch er selbst”. We may perhaps go further and say that Nietzsche’s claim that humans are not the products of “a will” (eines Willens) can be read as the rejection of the notion of teleology characteristic of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics: the world has no purpose, but the world as representation is given meaning by the fact that it is an expression of a single, unified underlying reality, the Will (Aydin 2003, p. 134). Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics can only lead to a dismissal of such a possibility.
- 13.
A claim central to Nietzsche’s take on nihilism.
- 14.
“der grösste Einwand gegen das Dasein”.
- 15.
“die Unschuld des Werdens”.
- 16.
“Unausmessbarkeit von Strafe und von Schuld”.
- 17.
“damit erst erlösen wir die Welt”.
- 18.
“Man ist nothwendig, man ist ein Stück Verhängniss, man gehört zum Ganzen, man ist im Ganzen”
- 19.
Regardless of Nietzsche’s critique of mechanism he believes it is nonetheless an improvement on a teleological world-view.
- 20.
- 21.
The best way to understand this “all” in Spinoza is, in Negri’s words, as an “open totality”.
- 22.
“For Spinoza, the substances and things that could be found in nature were not discreet substances in the first place but rather the constituent parts of one substance, that is, God” (my italics; Emden 2014, p. 105). It is perhaps telling that we find this view in a book focused on Nietzsche’s philosophy.
- 23.
The view that substance, the whole, is constituted by its parts is precluded by Spinoza’s commitment to monism.
- 24.
While Deleuze sometimes speak of modes as parts of substance, he is careful to caution his readers that part refers to what expresses, not what composes a whole (Deleuze 1968, p. 288).
- 25.
Infinite under each attribute, which means it is infinitely infinite (Deleuze 1981, p. 63).
- 26.
To “explicate” (explicare), as Deleuze shows, is a key notion for Spinoza. It designates an operation of the understanding by which it perceives the movement of the thing it studies. This operation is intrinsic and not extrinsic to the thing, and points to a dynamic operation of development of the thing that is explicated (Deleuze 1981, p. 103).
- 27.
For an in-depth analysis of numerical, formal and real distinctions in Spinoza see Deleuze 1968, chapters 1 and 3.
- 28.
As we have seen in the analysis of the “simplest bodies” of the Physical Interlude in Chap. 1.
- 29.
For a discussion of two types of multiplicity on Spinoza: of infinitely small bodies and of affects, see Chap. 1.
- 30.
Given Spinoza’s fundamentally relational power ontology a thing cannot exist or be fully understood on its own, so any strong distinction between outside and inside breaks down (see Jaquet 2004).
- 31.
I read self-knowledge to mean knowledge of what “a body can do”, i.e. of its active affects. This is in line with Spinoza’s critique of philosophers, (in TP I 1), namely that they misunderstand affects, and therefore the nature of human beings.
- 32.
The TTP is set up as a critique of “the many men who take the outrageous liberty” to “utilize religion to win the allegiance of the common people” (TTP Preface 8) and so strive to obtain secular authority and a “worldly career” (TTP Preface 9).
- 33.
The fact the superstition is variable and unstable, and therefore shaky ground for theologians to build their power on.
- 34.
“Philosophen, sofern sie Dogmatiker waren”.
- 35.
“Wir wissen, unser Gewissen weiss es heute—, was überhaupt jene unheimlichen Erfindungen der Priester und der Kirche werth sind, wozu sie dienten, mit denen jener Zustand von Selbstschändung der Menschheit erreicht worden ist, der Ekel vor ihrem Anblick machen kann—die Begriffe ‘Jenseits’, ‘jüngstes Gericht’, ‘Unsterblichkeit der Seele’, die ‘Seele’ selbst; es sind Folter-Instrumente, es sind Systeme von Grausamkeiten,
vermöge deren der Priester Herr wurde, Herr blieb …”.
- 36.
The worry about teleology undermining our ability to see what we could accomplish can also be found in Spinoza’s claim that “we do not know what a body can do” (EIIIp2s) together with the claim that it is our task to discover its power.
- 37.
Teleonomy is the science of adaptation, according to the principle that the body’s structures and functions serve an overall purpose and is “teleology made respectable by Darwin” (Dawkins 1999, pp. 294–5). Dawkins presents his book “The Extended Phenotype” as an essay in teleonomy and presents its main problem as deciding the “nature of the entity for whose benefit adaptations may be said to exist”, viz. the species, group, individual or gene(s) (Dawkins 1999, p. 81). To what extent this resembles traditional teleology and what the details of a Nietzschean or Spinozistic critique of this notion might be is beyond the scope of the present book.
- 38.
“Das Wesentliche am Rausch ist das Gefühl der Kraftsteigerung und Fülle”.
- 39.
“Physiologische Vorbedingung”.
- 40.
“es irgend ein ästhetisches Thun und Schauen”.
- 41.
If we are moved to act by external causes then we cannot speak of “our” desire. We are not its adequate cause.
- 42.
Saar, Die Immanenz der Macht: Politische Theorie nach Spinoza.
- 43.
Under what conditions the interaction between different individuals is not one of confrontation but of cooperation and mutual benefit will be discussed below.
- 44.
The thought that resistance or conflict can act as a stimulant for empowerment, as in the case of the Agon, can be traced back to at least as early as Homer’s Wettkampf (1872).
- 45.
Spinoza sets the foundations for the mixed discourse centred on affects in proposition 14–31 of book II, while its systematic treatment is accomplished in book III of the Ethics (Jaquet 2004, p. 44).
- 46.
Is it helpful to understand all the bodily events involved in the affect of generosity? Or, conversely, should we have all the ideas of all muscles and cells in order to swim? (Jaquet 2004, p. 33).
- 47.
“Gesetzt, dass nichts Anderes als real ‘gegeben’ ist als unsre Welt der Begierden und Leidenschaften, dass wir zu keiner anderen “Realität” hinab oder hinauf können als gerade zur Realität unsrer Triebe—denn Denken ist nur ein Verhalten dieser Triebe zu einander—”.
- 48.
“Unserm stärksten Triebe, dem Tyrannen in uns, unterwirft sich nicht nur unsre Vernunft, sondern auch unser Gewissen”.
- 49.
“Ich glaube demgemäss nicht, dass ein ‘Trieb zur Erkenntniss’ der Vater der Philosophie ist, sondern dass sich ein andrer Trieb, hier wie sonst, der Erkenntniss (und der Verkenntniss!) nur wie eines Werkzeugs bedient hat” (JGB 6 5.20) or “Unsre Bedürfnisse sind es, die die Welt auslegen: unsre Triebe und deren Für und Wider. Jeder Trieb ist eine Art Herrschsucht, jeder hat seine Perspektive, welche er als Norm allen übrigen Trieben aufzwingen möchte” (7[60] 12.315).
- 50.
“Eine eigentliche Physio-Psychologie hat mit unbewussten Widerständen im Herzen des Forschers zu kämpfen sie hat ‘das Herz’ gegen sich: schon eine Lehre von der gegenseitigen Bedingtheit der ‘guten’ und der ‘schlimmen’ Triebe, macht, als feinere Immoralität, einem noch kräftigen und herzhaften Gewissen Noth und Überdruss,—noch mehr eine Lehre von der Ableitbarkeit aller guten Triebe aus den schlimmen.”
- 51.
The metaphysical and moral illusions accumulated throughout history and that cloud our judgements, e.g. the doctrine of substance, or the belief in the existence of altruism and evil.
- 52.
“moralischen Vorurtheilen und Befürchtungen”.
- 53.
“als Morphologie und Entwicklungslehre des Willens zur Macht”.
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Ioan, R. (2019). Critique of Metaphysics and the Ontology of the Turn to the Body. In: The Body in Spinoza and Nietzsche. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20987-2_5
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