Power ≠ Power: Against the Mix-Up of Nietzsche and Spinoza

Introduction

The assumption that Nietzsche’s “will to power” is identical with or congenial to Spinoza’s concept of “potentia agendi” has become a common place in both mainstream research and poststructuralist interpretations. It was primarily via Gilles Deleuze that this line of continuity became influential within the academic Left. According to his 1962 book Nietzsche and Philosophy, Nietzsche’s will to power can be derived from Spinoza’s capacity for being affected so that it can be defined as an “affectivity, a sensibility, a sensation” (1986: 62). Absent in this equation, of course, is Nietzsche’s hierarchical obsession that motivates him to define power in terms of an aristocratic rule over the popular classes. The assumption of a continuity between Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s concepts of power is then reaffirmed in Michael Hardt’s study on Deleuze (1993: 34–38). It is therefore hardly a surprise to see it emerge again in Hardt and Negri’s Empire, which describes Nietzsche’s power concept in terms of an “expansive power,” so that its difference to Spinoza is reduced to an “omnilateral expansiveness of the power to act” (2000: 358–59). This assumption contradicts, however, Negri’s own finding in The Savage Anomaly that Spinoza’s concept of power is characterized by expansiveness and is thereby to be mediated with Marx’s concept of productive forces (1991: 137–39, 220f, 228f). A 2013 conference on “Spinoza and Nietzsche in Dialogue” at the University of London was marked by the commonly shared opinion that there is a “remarkable affinity” between Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s concepts of power (Wiesmann, 2013) and that the ethical position of Nietzsche’s will to power is the same as Spinoza’s potentia (Rutherford, 2013).

This continuity-thesis, as I will call it from now on, belongs to a grand narrative in Nietzsche research that Domenico Losurdo has characterized as a “hermeneutics of innocence.” It is a hermeneutics that dissimulates the elitist and antidemocratic perspectives of Nietzsche’s philosophy and subjugates even Nietzsche’s bluntest statements—from the support of slavery to the annihilation of the weak and degenerate—to an allegorical interpretation. Thereby, it depoliticizes one of the sharpest masters of suspicion, who was proud of his uncompromising “aristocratic radicalism,” as Nietzsche himself called it. ¹

Let us take as a case in point, Nietzsche’s “pathos of distance” and the way Deleuze interprets it. Nietzsche describes it in the Genealogy of Morals as a “pathos of nobility […] the feeling of complete and fundamental superiority of a higher ruling kind in relation to a lower kind, to those ‘below’,” and it is obvious that for him the terms “noble” and “master” as well as “base” and “slave” are to be understood not just in a moral sense but in a caste or estate sense (im ständischen Sinn)—that is, in the sense of an aristocratic classism from above. His examples were the ancient Greek aristocracy, the Roman “warrior,” the “Aryan” conquering and master race, and the “magnificent blond beast.” ² Deleuze renders Nietzsche’s pathos quote as “pathos of difference and distance” (1962/1986: 2), thus associating it with the seemingly innocent term “difference”; then he interprets Nietzsche’s class oppositions as a “differential element” that distinguishes between the “active force” or “affirmative will” on the one hand and the “reactive force” or “negative will” on the other (1962/1986: 55–57, 61, 86). By this allegorical interpretation, the staunch antidemocratic and antisocialist aristocrat morphs into a “nomadic rebel” who is revealed as being much more radical and subversive than Marx and Freud because he “decodifies” both the state and the family and helps us develop a “war machine” against the state (Deleuze, 1995: 142–44, 148–52). The basic philosophical operation that underlies Nietzsche’s shift to the “radical Left” is to disguise him as Spinoza, and the cornerstone of this rapprochement is the equating of their power concepts. ³

I will try to show that this line of continuity is philologically untenable and politically devastating. Peeling off the different layers of the continuity-thesis, I will demonstrate: 1) the widespread juxtaposition of Spinoza’s “static” and Nietzsche’s “dynamic” notions of power is a deception that diverts attention from the fundamental qualitative difference between their respective concepts of power; (2) Nietzsche relied on a philosophical handbook by Kuno Fischer that translated Spinoza’s concept of potentia as “power” in general and thus facilitated a semantic shift from a collective agency from below to a domination/power from above; (3) the “middle” Nietzsche was in fact influenced by Spinoza, but the continuity-thesis overlooks that the late Nietzsche took a sharp anti-Spinozian turn and introduced his “will to power” against Spinoza’s conatus; (4) rethinking Spinoza’s concepts of potentia and potestas in the framework of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony allows us to reassess Antonio Negri’s interpretation of Spinoza: his assumption of an “absolute antagonism” between potentia and potestas was certainly a simplification, but his observation of an ontological priority of potentia was accurate; (5) whereas Spinoza’s potentia agendi designates a collective and cooperative capacity oriented toward relations of synergy with others, Nietzsche’s “will to power” naturalizes the principle of oppression and domination. When he adopts some Spinozian descriptions of potentia, he turns in fact a potentially democratic agency into an elitist notion of aristocratic domination that he fantasizes further into the annihilation of the weak.

“Static” versus “Dynamic” Power?

As far as the continuity-thesis permits to consider some differences between Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s concepts of power, it does so in two respects: for one, Nietzsche freed the Spinozian concept of power from its connection to “reason,” which was oriented toward the knowledge of God; for two, he transformed Spinoza’s “static” model of self-preservation into a dynamic model of power enlargement.

The first difference could be supported by numerous quotes in which Nietzsche criticizes Spinoza’s orientation to reason as a rationalist “prejudice” that destroys affects by analysis and vivisection (cf. Notebooks, KSA 9: 118, 490, 517). This contradicts, however, Spinoza’s argument that knowledge (cognitio) cannot restrain at all an affect except if it becomes itself an affect and furthermore a stronger one (Ethics IV, Prop 7 and Prop 14, Dem). Nietzsche is aware of this, since he summarizes in his Spinoza excerpt that cognition must “be an affect, in order to be a motive” (Notebooks, KSA 9: 517). In fact, Spinoza’s reason is an astonishingly subtle concept. Instead of “destroying” affects, it rather surfs on conflicting emotions. Its role is to “arrange and connect” the existing affections of the body (Ethics V, Prop 10); it is concerned with balancing the differences of affects, and it does so by means of cheerfulness or hilarity (hilaritas), which makes that “all the parts of the body are equally affected, that is to say, the body’s power of action (Corporis potentia agendi) is increased” (Ethics IV, Prop 42, Dem).

The last sentence points already to the fallacy of the second distinction. In fact, Spinoza does not at all define the affects in a static way, but is, rather, interested in their dynamics. The criterion, according to which he distinguishes the affects, is exactly whether they increase or diminish the body’s capacity to act (Ethics III, Def 3), and it is, in particular, the affect of joy that increases the body’s power of action (Ethics IV, Prop 41, Dem). Contrary to any dualism between body and spirit, the same motives that increase our body’s power of action also increase our power of thought (III, Prop 11 and 12). And again Nietzsche must be aware of this dynamic character of Spinoza’s power concept, because he summarizes in his Spinoza excerpt that “we do what we do, in order to preserve and to increase our power” (Notebooks, KSA 12: 261). But this knowledge does not prevent him from criticizing in The Gay Science the self-preservation principle of the “consumptive Spinoza” from the point of view of his own concept of power enlargement as an expression of “people in distress” caused by their descent from the popular classes (Gay Science, V, Nr. 349; KSA 3: 585). ⁴ He thereby sets his readers on a wrong track, and a large part of Nietzsche scholarship has lost its way in this maze.

The consequences of this paradigm can even be seen when scholars cannot but recognize that Nietzsche’s juxtaposition is misguided. As Günter Abel observes, Nietzsche empties Spinoza’s concept of power of its dynamic moment and thus reduces it to the static principle of self-preservation (1998: 51). But instead of criticizing Nietzsche for this deceptive manipulation, he praises it as philosophically productive because it overcomes the still remaining “teleology” in Spinoza’s conatus and thus gets to a “completely a-dualistic concept of process-events” (1998: 53). It remains unclear why Nietzsche’s orientation toward the increase of power is not to be seen as a telos. We should also differentiate between “teleology” as the construct of a predesigned development in nature or history and as a human capacity to anticipate goals and perspectives, which according to Spinoza belongs to the nature of our imagination (Ethics, I, Appendix; II, Prop 40). Without developing capacities of anticipation and hope, emancipatory social movements can neither emerge nor maintain themselves. ⁵ Negri captures this dimension when he speaks of a “teleology of praxis” from below, oriented toward the construction of the common (2013: 8, 78–79).

Nietzsche’s fallacious distinction between a static and an expansive concept of power can be read as symptomatic for the fact that the real difference between Spinoza’s potentia agendi and his own concept of power is to be found elsewhere. It is already the terminological coincidence that is questionable and goes back to a problematic translation.

Consequences of a Problematic Translation

It is very likely that Nietzsche had never read Spinoza’s writings themselves. He had only a secondhand knowledge, in particular through Kuno Fischer’s (1880) Geschichte der neuern Philosophie, which translated the Spinozian concept of potentia simply as “Macht” (power). ⁶ Most Anglo-Saxon translations did the same. In some German editions based on the translation of Jakob Stern, the term potentia agendi was later translated as “capability of activity” (Tätigkeitsvermögen). Similarly, the Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism decided to translate potentia agendi as “capacity to act” (Handlungsfähigkeit) and thus associated it with the respective concept of the critical psychology school founded by Klaus Holzkamp—a subject-theoretical key concept that is designed to connect individual and social reproduction in a nonreductionist way. ⁷

However, looking at the etymology of the Germanic and Romance-language terms for power, a similar meaning emerges. The German term Macht goes back to the Gothic terms mahts and magan, which mean “to be capable.” This corresponds to the verbs pouvoir (French) or poder (Spanish) that underly the Romance nouns (le) pouvoir, puissance, poder and also the Anglo-Saxon power. In both language families, Macht/power is connoted with Möglichkeit/possibility, which explains why Zedler’s Universal-Lexikon of 1739 defines power as a capacity “to make the possible real” (quoted after Röttgers, 1980: 585). When Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe the “power of the multitude” in terms of its “becoming subject,” they refer to the Latin verb posse: “power as a verb, as activity,” part of the Renaissance triad esse-nosse-posse, being-knowing-having power, expressing “what a body and what a mind can do” (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 407–08).

The etymological finding can be connected with Max Weber’s observation, according to which power is “sociologically amorphous” (Weber, 1922/1978: 53). Tied to a complex of capacities, it might express both reciprocal relationships and unequal ones (such as in a pedagogical constellation), both competencies monopolized by elites or cooperative capacities to act from below. Whereas power is in principle open to democratization, the concept of domination is formed around the ancient figure of the dominus (“master”), which embodies the intersection of patriarchal and class rule, both usually overdetermined by racism. It cannot therefore be conceived without its constitutive meanings of hierarchy and verticality. Whereas power is to be found on opposite sides of class, gender, and race divides, domination is an “institutionalized, structurally anchored asymmetric power relation of superiority and subordination” (Goldschmidt, 2004: 83), bolstered by an “administrative staff” ready to exercise the “necessary compulsion” (Weber, 1922/1978: 53–54).

What we are dealing with here is of course an analytical distinction that is not to be confused with an empirical distinction of two separated domains. What the capability of “making the possible real” is actually capable of in the framework of hierarchical class societies depends to a large degree on the respective social position in this system of domination. The general meaning of “capacity” can therefore morph easily and unnoticed into the meaning of a particular capacity made possible by a privileged social position, and this might occur without the need to change the term “power.” This ambiguity traverses the entire conceptual history of power, which in turn needs to be deciphered as a field of hegemonic struggles. It circulates in an ellipse around the two poles of the general capacity of people to act and of the narrow and particularistic signification of the power of domination over people, in which the capacity to act is monopolized by the ruling classes and power elites.

Before we locate Spinoza and Nietzsche on this ellipse, we take a closer look at where Nietzsche was indeed inspired by Spinoza and where and why he took his distance from him.

The Late Nietzsche’s Departure from Spinoza

That Nietzsche was influenced by Spinoza can be shown by his famous postcard to Overbeck in July 1881, in which he enthusiastically described Spinoza as his predecessor because “he denies free will—; purpose—; a moral world order—; the nonegotistical—; evil” (KGB III.1: 111). As William Wurzer has shown in detail, this positive reception of Spinoza falls into Nietzsche’s so-called “middle” period (1975: 40–48), which stretched from his break with Wagner around 1876 to the end of 1882, when he started preparing Thus Spoke Zarathustra (published in 1883). It is often called the “enlightened” period, characterized by Nietzsche’s attempt to rid himself from what he described in Ecce Homo as “the opiate Wagner,” ⁸ a peculiar combination of romantic idealism, German nationalism, and anti-Semitism. During his middle period, Nietzsche intensely collaborated with Paul Rée, his Jewish friend and a moral philosopher, who was in turn influenced by Spinoza. It was also Rée who introduced Nietzsche to the French moral critics de Montaigne, de La Rochefoucauld, de Vauvenarges, de La Bruyère, and Stendhal. It seems that Nietzsche’s friendship with the Jewish intellectual helped to throw his earlier anti-Semitism into crisis, at least partially and temporarily (see Losurdo, 2004: 272). It is no coincidence that Wagner and other contemporaries blamed Rée’s “destructive” influence for Nietzsche’s separation from the ideals of his early period. The Wagnerian “milieu” of Nietzsche’s early period responded to his ideology-critique by mobilizing anti-Semitic stereotypes. ⁹ Indeed, in Human, All-too Human, Nietzsche combined his naturalist materialism with praise of the Jewish people for having provided humanity not only with Christ as the noblest man but also with Spinoza as the “purest sage.” The anti-Semitic trope of the nomadic and rootless cosmopolitism of the Jewish people is revaluated as a positive model for his vision of multinational and multiracial Europe. ¹⁰ Nietzsche also used the Spinozian concept of “self-preservation” (Human, All-too Human, I, Nr. 99; KSA 2: 95), which he later denounced as an outcome of Spinoza’s physical weakness and “phthisis” (Gay Science, V, Nr. 349; KSA 3: 585).

The continuity-thesis overlooks that Nietzsche’s relationship to Spinoza undergoes a fundamental change when he transitions to his late period. This late period, starting about the end of 1882, is characterized by a radicalization of his antidemocratic aristocratism. Also, the anti-Semitism of his early Wagnerian period re-emerges, but it is now more consistently integrated into a radical classism from above against all subaltern classes. ¹¹ This transition is a highly overdetermined process that comprises manifold social, political, and also biographical aspects. Toward the end of 1882, Nietzsche’s friendship with Paul Rée turned into hostility and contempt because both fell in love with Lou Andreas-Salomé. This crisis of unhappy love coincided with the composition of Zarathustra, by which Nietzsche had “elevated himself ‘vertically’ from this low point to [his] altitude,” as he writes in a letter to Overbeck. ¹² This new and precarious “altitude” will accompany Nietzsche during his late period, until his breakdown in 1889.

In November 1882, again at the time of his break with Salomé and Rée, Nietzsche introduced for the first time his concept of a “will to power” (Notebooks, KSA 10: 187), which from then on replaced the Spinozian concept of “self-preservation.” From spring 1883 onward, we can observe a growing hostility against Spinoza. He attacks Spinoza’s conatus of self-preservation as the plebeian foundation of “English empiricism” (Notebooks, KSA 11: 224) and depicts him as a sneaky advocate of vengeance and resentment, an insidious preparer of poison. ¹³ An anti-Semitic skit on Spinoza reads as follows:

Yet secretly beneath this love [of God], devouring

A fire of revenge was shimmering

The Jewish God devoured by Jewish hatred …

Hermit! Have I recognized you? (Notebooks, KSA 11: 319)

The assumed continuity between Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s power concepts is clearly refuted by the philological finding that Nietzsche broke with Spinoza at the very time when he developed his famous “will to power.” But how to explain that both Spinoza and Nietzsche seem to equate virtue and power, power and ethics? Before we can answer this question we must deal with the problem of the two different power concepts in Spinoza. Since their relationship is controversial, we need a detour that looks at the stakes of the debate.

An “Absolute Antagonism” between Potentia and Potestas?

It is important to realize that Spinoza used two different terms for what is usually translated as “power,” potentia and potestas. The relationship between these two terms has become a contested issue since Antonio Negri has described it as a relationship of “absolute antagonism” (1991: 229). According to Negri, potentia expresses the creative capacity and collective praxis of the many and thus founds a “metaphysics of production” in which the productive forces free themselves from the relations of production (1991: 218, 228–29); potestas, however, designates a power that subordinates multiplicity, the mind, freedom, and potentia (1991: 190–91). Negri connects his assumption of an “absolute antagonism” to a second argument: potentia has ontological priority in that it is the constitutive power that connects the singular and the multitude, whereas potestas is a secondary, reactive force/violence that tries to channel potentia into rigid and ossified forms. ¹⁴ This conceptual arrangement reemerges then in Hardt and Negri’s trilogy Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth, where a “biopolitical” productive force of the multitude is exploited and manipulated by the parasitic apparatus of Empire.

Against this interpretation Marin Terpstra has objected that Spinoza did not consistently maintain such a terminological opposition but instead tried to integrate the concept of potestas into that of potentia (1990: 80–88). Martin Saar challenges what he sees as Negri’s “over-interpretation of a terminological distinction,” claiming that Spinoza used the concept of potestas often not as an antagonism to potentia but rather in the sense of its intensification (2013: 175–76). According to him, Negri overlooked that there is no fundamental anti-institutional impulse in Spinoza’s work and that Spinoza considers the establishment of institutional and procedural regulations of potestas as a core issue of political thought (2013: 178).

Negri’s thesis of an “absolute antagonism” between potentia and potestas is indeed a simplification of a more complex relationship. In Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, the term potestas is used in the context of higher state powers (superiores potestates), whereas potentia designates the competences that individuals transfer to such a higher governmental power (Spinoza, TPT: 197–99). Spinoza does not oppose such a transfer from the multitude to the state and even supports a strong potestas of the state—not least in order to secure some protection from the Jewish and Christian religious apparatuses that had excommunicated him or denounced him for atheism.

But Spinoza keeps the two concepts at a distance. People will not be able to transfer their power (potentia) to other persons in such a way that they cease to be human beings, and there will never be a sovereign power (potestas) that can dispose of everything just as it pleases (TPT: 208). Contrary to Hobbes, Spinoza considers potentia as being transferred to the entire society: democracy is for him the “most natural” form of state because it

approaches most closely to the freedom nature bestows on every person […] no one transfers their natural right to another in such a way that they are not thereafter consulted but rather to the majority of the whole society of which they are a part. In this way all remain equal as they had been previously, in the state of nature. (TPT: 202)

Spinoza’s ideal is that “the whole of society […] should hold power together, collegially, so that all are subject to themselves and nobody must serve their equal,” with the result that all “are acting […] by their own proper consent” (TPT: 73). The ultimate purpose of the state is therefore “not to dominate or control people by fear or subject them to the authority of another” but rather to allow people’s “minds and bodies to develop in their own ways in security and enjoy the free use of reason”—that is, “in fact freedom” (TPT: 252).

Spinoza’s potentia of the many is therefore never fully surrendered to the potestas of the state. In the context of the “absolutistic” 17th century, it articulates a significant democratic counterweight. Matheron argues that there is no proper power transfer because sovereignty remains defined not by the potestas of the sovereign but by the potentia of the multitude (1997: 214–15). According to Balibar, Spinoza’s state of nature is not abolished by a homogenous state law; the conceptual arrangement maintains a dialectical openness to the opposition between the established summae potestates and the multitude: the potestas can only put its power into practice effectively if the people, who constituted it, consider it as a law that corresponds to their will (1997a: 174–76). Obviously, Spinoza struggles with a key problem of hegemony as later elaborated by Marxist theories: in the long run, the potestas of the state—its characteristics as political society (società politica), as Gramsci would call it, depends ultimately on the consensus of the people and thus remains bound to their potentia agendi (in whatever illusory and displaced manner). It is obvious that Spinoza has no elaborate theory of how such a mass consensus can be fabricated by ideological apparatuses from above.

Where Negri is Nevertheless Right

The fact that Negri reduces the contradictory relationship between potentia and potestas to an “absolute antagonism” is due primarily to his sweeping rejection of any dialectics and of social mediations. This leads Negri and Hardt to the illusory assumption that the “immaterial labor” of the multitude and the Empire confront each other in an immediate opposition and without any civil society mediations. ¹⁵ Negri is right, however, when he insists on the ontological priority of potentia. Even if Spinoza employs the notion of potestas in different ways, he uses the notion of potentia consistently. The different usage in regard to potestas can in turn be explained by an ambiguity of social and political reality itself: the question of whether or to what extent a state power is actually backed by the potentia of the many depends on the concrete conjuncture and cannot be decided beforehand. Moreover, Negri later distanced himself from the assumption of an “absolute antagonism” and argued that potentia and potestas are characterized not by an “ontological dualism” but rather by both an interaction and a dissociation, so that potentia can work both within and against potestas (2013: 13, 25).

We can now turn to the concept of potentia in Spinoza’s Ethics. It emerges first at the center of his concept of God, where it is conceived not in terms of transcendent religion as power over human and nonhuman beings but rather in the sense that God does and thinks an infinitude of things in an infinite way: the “power of God is nothing but the active essence of God” (Ethics II, Prop 3, Dem and Schol), a “substance consisting of infinite attributes” (I, Def 6), “existing from the necessity of its own nature alone,” and determined to action by itself alone (I, Def 7). It is the active essence of potentia that mediates and holds together Spinoza’s equation God = substance = nature (natura naturans). God is conceived as a universal potentiality of production that operates within each individual reality. The notion of God as a depersonalized, subject-less productive force is also the foundation of a critique of transcendent religion, which in its anthropocentrism ascribes human affects to God (I, Prop 8, Schol 2). Seduced by this anthropocentric teleology, humans “assert that the gods ordained everything for the use of man” and thus degrade the gods to an instrument of their own “blind cupidity and insatiable avarice” (I, Appendix). Althusser, who uses Spinoza’s ideas to de-Hegelianize Marxism, links Spinoza’s concept of an immanent God to his philosophical critique of teleology: “Spinoza, because he ‘begins with God,’ never gets involved with any Goal”; not only did he refuse such a Goal but he also explained it “as a necessary and therefore well-founded illusion,” which leads Althusser to the conclusion that Spinoza formulated the “first theory of ideology ever thought out”(1976: 135; emphasis in the orginal). ¹⁶

It is crucial that Spinoza’s concept of humans’ potentia agendi is never employed as dominating power over people. The difference with God’s potentia is that it is “infinitely limited by the power of some other object, and […] infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes” (Ethics IV, Prop 3, Dem). This is the reason why humans need to adapt to nature and are subjected to sufferings, or passionibus (IV, Prop 4, Chor). To translate the Latin term passio as “passion” without any specification, as many Anglo-Saxon editions do, is of course misleading. Spinoza uses the terms passio and pati for something of which we are not the “adequate cause” and which is therefore done to us. It designates a passive attitude, the state of being subjected to alienating powers, or to reformulate it in Gramscian terms, to be held in subalternity by “foreign hegemonies”; ¹⁷ to this imposed subalternity he opposes the notion of acting, which means that we are the adequate cause of our actions (Ethics III, Def 2). This emphatic notion of acting, caused by itself and self-determined, though always limited by external causes, is the starting point for the “geometrical method” that characterizes Spinoza’s Ethics, a method that describes affects and virtues according to their enhancing or inhibiting potentials—just as if he were considering “lines, planes, or bodies” (III, Pref).

It is perfectly understandable why the “ideology-critical” and anti-metaphysical Nietzsche of the middle period was impressed by this “geometrical” critique of morality, and some traces of this approach can also be discovered in Nietzsche’s later work. Indeed, both philosophers intersect in the criticism of free will, teleology, morality, and “life negation.” But the “power” from which Spinoza criticizes morality is conceived as a cooperative capacity. Contrary to Nietzsche’s elitist cult of heroic loneliness, Spinoza is interested in a processual “transindividuality” oriented toward relations of synergy with others (Balibar, 1997b). The potentiae of the individuals are realized in social collaboration: even if satirists, theologians, and melancholiacs scoff at human communities, people find out that they are “social animals” equipped with the experience that “far more advantages than disadvantages arise from the common society of men” and that “by mutual help they can much more easily procure the things they need, and that it is only by their united strength they can avoid the dangers which everywhere threaten them” (Ethics IV, Prop 35, Schol). Spinoza’s potentia agendi is embedded in these cooperative arrangements. If people are placed among those who agree with their nature, their “power of action will by that very fact be assisted and supported” (IV, Appendix, 7). Potentia is the capacity that makes people agree with each other, whereas impotentia and passive suffering separates people and turns them against each other (IV, Prop 32–4); the virtue resulting from this potentia is oriented toward what is common to all and can be equally possessed by all (IV, Prop 37).

Nietzsche’s Hostile Take-Over of Spinoza’s Potentia

When the early Nietzsche demands that one should have the courage of Hobbes and derive moral precepts from the bellum omnium contra omnes and the prerogative of the strongest, ¹⁸ he positions himself already at the opposite pole of the power ellipse. In his late writings, he portrays power as conquest, suppression of the weak, exploitation, and the will to violation and rape, all of which “belong to the nature of the living being.” ¹⁹ Nietzsche’s syntagm “will to power” has the function to naturalize the principle of oppression and domination and to anchor it in the “essence of life” itself. Inheriting the capacity of the Kantian transcendental subject to bring order into the sensual chaos, the will to power construes an ontological identification between the social relations of domination and the hierarchized insides of the subject, strictly divided into “commanding” and “obeying” parts, between organic and inorganic nature, human beings and protoplasm, which Nietzsche describes in terms of slavery and castes. ²⁰ All these levels are determined by the same principle: it is solely the “ruling role of the highest functionaries […], in which the will to life emerges as active and form-giving” (Genealogy of Morals, II, Nr. 12; KSA 5: 316). Whatever is active and creative is described as an effect of aristocratic rule, which is in turn disguised as the “affirmation of life.”

We can now get a handle on the fundamental transformation that happened when Nietzsche appropriated Spinoza’s potentia agendi. Whereas Spinoza’s concept is meant to lead to common activities and thus to produce a “power-accumulation in each part of the aggregate” (Röttgers, 1980: 597–98), Nietzsche’s concept of power is oriented toward power accumulation by the very few and the disempowerment of the many. His terminological adoptions of some of Spinoza’s terms are part of a hostile takeover by which the elements are severed from their original context and integrated in an opposite arrangement.

Let us observe this shift of meaning with a famous example: when Spinoza argues that virtue and potentia are the same (Ethics IV, Def 8), we can interpret this in the sense that one cannot discern moral values and attitudes detached from the development of collective and cooperative agency. It is not too far-fetched to associate this with Gramsci’s ethico-political perspective that the subaltern classes need to develop their own hegemony. Filtered through Kuno Fischer’s translation, Nietzsche’s summary in his Spinoza excerpt reads as follows: “Virtue and power are identical […] Good is what heightens our power; evil is the opposite” (Notebooks, KSA 12: 261). Of course, the translation of potentia as power as such already shifts the meaning towards a hierarchical notion of power. Nietzsche then transfers this sentence almost verbatim to his Der Antichrist: “What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness.” Any possible ambiguity is gone when he then continues: “The weak and the failures shall perish […] and they shall even be given every possible assistance” (Antichrist, Nr. 2; KSA 6: 170; cf. Notebooks, KSA 13: 192). In fact, his appeal to the weak and failures to commit suicide in order to show a remainder of virility and the eugenic fantasy to “assist” them belong to the ongoing obsessions of the late Nietzsche, for whom the creation of the future man requires on the one hand his systematic breeding and on the other hand the “annihilation of millions of failures” (Notebooks, KSA 11: 98). ²¹

Nietzsche has thus overpowered Spinoza’s capacity to act, incorporating it into a power of domination, which he fantasizes further to the annihilation of the weak. What is eliminated and repressed in the equation of Nietzsche and Spinoza is nothing less than the “difference” between social cooperation and projected genocide. To overlook this glaring opposition is utterly irresponsible and scandalous, intellectually and ethically. Unfortunately, this applies to Negri as well. In his Spinoza for Our Time, he cannot but realize that Nietzsche’s critique of Spinoza is “extremely harsh and combative” (Negri, 2013: 72–73, 80), but he does not even try to explain this hostility. This is due to the prejudgment, inherited from Deleuze, that “there is nothing in Nietzsche that thrusts toward reaction” (2013: 67). The widespread blindness regarding Nietzsche’s open stance of radical aristocratism provides the precondition for his triumphal success in poststructuralism and postmodernism—in the disguise of Spinoza. Geoff Waite was right when he pointed out that Nietzsche has been “remarkably effective in pulling the wool over the eyes of what he himself called the ‘lower’ or ‘working class’ or […] ‘caste’ […] over the eyes, then over the bodies and, if need be, over the corpses” (1996: 337) “Hence,” he writes, “a philosophically coherent and politically emancipatory project must forge its way back to Spinoza past the Nietzschean self and only then […] into the future” (1996: 14; emphasis in the original).

Conclusion: What Kind of “Life Affirmation”?

When Walter Benjamin in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” formulates the task for every generation “to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it” and to fan “the spark of hope in the past” (2007: 255), this is, in particular, true for Spinoza. By overcoming some of the deeply ingrained Western dualisms between matter and spirit, body and mind, affect and reason, acting, and feeling and thinking, he can be used for the development of a progressive ethics. His concept of potentia agendi is also important for a renewal of critical theory because both the ideology-critique of the Frankfurt School around Horkheimer and Adorno and the ideology-theory of the Althusser School were hardly interested in the practical impulses to resist or to subvert the ideological interpellations from above. Without conceptualizing the dimensions of a horizontal and cooperative capacity to act, it is impossible to understand the everyday motivations that are constitutive of a counter-hegemony from below. Since Spinoza’s ethics is directed against everything that turns life activities into attitudes of passivity, it can provide a philosophical foundation for our critique of alienating conditions and for our initiatives to counteract and overcome them. To this purpose Spinoza’s potentia agendi could be combined with Gramsci’s concept of “good sense” (buon senso), the “healthy nucleus” characterized by a sense of experimentalism and of “direct observation of reality,” from which a philosophy of praxis can start to render common sense more coherent. ²² Leftist politics cannot be based upon resentment, not even upon the resentment against “those on top,” which can be easily diverted and hijacked by right-wing populism. A sustainable progressive project needs to be centered on conceptions and images of a “good life” that are developed, spelled out, and debated by the people themselves. As soon as we go beyond the usual laundry lists of progressive demands and develop a politics centered upon projects of a good life for all, Spinoza’s combination of potentia, hilarity, and joy can provide an invigorating philosophical support.

It is beyond dispute that Nietzsche developed a “life-affirming” vision as well, namely one of “strong,” self-confident individuals who free themselves from mediocrity and narrow prescripts of morality. This is indeed one of the reasons for his appeal among rebellious movements and attitudes. But we have to add immediately that his utopia was built upon the horrible dystopia of an enslaved and despised multitude. An ethics inspired by Nietzsche’s philosophy can never get rid of its inherent “pathos of distance,” which manifests itself even in its most “leftist” forms as a celebration of social distinctions against ordinary, unenlightened people. Ishay Landa has shown that Nietzsche’s enormous influence on popular culture has created an elective affinity between an “outright elitism” on the right and a “critical elitism” on the left. ²³ The “affirmation of life,” which Nietzsche tried to hijack for his aristocratic class position, is to be released from its entanglements with privilege and elitism. Redefined in a democratic-socialist way, it can constitute the ethics of a counter-hegemony from below. It describes the philosophical and ethical foundation of what the Communist Manifesto anticipated could become “an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (MECW 6: 506).