Naming and Nietzsche
Putting the blood back into reference
In large part, Kripke’s Naming and Necessity is a serene demolition of the theory of proper names — a conception of how a word is attached to its unique referent — that emerged from the texts of Frege and Russell. This beleaguered tradition in analytic (or Anglo-American-Australian) philosophy of language rallies under the flag of descriptivism. Put very schematically, the fundamental claim of the descriptivist is that when reference to something is achieved by the utterance of the proper name for it, the speaker had a psychically instantiated intention to refer to the thing which possesses the property or properties associated with the proper name; it is, therefore, the properties of the thing itself that ultimately secure the reference to it. On this account, if I say ‘Nietzsche’, I refer to the person who, in fact, wrote a dazzling array of aphoristic and essayistic books and plummeted into madness in the streets of Turin — that is, the person whose (historical) existence satisfies the descriptions I associate with the name for him.
After calmly appealing to the intuitions of his readers to contest descriptivism as a philosophical position (and there is an apparent consensus in the relevant literature that he was momentously successful in doing so), Kripke sketches his own alternative to the theory of names proffered by the once ascendant Frege-Russell camp — or at least, a more adequate ‘picture’ (NN, 80). This picture is painted by the metaphor of the ‘initial baptism’, which recurs several times in Kripke’s discourse; one wonders if this metaphor is not unusually rich for an analytic philosopher (NN, 78, 96-97, 106, 135). The initial baptism is the distinct historical event — this ceremony could, in principle, be empirically verified — that ‘fixes the reference’ of the name or word; this is accomplished with a gesture which signals the referent or a ‘description’ that identifies it by its ‘contingent marks’ (NN, 96, 105, 107). Kripke is careful to accentuate that the description of the initial baptism does not function as if it was an abbreviation of the proper name, as the tradition of Frege and Russell alleges. Rather, the description specifies a thing’s ‘uniquely identifying property’ or properties and thus — like the signalling gesture — cleaves it from the wider universe in which it participates, such that a name can be hooked unto it in the baptism (NN, 107).
Kripke deploys the additional metaphor of the ‘chain’ to illuminate the subsequent use of the proper name within the linguistic community which accommodates it (NN, 91-93). (Interestingly, the metaphor of the chain is also important for Nietzsche; he posits that the history of a thing is ‘a continuous chain of signs’, the imprints — or scars — left by the wills to power which successively conquer it in order to put it to their own use (GM, 51).) On Kripke’s account, a name’s history is its successive transfers from ‘link to link’, from speaker to speaker, through ‘various sorts of talk’ — a chain that is, or could be, traceable to the ritual of the initial baptism (NM, 91). This chain ‘determines’ the achievement of the reference, not the referent’s properties coordinating with the descriptions (whatever they may be) associated by the speaker with the proper name for this referent; the utterer of the name is simply the heir to its history (NM, 137). The interplay of the chain and the baptism, as decisive metaphors of Kripke’s text, powerfully illuminates language in its socio-historical being. One of Kripke’s gentle examples of this metaphorical interplay is Feynman — a figure who is perhaps a more appropriate presence in the discourse of an esteemed analytic philosopher than Nietzsche, who rages against the stylistic norms of austere clarity which (officially) govern Anglo-American-Australian philosophical writing. Kripke’s illustration is striking for its innocence: a baby is brought into the world and his family, in an initial baptism, name him Richard Feynman; after this ceremony of the cradle, the name ‘Feynman’ circulates within a linguistic community, flowing from speaker to speaker, eventually reaching the man whose only (and non-specific) descriptive knowledge of the historical person Feynman was that he was a famous physicist. The sheer fact of the speaker’s entanglement in the ‘chain of communication’ that was born with Feynman — that is, his inheritance of the name’s history — is what secures his reference to the individual Feynman when he utters this name, rather than the properties of Feynman himself (there are, obviously, many famous physicists) (NN, 91-92). As the Feynman example makes clear, Kripke's theory of reference is remarkably bloodless — it does not disturb the tranquility of the rest of Naming and Necessity.
Nietzsche, I want to suggest, puts the blood back into reference. Contrary to the appearance of ‘master’ and ‘slave’ in Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy, where they are primarily symbols for the will to power in its affirmative and negative qualities and the active and reactive forces which are cultivated by these ontological modalities of the will to power, the master and the slave in the first essay of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals occupy determinate socio-historical positions (NP, 46-47, 104-05). For Nietzsche, the class relationship between the primordial master and his mutilated slaves was structured and sustained by a ‘hideous succession of murder, arson, rape and torture’, atrocities indulged in by the master as if mere ‘student pranks’ (GM, 23). The cunning triumphs of the slaves upon the political terrains of religion and grammar — Nietzsche’s genealogy, of course, asserts that lurking behind these victories was the festering instinct of ressentiment, the ‘inexhaustible and insatiable […] realm of subterranean revenge’ that the Nietzschean text dissolves the revolutionary class consciousness of the masses into (as Lukács underlines in Destruction of Reason) — terminated the torrent of violence which once eviscerated them (GM, 91). On the Nietzschean account, the descendants of these slaves are the different masters, the ruling class, of the Europe which atrophies from the plagues of democracy and decadence; the two-front revolt against the first masters, the deployment of a morality of Good and Evil whose inner core is a ‘hangman’s metaphysics’ of moral culpability, was essential to the European peninsula becoming the nest of the slave (TI, 48). (I discuss the class politics of Nietzsche more here.)
What is crucial for this article is that, before the primordial master was deluded into abstaining from atrocity by the slave revolt in morality, he ‘claimed the right’ to invent values from the stratification of classes his violence gruesomely maintained — or more specifically, from the ‘pathos of distance’ or ‘feeling of superiority’ derived from glancing at the slaves as they toiled and bled (GM, 12). For Nietzsche, the study of etymology provides the decisive evidence here. While the insipid ‘English psychologists’ — in their boundless ignorance of history — idly hypothesise that the masses devised the moral value Good in order to extol the acts of benevolence and charity which nourished them, Nietzsche narrates that grasping the true etymologies of the ‘names’ for the valuation ‘Good’ was what led him to unearth the actual historical ‘eruption’ of this moral value (GM, 10-11). Having asserted that the foundational idea of the names for Good was ‘aristocrat’ and ‘noble’ as markers of socio-historical position, Nietzsche’s genealogy stakes the claim that the first masters invented these names to, in the spontaneous affirmation of their own demands, glorify themselves for their ‘main nuance’ — that is, what exalted them above and over the slaves, a horde so wretched that it, unable to overthrow the dominant class by armed force, deviously retreated to the fields of religion and grammar to stage its uprising in morals (GM, 14).
The master's invention of names for Good — such as the ancient Greek masters' veneration of themselves by devising ‘the truthful’ — is cast by Foucault as the imposition of an interpretation as if ‘with the blows of the hammer’, not the announcement of a ‘sleeping truth’ (NFM, 275-78). In the short text in which this claim appears, Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Foucault's ambition is to unify the triumvirate of thinkers named in his title as the great liberators of the sign from ‘the original signified', or the referent it ostensibly ‘offers to interpretation'; the Nietzsche, Freud and Marx portrayed by Foucault triumphantly prosecuted a critique of metaphysical ‘depth’, exposing this alleged interiority as ‘only a game and surface fold’ — an interpretation, a veil (NFM, 273). But a rewriting in the terms of Kripkean discourse is also possible: one could say that the master's invention of names such as ‘the truthful’ is their initial baptism, and that he fixes their reference to himself. Implicated in this, however, is the slaughter and terror of the class structure that disfigured ancient humanity; this baptism in blood is thus a universe away from Kripke’s innocent — even quaint, compared to Nietzschean genealogy — Feynman example. Naming and Necessity alerts us to the history of the names with which we cut the world into manageable pieces — but Nietzsche suggests, in a contribution to the (political) philosophy of language, that this history, or language’s socio-historical being, is never far from class struggle, ‘thorough and prolonged bloodletting, like the beginning of all great things on earth’ (GM, 41).