On Nietzsches Late Notebooks

Notebook 36, June - July 1885 36[10]

How long have I been concerned in my own mind to prove the perfect innocence of becoming! And what strange paths Ive taken in this quest! At one point it seemed to me the right solution to decree that existence, as something like a work of art, does not fall under the jurisdiction of morality at all; instead, morality itself belongs to the realm of appearance. Another time I said: Objectively, all notions of guilt are entirely without value, but subjectively all life is necessarily unjust and alogical. Then again, I wrested from myself the denial of all purposes and felt the unknowability of causal connections. And what was this all for? Was it not to give myself a feeling of complete irresponsibility - to place myself outside all praise and blame, independent of all past and present, in order to run after my own goal in my own way? -

Becoming and psychobiography. This note shows another aspect of becoming as it was understood by Nietzsche. Rather than being the in-principle permanent unfolding of logical relations over time, here becoming is shown to be the unknowable, alogical domain of causality as such which cannot be apprehended. One could introduce that distinction into Nietzsche at any rate. At the same time Nietzsche is chasing after logical (meaningful) distinctions that operate below the surface, and so doing, introducing causality in a way into domains where it does not exist, he also intuits that the full causal field, causality as such, cannot be apprehended. It is beyond full knowing, even though its character may be intuited. There is, therefore, a reciprocal relationship between causality as it is traced in a sort of non-terminating series; and causality as such, causality as totality, which can never be exhausted. One might say that causality as such is simply the form of causality, the set of which causality as nonall, non-terminating is one of its members. (That is, by abstracting from causality in action a causality-as-such, what is common to every specific instance of causality and considering it as a totality, one arrives at this
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unknowable thing.) An important thing to throw into the mix here is morality. Morality is for Nietzsche something even broader than the conventional usage thereof. Morality stands for any interpretation of the world in terms of meaning, the fundamental assumption that meaning animates history, life, even matter. This is perhaps one of the referents of abyss. In the time of the rationalists, formal patterns began to be detected in the animation of things. Animals, for example, might be thought of in terms of clockwork, that is, as machines. By Nietzsches time, the patterns had already ceased to be meaningful: there is no meaningful pattern in the chaotic movement of molecules. That movement might be expressible in terms of some mathematical formula, but the formula was not pregnant with meaning or rooted by analogy in some other meaningful experience. Empirical science had increasingly shown the world to be non-meaningful inasmuch as its descriptions became increasingly remote and meaningful only qua formalism. The basis of morality, therefore, for Nietzsche and for anyone of his historical moment would be some discernible meaning at the heart of knowledge, at the deepest levels uncovered by science, upon which other meanings could be attached and built by their logical nearness so that a logical, meaningful system (of knowledge, of ethics) could be constructed. But when the empirical nature of the universe seems to be absent meaning, expressible only in terms of mathematics or in terms of self-contained theories that were opaque and did not resonate with the whole of human knowledge, then effectively there was no basis for morality, for meaning-in-general. To survive this, Nietzsche performs a negation of the negation, saying that whereas before I synthesized meaning because there was some basis (negated when the basis was negated) now I synthesize meaning for its own sake. Nietzsches intuition of the causality underneath, informed by his knowledge, leads him to perceive that there are processes and so on that are still independent of meaning; that is, until there is a need to shine a light on them, an occasion for discovering or inventing them, they remain independent. One cannot reasonably say they are not occurring: so there at the edges of perception they are meaningless. And these make up by far the bulk of processes, events, and so on in the universe. Life itself is in this category. Nietzsche in a way insists that it belong to that category. That is, it was unique for it to occur to Nietzsche that

morality might belong to the broader category of aesthetics. Likewise, only a Nietzsche would insist on pointing out that life itself is nothing but an ensemble of meaningless micro-processes and interactions at bottom, wherever that bottom is. A critic might claim there is a certain logical confusion here since Nietzsche is simply (mis)identifying the bottom with our epistemological limitation; he is saying that just because there is something we dont know, and perhaps always will be, that therefore this means that the bottom is unknowable. He doesnt keep the door open with the regulative fiction that because each successive thing (known) is knowable, that everything is in principle knowable. Rather than call it a confusion, we should separate out the registers and show just know the regulative fiction of knowability is itself put on, an article of faith, something asserted or undertaken. In this case, and perhaps with all regulative fictions, what a regulative fiction provides is logical closure. One might after all know things, even know many things without any position taken on the in-principle knowability of all things. Nevertheless, the question once posed demands an answer. One either declares with Science that everything is knowable because everything known is known. Or with Nietzsche one says that there is a middle region between known and unknown in which things are intuited or sensed but are not known, still do not exist. Assigning this the status of objective existence then (since who does not believe in the reality of his innermost thoughts?) but without naming it and forcing it center-stage where it would evaporate under the harsh light of scrutiny, it nonetheless guides knowledge and investigation. There are many registers of public existence and private existence competing in ways of which we are totally unconscious. Existence itself is a decision-procedure, the category in general being a reflection of dozens of decision-procedures in which the decision-procedures in question must be fully repressed for being arbitrary and formal. That if, is any one decision-procedure as such were to become known, if it were to become what it was by being drawn out and symbolized, it would suddenly acquire a context and seem pointless. Something like this is intuited by Nietzsche who closes the circle and asks after the question of his own psychobiography. Following the adage wherever you go, there you are, Nietzsche travels the paths and then thinks to ask whether his traveling the paths has some other heretofore unseen context in which his traveling is meaningful and central.