'A Chain of Necessary Rings of Culture': Nietzsche and the Ability of Science

In sections 4 and 5 of Human All Too Human, Nietzsche develops a non-linear train of thought that attempts to analyze and reconstruct the experiences and concepts of religion, art and science. There are developmental factors and connections among these three, for “art raises its head when religion relaxes its hold,” and the “scientific man is the further evolution of the artistic” (150; 223). Poets, for example, construct bridges to distant ages and dying religions, creating metaphysical alleviations that only serve to quell the truly revolutionary energy flowing beneath the surface of the social body (148). Also, artists are the notorious “glorifiers of the religious and philosophical errors of mankind,” and even though this has granted us the signification of a beautiful world, we have to ask ourselves the question: if Nietzsche tells of the death throes of art and religion, what does science inherit from these projects and how can their insights and creations be carried on in an affirmative project for the creation of necessary rings of a universal culture of free spirits (220)?

Art’s expansion transforms religious sensations and expressions, lending them profundity and an increased capacity for articulating these sensations—and science (the Enlightenment) is responsible for the dispersion of religious feelings into other areas, even politics (150). But if art is dying, then we must posit that the transformations of these metaphysical and religious sensations through art must also become invested into a new sphere, namely science. This is true because, when one organ of culture has weakened, another organ “has to discharge not only its own function but another as well” (231). Science inherits from art its ability to “look upon life in any of its forms with interest and pleasure, and to educate our sensibilities so far that we at last cry: ‘life, however it may be, is good!’” and has even made this affirmation “an almighty requirement of knowledge” (222). Thus, we can give up art without losing the capacity and sensibility that art and religion has prepared for us.

Science has to cultivate these capacities and seize upon its true calling as the project of achieving an objective by the appropriate means (256). Nietzsche’s science, gifted with the premonition of the Eternal Return, will assert that “every action performed by a human being becomes in some way the cause of other actions, decisions, thoughts, that everything that happens is inextricably knotted to everything that will happen,” that motion is enveloped in an immortality that is the total union of all being (208). Science also must recognize that everyone is “determined by such systems and representatives of different cultures” in a necessary but alterable fashion (274). This power to alter our cultural “determinations” means that we are responsible for our experiences and life experiments, that these are to be fused into a “goal without remainder” that has as its aim the will to distinguish ourselves as forming “a necessary chain of rings of culture and from this necessity to recognize the necessity inherent in the course of culture in general” (292). We are cultural artifacts composing necessary links to a universal culture that, even if it exists only potentially, must be achieved by the labor of free spirits, the kind that seem “to be the opposite of that which is profitable to their country or class” (227). Of course, the dominant culture and the established authority will resist the required degeneration of its stability, but the development of a de-centered, non-hierarchical, universal culture can only begin through the process of weakening the fetters of state culture. This will allow for the generation of lines of flight for new social organizations and/or assemblages.

To conclude, there are three possible factors for the birth of a global culture: absolute music, the scientific analysis of symbolic gestures, and a new language for all. The first two are closely linked, and they require an understanding of how poetry produces a superimposition of immediate feelings in music to the point where the music itself is rendered immediately symbolic for our internal life (215). The development of absolute music for the social ear means that music’s symbolism is understood without further assistance—likewise, the science of cultural tones in vocal patterns that are indicative of mood, feelings and expressions will be necessary to uncovering the vastness of operations at work in unconscious modifications of body and voice. Furthermore, linguistics and philology, as the two dominant sciences of language, can then dedicate their study of the laws of individual languages to the forms of non-verbal thought in a synthesis that has as its goal the creation of a “new language for all—first as a commercial language, then as the language of intellectual intercourse in general” (267). Given that this is merely a preliminary overview of an undercurrent in Human All Too Human, the next step in continuing this line of thought has to navigate the role of the state, the relations of states among themselves, and the relations among the responsibilities that we all bare to our composition of immortal vibrations in the links of a universal cultural chain.

An Argument Against Psychodynamism

If we reduce psychoanalysis to a study of the mind as a closed system of forces tending towards rest through discharge, do we not lose sight of the ultimate object of our inquiry?

Do we not thereby abandon the abyssal depths of the unconscious, ceaselessly channelling consciousness into a collection of psychological AND physiological processes (and how much antiquity still breathes in our age in that tiny article 'and'!) Consciousness is reduced to a dynamic image of self-reflection, equivalent to flows of energy through the brain, and is no longer comprehensible as light illuminating a world. After all, we must learn how to see even in the depths of the "under-mind." Absent phenomenology, "losing sight," we discover the psyche as its energy, as the intensity and flow of desire, which by an analogy to thermodynamics is bracketed and transformed into a mechanical and closed system where the total energy is invariant.

Hence: emotional intensity consists only in displacement, and persists only through discharge--which is also taken retroactively as evidence that, indeed, the mind-system tends towards a rest-position. But this doesn’t further confirm the initial and flawed hypothesis that the psyche is a closed system; wail, yes, fling all the paradoxes of subjectivity you wish against me, but listen closely: we are not talking simply about being open to the outside but about the unstructured-mind, which is open to infinity as idea.

Once opened, this door can never be closed: the mind is the flow of energy from the infinite-source, which is always and in every case identical to the relative source, whichever machine we’re connected to, extracting relative surplus energy, joy, value... and thus this question of desire which is Puritanically left merely at the sexual question is taken to be a book which is forever closed once the discovery that the unconscious had a structure was made.

But the truth is that this discovery is among a unique class of events in history, those which open a sort of Pandora’s box which, like a door to an unknown place, once opened could never be closed--an irreversible though immediately felt transformation.

It would not be completely wrong to say Freud discovered that desire is an allopoetic machine; but psychodynamic considerations led him to attempt to repress this fundamental insight and reinscribe triangulations into the social and psychic body. The untraceable fourth dimension in which the Other would unfold “it”-self, the spacetime of an Event, is ultimately repressed in the name of Society, but mysteriously reinscribed into the reality of individual neurosis, in other words, this same discovery was re-cognized as meaning: neurosis has the truth as its cause.

This fiery kernel of the Freudian discovery is, anyway, in disrepute and all but forgotten about. But as the essence of his discovery lies in the nature of social and psychic repression, it could almost be predicted from the discovery itself that the discovery itself would be misrepresented, perhaps especially by its discoverer! The status of the real is the critical ambiguity in Freud's text, since it seems that all our perceptions (and not just our dreams) are distorted by repressive forces within ourselves; but then again, that these repressive psychic forces merely mimic or internalize oppressive social power structures. The power of social fantasy is in fact the creation of the human universe; atheist as he was, this thought was perhaps too religious for Freud...

Fantasy and Illumination

Have we been led into darkness by honeyed words of light and universal acceptance? Are we so entranced by this spectacle of violent love, so subdued by the pure flow of nothing, that when we are left trembling fear before the void--- we no longer know which way to turn? The truth ultimately is that unconsciously we know already we will eventually turn back, that at some point we always betray the unique truth of our discovery, by the very act of its dissemination.

We lose our faith at the very moment we gain the full force of it, in the very act of expressing it. This is the deep reason poets lie: like religion, love is a story, the prototype of the pure narrative, a total and complete fiction and yet, love owes its existence solely to the strictness of our belief.

Likewise, the religious fantasy is claimed to be formally real: whereas and therefore, the responsibility lies entirely upon us for the spontaneous generation of the radical movement of faith. As we are at once subjects of the truth we seek and subjected to this truth, we are absolutely irreplacable and we are thus made innocent of the slightest skepticism of our place in existence.

By allowing ourselves to be made incapable of maintaining even a minimal distance from the "unadulterated truth", to our ruin and to that of the truth itself, we have by now occupied a meta-position outside of self and universe in order to more completely vaingloriously identify with this universal, to become its excess, to exceed this universal in a particular trajectory. We have gone even beyond essence in our presumption that the universal could be given voice.

Indeed, this identification is already death to a separated freedom; the desire to reunite our essence with the universal is against life itself, is the very force of being-towards-death.

Even as we attempt to regain our balance, to recount and give voice to the pure truth, we are actors in a pure surrealistic fantasy of radical lack, speakers of a negativist discourse whose focus is death, non-existence, which thus becomes the rupture around which our "defective" mortal existence radiates-- and thus, in earning the right to speak it, we murder the truth itself!