Chapter 3 | The Genealogy of Experience

Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche’s scandalous first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1871), was many things: an outburst against the narrow-mindedness of classical philology, a celebration of archaic over classical art forms, and a tribute to Richard Wagner’s vision of the total artwork. At its core, though, it was a forceful reclamation of aesthetic experience over historical and philological analysis. However speculatively, Nietzsche recounts every step in the emergence of Greek tragedy from the perspective of the spectator, for whom the representation of tragedy becomes the tragedy of representation: the tragedy of being separated from the vision on the stage, from the hero who is being sacrificed, from the gods who demand the sacrifice, and from the community who witnesses it. In pointed rejection of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s absorption of tragedy into the ineluctable progress of Spirit—the tragic sacrifice of Antigone, for Hegel, signals the emergence of rational civic laws—Nietzsche highlights the cruelty, the repetitiveness, the irrationality of tragic representation and, at the same time, celebrates the abandonment with which the spectators embrace it. This Rausch—the inebriation that arises from losing oneself in another experience—is Nietzsche’s early aesthetic and speculative version of the “pure experience” that William James discovered in his laboratory around the same time.

The book is also a first subterranean engagement with Buddhist visions of experience, though the deepest connection, that between the Eternal Recurrence of the Same and Nāgārjuna’s axiom of Dependent Arising, appeared ten years later. What Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy calls the wisdom of Silenus—“Wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and tribulation, why do you force me to tell you the very thing which it would be most profitable for you not to hear? The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is: to die soon”—invokes the mainstream Buddhist argument that the origin of dukkha (suffering) is “having been born” into a world of transitoriness. In this early phase, Nietzsche’s sympathy for Buddhism is still very much beholden to Arthur Schopenhauer’s view that Greek tragedy and Buddhism both despaired over the pain of individuation. We already know that Nāgārjuna makes short shrift of this stance: for him, at the heart of human suffering is ignorance—in particular the ignorance of believing that something can be the sole cause of something else or, more fundamentally, that anything is, unconditionally. Suffering, he says, is another name for the search for first, last, or sole causes.

Nietzsche’s invocation of tragedy at this stage targeted the blind progressivism into which Hegel’s philosophy of history had morphed in the second half of the nineteenth century. Tragedy, Nietzsche insisted, could not be overcome and “elevated” in the experience of consciousness but had to be experienced repeatedly and ritually to rouse a polis from complacency. The opposition he opens between the Apollonian arts of convention and the Dionysian vision of the groundlessness and meaninglessness of existence resembles the Buddha’s insight in the two truths, except that it remains confined to an annual festival and subservient to the needs of the polis and its metaphysics.

There is an air of bravado about this early work, meant to counter the pessimistic and paralyzing consequences Schopenhauer drew from his insights into the crushing futility of existence. Nietzsche celebrated the defiance of tragic heroes who do not accept suffering quietly or withdraw into the passive contemplation of art. Tragic repetition, for Nietzsche’s heroes as well as for the spectators, is not the repetition of an identical event but, since every tragedy was “new” and part of a citywide competition, the return of a difference that reaffirms the rebellion against the gods and the fate that hangs over them. The tragic hero is the first to say to the gods: “Was that life? Well then! One More Time!”

By reintroducing the repetitiveness and absolutism of tragedy into his vision of classical antiquity, Nietzsche also wanted to suspend the metaphysical question of justification and salvation of the world, a constant concern of this pastor’s son. He delighted in showing that pre-Socratic philosophies and cultures had no interest in this question, and that the operatic interpretation of tragedy—by Wagner, for example—transformed the task of saving the world into an aesthetic attitude: “Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified.” To the tragic hero’s bravado, he added the defiant irresponsibility of the modern artist who observes the spectacle of the world from beyond the confines of morality and teleology.

Nietzsche’s youthful attempt to synthesize ancient tragedy, Wagnerian opera, and Schopenhauer’s proto-Buddhist worldview famously failed, not least because he recoiled from Wagner’s eagerness to bring the German Reich into this triangle. Following his break with Wagner, Nietzsche pointedly turned to France—the “hereditary enemy” (Erbfeind) recently defeated and humiliated by the Second Reich—and immersed himself in the writings of French moralists and essayists from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. These mostly aristocratic writers had developed, through observation, introspection, and bemused thought experiments, a rich vocabulary of psychological and cultural criticism. They restored for him access to a world and a sensibility that academic psychology, in the wake of Immanuel Kant’s verdict against psychology, had closed and barricaded with its quantitative methods.

Nietzsche admired the French writers as “free spirits,” unbounded by systematic, political, or moral constraints. Intellectual heirs of Michel de Montaigne, they were irrepressibly curious, let their attention wander, and expanded the limits of articulating experience. Importantly, they developed specific literary forms to reflect the logical playfulness and intermittent temporality of experiential thinking: the essay and the aphorism. So captivated was Nietzsche by these agile and experimental writings that he would never write an academic “book” again.

With this shift in style, Nietzsche also abandoned the notion that truth results from concentrated conceptual labor or from expansive historical description. Aphorisms are the diametrical opposite of the style required in German academic Wissenschaft. They each have their own rhythm, their own cut and polish, their own perspective, often voicing alternative viewpoints and experiences without explicitly marking or judging them. This porosity of Nietzsche’s writing to others’ experience became a hallmark not only of his published works but also of his extensive notebooks. Some of these notebooks were published after his death without regard for the polyphony of voices they contain, essentializing concepts in a manner wholly incompatible with the thrust of Nietzsche’s late philosophy.

The most calamitous consequence of the editorial flattening of his thought—aside from the well-known falsifications that turned his writings into bellicose, antisemitic propaganda—was the misunderstanding of Nietzsche’s core vocabulary. Just as Nāgārjuna’s śūnya (emptiness) was misunderstood as a nihilistic doctrine and thereby turned from an instrument of critique into its opposite, an essence, Nietzsche’s Will to Power was quickly essentialized as a category in which he supposedly formulated his ultimate explanation of the world—his version of explaining, and thereby saving, the phenomena. Though the book with this title was later discovered to be a tendentious compilation, even such influential readers as Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze regarded these three words as a single fundamental concept.

William James observed that “philosophy has always turned on grammatical particles,” such as prepositions and conjunctions. They underscore that philosophical concepts are relations, not isolated modules that require a frame in which they find their place. So it is with Nietzsche’s key terms. Will-to-Power, importantly, is neither will nor power; it is the will’s wanting of and striving for power, and power’s solicitation of the will. The distortions that Nietzsche’s genealogical approach seeks to bring to light are often the result of mistaking a mutual relation for a single essence. Less systematically but also more expansively and attentively than Nāgārjuna, he goes through a series of phenomena that look like independent essences—compassion, morality, duty, God, religion, knowledge, mastery, slavery, art, the body—and shows them to derive from an effort to stabilize, to overpower, the radical contingency of a world that is no longer in the hands of God.

The Death-of-God—the loss of the path in which we expect an object to move, the collapse of any framework in which phenomena can be stabilized—is in turn codependent on the Will-to-Power. As aphorism 125 of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science so dramatically narrates, “we,” in search for power, have murdered God and now must perpetually fill this void with our own manifestations of power. Yet just as the will is dependent on power and power on the will, so is the Death-of-God internally a codependent relation: that between radical finitude (death) and radical infinity (God). When the Christian God, tripped up by his own insatiable Will-to-Power, imposed his will on the world by creating it ex nihilo, paradoxically and inevitably this imposition of omnipotence brought the nihil, the Nothing into the world as well. It manifests externally as the time before creation and imposed the linearity of beginning and end on the world—Nietzsche reclaims this excluded time in the eternity of recurrence; internally, in the created world the Nothing appears as death. Following Nāgārjuna, we can say that the radicality and subsequent death of the Christian God emptied emptiness of its experiential core.

The problem of the Death-of-God, then, extends beyond secular erosion of Christian values to the impossibility for the omnipotent God to die and to experience the anguish that so thoroughly shapes the lives of his creatures. That is why, for Nietzsche, Dionysus is the counterfigure to the Christian God: Dionysus, patron of tragedy, knows what it is like to die. Nietzsche’s deep compassion for Jesus stems from his recognition that the Son of God had to die, if not for the sins, then for the hubris of the Father. In heresies like Arianism and Gnosticism, where the belief in the trinity and in the death of God as Son had weakened, God appears as trapped in the same predicament as every absolute ruler: he is dependent on power. In Nietzsche’s genealogical analysis, God is dead because he cannot die, which is tantamount to saying that he cannot make experiences. In the terms this essay explicates later, this also means that God cannot read.

Mobilizing these internally and externally codependent terms, observing and tracking their interplay in history and their traces in psyches collective and individual, is the work of genealogy. In contrast to positivistic history, the suffocating effects of which Nietzsche had analyzed in his early writings, genealogy provides a means of identifying and following the concepts and practices that seek to stabilize and ground the flux of phenomena. Analytically, the genealogist does the same work Nāgārjuna had done in his dispute with the clerics who essentialized the dharma; but Nietzsche in addition reconstructs how the solidification of conventions played out in the history of Western Europe. He recognizes the emptiness in the conventions of the West, and the desperate attempts to fill it with ever more abstract values. Even after its historical demise, Christianity survives as nihilism, as the Nothing that attracts and harnesses the will and prevents its striking out for new experiences.

A third prepositional term co-arises with the Death-of-God and the Will-to-Power: the Eternal-Recurrence-of-the-Same. Nietzsche gives his awakening to this thought a time and place, and his alter ego Zarathustra staggers and groans under its near-unbearable weight. In The Gay Science and in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he stages elaborate scenarios to evoke the experiential gravity of this insight. Nietzsche thus insists that Eternal Recurrence is not simply a logical thought or a concept but a profound experience—an experience so all-encompassing that it changes the ways we inhabit the world. Like all experiences, it can be approached from the perspective of the experiencer or from that of the experienced; it can be understood as a thought experiment designed to challenge our ethical choices or as a cosmological theory about time, space, force, and matter. Nietzsche and his interpreters have attempted to “prove” Eternal Recurrence from both angles, as an ethical postulate or as a cosmological theory. Ultimately, though, experiences cannot be proven.

This is not to suggest that Nietzsche’s encounter with the thought of the Eternal Recurrence is a mystical event. It is an awakening to a rational path out of the dilemmas of Western metaphysics and its drive to save the phenomena. By taking temporality seriously—distinguishing eternity from infinite spatial division into before and after and breaking the linear conception of time that had shaped the world since the demiurgic myths of Hesiod, Plato, and the Hebrew bible—Nietzsche seeks to return things to the freedom of being the codependent same they have eternally been: to the freedom of no longer being split between the idea and its avatar, between the passive and active side of representation, between being a wandering blob of matter and a planet following its orbital path. In dismantling ideas of origination, purpose, and redemption, Nietzsche thrusts the world back into the groundlessness and boundlessness, the a-peiron, from which philosophers since the pre-Socratics had endeavored to rescue it. Zarathustra’s apotheosis of the Earth, his hymnic invocation of the sun and the stars, are his attempt to welcome the Same back from the exile of representation.

In a well-known interlude in the Twilight of the Idols, “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable,” Nietzsche recounts the history of Western metaphysics as a six-step sequence of the “error” that is the division between the true and the conventional world and that, in the last two steps, clearly reminiscent of his own awakening to the consequences of the Eternal Return, is finally undone:

• 5.  The “true world”—an idea that is of no further use, not even as an obligation—now an obsolete superfluous idea, consequently a refuted idea: let’s get rid of it! (Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato blushes in shame, the pandemonium of all free spirits.)
• 6.  The true world is gone: which world is left? The illusory one, perhaps? … But no! we got rid of the illusory world along with the true one! (Noon; moment of shortest shadow; end of longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)

A world without a double, one in which the scintillating surface is not obscured by the darkness of a metaphysical backdrop, “the seductive flash of gold on the belly of the snake Life”—this was Nietzsche’s most profound experience. It was the insight he believed he was the first to make and that burdened and exhilarated him in equal measure. His later works, particularly Ecce Homo and The Antichrist, overflow with gratitude for a world that, freed from its imaginary double, sparkles with the surprise of novelty. The Same that recurs is not the numerically identical—it is not the same old, das Selbe—but rather the constellation of innumerable conditions that might bring forth the same kind of event. Everything that occurs and recurs is simultaneously familiar and novel, including the self. The marvelous phrase at the beginning of Ecce Homo—“and thus I recount my life to myself”—captures this interplay between familiarity and novelty.

Entrance into this world of genuine experience is reserved for those who relinquish the Will-to-Power in its most insidious form: the Will-to-Knowing. Twice in his Zarathustra, Nietzsche uses a phrase that astonishes even in a book brimming with metaphorical flourishes. In the chapter “On Redemption,” he exhorts the will to give up its futile resistance to the intangibility of the past: “All ‘it was’ is a fragment, a riddle, a grisly accident—until the creating will says to it: ‘But I will it thus! I shall will it thus!’ But has it ever spoken thus? And when will this happen? Is the will already unharnessed from its own folly?” Similarly, in the chapter “On the Sublime Ones,” ostensibly directed at the “heroes” of knowledge and science, he observes: “To stand with muscles relaxed and with an unharnessed will: this is most difficult for all you.” Unharnessing one’s will—dropping the yoke—(Sanskrit: yoga), laying down one’s burden—these are phrases older than Nietzsche might have imagined.

Indeed, the Eternal Recurrence of the Same as the path to genuine experience is—and must be—the return of a very old worldview: Nāgārjuna marshaled similar arguments against the believers in motion behind the moving body, in time that is not present, in fire without fuel, or in a self that transcends a singular human existence. Ultimately, the Eternal-Recurrence-of-the-Same and the axiom of dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) articulate the same view of the world, with the important distinction that Nietzsche’s vision had to pass through the crucible of Platonic and Christian beliefs in creation, causation, and purpose.

Whether an event—an Augenblick in Nietzsche’s Goethe-inspired lexicon—is conceived as the result of infinitely many antecedents and consequences or as shaped by an infinite web of conditions: both perspectives converge on the fundamental insight that we must learn to live in a world without beginning and end, without purpose, without ground.

Only in such a world is true experience possible. Only when all barriers are removed—whether they take the form of nostalgia crystallized in moral prejudice, desire and thirst for stability (tanha), Will-to-Power reified in religion and dogma, or resentment dictating political decisions—only then can experience unfold as the experience of the infinite:

In the horizon of the infinite.—We have forsaken the land and gone to sea! We have destroyed the bridge behind us—more so, we have demolished the land behind us! Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean; it is true, it does not always roar, and at times it lies there like silk and gold and dreams of goodness. But there will be hours when you realize that it is infinite and there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that has felt free and now strikes against the walls of his cage! Woe, when homesickness for the land overcomes you, as if there had been more freedom there—and there is no more “land”!

Nietzsche’s furious attack against atrophied, disembodied forms of knowing, against harnessing cognition to what is already there, completes his life-long crusade against what we now can recognize as an aspect of artificial intelligence—the view that to know is to read, reassemble, and rearrange the fragments of the past, to subject them to the ordering prompts of a reader who wants to fill a void rather than launch into an uncertain future. His training as a classical philologist had acquainted him with modes of scholarship that are essentially large language models; opposing their nostalgia with the parallax view of genealogy became his life’s mission. Other ways of reading are possible, he insisted: a philology of the future that in every moment participates in the novelty of experience.

While Nietzsche’s relationship to Nāgārjuna is subterranean, unacknowledged, and rooted in the shared rejection of any ground uniting their worlds, his relationship to two nineteenth-century thinkers of experience, Charles Darwin and Ralph Waldo Emerson, is more overt and tangible. Nietzsche could not fail to notice that Darwin, too, had shattered the compressed timeline that had framed the natural world into epochs far too brief to allow for any explanation other than divine intervention or mechanistic causality for the origin and fixity of species. In the language of Nietzsche, the anti-Platonist, and Nāgārjuna, the reader of the Heart Sutra, the central issue was the status of forms. Darwin agreed that forms are empty—formal similarities between members of a species result not from intrinsic essences but from external conditions and contingent interactions.

Nietzsche saw his idea of a basic Will-to-Power in all beings validated by Darwin’s accounts of survival, in particular his insistence that “will” must not be misconstrued as conscious intention, nor “power” as its end. Nietzsche must have been struck by Darwin’s recognition that the dynamic interplay between selection and adaptation is best understood as an experience that nature herself makes, one where it is never preordained which is the active, “subjective” side and which is the side of “objective” resistance. Evolution is not a bildungsroman in which the organism first seeks to overcome, and then adapts to, environmental constraints; rather, the organism is the manifestation of these constraints as much as it extends and reshapes them. This co-origination of subject and object, figure and ground, becomes the narrative principle that Nietzsche employs in his genealogies and archaeologies of morals, religions, emotions, and institutions. It also anticipates the psychological analyses of absolute experiences that we will encounter in James’s work.

Emerson was a lodestar for Nietzsche like no other author. From his earliest schoolboy writings to the epoch of Zarathustra and beyond, (the German translations of) Emerson’s essays provided Nietzsche with a model for thinking and writing about experience. They also offered him a way to experience writing in a more supple format than the, at times, ponderous Essais of Montaigne. Emerson—admirer of Goethe and his concept of “tender empiricism”—approached experience not as a faculty in opposition to intellect but as a genuine source of insight. For Emerson, experience develops as it proceeds, incorporates reflection, and conceives of the experiencing self as something perpetually strange and remarkable to itself. Nietzsche adopted Emerson’s critique of compassion and philanthropy, understood “representative men” as exemplars of a new aristocracy, and deeply felt the sense of tragedy and finitude that pervades Emerson’s life and writing.

Darwin and Emerson—the latter in very concrete ways—were lodestars also for James. In James’s late philosophy, we see an attempt to construct a microphysics of experience, a project that unwittingly would connect Nāgārjuna’s and Nietzsche’s thought to the realities of the industrial world.