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work, one that is gaining in participation among scholars but that remains inadequately
explored in the intricacies and subtleties of the thought it reveals is the reading of
Nietzsche as an ontological thinker, as a philosopher of the nature of the real. Among the
continuing series of analyses in books and articles, Nietzsche is closely examined for his
destructive influence of religious belief, and a range of specifically and solely human
concerns—issues that arise within the realm of human perception and thought. However,
relatively little is observed regarding his views on the nature of the universe as it is unto
itself, beyond the scope and interpretation of human conceptions, as the foundation of the
human as much as it is of all else rather than as the result of human thought—as it is
beyond the limits of direct and comprehendible experience. In short, Nietzsche continues
have the credibility and the principles of legitimacy of a scientific theory. From The Birth
of Tragedy, in which Nietzsche devotes much of his thinking to the nature of not just
human life but the world itself as it is, he thinks, accurately portrayed by Greek tragedy,
2
to many of his late notes in the Nachlaß, which are dedicated to a developing theory of a
“processual” world, a world whose intrinsic constituency is that of process rather than
stabilized entities, a world essentially of Becoming rather than Being (a theory closely
aligned with the thinking in The Birth of Tragedy), Nietzsche demonstrates a continuing
interest in formulating an accurate idea of what the world is, an idea that is beyond the
of specific theories—theories he framed primarily during his last functioning years and
that he never published in full but that can be reconstituted from his unpublished notes.
built out of and illustrating the same basic principles for the universe as Nietzsche
conceived it: the Will to Power, the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, Nietzsche’s
For all the obscurity that continues to hang about Nietzsche’s ontological
speculations, one of his theoretical formulations has been more thoroughly overlooked
than the others: what the authors of this paper believe can justifiably be characterized as
1
A small number of other contemporary scholars have offered observations concerning this subject, as will
be noted farther down. All agree on the use of the term “panpsychism,” although Nietzsche never used the
word or any equivalent German term.
3
calls in his Nachlass the “Wesen der Dinge”—the “essence of material things.”2 It is a
worldview that is distinct from traditional Idealism in several regards, particularly in that
the events of the world are not merely matters purely of experience—sensations in their
Chief among the psychical qualities possessed by the full circuit of reality
attributable specifically to and not isolated among either individual human beings or
individual living entities. Rather, Empfindung is a quality that pervades the stuff of the
world and is present down to the most essential components of the real: “Der Stoss, das
Einwirken des einen Atoms auf das andre, setzt Empfindung voraus”3—“The push, the
impact of one atom upon another presupposes feeling.” “Der empfindungslose Zustand
dieser Substanz ist nur eine Hypothese! keine Erfahrung!—Empfindung also Eigenschaft
der Substanz: es giebt empfindende Substanzen.”4 “The condition [of substances] devoid
What Nietzsche is doing in this is to treat matter as not entirely apart from
as feeling. Put differently, Nietzsche ignores the line between mind and mindless matter,
or between the organic and the inanimate, recognizing what he refers to as “Der Verband
2
KSA 7.470. (All quotations attributed to KSA are drawn from Nietzsche’s Nachlass and are translated by
the authors.)
3
KSA 7.469.
4
KSA 10.649.
4
des Organischen und des Unorganischen,”5 “the binding together of the organic and the
inorganic.”
surprising, given even just the rudiments of his idea of Will to Power, and in particular
the recognition that Will to Power does not create the material and eventualities of the
world but manifests itself as those eventualities and apparent objects—enacting them in
much the way that water enacts waves, which do not thereby exist as independent self-
sustaining objects. Nietzsche makes the matter all the clearer by also attributing a quality
which for Nietzsche are the sole constituency of apparent entities. The stipulation of an
called classical cause-and-effect mechanics. Events do not arise out of and are not
compelled by preceding events, events that we ordinarily take as forcibly triggering the
events that appear to proceed from them. Rather, events are self-determining and self-
distinguishing and defining aspects of the Will to Power. The dominating principle in this
is one of autopoiesis: a self-organizing drive that is the nature of the world and all its
constituent events, whereby it and they create themselves out of themselves, subject to
and illustrative of no causal principles such as efficient cause or final cause. The world
and its component eventualities have neither outside initiating factors nor ultimate
purposes. They are driven by an internal quality comparable to a “will” that is a “pathos,”
an “agon” or “suffering.”
5
KSA 11.623.
5
This will—the Will to Power—is the creative principle of the universe,
and it is what Nietzsche calls an “Urschmerz,” a “suffering, primal and eternal, the sole
ground of the world.”6 The suffering at the heart of the world, the pathos, is the essential
nature of the real, the essential nature of Will to Power. That pathos at the center of the
world is its “primordial contradiction and primordial pain,”7 the contradiction of things
struggling with their own opposites, their internal opposing tendencies or forces, that
primordial pain intricated with its opposite: “Das Ineinander von Leid und Lust im
Wesen der Welt,”9 “The interpenetration of suffering and pleasure at the heart of the
world.” As the outcome of the pain, the contradiction, at the core of all things realizing
itself as a world, the world is then like “a work of art that gives birth to itself without the
beside the classical oppositions, that is supposed to be the excluded middle, but is for
Nietzsche the essence of the real. In the case of his panpsychism, that third is what we
might term Nietzsche’s “psychical materialism,” for lack of a better alternative. In this
conception, he is clearly rejecting the standard Cartesian dualism between mind and
6
Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann. New
York: The Modern Library, 1968. § 4, p. 46.
7
Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy. § 5, p. 49.
8
Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy. § 4, p. 46.
9
KSA 7.213.
10
Nietzsche. The Will to Power. Walter Kaufmann, ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1968. 419.
6
matter that is the substance of “common sense” conceptions. Put differently, mind and
matter are for him—to the degree it is meaningful to speak of them at all, given their
Rather than incompatibles that somehow coexist—the standard and we can say, for the
sake of the dualism they invoke, classical interpretation of the mind/body conundrum—
mind and matter are logically incommensurable concepts that point, from different
conceptual directions, toward a reality that in itself cannot be phrased and represented.
Nietzsche. Hartshorne argues in his work The Zero Fallacy that there is no zero degree of
throughout materiality, but at no point is a zero degree of mentality achieved. There are
qualities of mind present, to some degree, in all portions of evidently material reality:
“Atoms, particles, radiation waves, are not inert, and matter consists of them. They need
not be soulless, a zero of freedom or a zero of mind. The zero of activity cannot be
components of reality, to the world itself, Nietzsche is not to be taken as asserting there is
11
Charles Hartshorne. The Zero Fallacy: and Other Essays in Neoclassical Philosophy. Peru, Illinois: Open
Court Publishing Company, 1997. 62.
7
be found everywhere, Nietzsche is arguing for a universal minimal quality of mentality,
what can perhaps be more accurately referred to as sentience—a caliber of mentality that
that ought to be seen as feeling based. Specifically, Nietzsche asserts that “Der Wille zur
Macht interpretiert,”12 “the Will to Power interprets.” It is the concept that makes sense of
his parallel assertions that the quality of feeling, or Empfindung, is universal and that the
ego structure, which may be taken as the model for self-aware thinking, is a fiction, not
even attributable as an actual quality to human beings. In arguing against the existence of
coherent unities in nature, he asserts that “We need ‘unities’ in order to be able to reckon:
that does not mean we must suppose that such unities exist. We have borrowed the
concept of unity from our ‘ego’ concept—our oldest article of faith.”13 The
underlies all events, for it is a capability, the directing capability, of all that exists.
Schelling’s thought is rooted in his vision of a dynamic and organic nature that is
animated by a “world soul,” which in his Von der Weltseele he describes as the
12
KSA 12.139.
13
Nietzsche. The Will to Power. 338.
8
“organizing principle” of nature, a principle in which nature’s dualistic structure has its
origin: “Der Dualismus in der Natur führt auf ein organisierendes Prinzip = Weltseele.”14
beings. Anticipating Nietzsche’s Will to Power to perhaps a greater degree than does
Schopenhauer’s Will, Schelling observes that “Wollen ist Urseyn,”15 “Will is primordial
Being.” And like Nietzsche’s Will to Power as pathos, as a primordial pain that is a
Heraclitean unity of opposites, a dualism that at the same time admits of a unity.
clear that his conception of will is rooted in the sense of the word “wollen” as meaning to
want or to long for, as opposed to will as the intent to dominate. In what would later be
selbst zu gebären,” “longing . . . to give birth to itself.”16 In terms that the authors have
14
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Von der Weltseele, in Sämtliche Werke. K.F.A. Schelling, ed.
Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856-1861. 450. (All translations of Schelling are by the authors.)
15
Schelling. Schelling’s Werke, vol. 7. Manfred Schröter, ed. München: Beck, 1927. 350.
16
Schelling. Schelling’s Werke, vol. 7. 359.
17
Quoted in Thomas Buchheim. Eins von Allem—Die Selbstbescheidung des Idealismus in Schellings
Spätphilosophie. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1992. 149.
18
Thomas Buchheim. 149.
19
Thomas Buchheim. 149.
9
“longing at rest,” that becomes Wollen in the sense of “Übergang a potentia ad actum,”20
Nietzsche scholars, as stated earlier, it has been recognized by a few. Günter Abel has
observed that, in Nietzsche’s work, all processes have an internal interpretive capacity,
all the way from the “realm of the inorganic to that of conscious thought,” so that one can
Kevin Hill in their essays both offer observations concerning Nietzsche’s panpsychism.
Dries notes that Nietzsche’s perspectivalism implies that Will to Power enacts
to observe in a footnote, “Nietzsche insists that even the inorganic must be thought of as
notes that Nietzsche conceived the universe in accord with the theories of the eighteenth-
century mathematician and physicist Roger Boscovich, who saw the universe as
20
Thomas Buchheim. 43.
21
Günter Abel. Nietzsche—Die Dynamik der Willen zur Macht und die ewige Wiederkehr. Berlin-New
York: Walter de Gruyter, 1998. 55.
22
Manuel Dries, ed. Nietzsche on Time and History. Berlin-New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008.
23
Dries. “Towards Adualism: Becoming and Nihilism in Nietzsche’s Philosophy,” in Dries, Nietzsche on
Time and History. 131.
24
Dries. “Towards Adualism.” 131.
10
interacting fields of force, a proposition regarding Nietzsche with which the authors of
this paper agree. Hill adds that “Nietzsche also appears to have endorsed a form of
panpsychism regarding these fields of force . . . he thought the idea of force makes no
sense unless we understand forcing and being forced to be something undergone, felt,
something (in our sense of the word) mental. Thus every field of force will have its
corresponding ‘feel’ as it presses on other fields and is pressed upon in turn.”25 Hill
further notes that Nietzsche’s panpsychism permits Nietzsche to avoid the implications of
universal mind that necessarily arise in Idealism, in a sense naturalizing the stipulation of
universal mentality. “Panpsychism thus allows Nietzsche to escape from the most
untoward consequences of the esse est percipi principle. It allows Nietzsche to continue
to affirm the existence of a nature within which we are embedded. Though it is permeated
with mind, Nietzsche’s nature transcends us. Our knowledge of it may well be imperfect,
thus affirming a distinction between how things seem and what is so.”26
the world generally, and as illusory even in the case of human beings (the topic of
Nietzsche’s thought-through doubts regarding the value of and even the very possibility
of thought has yet to be properly explored), inoculates him from the charge of
human quality that nature also demonstrates. Hartshorne confronted the same potential
charge and made a similar argument: “Those who say that, apart from the specifically
psychical traits altogether are indeed celebrating the role of man or manlike creatures in
25
R. Kevin Hill. “From Kantian Temporality to Nietzschean Naturalism,” in Dries, Nietzsche on Time and
History. 83.
26
Hill. “From Kantian Temporality to Nietzschean Naturalism.” 83.
11
the world. They are saying that our kind of creature introduces mind as such into nature.
Apart from us and our kind there is nothing with intrinsic life, feeling, value, or any sort
whatever. Is this not in a class with the idea that our planet is the center of the
now call “human exceptionalism.” (And if Nietzsche can be said to have held any
position with consistency and vigorous force throughout his work, it is the rejection of
human exceptionalism.)
located with or housed in individual minds, nor is it in individual entities of any kind.
“oldest article of faith.” In short, they are fictions that come of the fiction we devise
concerning our own personal existences as discrete selves. Rather, for Nietzsche,
27
Hartshorne. “Physics and Psychics: The Place of Mind in Nature,” in J.B. Cobb/D.R. Griffin, Mind in
Nature: Essays on the Interface of Science and Philosophy. Washington, DC: University Press of America,
1977. 94.
28
KSA 10.274.
12
identical/non-self-same given in reality”—and its site is in active, self-activating
that are essentially discontinuous and too insignificant, taken one by one, to register
precisely—with his theory of time atoms, a component of his ontological thought that is
perhaps, both ontological formulations, of singulars and time atoms, align precisely with
conceived as discontinuous points: “die Zeitatomistik fällt endlich zusammen mit einer
“the atomistic time ultimately coincides with a theory of sensation. The dynamic time-
point is identical with the sensation-point.”32 The sites of Empfindung may be thought of
unconnected but not unrelated to each other, and are the alternative to the paradigm of
Being as the one and intransitory reality behind the mere appearances of this world, as
well as the alternative to the paradigm of the real as a continuous field upon which the
29
KSA 1.879-880.
30
It should be noted that Nietzsche’s theory of time atoms has been elucidated also by Robin Small in his
book Time and Becoming in Nietzsche’s Thought (London: Continuum, 2010), and by Keith Ansell Pearson
in his article “Nietzsche’s Brave New World of Force,” The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, issue 20, fall
2000.
31
KSA 7.579.
32
Translated by Carol Diethe, with modifications by Keith Ansell Pearson. Published in The Journal of
Nietzsche Studies, issue 20, fall 2000.
33
KSA 7.215.
13
drama of the world is played out, the stage upon which all actions of history occur—the
space and time within which the universe exists. For Nietzsche, the inherent geometry of
the universe, the structural principles of Will to Power as pathos,34 of Empfindung as the
panpsychism reveals itself in a pattern unlike that assumed as the backdrop of the real. It
direct perception, and it is the pattern, the structural principle, that underlies every one of
universe, a universe rooted in discontinuity. Taken at face value, there is a certain initial
that are self-existing, each existing in its own right rather than as a result of the causal
influence of preceding events or the purpose-driven influence of ultimate goals, and that
must, perforce, possess a principle of inter-relationship, differs from the standard vision
substantial entities that in their occurrences and eventualities interact with each other. It
would appear at first blush that this is the standard conception of reality poured into a
which it is organized.
34
Nietzsche. The Will to Power. 339.
14
For Nietzsche, the events of Empfindung—of feeling, or pathos, or
synonymous as one works one’s way through his reasoning—are not the discrete,
foreground activities that constitute the activities of the real, the components of the world
and its story, its history, occurring in an extension, in a continuous space and over a
continuous time, in which they are suspended in the way we think of the entities and
events of normal (apparent) physical reality as suspended in the space that is the universe
at its most essential and the time that is its progressively transpiring presence. Instead, for
“outside” or beyond the nature of the world and instigating that nature by means of a
causal influence, but rather in the sense that discontinuity is the root nature of things and
implication, or simultaneous aspect—B is the case because A is the case, not by causal
analytic rather than a priori synthetic. In other words, the discontinuity is the background
condition of Nietzsche’s universe—the eventualities of the processes are not played out
in a continuous space and time, but in spaces and at moments—each in its own space and
of its own moment—each its own space and moment. There is no overall stage upon
which the events of the world can be played out; there is no single encompassing space
absolute discontinuity—events occurring in their own spaces and moments, that are their
own spaces and moments of eventuality, are as if in parallel dimensions. They have no
15
principle of proximity, for unlike foreground physical atoms, or sub-atomic particles, or
entities of any sort, they are not separated by measurable amounts of space, or, more to
the point here, time. They are not set apart by extension, by any unoccupied formulation
of the “material” of which they are constituted, spatially or temporally. They are neither
in contact nor separated by any interceding medium. They are simply discrete. It is as if
each event were a universe unto itself—an instance of Becoming, of process, that is
intrinsically and primarily temporal, for it is processual, it is durational, but that does not
occur over time, nor does it occur in time. It is not itself an extension of time, nor does it
discontinuous points, or “atoms,” are the structural principle for Nietzsche’s ontology in
were to be in contact would blend together in a single, greater point of sensation or time:
would merge together.”35 For Nietzsche, contact equals merging, by which he observes a
interact freely, they are in essence the same system. It is a pure artificiality to denote
constitute another, larger single point and the situation would be right back where it
35
KSA 7.575.
16
began, with a single time or sensation point and the question of its relation to other
points. So too, were there to be a temporal medium between two otherwise discontinuous
time points, the same condition would apply, the entire system would merge together, and
again, be back where the question of relation began. What remains as the only possibility
moments that are not in direct contact and are not separated by an intervening
temporality, or sensation.
panpsychism “blends into” an analysis of his theory of time atoms, for as has been made
clear, Empfindung is essentially temporal: “The dynamic time-point is identical with the
Becoming. As is the case with Empfindung, or feeling, time comes in distinct points that
are not mathematical points in the sense of possessing a measurement of zero (for there is
no zero degree of feeling or time, and time atoms are durational); they are not in direct
contact for then they would blend into a single larger moment that would either be,
ultimately, a single, frozen moment of all of time, thus returning us to unchanging Being
as the condition of the world and eradicating all change, or making all eventuality
changing but simultaneous, with no possibility of even perceived succession; and the
time atoms are not “suspended” in a continuum of time. The time atoms do not occur in
time—they are time, their structures of fundamentally separate time points that have no
time passing between them and keeping them separated at different times, so to speak, are
the only time there is. Hence, the discontinuity is fundamental in the sense described
above—time exists in packets, and the packets of time have no temporal relations
17
between or among them, none of them is given as occurring before or after any of the
others, and they do not combine into a temporal continuum, into a flow: “Die Zeit ist aber
gar kein continuum, sondern es giebt nur totalverschiedene Zeitpunkte, keine Linie.”36
“But time is no continuum at all, there are only totally different time-points, no line.”37
Neither do they occur simultaneously—“Der dynamische Zeitpunkt ist identisch mit dem
deeper, more radical stipulation than the mere denial that different feelings and different
time points can occur simultaneously. It is comparable to, for it is of a piece with,
Nietzsche’s assertion that his singulars of Becoming are “Ungleichheit,” that they are not
self-same, not identical with themselves. So, too, with time—every time atom, every
moment, is not the same as itself. In a sense, it is out of phase with itself.
between time atoms. Otherwise, every event, every moment, would exist, literally and
thoroughly, in a universe of its own, in the sense that every event could have no effect on
or presence in relation to any other event. Such an implication would not only be self-
evidently implausible, it would also be fully at odds with other key elements in
sind verkettet, verfädelt, verliebt,”39 “All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored.”40
36
KSA 7.579.
37
Translated by Carol Diethe, with modifications by Keith Ansell Pearson. Published in The Journal of
Nietzsche Studies, issue 20, fall 2000.
38
KSA 7.579
39
KSA 4.402.
18
Furthermore, the principle of relation among time atoms is necessary to their individual
qualities, which is to say in that in their essential natures, these separated atoms of
sensation and eventuality, of Becoming, are relational. A time atom is the smallest
integrity of the event that is the time atom, the moment of Becoming, the feeling of the
event. Its scale is determined for Nietzsche by the time necessary for a discrete event.
the event is perspectival. Thus, without interaction, the concept of a time atom is
meaningless.
Nietzsche does address the issue of relation among time atoms, and calls
Zeitmomenten ist unmöglich : denn zwei solche Zeitpunkte würden in einander fallen.
Also ist jede Wirkung actio in distans, d.h. durch Springen. Wie eine Wirkung dieser Art
in distans möglich ist, wissen wir gar nicht.”42 “An effect of a sequence of time-moments
is impossible: for two such time-moments would coincide. Thus every effect is actio in
distans, i.e., through jumping. How an effect of this kind in distans is possible we do not
know at all.”43
from one time atom or moment to another, one may presume a transition that neither
takes time nor is instantaneous, in that there is no time, no quality of temporality, in the
40
Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Fourth Part, “The Drunken Song,” section 10. In The Portable
Nietzsche. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: The Viking Press, 1968. 435.
41
KSA 7.578.
42
KSA 7.578.
43
Translated by Carol Diethe, with modifications by Keith Ansell Pearson. Published in The Journal of
Nietzsche Studies, issue 20, fall 2000.
19
relation between moments. Hence, either to assert time or to deny it to the event of the
“jump,” to claim that some time transpires or that no time transpires, is to commit an act
of category confusion. The term simply does not apply. It is neither that there is no time
nor that there is. To speak of time transpiring or failing to in the “jump” between time
How that jump occurs, what its structural method is, is unknown to
Nietzsche, by his admission, and it can be taken to be, for obvious reasons, outside the
established laws of physics. Even so, it is evident that Nietzsche intends to maintain and
permit room for his proposition that all things are entangled, even in the face of an
apparently contradictory state of affairs, in which every moment and event is distinct and
unconnected to every other. Here, too, Nietzsche’s formulation of time, and Empfindung,
opposing alternatives of inter-relation and hermetic isolation. Thus, despite the complete
separation of every event in a moment of its own, disconnected from all other moments,
of something existing that “needs no other thing in order to exist.”44 The moments of
time, walled off from each other by non-existent, unbridgeable gulfs of non-time are
book he did not live, or remain coherent long enough, to write. But much of it is present
44
Rene Descartes. Principles of Philosophy. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
1991. 23.
20
largely in his unpublished notes, enough that the theory in its broad outlines can be
Eternal Recurrence of the Same, the Will to Power, and his panpsychism—can be given
discontinuity.
prescient of developments in science and philosophy that were to come shortly after its
formulation, in the first half of the twentieth century. In a paper of this brevity, only a few
of the instances can be cited and little analysis and depth of research offered. But a few of
fundamental discontinuity with future science is, of course, with the development of
quantum theory in physics, which introduced the recognition of a basic punctiform nature
into the conception of energy, a discontinuity in what had been understood on the model
bursts, or quanta, pellets rather jets, and it is interesting if not truly significant to note that
Max Planck’s theory of the quantum was published in 1900, the year of Nietzsche’s
space and time, on the one hand, and on the other, Planck’s division of energy into a
series of quanta (atoms of energy) that travel in a sequence, like bullets, with a
measurable expanse of space between each and its neighbor. However, recent
developments in physics come far closer to the ontological vision Nietzsche was working
45
The authors of this paper will be publishing more extensive material on this topic in the near future.
21
toward: string theory with its additional dimensions curled up and forming closed
systems rather than joining together into a universal expanse, and more particularly, loop
quantum gravity, in which the structure of both space and time come in discrete
components, nodes with a minimum size, which are indivisible, and forming through a
method of connectivity yet to be fully worked out in theory a “spin network” that
of gravity in which there is no “background spacetime.”46 In fact, the more closely one
examines Nietzsche’s time-atom theory, the more it resembles in the broad outlines
specifically loop quantum gravity, and it can be said that, regardless of the ultimate
Nietzsche was moving forward, perhaps intuitively, toward a number of what are now the
although without any evidence of direct influence. And yet, there appear to be none who
have reflected the heart of his conception, the discontinuity of the foundation of the real,
even though science has acquired the idea and is finding ways to put it to the test.
atoms. Specifically, he acquires from Bergson the idea that time is intrinsically
durational, that experience transpires, and thus any experience requires a passage of time
for it to be experiential. Experiential time cannot be brought down to, subdivided into,
46
Carlo Rovelli. “Loop Quantum Gravity.” Living Reviews in Relativity, 11, (2008), 5. 8.
22
“now moment” cannot exist. Any experience requires time to transpire, requires a
temporal thickness, something more than a single moment. That is to say the conceptions
by which we comprehend and measure time do not reflect the inherent quality of time—
increments. Time achieves us in discrete segments that in their scale are specific to the
experience they carry, they are. Below their minimal scale, experience cannot be detected
by discrete pulses of perception, each of which keeps us saying ‘more, more, more,’ or
‘less, less, less,’ as the definite increments or diminutions make themselves felt. The
discreteness is still more obvious when, instead of old things changing, they cease, or
when altogether new things come. Fechner’s term of the ‘threshold,’ which has played
such a part in the psychology of perception, is only one way of naming the quantitative
discreteness in the change of all our sensible experiences. They come to us in drops.
Our ideal decomposition of the drops which are all that we feel into still
finer fractions is but an incident in that great transformation of the perceptual order into a
conceptual order . . . All ‘felt’ times coexist and overlap or compenetrate each other thus
vaguely.”47
47
William James. A Pluralistic Universe, in Writings, 1902-1910. New York: The Library of America,
1987. 733-734.
23
James matches Nietzsche’s conception of a minimal duration of time as
intrinsic to the inherent nature of time, and as well the idea that minimal duration is
determined by the quality and nature of the event that the duration of time plays out, and
not by an arbitrary, fixed scale of measure, not by the mechanical clock or the
metronome. The time James speaks about here is human perceptual time, time as it is
observations that the mentality that experiences goes beyond the human mind, or that
these temporal qualities imply an ontological philosophy. James’s observations here are
psychological.
However, there are passages elsewhere in James’s work that suggest the
constituency of reality.
evolution, as the underlying dynamic in the development of the universe, requires some
degree of presence of consciousness from the very beginning of things, and thus, a
that starts without it, and yet professes to explain all facts by continuous evolution. If
evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must have been present at the
very origin of things. Accordingly we find that the more clear-sighted evolutionary
philosophers are beginning to posit it there. Each atom of the nebula, they suppose, must
have had an aboriginal atom of consciousness linked with it; and, just as the material
24
atoms have formed bodies and brains by massing themselves together, so the mental
animals.”48
Clearly, James is observing the principle Natura non facit saltus (Nature
does not jump), the Leibnizian, Newtonian—and Darwinian—principle that there can be
no abrupt appearances in nature, and any emergence of what was not there before in some
form, any movement from zero presence to positive presence, is abrupt, regardless of
how small the emergent property (“Consciousness, however small, is an illegitimate birth
in any philosophy that starts without it”). In short, anything that is there must always
discontinuity. Even so, in his conception of minimal durations of time and the
determination of time intervals strictly by the events they occur, James’s conception is
overtly ontological philosophy—one of the few currently who propound the position
Panpsychism,” which is the lead essay in his book Consciousness and Its Place in
Nature, Strawson argues that the proposition that the universe is fundamentally physical
48
James. The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1. New York: Cosimo, 2007. 149.
25
requires a proposition that some minimum degree of psychism must be present at its
fundamental level. The logic is comparable to that of James: the rejection of the
possibility of an emergent property, the claim that the capability of having experience
cannot arise at any point in a universe that previously did not contain it. “Real
physicalists must accept that at least some ultimates are intrinsically experience-
possible and, unless one is willing to allow the possibility of multiple types of ultimate
no more evident in Strawson than it is in James. The one philosopher of influence and
and his essential discontinuity of time atoms and Empfindungspunkt is he who must be
Whitehead sees the basic constituents of reality as “actual entities,”51 which are acts of
Becoming As such, the “actual entities” are more precisely events, which through
ultimately, enduring objects. Yet only the act of Becoming, only the occasion, can be
considered real: “ ‘Actual entities’—also termed ‘actual occasions’—are the final real
49
Galen Strawson. “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism,” in Strawson et al,
Consciousness and Its Place in Nature. Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic, 2006. 25.
50
Strawson. 25.
51
Alfred North Whitehead. Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press, 1979. 50.
26
things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find
according to a logic that makes the process by which occasions acquire the appearance of
separated by space and by time, and the “prehensive,” by which “things” are held
together in space and in time.53 What might at first blush be taken as a physical process,
process of what Nietzsche calls interpretation, in the sense that everything is a function of
the Will to Power and “the Will to Power interprets.” In essence, “prehension” involves
“apprehension.”
of natural entities is the being perceived within the unity of mind,”54 Whitehead offers a
thought that should be followed in some detail. “We can substitute the concept, that the
realisation is a gathering of things into the unity of a prehension; and that what is thereby
realised is the prehension, and not the things. This unity of the prehension defines itself
as a here and a now, and the things so gathered into the grasped unity have essential
reference to other places and other times. For Berkeley’s mind, I substitute a process of
prehensive unification . . . The things which are grasped into a realised unity, here and
now, are not the castle, the cloud, and the planet simply in themselves; but they are the
52
Whitehead. Process and Reality. 18.
53
Whitehead. Science and the Modern World. New York: The Free Press, 1967. New York: The Free
Press, 1967. 64.
54
Whitehead. Science and the Modern World. 69.
27
castle, the cloud, and the planet from the standpoint, in space and time, of the prehensive
unification. In other words, it is the perspective of the castle over there from the
standpoint of the unification here. It is, therefore, aspects of the castle, the cloud, and the
planet which are grasped into unity here. You will remember that the idea of perspectives
is quite familiar in philosophy. It was introduced by Leibniz, in the notion of his monads
mirroring perspectives of the universe. I am using the same notion, only I am toning
down his monads into the unified events of time and space.”55
world as it is and the way it is apprehended, and unified specifically and solely in the
apprehension. The bridge between that which is and that which is perceived—such that
panpsychic process—is in the use of the term “prehension,” which is applied clearly as
both a natural process, presumably to that which is, and a perceptual process. Whitehead
strengthens his claims to a further degree: “Space and time exhibit the general scheme of
prehension to prehension.”56
possesses the greater stability and substantiality of more normative objects and coherent
exclusion of any process of unification that is not perspectival—all qualities are functions
55
Whitehead. Science and the Modern World. 69-70.
56
Whitehead. Science and the Modern World. 72.
28
of interactions (interpretations), which occur from the standpoints of a here and a now
that are elsewhere, somewhere other than that which is being reacted to. All interactions
not on the model of the Berkeleyan “unity of mind,” hence, more akin to Nietzsche’s
minimal degree of psyche, more on the order of what we have called sentience. And it
should be noted that Whitehead’s substitution of the “unity of prehension” for Berkeley’s
“unity of mind” serves the same function for Whitehead that Hill argues Nietzsche’s
formulation of panpsychism served for him: avoiding the pitfalls of Idealism, permitting
nature to be psychic while at the same time permitting nature to transcend us, to be of
mentality and capable of experiencing while not being the product of our own minds—to
permit nature to give rise to us, as to all else, and thus to give rise to our own minds, to be
Whitehead’s work. Along with the separative and the prehensive, Whitehead has a “third
some sort . . . Analogously for time, a thing endures during a certain period, and through
no other period.”57 Elsewhere in his work, this quality of location takes on a durational
aspect—noting, like James, the influence of Bergson, Whitehead asserts that objects,
events, require minimum amounts of time to exist, the required time being specified by
the object, in other words, the constituent events. There is even a smallest possible
57
Whitehead. Science and the Modern World. 64.
29
that for the existence of certain sorts of objects, e.g. electrons, minimum quanta of time
are requisite.”58 Like Nietzsche’s time atoms, Whitehead’s “quanta of time” deny the
division of time below a certain scale, that limitation of scale being determined by the
What is not clear, finally, is whether Whitehead also reflects the ultimate
aspect of Nietzsche’s ontological formulations, and his most radical, if judged by the
degree to which those who have come after him have not acquired it: his fundamental
durations, the amount of time that each object and event requires to transpire, dispel the
idea of a universal time that is always transpiring, that is the background to all things, all
events, to the history of the universe. On one hand, Whitehead makes clear that his
discrete durations are not only perspectival but are capable of being sequenced, such that
they are capable of accumulating into the appearance, from a standpoint, of temporarily
continuous story of the world. Yet there is secondary literature on Whitehead that
concludes, since the discrete durations are all the time that exists, there can be no
universal temporal background that serves as the stage of all of history, time as the house
one example, F. Bradford Wallack writes that, for Whitehead, “Time perishes with its
58
Whitehead. The Concept of Nature. Cambridge, UK: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge,
2000. 162.
30
occasion. There is no continuously existing, actual time, absolute, reified,
substantialized.”59
sort, then he is the single example of a significant philosopher who acquired the idea, if
not directly from Nietzsche, then in his immediate wake. And only Nietzsche, Whitehead,
and the physicists who are currently conducting tests to discover if space is broken up by
pockets of non-space, if empty space is perforated by what is not even empty, what is not
even spatial, are the only ones to have adopted, and surely among the few who can
streaming in a strangely vibratory line away from a light source, with measurable
distances of space separating the individual quanta of light, and it is another to note that
electrons of an atom shift in energy levels and move to different distances from the
nucleus without traversing the space between the two electron shells, moving by way of
the “quantum leap.” There, it is space itself that seems discontinuous, broken, partial in
its presence, and what exists between and keeps separate, or marks the separations of,
areas of space is, to date, inexplicable and incomprehensible. Whitehead may have
moved to these radical lengths. It is certainly clear that Nietzsche did, in a precedent for
the physicists who have discovered the possibility that, in essence, Nietzsche is right.
ontology whose radical nature has yet to be fully analyzed and appreciated. Nietzsche’s
59
F. Bradford Wallack. The Epochal Nature of Process in Whitehead’s Metaphysics. Albany: SUNY Press,
1980. 173.
31
panpsychism is one part, one aspect or facet of, that movement of extreme imagination. It
early in the nineteenth century with the geometry of Carl Friedrich Gauss and has been
accelerating in philosophy and science over the last 100 years, a movement away from
does not depend on and eludes the limitations of visualization—not merely in the sense of
laboratory observation but in the sense of conception and comprehension that is not
compelled by the capabilities of the mind’s eye. To a growing degree, we understand the
real in terms that cannot be visually imagined. Thinkers of our time often speak of
transgressing logic, or dealing in contradictions, but what we are coming to is more the
unlocking of our logic from the intrinsic qualities of our internal optics, and as a result,
we find ourselves, as Nietzsche clearly found himself, capable of more expansive logics
than we have inherited from the long history of what we now can recognize as a visually
bound philosophical tradition. It is just this quality that constitutes the most radical,
(This is a pre-print copy of a paper slated for publication in Nietzsche on Consciousness and the
Embodied Mind, a volume of essays to be edited by Manuel Dries, Oxford University. The contents are
© 2009 Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen.)