Futures We Live In: Quetelet and Nietzsche

Abstract

Social and ethical concepts in Western modernity are marked by orientation toward the future. Two modes of such orientation can be distinguished: the orientation toward a future that is structured as continuous with the present, on the one hand, and the orientation toward a future that constitutes a break with every preceding time, on the other. As examples of these two modes of futurity in the nineteenth century, Quetelet's social statistics—a futurity continuous with the present—is discussed alongside Nietzsche's concept of the promise—a theorem of the discontinuous future event. Despite their opposition, both instances of futurity imply a constitutive reference to the other. This essay suggests that this mutual implication of the conflicting modes of futurity is essential for their modern theorization. The conflictual or even paradoxical intertwinement of continuous and discontinuous futurity appears as an irresolvable element in how the world in which we live is thought in modernity.

Keywords:

• epistemology
• futurity
• Nietzsche
• nineteenth-century philosophy
• probability
• promise
• Quetelet
• social theory

Notes

On Luhmann's discussion of time, see Elena Esposito, The Future of Futures: The Time of Money in Financing and Society (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2011), especially the section “Time Binding,” 18–36.

Niklas Luhmann, “Trust,” Trust; and Power: Two Works by Niklas Luhmann, introduction by Gianfranco Poggi, trans. Howard Davis, John Raffan, and Kathryn Rooney (Chichester, NY: Wiley, 1979), 13.

Aristotle, Physics, trans. Philipp H. Wicksteed and Francis M. Cornford (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), Book VI. 2 and 9 (232b 20–233a 32, 239b 5–240a 18); Book VIII. 8 (263a11– b 9).

For the concept of medium, see Luhmann, “Trust,” and Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz with Dirk Baecker, foreword by Eva M. Knodt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 160–163.

Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), Chapter 1.

This is a particular case of the general fact that systems theory ignores processes of genesis; see David A. Wellbery, “Die Ausblendung der Genese: Grenzen der systemtheoretischen Reform der Kulturwissenschaften,” Widerstände der Systemtheorie, ed. Albrecht Koschorke and Cornelia Vismann (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1999), 19–28.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 35–67.

See Werner Hamacher, “The Promise of Interpretation: Reflections on the Hermeneutical Imperative in Kant and Nietzsche,” Looking after Nietzsche, ed. Laurence A. Rickels (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 19–47.

For a parallel reading of Quetelet and Nietzsche, see Benno Wagner, “Zarathustra on Laurentian Hill: Quetelet, Nietzsche, and Mach (‘Description of a Struggle’),” in Stanley Corngold and Benno Wagner, Franz Kafka: The Ghost in the Machine (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 17–34. In a broader context, see Jürgen Link, Versuch über den Normalismus: Wie Normalität produziert wird (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1997); and Paul Fleming, Exemplarity and Mediocrity: The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

For references in Nietzsche, see Link, Versuch über den Normalismus.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. and introduction by Peter Preuss (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1980), 55.

Ibid., 55.

Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), chapters 1 and 21.

Ibid., chapter 12.

Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage 49.

Ibid., 58.

Lambert A. J. Quetelet, A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties, facsimile of the translation by Solomon Diamond, 1842 (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1969), 108B. The original French work bears the double title: Sur l’homme et le développement de ses facultés, ou Essai de physique sociale (Paris: Bachelier, 1835).

See Hacking, Taming of Chance, chapter 4.

Adolphe Lambert Quetelet, Lettres sur la théorie des probabilités, appliquée aux sciences morales et politiques (Brüssel: M. Hayez, 1846).

See Tobias Nikolaus Klass, Das Versprechen: Grundzüge einer Rhetorik des Sozialen nach Searle, Hume und Nietzsche (Munich: Fink, 2002).

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality 35.

Ibid., 36.

“… it is an active desire not to let go, a desire to keep on desiring what has been, on some occasion, desired, really it is the will's memory: so that a world of strange new things, circumstances and even acts of will may be placed quite safely in between the original ‘I will,’ ‘I shall do’ and the actual discharge of the will, its act, without breaking this long chain of the will” (Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality 55).

Hugo Grotius, Law and War and Peace, trans. Francis W. Kelsey, introduction by James Brown Scott (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962).

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality 35.