Malcolm Bull, The Politics of Falling, NLR 86, March-April 2014

7/25/2019 Malcolm Bull, The Politics of Falling, NLR 86, March-April 2014

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malcolm bull

THE POLITICS OF FALLING

Symposium: Response

It is a privilege to have critics to respond to, particularly oneswhose analyses are as incisive as those offered here. But readers

sometimes have surprises for authors, and that is true in this case.

Two phrases in particular have proved to be hostages to fortune:

‘transcendental argument’ and ‘distributive justice’. There is very little in

the book about either, but it is right for critics to seize upon them. There

is more to be said. Have I attributed to Nietzsche a transcendental argu-

ment that isn’t one (or, at least, not a good one), and am I advancing a

theory of distributive justice while claiming not to have one? I will try torespond to both questions, taking in other points along the way.

First, however, there is Raymond Geuss’s question about whether

Anti-Nietzsche, in addressing itself to a ‘systematic’ rather than a ‘per-

spectivist’ Nietzsche, gives an accurate impression of his method. There

are two issues here: whether Nietzsche’s writing is of a kind that allows

his ideas to be systematized, and whether he disavows system as a form

of thought. The first is literary, the second philosophical. Insofar as itsprimary focus is his account of nihilism, Anti-Nietzsche inevitably relies

on fragmentary material from the later notebooks. However, some of

this is already quite systematic in form (e. g. the Lenzer Heide fragment),

and Nietzsche’s various outlines for a major work on the Revaluation

of All Values indicate that he expected it to form the most coherent

exposition of his philosophy to date. It is hard to imagine Montaigne

projecting plans for a treatise of this kind, and Nietzsche was, in any

case, closer to Pascal—a more constant and adversarial presence in hiswork, and another aphorist whose world-view is more systematic than

its mode of expression.



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Anti-Nietzsche does not pretend to give a comprehensive overview of

everything Nietzsche wrote, but it does set out to distil the argument that

Nietzsche, during the final five years or so of his creative life, considered

his central contribution to European thought. One element of this is

the ‘perspectivist’ claim that everything is interpretation, including thatclaim itself. Some would argue that this means we should not attribute

to Nietzsche any coherent system, or even take anything Nietzsche says

too seriously—especially his alarming pronouncements about mastery

and slavery. There’s a sense in which that’s right, but the implication is,

I shall argue, quite the opposite. Rather than saying that ‘everything is

interpretation’ is itself merely an interpretation, Nietzsche emphasizes

that even that is an interpretation. This becomes clearer if we consider

it alongside Nietzsche’s claim that even devaluation (i.e. the idea thateverything is interpretation) is a form of valuation. Nietzsche routinely

equates interpretation and valuation, and argues that there can be no

escape from either. This is Nietzsche’s ‘transcendental argument’.1

Transcendental arguments

Peter Dews, whose essay in many ways provides a more illuminating

introduction to the book than any I could have written, is the first totake up the question. He suggests that ‘Nietzsche’s claim for the ubiq-

uity of the will to power (denials of which are, for him, merely sickly

expressions of the will) seems not to be transcendental but metaphysi-

cal. Transcendental arguments are supposed to rule out alternatives to

the conditions they discover as self-contradictory or unintelligible . . . But

there seems no such constraint on thinking of human thought and activ-

ity as driven by forces other than a putative “will to power”.’ Dews here

assumes that ‘everything is will to power’ is the subject of a transcenden-tal argument, but this is to conflate what are for Nietzsche two related

arguments, one of which is transcendental, one of which not.

Anti-Nietzsche suggests that in his later writings Nietzsche is attempt-

ing to derive an argument for social inequality from premises of the

most radically sceptical kind, and to show that nihilism, the ‘devaluation

1

The exposition and critique of Nietzsche’s thought in chapters 2 and 3 of Anti-Nietzsche makes no mention of a ‘transcendental argument’ at all, but the term isapplied retrospectively to the arguments of Heidegger and Nietzsche (an, p. 90 and

p. 123), and used, without a specific referent, in the prologue.



bull:

Response 131

of all values’ that constitutes the master narrative of European intellec-

tual history, must inevitably end in the acceptance of social inequality.

Nietzsche’s argument is this. We can’t devalue without valuing. Valuing

always takes the form of valuing over, and every valuation is the product

of a valuer, so every valuation is at the expense of some other valuer (‘willto power’). It is this inequality that makes valuation possible.

There are two claims here: the first that devaluation is necessarily a form

of valuation; the second is that valuation is itself a form of ‘will to power’.

It is the first of these that can be construed as a transcendental argu-

ment, in that it claims that one thing (valuation) is a necessary condition

of something else (devaluation) so that the latter cannot obtain without

the former. This is the argument dissected by Raymond Geuss. UnlikeDews, he seems to allow for the possibility that, if only the argument

worked, it would be transcendental in form; on his account, however,

the argument is unsuccessful, because ‘not-valuing’ is not necessarily a

form of valuation at all. He illustrates the point by enumerating four dif-

ferent forms of non-valuation: active dislike; indifference; indifference

born of ignorance, and indifference born of incapacity. On this view ‘val-

uing’ and ‘not-valuing’ lack ‘the degree of homogeneity the argument

seems to presuppose’.

Finely drawn as these distinctions are, the conclusion isn’t wholly per-

suasive. The first two, ‘active dislike’ and ‘I can take it or leave it’, are

forms of valuation/devaluation that differ in degree rather than kind;

while the latter two are forms of non-valuation due to incompleteness (I

have not read the novels) or incompletability (I am blind and cannot see

the paintings). It might be tempting to say that Nietzsche is concerned

only with the former, but Geuss is right to suggest that Nietzsche mightwant to consider indifference of the latter type to be a form of devalua-

tion as well. Nietzsche considers the displacement of values to be just

as much a form of devaluation as their negation, for he does not think

of valuation only as the expression of opinion (though having opinions

about things is clearly one of the ways we value) but as a set of revealed

preferences, a hierarchy, an implicit order of rank. Being unranked,

although not a specific place in a rank order, is nevertheless a place-

ment related to it. If my ‘To Do’ list contains ten items in rank order,they have been given priority over both the things I rejected, and the

things I might have thought about but did not even consider. In this



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context, not ascribing priority is tantamount to ascribing low priority,

and if I do not have any priorities, then not having any priorities is

my first priority.

If there is a problem with this, it is that it might appear to commitNietzsche to the absurd position that not-valuing two different things

(say, the work of a novelist I’ve never read, and high-frequency sounds I

cannot hear) is to put these two forms of non-valuation into a rank order

relative to one another. But rank order is not necessarily determinate

to the nth degree; some things are always going to be incomparable or

incommensurable. Not-valuing may implicitly ascribe a position rela-

tive to something else (e.g. the novelists I have read) without necessarily

assigning a rank relative to everything else. Nietzsche’s claim is not thatwe are valuing everything all the time, but rather that we are always

valuing something, even when (like Schopenhauer or the Buddhists) we

claim to be indifferent to everything.

The second part of Nietzsche’s argument derives from his insistent and

reductive materialism. Like Marx, Nietzsche is committed to translat-

ing man back into nature. This means that ‘answers to the question

about the value of existence, may always be considered first of all asthe symptoms of certain bodies’.2 Just as Marx equated Milton writing

poetry with a silkworm producing silk, Nietzsche considers value crea-

tion to be a physiological matter. Lack of enthusiasm for reading a novel

by Dickens and the tropic behaviour of plants (to use Geuss’s examples)

may not be quite the same thing, but the drive that is expressed through

them is the same. Both are manifestations of will to power, which is

why we probably should not take the content of any valuation or inter-

pretation too seriously—it is just one of the noises people make whenthey are fighting for mastery.

This is not itself a transcendental argument but, like the argument about

valuation, it is derived from the presuppositions of nihilism. Whereas the

former argument allows value to be reduced to the minimum required

to make valuation possible, the latter reduces valuation to mere tropism.

Nietzsche puts the two arguments together, so that the necessity attach-

ing to the transcendental argument is expressed through the biologicalrealities of the second. It is this that enables the move from the idea that

2 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York 1974,

Second Preface, § 2.



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Response 133

no one can live without evaluation to the conclusion that order of rank is

the supreme law of life.

On Nietzsche’s view, there is some way that the world has to be in order

for us to make sense of it—a literal ecology of value that is the pre-condition of any valuation at all. In Anti-Nietzsche, the countermove is

very simple, but it depends on separating Nietzsche’s transcendental-

ism from his biologism. In grafting a transcendental argument onto a

materialist one, Nietzsche forgets that the necessity that attaches to the

former does not carry over into the contingencies of the latter. Even if

we need inequality in order to make sense, the world could still be a bit

less unequal and make a bit less sense. That makes a negative ecology of

value sound extraordinarily easy and inviting. After all, who wouldn’t bewilling to make a bit less sense in order to have a more equal world? Or

have it more equal in order to make a bit less sense? Iterated, it becomes

a bit more difficult, especially if, like Nietzsche and Heidegger, you

assume that in ‘European nihilism’ it’s a move that has been iterated

countless times already and that there is almost nothing left.

Holding on to the ghost

There is as much in Anti-Nietzsche about Heidegger’s response to

Nietzsche and its legacy in contemporary European philosophy as there

is about Nietzsche himself. But nowhere is it claimed that Heidegger

dismisses ‘Soviets and capitalists as inferior animal-like versions of the

human, fit only to toil for an elevated Volk devoted to tending the embers

of Being’ (as Dews so eloquently puts it). On the contrary, it is explicitly

stated that ‘the point here is not that Heidegger seems to think of non-

Germans as he does animals; it is rather that he thinks of animals in thesame way as he does non-Germans.’3

As both Dews and Geuss acknowledge, in Anti-Nietzsche the potentially

barbarous consequences of Heidegger’s and Nietzsche’s thinking are not

automatically held against them.4 The implied analogy in Heidegger’s

Introduction to Metaphysics between human beings surrounded by the

3 an, p. 103.4 Anti-Nietzsche hardly uses ‘shock tactics’, as Keith Ansell-Pearson claims—though

if, like him, you believe that Nietzsche sets out ‘a progressive agenda of moraland social transformation’, there may well be shocks in store. (‘The Future is

Subhuman’, Radical Philosophy 175, Sept–Oct 2012, pp. 53–6).



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dark immensity of space, and the German people surrounded by the dark-

ness of communism and capitalism, is interesting because it assumes

that what distinguishes humans and Germans is the same thing: asking

the question of Being. Were that question to remain unasked, Heidegger

suggests, then humans and Germans alike would be enveloped in thesurrounding darkness: the human being would not stand out from the

elephant in the jungle, and the German would be indistinguishable

from, say, a Soviet citizen on a collective farm. Any similarity between

an Indian elephant and a Soviet farmer is neither here nor there. What

is significant is that Heidegger makes an analogy between two things

that he elsewhere claims to be different in kind rather than degree: the

darkness of the world and the world-poverty of the animal. If asking the

question of Being is what makes the difference in both cases, then leav-ing that question unasked must have the same consequences in both

as well, and the darkness of the elephant and the darkness of the Soviet

farmer must be of the same kind if not of the same degree.

If that is so, then the basis of Heidegger’s defence against nihilism

begins to give way. Heidegger believes that nihilism must inevitably turn

back on itself at the boundary of the species, in the human essence. But

if the boundary of the species is analogous to the borders of the Germannation, then it is going to be possible to slip over to the other side. The

monadic existence of the animal and the monadic life of modern man

constitute a similar threat, and in modernity someone can find them-

selves transposed into it without even noticing—which is what happens

to Lord Chandos in Hofmannsthal’s famous story. It is to avert that dan-

ger that Heidegger reminds the Germans of their national vocation in

the Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), rather as he had reminded human

beings of their unique vocation in the earlier Fundamental Concepts ofMetaphysics (1929–30).

Heidegger’s response to nihilism is, like Nietzsche’s, ultimately ecologi-

cal in the sense that it depends not on defending values that nihilism

has undermined, but upon there being a certain configuration of liv-

ing beings in the world. However, that is where the similarity ends, for

whereas Nietzsche needs an ecology of value in which the weak do not

swamp the valuing capacity of the strong, Heidegger’s ecology of Beingdoes not depend on relations of mastery and slavery (as Dews seems

to suppose). Tempting as it is to speculate on how useful Heidegger’s



bull:

Response 135

account of world-poverty might have been as a phenomenology of

slave-labour in the East, there is nothing in his account of nihilism that

would require it to serve that purpose. Heidegger’s ecology depends

solely on human beings never being anything less. But that, as the

Introduction to Metaphysics makes clear, is not something that canalways be taken for granted.

It is for this reason that subhumanism, the failure to be human

that comes from reading like a loser, has as destructive an effect on

Heidegger’s ecology as it does on Nietzsche’s. But whereas, in Nietzsche’s

case, a negative ecology works through shifting the demographic bal-

ance away from the value-positing strong, in Heidegger’s case a negative

ecology works not quantitatively but qualitatively, by making the worldless human, and less hospitable to Being. Dews claims that rather than

undermining Heidegger’s position, subhumans ‘would simply find

themselves excluded from the conversation’. But that is just the point.

Being excluded from the conversation is exclusion from language, from

‘world’, from the clearing of Being. It is the darkness spreading out.

But is that not, as Dews puts it, ‘simply giving up the ghost’? Maybe.

But in what way would ‘holding on to the ghost’, that last residue ofWestern metaphysics that first Nietzsche and then Heidegger failed to

squeeze out of philosophy, be a preferable alternative? Both Nietzsche

and Heidegger maintain, in their different ways, not that holding on to

the ghost is preferable but that giving up the ghost is impossible, that

we are inevitably left holding on to something even when we try to let it

go. Anti-Nietzsche turns that argument around. If that ghost is just our

humanity, it is merely a collection of social and biological characteristics,

and relinquishing it is something we may do without being able to helpit, maybe without even being aware of it. So why not just go and fall

into an abyss, Dews asks, in an aptly chosen quotation from Aristotle?

Indeed, why not? I will come back to that.

Distributive justice

For Nietzsche, as I have argued above, valuation is unavoidable, and

inequality is necessary for valuation to take place, and so inequalityis necessary as well. Nietzsche is explicitly opposed to egalitarianism,

and his argument about valuation is designed to demonstrate that



136 nlr 86

egalitarianism is incoherent. It would therefore appear to be obvious

that any anti-Nietzschean position must be an egalitarian one, especially

one committed to a negative ecology of value. And this is what Kenta

Tsuda assumes is found in Anti-Nietzsche which, he claims, follows Marx

in seeking to establish ‘complete equality . . . among the citizens of thenegative community’.5 That is not quite right, though I have to concede

that the final chapter of Anti-Nietzsche is rather ambiguous here. In fact,

the argument is neither straightforwardly Marxist nor egalitarian, nor

even non-egalitarian in a Marxist sort of way.

Marx envisages a form of negative community, but he is not an egalitar-

ian in anything like the usual sense of the word. Anti-Nietzsche is also

open to the possibility of negative community, but diverges from Marxin that, rather than being neither egalitarian nor inegalitarian, it is ‘extra-

egalitarian’ in that it potentially uses egalitarianism to generate both

equal and unequal distributions. To borrow Geuss’s helpful distinction:

‘real’ egalitarianism is equality for equals, whereas ‘ascriptional’ egali-

tarianism is a demand for the equality of unequals. Extra-egalitarianism

takes up this demand and never lets it go. It requires not only that any

unequal distribution become more egalitarian, but that any equal distri-

bution should become less so by expanding its domain and includingthe less than equal so that they can be made equal in their turn. Geuss’s

analogy with Hegel’s ‘good infinity’ is appropriate: extra-egalitarianism

is a form of equality that is forever assimilating its opposite.

So, although it starts from Babouvist premises, extra-egalitarianism

is a process not a state, and ‘equality is the means, not the end’.6 As

I acknowledge elsewhere, it would be quite possible to devise a non-

egalitarian form of levelling out that did not require complete equality tobe realized at any stage.7 Extra-egalitarianism does not have a telos: it is

a ‘What next?’, not a ‘What if?’ kind of theory—an algorithm for under-

mining value through extending equality. The results will eventually

approximate to negative community, but whereas for Marx this (and not

5 Other critics have put it more starkly. According to Ross Wolfe, Anti-Nietzsche maintains ‘a bland, unimaginative egalitarianism’: ‘Twilight of the Idoloclast?

On the Left’s Recent Anti-Nietzschean Turn’, posted on thecharnelhouse.org,

January 2013.6 an, p. 166.7 ‘Levelling Out’, nlr 70, July–Aug 2011, p. 23.



bull:

Response 137

equality) is a telos, a utopian return to origins, in Anti-Nietzsche, negative

community is merely the outcome of the algorithm.

It is in this context that Tsuda’s challenging question about how goods are

to be distributed in a negative community must be addressed. Picking upthe claim that ‘extra-egalitarianism . . . transforms questions about value

into questions about need’,8 he interprets this to mean that in a negative

community there is an ‘equal right to the satisfaction of need’, which

therefore requires a theory of need to explain how needs are commen-

surable. Otherwise, the concept of need is just ‘empty’. This is a genuine

problem, but I do not think it is as pressing for my account of negative

community as it is for that of Marx, who (as Geuss points out) dismissed

equality itself as an empty concept and focused on needs instead.

Marx’s account of the final stage of communism, in which goods are

distributed to each according to need, implies a needs-based theory of

distribution right from the start. In this context, we do have to know how

to balance my need for a new car with your need for a new house and

so on. Extra-egalitarianism transforms values into needs in a different

sense, by allowing that equality might eventually be extended to a point

at which only basic needs are met—Parfit’s ‘repugnant conclusion’,where a very large population subsists on a diet of muzak and potatoes.

From where we are now—a world where the poorest 5 per cent in a

wealthy Western country may be better off than the richest 5 per cent

in Africa or India—we can level out a long way before ever reaching

a situation remotely like the repugnant conclusion.9 But let’s suppose

that we do, and that eventually there isn’t enough muzak or potatoes

to go round. It’s easy to do without the muzak, but the potatoes area different matter. What happens when they start to run out as well?

That’s where the force of Tsuda’s point is finally felt. Under conditions

of scarcity, any negative community is going to be threatened by the

tragedy of the commons. In these circumstances everyone won’t just be

able to take what they need because there isn’t enough to go round. But

if, as I claim, negative community has dissolved ‘the concept of prop-

erty, and with it the possibility of equality, or any form of distributive

8 ‘Levelling Out’, p. 24.9 Branko Milanovic, The Haves and the Have-Nots, New York 2011, pp. 115–9.



138 nlr 86

justice’, then how are goods going to be distributed?10 It is a fair ques-

tion, but what is required at this point is not so much a theory of needs

as a theory of triage.

It’s clear, however, that a negative ecology of value cannot have a theoryof triage, because triage (which leaves some people to die because of the

greater priority given to the lives of others) is what negative ecology has

been avoiding all along. If, as Nietzsche suggests, valuation is triage in

disguise, not having a theory of triage is the essence of nihilism. In an

ecology of value, exclusion is always needed just to preserve value; in a

negative ecology, no one is excluded. There’s liable to be a panicky reac-

tion to this, along the lines of: ‘You’re going to let everyone on board

the lifeboat and they are all going to drown’. To which the response is:‘That’s something for everyone to think about when the situation arises’.

Politics of falling

In a related article, ‘Levelling Out’, I cited Jonathan Wolff’s thought

experiment, in which a swimming pool in the American South is closed

by a mayor rather than allowed to become a whites-only facility, as an

example of a case in which levelling might be justified. To this, Tsudajuxtaposes a historical case which, on the surface, appears very similar—

the ‘Stanley Plan’ which involved closing public schools rather than

allowing them to be racially integrated as required by federal law. Tsuda

notes that ‘like Wolff’s hypothetical, the Stanley Plan closures involved

Pareto-inferior levelling down’, a levelling that ‘Bull would not have

found desirable’ though he ‘cannot explain why not’.

However, the structural similarity exists only if we take Wolff’s thoughtexperiment as a levelling down, rather than, as in my re-interpretation of

it, a form of levelling out. What makes the example persuasive is that it

moves from an original (white) population enjoying a benefit, to include

an additional (black) population that does not enjoy it, and then com-

bines the two so that no one enjoys it. On this reading, the plausibility

of the example depends on the second step—the inclusion of extra peo-

ple. In the case of the Stanley Plan, however, the schools should legally

already be racially integrated, but are closed so that the same (blackand white) population cannot be educated together. As Tsuda points

10 an, p. 159.



bull:

Response 139

out, both are Pareto-inferior outcomes. The difference between the two

is this: the first example involves extra people, whereas the latter is a

same-number case.

But what’s so good about extra-people? Maybe nothing, except thatthere are things that sharing resources will make us forgo. Extra-

egalitarianism repeatedly asks whether the things we take to be intrinsic

values worth preserving aren’t just privileges—like the use of Wolff’s

swimming pool. What’s so valuable about the uk that it can’t be shared

with eu migrants? What’s so valuable about the eu that it can’t be shared

with the Turks? What’s so valuable about the Turkish state that it can’t be

shared with Syrian refugees? The purpose of levelling out is to abolish

both illusion and exclusion, and so make it progressively more difficultto specify what is for the best by repeatedly asking ‘Best for whom?’ But

if that means we are going to accept (not ‘advocate’, as Tsuda suggests)

outcomes that are strongly Pareto-inferior, i.e. better for no one, why

don’t we just go and fall into an abyss?

For Nietzsche, inequality is the source of value, and if Pareto-efficiency

were allowed to create a floor beyond which egalitarianism could not

take us, then the Pareto-efficient level of inequality would constitutethe minimum level of value in the world. If that were the case, the

history of nihilism would have come to an end as soon as it became

Pareto-inefficient, maybe even before Nietzsche takes up the story.

Pareto-efficiency, like equality itself, potentially provides a floor—a base-

line beyond which politics can go no further. But as Nietzsche repeatedly

reminds us: there is no floor. Even if we think we have reached it there

is always a certain lethargy to our social arrangements, an ineradicable

tendency for individuals to fall below their potential, and an associatedelasticity in the boundaries that define the social groups to which they

belong. Nietzsche calls this gravity. There is no ideal, no account of the

good life, strong enough to resist it.

That is important. Since Machiavelli, political theory has derived much

of its urgency from a sense of diminishing certainty about what can

be taken for granted. If you believe in the divine right of kings, then

it is not going to be difficult to work out the best form of government.But for most political thinkers, the first problem has been that of estab-

lishing the ground on which a theory can be constructed. One way to

establish a ground is to discover a floor—some historical or, more often,



140 nlr 86

hypothetical, state of affairs in which uncertainty comes to rest, either

because we cannot imagine anything less, or because it would be irra-

tional to prefer anything worse. Making a floor into a foundation ensures

that political theory always starts off at ground level. Think of Hobbes,

who proposes ‘to return once again to the natural state and to look atmen as if they had just emerged from the earth like mushrooms’.11

Both Machiavelli and Nietzsche take seriously the idea that if political

theory is ungrounded in the sense of having no foundations, it will also

be ungrounded in the sense that it has no floor. If there is nothing that

we can take for granted, there are no constraints on where politics might

take us, no safety net at all. Politics, as Nietzsche imagines it, is not like

building something up out of the earth, it is more like a formation ofskydivers in the air: ‘Are we not plunging continually? Backward, side-

ward, forward, in all directions . . . straying as though through an infinite

nothing?’12 We cannot help ourselves falling, but Nietzsche thinks there

is an inegalitarian formation we can adopt in which a few of us will

stop falling and start flying. And the rest? ‘Him you do not teach to fly,

teach—to fall faster ’.13 In Anti-Nietzsche it is different. We are, all of us,

falling slowly through the air.

11 Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, trans. Michael Silverthorne, Cambridge 1998,p. 102.12 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §125. Perhaps only Machiavelli, with his

vision of men tossed around by Fortune like flotsam on a flooded river, comes closeto Nietzsche here. See Gopal Balakrishnan, ‘Future Unknown’, nlr 32, Mar–Apr

2005, pp. 5–21.13 Friedrich Nietzsche,Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth1969, p. 226.

Malcolm Bull, The Politics of Falling, NLR 86, March-April 2014

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