ISSN 1393-614X Minerva - An Internet Journal of
Philosophy Vol. 10 2006
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Logos As Will And Cosmodicy Mark Balto |
Abstract
Recent scholarship
has seen a burgeoning interest in the young Nietzsche’s relationship towards
the ancient Greeks with the aim of catching a glimpse into the beginnings of
his philosophical development. With this in mind, I set out to gain an
understanding of what I believe is a critical aspect in the beginning stages of
Nietzsche’s thought: what he had learned not only from the pre-Platonic
philosophers in general, but also from Heraclitus of Ephesus in particular, and
how he had synthesized and internalized what he learned from him, and made use
of for his own philosophical agenda. Throughout this paper, I argue that his
earliest conception of the Will is directly influenced by, and may perhaps even
be considered the same concept as, Heraclitus’ Logos. And I attempt to reveal
this strong association through a careful textual analysis and interpretation
of his
Contemporary scholarship has recently seen publication of the notebook
entries and early lectures Nietzsche produced while a professor at the
In
principle, it is impossible to say whether Nietzsche discovered these doctrines
in the Greeks or projected them onto early Greek science. What we do have here
is the self-development of Nietzsche […] (Whitlock 157)
Much scholarship in the past has concluded that the unpublished works,
otherwise known as Nietzsche’s “Nachlass”, are
not to be taken seriously as significant philosophical treatises in their own
right. At best, these works are nothing more than curiosities, and if one is
interested in gaining a thorough understanding of Nietzsche’s philosophical
activity, one is instructed to investigate his published works written during
the middle and late 1880s. This position is expressly
summed up by R.J. Hollingdale who argued in his book, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy, that the notes
and the lectures in the “Nachlass” were
never incorporated into the published works, and were therefore ideas Nietzsche
had rejected; and for this reason, we should too (Hollingdale 172). Recently,
however, this attitude has been challenged, and there has been a growing
interest in the notebooks and lectures Nietzsche produced throughout his early
career as a Philology professor. I believe Whitlock is correct in arguing that
Nietzsche’s lectures on the pre-Platonic philosophers are the fertile workshop
for his budding philosophical activity. And to this end, I will try to make a
case study whereby one can gain insight into his early philosophical
development by a close analysis of Nietzsche’s discussion of Heraclitus of
As we turn our attention to those fragments that specifically discuss the
Logos, Nietzsche gives the following remarks about the opening lines of the
proem:
Heraclitus,
who found himself in solitude and who recognized the unified lawfulness [Logos]
of the world [cosmos], was accordingly exclusive to all other human beings:
their follies lie in this, that they live in the middle of lawfulness [Logos]
and yet do not notice — indeed, that they know nothing at all
thereof, even when it is remarked [upon]. (PPP
10, 58)
After giving some discursive comments on the idea of the “wise Man” in
ancient Greek philosophy, he next begins a reading of one of the most
significant fragments of the Heraclitean corpus, fragment 1:
Although
this account [Logos] holds forever, men ever fail to comprehend, both before
hearing it and once they have heard. (Heraclitus fragment. 1, 29)
Nietzsche approaches the opening line of the proem not much differently
than many other German- or English-speaking classicists have done in the past;
for he says Heraclitus believed that he alone had reached rational intuitive
insight into the absolute lawfulness of the cosmos through the Logos which
itself is an intelligence or gnômê. According to Lidell and Scott, gnômê means:
“mind,” “thought” or “intelligence”: but it could also mean, “Will,” as
mentioned in Aeschylus (LSJ 166). It
should additionally be pointed out that while Nietzsche was lecturing on the
pre-Platonic Philosophers, he was also delivering lectures on the Greek
tragedian Aeschylus; more precisely, one of the trilogies of the Oresteia called The Libation Bearers (Choephori)
(Malcolm). Now if the Logos signifies the absolute lawfulness of the cosmos, and
it is also thought to be an intelligence, then Nietzsche must have connected
the Logos with the Will. Indeed, it is possible there are other connections
Nietzsche made between the pre-Platonic philosophers lectures, especially his
remarks on Heraclitus, and his lectures on Aeschylus; since the works of
Aeschylus had been known to have a strong moral and
religious emphasis, focusing on man's position in the cosmos, his relation to the gods, and the divine law.
The next mention of Logos is in connection with the notion of Being in
Parmenides’ philosophy. According to the tradition, Heraclitus rejects the
position put forward by Parmenides — the first principle designated as
Being taken as absolute persistence. The motto of Heraclitus is “Πάντα
ῥεῖ,” or “All Things
Flow”: he only knows Becoming, since he considers that which persists as
leading to error and falsehood. Nietzsche depicts the doctrine of Becoming in
his lectures by saying whatever “[…] Becomes is one thing in internal
transformation, and the Law [Logos] of this eternal transformation, […] is
precisely this One, Fire. The one overall Becoming is itself Law; that it Becomes and how it Becomes is its work” (PPP
10, 63). Thus, Nietzsche interprets the Law and Fire to be equivocal terms. In
fact, many classicists have interpreted the first principle in the Heraclitean
philosophy in this same manner — i.e. the first principle of all
things coming into existence and perishing is the ever living Fire whose Law is
the Logos.
In his lectures on the pre-Platonic
philosophers, Nietzsche placed much emphasis on Anaximander; this is reflected
not only in the way he represents him in the succession of the philosophers,
but also the extended discussion Nietzsche gives of him. Anaximander reasoned
that the first principle was the Unlimited; and from the Unlimited, all things
come into being. All Becoming is not true Being; rather, it is a derivative of
the Unlimited depending upon it by borrowing its existence from it. Therefore,
everything that comes to be and exists does so on borrowed time. All Becoming
owes its temporary existence or
“borrowed time” to the Unlimited. Furthermore, the debt incurred from borrowing
time for temporary existence implies
a guilt that must be paid back or atoned for through passing away. As Nietzsche
had said: “Anaximander taught, ‘everything with qualities arises and perishes
mistakenly: thus there must be a quality-less Being.’ Becoming is an injustice
and is to be atoned for with Passing Away” (PPP
10, 63).
Anaximander had reasoned that whatever possesses qualities is subject to
Becoming and Passing Away; and because of this, there must be some quality-less
Unlimited Being. On behalf of Heraclitus, Nietzsche raises the questions as to
“[…] how […] that which is encumbered by qualities, Becoming, arises from the
quality-less? And how might a world of such eternal lawfulness in its entirety be a world full of injustice?”
These profound and enigmatic questions led to a contradiction: for how could
something (imbued with qualities, Becoming), arise from nothing (the
quality-less, Unlimited Being)? And for what reason is Becoming an injustice by
its severance from the quality-less Being, and that whatever has qualities must
pay its penance by Passing Away? Nietzsche answers Anaximander on behalf of
Heraclitus by saying:
[…] if
Becoming and Passing Away are the effects of a justice, then there is no such
dualism between a world of the Unlimited and the qualities, because qualities
are tools of Arising and Passing Away, thus tools of justice. (PPP 10, 63)
In contrast to Anaximander, Heraclitus reasoned that if Becoming and
Passing Away are themselves the consequences of justice, then there must not be
a dualism between the Unlimited and the qualities, since the qualities
themselves are tools of Becoming and Passing Away, and are therefore tools of
justice. Heraclitus additionally maintained that the principle must likewise be
“rightful” in its qualities, and must also have all predicates or all qualities,
since “all witnesses swear by justice.” Furthermore, he places the entire world
of qualities around the principle in that it manifests itself in all of them.
And therefore, Becoming and Passing Away are part and parcel of the principle,
and are therefore not a punishment as originally conceived by Anaximander.
Rather, it is more accurate to characterize this process as the “Innocence of
Becoming”, whereby there is no guilt or moral implications attributed to
Coming-To-Be and Passing Away — and, contrary to Hegelian, Marxian
and Judeo-Christian doctrines of “world-historical
processes”, the “Innocence of Becoming” has no goal or end (telos) in its sight.
Furthermore, it is in this way that Heraclitus presents a cosmodicy or a
justification of the cosmos down to its most intricate details over his
forerunner; since he presents a vindication of the absolute goodness of the
cosmos based upon the “Innocence of Becoming” when confronted with the
existence of evil (PPP 10, 63).
From the preceding, we can clearly recognize just how Nietzsche connects
Heraclitus’ doctrine of Becoming with justice. Now during the course of his
lectures, he cites three Heraclitean fragments which he believes are indicative
for gaining immediate intuitive insight into the paradoxical heart of
Heraclitus’ philosophy: fragment 23: “If it were not for these things, they
would not have known the name of justice”; fragment 94: “The sun will not
transgress his measures. If he does, the Furies, ministers of justice, will
find him out and punish him”; and finally, one of the best known fragments:
30d: “The ordering (cosmos), the same for all, no god nor man has made, but it
ever was and is and will be: everliving fire, kindled in measures, and in
measures going out” (Heraclitus fragments 23, 94, 30d, 61, 49, 45). What we can
infer from Nietzsche’s ordering and interpretation of these fragments is that
he connects justice, law or Logos, and fire as equivocal terms in the
Heraclitean philosophy. Of course, the interchangeable use of these terms
allows for the rich multiplicities and variegations of the interpretations of
the fragments themselves — not to mention the fact that all of
these terms simultaneously resonate amongst each other — and furthermore point
in the same figurative direction, and that is the one principle of Heraclitus’
philosophy — the Logos. Along with the above-mentioned terms, Nietzsche discusses two
others known to be at the dialectical heart of the Heraclitean corpus: war and
fate. According to his reading, the universal law or fate is defined as the
opposition of all things in the cosmos in a constant state of tension or war — which paradoxically
produces the harmony of the cosmos as well. Fragment 80 excellently sums up
Heraclitus’ position:
It should be understood that war is the common condition and that strife
is justice, and that all things come to pass through the compulsion of strife.
(Heraclitus fragment 80, 67)
Heraclitus views the cosmos as existing in a constant state of tension of
opposing forces, and he uses war as a trope for this common condition. Thus,
according to the reading above, “Strife” or “battle” (LSJ 314) is justice — it is the way of the cosmos to
always exist in a state of tension of dialectical forces. The Ephesian adds the
further principle that all things coming into existence must do so by means of
force or strife. Contrary to Anaximander who attached moral implications to the
Coming Into Being and Passing Away of all things, Heraclitus does not do so;
for him, Becoming has no moral implications since “strife is justice”. And it is for this reason that Heraclitus
presents a cosmodicy over his forerunner.
That the common condition of the cosmos in a constant state of tension of
dialectical forces guided by a “unified, lawful, reasonable justice” is an idea
that can be traced all the way back to the original conception of the Greek’s
notion of Being; for it is Hesiod’s “good strife” transformed into a universal
principle:
Contests […]
distinguished the Greeks. Every individual competes as if [he] alone is
justified, yet an infinitely definite standard of just judgment decides who is
linked to victory. From the gymnasium, musical competitions, and political life
Heraclitus became familiar with the paradigm of such strife. The idea of
war-justice is the first specifically Hellenic idea in philosophy--which is to
say that it qualifies not as universal, but rather as national. (PPP, 64)
The Greeks were deeply imbued throughout their Hellenic Will when it came
to their high regard for competition and the sublime ecstasy of victory.
Heraclitus became familiar with the idea of competition through the rigorous
standards of the Greek gymnasium, by means of his participation in musical
competitions, and lastly, through his observation of Greek politics. Perhaps
what is more striking is Nietzsche’s emphasis of the notion of war-justice — which is not only the
“first specifically Hellenic idea in
philosophy” — but is also the driving force behind cosmodicy.
The idea of cosmodicy resurfaces once again in the Basel lectures when
Nietzsche discusses the Greek’s notion of competition in light of Heraclitus’
doctrine of opposites and it’s relation to what he describes as “Eternal
Becoming”. He paraphrases a passage from Plato’s Phaedo (70e-72e) and Heraclitus’ fragment 88 as examples for
describing the Will as a play of forces permeated throughout the cosmos: “Well,
Heraclitus perceived that contrary predicates imply each other, something like
what Plato says about the pleasant and the unpleasant in the Phaedo; [for] they are intertwined like a knot[:]
The entrance
of life and death, and of waking and sleeping, is only predominance becoming
visible that one force has won over its opposite and momentarily begins to lose
again to it. Both forces are continuously efficacious at the same time, since
their eternal strife allows neither victory nor domination over time.
It is one
and the same thing to be living and dead, awake or asleep, young or old. (PPP 10, 65)
Following his discussion of those fragments connected with the doctrine
of opposites, Nietzsche further deepens the notion of cosmodicy by citing
Lucian’s Philosophies for Sale where
there is a character called “the Heraclitean” who speaks of the cosmos as
filled with: “Joy and joylessness, wisdom and un-wisdom, great and small […]
circling about, up and down, and interchanging in the game of Eternity”.
Nietzsche similarly remarks upon section 14 of Lucian’s Philosophies for Sale in an echo of Heraclitus’ fragment 52 where
an image of God is depicted as the boy-god Aeon playing at times with
sandcastles, and at other times with game pieces: “The Buyer […] inquires, ‘And
what is eternity?’ The Heraclitean answers, ‘A child playing a game, moving
counters, in discord, in concord.’ In his world-creating capacity, Zeus is
compared to a child who builds and destroys sand castles on the beach at the
sea” (PPP 10, 65-66). Hence, the
tropes of God depicted as an innocent child and the cosmos itself as nothing more
than a creative force or Will, and where the child playing at the edge of the
sea competes with himself by moving pieces of a game sometimes here and
sometimes there and by randomly creating and destroying everything all in
complete and utter innocence are all metaphors for the “Innocence of Becoming”
as the Will of the cosmos which itself signifies the theme of cosmodicy. As
part of his idea of cosmodicy, Nietzsche further explains that the cosmos can
only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon, since it has no moral
calculations.
We find here
a purely aesthetic view of the world. We must exclude even more any moralistic
tendencies to think teleologically here, for the cosmic child (Weltkind) behaves with no regard to
purposes but rather only according to an immanent justice: [he] can act only
willfully and lawfully, but [he] does not will
these ways. (PPP 10, 70)
Significant in this passage are the following points. First, Nietzsche
connects his notion of cosmodicy with viewing the cosmos aesthetically; this is
opposed to the Anaximandrian idea of attaching moral implications to the Coming
Into Being and Passing Away of all things; hence, there is a dialectical
tension at play between art and morality. Now the tension between art and
morality will resurface throughout Nietzsche’s later works whereby its
intensity will be deepened and its scope broadened. Secondly, the idea of a
cosmic child (Weltkind) functions as
a trope for God; this child, driven by necessity, wills the cosmos according to
an immanent justice. And thirdly, Nietzsche makes a connection between the Will
and the Logos. Hence, we could assume that the inspiration for his idea of the
Will, and conceivably the notion of the Will-To-Power, may have had its
earliest beginnings in these pre-Platonic lectures, and perhaps more
specifically in his interpretation of the Logos. Anyway, in the concluding part
of the lecture, Nietzsche once again depicts the notion of cosmodicy, and
perhaps even identifies himself as being one and the same with Heraclitus, in
opposition to the pessimistic philosopher, Schopenhauer, who also posited the
Will as the fundamental nature of reality as well; for he says that the
Ephesian:
[…] is
[himself] the opposite of a pessimist because he does not deny away sorrows and
irrationality: for him, war reveals itself as the eternal process of the world.
Yet he contents himself with an eternal universal law and, because it oversees
all things, calls it Logos, intelligence. (PPP 10, 74)
So as to summarize what has been learned throughout the course of this
essay, we must assume that during the time he had delivered these Basel
lectures on the pre-Platonic philosophers in general and Heraclitus of Ephesus
in particular, Nietzsche had indeed melded together his earliest philosophical
conception of the Will and his interpretation of the Logos as depicted in his
reading of the fragments of Heraclitus. Moreover, Nietzsche tried to tie his
own understanding of the Will and the Logos to what he called a cosmodicy as a
means to justify the true nature of the cosmos as nothing more than the
exchange and play of the dialectical forces of nature itself that are in a
state of perpetual war or strife with each other, but without the necessity of
interpreting this phenomenon by means of the moral connotations of good and
evil. Therefore, during the earliest stages of his budding philosophical
development, Nietzsche considered the cosmos to be nothing more than the
Innocence of Becoming; i.e., of everything coming into existence and passing
away, and whereby all entities that do so had no greater significance other
than the aesthetic appreciation we can gain from these entities parading
themselves by means of this eternal process. Perhaps more significantly, it
should lastly be mentioned that it is wholly not inconceivable that with his
understanding of the Will devoid of any negative Schopenhauerian connotations
as well as his idea of the Will’s deep ties to both the Logos and cosmodicy,
the mature Nietzsche of the 1880s will begin to develop and later refine what
would later become known as a twofold interpretation of the fundamental nature
of reality — the Will-To-Power and the Eternal Recurrence of the Same.
REFERENCES
Hollingdale,
R.J. Nietzsche: The Man and his Philosophy.
Liddell and Scott. An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon.
Nietzsche Chronicle. Ed. Brown, Malcolm. 2005.
——. The
Pre-Platonic Philosophers. Translated by Whitlock, Greg.
Copyright © 2006
Minerva
All rights are reserved, but fair and good
faith use with full attribution may be made of this work for educational or
scholarly purposes.
Mark Balto is a recent PhD graduate of the
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