Force: Towards an Aesthetic Concept of Life

I

The “threshold of modernity,” Foucault claimed, is “biological”;² modernity begins with or as the turn to “life.” In the context of his historical account of successive power formations, Foucault recognized this biological turn of modernity in the fact that the object of the so-called “disciplines” is no longer the “mechanical” body, “the image of which had for so long haunted those who dreamt of disciplinary perfection. This new object is the natural body, the bearer of forces and the seat of duration.”³ The philosophical blueprint of this new, natural body of disciplinary power—or of Foucault’s account of it, which he developed out of Cassirer’s book on the Enlightenment—can be found in Leibniz’s monad. The decisive aspect of the monad in this view is that its “changes” or alterations are “acts” (actions) because they follow from an “internal principle” that Leibniz contemplated naming “active force”: “The action of the internal principle which brings about the change or the passage from one perception to another may be called appetition. It is true that appetite cannot always attain altogether the whole perception to which it tends, but it always obtains some part of it, and so attains new perceptions.”⁴ The monad has “appetites,” it has “forces,” it is “active”; in short: the monad lives.⁵

The decisive point of this idea of living processes is that it does not tie (self-)acting to self-consciousness; the monad can also be active in a “period of unconsciousness” (étourdissement or “dizziness”⁶). This insight into living as an activity that is non- or unconscious raises the problem of how to think the relation between the unconscious activity of life and the self-conscious activity of spirit (in the broad sense of the capacity for rational practice). For if the body is understood as “natural,” in the emphatic sense of Foucault’s statement about the body of disciplines, that is, no longer as “mechanical” but instead as living, then the dualism of body and mind also no longer holds with which Descartes had disrupted the traditional concept of the human being; the duality of life and spirit as two distinct forms of activity is not (in the Cartesian sense) dualistic. This question regarding the relation between living body and self-conscious spirit can be raised from both sides. Beginning from the body as living and thus self-actuating, one can inquire into the consequences of this new conception for the other side, the concept of the mind (or spirit); that is Baumgarten’s question, which he will answer by saying that the mind is not a Cartesian “I” but rather a “subject.” Beginning from the side of spirit as self-conscious teleology, one can raise the question whether the concept of “life” indeed designates an objective reality or rather an (although necessary) “idea” formed by the mind in order to make sense of nature; this is obviously Kant’s question.

Both questions regarding the relation between life and spirit, between unconscious and self-conscious activity, share the same presupposition: they both presuppose that Leibniz’s neo-Aristotelian terminology—the language of “appetites,” “forces,” “actions” attributed to the monad—is also Aristotelian in substance, referring to living processes as teleological. According to this (neo-)Aristotelian presupposition, the “internal principle” or “active force” of the monad’s alterations is their immanent aim, their telos, as the possibility of their reality.⁷ This is how the (Kantian) question regarding the objectivity of the category of life has mostly been understood: as the question whether teleology without self-consciousness does indeed exist or is just a projection of a spirit that understands itself as teleologically structured. In the following, I want to reject this shared assumption of the teleological character of life. Irrespective of Leibniz’s conviction, this teleological assumption does not follow from the terminology of “appetites,” “forces,” “actions” that the Monadology had introduced. These concepts, and thus the concept of life, can also be understood non-teleologically. Following Nietzsche, I want to call such a non-teleological understanding an “aesthetic concept...