“Out of life’s school of war—what does not kill me makes me stronger (Nietzsche’s1888 book Twilight of the Idols.)”

There is an entirely new type of causality here whereby the effect correlates with the cause but is not the result of it.  We might suppose a set of triplets in an abusive home: One grows up with terrible PTSD, the second unaffected, and the third stronger for it.

Now, I may say the mansion is houseness incarnate, houseness being merely present in the average house and deficient in the dilapidated shack – while the next person may find the mansion gawdy and the shack quaint. The various presencings of houseness seem to point back to the observer, as Nietzsche says stamping becoming with Being is the highest form of will to power: “Dem Werden den Charakter des Seins aufzuprägen — das ist der höchste Wille zur Macht.” (To stamp becoming with the character of being—that is the highest will to power (WM, 617, 1888).

However, with subjective perceptions—the mansion as gaudy to one, the shack as quaint to another—shifts this toward Nietzsche. In On the Genealogy of Morals or Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche critiques metaphysics as a “will to power”: imposing stable “Being” (eternal forms like houseness) onto flux-ridden “becoming” (the chaotic, perspectival world). The “various presencings of houseness” pointing back to the observer aligns with this—houseness isn’t an objective cause but a projection of human valuation. One observer “stamps” the mansion with ideal Being (houseness incarnate), empowering their worldview; another inverts it, finding essence in the shack’s authenticity. In this Nietzschean lens, houseness as a figurative efficient cause becomes ironic: it’s not a neutral agent but a power-driven construct. The observer’s will “efficiently causes” the essence by interpreting the structures, retroactively making houseness the “maker” of their meaning. This subverts Aristotle—causation isn’t out there in the world but in the subjective act of willing order onto disorder. If we push further, this echoes Heidegger’s rethinking of causes in The Question Concerning Technology, where efficient cause dominates modernity as “enframing” (Gestell), reducing everything to resources for production. Our houseness could figuratively “enframe” houses as varying efficiencies of shelter, but always observer-dependent.

The new translation by R. Kevin Hill and Michael A. Scarpitti (Penguin Classics, 2017) renders Nietzsche’s aphorism 556 as follows:

“The question ‘what is that?’ is an establishment of meaning from some other viewpoint. The ‘essence’, the ‘essential nature’ is something perspectival and already presupposes a multiplicity. At bottom there is always ‘what is that for me?’ (for us, for all that lives, etc.). A thing would be defined once all creatures had asked ‘what is that?’ and had answered their question. Supposing one single creature, with its own relationships and perspectives for all things, were missing, the thing would not yet be ‘defined’.”

If I were to ask a tourist about the essential character of Niagara Falls, they might say it’ s a wonder of the world, while it’s defining trait for a local might be that it’s noise pollution and jammed traffic with all the annoying tourists.  What is sacred for one is profane for another, such as some Palestinians at the time celebrated 9’11 as “sweets from Bin Laden.”  Nietzsche says “supreme good and supreme evil are identical. 1884–1885 (XIV, 2nd part, §168, lines 7–8, cited by Derrida, 298)

Why is that which persists through change the “really real?” Because that is what the sickness of the thinker needs to attuned to to overcome restlessness.  Heraclitus thus says aion is a child playing draughts, the seriousness of a child at play – which is what the thinker wants to achieve with the challenges of her research and debates.  For example, Toohey notes Horace’s description of Bullatius’s boredom and restlessness as horror loci woes in Epistles I. II were countered by philosophy (verses  25-30), with the exercise of logic (ratio) and prudence (prudential) that brought about a calm mind (aequus animus).  Nietzsche’s answer is not to load up with distractios, but to channel the energy suffered as restlessness creatively.  In Human all too Human Nietzsche says: “”He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink the most potent refreshing draught from the deepest well of his own being”. (“The Wanderer and His Shadow” (often published as part of Human, All Too Human), aphorism 200).  Heidegger talks of “the feast of thinking—experiencing what meditative thought (Besinnung) is and what it means to be at home in genuine questioning. (“Heimischsein im echten Fragen cited by Derrida, 175-6)”

For Heiegger, then, what a being is (essentia) for his reading of Nietzsche is will to power, and how a being is is eternal return (existentia, e.g., Ecclesiastes’ “nothing new under the sun”). Heidegger suggests when Nietzsche refers to the sciences such as physics and biology he is not fundamentally living here as philosophy is Nietzsche’s primary concern and the question of Being.  Heidegger asks with Nietzsche whether thinkability is the court of jurisdiction for the essence of beings (Derrida, 191).” For example, we rule out infinite space because we can’t think it.  But, as an antinomy, space as a giant finite container is equally unthinkable because we can’t picture a container that doesn’t have an outside.  And yet, space must be either finite or infinite. 

As I talked about last time for Nietzsche and “Life:” “Life” is understood sometimes in the sense of everything that is (living), the character of the living in general, sometimes in the sense of “our life,” life as the being of man.  (Derrida, Jacques. Life Death (The Seminars of Jacques Derrida) (p. 200). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition).  Derrida says:

Once we have said, with Nietzsche, that life or beings as a totality are Will to Power, we can no longer simply think Will to Power on the basis of everyday representations of will or of power, for example, through a psychology of the will or a physics of power. Since the Will to Power is the essence of all beings, one should be able to find it everywhere, everywhere, in every region of beings, in nature, art, language, history, politics, science, and knowledge in general. In this series (nature, art, history, politics, science or knowledge), science and knowledge have a privilege that interests Heidegger. He is going to follow this out by claiming that, indeed, “‘science’ is not simply one field of ‘cultural’ activity among others” it constitutes a fundamental power (Grundmacht) in Western man’s relation to beings.  (Derrida, Jacques. Life Death (The Seminars of Jacques Derrida) (p. 204). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition).

Derrida is thinking “objects” in a way that was important in the continental tradition but no so much in English speaking philosophy, I mean the “object in general” which then is differentiated into historical objects for history, physical objects for physics – objects of inquiry (Derrida, 212).  When we consider the text-analogy in biology and DNA, Derrida asks

But what if—as we now see—the “biologist” were no longer simply a biologist; what if in his or her work as a so-called biologist he or she had to do history, linguistics, semantics, chemistry, physics, the science of institutions, even literature? What if the mathematician were the only one able to speak of the foundations or non-foundations, of the epistemology or the history, of mathematics? What if “beings” were no longer this general form that circulates among the specialized fields in order to give unity to the encyclopedia and assign the various tasks, forbidding us, in the end, from breaking with the principle of the division of labor and with the philosophical order that is there to oversee it, the philosopher being there [269] to allocate this division of labor and remaining himself the only one, in the end, to escape it, though in so doing he serves everything that has an interest in maintaining it? (Derrida, Jacques. Life Death (The Seminars of Jacques Derrida) (p. 214). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition).

Derrida notes “Heidegger does not deny that Nietzsche’s thought is very “biological,” even biologizing. If bios means life, the course of life, closer in Greek to the biographical than to the biological (215).”  When Nietzsche talks about Will to Power, it is not figurative, not a metaphor, but like a pre-Socratic Arche.  Let’s consider this with Freud.  Freud notes a fundamental pleasure principle or tendency (Derrida, 238). 

Derrida says,

There is no renunciation of pleasure, only a detour in order to defer (Aufschub), a différance of satisfaction. Freud speaks here of “long detours (auf dem langen Umwege)”45 with a view to pleasure. In this case, the pleasure principle submits temporarily to the reality principle, which is in fact in its service. (Derrida, Jacques. Life Death (The Seminars of Jacques Derrida) (pp. 233-234). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition).

This tendency/function is to seek pleasure and avoid unpleasure (Derrida 239), but there is a more primitive drive.  In repetition we see the opposite tendency to revert to the inanimate, a death drive, and so someone with the energy surplus of anxiety may result to “checking” over and over again (e.g., to see if they left the stove on) to relieve anxious energy.  Derrida comments:

Now what do we observe in the case of traumatic neuroses, that is, in the case of frights that lead to so-called traumatic neuroses? One observes, for example, that dreams—the most trustworthy means, says Freud, of investigating deep psychical processes—reproduce, have the tendency to reproduce, the traumatic accident, just as with hysterics, who, as Freud and Breuer had said as early as 1893, “suffer mainly from reminiscences,”9 though we are here talking not about memories but about oneric reproduction. It is here that Freud makes a curious pirouette: since it is agreed, or assuming we agree, that the predominant tendency of the dream is wish-fulfillment, then it is difficult to understand what a dream that reproduces a situation of extreme unpleasure could possibly be. One would then have to admit, he says, either that the function of the dream has, in such cases, undergone a serious alteration that diverts it from its purpose, or else that there are masochistic tendencies.  (Derrida, Jacques. Life Death (The Seminars of Jacques Derrida) (p. 244). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition).

Freud notes of a child’s game of hide and seek played with itself:

It soon turned out, however, that during this long period of solitude the child had found a method of making himself disappear (sich selbst verschwinden zu lassen). He had discovered (entdeckt) his reflection in a full-length mirror which did not quite reach to the ground (Standspiegel), so that by crouching crouching down he could make his mirror-image “gone [fort].” (Derrida, Jacques. Life Death (The Seminars of Jacques Derrida) (p. 252). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition).

Derrida comments on the child identifying with its mother leaving and returning of repetition:

The child thus plays at being fortified [se faire fort] by his own disappearance, by his “fort” in the absence of his mother. Double pleasure [jouissance]: he identifies with the mother since he disappears like her, and he makes her come back by making himself come back, for the30 pleasure [jouissance] is here coupled; it has to do with the fact that he makes himself disappear, which is a way of mastering himself symbolically, of playing with his death or his absence, but also that he is able to make himself reappear, when he wants to, like his mother who is held at the end of the string. He affects [s’affecte] himself spontaneously with his presence-absence in the absence-presence of his mother, etc. I won’t dwell on this. (Derrida, Jacques. Life Death (The Seminars of Jacques Derrida) (pp. 252-253). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition).

There is then a will to power or master oneself such as with the pleasurable repetition of the child or the neurotic repetitive checking of the ill person to reduce anxiety – the death drive driving at returning to an inorganic state (Derrida, 271).  There is a repetitious compulsion more primitive than the pleasure principle, and so for example the lover doesn’t aim to preserve the arousal indefinitely, but return to an unaroused state after climaxing.  There is also a repetitious compulsion to relive unpleasant events, such as in dreams or treating your lover in the dysfunctional was your father treated your mother:

Freud allows for the hypothesis of the repetition compulsion (more originary than the pleasure principle), he underscores that it appears so intimately tied to the search for the pleasure principle that it is very difficult to tell them apart. (Derrida, Jacques. Life Death (The Seminars of Jacques Derrida) (p. 262). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition).

At this point, Freud has recourse to metaphors as we noted in previous posts because Derrida comments:

The topology of the living vesicle has at least reshaped a definition of trauma: there is trauma when, at the limit, on the front, the protective shield is broken, and the entire system of defense, its entire economy of energy, is defeated, put to rout. It is at this moment, says Freud, that the pleasure principle is the first to be “put out of action” (ausser Kraft gesetzt). What was once in command of operations is no longer able to master the situation when it is submerged, flooded (Überschwemmung: an image of a sudden liquid surge) by great quantities of excitations that overflow [débordent] the psychical apparatus. The apparatus, panic-stricken, no longer seeks pleasure, it would seem, but attempts to bind (binden) these large quantities of excitation and gain mastery over (bewältigen) the excitation. To do this, the psychical apparatus carries out, in the region that has been invaded, a counter-insurgency [contre-investissement], a counter- or anti-cathexis (Gegenbesetzung) of energy, at the cost of a psychical impoverishment in other regions. These energetico-military metaphors (for instance, a withdrawing of forces from one front in order to send them in all haste to shore up another that has just been breached) are called by Freud Vorbilder (models, prototypes, paradigms), and he says that they are essential for propping up the metapsychology. Recourse to these metaphors becomes all the more necessary inasmuch as Freud, at the moment he proposes the law according to which a system is more capable of “binden,” of binding or of banding energies, when its own charge, in a state of rest, is great, at the very moment he speaks of quantities of binding, banding, or counter-banding in a counter-investment, he does not know—and he asserts that we do not [329] know—what we are talking about, what is bound or unbound in this way. We know nothing, he says, about the nature of the excitatory process that takes place within the psychical process. This content, this nature of the excitatory process, is an unknown factor, a “large unknown factor,” “a large X,” he says.20 It is obviously in place of this X, this thing X, that the “Vorbilder” come, that is, models, images, and metaphors borrowed from some other field.  (Derrida, Jacques. Life Death (The Seminars of Jacques Derrida) (pp. 266-267). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.

Freud notes in childhood repetition produces pleasure, whereas in adulthood novelty produces pleasure (Derrida, 269).  However,  “the problem of the relations [345] between the repetition compulsion and the mastery of the pleasure principle is still unresolved, (Derrida, Jacques. Life Death (The Seminars of Jacques Derrida) (p. 281). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition).”  Derrida’s answer is that what is crucial about the pleasure principle is not the pleasurableness of it but its being master, and so is not metaphorical, but as I said arche-like purveying everything as will to power.  Derrida comments:

  The Herrschaft of the pleasure principle is a power, a force, a holding sway, a mastery. It reigns over the so-called psychical domain—and it is indeed necessary to call this a domain. As soon as it begins to reign over psychical life, both conscious and unconscious, to reign, therefore, over every living subjectivity, the meaning of such mastery has no regional limit. What I mean is that in speaking here of mastery we are not speaking metaphorically. It is perhaps, on the contrary, only on the basis of the mastery of something something that is here called (hypothetically) the pleasure principle over the subject (that is, the psychical, and thus living, conscious and unconscious, subject), only on the basis of this mastery over the subject, that any mastery whatsoever can then be defined in a figurative or derivative way, for example, the ordinary meaning of mastery (in the sense of technique, expertise, or politics, or the struggle between consciousnesses). All these masteries presuppose a subject or a consciousness. If there first reigns over this subject or this consciousness the mastery (of the pleasure principle), it is to that mastery that one would first have to refer in order to look for any kind of proper meaning… What I have just said here about the figure of mastery and the inversion [351] of meaning that has to be carried out with regard to it, from the figurative to the proper, from the regional to the non-regional, can and must be said about all notions, all concepts, all figures, whether they are directly dependent on this figure or not. (Derrida, Jacques. Life Death (The Seminars of Jacques Derrida) (p. 286). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition).

Derrida cites Nietzsche regarding pleasure and pain. This reveals the primacy of Will to Power in the psychological that we saw with the houseness of the house and the Niagara-Falls-ness of Niagara Falls:

Pleasure is a sort of rhythm in the succession of minor pains and in their relative degree, an excitation that results from rapid variations of intensity, as when one irritates a nerve, a muscle, but with a generally ascending curve; tension is here just as necessary as release. A tickling. Pain is the feeling of being faced with an impediment; but since power becomes aware of itself only through impediments, pain is an integral part of every activity (every activity is directed against something it must overcome). The will to power thus aspires to find resistances, pain. There is a will to suffer at the root of all organic life. (As opposed to “happiness” taken as an “end.”) III–XII 1884 (XIII, §661) (Derrida, Jacques. Life Death (The Seminars of Jacques Derrida) (p. 299). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition).