Nietzsche, Reification, and Open Comportment   
   
by  
Luke Currie 
A thesis accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the   
requirements for the degree of  
Master of Arts   
in Philosophy 
Thesis Committee:  
Dr. Michael Stern, Co-Chair  
Dr. Alejandro Vallega, Co-Chair  
University of Oregon  
Summer 2023 
  
  
© 2023 Luke Currie  
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THESIS ABSTRACT 
Luke Currie 
Master of Arts in Philosophy 
Title: Nietzsche, Reification, and Open Comportment 
This work primarily discusses the “fallacy of reification” from the perspective of 
Nietzsche’s late philosophy (particularly in the chapter on ‘Reason’ in philosophy in his Twilight 
of the Idols). While reification is typically a logical, metaphysical, or epistemological problem in 
Modern Western philosophy, the author attempts to show that reification is also a problem in 
ethics. An outline of a groundwork for an ethical “open comportment” is gestured toward by way 
of Nietzsche’s critiques of “anti-natural morality” and the “conceptual mummies” of philosophy. 
The likes of William James, Willard Van Orman Quine, and Henri Bergson are discussed to 
expand on the points made by Nietzsche and to show how his thought could be developed 
further, though the scope of the paper remains mostly within the perspective of Nietzsche’s late 
philosophy. Additionally, the likes of Hesiod, Kant, and aspects of Christianity are mentioned to 
serve as examples to situate Nietzsche’s campaign to “re-evaluate all values” (a simultaneously 
destructive and creative endeavor) in the thesis.  
When a reified concept replaces the “real” entity from which it is abstracted, the original 
entity risks being missed in favor of the concept. For example, if an outsider has a prejudice 
about what a certain group of people are like without being open to experiencing them in their 
multiplicity and diversity, any given person from that group is at risk of being reduced to the 
prejudice of the outsider, and thereby is treated and understood according to the outsider’s 
prejudice (regardless of its accuracy in relation to the particular person on whom this prejudice is 
imposed). The prejudice, in this example, is a reified concept. It is not recognized as an ossified 
abstraction, but instead appears as a simple given truth. This blindness to the origin of concepts 
and their sublimation of difference under abstract sameness is as much an ethical issue as an 
issue for the development of human knowledge. Bergson’s peculiar “infinite” shows that things 
are not reducible to concepts alone, and thereby suggests a possible avenue for open engagement 
insofar as we develop a comportment toward the irreducible indeterminacy of becoming. 
3
To ZMRT, with all of the love in my heart.  
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TABLE OF CONTENTS 
Chapter Page 
I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 6 
II. VICIOUS ABSTRACTION .................................................................................... 22 
III. PRESCRIPTIVE MORALITY .............................................................................. 35 
IV. NIHILISM AND AFFIRMATION ......................................................................... 43 
V. OPEN COMPORTMENT AND THE INFINITE ................................................... 52 
REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................ 59 
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Chapter One: Introduction 
“Theories are usually the over-hasty efforts of an impatient understanding that 
would gladly be rid of phenomena, and so puts in their place pictures, notions, 
nay, often mere words. We may surmise, or even see quite well, that such theories 
are make-shifts…”  
(Goethe 69) 
The fallacy of reification is a nearly ubiquitous problem for late nineteenth and early 
twentieth century philosophers, though it emerges in different thinkers’ works under different 
guises. Friedrich Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols features a comprehensive statement on the 
issue in the chapter “‘Reason’ in Philosophy,” wherein Nietzsche offers an account of the origin 
and meaning of the problem of reification as it replaces the world of becoming with the 
“conceptual mummies” of Reason. The problem does not lie in the process of abstraction as such 
(a necessary and often highly beneficial process); the problem lies in taking an abstraction 
derived from some larger context as the sole truth or reality of that very context. For example, a 
syndrome in medicine often refers to a cluster of symptoms, not a thing named “X Syndrome”. 
The latter interpretation misplaces the quality of concreteness in the name of the syndrome over 
and against the actual concrete cluster of symptoms to which it originally refers. 
Insofar as the process of abstraction circumscribes that from which it abstracts by isolating 
certain salient features of a context and then closing off engagement with what might fall outside 
of that very circumscription, the resultant reified concepts from this process are reductive 
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abstractions that are treated as the real thing in place of the real thing. When this process is 
brought to interpersonal matters, for example, a great deal of ethical problems may emerge. If 
Person A is defined by Person B (according to their theory or abstract conceptualization of 
Person A or people “like” Person A), Person A is consequently understood and treated according 
to Person B’s abstract conceptualization of them. Person A is thereby missed altogether. A 
morality that determines “right” and “wrong” according to rules prescribed in advance of any 
particular ethical quandary similarly closes off such open engagement, for it takes its 
contextually derived moral attitudes as universally good, true, and consequently binding on all 
who partake in said morality or moral theory.  
This thesis is an attempt to provide a possible outline for the preconditions of a certain 
ethical attitude (i.e. “open comportment”) that does not privatively reduce things to abstract 
representations and handle them according to reductive, prescribed rules, but rather tries to 
expand our understanding of things in their utter uniqueness in order to respond to them in their 
own process of becoming, in their change over time, and in all else that is easily missed when a 
living, fluid being is made static. A primary difficulty this work faces is the fact that these 
thoughts are conveyed in printed English, a static language in a static medium. My hope is that 
the overall point of the work emerges from the words used to help point toward it. Attempts to 
qualify peculiar uses of common philosophical terms are made throughout, but there remains the 
difficulty of trying to point beyond a tradition by way of the tools provided by that very tradition.  
 In what follows, there is first an attempt to provide a background for Nietzsche’s thoughts 
in his chapter “‘Reason’ in Philosophy” from Twilight of the Idols by giving an account of the 
idea of becoming in Hesiod’s Theogony. After that point a preliminary discussion on concepts 
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and abstraction sets up Nietzsche’s first aphorism in the above mentioned chapter, which is 
followed by an elaboration and interpretation of the various points Nietzsche makes therein. The 
second chapter is focused on the fallacy of reification under the name “vicious abstraction” based 
on what William James calls “vicious abstractionism” in his book The Meaning of Truth. 
Passages from Willard Van Orman Quine’s From a Logical Point of View are also discussed in 
order to bolster the points made by Nietzsche in his chapter on “‘Reason’ in Philosophy”. The 
third chapter attempts to connect the problem of reification with Nietzsche’s account of the 
origin of logic and his critique of morality. The fourth chapter showcases Nietzsche’s 
immoralism and makes a distinction between active and passive nihilism in order to put forward 
the idea that the destructive aspects of Nietzsche’s project to “re-evaluate all values” is only one 
aspect of that project. This chapter concludes with Nietzsche’s thoughts on “learning to see” and 
“learning to love” with an emphasis on the affirming aspect of these approaches to engaging life. 
The kind of sight and love Nietzsche describes are also considered preconditions for the ethical 
“open comportment” which this thesis aims to gesture towards. The final chapter arrives at the 
idea of an open comportment, situated within the perspective established by the preceding 
discussions. Henri Bergson’s intellectual sympathy and intuition toward an “absolute” (which, 
for Bergson, is a kind of qualified “infinite”) in his Introduction to Metaphysics. The ultimate 
aim is to convey a kind of ethical attitude toward an “other” that is receptive to what might be 
novel, strange, and excessive to one’s own knowledge or conceptualization of the other in order 
that one may more openly engage with the other, with a sensitivity toward their own independent 
life, affirming them as they are rather than seeing them only in terms of how they neatly fit into 
one’s predetermined categories, expectations, and predetermined (prejudicial) moral judgments.  
8
A key element of Nietzsche’s late thought is an emphasis on life affirmation through the 
image of becoming. Reification is the deadening of that which becomes into that which 
abstractly is. Hesiod’s Theogony provides an example of the original “source” of becoming. The 
very name of the Theogony (Θεογονία) means something like the genealogy of the birth of the 
gods. At the beginning of Hesiod’s genealogy, Chaos (Χάος), more literally translated as Chasm 
or Abyss (Oxford), is introduced as the cosmologically most prior god: “ἦ τοι µὲν πρώτιστα 
Χάος γένετ᾽ [English translation: In truth at first Chaos came to be (Perseus); First came the 
Chasm (Oxford World’s Classics)]…” (Hesiod 116). The very first god is Χάος, superlatively 
primordial and self-generative. The conjugated verb γένετ᾽ comes from the ancient Greek word 
γίγνοµαι, which means “[to] come into a state of being,” “to become…” or “to be born”.1 Let us 
note that γένετ᾽ is a middle voice form of this verb, so it may additionally mean something like 
the Chasm birthed itself or became of itself. Thus with the Chasm comes the birth of birth itself, 
and with this genesis of birth comes life. Becoming and the birth of life itself are inextricably 
linked. Further, Θεογονία involves this very same verb of birth and becoming, γίγνοµαι, and, of 
course, the gods (θεοί). In this cosmology we already have a sense of birth and life, though many 
of the original gods are “immortal”, they nonetheless come to be. The very primordial abyss even 
birthed itself and plays a role in the generation of other gods! Insofar as existence starts with 
birth, becoming is the beginning of change and the generation of life, growth, emergence, 
blossoming and decaying. Χάος is the first-born of the gods. Becoming as it relates to birth is 
thus shorthand for the movement of life itself. 
1 This is closely related to “genesis” (γένεσις), particularly regarding origin, creation, and birth.
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Time-lapse footage of the life of a rose provides an unambiguous aesthetic example of 
the movement becoming rather than the reified abstraction “becoming.” At no point is the flower 
simply the thing named “flower” over the course of the time-lapse footage. Insofar as the footage 
captures the flower’s life, we see that its life is activity and ceaseless movement, an ever 
changing process that begins and ends. The birth of the flower as it first blossoms marks a 
moment in its becoming that also grants its being: the flower had not yet existed, so the first act 
of becoming (birth) begets being, yet being is transient and subject to the movement and change 
of becoming. 
In certain cases what was once a god comes to be treated instead as a concept. Night in 
the Theogony is a god that gives birth to day (seeming to follow the primordiality of abyssal 
darkness in both its theogonic priority and its generative capacity to birth Day). Night, however, 
is describable in modern scientific terms that account for the movement of the Earth on its own 
axis relative to the Sun, etc. In our present era, night is hardly an entity, but rather a condition 
contingent upon other conditions, and so on. The concept of night thus refers to a certain 
arrangement of physical matter according to our current scientific paradigms — it refers to a 
state of affairs instead of an object. This marks the opening of the reified concept; an opening 
which undoes its very reification. Yet, insofar as it is named “Night”, the noun “night” might be 
mistaken for a proper noun denoting the entity or actual thing named Night. Even the crude 
“scientific” definition of “Night” above is a response to the implicit question: “What does ‘night’ 
mean?” Which implies that, in some regard, night is. This presses us further to ask: “What is 
night?” Whether we intend to define the meaning or the existence of night, the concept “night” is 
treated as a general abstraction for some singular and definable referent that exists. In short, the 
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concept “night” purports to have a content. This content-baring may be carried over from its use 
as a proper noun as the Greek god Night, for a proper noun names an entity. The names of 
concepts hypostatize that from which they are abstracted insofar as they are understood as being 
proper nouns for some entity (in this case the god) and not general terms that sweepingly refer to 
an array of phenomena. 
Concepts distort by way of abstraction in order for us to comprehend. Concepts are 
necessarily general; concepts name their abstracted “content” (or referent). The generality of the 
concepts with which we think forms as the consequence of a process which abstracts from the 
incalculable complexity of our experience the common traits or shared similarities under some 
general notion—simplification by way of abstraction, reduction, and generalization is the modus 
operandi of the concept as such. Any word or name can fulfill this conceptual role (e.g. “tree” 
names the unthinkable variety of trees we encounter) and makes it possible to think and discuss 
that which it names without having to mean solely that thing there. The generality of such 
concepts makes communication and understanding possible in a simple and useful manner, so 
that one who may not have experienced the particular tree about which another speaks may still 
have some understanding of what the speaker means (insofar as both interlocutors have 
experienced some entity which fits under the concept or name “tree”).  
“Reason” (a manner of thinking that is logically oriented and highly abstract), uses even 
simpler concepts to refer to increasingly more general “objects.” Instead of speaking of a 
particular tree and using the general name “tree” as a means to refer to the particular tree, 
rational thought abstracts from the trees their togetherness and names this grouping a “forest.” 
The forest F names and encompasses all trees and life therein, abstracting so greatly from the 
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dense particularity and variety of the trees, plants, animals, and the like into a single unit (F, 
“forest,” etc.). Concepts unify and therefore, by a kind of necessity, exclude difference. The 
forest is one such concept—the difference between two particular trees is lost in favor of the 
overarching name “forest”. One is usually accused of being “unable to see the forest for the 
trees,” but in this instance, highly abstract thought is unable to see the trees for the forest.  
Rational thought deals in such abstractions to make its calculations all the more expedient 
and objective. With such high degrees of abstraction, masses of multitudinous phenomena can be 
reduced to data points, and those data points can be manipulated in such a way that their 
abstraction from the preceding phenomena may tell us something about said phenomena. All of 
this is highly useful, efficient, and seemingly prevalent in rational thinking. Such thinking is not 
limited merely to the realm of logic, but also shows itself in the sciences (most obviously in 
physics, but also in the so-called “social sciences”: economics, psychology, etc.) and perhaps 
most apparently in philosophy itself. In Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche levels various 
critiques against “Reason” in philosophy. Most notably, for our purposes, he lambasts the 
“concept”:  
“You ask me which of the philosophers’ traits are most characteristic? For 
example, their lack of historical sense, their hatred of the very idea of becoming, 
their Egypticism. They think that they show their respect for a subject when they 
dehistoricize it sub specie aeternitas — when they turn it into a mummy. 
Everything that philosophers handled over the past thousands of years turned into 
concept mummies; nothing real escaped their grasp alive. Whenever these 
venerable concept idolators revere something, they kill it and stuff it; they suck 
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the life out of everything they worship. Death, change, old age, as well as 
procreation and growth, are to their minds objections — even refutations. 
Whatever has being does not become; whatever becomes does not have being. 
Now they all believe, desperately even, in what has being. But since they never 
grasp it, they seek for reasons why it is kept from them. ‘There must be mere 
appearance, there must be some deception which prevents us from perceiving that 
which has being: where is the deceiver?’” (“Twilight of the Idols”) 
Nietzsche’s “conceptual mummy” comes as a consequence of the highest order of abstraction: an 
abstraction that not only generalizes, but dehistoricizes and decontextualizes that from which it 
abstracts, effectively “killing” the original experience or phenomenon from which the abstraction 
is derived. At its most extreme, the conceptual mummy attempts to render eternal that which it 
has violently conformed into the shape of a concept. But if the original “stuff” out of which such 
a concept is derived is living, changing, becoming, the very movement of its life is terminated 
once it is ossified in conceptual stone. This is the process and result of reification. 
Why should death, change, old age, procreation, and growth be refutations or objections? 
Either concepts at the highest degree of abstraction, insofar as they are universal, general, etc. are 
eternal and also the most real inasmuch as they are unchanging, or there is first the real, ever 
changing phenomena of life, experience, existence, etc., then it is abstracted from and made into 
concept mummies and the like. The former sketch may look akin to Platonism or its derivative 
forms; the latter, something utterly different. We may also illustrate this contrast by saying the 
former is Parmenidean while the latter is Heraclitean. On one hand, this metaphysical distinction 
presupposes both Being and becoming, and the differing perspectives differ only insofar as they 
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put more ontological weight on the former or the latter. On the other hand, the metaphysics at 
work in what we have spoken of thus far may allow us to move past this rigid dualism entirely 
(for turning this distinction on its head should also undo it and utterly change the meaning of the 
reversed terms). The point is not simply to decide Being over becoming, or becoming over 
Being, but rather to evaluate what the implications of a metaphysics that sees the flux of 
experience as prior to any conceptual attempt to understand it might mean for us. While this 
matter will be plumbed more deeply later on, let us, for now, look to what Nietzsche says of 
Heraclitus, the exemplar of a philosophy of becoming:  
“With the highest respect, I exclude the name of Heraclitus. When the rest of the 
philosophic crowd rejected the testimony of the senses because it showed 
multiplicity and change, he rejected their testimony because it represented things 
as if they had permanence and unity. Heraclitus too did the senses an injustice. 
They lie neither in the way the Eleatics believed, nor as he believed — they do 
not lie at all. What we make of their testimony, that alone introduces lies2; for 
example, the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence. 
‘Reason’ is the reason we falsify the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses 
show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. But Heraclitus will 
remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The 
‘apparent’ world is the only one: the ‘true’ world is merely added by a lie.” (ibid.) 
2 Nietzsche regards the “apparent world” shown by the testimony of our senses as the only world for human beings. 
It is only retroactively described as the merely “apparent” world in contrast to a “lying added” “true” world, a world 
comprised of the empty concepts of unity, permanence, etc. For this reason Nietzsche takes the sensory experience 
of multiplicity and change as evidence for becoming, while being, in his sense, is the consequence of an attempt to 
invent a realm of permanence and consistency beyond our senses (which, for him, is itself a falsification of our 
senses’ very testimony). The senses simply show multiplicity and change; ad hoc interpretations invent unity and 
permanence.
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Nietzsche is clearly siding with Heraclitus as he sees him favoring becoming over the fixity of 
Being. The testimony of the senses that shows multiplicity and change are seen as more “true” 
than the added “lies” of permanence, unity, substance, thinghood, etc. The testimony of the 
senses seems to be Nietzsche’s “basis” –– he goes no further in providing a deeper foundation for 
existence — and it is not quite accurate to think of the senses as a basis so much as the only 
means we have to understand the world. Our senses are thus the framework of our perspective, 
and immediate sensations that give rise to our apprehension of the passing of things are not 
fundamentally untrustworthy insofar as they show things to be passing, changing, and so on. In 
this way Nietzsche deliberately keeps his perspective “superficial” in the literal sense that it does 
not go beyond what appears to our senses (not presupposing there is something “behind” the 
appearance, etc.). He takes sense appearance to simply be the case, and any attempt by Reason to 
deny the testimony of the senses and import concepts on to the change and passing is, for 
Nietzsche, as an additive “lie”.  
Typically the perspective of Reason supposes that the truth of something lies behind what 
appears to us via sense perception. First there is the sense perception, then there is the task of 
Reason to uncover what principles are fundamentally at work to cause the perception before us. 
There is the additional function of rationally “fixing” that which has already come to pass, 
rendering the flux of phenomena static in order to plumb the depths of appearance. This 
perspective only works on the basis that there are metaphysical, ontological, and / or logical 
principles operative in the very occurrence of phenomena, that the world is ordered according to 
some cosmological or theological order. Universal Reason is the secularized will of God, though 
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the former can be known to the human being while the latter is considered largely inaccessible to 
human understanding.  
Taken from another perspective, the rational explanations of apparent phenomena by way 
of fundamental principles, causes, and the like are useful narratives that help account for the flux 
of phenomena, but they never go behind phenomena to a “truer” (i.e. unchanging, eternal) 
knowledge thereof. Such narratives, in this view, are ad hoc rationalizations that attempt to 
narrowly focus on certain, particular processes in the larger flux from which it abstracts. These 
ad hoc rationalizations aim at epistemological or theoretical utility insofar as they simplify and 
generalize the irreducible flux of phenomena to reliably consistent rules of thumb. However, as 
soon as these abstract, probabilistic, and highly approximate narratives, formulae, and rules of 
thumb are hypostatized and thus treated as real in themselves, we fall back into the perspective of 
Reason which sees itself as somehow getting at the fundamental nature of reality rather than 
abstractly approximating becoming for human purposes. 
Mathematical Platonism, painted with a broad brush, may serve as a fruitful example 
regarding the perspective of Reason and the perspective of becoming. The former perspective 
might take the existence of numbers to be an ontological fact, such that numbers are real albeit 
abstract entities. The latter perspective might see numbers as a way of grouping abstracted things 
from their life and movement under forms which are general enough to perform mathematical 
operations with the abstracted data in order to reach further conclusions about the initial life and 
movement in question. Let us take a slightly more concrete example from classical mechanics: a 
law of physics, say F=ma, would thus be interpreted quite differently depending on the 
perspective taken up. On the former view, F=ma perhaps expresses something fundamentally, 
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always true about the very nature of Force, insofar as it is the product of mass and acceleration 
and these three variables are taken to be entities in their own right. On the latter view, force is a 
placeholder for the relationship between the mass of some object and its acceleration in some 
context of movement relating to other factors that are abstracted from in order to generate such a 
formula in the first place. The former view takes F=ma as physical law (which necessarily comes 
with the metaphysical import of Reason, or God, or some other ultimate source capable of 
ordering the cosmos by rational principles, etc.) while the latter takes F=ma as a highly 
generalized account of an abstracted feature of movement (force) which relies on further 
abstractions (mass and acceleration) to consistently describe an aspect of movement. The 
variables themselves are useful but not in and of themselves true. First and foremost, the 
movement which the formula is meant to describe is an “actual” phenomenon while the formula 
is a markedly succinct way to account for a relationship within that phenomenon. Either way the 
formula stands, but whether it describes some fundamental ordering principle of reality or is a 
useful ad hoc description of a phenomenon that occurs in a repeatable and reliable way marks a 
striking difference in perspective regarding the interpretation of appearances (and the 
interpretation of said interpretation, etc.). 
On the matter of the perspective of Reason in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche says, 
“[Philosophers] put… the ‘highest concepts’, the last fumes of evaporating reality, at the 
beginning as the beginning. It is again only the expression of their way of doing reverence: the 
higher must not be allowed to grow out of the lower must not be allowed to have grown at all… 
Moral: everything of the first rank must be causa sui. Origin in something else counts as an 
objection, as casting a doubt on value” (Nietzsche 47). Nietzsche speaks directly to the point 
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made above — that the “highest concepts” of Reason are in fact what is created out of the 
“lower” aspects of reality: namely, all that is of becoming. Of course this is not how the highest 
concepts are understood from the perspective of Reason. They are, in fact, seen as the most real 
and true while all that comes to pass is lower. Let us note that these abstractions are valued 
higher than the aesthetic, sensory phenomena of experience. It will become clear later that such 
abstractions of rationality are also an abstracted morality with implicit value judgments on what 
is fixed and what is fluid, and that this rationalistic morality does the same violence on becoming 
that Reason does in the epistemological and metaphysical aspects of our discourse.  
Nietzsche continues: “All supreme values are of the first rank, all the supreme concepts 
–– that which is, the unconditioned, the good, the true, the perfect –– all that cannot have 
become, must therefore be causa sui. But neither can these supreme concepts be incommensurate 
with one another… Thus they acquired their stupendous concept ‘God’... The last, thinnest, 
emptiest is placed as the first, as cause in itself, as ens realissimum” (47). Supreme concepts are 
the most supremely valued, are analogous to supreme values, and are therefore the most moral. 
What is most highly valued in these supreme concepts gives us a good idea of the psychological 
wants that are to be met by the supreme concepts of Reason: they are all self-caused and thus 
unconditioned; they are perfect, good, and true. In a word: they are eternally reliable. Hence the 
father figure of the omnipotent, omnipresent, and everloving God of Christianity. From the 
perspective of Reason (if it be coupled with religious belief) or faith as such, God, ens 
realissimum, is the “most real” being. However, insofar as God is, for Nietzsche, the most 
supreme concept and value, in this very supremeness he is therefore also the most empty 
concept, i.e. the most devoid of life, becoming, and so on. 
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The life of all that becomes is devalued and replaced with empty concepts that are valued 
as “higher” than all that lives3. This is a morality of the unconditioned, of death, for death is the 
only unconditional fact of creatures that are born, grown, decay, and pass away. This devaluation 
of life is one aspect of what Nietzsche calls nihilism. In The Will to Power, Nietzsche says, “The 
faith in the categories of reason is the cause of nihilism. We have measured the value of the 
world according to categories that refer to a purely fictitious world… All the values by means of 
which we have tried so far render the world estimable for ourselves and which then proved 
inapplicable and therefore devaluated the world––these values are, psychologically considered, 
the results of certain perspectives of utility, designed to maintain and increase human constructs 
of domination––and they have been falsely projected into the essence of things. What we find 
here is still the hyperbolic naiveté of man: positing himself as the meaning and measure of the 
value of things” (Nietzsche 13-14). The value of utility is perhaps the main psychological origins 
of the categories of Reason and their subsequent imposition on the world of becoming. 
Becoming is uncertain, precarious, subject to frequent and often unpredictable change. To be 
able to invent a world wherein this flux is tamed, known, and made to follow certain laws, and 
thus ultimately made to be predictable according to those laws, would quell anxiety and 
uncertainty around the initial onslaught of change and variety. However, insofar as this utility is 
imposed on life to the point that it is seen as the most true, such categories of Reason are no 
longer solely expedient. They instead confuse use-value for the operations of the world itself, 
and thus conform the world in terms of a rationalistic utility (even certain theories of evolution, 
3 Life is juxtaposed with the dead concepts that abstractly represent it throughout this thesis in order to show how 
the “becoming” of life (in its birth, growth, decay, and death) is a robust process that exceeds rigid conceptions 
thereof.
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ever mindful of the becoming of life, see life’s aim as maximizing utility — what does it mean to 
be the “fittest” if not to be the most efficient in one’s environment? Is this all that the process of 
evolution aims toward? Does it even have a telos in this manner?). The imposition of 
rationalistic categories on the world that does not even recognize this very imposition confuses it 
with how the world really is. The categories thus obscure anything which does not conform to 
them and, while this may be convenient in some cases, it, on the whole, sacrifices the novel 
movement of life for the predictable, rigid, and fixed categories of Reason.  
This is all the consequence of Reason. In the following chapter we will see how logic, the 
basis of “reason” itself, leads to this error of reification (A=A, etc.) The content of rational 
thought are its concepts; logic is the form of rational thought. The denial of life in the form of 
abstracting from becoming results not only in metaphysico-epistemological errors, but also leads 
to unethical consequences, though much of this is brought about by theological and / or 
rationalistic morality. Out of a fear of finitude, the fact that anything living will indeed pass 
away, it is easy to take solace in that which seems eternal and undying (be it religious doctrine, 
universal philosophical truth, Reason, God, etc.). Abstract concepts and the imposition of 
stability on flux can be useful, but without a keen awareness that such concepts and stability are 
merely useful, we run the risk of hiding behind concepts and missing out on life itself. In the last 
analysis, life is all that we have. Our fear of finitude thus deprives us of that which is most 
precious. In this manner, the rationalistic mind that creates concept mummies and treats birth and 
decay as objections, as falsities, falsifies its own existence and dulls its senses to the movement 
of life, of becoming, altogether, sensing only a problem in the uncertainty of life instead of 
20
finding its heart therein. In the following chapter we shall look at the process of reification as it 
relates to this struggle with accepting becoming. 
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Chapter Two: Vicious Abstraction 
“With many a science the endeavor to discover a universal principle is perhaps 
often just as fruitless as would be the endeavor of a mineralogist to discover a 
primal universal substance out of which all the minerals had arisen. Nature 
creates, not genera and species, but individua, and our shortsightedness has to 
seek out similarities so as to be able to retain in mind many things at the same 
time. These conceptions become more and more inaccurate the larger the families 
we invent for ourselves are.”   
(Lichtenberg 21) 
“What is particular is eternally defeated by what is general; the general has 
eternally to fit in with the particular.”  
(Goethe 23) 
In the foregoing chapter I introduced a way of thinking about becoming that partially 
escapes from merely reiterating a conception of becoming as Being (insofar as becoming is 
posited as the ultimate principle of existence), but in terms of genesis, birth, living movement, 
etc. The opposition between Being and becoming, then, is marked by certainty, fixity, 
completeness and eternity on the one hand; on the other, uncertainty, flux, incompleteness, and 
temporality. Reification as a fallacy can best be understood as a distortion of that which belongs 
to becoming (i.e. all that is living or “in process”). It can only be an issue from the perspective of 
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becoming — from the perspective of Reason, reification is closer to finding the fundamental 
truth of some process. Nietzsche shows how the rational concepts of “the philosophers” are 
derived from metaphorically “killing, stuffing, preserving,” and thus rendering eternal, that 
which was once alive and necessarily temporary.  
There is, of course, a trade off in this process which cannot be ignored: when taken to an 
extreme, reification leads to this “mummification” or “deadening” of the living that is reified. 
However, reification is not inherently an (epistemological or moral) evil—it is often practically 
expedient to think in terms of objects. It is only when what is reified is objectified to the point 
that we no longer see the original living movement from which the fallaciously concretized 
abstraction. Reification grants us a proximate certainty in our everyday dealings and thus helps 
us navigate the myriad sensations, ideas, impulses, and the like. We need not worry what 
everything we encounter might be because we can easily dismiss it as a material object, for 
example. Hypostatization can go too far, however, to the point that we miss what is right before 
us, insofar as our understanding is conditioned to conceptualize what is immediately present 
before our eyes. In Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense, Nietzsche says,  
“Every concept arises by means of the equating of the unequal. Just as certain as it 
is that no one leaf is exactly the same as any other, so, too, it is certain that the 
concept leaf is formed by arbitrarily ignoring these individual differences, by 
forgetting what distinguishes one from the other, thus giving rise to the notion that 
there is in nature something other than leaves, something like ‘The Leaf,’ a kind 
of prototype according to which all leaves were woven, drawn, delineated, 
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colored, crimped, painted, but by unskilled hands, so that no specimen turned out 
correctly or reliably as a true copy of the prototype.” (Nietzsche 28)  
The individual differences between leaves on the same plant may be subtle or obvious, but they 
are both equally a “leaf” inasmuch as we have a concept for “leaf.” “The Leaf”, as a prototype of 
which our two leaves are an example, follows the same line of thinking as Mathematical 
Platonism, in its most simple form, for in this scenario of two leaves we could just as well 
describe the two individuals as an instantiation of the number “2”, which itself is the true 
prototype and of which the two particular leaves are only a crude copy.  
However, this rational perspective is only possible if the many differences between these 
individuals are not taken into account. The equality of a concept comes at the cost of abridge, 
eliding, and leveling out any differences between the individuals made to conform to the 
overarching concept. Nietzsche continues: “Overlooking the individual and the actual yields 
concepts, just as it yields forms, whereas nature knows neither forms nor concepts, hence no 
species, but only what remains for us an inaccessible and indefinable X. For even the distinction 
we draw between the individual and the species is anthropomorphic and does not stem from the 
essence of things, thought neither can we sat that it does not correspond to the essence of things, 
for that would be a dogmatic assertion and as such just as indemonstrable as its 
counterpart” (29). Nietzsche comes close to a kind of mysticism in this passage, for the 
“indefinable X” suggests the “thing” we seek to “define” is always out of reach and thus 
ultimately unknowable (at least in a complete, comprehensive, rational manner). It is apt to refer 
to it as an indefinable X, for even conceiving of this X as an individual is itself an abstraction 
from the interconnected networks of processes, lives, and the like, cutting out from this fluid web 
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of becoming discrete and individual “objects” or “things.” The use of the variable X is a fitting 
placeholder for what Nietzsche is describing as indescribable, for it gestures toward some 
unknown. If we were to take this position to its most extreme conclusion, discourse about any 
matter, insofar as it relies and words and concepts that define the necessarily indefinable (and 
thereby contradict the very nature of what is being discoursed about), would be impossible and 
ill-advised. This route would lead to an abrupt halt in our path, and we would fall into an 
absolute quietism. 
While this is the most epistemically humble conclusion, it is simply not useful, so the 
indefinable X is fit into some haphazard definition and dealt with conceptually. This process of 
abstraction, of “mummifying” that which slips from our conceptual grasps in its very life 
movement, is perhaps most succinctly described by William James in the following passage on 
what he calls “vicious abstractionism”: 
Let me give the name of ’vicious abstractionism’ to a way of using concepts 
which may be thus described: We conceive a concrete situation by singling out 
some salient or important feature in it, and classing it under that; then, instead of 
adding to its previous characters all the positive consequences which the new way 
of conceiving it may bring, we proceed to use our concept privatively; reducing 
the originally rich phenomenon to the naked suggestions of that name abstractly 
taken, treating it as a case of ’nothing but’ that concept, and acting as if all the 
other characters from out of which the concept is abstracted were expunged. 
(James 135) 
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Vicious abstractionism is the use of concepts partially described above (rendering definable, 
constant, and useful that which is indefinable and variable), though James adds very useful 
additions to the matter at hand. It is not inherently mistaken to simplify or extract a certain 
character out of becoming in order to name it and aid our understanding––the error is to do so 
privativtely. A concrete situation with a whole plethora of features would be too challenging to 
parse through if there were not some features that were considered more relevant than others, at 
least in order that one may find footing in the midst of the rich phenomena before them. When a 
concept is developed to refer to some relevant feature in this generic concrete situation, it grants 
an intellectual shortcut through the noise of sense experience to something more relevant to it. It 
reduces in order to have any understanding of the situation at all. This is a way in which such 
abstract concepts may be genuinely beneficial in order to highlight a certain feature of a situation 
and then subsequently plunge back into the sense data with a newfound footing. Vicious 
abstractionism does no such thing. The rest of the phenomena from which the concept 
highlighting a salient feature is abstracted is thrown out instead, depriving the concept of its 
living context, and depriving our understanding of the concrete meaning of the concept. In this 
way the particular situation from which the concept is derived is snuffed out in favor of the 
generality of the concept itself. 
William James continues: “Abstraction, functioning in this way, becomes a means of 
arrest far more than a means of advance in thought. It mutilates things; it creates difficulties and 
finds impossibilities; and more than half the trouble that metaphysicians and logicians give 
themselves over the paradoxes and dialectic puzzles of the universe may, I am convinced, be 
traced to this relatively simple source. The viciously privative employment of abstract characters 
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and class names is, I am persuaded, one of the great original sins of the rationalistic mind” (136). 
When abstract characters and class names become reified and treated as “real objects”, what is 
“shared” or “common” in such concepts becomes what is “real,” and all otherness and 
difference, i.e. all uniqueness is lost. Heterogeneous experience becomes flat and homogenous. 
This newly leveled experience is easy to navigate and interpret, but also severely lacking in 
phenomenal depth. It is essentially an act of violence, and James is right to describe this process 
as a mutilation of things. Though it may be of use to us for initially gaining some footing in an 
ambiguous concrete situation, the process of vicious abstractionism ultimately leads to far more 
confusion than enlightenment, for we throw out becoming in favor of the “last vapors of reality” 
in the same manner that Nietzsche described in the previous chapter. At its worst, the perspective 
of Reason that favors the hypostatization of concepts (to the detriment of living phenomena) 
either kills what it abstracts from, or it disregards that which is of no immediate use to it. 
We must also remember how anthropomorphic the distinction between the individual and 
the species is, for usefulness only pertains to what simplifies our engagement with the world, and 
this very simplicity is based on what is simple to this particular perspective. In his essay “Two 
Dogmas of Empiricism” from From a Logical Point of View, Willard Van Orman Quine speaks 
to this issue in regard to the abstract concept of a “physical object”: “Physical objects are 
conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms 
of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of 
Homer . . . in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in 
degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural 
posits” (Quine 44). Not only are our concepts based on our parochial sense of usefulness, they 
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are also provincially reliant upon our culture and its tacit mythos, a mythos that enters into our 
“reason” under the guise of common sense and shapes what become our cultural posits. 
Contextualizing concepts, in an additive rather than privative fashion, helps us to open them up 
from their reified state back into the concrete situations from which they were invented. 
We see how abstraction comes to form dead concepts from live situations, and we see 
how the use of such concepts to the privation of their source leads to vicious abstractionism. 
What, at present, remains a mystery is exactly how such conceptions come to be hypostatized in 
the first place. Why might concepts deduced from Reason be treated as real? While the belief in 
fixity as being more real than that which changes is a given, what else might motivate a faith in 
what is unchanging to the degree that the faithful might deny their very senses and the becoming 
which their senses show? It is interesting that such confusion between concepts and their 
processual roots in becoming emerges at all. The source of this confusion might be found in both 
language and logic. Regarding the former, Quine’s essay “Identity, Ostension, Hypostasis” 
speaks on the treatment of general terms as proper names and how such treatment might have 
resulted in the belief in abstract entities: “I attach much importance to the traditional distinction 
between general terms and abstract singular terms, ‘square’ versus ‘squareness’, because of the 
ontological point: use of the general term does not of itself commit us to the admission of a 
corresponding abstract entity into our ontology” (76). Quine’s understanding of an ontology is 
less that of the study of Being as such and more the study of relative ontology upon which some 
theory is fundamentally based and cannot do without. Mathematics, for example, cannot do 
without some notion of numbers (even if they are ultimately reducible to sets, etc.), therefore 
mathematics requires some belief in (or, in technical terms, some ontological commitment) to 
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numbers as actual, albeit abstract entities. Whether concepts be hypostatized into such abstract 
entities in the first place is a question of the use of language. General terms and abstract singular 
terms signify very different kinds of meaning, yet their usage often looks grammatically 
identical. A general term, square, simply refers to something shaped like a square, much like 
recognizing a circle, or a rectangle, or a duck, and so on. These are all general terms that refer to 
particular cases, e.g. that duck, this square –– they never imply that what they describe in general 
terms is also essentially imbued with that general quality. When a child identifies a duck at the 
park, their ostensive identification does not mean, “That entity there partakes in duckness, and as 
an instantiation of that universal it may be described as a duck.” A general term is a singular term 
used to describe many different cases; it is never the case itself. 
Quine continues: “...the use of an abstract singular term, subject to the standard behavior 
of singular terms such as the law of putting equals for equals, flatly commits us to an abstract 
entity named by the term… It is readily conceivable that it was precisely because of failure to 
observe this distinction that abstract entities gained their hold upon our imaginations in the first 
place” (76). The distinction between abstract singular terms and general terms is not apparent in 
the term itself. Let us recall Nietzsche’s example of The Leaf from Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral 
Sense: there are individual leaves of potentially infinite variety, and then there is the form Leaf of 
which they are all a pale imitation. When stated in this manner, it is clear that “leaf” or “leaves” 
refers to things named leaves — the general term names an array of possible entities under one 
blanket term and functions as a defining boundary for what may or may not fall under the scope 
of its purview, but it is only a name. The Leaf, as an abstract singular term, names an entity: 
namely, the form or essence, of the Leaf. The matter becomes more ambiguous when dealing 
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with something already general or abstract like numbers or shapes. In phenomenal experience we 
never directly encounter the number “2” or “squareness” as such, but we do encounter pairs of 
shoes, a romantic couple, two eyes on a rabbit or a cat, a painting framed by four equivalent 
lengths, a square-shaped window, etc. Describing these particulars’ number and shape, with 
comparative reference to the respective number or shape terms, seems to compare one realm of 
particulars with another realm of particulars. This results in an apparent leveling of the singular 
abstract term to the particular it is used to describe, as if squareness and square-shaped window 
are ontologically (in the Quinean sense) equivalent.  
Further along Quine says, “This tendency is no doubt encouraged by the fact that it is 
often convenient for purely syntactical reasons, reasons, for example, of word order or cross-
reference, to handle a general term like a proper name” (77). In the above case of cross-
reference, the syntactical treatment of the general term “square” as a proper name gives it the 
singular abstract entity status “Square,” though this is only a consequence of grammatical 
accident and semantic ambiguity. It is likely that, for this reason, Nietzsche says (in Twilight of 
the Idols), “I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar” (Nietszche 
48). God as the supreme concept, the greatest abstraction, could only be devised and invented 
through an ambiguous grammar. As long as the ambiguity of grammar imbues a confused sense 
of being into the general terms that it uses in manners identical to the use of proper names (which 
are meant to really have being, at least insofar as they name one particular thing), the name God 
will seem to be a name with a content or referent. The general term “square” does not have one 
sole referent; the name Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche does indeed have such a singular referent. If 
“square” is treated in the same syntactical manner as “Nietzsche”, it may look like the general 
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term “square” is actually a singular abstract term with a sole referent squareness. This is 
precisely the confusion on which both Quine and Nietzsche speak. 
Are reified concepts a consequence of treating abstract, general terms as proper names 
that refer to real entities (either confusedly or deliberately)? Or are concepts themselves already 
based on some prior reification of “becoming” into things from which the hypostatization of 
abstract concepts into abstract things inevitably follows? Nietzsche speaks in favor of the latter 
in Will to Power when he touches on the “origin of logic”, our second potential source of the 
reified concept of vicious abstraction. The reification of concepts is already presupposed in the 
very logic of a concept, even if the concept itself is not yet reified, for the act of abstracting out 
from becoming and seeing equal things at all already reifies processes into things. Treating 
concepts as things takes this basic move one step further, but would not be possible if the very 
notion of a thing was not already invented and at work in the very logic which makes use of 
concepts. Nietzsche gives a psychological account of what qualifies this inclination to posit 
things as equal: “The fundamental inclination to posit as equal, to see things as equal, is 
modified, held in check, by consideration of usefulness and harmfulness, by considerations of 
success: it adapts itself to a milder degree in which it can be satisfied without at the same time 
denying and endangering life” (Nietzsche 276). Nietzsche shows that positing different things as 
equal (or, more technically put, subsuming different things under a sign that values them as the 
same, that forces difference into the sameness of abstract equivalence) is not necessarily a value 
in itself (though it may well be a psychological tendency). It is rather guided by the relative 
successes or failures of such equalizing posits, namely whether they are useful or harmful to us. 
This inclination adapts to these different outcomes and does not run rampant (to the point of life 
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denial). This sounds much like a repeat of what we found above with Wiliam James’ points on 
the beginning of vicious abstraction: focusing on some salient feature of a concrete situation may 
aid our engagement and understanding of it. In this sense abstraction and positing things as equal 
is useful for us. We might be able to readily recognize danger after having encountered it once 
before, for example. In such a recognition of a repeated pattern, we are treating the new 
seemingly dangerous situation as equivalent to the previous one experienced in order to reduce 
harm. Medical science may serve as another example, wherein certain diseases are found to be 
cured best by certain medicines — a cure to a disease can, at first, only be discovered through 
much trial and error. However, once it has been discovered, a doctor may treat varying 
symptomatic presentations of the same illness as the same if enough of the symptoms are shared. 
When the inclination to posit as equal is kept in check by such considerations, it generally helps 
us get along in the world and is thus not an inherent evil. 
Let us note that positing things as equal is the sole condition of logic. Nietzsche says, 
“Logic is bound to the condition: assume there are identical cases. In fact, to make possible 
logical thinking and inferences, this condition must first be treated fictitiously as fulfilled. That 
is: the will to logical truth can be carried through only after a fundamental falsification of all 
events is assumed. From which it follows that a drive rules here that is capable of employing 
both means, firstly falsification, then the implementation of its own point of view: logic does not 
spring from will to truth” (277). The will to logical truth is not the will to truth. Logical truth is 
conditioned by the assumption of identical cases, of equating the unequal. The will to logical 
truth is guided by considerations of use value, not epistemological value, for the fictitious 
fulfillment of the condition that assumes identical cases already leaves out a great majority of the 
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unique, novel, and unrepeatable aspects of becoming in favor of what can be plucked out and 
gathered together under sameness. Along with the perspective of Reason discussed in the 
previous chapter, we see that logic falsifies life and then implements its own perspective in place 
of life. Logic and the perspective of Reason are thus one and the same in this regard. In this 
sense the violence of logic and Reason is marked by the imposition of logical, conceptual, and 
ultimately rational sense of equality on originally unequal things.4 
The will to logical truth, predicated on the act of positing things as equal (initially for the 
benefit of our survival), is the source of the categories of Reason. Nietzsche says, “The inventive 
force that invented categories labored in the service of our needs, namely of our need for 
security, for quick understanding on the basis of signs and sounds, for means of abbreviation: 
"substance," "subject," "object," "being," "becoming" have nothing to do with metaphysical 
truths. — It is the powerful who made the names of things into law, and among the powerful it is 
the greatest artists in abstraction who created the categories” (277). The will to logical truth is 
ultimately an inventive, artistic force of the “artists of abstraction” among the powerful. It creates 
useful abbreviations that satisfy our needs for security, shortcuts through signs and sounds to aid 
our understanding, and generally helps to render one’s thinking more concise. Even the phrase 
“will to logical truth” is one such category of abbreviation invented by Nietzsche himself. On 
this view, the ubiquity of these categories of Reason in Western thought is not due to their 
inherent truth, but is instead a function of power. It is therefore a matter of cultural contingency 
that the names of things we receive in our metaphysical tradition have been codified as truths. 
The source of vicious abstraction may, therefore, be found in a grammatical confusion 
4 I take “unequal” here to mean different or unique, not necessarily in a valuative hierarchy that holds one 
as more valuable than another.
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(metaphorically using a general term in the same syntactic way as a proper name and 
consequently treating that general term itself as a proper name) and, more deeply, in the most 
fundamental assumption of logic: that there are identical cases. When the abstraction of logic is 
predicated on the denial of difference insofar as it only gathers what is the same by cutting out 
what does not fit into its logical equality, we are already missing out on a whole slew of novel, 
unique, and hitherto unknown features of becoming. The scope of our understanding is severely 
narrowed through this rationalistic lens of abstraction. It is only worsened when the general 
terms that name concepts (which are pale metaphors for the reality which they are meant only to 
abridge and describe as easily comprehensible symbols) are themselves imbued with a 
metaphysical reality over and against that of which they are mere abstractions. In this twofold 
process becoming is utterly lost and, at its most extreme, the reification of concepts results in an 
utter denial of the senses, of the flow of life itself. Life is reduced to mere living objects and the 
rule of law (be it physical, moral, or governmental) enforces this reduction to the point that it 
simply seems to be the case. If everyone partakes in such an illusion and treats it as real despite 
it being a clear fiction, it becomes a social fact, conditioned by and contingent upon the historical 
factors that brought it about and perpetuated by those who uphold it unquestioningly. 
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Chapter Three: Prescriptive Morality 
“Morality is only an interpretation of certain phenomena, more precisely a 
misinterpretation.”  
(Nietzsche 55)  
Let us begin with a distinction between morality and ethics: morality, in the following 
passages, is understood as a rational or theoretical means to determine what is right and wrong in 
advance and in such a manner that moral quandaries can be settled by making recourse to 
morality. For example, one can settle a matter by making recourse to utilitarianism, theology, 
deontology, etc. Ethics differs from morality in that it is not a theory so much as it is a 
comportment toward situations that are undetermined and thus problematic. I think of ethics as a 
matter of what attitude one brings to any given situation that calls for action, which are perhaps 
mostly situations which have no clear sense of right or wrong and require further deliberation 
and reflection on what one ought to do. In this kind of ethics one may make recourse to moral 
theories as guiding rules of thumb, but to dogmatically take on the perspective of any such moral 
theory and interpret all ethical problems according to the logic of the moral theory alone 
abandons the very ethical task of engaging a problematic situation for one’s self as it arises. In 
this manner I think ethics is more akin to a musical improvisation than logic –– it requires that 
one be ready to act and respond no matter what comes its way; it requires a fundamental 
responsibility to an “unknown” beyond ourselves. 
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The moral laws of a rational morality are analogues to the reified concepts of Reason. As 
such, they are hypostatizations of solutions to ethical conundrums, taken out of their particular 
context (and therefore killed, mummified, and stuffed), universalized, and imposed in many 
places where they do not apply neatly, leading to the messiness of casuistry or, in less subtle 
cases, the violent imposition of ill-fitting rules on vulnerable persons in the name of Morality. 
This is particularly the case in prescriptive moralities composed of “thou shalt” and “thou shalt 
nots” and other presuppositions about what is good and evil. The rationalistic conception of the 
universal human (found in versions of Deontology and Utilitarianism, among other places) and 
the necessary exclusion of those who are “other” than that “universal human” marks an 
immediately glaring limit to such a morality. It proceeds in the same manner as logic by 
assuming there are identical cases, and, by identifying like cases, it also excludes what is unlike 
such cases. What happens when a rationalistic morality fundamentally assumes, as a criterion of 
one’s own “humanness”, that the universal human partakes in Reason (a highly contextual and 
ever-shifting notion depending on interpretation, culture, historical period and other conditions)? 
Is the “irrational” human that does not meet this “rational” criterion (as the reasoner understands 
it) thus not human if they failed to partake in Reason? Or is this not risking bigotry against an 
invented “irrational” group in the name of Morality?  
A moral theory with such inflexible laws may be one of Reason, but it may also be a 
theological morality. In either case, such a moral theory purports to know, in advance, what 
would be right or wrong courses of action in cases of ethical uncertainty, without exception. In 
this sense, moral law offers a rigid, reliable, and eternal sense of what is good or bad, but it does 
so at the cost of genuine ethical engagement. It sacrifices ethics for the comfort of certainty. 
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The casuistic application of abstract, rational moral principles that morality claims ought 
to guide how one lives precludes spontaneous, living ethical engagement with one another and 
the world at large, for the ambiguity and uncertainty of ethics is already decided by such rational, 
universal moralities. Yet problems of ethics emerge in uncertain, as-yet-undetermined situations. 
While substituting the uneasiness of an ethically problematic situation for a pre-given moral 
solution is certainly more expedient than sitting with unresolved ethical tension, it also closes off 
engagement with the actual concrete situation before one’s eyes. Such a solution is determined in 
advance by abstracting from particular, past ethical problems, and resolved by treating moral 
principles (rules of thumb) as reified, fixed truths. Prescriptive morality, therefore, already 
decides what should be done in any ethically problematic situation before it has even occurred, 
precluding the possibility of ethics and settling ethical issues with principles that are easy to 
blindly uphold. For example, the law sets a precedent for what is and is not allowed and it is 
enforced by police. While social contract theorists may say we are obliged to follow the law 
insofar as we willingly aim to remain citizens of the county whose laws we uphold, the violent 
imposition of the law by the police suggests this is not a matter of debate, but of following the 
law or becoming a criminal. There is a compulsory element that leaves out certain ethical 
considerations, for not every citizen democratically decides the laws amongst themselves; there 
is, instead, a precedent already set which we must follow. Let us look to another example: during 
wartime, when the “enemy” is othered and treated as less than human, and a duty to one’s home 
country is appealed to as the moral ground for going to war and killing the other, one’s “service” 
is seen as morally righteous by those who buy into the morality that sent them off to war—yet 
fulfilling one’s “moral duty” in this regard may often involve committing horrifically unethical 
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acts against other people in the name of some moral cause. Ethics is impossible in war if people 
are unwilling to budge in the moral views that sent them to war in the first place. These are both 
very simplistic examples meant to gesture toward what is meant by the imposition of morality 
that pre-determines the “right” action and thus forecloses any possibility of deliberating over 
what might be “right” in some novel context. It soothes the ethical ache that comes with not yet 
knowing how to proceed in a “right” manner in some problematic situation, but in so doing it 
only apparently resolves the ethical questions at hand when it, instead, glosses right over them 
because the moral answer is already supposed to be known and thus no further ethical 
considerations are deemed necessary. 
A more concrete example from the history of philosophy is Immanuel Kant’s categorical 
imperative. He formulates this imperative in the following way: “Act only according to that 
maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (Kant 30). 
Kant’s deontology is caricatured by Nietzsche in The Anti-Christ in order to juxtapose Kantian 
moral theory with Nietzsche’s own sense of ethics. Nietzsche speaks directly against Kant’s 
vision of morality: “What does not condition our life harms it: a virtue merely from a feeling of 
respect for the concept ‘virtue’, as Kant desired it, is harmful. ‘Virtue’, ‘duty’, ‘good in itself’, 
impersonal and universal — phantoms, expressions of decline, of the final exhaustion of 
life” (Nietzsche 131-132). He states plainly that a virtue upheld merely for its own sake, as the 
“concept” of virtue, is harmful to life and indicative of exhaustion. These concepts (virtue, duty, 
the good in-itself) are much like the hypostatized abstractions we spoke of earlier, just under a 
moralistic hue. There are surely virtues, goods, and duties one may develop in the course of one’s 
own life or recognize in others, in the rich diversity of human life, but virtue as such, duty as 
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such, good in-itself, as universalized abstractions, are given a misplaced weight when they are 
valued for their own sake and not for the role they play in the larger context of the life and 
movement of an interdependent social network. Abstracted from the movement of life itself and 
upheld by the perspective of Reason, the moral concepts of virtue, duty, and the good in-itself 
seem to be supreme values, but like the supreme concepts, the abstract virtues, too, are the “last 
fumes of an evaporating reality” (Nietzsche, 47). 
Nietzsche continues: “The profoundest laws of preservation and growth demand the 
reverse of this: that each one of us should devise his own virtue, his own categorical 
imperative… Kant’s categorical imperative should have been felt as mortally dangerous! … An 
action compelled by the instinct of life has in the joy of performing it the proof it is a right 
action: and that nihilist with Christian-dogmatic bowels understands joy as an objection” (132). 
When Nietzsche speaks of devising one’s own virtue, one’s own categorical imperative, this 
seems in line with the task of ethics briefly described at the beginning of this chapter: to 
determine the most ethical choice in some ambiguous situation by one’s own lights, by being 
personally responsible and invested in how one acts or ought to act in an ethically tumultuous 
quandary. The instinct of life that compels an action is proven “right” by the joy it produces in 
the actor. While this is certainly not an exhaustive account of what constitutes an ethically “right 
action”, the fact that some sense of an expression of one’s own life can be felt in an action gives 
it a life affirming quality that flies in the face of the nihilistic denial of life in the phantasmagoric 
impersonal virtues in themselves that we have a universal duty to uphold. The former is more 
natural insofar as it is an expression of life itself; the latter anti-nature in its denial of life (though 
it is nonetheless of nature, for only a living, natural being can invent such a morality). 
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Let us turn to Nietzsche’s chapter on the “Morality as Anti-Nature” in Twilight of the 
Idols, where he says, “All naturalism in morality, that is all healthy morality, is dominated by an 
instinct of life — some commandment of life is fulfilled through a certain canon of ‘shall’ and 
‘shall not’, some hindrance and hostile element on life’s road is thereby removed” (Nietzsche 
55). Nietzsche’s sense of a healthy morality looks somewhat akin to the psychological 
motivation behind the inclination to posit things as equal: both are checked by considerations of 
what may benefit life and what may be harmful to it with an aim to remove what is harmful. In 
positing things as equal, near identical cases of danger can be avoided if they can be recognized 
in the future before the danger becomes fatal; in a naturalistic morality, that which is hostile to 
life is removed by a shall not (e.g. “thou shall not neglect one’s physical health”) in order to 
uphold and affirm life as the ultimate value. Contrarily, anti-natural moralities put other values 
above and beyond life. Nietzsche says, “Anti-natural morality, that is virtually every morality 
that has hitherto been taught, reverenced and preached, turns on the contrary precisely against 
the instincts of life – it is a… condemnation of these instincts. By saying, ‘God sees into the 
heart’ it denies the deepest and the highest desires of life and takes God for the enemy of 
life” (55). God is the highest concept that takes life’s place as the highest value in naturalistic 
moralities. Not only is life lowered as a value, its very instincts are condemned and made “evil”, 
denying life itself in favor of the abstract values derived from it. 
Nietzsche juxtaposes the aforementioned moral perspective with the perspective of 
becoming in the following:  
Let us consider what naïvety it is to say ‘man ought to be thus and thus!’ Reality 
shows us an enchanting wealth of types, the luxuriance of a prodigal play and 
40
change of forms: and does not some pitiful journeyman moralist say at the sight of 
it: ‘No! Man ought to be different’? … He even knows how man ought to be, this 
bigoted wretch; he paints himself on the wall and says ‘ecce homo’! … And there 
have indeed been consistent moralists who wanted man to be different, namely 
virtuous, who wanted him in their own likeness, namely that of a bigot: to that 
end they denied the world! (56) 
From the perspective of becoming, the world is abundant with myriad types of people and forms 
of life (let us not forget the ethics and epistemologies of animals!) ever changing and growing, 
developing into novel forms, reverting into previous shapes, etc. To reduce all of this variety to 
how the moralist thinks everything ought to be goes one step further than vicious abstraction (for 
vicious abstraction stops at the salient features it abstracts out and then simply discards the rest). 
The moralist not only treats that which does not fit under their moral framework as morally 
wrong and privatively discards other ways of life; the moralist, further, denies those other ways 
of life as valuable and wishes to impose his moral vision on everyone in place of their own ways 
of life. This is the tyranny of the categorical imperative, of the rational moralism that touts only 
the abstracted concept of values in themselves by denying life. This is, to a degree, the very same 
bigotry of colonialism, of religious hatred, of sexism, racism, xenophobia, and the like. When 
another form of life differs from the moralist’s own, the moralist cannot simply turn their head 
and leave the other in peace (or, god forbid, learn from the other by engaging them and 
responding to their otherness in an open manner); instead, this other is a heretic or a heathen, a 
threat to the moralist’s way and must be converted or destroyed. Both options are an act of 
violence, and this is the most direct form of violence that has its root in rationalistic thinking. 
41
The denial of ways of life (and the very living movement of becoming) in hypostatized concepts 
and virtues is not solely a philosophical concern: it is a concern with the violence that such 
rational thinking enacts on other forms of life simply because they differ and are deemed morally 
“wrong”. 
42
Chapter Four: Nihilism and Affirmation 
“God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of 
years in which his shadow will be shown, ––And we––we still have to vanquish 
his shadow, too.”  
(Nietzsche 167) 
“Amor Fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against 
what is ugly. I do not want to accuse… Looking away shall be my only negation. 
And all in all and on the whole: someday I wish only to be a Yes-sayer.” 
(223) 
Nietzsche introduces an affirmative response to the life-denying moralist he caricatures in 
the last quoted passage from Twilight of the Idols. He concludes that very same aphorism with 
the following: “In so far as morality condemns as morality and not with regard to the aims and 
objects of life, it is a specific error with which one should show no sympathy… We others, we 
immoralists, have on the contrary opened wide our hearts to every kind of understanding, 
comprehension, approval. We do not readily deny, we seek our honor in affirming” (Nietzsche 
56). We see Nietzsche contrast the bigotry and life denial of moralism with his own brand of 
immoralism. Immoralism is meant to contrast the imposing violence of moralism by affirming 
things as they are instead of willing things to be other than what they are. This involves open-
hearted understanding, comprehension, and approval instead of denial and disapproval. In this 
sense, Nietzsche’s immoralism may strike us as more ethical than the bigoted moralism he 
43
depicts. In this passage we also see a microcosmic representation of Nietzsche’s twofold process 
of reevaluation of values: first he severely critiques and undermines an old, questionable value, 
then he replaces it with a new interpretation, a new valuation in place of the old value. 
Nietzsche’s revaluation of values is ultimately an ethical project, for the purpose of 
clearing away old values is to be able to posit new values. His immoralism is a first step in 
overcoming the life denying values that he critiques. For example, the life denial of morality is 
nihilistic in a similar manner that the categories of Reason deny life, though this may not be 
apparent to those who still cling to the abstract concepts and values of Reason. Both are 
comprised of the last fumes of the reality from which they emerged and signify nothing when 
they are only understood as signifying themselves (a signifier with no signified). In this context 
nihilism means that “the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; ‘why?’ finds 
no answer” (Nietzsche 11). A high value comes to hollow itself out when it becomes apparent 
that it has little to do with life itself and is instead an invented fiction. When it becomes apparent 
that certain forms of social etiquette, for example, are not practiced for any good reason other 
than that it is “tradition”, the value of a cultural ritual may come to devalue itself as a merely 
unbroken habit sustained for generations. The “Why?” of the value is without aim. It is not done 
for the good of the people, for the improvement of one’s health, etc., it is simply done because it 
is done (much like Nietzsche’s portrayal of Kant respecting the concept of virtue for virtue’s sake 
instead of a particular virtue for a particular way of life). This is all a symptom of passive 
nihilism, the nihilism of decay and purposelessness. 
Nietzsche diagnoses the etiological root of nihilism in the “categories of Reason”: “The 
faith in the categories of reason is the cause of nihilism. We have measured the value of the 
44
world according to categories that refer to a purely fictitious world” (13). The categories of 
Reason are abstracted fictions that became articles of faith for interpreting the world. Not only 
were they useful means for understanding the world, they came to be the “true” world 
themselves. The categories of Reason, thus hypostatized, become the laws of nature and so on. 
When these categories are shown to be fictitious and their reified state fractures, they return to 
their original role of serving a merely pragmatic role in human life. Yet it is rare for such a de-
reification of the categories of Reason to occur without the value of the world being put into 
question. If what “made” the world valuable was the categories of Reason we thought we had 
uncovered in the world, then the very criteria grounding the world’s value are put into question, 
and so too is the world’s value turned into a question mark. 
A similar phenomenon occurs in people who have doubted or lost their faith in 
Christianity, for example: when the source of the world’s value and meaning (the most supreme 
concept “God”) is put into question or discarded as fiction, the guarantor of the world’s meaning, 
value, and, crucially, of a world beyond, ceases to fulfill that role as guarantor, and so the world’s 
meaning and value appear to be lost. In the most severe cases, the world seems deprived of 
meaning. The world, however, was always alive and present during these crises of faith. Only the 
interpretation of the world has changed. Passive nihilism is a felt lack of meaning when an 
interpretation (held to faithfully to the point that it simply felt like the absolute truth about 
reality and came to replace the world itself) falls away and the meaning it provided is provided 
no longer. The lingering shadow on the cave wall after the death of God is the lingering sense of 
meaning which can no longer be found but is still sought. The move from theological to rational 
categories (the latter often being secularized versions of the former, “godless” but reliant on the 
45
logic of God) suggests that the death of God perhaps happened long ago, and the categories of 
Reason are one of presumably many cases of God’s lingering shadow on the cave wall. 
What induces this crisis of faith? What ruffles the feathers of the hegemonic perspective 
of a culture to the point that it collapses? Passionate, philosophical inquiry (or skepticism), with 
its capacity to see what is questionable in that which is taken for granted, puts articles of faith 
into question and acts as the trigger for such a crisis: “Skepticism regarding morality is what is 
decisive. The end of the moral interpretation of the world, which no longer has any sanction after 
it has tried to escape into some beyond, leads to nihilism” (7). When morality is the source of the 
world’s value, and this source is fatally questioned, nihilism inevitably follows. The activity of 
skepticism and its lack of faith in what it scrutinizes brings out what is questionable in 
dogmatically held articles of faith. Insofar as it renders these articles of faith questionable, it 
opens them up to reinterpretation. The need for reinterpretation may occur to those who are 
dissatisfied with the meaning that old values provide. Nietzsche says, “Nihilism… can be a sign 
of strength: the spirit may have grown so strong that previous goals (‘convictions,’ articles of 
faith) have become incommensurate (for a faith generally expresses the constraint of conditions 
of existence, submission to the authority of circumstances under which one flourishes, grows, 
gains power)” (17-18). The consequent nihilism of such a crisis of faith in which one might 
become passive and enervated from a lost sense of meaning and value differs from an active 
nihilism, the kind that is the sign of increased strength or power in spirit that needs to set new 
goals for itself because faith restricts this spirit’s capacity to fully flourish. Active nihilism is 
much like Nietzsche’s “epistemological evil” in The Gay Science: “What is new… is always evil, 
being that which wants to conquer and overthrow the old boundary markers and the old pieties; 
46
and only what is good is old” (Nietzsche 79). The “evil” of the new (e.g. Nietzsche’s 
immoralism) intends to overthrow the “good” old values in order to replace them with more 
fitting values. The epistemological “good” of the old values lies in their solidity, their constancy, 
and in the fact that they do not induce uncertainty and crisis — one can have faith in them and 
leave them unexamined. Yet when old values overstay their welcome, they bring about passive 
nihilism insofar as they devaluate themselves as they restrain the conditions of existence for the 
flourishing of life, which, like a growing animal trapped in a small cage, hinders the flourishing 
of life itself. The conservation of the “good” values for their own sake forgets to tend to life, and 
the “evil”, destructive forces move the boundary stones in order to recondition human existence 
in favor of its continued growth and flourishing. 
While active nihilism is, in part, a destructive force of an empowered and lively spirit (by 
way of skepticism, founding new moralities and religions, and unsettling the old pieties) it also 
can become a creative and life-affirming force. The following questions must be asked: Would a 
newly founded morality repeat the same mistakes as those of old? Would the active nihilist assert 
himself in the same fashion as the bigoted moralist and expect everyone to obey his command? 
Or would the moved boundary stones open up possibilities for new ways of living unhindered by 
the unethical strictures of the life-denying, predetermining, dead moralities of old? The latter 
direction is made possible by the intense force of active nihilism. In fact, active nihilism may be 
the first condition of an open comportment toward the world, a manner in which one holds 
oneself out toward life. In an open comportment, one cares, loves, and tends to life directly, 
thereby affirming it as it is and bearing responsibility for it rather than judging and evaluating 
life according to the rules of the lifeless logic and morality to which a closed comportment is 
47
bound. Active nihilism shatters ossified conceptions and opens us back into indeterminacy, 
allowing us to ethically engage the world in a fresh light.5 
Nietzsche puts a value on learning to see and learning to love in Twilight of the Idols and 
The Gay Science respectively. Seeing and loving in the ways that he outlines strike me as 
preconditions for the kind of open comportment I wish to gesture toward, particularly in how 
they convey an attitude that is patient with what is unknown. Let us first look at what he says on 
learning to see in Twilight of the Idols: “Learning to see –– habituating the eye to repose, to 
patience, to letting things come to it; learning to defer judgment, to investigate and comprehend 
the individual case in all its aspects… not to react immediately to a stimulus, but to have the 
restraining, stock-taking instincts in one’s control” (Nietzsche 75). Nietzsche’s sense of learning 
to see has a cautious and keen skeptical quality that defers judgment in trying to understand some 
individual case in its multiple aspects, taking stock of its features and, by way of restraint, seeing 
it in its very life before arriving at any conclusions. The rationalistic approach to morality and 
logic in general does the exact opposite of this, for it already abstracts from the individual case 
and explains it by means of general concepts. In the latter mode of engagement the individual 
case is already mostly settled before anything novel or contrary to the abstract suppositions 
imposed on it have had the chance to show themselves. While useful as an intellectual shortcut to 
quickly gather information about some concrete scenario, the subsumption of the individual 
5 Active nihilism is, in this sense, a precondition for what I am calling an “open comportment” insofar as it helps us 
break away from traditional values that may have ossified to the point of seeming to simply be “objectively true”, 
thereby closing off a certain openness toward things (because ossified values give us predetermined answers and do 
not call us to think and act anew in the face of indeterminacy). While this could lead to passive nihilism (a nihilism 
marked by the feeling of a yawning abyss and utter meaninglessness), active nihilism is marked by the strength of 
spirit which seems to destroy in order to create — much like an artist twisting conventions in order to invent a new 
style.
48
under the general blinds one to the individual, for all one has learned to see in this way of 
thinking is the general. 
If the patience and repose of Nietzsche’s conception of seeing makes it possible to 
observe the life of some individual without immediately judging it partially and incompletely, 
with the necessary blindness that comes with seeing only a general term in place of a particular, 
this may help inform how one can comport oneself more openly toward the other. The moralistic 
approach jumps on the slightest indeterminate stimulus and immediately settles the case before it 
has given it room to breathe; at the first sign of life other than it, it immediately strangles it back 
into something recognizable and familiar (generally in the form of an ad hoc rationalization) and 
does not concern itself with the stimulus beyond that point. More than anything, this moralizing 
approach is completely at odds with love, for it cannot grasp an other unless it subsumes that 
other under its own image — it is the bigoted moralist demanding that people be different, 
painting himself on the wall and exclaiming “Ecce homo!” Love, as Nietzsche describes it in The 
Gay Science, is a learned process that, at first, involves being generous with what is other: 
One must learn to love. –– This is what happens to us in music: First one has to 
learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it 
and delimit it as a separate life. Then it requires some exertion and good will to 
tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearance and 
expression, and kind hearted about its oddity. Finally there comes a moment when 
we are use to it, when we wait for it, when we sense that we should miss it if it 
were missing; and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we 
49
have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the 
world than it and only it. (Nietzsche 262) 
The aesthetic analogy made with music is crucial to understanding what Nietzsche means by 
“learning to love”, for the moralism he speaks against is a highly rational and conceptually-
based perspective, a manner of seeing according to the structures of general concepts, not a 
matter of feeling. His immoralism, as an inversion of the aforementioned “rationalistic” 
moralism, is an open-hearted, affirming, arguably loving immoralism. When hearing a piece of 
music, our senses are directly engaged in such a manner that it pulls our affective, embodied 
existence into the aesthetic experience of the music. This aesthetic experience is a matter of 
hearing particularities such as a melody, an unusual polyrhythm, or the tone of the singer’s voice, 
and accepting these as having their own life separate from our own. The effort and patience 
required to engage it as something strange and not fully known to ourselves is perhaps the most 
challenging moment in this process, for it involves an acceptance of uncertainty, of foreignness 
in the listener yet still requires the listener to meet the piece of music on the aural site of its very 
otherness as it presents itself and reaches out to the listener. Eventually we are able to meet it on 
its own terms and our patience will have rewarded us with an understanding far more 
comprehensive (but open-ended and always subject to further revision and complication) of the 
piece of music than we ever would have achieved if we heard it once, labeled it “Jazz”, and 
carried on to the next piece of music without a second thought for what rich life is to be found in 
the minute and obscure idiosyncrasies quietly present in the music. 
This aesthetic process of coming to appreciate and love a piece of music, of course, 
extends to the process of loving in other contexts. Nietzsche continues: “That is how we have 
50
learned to love all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, 
our patience, fair mindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually, it sheds its veil and 
turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality… Love, too, 
has to be learned” (262). Good will, patience, fair mindedness, and gentleness toward what is 
strange or other is perhaps the best characterization of what dispositions would make an ethics of 
understanding and openness possible. At no point is the other reduced to the conceptual 
understanding of the observer, nor is it taken out of the context of its own life; the other is 
instead affirmed as another independent life and its strangeness is accepted as a fact before it is 
slowly understood according to its own terms. The moralistic view enforces conformity to its 
own hermetically sealed law to the degree that anything other to it is heretical. Otherness is 
consequently forced to conform or to be condemned as an evil. Nietzsche’s immoralism affirms 
the other with a wide-open heart in an attempt to understand and comprehend the rich tapestry of 
life in its actual living movement, without prejudice about how forms of life ought to be.6 
6 This is not to say Nietzsche’s immoralism is without any prejudice whatsoever, but that it is without the particular 
moralizing prejudice that declares for others what is and is not a morally legitimate form of life.
51
Chapter Five: Open Comportment and The Infinite 
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, 
Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks 
of his cavern.” 
 (Blake xxii)   
“There is a great difference whether a poet is looking for the particular that goes 
with the general, or sees the general in the particular… the latter in fact 
constitutes the nature of poetry, expressing something without any thought of the 
general, and without indicating it. Now whoever has this living grasp of the 
particular is at the same time in possession of the general without realizing it.” 
(Goethe 33-34) 
When we previously considered the errors that follow from replacing the phenomena of 
becoming with hypostatized abstractions, one of the most crucial problems that emerged was the 
privative manner in which rationalistic abstractions reduce myriad processes to a few key aspects 
that are then taken as accounting for the whole. The privative function of vicious abstractionism 
deprives life of its wealth of details and variety — in short, of its infinite diversity — and thus 
denies the passing of life as unreliable, untrue, and inconsistent in favor of the timeless, deathless 
abstractions it derives from the passing of life, for these abstractions are consistent, reliable, and 
unchanging. The infinite, however, poses a unique problem for the conceptual mummification of 
52
Reason, for it cannot be reduced or delimited to anything more than an incomplete definition that 
only gestures to what it might be. The infinite is necessarily incomplete and, as such, cuts 
straight through rationalistic conceptions that narrowly circumscribes phenomena to its barest 
essentials. If vicious abstraction deprives becoming of its irreducible variety, the notion of the 
infinite helps to re-introduce that irreducible variety in an additive fashion. On the one hand, 
there is Nietzsche’s new perspectival infinity: “the world has become ‘infinite’ for us all over 
again, inasmuch as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite 
interpretations” (Nietzsche 336). If infinite interpretations are possible, the horizon of human 
understanding may be endless. Thus the purported “theories of everything” or “universal 
theories” cannot have the last say on what reality is like, for insofar as they are theories they are 
elaborate interpretations of endlessly interpretable phenomena. There is always therefore an air 
of incompleteness lurking behind any theory which attempts to account for all of reality, or even 
for the full scope of one particular.  
The “nature of poetry”, according to Goethe, is to see the general in the particular. This is 
a radical inversion of the rationalistic tendency to understand the particular in terms of the 
general. The reified concept is the general treated as particular, “thingified” and treated 
according to this misplaced status. Reified concepts are the consequence of an inversion of the 
poetic perspective as Goethe describes it. For this reason it is not a wholly artificial distinction to 
treat these perspectives as antipodes. If we found the reification of concepts to be the source of a 
great deal of error, perhaps the poetic emphasis on the particular will provide us some sense of 
how to undo the trouble caused by reification. A conceptual representation of some living 
movement can at best only give an external, limited, and incomplete picture of the life it tries to 
53
encapsulate. However, with the logical tendency that assumes the existence of identical cases, a 
conceptual representation rarely has such humility. It is often treated as complete, or at least as 
accounting for the wide range of normal patterns of life to the degree that anything that 
contradicts or falls outside of the general account is simply regarded as an anomalous curiosity, 
not a serious objection to the upheld norm or a suggestion of the general conception’s own 
incompleteness. 
In his essay entitled An Introduction to Metaphysics, Henri Bergson gives an account of 
two kinds of knowledge: “The first implies that we move round the object; the second, that we 
enter into it. The first depends on the point of view at which we are placed and on the symbols by 
which we express ourselves. The second neither depends on a point of view nor relies on any 
symbol” (Bergson 21). The first kind of knowledge that Bergson describes is relative knowledge, 
for it grasps a thing from without, and its external perspective, symbology, and whatever other 
tools of interpretation at its disposal inform and frame it in a highly contextual and conditioned 
manner. The second kind of knowledge is, for Bergson, absolute and metaphysical, for it 
understands an object “from within”, without recourse to other means of interpretation. 
With Bergson’s two kinds of knowledge, we also have two kinds of infinity: the 
perspectival infinity of Nietzsche is closely akin to the infinite points of view possible in 
Bergson’s relative knowledge; the second infinity in absolute knowledge is closer to that of the 
nature of poetry à la Goethe. Bergson says, 
But the absolute, which is the object and not its representation, the original and 
not its translation, is perfect, by being perfectly what it is. It is doubtless for this 
reason that the absolute has often  been identified with the infinite. Suppose that I 
54
wished to communicate to someone who did not know Greek the extraordinarily 
simple impression that a passage of Homer makes upon me; I should first give a 
translation of the lines, I should then comment on my translation, and then 
develop the commentary; in this way, by piling up explanation on explanation, I 
might approach nearer and nearer to what I wanted to express; but I should never 
quite reach it… Viewed from the inside, then, an absolute is a simple thing; but 
looked at from the outside, that is to say, relatively to other things, it becomes, in 
relation to these signs which express it, the gold coin for which we never seem 
able to finish giving small change. Now, that which lends itself at the same time 
both to an indivisible apprehension and to an inexhaustible enumeration is, by the 
very definition of the word, an infinite. (23) 
An object, according to Bergson, is capable of both an indivisible apprehension and an 
inexhaustible enumeration, making it an infinite. How could one  consider a particular object as 
infinite at all? Is it not finite insofar as it is an object? This seems like a contradiction in the 
meaning of the terms presented. But this would be a shortsighted resistance to Bergson’s insight, 
as he is using these terms in novel ways to express something beyond them — he is attempting to 
perform the very task about which he speaks by way of a poetically and metaphorically 
evocative use of language.7 The infinite is indivisible insofar as it is simply not reducible to any 
interpretation, no matter the kind. The infinite is also inexhaustible (it is etymologically derived 
7 While the term “infinity” may evoke traditional conceptions of a totalizing infinity, Bergson’s meaning is quite 
different from such notions and, consequently, has a notably different meaning. This is not the infinity of God, but 
an infinite qualified by being both indivisible and inexhaustible. Bergson’s experience reading Homer in the Greek is 
an example of this infinite. Bergson can have a simple, “absolute” apprehension of Homer as he reads him, but he 
can neither give an exhaustive external account nor experience a simpler apprehension, divisible into constituent 
parts, than he already experiences in Homer. On this view there is not, therefore, one all-encompassing Infinity, but 
infinitely many sites of the infinite.
55
from the Latin in-finitus literally meaning “not finite, finished”). However, relative accounts may 
pile on one another to get asymptotically closer to the infinite which one attempts to describe, yet 
such compounded attempts at description, of course, never fully grasp the infinite as such. There 
is always a remainder, an utter excess that cannot be accounted for. 
Let us also note how Bergson’s example of a simple perception of an absolute is an 
aesthetic example (i.e. reading Homer in the original Greek). This is another version of what 
Nietzsche says on learning to hear a piece of music and growing to love it in its uniqueness. The 
aesthetic experience of art is the site of intellectual sympathy, a key notion which Bergson 
introduces in the following passage: “It follows from this that an absolute could only be given in 
an intuition… By intuition is meant a kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself 
within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently 
inexpressible” (23-24). Intellectual sympathy is the means by which one can intuit an absolute 
from within itself. The sympathetic means of this intuition evokes Nietzsche’s sense of love that 
is learned inasmuch as it is an affective, open-hearted comportment toward that with which one 
sympathizes or loved that results in the beauty unveiled by what was once strange, in the simple 
and immediate comprehension of its life and meaning. Intellectual sympathy, too, requires 
discipline and patience in its active need to reverse the habitual role of rational thought to 
conceptualize its object.  
Intellectual sympathy may be the third precondition for an open ethical comportment 
along with learning to see and love. Bergson directly describes the process and aim of intuition 
by means of intellectual sympathy: “[Intuition by means of intellectual sympathy] is extremely 
difficult. The mind has to do violence to itself, has to reverse the direction of the operation by 
56
which it habitually thinks, has perpetually to revise, or rather recast, all its categories. But in this 
way it will attain to fluid concepts, capable of following reality in all its sinuosities and of 
adopting the very movement of the inward life of things” (51). Bergson’s optimism regarding 
what intuition can ultimately obtain sets a noble goal for our concerns with cultivating an open 
comportment. The difficulty of achieving intuition requires the self-discipline (or violence turned 
toward one’s habitual modes of thinking) to refrain from letting categories ossify and become 
dogmatically believed facts. One, along with Nietzsche, must be willing to constantly reevaluate, 
revise, and recast those values in order that the novel fluid concept may be attained — a concept 
that can gesture toward a fluid entity and that itself is fluid in that it adapts to change and evolves 
with the flow of life. This creates an openness to the very fluidity of becoming and perpetually 
resists reification, for the concept itself can never fully settle in order that it may keep up with 
what it represents. Beyond the fluid concept, intuition itself seems to be the achievement of an 
open comportment, the actualization of an open-hearted attunement with what is sympathized 
and loved in order that it may understand what is ultimately inexpressible in it. It is, in the last 
analysis, a deep feeling for another with love and sympathy for that other’s otherness is related to 
one’s own mysterious depths. 
 What are the ethical implications of this perspective on the cultivation of an open 
comportment? To see infinity in the particular, to be sensitive to what is overlooked, to be in tune 
with the life of another beyond caricature — to form an open comportment of this sort in order to 
more ethically engage with what we encounter. This comportment is more ethical insofar as it is 
more open (i.e. responsible) and more sensitive to the uncertainty, uniqueness, and ever renewing 
flow of becoming in which any undecided situation between any forms of life may emerge. It 
57
does not typify, nor does it reduce to formulae; it opens itself to the infinity of possibilities and 
arrangements of different relations and the temporal lives of those with whom we are concerned. 
It also does not preclude any one life from a universal conception, but rather approaches each life 
with a sensitivity to its own infinity, its irreducibility, its ultimately ineffable, dynamic or fluid 
“essence”, not fixed and ever true (for this would only gather what makes it common and 
universalize this into a static essence), but what makes its it uniquely itself, distinct and worthy 
of ethical engagement insofar as it exists, breathes, and has a life wholly of its own.  
58
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