Nietzsche's Historical Chemistry and the International Scene

"Departure requires a rending that rips a part of the body from the part that still adheres to the shore where it was born, to the neighborhood of its kinfolk, to the house and the village with its customary inhabitants, to the culture of its language and to the rigidity of habit. Whoever does not get moving learns nothing, Yes, depart, divide yourself into parts. Your peers risk condemning you as a separated brother. You were unique and had a point of reference, you will become many, and sometimes incoherent, like the universe, which, it is said, exploded at the beginning in a big bang. Depart, and then everything begins, at least your explosion in worlds apart." --Michel Serres, The Troubadour of Knowledge

From the start of Human All Too Human, Nietzsche sets up the task of burning the corpse of God and religion, along with its bastard son, metaphysics. To do this, Nietzsche not only raises the challenge to philosophy to become thoroughly historical and historicizing, but also challenges science to develop “a chemistry of the moral, religious and aesthetic conceptions and sensations, likewise of all the agitations we experience within ourselves in cultural and social intercourse, and indeed even when we are alone” (12). This chemistry and history would be directed especially toward the way in which the reason and imagination function together to produce metaphysical images that overcode the natural world. In other words, Nietzsche argues that because we impose moral, aesthetic and religious demands on the world, we have recreated it in light of these demands—this happens insofar as “it is the human intellect that has made appearance appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things” (20).

This not only applies for these three specific overcodings. Even mathematics produces metaphysical illusions insofar as number imposes a false unity with arbitrary units of measure; however, it is only because these units are imposed with constancy that pure multiplicity can be subsumed under a number or set as a unity and still retain any utility. An example of an illusory unity is custom, defined as “the union of the pleasant and the useful” (52). This plurality exists as a unity insofar as custom is grounded in habit, which produces pleasant sensations because they integrate us within a collective. Custom takes on its power through the investments and productions of herd pleasure. It acts as a sort of arbitrary unifier—it forms a set of the multiple ways in which the social field produces a rhythm that corresponds with habits that legitimate themselves as useful. However, we can unfold or disentangle utility and any criteria relating to pleasure if we are able to create truly vital thought experiments that construct new ways of grouping together different values of the useful and pleasurable—maybe to the detriment of one or the other for the developing cultural forms that this sort of experimentation may produce. The question of the chemistry of social groups would consequently be concerned with the large molar aggregates of custom (representation) and the selection of the molecular flows of pleasure and utility that (de)compose custom and culture at large.

This is one path for this potential chemistry, but it is insufficient by itself because it presupposes a macropolitical view of situations and thus already relates our criteria to a pre-existing social body already pervaded with a dominant culture. On the micropolitical level, we could ask how to create along with this chemistry a physics of mortal and transient customs. Nietzsche sets this task for the free spirits to come so that they may continue the process of the auto-liberation of thought. As he reminds us, “The less men are bound by tradition, the greater is the fermentation of motivations within them, and the greater in consequence their outward restlessness, their mingling together with one another, the polyphony of their endeavours” (24). Nietzsche believes that to create this polyphony, we will have to move “beyond the self-enclosed original national cultures” (24). Nietzsche proposes a historicizing philosophy linked to the natural sciences that can analyze standards for a generic culture, along with the political situations that they entail, and that can act as a constructive milieu for thought. In fact, he challenges us to discover “knowledge of the preconditions of culture as a scientific standard for ecumenical goals. Herein lies the tremendous task facing the great spirits of the coming century” (25). Ecumenical has (at least) two significant meanings here: general and universal on the one hand, mixed and motley on the other. With this we can tease out a physics along with this socio-historical chemistry. For if we couple Nietzsche’s proposal for a chemistry of aesthetic, religious and moral concepts and sensations with his injunction to discover the preconditions of culture from a universal point of view, then we start to connect a series of thoughts that point toward a social science that can address the question of generic and universal cultural construction that grounds itself in a physics of the interaction between molecular beliefs and desires (affects) and the corresponding cultural formations (custom) that result from the bindings of the former to a metaphysical image. The historicizing process, then, must deal with the evolution of habit and the institutions of the state that stratify custom within the social field.

On Epistemiology

Every epoch is haunted by a series of paradoxes: every social formation, every expression or formulation of knowledge is structured by that which it cannot integrate into itself. The epoch defines the series, but the paradoxes structure the limit-boundary of the epistemic situation. There is no radical exterior to a given ‘psycho-situation.’

The ‘outside of knowledge’ is not merely clouded in ignorance, obscurity, but is, in fact, paradoxically absent. There is no ‘outside’ of the historical-linguistic situation, or rather, the position of the unnameable or ‘uncounted’ within the situation is already the structure of a paradox from the standpoint of that historical epistemic formation.

I must immediately clarify that I am not trying to establish a scheme for the division of historical eras; rather, I mean to investigate the series of human cognitive acts as an intentional evolution of the relationship between language and power. The question of what we shall call a ‘psychosituation’ is that of the interdependent reproduction of forms of truth-expression and systems of truth-repression. In other words, the epistemological schema is interwoven into the socio-political organizations as conflict; in fact, they emerge only later, as a result this paradoxical struggle, as separate, self-perpetuating, atheoretical forms of knowledge or historical formations of power. The question which can only be answered within a later psychosituation (as it is always an unresolved paradox within the episteme) is about the relationship between the ‘accidental’ multiplicity of sociality and conversation and the ‘deliberate’ generality of knowledge forms and power-relations, whether pyramidal and axiomatic or dis-associated and subtractive. Thus we are asking an epistemo-technological as much as a sociohistorical question. The boundaries of the psychosituation are formally paradoxical, which is equivalent to the impossibility of traversing, from within the given social formation or epistemological paradigm, any rational structure which is paradoxical from within the psychosituation. Since the relation between knowledge and the social (‘real’) situation exposes radically the inextricable bondage of cognitive potentiality to political, cultural and biological forms, how do we account for the true, episteme-shattering act of cognition which represents an authentic yet radical break with the traditional forms of knowledge tradition?

We shall say a psychosituation is the functioning of language/power as it (subjectively) investigates/dominates truth/the real. The psychosituation is only traversed paradoxically, that is, it is traversed at the same time it is traversed e process of technological progress as it relates to real historical development is essentially paradoxical. This is because the psycho-situation is the most real, functional unit of progress, that is, an epistemic co-ordinate: a mapping of power and technology to knowledge and ‘truth’ in a society. The given “psychosituation” is always particular, unique, an historical accident, but also an inevitable result of the resolution of earlier ‘paradoxes’ (and we’ll get into what exactly we mean by that in a second); thus the psychosituation is the multiplicity of the social relation. Thus it is a singular multiplicity; the birth of the psychosituation is the inauguration of a new language, the ground or staging for a new set of paradoxes.

The question of historical analysis, then, would seem to revolve around reconstructing narratives of previous epochs around the new psychosituation--in a sense, we see them clearer because we have the benefit of hindsight, of having many of the paradoxes which haunted earlier eras resolved. Psychosituational analysis means considering the relationship between tools, power, language, etc., and the ‘real’ web of social organization. The primary hypothesis is that we must view historical social organizations (inevitably) as positive, creative formations--the criterion is as always never whether the formation (the idea, the act, the organization or the technology) is good or bad in itself, but whether it successfully reproduces its own mode of existence, i.e., as the resolution of a paradox and the staging of new paradoxes. The present moment is an accidental conjuncture, a nonsensical sense-event, which is produced as the disjunctive epicenter of dual, interlocking corridors of non-symmetrical paradox. The structure of the paradox is both delightful and humorous as much as it is alien and horrifying because it is an epistemologically-directed ‘logic bomb.’ It is aimed at the heart of what we can and can’t know, and blurs the distinction so that no traversal is possible within the structure of the paradoxical narrative; it is a description, nonetheless, of a particular though somehow logically inconsistent universe, which causes the very reason which enabled us to comprehend the structure somehow unable to continue. The paradox does not aim to point out a contradiction in anything but truth itself; hence the convoluted ‘dual’ structure where its very particularity implies its address is universal, extending from the tiniest particles in the universes to the black holes our galaxies spin around.

An epoch cannot traverse its paradoxes, for once the traversal is made the epoch upon which they depended for their staging disappeared; then the new paradoxes become the old paradoxes, and the stage is set for a new escape. But ultimately this is inadequate, right? Let’s say paradoxicality possesses a rational structure which yet cannot be traversed by reason; you could say paradoxes are post-sensical. There is no escape from the structure of paradox--which we now understand as the entire process of the creation of a space between psychosituations, so there’s no escape from the epistemological present within the epistemological present, we have to go, in a sense, beyond space, beyond time. Multiplicity is the basis of paradox, the infinite depth of the original abyssal contradiction: self-interpretation; yet a paradox, The reproduction of the structure of the singular multiple establish the boundaries between epistemes at the same time it stages questions, disarms and dissolves boundaries in the same, contradictory movement--and this movement is the evolution of reason.