Nietzsche’s Dynamite
Nietzsche discovered a whopper of a ‘foundational flaw’ in Western thinking and he intuited that it would have to ‘surface’ at some point in the future, hence his describing his ideas as ‘dynamite’.
A century later, It is not that difficult to give a rendering of this flaw that we, as participants in a globally dominating culture, have been trustfully building upon. It goes almost without saying that I feel we will be far better off by being ‘awakened’ to this flaw.
The flaw arises in our popular DE-SPATIAL-RELATION-ALIZED manner of conceptualizing dynamics, in terms of material objects and organisms and ‘what they do’, as if in a non-participating space, which we base on our observation of ‘visible material forms’.
Our physical, sensory experience, on the other hand, is one of RELATIONAL inclusion in a continually unfolding spatial-relational world dynamic as we are fully aware of while driving in the busy flow of freeway traffic or sailing in a stormy sea/atmosphere. In this case ‘what we do’ or ‘what things do’ is not foundational but is relative to the predominating spatial dynamic in which we are situationally included. As we are surfing in the turbulence, we are ‘thinking while doing’ rather than ‘thinking about doing’.
Relativity and quantum physics affirm the predominance of a ‘relational space’ [modeled using non-euclidian geometry] in which material forms are no longer ‘independent’ of the ‘dynamics of habitat’ they are included in, as they are in our popular standard way of mental conceptualizing [wherein we implicitly impose ‘Euclidian geometry’ as an absolute reference frame or spatial operating theatre that allows us to think in terms of absolutely-existing local material form with their own absolute locally originating behaviours].
In relational space, all material forms are understood in a fluid-dynamical context [energy-exchange context] as with the hurricane in the atmosphere; i.e. in a dynamic figure-and-ground relation. Ernst Mach’s principle of relativity captures this ‘conjugate space-matter relational dynamic as; “The dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat.”
Thus, ‘evolution’, in the understandings of Lamarck, Nietzsche, Rolph and Roux, which is consistent with modern physics [e.g. see ‘Quantum Nietzsche’ by James Plank] is seen as a ‘process of flow’ in which outside-inward nurturing influence predominates over inside-outward asserting material dynamics. Nietzsche shared Mach’s view that “all forms of the law of causality spring from subjective impulses which nature is by no means compelled to satisfy.” (The Science of Mechanics). That is, while we are engulfed in a turbulent space, what we conceive of as causal actions can be imposed on our mental models but they are not imposed on nature. As a steely-willed team of gymnasts forming the human pyramid on the beach as the tsunami arrives discovers, the steeliest of inside-outward asserting deterministic-constructivist actions is unable to overcome the naturally predominating outside-inward orchestrating influence of the habitat-dynamic. In other words, the modeling of dynamics in terms of the predominating of inside-outward asserting deterministic constructivism is ‘subjective suggestion’ [idealized conception] rather than physical reality.
[Ernst Mach’s ‘Analysis of Sensations’ and his ‘Science of Mechanics’ had a strong influence on Nietzsche, according to written correspondence and Nietzsche’s biography by his sister Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche’, The Life of ‘Nietzsche]
Nietzsche’s philosophical concepts are strongly tied to relativity and quantum physics, theory that was in a vigorous embryonic form in Nietzsche’s era, and this manifested in Nietzsche’s rejection of the over-simplistic foundations of mainstream science [pre-relativity, causal science] which imputed an innate predominance of inside-outward asserting deterministic cause/construction in physical phenomena.
For example, Nietzsche’s view of evolution is that the nurturing quality of ‘space’ or ‘the habitat’ is the predominating influence in evolution. Thus, for example, the habitat in the San Francisco Bay region would orchestrate ‘settlement’ through its nurturing qualities (the land could be farmed, the sea could be fished etc.). Darwinism, on the other hand, portrayed evolution starting from ‘what things did’, the competitive skills of organisms viewed as ‘machines made of meat’. In the Nietzschean view, the habitat’s opening of a nurturing niche, the restaurant on the wharf in need of fish, orchestrated the conversion of an inhabitant; e.g. a farmer or migrant worker, to a fisherman, while in the Darwinian view, fishermen developed from reproduction with random variation, from existing species (farmers, migrant workers). In the Darwinian view, space is passive and there is no ‘outside-inward inductive/organizing influence; what happens must be fully explained in terms of inside-outward asserting deterministic ‘constructivism’. The fisherman shows up as a persisting species because he is well adapted for competition in the struggle for life. The inductive influence of the nurturing quality of space/habitat on how the world dynamic unfolds does not enter into the Darwinian view; the latter is seen as being driven fully and solely by the dynamics of the inhabitants of space, a ‘picture’ that is ‘all figures and no ground’, in contrast to the Nietzschean/Machean view of a ‘conjugate figure-ground relation’.
In the Nietzschean view, the spatial-dynamic plays the leading role in the evolutionary dynamic [outside-inward habitat-dynamic influence predominates over inside-outward inhabitant dynamics]. This is affirmed by modern observations of evolutionary unfolding, such as in the wake of the Mt. St. Helens explosion. Note that we are always tending to observe the dynamics of organisms in the context of ‘the dynamics of organisms’, but rarely do we focus on observing the dynamics of inhabitants relative to the dynamics of habitat, as has been possible in the Mt. St. Helens region. In a Seattle Times article by Lynda Mapes (May 16, 2010) entitled ‘Species by species, a habitat takes shape’, there is a discussion as to how change in the habitat orchestrates change in the inhabitants;
“The eruption of Mount St. Helens 30 years ago destroyed so much that often overlooked is what it created. Scientists are witnessing the assembly, species by species, of an entirely new ecosystem. … The eruption of Mount St. Helens 30 years ago destroyed so much that often overlooked is what it created: an entirely new ecosystem. More than 130 new ponds and two new lakes were birthed at the foot of the volcano. What’s going on today in and around these ponds isn’t restoration, or renewal, or recovery. Salamanders, frogs and toads are not just moving back where they were before the eruption. They are taking on whole new territory. It’s the assembly, species by species, of a new habitat. “Build it, and they will come,” said Peter Frenzen, spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service here.
[see also video-slide clip http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/crisafulli-blast-zone.html ]
Meanwhile, the Western acculturated norm, the Darwinian view, of the animating influences of physical phenomena infuses ‘purpose’ into the ‘inhabitant’ to ‘make up for’ its purging of the inductive influence of the ‘nurturance’ of the ‘habitat’ that is the predominating animator in the Nietzschean view. In the above referenced video-clip, the nurturance of new plant growth in the volcanically altered landscape induced healthy growth in the elk population. While Darwinism attributes beneficial adaptation to the organism/inhabitant, the point here is that the habitat undergoes adaptation beneficial to the inhabitant/organism.
Modern science and systems sciences view physical phenomena in terms of ‘purposive systems’. As Russell Ackoff observes, the ‘subjective teleology’ of Aristotle who imputed an internal a priori purpose to reside within the ‘acorn’ [system] that was necessary and sufficient to animate its development into an oak tree, has been modified by modern science and systems thinking. The currently prevailing ‘objective teleology’ recognizes that while systems are ‘purposeful systems’, their purpose is a ‘necessary but not sufficient’ cause for their development. This is equivalent to Darwin’s ‘reproduction with variation’ in that the system’s development of form, behaviour and organization is still predominantly inside-outward asserting deterministic-constructivist in nature, though modified by random variance.
Epigenetics turns this around, however, since it shows that outside-inward organizing influence predominates over inside-outward asserting DNA-based deterministic constructivism, thus supporting the Nietzschean/Lamarckian view of evolution.
Nietzsche gets to the root of the still-prevailing problem in the Western ‘purposeful system’ model, calling it an ‘error in grammar’. He points out the redundancy in ‘lightning flashes’ that serves to ‘invert’ the animating sourcing of the phenomenon. Within the turbulence in the atmosphere, imbalance develops in the distribution of electrical charge which is spatial-relation based. The habitat-based niche of electron deficiency orchestrates the behaviour of the electrons and the animation we term ‘lightning’.
“If I say “lightning flashes,” I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, “is” and does not “become.”–To regard an event as an “effecting,” and this as being, that is the double error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.” – Nietzsche, Will to Power, 531
This ‘double error’ is replete in our globally dominating mode of thinking. We have built it into our scientific modeling approach. The statement ‘the fisherman fishes’ purges from our mind the predominating outside-inward influence [the nurturing niche] that animates the fishing behaviour. It truncates the sourcing of the action and imputes the animating source as residing within the ‘purposeful system’. That is, the notion of ‘purpose’ as in Singer’s ‘producer-product’ animating source and Somerhoff’s ‘directive correlation’ [See Ackoff, Russell L., ‘Creating the Corporate Future’, The Systems Age, Systems Thinking], effectively subsumes the outside-inward animating source that lies in the nurturing quality of space. Thus if we fly over the San Francisco Bay settlement/area, we can think of the city as being purposefully constructed by its inhabitants, within an evolutionary dynamic that is ‘all figure and no ground’ based [this is essentially, the ‘Euclidian’ or ‘Darwinian’ view of development in which ‘space’ is a non-participant].
Nietzsche’s ‘dynamite’ is starting to ‘hit the fan’, to use a mixed metaphor. People are tired of being pawns in top-down [inside-outward asserting, from a central directive authority] ‘purposeful systems’ games. This mode of operation comes from the ‘double error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty’.
As sailboaters engaging in life’s spatial turbulence, we are thinking while we are acting, we are not ‘thinking about acting’. Others can observe our actions out of the context of the outside-inward influence of the accommodating (receptively here, resistively there) quality of the dynamic habitat we are situationally included in. In sailboating mode, we are ‘thinking while acting’ but as powerboaters, when we are Captains on the bridge of the Titanic, we are ‘thinking about acting’.
“Self-observation — it betrays. Know thyself. Through acting, not through observing. Observation confines and limits energy: it breaks up, disintegrates. Instinct is the best. Our deeds must be brought about unconsciously.” – Nietzsche, while a student in Leipzig
The current ‘Occupy’ initiatives suggest a rejection of the predomination of the ‘purposeful systems’ view, as incorporated in the ‘Democratic State’.
The globally predominating ‘Western’ culture has ensconced itself in the global social dynamic by way of the imposing (to some extent self-imposing) of ‘democratic sovereign states’. These local inside-outward, self-asserting ‘purposeful systems’ are built on top of Nietzsche’s ‘double error’, the recasting of ‘thinking-while-acting’ as ‘thinking about acting’. Using intellectual knowledge, ‘thinking about acting’, to drive individual and collective action, as built into the architecture of the ‘democratic sovereign state’, occludes natural access to ‘thinking-while-acting’ and makes the man on the street the pawn of intellectual experts that have access to the seat of supreme central authority. As Richard Lewontin observes and evidently endorses (Lewontin is by his own declaration, Darwinist);
“It is one of the contradictions of a democratic society in a highly advanced technological world, … to make rational political decisions, you have to have a knowledge which is accessible only to a very few people.” [Lewontin continues by noting;] “that different people have different interests, and therefore the struggle is not a moral one, it’s a political one. It’s always a political one, and that’s the most important thing you have to recognize… that you may be struggling to make the world go in one direction, … [while] somebody else is struggling to make it go in another direction, and the question is; who has power? And if there’s a differential in power, and if you haven’t got it and they have, then you have to do something to gain power, which is to organize. “ – Richard Lewontin
The Darwinian views of Richard Lewontin lead inevitably to the ‘politics’ based on ‘thinking about acting’ while the Nietzschean view that it is natural for ‘thinking while acting’ to predominate transcends politics, and it is this ‘politics transcending’ ‘direct action’ of the ‘Occupy’ initiatives that is now showing itself, … the blistering fuse of Nietzsche’s dynamic, perhaps.
Politics concerns itself with the question of ‘how we should make things evolve’; i.e. it assume that predominance of inside-outward asserting deterministic constructivism sourced from the internal of human organisms (directed by intellection and purpose).
When this Darwinian thinking is implemented in a top-down central authority directing architecture of the sovereign state and/or corporation, life becomes very boring and unadventurous for the participants, since one is deprived of the natural joys of ‘surfing’ through life, ‘thinking while acting’ in the manner of the sailboater/surfer that is uniquely, situationally included in a habitat dynamic whose outside-inward orchestrating influence predominates over one’s own inside-outward asserting behaviour, hence one must ‘think while acting’ rather than letting oneself be driven from prior knowledge (prior knowledge can only play a supporting role when one is ‘in the surf’).
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Footnotes;
1. “What Nietzsche Hated”, by Crane Brinton, McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History, Harvard University
Moreover, and in spite of the ecstatic and far-fetched comments of followers like Klages, who hold that Nietzsche actually felt the intellect to be a weakness in men, Nietzsche himself rarely went the whole way in condemning the intellect. It was the abuse of thinking by savants, Christians and “practical” men he objected to, the making an end rather than a means of the intellect and of intellectual effort. Only rarely does he write in the vein of “Gefühl is alles”; usually he employs words like “intellect,” “intelligence” and “reason” in a clearly eulogistic sense.
Here, as so often, Nietzsche will not be pruned down. He is complex, refined, subtle, modern, most zeitgemäss; his thought is part of what he called the “morbid multiformity of modern life.” Yet, in a final attempt to pin him down, we may take two texts which reveal, perhaps, a common ground in his hatred for science and for Rousseauistic romanticism. Both are from his earliest writings. In one of the essays in Thoughts out of Season he writes;
“Science . . . considers only that view of things to be true and right and therefore scientific, which regards something as finished and historical, not as continuing and eternal. Thus it lives in a deep antagonism towards the powers that make for eternity — art and religion.”
This is a complete misunderstanding of what the practising scientist does, and it runs counter to such modern theorists of scientific method as von Mach and Poincaré. But it is not a serious misunderstanding of what such contemporaries of Nietzsche as Herbert Spencer thought science to be. Nietzsche’s
outburst is a revulsion against the notion of science as a closed system of absolute laws which still prevails today amont lesser scientists, and among major non-scientists. In the history of thought, it places him more or less clearly in the company of such thinkers as Croce, Bergson, and even Whitehead, who insist that the “scientific positivism” of the nineteenth century tradition provides no place for novelty and adventure.
A second text has an even earlier origin, in the reflections of a Leipzig student;
“Self-observation — it betrays. Know thyself. Through acting, not through observing. Observation confines and limits energy: it breaks up, disintegrates. Instinct is the best. Our deeds must be brought about unconsciously.”
Both Spencer and Rousseau, both scientist and romanticist, sin against this precept. Knowing is doing, not formulating nor enjoying. Laws and lyrics are both evasions, forms of self-indulgence. Men must act; and for a guide to action they must seek neither in the lessons of the past — in the too-neat patterns of science or history, or of that deadening combination, scientific history, — nor in tortured searchings of the heart; but in a difficult and most human skill, a skill impossible to define, hard to learn, but which can be recognized in its results. Nietzsche here takes refuge in the word ‘unconscious,’ but he clearly does not mean the romantic “impulse from a vernal wood.” He means rather the acquired unconscious, the unconscious skill of the trained craftsman, an effective adjustment to the complexities of experience which can be gained only by thinking while acting, never, or never solely, by thinking about acting. Here again in Nietzsche’s position, where he does not exaggerate it for the purposes of philosophizing with a hammer, is essentially that of contemporary anti-intellectualism.”
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2. Nietzsche’s anthropic circle: man, science, and myth By George J. Stack
15. Ibid., 273. Ernst Mach offered a similar psychologistic account of causality and accepted it only as a working assumption. Thus, it is held that “all forms of the law of causality spring from subjective impulses which nature is by no means compelled to satisfy.” Ernst Mach, The Science of Mechanics, trans. T.J. McCormack (La Salle, II.: Open Court, 1942), 607. The first German edition of this influential work, Die Mechanik in ihre Entwicklung Historisch — Kritisch Darstellt, was published in 1883. Nietzsche received a copy of one of Mach’s works (probably The Science of Mechanics) that had the inscription “for Herrn Prof. Dr. Nietzsche respectfully yours, Ernst Mach.” Alwin Mittasch, Friedrich Nietzsche als Naturphilosoph (Stuttgart: A Kröner, 1952), 367.
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3. Excerpt from Nietzsche’s ‘The Will to Power’ in regard to ‘the double error’.
531 (1885-1886)
Judgment is our oldest belief, our most habitual holding-true or holding-untrue, an assertion or denial, a certainty that something is thus and not otherwise, a belief that here we really “know”– what is it that is believed true in all judgments?
What are attributes?–We have not regarded change in us as change but as an “in itself” that is foreign to us, that we merely “perceive”: and we have posited it, not as an event, but as a being, as a “quality”–and in addition invented an entity to which it adheres; i. e., we have regarded the effect as something that effects, and this we have regarded as a being. But even in this formulation, the concept “effect” is arbitrary: for those changes that take place in us, and that we firmly believe we have not ourselves caused, we merely infer to be effects, in accordance with the conclusion: “every change must have an author”;–but this conclusion is already mythology: it separates that which effects from the effecting. If I say “lightning flashes,” I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, “is” and does not “become.”–To regard an event as an “effecting,” and this as being, that is the double error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.
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Return to main essay, ‘The Followers of the Democratic State’
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