Fate, Will and the Sea: Sovereign Creativity and the Economy of Eternal Return
Amy Ireland
Transcendental philosophy, crudely put, is a question of framing — a drawing of borders, a
cartography of the space of possible and legitimate thought. Thus Kant, surveying his
territory, writes [SLIDE]:
This domain is an island, enclosed by nature itself within limits that can never be
altered. It is the country of truth (a very charming name), surrounded by a wide
and stormy ocean, the true home of illusion, where many a fog-bank and fastmelting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the
adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in
enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to
completion.1
Kant’s island of ‘truth’, its shores delineated by the transcendental synthesis of the
imagination, or the schemata — the universal rules for the subsumption of bundles of
empirical sense impressions under the pure concepts of the understanding — rises out of
the ocean as a prophylactic measure against the nausea of existence. A little piece of solid
ground upon which the tired seeker of knowledge may finally lay down her staff, remove
her boots, and rest. Outside, a dark and turbulent sea continues to churn — but we need
not pay it any heed for we know it houses nothing but illusions: fog-banks and icebergs.
Our island is sure, stable, and for the moment, secure. Fog, on the other hand, disperses.
Icebergs dissolve.
If there is one weak spot in Kant’s construction of the domain of knowledge it is in the
operation that draws the borders of the island — the schematism — this strange suture that
1 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Marcus Weigelt, (London: Penguin, 2007) p. 251.
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anchors the transcendental unity of apperception, the ego, to the synthesis of objects in
experience. Famously, Kant locates its guarantee in the necessity of the a priori (human)
determination of time to both sides of the synthesis. In a book that begins with a
declaration of ‘scientific’ rigour and clarity of enunciation, the following sentence cannot
help but arouse suspicion amongst even the most compliant of readers [quote]: ‘this
schematism of our understanding, regarding appearances and their mere form, is a secret
art residing in the depths of the human soul, an art whose true stratagems we shall hardly
ever divine from nature and lay bare before ourselves.’2 … This ‘secret art,’ mysteriously
hidden in the ‘depths of the soul’ is the reason for all the signs on the beach that read
[SLIDE] NIHIL ULTERIUS !?3 If the unification, finitude, and singularity of experience has to
be so deviously shored up against its dissolution into multiple frames and orders, one
would have to be mad not to want to test the water for oneself! Or rather, mad is exactly
what one would have to be.
Nietzsche offers us a cartography of an entirely different kind. He will invert Kant’s map,
dilate it and multiply it — before throwing it into the wind. He is the master-invoker of
inhuman scale. Spatially grasped, his thought is cosmic, not terrestrial. In terms of
temporality, it is humiliating, and unapologetically heretical when placed alongside the
Kantian formulation: we do not synthesise time, time synthesises us. [SLIDE]
In some remote corner of the universe poured out into countless flickering
solar systems there was once a star on which some clever animals invented
knowledge. It was the most arrogant and most untruthful minute of world
history, but still only a minute. When nature had drawn a few breaths the star
solidified and the clever animals died. It was time, too: for although they
2 Kant, B 180-181 On the anxiety of science in the CPR, see Le Doeuff p 10.
3 ‘Nothing but the sobriety of a strict but just criticism can liberate us from these dogmatic semblances [...]
and limit all our speculative claims merely to the field of possible experience, not by stale mockery at
attempts that have so often failed, or by pious sighing over the limits of our reason, but by means of a
completer determination of reason’s boundaries according to secure principles, which with the greatest
reliability fastens its nihil ulterius on those Pillars of Hercules that nature has erected, so that the voyage of
our reason may proceed only as far as the continuous coastline of experiences reaches, a coastline that we
cannot leave without venturing out into a shoreless ocean, which, among always deceptive prospects, forces
us in the end to abandon as hopeless all our troublesome and tedious efforts.’ Kant, A 395/396
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prided themselves on knowing a lot, they had finally discovered, to their great
annoyance, that they knew everything wrongly. They died and as they died
they cursed truth. That was the way of those desperate animals that had
invented knowledge.4
Nietzsche is deeply suspicious of any thought that would seem to reassure us of our
central position or ultimate purpose in the universe. Kant’s ‘truth’ is not difficult enough for
him.5 We need to be reminded of the folly of our hubris, of the pathetic
anthropomorphism of this knowledge that we nonetheless pass everything through in
order to judge it, and the fact — tragic as it may be — that it is formed out of nothing but an
accumulation of error. [SLIDE]
The concepts ‘individual’ and ‘species’ — equally false and merely apparent.
‘Species’ expresses only the fact that an abundance of similar creatures
appear at the same time and that the tempo of their further growth and
change is for a long time slowed down, so actual small continuations and
increases are not very much noticed ( — a phase of evolution in which the
evolution is not visible, so an equilibrium seems to have been attained,
making possible the false notion that a goal has been attained — and that
evolution has a goal).6
What is at stake in Nietzsche’s invocations of distance and speed, and what separates
him most precisely from Kant, is this double repudiation of unity and equilibrium.
Nietzsche teaches us that equilibrium — the inertia of truth — is a fiction founded in the
false unity of the ego. What Kant’s account elides is the fact that knowledge and truth
are not fixed qualities, powers, or categories of the human mind, rather they have
evolved just as the human animal has in order to arrive at their current forms, and they
4 Nietzsche, ‘On the Pathos of Truth’, Early Notebooks, p. 252.
5 WTP - naivety ; s538 ‘The easier mode of thought conquers the harder mode;—as dogma…’ p. 291)
6 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, s521, p.282 My italics.
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are transient, just like everything else in nature. This is where genealogy rails against
critique, perspectivism against a single set of transcendental conditions. As an antidote
to the human bias inherent in the auto-legislation of reason, Nietzsche proposes to carry
out a ‘biology of knowledge’, the effect of which will be nothing short of a copernican
revolution (‘what were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?’ cries the
madman in the market place) — and a much more harrowing one than that claimed by
Kant.7
What Nietzsche’s reevaluation of knowledge will come to demonstrate is the extent to
which our particular form of knowledge is developed by — and inside of — an economy
of survival. We owe our perceptions of the world to [quote] ’the utility of preservation —
not some abstract-theoretical need not to be deceived’. There is no paradox in
correlating survival with deception, for [quote] ’a belief can be a condition of life and
nonetheless be false’.8 The thought should be pushed even further to the conclusion
that survival without falsification is impossible. Here is the characteristic Nietzschean
inversion: truth is nothing but deception, in fact, life demands that this be so.9 [SLIDE] At
the root of the differences between the epistemological models of Nietzsche and Kant
one can discern a disjunction of economy. Kant limits trade to the denizens of the island,
Nietzsche opens the market to the sea, the black abyss of space and — as we will see —
the entirety of time.
What is at the heart of this deception? Why is it ‘necessary’ for survival? Nietzsche’s
answer is very simple: identity. To live, we require the ability to posit sameness — and this
need has evolved into a biological rule of perception. Identity is not a fact about the
world so much as an instrumentalised belief that enables us to navigate a vertiginous
7 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 272; Gay Science s125; Criticism of reason’s critique of itself: ‘a critique
of the faculty of knowledge is senseless: how should a tool be able to criticise itself when it can only use
itself for critique? It cannot even define itself!’ WTP s.486, p 269.
8 WTP, s480, p. 266; WTP s483, p268.
9 WTP s493, p. 272.
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topology of difference.10 Moreover, the entire edifice of identity-based deception can
be traced back to a single conceptual pin: the ego. [SLIDE]
‘The subject’: this is the term for our belief in a unity underlying all the
different impulses of the highest feeling of reality: we understand this belief
as the effect of one cause — we believe so firmly in our belief that for its sake
we imagine ‘truth’, ‘reality’, ‘substantiality’ in general. ‘The subject’ is the
fiction that many similar states in us are the effect of one substratum: but it is
we who first created the ‘similarity’ of these states; our adjusting them and
making them similar is the fact, not their similarity (which ought rather to be
denied).11
We anchor the annihilating difference of the sensible manifold in a fictitious concept of
the one because if we did not, we would perish. The ‘I’ is simply a security [SLIDE]
measure.12 Despite risk of further humiliation, it is important to add that the
responsibility for this fundamental error — even once it has been recognised as error —
cannot be attributed to some excess of human creative agency such as Kant’s ‘errant
reason’ — for it is nature that has built our apparatus of thought, and which, in this sense,
thinks itself through us.
Localised human agency falls away with the concept of the subject. From the economic
necessity of grasping ourselves as single unified beings we derive a cascading series of
conceptual structures which, taken together, constitute what we are bound to call
knowledge. The subject gives us logic and grammar, or rather, logic and grammar are
10 WTP 506 ‘believing is the primal beginning even in every sense impression: a kind of affirmation of the
first intellectual activity’.
11 WTP s485. See also WTP. 481 ‘The “subject” is not something given, it is something added and invented
and projected behind what there is.’ It is a belief - an effective one, but for which we cannot make a stronger
epistemological claim. ‘However habitual and indispensable this fiction may have become by now — that in
itself proves nothing against its imaginary origin: a belief can be a condition of life and nonetheless be false.’
12 WTP s513 p. 277 ‘The inventive force that invented the categories laboured in the service of our needs,
namely of our need for security, for quick understanding on the basis of signs and sounds, for means of
abbreviation: — “substance,””subject,” “object,” “being,” “becoming” have nothing to do with metaphysical
truths.— cf. Land’s HSS
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the means by which the subject imposes form on new experience in order to assimilate
it. ‘This whole process,’ writes Nietzsche, ‘corresponds exactly to that external,
mechanical process (which is its symbol) by which protoplasm makes what it
appropriates equal to itself and fits it into its own forms and files’.13 Or again, ‘the spirit
wants equality, i.e., to subsume a sense impression into an existing series: in the same
way as the body assimilates inorganic matter.’14 This is, of course, a shot fired in the
direction of Kant’s ‘synthetic a priori’, with its categories [SLIDE] and its pure forms of
time and space.15 Such logic — the logic of the a priori — is, as Nietzsche writes, ‘bound
to the condition: assume there are identical cases.’16 From the subject we also derive the
object (the notion of subject conceived from outside) and this in turn licences belief in
agency and intention (a subject acts upon an object), which underwrites what we
perceive as the law of cause and effect.17 If everything that occurs is caused by the act of
some agent, then there is always someone or something to hold responsible. Thus the
entire history of accusation, blame, ressentiment, redemption, disappointment, and
nihilism can be traced back to the founding fiction of the subject. The emergent ‘truth’ of
this process is sealed when its origin is forgotten: [quote] ‘a sign it has become master’.
Alternatively put, it is not the ‘truth’ of ‘subject’, ‘object’, ‘logic’, ‘agency’ and ‘causality’
that produces the kind of experience we have — rather, ‘truth’ is nothing more than the
contingent effect of self-preservation and evolution.18
Taken as a whole, this revaluation of knowledge is a rejection of atomism — fixity on both
the level of being and on the (transcendental) level of being’s apprehension of being —
13 WTP s510 p. 276
14 WTP s 511 p.277 ‘Logic is the attempt to comprehend the actual world by means of a scheme of being
posited by ourselves; more correctly, to make it formula table and calculable for us.’ WTP s517, p.280 ‘…
what appears is always something new, and it is only we, who are always comparing, who include the new,
to the extent that it is similar to the old…’ WTP s521, p. 282; cf. Bataille
15 Our inability to get outside of Euclidean space is a mere human ‘idiosyncrasy’ — an incapacity on our
part, not a ‘truth’. WTP s515 p. 278 (Lovecraft.)
16 WTP 512
17 ‘The interpretation of an event as either an act or the suffering of an act (—thus every act a suffering) says:
every change, every becoming-other, presupposes an author and someone upon whom “change” is effected.’
WTP s546, pp. 293-294.
18
WTP s514, p. 278
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and more virulently, the dogma at the heart of this atomism — the presupposition of
similarity as the primary rule of conceptual subsumption. Having shown the
shortcomings of epistemology as philosophical method beholden to truth, Nietzsche
then proceeds, most markedly in his later works, to make a series of ontological
propositions based on a positive inflection of what epistemology conceals [SLIDE]:
‘knowledge and becoming exclude one another.’19 These converge around a notion of
flux. He writes of [quote] ’the continual transitoriness and fleetingness of the subject,’ the
fact that ‘continual transition forbids us to speak of individuals,’ that ‘we would know
nothing of time and motion if we did not, in a coarse fashion, believe we see what is at
“rest” beside what is in motion,’ proposing that ‘the antithesis of this phenomenal world
is not the true world, but the formless unformulable world of the chaos of sensations’.20
When Nietzsche talks about the ‘innocence of becoming’ he is alluding to the fact that
judgement — and the condemnation or reprieve of the ‘accused’ (i.e. those held
responsible under the logic of cause and effect) — cannot be grounded in anything
more meaningful that what he has shown to be a bio-fictional account of intentionality
and causality.21 If you suffer at the hands of nature, there is no ‘one’ to blame. Existence
is innocent, meaningless, purposeless, and therein, blameless [SLIDE]:
Nobody is responsible for people existing in the first place, or for the state or
circumstances or environment they are in. The fatality of human existence
cannot be extricated from the fatality of everything that was and will be.
People are not the products of some special design, will, or purpose, they do
not represent an attempt to achieve an ‘ideal of humanity’, ‘ideal of happiness’,
or ‘ideal of morality’ … A person is a piece of fate, a person belongs to the
19 WTP s517.
20 WTP s490; s520; s569. See also Twilight of the Idols pp. 166-167.
21 ‘In every judgement there resides the entire, full, profound belief in subject and attribute, or in cause and
effect (that is, as the assertion that every effect is an activity and that every activity presupposes an agent);
and this latter belief is only a special case of the former, so there remains as the fundamental belief the belief
that there are subjects, that everything that happens is related attributively to some subject.’ WTP, s550, p.
294
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whole, a person only is in the context of the whole, — there is nothing that can
judge, measure, compare, or condemn our being, because that would mean
judging, measuring, comparing and condemning the whole … But there is
nothing outside the whole! [And then:] there is no whole … it is necessary to
disperse the universe, to lose respect for the whole.22
By what law are we holding life responsible for suffering? Any tribunal brought to bear
upon life is nothing more than an artefact of illusive, transcendent logic. One may
choose to negate life — accuse it, despise it for its injustices (whether one blames this on
God or on one’s own failure to appease God), or — one can choose to love it, to love the
fatalism expressed in its meaninglessness, to — as Nietzsche writes, ‘give presents to
life’… (or hugs to horses, whatever yr into).23 This is the measure of our freedom.
Anything more is a hubristic and ultimately unfulfillable projection of absent power, and
a refusal to love what is. Late in his life Nietzsche will make a lesson of Socrates, who at
the very last moment — faced with the Athenian tribunal — would renounce life — or more
accurately, submit it to dialectics, the last resort of reactive consciousness.24
‘Nothing with real value needs to be proved first,’ he writes, ‘as the member of an
oppressed group, did Socrates take pleasure in the ferocity with which he could thrust
his syllogistic knife? Did he avenge himself on the nobles he fascinated? … Dialectics
lets you act like a tyrant; you humiliate the people you defeat. The dialectician puts the
onus on his opponent to show that he is not an idiot: the dialectician infuriates people
and makes them feel helpless at the same time. … What? Is dialectics just a form of
revenge for Socrates?’25 Nietzsche uses Plato’s apologia for Socrates to unveil
22 Twilight p 175 Also, then: ‘there is no whole’; ‘it is necessary to disperse the universe, to lose respect for
the whole.’
23 Scarcity/Production vs Abundance/Excess/The Gift
(Bataille); 'Those poor in life, the weak, impoverish
life; those rich in life, the strong,enrich it. The first are parasites of life; the second give presents to it.'
24 Nietzsche, ‘The Problem of Socrates’, The Anti-Christ; Cf. Land, After the Law; Deleuze ‘The
Tragic’ (Knowledge or Intoxication)
25 TI 164 Sections 5; 6; 7. (Dialectics here is as syllogistic reasoning — but N’s tacit anti-Hegelianism allows
for this to be expanded, as it has been by a great chunk of post-structuralist thought, even declaring that his
own Birth of Tragedy ‘smelled offensively Hegelian’).
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judgement’s alliance with ressentiment [SLIDE] (the psychological foundation of
nihilism), arguing that Socrates submits the non-knowledge of death [SLIDE] to the jury
as proof of his superior knowledge (possessing the knowledge of non-knowledge) and
thus sets a precedent (in the legal sense) that will suture philosophy to the mastery of
juridical procedure — that which ultimately judges life [SLIDE (Phaedo)] and the body
that perishes with it. Non-knowledge itself cannot be affirmed. It must be dialectally
subsumed by philosophy. Only the philosopher, like the priest who will succeed him, is
truly prepared for death. Finally, driving home the point that knowledge as we have
constructed it is subordinate to survival, Nietzsche names Socrates’ elegant recuperation
of death a [quote] ’personal strategy for self-preservation’.26
So what is this ‘innocent becoming’ that is concealed or excluded by knowledge? If the
Socrates-Christ complex is the avatar of life’s judgement and negation, Dionysus is the
[quote] ‘ecstatic affirmation of the total character of life as that which remains the same —
just as powerful, just as blissful — through all change; the great pantheistic sharing of joy
and sorrow that sanctifies and calls good even the most terrible and questionable
qualities of life; the eternal will to creation, to fruitfulness, to recurrence; the feeling of
the necessary unity of creation and destruction.’27
Throughout Nietzsche’s oeuvre, Dionysus’ symbolic counterpoint will shift — from Apollo, to
Socrates, to Christ — as Nietzsche refines his models of negation. In the very late writings,
once his true opponent has been identified [SLIDE], Dionysus expands to absorb Apollo,
building the necessity of constraint and crystallisation into the chaos he comprises, no
longer as suffering’s resolution, but as [quote] ‘something higher than all reconciliation’:
affirmation.28 Here the animating dualism of Greek tragedy is contracted to a single term,
exploded out, and re-transcendentalised as a cosmic principle commensurate with
26 Twilight, Section 9
27 WTP, Section 1050
28 Zarathustra, II ‘Of Redemption’ (Dz 16) See note 96 WTP Also, ‘The opposition of Dionysus or
Zarathustra to Christ is not a dialectical opposition, but opposition to the dialectic itself: differential
affirmation against dialectical negation, against all nihilism…’ Deleuze 17.
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becoming itself: its complementary components reassembled into an engine, which —
providing each is affirmed in their operation — underwrites the perpetual production of all
being: the eternal return. [SLIDE]
Recalling that we have cast causality aside, this leads to a very strange, paradoxical
conclusion: namely that fate and chance are part of the same complex. The necessity of
being (’an individual is a piece of fate’29 ) is inseparable from the contingency of the
becoming that throws it up (and has dismantled other things to do so). There is no
negativity in this process if being ceases to be construed as an ultimate break, and is —
instead — affirmed (not judged) in the full light of the conditions that constrain it in its
individuation. Since it is enveloped by (and secondary to) the chaotic process that
produces it, affirming the being that is thrown up by chance affirms chance as such
(becoming as such) and thus restarts the loop. ‘Dionysus’ is the cipher of this double
affirmation: affirmation of the becoming (which is also the dissolution) of being, and
affirmation of the being of becoming.
For a species that has raised itself out of the ocean by clinging to fixity and identity, the
affirmation of ceaseless becoming can be a difficult thought. [SLIDE] ‘Everything seems
far too valuable to be so fleeting’ Nietzsche worries in The Will to Power, but if one finds
oneself wondering why there cannot be an eternity for everything (the soul, the good,
the beautiful), why — as he puts it — one [quote] ’ought to pour the most precious salves
and wines into the sea …— My consolation is that everything that has been is eternal: the
sea will cast it up again.’30 Affirmed as such, the eternal return is the ‘process‘ — at once
of being, becoming and justice — that exceeds all tribunals and obsolesces all law.
Against mechanistic accounts of the universe which must posit either an original state or a
final cause — some kind primary [SLIDE] equilibrium or identity from which all change then
29 Twilight, p 175
30 WTP Section 1064
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ensues — Nietzsche floats the ‘unthinkable’ [SLIDE] turbulence of infinite becoming. He
expresses it best in the following interminable, breathless sentence [SLIDE]:
This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron
magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend
itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household
without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed
by ‘nothingness’ as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not
something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force,
and not a space that might be ‘empty’ here or there, but rather as force
throughout, a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and
many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces
flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with
tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the
simplest forms striving towards the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid,
coldest forms toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and
then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play
of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this
uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return
eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this is
my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally selfdestroying.’31
After this, any kind of conclusion is an ersatz arrangement, but I will close with two remarks.
Firstly to return to the thought of two economies: the restricted economy of (all too
human) judgement underwritten by survival, and the [SLIDE] general economy of tragic,
cosmic production, propelled by death. The latter is sovereign in the sense that is
beholden to no higher force of regulation or justification. The delicious twist, of course,
31 WTP Section 1067
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being that — to get outside of illusion, one must affirm, or in the very least, entertain the
perspective of one’s own annihilation.
Secondly, and recalling here that Kant casts the work of critique as a juridical procedure,
we might be forgiven (by whom?) for affirming the expansion of thought past the pitiful
exigencies of our own survival economy, and pitching ourselves headfirst into the
[quote] ‘dangerous green bodies’ of the waves, those ‘beautiful monsters’ so beloved by
Nietzsche, that shatter themselves against the cliffs of the ‘country of truth’, only to
recede and return, each time more forcefully than before. As Luce Irigaray, writing to
Nietzsche in the voice of the sea, warned 'I am coming back from far, far away. And say
to you: your horizon has limits. Holes even. ... Your world will unravel. It will flood out to
other places. To that Outside you have not wanted.'32
32 Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, 4
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