Introduction
In what I take as a simultaneously comic and tragic passage in The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!” – As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Emigrated? – Thus they yelled and laughed.
(Nietzsche 1974, 125)
Perhaps Nietzsche was longing for living in this environment where not he – the atheist – but the Christian was the madman. However, Nietzsche does not merely mock the Christian for believing, nor does he ever claim to be closer to the truth than a Christian. Truth is always historical and continuously changing. This idea comes to the fore in the same section when Nietzsche continues: “The madman sprang into their midst and transfixed them with his gaze. ‘Where has God gone?’ he cried; ‘I’ll tell you where! We have killed him – you and I! We are all his murderers’” (Nietzsche 1995, 125). Nietzsche suggests that God did exist, at least in our minds. The image of killing God reflects the idea that we have killed one truth, and consequently we are in need of another truth. In fact, the murder of God does not resolve our problems. On the contrary, it creates a whole range of new problems. I quote Nietzsche again: “Where are we moving? Away from all suns? Aren’t we falling constantly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in every direction? Is there still an above and below?” (Nietzsche 1995, 125). Without the belief in God, we have lost our whole orientation. The lantern, lit in the bright morning, indicates the impossible nature of the madman’s search (similar to the impossible nature of Diogenes’s search for an honest man). Dark and light, up and down: all direction is gone.
Here we are immediately thrown into existential homelessness. Without a god who created the world with a goal, all direction is lost: values, boundaries, borders, and categories dissolve. We encounter an absolute freedom. Yet the gift of freedom poses a serious problem. To be absolutely free is to lose all order. In this position we can start to philosophize. It is the first, positive form of homelessness, which I will call an existential homelessness, since one is confronted with oneself, with one’s very existence. To be without direction and certainty means that the only remaining certainty is our being, the fact that we are. Yet, this existential homelessness, to be without any direction, is impossible for us. Nietzsche’s death of God is an attempt to make everything fluid, but we cannot really accept a world of fluidity, in which we find nothing to hold on to. Opposed to this first form of homelessness we will find homelessness in a lack of reflection, in constantly being immersed in what Nietzsche calls “the herd.” Ironically, in finding our place or home in the herd, we are in fact far removed from ourselves. Thus we are lost, homeless in a false sense of home.
Returning to existential homelessness, its lack of direction and values could be represented as empty space, the void. This idea, indeed, proved pivotal in Nietzsche’s early thinking, when he encountered the atomism of Democritus, which arguably provided an inspiration for the rest of his life. The void represents life as devoid of meaning. Everything in nature is fluid, and without necessity. Thus, we arrive at Nietzsche’s assessment of nature, which is, first of all, valueless and without order. In all its aspects, nature is chaos. In this chapter I think through Nietzsche’s idea of nature without value, in conjunction with our tendency to produce and create value. Throughout the book, I discuss notions of boundaries and borders that identify what should and should not be. Who or what should be where and who or what is deemed to be the other that needs to be excluded, either through subtle mechanisms or through violence. Ordering the world into places of identity creates a home as well as exclusion from that home. It is an appropriation that can only be realized through alienation. In this chapter I focus on the ways in which this appropriation or creation of a home at the cost of exclusion is created through order, purpose, and norms in a world that is, according to Nietzsche, without order, purpose, and norms.
In particular I evaluate our own position and who we are. In a world without absolute values, a sense of homelessness and fluidity arises. In the last section, I will use H.G. Wells’s novel The Island of Dr. Moreau and the film The Island of Lost Souls, based on Wells’s novel. The book and film introduce hybrid beings that provide an interesting take on Darwin’s theory of evolution, which also greatly influenced Nietzsche. I argue that we can understand ourselves as fluid and changing beings in relationship to our environment – the place in which we live, grow, and develop.
The void
When we give up all values and move toward an understanding of nature without any order, how exactly do we understand place, provided that we can still have any understanding at all? A picture of “nature as chaos” emerges, in which all places and placement is arbitrary, and we return to a sense of space in which such random placements occur. Can we, however, really imagine such chaos? To think chaos – if at all possible – is not an easy task. Defining chaos is difficult at best. In fact, Nietzsche claims that our inability to think chaos is a result of more than two millennia of order, teleology, and value. We define chaos negatively, as the opposite of order. Inspired by Friedrich Lange, Nietzsche argues that a conception of nature without a purpose, value, and order has been long lost with the loss (and destruction) of the ideas and works of Democritus.
While Democritus and this concern appear in Nietzsche’s very early writings, the project to retrieve a conception of nature that is without order is, arguably, a driving force throughout his career. As Deleuze, Nehamas, and Safranski (to name just a few) have pointed out, one of Nietzsche’s tasks is to define the natural world of forces without falling into the determinism and teleological ideas of Western thinking. It is well-known how, for Nietzsche, all life is determined as a will to power, which can be a force that acts or re-acts against other forces (Deleuze 1983) and even a force that acts against its own nature (Nehamas 1985). One way to think of this world of forces without a source or goal is through the atomism of Democritus.
The fragment attributed to Democritus that inspired Nietzsche, among others, reads as follows: “Nothing exists but atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion” (Lange 1925, 18). Nietzsche translates this fragment into the following:
Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature – nature is always value-less, but has been given value at some time, as a present – and it was we who gave and bestowed it. Only we have created the world that concerns man!
(Nietzsche 1974, 301)
Perhaps Democritus can be understood as Nietzsche’s Greek predecessor. For both thinkers, Gods, form-giving principles, as well as good and evil, are classified as mere opinions, or in Nietzsche’s words, “perspectives.” 1 The philosopher who celebrated the death of God was certainly enthused to find an account of the world in which only atoms and empty space exist. It gave Nietzsche hope that an understanding of the world “beyond good and evil,” a philosophy without anthropomorphism and supernatural ideas, existed in the very beginning of Western thought.
Democritus’s account of atomism places the human being in a decentralized position, questioning all values and ideas of determination. This atomism provides us with absolute freedom without any kind of determinism (besides the fact that atoms and empty space existed). For the Western world, however, such a freedom is a prison: without truth, boundaries, values, norms, or any determination, one is nothing but homeless. Nietzsche is seeking such homelessness, moving against the grain of the tradition of Western thinking that, for him, is seeking truth rather than homelessness or chaos. Within that context, Nietzsche raises some serious suspicions about the history of philosophy in relation to Democritus’s reclaimed works. These are suspicions that, arguably, became the foundation of Nietzsche’s relation to the history of philosophy, to him a history of sick thinkers who needed philosophy and its “truths” as a crutch (Nietzsche 1974, i). The suspicion starts with a question about what happened to Democritus and his non-teleological account of nature. Have Plato, Aristotle, the neo-Platonists and, finally, the Christian thinkers burned Democritus’s atomism – either literally or figuratively – simply because it did not match their view of the order of nature? Influenced by Friedrich Lange’s History of Materialism, Nietzsche discovers, through the oppression of Democritus’s philosophy of nature, the dynamics of the history of philosophy.
Reconstructing Democritus is not an easy task since so little is left of his writing and what is left comes from a variety of different sources. 2 Democritus is known for his atomism, the theory that everything in nature is made out of invisible and indivisible parts. Hermias writes that the theory is a full explanation of all that is: “Being is the full and non-being the void. And the full produces all things by its impulsion and proportion in the void” (Nahm 1964, 160). 3
The second-century physician and philosopher Galenus writes that atoms do not have qualities:
Since all the atoms are minute bodies, they have no qualities and the void is a kind of place in which all these bodies, as they move up and down through all time, either [sic] become somehow entangled with each other by reason of such contacts, and in this way produce all other combinations including our own bodies with their affections and sensations.
(Nahm 1964, 160)
We encounter here, thus, a complete randomness in the way atoms entangle. Whether we talk about mountains, rivers, plants or human bodies (with their affections and sensations) we find a random entanglement of atoms that have collided. In this entanglement, bodies come into being.
Besides the causes of movement and entanglement, commentators such as Galenus, Simplicius, and Dionysius, over the course of almost 500 years, are quite consistent in their respective accounts of atomism. 4 All take a materialistic approach in which we indeed have only atoms and empty space. How movement comes about and how atoms entangle are not agreed upon, but all think of perceivable objects as merely the temporary states of the entangled atoms.
While most sources do seem to take the role of “objective” reporters or historians, some other sources include objections to Democritus. 5 Aristotle (and Plutarch) questions the growth and decay of the body within the theory of atomism. In On Parts of Animals he writes: “[Democritus] says it is clear to everyone what sort of shape man is, since he is known by his shape and color. And yet a corpse has the same shape, but it is not therefore a man” (Aristotle 1937, 1640b29). Indeed, if Democritus’s world only consists of atoms and the void, his theory seems to run into some obvious problems. Aristotle asks what the difference between a living and a dead body is. In addition, we can ask questions about the randomness of the collision of atoms. Even while we lose millions of body cells every single day, and while apparently over time most of our cells are replaced, on a day-to-day basis our bodies are quite consistent in appearance. Moreover, we resemble our biological parents as well as other members of our species. Understood this way, it seems that our bodies are considerably organized forms, rather than random conglomerations. This implies that a human being is more than simply an aggregate of her material parts. What constitutes a self, how a self remains to some degree consistent, and how we appear similar over time, even while material parts continuously change, are questions that certainly lie beyond the scope of my discussion here. Yet this version of atomism fails to address these issues if it simply regards the human body as a collision and entanglement of atoms.
We do find answers to these objections in some other accounts of Democritus’s atomism. Besides the previously discussed materialistic approaches, in which atoms are regarded as physical entities that are indivisible, we also find supernatural explanations. Sextus Empiricus, for example, seems to interpret atoms as platonic forms. 6 Some others also mention that atoms are forms, and many suggest that atoms are eternal. In addition, Aristotle makes a somewhat puzzling comment that could be interpreted in line with this “form-giving atomism.” In the Metaphysics, while discussing generation, he writes: “Democritus’s doctrine would be better expressed as ‘all things were together potentially, but not actually’” (Aristotle 1997, 1069b22). Aristotle appears to want to correct the theory of atomism by suggesting that atoms should be seen as pure potentiality. When things come into being, they are no longer simply elements; they become actual things. Atoms should, then, not be seen as the actual beings that make up the universe, but the potentiality for those things.
This can perhaps be better understood through the vortex that Aristotle discusses in The Physics. He mentions that for “some … the vortex and shifting that disentangled the chaos and established the cosmic order came by chance” (Aristotle 1934, 196a24). A few lines later he adds, “This is surely most amazing – for these people actually to say that” since plants and animals “are all caused by nature or mind” (Aristotle 1934, 196b32). Although Aristotle does not mention Democritus by name, commentators such as Simplicius interpret “some” as referring to Democritus. 7
The Greek word for vortex is dine: a rotating heaven, whirlpool, or eddy. Simplicius explains the vortex as separated from the universe: “‘[a] vortex of all sorts of forms was separated from the universe.’” This vortex “seems to produce the world by chance and luck” (Simplicius 1992, 327). In a sense, Simplicius merges the material and form-giving approaches. The vortex or swirling movement is invisible and is separated from our world, but the vortex produces the material world “by chance and luck.” 8
Diogenes Laertius also mentions the vortex: “[atoms] are borne along in the whole universe in a vortex, and thereby generate all composite things.” It is interesting that a few lines later he adds, “In nature there is nothing but atoms and void space” (Diogenes Laertius 1972, 34). It seems that the vortex is a birthplace for atoms in which some kind of transference from form or pure potentiality to matter or actuality takes place. Nature is matter or actuality, while the vortex is separated from nature, and some kind of transformation between the divine or intelligible world and nature.
In Democritus we, t...
