—Laurence Lampert
1. The Will of Power? I think not.
In what is perhaps his most perfect work—and that's saying something—, Lampert writes:
"Philosophy is the passion to understand the whole rationally, the love of wisdom that is [...] the highest eros of a whole that can be understood as eros and nothing besides." (How Philosophy Became Socratic, page 13.)
And:
"Plato and Nietzsche share [...] the essential paganism of all philosophy, eros for the earth, and that is the deepest sharing, for each discovered that in being eros for what is, philosophy is eros for eros, for being as fecund becoming that allows itself to be glimpsed in what it is: eros or will to power." (op.cit., page 417.)
Thus he presents philosophy, not just as the passionate love of wisdom, i.e. of rational understanding, but also of the object of that understanding, the whole, "the earth" (i.e., "this" world—the world), what is; and he presents it, not just as the strongest ("highest"—pitched) love toward that object, but also as the hierarchical summit of that object itself, which is of course presented as a(n) (rank) order—kosmos—of loves and nothing besides. But how is this latter ambiguity to be conceived in terms, not of love, but of will?
- "Philosophy is the passion to understand the whole rationally, the will to wisdom that is the highest will to a whole that can be understood as will and nothing besides."
- "Philosophy is the passion to understand the whole rationally, the will to wisdom that is the highest will in a whole that can be understood as will and nothing besides."
"Nietzsche defines philosophy as the most spiritual will to power which prescribes to nature what or how it ought to be ([BGE] aph. 9). Nietzsche's philosophy prescribes to nature that it ought to be will to power and nothing besides. However, this means prescribing to it that it ought to be what it most probably is. In other words, commanding it that it be what it most probably is. But how could something not be what it is? How could I command a miserable wretch about nihilism to be a miserable wretch about nihilism? He could not do otherwise if he wanted to! So that's not much of a command. Therefore, the command must be, 'remain what you are'. But of the essence of what nature is is change. Nietzsche does not command nature to stop changing. What he does is, he commands it to keep changing to all eternity. But change is not all there is to nature; it is a series of specific forms. What Nietzsche does is, he commands nature to be that series of specific forms to all eternity. In other words, he commands it to eternally recur. This is why Nietzsche's philosophy is not simply the philosophy of the will to power, but the philosophy of the eternal recurrence of the will to power: Nietzsche's philosophy prescribes to nature, not that it be what it most probably is, but that it recur eternally as what it most probably is. In other words, he does not prescribe to nature what it ought to be, so much as how it ought to be". (Sauwelios, "Re: To Nietzscheans".)
This softer, more Straussian form of my argument is perhaps more palatable to scholars and the like. Compare:
"[T]he deadly truth of science, objective knowledge, is concerned with the text as distinguished from any interpretation: the accurate truth not idealized in any way. The life-giving truth, on the other hand, is primarily the subjective truth, the will to power's imprinting meaning and value on the meaningless [Lacuna in the transcript.] Then objective knowledge is proved as the will to power turning against itself, becoming critical of its own intrinsic activity. But in the last stage of this process, the will to power as [the] imprinting of meaning and value is at the same time the will to the future, because [there can be] no meaning without an ideal, without a view of the future. As the will to the future, the will to power is necessarily a negation of the past, and therefore it is not fully positive. The fully positive will, the will which is mere and pure yea-saying, is no longer will simply, but acceptance. The highest form of the will to power turning against itself is an acceptance [of] the whole, and that means the whole is divine in its purpose[lessness] and nonrationality. The peak of the will is acceptance.—You can also put it as follows. The peak of creation is contemplation or, differently stated, true contemplation is creation. And if the theme of contemplation is nature, nature is only, at least in its fullness, by virtue of contemplative creation. That is the paradoxical teaching of Nietzsche.
"Now to say it again: the fundamental difference between Nietzsche and the tradition in the simplest form is explained by contrasting Nietzsche with Socrates/Plato. For Socrates/Plato, the themes of contemplation are the ideas, and they are in no way man's creation. And there is a human relation to the ideas, and in a way, the fundamental character of [this thought] is therefore erōs, longing for something pre-existent. The place of these ideas and erōs [in this] context is taken by Nietzsche into the will to power as it creates any ideas or ideals; therefore there cannot be contemplation proper in Nietzsche. But the nearest approximation to contemplation is what we may call by the term, now common [and] familiar: 'creative contemplation.' The argument would be this. There must be [a] harmony between the knower and the known, but if the known, the object, the reality, is will to power—i.e., creativity—only [the] creativity of the knower can be in harmony with its object. Contemplation must be creative contemplation. Hence Nietzsche's doctrine of the will to power is at the same time creation and contemplation of what is. As creation, it is incompatible with the spirit of gra[vity]. That means there cannot be certainty or demonstration, but only pointing to. All human activity, hence all knowledge, is a modification of the will to power. The will to power means overcoming and it means in the highest stages self-overcoming, and the highest stage of self-overcoming is acceptance of what is. But acceptance as full acceptance in the most radical sense consists in the positing of eternal return. You accept a thing fully if you are willing to will its eternal return. The eternity of [the ideas or universals] of mental perception in the Platonic/Aristotelian sense survives somehow in the demand for [the] enigmatic vision [of] eternal return.—That is really the peak of Nietzsche's teaching.
"I must develop it a bit more, and later on you can try to explain this in the discussion.—We start again from the premise that reality is will to power and there is no essential difference between men and brutes; there is no nature of man strictly speaking. Given this premise, the doctrine of eternal return—which means, subjectively, transformation of the will into acceptance—is the only way there can be knowledge, as acknowledging of what is, and it is the only way in which there can be nature; that is to say, that which is by itself and not by being willed or posited. But precisely because acceptance is transformed will, will survives in the acceptance, in the contemplation. Contemplation is creative." (Strauss, lecture on Thus Spoke Zarathustra , May 18, 1959.)
Cf. note 1 of my introductory essay.
2. The Will is the Radiance of the Mind.
What does it mean that Lampert does not consider himself a philosopher? In terms of the final two paragraphs (before the notes) of my "The Ideal of the One Who Paves the Way", it means he doesn't love (rational understanding of) the whole enough to consider himself a philosopher. And no matter how much he loves the philosopher, he doesn't seem to have had the will to become a philosopher himself (and he is now 80 or 81). For love can inspire wishes, but it cannot inspire will. If philosophy is the highest love of a whole that can be understood as love and nothing besides, then the part of the whole that the philosopher loves best is that love of the whole itself. That love's self-love, too, cannot inspire will; but it can transform into will... As I put it 38 days ago:
"[I]n Lukacher's quote¹ we find the paradox that 'thought thinking itself' (noesis noeseos) sets in motion, whereas 'will willing itself' (poiesis poieseos?) lets things be. In other words, when thought thinks itself it becomes will (the will 'to the "creation of the world", to the causa prima'—BGE aph. 9), but when the will wills itself it becomes thought (understanding, receptivity, amor, etc.).—"
More recently, I even symbolized this by (qua)ternary numerology...
1 + 1 = 2
2 + 2 = 10 = (1 + 0) = 1
(I put the "qua" part between brackets because the "numerology" aspect consists precisely in reducing the four to three—or ten to nine, etc.: if the 10 is the new 1 instead of the new 0, then the number immediately preceding it is the new 0.)
How the will (to power) transforms into love (or acceptance, to speak with Strauss), I've explained at length in my recent writings. But as for how love transforms into will, I can really only think of this passage:
"Now note that in this passage [i.e., the passage immediately preceding this passage...]² I speak, not of self-lightening [i.e., will to power], but of self-valuing. By this, I do mean the valuing of that very valuing—and, again, not of some 'self'—, but not directly, only indirectly: self-valuing through other-valuing, i.e., by valuing other self-valuings which in turn other-value 'you'... What this means, however, is that 'you', the (more or less stable collection of) self-lightening(s) that you are, lighten yourself [i.e., discharge yourself] on another self-lightening (collection) which 'in turn'—i.e., before, during, or after—lightens itself on you. Thus 'valuing' does not mean 'considering valuable', not 'attaching value' in the mind (only), but physically, by bestowing value, 'values', in the literal sense of 'things of value'—and the sole ultimate value is valuation itself, i.e., self-lightening." ("The Three Gooods: Eros, Will-to-Power, Self-Lightening".)
In other words, by "self-love" I do mean the love of that very love, but not directly, only indirectly: self-love through other-love, i.e. by loving other self-loves which in turn other-love "you". And what this means is that "you", the (collection of) self-bestowing(s) that you are, bestow part of yourself to another (collection of) self-bestowing(s) which 'in turn' bestows part of itself on you. As Zarathustra says:
"That is your thirst, to become offerings and gifts yourselves: and therefore have you the thirst to heap all riches in your soul.
Insatiably tries your soul for treasure and jewelry, because your virtue is insatiable in wanting to bestow.
You force all things towards you and into you, so that they shall stream back from your wellspring as the gifts of your love." ("Of the Bestowing Virtue", my translation.)
And:
"Passion for power [Herrschsucht, lit. "ruling-sickness, addiction to ruling"]: but who would call it passion, when the height longeth to stoop for power! Verily, nothing sick or diseased [süchtig, "addicted"] is there in such longing and descending!
That the lonesome height may not forever remain lonesome and self-sufficing; that the mountains may come to the valleys and the winds of the heights to the plains:—
Oh, who could find the right prenomen and honouring name for such longing! 'Bestowing virtue'—thus did Zarathustra once name the unnamable.
And then it happened also,—and verily, it happened for the first time!—that his word blessed selfishness [Selbstsucht], the wholesome, healthy selfishness, that springeth from the powerful soul:—
From the powerful soul, to which the high body appertaineth, the handsome, triumphing, refreshing body, around which everything becometh a mirror:
—The pliant, persuasive body, the dancer, whose symbol and epitome is the self-enjoying soul." ("Of the Three Evils", Common trans.)
Everything becomes a mirror around it because it lightens itself on everything.—This, then, is how love loving itself becomes will. For this will, however, to will itself, it must pave the way for its kind—i.e., will the historical recurrence of the similar—, or even for itself...
3. Love is the Law, Love under Will.
When, in "The Will is the Radiance of the Mind" (an adaptation of "love is the gravity of the soul"), I said "love can inspire wishes, but it cannot inspire will", I was wrong in a way, yet also right. In this attempt at an essay (which is actually a tautology, like my status of amateur philosopher), I will look into Daniel Conway's excellent essay, "Love's labor's lost: the philosopher's Versucherkunst" (it's basically also a chapter of his book, Nietzsche & the Political, but I'm less impressed with the rest of the book—I've even been using it as a makeshift mouse pad...).
"Erōs arises in response to the gulf that separates the exemplary human being from all others, and it naturally aspires to bridge this gulf. While the self-overflowing emanations of the will establish and preserve the pathos of distance, erōs strives to eliminate or minimize the distance between lover and beloved."
What this basically means is that eros is aroused by the pathos (feeling) of distance, whereas the distance in turn is created by the will to power. Now Conway immediately continues:
"The excitation of erōs in turn fortifies the lover's will, enabling him to accept his beloved's unintended invitation to enter the 'circle of culture.' [...]
As he [Nietzsche] explains in a note written in the spring of 1888, the excitation of erōs transfigures the lover, elevating him—if only temporarily—to the lofty station of his beloved:
- The lover becomes a squanderer [Verschwender]: he is rich enough for it. Now he dares, becomes an adventurer, becomes an ass [donkey] in magnanimity and innocence; he believes in God again, he believes in virtue, because he believes in love; and on the other hand, this happy idiot grows wings and new capabilities, and even the door of art is opened to him. (WP 808)
Such squandering is basically what I mean by "self-lightening" (self-discharging). In other words, then, the lover becomes a self-overflowing willer. But, as Conway warns, "only temporarily". The lover's strength of will is an exceptional condition; it does not characterize him. Thus only a little further on, Conway says:
"As erōs finally subsides, the temporary union [i.e., equality] of lover and beloved dissolves, and the 'natural' gulf between them is restored, in accordance with the order of rank. [...] Lovers 'attach their hearts' to a great human being and are thereby consecrated to culture, but their love is not reciprocated. Because erōs strives ever upward, these exemplary figures never come to love those whose erōs they have inadvertently awakened. Their gaze fixed firmly on the shimmering horizon of human perfectibility, great human beings love only themselves and their 'next' selves, which immediately vanish upon consummation."
This gives me occasion to make a slight foray into the realm of Qabalah. We may understand the Sephiroth, the spheres on the Tree of Life, as progressive emanations of the divine will: the infinite emanates the Crown, the Crown emanates Wisdom, etc. Now these spheres are considered masculine from the perspective of the next and feminine from the perspective of the previous sphere. Thus we may view them as willers from a lower perspective and as lovers from a higher one. The great and thereby exemplary human being, according to Conway, always experiences himself as a lover, i.e. someone who strives upward, and is only a willer "inadvertently". As Conway says earlier on:
"From the dialogical perspective of the witness, [...] the squanderings of the genius are often mistaken, especially by impoverished souls, for invitations and seductions. From the monological perspective of the artist, however, these same emanations appear (if at all) simply as the inevitable by-products of the philosopher's private pursuit of self-perfection." (Note: the genius, the artist and the philosopher are here one and the same person.)
Now while it remains true that the great human being strives ever upward in a way, there is a turning point on the Tree of Life. When one attains to Understanding, i.e. when one has successfully crossed the Abyss, one is cast down into the sphere most natural to oneself, in order to manifest Wisdom, the Word of the Aeon, the Will of the All-One:
"[L]et it not be forgotten that though She [Binah, "Understanding"] be love, her function is but passive; she is the vehicle of the Word, of Chokmah, Wisdom, the All-Father, who is the Will of the All-One. And thus they err with grievous error and dire who prate of Love as the Formula of Magick; Love is unbalanced, void, vague, undirected, sterile, nay, more, a very Shell, the prey of abject orts demonic: Love must be 'under will.'" (Aleister Crowley, Little Essays toward Truth, "Love".)
Compare this to Lavater:
"Discern closely, in yourself and others, between desire [Verlangen] and will in the strictest sense of the word.
Whoever has many desires (desideriorum multa), ordinarily has little will; whoever has earnest, powerful will, has few (diverging) desires; whoever can wholly will a single thing, renounces many a desire; whoever cannot renounce many a desire, never has the genuine manpower, in which man's true kingly greatness consists. The power to will properly, the concentrated result of all the human powers, is the will born through the pain of the renunciation of many a desire." (J.C. Lavater, Aphorismen über den Menschen, aph. 20 whole, my translation.)
Erōs may also be translated as "desire": hence this Greek god—or daemon—has two Roman counterparts: Amor, Love, and Cupid, Desire. Compare:
"'Should one follow one's feelings?'—That one should put one's life in danger, yielding to a generous feeling under the impulse of a moment, that is of little value and does not even characterize one. [...]
A higher stage is: to overcome even this pressure within us and to perform the heroic act not on impulse—but coldly, raissonable, without being overwhelmed by stormy feelings of pleasure— [...]
Greatness of character does not consist in not possessing these affects—on the contrary, one possesses them to the highest degree—but in having them under control. And even that without any pleasure in this restraint, but merely because—" (WP 928.)
And:
"The Overman has, out of overfullness of life, those apparitions of the opium smoker, and the madness, and the Dionysian dance: he does not suffer from the afterpains." (Nietzsche, workbook November 1882-February 1883 4 [75], my trans.)
And, speaking of the afterpains of madness, Conway continues as follows on the subsiding of eros:
"As the madness of erōs fades, a sense of shame suffuses the neglected lover, who now cannot help but see himself as mired in a life unworthy of his 'next' self, which he momentarily glimpsed in the visage of his beloved. If this shame is attached directly to the lover's failures and incompleteness, then his opportunity for moral growth is soon crushed by a swelling tide of resentment and self-contempt; he will spend his life in penitent atonement for his momentary affliction of madness.
If this sense of shame is directed instead to the lover's consent to his incompleteness, to his willingness to remain unworthy of his beloved, to his voluntary complicity in his current imperfections, then it may succeed permanently where erōs itself has failed, in spurring the lover to attain his 'next' self. If the spurned lover resists his plight, refusing to consent to the imperfections of his current incarnation, then he may overcome himself, despite the 'melancholy' and 'longing' he feels upon 'discovering in himself some limitation, of his talent or his moral will' (SE 3)."
In this way, love can transform into will. Yet Conway ends grave:
"The advent of the 'last will of humankind,' the will to nothingness, marks the critical point of exhaustion at which the enervated will is no longer capable of awakening erōs, the point at which the pathos of distance vanishes altogether. The advanced decay of late modernity thus signifies a state of affective entropy, a disaggregation of the will into quanta so discrete that they can no longer generate the erōs needed to sustain the ethical life of the community (CW 7). A dissipation of will would result in the irrecuperable desuetude of erōs, and a cessation of erōs would nullify the temptations of the Versucherkunst ["(at)tempter's art"]. The decadence that besets late modernity thus comprises an assault on beauty itself, as potential objects of erotic attraction are systematically debased. Indeed, if it were no longer possible to 'attach one's heart' to a great human being, in whom one sees reflected one's own prospects for self-perfection, then one would have no means of redeeming one's hatred of oneself. The future of humankind as a whole would no longer be warranted, and the teachings of Silenus would become wisdom once again."
This is the microcosmic equivalent of the heat death of the universe (even as historical recurrence is that of eternal recurrence)!
Notes:
¹ "While the genealogy of Parmenidean Being leads through Aristotle's notion of the 'prime mover' (noesis noeseos) (Metaphysics 1074b34) and dominates much of the spiritual history of the West, the Heraclitean-Anaximanderian genealogy of the names for time's namelessness, in other words, the genealogy of eternal recurrence, would constitute a kind of counterhistory, a strange kind of 'bastard reasoning,' as Plato calls it in the Timaeus, neither muthos nor logos. This is what Plato says about the khôra touton, the receptacle[!] of all becoming (49b): 'A third kind [triton genos] is ever-existing Place [khôras] which admits not of destruction, and provides room for all things that have birth, itself being apprehensible by a kind of bastard reasoning by the aid of non-sensation, barely an object of belief' (52b); 'of a kind that is invisible and unshaped [amorphon], all-receptive[!], and in some most perplexing and baffling way [aporétatá] partaking of the intelligible' (51b)." (Ned Lukacher, Time-Fetishes: The Secret History of Eternal Recurrence, pp. 19-20.)
² "The Three Gooods: Eros, Will-to-Power, Self-Lightening.
"Perhaps the most significant philosophical, as distinct from politico-philosophical, statement in Lampert's latest book is this:
"'[T]he nature of nature is universal process, a becoming that is an internal drive to fulfill itself whose product is an internal drive to fulfill itself.' (How Socrates Became Socrates, page 190.)
"In order to fully appreciate it, however, at least when taken out of context like this, we must compare it to the corresponding statements in his forelast book:
"'[F]orce is the drive to discharge itself within a field of forces enacting the same necessity. […W]ill to power has no aim but discharge of the total quanta of its force at every moment; such discharge is always an event within a relatively unstable field of such impulses to discharge, the relation among them being simply that of greater or lesser; all beings are ultimately more or less stable collections of such impulses and themselves express the fundamental quality of impulse, will to power.' (Becoming Nietzsche, pp. 264 and 266n29.)
"By 'force', we should here understand repellent force: will to power is the internal drive (the 'inner world', which Kaufmann wrongly renders as 'inner will') that explains force as repellent (WP 619; cf. 618). The former statement, then, may be taken to describe eros as the internal drive that explains force as attractive: attractive force is the drive to fulfill itself in bringing forth (pro-ducing) another such force. The irony, however, is that such a drive 'fulfills' itself precisely in discharging itself, lightening itself from a part of itself, which manifests as a new whole which in turn seeks to 'fulfill' itself like that, too. And all this happens 'within a field of forces enacting the same necessity'. When a quantum of force lightens itself of a part of itself, what happens to that part, then? It adds itself to another quantum of force, which thereby becomes greater, i.e., a heavier cloud, so to say, more pressed to discharge itself.—Eros and will to power, then, can both be described as self-lightening (self-discharging)—not in the sense of the lightening of some 'self', but of the lightening of that very lightening. Now as I wrote in an email to Lampert four and a half years ago:
"'The first of the Three Evils [from Zarathustra's eponymous speech], Wollust [lit. "well-lust", in the sense of goodly pleasure or desire], corresponds to Platonic eros. The second, which I now call Herrsch-Lust [lit. "lust to rule", as distinct from Herrschsucht, lit. "ruling-sickness, addiction to ruling"], corresponds to the will to power. And the third, which even Zarathustra calls Selbst-Lust, corresponds to self-valuing. The fact that I call the latter two evils Lust may serve to confirm that eros is basic to them. (Consider WP 55: "good, valuable—with pleasure [Lust]." I have identified this Lust, as the feeling of power, as the feeling of freedom, as the feeling of—free—will. The feeling of power (might) is the feeling of will-power (will-force).)
"'The third Evil I see as the synthesis of the first two: Wollust is what Blake calls the Devouring portion of being; Herrsch-Lust, the Prolific. For more on this, see https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?p=2532431
"Now note that in this passage [...]"