ZarathustraMadman
Rising Star
Introduction
Nietzsche uses the concepts ‘art’ and ‘artistic’, not only in references to artworks but also in an expanded sense, profoundly linked with our human existence in an understanding of the world. In The Gay Science, he writes that giving ‘style’ to one’s character is a great and rare art, “We want to be the poets of our lives—first of all in the smallest, most everyday matters.” Throughout his production, beginning with his first book The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche pictures Greek culture as acknowledging an artistic creativity as fundamental for human lives. Seemingly left in the past, Nietzsche revives and furthers this notion of creative freedom in order to replace the God who has died. A new sense of creation and becoming had to take place. Nietzsche gladly stepped in.
For Nietzsche, such movements lead to individuation, or the ‘others in me’ which arise from an unfolding of thoughts and non-thoughts. The latter is unconscious. It belongs not to a preexistent ego, or self, but to a ‘fluid and shifting collage’ of a self, which is consistently coming apart and being put back together during present-time chance events. In this way the individual is not a subject, but a process of individuation.
Individuation is a constituent of Metaphysics called ‘personal identity,’ which questions how an individual can stay the same over time from birth until death. There are different types of individuation, but in very general terms,
“…it is the name given to processes whereby the undifferentiated tends to become individual, or to those processes through which differentiated components become integrated into stable wholes. Individuation is the process through which a person becomes his/her 'true self'. Hence it is the process whereby the innate elements of personality; the different experiences of a person's life and the different aspects and components of the immature psyche become integrated over time into a well-functioning whole. Individuation might thus be summarized as the stabilizing of the personality.”
Though it must be noted that, especially for Nietzsche, the self never becomes cemented into a stable, whole, but only a relative self emerges from time to time at different points in time, depending on moments of self-monitoring and reflection. Individuation and the becoming of, are creative functions of unconscious processes, and is where it is always already headed. This process refers to the continual process of building an individual: the birth and death, not of a self, but of a multiplicity of selves. A particular self is only expressed more than another at different points in time, according to events, necessity, or what the present situation calls for. This is the operation of Nietzsche’s unconscious processes, which functions according to present moments which occur in rapid, non-linear, instant happenings fueled by the will-to-power. In this process, an individual identity is formed—at least for the moment—until creativity produces the next person. As Nietzsche writes, “The subject’ is the fiction that many similar states in us are the effect of one substratum: it is we who first created the ‘similarity of these states….[but it is instead], The subject as multiplicity.” The unconscious as a multiplicity is in a constant state of formation and fragmentation, in a ceaseless effort to reach for the progression of its possessor. This occurs in order to adapt the subject within perpetual states of becoming. It is caught-up in a never-ending strive fueled by the will-to-power. In this way, the psyche will never grow ‘old’.
For Nietzsche, individuation also results from a constant inter-play of instinctual desire versus restraint, in the style of Dionysus versus Apollo. It produces a sense of self through the constant re-experiencing of a self, with each paradoxical clash of instinctual desire being restrained. He says, “The cost of controlling our instincts is self-imposed tyranny.” It leads one to believe that he is actually doing something himself, when he is actually causing nothing, as he says, “The deed has no doer,” and “…that one is simply deceiving oneself if one thinks they cause anything at all.” What he means by this is that no one causes anything to happen, but we instead simply infer by ‘retro-acting’ causal connections to events that have already occurred. For example, if one has a thought to throw a pen, and then throws it, that person would be self-deceived, according to Nietzsche, that he has caused the throwing of the pen, or even the thought itself, as he says,
“…the cause is imagined after the effect has taken place…“In fact, we invent all causes after the schema of the effect: the latter is known to us—Conversely, we are not in a position to predict of any thing what it will ‘effect’… “…an event is neither effected nor does it effect….Interpretation by causality [is a] deception…[and]… “We have believed in the will as cause to such an extent that we have from our personal experience introduced a cause into events in general (i. e., intention a cause of events).”
Thoughts are unbounded and without limitation, they are non-linear, as is also unconscious processes. We falsely construct a linear progression of our thoughts out of non-linear material, and call it ‘reason’ or ‘logic’, or more precisely ‘thought’. From these deceiving thoughts, arises a false concreteness on the nature of memory. As Nietzsche says, “The same goes with thought and memory, “…memory also maintains the habit of the old interpretations, i.e., of erroneous causality—so the ‘inner experience’ has to contain within it the consequences of all previous false causal relations.” Though the past has vanished, and though our memories are constructed of past thoughts, we still dig down deep into fuzzy sets of linked-thought-chains to make-believe what we want to remember.
Though some argue that there is no subject which is different from objects—because the universe is interconnected—therefore one, Nietzsche’s destruction of the subject depends on his destruction of causality. According to him, the ‘inner self’ that we construct is based on causal relations between thoughts, memories, feelings, and perceptions, but that we only imagine the causal relations, they do not really exist. We fabricate the connections and connect them to an original source, namely—a self.
Nietzsche’s circumstantial will-to-power continuously shapes us into the creation of a future individual (which does not yet exist) through unconscious processes. The will-to-power is a force which acts before the individual. It appears to be prior to any idea of the subject or individual. The will-to-power is pre-rational and a-conceptual, ultimately enabling the ‘conquest of the unconscious’ during it own constructive process. “The deed has no doer.”, and “We do not cause anything,” shows that a dominant pre-thought, pre-active force must be present and in the workings, such as unconscious forces. Nietzsche makes use of the term unconscious, and refers to instincts and drives as the real motivations determining our actions and our consciously held values and beliefs; this implies operations at an unconscious level. In Beyond Good and Evil he refers to the real determinations behind a philosopher’s thought in contrast to what they believe to be the reasons shaping the theories they propound:
“It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been: a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; moreover that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy have every time constituted the real germ of life out of which the entire plan has grown.”
There is no unconscious which exists as a complete and distinct, separate, stable entity, but only bodily unconscious processes that are fueled by the will-to-power, which stabilizes and fragments the possessor into a persistent state of becoming. The will, coupled with instinctual desires that occur in present-time moments or events are what ‘wills’ unconscious processes into being. The unconscious will-to-power, which wills to produce life, and the furthering of, is pure potential. It is nowhere, yet it is everywhere. The will-to-power exist in order to redirect life into newer, better pathways of creation, exponentially. Unconscious processes, driven by the will-to-power, are not single means-to-an-ends forces but are a,
“…pre-rational, differential and excessive, triadic logic of floating images and disparate meanings inhabiting Alice’s paradoxical wonderland. The unconscious is not a single drive—it is an assembly line of affects and effects; it is not a mechanical law utilized in the production of some predetermined end imposed by a transcendental subject—instead subjects and objects are themselves differentiated and produced as the outcomes of the unconscious.”
The unconscious is not a representation of the inner mind, as Freud would have it, it is not a theater, but a factory: a factory of the production of pathways. ‘Process’, not ‘representation’, is the more accurate description of the milieu of the unconscious. The ultimate operation of unconscious processes is being a force of production. In order for it to somewhat conform to stability, and to will power to its possessor, it creates an ego or an individual subject. It does this only to create a point of reference, a place from which its ‘subject’ can ‘take its next step’—becoming—into more and more progressive selves, and into accumulations of wisdom.
A major process for unconscious processes is concern with the possibilities of what can be created, the realm of the ‘as-yet unthinkable’. Thinking the unthinkable brings an element of non-thought into thought. Though seemingly contradictory, one may be able to show the possibility of the impossible, and to see borders, that is, to show the imperceptible. This paradoxical thinking constitutes the supreme act of philosophy: that which cannot be thought and yet must be thought. In this way the will-to-power further creates.
Unconscious creativity draws from a multiplicity of resources such as memory (regardless of the accuracy), and symbolism (such as archetypes), to build a relative subject through unconscious processes. The process of individuation is artistic and creative. It may include the metaphorical death of the subject, in order to come back to life anew. In other words, the process of individuation may be described by the outcome of the emergence of new content. Each and every moment is created by repetition, and acts as a marker for new breakthroughs. Individuation is an always-already-becoming-of-another, and is bound to the multiplicity of unconscious will-to-power processes.
Unconscious processes unfold and expose topological layers throughout the possessor’s course, revealing itself through mystic fits and rhythm. It is a producer of a multiplicity of a self that has no self, only a ‘fluid-collage’ of a self, and of the creation of a future self which does not yet exist—through circumstantial chance events.
Nietzsche uses the concepts ‘art’ and ‘artistic’, not only in references to artworks but also in an expanded sense, profoundly linked with our human existence in an understanding of the world. In The Gay Science, he writes that giving ‘style’ to one’s character is a great and rare art, “We want to be the poets of our lives—first of all in the smallest, most everyday matters.” Throughout his production, beginning with his first book The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche pictures Greek culture as acknowledging an artistic creativity as fundamental for human lives. Seemingly left in the past, Nietzsche revives and furthers this notion of creative freedom in order to replace the God who has died. A new sense of creation and becoming had to take place. Nietzsche gladly stepped in.
For Nietzsche, such movements lead to individuation, or the ‘others in me’ which arise from an unfolding of thoughts and non-thoughts. The latter is unconscious. It belongs not to a preexistent ego, or self, but to a ‘fluid and shifting collage’ of a self, which is consistently coming apart and being put back together during present-time chance events. In this way the individual is not a subject, but a process of individuation.
Individuation is a constituent of Metaphysics called ‘personal identity,’ which questions how an individual can stay the same over time from birth until death. There are different types of individuation, but in very general terms,
“…it is the name given to processes whereby the undifferentiated tends to become individual, or to those processes through which differentiated components become integrated into stable wholes. Individuation is the process through which a person becomes his/her 'true self'. Hence it is the process whereby the innate elements of personality; the different experiences of a person's life and the different aspects and components of the immature psyche become integrated over time into a well-functioning whole. Individuation might thus be summarized as the stabilizing of the personality.”
Though it must be noted that, especially for Nietzsche, the self never becomes cemented into a stable, whole, but only a relative self emerges from time to time at different points in time, depending on moments of self-monitoring and reflection. Individuation and the becoming of, are creative functions of unconscious processes, and is where it is always already headed. This process refers to the continual process of building an individual: the birth and death, not of a self, but of a multiplicity of selves. A particular self is only expressed more than another at different points in time, according to events, necessity, or what the present situation calls for. This is the operation of Nietzsche’s unconscious processes, which functions according to present moments which occur in rapid, non-linear, instant happenings fueled by the will-to-power. In this process, an individual identity is formed—at least for the moment—until creativity produces the next person. As Nietzsche writes, “The subject’ is the fiction that many similar states in us are the effect of one substratum: it is we who first created the ‘similarity of these states….[but it is instead], The subject as multiplicity.” The unconscious as a multiplicity is in a constant state of formation and fragmentation, in a ceaseless effort to reach for the progression of its possessor. This occurs in order to adapt the subject within perpetual states of becoming. It is caught-up in a never-ending strive fueled by the will-to-power. In this way, the psyche will never grow ‘old’.
For Nietzsche, individuation also results from a constant inter-play of instinctual desire versus restraint, in the style of Dionysus versus Apollo. It produces a sense of self through the constant re-experiencing of a self, with each paradoxical clash of instinctual desire being restrained. He says, “The cost of controlling our instincts is self-imposed tyranny.” It leads one to believe that he is actually doing something himself, when he is actually causing nothing, as he says, “The deed has no doer,” and “…that one is simply deceiving oneself if one thinks they cause anything at all.” What he means by this is that no one causes anything to happen, but we instead simply infer by ‘retro-acting’ causal connections to events that have already occurred. For example, if one has a thought to throw a pen, and then throws it, that person would be self-deceived, according to Nietzsche, that he has caused the throwing of the pen, or even the thought itself, as he says,
“…the cause is imagined after the effect has taken place…“In fact, we invent all causes after the schema of the effect: the latter is known to us—Conversely, we are not in a position to predict of any thing what it will ‘effect’… “…an event is neither effected nor does it effect….Interpretation by causality [is a] deception…[and]… “We have believed in the will as cause to such an extent that we have from our personal experience introduced a cause into events in general (i. e., intention a cause of events).”
Thoughts are unbounded and without limitation, they are non-linear, as is also unconscious processes. We falsely construct a linear progression of our thoughts out of non-linear material, and call it ‘reason’ or ‘logic’, or more precisely ‘thought’. From these deceiving thoughts, arises a false concreteness on the nature of memory. As Nietzsche says, “The same goes with thought and memory, “…memory also maintains the habit of the old interpretations, i.e., of erroneous causality—so the ‘inner experience’ has to contain within it the consequences of all previous false causal relations.” Though the past has vanished, and though our memories are constructed of past thoughts, we still dig down deep into fuzzy sets of linked-thought-chains to make-believe what we want to remember.
Though some argue that there is no subject which is different from objects—because the universe is interconnected—therefore one, Nietzsche’s destruction of the subject depends on his destruction of causality. According to him, the ‘inner self’ that we construct is based on causal relations between thoughts, memories, feelings, and perceptions, but that we only imagine the causal relations, they do not really exist. We fabricate the connections and connect them to an original source, namely—a self.
Nietzsche’s circumstantial will-to-power continuously shapes us into the creation of a future individual (which does not yet exist) through unconscious processes. The will-to-power is a force which acts before the individual. It appears to be prior to any idea of the subject or individual. The will-to-power is pre-rational and a-conceptual, ultimately enabling the ‘conquest of the unconscious’ during it own constructive process. “The deed has no doer.”, and “We do not cause anything,” shows that a dominant pre-thought, pre-active force must be present and in the workings, such as unconscious forces. Nietzsche makes use of the term unconscious, and refers to instincts and drives as the real motivations determining our actions and our consciously held values and beliefs; this implies operations at an unconscious level. In Beyond Good and Evil he refers to the real determinations behind a philosopher’s thought in contrast to what they believe to be the reasons shaping the theories they propound:
“It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been: a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; moreover that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy have every time constituted the real germ of life out of which the entire plan has grown.”
There is no unconscious which exists as a complete and distinct, separate, stable entity, but only bodily unconscious processes that are fueled by the will-to-power, which stabilizes and fragments the possessor into a persistent state of becoming. The will, coupled with instinctual desires that occur in present-time moments or events are what ‘wills’ unconscious processes into being. The unconscious will-to-power, which wills to produce life, and the furthering of, is pure potential. It is nowhere, yet it is everywhere. The will-to-power exist in order to redirect life into newer, better pathways of creation, exponentially. Unconscious processes, driven by the will-to-power, are not single means-to-an-ends forces but are a,
“…pre-rational, differential and excessive, triadic logic of floating images and disparate meanings inhabiting Alice’s paradoxical wonderland. The unconscious is not a single drive—it is an assembly line of affects and effects; it is not a mechanical law utilized in the production of some predetermined end imposed by a transcendental subject—instead subjects and objects are themselves differentiated and produced as the outcomes of the unconscious.”
The unconscious is not a representation of the inner mind, as Freud would have it, it is not a theater, but a factory: a factory of the production of pathways. ‘Process’, not ‘representation’, is the more accurate description of the milieu of the unconscious. The ultimate operation of unconscious processes is being a force of production. In order for it to somewhat conform to stability, and to will power to its possessor, it creates an ego or an individual subject. It does this only to create a point of reference, a place from which its ‘subject’ can ‘take its next step’—becoming—into more and more progressive selves, and into accumulations of wisdom.
A major process for unconscious processes is concern with the possibilities of what can be created, the realm of the ‘as-yet unthinkable’. Thinking the unthinkable brings an element of non-thought into thought. Though seemingly contradictory, one may be able to show the possibility of the impossible, and to see borders, that is, to show the imperceptible. This paradoxical thinking constitutes the supreme act of philosophy: that which cannot be thought and yet must be thought. In this way the will-to-power further creates.
Unconscious creativity draws from a multiplicity of resources such as memory (regardless of the accuracy), and symbolism (such as archetypes), to build a relative subject through unconscious processes. The process of individuation is artistic and creative. It may include the metaphorical death of the subject, in order to come back to life anew. In other words, the process of individuation may be described by the outcome of the emergence of new content. Each and every moment is created by repetition, and acts as a marker for new breakthroughs. Individuation is an always-already-becoming-of-another, and is bound to the multiplicity of unconscious will-to-power processes.
Unconscious processes unfold and expose topological layers throughout the possessor’s course, revealing itself through mystic fits and rhythm. It is a producer of a multiplicity of a self that has no self, only a ‘fluid-collage’ of a self, and of the creation of a future self which does not yet exist—through circumstantial chance events.
