ROUSSEAU AND NIETZSCHE ON THE SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 1

Traditional social theory begins with the individual taken from an ontogenetic standpoint almost as if that in-dividual could exist independently of the species and indeed of the environment with which the species interacts. It is understandable, then, why the passage from individual to society is so fraught with antinomies and antitheses and contradictions and why only a transcendental approach can help fill this hiatus. What we are seekng to do here is to develop an immanentist approach to social theory that takes a phylogenetic approach to society and its members an approach that treats human beings as aspects of being human. Hobbes and Hegel started from the fear of death in order to escape the state of nature and secure the rational salvation of Christian-bourgeois society through the deus mortalis or the Welt-geist, the State. The negatives Denken despairs of the rational State and liberal Christian-bourgeois society; hence, it turns back to the pre-comprehension of the individual ontological dimension of the Da-sein (being there, bare existence) that precedes civil society back toward an authentic state of being which is its own state of nature. Heideggers pre-comprehension of the Da-sein is perhaps the archetypal manner of escaping the alienated ontic world of liberal Christian-bourgeois society to return to the Hobbesian neutral state, or to what Schmitt called provocatively the Political (cf. Leo Strausss review of Schmitts The Concept of the Political) indicating that the liberal State only deludes itself into thinking that it has eliminated conflict from Christian-bourgeois civil society. Heidegger and Schmitt utilize their revulsion at the inauthenticity of Christian-bourgeois civil society, at the facticity of its reification and alienation, at its quantification and spatialisation of time so as to revert to a phenomenological and existential precomprehension of it that leads straight to the authenticity of the resoluteness toward oneself, of freedom before death, to the Political of friend and foe, to the decision in anticipation of death, to the decision stemming from nothing (auf Nichts gestellt). Heidegger and Schmitt revive Kierkegaards anguish before death (an echo of the Schopenhauerian renunciation) to reject the liberalism of bourgeois society, its mask, its pretended homologation of all tension and conflict, its fear of contra-diction, and therefore its faith in the necessity of logic and science, and ultimately in the rational reconciliation of Politics and Economics in the liberal State. Yet, what Heidegger followed by Schmitt will want to re-formulate later as an ontological difference, and Hobbes and Hegel wanted to reconcile with a social synthesis, Nietzsche criticizes immanently from the perspective of the Will to Power which (contrary to Heideggers effort to place him within Aristotelian-German Idealism) deploys a new ontology to formulate a new negative theory (as opposed to a syn-

thesis) devoid of inter esse, whether rational-mechanical (Hobbes) or idealistic (Rousseau) or teleological (Hegel). Marx himself remained, of course, within this rationalist uni-verse despite inverting Hegels dialectic to a historico-materialist basis: although his inter esse is not the dialectically unfolding Ratio of the free will or of self-consciousness, it is still what he perceived as the scientific foundation of socially necessary labour time (which, like Hobbesian mechanicism and Hegelian dialectics, turns the freedom of the will into a *Schopenhauerian+ quest for freedom from the will). It is worth recalling here that the Marxian necessity of social labour does not refer only to the overall re-production of society, but also to the theft of labour time on the part of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat which is a way of saying that pro-ducts belong to social labour in a causal sense. The worker appears here as the creator ex nihilo of value. This is another aspect of necessity that Nietzsche flatly rejects. From Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard through to Nietzsche and Heidegger, although in each case from different premises, the negatives Denken de-structs this social syn-thesis first by destructing the Sub-ject of the con-vention, and then by attacking the causal nexus of the subiectum. Chief target of this de-struction is the work of actu-ality *Wirklichkeit+, the ergon of energeia, the opus of the operari: not just for the subjectity of the notion of work (Arbeit), its active part, its being the foundation of the social synthesis; but also for its inevitable self-dissolution (Selbst-aufhebung, Nietzsches term applied to Christianity in the Genealogie) in objectivity and reification - in nihilism. Schopenhauer attacks the futility of the operari, its aimlessness, its evanescence at the point of satis-faction, of ful-filment and com-pletion; Kierkegaard attacks its irrelevance to the fundamental question of existence, of the human condition; Nietzsche attacks its causality, its value; and Heidegger its facticity, its Zuhandenheit. All are dis-satisfied, dif-ferently, with the apparent social syntheses of liberalism (utility) and socialism (labour) with their Value, which is the central concept of economic science. 2 Well-known is the distaste and revulsion that Nietzsche spews out at regular intervals in his oeuvre against an exclusively political thinker to whom many of his contemporaries attributed the ideological origins of the French Revolution as well as his contempt for this epochal event that, to his mind, gave comfort to all those philosophasters (chief among them Hegel but also Hobbes) deprecable for being crazy for the State (Human, All Too Human), for that idol (Twilight of the Idols) on which Nietzsche endlessly pours scorn. That political thinker par excellence is, of course, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And yet, for all the antipathy that the German feels for

the Frenchman, it is rewardingly instructive to compare and contrast Nietzsches On Truth and Lies with the famous dictum with which Rousseau begins his Du Contrat Social: - Lhomme est ne libre, mais il est partout dans les fers. There is a well-nigh universal tendency to read this Rousseauean cri de coeur in a historical dimension as evidence of his glorification of the noble savage, of a primitive human being living in an idyllic, innocent state of nature from which he has been banished by the rise of society, and most damnably by that private property that characterized the rise of the capitalist bourgeoisie throughout northern Europe especially from the beginning of the seventeenth century. Human beings were once, in the remote past, free because they belonged in primitive small communities over whose destiny and direction they had full political control because they retained a measure of personal independence such that their natural self-interest did not interfere with or override the self-interests of other members of the community. It was the rise of commercial society, of the exchange of the fruits of ones labour and personal exertions with those of other humans that made possible the development of the institutions of private property and, with them, the ability of some human beings to command the labour, the living activity, of others. This is how human beings who are born free eventually end up everywhere in chains the chains of dispossession and alienated labour. Freedom here means for Rousseau the ability and possibility for a human being to live in accordance with its own abilities and potential and inclinations consistently with the freedom of other human beings. This freedom then has a rational element in that it postulates an interest common to all human beings, an inter esse, a common being and goal that is both innate and accessible to every human being through the power of reason. For these two reasons, the freedom of the individual and its rational foundations, Rousseau is both a product of Romanticism and of the Enlightenment. But beside this historico-political dimension, comforted by Rousseaus anthropological reflections (cf. the Discours sur lOrigine de lInegalite parmi les Hommes), there is also and preponderantly a metaphysical core to his thought a point highlighted by Rousseaus use of the passe simple tense: the phrase Man was born *est ne+ free, but everywhere he is in chains does not necessarily revert to the time immemorial of humanity but can refer instead to each individual human birth. Each human being, to enucleate Rousseaus meaning, is free by virtue of its very birth, just as St. Augustine had said (and Hannah Arendt reminded us), by virtue of the fact that each human being is a new beginning. But this birth-right of existential freedom has no element of contingency about it (as it does, for instance, in Heideggers notion of Da-sein *being there+). Rather, Rousseaus notion of freedom, like Kants, is also subordinate to reason in such a way that the freedom of the individual gifted with the power of reason must also be consistent with the freedoms of other individuals. This is the essence of Rousseaus jus-naturalism.

It is in this transition of freedom from its metaphysical origins in the individual to its translation into social con-ventions that its potential alienation becomes problematic and indeed a historical fact that Rousseau seeks to explain with a full-fledged social and political theory. The historical-political dimension of Rousseaus philosophy and his explanation for the social alienation of individual freedom is based on his confusion of human phylogenetic intersubjectivity and interdependence - the fact that human beings are not simply, with Marx, species-conscious beings, but are rather aspects of human being with the exchange by individual human beings seen as individuals, as atoms, of their individual labours, that is, social co-operation that can be parceled (but how?) into individual tasks whose pro-duct belongs (but how, and why?) to the individual worker, with that of others through specialization in the process of production aimed at the reproduction of society meaning by this, in the paradigm of Classical Political Economy, a quantifiable socially necessary labour time (again, why necessary?) required for society to reproduce itself; and finally that this exchange necessarily entails the creation of private property. Of course, what Rousseau (or Adam Smith, who follows Rousseau in this crucial respect, see Ch.2 of The Wealth of Nations v. L. Colletti, Ideologia e Societa) fails to grasp is that it is not the exchange of pro-ducts between individuals that entails private property; nor is it exchange that encourages specialization. Instead, it is the artificial parcelisation of social labour into individual labours and the consequent attribution of legal possessive ownership of pro-ducts to the individual labourer that already presupposes private property and the exchange of the now commodified products of human living labour (what we call dead objectified labour) between individual labourers! Only through this misconception could Rousseau confuse capitalism with exchange and specialization and come to believe in a mythical original form of free association in which humans merely co-operated and shared simple unspecialised tasks that they could choose to perform singly, independently of others. Yet for Rousseau the fact that such an original natural state of freedom was historically possible and has since been lost to private property means also that it can be re-constituted politically through the application of human reason to a refounded polity or State precisely because each individual is born free despite the fact that the present state of society places it instantly everywhere in chains (recall here Webers iron cage and his preoccupation with preserving human dignity against the Rationalisierung). Rousseau sees no necessity historical or teleological in the advent either of society or indeed of capitalist industry itself. For him, the alienation of the individuals labour in advanced societies from its original, pristine freedom in the state of nature is simply an accident or an ab-erration of history due to a series of contingent historical circum-stances. There is no necessity in society and no necessity in alienation and exploitation. Rousseaus existing bourgeois society is a state by historical acquisition. Only his advocated republic is a state by

institution, but one that, unlike Hobbess, is entirely voluntary. For this reason, Rousseau always viewed with diffidence the social synthesis of bourgeois society, the interdependence of human beings in society through symbolic exchange, as dissimulation, as that hypocrisy that Mandeville first, though not Hobbes who saw civil society as necessary, and then Nietzsche will later condemn as an artificial departure from the genuineness (or authenticity, to echo Heidegger) of the presocial state of nature. It simply does not occur to Rousseau that his notion of exchange may be flawed because it presumes that human beings are capable of existing in-dividually, that is to say onto-genetically, not only separately as egos, but even separately as bodies. This atomistic view of man (human being as a human being *recall Leibniz: a being must be a being+ rather than as being human humans seen ontogenetically rather than phylogenetically) explains the singular mode of Rousseaus dictum: Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains. Again, this confirms the metaphysical or ontological dimension of Rousseaus philosophy that exists side by side with the exquisitely political one. The freedom with which man is born then becomes not just a political independence from other human beings but also an ontogenetic and existential freedom the fact that as sheer possibility human being is characterized by free choice and by the possibility of establishing a society or community compatible and in harmony with the intelligible or rational freedom of that choice. There are obvious similarities here with Heideggers concept of Da-sein (in Being and Time), except that Heidegger founds human freedom on the possibility of non-being, of nothingness, of death on sheer contingency. His is a freedom before death that has few and certainly no obvious political implications only existential ones; freedom as condition humaine (Pascal). And there are similarities also with Hobbess political theory, except that in Hobbes the social contract founded on the commonwealth, does not spring from the need of human beings to objectify and realize that innate freedom that has been distorted by society, but rather from their rational ability to curtail socially their antagonistic free-dom in the state of nature so that Hobbess contractum unionis turns instantly into a contractum subjectionis through the relinquishment or alienation of individual free-dom to the Sovereign with the rational aim of avoiding violent death in the state of nature. (But we may ask, with Nietzsche and Heidegger, what is rational about preserving life?) So rationally mechanical indeed is Hobbess transition from the state of nature to the civic state that, contrary to his jusnaturalist premises, the latter appears to be a state by historical acquisition rather than by contractual institution because on Hobbess own theoretical premises his state of nature could never exist historically given that such a state would instantly self-destruct unless it turned instantaneously into a civic state!

Unlike Heidegger, Rousseau sees freedom as a function of the basic rational equality of human beings equal in reason. It is by virtue of this equality in reason and freedom as birthright by virtue of their universality (recall The Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen) that it is possible for Rousseau to postulate the existence of a consensus, of a general will (volonte generale) upon which the new republic can be erected. Thus, unlike Hobbess free-dom, Rousseaus freedom is not antagonistic and in contradiction to that of other individuals but is in harmony with theirs by virtue of the fact that rational equality is an intrinsic part of the definition of freedom: freedom and justice and reason coexist in Rousseau as la volonte generale, but they are contra-dictory in Hobbes who believes that free-dom must be curtailed by an external force, the Sovereign, elected by common consent, on pain of death. Where Rousseau sees in the concept of freedom an original harmony now lost yet recoverable rationally and contractually in the new republic through a total constitutional order (the phrase belongs to Habermas, in Theorie und Praxis), Hobbess free-dom denotes an irresoluble conflict and contra-diction that only an external will - not a general will (Rousseau), a will made general by shared human reason, but rather the mechanical State - can resolve. Where Rousseau sees the possibility of a State founded on free choice of individual wills guided and unified by Reason, Hobbes sees the State as the bitter fruit of dire necessity, imposed mechanically on individual free wills by their rational self-interest in avoiding violent death in the state of nature.

3 Returning to Nietzsche, we have seen how he opposes his physio-logical metaphysics of art (art intended as intuition, as the life of the instincts) to Rousseaus rationalist metaphysics of freedom. Against Rousseau, Nietzsche follows Hobbes in seeing freedom the Freiheit of German Idealism - as free-dom, as an antagonistic, inharmonious state one to which contradiction cannot apply, but the fear of contradiction, which is the foundation of logical and scientific necessity, certainly can. He does not see the rationality, either mechanical (Hobbes) or spontaneous-innate (Rousseau) or teleological (Hegel), of this freedom and of its ultimate expression in the State. Instead, he postulates an inevitable contrast and conflict between the rational man who lives in fear of necessity, and the artistic man who combats need-necessity through artistic creativity and dissimulation or mimesis.
There are ages, when the rational and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one full of fear of the intuition, the other full of scorn for the abstraction; the latter just as irrational as the former is inartistic. Both desire to rule over life; the one by knowing how to meet the most important needs with prediction, ingeniousness, regularity [Webers Kalkulation]; the other as an "over-joyous"

hero by ignoring those needs and taking that life only as real which simulates [imitates, mimes] appearance and beauty. Wherever intuitive man, as for instance in the earlier ON TRUTH AND FALSITY 191 history of Greece, brandishes his weapons more powerfully and victoriously than his opponent, there under favourable conditions, a culture can develop and art can establish her rule over life.

In this optic, the rational man is simply a distortion of the human artistic instinct to create metaphors to interpret life and the world one without which human beings cannot be conceived of as human for the purpose of making their lives more secure and safe. The rational man believes that necessity is the mother of invention and that logic and science are the tools with which this necessity can be explored and be known absolutely as a cosmos. And all this, this crystallization and sclerosis of artistic metaphorical invention and dissimulation, is the product of fear. The rational man also dissimulates, for this is the essential metaphysical activity of human beings: but the dissimulation of the rational man differs from that of the artistic man in that now this dissimulation becomes fixed, so as to crystallise and freeze the creative instinct of artistic man. Free dissimulation becomes now entirely subordinate to necessity, to a regular and predictable form of symbolic exchange, to a system of concepts, to science and Truth. There is no Rousseauean freedom in Nietzsche, because there is no purpose or reason or rationality in human needs and least of all any scientifically established necessity that can constitute a telos and a ratio (a nomos or Law) in life and the world. There is at best, Nietzsche claims, the limited Hobbesian free-dom that is allowed to individual wills by their coming into conflict with other wills. For Nietzsche, freedom in the rationalist sense is not only unattainable, but also inexistent. In Nietzsche we find only conflict between and even within human beings: the artistic man and the rational man represent here different but conflicting complementary facets of human being. There are, to be sure, instincts for freedom, but these express a need-necessity in the sense that they are purely physio-logical and in no sense physio-logical. Put differently, for Nietzsche it is simply absurd to see any necessity in needs because their satisfaction can be arranged in literally infinite or indefinite ways! Necessity is the invention of science it is the belief that there is only one way, or even several scientific ways (as in the mathematical case of multiple equilibria), in which needs can be satisfied. (Webers concept of Wert-rationalitat is victim precisely to this fallacy that Nietzsche exposes: although he accepts that there are infinite chains of scientific causation, Weber does not see that this fact destroys the causality of the chains.)
That dissembling [dis-simulation, mimicking], that denying of neediness, that splendor of metaphorical notions and especially that directness of dissimulation accompany all utterances of such a life [that is, one in which art rules]. Neither the house of man, nor his way

of walking, nor his clothing, nor his earthen jug suggest that necessity invented them; it seems as if they all were intended as the expressions of a sublime happiness, an Olympic cloudlessness, and as it were a playing at seriousness.

It is not necessity that is the mother of invention, then, but it is rather necessity that rigidifies and deadens artistic invention: it is artistic invention (by no means to be read as artistic freedom!) that falls prey to this fictitious notion of necessity. Needs are so important and even unconscious for Nietzsche that he eschews and negates the entire notion of freedom rationally accessible to the individuum, in favour of the instincts *Triebe, drives+ for freedom where these instincts are a function of freedom and not the other way around that is, freedom is not an innate, perhaps divine, function or property of the human will, of the soul, but rather the will is free because there is conflict, because there is no order or sense or Value (moral or scientific or metaphysical) in life . (This view of the will as a function of free-dom rather than freedom as a function-goal of the will was first expounded in Schellings Essay on the Freedom of the Will.) Free-dom in this sense is not a telos as in Hegel but rather a struggle (Kampf) as in Schopenhauer (cf. his Essay on the Free Will). Unlike Schopenhauer, however, Nietzsche also negates and decries the social trans-formation of needs into necessity that can and must be dealt with scientifically what he calls the instinct for truth - when in fact this necessity is merely a product of fear: - fear that results ultimately in the nihilism of Schopenhauers determinism and renunciation *Entsagung+ of life and the world and indeed in the self-dissolution and nihilism of Christian-bourgeois society (cf. final part of Genealogie der Moral). Sheer folly for Nietzsche is Schopenhauers promotion of art as a refuge from the Will to Life. On the contrary! Far from being a refuge from life and the world, art is for Nietzsche the very essence of intuition, the very proof that we are alive, the happiness of existence, that without which human being would be inconceivable! (What! Thou livest still, Zarathustra? in The Dance Song, Zarathustra.) Needs there are, but these are not and cannot be rational, nor can they be rationally known and rationally met contrary to what was soon to become the central thesis of Webers entire lifework. (Like Nietzsche, Weber also renounces the finality of values their ab-soluteness, their suprasensible quality, their objectivity. But precisely because for Weber science cannot be objective, because it cannot sanction and justify values, it is possible for it to be extricated from values to the extent that it becomes aware of these values and thus achieve a limited measure of wert-freiheit. Much in the way of Schopenhauers principle of sufficient reason *cf. Pianas essays on Schopenhauer+, Weber the scientist, unlike Nietzsche, simply could not entirely jettison the notion of rational science *cf.

Lowiths essay on this+.) These needs are physio-logical instincts that form part of life and the world (of the physis as opposed to the ordered cosmos) as exploitation, as struggle. There is then in Nietzsche neither a theory of in-dividuality in the sense of subject-ity, of ego-ity or Ich-heit, nor a theory of inter esse, of common being or comunitas, but rather a duality of instincts the instincts for freedom of the artistic man and the instinct for truth (or science) of the rational man which is a product of fear. The former represent the original intuitive artistic invention of human existence through the construction of metaphors, while the latter represent the rationalist mortification of this intuition and the crystallization and sclerosis of metaphors through the hardening of these metaphors into concepts, into Platonic primal forms that erect an unreal suprasensible world of ideas linked by logical necessity in philosophy, as well as a false reality dictated by physico-mathematical necessity (necessity is the mother of invention) in science.
Surely every human being who is at home with such contemplations [i.e. the rational man] has felt a deep distrust against any idealism of that kind [by the artistic man], as often as he has distinctly convinced himself of the eternal rigidity, omnipresence, and infallibility of nature's laws [Naturgesetzen]: he has arrived at the conclusion that as far as we can penetrate the heights of the telescopic and the depths of the microscopic world, everything is quite secure[!], complete, infinite, determined, and continuous. Science will have to dig in these shafts eternally and successfully and all things found are sure to have to harmonise and not to contradict one another. (p186)

Nietzsches instincts for freedom are not in search of a freedom that is innately and rationally given and that constitutes a human inter esse: they are rather a conflictual, Eristic struggle for free-dom the will to power. They do not converge to agreement (homonoia) but diverge into conflict, into civil war (stasis) the Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes. The rational State as a deus mortalis imposed either externally by subjection (Hobbess Sovereign) or internally by union (Rousseaus general will) or teleologically as the extrinsication of human reason (the dialectic of self-consciousness, the expression of Objective Spirit, Hegel) is im-possible; it is a contradictio in adjecto because State and rationality, State and com-unitas or inter esse, are as antithetical as godliness and mortality. The State can exist only as Police in the interest of those who exercise power and command in its name (cf. Schopenhauer, Part 4 of Die Welt, and Weber, Politik als Beruf), not as a neutral entity super partes. Nor are these instincts historical, even though they are certainly physiological rather than metaphysical and therefore retain a measure of immanentism. For Nietzsche, the instincts are removed from history intended as a linear, cumulative process; he theorizes them instead in an abstract cyclical or epochal sense (There

are ages when<). There may be history for Nietzsche in the Greek pre-Socratic and Thucydidean sense of a-methodon hyle (shapeless matter) or even in the Herodotean sense of istorein (inquiry); but there most certainly is no progress because there is no science and no necessity that attaches to the human choice over different courses of action, however much these may be prompted by neednecessity, that is, by physio-logical instincts (with the emphasis on physis). It is important to note that Nietzsche does not identify the state of nature as a Rousseauean idyll (see Vattimo reference in Al di la del Soggetto): far from it, given his acceptance of the Hobbesian bellum civium! (- Albeit not as a historical state, as we have seen, but only as a paradigmatic one) Nietzsches account of the state of nature is not a romantic throwback to the noble savage: nor is there any trace here of that rationalism, Hobbesian mechanical or Rousseauean idealistic, that necessitates or enables, respectively, the transition to the social contract. Much rather and almost explicitly, it is a Mandevillean satire of Christian-bourgeois society, but one that engages in a fundamental critique of the rationalist bases of both the Hobbesian and Rousseauean versions of the state of nature. Even at this early stage, Nietzsche envisages the state of nature paradigmatically (not historically) as a neutral state, as a spontaneous state of ir-responsibility (Unverantwortlichkeit), of unconsciousness(Un-bewusstheit) and oblivion (Vergessen), one in which values such as truth and falsehood do not apply only the extra-moral sense applies, and it is against the stark background of the inaccessible and undefinable X of this state of nature that truth and falsehood must be under-stood. But Nietzsches emphasis here is less on hypocrisy, as with the Hobbesian Mandeville, and more on the fear, the need for protection, the regularity and predictability of human life based on science rather than on art as the splendor of metaphors. The origin of this fear is to be found in the very conflictuality of free-dom. Which is why to Nietzsche the Hobbesian, Rousseauean, Hegelian and Marxian call for a rational State or society founded on freedom must have sounded like the zaniest of absurdities.