Nietzsche and the Sign Language of the Affects

Abstract

As mentioned in the introduction, Nietzsche proclaimed his joy at discovering Spinoza in a piece of correspondence from the summer of 1881, where he detailed five specific areas of strong affiliation and one overarching tendency. The force and specificity of his remarks means that it is unlikely to be a mere coincidence that after his discovery of Spinoza and their shared tendency of making knowledge the most powerful affect, Nietzsche’s use of the term ‘Affekt’—somewhat more technical and specific than ‘Gefühl’ or ‘Leidenschaft’—proliferates greatly. This is not to say that Nietzsche does not use these terms interchangeably at times; the point is rather that the more specific and Spinozist term ‘Affekt’ plays a much greater role in Nietzsche’s later texts and is paradigmatic of a shift in his philosophy that decisively breaks with the more metaphysically inclined Schopenhauerean inspired early works, such as The Birth of Tragedy, as well as the more ‘positivist’ stance of Human all too Human to a more ‘Spinozist’ orientation towards the immanence of affectivity. In fact, although Nietzsche uses the term ‘Affect’ (spelt with a ‘c’) occasionally before his discovery of Spinoza during 1881, this is dropped almost entirely in favour of ‘Affekt’ thereafter (as can be seen in his message to Overbeck), which then proliferates in his writings. Furthermore, Nietzsche does not actually use the word ‘Affekt’ in any published text before Beyond Good and Evil in 1886, where both morality and the will are first unambiguously couched in terms of affectivity.