Revue internationale de philosophie n° 241_0245

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OVERCOMING THE WEIGHT OF MAN : NIETZSCHE, DELEUZE, AND

POSSIBILITIES OF LIFE

Keith Ansell Pearson

Assoc. R.I.P. | Revue internationale de philosophie

2007/3 - n°241pages 245 à 259

ISSN 0048-8143

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Ansell Pearson Keith, « Overcoming the Weight of Man : Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Possibilities of Life »,

Revue internationale de philosophie , 2007/3 n°241, p. 245-259.

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Overcoming the Weight of Man:

Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Possibilities of Life

Keith Ansell Pearson

If only someone could rediscover“these possibilities of life!”

(Nietzsche, 1875)

What does it want, this will without which the Earthitself remains meaningless? What is its quality, aquality which also becomes the quality of the Earth?Nietzsche replies: “The weightless…” [ La légère]( Nietzsche et la philosophie 90; 79).

I hear the phrase “possibilities of life” in terms of a distinctly Nietzschean registerand inspiration. Deleuze employs this formulation from Nietzsche in his ground-breaking work of 1962, Nietzsche and Philosophy, and again several decades laterin What is Philosophy? In this essay I want to do two things. First, I want to

show the context in which the formulation appears in Nietzsche’s writings andis developed by him, which is a notebook from 1873. Second, I want to addressthe topic in the context of Nietzsche’s encounter with man’s monstrous moralpast, namely, his attempt to present the “genealogy of morality” as a “Dionysiandrama on the ‘fate of the soul.’” This will lead me to propose that we need tocarry out an important refinement of Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche. Finally,I shall say something briefly on Deleuze’s statement on shame in What is

Philosophy?, which is especially pertinent to the approach to the topic I amadopting here.

Nietzsche on Art, Science, and Philosophy

A feature of Nietzsche’s thinking that remains constant throughout his variedproductions is the attempt to work out the relation among art, science, andphilosophy. This is the case with the attempt to posit “the gay science,” but itis also a feature of Nietzsche’s early reflections.1

1. The following are the texts of Nietzsche cited in this essay: Beyond Good and Evil, trans.

Marion FABER (Oxford & New York, Oxford University Press, 1998) [cited as BGE]; Onthe Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol DIETHE (Cambridge & New York, CambridgeUniversity Press, 1994, second, revised edition, 2006) [cited as GM]; The Gay Science, trans.Walter KAUFMANN (New York: Vintage Books, 1974); “The Philosopher: Reflections on theStruggle between Art and Knowledge”, in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s (New Jersey & London, Humanities Press, 1979), pp. 3-61; “TheStruggle between science and wisdom”, Philosophy and Truth, pp. 127-49.

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Keith Ansell Pearson246

In the early to mid 1870s Nietzsche was working on a project he called The Philosophers’ Book (to which he gave the sub-title “Reflections on the Struggle

between Art and Knowledge”). At the centre of Nietzsche’s concerns is whathe calls “the knowledge-drive” and its unselective and selective operations. Hedescribes philosophy as the “selective knowledge-drive,” and argues that theunlimited knowledge-drive is the consequence of an impoverished life. Thisdrive operates selectively when the value and goal of the knowledge have beendetermined. Nietzsche says that the difference between the effect of philosophyand that of science, as well as their different origins, needs to be made clear.Nietzsche poses the question: is philosophy an art or science? His answer is

that in its aims and results philosophy is an art, but it uses the same means asscience,2 namely, conceptual representation. He writes: “Philosophy is a form ofartistic invention. There is no appropriate category for philosophy; therefore, wemust make up and characterise a species for it.” Philosophy is invention beyondthe limits of experience. It is the continuation of what he calls the “mythicaldrive” and is something essentially pictorial. There is a great kinship betweenphilosophers and founders of religion (this insight is picked up again and refinedin the Third Essay of the Genealogy of Morality: the philosopher necessarily

dons the guise of an ascetic priest, even though he is not one).3 What does philosophy do in relation to science and art? First, it draws attention

to science’s “barbarizing effects,” chiefly, the fact that it so easily loses itselfin the service of practical interests. The laisser aller attitude of modern scienceresembles the dogmas of political economy: it has a naïve faith in an absolutelybeneficial result. Second, it employs artistic powers to break the unlimitedknowledge-drive in order to produce a unity of knowledge. The primary concernof philosophy consists in determining the value of existence. Nietzsche notes:

“For science there is nothing great and nothing small – but for philosophy!The value of science is measured in this sentence” (“The Philosopher” number34). In a later notebook from 1875 Nietzsche claims that whilst science canprobe the processes of nature it can never command human beings: “scienceknows nothing of taste, love, pleasure, displeasure, exaltation or exhaustion.

2. We should note that the German term Nietzsche uses, Wissenschaft , refers not simply to thenatural sciences but to any disciplined, self-critical, and organised mode of knowledge.

3. Deleuze comments on this as follows: “Interpretation reveals its complexity when we realisethat a new force can only appear and appropriate an object by first of all putting on the maskof the forces which are already in possession of the object…Thus the philosopher can only beborn and grow with any chance of survival by having the contemplative air of the priest, ofthe ascetic and religious man who dominated the world before he appeared” ( Nietzsche et la

philosophie, Paris, PUF, 1962 p. 5; Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, London,Athlone Press, p. 5).


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Overcoming the Weight of Man:Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Possibilities of Life

247

Man must in some way interpret, and thereby, evaluate, what lives throughand experiences” (“The Struggle between Science and Wisdom,” no. 199).

Philosophy is close to art, but at the same time it cannot exist without science:“there is no distinct philosophy separated from science.” At the same time it ispossible to detect philosophical thinking in the midst of all scientific thinking (forexample, in conjectures). Nietzsche speculates whether the difference betweenphilosophical and scientific thinking resides in the different speeds at whichthey think, with philosophy being an “infinitely rapid flight through immensespaces.” He argues that what distinguishes them, in fact, is that philosophy isthe “wing beat of imagination” in the sense that it repeatedly leaps “from possi-

bility to possibility”; in short, philosophy is thinking which specifically takesup “possibility” and accords value to it (“The Philosopher” no. 60). Even whenwe think we have established certainty in the case of something, philosophywill reinstate the rights of possibility: “Here and there, from a possibility to acertainty and then back to a possibility” (ibid.).

This leads Nietzsche to ask whether scientific thinking – which is involvedin possibility – is distinguished from philosophical thinking by the dosage orby the domain. Ultimately, a philosophical thought retains a higher value than

a scientific proposition on account of its aesthetic value, such as its beauty andsublimity (ibid. 61; let me note that in his book on Hume Deleuze specificallyidentifies the concept of “possibility” with the aesthetic).4 Nietzsche’s idea isthat a construction of philosophy cannot prove itself in the same way as a scien-tific proposition (a riddle from Heraclitus for example). The constructions ofphilosophy can only be approached in terms of considerations of artistic value.If we allow for the knowledge-drive to be mastered by the imagination then thephilosopher is filled with the “highest pathos of truth.” Why? Simply because:

“the value of his knowledge vouches to him for its truth” (ibid). It is this pathosthat is at work in the later conception of the gay or joyful science. Pathos meansfeeling, but also ardour and fervour, and it becomes a key issue for Nietzsche inthe 1880s when he places the stress on our need to make of knowledge the mostpowerful passion, and concerning which he expresses his affinity with Spinoza.At the end of The Gay Science 341 on the “heaviest weight” Nietzsche speaksof wanting nothing more ardently than the ultimate eternal confirmation andseal offered by the eternal return of the same.

4. Gilles DELEUZE, Empiricism and Subjectivity. An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature,trans. C. V. BOUNDAS (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 57: “Aesthetics isthe science which envisages things and beings under the category of power or possibility.”


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What, then, is philosophy? It is bound to the discovery of what Nietzschecalls “ possibilities of life” (“The Struggle” no. 200; this formulation appears

in Nietzsche et la philosophie, French text, 115; English translation, 101).5 ForNietzsche the philosopher is not a deformed or ruined figure with a priestly face,not a scrawny desert hermit, and not a fanatic or theologising counterfeiter;rather, the philosopher is a circumnavigator “of life‘s most remote and dangerousregions.” A complex knowledge-drive guides the philosopher in this enterprise,encouraging him to leave behind inhabited lands and to venture forth into theunknown; on the other hand, the drive which desires life “must again and againgrope its way back to an approximately secure place on which it can stand”

(ibid.). The later Nietzsche places the stress on how the growth of neutral andindifferent knowledge can become our new passion, and for this to take placewe need to practise the incorporation ( Einverleibung) of truth and knowledge(see The Gay Science 110). What guides this incorporation is the search for newmodes of existence, those of a rarer, more delicate, more subtle and refined, andsuperior kind. This is precisely how Deleuze configures the significance of ourincorporation of the eternal return when conceived in terms of a new practicalsynthesis: “One thing in the world disheartens Nietzsche: the little compensa-

tions, the little pleasures, the little joys… Everything that can be done again thenext day only on the condition that it be said the day before: tomorrow I willgive it up – the whole ceremonial of the obsessed” (NP 78; 68). For DeleuzeNietzsche’s significance is to have shown us that thought can become the powerof an affirmative life. This is a “thought that would go the limit of what life cando, a thought that would lead life to the limit of what it can do…” (115; 101).For Deleuze there are so many territories and zones to explore: “The heightof summits and caves, the labyrinths; midday-midnight; the halcyon aerial

element and also the element of the subterranean…extreme places…extremetimes, where the highest and deepest truths live and rise up” (126; 110). In anote from 1881, as he is preparing the The Gay Science, Nietzsche states thatthe fundamental condition of the passion of knowledge is to give existence anaesthetic meaning and so augment our taste for it, which is to augment our tastefor living out possibilities of existence.

For Deleuze, Nietzsche’s practise of knowledge heralds the arrival of theoverman, which is to be conceived as a new way of thinking, of feeling (sentir ),

5. Gilles DELEUZE, Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: PUF, 1962). Nietzsche and Philosophy,trans. Hugh TOMLINSON (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Cited henceforthas NP, with page references to the French edition followed by references to the correspondingpages in the English translation.


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249

and of being (NP 81; 71). The affirmative mode of existence means setting freewhat lives, not taking on the burden of what is: “To affirm is to unburden: not to

load life with the weight of higher values, but to create new values…which makelife light and active” (212; 185). The object of philosophy is neither the true northe real but rather the sense and value of life, “not affirmation as acceptance butas creation; not man but the Overman as a new form of life” (213; 185).

Nietzsche, Deleuze and Genealogy

In Nietzsche and Philosophy Deleuze accords tremendous importance to the

texts of Nietzsche’s late period, notably Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On

the Genealogy of Morality (1887). In fact, Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche isstructured in accordance with the priority it grants the critical (dealing with thesemiology of morals) and clinical (dealing with morality as symptomatology)project we find outlined in Nietzsche’s text, On the Genealogy of Morality.Thus, for example the opening chapter on “The Tragic,” which concerns theearly Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy), begins, significantly, with a sectionentitled “The Concept of Genealogy.”

At the very start of the book Deleuze states that, “Nietzsche’s most generalproject is the introduction of the concepts of sense and value into philosophy.”This leads to a radical rethinking of the object of philosophical investigation,namely, the phenomenon, which is no longer to be thought of as an appearancebut as a sign that finds its sense or meaning in some existing play of forces: “Allforce is appropriation, domination, and exploitation of a quantity of reality. Evenperception…is the expression of forces which appropriate nature…nature itselfhas a history. The history of a thing, in general is the succession of forces which

take possession of it…” (NP 4; 3). Every event and every phenomenon havemultiple senses attached to them since everything depends on the forces whichtake hold of the thing: “Pluralism is the properly philosophical way of thinking,the one invented by philosophy…the only principle of a violent atheism” (4; 4).In contrast to Hegel’s ridiculing of pluralism, in which it is equated with a naïveconsciousness, Deleuze insists that the idea that a thing has many senses “isphilosophy’s greatest achievement, the conquest of the true concept, its matu-rity and not its renunciation or infancy” (ibid.). This pluralism, however, is not

equivalent to relativism. To interpret and evaluate a thing is to engage in a subtleand delicate art of weighing, in which the conception of “essence” remains atwork, “for not every sense has the same value” (5; 4). No thing is neutral, saysDeleuze, but has “more or less affinity with the force in current possession”


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(ibid.). Deleuze proposes that the “method of dramatisation” is the only methodthat can prove adequate to Nietzsche’s project and to the form of its questions:

“a differential, typological, and genealogical method” (89; 79). In the prefaceto the English translation of Nietzsche and Philosophy Deleuze stresses a pointthat he plays out several times in the book, namely, that one of the most originalfeatures of Nietzsche’s philosophy is the way it transforms the question “whatis…?” into the question “which one is…?” He insists that the “one” does notso much refer to a person or an individual but to an event, “that is to the forcesin their various relationships in a proposition or a phenomena…’The one that’is always Dionysus, a mask or a guise of Dionysus…” (NP xi).

Although it is often prized as his most important and systematic work, Nietzschehimself conceived his text of 1887, On the Genealogy of Morality, as a small,polemical pamphlet that might help him to sell more copies of his earlier writ-ings. It clearly merits, though, the level of attention it receives from commenta-tors, and Deleuze was one of the first to draw attention to its importance. Forshock-value no other modern text on the human condition rivals it. Nietzschehimself was well aware of the character of the book. There are moments in thetext where he reveals his own sense of shock at what he is discovering about

human origins and development, especially the perverse nature of the humananimal, the being he calls “the sick animal” (GM III, 14): “There is so muchin man that is horrifying!....The world has been a madhouse for too long!”(GM II, 22). In Ecce Homo Nietzsche discloses that an “art of surprise” guideseach of the three essays that make up the book and admits that they merit beingtaken as among the uncanniest things ever scripted. He then stresses that hisgod, Dionysus, is also the god of darkness ( Ecce Homo, “Genealogy”; see alsoBGE 295). But whilst it is one of the darkest books ever written, it is also

informed by great expectation and hope for the future.Although it can be read as a seminal contribution to modern naturalism,

nothing less than a new twist and possible outcome of the “ Dionysian drama

on ‘the fate of the soul’” is what is to be meditated upon and chewed overin our exegetical reading of the book. The critical aim of the project is tocombat the “degeneration and diminution of man into a perfect herd animal”(BGE 203). This requires that we recognize “that man is the animal that has not

yet been established ” and that it is possible for man to be something other than

a “sublime deformity” (BGE 62). For Nietzsche nihilism stems from the factthat the sight of man now makes us tired, and what he seeks is a “glimpse of aman who justifies man himself …and enables us to retain our faith in mankind !”(GM I, 12; see also III, 14). Nietzsche considers the so-called “science of


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251

morality” to be at a clumsy and crude state of development (BGE 186). Hewants to enliven this science by drawing attention to the importance of questions

of origins and descent, of decisive events, and, perhaps most importantly, ofvalue and future possibility. Nietzsche contends that there is no thinker in Europewho is prepared to entertain the idea that moral reflection can be carried out in adangerous and seductive manner, “that it might involve one’s fate!” (BGE 228).Nietzsche argues that in their attempts to account for morality philosophers havenot developed the suspicion that morality might be something problematic; ineffect what they have done is to articulate “an erudite form of true belief in theprevailing morality,” and, as a result, their inquiries remain “a part of the state

of affairs within a particular morality” (BGE 186). Nietzsche does not inquireinto a “moral sense” or a moral faculty – a common intellectual practice in thework of modern moralists and humanists, such as Francis Hutcheson, Hume,and Kant, for example – but rather sets out to uncover the different senses ofmorality, that is the different meanings morality has acquired in the history ofhuman development. His attempt at a critique involves developing a knowledgeof the conditions and circumstances under which values emerged, and this willgive us an appreciation of the different senses of morality: as symptom, as mask,

as sickness, as stimulant, as poison, and so on.Nietzsche begins the Genealogy proper by paying homage to “English psychol-

ogists,” a group of pioneering researchers who have held a microscope to thesoul and, in the process, come up with a new set of truths: “plain, bitter, ugly,foul, unchristian, immoral…” (GM I, 1). The work of these psychologists has itsbasis in the empiricism of Locke and in Hume’s new approach to the mind, andseeks to show that so-called complex, intellectual activity emerges out of proc-esses that are, in truth, “stupid,” such as the vis inertiae of habit and the random

coupling or association of ideas. In the attempt of “English psychologists” toshow the real and “ungodly” mechanisms of the mind Nietzsche sees at work nota malicious and mean instinct, and not simply a pessimistic suspicion about thehuman animal, but the research of proud and generous spirits who have sacrificedmuch to the cause of truth. He greatly admires the honest craftsmanship of theirintellectual labors. He criticizes them, however, for their lack of a real historicalsense, for bungling their moral genealogies, and for failing to raise questions ofvalue and future legislation. In section 252 of Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche

speaks of “respectable, but mediocre Englishmen,” such as the likes of Darwin,Spencer, and John Stuart Mill. To repeat: what the “English” lack according toNietzsche is “spiritual vision of real depth – in short, philosophy.” As Deleuzenotes, Nietzsche’s superior empiricism devotes itself to distinguishing between


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noble and base ways of thinking and to raising questions of value (that ofmorality and of truth, for example). Nietzsche criticizes British empiricism for

failing to make use of truth in this way; in its timidity with regard to the tasksof cultural discipline and breeding it displays its “plebeian ambition” (BGE213) and allows truth to further the ends only of the transformation of man intoa perfect herd-animal.

Deleuze conceives genealogy as an exercise in positive critique. It is not anact of revenge or resentment, but the expression of an active mode of existence,a mode of attack that affirms natural aggression as a way of being. Genealogyconcerns itself with origins and with the differential element of values fromwhich their value itself derives. This means that it concerns not simply originor birth but difference and distance in the origin (NP 3; 2). It is bound up withour determination of nobility and baseness, of high and low, and of nobilityand decadence and vulgarity in the origin. Deleuze’s conception of genealogyis complicated because it acknowledges that “genealogy does not appear onthe first night” and “we risk serious misunderstanding if we look for the child’sfather at the birth” (6; 5). In short, the difference “in” origin does not necessarilyappear “at” the origin. Moreover, the origin can often find itself caught up in

an inverted self-image in which difference becomes negation and affirmationbecomes contradiction; in short, active forces find themselves perceived fromthe side of reactive forces: “Active forces are noble but find themselves beforea plebeian image, reflected in a reactive force” (63; 56). This is how Deleuzesucceeds in positioning Nietzsche as a genealogist in spite of the fact that it isfar from self-evident that Nietzsche is, in fact, doing a “genealogy of morality.”In the book Nietzsche repeatedly takes to task a range of thinkers for the waysin which they, as he sees it, bungle their moral genealogies. Indeed, Nietzsche’s

historical inquiries lead him to question one of the essential assumptions ofgenealogy, namely, that there is a line of descent that can be continuously tracedfrom a common ancestor. In contrast to a genealogical approach to moralityNietzsche places the emphasis much more on decisive events, discontinuities,and fundamental transformations. This is reflected in the German title of the workwhich indicates that Nietzsche sees himself not creating a new subject or concept,but rather as making a contribution to an existing discipline and subject.

Deleuze’s argument, however, is ingenious. Although genealogy is the art of

difference and distinction, today it finds its image turned upside down: “Whetherit is English or German, evolutionism is the reactive image of genealogy,” wherethe English style is largely that of utilitarianism and the German style that ofHegelian dialectics (63; 56). The result of both is the “mediocrity of thought”


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that characterizes liberal modernity and reflects our mania for interpreting andevaluating phenomena in terms of reactive forces and energies. Deleuze draws

attention to Nietzsche’s particular, and complicated, concern with “origins,”and thus genealogy can properly be conceived as the art of nobility. Unless thetypology of active and reactive forces and affects was at the center of Nietzsche’sproject, and unless an active science was indeed operative in Nietzsche’s text,it would be difficult to make sense of genealogy as this kind of art.

The Great Health

Deleuze contends:

The spirit of revenge is the genealogical element of our thought, the transcen-dental principle of our way of thinking. Nietzsche’s struggle against nihilismand spirit of revenge will therefore mean the reversal of metaphysics, theend of history as history of man and the transformation of the sciences…Nietzsche presents the aim of his philosophy as the freeing of thought fromnihilism and its various forms. (NP 40; 35)

This is not the place to subject to close examination the details of Deleuze’s

reading of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality. I need, however, to expressa concern I have about Deleuze’s reading: does its interpretation of Nietzsche asthe anti-dialectician (anti-Hegelian) par excellence mean that he posits the fictionof a pure, active force? And, moreover, does this lead him to underestimate thesignificance of Nietzsche’s treatment of bad conscience? Let me simply notethat Deleuze appears to identify too quickly ressentiment and bad conscience,at one point claiming that the latter takes over and completes the work of theformer (NP 146; 128), and so missing the challenge of Nietzsche’s argument:

the coming into being of man’s bad conscience precedes all ressentiment . ForNietzsche, it is a development that is inadequately understood if it is thoughtin evolutionary terms, such as for example an “organic assimilation into newcircumstances”; rather, what is involved, he stresses, is a “leap,” a “compulsion,”and, as such, the bad conscience has to be read as a catastrophe and a fate. Thisis a difficult thought for us – especially coming after Deleuze – to swallow anddigest, not simply because it means that man is by definition a reactive animal(Deleuze fully appreciates this point), but because it means that bad conscience

is not something man can opt either into or out of: to think of an over-humanbeing that would be beyond bad conscience is to engage in fantasy, and this isnot what Nietzsche wishes us to do.


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In the Second Essay of the Genealogy Nietzsche outlines a story about theorigins and emergence of feelings of debt and guilt (personal obligation). He

is concerned with nothing less than the evolution of the human mind and howits basic ways of thinking have come into being, such as inferring, reckoning,calculating, weighing, and anticipating. He is also concerned with how a Chris-tian-moral culture has cultivated a type of bad conscience in which feelings ofdebt and guilt cannot be relieved. This is because the bad conscience becomesattached to a set of sublime metaphysical fictions, such as eternal punishmentand original sin, in which release is inconceivable. For Nietzsche our sense of“guilt” has evolved through several momentous and fateful events in history.

In the earliest societies individuals are answerable for their deeds and there isan obligation to honoring “debts.” In the course of history this material sense ofobligation has been subject to increasing moralization and reaches its summitwith the feeling of guilt before the Christian God. Now individuals are answer-able for their very existence, regardless of any of the actual conditions of thatexistence.6

In section 16 of this Second Essay of the Genealogy Nietzsche advances, albeitin a preliminary fashion, his own theory on the origin of the bad conscience. He

looks upon it “as a serious illness to which man was forced to succumb by thepressure of the most fundamental of all changes which he experienced.” Thischange takes place when man finds himself “imprisoned within the confines ofsociety and peace.” On the one hand, Nietzsche approaches the bad conscienceas “the worst and most insidious illness” that could come into being and as asickness from which man has yet to recover, his sickness of himself. On the otherhand, he maintains that the “prospect of an animal soul turning against itself”is a momentous event, and a spectacle too interesting “to be played senselessly

unobserved on some ridiculous planet.”In section 17 Nietzsche states the two main presuppositions of his theory.

First, this fundamental change in man was neither a gradual nor a voluntary one;rather, it was “a breach, a leap, a compulsion, a fate” that nothing could wardoff, and it involved neither struggle nor ressentiment . Second, the formationof a shapeless population into a stable character can only take place throughacts of tremendous violence, and thus the oldest state emerges “as a repressiveand ruthless” machine of tyranny. Nietzsche imagines a pack of “blond beasts

6. One of the places in his writings where Nietzsche takes to task the idea that a person is respon-sible “for simply being there, for being made in such a way, for existing under such conditions,and in such surroundings,” and offers an alternative teaching, is section 8 of “The Four GreatErrors” in Twilight of the Idols.


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form of Christ does not produce human liberation, but only serves to intensify thedebtor’s feeling of guilt. The ultimate creditor has been conceived in a number of

ways: as the “cause” of man and the beginning of the human race, or as nature,the womb from which man comes into being and that is viewed as diabolical, oreven existence in general which has come to be viewed as “inherently worthless”and from which the will seeks escape into nothingness, giving expression to a“nihilistic turning-away from existence.” Atheistic thinkers such as Schopen-hauer continue to think under the grip of a Christian metaphysics and considerexistence itself to be guilty. The essential development has taken place in termsof the human being of bad conscience seizing on religious precepts and carrying

out self-abasement with a “horrific hardness”: “Alas for this crazy, patheticbeast man! What ideas he has, what perversity, what hysterical nonsense, whatbestiality of thought immediately erupts, the moment he is prevented, if onlygently, from being a beast in deed !....” (II, 22). Although Nietzsche finds thisdevelopment highly interesting, he also sees in it “a black, gloomy, unnervingsadness.” In the case of Christianity we have a “madness of the will showingitself in mental cruelty which is absolutely unparalleled.”

The Second Essay of the Genealogy ends on a note of redemption. In contrast

to the English word, which suggests the payment of a debt, the German wordfor redemption ( Erlösung) means a setting free.7 Nietzsche’s line of thought atthis crucial point in the text is highly intricate; the over-human future he nowappeals to does not suppose a simple-minded release from the kind of creatureswe have become. Nietzsche notes that “we moderns” are the inheritors of centu-ries-long “conscience-vivisection and animal-torture.” Indeed, we have becomeso refined at such vivisection and torture that we can fairly consider ourselves tobe “artists in the field.” Our natural inclinations are now thoroughly intertwined

with the bad conscience. Nietzsche then asks whether a “reverse experiment”might be possible, in which bad conscience would become intertwined with“ perverse inclinations” and “all the ideals which up to now have been hostileto life and have defamed the world.” Anyone who wishes to subscribe to sucha hope will have to contend with “the good men.” Nietzsche has in mind boththose who are satisfied with man as he now is (the lazy and the complacent)and those who impatiently wish to leap over man (the zealous). The task ofenvisaging a surpassing of man is a “severe” and “high-minded” one; it is not,

for Nietzsche, a question of simply letting ourselves go. He thus looks towards adifferent kind of spirit, one prepared for and by “wars and victories…for which

7. See the discourse entitled “Of Redemption” in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.


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257

conquest, adventure, danger and even pain have actually become a necessity,”and in whom the practice of the “great health” has become personified. At this

point Nietzsche looks ahead and outside the all-too timely frame of the present.He refers to “the redeeming man of great love and contempt” who will redeemthe earth from the ideal that has reigned on it for so long and from the nihilismand will to nothingness that arises from it. He speaks fatefully of the “decision”that will make “the will free again,” give a “purpose” to the earth and give manback his “hope.”

In inviting us to develop a new bad conscience over our aspirations to a“beyond” and reliance on ideals that oppose life and slander existence, the readerhas difficulty knowing whether Nietzsche is being entirely serious or advancinga parody. He makes use of the bad conscience as a way of enticing us to thinka possible overcoming of man, and he supposes that we have a “responsibility”to the future and to its invention. Although his aim is to unburden life and trans-form the human animal into something light and free, Nietzsche is forced to relyon the full baggage of our inherited feelings and concepts. He appreciates theessential paradox of his call for a “self-overcoming” of morality, namely, thatit is morality which makes this demand on us. Such an act, however, is at the

same time to be carried out in terms of play and parody. In an aphorism from1887 on “the great health” Nietzsche notes that “the ideal of a spirit” that plays“naively,” from “overflowing power and abundance,” with everything that hasbeen hitherto “called holy, good, untouchable, divine,” which he says is an ideal“of a human, superhuman well-being and benevolence,” will appear inhuman when it stages an encounter with “all earthly seriousness” to date (GM 382).Foucault was correct, I believe, when he noted that, “Genealogy is history inthe form of a concerted carnival.”8

Conclusion

In the Genealogy Nietzsche stakes out his hope that modern human beings willlearn the art of the gay science and practice the great health and, in so doing, turnthe bad conscience against the reigning ideal that has cursed the earth and thathas been man’s only ideal to date. The acquisition of bad conscience was notan option for man; he became what he is – human, all too human – in terms of

an ineluctable leap, a catastrophe, and a fate. To relate the history of the originsand development of the bad conscience is, then, to tell the fateful story of the

8. Michel FOUCAULT, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), in Michel Foucault: Essential

Works, volume two (Middlesex: Penguin, 1998), pp. 369-93, p. 386.


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human animal. If one attains an exalted perspective on it, one can see that it isthe form of conscience which has shaped man to date in terms of his greatest

affliction and yet contains within it his great promise. For Nietzsche it is thebad conscience that will now give rise to new becomings of the human. For thehuman animal there can be no purely active force; this belongs to the imaginedblond beasts of prey (the great lions of nature), and in the text Nietzsche isevidently not advocating an ahistorical return to a pre-human state, or pre-moralmode of existence. He makes it clear that the bad conscience is man’s active force (GM II, 18).

The question Nietzsche leaves us thinking and chewing over is this: What isnow our debt? Clearly, this issue cannot be effectively worked through withoutthe coming into view of the over-human. This metaphor is Nietzsche’s most“cheerful” and strongest concept and gift, and Deleuze is one of the few readersof Nietzsche to adequately appreciate the nature and significance of the overmanin Nietzsche. But it is also difficult to get the measure of, and for good reason:Nietzsche designed it so as to challenge and put to the test the measure of man. Isit possible to transform the greatest weight (ourselves) into something light andfree? Is it possible for the earth to be something other than a “madhouse”?

From Nietzsche and Philosophy through to What is Philosophy? Deleuzesought to be equal to these questions. For Deleuze, possibilities are bound upwith untimely dimensions of existence. In Nietzsche and Philosophy the focusis on a becoming-active of the reactive forces that have constituted man andwithout which man cannot be comprehended. In What is Philosophy? the focushas shifted from genealogy to geophilosophy, at the center of which is not thenotion of “forces,” but that of “virtual” becomings and events. However, evenhere, at the end of his oeuvre, Deleuze once again utilizes the idea of “possi-bilities of life.” He now laments the fact that these possibilities are more andmore being squeezed out of existence under the re-territorializing conditions oflate modern capital: “We do not feel ourselves outside of our time but continueto undergo shameful compromises with it.”9 This feeling of shame, Deleuzewrites, is one of philosophy’s most powerful motifs. One could contend thatwith this sentiment he inherits, affirms, and refines Nietzsche’s insight intohuman existence and the future of the earth. The creation of a new earth andnew peoples – which is the Nietzschean–inspired refrain running throughoutWhat is Philosophy? – has to be an affair of conscience, including the bad kind.

9. Gilles DELEUZE and Félix GUATTARI, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Les Éditionsde Minuit, 1991), p. 103; What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh TOMLINSON and GrahamBURCHELL (London: Verso, 1994), p. 108.


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In his last work Deleuze reveals that he knows something deep about Nietzscheand the bad conscience:

When Nietzsche constructed the concept of “bad conscience” he could see inthis what is most disgusting in the world and yet exclaim, “This is where manbegins to be interesting!” and consider himself actually to have created a newconcept for man, one that suited man…and with a new image of thought. 10

It is, I believe, within the pages of Deleuze’s last book, and all that it serenelyand soberly works through, that we find a conception of the overman relevantto the tasks of philosophy today and faithful to philosophy’s amor fati. To

demonstrate this must be the task of another essay.

University of Warwick

10. Ibid. p 80; p. 83.

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Revue internationale de philosophie n° 241_0245

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