Life of Thought: Nietzsche’s Truth Perspectivism and the Will to Power
How did the whole organic process stand itself against the rest of nature?—so revealing its fundamental will.
—Friedrich Nietzsche[7]
Nietzsche’s account of subjectivity germinates in his conception of life as interpretation (perspectivism), and the organism as an arrangement of drives (will to power) that grows and sustains itself by “interpreting” its environment. Life functions only by means of interpretation, converting its environment into something that is of use to it: for instance, air is filtered by the lungs to become oxygen; a plant nourishes by means of digestion; and light is a source of vision only for a creature with an optic nerve. Nietzsche’s perspectivism emphasizes the body’s role in discourse: it is the principle of embodied interpretation, or the postulate that every truth is constructed within a particular vital milieu, according to particular needs and desires. Our so-called truths reflect what is needed for the species to survive. Nietzsche writes in a posthumously published fragment: “In valuations are expressed conditions of preservation and growth. All our organs of knowledge and our senses are developed only with regard to conditions of preservation and growth.”[8] Interpretation thus occurs always from a viewpoint derived from the needs and desires contingent to the organism that interprets.
Likewise, Nietzsche understood bodies as ”systems” of difference that interpret themselves as a unity. His concept of “will to power” attempts to elucidate the internal processes of all living things and the manner of interaction between organisms. As partner concepts, perspective (truth as “interpretation”) and will to power (“that which interprets”) are not easily distinguished. For while perspective is the “effect” of wills to power interpreting, it is also the mechanism by which bodies constitute themselves as such.
How far the perspective character of existence extends or indeed whether existence has any other character than this; whether existence without interpretation, without “sense,” does not become “nonsense”; whether, on the other hand, all existence is not essentially actively engaged in interpretation—that cannot be decided even by the most industrious and most scrupulously conscientious analysis and self-examination of the intellect; for in the course of this analysis the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its own perspectives, and only in these. We cannot look around our own corner.[9]
Physiologists should think twice before positioning the drive for self-preservation as the cardinal drive of an organic being. Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength—life itself is will to power—: self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of this.[10]
With the concept of will to power, Nietzsche attempts to describe the dynamics between various bodily instincts and organisms. Optimally, the organism is a complex arrangement of forces, which are better able collectively to appropriate—that is, form in their image—whatever surrounds them. The body is thereby a composition of “forces” that have formed strategic alliances with one another, and to map its prehistory, one would have to relate a brutal struggle, literally involving death for some of these forces. According to Nietzsche, the arrangement of drives also necessitates a division of labor between them: active, form-giving force, which compels the allegiance of others that it encounters; and reactive force, which strategically obeys active force in order to obtain sustenance only indirectly, after satisfying the force that commands. Significantly, for Nietzsche perspective (interpretation) and the formation of the body (will to power) are only conceptually separable: interpretation expresses the means by which the drives articulate their relations to one another, and thereby also exercise their power.
Nietzsche’s concept of will to power, in addition to describing biological organisms, includes within its scope behaviors and events in the different “spheres” of the organic world: animal, political, social, and philosophical (Will to Power, §423, 227). Will to power (as the material struggle of forces) and perspective (as the effect of relations between these forces) become for Nietzsche a substratum for both body and thought. They are two sides of the one phenomenon: life.[11] When he turns, then, to philosophy, text seems to have become a visceral remainder. Philosophical texts reflect, by Nietzsche’s account, a truth about the philosopher’s body, which provides the “real germ of life from which the whole plant has grown” (Beyond Good and Evil, “Prejudices,” §6, 13). Yet, even here the relation between body and language is not simple; nor is it unidirectional. As he writes in The Gay Science, “I have asked myself whether, taking a large view, philosophy has not been merely an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body” (Preface, §2, 34-5).
Philosophy often relates a fantasy of overcoming the body, and this narrative, also, plays a part in the agonistic drama of a body pitted against itself. What we find in the philosopher’s language is a movement of both revealing and concealing of the drives. The body, which according to Nietzsche is a thriving multiplicity, is inhibited by “reason,” and is thereby forced to conform to a linear and possibly torpid viewpoint. Reason ostensibly provides an imperative that one’s thoughts and values should be mutually coherent—or in other words, that one thought should follow logically from the last—but what reason actually provides is the paradigm for what is recognized as coherent: there is no coherence in itself, apart from the constraints, or form of life, through which it is perceived. As such, philosophy represents for Nietzsche an egalitarianism of the soul: that is, an attempt to render bodies equivalent to one another, by means of “the impartial” discourse of reason. By devaluing bodily differences—“the passions”—the philosopher attempts to master them. For Nietzsche, conversely, difference is the source of the body’s power and creativity.
By continually contrasting the healthy body to “philosophy,” conceived as a degenerate form of corporeality, Nietzsche promotes a notion of the body as a source of power, figured as difference. Nietzsche charges philosophical thought with the disempowerment and normalization of the body, reflected in the metaphysics inherent in grammar. Philosophy renders explicit “truths,” or viewpoints, humanity already tells itself in the very form of language. Language and subjectivity, Nietzsche held, implicitly reduce bodily diversity to sameness: otherwise communication and understanding would not be possible. The root of thought’s movement away from bodily multiplicity can be traced to the advent of consciousness according to Nietzsche. He discusses the possibility of a thinking being without consciousness in The Gay Science. Yet, what he describes is not usually considered as “thought” by philosophers, who tend to confuse thought with consciousness and reason:
[W]e could think, feel, will, and remember, and we could also “act” in every sense of that word, and yet none of all this would have to “enter our consciousness” (as one says metaphorically). The whole of life would be possible without, as it were, seeing itself in a mirror. Even now, for that matter, by far the greatest portion of our life actually takes place without this mirror effect; and this is true even of our thinking, feeling, and willing life, however offensive this may sound to older philosophers. For what purpose, then, any consciousness at all when it is in the main superfluous? (Gay Science, §354, 297)
Nietzsche then attributes consciousness’s superfluous “mirror effect” to the turn to language: “only this conscious thinking takes the form of words, which is to say signs of communication, and this fact uncovers the origin of consciousness” (Gay Science, §354, 298).
According to Nietzsche, the necessity for communication represents a regrettable “loss of contact” with our individual, bodily being. Such a loss, however, is ambiguously situated in this text. For it is not the
