Nietzsche and Rationality

In this paper, I will contradistinguish Nietzsche with other thinkers mainly, Spinoza followed by Hobbes and several more well known Sociologists such as Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx and Theodore Adorno to discuss two controversial themes: rationality and the commonwealth. Several primary questions will be addressed. Firstly, whether rationality is indeed as reprehensible and useless to one self’s will to individuation and life and secondly, whether the commonwealth is indeed cumbersome as Nietzsche proclaims to the grand task of his will to existence.

In Nietzsche’s caustic account of rationality whose progenitor is Socrates, rationality is pilloried as the chief cause of the liquidation of the Dionysiac spirit. Music, “the direct copy of the will itself,” (TBOT: pp. 99) whose melody transcends all forms and strikes at the heart of things, the “inmost kernel” (TBOT: pp. 100) loses its mystical charm and potency when infected by rationality. In the Attic dithyramb, music when calibrated, structured and formalized, can no longer strike directly at the heart of one’s inner most being and the will itself. Dionysiac music which when engaged in is supposed to “incite a symbolic intuition of Dionysiac universality,” (TBOT: pp. 101), to feel a Durkheimian sense of collective effervescence whereby in the lure of singing and dancing to consecrate a mythical God objectified in a totem, a trance-like psychic activity is awakened. Here, “vital energies are over-excited, passions more active, sensations stronger” (Durkheim EFRL pp. 195) and quintessentially, man transcends his profane life into one enshrined with “a higher dignity” (Durkheim EFRL pp. 195) and where he experiences himself as part of his tribe. The Dionysiac-Durkheimian experience of music thus annihilates the individual and allows him to feel the omnipotence behind individuation, the eternal life that continues beyond all appearances (TBOT: pp. 102). Music in light of rationality however, loses its instinctual Dionysiac wisdom. This manifests itself most in operas in which as Nietzsche writes “[people] have not the faintest conception of the Dionysiac profundity of music [where] musical enjoyment [is transformed] into a rationalistic rhetoric of passion in the stilo rappresentativo, into a voluptuous indulgence of vocal virtuoso feats; lacking imagination; [requiring] engineers and stage designers.” A modern reading of Nietzsche can be found in Adorno who castigates music as a degraded product; a practice of arrangement (Adorno: pp. 38). Music, most sadly, becomes something that can be reified, its dynamics predetermined and the unity that is realized in the spontaneity surrenders to the protective fixation of the pieces (Adorno: pp. 39). Or in a Marxian interpretation, music vilified by rationality maybe conceived as a adorning a new “fetish character” – the veneration of a thing’s exchange value and is quid pro quo in that its satisfaction of music is contingent on a social substitution or in other words, the value that society places on it (Adorno: OTFC pp. 36-37). What is quintessential in music, the primal dionysiac sensory pleasure and experience is vilified, supplanted and even outstripped by other rational objectives and purposes.

Yet, in the attempt to understand whether rationality is all that opprobrious and ignoble as Nietzsche thinks, it is useful to contrast it with the benefits of rationality and consequently, assess if the “primal Dionysiac wisdom” is all that good. In Spinoza’s view, it is only through reason that man can have clear and distinct ideas of his conception of life and thus act based on adequate ideas. Through reason, we can gain adequate knowledge of the formal essence of things under the formal essence of the naturalized Spinozistic God (Spinoza EII pp. 141), which for our purposes can be understood as everything in the world or nature. Spinoza proffers in his very famous proposition called the doctrine of the conatus that the essence of all man is that as far as he can by his own power, he will strive to preserve in its being and thereby act to attain a greater perfection or happiness (Spinoza pp.) Yet, many things can encumber him from attaining this happiness and that of which concerns us is, the human affects or passions or what other philosophers may term as desires or appetites. As a corollary, Spinoza argues that passions like sadness for instance, can diminish our power of acting by virtue of saddening our minds. But not only this, passions like anger or jealousy can make man acrimonious and antagonistic to each other. Hence, man if enslaved by human affects cannot act adequately or autonomously and consciously. The will to act in an individuated fashion for oneself also resounds in Nietzsche who treats it with pristine importance and which explains why he chastises all ascetic ideals, Judaeo-Christianity and even pity which is a mere palliative or a mere pretext that imbibes all the responsibility from people from themselves like a shelter for the homeless and dull their abilities to act for themselves. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche urges man to shake of the spirit of gravity and to be like an innocent child who says “yes” to life i.e. to be willing create his own idiosyncratic values. In the same line, Spinoza wants people to act for his own greatest happiness, unencumbered by affects. Spinoza wants people to be able to “act adequately” on his own account just like Nietzsche wants people to will themselves into their own existences. Yet, the plausibility for doing so, to be free from the effects of passions or for our purposes, anything that represses and fetters one if any is through rationality or reason.

The role of reason is important in Spinoza vis-à-vis Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, reason acts like a restraint that inhibits one’s ability to live life to the fullest i.e. it inhibits the dionysiac instinctual expression or as shown in the case of music, the access to the universal expression of the will. But contrary to Nietzsche, Spinoza sees reason as the most quintessential solution to human bondage and freedom from affects. To be free, is to be able to act adequately from conscious adequate ideas. The latter is then attained with the guidance of reason. Through reason, we can understand the causal nexus or the plethora of cause-effects relations that govern life in the entirety of nature (i.e. God) that will empower us to take control over our passions and not be enslaved by them. We will then be emancipated from fear that may consternate us so much that it incapacitates us from acting or living the life we sought after. Hence, I think that Spinoza’s notion of reason can complement Nietzsche’s more important philosophical idea of individuating and willing one’s existence for reason can be taken as a tool for each individual to rationalize in his or her own ways, the importance of living by one’s own standards contrary to chimerical and counterfeit ones i.e. God and why one should undertake The Greatest Weight which is the idea that:

If some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have live it, will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again and you will with it, speck of dust!”

(Nietzsche: The Gay Science Book Four 341 pp. 273).

Or, consider the sheer morbidity of the life of the Excelsior when Zarathustra tells him:

“You will never pray again, never adore again, never again rest in endless trust; you do not permit yourself to stop before any ultimate wisdom, ultimate goodness, ultimate power, while unharnessing your thoughts; you have no perpetual guardian and friend for your seven solitudes; you live without a view of mountains with snow on their peaks and fire in their hearts; there is no avenger for you any more nor any final improver…”

(Nietzsche: The Gay Science Book Four 285 pp. 285)

For Nietzsche’s couterintuitive philosophical idea of life to be practically adoptable by people like you and I, for us to “bite off the serpent’s head” and to live a life of truth, to lead a “warrior life,” “to realize and live in loneliness” apart from the herd, rationality has to have an important place as a tool for rumination. For Nietzsche himself I think, recognizes this when he writes:

“Free from what? Free for what? Can you give yourself your own evil and your own good and hang your own will over yourself as a law? Can you be your own judge and avenger of your law? Terrible it is to be alone with the judge and avenger of one’s own law. Thus is a star thrown out into the void and into the icy breath of solitude.
(Thus Spoke Zarathustra: First part pp. 175 On the way of the Creator)

Hence, rationality has to instruct the person’s act for the sheer danger of living in solitude and loneliness as Zarathustra preaches is much less enthralling than the anticipation of a heavenly paradise that awaits one and it is much more austere and onerous to spin one’s own web of values and rules. To be able to will and want to will, a person must first cognize the greater purpose of it for as Spinoza puts it, “the mind as far as it can strives to imagine those things that increase or aid the body’s power of acting and when the mind imagines those things that diminish or restrain the body’s power of acting, [it will] as far as it can, recollect things which excludes their existence.” In other words, it is in the nature of the man and his minds for our purposes to not choose a course of action that he thinks will diminish his general happiness. One will always strive for greater happiness and thus, to practically live dangerously like the excelsior, reason has to be the crucial pondering factor to convince anyone to do so for impressionistically, no one has any reason to risk putting himself in nihilism or a perpetual sense of danger. To live life as though it will be an eternally recurring moment vigilantly on a qui vive is not what most man will do unless it benefits him. For the most part, the hoi polloi are like the cavemen in Plato’s cave allegory who will upon their ascent to the light, upon willing to live and live with the truth, be bedazzled by the glare of the sun and would rather have his eyes full of the darkness and shadows he has been accustomed to.

Men then are indubitably imperfect creatures. Spinoza’s account for this is obvious when he gives an elaborate account of the passions that vilify men. Over-ambitiousness, jealousy, fear, shame, remorse, mockery, and despondency all function to incapacitate men to act for his own striving and perfection as Nietzsche would accede to. Nietzsche himself makes this point clear in his account of the slave-morality or ethics that impregnates most of mankind or Europe. The slaves as opposed to the noble grew hostile, hateful, resentful and vindictive for no longer is there an inward evaluation of oneself and hence, the attainment of happiness and satisfaction by one’s own standards but an outward projection of all self-evaluation producing contempt of others’ superiority and gloat over others’ misery. As such, the slaves insinuated Schuld (guilt) and the feeling of indebtedness Schulden upon others which they behold as moral laws in a commonwealth to encumber their self-striving in Spinozistic terms. Laws and punishments act in the slaves-weak mob who cannot deal with the battle-like, rapacious, exploitative, and destructive nature of life itself (TGOM, pp. 208) to equalize and make everyone like them.

Hence, Nietzsche writes:

“Wherever justice is practiced and maintained [in the commonwealth,] we see a stronger power intent on finding means to regulate the senseless raging of rancor among its weaker subordinates …[by] imposing a code of law…”

(Nietzsche TGOM pp. 207)

And punishment in the commonwealth against violators i.e. the noble-strong who dares to be idiosyncratic in their expression serve most importantly to incapacitate their will to live.

“Punishment [first] awakens a sense of guilt in the “culprit” [and acts as] the true instrument of the psychological reaction called “remorse”… [Secondly,] it breaks the will and brings about a miserable prostration and self-abasement.”

(Nietzsche TGOM pp. 214)

Thus as Nietzsche writes, laws and punishment in the commonwealth serves to instill bad conscience amongst the noble propagating self-mortification for redemption from the “sins” and “wrongs” they have committed and to emancipate them from their indebtedness. It promotes selflessness, self denial and self sacrifice as virtues (Nietzsche TGOM pp. 221) directly antithetical to the self-striving conatus that both Spinoza and Nietzsche endorses. Man’s instinct of freedom becomes blunted and is “driven underground to vent its energy upon itself” (Nietzsche TGOM pp. 220)

Thus, for Nietzsche, it seems that ideally, the will to life entails the extrication of the individual from the commonwealth that fetters him. The commonwealth is seen in the Genealogy of Morals as a commune that tries to fit the “unrestrained and shapeless populace into a tight mold” through violent acts and oppressive machinery that sounds with hindsight, very much like a Weberian notion of the “state” as an entity possession the legitimate use of violence. Several patches of Nietzsche’s writings points me to such a conclusion.

First, in The Dawn, Nietzsche writes:

“As little state as possible… At such a price, one pays far too dearly for the “general security” [that the state provides and moreover,] one creates the very opposite of general security. [It makes us comfortable and] secure against thieves and fireproof and infinitely comfortable for every trade and activity… these low, mediocre and not at all indispensable goals. [The state as like] its economy is a squanderer: it squanders what is most precious, the spirit.”

(The Dawn pp. 83 179)

Then in many parts in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes:

“O Solitude! O my home, solitude! Too long have I lived wildly in wild strange places not to return home to you in tears… I found it more dangerous to be among men than among animals… [all humans want] consideration and pity… with concealed truths, with a fool’s hands and a fond, foolish heart and a wealth of the little lies of pity…”

(Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Third part The Return Home pp. 295-297)

In Nietzsche’s analogy of the marketplace, he writes of it as analogous to the commonwealth where one’s neighbours are and will always poisonous flies that want to instill bad conscience into one. The market place is always filled with cowards and their cleverness to charm, flatters and whiners but nevertheless all flies that are bloodless souls, who nevertheless always crave for one’s blood and so Zarathustra urges:

“you, you deep one, [you have] suffer too deeply even from small wounds; and even before you healed, the same poisonous worm crawls over your hand. You are too proud to kill these greedy creatures. But beware lest it become your down-fall that you suffer all their poisonous injustice.”

(Thus Spoke Zarathustra: First part On the flies of the market place pp. 163-166)

Even in his later writings of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes as though the commonwealth, the marketplace is a bad place that needs escape from.

“Flee my friend, into your solitude: I see you stung all over by poisonous flies. Flee where the air is raw and strong. Flee into your solitude! You have lived too close to the small and miserable.”

(Thus Spoke Zarathustra: First part On the flies of the market place pp. 163-166)

Yet I do not think that the only recourse to Nietzsche’s idea of the state and commonwealth is to accept everything he says. Spinoza and Hobbes even can provide a brighter view of the commonwealth which I think is more rational and fairer in its account. In Spinoza’s ethica, he has asserted how man is so mobbed by passions. He defines “bondage” as man’s lack of power to moderate and restrain his affects and most men as it is, is always subject to the sway of his affects such that “although he sees the better for himself, he is still forced to follow the worse.” (Spinoza pp. 197) In a very similar picture, Hobbes writes of the human nature as that of a quarrelsome one as a corollary of competition, diffidence and the strive for one’s own glory (Hobbes pp. 75-77). Thus, without a civil state, there will always be war and contention for each man fights for his own life. But a commonwealth, man is binded by the lex naturalis a law of nature that is a precept derived by reason to forbid man to do that which is destructive of his life and forbid him from omitting that by which he thinks it maybe best preserved. The begetting of laws of nature i.e. notions of justice, equity, modesty and mercy also help to curb and constrain the natural passions as Spinoza himself has blacklisted e.g. partiality, pride, revenge cruelty to self and others and the like. Man thus, to live the best life must live in a commonwealth for otherwise, all his energies would be diverted only to war and defense. Under the aegis of the commonwealth, man can engage in a more fruitful and greater life for his neighbors’ are constrained by law not to harm him which if left to the behest of the natural environment, his neighbor might impetuously and precipitously inflict harm on him on any basis i.e. jealousy, anger and the like. Moreover, if men were to be allowed to live apart from the commonwealth, he would not live to his greatest perfection. This is because all men are finite beings or modes as under God’s infinite attributes, and are always subjected to being affected by a multiplicity of factors and things that can harm or aid him in nature including other men’s passions, environmental disasters and any other possibly conceivable thing. Spinoza writes this explicitly in part IV of the ethica on human bondage that the “body is disposed to be affected in a great many ways. Whatever renders the body less capable of acting is harmful and the more it renders the body capable of being affected in many other ways is more useful” (Spinoza pp. 221). Hence, if the nature of man is that of him being vulnerable and susceptible to a great many things, then to live to one’s greatest perfection and his best striving by the notion of the conatus, one has to live in a commonwealth that at least guarantees a basic security for man and acts as a “corrective apparatus” instead of a Nietzschean “repressive apparatus.”

In retrospect then, it is important for us to mount a genealogy of Nietzsche’s works itself to understand why such a prolific writer is so against the idea of living together in a commonwealth and associates the will to power with an emancipation from the fetters of the state. The question is then why does Nietzsche see the state as a reprehensible apparatus that cannot aid the individuation of the individual but must fetter his attempts. Could it be because of the ecclesiastical-church-state interconnectedness of his time that allowed his contempt for the religious superstructure i.e. Judaeo-Christianity to flow concomitantly to his idea of the state? This genealogy if done would be thought-provocative but is beyond the length of this paper to dwell into. Hence, I will conclude by reiterating the importance of having a more nuanced and balanced view of both notions of rationality and the commonwealth which I have attempted to show above. It is less important which line of thought we adopt but the understanding and rationalizing of our option which is the aim of this paper.