Under a number of forms, this question has caused great debates among commentators. This is, I think, because Nietzsche’s writings are vascillating between two descriptions of incorporation, which are rooted in the ambiguity of Nietzsche’s treatment of the phrase “to be or become more.” As was shown above, incorporation, in its simplest physical form is always linked to an increase. This is constant in all of Nietzsche’s descriptions of incorporation in
nature. However, the physical model seems to meet its limits here: indeed, we remember that Nietzsche characterizes man as a “sick animal," and identifies sickness with humanity. In this specifically human context the meaning of the phrase ‘becoming more’ is unclear. If I say ‘thanks to incorporation, X will become more’ what does ‘more’ apply to? Is it to X, in which case, X’s incorporation would follow the same model as the amoeba’s? Or is it to ‘be,' in which case X will be seen to have attained a higher degree of being? This question goes to the root of Nietzsche’s treatment of the relationships between quantity (which man shares with nature) and quality (which is specifically human). What we have for certain is a negative thought: the death of God. This only allows for an annulment of incorporated error, not for positive increase. Nietzsche’s most explicit –but by no means only- statement of this view reads thus: “if we removed the effects of [the basic worldview that God stands for], we
should also remove humanity, humaneness and ‘human dignity.’”212 Here, like in
GS 354, Nietzsche establishes a correspondence between all things human and sickness. The challenge is therefore to reduce humanity, maybe even to save the human from humanity as sickness.213 This aphorism is situated among the texts that announce the thoughts of the death of God and of the incorporation of truth. Indeed, it appears as a characterisation of what is to be overcome and for a moment it seems that Nietzsche’s aim is merely to remove errors and humanity
qua sickness. However, later texts indicate that Nietzsche sees in the death of God the opportunity for a greater achievement than simple re-establishment of man as the animal he once was. In the terms of our present question, the problem can be formulated thus: does the incorporation of the death of God expand the self’s degree of being (first option), or does it expand its amount (second option), and if it does, in what fashion?
In a short but defining contribution to the Royaumont debate of 1964, Jean Granier pleads for the first option:
“For Nietzsche however, negation often presents itself as a truly creative work. This theme appears clearly in the texts of GM I, 6 and II, 16, where Nietzsche speaks of the
212GS 115, see also TI, “The Four Great Errors” and GM, II, 18-25 where the humanity of the
animal man is shown as sickness and where Nietzsche calls for its “reversal,” “a reverse experiment should be possible in principle, but who has sufficient strength?” (GM, II, 24).
213 Through different channels, Keith Ansell-Pearson (op. Cit.) arrives to the conclusion that the
incorporation of truth is Nietzsche’s path towards the overhuman. Insofar as the overhuman may be understood as the human who attained the “great health” (GS 382, EH “books”, “Zarathustra” 2—in this text, the great health is associated not to the Overman but to Zarathustra himself), that is to say, the perfect unison of all his drives, I think my argument is largely parrallel to Ansell- Pearson’s.
phenomenon that makes man ‘interesting.' He says that man in a certain way made himself sick, tore himself apart, and turned his instincts against himself. Nietzsche speaks there of negation. This negation elevated man from the animal self to the spiritual self.”214
In other words, for all its negativity, the sickness of the animal man itself holds a place in the process that takes us to a superior, “more interesting” existence. As regards truth and its incorporation, this view would entails that the incorporation of truth as the death of God is more than a mere correction, but that it brings increase: “to overcome everything Christian through something over-Christian, and not merely put it aside” says Nietzsche.215 According to this view, one has to support the stronger possibility, namely that the incorporation of the death of God and its errors cannot be conceived in terms of a return to our original animal selves. Instead, one has to appreciate that the having been of God is impossible to annul: “a reversion, a turning back in any sense and to any degree is quite impossible,”216 The thing that is to be overcome and redeemed acts as a stepping stone towards its own redemption as overcoming,217 and this overcoming itself, is a stepping stone towards a higher state.218 In this view then, incorporation preserves what it incorporates whilst it overcomes it.
214 Jean Granier, in Gilles Deleuze, (Ed.) Nietzsche, Actes du Colloque de Royaumont, Seuil
Minuit, Paris, 1967, 36.
215WP, 1051 [1885].
216TI, 9, 43. See Wolfgang Müller-Lauter op. Cit. 37 for an elaboration. 217 See Z, II, “On Redemption.”
218 For another version of this argument and its Hegelian undertones, see Granier, op. Cit. 46-52:
“Nietzsche preserves the great Hegelian idea according to which the negative—the
contradiction—possesses a mediating and creative energy," 52. Granier insists in 39-43 that Nietzsche opposes metaphysical dualism, one sees here how he uses negation as the mechanism
1. (redirection of) Drives.
In his Nietzsche, Wolfgang Müller-Lauter gives an analysis of the self informed by Zarathustra’s teaching that the human (and in general any organism) is “a herd and a herdsman.”219 As a herd, it is multiple; as a herdsman, it is unified. Müller-Lauter directs his efforts towards understanding in precise terms what kind of unity Nietzsche has in mind when he says that the self both unifies its drives and maintains its own inner diversity. The solution, he finds, is in understanding “the organism as an inner struggle” within which the
opposition of drives involves their bond. As the term “struggle” suggests, the opposition referred to here is an opposition of contact.220 In this sense, the unity of the organism is not threatened but constituted by its containing disharmonies.
If one understands this struggle as a struggle between drives, the picture can be refined. For Nietzsche, drives are defined by two factors: a quantum of power and a direction towards which one directs this quantum. They are conceived on the model of geometrical vectors that possess a ‘direction’ and a certain ‘length’ (which, as the quantifying element of the vector, would stand for its quantum of power). Now, Nietzsche repeatedly claims that the essence of
of overcoming missing in any monism: negation permits without recourse to anything external, to move to another level. This is largely why, in Nietzschean Genealogy, historical becoming starts with the no, the original yes making being unable to create anything else than itself from itself. “[H]uman history is the continuation of the history of the organic, which itself has no beginning” Müller-Lauter, op. Cit. 32
219Z, I, 4 “On the Despisers of the Body.” See also WP, 561. 220 Müller-Lauter, 131, 176.
the world is one, it is “will to power.”221 It is not my purpose here to examine this claim as such; however, we can already see that this gives an ontologically essential status to the quantum of power in all drives (it unifies the drives), leaving the status of its direction (which distinguishes them) secondary.222 Bernard Reginster gives a clear overview of the major interpretations of the relations between the specific drives and the will to power as unique principle. He outlines six possible interpretations, the last of which is his own. I shall not discuss all six here because it seems to me that most of these views (numbered 2- 5 by Reginster223) are inescapably entangled in a dialectic of ends and means which is foreign to Nietzsche’s thoughts on the will to power. Two views remain: the so-called reductionist view which emphasises that “the will to power is the essence of life” (a view I endorse); and Reginster’s own interpretation,
221 This does not mean that this essence cannot divide and re-arrange itself. Indeed, this
rearrangement is the basis of the ontology of becoming.
222 For a detailed account of this claim, see Müller-Lauter, 175. Müller-Lauter shows that a drive
always maintains its own quantum of forces; however, its direction depends on “perceptions” of where the resistances are lying, so that resistances actually attract the discharge of the drive onto themselves. In drives, quanta of power are essential and directions are contingent. This direction is precisely the domain of the self and its agency. It is only by understanding this that one can understand Nietzsche’s alleged determinism along with the fact that his works are saturated with the language of command. Agency has no directly essential role, in this sense, it is
inconsequential and refuted by Nietzsche. However, the self can change the direction of its drives, and every task that Nietzsche ever assigns to man is the task of redirecting drives. This will be discussed in detail in Chapter III.
namely, that “the will to power is the will to the overcoming of resistances.”224 This view, I think, is untenable from the start insofar as Nietzsche makes it clear that resistance presupposes a striving. As a result, Reginster’s approach seems to make the will to power a circular concept at best. Reginster seems to admit this objection, and his solution is to posit drives before the will to power. The drives would then be in charge of doing the striving for a resistance, and the will to power would do the overcoming.225 For this view to distinguish itself from the first view (mine) it must involve an essential distinction between drives and will to power. Alas, Nietzsche explicitly states that the will to power is not distinct from the drives.226
Let me say a word about why Nietzsche rejects a dialectic of ends and means (those Reginster numbers 2-5). In Nietzsche’s view, this dialectic would operate across two distinct levels. It is clear that Nietzsche sees drives as distinguished from the overall will to power by their object, the ‘end’ they pursue. For example, ‘drives to knowledge,' ‘preservation’ or ‘sexual instincts’ are determined according to the object of their striving. Those readings assume that this distinction is essentially relevant, that is to say, that it supplants the general characteristics of the will to power. In these readings, the ends of a drive (what it is a will to) is just as essential as their being a will to power at all. In my view on the contrary, these distinctions take place within the possibilities defined by the will to power. This is because Nietzsche never describes the essence of
224 ibid. 131-132. 225 ibid. 132.
the will to power as end-directed in the sense of ‘representational.’227 If it is indeed teleologically structured, it does not by any means imply that it represents its own object in its striving. On the contrary, this striving is blind: as Nietzsche writes as early as his lecture courses of 1869-1870, “that something may be
227 This is not to say that the will to power does not provide representations (indeed, there are
representations, and in the hypothesis of the will to power, anything that is is will to power); my point is rather that representations are not essential to the will to power. One can seek power without doing so consciously, or even, without any awareness of any sort that they are indeed seeking power. Nietzsche sometimes expresses this idea by saying that there is no ‘will’ in the sense that ‘will’ is a psychological metaphor. See John Richardson, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism, Oxford, 2006; 27-34. Richardson goes on to claim that Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power can only be understood as non-mental if explained in terms of Darwinian evolution. I cannot subscribe to this view insofar as it places the principle of selection prior to that of will to power. Richardson is aware of this objection, however; but claims, I think unconvincingly, that Nietzsche does not reject such an idea. In my view, this bias of Richardson’s is based on his starting hypothesis that Nietzsche’s criticisms of Darwin can be boiled down to the claim that Darwin (allegedly) misses that living things seek increase and not preservation. In my view, on the contrary, Nietzsche’s most profound qualm with Darwinism is the quite different view according to which Darwin believes that the stronger survives. This is a blatant misunderstanding of Darwin’s idea of ‘fitness’ but it involves a consequence which, I believe, poses difficulties for Richardson, namely, that the will to power is not an empirical fact identified by Nietzsche in actuality, but instead, a philosophical hypothesis. One of the strong consequences of this is that Nietzsche can use the will to power as a critical tool against some natural facts. This would be impossible were Nietzsche holding only the view Richardson attributes to him. I shall discuss this last point in chapter III. See Richardson, 1996, “Nietzsche Contra Darwin,” op. Cit. esp. 556- 570.
finalised without consciousness is the essence of instincts.”228 As I will discuss in the next chapter, the will to power is determined by an origin point (the organism that seeks power) and a direction, not an ‘end.’ This I believe, concurs with the discussion of the tangentiality of the will to power from chapter I, but let me just point to the following argument. Nietzsche’s entire view of history relies on the reversibility of drives. The change in the end-directionality of a drive is the key mechanism for any incorporation229 or for any reversal (e.g. the slave revolt in morality, which relies on the internalization of drives), or any sublimation (the sexual libido re-directed towards knowledge in the libido sciendi.)230 Nietzsche explicitly states that this does not mean that for every
228RL, “On the Origins of Language” 81. I will discuss this claim in the next section. For now, let
me just stress that this idea is not specific to the young Nietzsche, consider this very important remark from EH: “ that one becomes what one is presupposes that one doesn’t have the remotest idea what one is” (“Why I am so Clever” 9).
229 “[W]hat has been overpowered [incorporated] can, with some remodeling [redirection], be put
into service by the overpowerer”. Müller-Lauter, 175, see also Nachlass KGW VII, 220 and KGW VIII, 88, and Richardson (1996), 33: “Mastery is bringing another will into a subordinate role within one’s own effort, thereby ‘incorporating’ the other as a sort of organ or a tool."
230WP, 255 [1883-1888]: “All virtues physiological conditions: particularly the principal organic
functions considered as necessary, as good. All virtues are really refined passions and enhanced states. Pity and love of mankind as development of the sexual drive. Justice as development of the drive to revenge. Virtue as pleasure in resistance, will to power. Honor as recognition of the similar and equal-in-power." On applying the concept libido sciendi to Nietzsche, see Paul- Laurent Assoun, Freud and Nietzsche, (Trans. Richard L. Collier), Continuum, London & New York, 2006, 105
incorporative event there is an essential transfiguration of the drives but rather, that they are simply re-directed.231 Therefore the end-directionality of a drive is not relevant on the same level as its being a drive altogether. One can only conceive of drives as particular wills to power differentiated in their mode of being, but not in their being.232 As a result, we must consider that two drives belonging to the same organism and directed in the same direction are essentially
unified.
2. From Sickness to Power through “Creation.”
Nietzsche writes:
“Appropriating and incorporation are above all a desire to overwhelm a forming, a shaping and reshaping, until at length, that which has been overwhelmed has entirely gone over into the power domain of the aggressor and has increased the same.”233
On the one hand, we have a constant quantum of power within an organism, on the other; we have an increase through appropriation. Furthermore, we know that incorporation involves the subjugation of the incorporated object to our own ends, and that incorporation signifies a redirection of drives. Appropriation thus brings about an increase, but only in a certain sense, since the amount of power in an organism can increase only through the incorporation of
231 VII [1], X [7], X [21], X [154]
232 I find support for this claim in Wolfgang Müller-Lauter’s discussion of the difference between
‘will to power’ and ‘the will to power.' Müller-Lauter states clearly that the second phrase only denotes a specification within a general and overarching principle which is ‘will to power.' See Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, op. Cit. 1999, 133 ff.
external drives. In other words, there is properly speaking no creation of power, but only a rearrangement of the forces across the inside-outside divide. Our question however applies to the incorporation between drives within one organism. Let us assume a set of three drives: drive D) is the overall drive (i.e. the organism), drive a) of quantum 5 and drive b) of quantum 5 too, are parts of D but they are in conflict with each other (i.e. they have opposite directions). The overall (net) power quantum of D is clearly 10; however, D finds itself incapable of incorporating any new drive from the outside insofar as a) and b) neutralize each other, making the available power quantum of D null (it always takes power to incorporate234). In other words, D’s quantum of forces is unchanged, but D is impotent235. This phenomenon is precisely what Nietzsche calls “sickness” and that is why he describes it as the “internalization of man” in GM, II: the drives “turn inwards,” against each other, instead of unifying towards the outside. One understands here how the self can hold the keys to its own being “more” or “less” without changing the amount of its power. If it redirects its opposing drive towards one unique direction, it will turn its power outwards. On the other hand, if it creates opposition within itself, its will cause its own sickness. Health and sickness do not depend on one’s instincts, but on their
direction. The mere re-direction of such drives is “inconsequential” in the sense that no more power is created, but on the other hand, it increases the power