Bad Conscience



Responsibility      -         Irresponsibility
Tyrrhic                  -         Odinic     
Reactive               -         Active     
   



The imputation of wrongs and responsibilities, the bitter recrimination, the perpetual accusation, the ressentiment - this is the pious interpretation of existence.

"It's your fault, it's your fault", until the accused, in turn, says, "it's my fault" and the desolated world resounds with all these moans and their echoes. "Everywhere where responsibilities have been sought it is the instinct of revenge that has sought them [...]”

Nietzsche does not see ressentiment (it's your fault) and bad conscience (it's my fault) and their common fruit (responsibility) as simple psychological events but rather as the fundamental categories of Semitic and Christian thought, of our way of thinking and interpreting existence in general.

Nietzsche takes on the tasks of providing a new ideal, a new interpretation and another way of thinking. "To give irresponsibility its positive sense", "I wished to conquer the feeling of a full irresponsibility, to make myself independent of praise and blame, of present and past".

Irresponsibility - Nietzsche's most noble and beautiful secret.

[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.21




For a long time we have only been able to think in terms of ressentiment and bad conscience. We have had no other ideal but the ascetic ideal. We have opposed knowledge to life in order to judge life, in order to make it something blameworthy, responsible or erroneous.

We turned will into something bad, something stricken by a basic contradiction: we have said that it must be rectified, restrained, limited and even denied and suppressed. It was only any good at this price.

There is no philosopher who, discovering the essence of will, has not groaned at his own discovery and, like the timid fortuneteller, has not immediately seen bad omens for the future and the source of all evils of the past. Schopenhauer pushed this old conception to its extreme limit; the penitentiary of the will, he said, and the wheel of Ixion.

Nietzsche is the only one who does not groan at the discovery of the will, who does not try to exorcise it, or limit its effect.

[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.35



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Reactive / Active



Reactive         -         Active
Tyrrhic            -         Odinic     
   



What Nietzsche calls weak or slavish is not the least strong but that which, whatever its strength, is separated from what it can do.

The least strong is as strong as the strong if he goes to the limit, because the cunning, the subtelty, the wit and even the charm by which he makes up for his lesser strength are part of this strength so that it is no longer the least.

Thus reactive force is: 1) utilitarian force of adaptation and partial limitation; 2) force which separates active force from what it can do, which denies active force (triumph of the weak or the slaves); 3) force separated from what it can do, which denies or turns against itself (reign of the weak or of slaves).

And, analogously, active force is: 1) plastic, dominant and subjugating force; 2) force which goes to the limit of what it can do; 3) force which affirms its difference, which makes its difference an object of enjoyment and affirmation.

[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.61




Inferior forces are defined as reactive; they lose nothing of their force, of their quantity of force, they exercise it by securing mechanical means and final ends, by fulfilling the conditions of life and the functions and tasks of conversation, adaptation and utility.

[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.40




The reactive is a primordial quality of force but one which can only be interpreted as such in relation to and on the basis of the active.

[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.42




Thought does not need a method but a paideia, a formation, a culture. Method in general is a means by which we avoid going to a particular place, or by which we maintain the option of escaping from it (the thread of the labyrinth).

[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.110




Everything that separates a force from what it can do he calls law. Law, in this sense, expresses the triumph of the weak over the strong. Nietzsche adds: the triumph of reaction over action.

[...] hierarchy also designates the triumph of reactive forces, the contagion of reactive forces and the complex organisation which results - where the weak have conquered, where the strong are contaminated, where the slave who has not stopped being a slave prevails over the master who has stopped being one: the reign of law and of virtue.

We make Church, morality and State the masters or keepers of all hierarchy. We have the hierarchy that we deserve, we who are essentially reactive, we who take the triumphs of reaction for a transformation of action and slaves for new masters - we who only recognise hierarchy back to front.

[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.58, 60-1



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Artist-Poet-Shaman-Philosopher




[...] philosophy itself does not throw off its ascetic mask as it grows up: in a way it must believe in this mask, it can only conquer its mask by giving it a new sense which finally expresses its true anti-religious force.

The people are certainly not always wrong: they have a foreboding of the essence of the philosopher, his anti-wisdom, his immoralism, his conception of friendship. Humility, poverty, chastity - we can guess the sense that these wise and ascetic values take on when they are revived by philosophy, by a new force.

[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.5-6




Philosophy does not serve the State or the Church, who have other concerns. It serves no established power. The use of philosophy is to sadden. A philosophy that saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not a philosophy.

Is there any discipline apart from philosophy that sets out to criticise all mystifications, whatever their source and aim, to expose all the fictions without which reactive forces would not prevail? [...] turning thought into something aggressive, active and affirmative. Creating free men, that is to say men who do not confuse the aims of culture with the benefit of the State, morality or religion.

Philosophy is at its most positive as critique, as an enterprise of demystification. And we should not be too hasty in proclaiming philosophy's failure in this respect. Great as they are, stupidity and baseness would be still greater if there did not remain some philosophy which always prevents them from going as far as they would wish, which forbids them — if only by yea-saying — from being as stupid and base as they would wish. They are forbidden certain excesses, but only by philosophy.

If philosophy's critical task is not actively taken up in every epoch philosophy dies and with it die the images of the philosopher and the free man.

It is up to us to go to extreme places, to extreme times, where the highest and the deepest truths live and rise up. The places of thought are the tropical zones frequented by the tropical man, not temperate zones or the moral, methodical or moderate man.

[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.106-7, 110




The species activity of culture has a final aim: to form the artist, the philosopher. All its selective violence serves this end, "I have to do with a class of men whose teleological conceptions extend further than the well-being of a State".

The principal cultural activities of Churches and States form in fact the long martyrology of culture itself. When a State encourages culture "it only encourages it in order to be encouraged itself, and it never conceives that there is an aim superior to its own good and existence".

[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.109




Stupidity and baseness are always those of our own time, of our contemporaries, our stupidity and baseness. Unlike the atemporal concept of error, baseness is inseparable from time, that is from this rapture of the present, from this present condition in which it is incarnated and in which it moves. This is why philosophy has an essential relation to time: it is always against its time, critique of the present world.

Thinking actively is "acting in a non-present fashion, therefore against time and even on time, in favour (I hope) of a time to come"

There is no eternal or historical philosophy. Eternity, like the historicity of philosophy amounts to this: philosophy always untimely, untimely at every epoch.

[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.107



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Life Force




We will never find the sense of something (of a human, a biological or even a physical phenomenon) if we do not know the force which appropriates the thing, which exploits it, which takes possession of it or is expressed in it.

A phenomenon is not an appearance or even an apparition but a sign, a symptom which finds its meaning in an existing force. The whole of philosophy is a symptomatology, and a semeiology. The sciences are a symptomatological and semeiological system.

The history of a thing, in general, is the succession of forces which take possession of it and the co-existence of the forces which struggle for possession. The same object, the same phenomenon, changes sense depending on the force which appropriates it.

[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.3



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