Nietzsche's Values 0190098236, 9780190098230

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Citations
1. Value: Introducing the Problems
PART I: BODY VALUES
2. Life: As Valuer and Valued
3. Drives: Psychology of Drives Not Agents
4. Affects: Memory and Suffering
PART II: HUMAN VALUE
5. Human: Agency as Our Life- Condition
6. Words: Language and Community
7. Nihilism: Against Morality— and Truth?
8. Freedom: Science, History, Psychology
PART III: NIETZSCHE VALUES
9. The Yes: Value Monism
10. Self: To Become Who One Is
11. Creating: Founding New Social Norms
12. Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return
Bibliography
Name Index
Subject Index

Citation preview

Nietzsche’s Values

Nietzsche’s Values J O H N R IC HA R D S O N

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Richardson, John, 1951– author. Title: Nietzsche’s values / John Richardson. Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University Publication, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019059652 | ISBN 9780190098230 (hb) | ISBN 9780190098254 (epub) | ISBN 9780190098261 Subjects: LCSH: Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900. | Values. Classification: LCC B3317 .R465 2020 | DDC 193—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019059652 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

Contents Preface Acknowledgments Citations

ix xvii xix

1. Value: Introducing the Problems 1.1 Studying values—​and valuing 1.2 The value of values 1.3 Twelve principles from the study of values 1.4 Incorporating the truth about values 1.5 Metaethical multiplicity

1 3 6 13 26 30

PA RT I   B O DY   VA LU E S 2. Life: As Valuer and Valued 2.1 Life: an introduction 2.2 Life as valuing 2.3 Life values power 2.4 Justifying power 2.5 Lessons from life’s value

39 41 46 53 61 71

3. Drives: Psychology of Drives Not Agents 3.1 Knowing the drives 3.2 Drives valuing 3.3 Conflict and synthesis of drives 3.4 New relation to the drives

81 83 92 101 108

4. Affects: Memory and Suffering 4.1 Affects

115 117



4.2 The problem of the past

127



4.3 Suffering and pessimism

139



4.1.1 Analyzing affects 4.1.2 Affects and drives 4.1.3 Lessons for the affects

4.2.1 The past’s importance 4.2.2 Problems with retrospection 4.3.1 Defining suffering 4.3.2 Reply to Schopenhauer 4.3.3 Suffering’s genealogy and types 4.3.4 Sick and healthy suffering

118 121 124 130 134 140 143 147 153

vi Contents

PA RT I I   H UM A N   VA LU E S 5. Human: Agency as Our Life-​Condition 5.1 Doubts against the subject/​agent 5.2 Do life-​conditions justify?

161 164 172



5.3 Genealogy of agency 5.4 Human means values as true

188 196

6. Words: Language and Community 6.1 Community and the common 6.2 Who speaks? 6.3 Language’s risks 6.4 Commons and individuals 6.5 New language, new community

204 206 211 217 224 233

7. Nihilism: Against Morality—​and Truth? 7.1 Nihilism

240 242





5.2.1 Transcendental argument in Kant 5.2.2 Against transcendental argument 5.2.3 Necessary perspectives



7.1.1 No-​to-​life nihilism 7.1.2 No-​values nihilism



7.2.1 What it is 7.2.2 Why it’s bad

173 175 180

246 251

7.2 Morality

255



7.3 Critiques of moral values

266



7.4 Genealogy of the will to truth 7.5 Assessing the will to truth

283 290



7.3.1 Against pity 7.3.2 Against equality

255 258

268 277

8. Freedom: Science, History, Psychology 8.1 Doubts about science 8.2 Freedom

304 306 315

8.3 History

327

8.4 Psychology 8.5 What’s next

342 348



8.2.1 Animal freedom as drive-​unity 8.2.2 Human freedom as agency 8.2.3 Nietzschean freedom by genealogy



8.3.1 Nietzsche’s path from UM.ii 8.3.2 The new science of history 8.3.3 The historical sense

318 319 322

328 334 339

Contents  vii

PA RT I I I   N I E T Z S C H E   VA LU E S 9. The Yes: Value Monism 9.1 Monisms and dualisms 9.2 Against opposite values 9.3 Saying Yes and saying yes-​and-​no

353 356 363 374



387 394



9.3.1 The Yes and everyday values 9.3.2 Dualism redux

9.4 How to say Yes 9.5 The value of the Yes

378 383

10.

Self: To Become Who One Is 10.1 Selfhood as reflexivity 10.2 Genealogy of the self 10.3 A Nietzschean self 10.4 How to become a self

398 400 405 412 417



10.5 Being one’s own

429





10.4.1 Self out of multiple parts 10.4.2 Self out of enveloping other 10.5.1 One’s own perspective 10.5.2 Selfishness

418 424

429 432

11. Creating: Founding New Social Norms 11.1 Herds and individuals 11.2 Creating values, founding norms

439 442 449



455 461







11.2.1 Creating 11.2.2 Founding

11.3 De-​moralizing norms 11.4 Recognizing rank-​order

11.4.1 The ladder of human types 11.4.2 Social classes: noble and herd

451 453

464 467

12. Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return 12.1 Superhuman 12.2 Religions and gods

475 478 482



507 525



12.2.1 Diagnosing religion 12.2.2 New religion

12.3 Eternal return 12.4 In lieu of a conclusion

Bibliography Name Index Subject Index

485 494

527 537 541

Preface Nietzsche has, more and more clearly, the importance for us that he expected to have. Or so at least I have to hope, now as I’m adding to the enormous supply of pages and books written about him—​and adding, it may seem, an absurdly excessive amount. The very breadth of Nietzsche’s appeal shows that he is amenable to many kinds of approach. There’s room for lots of different ways of writing about him; he himself undermines confidence that there is one right way. So let me try to specify the kind of understanding this book aims to find and convey. It clearly belongs, to begin with, to the “analytic” genre of writing about Nietzsche. If “analysis” is taking concepts and claims apart into parts and examining these in close detail, then the book does try to do this across the range of Nietzsche’s philosophical topics. It tries to determine Nietzsche’s thinking on twelve main topics—​named in the chapter titles—​by specifying what he “means” by his words and statements addressing them. It looks to sharpen these meanings by noticing ambiguities and the ever-​finer options he might mean. It tries to choose among these options which his principal point must be. There is huge work to do in giving adequate analyses of even these central terms, not to mention the host of subsidiary ones. But the book makes a second main effort in the opposite direction, by locating these concepts and claims within the web of Nietzsche’s other concerns and trying to show how his “local” meanings are affected by that whole network of others. These relations to his other views tend to be discounted when one’s aim is to locate or place Nietzsche’s position amid our current alternatives. This book practices “synthesis” as well as analysis—​and in ways and to a degree that may go against the grain of much recent analytic treatment of Nietzsche. It tries to consider the full range of his topics and show how his views on each is interwoven with his views on others. These two aims of analytic detail and synthetic unity combine to explain the length of this study. Thus this book aims to give an overall picture (or map) of Nietzsche’s thought that is strongly detailed but also strongly unified. That thought amounts to Nietzsche’s own picture of the world and of us (humans) in our relation to it. So the aim is to give a picture of this picture. But we must bear in mind a couple of things about Nietzsche’s “picture.” First, it is strongly valuative: in describing the world, it mixes in assessments of things’ worth, nobility, strength, and health—​to mention a few of his most frequent

x Preface standards. As valuative, the picture is meant to engage not just our thinking (believing), but also our willing and our feeling. The picture involves an account of the main task Nietzsche thinks that we—​all humanity—​have in this age; he depicts a future he wants us to want. The main part of our own task will be to specify and analyze this valuative aspect of his picture. Second, Nietzsche offers his readers not just a picture, but reasons to accept it, values and all. Indeed he embeds these reasons into the picture itself. He describes world-​and-​us in ways that give us grounds to accept this picture. Another main task will be to identify and assess these reasons. Sometimes they take the form of explicit arguments supporting that picture as true; then, of course, we try to determine their logical structure, premises, and evidence. But Nietzsche also gives other kinds of reasons to his readers, including what we might call “emotive” ones, and we will need to identify these as well. Returning now to the book’s aim at synthesis; this is justified, I  claim, by the special character of Nietzsche’s own picture. The latter is—​against some appearances—​highly synthesized and unified. He shapes his views on any given topic in close relation to his views on others. His work is even exceptional, I suggest, in how often it makes surprising connections between ideas—​ between ideas on topics that seem quite “removed” from one another. His ideas are connected—​and support one another—​along a different structure of joints than we expect from philosophical systems, and this is one reason Nietzsche’s “system” is hard to see. Nietzsche integrates his picture this way because he thinks that the world (which this picture is of) is itself strongly interinvolved. No thing could be different without the whole world (and its whole history) being different as well. Indeed, things are ontologically dependent on one another—​nothing is a thing in itself, everything is constituted by its relations to other things. So Nietzsche unites his picture in order to reflect the world’s own strong unity. And now our picture of his picture must have this synthetic character in turn. We only adequately determine his thinking on any given topic by noticing how it bears on and fits with those others. Now I’ve mentioned that only some of the reasons Nietzsche gives his readers to accept his picture amount to arguments. Others give what we might call “emotive” support:  they draw us in by appealing not to our methods for aligning beliefs to truth, but instead to (what Nietzsche will call) our drives and affects. And this raises a worry: that he overuses this appeal to emotive support for his picture and cares too little about epistemic reasons (i.e., grounds that count for this picture’s truth). The worry can apply not just to the reasons Nietzsche gives us, but to those that persuade him to adopt the picture himself. This worry belongs to a larger question that will concern us throughout: How much does Nietzsche care about truth? Many readers have supposed that he

Preface  xi cares much less about it than philosophers before him; they have taken this as either a damning mark against him or as to his credit (and perhaps to the credit of the view). This book reads him differently. It takes his critique of truth very seriously. But it takes this critique to reach quite different lessons than a disregard for truth. Nietzsche thinks he cares more about truth than other philosophers do. This is partly because he is not in thrall to a moral bias, but also because he understands better the kind of truth there really can be—​the kind humans can and do have. So he rewrites philosophers’ previous idea of truth while still giving it preeminent value. However these claims that Nietzsche offers a unified picture of human-​in-​ world and offers this picture as true seem both to be refuted immediately by one of the most striking features of his writing: its pervasive self-​contradiction. He almost never says P without, somewhere else and often in the same work and even same paragraph, saying not-​P. He says (seemingly) contradictory things about every major topic. How can he want or have a unified picture if his assertions aren’t even consistent? Far from lending mutual support, they seem to repel and undermine one another. And if he doesn’t care about consistency, how can he care about truth? But, again, this book will find a different point in this practice. Nietzsche thinks that these seemingly inconsistent views present different perspectival angles on their topic and that the “full truth” about it requires their joint contribution. He also thinks, however, that these different perspectives are not all of equal epistemic value; some see from a “higher” position and so “see more” than others. So our task is to identify, among the disparate things he says on a topic, which among them he thinks sees it best. A key reason for the diversity of Nietzsche’s views on any given topic is the historical way he treats it. This book’s emphasis on the historical dimension and force of his thinking is another main difference, I think, from most analytic accounts of him. Nietzsche views a topic like freedom in a very different way than analytic philosophers have been used to. He sees it as the referent or target of an evolving series of perspectives, all of which remain active today. To understand “what freedom is” we need to see how the past history of senses are compacted into our present meaning. That higher epistemic position will, above all, lie in this historical comprehensiveness. Thus we will approach many main topics by seeing how Nietzsche’s “conflicting” views on it reflect his effort to track the idea’s historical trajectory. But the truth about a concept lies not just in what it has been and is, but also in what it can and should become. Nietzsche wants thinking to be historical in a way that includes and in fact emphasizes this “future history.” So, most generally, his values include his idea of the “task” we now face out of that history—​ our task as a culture, even as a species. His values culminate in a picture of the

xii Preface future he tries to aim us toward. This task is, abstractly, to “incorporate the truth about values.” I think this is the task he calls, at the beginning of Ecce Homo, “the heaviest demand . . . [human] has ever been set.” My account of this aim will be the unifying theme of this book. I’ll try to show how Nietzsche’s other main ideas all hang together around this goal he tries to set us. And I’ll try to show that this goal has both the importance and the difficulty that attract him to it. So now we turn from this book’s form or method to its content. Let me sketch very quickly its main issues and claims and preview its chapter contents. Nietzsche’s most important topic, I try to show, is values. He believes that his main insights concern our values; his books are filled with diagnoses of them. He wants above all to improve how we think about values—​and how we value. He wants, in brief, to value in the light of a crucially improved thinking about them—​and he wants us to do so, too. Thus he claims to uncover important truths about values. Some are truths about values in general, others are truths about Europe’s dominant, Christian, moral values in particular. In announcing these truths he contributes to what he thinks is a prolonged, ineluctable process by which our modern scientific will to truth finally faces the truth about values—​the last and hardest topic for it to face. As these truths are exposed, our culture, and the rest of the world through it, is confronted with a great spiritual crisis and challenge: How can and will we go on to value once we have uncovered these truths about our valuing? How can we value, now for the first time, honestly (i.e., while facing the truth about what we’re doing)? Humanity is confronted, as Nietzsche puts it, with the challenge to “incorporate” the truth about values—​to incorporate it not just as a belief among other beliefs, but into the very act of valuing, as we value. But it is extremely difficult to do so because this truth tends to undermine our valuing. This is so for our Christian, moral values in particular because the truth is that these values are “sick” (he will try to show) and depend on lies. But it is also true for values more widely, insofar as they involve a framing claim that these things (that are valued) are really, independently good. For the truth, Nietzsche holds, is that all values are dependent on valuings—​are “perspectival.” And although it is easy enough to hold this as a theoretical or philosophical view, it is very much harder to carry this insight into the valuing by which we live. We live indeed in the age in which the will to truth, exposing the truth about values, is gradually making its way down into our valuing, where its main effect is to undermine and erode our ability to value. Nietzsche famously calls this nihilism. What makes the challenge to “incorporate the truth about values” so difficult is not so much holding on to the truth as finding a way to value again in the light of it. Nietzsche offers his own values as ones that can be valued while

Preface  xiii facing the truth—​both the truth about values in general and the truth about these values in particular. They are values we can honestly value. In ascribing to Nietzsche this strong allegiance to the truth, this book diverges, I think, from most “continental” readings of him. To be sure, this truth has a different—​perspectival and historical—​character than is often insisted upon in analytic readings. But Nietzsche thinks that this is the very thing truth is and can be for us—​our human truth. Rather than downgrading and subordinating his will to truth to other interests, he wants us to push it as far as we humanly can and with respect to the most difficult topic: our values. He has in this regard the same ultimate allegiance that philosophers have always claimed. But are Nietzsche’s own views true? I  will mostly desist from inserting my own judgments into this story. Or, at least, I will avoid doing so explicitly! For throughout, both in the overall position and in the views on particular topics I attribute to him, my strong aim is to give a reading of his texts that is as philosophically interesting and even plausible as I can make it. I believe that he has important insights to offer on all of the topics I address. Obviously I don’t think that there is nothing to criticize in the views I present, both in general and in particulars. But my ambition is to interpret and synthesize Nietzsche’s ideas into the strongest positions I can and to leave assessments of them to readers. Chapter 1, “Value,” introduces Nietzsche’s general notion of values and works to formulate his metaethical position, which will orient all the later discussions. It distinguishes two ways that he speaks of “values”: as the objects of his study and as the things he values. Only in the latter sense does he see them as good. This raises the question of which sense has priority for him—​which he thinks refers to values as they truly are. The whole book will try to show his allegiance to the first, naturalistic view of them. A value is just the object of a valuing; it’s a “valued.” I’ll call this his internalism and perspectivism. It is the central truth he strives to incorporate into his own valuing: he means to call his values “good” in a sense consistent with it. On this naturalistic view, we’ll see, a “value” is essentially a sign used by a will or aiming; a will “values” precisely in so using a sign. Usually we have in mind positive signs toward which the aiming steers, but, of course, there can also be negative signs, “disvalues.” As such a sign, a value is dependent on a will that, in steering by it, values it. Recognizing Nietzsche’s idea of values as signs is the key to much of his thought about them. Seeing a value as a sign, we see why he insists that it’s not only humans that value. Animals are clearly responsive to signs in their perceptual discernments. So a predator may employ a certain smell as a sign of prey. And we can see ways that plants are responsive to signs as well. Nietzsche holds that willing (or aiming) is something that all organisms do. It depends not at all on consciousness. And,

xiv Preface in their aiming, all organisms use signs to steer this aiming by. In this crucial sense all living things value. Part I examines Nietzsche’s account of this biological valuing. This operates not just in other organisms, but in our own human bodies, which of course is where his interest lies. It is the underlying level in our valuing, very little noticed by us. The part’s three chapters discuss, respectively, the ultimate aim of this deep valuing, how it operates in our drives, and how it is also carried in our affects or feelings. Chapter 2, “Life,” treats Nietzsche’s key concept of life—​the crux of his “biology”—​and his famous insistence that the basic and pervasive character of living things is their “will to power.” It focuses on his frequent citing of “life” as a criterion for value and on his use of it to justify the value of power. The key question concerns the structure of this argument and the metaethical position it involves. In what sense (if any) does he think that life or power is truly valuable, such that we should value it? We must look for the strongest sense consistent with the basic idea that values are simply valueds. Chapter  3, “Drives,” begins to make Nietzsche’s idea of this bodily valuing more concrete by developing the first and primary way this valuing occurs—​ in our drives. These are the principal explainers in Nietzsche’s psychology. Our drives are the ways we press ahead toward goals, with the underlying aim of power or growth. We value, often unconsciously, in the signs by which these drives steer. Each of us consists of very many such drives, synthesized by some “balance of power” among them. This drive-​synthesis gives each body a system of values: the web of signs it aims toward or away from. Chapter 4, “Affects,” treats the second dimension of our bodily valuing—​in our affects. In these we “feel” the world’s impacts upon us; we evaluate, in this very feeling, how these impacts strengthen or weaken us. So here we value not by steering toward goods (as in our drives), but reactively and retrospectively. We use those impacts as signs in a different way: as signs of how to feel that we are and have been growing—​or declining. This backward turn in our affects opens up a great problem for Nietzsche, which I call his “problem of the past.” Our affectivity also raises the problem of suffering, whose felt judgment “against life” Schopenhauer uses to ground pessimism—​a conclusion that Nietzsche denies and reverses. So here we broach some of the “existential” problems that later chapters will address. Part II turns to Nietzsche’s account of the distinctive way in which we humans value by virtue of our special capacities for consciousness, language, and agency. This is the kind of valuing we ordinarily suppose is all of valuing. Nietzsche pays enormous attention to its special character; his main “scientific” task is to explain it. But his diagnosis is strongly critical. He works hard to reduce our pride in our ability to value this way. The part’s four chapters focus on four aspects of these

Preface  xv “human values”: their “agential” character, the way they are “common” or shared, their development into morality and nihilism, and their claim to “free” us. Chapter  5, “Human,” lays out Nietzsche’s account of the major innovation that made us human: what we call our “agency.” He thinks that our conceptions of ourselves as subjects and agents are very largely mistaken. Nevertheless the very thinking of ourselves in these ways makes the key difference. We’ll see how Nietzsche here develops a naturalistic alternative to Kant’s transcendental arguments: our posit of ourselves as agents is not a possibility-​condition but a life-​condition. This posit makes us able to attend to a new kind of value-​sign, one that we steer by consciously. An important feature of this human way of valuing is its claim that its values should be “true”—​should be grounded in reasons and not just in what we happen to want. Chapter  6, “Words,” treats a second distinguishing feature of our human values: their formulation in words. Language belongs, Nietzsche thinks, to the uniquely social character of human life. It is the community that “means” things when we speak. Our human values, as worded, are distinctive in being held in common, as norms. They are accepted because this is “how one values” in the community to which one belongs. They thus serve a “herding” function, which strengthens the group but at the expense of members’ individuality. Nietzsche’s own question is how, given this way all of his words have “common” meanings, he can use them to express his own quite individual thoughts. We will need to see the grounds but also the limits to his critique of our sociality. Chapter  7, “Nihilism,” turns to Nietzsche’s account of the culmination he thinks these human values are now arriving at, in which they expose the truth about themselves and so undermine themselves, in the great crisis he calls nihilism. This loss of values is, more precisely, one of two things he calls nihilism. In another sense the term applies to morality itself, back through its history; in this sense morality is nihilistic not by not having values, but by having values that are “anti-​life” (as he claims). This charge against morality seems to apply as well to the will to truth that is now undermining it; we must weigh just how damning Nietzsche takes this critique of the truth-​goal (as ascetic or anti-​life) to be. Chapter 8, “Freedom,” tries to show that it’s not damning at all: rather than dismissing or diminishing that will to truth, Nietzsche sees it as the path to new and better values. He thinks that he brings the sciences of history and (especially) psychology to a maturity in which they can at last begin to explain the most important fact about us, which is the character of our values. By exposing the functions and purposes in these values, we make it for the first time possible to free ourselves from the forces that have all along controlled us through them. We find, through this truth about morality, a more genuine freedom than Kant thought he found in morality itself.

xvi Preface Part III proceeds to look at Nietzsche’s lessons from his diagnosis and critique of morality. It tries to lay out the new values he projects for us as those we can value “honestly” (i.e., while facing that truth about values: about both values in general and these new values themselves). He defends them, ultimately, as the values we can and must value in order to value honestly. The part’s four chapters present in turn the affirmative stance needed to sustain this honesty, how the honesty makes one more fully oneself, Nietzsche’s aim to embed these new values in social norms, and, finally, the new religion designed to sustain these norms. Chapter 9, “The Yes,” treats the centerpiece of these new values, the stance I will call “the Yes.” Nietzsche sets his readers the goal of a “universal affirmation” which sees everything, even the ugly, the weak, and the sick as good. The bad is itself a way of being good. This amounts to a “value monism” and a denial of “opposite values” such as he thinks are presumed in morality’s distinction between “good” and “evil.” This Yes is expressed in some of Nietzsche’s most famous ideas, including the eternal return and amor fati. It poses many puzzles to us. We must see, in particular, how he offers this value as to be valued “honestly” (above all, as a valued). Chapter 10, “Self,” develops how incorporating the truth about values allows one to “become who one is”: to become an individual and self, crystallizing from the herd identity one has in living by norms. Nietzsche’s idea of the self roots it in our reflexivity or self-​relation: adequately to “be a self ” is to become more adequately reflexive by seeing better what values are “other” or alien to oneself and replacing them with values of one’s own. We’ll see how Nietzsche tries to specify this “own.” And we’ll see how he claims this selfhood to be the culmination of a long historical process in which the needed abilities evolved. Chapter 11, “Creating,” turns to the social or political ambitions Nietzsche has for his ideas. He doesn’t only mean to show how individuals should “create” new values for themselves. He also wants to “found” values as new norms for a new society—​for a new kind of herd. These values will spread through the herd as much of that honesty in valuing as possible. The new norms will be honest by being “de-​moralized”: they will recognize their own perspectivity in ways that morality suppressed. The new herd can sustain this honesty because it will recognize “rank-​order” and will see the high rank of its own norms. Chapter 12, “Dionysus,” treats finally the religious dimension of these new values, expressed most prominently in Nietzsche’s idea of Dionysus, offered as his replacement for Christ. The universal Yes amounts to a “sanctification” of the world, demanding a strong affective response that is the positive core of religion that Nietzsche wants to save. Religion is crucial, we’ll see, for incorporating the truth about ourselves-​and-​world in our affects. The idea of eternal return is designed to evoke this special affect or feeling toward all of life. We conclude with this most evocative of Nietzsche’s ideas.

Acknowledgments My largest debts are to those who—​heroically!—​read drafts of most of the chapters:  Ken Gemes, Andrew Huddleston, and Tuomo Tiisala. I’m hugely grateful for their advice. Others gave very valuable feedback on parts of the book: Maudemarie Clark, Paul Loeb, Christopher Schuringa, and Gudrun von Tevenar. I’ve also greatly benefited from discussing the material of the book with many people over the years, but above all (in addition to those mentioned) with João Constâncio, Paul Katsafanas, and Julian Young. I owe special thanks to Oswaldo Giacoia for hosting a memorable week of Nietzsche discussions in which João Constâncio, Werner Stegmaier, and Paul van Tongeren also joined. I am indebted, too, to all those who invited me to give talks in which I presented chapter drafts; these include João Constâncio, David Dudrick, Christian Emden, Ken Gemes, Robert Guay, Helmut Heit, Alexander Izrailevsky, Scott Jenkins, Anthony Jensen, Paul Katsafanas, Stephan Käufer, Rogério Lopes, Mark Migotti, Alexander Nehamas, Örsan Oymen, Joseph Russell, Werner Stegmaier, Julian Young, and Rachel Zuckert. I  thank these hosts and the many people who responded to my presentations in these events. Finally, I owe a more generalized debt to all those who have contributed to the flourishing philosophical scholarship about Nietzsche upon which this book tries to build.

Citations I cite Nietzsche’s books by their familiar (English) acronyms, as laid out in the Bibliography. I cite Nietzsche’s Nachlass by a system that I have not seen elsewhere, but which seems to me the most compact and perspicuous:  first, the last two digits of the year of the notebook in which the note occurs, followed by a colon, followed by the notebook number, followed by the note number in brackets. I add, in parentheses, references to a note’s appearance (if it does appear) in the available English translations from the Nachlass: The Will to Power [WP], Philosophy and Truth [P&T], Writings from the Early Notebooks [EN], and Writings from the Late Notebooks [LN].

1

Value Introducing the Problems

“Value” has good claim to be Nietzsche’s primary topic.1 He insistently questions, hypothesizes, and makes claims about what he predominantly calls “values” [Werthe]. He takes himself tasked to carry out a “revaluation of values” [Umwerthung der Werthe] and a critique of “morality” [Moral], the ruling kind of values. This examination and study of values, and especially of moral values, is the gist, in his own eyes, of his claim to our attention.2 In it he is, he believes, a great innovator, opening up a new field of research and inquiry of supreme cultural importance, giving “knowledge [Kenntniss] of a kind that has neither existed up until now nor even been desired” [GM.p.6].3 Values are so important because they play (he thinks) a key role in explanations. Values explain humans’ thoughts and behavior and need to be themselves explained. One of Nietzsche’s favorite tricks is to reveal how something unexpected (e.g., seemingly “objective,” such as science or philosophy) expresses values in such a way that its positions are explained by them (and not by “reason”). It’s because values play this key explanatory role that they’re the appropriate focus for our efforts to change thoughts or behavior. Indeed Nietzsche extends values’ explanatory role to cover the behavior not just of humans but of animals and even of organisms generally; valuing is co-​extensive with life, is even the defining trait of life. Nietzsche’s claim to novelty in this study of values can seem ridiculous: very many people gave accounts of values before him. However he thinks he subjects them to a new kind of scrutiny, and this may be more plausible. He studies them in a special naturalistic way that will require careful specification. This study issues on the one hand in general analyses what values are—​what we might call Nietzsche’s “ontology” for values. The primary point here will be that values

1 Schacht [1983,  341]:  “No philosopher has been more intensely concerned with questions of value than Nietzsche was.” 2 This focus on values is one of the main ways Heidegger thinks that Nietzsche goes wrong; see, e.g., his (1950/​2002, 170; 1961/​1982, 15). 3 BGE.186 speaks of “what is still necessary for a long time to come, what alone is justified so far: to collect material, to conceptualize and arrange a vast realm of subtle value-​feelings and value-​ differences which are alive, grow, beget, and perish.” He calls his readers to this research project. Nietzsche’s Values. John Richardson, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190098230.001.0001

2  Value: Introducing the Problems depend—​in the way the study uncovers—​on acts of valuing, which (in a certain sense) constitute them; there are no “values-​in-​themselves.” This point is an obvious variant on (what might be called) Humean subjectivism; its interest will be in how it develops that familiar idea. But besides such general claims Nietzsche’s study also and much more frequently issues in detailed diagnoses of (or in terms of) particular values: these make up, indeed, the largest part of his corpus. He states his task: “I say of every morality: it is a fruit, by which I know the soil from which it grew” [88:14[76] (WP.257)]. Sometimes these diagnoses treat values as social: as held by some societal group and as developing down through the history of that group. And other times his diagnoses treat values at the level of the person, finding them pervasively and decisively at work in various kinds of people, usually in ways they don’t recognize. Nietzsche has an eye for boundless detail in his social and psychological depictions of values. The root to his novelty, he thinks, is that he is less in thrall to the moral values he examines. He purports to “step out” of these values and to study them from an independent standpoint never (for this purpose) achieved before. GS.380: “ ‘Thoughts about moral prejudices,’ if they are not to be prejudices about prejudices, presuppose a position outside morality, some point beyond good and evil to which one has to rise, climb, or fly.” This study requires leaving (as much as one can) one’s own convictions behind.4 It treats values in a quasi-​scientific spirit that gives no allegiance to them. Indeed Nietzsche most often studies values he clearly does not concur in (as he clearly does not in, e.g., moral values). When he speaks of these “values,” he means the term descriptively and not to say that he values these things himself. But values are something more than just a topic for Nietzsche. He also speaks of “value” in a quite different way when he does indeed value things himself. For, of course, he’s not only a neutral observer of the human phenomena he describes. His diagnoses and genealogies are laced with strong judgments. He values some things and—​more often and more emphatically—​disvalues others. His social and psychological diagnoses of values are almost always intertwined with his own valuative comments. This gives his writing its distinctive double force, constantly mixing into a quasi-​scientific examination of values a kind of running commentary from a valuative stance that purports to profit from that study.5 4 There’s an important statement of method in A.54:  “Where basic issues about value or lack of value are concerned, people with convictions do not come into consideration. Convictions [Überzeugungen] are prisons. These people do not see far enough, they do not see beneath themselves:  but if you are going to talk about value and lack of value, you need to see five hundred convictions beneath you,—​behind you.” 5 For example, BGE.202: “Morality in Europe today is herd animal morality:—​and so only, as we understand the thing, one kind of human morality, beside which, before which, after which many others, above all higher moralities, are, or ought to be, possible.”

Value: Introducing the Problems  3 So Nietzsche engages in or performs that very activity, valuing, which he otherwise studies: he values certain things himself, he makes value judgments. And when he speaks of “value” in this voice—​when he specifies or assesses “the value” of some x—​the word carries some different or further sense. It is now surcharged with a force lacking in the study’s descriptions. At such times he uses “value” not descriptively but (as I’ll put it) valuatively (or valuingly): they are “values,” in the sense that (he judges that) they are valuable.6 (Or, in a prominent variant, he asks “what to value” or what “the value” of some x is. BGE.1: “We asked about the value of this will [to truth].” So he’s weighing how to carry out that activity of valuing.7) And, of course, he also values on many other occasions without using the word “value.” Indeed he more commonly employs various other predicates with valuative force, as when he calls things “healthy” or “noble.” And he values as well whenever he (as he often puts it) ranks persons and values by these and related criteria.8 By pursuing the difference between these two stances that Nietzsche takes toward values we can make a fresh approach to his “metaethics.”9

1.1  Studying values—​and valuing The difference we’ve just uncovered is between two attitudes Nietzsche adopts and expresses. Sometimes he treats values as objects of study, sometimes as the goods he values. These attitudes “mean” “value” in different ways; the word has different senses in them.10 As we might put it, it carries the implication of “valuable” or “good” in the valuative but not in the descriptive use. But what, in Nietzsche’s view, does this difference in his attitudes and meanings imply about the “values” he directs these attitudes upon? Are these the same things, only viewed in different aspects by these two attitudes? 6 I will not call this sense “normative,” as is usual in treating the distinction. As I discuss more fully in Chapter 6, I think “normative” is best used as paired with “norm,” which is a certain kind of value: one accepted as a common standard by a social group. If an individual makes values for him-​or herself, these are emphatically not “norms.” To speak of them so grates (to my ear) against Nietzsche’s aim to “individualize” values; it reinforces our implicit assumption that all values must operate as societal standards. It subtly undermines his point. 7 Some of his most commonly posed questions are about “the value of morality” (cf. note 14 herein), “the value of truth” (e.g., GM.iii.24), and “the value of life” or “existence” [Dasein] (e.g., BT.asc.1,5). 8 I think many readers prefer Nietzsche’s descriptive to his valuative voice and are willing to entertain his diagnoses of our values while being somewhat repelled by many of the values he seems to prefer and promote. 9 Here I try to improve on the approach I took in Nietzsche’s New Darwinism [2004, ch. 2 §5]. 10 This distinction between Nietzsche’s descriptive and valuative senses has, of course, been noticed. See, e.g. Huddleston [2014], Silk [2015, 2017]. But I think the full implications of the split still remain to be examined.

4  Value: Introducing the Problems It would be quite natural to think that they must be, on the ground that we (apparently) can direct either attitude upon (not just the same kind of thing but) the very same thing. It seems that Nietzsche could study his own values, for example, or could come to value some value he has studied. The situation looks analogous, perhaps, to the way that I can hear a bird and then see it; these different attitudes are directed upon the same thing though, of course, they view it in different aspects. So, in parallel, Nietzsche might hold that the same value could be meant in either way, either valuatively or descriptively. Then values would be one class of things, and he would value one set of its members and study another, perhaps overlapping, set. However there is another option here that must be considered. Perhaps the difference in attitudes is so decisive that it entails a difference in the very kinds of objects these attitudes have. One might think this other way about the case of the bird: truly, what we hear is a sound and what we see is a sight, and neither can be an object for the other attitude. Similarly, studying and valuing might require that their objects be different in kind—​a fact versus a good, perhaps—​hence to be non-​overlapping classes of things. In this case it would not really be the same thing that I end up studying, when I try to study some value I value: in directing that different attitude upon it, I would shift my attention from the good to some (related) fact. Of these two attitudes the second, valuing way Nietzsche posits values is the more mysterious. Whereas the main aim of his descriptive project is to say what these things are, when he speaks in that valuing way he generally doesn’t tell us in what sense he means that his values are valuable. But one clear way this valuative use differs from the descriptive is in being much more exclusive: the values Nietzsche posits valuatively are meant rather than or instead of opposed ends, valued by other valuings, which are in this use not values at all because not valuable. So there’s a drastic shrinking in the application or extension of “value.” What is the different sense of “value” that results in this exclusivity? One natural way to think of the shift is that Nietzsche passes from a third-​ personal to a first-​personal stance toward values. That is (for now), he passes from viewing values “from outside” (them) and hence also “as outside” (himself), to viewing them “from within” and as his own. So we might suppose that, in the descriptive sense, “value” means “what something values,” whereas in the narrow sense it means “what I value.” Then, in his valuative use, Nietzsche would just say or express that these things are valuable to him. And indeed he sometimes puts it this way: he speaks of “my” values or in other ways explicitly relativizes values to himself. So in 87:10[145] (WP.1009, LNp199): “Viewpoints for my values. . . .” But it will be a large question whether in his exclusive and valuative use of “value” Nietzsche does mean his values as “relative to his valuing” in this way—​ allowing that they’re “just his.” When he calls something valuable, he seems to

Value: Introducing the Problems  5 mean more than just that he values it. Such relativizing would threaten to set his values on a par with all or many others’, undercutting their claim and appeal to us. It seems quite at odds with the plain and unrelativized way he usually expresses his valuing: he seems to present his values as there for us to find, too, there in the world and not just in his valuing. So, for example, TI.ix.33 speaks straightforwardly about “the value” of selfishness as depending on the “physiological value” of the individual.11 Here value seems meant as much more than a personal posit just picked out by his valuing it. So how does Nietzsche “mean” the values he values? This valuative use of “value” is puzzling in its own right and also puzzling in its relation to the descriptive use with which it is intricately entangled. Nietzsche is constantly passing between these different ways of talking about values—​ between studying valuing and engaging in it. The shift between these stances—​ the vital tipping point in all his writing—​happens so often that it can be hard to notice. Indeed, his analyses constantly employ “thick” terms such as “noble” and “healthy” in which both descriptive and valuative sense is fused.12 And he so constantly inserts valuative comments into his psychological and historical analyses that the two stances seem to merge; we don’t notice the two elements or question their relation. Nietzsche himself, however, is preeminently aware of the difference between studying values and valuing—​he doesn’t pass from one to the other unwittingly. Indeed he experiences these attitudes as at odds with one another. The attitude of study—​properly pursued—​tends to weaken the attitude of valuing: when I examine my own values, this erodes my ability or inclination to value them. (As he succinctly puts it already in BT.7: “Knowledge kills action.”) He thinks his own values are won from study despite this tension; they are won indeed only after the hiatus of nihilism and indifference. They are designed so that he can value them after (and in the light of) this study. So their relation to the values he studies is something he pays great attention to. And he discusses this relation at certain pivotal points in his works. These two relations to valuing are both needed for Nietzsche’s grand project of a revaluation of values. The task of the philosopher today is to “solve the problem of value, . . . to determine the rank-​order of values.—​” [GM.i.note]. The ranking will be based on the study of prevailing values. Nietzsche claims to speak with authority by virtue of truths uncovered in this study, by which he improves his own values—​gives them status or claim. His lesson from that study is to shift 11 In 87–​8:11[411] (WP.p): “we must first live through nihilism, before we can find [dahinter zu kommen] what really [eigentlich] the value of these ‘values’ was.” In 87:10[152] (WP.245): “all actual [wirklichen] values were therewith denied and systematically conceived as non-​values.” In BGE.43: “what can be common, always has only little value.” 12 Thanks to Andrew Huddleston here.

6  Value: Introducing the Problems and even reverse the prevailing values. As BGE.32 says (in a more limited application): “Shouldn’t we have reached the necessity of once more resolving on a reversal and fundamental shift in values, thanks to another self-​examination and deepening of human. . . .?”13 My main project is to study and assess this step. In a nutshell: How does his study of values support his own values? Many complications emerge as we try to pin down this relation; we only aptly determine it by working through the main part of Nietzsche’s thinking.

1.2  The value of values As we examine the relation between these two uses of “value,” we can conveniently focus on a recurring phrase in which these uses are concisely juxtaposed. Nietzsche adopts and promotes the project to determine “the value of values.” GM.p.6: “we need a critique of moral values, for once the value of these values [der Werth dieser Werthe] must itself be called into question. . . .” In this revealing construction14 the first use of “value” is valuative, the second descriptive.15 This phrase shows Nietzsche at that tipping point where the study and understanding of values passes over into valuing. He will answer the question posed in that phrase—​“what is the value of (current, prevailing) values?”—​by his “revaluing of values.” Once his study has exposed the true character of various “values” that are currently valued, he’s in a position to assess “the value” that they indeed or truly have. Or so at least we might first put it. On a very natural (I think) understanding of the phrase, the fact that the valuative use is singular and the descriptive use plural carries an important weight. It reflects the restrictiveness of the valuative use, but it also suggests something further. We readily read the phrase to ask about the “real” or “genuine” or “true” value of all those purported values. We take Nietzsche to be asking whether these many things that people have valued are really or genuinely or truly good. And, insofar as they’re not thus good, they would not, strictly speaking, be values after all. This is the gist of one basic view of how to put Nietzsche’s two uses of “value” together. Let’s call it: (A) Valuing gets values right. It gives priority to his valuative 13 BGE.211 speaks of the philosopher’s need to “pass through the whole range of human values and value feelings,” as a precondition for his task to “create values.” 14 Nietzsche speaks later in GM.p.6 of “the value of these ‘values.’ ” We saw that, in 87–​8:11[411] (WP.p), he speaks of discovering “what really the value of these ‘values’ was.” He also weighs the “value of morality” [GM.p.5; 80.4[27], 85–​6:2[203], 88:14[107]], and the “value of ethical actions” [80:1[62]]. And 85–​6:2[189] (WP.254) asks:  “what are our valuations and moral tables of goods themselves worth [werth]?” (Note how this adjectival use of werth is not matched by “value,” so that, in this form of the question, the repetition of werth disappears in translations.) 15 Huddleston has made this point [2014, 322].

Value: Introducing the Problems  7 use and to its posit of his own values as good: it’s only these goods that are values. This reading takes him to distinguish these values as (for example) “real” or “genuine” or “true” in a way that things valued by others—​as, for example, by Christian moralists—​are not. So it takes him to discount the descriptive use of “value”—​even in his own studies—​as leaving out something crucial:  strictly speaking, a value must be good, must be valuable. Hence his genealogies treat only purported values, and guesses or hypotheses what the true values are. Study only ever finds (scare-​quoted) “values,” not values themselves. According to this view it looks quite to be expected that Nietzsche’s study should fail in this way: it doesn’t look with the eye that finds something valuable. The study is carried out from a naturalistic stance that is limited to a statement of facts—​of what is and not of what ought to be. The facts that are there to be discovered are about what is (or has been) valued by various valuings. But this study can never find and identify values themselves (i.e., what should be valued), which lies over and above all those facts.16 We find values only by exiting that studying attitude; we must do so in order to address the question about “the value of values.” That question has the sense “what is the (genuine) value of (so-​called) ‘values.’ ”17 As I  will try to show, this first way of reading Nietzsche has powerful appeal for us despite the ways it may also strike us as unNietzschean. We’ll see, in fact, that he offers genealogies to explain this very appeal. We’ve inherited a will to make this claim (to have values that are real/​genuine/​true) in our own valuing, and so we naturally hear it in Nietzsche. This assumption works as an implicit intuition of what values must be; it has a universal, inbred force. I think we Nietzsche-​readers imagine it easier to throw off than it is. It works even if we resist (in interpreting Nietzsche) such terms as “real” and “true.” Moreover, very importantly, the claim also has this intuitive force for Nietzsche himself. Over and again, we’ll see, he submits to it and attributes that special status to the values he values himself. However he also has a second way to relate these two uses of “value,” which I will argue is his dominant view. Let’s call it (B) Studying gets values right. Here he takes the descriptive use to be fully adequate: all of the values he studies are just as much values as those he values himself. In this case it’s the descriptive use that says what values “really” or “genuinely” or “truly” are—​for this second view 16 What Nietzsche says about such (quasi-​) “values” is not good evidence for his metaethics if the latter treats the status of (genuine) values. Therefore many of the most familiar remarks in which he has been taken to state his metaethics might in fact be quite irrelevant to it. Huddleston astutely makes this point [2014, 332]. 17 Besides Huddleston, I take Schacht to state this view; he says [1983, 347–​8] that when Nietzsche speaks in BGE.2 of “the value” of certain things, he considers it “to have a kind of validity which [other value standards] lack. It is an actual value, which he readily affirms to be such, even though its apprehension is associated with the attainment of a certain perspective. For this perspective is a privileged one.”

8  Value: Introducing the Problems appropriates these very same terms when it states itself.18 Our biological, genealogical, and psychological sciences show what values really are: they’re precisely all these things that are valued. (So whereas under (A) “real value” serves to pick out a subset of all the things valued, under (B) it applies to every one of those valueds.) This is the truth of what values are. And, very importantly, it’s the truth (on this view) about Nietzsche’s own values: they are only his own “valueds.” This second view not only gives authority to the descriptive use, it also adds a criticism of the valuative use, in its exclusiveness; this is twin to the denial within (A) of studying’s adequacy. That “more” that we mean or claim about our own values (and deny to the values we study) is unwarranted and indeed a fiction. The special status we project as we value our values is imaginary, so that it’s these that deserve to be put in scare quotes. Insofar as I operate with an illusion about the things I value, what I (take myself to) value are only (scare-​quoted) “values,” not values as they really are. And this, too, would apply to Nietzsche’s own valuing—​ insofar as he still does attribute a special status to what he values in his valuing it. Just what is that “more” that we attribute to our values in valuing them—​the special status we think distinguishes them from the many other things that others value? We will see that there are very many parts to an adequate answer to this crucial question. But, I propose, at or near the heart of the answer is this: in valuing X, I take X to be good prior to my valuing it. I take myself to value it because it’s good: I take this to be the reason to value it. I will call this claim about the status of values externalism: it takes a value to be something settled outside the valuing of it. Valuing takes itself to discover and track that independent value. So if (A) valuing gets values right, this externalism will hold.19 Nietzsche thinks that, by contrast, the attitude of studying discovers only values (and goods) that are due to valuing—​that are constituted by and dependent on a valuing. Here values are essentially “valueds”; their goodness (all they can have) is conferred upon them by the valuing. Values are thereby indexed to particular valuers: each value is “good for” this valuer (or these valuers) of it. (Or, more radically, values are indexed to particular episodes or states of valuing and are good only for these.) Values are good because they’re valued, and not vice versa—​or so our study says. I will call this internalism, inasmuch as it makes values arise only by and within the valuings of them. If (B) studying gets values right, then this internalism will hold.

18 So, on this reading, Nietzsche’s naturalistic analyses of values do give his metaethics after all. 19 This seems to be Schacht’s reading; he identifies the “survival and growth conditions” as having “an objective basis independent of any such evaluations, in the constitution of the type of creature in question and its circumstances” [1983, 404]. In 86–​7:5[105] (LNp123): “One must try to judge according to objective values.” (The note goes on to say that the “advantage” of the community is such a value, but that it’s usually confused with the community’s “feeling of pleasure.”)

Value: Introducing the Problems  9 Now I’ve presented these two readings of Nietzsche as simple alternatives, but in fact each encompasses a great family of different versions—​different ways of viewing values as either external or internal to valuings. Externalism can state itself as a point about “real,” or “genuine,” or “true,” or “objective” values: each term can express a different kind of independence and authority for values. And internalism also has important versions, distinguished by just how they interpret values to be grounded in valuings. We will see that these complexities make possible overlaps between externalism and internalism: some versions of the former will count as versions of the second: one can have externalism in one sense and internalism in another. Although there is this complex structure to the difference between externalism and internalism, I think we can still, for some purposes, usefully imagine them as opposite directions along a single scale. This scale will run through all the degrees to which one might take a valuer’s good to be independent of (or dependent on) his or her valuing it. Our question, then, is where to locate Nietzsche along this scale. We can picture it as running between two extremes: the most complete forms of externalism and internalism. Considering these extremes can improve our sense of the scale. At one end, then, is a complete externalism in which values are considered to exist in total independence from any valuing. Let’s call this full value realism (FVR). What’s good for person P is (completely) independent of what P does value.

The most obvious example is the status of the good in Plato’s theory of Forms. A close neighbor is theism, which posits values as totally independent of human valuing, but as grounded in the valuing by god. The good has its status and authority as god’s command, whatever humans might value themselves. Less extreme forms of value realism treat (person) P’s good as grounded in the valuing of “society” or of “nature.” These factors are less clearly independent of P, since the latter, as a member of society and a part of nature, may be understood to share in—​and contribute to—​their valuing. So now there’s a partial or indirect dependence of the good on P’s own valuing—​and we meet a weak form of internalism. There is a similar ambiguity when P’s good is (thought to be) grounded in “conscience” or “reason” inasmuch as each of these is supposed to be “in” P. Nevertheless, we’ll see that Nietzsche diagnoses these criteria of society, nature, conscience, and reason as all set up to foster conformity to social norms and hence as crucially external authorities. At the other end of this scale is a similarly complete internalism in which a value is considered to exist only within and for some concrete act of valuing it. I will call this full value perspectivism (FVP).

10  Value: Introducing the Problems What’s good for person P is (precisely) what(ever) P does value.

This formulation puts the point in terms of a person, which is an easier way to think it. But we should bear in mind that the fullest form of internalism makes a good exist “for” the mere act or state of valuing it. A good is then nothing more than the intentional object of an episode of valuing. So my good now would be only and exactly what I am valuing now. But here, too, there are more moderate versions. P’s good might still be taken to depend on P’s valuing but not to be the immediate object—​valued—​of that valuing. It might depend as well on a certain operation being carried out on that valued. For example, P’s good might be that immediate valued “corrected” in the light of certain facts. Or, if P values many conflicting things, its good might be those many valueds corrected by (for example) the removal of inconsistencies. In such ways P’s good might be identified not with what it now values, narrowly understood, but with what it would value given these improvements. Nietzsche has strong reasons to avoid the extremes of FVR and FVP and to establish his position somewhere along that scale between them. On one side, his attacks on value realism are too pervasive and sweeping to discount as not applying to his own values. His dominant tendency is internalist. But he also can’t accept the extreme form of this stated in FVP. By collapsing what’s good for a person into what the person actually values, this view gives equal authority to every valuing and every value; it amounts to a flattening relativism. Too directly tying P’s good to P’s valuing would rule out any effort to persuade the person that what’s good for her or him is something other than what he or she now values. That is, it would rule out any effort to persuade by reasons, rather than by coercion or propaganda. But Nietzsche very much wants to give reasons in favor of his values—​reasons why we readers should change what we value by adopting his values. He wants at least this much of externalism. But he also holds onto the internalist demand that these reasons rest, ultimately, on the values we already have. Thus Nietzsche rejects that extreme internalism and moves somewhat toward externalism in a way we must determine. But I’ll argue that he doesn’t move very far. His main allegiance is to internalism, grounded as it is in the naturalistic study of values. His allegiance to internalism expresses his allegiance to truth. Now if Nietzsche holds that (B) studying gets values right, and he thinks that this shows that the “more” we claim for our own values is illusion, it might seem that his position must be some form of the fictionalism so ably defended by Hussain (e.g., 2007, 2011). Nietzsche would give authority to his genealogy to say what values truly are, but think that we and he can’t help but posit that “more,” since valuing itself depends on the illusion that it is tracking real goods. Since it’s not possible to incorporate the truth about values into his valuing, the best he

Value: Introducing the Problems  11 can do is to be “honest” in the illusions his valuing involves: to understand it as a kind of make-​believe. Hussain calls his version of this reading “revolutionary” fictionalism [2011, 394] because he claims that Nietzsche offers this way of valuing as a “replacement practice” for the way we have valued so far—​which hasn’t been “honest” because it hasn’t recognized its value realism as illusion. The challenge in building this practice is to “recreate some simulacrum of the phenomenology of evaluative experience” [395], which requires that values’ reality be full-​fledged illusions and not mere pretendings. Just as we really do see the stick in water as bent (while knowing that it’s not), so we must really “see” our values as independent goods (while knowing that they’re not). I can begin to introduce my own reading in relation to this picture. I think it gets right that Nietzsche’s ambition is to create a new valuative practice, one that he tries to pioneer and model himself. But I think that he sets his sights higher than this fictionalism supposes. I think that he aspires to absorb the truth about values, found in that study, more fully into the valuing attitude itself. We don’t need to posit values as real (or strongly external) in order to value at all; that posit isn’t essential to valuing. Although it will be very hard, we can gradually learn to value our values as perspectival, thus building the naturalistic truth won by studying values into our own valuing. We can revise our valuing’s claim to special status to make it consistent with internalism. Thus we will integrate and harmonize those two attitudes we take toward values. So, I will offer a more full-​throated version of the perspectivist line, one that I  think is more adequate to Nietzsche’s high ambitions in his valuing. It’s his dominant project to improve his valuing by his study of values—​to bring into his valuing as much of the lesson of his studies as he can. He undertakes the experiment to see how far these truths can be “incorporated”—​can be recognized within one’s own valuing. GS.110: “To what extent can the truth endure incorporation?—​that is the question, that is the experiment.”20 It’s an open question for Nietzsche just how far this will prove possible. Illusions and ignorance will surely remain in his values. But his new valuative practice is distinguished, he thinks, by how much of the truth it manages to reflect. And the core truth it incorporates is about values’ dependence on valuings. If Nietzsche gives up the posit that his values are real goods, he needs some other way to “prioritize” them, to single them out from all the values of other valuings. If his own values are, like all others, no more than “valueds,” they would

20 GS.11: “It is still a quite new task, now first dawning for the human eye, to incorporate knowledge and make it instinctive, a task that will only be seen by those who have conceived that so far we have only incorporated our errors and that all of our consciousness refers to errors!” In 81:11[141]: “in summa to wait [to see] how far knowing and the truth can be incorporated.”

12  Value: Introducing the Problems seem to be merely good for him—​and indeed good for him only in that he does value them, not in that he should. Nietzsche needs to be able to give reasons for his values—​reasons both for his own benefit and for his readers to accept his values, too, if this is what he wants us to do. In the absence of such privileging reasons that perspectivism threatens either a flattening relativism or a nihilistic loss of values.21 But he needs a kind of reason that’s consistent with internalism. We’ve already anticipated Nietzsche’s strategy. He tries to “moderate” the internalism by loosening the relation between what a person does now value and what’s good for the person: the latter still depends on the former, but they’re not simply identical. Very roughly, P’s good is what his or her values would be if corrected with respect to power and/​or truth. This opens up a difference between what a person does value and what he or she should value. And it lets Nietzsche claim to have reasons for his own values, reasons both for him to hold them and for some others to hold them as well. This moderated internalism gives him license to argue for his perspective and values. It gives him the degree of externalism he needs in order fully to value his values. As we’ve noticed, however, a much stronger externalist posit is deeply ingrained both in us and in Nietzsche himself. The assumption of real values quite independent of our valuing has ruled through most of our human history and pre-​history, so it is not surprising that it is deeply deposited in us. And it is also no surprise that as Nietzsche struggles to find a way to justify his own values even he slides repeatedly back into making that stronger claim. His aspiration to privilege his values by how much he understands constantly pushes against and past the limits set by the very lessons he thinks he has learned. So he drifts, over and again, into meaning and claiming his values to be valuable in a sense that their perspectivity can’t allow. He slips back into the realist illusion in his valuing that he aspires to overcome. But just as frequently Nietzsche tries to recoup these trespassing claims by showing how approximations to them can be constructed within the internalism. He tries to show how much of the privileging of certain values, formerly licensed by a value realism, can be secured on truer grounds within the value perspectivism. He makes a justification for his values out of points that internalism allows. We will see this dialectic—​between realist oversteppings and perspectivist recoveries—​at work at many important points in his thinking on values. One reason Nietzsche is optimistic that we will be able to incorporate this perspectivist truth is that the strong realist posit in valuing is a historical phenomenon. That is, this posit is historical and not biological, which gives hope that 21 Jonas [1966/​2001, 215] states well the perspectivist lesson (“[v]‌alues are no longer beheld in the vision of objective reality, but are posited as feats of valuation”) and takes this as Nietzsche’s initiation of “European nihilism.”

Value: Introducing the Problems  13 it can also be unlearned and replaced as our history proceeds. Moreover, it is a posit that we make only in one way that we now value. We make it in our “agential” values (i.e., in those we put into words and awareness). But Nietzsche thinks there is another kind of valuing that we engage in all the time that does not involve that posit; this is the valuing we perform in our “bodily” drives and affects. The absence of value realism in this valuing gives a further reason for hope that we can learn not to make it in those worded and conscious values. Later chapters will present at length and in detail his accounts of these bodily and agential forms for valuing. For orientation now, let’s anticipate some main features of these accounts. Let’s get a broad sense of the naturalistic truths about values that Nietzsche aspires to incorporate into his/​our valuing. Then we can return in §1.4 to ask what that incorporation might involve and in §1.5 to sketch the metaethical positions I therefore attribute to him.

1.3  Twelve principles from the study of values The realist and perspectivist readings differ as to whether values are good independently of their being valued. There’s a lot to do to clarify what kind of “independence” is at stake. Those readings also differ as to whether Nietzsche means to incorporate the findings from his study of values into how he himself values. We can make progress on both points by taking a first look at “what values are” according to his historical and psychological studies of them. This will begin to show just what kind of “dependence” of values on valuing that study claims. And it will give us a sense of the other main results from the study that will need to be recognized in his valuing, according to the perspectivist line. In order to make his account more perspicuous, I’ll detail what I’ll call—​rather jestingly—​Nietzsche’s “principles of valuing.” I have a dozen to offer, the first six stating points that (I claim) he thinks apply to all valuing, the second six stating features characteristic of our historical human valuing. The first will be essential or indispensable. With the second six it will be an open question whether we might be able to value differently than they describe. I here defer describing the third, “Nietzschean” way of valuing he aspires to develop; this is not an existing object for study, but something to be made and brought about based on that study. (A) All values. These first principles apply to all values and valuings, including those that occur just “in the body” and its drives. Indeed they apply to living things generally:  all of these value, according to Nietzsche, in this minimal sense that obviously does not require consciousness or agency.22 Valuing has the 22 I don’t think that this point is taken nearly seriously enough in most treatments of Nietzsche’s theory of values. One exception is Silk [2015, 264].

14  Value: Introducing the Problems following six features even in its biological and physiological form, and they hold of our “higher” human valuing, too. Together we might say they make up the “essence of values.” Here we take a first look that we’ll fill out in Chapters 2–​4. (1) The key point: values arise only by valuings, and are essentially “valueds.” This I think is the heart of the lesson Nietzsche draws about values: they depend on valuings.23 We get some sense of the lesson from what he claims it negatively and positively involves. Negatively it entails (for him) that there is no “value in itself,” that nothing has value prior to and independently of its being valued by a valuing. TI.ix.37: “an sich hat keine Moral Werth.”24 (It also means that there is no “metaphysical value” [GM.iii.24] and no “absolute value” [80:4[27]].) And positively it entails that values are perspectival: they are or express the perspectives of the valuings they depend on. HH.i.p.6: “You should learn to grasp the perspectival in every valuation.”25 But these negative and positive “entailments” still leave it unclear what kind of dependence of values on valuing Nietzsche means. We need to specify this dependence to see what the (denied) in-​itselfness and (asserted) perspectivity amount to. Let’s start by distinguishing minimal and maximal kinds of dependence and asking where Nietzsche stands. At the very least, values are brought into existence by acts of valuing. I think this is how he states the dependence most often. Valuing is the cause, the producer and “creator” of the value. Very often he pictures the value as created in the things that we value: the value is “given” to them as a kind of property. So, in Z.i.15: “The human first put values into things, in order to preserve itself,—​it first created a meaning for things, a human meaning! . . . /​Esteeming is creating [Schätzen ist Schaffen].” And in GS.301: “Whatever has value in the present world has it not in itself, according to its nature—​nature is always value-​less—​but has

23 In its general form this idea is, of course, not new; it is most familiarly a Humean position, but Nietzsche will develop it in distinctive, surprising ways. 24 D.210:  “One has reflected and finally settled that there is nothing good, nothing beautiful, nothing elevated, nothing evil in itself, but rather states of soul, in which we cover things outside and in us with such words.” Also see GS.299. 83–​4:24[15] (WP.260): “We have laid in the ends and the values . . . /​therefore nothing ‘in itself ’ valuable [werthvoll].” 88:14[16] (WP.428) says that the Sophist “set out the first truth, that ‘a morality in itself ’, a ‘good in itself ’ does not exist, that it is a swindle to talk of ‘truth’ in this domain.” Huddleston [2014, 331] points out passages in which Nietzsche says of things that they do (each of them) have “value in itself.” But this is Werth in sich rather than an sich (as in the earlier passages); it’s the distinction (I suggest) between things valued “for themselves” and things valued as means to other things. 25 In 84:26[119] (WP.259): “Insight: all evaluation is a matter of a definite perspective: preservation of the individual, of a community, a race, a state. . . .”

Value: Introducing the Problems  15 rather been given, granted value, and we were the givers and granters!”26 And, more generally, in Z.i.15: “First through esteeming [Schätzen] is there value.” This merely causal dependence is quite consistent with the value’s persisting independently of and long after the initiating act. It might “leave the hand” of the valuing and get set into the world to have effects of its own.27 Lots of things persist after they are caused or produced—​persist in complete independence from what made them. The physical changes we make to things often have this character. There would be little temptation to call Nietzsche an “idealist” about values if this were all of his point. But he clearly means more. At the other extreme, the dependence of value on valuing might be so strong that it rules out any persistence beyond the creator. The value might be, for example, something like an idea or representation “within” a valuing; when the valuing ends, so do these. Here the case would be clear for idealism. Such close dependence of value on valuing might be gathered from some of Nietzsche’s common terms, in which value and valuing seem fused into a single thing: Werthschätzung (literally “value-​esteeming,” though I’ll translate it “valuation”), Werthsetzung (“value-​positing”). But Nietzsche can’t mean such strong dependence given the further claims about value we’ll see. We need an intermediate way, one between too little and too much dependence. Nietzsche does think of values as things that can last long after the valuings that first made them. Yet he thinks of these values as “perspectival” in a sense that requires some continuing dependence on valuing perspectives. I think the simple notion of a tool can give us a helpful first model for what he has in mind. Of course a tool can persist long after it leaves the maker’s hand, but it persists as that tool only so long as there remains someone able to use it as such. So, too, a value is some change in the world, but it persists as that value only when there are one or more “tool-​users” able to employ it in its defining way. We’ll see that value is indeed a kind of tool for Nietzsche. (2) Valuing occurs in life’s aiming: valuing is a function of life as will (to power). What kind of thing is this valuing, which makes values? Nietzsche holds that valuing occurs within—​is an element or aspect of—​an aiming or directedness, which he of course calls “will.” A value is a certain kind of telic object, playing a

26 In 82–​3:4[137]: “All goals are destroyed. Humans must give themselves one. It was an error, that they had one: they have given themselves all of them.” 84:25[80]: “In der Welt giebt es gar nicht Gute und Böse: diese sind immer à part.” 27 We might perhaps hear 86–​7:5[19] (LNp109) this way: “Supposing however that we lay certain values into things, then these values work [wirken] back upon us after we have forgotten that we were the givers.” Read in context, however, I think this sentence means that it’s our (continuing) valuative interpretation of things that has this effect and not some change made in the things.

16  Value: Introducing the Problems particular role within such an aiming. See 83–​4:24[15] (WP.260): “But willing: = willing an end [Zweck-​Wollen]. End contains a valuation [Werthschätzung].”28 Both aiming and valuing occur far more widely than we suppose, Nietzsche thinks. Everything living aims and values, plants as well as animals.29 Indeed he is even inclined to define life as a willing and valuing. See 84:25[433]: ‘ “Alive”: that means already esteeming [schätzen]:—​/​In all willing is esteeming—​and will is there in the organic.” And 84:26[72]: “Valuations lie in all functions of the organic being.”30 Nietzsche insists on putting values in this biological context. Within it, what life aims at ultimately is its own preservation and growth (power), and values are employed for this aiming. BGE.3: “valuations, or, more clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a certain type of life.” And 87–​8:11[73] (WP.715, LNp212): “The viewpoint of ‘value’ is the viewpoint of preservation-​ enhancement-​conditions with respect to complex forms of relative duration of life within becoming.”31 All organisms are directed in their plastic (responsive) drives. They aim at power not by having an idea or concept of it, but by having been selected to be responsive toward outcomes that enhance their control (i.e., their ability to command).32 So even the amoeba aims at power by its responsive disposition, designed into it by selection, to appropriate other organisms into itself as food; this disposition “wills power” inasmuch as it was selected because it brings about “growth in control.” Thus Nietzsche thinks that all biological life—​every organism—​aims and values. But he also thinks that this biological life is built into each of us, in our underlying bodily drives. So these constitute a way in which each of us humans values as well. And although Nietzsche cares not at all about how an amoeba or a cat or a chimp values, he thinks that an “animal” kind of valuing operates in us all the time, in the “part” of us we call our body; it happens in our “muscles, nerves, ganglia” [88:14[29] (WP.373, LNp243)]. I’ll refer to this lower level of valuing in us as body-​values; these are the kind of ends in us that we share with other living things. Nietzsche speaks of this valuing whenever he speaks of our drives. (3) Values are markers: a value is something sighted in order to aim.

28 In 87–​8:11[114] (WP.668, LNp222): “there is no “willing,” but only a willing-​something: one must not uncouple the goal from the state.” 82–​3:4[147]: “originally all moral judgments are judgments about means to ends.” 29 72–​3:19[156] (PTp37): “The plant is also a measuring creature.” 30 TI.v.5: “life itself values through us when we posit values.” 31 87:9[38] (WP.507): “in valuations preservation-​and growth-​conditions express themselves.” 32 I  present this Darwinian reading, and the kind of “teleology” it involves, in Nietzsche’s New Darwinism.

Value: Introducing the Problems  17 Valuing occurs within life’s aiming; however it is not this aiming in general, but a certain element or aspect in it. A value is something that serves, within such an aiming, as a marker (or criterion) to steer by. This is the kind of tool a value is: one adopts it as an indicator by which to find and secure what one aims at. It marks—​and then enables one to recognize—​an end or a means in such pursuit. Such a marker might be, for example, the particular “look” (or sound or feel or taste) by which one recognizes a favorite food. One’s values/​disvalues are all the markers one steers toward/​away from. Hence valuing is not just aiming: it’s relying on such a criterion for this aiming. This is the ultimate way that values are (as Nietzsche often puts it) “interpretations”: they are interpretations by the body of the world as a network of marked paths to be taken or avoided.33 Nietzsche thinks of willing (and its aiming) as ultimately prior to and separable from such criteria:  there is a level of willing/​aiming that precedes and underlies direction by such markers. In its raw form, he sometimes thinks, willing aims just at “release” [Auslassen] of energy. As in BGE.13: “Before everything something living wills to release its force—​living itself is will to power.”34 And 83:7[77]: “So it is not for the sake of happiness or profit [Nutzens] or to ward off displeasure that human acts: rather there is a certain quantum of force that seizes something on which it can release itself. That which one calls ‘goal,’ ‘purpose’ is in truth the means for this involuntary explosion-​event.” So sometimes, we see, Nietzsche thinks of will to power as aiming merely to release its force or energy. But more often he thinks of it as something more: will aims to grow. A living thing aims to extend its scope—​the scope of its activity. And it aims in particular to grow in its control of other forces. There is one most important marker by which wills recognize this ultimate aim:  Nietzsche calls it the “affect of command.”35 In this state a will feels its power to control other forces. This feeling is thus a deep value for all wills, as aiming to grow in control. By itself this criterion of “feeling power” is indefinite, however. It requires a supplement: the specification of some activity that one will control other forces to (or for)—​some content that one imposes on them. Drives are distinguished by their particular activities or projects. So, besides the values they have in common as wills to power, each has values of its own: to steer its particular project and to grow in this. These values give content and direction to that inchoate directedness by marking things and paths to avoid and pursue. They thereby specify what that control will be for: they distinguish particular species of power.36 33 In 85–​6:2[77] (WP.590, LNp73): “Our values are interpreted into things.” 34 86:2[63] (WP.650) is a draft of this. See, too, 87–​8:11[77] (WP.694, LNp214). 35 E.g., 87–​8.11[114] (WP.668). 36 In 87–​8.11[96] (WP.675): “All valuations are only consequences and narrow perspectives in the service of this one will: valuation itself is only this will to power.” (I take him to mean that will to power carries out this valuing, and not that power is itself a value.)

18  Value: Introducing the Problems At the broadest level are the drives for, for example, eating and sex: each of these depends on a value that specifies (and marks) what its “more” will be. The organism wills to grow by the blatant activity of incorporating other life. Or it wills to grow by heightening its excitement and delight with life—​or by extending its own life into offspring. Thus these drives differ in their broad specifications what “more life” for the organism will be. And they employ in addition many further value-​marks to guide their broad pursuit, marks that become quite specific in the individual organism. So the sex-​drive will steer by quite particular sensory marks for its favored partner; these, too, count as its values. (4) Values are made things: values are markers set up to persist. A value, as a marker, is at the very least “set up” in the valuer as something that will continue to be used this way. So the sex-​drive can adopt a certain look of the other as its new criterion; it thereby acquires a further value. Thus a value is a product of a valuing, it is made. Very commonly this value is also “set into” the world: the valuing installs its mark in the world, as it were by making a “path” that guides and favors pursuit of its aims. This mark or path will be there in the world to promote those aims independently of the valuing that set it there.37 So a value can be counted a kind of tool which persists in a certain way there in the world, or at least in the valuer, after the act of valuing that made it has ceased. Values tend toward stasis. They persist, even after they cease to serve as they were meant (by the valuing that made them) to do. Z.ii.12: “Your will and your values you have placed on the river of becoming: what the people believe to be good and evil betrays to me an ancient will to power.” As we might put it, valuing “becomes” but values persist—​although, like bridges over rivers, in periods of “thaw” they too can be swept away, as Z.iii.12.8 puts it. This persistence is enormously important to Nietzsche—​is even the root of the problem that most concerns him. GS.57: “You still carry around the assessments [Schätzungen] of things that have their origin in the passions and loves of former centuries!” We align ourselves by values made by and for valuings very different from our own. (5) Values are signs to valuing: values are things made to communicate the valuing. A value is a marker built into valuer and world by a valuing, as a sign to further that valuing; this adds to the kind of tool a value is. Here “sign” involves not just being used as a marker, but being used with this communicative intent. A value,



37

So Nietzsche describes our valuations as things we “build”; e.g., in 84:25[438] (WP.1046).

Value: Introducing the Problems  19 as a sign, functions to transmit or share its valuing—​and this is the particular kind of tool a value is. The valuer may share it, first, with itself at a later time. A value is (in this way) a sign I set for myself going forward. By making this sign, I solicit myself in later moments to resume (or continue) steering by it; I tug my future selves back into this aiming. And/​or, second, a value can share a valuing with others. My values are in this case the signs I put in the world in order to transmit my aiming to others. I show a path in the world in order to get others to follow it, too. Nietzsche often speaks of values or moralities as a “sign-​language”; see, for example, BGE.187 (“moralities are also merely a sign-​language of the affects”) and CW.e.38 It might be tempting to read “sign” here as meant in a weaker sense than I’m suggesting: as not implying communicative intent but merely evidence of a cause (as when we speak of a wind as a sign of an approaching storm).39 Can Nietzsche really think that the affects mean to communicate? But I suggest he does: the affect (or drive) really is signaling with its values, to itself and others, with the aim to spread its own valuing. (6) Values are power strategies: values are designed to further the valuer’s own life/​power. The underlying aim in communicating is still the biological one set in our drives: this is power (i.e., the preservation and growth of one’s kind). So when the valuing offers its mark to others, this is a power ploy: it prompts other wills to further its own interests, but not necessarily their own. Values are communicated for the sake of power—​for the preservation and growth of the valuer’s kind. So a value, as a tool, is not just a sign but also a weapon, one used to advance a particular kind of life in preference to others with which it competes.40 Z.ii.7: “Good and evil, and rich and poor, and high and low, and all the names of values: weapons they shall be and clashing signs that life must itself overcome itself again and again.” Values express will to power already in the way we’ve seen that they direct and focus an originally inchoate will. Z.ii.12: “With your values and words of good and evil you exercise force [Gewalt], you valuers [Werthschätzenden]: and this is your hidden love. . . .” If naming is a power-​act then even more so is the naming of marks and criteria to steer by. Values are names by which a willing aspires to channel and control its own future willing, and/​or that of others.

38 In 83:7[268]: “morality as sign-​language of the body.” Also 85–​6:2[165] (WP.258). 39 By contrast Leiter [2015, 575] argues that in such passages Nietzsche means by “sign-​language” merely a “symptom” or cause. I return to this issue in Chapter 6 (§6.2). 40 Cf. May (1999, 11).

20  Value: Introducing the Problems It’s because values are designed for power that they can be deceptive: they can be used to transmit aims different from the valuer’s own. The values I signal to others may be very different from those I use myself. I can try to get others to steer by values I purport but do not in fact aim by myself. (B) Human values. We now turn to a second set of principles about value which treat it in its distinctively human form. Sometimes Nietzsche attributes some of the previous features to humans alone, but I think they belong to what he thinks is a deeper level in us, which he insists on linking back to our animality and sheer aliveness. The following features he thinks evolved and developed in our prehistorical past and have really most made us human. (Again, this is a first look to be elaborated in Chapters 5–​8.) Nietzsche has a notably different attitude toward this distinctively human way of valuing. He is sharply critical of it, as summed up in his account of the human as “the sick animal.”41 But he also thinks that this human way of valuing may be alterable—​at least some parts of it. That is, we may be able to change how we value so that we do not in future altogether value in this human-​typifying way. (7) Human values are agential criteria: (human) values are criteria referred to by reflecting agents as they decide (as they think) what to do. This is what we usually mean by “values”: principles—​linguistic expressions—​we refer to in our conscious deliberation over which act among options to carry out. This is the particular way our human values play values’ generic role of being communicable signs for valuing: they are signs to a consciousness, via words. Nietzsche thinks that language and consciousness (by which he especially means self-​consciousness) come onto the scene together, out of the individual’s need to communicate as well as the group’s need to join individuals into a community (see GS.354). Value-​words and -​principles are clearly crucial for this. Reflecting this linguistic character of our values, Zarathustra speaks often (e.g., Z.iii.12) of “tablets [Tafeln] of values”; other works (e.g., BGE.194) speak of “goods-​tablets” [Gütertafeln]. GM.i.2 says that it was the powerful nobles who “first took for themselves the right to create values, to coin names of values.” Among these agential values Nietzsche particularly singles out our “virtues.” A virtue is a mark for the agent’s sense of itself, as an agent able to regard itself and work on itself. A virtue is an orienting self-​conception for an agent.

41 GM.iii.13: “human is sicker, less certain, more changing, more unsettled than any other animal, of this there is no doubt,—​he is the sick animal”; iii.14 begins by speaking of the “normality” of sickliness [Krankhaftigkeit] in the human. Cf. A.3: “the sick animal human.” Also see 84:26[119] (WP.259). And notice 87–​8:11[103] (WP.302): “One should at last put human values nicely back in the corner [Ecke] they only have a right to: as nook-​values [Eckensteher-​Werthe].”

Value: Introducing the Problems  21 When a value becomes explicit in this way, it gets used in a different way. It becomes something measured:  it involves a quantitative comparison, a more-​ and-​less. So GM.ii.8 speaks of the human as “the creature who measures values, who values and measures [werthet und misst], as the “esteeming [abschätzenden] animal in itself ”.”42 Such agential valuing is different from other animals’ valuing and also different from the valuing that continues in our own drives “beneath” or “behind” this agency. These word-​based values are transmitted principally not “in the blood” but by social sharing and imitating.43 Because of their explicitness, these are of course the values we notice. But they are merely the visible tip of our valuing, and our tendency to limit “value” to refer to them reflects and encourages neglect of the deep valuing in our drives. (8) Human values claim/​promote agential control: (human) values value (in part) agency. These values (or the forces that made them) want to address themselves to “the one in charge.” To be effective, they wish the faculty that answers to them to be dominant in the person, to rule the competing aims in the drives. So humans are challenged to be single things, under the authority of the agent, as what chooses by conscious reference to word-​signs. The great work of “taming” or “domesticating” humans, the main arc of human history, has shaped values to favor this unity. So self-​control, moderation, consideration, consistency are integral virtues that strengthen the very power to choose in that way, instead of acting on impulse and from desires. Primitively, Nietzsche thinks, the drives and their values were already unified. But the need to live in a society or community requires suppression of certain aggressive drives, which disrupts that original unity. The challenge of agency is to make an artificial unity that stands apart from and can control the drives. The problem of uniting this agent has become increasingly harder as history has gone on because there has been a progressive complication and enrichment of the values (ways of life) available in the culture. This mixing happens not just through culture but through “racial” mixing, which builds a diversity of values into our very bodies.44 Against this internal chaos, agential values want “stronger

42 BGE.200: “Triebe und Werthmaasse”; BGE 208: “Maasse und Werthe”; also BGE.210, GS.3. 43 In Nietzsche’s New Darwinism, I describe the process of “social selection” that acts on human practices like these values in contrast with the natural selection by which the values in our (and animals’) bodily drives are selected. 44 Cf. BGE.200 on people in race-​mixing ages as having multiple values and drives in their bodies; also BGE.208 regarding “different measures and values inherited in the blood”; also BGE.224. And notice 85–​6:1[21] (LNp55): “Valuations are innate, despite Locke!, inherited.”

22  Value: Introducing the Problems agency.” But they “want” this for a further, controlling reason, which is mostly concealed. (9) Human values serve group interests: (human) values favor and steer the agent to serve as member of a group. Human values—​word-​signs to agential valuing—​arise within social practices and primarily function to strengthen the group. Although these values are addressed to and employed by individual agents, they are offered in a social setting to those agents understood as members of a community. And although these values promote agency, they are also formed in order to use this agency for ends neither from nor for the individual. These values want the agent as collaborative member of a group. They signal to individuals what they must be in order to serve the group. So the simplest and earliest human values are the “five, six ‘I will nots’ . . . in regard to which one has given one’s promise, so as to live under the advantages of society” [GM.ii.3]. And GS.116: “These valuations and orders of rank [that we encounter in every morality] are always expressions of the needs of a community and a herd.”45 Hence each “individual” human being receives from the group values that are in the group’s interest, not (necessarily) in the individual’s own. And since values are so lasting, they often reflect the interests of groups from much earlier eras—​groups differently constituted than one’s own and facing different problems. Most often these values promote group interests by trying to bring the individual into tighter unity with the group—​to submerge him or her into it as an average member. So 86–​7:6[25] (WP.32): “What has been deified? the value instincts in the community (that which made possible its persistence); /​What has been slandered? that which set apart the higher men from the lower, the cleft-​ making drives.” When aggressive impulses that threaten that unity are nevertheless valued, this still expresses the interests of the group, but now its need for such virtues in special times of external threat (cf. BGE.201). (10) Human values attack drive interests: group interest designs values that proscribe strong drives. Group interest requires control and suppression of certain strong “animal” drives, particularly those that aggressively impose on others and fracture group

45 In GS.21: “A person’s virtues are called good with respect to their presumed effects not on him but on us and society.” In 83–​4:24[15] (WP.260): “by analysis of individual goods-​tablets it emerged that their erection is the erection of existence-​conditions of limited groups (and often erroneously): for preservation.”

Value: Introducing the Problems  23 solidarity. Human values, mainly shaped for group interests, hence typically oppose and combat these drives.46 This indeed is the main role of agency itself: it is, most urgently, a means by which strong drive-​impulses can be resisted and not acted on. The organism forms an identity separate from these drives and defined by this ability to act in independence from them, by allegiance to principles and rules (which, of course, favor group cohesion). It’s in this deep-​rooted opposition to drives that human values have been dominantly ascetic. They promote a cleavage of the person from his or her body, which gets viewed as the source of dangerous impulses that are alien from one’s true self.47 So “the animal ‘human’ finally learns to be ashamed of all its instincts” [GM.ii.7] and indeed to have a “bad conscience” toward them due to the redirection of the aggressive drives back at themselves when barred from outward discharge [GM.ii.16]. In developed form these ascetic values downgrade not just the body but our whole embodied life, calling us to live this for the sake of a distinct true life in another world where true value resides. And these values have raised up virtues such as mildness and altruism that oppose and undermine the aggressive and selfish virtues built into our drives and bodies. (11) Human values also express drive interests: beneath/​behind agent-​values are body-​values. And yet Nietzsche also holds that, even as human values attack the drives, they still express drives—​express precisely a deep preference and judgment in the organism to adopt this ascetic stance, to take on these anti-​drive values. It is his frequent theme that our values—​our agential values—​express interests in our drives, and in their associated affects.48 See 85–​6:2[190] (WP.254): “moral valuation is an interpretation [Auslegung], a kind of interpreting [interpretiren]. . . . Who interprets? [Wer legt aus?] Our affects.” And in BGE.187: “moralities are also merely a sign-​language of the affects.” A person’s drives and affects stand in power-​ relations that mesh into a structure, which is reflected in his or her values. BGE.268: “The values of a human being betray something of the structure of his soul and where it finds its conditions of life, its true need.” Often Nietzsche thinks of this structure of drives as a single thing, the deep will of “the body.” Z.i.4: “Behind your thoughts

46 BGE.198:  “All these moralities that address themselves to the single person, to the end of his “happiness” as it’s called,—​what are they but . . . recipes against his passions, his good and bad inclinations insofar as they have the will to power and want to play the master.” 47 In 87–​8:11[227] (WP.39): “Such a complete aberration of humanity from its basic instincts, such a complete decadence of value judgments, is the question mark par excellence.” 48 I treat the relation between drives and affects in Chapter 3 (§3.2) and (especially) in Chapter 4 (§4.1).

24  Value: Introducing the Problems and feelings, my brother, stands a mighty commander, an unknown wise one—​ his name is Self. In your body he dwells, he is your body.” Sometimes Nietzsche thinks of this single deep self as choosing the agent’s values by its inarticulate judgment that they best serve its overall interest, as set by its synthesized drives. Even the agential values’ ascetic hostility to the drives expresses an aim in the drives: their inversion against themselves, their “instinct for freedom discharging and venting itself only on itself ” [GM.ii.17]. And GM.iii.13 stresses that “the ascetic ideal springs from the protective and healing instincts of a degenerating life . . .; it points to a partial physiological hindrance and tiredness against which the deepest instincts of life, which have remained intact, fight incessantly with new means and inventions.”49 But Nietzsche also thinks that these deep bodily commanders can make mistakes about what really serves their deep drive interests. So the surgery may be, in many respects, ill-​advised by the body’s own interests. Ascetic values can also be adopted because these deep drives judge that the organism will do better with them, even when in fact it will not. So the ascetic priest “alleviates suffering” [GM.iii.17], but doesn’t really cure the sickness of his flock, which lies in the frustration of their unactable drives. We’ll see, indeed, that moral values have been designed to deceive the organism about itself, the better to effect their group control. Taking (10) and (11) together we see that agential valuing is designed partly for and partly against the person’s deepest interest, which is that of his or her body as a system of drives. In WP.256: “I understand by ‘morality’ a system of evaluations that partially coincides with the conditions of a creature’s life.” One of Nietzsche’s objectives will be to improve the fit between agential values and the drive-​body. (12) Human valuing posits its values as true: agent-​values purport to rest on reasons. This last point is crucial in Nietzsche’s story (and to my story about his story). We posit our agential values with a force not claimed by our bodily values: we claim them to be true or to be grounded in reasons.50 It will be a large challenge to clarify this claim—​and the relation between the two ways I’ve just put it—​in terms of truth and of reasons. When we look in Chapter 5 (§5.4) at this human

49 In 88.14[29] (WP.373): “The dominance of an altruistic mode of valuing is the consequence of an instinct for being mis-​formed. The value judgment at the lowest ground here says: ‘I am not worth [werth] much’; a merely physiological value judgment.” 50 Clark and Dudrick [2012, 171] say that values go beyond mere desires in involving a “judgment about the good”—​which may be near what I here mean.

Value: Introducing the Problems  25 posit of true values, we’ll see that (as usual for Nietzsche) it is something with a history, through which it takes different forms. He thinks the origins of this truth-​claim lay (and still lie) in values’ service of group interest. The main function of values is to “tame” members for social life, and this requires above all that values be shared. To ensure this sharing, members must experience values—​the group’s “norms”—​as binding and requisite. They must feel themselves tasked to “get right” what the group voice wills: this is the origin of externalism. This trained-​in need to make one’s own valuing correspond to group norms is the root of the posit of values as true. Indeed it is the root, more broadly, of our human will to truth: group norms are the first criterion of truth. Values—​and secondarily beliefs—​are first “true” when they match the group’s view. So the group norm is, as it were, the original “moral fact.”51 Initially the authority of these norms lies explicitly in their being commands.52 The group’s values are imagined and justified as commanded by founding ancestors who then, as GM.ii.19 describes, are gradually inflated into gods and finally into one perfect god. These commands (are thought to) set and fix these values into the world regardless of any private values members might have. So although, as commanded, these norms do depend on (imagined) valuings by ancestors or gods, they are fully “real” in their independence from members’ own values. They are good quite apart from whatever any and all of the members do value. As we noticed in §1.2, this posit of external commands is ameliorated and disguised by later developments: new stories are told about how true values are grounded in nature or conscience or reason. Kant tellingly speaks of the moral “law” as given by the agent’s own reason, so preserving that root in command but attributing the command to the agent’s own freedom. Nietzsche diagnoses this as one more way of justifying those social norms—​as an external standard feigning to be internal. The external command is disguised as issuing from a part of the person, which may involve coopting or creating an actual part to “voice” that command. Here again the boundary between externalism and internalism becomes more difficult to draw.

51 In 87–​8:11[100] (WP.7):  “one has built these social values over mankind with the goal of strengthening their voice, as if they were commands of god, as ‘reality,’ as ‘true’ world, as hope and future world.” 52 GM.ii.19: “all customs, as works of the ancestors, are also their statutes and commands.”

26  Value: Introducing the Problems

1.4  Incorporating the truth about values These, I suggest, are the main lines of Nietzsche’s naturalistic “theory of values.” They are his analyses of how we have valued so far. And they pose for him the question of how humans should value in the future on the basis of this newly achieved understanding of themselves. They challenge him and us to a revaluation of values on this basis. Since the point is to learn from this study of values, this revaluation will consist in “incorporating” the truths about values uncovered by that study. It will lie in incorporating these truths into one’s valuing—​valuing in the light of them. This amounts to a particular kind of “honesty” or “truthfulness” in one’s valuing. Those truths give us reasons to change our current valuing—​reasons to change both its force and its content. As we incorporate the insights of biology, history, and psychology into our values, we will revise both how and what we value. I think that this is Nietzsche’s main idea of his own achievement. He thinks he is the first (in human history!) to take the “step back” from values that is needed to see them as they are.53 This makes it possible (for the first time!) to value in the recognition of what valuing is—​not just in the abstract, but in our own case.54 Thus he prepares for a great turning in human development,55 which can even be seen as humanity’s passage into a new kind: the superhuman. So Nietzsche offers his own new values as the product of such truthfulness: this is their claim to his readers’ attention. It is also the way he justifies his values to himself: this is what lets him credit his values as meriting his own valuing of them. It’s this particular way that he claims to improve on earlier values that grounds the externalist force we’ve seen he needs for valuing. That his values result from incorporating those truths is the reason (he claims) that he and we should value them. But what is the force of this “should”? Why should we care whether his values are the product of his studies—​whether they incorporate these truths? Why should this give them a special status—​make them good? It seems that this truthfulness is just something Nietzsche himself values, one more of his “valueds.” As such it seems not to give us any reason to value it ourselves. Indeed it seems not 53 EH.iv.7: “What marks me off, what sets me aside against all the rest of humanity, is to have uncovered Christian morality.” BGE.186: “In all ‘science of morality’ so far there was lacking, strange as it may sound, the problem of morality itself: there was lacking the suspicion that there is something problematic here.” 83:7[125] says that so far people have lacked the “ears” to understand the sign-​ language of moral judgments. 54 Nietzsche has this goal in mind from early on; in HH.iii.44 he speaks of the highest stage of morality as that of “insight,—​which is beyond all illusionary motives in morality, but has made itself clear how for long ages humanity could possess no other.” 55 EH.iii.D.2:  “My task, preparing for humanity’s moment of highest self-​examination, a great noon. . . .”

Value: Introducing the Problems  27 to give Nietzsche himself such a reason—​any reason external to what he already does value. This brings us back to the problem we raised in §1.2. How can Nietzsche get, consistently with his internalist insistence that “values are just valueds,” the externalist force he needs for valuing? How can he legitimate the claim that he values incorporating those truths because it’s good—​good already before he values it? How can there be any such “prior good,” if values are essentially valueds? Nietzsche needs some degree of externalism, but he also needs to ground it in the internalism to which he’s committed. Given his internalism and perspectivism, his justification must ultimately appeal to values that he and we (his readers) already have. He must hold that this value of incorporating these truths is already in us and only needs to be recognized or aroused by his appeal. And I think we can see, from §1.3’s sketch of the broad findings of his study of values, just where he finds the supports for that value in us. We value honesty in valuing on two deep grounds. These two deep reasons for valuing “truthful valuing” have in common that they are “meta-​values”; that is, values with the second-​order role of steering one’s (first-​order) valuing. The first reason is (in a way) pragmatic, the second epistemic. Making our values reflect truth is valuable first because it helps us to something else we value, and, second, because we value truth itself. So, first, we saw—​this was principle (2)—​that all values are ultimately strategies by life for power: they are signs adopted by living things in their effort to preserve and (especially) expand the scope of their activity. Such growth is the criterion by which these value-​signs are constantly implicitly assessed. Power is life’s ultimate meta-​value, its value-​for-​judging-​values. And Nietzsche first rests his appeal—​in favor of his truthful values—​on this criterion that he thinks is already deeply operative in both himself and his readers. He claims that incorporating the truth about values will let us make values better signposts for the growth we ultimately want them for. Just how does Nietzsche think that incorporating his truths will help us toward power? When we recognize explicitly that we do deeply value this growth, we will be able to apply this criterion not just in the subliminal judgments of our drives, but also in our agential (conscious and worded) valuing. We will be able to bring the latter into better alignment with the former. The study of values will particularly reveal how our current moral values not only are not so aligned, but also work to steer us away from our power. So our agency will learn to take the side of the drives and their basic value of power against morality’s attacks. There’s a second main basis for Nietzsche’s value of truthful valuing. He justifies it not just as a means to power, but also as satisfying another deep aim we already have: the aim—​this was (12)—​at truth. We have this aim, Nietzsche thinks, just as humans. It has been set into us in that long process of “taming” that gave

28  Value: Introducing the Problems us agency. It is the way of growing, the form of power, that we have been bred to seek. And like power, it operates as a meta-​value (i.e., as a criterion for judging and improving our first-​order values). We all already judge them with respect to truth. To be sure, Nietzsche rejects the original and long-​standing way this criterion of truth has been understood and applied. He denies that his (or any) values are “true” in the sense of corresponding to real goods independent of his valuing; there are no such goods. As I have put it instead, he claims that his values are “truthful” or “honest” in the sense that he values them while seeing and facing the truth about them. This is the form that that bred-​in criterion of truth can now take, once we see that its original form rested on the lie of real goods. We learn to want the kind of truth for our values that they truly can have. It’s important to see that these values of power and truth are of a different kind than our many other values. They are values that apply to the way that we carry out all that other valuing. They are the signs by which we (seek to) improve our valuing. Or, as we might rather put it, these meta-​values are embedded within all those other values, as the ways they try to improve themselves. Our drives judge their values by how well they empower. Our agency judges its values by whether they’re true. We’ll examine these meta-​values in some detail later on (power in Chapter 2, truth in Chapter 5). We’ll see Nietzsche’s naturalistic accounts of how and why these values came to be embedded in us. It’s also important to bear in mind just where Nietzsche thinks we hold these meta-​values. They are the aims of wills set so deeply in us that they operate largely implicitly. We need never become aware of these values, need never put them in words. This applies even to the “will to truth,” which we’ve seen is entangled with our agency. It, too, does its main work as an unnoticed need to match one’s beliefs and values to standards outside. Agency depends on this implicit will and need never make explicit its own valuing of truth. The implicit and background nature of these two meta-​values affects the character of Nietzsche’s appeal to them. In a Socratic dialectic, what counts are the beliefs and values the interlocutor articulates and defends. Pressed by the philosopher, the interlocutor can rescue his or her position by amending those beliefs and values, more or less at will. For Nietzsche, by contrast, what counts are values the interlocutor may well not recognize that he or she has—​values that are set so deeply into him or her that there’s no prospect of amending them to avoid his arguments. Thus Nietzsche grounds the degree of externalism he needs in these two meta-​ values he claims we all share. Externalism, remember, is the idea that my goods were good before I valued them—​that I value them because they’re good, rather than the reverse. Nietzsche can reconcile this with internalism, which holds the reverse, by taking those goods as “external” only to the first-​order valuing. So he

Value: Introducing the Problems  29 values honesty because-​it’s-​good—​good independently of all those other (first-​ order) values. It has to be independent of them if it is to improve them. But this good is not independent of those meta-​values: it’s grounded in them. It’s good as (an achievement of) what they (in the abstract) value. This shows both how Nietzsche can justify his values to us and how he can fully value them himself—​can posit them in the valuative sense, while still hanging on to the internalist view that they are merely valueds. To value them, he must think that he does so because they’re good, that he’s tracking some goodness they already have. And he can think this (truly) because he can see his values as improvements in his own earlier values, by those criteria of power and truth. He values them now as values he has risen to by revising his earlier values to meet better those standards of power and truth. Here we notice Nietzsche’s dynamic idea of (proper) valuing. He teaches me to see my valuing as (in the process of) improving. It’s by comparison through time that I get the needed confidence in my valuing. I need to see what I value now as better, by those two basic criteria, than what I valued before. I need to value it as improving upon what I valued before, hence as good prior to and independently of my valuing it now. So we can see the externalist force as achieved by these comparisons with one’s own earlier valuing. I don’t see my values as real or objective, but simply as better than my old, when held to the criteria of those meta-​values. There will be many more complications to consider. We will have to see how those two meta-​values also stand in a certain tension with one another. Incorporating the truth about values into our valuing can also hurt our values’ ability to signpost power. We’ll see that the conflict between “truth” and “life” and the ascetic force of the will to truth are important problems for Nietzsche. I’ll try to show, however, that he thinks he finds a way to make these two values aid and abet one another—​let them work together as standards for improving our values. This lets them jointly license, as we’ve seen, his project of incorporating the truth about values. This, I suggest, is Nietzsche’s way of obtaining, consistently with his deep allegiance to internalism, the degree of externalism he needs in order to value and to promote his values to us. But he doesn’t always hold onto this line. That stronger, realist externalism is very hard to cast off: it’s embedded in our agential values more deeply than any metaethical theory one might pronounce. It’s very easy to deny, in abstracto, that there are any real values yet go right along presuming one’s own values to be real in just this way. Changing values at all isn’t easy. They’re not mere ideas, but things built physically, lastingly into the world. Agential values are set down on tablets, but, more importantly, they are built into us as deep-​rooted mental habits for feeling and judging in given ways. We don’t just “give up” a value; we need to actively weed

30  Value: Introducing the Problems its habituated response out of ourselves in the many different kinds of situations they’re tangled in. Nor are our values rooted just in single persons; they are woven into all the valuative practices that structure society. It’s not clear whether those practices could survive if the claim that these values are “real goods” is discredited and revoked. So this is difficult work. The expectation of real value is ingrained in all of us, Nietzsche included. In justifying his values, he slips, repeatedly and in several ways, into claiming to have laid bare fully external values—​values that are more than mere valueds. He falls back into crediting himself with having found real goods. Two examples are the ways he tries to ground values in humans’ survival conditions and in their rank order. He treats survival conditions as a biological basis for his own values.56 And he posits a real rank order of human types and values—​a standard not itself dependent on any particular valuing, it seems.57 But my claim is that Nietzsche also repeatedly “catches himself ” in these realist oversteppings. They are missteps within his dominant project to give an internalist justification of his values: to show that he can single them out as privileged and deserving our special attention without imagining them independent of his and our valuing.58 His claims about survival conditions and rank order, as well as the key claim about will to power, all begin as strategies to show how facts about valuing—​and about what we already value—​can commend certain other values to us. His realist-​externalist flourishes occur when he inflates too far what he admits is all he’s entitled to. But over and again he pulls himself back to naturalized values, with reminders (to his readers and himself) that his values are “his”—​but also “ours.”

1.5 Metaethical multiplicity Now I  still haven’t done what is expected in a treatment of Nietzsche’s metaethics: I haven’t said where he stands in the map of metaethical positions laid out in current analytic debates.59 Let me try to do that, very quickly, now.

56 So Schacht says [1983, 404] that these are values without an esteeming. 85–​6:1[53] (LNp59) speaks of the task “to make a critique [of the current way of judging] by asking: how strong is it? what does it work towards? . . . But the critique is new, the question: is ‘good’ really [wirklich] ‘good’?” 57 In 88:15[120] (WP 857): “I distinguish a type of ascending life and another of decay, of decomposition, of weakness. /​Is it credible, that the question of rank between these two types is still to be posed?” 58 In 85:34[121] (LNp8): “That my valuation or condemnation of someone does not give another the right to the same valuation or condemnation:—​unless he stands equal to me and is of equal rank.” 59 Among the many attempts to locate Nietzsche’s position this way, see, e.g., Leiter [2000, 2002], Shaw [2007], Hussain [2011], Silk [2015, 2017].

Value: Introducing the Problems  31 It is common in recent treatments of Nietzsche’s metaethics to suggest that this is underspecified—​that he doesn’t take a clear or consistent enough stance on the questions our own metaethics asks.60 But I think the problem is rather that his position is too rich: he refuses to give simple or single answers to these questions. He does so not out of a sloppy inconsistency, but because he sees that the phenomenon of valuing is more diverse than those questions recognize. The main complication is Nietzsche’s denial that valuing is “one thing.” Indeed the expectation that he has a single idea of “what values are” should be suspect from the start. He distinguishes many different ways of valuing; our usual conception of it is too local and treats it as too uniform. Most treatments of Nietzsche’s metaethics have been naïve in their inattention to these distinctions. In particular, as I’ve tried to show, he thinks of three main ways of valuing: the body’s, the moral agent’s, and his own. We could also call these animal, human, and superhuman valuing. Each has its own “semantics” (or “intentionality”); that is, its own way of positing its values as good. So Nietzsche has what might look like three separate and inconsistent metaethical positions but that are really three elements in a unified account of valuing. Let’s work our way down through a familiar catalogue of metaethical positions, considering how each applies to those three kinds of valuing, as Nietzsche understands them. (a)  The usual partition of positions begins with the distinction between cognitivism and non-​cognitivism. These are semantic theories about what is “meant” or “expressed” in our valuing. Cognitivism takes evaluations to express a belief purporting truth; non-​cognitivism denies this. Of the three kinds of valuing, the first means its values non-​cognitively. Our drives value simply by using signs to steer by (toward).61 They “see” or “interpret” their values as good just by using them this way. They don’t posit them as “true” to anything outside them. Instead they judge and adjust these signs as they learn how well they “pay off ” in expanding power. As we saw, the drives don’t recognize what they’re doing as they value. They don’t see the “frame” of their valuing around their values; they lack the perspectivist truth. But they refrain from the externalist mistake of thinking their values tasked to match real goods outside. By contrast Nietzsche thinks that our agential valuing does make that externalist posit. This is one of its main impositions on our drive-​valuing. In order to “tame” the latter for social life, the habit of obeying external norms needs

60 So Leiter [2000]. Hussain [2011, 412]: “The texts lack the granularity that would really be needed to resolve the claims of competing metaethical interpretations.” Also Huddleston [2014, 323–​4]. 61 In Chapter 4, I’ll add a second aspect to this bodily valuing, in the affects’ feeling of growth/​decline. This, too, is non-​cognitive in making no truth-​claims.

32  Value: Introducing the Problems to be inculcated. It’s to license this habit of obedience that the conviction is gradually ingrained that there are real values outside one’s valuing that one needs to align it toward. The claim to match such values—​to be true—​comes to be part of the semantics of valuing. This illusion of real or external goods develops to serve that taming—​a diagnosis that is a large part of Nietzsche’s hostility to it. But the historical character of this posit and the way it is overlaid on a deeper valuing that doesn’t make it suggest the contingency of such externalism. They support Nietzsche’s optimism that human can find a way to grow out of what is only a (deeply settled) bad habit. Nietzsche aspires to overcome this posit himself—​that is, the posit that his valuing is “true of ” values existing in their own right apart from that valuing. But this is not to say that his new valuing is “non-​cognitive.” It does make a truth-​claim, though not about such real values. (b)  Let’s continue down our metaethical catalogue focusing on cognitivism and its varieties. Begin with “error-​theory”; that is, the species of cognitivism that holds that valuing’s truth-​posit is false.62 Nietzsche’s frequent expressions of this position are unsurprising given what we’ve just seen: they apply to our agential, moral valuing which does indeed claim its values to be real—​which they’re not. In TI.vii.1: “One knows my demand on philosophers, to set themselves beyond good and evil,—​to have the illusion of moral judgment beneath them. This demand follows from an insight that has been first formulated by me: that there are no moral facts at all. Moral judgment has this in common with religious, that it believes in realities [Realitäten] that are not [die keine sind].” But this error-​theory does not apply to the two other ways of valuing in Nietzsche’s scenario. Bodily valuing makes no truth-​claim, and his own valuing does, but a different one that (we’ll see) has a chance to be true. Nietzsche denies that all valuing makes the mistake of positing its values as real. And why indeed would he allow our agential-​moral valuing to represent valuing in general? Human is “the sick animal” due precisely to the defective way it values. Nietzsche’s return to “natural” values is his effort to bring our conscious and worded values into healthy alignment with our drive-​valuing; this will include undoing that false posit. (c) Let’s continue our catalogue by distinguishing forms of cognitivism, according to just which “belief purporting truth” it claims valuing makes.



62

We should also place here the Hussainian “fictionalism” discussed in §1.2.

Value: Introducing the Problems  33 Cognitivism holds that in valuing X I believe (it is true that) X is good or valuable. In the case of moral valuing, this truth-​claim posits X as “really” good or valuable (i.e., good independently of my valuing it). But I can believe (it is true that) X is good without that externalist posit. I can posit it as good by and in my valuing it—​as good not really but perspectivally.63 So, against the usual realist-​ externalist cognitivism we discover a perspectivist-​internalist cognitivism. This is the way Nietzsche means to posit his own values. We’ve already seen the great challenge this faces. The belief needs to single out the value as deserving valuing: Nietzsche needs to persuade his readers, and even himself, that his values “should” be valued.64 When he values, for example, power he can’t mean just that he values it. Since (he thinks) his values are indeed only “valueds,” he needs a way to prioritize them over other valueds. He needs to give us, his readers, reasons to adopt these values ourselves. Yet these reasons can’t claim that his values are real or external goods. His reasons must appeal to the values we already have; they must show how our own values give us these reasons to change our values. These reasons will be, in particular, certain truths about these values we already have. (d)  Once again we can distinguish options, now within a perspectivist-​ internalist version of cognitivism. These options are hypotheses about the force with which Nietzsche himself “values his values”; I’ve offered different accounts of the force of our drive-​valuing (non-​cognitivism) and of our moral-​ agential valuing (error-​theory). In his own valuing Nietzsche aspires to posit values as what they indeed are. He tries, that is, to absorb the lessons from his study of values into the way he values his own. So he tries to “incorporate” those lessons, but in a manner that still lets him privilege his own valuing. He wants to claim a certain kind of truth for his values, and reasons for them. The options for this reading differ in what kind of privilege they take Nietzsche to claim. A first possibility is the “constitutivism” that has been so meticulously developed by Katsafanas [2013]. He reads Nietzsche to claim that power is a “constitutive aim of action”; that is, a quasi-​Kantian “condition of the possibility” of agency. In being an agent one must value power.

63 Reginster [2006] frames the issues using the terms “objective” and “subjective.” Another pair of terms is “attitude-​independence” and “attitude-​dependence”; this is how Silk [2015] states it. 64 Nehamas [1985, 35]: “Nietzsche’s central problem as an author, therefore, is that he wants his readers to accept his views, his judgments and his values as much as he wants them to know that these are essentially his views, his judgments, and his values.” Katsafanas [2013, 147–​56] presents well the “tension” between the “privileged normative status” Nietzsche gives to power and his denial of objective values.

34  Value: Introducing the Problems I will discuss the force of such “transcendental arguments” in Chapter  5 (§5.2). I agree that Nietzsche does sometimes try out these arguments. But just as he finally rejects such arguments in epistemology, so I think he opts against this attempt to show that we must value power. He prefers to rest his appeal on the claim that we do. Transcendental arguments try to get—​I suggest—​a kind of logic-​coercing grip on us that goes against Nietzsche’s grain. He diagnoses Kant, here and elsewhere, as obsessively looking for “laws” to obey. He himself wants something else, a good not required but advised. I’ll return to this in Chapter 2. Another option is the “constructivism” that has been well-​presented by Silk [2015]. He reads Nietzsche to claim that values “in the normative sense” are “constructed”—​not by humans generally, but by the “new philosophers.” For only the latter satisfy the “epistemic constraints” Silk thinks Nietzsche places on the creators of “genuine values.” The values they construct (unlike others who might “make values”) are genuine and normative in that they “make legitimate claims on us,” such that we “ought to, or have reason to, have or promote” them [2015, 255]. My own reading lies very close to this. I agree that Nietzsche privileges his own values by their satisfaction of epistemic constraints. But I don’t think that he privileges them to the extent of thinking them “genuine” values, whereas values inherited or made by others (non-​“new philosophers”) are not genuine. He doesn’t claim that his own stance is “metaphysically privileged” [2015, 258] in constructing genuinely normative values. I hear Silk’s version of constructivism still to claim to constitute an external standard to which we all “ought” to align. But Nietzsche justifies his values by direct appeal to the values we already have. He tries to point out values we have without noticing them. The “ought” is supplied not from outside but by what the person values already. He claims only to offer the means by which that valuing will want to improve itself. All values are just as much genuine values, in Nietzsche’s view—​in the “descriptive” view that is primary for him (as we saw in §1.2). They have all been “created” or “constructed” back through human history by innovating valuers. None of these valuers has known what Nietzsche takes himself (and his new philosophers) to know, but that hasn’t prevented them from creating values. And it doesn’t prevent all of us from having values ourselves. By his perspectivism, Nietzsche gives credit to our existing values as the only determiners of what’s good for us. So his appeal is ultimately to these. But our valuing of these values includes a will and ability to improve them, in the two fundamental respects we noticed in §1.4. We will to improve them as signs for power—​a will embedded deeply in us just as living things. We also will to improve our values in how well they face the truth—​a will bred into us humans

Value: Introducing the Problems  35 and indeed distinctive of our kind. These deep aims function as second-​order or meta-​values, criteria by which we will to improve our first-​order values. So, in the first place, Nietzsche relies on the claim that our very deepest aiming—​going on beneath our agency in our bodily drives and affects—​is a will to power. He appeals to this will to power directly—​he tries to incite it—​and he also tries to call our attention, in our agency, to the fact of this deep will. When we see this truth about our bodily selves, we find reasons to amend our agential values for the sake of our power. And, in the second place, Nietzsche thinks we have reasons to amend our agential values so that they better face the truth. He offers his own values not as “true” to real goods, but as “truthful” to the facts both about oneself and about what one values. Better, he offers them as “more truthful,” since he knows that there are many important facts he hasn’t faced. So he offers his values not as end-​ points, but to mark a direction of improvement. Progress in this direction will go on beyond him and the level he thinks he reaches. There will be other new kinds of things to learn about ourselves and to reflect in our valuings. But this is only the beginning of our look at the claims Nietzsche makes for his own values. We’ll see that he makes some of these claims as it were to himself: he cites credentials that give him reason to think that his values are “his own”—​and are to be valued by him as such. He makes other claims to his readers, and these include assertions about our own drives. We of course must assess these in deciding his values’ credit for us. He will need to persuade us that we already want what he claims in order to think that, if we value as he does, we will do so from a stance that “knows more.” If we agree, then we likewise can value power as truly good.65 In the next chapter I’ll examine this argument concerning life and power. This will continue the work of specifying Nietzsche’s metaethics, a task that will last us most of the book.

65 In A.9: “As far as the theologians’ influence reaches, the value-​judgment is turned on its head, the concepts ‘true’ and ‘false’ are necessarily reversed: what is most harmful to life is here called ‘true,’ what raises, increases, affirms, justifies, and makes it triumph, is called ‘false.’ ”

PART I

B ODY  VA LU E S

2

Life As Valuer and Valued

There’s no better place to start on Nietzsche’s values than with his idea of life. This lies at the very center of his thinking and of his thinking on values. It is a main part of the hinge with which he turns from his study of values into his valuing. So it’s here we should start to consider whether he inflates his own values beyond the status of valueds in his effort to justify these values to us—​and indeed to himself. Now I think life is one of the topics those working on Nietzsche’s arguments tend to avoid. There are, after all, some of his ideas that are better noticed by beginning readers. Those who go on to treat him argumentatively tend to discount these ideas and place them on the periphery of his thought, either because (a) these views look like embarrassing weaknesses or because (b) they at least look useless as arguments—​they seem dead weight in his theory. Life is one such topic—​and especially the way Nietzsche so often uses it to support or justify his values. I think beginning readers better notice the importance of this argument to him. Indeed I think it is Nietzsche’s principal justification for his values: life gives the main criterion by which he carries out his “revaluation of values,” and the fact that life supplies it is what justifies that criterion. “Life” is the clear fulcrum of most of his defenses of his values, and only such judgments as (a) and (b) can explain the widespread neglect of the topic.1 Contra those judgments, I think that this argument has some merit—​at least in potential. Although early readers can’t well say quite why, I think they aptly feel some force in this argument. So it shouldn’t embarrass us as much as we (sympathetic) interpreters might think. Life is so important to Nietzsche because it plays two fundamental roles in relation to values: (i) it is what values and (ii) it is (the gist of) what’s valued. It’s on these two grounds together that life serves Nietzsche as the decisive criterion for judging “the value of values.” To be sure, we’ll see that there are other important criteria besides. But these will be in effect specifications of the kind of life 1 Hunt [1991, 111–​30] is one exception who stresses and examines Nietzsche’s argument from life to values. See also Conway [2006]. May [1999] develops how “life-​enhancement” is Nietzsche’s standard for evaluating values but doesn’t examine just what life is. The same is true of Reginster [2006], despite his focus on “the affirmation of life.” Schacht [1983] treats at length Nietzsche’s notion of life [232–​53], and more briefly, the role of life in supporting values [354–​6 395–​8]. Nietzsche’s Values. John Richardson, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190098230.001.0001

40  Body Values that’s most valuable, and dependent on prior argument that life is valuable per se. Nietzsche sees his position on the value of life as the root of his disagreement with Schopenhauer, which set him on his philosophical path.2 In using life to justify his own values, Nietzsche faces the challenge we treated in Chapter 1: he needs to privilege his own values, but without positing them as real (i.e., without violating his internalist stricture that values depend on valuings—​are perspectival). It will be clear enough that he tries to honor this requirement. For when he justifies the value of life, it is as something valued: as valued indeed by life, which is taken to speak with a certain authority that gives it argumentative weight for us (his readers). But we will need to see how this authority can be grounded in the values his audience already has. Our path will be this. We’ll begin in §2.1 with an orienting look at the topic of “life,” seeing the importance of the idea for Nietzsche, but also its multiple meanings: biological, human, phenomenal, personal, poetic. Each plays an important part in his overall argument. Our challenge is to understand how these several parts to his notion of life are related and ordered. Life, we see, is so important to Nietzsche because it is both what values and what is (ultimately) valued. So we look next, in §2.2, at the idea that life is “what values.” We examine Nietzsche’s claim that all life values and discuss his prospects for “naturalizing” this claim in a way that avoids positing “little minds” in all organisms. Given that it’s life that values, we then, in §2.3, consider what it most basically values—​its ultimate “valued.” We try to give an adequate sense to Nietzsche’s famous answer—​power—​and defend this reading against a notable alternative. Next we examine in §2.4 the argument Nietzsche builds from the claims that (a) only life values and (b) life values power: his justification of power as the good. We consider the historical context of his argument and see that he ultimately means it to take an internalist form. Finally we take a first look, in §2.5, at how he uses this criterion of power to judge values; we also consider the relation between this criterion and a seemingly independent standard he uses, saying “Yes” to life. All of this will give us a broad sense of power, which the rest of the book will both rely on and elaborate.

2 In 87:9[42] (WP.1005): “At the same time [around 1876] I grasped that my instinct pushed in the opposite direction from Schopenhauer’s: towards a justification of life, even in its most fearsome, ambiguous, and mendacious—​for this I  had to hand the formula ‘dionysian.’ ” Also A.7. Schacht [1983, 344] stresses this reaction to Schopenhauer.

Life: As Valuer and Valued  41

2.1 Life: an introduction Let’s examine Nietzsche’s notion of life [Leben]. We’ll see that he means many things by the word. So there’s an unavoidable complexity to the topic. The challenge will be to bring this multiplicity into perspicuous order. Given its key role in supporting his values, it’s not surprising that the idea of life is constantly present in his writing. It appears again and again at crucial points. It plays an important role near the start of his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, which develops how art “made life possible and worth living” for the Greeks in the face of their tragic view that it’s “better never to have been born” [BT.1, 3]. The way tragedy is life-​affirming despite this negative judgment is a crucial point of the book. This is confirmed in the later-​added “Attempt at a Self-​ Criticism,” which famously says that the book’s task was “to look at science in the optic of the artist, but at art in that of life” [BT.asc.2]; it adds later that the book was burdened with the question “What, seen in the optic of life, is the significance of morality?”[4]‌. The idea of life remains important in the middle, “positivist” works,3 and then all through Nietzsche’s maturity, where, of course, our interest mainly lies. He counts himself among the “advocates of life” [Fürsprecher des Lebens] [88:15[44] (WP.116)].4 His task is to address the “total problem of life” [EH.i.1]. He makes life literally everything to him.5 And he quite usually presumes and relies on the idea that life is or gives the standard for his revaluation, as, for example, in BGE.2: “For all the value that the true, the truthful, the selfless may deserve: it would be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for all life must be ascribed to appearance, the will to deception, selfishness, and lust.”6 We’ll look at many more of these passages as we go. Our main interest will be in the arguments Nietzsche tries to base on life. But I also want to do justice to his poetic and affective relation to it. He composed music for a “Hymn to Life,” to words by Lou Salomé (as he mentions in EH.iii.Z.1). But the most important such treatment is in climactic passages in 3 Life as criterion is embedded in the title of the second Untimely Meditation: On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life. UM.ii.10: “[I]‌demand that the human should above all learn to live and should use history only in the service of the life [he has] learned [to live].” In Human, All-​too-​ Human he continues to mull the question whether truth is harmful to life; e.g., HH.i.34. Notice the important role of life at the beginning of The Gay Science, GS.1. 4 This is Zarathustra’s role, too: Z.ii.19, iii.13. Nietzsche also says that he belongs to the “friends of life” [82:2[4]‌, 82–​3:4[1]]. 5 85–​6:1[24] (LNp56): “The living is being [das Sein]: beyond that [weiter] there is no being.” 85–​ 6:2[172] (WP.582, LNp94): “ ‘Being’—​we have no other representation of it than ‘living’.—​How can something dead ‘be’?” Cf. 87.9[63] (WP.581). 6 See also BGE.4, 19, 23. 86–​7:7[6]‌includes a sketch (WP.266) of a book about morality’s relation to life: “opposition of life and morality: morality judged and condemned from life.” It lists ways that morality has been detrimental to life—​but also ways that it has been useful.

42  Body Values Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where life is personified as a woman Zarathustra loves. I’ll quickly sketch this little drama, which bares a worry that grips Nietzsche all his life: that his allegiance to truth is hurting his life. The personification begins in “The Dance-​Song” [Z.ii.10], where Zarathustra finds himself torn between his loves of Life and of his “wild Wisdom,” both imagined as women jealous over him.7 In “On Self-​Overcoming” [ii.12] this personified Life tells us what she is: will to power; Zarathustra loves Life as will to power, and her identity clarifies the conflict with truth. In “The Other Dance-​ Song” [iii.15] Zarathustra’s romance with Life culminates. She complains that he doesn’t love her enough, citing his thought that he will leave her soon; he replies by whispering (it seems) that he knows he will return. Life denies that anyone knows this, yet it seems that this idea of eternal return is what lets Zarathustra marry Life at the end of the book [iii.16].8 Now given the omnipresence of Nietzsche’s idea of life and its starring role in the book most important to him, why has it been so often discounted and ignored? Chiefly I think because it seems hopelessly vague and, as such, quite unable to do the work he wants it for. When he tells us that he “takes the side of life,” we remember how wide a spectrum of viewpoints can call themselves “pro life.”9 Moreover, it seems that every viewpoint, just insofar as it values, can claim (if it wants) a right to so count itself. For inasmuch as values render a judgment on how to live, every one of them is (in this way) for the sake of life. Any values—​ including the Christian—​purport to tell how to live life best; each is a strategy for life. Nietzsche remarks this all-​inclusiveness when he says of the advice “ ‘live according to life’—​how could you not? Why make a principle of what you yourselves are and must be?” [BGE.9] And these grounds for distrusting the concept are reinforced by the way his most conspicuous mentions of life are those poetic personifications of “her.”10 If he is so loose and metaphorical here, we may suspect him to be just a little less so elsewhere, too. And indeed even in places where he’s not actually personifying life, he sometimes seems to be treating it as a “thing” in ways that can only be metaphorical. We’ll look into what philosophical significance any of Zarathustra’s story might have. But notice how the device of personifying life takes a step toward 7 I should mention that my special capitalization of “Life” here reflects no change in the German (where Leben is capitalized throughout). 8 That is, the end of the book as Nietzsche planned it, before the appended Part iv. Regarding the marriage, I follow Lampert [1986]. 9 In Z.ii.7 Zarathustra says that even “tarantulas”—​egalitarians antithetical to himself—​“preach my teaching of life.” 10 Life is also presented as a woman in GS.339, entitled “Vita femina,” which concludes: “But perhaps that is the strongest magic of life: a gold-​worked veil of beautiful possibilities lies over it, promising, resisting, bashful, mocking, pitying, seductive. Yes, life is a woman!” And Zarathustra’s “wild Wisdom” is also echoed in the famous opening of the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil, “Supposing truth is a woman.”

Life: As Valuer and Valued  43 setting it up as an authority for values. By itself this seems only a rhetorical device with no argumentative force:  clearly it’s not part of Nietzsche’s naturalistic view of life, that it’s a woman. Yet the device does indicate, I think, his intent to use life as something with a point of view which our own valuing ought to match or accept. It also indicates, we’ll see, that life’s authority lies not in the kind of reverence usually accorded to value-​giving gods but in an erotic relation. What can life be, within his naturalistic view, that would make sensible such an erotic stance toward it? And what kind of ground would this give us to accept life’s values? Even the poetic treatments of life offer clues to his argument. I will try to show that Nietzsche’s idea of life is not so much indefinite as multiple and that we can profitably examine and sort out this multiplicity. (I made the same claim about his notion of “value” in Chapter 1.) We can map the relations in which his different notions of life stand to one another and can determine which has priority. Let’s begin with a quick partition of some senses in which Nietzsche (or anyone) might use “life.”11 Which of the following—​or which combination of them—​does he mean, in his value lessons? When he counsels us, for example, to “say Yes to life,” which sense of life is intended? Similarly with his claim that “life is will to power”: What kind of life does he so characterize? In general, which sense of “life” serves in his defense of his values? I  think most treatments of Nietzsche on life are sunk by not noticing these distinctions. (1)  Biological. Life = all organisms, or what it is to be an organism. So either (a) life is the sum total of organisms, as when one says “So far as we know, life is confined to this planet.” Or (b) life is the property (being-​a live) that all of these organisms possess, as when one says “Life is what all living things share.” If meant biologically, “saying Yes to life” would be affirming or valuing all organic life, or that property of aliveness that all of it has. Similarly, “life is will to power” would say that organisms’ aliveness either is or involves willing power. Nietzsche clearly does have this biological life sometimes in mind.12 It is flagged, for example, in his frequent references to “organisms” and to the “organic.” In BGE.13, for example, he seems to equate “something living [etwas Lebendiges]” with “an organic being.”13 If it’s life in this sense that justifies his values, Nietzsche’s biology would play a crucial role indeed.

11 Compare Schacht’s division (1983, 234)  of the “biological-​ scientific” and “experiential-​ psychological” ways in which Nietzsche regards life. 12 87–​8:11[111] (WP.704, LNp221): “To understand what life is, what kind of striving and tension life is, the formula must apply to trees and plants as well as to animals.” 13 Life is also linked with the organic in BGE.36, 259.

44  Body Values (2)  Human. Life = all humans, or what it is to be a human being. Nietzsche’s interest is obviously focused on human beings; his valuative conclusions concern these alone and give no hint of concern for animals or plants. So we may suspect that when he uses “life” he’s referring just to human life—​either to the whole set of humans or to their property of being (humanly) alive. In this case life would be studied not by biology but by anthropology—​yet in the same scientific fashion. If meant in this sense, “saying Yes to life” would mean affirming or valuing human life, and the claim that “life is will to power” would apply only to human life. Even some references to “the organism” may have just humans in view, as in A.14: “becoming conscious, the ‘spirit,’ count for us as symptoms of a relative imperfection of the organism.” Sometimes Nietzsche extends this sense to apply to composites of many individual humans; UM.ii.1 says that there’s a degree of historical sense “by which the living [thing] comes to grief, and finally is destroyed, be it a human or a people or a culture.” So he treats human groups as “living” as well. (3)  Phenomenal. Life = the experience of living, what it’s like to live (either as an organism or as a human). When we say “Life is hard,” I think we mean life in this sense. Meant so, “life” involves a point of view, an intentionality that has this experience. So biology and anthropology—​at least as “objective” disciplines—​would be insufficient to treat life since they wouldn’t reach that essential point of view. We’ll see that Nietzsche insists on treating life as perspectival in just this way:  to understand organisms we must see them not as mechanical systems but as wills or drives, with perspectives and aims. So life is something “lived” (i.e., experienced), a sense captured in the German erlebt.14 This is indeed part of what is meant by the claim that “life is will to power.” If meant the same way, “saying Yes to life” would be affirming the (first-​personal) effort or experience of living, not the (third-​personal) existence of organisms. (4)  Personal. Life = that which a person is aware of living through, from its beginning to its end. Each of us understands him-​or herself as living a life, (in each case) “my” life between birth and death. This may be the special character of phenomenal life in the case of humans: the living thing recognizes about itself that it is this interval, after birth and before death, of first-​personal effort and feeling. When Nietzsche uses “life” preceded by “a” or by a personal pronoun, he usually has this sense in mind.15 It is for obvious reasons to the forefront in Ecce Homo, 14 See how BGE.p.1 speaks of “the rest of life, so-​called ‘experiences [Erlebnisse],’ ” and again of “our experience, our life, our being.” 15 Consider in UM.iii.3: “every great philosophy . . . as a whole always only says: this is the picture of all life, and learn from it the sense of your life. And the reverse: read only your life and understand from it the hieroglyphics of universal life.” Or GS.295: “The most unbearable . . . for me would be a life completely without habits.” And perhaps GS.324: “In media vita. No! Life has not disappointed me!

Life: As Valuer and Valued  45 as in its opening paragraph: “How could I not be thankful for my whole life? And so I tell you my life.” If Nietzsche advocates in this sense “saying Yes to life,” he means affirming or valuing my life, my experience of living this one personal life. And the claim that “life is will to power” would attribute this will to the standpoint that has this personal life in view. (5)  Poetic. Life = no definition is feasible; the term isn’t a concept denoting “what life is.” Let’s distinguish two ways life might be meant poetically. (a)  Perhaps “life” is a metaphorical stand-​in for something else that resembles it in some aspect. When Zarathustra personifies Life as a woman, it apparently sets up a stand-​in for life which could still be definable by one of the four prior senses; the personification would point out some feature of life in that sense (e.g., of all organic life). However, we might suspect instead that this metaphor for life should hint to us that “life” is itself a metaphor for something else and hence not definable in any of those senses. The best candidate might be that it stands in for the particular kind of life that Nietzsche most esteems and promotes. In this light, we might hear “life is will to power” as Nietzsche’s announcement of just what he’ll be using “life” as a metaphor for (will to power); rather than being a hypothesis or definition, it would simply introduce a poetic trope. And then when he says “Yes to life,” he would be affirming a quite particular way of living. (b)  Or perhaps “life” is used not to communicate any content at all, even indirectly by metaphor, but rather to attune our feelings in a certain way. Nietzsche might use it emotively, not to designate or refer (even metaphorically). The word has, after all, strong positive overtones and is well-​suited to this affective purpose: Who is against life? In this case Nietzsche would not be using his claims about life as reasons justifying his values to us but merely to attach our feelings to them. The term would function not as part of an argument, but in his rhetorical selling of his values. His seeming-​claim “life is will to power” would be a disguised way of saying “you should will power.” And his advice to “say Yes to life” would just promote a kind of upbeat enthusiasm. These poetic uses of “life” pose a threat to my project: if all of his uses are really poetic, especially in that emotive way, then he wouldn’t mean them as arguments for his values after all. Instead they would have a propagandistic intent. As we’ll see, however, there are many places Nietzsche clearly does use “life” to designate

From year to year I find it much truer, more desirable and more mysterious,—​since the day the great liberator overcame me, the thought that life could be an experiment for the knowledge-​seeker.”

46  Body Values “what life is” (i.e., not metaphorically or emotively); it’s this positing use that occurs in his justifications of his values. If he is tricking us here, and even these arguments are meant in that rhetorical spirit, there would be little we could trust him on. I think we must assume that he doesn’t cynically give arguments (from life to values) that he knows are bad just for their power to persuade. On the other hand I think his poetic uses of “life” are extremely important to him. An adequate account must do justice to the powerful affective force he gives the word (e.g., by embedding it in those lyric and dramatic contexts). These poetic uses express ideas about life that don’t show up in the argument that runs through the biological and other senses. We must see how to connect the argumentative and affective uses of the term.

2.2  Life as valuing Life plays, as I’ve mentioned, two crucial roles in Nietzsche’s thinking on values: it’s what values, and it’s also what’s valued. It will be these roles together, both (supposedly) revealed by his naturalistic study of valuing, that he’ll use to support his own values. Let’s look first at life’s role as “what values,” as stated, for example, in TI.v.5: “When we speak of values, we speak under the inspiration, under the optic of life: life itself forces us to posit values, life itself values through us, when we posit values.” Principle (2) in Chapter 1 (§1.3) posited that valuing occurs in life’s aiming. We need to see better the character of this aiming and just how valuing occurs within it. And we need to settle in which of the senses of “life” just distinguished—​biological, human, phenomenal, personal, and poetic—​Nietzsche claims that life is what values. Let’s start with the widest sense of “life,” the biological. 83–​4:24[14] (WP.641) gives this definition: “A multiplicity of forces, connected by a common feeding-​ procedure [Ernährungs-​Vorgang], we call ‘life.’ To this feeding-​procedure, as a means of making it possible, belong all so-​called feeling, representing, thinking, i.e. (1) a striving-​against all other forces, (2) a preparation for this by form and rhythm, (3) an evaluation in regard to incorporation or separation.” This passage might suggest that feeding is life’s deepest aim and that the intentional “striving” against other forces is a secondary, necessary means in the pursuit of sustenance.16 But elsewhere Nietzsche insists that feeding is itself an expression of life’s basic directedness, its will to power. Feeding’s own aim, we might say, is not sustenance but (a certain kind of) growth, which it accomplishes not just by 16 Nietzsche does give priority to this drive and speculates that it may be basic; e.g., 84:25[466]: “perhaps derivation of all desires from hunger.”

Life: As Valuer and Valued  47 competing against but also by “incorporating” other forces. The organism ingests other organisms not for the sake of sustaining itself (nor of reproducing itself) but in order to grow by overcoming.17 In 86–​7:7[9]‌(WP.681): “life is not adaptation of inner conditions to outer, but will to power, which, [working] from within, subdues and incorporates ever more ‘outer.’ ” And 87:9[151] (WP.656, LNp165): “Appropriation and incorporation is above all a willing to overwhelm, a forming, shaping and reshaping until finally the overwhelmed has gone completely over into the power of the attacker and has increased it.”18 Feeding is only one way of incorporating, Nietzsche thinks. So here we meet the biological form of the will to power idea: its application to the life of all organisms. This is the widest application Nietzsche is confident about; he sees the extension of will to power to inorganic nature as speculative and dispensable.19 But assigning it to all organisms is radical enough: it makes even the simplest ones (he thinks here of amoebas) end-​directed and indeed intentional—​as is reflected in all the teleological terms in the previous paragraph. He is also emphatic that plants will power, too.20 Although Nietzsche is critical of teleology, his main claim about life attributes this distinctive aiming to it.21 By virtue of this aiming (at power), all organisms have perspectives and interpret, so that the phenomenal sense of “life” is involved as well. In 85–​6:2[148] (WP.643, LNp90): “The will to power interprets: the formation of an organ is a matter of interpretation; it defines limits, determines degrees, variations of power. Mere variations of power could not feel themselves to be such: there must be present something that wills to grow, that interprets the value of whatever else wants to grow. . . . (The organic process constantly presupposes interpretations.)’22 I’ll come back shortly to the role of values here. These passages have all come from Nietzsche’s notebooks, but the main points are repeatedly made in the published works, too. Here are three prominent

17 88:14[174] (WP.702) (Which is headed “The will to power as life”): “Let us take the simplest case, that of primitive feeding: the protoplasm stretches its pseudopods out, in search of something that opposes it—​not out of hunger, but will to power.” Also 86–​7:5[64] (WP.657, LNp115), 87–​8:11[121] (WP.651, LNp224), 88:14[174] (WP.652). Nietzsche argues similarly that procreation is a derivative project in 85–​6:1[118] (WP.654). 85:35[15] (WP.658; LNp18) makes the general point: “the organic functions translated back into the basic will, the will to power,—​and splitting off from it.” 85–​6:1[30] (LNp56): “Reduction of all organic basic functions to the will to power.” 18 Compare the definition of life in 85:36[22] (WP.642): “an enduring form of process of force-​ establishing, where the different battlers grow unequally.” 19 E.g., BGE.36; 85–​6:1[30] (LNp56), 88:14[81] (WP.689). Elsewhere, however, he is more confident; e.g., in 85:34[247] (LN p15): “that it is the will to power that guides the inorganic world as well, or rather, that there is no inorganic world.” 20 E.g., 87–​8:11[111] (WP.704, LNp221) says that the trees in a jungle fight each other for power. 21 See my [1996, 21] on Nietzsche’s critiques of “teleology” and their consistency with his treating will to power as an aiming. 22 86–​7:7[1]‌(LNp129): “the world consists of such living beings, and for each of these there is a small corner from which it measures, is aware [gewahr wird], sees and doesn’t see.”

48  Body Values passages. BGE.13:  “Physiologists should think twice before putting down the self-​preservation-​drive as the cardinal drive of an organic being. A living thing [etwas Lebendiges] wills above all to discharge its strength—​life itself is will to power —​: self-​preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results.”23 GS.349: “The struggle for existence [Dasein] is only an exception, a temporary restriction of the life-​will [Lebenswillens]; the great and small struggle revolves everywhere around preponderance, around growth and expansion, around power, in accordance with the will to power which is simply [eben] the will of life [Wille des Lebens, mistranslated in the Cambridge edition as “will to life”].” And GM.ii.12 says that in making “adaptation” basic, Darwinists like Spencer “mistake the essence [Wesen] of life, its will to power; thereby the fundamental priority of the spontaneous, attacking, infringing, reinterpreting, reordering, and formative forces is overlooked.” As these passages show, Nietzsche often puts this point in opposition to an alternative he thinks is widespread, one shared diversely by Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Darwinists: that life strives to survive, to exist. So, 88:14[121] (WP.688): “It can be shown most clearly for every living thing, that it does everything, not in order to preserve itself, but to become more.” And GS.349 again: “To will to preserve oneself is the expression of distress, of a limitation of the genuinely basic drive of life [Lebens-​Grundtriebes] which aims at the expansion of power and in this willing frequently puts in question and even sacrifices self-​preservation.”24 In §2.3 I will try to sharpen the account of this aiming at power, saying what it is toward, its object or goal or end. I will suggest that this is “growth in control.” But here it’s more germane to notice Nietzsche’s reluctance to try to say very closely what power is. This aiming has a special indefiniteness—​which brings us to the role of values. For as we began to see in Chapter 1, values are the markers life sets down for itself in pursuit of power. In 87–​8:11[96] (WP.675, LNp217): “All valuations are only consequences and narrower perspectives in the service of this one will: valuating is itself only this will to power.” Values give an inchoate striving more definite targets to aim at. But power itself, lacking this (relative) definiteness of such markers, is itself (as he sometimes thinks) “only” a kind of proto-​value, not quite a full aim or goal.

23 This is echoed later in BGE, in 259: “life simply is will to power [Leben eben Wille zur Macht ist].” 24 85:34[208] (LNp13): “NB. ‘The struggle for existence’—​that describes an exceptional state. The rule is much more the struggle for power, for ‘more’ and ‘better’ and ‘faster’ and ‘more often.” ’ 85–​ 6:2[68] (LNp71): “Self-​preservation as only one of the results of self-​expansion.” 87:9[98] (WP.488, LNp159): “No ‘substance,’ but rather something that strives in itself at strengthening; and that only indirectly wills to ‘preserve’ itself (it wills to surpass itself—​).” Earlier, however, Nietzsche often speaks of the end as preservation; see, e.g., GS.1.

Life: As Valuer and Valued  49 At the lowest level, values specify what the growth in control will be in: in what feature or aspect or activity the organism will strive to grow.25 The basic drives channel the will to power into their separate efforts, to grow-​in-​eating, to grow-​in-​sex, to grow-​in-​parenting, to grow-​in-​social-​stature. We can think of each of these as involving a basic value in its designation of the activity that will seek to enhance itself. In 84:26[72]: “Valuations lie in all functions of the organic being. . . . /​Every ‘drive’ is the drive towards ‘something good,’ seen from some standpoint; in this it is valuation, only thus has it incorporated itself.” And then many particular versions of that drive are distinguished by more particular values—​the different ways they interpret that first one: what look or smell or taste of a thing will count it as good to eat, for example. This account sets values into all organisms; it makes them part of Nietzsche’s biological idea of life. In 84:25[433]: “ ‘Alive’: that means already esteeming [schätzen]:—​/​In all willing is esteeming—​and will is there in the organic.”26 But, it may now be objected, isn’t it implausible and even absurd to treat life generally as will to power and as valuing? It looks like a kind of vitalism to attribute this intentionality to all organisms: Isn’t this just to imagine them, covertly and illicitly, as mental and cognitive? Isn’t it a kind of anthropomorphizing of them, which we would have thought Nietzsche was alert against? And how can we seriously suppose that the amoeba, or “protoplasm” (which he also often speaks of this way27), has such an aim at power and drive-​values to steer itself by? In my own [2004] I make a case that Nietzsche can (and sometimes does) fully naturalize this biological notion of will to power by presenting it as a directedness designed into organisms by natural selection. So life values in (by virtue of) its selected plasticity toward outcomes. The amoeba’s eat-​drive is its dispositional responsiveness to the conditions around it, by which it identifies and assimilates food. It thereby uses these environmental resources for its own growth (i.e., the enhancement of its power). This outcome “power” is the goal of this disposition, not because there is any “preview” of that outcome within the amoeba, but because that’s what the disposition was selected to do (that’s what gave it selective advantage). So the outcome (power) explains why the disposition is there in the amoeba, and this explanatory structure is what it is, for an outcome to be an end.28

25 In my [1996, 23] I argue that power is “essentially enhancement in an activity already given,” so that “to be a will to power, it must already want something other than power.” But now I would add that Nietzsche thinks even those given activities were developed under selection for power. 26 87–​8:11[73] (WP.715): “The viewpoint of ‘value’ is the viewpoint of preservation-​enhancement-​ conditions with respect to complex forms of relative duration of life within becoming.” 27 E.g., 87:9[151] (WP.656), 87–​8:11[121] (WP.651), 88:14[174] (WP.702). 28 Here, I lean on the “etiological” analysis of functions pioneered by Wright, e.g., in [1973]; I develop this in [2004, ch. 1 §3].

50  Body Values By naturalizing end-​directedness in this way, Nietzsche can (I think) naturalize a biological intentionality or perspectivity as well. Science—​at least science so far—​has tried to reduce nature to “a happening arranged for sight and touch, consequently [to] motions” [83–​4:24[17] (WP.640)].29 So it treats organisms simply as mechanisms. Nietzsche insists that we must go beyond science-​so-​far by introducing “will” (i.e., directed effort). In being responsively directed toward certain ends, organisms have “perspectives” or “views”—​as even the amoeba does in its differential responsiveness to environmental cues. He can argue this without sacrificing his naturalism by taking this directedness to be constituted by selection and not by a mental fore-​sighting of goals nor by conscious awareness of the intentional contents. Hence all biological life can indeed be “perspectival” by virtue of having at least these minimal forms of intentionality or “aboutness,” in their mere responsive directedness. Now this argument—​that Nietzsche can naturalize the aboutness he attributes to will to power and drives by basing it on selection—​deliberately leaves consciousness out of its story. Its strategy is precisely to attribute intentionality to amoebas and protoplasm without imagining them conscious of what they’re “toward.” And yet Nietzsche does, as well, want to attribute a kind of consciousness to them. However, it is not what he himself calls “consciousness” and which he limits to humans. As has been effectively argued,30 Nietzsche usually uses “consciousness” to refer to a developed form of self-​awareness. But what he attributes to all organisms is something much less than this:  what we might call phenomenal consciousness. He attributes to them sensation [Empfindung] and feeling [Gefühl] and, above all, the feelings of pleasure and pain.31 Will to power—​and every particular drive it’s instantiated in—​depends on an ability to recognize its own success and failure, which it does by feeling pleasure and pain.32 Nietzsche thinks such affects are indispensable for willing (as we’ll see in Chapter 4). In 88:14[81] (WP.689): “Can we assume a striving for power divorced from a sensation of pleasure and displeasure [Lust-​ und Unlust-​Empfindung], i.e. divorced from the feeling of enhancement or diminishment of power?” This feeling (of growth or decline) is something more than the kind of end-​ directedness the Darwinian story about selection can ground. But it is perhaps a plausible addition to that story. It seems likely that one of the first and most

29 Also 88:14[79] (WP.634, LNp246), 88:14[122] (WP.625, LNp258). We’ll return to this critique of science-​so-​far in Chapter 8 (§8.1) and see his lessons for improving science. 30 Cf. Riccardi (2016). 31 Already in 72–​3:19[159] (P&Tp35–​6), he says that even the working of atoms on one another involves sensation; “[w]‌hat is difficult is not the awakening of sensation in the world, but that of consciousness. But this is also explicable if everything has sensation.” 32 This is not to say that pleasure and pain are always accurate signs of one’s success and failure.

Life: As Valuer and Valued  51 vital capacities designed (naturally selected) into organisms would be a sensitivity and responsiveness to circumstances. Organisms must identify their current conditions as they bear on their biological success. Nietzsche can hope that some very minimal such responsiveness—​even in the amoeba—​can be plausibly interpreted as “feeling.” (We’ll return to his treatment of feeling in Chapter  4 (§4.1) when we analyze his “affects.”) A quite different kind of objection can be raised against this biological reading of Nietzsche’s notion of life. How could that claim about organisms in general be so important to him when his attention is overwhelmingly focused on one particular kind of organism, the human? Isn’t the only thing that matters to him, that humans will power in this way? So aren’t his biological claims about life and “organisms” quite beside the point? It seems all we need to attend to are his arguments that we are wills to power and that our life is the context of values. So, surely, it’s the human and perhaps the personal notions of life that are relevant here. But, in fact, the biological is of huge importance to Nietzsche in its role explaining our own human case. He thinks that his naturalistic understanding of our values is distinguished by its seeing just how thoroughly they express a biological level within us, in which we are “just” organisms. Our deepest values are set down in drives not different in kind from those working in all living things. So biological life is not just the widest genus to which I belong, but is also my inner constitution.33 What happens in amoebas isn’t intrinsically important, but it can help us to know ourselves better—​by helping us to recognize that organic directedness in us. It’s this biological level that is the prime locus of our will to power and the starting point of Nietzsche’s arguments for his values. These organic levels of our directedness, in which we share a nature with much simpler organisms, are present in us due to the typical working of evolution: it deposits structures upon earlier ones, which persist—​since the later capacities typically presuppose the functioning of “lower” ones. In this way our drives were layered into us back through our genetic line. As it passed through simpler kinds of life, their dispositions and aims were built into it and so into each of us. Because previous drive-​capacities are retained, development is importantly cumulative. And by virtue of this, too, living things stand in a hierarchy: higher and higher stacks of capacities tend to be built. This expresses, indeed, the logic of life as will to power.34 But since every superimposed capacity relies on the working of those below it, these stacks become increasingly unstable or fragile. And so Nietzsche pushes the paradox that the strongest are also the most delicate



33 34

BGE.258: “the foundation of the affects, which is called ‘life.’ ” Z.ii.7: “Into the heights it wants to build itself with pillars and steps, life itself.”

52  Body Values and at risk. Our general fragility as humans is due to the depth of our stacked abilities, as well as to a certain tension among them, as we’ll see. Thus the values of earlier, simpler members of my evolutionary line are still active in me. This persistence of evolutionarily earlier traits is an important theme for Nietzsche; he harps on it especially in Human, All-​too-​Human.35 It’s due to this persistence I  think that he sometimes even identifies us with our evolutionary line: I am all of it because it is deposited vertically—​layered—​in me. Here are two characteristic passages (there are many others36). 86–​7:7[2]‌ (WP.678): “The human is not only an individual [Individuum], but the on-​living collective-​organic [Fortlebende Gesammt-​Organische] in one particular line.” And 87:10[136] (WP.682): “The ego is a hundred times more that just a unit in the chain of members; it is this chain itself, entirely.” So each human life opens out into biological life in its full hierarchy of kinds. As Nietzsche often puts it, these lower strata of life’s willing are built into our bodies. Here he uses “body” in a way that distinguishes it from our spirit, from our conscious-​linguistic intentionality (our agency). Elsewhere, to be sure, he emphasizes that we are just our bodies and that spirit is just a fact about the body. So, Z.i.4: “Body am I entirely, and nothing more; and soul is only the name of something of the body.” Still he continues to use “body” to refer to this subset of the body’s capacities, those made not by social history but by a more ancient, pre-​human evolution “in the blood.” Here “what values” is bodily or biological life within us. Because these deep projects are intentional, they are part of a particular human’s stance and are accessible—​albeit with difficulty—​in a first-​personal attitude. It’s possible to make explicit, to bring to awareness, the end-​directedness in our body. We can notice better than we usually do “what it means” to will as these bodily drives do. And I think this is another kind of access Nietzsche thinks he has to the truth that biological (and human) life is will to power. It’s not just by those studies of biological works, but also by a kind of phenomenology—​ of course not under this description37—​that he thinks he can see this truth. By “living” his body more alertly, he can see the biological will at work in it. So what’s most important to Nietzsche is the human way of expressing and reflecting on this level of biological life within us—​understanding both of these as phenomenal or intentional. And we can bring in the fourth sense for “life” as well, the personal, in which we are aware of “living a life” as a single passage between 35 HH.i.2: “All philosophers have the common failing, that they start from present humans and think they can reach their goal through an analysis of them.” And i.16 speculates that “what we now call the world is the result of a host of errors and fantasies, which in the whole evolution of the organic being have grown into one another and are now inherited by us as the accumulated treasure of the entire past.” 36 Also 87:9[7]‌(WP.687), 87:9[30] (WP.785), 87:9[84] (WP.379), 88:14[29] (WP.373). 37 See Daigle’s account [2011] of Nietzsche’s “phenomenological view of embodiment.” Ansell-​ Pearson [2007, 62] finds only a single occurrence of the term “phenomenology” in Nietzsche.

Life: As Valuer and Valued  53 birth and death. For this human-​biological life also recognizes itself as living a life, exposed to the possibility of death. Indeed Nietzsche thinks that this recognition occurs already “in the body”—​in our will to power and drives. Organisms are very deeply alert against death; 84:25[427]: “NB. the principle of preservation of the individual (or ‘the fear of death’) is not to be derived from experiences of pleasure and displeasure, but is something directing, a valuation, which already lies at the ground of all feelings of pleasure and displeasure.”38 Aiming at its own power, the body must be alert to what will destroy it. So we find at least the first four senses of “life” introduced in §2.1 to be involved in the “valuing” Nietzsche attributes to life. He has especially in view a biological level of human experience in which we use signs (values) to steer ourselves through our mortal spans. Let’s go on now to determine better just what life values.

2.3  Life values power In using life—​as so valuing—​to ground his own values Nietzsche needs to do three things, which I’ll treat in turn in this and the following sections. We must see how he meets three challenges. First, he must specify this value or values. Second, he must justify the “authority” of this value, its claim to be preferred to conflicting values. Third, he must show that recognizing this authority would give us lessons we might plausibly live by. 1. First, what value does life supply? What basic value does it specify, to be used as a standard in the revaluation of values? 2. Second, what authority does this value have? Nietzsche owes us a reason to accept its standing to judge our other values. 3. Third, what correction does this value make? What are the consequences (on our values, our lives) of applying it as such a standard? So (first) what value is it that Nietzsche tries to ground in life? There are in fact two strong contenders here. One of course is power, the aim of the willing he thinks is basic to life; he often cites this as his criterion or measure [Maass] of value.39 But another is life itself, which so often grounds his arguments, for

38 Also 84:25[390], 84:25[399]. We’ll see in Chapter 6 that Nietzsche also identifies a second aim distinct from that of “preservation of the species”: preservation of the herd or community. This arises in our distinctively human valuing. 39 A.2: “What is good?—​Everything that enhances the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in humans.” 85–​6:2[185] says that “the measure, by which [moral ideals] can be measured,” is will to power. 88:14[158] (WP.354) identifies the measure as “the highest enhancement [Steigerung] of life itself.”

54  Body Values example when he condemns morality as hostile to life.40 The two values are tangled together, for example in 85–​6:2[190] (WP.254, LNp95–​6):  “what are our evaluations and moral tablets of goods themselves worth [werth]? What is the outcome of their rule? For whom? In relation to what?—​Answer: for life. But what is life? Here we need a new, more definite formulation of the concept ‘life.’ My formula for it is: Life is will to power.” Near the start of this chapter I spoke of life as “what’s valued,” and there are indeed reasons to treat it as Nietzsche’s ultimate value. The value of power seems in two ways to presuppose (for him) the value of life. Power is good because life wills it. And valuing power itself involves valuing life in a certain way, inasmuch as power is “more life” and hence a kind of compound of life—​some kind of accumulation or magnification of it. Nietzsche has both motives for treating life, not power, as his basic value—​and yet he has countervailing reasons that work against these motives. We can now see more precisely how life is and is not his ultimate value. Nietzsche has a long-​standing interest in the question of the “value of life” [Werth des Lebens].41 He initially poses his disagreement with Schopenhauer in this way: he replaces the latter’s negative judgment on life with a positive one—​a self-​identification extremely important to him. In this early period he thinks it is the philosopher’s main task to make a judgment on this question.42 He discusses the conditions required for such a judgment to be just or correct.43 Even as late as BGE.205 he suggests (without criticism) that the philosopher “demands of himself a judgment, a Yes or No, not about the sciences but about life and the value of life.” But Nietzsche also has doubts from early on whether the project is feasible.44 And he eventually comes to think that there is something incoherent in the effort to determine the value of life. TI.ii.2: “Judgments, value-​judgments on life, for or against, can ultimately never be true: they have value only as symptoms, they

40 87:10[138] (WP.639, LNp199):  “the transformation of energy into life and life in its highest potency [Potenz] thus appears as goal.” EH.iv.7 develops how morality “negates life in the deepest ground.” Hunt [1991, 212] reads life as Nietzsche’s basic criterion. 41 Notice his very lengthy notes on Dühring’s The Value of Life preserved as 75:9[1]‌. 42 75:3[63] says that the philosopher uses the philologist’s labors “to make a statement about the value of life.” 76–​7:20[12]: “It is perhaps the most important goal of humanity, that the value of life be measured, and the reason [Grund] why it is there be correctly determined. It awaits for this the appearance of the highest intellect; for only this can settle the value or disvalue of life conclusively.” (Cf. 75.5[188], which adds the requirement of “the warmest heart.”) 43 UM.iii.3: “The verdict of the philosophers of ancient Greece on the value of existence [Daseins] says so much more than a modern verdict does because they had life itself before and around them in luxuriant perfection”; see how the section ends. 44 HH.i.32: “All judgments as to the value of life have evolved illogically and are therefore unjust.” 82–​3:6[1]‌: “all estimates [Ansätze] about the value of life [are] false.”

Life: As Valuer and Valued  55 can be taken seriously only as symptoms,—​in themselves, judgments like these are stupidities. One must stretch out one’s fingers and make an effort to grasp this amazing subtlety [finesse], that the value of life cannot be evaluated [abgeschätzt].” His reason for this is that we cannot “get outside” of life in order to judge it.45 So TI.v.5: “One would need to have a position outside life, but on the other hand to know it as well as one, as many, as all who have lived it, to be able to touch the problem of the value of life.” Thus it is precisely life’s status as the universal and ultimate valuer that precludes evaluating life. Yet it will be this very status, we’ll see in §2.4, that Nietzsche then uses to establish life’s valuing as authoritative. So, we might say, it’s to permit it to establish the value of power that he denies life any value “in itself.” He denies that it has any “objective” (or externalist) value, which would need to be established by something “outside life.” This denial makes way for the (internalist) conclusion that life has “only” the “subjective” (or perspectival) value it gives itself. What of the second way the value of power seems to presuppose that of life—​by power’s being a “compound” of life (i.e., “more life”)? Here we need to notice the very special way power is compounded from life; it’s not by the ways we’re most likely to think of that “more.” Nietzsche stresses that the end he offers is not “more life” in the sense of the preservation [Erhaltung] of life—​not “more of the same” through time.46 He also stresses how the organism will risk or give up its own life for the sake of power; its end isn’t “staying alive.”47 Nor is the end more of the same kind of life in additional organisms: it doesn’t come by a mere increase in population. Power is “more life” not by its mere continuation, nor by its multiplication, but by life’s being raised to a higher level of capacity and control; it is intensification not extension.48 It is “life-​enhancement” [Lebenssteigerung] [87–​8:11[83] (WP.674, LNp215)].

45 TI.ii.2 continues: “Not by the living, who are an interested party, even a bone of contention [Streitobjekt], and not judges; not by the dead for other reasons.” See how Schacht [1983, 395–​8] and Reginster [2006, 82–​3] develop the point. 46 See note 24. This is the difference Nietzsche thinks he has with Darwin: life doesn’t live in order to stay alive (i.e., to survive or preserve itself). The will of life is not a will to life, but to power. I treat this relation to Darwin in [2004, 45–​64]. Nietzsche’s critique of the “preservation-​principle” is a major topic of Abel [1998, part I]. 47 GS.26: “What is life?—​Life—​that is: continually shedding something that wills to die; life—​that is: being cruel and inexorable against anything that is becoming weak and old in us, and not just in us.” Z.ii.12: “Much is valued by the living more highly than life itself; but out of this very valuing there speaks—​will to power!” GS.349: “The wish to preserve oneself is an expression of distress.” 48 So, as Nietzsche is tempted to put it, power involves a qualitative and not just quantitative change; e.g., 85–​6:2[157] (WP.564). He also speaks of life being “heightened” [gesteigert], as at BGE.23—​and not of its being broadened.

56  Body Values This shows that power is compounded from life so surprisingly that “life” is likely to be a misleading way to point to it. This gives Nietzsche further reason to say that his value is not life but power. Calling “life” the good risks flattening the differences between levels or degrees of life; it could give comfort to consequentialist efforts at more of a merely generic life. The good is really power—​this particular way of “increasing life”; the good is not “life” as we generally think it would be pursued and maximized. Nietzsche is not, however, consistent on this point. He sometimes ignores the distinction and speaks of life’s end as “life” or even as “preservation.” Sometimes he has in view cases in which the best the organism can do is to maintain the status quo and just survive. Other times he hears even in “preservation” the idea of power. So, 84:25[427]: “preservation of the individual: i.e. presupposing, that a multiplicity with the most manifold activities wills to ‘preserve’ itself, not as equal-​to-​itself, but ‘livingly’—​masteringly—​obediently—​feeding itself—​ growing—​” Here the aim is to preserve oneself as or in one’s getting power (i.e., to preserve life’s advancing in power). I think we best hear in this way most later passages treating preservation as the end. What then is this end or good of power? We should remind ourselves first of the limits to what can be said here. I’ve been speaking of power as “what life values,” but in §2.2 we saw that power is here a kind of proto-​value, lacking the definiteness that needs to be supplied by value-​markers, beginning with those that distinguish the basic aims of the drives. Nietzsche veers away from defining power very closely and has doubts whether it amounts to a goal or end at all.49 The basic striving is so primitive that its direction is perhaps best indicated just as “forward [vorwärts]”50; values must be added to specify which way forward lies. This indefiniteness rules out any effort to deduce or even be very confident in positing what does or does not, in a given organism’s case, enhance its power. But we can say some things about it. Let’s consider the passage [Z.ii.12] mentioned earlier, in which Life tells Zarathustra what she is: “ ‘Behold’, she said, ‘I am that which must always overcome itself. /​‘Indeed, you call it will to procreate or drive toward an end, toward the higher, farther, more manifold: but all this is one and one secret. /​‘I would rather go under than renounce this one thing: and truly, where there is going-​ under and falling leaves, behold, there life sacrifices itself—​for power!’ ” Here we 49 Katsafanas [2013a, 156]: “Nietzsche describes will to power in language that seems deliberately vague.” As we noticed in Chapter 1 (§1.3), his idea sometimes is that will to power is just the effort of force or energy to “release” itself, as BGE.13 puts it. So 83:7[77]: “a certain amount of force spends itself, seizes something on which to release itself. What one calls ‘goal’ [or] ‘end’ is in truth the means for this involuntary explosion-​event.” 50 84:26[369]:  “something other than the will to preservation, namely the will to forward [Vorwärts], to more, to —​ —​ —​.” Also 87–​8:11[75] (WP.696). Or perhaps it is just for “living more” [Mehr-​leben] [EH.i.2].

Life: As Valuer and Valued  57 see again how the end of power can be contrasted with that of life (understood as continued life). Power is transition to a higher level, and the passage describes this as “self-​overcoming” [Selbst-​Überwindung], a creative-​destructive transition that is a kind of “little death,” in which an old life is replaced by a new one. What makes the new life higher? I suggest that Nietzsche’s core idea of power is “growth in control.” He has a quite particular kind of growth in mind, one that involves—​but is also more than—​bringing into control something alien and competing. Every living thing, confronting an environment of competing forces, aims above all to increase its own capacity for activity by subordinating those other forces and incorporating them into its own effort. This applies to the individual organism in its dealings with others, and it applies to each drive in an organism as it competes with other drives to “run” the organism’s behavior. For the growth Nietzsche has in mind, the competing force is not simply destroyed—​this wouldn’t improve the capacity—​but incorporated by having its different abilities adapted to serve the living thing’s projects. It’s by this incorporation [Einverleibung] of something foreign that the old life is disrupted and outgrown, and the jump to a new level occurs. Once again, growth isn’t a matter of adding “more of the same”; it’s by incorporating something alien that genuine, qualitative growth occurs. One’s own character is shifted and expanded by it. I would like to distinguish this account of will to power from the important one advanced by Reginster, who interprets it as “a will to the very activity of overcoming resistance” [2006, 127].51 Reginster puts his finger on an important element in Nietzsche’s full conception of power, but not I think the most central one, which is growth.52 Depending on how it’s understood, overcoming resistances is either a part of or a means to growth (and power), but not the thing itself. Consider 88:14[174] (WP.702): what the human wills, what every smallest part of a living organism wills is an increase [plus] of power. . . . [O]‌ut of that willing it seeks resistance, it needs something that opposes it. . . . [E]very victory, every feeling of pleasure, every happening, presupposes a resistance overcome. /​Let us take the simplest case, that of primitive feeding: the protoplasm stretches out its pseudopodia in search of something that resists it—​not from hunger but from will to power. It thence makes the attempt to overcome that thing, to appropriate and incorporate it to 51 Katsafanas concurs: “to will power is to aim at the activity of overcoming resistances to ends” [2013a, 159]. The view has been widely accepted. 52 A.6: “Life itself counts for me as instinct for growth, for endurance, for accumulation of forces, for power.” GS.349: “growth and expansion.” 85:37[11] (WP.125): “To have and to will to have more, growth [Wachsthum], in a word—​that is life itself.” 85–​6:2[128] (WP.134): “The many-​meaningedness of the world as a question of strength, which views all things under the perspective of its growth.” There are too many other passages treating power as growth for me to cite, but see, e.g., 85–​6:2[148] (WP.643, LNp90), 87–​8:11[96] (WP.675, LNp217), 88:14[81] (WP.689).

58  Body Values itself:—​what one calls “feeding” is simply a consequent phenomenon, a practical application [Nutzanwendung] of that original will, to become stronger(.)

I suggest that this passage shows the relation between power and the need for resistance.53 The basic will is “to become stronger [stärker],” and “out of that willing”—​not as it—​resistances are sought and then overcome. Resistances signal to the primitive will where it can grow since it is only through something alien and different that this happens.54 But one grows not precisely by “overcoming” that resistant thing (as I believe Reginster means the term), but by “appropriating and incorporating” it (i.e., by making that other life now part of oneself).55 (Feeding on it is only one way to do this.) It’s this incorporation, I suggest, that is an element in the growth Nietzsche means: one adds the other will to oneself.56 So whereas (as I read him) Reginster interprets will to power as hurdling these resistances, I read it as climbing up onto them—​as happens in the “stacking” of capacities by evolution, as we saw in §2.2. Moreover, even this incorporation (“overcoming” in another sense, perhaps) isn’t quite the growth itself; this lies in the enrichment of capacity and activity—​its ascent to a new level—​that the incorporation allows. It lies in “becoming stronger” (in §2.5 we’ll return to this notion of strength).57 I mean to concentrate these points in the phrase “growth in control.” Incorporation is a matter of coming-​to-​control another and contrary will by inducing it to serve one’s own activity. By building it into that activity, one grows in that activity. Nietzsche’s term for this control is “mastery” [Herrschaft].58 It’s this mastery of other forces, and not destroying or neutralizing or surpassing

53 See, too, 87:9[151] (WP.656, LNp165), which begins “The will to power can only express itself against resistances; it seeks what resists it,” but soon goes on: “Assimilation and incorporation is, above all, a willing to overwhelm . . . until at last the overwhelmed has passed entirely into the power of the attacker, and augmented it.” 54 Along this same line is GS.305: “one must be able to lose oneself at times, if one wills to learn something from things that we are not ourselves.” 55 BGE.230: “The spirit’s force to appropriate [anzueignen] the foreign reveals itself in a strong inclination to assimilate the new to the old. . . . Its aim is thereby at incorporation of new ‘experiences,’ at setting new things in old rows—​at growth, then; more precisely, at the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased force.” 56 85:40[7]‌: “The drive of assimilation, that basic organic function, on which all growth rests.” 57 We must recognize that Nietzsche is (of course) not consistent in his use of “power.” He often uses it to mean what I am calling “control,” and, in this sense, he sometimes speaks of “growth in power.” See, e.g., 85–​6:2[108] (WP.616), 88:14[101] (WP.695, LNp253). However I claim that when he speaks of “will to power” he (almost) always means power in that fuller sense—​as growth. So my analysis applies to these primary uses of the term. 58 84:25[408]: “the highest force, the mastery over opposites, provides the measure.” I’ll discuss this notion of “control” further in §2.5, where I’ll relate it to the adjoining notions of “strength” and “command.”

Life: As Valuer and Valued  59 them, that is power in the primary sense.59 In a secondary and less adequate way, one can “grow” by destroying an opposing force just by virtue of “clearing the field” for one’s activity:  one’s capacity is “improved” by having freer rein. But again, this is not the kind of power Nietzsche principally means since it doesn’t involve a genuine growth of those capacities themselves (i.e., their transmutation into something fuller and higher). (I return to this topic, too, in §2.5.1.) There are a few complications to face. First, it might be doubted whether Nietzsche thinks that life’s end is power or, instead, the feeling of power. Or, as we might also put the question, whether he means by power growth or the feeling of growth. A.2 seems to waver on the first point: “What is good?—​Everything that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in humans.”60 And BGE.230 addresses the second point: spirit aims at “growth, then; more precisely [bestimmter noch] at the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased force.” If the end is not growth but that feeling, Nietzsche’s values may look like a variant on hedonism—​and all the more so since he often identifies pleasure with the feeling of growth. This analysis of pleasure and/​or happiness as the feeling of power is frequent in the 1888 notebooks. In 88:14[70] (WP.1023): “Pleasure arrives, where [there is] feeling of power /​Happiness in the triumphing consciousness of power and victory.”61 But his point in these passages is to deny that pleasure (or happiness) should be understood as just a raw phenomenal “feel”: it involves a judgment, the judgment that growth is occurring. So the “feeling of growth [Gefühl des Wachsthums]” is not an end separate from growth (as a raw feel might be) but a judgment that the end and (proto-​)value of growth is now occurring, is now being enjoyed. The point is important for Nietzsche. It contributes to his arguments against hedonism and utilitarianism, both of which mistake the end as a mere feeling—​ pleasure or happiness—​and fail to see the judgment it involves as to power (growth). The end is that power, and the feeling is a way of judging that the end is achieved.62 In 88:14[121]: “ ‘it [everything living] strives for power, for more in power’—​pleasure is only a symptom of the feeling of achieved power, a difference-​consciousness.” But since the judgment involved in this enjoyment 59 81:11[284]: “The feeling of power first conquering, then ruling (organizing)—​it regulates the overcome [thing] toward its preservation and thereto preserves the overcome [thing] itself.” 60 88:14[82] (WP.689): “[life]: strives after a maximal-​feeling of power /​: is essentially a striving for more of power.” Also 88:14[174] (WP.703). 61 88:14[101] (WP.695): “If pleasure and displeasure are related to the feeling of power, then life must represent a growth of power, so that the difference of ‘more’ comes into consciousness. . . . The will to power lies in the essence of pleasure: that the power grows, that the difference comes into consciousness.” Also 88:14[115] (WP.428), 88:14[129] (WP.434). Nietzsche is already thinking of happiness this way in HH.i.113: “happiness, thought as the liveliest feeling of power.” 62 We’ll come back to these topics in the discussion of “affects” in Chapter 4 (§4.1).

60  Body Values can be false, the feeling can be deceptive, the end not really achieved. Thus the feeling of growth can come apart from growth itself. One form of this feeling of growth becomes especially important to Nietzsche. “The essential in Rausch is the feeling of ascending strength and fullness” [TI. ix.8]. Perhaps it is the most intense such feeling, and the one most indicative of that ascent in quality by incorporating difference, which we saw was the crux of power. But Nietzsche thinks that even Rausch can mislead by involving a false judgment whether true growth occurs. In 88:14[68] (WP.48): “Here the experience of Rausch was misleading . . . /​this increases in the highest degree the feeling of power /​hence, naively judged, power—​/​ . . . there are two starting-​points of Rausch: the over-​great fullness of life and a condition of morbid nutrition of the brain[.]‌” So we see that the end is power and not the feeling of power. A second complication: Does Nietzsche think that the organism’s deep allegiance is to its own growth or to that of its genetic line? In §2.2 we saw that he sometimes identifies the organism with its genetic line, and we can now improve on that point. There it seemed that the individual was this line due to its inheritance of the line’s traits (i.e., by its relation to the line’s past). But now we should add that the individual also bears an interest in the line’s future. Its deepest aim at power is in the growth of that line. Thus GS.1 says that “nothing in [humans] is older, stronger, more relentless and insuperable than this instinct [to do what benefits the human species].”63 Nietzsche often attributes such long-​term aims to life, which I think can only be plausibly naturalized by being interpreted as upshots of natural selection. So that aim at growth of one’s line is “deepest” because it’s embedded in the organism by the broadest level of selection, which operates on the genetic line and designs it to persist and grow. Selection judges a line not just by the capacity of each current generation to survive and grow, but by the capacity of the line to improve over many successive generations.64 By this broadest selection the organism has been aimed to improve its inheriting line (its clade). So the individual aims at its own growth as a part or means to the more ultimate end, the growth of its line. However I don’t think Nietzsche has a settled position here. Sometimes he makes the interest of the individual basic, as in 84:25[427]:  “ ‘preservation of the species’ . . . is only a consequence of the law of the ‘preservation of the individual,’ not an original law.” And elsewhere he applies the point indifferently to many different interests. So 84:26[119] (WP.259) says that valuation is always under the perspective of “preservation of the individual, of a community, a race,

63 87:9[102] (WP.801, LNp159–​60): “what the deepest instinct recognizes to be the higher, more desirable, more valuable overall, the upward movement of its type [Typus].” See, too, 81:11[122]. 64 At this level even a species is just a temporary stasis. So 87:9[100] says that species are not goals, but only “slowings of the tempo” in a process of strengthening.

Life: As Valuer and Valued  61 a state, a church, a faith, a culture.” We will need to defer the question of where his allegiance mainly lies: Do I aim at my power for its own sake, or as the way I best advance my kind? (I’ll address this again in Chapters 6 and 11, in treating Nietzsche’s idea of human’s societal character.) One last complication: we need to bear in mind that power is not a goal in the most usual sense since it includes a “movement” within it. To be sure, Nietzsche sometimes does speak of a “growth in power,” but I take this as a loose way to remind us that power is itself a growth. It is not a (steady) state or condition, as we usually think a “goal” to be. It is not even the (settled) condition of having grown in control, but rather the process of growing in control.65 Life’s deep aim is to change in a certain direction, and not to arrive at some point or position in that direction. This is reflected in the ever-​renewing character of will to power: it’s never satisfied, an idea that Nietzsche takes over from Schopenhauer’s idea of will. It’s the will to be moving ahead and, in the best case, to be raising the whole level of its distinctive activity by enriching it as we’ve seen.

2.4 Justifying power We’ve looked at Nietzsche’s idea of life as what ultimately values and at his idea that its ultimate valued is “more life,” or power. Now we must consider how he tries to turn these two points together into a justification of power. He gives this often, for example, in 86–​7:5[71] (WP.55): “There is nothing in life that has value, except the degree of power—​assuming that life itself is the will to power.” The justification has this overall structure: (P1) Life is the ultimate valuer. (P2) Power (more life) is life’s ultimate valued. (C) Power is to-​be-​valued.

Obviously there’s a suppressed third premise here: (P3) Whatever is the ultimate value of the ultimate valuer is to-​be-​valued. And it’s this we must now examine. Let’s keep in mind that power is only the first element in Nietzsche’s full package of values, so that this justification is only the start of his defense of his values. Still it plays a leading and grounding role for the rest. I tried to show in §2.1 that this argument is a dominant theme in his thought.66 Often it is stated

65 I develop this temporal point more fully in [1996, 24–​6]. 66 It’s not until the mature period, from Zarathustra on, that the idea of power becomes quite explicit. But well before that we can see Nietzsche reaching toward this way of specifying life’s aim for use in this very argument.

62  Body Values explicitly, and it is otherwise a nearly constant background presence. But can the argument bear this weight? First an orienting, background point. As a deeply historical philosopher, Nietzsche thinks of the project to justify values as itself something historical. His innovation is to philosophize in clearer awareness of the history of this and the other philosophical tasks he takes on. The history he has in mind is not just “the arguments of the philosophers,”67 but the social and psychological roots of these arguments, extending back into human prehistory. He thinks his study of this development equips him for judgments on how to re-​aim these projects. This means that to understand his argument regarding life we will need to see how he relates it to a family of justifications of values it descends from. Nietzsche’s genealogy for this argument presents one aspect as crucial: the way its “justification” of values depicts them as commands. What distinguishes different forms of the argument are the “commanders” they respectively identify and the kind of “authority” they attribute to these commanders. As these vary, so, too, does the reason the arguments give us—​those who hear them—​to obey by taking on the values so justified. This is the practical effect these arguments seek—​and that Nietzsche wants, too, for his own value of power. He wants his favored readers to adopt this value—​or else to elevate or stress it among their values if it’s already there. So he wants them to “obey,” but to obey a different kind of authority than offered before. We saw in Chapter 1 that it is Nietzsche’s ambition to replace externalist theories of value with a new internalism, one that sees values as good merely for and in the valuing of them. And this indicates Nietzsche’s overall aim in his revision of that argument-​type. He wants to bring the authority that “commands” the value into the individual that is meant to obey it—​so that the command is a self-​command. Now obviously he is not the first philosopher who has attempted this: it’s a familiarly Kantian idea that one gives the moral law to oneself. But Nietzsche will claim that such predecessors have misidentified this “self ’:  indeed, that they have willfully, out of an unacknowledged allegiance to morality, relabeled as “self ” elements in us that are really alien and external. Moreover they have tried to use this authority to establish moral values as “real” or “objective” in ways that elide their true perspectivity. Nietzsche means to renounce these externalisms, but, as we began to see in Chapter 1, this lesson is extremely difficult to live—​or philosophize—​by, and (I think) he himself didn’t consistently keep it in his own clear view.68 67 Whereas arguably these are the main focus of Heidegger’s “history of being.” 68 I think he oversteps, for example, in 87–​8:11[83] (WP.674, LNp215): “How is value measured objectively? Only in the quantum of enhanced and organized power.” And in 88:14[105] (WP.710): “The attempt should be made, whether a scientific order of values could be built simply on a numerical and mensural scale of force . . . /​—​all other ‘values’ are prejudices, naiveties, misunderstandings . . . /​—​they are everywhere reducible to that . . . scale.”

Life: As Valuer and Valued  63 Nietzsche’s argument regarding life is an instance of this general argument-​pattern: You should value V because X values V.

Different versions of the argument specify different Xs, but in each case this X’s valuing is taken as authoritative; that is, to have status such that I  should obey it, should value its V, too. Nietzsche offers a genealogy or history of such arguments.69 He offers his own version as an advance on the basis of this history. These arguments originated with one most important function, still dominant in most of them. They function to secure obedience to social rules—​the rules needed for life in cities and societies. These arguments play a crucial role in what Nietzsche calls the “taming” of “the human animal.” The general method was to train this creature to “value” those rules in a new kind of way, unlike that practiced in its drives. This new valuing is (self-​)conscious and linguistic, but, above all, it understands itself as tasked to value things whose value is set outside it. Society needs the individual organism, steered by the selfish values of its drives, to have the expectation that values are set by authorities outside itself, which its own valuing ought to obey. It needs to inculcate externalism. The expectation of external authority then fits the creature to enforce social norms against its own drive-​values. This is the social-​historical role of the argument-​ pattern, and it has passed through many forms, all leaving imprints in us.70 In the most primitive case the value is imposed by explicit personal command—​ of the parent, of the leader. [X = master] 85–​6:1[10] (LNp54): “Before the ethic of custom (whose canon wills ‘everything traditional shall be respected’) stands the ethic of the ruling person (whose canon wills, that ‘the commander alone will be respected’).”71 The presence of these authorities gradually bred into us a disposition to obey, which grounded further development. In BGE.199: “considering, then, that obedience has so far been practiced and cultivated best and longest among humans, one may fairly assume, that the need for it is now innate in each, on average, as a kind of formal conscience, which commands: ‘thou shalt unconditionally do something, unconditionally refrain from something,’ in short ‘thou shalt.’ ”72 69 In Chapter 5 (§5.4) I’ll come back to set Nietzsche’s genealogy of this problem within his broader story how we came to be “human” by conceiving of ourselves as subjects and agents. 70 85–​6:1[22]: “How manifold is that which we experience as ‘ethical feeling’: in it is worship, fear, the touch as of something holy and secret, in which something commanding speaks, something that takes itself more important than us . . . . Our ethical feeling is a synthesis, a sounding-​together of all ruling and subservient feelings which have been at work in the history of our ancestors.” Also 84:25[336]. 71 84:25[452]: “Commands ‘so shall you esteem!’ are the starts of all moral judgments—​a higher stronger one has commanded and proclaimed his feeling as law for others.” Cf. HH.i.99. 72 Cf. 84:26[195].

64  Body Values As a society lasts and grows it forms a picture of itself as a lasting society, held together by customs and laws (i.e., enduring procedures and principles in which its values are codified). This is the long developmental stage Nietzsche calls the “ethic of custom [Sittlichkeit der Sitte].”73 But the mode of address of these external values remains the same:  they are commanded and are persuasive and compelling as commands.74 Society therefore needs a new way to personify a commander of its lasting values. Nietzsche describes in GM.ii how laws were given personal authority by being attributed to the ancestors taken to have founded the society. [X = founder] The authority of these founding fathers—​ their having-​commanded these values—​sets the values up outside us as binding on us. GM.ii.19: “all customs [Bräuche], as works of the ancestors, are also their statutes and commands.” As the society continues to prosper the ancestors are inflated along with its sense of itself and become gods, then finally (the one absolute) god.75 [X = god] But gods and (the) god are still used for that same purpose, to validate the society’s values as binding on every member. A.57: “The authority of the law is grounded in the theses: god gave it, the ancestors lived it.”76 So values’ appeal still depends on a quasi-​personal command addressed by god and the ancestors to the society or people. It’s this command that gives members their principal reason to believe and obey, though now the command is accepted at second hand (as it were). A further refinement of the strategy stretches out the reliance on command still further. Members attribute authority to the values themselves, as real and true in their own right. At first they still receive this authority from divine commands: god makes these values real by commanding them. But—​as we see in the Euthyphro—​it becomes thinkable that the values be bindingly good in their own right and “prior” to god’s assent to them.77 Nietzsche associates this idea 73 The phrase is often mistranslated to contain “morality,” from which Nietzsche intends to distinguish it. D.9 (“Concept of ethic of custom”) treats this stage of values: “[An] ethic [Sittlichkeit] is nothing other (therefore no more!) than obedience to customs [Sitten], of whatever kind these may be.” HH.i.95 says that tradition arises “above all for the sake of the preservation of a community, a people. . . . Every tradition [Herkommen] now constantly becomes more venerable the farther away its origin lies and the more this is forgotten.” We’ll return to this “ethic of custom” several times in different contexts; my main accounts of it are in Chapter 6 (§6.4) and Chapter 7 (§7.2). 74 D.9: “What is tradition? A higher authority which one obeys, not because it commands what is useful to us, but because it commands.” (It goes on to say that tradition’s command is taken to come from a “higher intellect.”) Also D.p.3. 75 Later in GM.ii.19: “in the end the forefather [Ahnherr] will necessarily be transfigured into a god. Perhaps this is even the origin of gods. . . .” See note 1 in Chapter 12 on my practice of not capitalizing “god” even when it refers to “the absolute god.” 76 TI.ix.5 says that Christians “believe in god who has privileged knowledge of [what is good and evil for them].” See, too, 84:26[407]. 85:38[13] says of the founders of religions: “their ‘thou shalt’ must not sound to their ears like ‘I will,’—​only as the command of a god do they dare fulfill their task.” 77 HH.iii.44: “Further stages of morality, and thus of means of attaining the ends described [the preservation of the community at a certain height], are the commands of a god (such as the Mosaic

Life: As Valuer and Valued  65 with Plato and his posit of the eternal Form of the Good.78 It marks the transition between that “ethic of custom” and “morality” [Moral]. Still, the roots of the position in the old idea of command are still evident. For even when values are credited with this independent reality and truth, they are reinforced by stand-​ins for an authority that commands them to us. We can distinguish two versions of these abstracter ways of specifying the X (that commands values to us). A first locates it outside us, not in god but in (for example) nature. [X = nature] There’s an aiming out there in all the natural world, and our task is to align ourselves with it.79 Indeed even the scientist’s talk of “laws of nature” is descended from that practice of obedience to external commands.80 A second way of specifying that X locates it “in us,” as a voice that is at once both our own but also something separate that speaks to us. One example of this is reason, taken as something we can and should “listen to.”81 [X = reason] Another example is conscience. [X = conscience] 87:9[43] (WP.20): “After one unlearned faith in [a superhuman authority to set the goal], one still sought by the old habit an other authority, which knows to speak unconditionally, [and] can command goals and tasks. The authority of conscience now steps to the fore (the more emancipated from theology, the more imperativistic morality becomes); as compensation for a personal authority.”82 Once we recognize this historical pattern of argument, we see that Nietzsche deliberately echoes it in his justifications of power through life: he offers life as an authority to determine (and justify) values. He does so most obviously in his personifications of life, which imagine it with a quasi-​divine status: when—​in Z.ii.12—​“she” tells us that her deep end is power, this borrows force from theological precedents. To be sure, Life doesn’t (in this passage) explicitly command us to value power. But we’re encouraged to take her to speak with authority: that

law); further and higher still the commands of the concept of unconditional duty with its ‘thou shalt.’ ” 78 85:38[13] (WP.972, LNp39) contrasts Muhamed’s justification of values through god with Plato’s posit of eternal values. 79 BGE.9 critiques the Stoic aspiration to “live according to nature”; it charges Stoics with depicting nature “as an immense eternal glorification and generalization of Stoicism.” 80 Cf. HH.ii.9, entitled “ ‘Law of nature’ a superstition.” Also GS.109. 81 D.207 diagnoses Kant’s morality as expressing a German instinct for obedience: “Long before Kant and his categorical imperative, Luther had said, out of the same experience: there must be a being whom the human can trust unconditionally,—​it was his proof of god; coarser and more folkish than Kant, he wanted one to obey unconditionally not a concept but a person, and in the end even Kant took his detour around morality only in order to arrive at obedience to the person.” Also BGE.187 regarding Kant, and CW.11 regarding Germans. 82 HH.iii.52: “The belief in authorities is the source of the conscience: it is therefore not the voice of god in the breast of the human, but the voice of some [other] humans in the human.” Also see GS.335. Note how in D.p.4 Nietzsche places himself in this tradition: “we too still obey a stern law over us . . . we too are still men of conscience.”

66  Body Values she values it does effectively credit and promote the value to Nietzsche’s receptive readers. Elsewhere the lesson is quite explicit, as in 85:37[11] (WP.125): “for so sounds the teaching preached by life itself to all that lives: the morality of development. To have and to will to have more, growth, in a word—​that is life itself.” And some of this force also operates in Nietzsche’s non-​personified references to “life.”83 If all of life wants power, who am I to resist and refuse this value? There’s unsubtle pressure to obey and follow this omnipresent valuing. But although Nietzsche leans on this externalist argument-​pattern, I  don’t think he rests his main weight there. It stands in for his ultimate way of justifying values, which is internalist. He addresses those arguments that make life an external authority to readers who require such an authority—​to those who “need to obey.” (This includes himself, sometimes.) But what he most wants is readers who can “obey themselves,” and in particular the strong instances of life and will to power they contain; he addresses his ultimate justification of power to them. It’s in and from our own drives that he wants “life” to address us. So his appeal, in the end, is to the authority of values already in us. And this is his broad strategy to revise that old argument-​pattern: by specifying an “internal” authority to justify values to us, he hopes to avoid positing his values as real, as not for-​a-​valuing. In that argument-​pattern (you should value V because X values V) the shift from an externalist to an internalist justification of values involves putting X somehow “inside” you. It partly collapses the difference between you and X, so that the point can be that you should value V because (although you’ve failed to see this) you already do. This argument only partly collapses the difference between you and X, however. For the argument is, after all, an effort to persuade you to value what you as yet don’t. So it must rely on some distinction between different parts of you that do and don’t value V or else between different ways you do and don’t value it. And this means that the argument still relies on some claimed authority. If X is a part of you, why should this part have authority to set V as value for the part that doesn’t value it? Or, why should the way you do value X have authority to say you should value it that other way, too? At issue here are, once again, relations of “commanding” [Befehlen] and “obeying” [Gehorchen] now between different “internal” parts. Notice what Z.ii.12, so important a statement on will to power, says about commanding and obeying. It offers three findings about life that are then explained by its will to power: (i) “[e]‌verything living is something that obeys [ein Gehorchendes],” (ii) “[w]hoever cannot obey himself will be commanded,” and (iii) “commanding is harder than obeying.” I take the implicit lesson here to be important to him: obey 83 As mentioned, he sometimes seems to base real or objective values on the authority of life, e.g., when A.26 says that the priest disvalues “every natural custom, every natural institution . . . every requirement given by an instinct of life, in short everything that has its value in itself.”

Life: As Valuer and Valued  67 yourself rather than others and become the rare one strong enough to command on a large scale.84 Nietzsche’s internalist strategy thus gets expressed in the idea that obedience should be redirected within. Familiarly, Nietzsche has a presumption against obedience to external authority; it betrays something lacking in oneself when one seeks it. This may be the root of his rejection of externalist justifications of values. In 83:7[1]‌: “Where there is no drive to obedience, there a ‘thou shalt’ has no meaning. /​ . . . Our morality must say ‘I will.’ ” Obedience is all-​important in a training phase—​that of the camel—​but then, ideally, is to be largely left behind in an overall shift of temperament: one grows into a lion or a free spirit [Z.i.1]. Nietzsche is generally critical and scornful of those on the look-​out for something to obey.85 But morality is fundamentally such a command; TI.vi.2: “The most general formula that lies at the basis of every religion and morality, says: ‘Do this and that, avoid this and that—​so you will be happy! Otherwise . . .’ Every morality, every religion is this imperative.”86 Obeying oneself is by contrast always a crucial virtue for Nietzsche. What form does he think this self-​obedience should take? Because humans are (for Nietzsche) complexes of drives each willing power, the internal relations of command and obedience among these drives are decisive. So BGE.19 famously analyzes willing to involve experience of a part that obeys as well as of the part that commands: “In all willing it is absolutely a matter of commanding and obeying, on the basis . . . of a social structure of many ‘souls’.” We’ll explore more details of this drive-​structure in Chapter 3 but can anticipate that Nietzsche thinks it’s all-​important that these many drives (sub-​ souls) be somehow unified and not left to express themselves diversely and chaotically. And this unification requires, he insists, that there be a single will or drive (or perhaps a ruling coalition of drives) that commands and that the other drives mainly obey. Unification is by command and by (in the best case) a single commander. Now the notion of a unified self able to control potentially renegade drives is already a familiar ideal for us; philosophy has paid long attention to the failure at this, akrasia or weakness of will. What’s notable in Nietzsche’s version of the ideal is his insistence that this unification should come by the rule of some drive, rather than by the rule of that thinking, reasoning, deliberating part of us that I’ll call the “agent.” His view is, indeed, that this agent should obey such a principal drive rather than commanding the drives quite generally. What “I”—​my agential 84 Later, in Z.iii.12.4: “Who cannot command himself, shall obey. And many a one can command himself, but much is lacking before he can also obey himself!” 85 As he says for example of the Germans, in D.207: “ ‘The human must have something that he can obey unconditionally’—​that is a German experience, a German logicality.” 86 83:7[73]: “[Morality] commands, but is not able to justify itself.—​The commanding is what’s essential in it!”

68  Body Values self, with its worded values—​need to learn is to obey my genuine self, which is my body and its great will. So Nietzsche says of himself in EH.iv.2: “I obey my Dionysian nature.” And TI.vi.2:  “Everything good is instinct.” It’s by obeying this dominant drive (or coalition of drives) that the agent learns to value power, we’ll see. On the opposing Kantian model, obeying a drive involves a loss of autonomy or freedom. But Nietzsche denies that such freedom is genuine. The Kantian agent, acting from the categorical imperative, is still obeying an external authority: it’s just that the latter’s otherness from it is concealed. Recall that some versions of the general argument-​pattern (you should value V because X values V) located the authoritative valuer (X) “within” us, for example as our “conscience” or our “reason.” But in both cases, Nietzsche claims, this authority is really an alien interest, as is reflected in its need to claim to dictate what’s “really” good.87 Our conscience, or our moral reasoning, still speaks as an external authority, which delivers an independent value not already present in our wants or preferences. This value is delivered to each of us as an agent who is required to obey it and, out of this obedience, to command his or her drives and appetites. So here, too, unity originates in that authority and is merely enforced by the agent. At the bottom of Nietzsche’s argument, I suggest, is a claim as to what’s most truly oneself: what one is. To “internalize” that argument-​pattern we need its X to be something truly one’s own; Nietzsche claims that our drives are more truly “who we are” than such authorities as conscience or reason. If we align our agential values to our ruling drive, we are more truly “obeying ourselves.” And it’s because his justification cites a valuing that is thus “our own” that it doesn’t need to claim any real or independent value: the value already speaks from us and doesn’t need to speak at us. What’s required is “simply” to notice it. But what’s Nietzsche’s argument to establish that my drive-​nature is more truly “my self ” than my agency or conscience or reason? Partly it is the negative story he tells about how these latter all represent the interests of various past groups; we touched on this story in Chapter 1 (§1.3), and we will look at it in detail in Chapter 5. Here let’s focus on the positive side: why he thinks that it’s my drives that are “most me.” Even here we find Nietzsche making his argument in two ways, one of which still relies on a kind of external authority. Such, I suggest, is his argument through the notion of essence: that the valuing of power in our drives has authority and priority—​we should deliberately value it, too—​because willing power is the essence [Wesen] of every living thing.88 So this will in my drives has title to dictate 87 82–​3:4[64]: “The conscience is a ventriloquist, when it speaks we don’t believe any more that its voice comes from us.” 88 E.g., BGE.259, GM.ii.12.

Life: As Valuer and Valued  69 its value to my agential self because it’s the deeper essence of me, as an organism. But, once again, I think this argument tries to impose on me from outside: this essence, determined to hold of life generally and justified by this generality, is then applied to my case to identify what’s most me. On this reading I am still, in the argument for power, commanded from outside. The same point holds, I suggest, for interpretations that attribute a Kantian or “transcendental” justification of power to Nietzsche, as I  take Katsafanas’s “constitutivist” reading to do. As I suggested at the end of Chapter 1, I think this makes the justification more “coercive” than Nietzsche means it to be (at least as addressed to his favored readers). It still assigns him an externalist justification for his values: they’re commanded to us by “the rules of the game” of agency. But Nietzsche sees Kant’s transcendental arguments as one more way to subject us to laws and commands. By contrast he makes not a logical but a factual claim: one about what deep aims we already do have. So here, too, Nietzsche has a different kind of argument in reserve. His internalist justification of the value of power at bottom relies on my own ability to discover and expose this value in myself: to see that this was what, under all, I have always been after. It’s only in that recognition that the justification reaches its ground, internal to my own valuing. I can learn to notice this deep level of valuing in myself—​to see that what I’m ultimately aiming at is to enlarge my capacity in the respects picked out by my dominant drives. I can see that I want this more strongly and unshakably than I want other things and that indeed I want other things because they have seemed to abet that basic aim. So, on this strong internalism, the proffered value is to be accepted, if at all, only in the feeling that it is what one wanted all along. This shows us where we must, in the end, locate the “life” that Nietzsche cites as authority in his own version of that argument-​pattern. [X = life] Life is the willing in my very own drives as they seek their own growth; this willing has the right to be called “life” because it’s most truly my own. When Nietzsche says what “life is,” he speaks both of and from this part of himself. And he speaks to, in the end, this same part in each of us—​the part that values power in this implicit and bodily way. He addresses our reflective self only in order to induce it to recognize and defer to this deeper self. And the force of his saying “life wills power” is not “since everything does it so should you,” but to bring to my awareness that I—​ that deep and implicit I—​already do. We now finally see what kind of authority this life speaks with: it speaks as my own deepest valuer. Nietzsche hypothesizes that it really is the case that will to power has been laid down by evolution at the end-​setting bottom of each of us—​with all our superimposed practices and values adopted as experimental ways of realizing power. (It lies, as we put it in §2.3, at the bottom of those “stacks” of capacities evolution makes organisms out of.) Each human organism aims at its

70  Body Values own growth-​in-​control, and it takes on such practices and values out of an implicit judgment that they empower it, or at least let it survive.89 Many of these judgments, however, are mistakes—​or else the values become fixed and persist even after they’ve ceased to be helpful in this way. In 87:10[23] (WP.110): “the feeling of value is always out of date [Rückstandig], it expresses preservation-​ growth-​conditions of a much earlier time.”90 The practices and values available to individuals are formed at the social-​ historical level, generally for the benefit of various past groups; it’s very unlikely that they will accurately serve the particular growth my drives want. In 88:14[158] (WP.354) Nietzsche puts the point so: Humanity has always repeated the same mistake: it has made a means to life into a standard [Massstab] of life : so that instead of finding the measure [Maass] in the highest enhancement of life itself, . . . it has used the means to a quite particular life to the exclusion of other forms of life, in short for the critique and selection of life : i.e. the human finally loves the means for their own sake and forgets they are means: so that they enter his consciousness as goals, as standards for ends[.]‌91

When I notice my own main aim at enhancement, I can remind myself how my deliberate goals and standards have really only been meant as means to it after all. Nietzsche claims there is a bottom to my system of motives and, at this bottom, an aim that sustains all my further motives. This organism that I am acquired, as it grew up, habits and values that promised to advance its implicit, bodily aims. But its judgments were often mistaken, and it has taken on many ineffective and even self-​defeating means. Most of our agential values are not good signposts for power, though that’s what we deeply want them for. Foremost among these, Nietzsche thinks, is morality—​a system of values astutely designed to appear to improve us while not really doing so. When we identify our own deep aim at power we will have a new capacity to assess this mass of acquired habits and values.

89 Compare Hunt [1991, 120–​1]: “all moralities are fundamentally vitalistic in the intentions that lie behind them.” 90 D.104 describes a different kind of case: “Why do we take on [valuations from others]? From fear,—​that means: we hold it more advisable to present ourselves as if they were also our own—​and habituate ourselves to this presentation, so that it finally becomes our nature.” 91 87:10[137] (WP.707, LNp198): “This is my basic objection . . . against all Why’s and highest values in previous philosophy and religion-​philosophy. A kind of means has been misunderstood as end; conversely life and its power-​enhancement has been reduced to means.”

Life: As Valuer and Valued  71

2.5  Lessons from life’s value Now if we accept this sketched argument from life to the value of power, what are we to do? How will the recognition of power’s value change us—​change how we live? Here we begin a story that will continue into Chapter 3, when we look more closely at Nietzsche’s account of the drives. And we will take it up again at later points.92 Our task here is to set in place some distinctions we will need all through these later discussions. The first is a distinction among several basic concepts tightly linked with “power.” The second is a distinction between two quite different ways of “incorporating” the lesson that power is the end. These distinctions will help us get a general fix on what Nietzsche wants us to do. a. Strength versus health. We’ve seen that power is “growth in control,” and hence a process or transition from less to more and from lower to higher. Life’s deepest aim is this ascent. But there are two related terms that Nietzsche very often uses as criteria in his evaluative judgments: “strong” [stark] and “healthy” [gesund]. Although he uses these with his usual freedom, I think we can identify certain central or principal uses, which we can use to fix these terms’ relations to “power” and to one another. Very roughly, I suggest, strength is the capacity to get what one wants, whereas health is the capacity to want the right thing. But Nietzsche has his own very characteristic way of making this distinction. Both strength and health are standing conditions or states rather than changes or processes (as power is, being growth). I think we should understand them as capacities.93 But this forces our attention to certain complications that enter in with the idea of a capacity. 1. These complications emerge most clearly with “strength,” the simpler term. Strength is, I will claim, the capacity to command other forces. This capacity is both (a) comparative and (b) relational. So (a) a will is stronger than another will insofar as it is able to command more other forces, or stronger such forces, or to command them more thoroughly. And (b) its comparative strength is thus in relation to some particular set or range of other forces—​those it can command. These “forces” include recalcitrant matter (which “obey” in some extended sense), but Nietzsche mainly has in mind the commanding of other wills. Now “capacity” has an ambiguity flagged by Aristotle in his distinction between first and second dunameis (potentialities). We might say that X has the

92 In Chapter 7 we’ll see how the criterion of life is used in the revaluation of morality. In Chapter 9, we’ll look further at the “Yes to life” Nietzsche promotes, and in Chapter 10 at how he thinks we should change our relation to ourselves. 93 To be sure, this involves waiving GM.i.13’s insistence that “strength” is just the “doing” itself and not something that stands behind the doing. But his own practice is to waive this; his psychology, e.g., relies on drives and affects as “doers behind the doing.” And he quite usually treats strength as a capacity.

72  Body Values “capacity to command” Y either (at one extreme) when X could, over time and with effort or even luck, succeed in making Y obey, or else (at the other extreme) when X has already brought Y to submission and has only to issue commands in order for Y to obey. Or, of course, we could set the condition for strength somewhere in the range between these extremes, for example by specifying how long or hard it would be for X to make Y submit. This exposes, moreover, a related ambiguity in the notion of “control’, which I’ve defined power to be growth in. Recall that Nietzsche’s term for such control is Herrschaft, “mastery.” Does a master control or master a slave all the time that it can command the latter or only when it does (actually issue commands)? These options correspond to Aristotle’s further distinction between first and second entelecheiai (actualities). In willing power, does one will to increase how much one does command or how much one can? I suggest that we organize these several terms as follows. Let’s think of a “command” as an event in which a value, a sign for an aim, is transmitted from the commander to an obeyer—​transmitted in the sense that the obeyer accepts and takes on that value as a sign it steers by.94 This event lasts as long (let’s say) as the obeyer continues to obey by so using the value. So “command” counts as a success-​word, meaning “effective command” or “obeyed command.” And a command is always “with respect to” some other will or wills, the obeyer(s), in which the command is realized and persists. Let’s think next of “control” (mastery) as a capacity to command, but a capacity that is very “close” (along the range we noticed) to actually commanding. The master controls the slave even while not issuing commands at the moment. It may be that the slave’s ongoing obedience keeps past commands in effect. But, most importantly, the slave has shown itself submitted to obeying future commands: the master has only to make them. Still this control, as a capacity, persists as a state even while the master is not commanding. Then “strength” [Stärke] stands a further step back from control: it is a capacity to control other forces in this way, but again a capacity that “stands close” to actually controlling. It “knows how” to master such forces, though it may not now be controlling this one. Thus the strength of a drive consists in its ability to control other drives within the human. And the strength of a human lies in its ability to control both its own parts (its drives) and (some) other humans. How then is strength related to power? Since power is “growth in control,” and strength is a capacity to control, it might seem that strength is just a capacity for power. But I think this is too quick. We need to take account of the particular way Nietzsche understands the “growth” he most associates with power. In its



94

I’ll develop this notion of command further in Chapter 3 (§3.4); it will be very often used.

Life: As Valuer and Valued  73 paradigmatic form, will to power is an effort not just to widen control by bringing more other wills of a given type into its control. It is an effort to raise the level of control: to control a new kind of foreign will or to control in a new and fuller way. A will can be strong and yet lack this capacity to “raise the level” of its control. It may, as it were, have done all that it can with its strength: it may have shown great strength in subduing so many Ys but be unable to move on to any new Zs. The special ability that Nietzsche thinks is the highest form of will to power involves that further kind of strength: the capacity to expand not just quantitatively but qualitatively. Thus we might speak of a special “strength for power” that is an ability to grow in this “vertical” dimension. It’s for the sake of such growth that one seeks strong opponents; one doesn’t ascend by an easy victory (e.g., EH.i.7). This is what he thinks will to power ultimately wants, and other kinds of “growth in control” are second-​bests. 2. Let’s turn now to Nietzsche’s other key notion, “health.” He is constantly labeling things sick or unhealthy; this is one of his main ways of persuading his readers against favorite targets such as Christianity and morality. The force of these terms seems to depend on their ability to combine factual and valuative senses: when he calls some value “sick,” for example, it sounds like a medical diagnosis that nevertheless stains and discredits the value. There have been several attempts to clarify Nietzsche’s notion of health.95 I have a simple suggestion:  “health” [Gesundheit] is, for Nietzsche, aiming well at power. A living thing aims, remember, by its values—​the signs it steers by. These signs range from the perceptual markers used implicitly by the drives, to the moral maxims we consciously consult. For Nietzsche health and sickness are features of these values: whether or not they accurately point the way to “growth in control.” One is sick when one’s values steer away from one’s growth and toward failure and decline. Sickness is, on this account, “wanting what’s bad for you.”96 (We could also include those who don’t want the good enough, though I think Nietzsche usually considers this a defect in strength not health.) Like strength, health is a capacity, but a capacity located in one’s values. It is the capacity of these values to steer one toward growth in control.97 It is the fact that one’s values are reliable or effective signposts to power. So health is a crucial element in the special “strength for power” mentioned earlier. It is “knowing the signs” of growth in control, which is necessary for the capacity to ascend to higher levels of control though not, of course, sufficient for it. 95 See especially Huddleston [2017] and Dunkle [2017]. 96 EH.i.2 offers as proof that he is the opposite of a décadant: “among other things, that I always instinctively chose the correct means against bad conditions: while the décadant in himself always chooses the means disadvantageous to him.” 97 This definition of health explains why it must involve the kind of fit between one’s drive-​aims and one’s abilities that I take to be the crux of Dunkle’s “drive-​ability model of health” [2017].

74  Body Values Since life’s end is power, and health is aiming well at power, a living thing has a basic interest in “healing” itself (i.e., in revising its values so that they steer it better toward power).98 We must bear in mind, however, Nietzsche’s insistence that sickness in a part, or sickness for a period, can be ingredients in or steps to a “higher health,” a “great health.”99 So Nietzsche describes himself, in the period of Human, All-​too-​Human, as struggling to heal himself from a dangerous sickness and as thereby achieving a “new health” [cf. HH.i.p.4, HH.ii.p.6]. His higher health consists in his ability to use sickness itself as a means to grow. This definition of health explains, I  suggest, why Nietzsche so often treats health as depending on a “unity” of the organism’s parts. As we’ll see more fully in Chapters 3 and 4, human is a synthesis of drives and affects, but very often this synthesis is inadequate or incomplete. In such a person one or more of the drives don’t “obey” an overall project; we may call these “rebel drives.” And then the values that such drives steer by will steer the human away from its (overall) growth. Disunity is a sickness of the whole human, but we should note that those rebel drives might be quite healthy considered on their own. That is, their values-​signs may lead them quite reliably to their own power/​growth; they are problematic only in relation to the whole and a unifying aim. To the extent that a drive isn’t integrated with other drives, its own strength and health may make it all the more damaging to the strength and health of the whole human. On the other hand we need to think of this “healthy unity” as taking Nietzsche’s typically Heraclitean form. Drives are properly synthesized in a human and in members in a society in a way that preserves a competitive tension among these parts—​an agon. The parts must not abandon their own aims to the overall project, but struggle always to reflect themselves more fully in it. They have allegiance to the whole, but also to their distinguishing aims; they want to improve the whole by increasing their own part in it. Values are healthy or not in relation to a will that steers by them; their health lies in their capacity to further this will. And of course very different values will be healthy or sick for different drives, persons, societies. So GS.120 emphasizes

98 Huddleston [2017] argues that Nietzsche’s idea of health is irreducibly “normative.” I agree that it’s valuative (I prefer to use “normative” in a different way; cf. Chapter 6), but add that Nietzsche gets this force not from his own idiosyncratic valuing, but from a valuing (of power) he claims is deep-​ rooted in us all. 99 GS.382 speaks of “the great health—​such as one not only has but also constantly acquires and must acquire, because one always gives it up and must give it up!” EH.iii.Z.2 quotes this passage to clarify “what I call the great health.” NCW.e.1: “I owe to [my long infirmity] a higher health, such as becomes stronger by everything that does not kill it!” Also 85–​6:2[97] (WP.1013, LNp78).

Life: As Valuer and Valued  75 that “there is no health in itself ” but rather, because bodies are so different, “innumerable healths of the body.”100 However there are also certain values that are unhealthy for any drive or will. Such—​the most obvious example—​is the value that disvalues power, or that values (the will’s own) destruction or decline. Such values “say No to life” and are the paradigm cases of sickness for Nietzsche.101 We’ll come back to this point shortly. Consider finally how strength and health are related. I began with the rough suggestion that strength is the ability to get what one wants and health the ability to want the right thing. We’ve now seen Nietzsche’s version of this. Strength is the capacity to control other forces. This is the capacity that matters most for him; it most determines one’s ability to “get what one wants.” And health is aiming well to improve this control, to grow in strength. It’s to “want the right thing” by having signs-​values that steer one well toward growth. These definitions allow strength and health to diverge—​as Nietzsche thinks they do, on a very large scale, with “human,” who is both the strongest animal but also the sickest [A.14].102 But they also come together in that “strength for power” which depends on healthy values to steer it aright. b. Aiming better at power. What, then, am I to do once I see that life’s end is power? I am to aim myself better at power, which means, we now see, to “heal” myself. I must revise my values to make them better signposts for the growth (in control or mastery) I now see is my proper end. It is out of this “will to health, to life” that Nietzsche says he created his own philosophy [EH.i.2]. But, as we should now begin to see, this revision needs to happen at both of the “levels” at which I (like every human) value. (1)  I must revise, on the one hand, my “agent-​values”—​the values I put into words and refer to in deciding what to do. So the first lesson is to use power as a second-​order value of this agential kind—​as a standard or criterion for judging the other agent-​values I  do or could have. This is a familiar theme in Nietzsche: he often rallies us to his project to assess “the value of values,” meaning (by the latter) our conscious, formulated values, our norms, and in particular our morality.103 And he often offers power as the standard to be used in this assessment; this is his most obvious lesson from power’s value. I’m to 100 HH.i.286: “Freedom of opinion is like health: both are individual, for both no generally valid concept can be set up. That which one individual needs for his health, is for another a ground of sickness.” Cf. 76:16[43]. 101 See GM.iii.21 on how destructive the “ascetic ideal” has been to “European health”; iii.22 begins:  “The ascetic priest has ruined the health of the soul wherever he has become master.” A.51: “Christianity has the rancor of the sick as its ground, the instinct directed against the healthy, against health.” 102 Cf. GM.iii.13. 103 See Chapter 1 (§1.1), especially note 14.

76  Body Values judge existing (agent-​)values by whether they steer or signpost me well toward power (i.e., by their health). I am to see—​in my conscious agency—​that the point to my life is my growth or strengthening and that the latter lies not merely in expanding but in ascending, which involves overcoming previous states of myself. I am to set my sights explicitly on this meta-​project, which subjects all my existing values to a critical eye, with the aim to transform them. I now review and rethink the principles and virtues by which I habitually aim and choose, asking whether they help or hinder this self-​overcoming. I “revalue” my values by redesigning them better to serve that ultimate end. This involves revising my values so that I can value them as thus good-​for-​ me. 86–​7:7[6]‌(WP.326) says that virtues should be adopted “as conditions of precisely our own existence and well-​being, which we recognize and acknowledge independently of whether others grow with us under similar or different conditions.” I will value them thereby as perspectival (i.e., as good precisely for my own interested perspective). I thereby remove the false claim to be true to real values that was made in my moral valuing. I incorporate (in this first way) the truth of their perspectivity. Nietzsche has ideas on how this review and redesign will go. He thinks there are general reasons why agent-​values tend to hinder power; these justify a strong wariness toward them. These agent-​values have mainly functioned in the age-​ old process of “taming” humans for social life, and this has shaped them in ways often harmful to individuals. We’ll look at this story in Chapter 5, when we examine Nietzsche’s genealogy of agency and its values. But we can anticipate that, due to this origin, agent-​values deeply serve the interests of the group—​and of various particular groups—​at the expense of the individual. Designed to socialize the “human animal,” agent-​values attack and suppress the drive-​values that best express the organism’s effort at its own power. It’s due to this ascetic hostility of agent-​values to drive-​values that humans are the distinctively “sick animal.” Thus Nietzsche uses the value of power, justified by life’s willing it, as a standard for judging our agent-​values: Do they advance our power? However, this is not the only such standard he has. A second criterion seems sometimes to supplant the first. This refers to life a different way and seems to leave power out of the account. This second standard judges values by whether they “say Yes to life,” by whether they’re life-​affirming. This seems a matter of “attitude,” whereas power is a matter of real growth. So the two standards seem quite different and likely to give divergent results. We’ll look at the second lesson in detail in Chapter 9. Here let’s consider just its appearance to bypass the argument about will to power. Perhaps it

Life: As Valuer and Valued  77 doesn’t matter what life’s essence might be, so long as one affirms life? But this independence vanishes as we look more closely. For this affirmation must, after all, be of life: it’s crucial that one “say Yes” to life as it actually is. It’s not enough to announce oneself “on the side of life”; as we’ve seen that can mean almost anything. If you’re in favor of “life,” by which you mean the eternal life in the world to come, you’re not really “life-​affirming” according to Nietzsche. Hence this criterion, to be applied, depends on a specification of “how life is,” and this can only be, for Nietzsche, the specification of it as will to power. It is as such that one must “say Yes” to life, to do so in the fullest sense.104 But why does Nietzsche put so much weight on “affirming life” if the point leans back on the claim about will to power? I suggest that he does so to convey that the lesson to us concerns not just our agent-​values—​not just our explicit principles—​but the very way we “live our bodies”; it has an emotive or affective aspect as well. (2)  This brings us to the second kind of lesson Nietzsche draws from his justification of power, the second way he means it to affect us. To learn the lesson about life and power we must not just change our principles, but our whole willful and emotive stance. It’s because the idea of life-​affirmation works mainly in this other part of us, that he uses it as complement to the argument for the value of power. Affirming (saying yes to) life is, of course, an attitude or perspective, but in Nietzsche’s rich sense. It involves not just seeing or thinking, but also feeling and willing. And it involves these not just in their self-​aware and worded forms, but also in that background intentionality that goes on “behind the scenes” all the time. Adequately affirming life must engage all these aspects in an overall intending of life as good. So “saying Yes” doesn’t happen in a cold or contemplative judgment, but only when the person’s full faculties are engaged into an overall love of life.105 It’s not just that this affective and bodily element in us must be active; it needs to take a certain authority. The relation of command between it and our agency must be (largely) reversed. This element is suited for such command because its principal allegiance is to the power of the organism that I am. My deep drives are more reliably aimed at my growth, health, power than I am in my self-​aware

104 Notice how life affirmation involves insight in EH.iii.BT.2: “This ultimate, most joyous, most abundantly playful Yes to life is not only the highest insight, it is also the deepest, the most strictly confirmed and supported by truth and science.” 105 I develop this point further in Chapter 9 (§9.4).

78  Body Values agency. Those drives’ values are (for the most part) healthier than the agent-​ values I’ve been raised into. And so “I,” as a deliberative agent consciously choosing for worded reasons, learn to submit to the “self ” that values and judges in my body.106 I  learn to defer to a taste in my body, a taste Nietzsche often depicts as a sense of smell. I encourage my passions, trusting their judgment better than the most careful conclusions of moral reasoning—​suspicious as I now am of the design of that reasoning power. Z.i.3: “Listen rather, my brothers, to the voice of the healthy body: a more honest and purer voice is this.” Z.i.4: “There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom.” And 87:9[121] (WP.124): “That one gives back to humans the courage to their natural drives [Naturtrieben].”107 For this reversal it’s not enough for the agent to obey the body-​self: the body must also rise into the role of command. This bodily taste needs to learn to express and assert itself. It needs to recover its voice and even its eye from the ways that these have been constrained and distorted by hostile agent-​values. As that distorting pressure comes off, it needs to heal itself. So, Z.i.22.2:  “Knowing, the body purifies itself; experimenting with knowing it elevates itself; for one who understands, all drives sanctify themselves; for one elevated, the soul becomes gay.” I think we should even say that it’s only by the judgment in my strong bodily drives that I finally identify what “power” is. Definitions like “growth in control” need to be replaced by that judgment: its unstudied taste is the best compass for this power. We saw in §2.4 that the “proof ” of the value of power could only come by recognizing the deep aim at it in ourselves. And this recognition—​of “what power is”—​comes, ultimately and conclusively, only in this bodily “sight” and not in any conscious descriptions I might frame about it. The “life” that has authority to say that power is the good is—​in each of us—​this bodily self. This way that the lesson about power needs, above all, to be learned and practiced at the emotive and bodily levels shows the importance of Nietzsche’s personal and poetic uses of “life” (§2.1). He brings out the engagement with personal life by so often describing how he himself carries out this revaluing—​how he has managed it in the living of his own life.108 This personalizing of his ideas, of course, culminates in Ecce Homo, which presents the new ideal as it is found and embraced within an individual life. The point of this personalizing is not to

106 See D.552 on how one must, in consciousness, defer to and care for a creative process working unconsciously. Regarding the contrast between “I” and “self,” see Z.i.4. 107 EH.ii.9: “That one becomes, what one is, presupposes that one is furthest from suspecting what one is. . . . One must keep the whole surface of consciousness—​consciousness is a surface—​clean of all great imperatives.” TI.ii.11: “so long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct.” 108 Conway [2006, 539]: “most of his specific references to self-​overcoming pertain to the developmental trajectory of his own life.”

Life: As Valuer and Valued  79 relativize the ideal to Nietzsche himself, but to display how the ideal needs to be appropriated: not propositionally, and not just consciously and deliberatively, but in a way that engages the whole organism, drives and all. This is also one reason that Nietzsche wrote Zarathustra as he did. The drama about Zarathustra sets our attention on the personal: the ideas are events in an individual’s life and are, in their crucial points, responses to his awareness of living his own one life. Although this character is, of course, a rather distant persona, we are invited to enter into it and to experience the drama and teachings first-​personally. Similarly, we may take the book’s poetizing as an effort to speak to the body—​to feeling and to primitive effort. It appeals to the judgment of the deep will in one’s body, whose taste is sensitive to a different kind of argument or evidence. Nietzsche expresses this affective point most dramatically in those culminating passages of Zarathustra describing the hero’s love for (personified) Life. This love is much more than the kind of “affirmation” involved in believing that life is good. Zarathustra is engaged reflectively with his own life, before death and in the light of his dominant project and passion (toward truth). He loves this, his life, in a way that contains and guides that passion: he pursues it out of this love for his life. This love is itself a passion, as it were a meta-​passion, a passion for passions. As a passion, it belongs to his body. The drama presents Zarathustra’s love for life as erotic. It is inspired by and directed at life’s beauty, not its truth or moral rightness. So this love of life involves an aesthetic sensibility and judgment.109 We apply this artistic sensibility, as artists themselves usually don’t, to our lives so that, as Nietzsche famously puts it in GS.299: “we, however, will to be the poets of our lives, first of all in the smallest and most everyday things.” This poetic work on one’s life is carried out not in a deliberate way—​it’s not a precious effort to be picturesque. Rather it’s run by that passion for life, aimed at enhancement, that judges and arranges the other passions, including that for truth. It arranges them into a life it favors by its own inarticulate taste.110 Zarathustra’s embrace of eternal return, the ultimate saying-​Yes to life, takes place only in confrontation with the existential structure of his own life: it’s this life whose return he affirms.111 And he only accomplishes this embrace by a struggle fought in his body and suffered physiologically, as described in iii.13

109 In my [2004, ch. 4] I try to show that Nietzsche thinks of sexuality as the evolutionary root of our aesthetic responsiveness. 110 GS.290: “One thing is needed.—​To ‘give style’ to one’s character: a great and rare art!” Nehamas (1985, 185) treats this idea famously. 111 The focus is also on personal life in GS.341: “What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it . . .’ ”

80  Body Values (“The Convalescent”).112 So Nietzsche’s test for life-​affirmation—​whether one can will this return—​needs to be met with regard to one’s personal life and at the level of one’s body-​values. Although Zarathustra makes the point about life “just” metaphorically, it locates the point where Nietzsche felt it most strongly. The personification of Life as the object of sexual love stresses both the existential-​personal sense of life and the need to respond to it in one’s bodily taste and feeling.113 It expresses the emotive relation to one’s living that Nietzsche principally advocates. We can’t simply apply these lessons about life’s ends to our values “from outside”: we need to uncover and activate these life-​ends in ourselves (in our bodies) and arrange a cooperation between them and our agential valuing. I hope we can see a bit better what this might involve by turning next to look more closely at the drives.

112 “[H]‌e collapsed like one dead and remained long like one dead. But when he came to himself again, he was pale and trembling and remained lying, and long wanted nothing to eat or drink.” [iii.13] Nietzsche thought of himself as having undergone a decisive illness and then convalescence during his “middle,” positivist period. 113 I return to the topic of this “love for life” in Chapter 9 (§9.4), in discussing Nietzsche’s own value of “the Yes.”

3

Drives Psychology of Drives Not Agents

I’ve tried to show that Nietzsche’s idea of life has more definite content than might have seemed. The idea has a mappable structure that meshes with (and meets the demands of) the crucial argument he uses it in, the argument to justify the value—​power—​he offers us. But of course this structure (of “life”) is very general and our sense of the lesson he means—​just how he wants us to “value power”—​remains very abstract. We can get a more concrete idea of both the argument and the lesson (why we’re to value power and just how) by turning from Nietzsche’s notion of life to that of a “drive” [Trieb]—​another crucial term for him.1 Here we turn (as it were) from his biology to his psychology, which is decidedly a drive psychology: it treats drives as the real explainers of what we think and do; they mediate between will to power and values.2 This psychology treats us indeed as just being our drives.3 Nietzsche claims that it is drives that explain, rather than the agent (or ego or subject) that has always been thought to do so.4 His books are filled with diagnoses of the manifold unsuspected ways our drives lie behind behavior we had supposed was chosen by or for an independent reason.5 By delving into this psychology and the more concrete ways it treats our drives as “toward power,” we can solidify our sense of how to value power.

1 See the survey of Nietzsche’s treatment of drives in Parkes [1994, ch. VIII]. I discuss Nietzsche’s notion of drives in my [2004, 35–​45] and will draw on it. I there note [35 n. 67] the prevalence of the term (and its cognates) throughout his writing, beginning with the Apollonian and Dionysian “art-​ drives.” Katsafanas’s analysis of drives (2016 et al.) is an important advance that I will refer to as I go. 2 E.g., 85:40[61] (LNp46): “Our intellect, our will, as well as our experiences, are dependent on our valuations: these correspond to our drives and their existence-​conditions. Our drives are reducible to the will to power.” 3 E.g., D.119 speaks of “the totality of drives that constitute [a human’s] being.” See, too, the end of BGE.6, and 83:7[94] (quoted in §3.4). 4 To be sure, we’ll eventually have to do justice to the sense in which we are “agents”; this will be the work of Chapter 5. But this agency will consist in a certain way of having drives and not in any separate entity. 5 BGE.6 famously insists that it’s not a “drive for knowledge” that fathers philosophy, but that in each case “another drive . . . has used knowledge (and misknowledge!) merely as a tool.” 88:14[142] (WP.423):  “Against this I  seek to show which instincts have been active behind all these pure theorists.” Nietzsche’s Values. John Richardson, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190098230.001.0001

82  Body Values As we clarify Nietzsche’s idea of power we must also try to vivify it—​to feel and imagine it—​for reasons we’re beginning to see. To take his lesson in as he wants, we must do so not just qua agents, but in the way we live in—​or as—​our drives. Only so will we “incorporate the truth” about our valuing into that valuing itself. And to find our way here I think we need a more intuitive and more resonant picture of what he claims each of us is, as a system of drives. We need a picture that helps us to recognize our own drives, and their synthesis into the bodily self that is the core to each of us. Moreover, since Nietzsche’s aim for us is ultimately practical, we need a picture that will help us to inhabit our drives in some way better than we’ve so far done. Let’s orient ourselves by recalling some earlier discussions of the drives; this gives a synoptic overview of the ground we will need to cover more closely. We began to look at the drives in Chapter 1 (§1.3) where we saw that they value. This is part of the very rich intentionality Nietzsche attributes to drives.6 A drive values by specifying the activity that power is to be growth in, as, for example, the eat-​drive is the effort to grow as an eater. The drive’s values are the signs by which it steers—​the marks it uses to identify the activity it tries to push forward. Drives press their own values against those of other drives; they compete to express these values in action. Drives also “feel” their successes and failures in pleasure and pain. Nietzsche claims that all of this drive-​valuing goes on “beneath” the conscious and linguistic valuing to which we ordinarily restrict the term “value.” In attributing all this intentional structure to the drives Nietzsche may seem to treat them as mini-​agents and -​intelligences within us. But we’ve also been seeing, all along, Nietzsche’s effort to “naturalize” his account of us. This often pulls in the opposite direction: toward a minimal and quasi-​mechanistic account of the drives. They often seem merely “physiological,” mere causal tendencies carried in our bodily matter. They seem to bring about their effects without any kind of foresight of them. If they “aim” at their effects it is only in the sense that they’ve been naturally selected to bring them about. Drives have been so designed to contribute to survival and growth, which are in this limited sense their “aims.” However this is only a very slender kind of aiming—​even less than the way a tool “aims” at the function it was made for. It looks like far less than the rich intentionality Nietzsche elsewhere ascribes to the drives. How are we to reconcile these minimal and rich accounts of the drives? Nietzsche interprets drives physiologically, in a naturalizing way that allows

6 Pippin [2010, 88]: “[d]‌rives must have intentional content.” Clark and Dudrick [2012, 196] say that drives are “simpler—​though still intentional—​phenomena,” which “themselves exhibit agency of a sort.”

Drives: Psychology of Drives Not Agents  83 them to be attributed to even the simplest organisms,7 but also psychologically, as aiming, interpreting, feeling (i.e., as complexly “intentional”), and as individuated by how they “mean.”8 He seems to want to have it both ways, but these ways look incompatible. Moreover that rich psychological notion of drives may strike us as implausible: it seems to imagine a host of homunculi—​of mini-​agents—​at devious work within us. Yet, on the other hand, the minimal notion would apparently reduce to mere metaphors his constant descriptions of drives as devising and struggling for power. How we resolve this puzzle will affect how we hear the positive lesson Nietzsche has for us in our relation to the drives, which we noticed in Chapter 2 (§§2.4–​2.5). He preaches reversing the relation of command and obedience between our agency and our drives: the latter are more genuinely “our selves” and more properly rule in us. It’s best if our drives are unified under the command of a single dominant drive: it should be this, rather than our agency, that gives unity and coherence to our lives. It’s the drive-​body in each of us that is his or her true self or soul; this is the kind of “life” that is the real authority Nietzsche relies on in justifying his value of power to us. But all of this seems to require that richer, psychological conception of the drives. How could they merit that status if in fact they’re mere physiological dispositions? Our route through these theoretical and practical issues will be the following. We’ll begin (§3.1) by looking at our access to the drives—​at how Nietzsche thinks he is able to bring the drives “into view” so as to analyze them and what they do. This prepares us then to address (§3.2) the central issue of drives’ intentionality, end-​directedness, and, above all, the sense in which they “value.” Here I offer my main account of the Nietzschean drive. After that the task is to see (§3.3) how these drive-​units interact according to Nietzsche: how they compete against one another and also combine into systems or syntheses, above all, in the body as a whole. Finally we turn (§3.4) to the practical lessons from all of this—​to the new relation to our drives Nietzsche counsels.

3.1  Knowing the drives If Nietzsche is to have what could amount to a drive psychology, he needs an account of how we can come to know the drives—​some route of access to them, a method by which that psychology can discover its principal explainers. He 7 Indeed Nietzsche attributes drives (as we’ve seen he does will to power) even to the inorganic, e.g., in 85:36[21] (WP.655, LNp25). 8 Katsafanas [2013b] focuses on this problem.

84  Body Values himself owes an explanation of just how he knows what (he says) the drives are: how he’s able to bring them into view so as to say what they are and how they work. And the psychology needs a method to identify drives in particular cases—​to identify which drive causes some thought or action. How, most pointedly, am I to discover what my own drives are? Can I directly introspect them? Or by what steps do I infer them? The question of our access to the drives obviously interacts with the standing question of what they are—​and whether they are mechanisms or intelligences. If the former, then drives will be studied by the methods of physiology or biology; if the latter, we will need a method that can get at drives’ intentional contents. Since, as we’ve seen, Nietzsche is adamant that drives are generally unconscious, there’s a particular problem in how we can access their “internal” intentionality. How can we, within ourselves, “bring them to consciousness”—​or is this even the way we should try to know them? We must weigh whether Nietzsche shares Freud’s view: “It is of course only as something conscious that we know [the unconscious], after it has undergone transformation or translation into something conscious.”9 Some of our evidence for how Nietzsche thinks we discover drives is what he says about his own drives. He claims, in places, to know himself down to this level—​to have identified in particular his “strongest drive.” I’ll discuss this, but also want to consider his interesting sex-​drive and his understanding how it works in himself. He recognizes that his sexuality expresses itself in his philosophical views and even singles it out as working unusually and exceptionally—​ so as to render his views about women “perspectival” in a degree or way that his other opinions are not.10 How well does he seem to know himself in this respect? Sometimes, we should notice at the start, Nietzsche denies knowledge of the drives: he denies that we do know them, and sometimes this escalates into the assertion that we can’t know them, so that the meanings of our actions are unavailable. D.116: “Actions are never what they appear to us to be! . . . Moral actions are in truth ‘something other,’—​more we cannot say: and all actions are essentially unknown.”11 D.119:  “However far one may drive his self-​knowledge, nothing can be less complete than [his] picture of the gathered drives that constitutes his 9 Quoted by Lear [2005, 23]. 10 So BGE.231 famously qualifies the “truths about the ‘woman as such’ ” he then offers, as “only [eben nur]—​my truths.” 11 Nietzsche makes the claim very early, in 71:12[1]‌(ENp84): “Even the total drive-​life, the play of feelings, experience, affects, acts of will, is for us—​as I here must insert against Schopenhauer—​ by the most careful self-​inspection, known only as representation, not in their essence.” 85:34[46] (LNp2):  “Feeling, willing, thinking show everywhere only outcomes [Endphänomene], whose causes are completely unknown”; “[t]he true world of causes is hidden to us.” 87–​8:11[113] (WP.477, LNp221): “the causal union between thoughts, feelings, desires . . . is absolutely hidden, and perhaps purely imaginary.”

Drives: Psychology of Drives Not Agents  85 essence.” And D.129 says that the “actual ‘struggle of motives’ [is] for us something completely invisible and unconscious,” and that “I certainly learn what I finally do,—​but I do not learn which motive has therewith really won.” One reason for the difficulty is that, even as one tries to understand oneself, one is also trying to subvert and mislead that effort. My real motives have reason to conceal themselves. There are parts of me that only function when they’re not made explicit—​that need to foster a false story about their workings. The drives we’re trying to understand conceal and even misrepresent themselves. So, already, in HH.i.491: “Self-​observation.—​Human is very well defended against himself, against being spied out and besieged by himself, he is usually able to perceive no more of himself than his outerworks. The genuine fortress is inaccessible to him, even invisible, unless friends and enemies play the traitor and lead him in by a secret way.” And yet a thorough skepticism here would leave his drive psychology quite disabled—​unable to explain by the entities it claims really do explain, unable even to describe them. And it would leave Nietzsche himself quite unentitled to most of his psychological insights on which he so prides himself, and impresses us. So we must look (as on every topic important to him) for an epistemic position that authorizes his positive account—​for a way to limit the scope or force of full skepticism. Overall, Nietzsche presses his skeptical attacks as a way to shake our faith in our current methods, to spur us toward a new method that will let us know better than we have. His real target is not our effort to know, but our presumption that we can and do know by the methods now at hand. In the case before us, Nietzsche’s main target is our settled, implicit faith that conscious motives explain actions. This faith is so immediate that we don’t even realize we are relying on a “method” for knowing why we act and are making an inference here. Nietzsche claims to expose a new epistemic gap, a twin to the one long noticed between appearances (our sensations) and external reality; here, as elsewhere, he gives less credit to Hume than he should. Our conscious motives are likewise mere appearances, facing that epistemic gap as mere hypotheses of why we act. And indeed, he thinks the meanings and causes of our own thoughts and actions are even worse revealed. Our motives are less accurate appearances of the causes of our action than our sensations are of things around us, so that we know ourselves worse than we do the world. In 88:14[152] (WP.478): “nothing is so much an illusion as this inner world that we observe with the famous inner sense.”12 He calls this his new “phenomenalism.”13 12 83:7[268]: “the essentially faulty self-​observation in all acting is overlooked in morality.” 85–​ 6:2[103] (LNp78): “Mistrust of self-​observation.” 84:26[432]: “I hold all proceeding from the self-​ reflection of spirit to be unfruitful and believe in no good research without the leading thread [Leitfaden] of the body.” 13 This note, and the phenomenalism, are well discussed by Riccardi (2015). Also 87–​8:11[113] (WP.477, LNp221). See, too, 83:12[40] on how we are only a “picture” to ourselves.

86  Body Values Nietzsche is intent on shaking this powerful complacency in us—​our constant sense that we’re aware of why we act, which occurs not just as a reflective or “philosophical” thought, but all the time as we proceed with our lives. Nietzsche puts points to all degrees of emphasis against it, right up to (we’ve seen) the alarming denial that we can ever know, by any means, why we act. Given his positive ambitions, we can set aside such full skepticism as hyperbole. When he says that we can’t know, he means by the method we’ve so far used; when he says that we don’t know, it’s because, with our faulty agent psychology, we haven’t been looking for the causes (of actions) in the right place. It’s very much more difficult than we think to know and explain why we act—​and indeed we will only be able to “know” and “explain” in different and seemingly diminished senses. But Nietzsche thinks the new psychology will still give us more of the real truth here. Is it, then, that this new psychology will abandon introspection and self-​ awareness as ways to know why we act? Is this what he means when he says that we must “start from the body and use it as guiding thread” [85:40[15] (WP.532, LNp43)]? If Nietzsche is so dubious that our conscious motives explain, is he a skeptic about all “inner sense” and about any first-​personal access to why one acts?14 I think in fact he will rely on it, but on an inner sense that has first been instructed and disciplined by a very different kind of evidence about the drives. What we have now to see is how both kinds of access to the drives are requisite and how these two approaches are required by two aspects of drives. These crucial aspects are two “opposite” ways drives aim, or are directed, ways calling for either third-​or first-​personal understanding. We can get at these distinctions by paying attention to (what I  take to be) Nietzsche’s dominant image for his psychology’s method: it gets at the workings of drives by interpreting the drives’ “signs” [Zeichen].15 This is his distinctive way of describing our access to the drives: we view behavior as a “sign-​language” of these drives and infer the latter from it.16 These signs include not just our actions but our thinking17 and our conscious purposes. BGE.32: “the intention [Absicht] is merely a sign and symptom [Symptom] that first requires interpretation, thereby a sign that means too much and therefore, by itself alone, almost nothing.”18 Nietzsche claims a special capacity to read such signs.19 I think we should take this very common locution more seriously than is usually done. 14 Riccardi [2015] attributes a thesis of “Inner Opacity” to Nietzsche. 15 On Nietzsche’s treatment of signs see Stegmaier [2000, 2006]. 16 See how HH.i.p.8 uses “sign–​reader” [Zeichendeuter] in apposition to “psychologist.” 17 85–​6:1[28] (LNp56):  “Thinking is not the inner happening itself, but likewise only a sign-​ language for the power-​balance of affects.” 18 83–​4:24[16] (WP.676): “could even our end-​setting, our willing etc. be perhaps finally only a sign-​language for something essentially other—​namely not-​willing and unconscious?” 19 EH.i.1: “I have a finer sense of smell for the signs of ascent and decline than any human has had.” Also EH.ii.10.

Drives: Psychology of Drives Not Agents  87 Just what does Nietzsche mean to convey in speaking of “signs”? We must distinguish two points, which will reflect those two ways drives aim, and our two means of access to them.20 To put it simply, sometimes a sign is just third-​ personal evidence, sometimes it is a first-​personal appeal. In the former case we make inferences from it, in the latter we interpret what it means. In its first aspect, a sign is just observable evidence of what lies hidden—​in this case our drives. Often Nietzsche uses the word just to stress that epistemic gap: to emphasize that (conscious) intentions are merely clues regarding our actions’ causes, data requiring very cautious interpretation. The causes of our actions aren’t, as we can’t help supposing, directly given to us in the motives we so vividly experience ourselves as acting from. Instead we must go by signs, as the doctor infers the illness from certain symptoms observable in the patient. And, as we’ve just seen, Nietzsche sometimes pairs “symptom” with “sign” in just this way.21 The point also seems uppermost in what immediately precedes in BGE.32: “everything about [an action] that is intentional, everything about it that can be seen, known, ‘conscious,’ still belongs to its surface and skin,—​which, like every skin, betrays something but conceals even more.” We infer the drives from evidences that are drastically different from what they’re signs of; a “sign,” in this way that Nietzsche uses it, implies a challenge to our access.22 Nietzsche treats our behavior as this kind of sign when he uses biology to interpret it. He finds out key things even about his own drives by readings in biology. To this biological eye, behavior is a sign of drives, understood as organisms’ inbred dispositions for such behavior. But for Nietzsche the crucial further point is supplied by Darwin: due to natural selection, these dispositions were one and all “designed”—​and fixed in the organism’s ancestral line—​due to some way(s) that they served the preservation or growth of its kind. So there is this common “meaning” or reason behind our own drives, too: this is why they strive as they do, and hence why we act, when we act from them. A drive is crucially the sign, then, of the selective advantages it served at the times it was formed and modified. This biological way of interpreting behaviors as “signs” proceeds third-​ personally. Drives are, for it, causal dispositions it treats “from without.” Nevertheless the Darwinian insight reveals a kind of “design,” and hence a kind of “aim” or “end,” that plays a key role in drives” explanation of behavior.

20 See how GS.8 bears on this distinction between two kinds of signs. 21 Cf. 85–​6:2[165] (WP.258). Nietzsche also uses “symptom” because he wants the psychologist to diagnose, from these signs, whether the underlying drives are healthy or sick. See e.g., GS.p.2. I return to this later. 22 See how GS.354 speaks of signs as limiting: “the world of which we can become conscious is merely a surface-​and sign-​world, a world turned into generalities and thereby debased to its lowest common denominator.” Also BGE.268.

88  Body Values As we might put it, drives have a certain “function,” which explains both them and (in turn) the behavior they produce. The drive “is directed” at reproductive success—​or rather it “has been directed” at such success because it was the selective logic that shaped the drive, back among the organism’s ancestors, and aimed it so. Thus the directedness is (as we might put it) passive, imposed on the drive, which comes into existence with it. This way that the ends of preservation and growth are imposed on the drives is reflected in how the drives themselves have no inkling of them.23 A drive is a behavioral disposition that is “plastic” toward its distinguishing outcome—​which we generally name the drive after. For example the eat-​drive in the cat senses and adjusts to changing circumstances—​the flight maneuvers of a mouse—​so as still to bring eating about. The drive is sensitive and responsive to conditions insofar as they help or hinder its pursuit of that outcome. By contrast the drive is not thus responsive to the “imposed” end of reproductive success; it does not adjust its eating in the light of what (in particular conditions) serves that success. Yet Nietzsche insists that to understand drives we must grasp this further function they serve. We can infer this function for every drive. We could do so even if we weren’t able to identify particular drives or their working in particular cases. And sometimes Nietzsche seems content to stop here—​to suppose that this is all we can know about the drives: that there is, in each of us, this very complex set of dispositions all originally serving survival or growth. In this case our drive structure would be for us a “black box,” unknowable apart from this general point supplied by (the logic of) natural selection. More often, however, Nietzsche treats drives as somewhat inferable from behaviors. He attributes to us the same generic drives often cited by biologists to explain the behavior of animals, in particular the eat-​drive and the sex-​drive. Everyday and scientific observation of animals’ behavior grounds attributing certain instinctual dispositions to them, and our evolutionary relation to them suggests that these instincts are still operative in us. All of these accounts of the drives issue out of third-​personal and scientific approaches to them, which treat organisms’ behavior as “signs” in that first sense. Behaviors are symptoms of dispositions, which are perhaps mechanisms, but ones that have been “aimed” at preservation and growth. But Nietzsche thinks of this as only one side to drives’ directedness or aiming. It is (as it were) this aiming’s passive aspect, but aiming has an active one as well, by which it has not just a function but (as I will develop in §3.2), a “goal.” And our access to this active aspect comes from treating behavior as “signs” in a second sense—​treating



23

However, 81:11[127] seems to bring reproductive ends within the scope of the sex-​drive’s desire.

Drives: Psychology of Drives Not Agents  89 them more particularly as a “sign-​language,” as Nietzsche so often puts it.24 In its active aiming a drive “means” things in what it does, and, to understand them, we must read in the signs this communicative intent. We’ve seen that the biological view of drives treats them as “plastic” dispositions—​ each is a tendency sensitive and responsive to current circumstances in a way that keeps it “toward” a given outcome (e.g., eating). This responsive “towardness” is the root of the drive’s active aiming. But what gives us access to it is something further that it does: it signals its aiming, if only to itself at a later time. It deploys behaviors with communicative intent. So we are “to see in all moral judgments a bungling kind of sign-​language, by which certain physiological facts of the body want to communicate [mittheilen]: to such as have ears for it” [83:7[125]].25 The drive “expresses” its aims in actions, not just (in that first sense) by leaving effects and evidences of them, but by trying to signal and share them. So, as Nietzsche often puts it, the drives “speak” in these evidences of them.26 We comprehend this second, active aspect of a drive’s directedness by hearing what it means to “say” in its behaviors. We do it by “sharing” the meaning (i.e., by entering first-​personally into that aiming ourselves). Communication is, after all, an effort to share a viewpoint; to understand a communication is to enter into that viewpoint—​at least briefly.27 It is to stand, at least briefly, in that viewpoint’s responsive relation to circumstances, responsive especially to the viewpoint’s own signs for its ends. And this holds for the drives, Nietzsche thinks. In the next section we’ll look more closely at the drives’ use of signs. Here the point is the need of “drive psychology” for this first-​personal understanding. It’s the need to grasp drives as intentional that gives a role to (a kind of) introspection or inner sense after all. We understand something intentional only, in the end, by occupying that intentional stance.28 We must “feel what it’s like” and

24 BGE.187: “moralities are also only a sign-​language of the affects.” 83:7[60]: “Moralities as sign-​ language of affects: but the affects themselves as a sign-​language of the functions of everything organic.” 83:7[62]: “music is a sign-​language of the affects . . . [and] the drive-​system of a musician is clearly recognized from his music.” (I treat “affects” later and more fully in Chapter 4 [§4.1].) 83:7[268] makes morality a “Zeichen-​Sprache of the body.” Also CW.e, 83:7[76]. TI.vii.1 varies the term: “Morality is mere sign-​discourse [Zeichenrede], mere symptomatology.” 25 In 85–​6:1[28] (LNp56) Nietzsche extends the point to inorganic forces: “all movements are to be grasped as gestures, as a kind of language, by which forces understand one another [sich]. In the inorganic world misunderstanding is absent, communication seems perfect. In the organic world error begins.” 26 83:7[62]: “The philosopher is only a kind of opportunity that makes it possible for [his strongest] drive to come sometime to speech.” 27 I’ll treat Nietzsche’s “theory of language” in Chapter 6, examining especially how its sharing involves the individual in complex relations to community. I come back there to his idea of signs and sign-​language. 28 D.142: “To understand another person, that is, to imitate his feelings in ourselves . . . .” I’m in general agreement with Poellner’s [2006] attribution to Nietzsche of a phenomenological approach.

90  Body Values so must be able to experience, and attend to, the drive-​perspective. Fortunately, Nietzsche thinks, we share a deep evolutionary history: drives laid down through human and pre-​human development are deeply fixed in all of us. So the psychologist relies on possessing the drives-​to-​be-​understood and on an ability this gives him or her to “see from their viewpoint.”29 Nietzsche thinks we “late” moderns possess an unprecedented multiplicity of drives that equip us to understand a great diversity of human types. And he stresses this about himself and how crucial it is to his own work as a psychologist; he can read the “signs of ascent and decline” because “I know both, I am both” [EH.i.1].30 But what is it to “occupy” a perspective and to “see from its viewpoint”—​and what is it to do this, in particular, for a drive? If we already have these many drives in ourselves, it seems that we already “occupy” their perspectives just by their working in us. In what further sense are we to do so in order to have the special knowledge of them that the psychologist wants? It’s natural to think that the change lies in occupying the perspective consciously. Then, although drives are typically unconscious, it would be possible for them to become conscious—​for us to be aware of ourselves while/​as in them. I think this is in fact Nietzsche’s view. We are to use the drive’s sign-​language in its behaviors to “light up” its viewpoint into awareness in ourselves. But there’s a complication here. For drives sometimes “communicate” their aims and viewpoints dishonestly. Their allegiance to those aims makes them sometimes strategic in signaling them—​to others and even to themselves. So some of the signs of themselves that drives leave in behavior are deceptive. The main reason they communicate, after all, is to advance their aims, and often they can best do this by hiding those aims.31 Thus our professed motives, though signs of the drives, are often quite discrepant from them.32 Similarly, Nietzsche thinks that Christian love deceptively expresses resentful hatred; the latter “speaks” to deceive—​to deceive not just others but even the conscious “self.” Indeed, drives pretty commonly hide from the moralizing agent’s

29 85–​6:2[29] (LNp70): Schopenhauer “deceived himself about music as about pity and for the same reason—​he knew both too little from experience.” 30 86–​7:6[4]‌: “My writings speak only of my own experiences [Erlebnissen]—​fortunately I have experienced much.” 83:21[6]: “Many drives struggle in me for dominance. /​in this I am a reflection of everything living and can explain it to myself.” Such access to internal multiplicity is characteristic of the Dionysian, who “enters into every skin, into every affect: he constantly changes himself ” [TI. ix.10]. Already in UM.iv.7 Nietzsche says that Wagner’s art allows us “to take part in other souls and their destiny, to learn to see the world from many eyes.” He also associates this capacity with “the historical sense” [85:35[2] (LNp17)], which we’ll return to in Chapter 8 (§8.3). 31 See 83:7[173]: “To communicate is originally to extend one’s force over the other: this drive is an old sign-​language lying at the ground—​the sign is the (often painful) impressing of one willing on another willing.” I treat the point at more length in Chapter 6. 32 Pippin [2010, 89]: “Real motives, according to Nietzsche, are often exactly the opposite of what is avowed, even sincerely avowed.”

Drives: Psychology of Drives Not Agents  91 introspecting view. They judge what this agent will tolerate as a motive to ascribe to itself. But the drive does still express itself, even in the overt motive (love even of sinners) that seems so contrary to it. The psychologist must be able to hear the drive’s particular way of so expressing itself, must be able to hear how love is, in this case, an expression of hatred.33 But—​it bears reminding—​this “occupying” is only one of two ways we need to grasp drives. To understand a drive quite thoroughly “from within,” by entering its perspective in detail, is not itself enough. The psychologist must also see what the drive itself does not: how its aiming has been shaped by forces before and around it—​how it has “been aimed” by them. It must grasp the drive “in context”; that is, in its relations to the other drives, wills, interests, and forces that bear upon it—​that shape, constrain, or affect it. Above all this view will see how the drive arose, with this aim, in the first place and what forces designed it for what aims of their own. It sees this not first-​personally, as within the drive, but in a third-​personal view upon it. It is the juxtaposition of both interpretive views, from within and without, that lets one grasp the drive’s “perspective,” as Nietzsche thinks of it. In sum:  the new psychologist needs to interpret “signs” of the drives by a method that does justice to both ways that they’re signs. He or she must combine the diagnostic and third-​personal eye that infers from clues, with an ear that’s attuned to drives’ communicative intent.34 By both routes the psychologist arrives at how the drive aims; it uncovers the two sides of its directedness. On the one hand a drive “has been aimed”: by selection, at preservation and growth, and also by other forces. On the other hand it also “aims itself ” by adopting signs for its goals. Drives explain behavior by their aiming and not as mere mechanisms. Our mechanistic accounts are efforts to translate this genuine, telic explanation into a “vocabulary” accessible to our senses; they are themselves a kind of “sign-​ language” addressed to the senses.35

33 87–​8:11[240] (WP.179):  “the psychological difficulty that has hindered the understanding of Christianity” is that the “drive that created it compels a fundamental battle against itself ”; “[a]‌rtfulness: to deny, condemn the drive whose expression one is, to make a show constantly, by word and deed, of the opposite of this drive.” 34 Contrast (with the following) Poellner’s [2006, 308] rather different account how Nietzsche can appeal to both “phenomenological” and “physiological” explanations. 35 88:14[82] asks whether “mechanism is only a sign-​language for the internal fact-​world of struggling and overcoming will-​quanta?” And 88:14[122] (WP.625):  “the mechanistic concept of motion is already a translation of the original process into the sign-​language for eye and touch.” Also 85–​6:1[28] (LNp56).

92  Body Values

3.2 Drives valuing In looking at Nietzsche’s account of our access to the drives we’ve begun to see what he thinks they are. We grasp drives by interpreting signs, and we read the latter in two ways, so as to bring out the two sides to a drive’s aiming or directedness. We read them as clues to the ways a drive “has been aimed”—​most deeply at preservation-​growth. But we also take them as signals through which we can enter the viewpoint of a drive’s own active aiming. Now I want to fill out this “directedness” of drives and build it into a fuller analysis of just what a drive is for Nietzsche. What kind of thing is it, first, that has this “directedness”? I suggest that we think of the drive as a certain kind of disposition, one that occurs as a “habit” in some particular person and/​or as a “practice” in some society.36 In the individual case it is a habit of directedness; in its social form such a habit is spread and shared as a norm. These dispositions are usually biological in origin but have been enormously modified and elaborated by historical processes. These changes have mainly happened at the social level, in the development of those norms. They are acquired by individuals partly genetically, partly by training, partly by active learning. They are subject to modification and indeed have an intrinsic tendency to modify themselves, as we’ll see. So it is these habits and practices of directedness that we need to understand. We can get at the structure of this directedness by returning to our topic of value. Nietzsche often says that drives value. In HH.i.32: “A drive to something or away from something, without a feeling one is willing the beneficial, avoiding the harmful, a drive without some kind of knowing assessment [Abschätzung] of the value [Werth] of its goal [Zieles] does not exist in humans.” And, in a notebook entry quoted in Chapter 2, 84:26[72]: “Valuations [Werthschätzungen] lie in all functions of the organic being. . . . /​Every ‘drive’ is the drive toward ‘something good,’ seen from some standpoint; in this it is valuation, only thus has it incorporated itself.”37 This talk of drives as valuing epitomizes the “rich” intentionality Nietzsche attributes to them. But how can these unconscious dispositions do as much as this? Nietzsche seems guilty of an implausible “personifying” of drives, which we’d have thought he’d be immune to. Before turning to my response, let’s look at a strategy for defusing the problem, one offered by Katsafanas [2013b]. As I read him, he in effect displaces valuing

36 Clark and Dudrick [2012, 169] present well this habituated character of drives. 37 A drive is a valuing that has become instinctive; so 84:25[460]: “All human drives, like all animal ones, are developed as existence-​conditions and placed in the foreground. Drives are the after-​effects of long-​tended valuations, that now work instinctively, as a system of pleasure-​and pain-​judgments.”

Drives: Psychology of Drives Not Agents  93 from the drive itself to certain psychic states it produces (or to other faculties it affects); the drive “values” only by and in these effects on other psychic powers, not by itself. This strategy can be extended to the other intentional or psychic acts Nietzsche attributes to drives.38 Katsafanas interprets the drive as indeed a mere disposition, hence not the sort of thing that can have values in or by itself. But this disposition produces an “evaluative orientation,” in particular “by coloring our view of the world, by generating perceptual saliences, by influencing our emotions and other attitudes, by fostering desires” [743]. And this evaluative orientation in turn affects how the agent values, so that the drive-​disposition works on these at second hand; it’s only by so working that the drive “values.”39 Now I agree that when Nietzsche is speaking of agential values he thinks the drives affect these “at second hand.” So Katsafanas’s reading catches the point of many passages, such as that from HH.i.32 quoted earlier, where the wording suggests that the assessment may be something additional to the drive and perhaps something done by the agent (given the restriction to humans). Drives don’t carry out this agential valuing themselves. Instead they use other powers of the body to express these values, in the same way the eat-​drive uses the body’s perceptual apparatus to find its prey. Drives use the body’s linguistic and cognitive powers to think and pronounce agential values. But it’s important to see that drives do use these various bodily powers and use them for aims and values they already have, themselves. It’s not by chance that drives have the causal effects they do on our feelings and thoughts; the latter are not merely their (dispositional) tended-​results, but are selected by a kind of purposive intent.40 Rather than offering the steady dumb pressure of a mechanism, drives manage the bodily powers, including our agency, in a way that adjusts to circumstances in the light of their—​the drives’—​own aims. It’s crucial to Nietzsche’s conception of drives that they work in this richly intentional way. The particular point that drives value “in their own right” is visible in Nietzsche’s many attributions of valuing to everything alive (or organic), as well as in his assertions that it’s the body that values.41 He very commonly treats drives as perspectival and as struggling against other drives. In 85–​ 6:1[58] (LNp59): “From each of our basic drives there is a different perspectival 38 Gemes [2009a, 50–​1] adopts a similar strategy to account for Nietzsche’s apparent attribution of “recognitional capacities” to the drives. 39 So “drives generate affectively charged, selective responses to the world, which incline the agent to experience situations in evaluative terms” [2013b, 745]. Katsafanas defends the view further in [2016]. 40 In Katsafanas’s example [2013b, 742] from Murdoch, the various elements of the mother’s affective orientation are designed by her jealousy (if this is the drive at work), which is itself intelligent and even devious. Similarly, when he argues that the addict does not “value” alcohol, I think he neglects the bodily intelligence that does so value it. 41 We’ve noticed many passages in Chapters 1 and 2, for example: 84:25[433]: “ ‘Alive’: that means already esteeming [schätzen]:—​/​In all willing is esteeming—​and will is there in the organic.”

94  Body Values assessment of all events and experiences. Every drives feels itself, with regard to every other, hampered, or furthered, flattered.” 86–​7:7[60] (WP.481): “It is our needs that interpret the world: our drives and their for and against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule [Herrschsucht], each has its perspective, which it wishes to impose on all other drives as a norm.” A drive is even, at its core, a certain judgment.42 All of this shows Nietzsche’s commitment to think of drives as intentional in their own right. What then are the elements of this intentionality—​and can Nietzsche make them simple enough that he can plausibly attribute it even to very simple animals? This intentionality is crucially a kind of aiming, I suggest.43 The fundamental way drives “mean” things is by aiming at them, and all their other meanings are elaborations or supplements to this one. In the primary case drives aim at a certain activity and not at its effects or results.44 So we most aptly name them by the activities they are distinctively “to” or “for”: the drive to eat, the drive for sex. It’s in these activities that drives find their “satisfaction.” They interpret everything in relation to them. So D.119 says that a drive eager for satisfaction “views every event of the day with regard to how it can use it for its end”; “the drive will in its thirst as it were taste every condition in which the human enters.” Nietzsche has a complex picture of this directedness; I suggest that he builds drives’ aiming out of four main elements.45 A first element we’ve already met: drives’ selectedness. A drive gets a first kind of end through the selective process that explains it. This process selected the disposition, and in particular its distinguishing activity, “for the sake of ” something further. I’ll call this element the drive’s “function.” 1.  Drives have been aimed at functions they were selected for. Such aims are (as it were) imposed on the drive, so that we naturally say that the drive “was aimed” at them and not that it “aims” at them in a full, active way. In the original case selection was “natural”: a drive is fixed in a population, and its outcome (its distinctive activity) fine-​tuned, by the way it has made its bearers fitter, more survivable. By this logic of natural selection, the drive-​disposition is explained by its outcome, which is itself explained by how it helps fitness (or “survival”). 42 81:11[164]: “I speak of instinct when any judgment (taste in its lowest stage) is incorporated, so that it now spontaneously stirs itself and no longer needs to wait for stimuli. It has its growth for itself and consequently its sense of activity pushing outward.” 43 Clark and Dudrick [2012, 148]: “Drives are dispositions to action, picked out in terms of their goals.” 44 83:7[260]: “Satisfaction of the drive is to be sought not in the result of the activity, but in the doing.” Cf. 83:7[263]. 45 Here I amend and add to the account in my [2004] of the teleology of Nietzsche’s drives.

Drives: Psychology of Drives Not Agents  95 It’s very important to Nietzsche that drives have such imposed or passive aims.46 They are, in part, instruments for outside forces, and what they do is explained by the latter as well as by themselves. It is our usual mistake to miss this way in which we are passively aimed; “[h]‌umanity has in all ages confused the active and the passive” [D.120]. As we saw in §3.1, a drive’s functions usually lie quite outside its own recognitional scope.47 It may have no inkling of, and no capacity to detect, whether its behaviors advance its reproductive fitness or not. The sex-​drive’s “own” (or active) aim is sex-​activity, and it has no regard for the genetic survival it promotes. Since such bred-​in ends aren’t within the drive’s own capacities for recognition and response, it is quite unable to adjust to changing conditions so as still to bring these ends about. Thus—​and this is a large point for Nietzsche—​a drive can be fixed in a genetic line due to a way it temporarily improves fitness and can then persist long after it has ceased to do so.48 We should notice that selection can also be “artificial”:  the disposition, with its distinguishing outcome, can be deliberately “selected for” by some intelligent will(s). This is the case for many of the socially formed drives Nietzsche attributes to us. For example—​very commonly, Nietzsche thinks—​a type of person in power revises the population’s practices and norms to effect outcomes that favor its type. It inculcates dispositions that function in its interest. In such cases the drive may not serve its possessor’s own preservation or growth, but instead that of its designer(s). This is a second main reason (besides persistence in changed conditions) that drives can work against the bearer’s own interest. But as we further saw in §3.1, Nietzsche thinks drives also aim more actively and intentionally. Natural selection has made them this way: such active aiming is more effective and survivable. So a drive is more than a mere mechanism preset to perform a certain activity (that then enhances fitness). A drive “intends” or “means” its activity. It does so above all by deploying “signs” for it, signs that it adjusts by experience. Nietzsche needs these signs to occur in very rudimentary

46 This aspect is uppermost in James’s near-​contemporary account [1892/​1992, 366–​86] of “instinct” and “impulse” (by which he translates Trieb). So the cat “avoids falling from walls and trees . . . not because he has any notion either of life or of death, or of self, or of preservation”; he “must” behave in certain ways when presented with certain “excitants” [366]. 47 Katsafanas [2013b, 736] points out that “instinct” was usually used to mean behavior “directed at an end of which the animal simply cannot be cognizant”; he finds this sense in Darwin (“without their knowledge for what purpose it is performed”) and Schopenhauer (“action as though in accordance with the conception of an end and yet entirely without such a conception”) [739]. 48 84:26[72]: “Every drive is bred in as a temporary existence-​condition. It is long inherited, even after it has ceased to be such.”

96  Body Values forms, to be attributable to all “organic beings.”49 By virtue of these signs, the drive aims at its outcome in a way that “previews” it. Being so meant in advance, an outcome amounts to a “goal.” 2.  Drives aim at goals—their distinctive activities—by signs drawn from experience. A drive’s activity is explained by its goals in a different way than it is by its functions: not through past selection for (ancestral instances of) it, but through a current sign that means or points to (a future occurrence of) the activity. So the outcome—​performance of the distinctive activity—​has a kind of presence-​in-​advance in the sign for it—​which was not the case with designed-​in functions. By this use of signs drives have a kind of foresight. The principal thing the drive “signs” and “means” in this way is its distinctive activity; the sign is a mark it holds up to identify the very condition it seeks.50 This sign is the drive’s principal “value.” But this is only the start of its intentionality: the drive means not just that activity, but also all its routes into this activity; it means them in all the further signs it sets up to steer by. So, for example, the sex-​drive works with signs not just for its culminating activity but also for a network of paths toward that activity, as well as of next-​best or partial achievements of it. The sex-​drive doesn’t dumbly push us “toward sex,” it navigates us through situations by responding to signs of all sorts—​including, for example, the look of potential partners. By its use of these signs, the drive interprets its surroundings—​ all in the light of its aim. It’s important that these signs are not simply imposed by the forces that made the drive, but can be produced or amended by the drive itself. The drive is not a mechanism fixedly responding to preset stimuli. It is “intelligent” in its capacity to revise the signs by which it steers, based on experience.51 A drive—​I claim Nietzsche thinks—​can learn from experience.52 He attributes this kind of memory to all living things.53 So a particular sex-​drive reorients itself toward its goals by changing the marks by which it finds its route—​changes them as it sees what works or fails. This flexibility reflects the drive’s active relation to its goals, in contrast with its passive relation to 49 85:34[247] (LNp15): “The creative in every organic being, what is it? /​—​that all of its ‘external world’ represents a sum of valuations, that green, blue, red, hard, soft are inherited valuations and their signs [Abzeichen].” 50 See how tightly 83:7[263] ties the drive to an activity; it argues that if the drive’s activity itself has a goal [Ziel], this is the activity of a different drive. 51 D.119 shows the devising “intelligence” Nietzsche attributes to drives. 52 85:37[4]‌(LNp29) attributes to the body “a thousand-​fold obedience which is not blind, still less mechanical, but a selective, clever, considerate, even resistant obedience,” which makes the body more intelligent than our consciousness. 53 Already in 72–​3:19[161]: “sensation and memory are in the essence of things. It is a matter of memory and sensation that one stuff, by contact with another, decides just so. At some time it has learned, i.e., the activities of the stuff have become laws [sind gewordene Gesetze]. But then the decision must have been given by pleasure and displeasure.”

Drives: Psychology of Drives Not Agents  97 its functions. In 86–​7:5[99]:  “Colors sounds shapes motions—​unconscious memory [is] active, in which useful properties of these qualities (or associations) are preserved.” Learning from experience is a matter of setting up new marks (i.e., signs to itself). So the drive “means” something to itself by establishing signs by which it orients itself—​finds its way to its goal, indeed recognizes that goal. The drive’s values are these signs it sets up for itself to aim its action: targets. In the most rudimentary case of this, a behavior that achieves the goal is remembered as a sign to steer by, as a model to pattern future behavior after.54 Something that has worked is taken as a sign of what will.55 For the drive ready to learn from experience, its own successful behavior becomes, in the memory, a sign to its (future) self.56 So, perhaps, the sex-​drive remembers how it was stirred by some physical feature before and adopts it as an ongoing criterion for its objects. Such memory of cases of heightening and success are perhaps the drives’ first signs. But drives signal not just to themselves but to others. I’ll look at Nietzsche’s idea of “communication” in Chapter 6; here we only touch a few points. In its crudest form communication is by a shove—​one tries to “communicate” a motion to this other. In 83:7[173]: “the sign is the (often painful) impression [Einprägen] of one will upon another will.” The behavior, the shove, does more than just physically displace the other body, it signals its own will that the other shift its heading. The shove is a sign addressed to a will comparable to one’s own, a sign that it should “shift itself ” (i.e., aim itself as the “signer” wants). It is, in other words, a command, a demand that the other obey. Nietzsche treats commands as the fundamental communicative acts—​and not propositions purporting to share facts. He thinks drives are all crucially alike in being able to command and obey.57 And since a drive embeds commands in its behaviors, the latter are themselves communicative: they try to indicate to others how they should steer. It’s in this way most of all that Nietzsche thinks drives “mean” things to others as well as to themselves.

54 Relatedly Nietzsche thinks that every exercise of a drive strengthens it. 83:7[120]: “in every action certain forces are used, others not used, so temporarily neglected: one affect affirms itself always at the expense of the others, whose force they take away.” So drives are built up like habits, by exercise. And it’s their successful exercise that is most repeated. 55 72–​3:19[147] (P&Tp40):  “The so-​called unconscious inferences are to be traced back to the all-​preserving memory, that presents experiences of a parallel kind and thus already knows [kennt] the results of an action. It is not anticipation of the effect, but the feeling: equal causes equal effects, brought forth by a memory-​image.” 56 James says that although every impulse “taken in itself ” is “blind,” “every instinctive act, in an animal with memory, must cease to be ‘blind’ after being once repeated,” and so can be accompanied by “foresight’ ” [1892/​1992, 369–​70]. 57 See how these command-​obey relations are portrayed in 85:34[123] (LNp8).

98  Body Values All of this—​I claim—​makes up the intentionality, the space of meaning, that Nietzsche attributes to drives. It constitutes their “perspective.” A  drive “expresses” its perspectives in behaviors by thus meaning things by them:  its behaviors signal to themselves and others how to be. And, as we saw in §3.1, we understand behavior by “hearing” what drives are expressing in it, which we can only do by entering their perspectives ourselves. So drives “learn from experience” by turning into habits those of their behaviors that succeed. But what, in this learning, do the drives count as success? What is it that they try to adjust their signs in order to (re)achieve? Nietzsche thinks there is one ultimate criterion here: drives judge by the criterion of power. Power is not the drive’s goal-​activity—​sex for example—​but how it aims at that activity: not to repeat it, but to enhance or “grow” it. “Power” is thus a structural element in drives’ aiming and not a goal on a footing with their others. 3.  Drives aim at power in their goal-activity. So drives remember best, and try to repeat, the behaviors in which they felt their own power; they cull from these the signs by which they then steer. I gave a fuller account of power as “growth in control’ in Chapter 2 (§2.3). Here we focus on its application to drives. Power is drives’ deepest goal because it has been so strongly and widely selected for: causal dispositions that enhance their activity, that try to (not just maintain but) expand its scope, are those that get most often and firmly fixed in the genetic line.58 BGE.6: “every drive seeks to rule [ist herrschsuchtig].” Each, that is, involves a deep effort at “more,” at growth, by extending its control over other forces; mere survival is pursued only as a second-​best. This growth is always in the activity that is the drive’s distinguishing and defining goal. So the sex-​drive seeks enhancement in sexual activity. This deep aim at power serves, Nietzsche thinks, as a kind of meta-​aim that guides the drive’s relation to its more particular goals. As we also saw in Chapter 2 (§2.3), power is something more basic than a value for Nietzsche: it’s the criterion values are judged by. This underlying aim at power loosens the drive’s allegiance to its values: they are all just hypotheses as to where its power most lies.59 It represents a crucial “openness” in the drive’s aiming, an opening to the new signs and values that will give it, not more of the same, but that

58 I  treat the relation between will to power and natural selection in much more detail in my [2004]. I there acknowledge that Nietzsche often thinks of will to power in a vitalist or even metaphysical way that makes it prior to and independent of selection. 59 Nietzsche sometimes treats the main drives as branching off from will to power, as different strategies for it: 85:35[15] (WP.658; LNp18): “the will to power specializing as will to feeding, to property, to tools, to servants.” Also 85–​6:1[57], 87–​8:11[121] (WP.651).

Drives: Psychology of Drives Not Agents  99 “qualitative” more.60 In willing power a drive wills to amend its existing aims for the sake of growth. The drive recognizes its power in a “feeling” of enhanced activity; this feeling is itself a kind of sign of that final goal. As we will soon see more fully, a drive judges that it has grown when it feels a certain pleasure or Rausch.61 This feeling is not the goal itself, and indeed can be misleading, Nietzsche thinks (and as we saw in Chapter 2 [§2.3]). In the best case, a drive will learn from experience to recognize better the feeling that is truly a symptom of power—​and not just learn better strategies for achieving the feeling. By experience it can thereby alter even its ultimate sign by which it recognizes power itself. Nietzsche recognizes, however, that drives don’t manage all of this all of the time. They give up on—​or lack the energy for—​pursuing power or growth and content themselves with “repeating” (i.e., simply sustaining a current level of activity). Habits initially adopted to favor an ascending slope in the drive’s activity get repeated as routine. The drive’s signs solidify, and it no longer has occasion to realign them to reflect new experiences of growth. But that drives tend to congeal in this way does not change Nietzsche’s view that their ultimate aim is power. For we can diagnose and recognize that their stasis is a settling for something second best. Nietzsche’s insistence that drives aim at power has dramatic consequences in his conception of the sex-​drive. This drive seeks to feel itself commanding. It aims to command other drives, as any drive does. But it also pursues a specifically sexual kind of command over a sexual other that it tries to “make obey”—​by aligning it with its own activity. This sexual other is of the other sex, in Nietzsche’s (heterosexual) view. The sex-​drive is polarized into two types, male and female, each trying to subordinate the other to its own project. So a kind of “battle of the sexes” is very real to Nietzsche. BGE.238 famously speaks of “the most abysmal antagonism between them and the necessity of an eternally hostile tension.” Each gendered drive has its distinctive values—​the signs by which it expects to find power over its other. I think there’s a fourth key aspect to the drives, one that makes another main contribution to their aiming: this is their “affectivity.” I’ll treat this topic more fully in Chapter 4, but for the moment we can view an “affect” as an aspect or element of a drive and not a separate psychic event.62 We’ve already

60 Freud introduces Eros with similar purpose; so Lear [2005, 85]: “Sex is Eros and not just sex because . . . it is also reaching beyond itself,” i.e. (he quotes Freud [83]) “to form living substance into ever greater unities, so that life may be prolonged and brought to higher development.” 61 Already in 73:29[16] (PTp95): “All drives [are] bound up with pleasure and pain.” 62 Notice how BGE.19 treats affects as a third element in our experience of willing, alongside sensations and thoughts; he speaks in particular of the affects of command and obedience—​showing, I suggest, that he takes affects to belong to the aiming itself.

100  Body Values touched on this aspect in noticing the “feeling” of power. Drives essentially involve affects since they need to feel the status of their aiming, their success or failure at it.63 An affect, as such a self-​gauging, is how the drive “looks at itself,” its reflexivity. So just as drives’ foresight gives them a simple kind of rationality, their affectivity gives them a simple self-​awareness. A  drive pays attention to itself not by a cold self-​inventory, but by feeling how well it is doing. 4. Drives feel their success or failure in their aiming. This affective aspect of drives is an obvious product of selection:  drives are attracted and spurred to their activities by enjoying and suffering their success or failure at them. As we’ve seen, the principal affect is the feeling of power, which Nietzsche also calls “the affect of command.” BGE.19: “What is called ‘freedom of the will’ is essentially the superiority-​affect [Überlegenheits-​Affekt] with respect to something that must obey.” Nietzsche goes on to say that, in such cases, when we feel this commanding, there is always something else in us that obeys and by which we simultaneously “know the feelings of constraint, compulsion, pressure, resistance, motion.” Our several drives are constantly feeling their success or failure in us, but in a degree that seldom rises to consciousness. In 83:8[22]: “Every person whom we meet stirs up certain drives in us (fear, trust etc.)[.]‌Uninterrupted moving of our drive-​life by the external world (nature).” It is only exceptional degrees of these affects that we notice. The drives feel their power as pleasure, their constraint as pain.64 These basic feelings thus involve judgments according to Nietzsche, judgments based on the drive’s values (signs).65 So 88:14[29] (WP.373) speaks of “a mere physiological value-​ judgment, still more clearly:  the feeling of impotence, the absence of the great affirming feelings of power (in muscles, nerves, movement-​ centers).” Nietzsche also interprets happiness as this feeling of power, already in HH.i.113: “happiness, thought as the liveliest feeling of power.”66 He thinks of Rausch as a particularly intense feeling of power, though, even in

63 Katsafanas [2013b, 740] analyzes drives as “dispositions that induce affective orientations,” but I think their relation is tighter than this. 64 88:14[101] (WP.695): “The will to power lies in the essence of pleasure: that the power grows, that the difference comes into consciousness.” 88:14[129] (WP.434): “Pleasure is a feeling of power: if one excludes the affects, one excludes the states that give the highest feeling of power, hence of pleasure.” 65 85–​ 6:1[97] (LNp62):  “Pleasure and displeasure are the oldest symptoms of all value-​ judgments: but not causes of value-​judgments!” 66 88:14[70] (WP.1023): “Pleasure arrives, where [there is] feeling of power /​Happiness in the triumphing consciousness of power and victory.”

Drives: Psychology of Drives Not Agents  101 this case, as we’ve seen, he allows that the feeling can be mistaken. In 88:14[68] (WP.48): “Here the experience of Rausch was misleading . . . /​this increases in the highest degree the feeling of power /​hence, naively judged, power—​/​ . . . there are two starting-​points of Rausch: the over-​great fullness of life and a condition of morbid nutrition of the brain[.]‌” In sum, then, drives have a four-​faceted directedness or aiming. This, I suggest, is the minimal richness of intentionality Nietzsche wants to attribute to them. By it drives possess proto-​values (in their signs for goals), a proto-​reason (in revising signs by experience), and a proto-​self-​consciousness (in feeling their power or constraint). He thinks that all of this can go on without consciousness and that it generally does, not just in us but in all organisms. Drives will, think, and feel without (for the most part) being aware of it. What about our early puzzle over Nietzsche’s split allegiance to a minimalist naturalism and a richly intentional account of the drives? We now see better the structure of that drive-​intentionality and how Nietzsche tries to root it in biology. He thinks a proper naturalism leads here and not to a mechanism.67 Since it is wills that explain things, science must be augmented to take account of aims and viewpoints. But (of course) it mustn’t simply read our human form of these back into the drives. Nietzsche tries to ground this intentionality in these four ways drives aim. Drives are dispositions selected to pursue activities by the guidance of signs—​that also adjust these signs on the basis of past felt success. Drives are thereby “intelligent,” but in a different way than agents are taken to be—​a way that is easier to attribute to animals (and even plants68) than is agency.

3.3  Conflict and synthesis of drives Now that we’ve seen what drives are, let’s look more closely at how they interact: at how they connect or combine with one another into structures—​synthetic units, the fullest of which is the body itself. This is Nietzsche’s “combinatrics”—​as it were his chemistry of drives. We’ve already seen that the basic relation between drives is that of command and obedience. Let’s examine how syntheses are built out of this relation. We’ll see how this relation depends on the sharing of signs and values between drives and how this sharing constitutes a “common space” of meaning among the synthesized drives. 67 So BGE.21 speaks of “the ruling mechanistic foolishness, which lets the cause push and shove until it ‘effects [wirkt]’; one should use the ‘cause,’ the ‘effect [Wirkung]’ only as pure concepts, i.e., as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and communication, not as explanation.” See note 35 above. 68 85–​6:2[76] (WP.660, LNp72): “The ‘purpose.’ To proceed from the ‘sagacity’ of plants.”

102  Body Values 1.  First on the multiplicity of drives. In 83:7[94]: “As cell stands physiologically beside cell, so drive beside drive. The most general picture of our essence [Wesens] is a socialization [Vergesellschaftung] of drives, with constant rivalries and separate alliances with one another.”69 Every drive competes to express itself in the organism’s behavior.70 Each tries to restrain or control the others.71 But they also collaborate, and several express themselves together in any action; 83:7[263]: “In every action [Handlung] many drives are active [thätig].” They compete in particular for power. This struggle is still unresolved in puberty; 88:14[174] (WP.703):  “the whole organism, to the age of puberty, is such a complex of systems wrestling for a growth of power-​feeling.”72 The drives struggle against one another in a strong sense. It’s not just that each pushes in its own direction, which happens to be incompatible with the directions in which others push. Drives are acquainted with the presence or possibility of “competing considerations”—​and that they are pressing their own activity and aims against other motivating factors. Each, we’ve seen, aims to control other passions that might have steered activity instead. Each contrives how to advance its own signs for ends over the signs of those competing projects. Drives’ intrinsic aim to control one another makes it all the harder to “unite” them.73 It’s not a matter of channeling brute tendencies, but of addressing opposed intentionalities. Nietzsche thinks humans are distinguished from animals by their multiplicity of drives74 and that modern humans carry this to a new degree. History accumulates: we bear traces of the many drives and values it has made in its many epochs. Moreover our age has seen an unprecedented mixing of peoples, which involves a mixing of drives and values shaped in these peoples’ very different histories.75 BGE.200 says that, in such an age, a person “has in his body the heritage

69 On this multiplicity, see also 84:27[27]: a human is “a multiplicity of living beings which, partly fighting one another, partly arranging and subordinating one another, involuntarily affirm the whole in affirming their individual being.” Parkes [1994, 277]: “It is a main trait of the genealogical method to take what appears to be a unitary phenomenon and disclose its multiple origins, showing it to be generated by a plurality of drives.” 70 This competition is a product of selection working at this sub-​individual level (compare Dawkins regarding genes)—​as I argue in [2004, 43n89]. 71 83:7[263]: “In order to take power over [the stimulus], [the drive] must fight: i.e., hold back the other drive, muffle it.” 72 83:7[239]: “The actual life is a wrestling of instincts, a growth of some, a diminishment of others.” 73 Parkes [1994, 273–​4] cites “On Moods” as Nietzsche’s first mention of the drives, and points out that already here we find the themes of drives’ “enmity,” and the need for some force to unite them. 74 84:27[59] (WP.966): “Human has, in contrast to the animal, bred large in himself an abundance of opposite drives and impulses; by this synthesis he is master of the earth.” 75 BGE.224: “The past of every form and manner of life, of cultures that earlier lay next to one another, upon one another, now flows into us ‘modern souls,’ thanks to this mixing.”

Drives: Psychology of Drives Not Agents  103 of a manifold ancestry, that is, of opposite and often not merely opposite drives and value-​measures, which fight with one another and seldom give one another rest.” Nietzsche tends to treat this mixing as genetic, but since he thinks drives can also be “learnt,” it will happen to everyone in multicultural societies. He tends to stress the negative consequences of this multiplicity but finds (we’ll see) an all-​important benefit in it as well. The problem with this modern multiplicity is that very often the drives don’t add up to anything, with the result that “we ourselves are a kind of chaos” [BGE.224]. Their struggles with one another inhibit them individually, but, more importantly, they prevent the set of drives from forming syntheses or unities. Where there is cultural “mixing” and individuals bear dispositions and signs formed in many periods of history, and in the histories of different peoples, there are no “ready-​made” harmonies or unions which the drives settle easily into. These different elements haven’t been “designed” to hang together. This modern problem is an extreme form of the historically recurring phenomenon of decadence, which Nietzsche sees as a stage in the cyclical formation of societies [BGE.262]. It is a final stage of relaxation and complication in the set of this people’s drives and values. This set is originally shaped in certain founding moments:  moments when the group faces such threats to its survival that it carries out a sort of self-​surgery and inculcates—​as mandatory—​the drives and values it needs to survive.76 (This is an application of Nietzsche’s more general rule that “pain concentrates us” [83:7[239]].) At these times there is a great simplifying and streamlining of the package of drives and values “available” in the society. Here values are “designed to cohere”; those who grow up in such societies acquire drives that readily combine. For us moderns, by contrast, synthesis is far more chancy and difficult. We inherit or acquire values originating in a vast variety of cultures and ages. We are susceptible to all these values—​are solicited by all these competing signs superimposed on the world around us. We feel a need to do justice to all of them. But for the most part this leaves us pulled back and forth by these drives and unable to channel them into an overall activity. 2.  Next is the way drives combine or synthesize.77 Nietzsche thinks synthesis happens by command and obedience (which we took a first look at

76 BGE.262:  “Manifold experience teaches them to what properties above all they owe it that . . . they are still here, that they have always so far prevailed: these properties they call virtues, these virtues alone they breed large.” 77 See Anderson’s well-​elaborated account [2012] of how the self is bound together by the drives and affects “recruiting” one another.

104  Body Values in Chapter  2 [§2.4]). This is what sets drives “in place” in a structure that functions as a unit in its own right. Without settling into such order drives push and pull uselessly against one another. In commanding and obeying, by contrast, they understand one another.78 For to command is not simply to push some “thing” a certain way, but also to give an aim to another will. And to obey is to accept such an aim from another will recognized as imposing it. Drives, to enter into these relations Nietzsche clearly assigns them, need these rich recognitional skills. So 85:37[4]‌(LNp29) says that the body involves “a magnificent binding-​together of the most diverse life, the ordering and unifying of the higher and lower activities, the thousandfold obedience which is not blind, still less mechanical, but a selecting, clever, considering, even resisting obedience.”79 We can understand this relation of command to obedience as a transfer of signs—​in particular a transfer of values. The first drive requires the latter to accept a new value, and to subordinate its own values to it. It forces it to steer by a new sign. In taking on the first drive’s value, the obeyer shows that it understands that drive. The commander has less need to understand the other’s own aims, but it will do so at least to the extent of seeing that they are initially adverse but can be overridden. So, in this relation of commanding and obeying there is (as it were) a “meeting of minds” between the drives. Let’s distinguish a few forms of obedience to facilitate future discussions. If obeying is accepting a foreign drive’s value in this way, it will matter how this value impinges on the obeying drive’s existing aims. Recall that a drive aims at some distinguishing activity in which it tries to “grow in control.” It steers toward this by signs, by which it finds its route to that activity and judges its arrival there. In obeying it acquires a “foreign” sign to steer by, and the question is how this affects its pursuit of its own activity. A first possibility is that the command imposes a value that denies the obeyer any expression of its distinctive activity. So either the drive obeys simply by desisting from its own aiming or else its aiming is forced away from its usual object and toward a different activity. In such a case we have suppression. 1.  Suppression: the obeying drive is denied any expression or satisfaction. In the extreme case the commanding drive wants the other drive simply absent. It cares to make no use of it; it only wants it not to be in the way. Or, less 78 Compare the claim by Clark and Dudrick [2012, 175] that drives stand in a political and not merely causal order—​in relations of “authority” and not merely “strength.” 79 Later in 85:37[4]‌(LNp30): “Along the guiding thread of the body . . . we learn that our life is possible through an interplay of many intelligences [Intelligenzen] that are very unequal in value, and thus only through a constant, thousandfold obeying and commanding—​put morally: through the incessant exercise of many virtues.”

Drives: Psychology of Drives Not Agents  105 drastically, it tries to harness lower level abilities in the obeying drive to its own purposes. It uses only “lower level” abilities: not the obeying drive’s immediate capacity for its activity (since this is suppressed) but its skills for more remote means, which can also be turned into means to the commanding drive’s aim. (Imagine that the sex-​drive uses the eat-​drive’s capacity to track, shifting it from finding food to finding sex-​others.) Here there is already, perhaps, some little expression and satisfaction the obeying drive finds just in exercising these lesser skills. In a second kind of case, the obeying drive is allowed satisfaction in its distinctive activity but in a controlled way that doesn’t interfere with the activity of the commanding drive. 2.  Permission: the obeying drive is allowed occasional or partial expression. Perhaps the commander allows this expression just to secure obedience elsewhere: it keeps the obeying drive content by allowing it little satisfactions in the very thing it wants. Or the commanding drive may find a way for the other’s activity to contribute to its own, or even to enter as an element into its own. (So the sex-​drive can have the idea of eating aphrodisiacs or can use a meal in a seduction.) And here we can see that the balance between the two drives’ activities can vary. It can even happen that the drives are equally expressed, either side-​by-​side or in fusion; in this case each drive both commands and obeys. A third possibility is intermediate between suppression and permission: here the obeying drive is denied its distinctive activity but allowed some indirect or reflected form of it.80 It finds satisfaction in activity that bears some features of its preferred activity and which it is able to view as its own. 3.  Sublimation: the obeying drive finds satisfaction in a (resembling) substitute for its activity. Perhaps, in particular, the commanding drive’s activity is adjusted so as to be viewed as involving such a modified version of the obeying drive’s activity. In this case the obeyer will add its voice and strength to the behavior. A particularly important form of sublimation is the “internalization” of drives: they are allowed an “inner” expression.81 GM.ii.16: “All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn themselves inward.” They are played out not in bodily behaviors but in thought and felt attitudes. In all of these cases the obeying drive initially takes itself to obey a will foreign to itself. It feels itself subject to a foreign value, one to which it feels it sacrifices its own free pursuit of (growth in) its defining activity. So the drive is “alienated”

80 Cf. Gemes [2009a, 48]: “in sublimation the stronger drive co-​opts a weaker drive as an ally and this allows the weaker drive expression, albeit to an end that contains some degree of deflection from its original aim.” The paper helpfully treats Nietzsche’s relation to Freud here. 81 Nietzsche also speaks of this as the drive becoming more “intellectual”; cf. 81:11[124].

106  Body Values from this value it obeys. Over time, however, Nietzsche thinks the drive can forget the foreign source of this value; it can come to take it as “part of itself ”—​as when the parent’s dictated behavior becomes part of the child’s sense of itself. So, too, a drive can “internalize” a foreign value and continue to obey it even when the commander’s coercive pressure is gone, even when any reference to the commander has dropped out of view. The value becomes (to some degree) part of the drive itself. 3.  It’s by such relations of command and obedience, with their relative stability, that drives form syntheses and “higher” unities. Two drives that shape behavior from a settled relation of command and obedience do so as a unit: their action is organized toward a purpose that is shared—​though by the obeying drive reluctantly. It is shared in these drives’ “intentionality”—​by their inhabiting a common “space of meaning.” I don’t think this consequence of commanding and obeying has been sufficiently seen. Drives can only command and obey by understanding one another, which happens above all by their sharing values (i.e., their signs for ends). This understanding will be the more mutual to the extent that the commanding drive also sometimes obeys the other drive. Arrangements in which each drive steps aside for the other in some situations, and even abets it, will be common for drives of roughly equal strength. Such drives, commanding and obeying one another in turn, will operate each with a sense of the other’s values. And such pairs of drives can also “act together” to command further drives into service of their shared project. It is in this sense, I suggest, that Nietzsche speaks of “committees” of drives. Drives stand in much richer intentional relations to one another than we expect; our wariness over anthropomorphizing here holds us back. We may think of the whole set of a person’s drives as coalescing into a network by their many such relations of command and obedience.82 This network involves a shared grasp of signs—​all the drives’ signs for their ends (i.e., their values). This shared meaning is analogous to the single “space of consciousness” we attribute to the I or agent.83 (In Chapter 10 [§10.2b] we’ll see that this shared meaning includes a shared reflexivity—​a shared “sense of itself ” that makes the whole indeed a self.) Together, the drives add up to the 82 See again the long rhapsodic account of the body in 85:37[4]‌(LNp29–​31), from which here is another piece: “such a tremendous synthesis of living beings and intellects, which is called ‘human,’ can only live once that subtle system of connections and mediations, and thus a lightning fast communication [Verständigung] of all these higher and lower beings, is created.” See, too, 84:25[437]: “the actual morality of human in the life of his body is a hundred time greater and finer than all conceptual moralizing is. The many ‘you should’s ‘ that constantly work in us! The regard of commanders and obeyers for one another! The knowing of higher and lower functions!” 83 BGE.19 describes how, in “acts of will,” we experience ourselves both as commanding and as obeying, knowing the sensations of both (though we conceal this from ourselves through our concept “I”).

Drives: Psychology of Drives Not Agents  107 body, so it is to the body that we can attribute this shared intentionality.84 So Z.i.4: “The body is a great reason, a manifold with one sense.”85 Moreover we, as reflectors, have some access to this shared space inasmuch as this drive-​ intentionality can be “made conscious.” It can also be put into words, at least approximately. 4.  As we saw earlier, however, such unity of the drives is not inevitable and is particularly difficult for us due to the great number and variety of drives we contain. Nietzsche puts great stress on its achievement. He treats unity as the first step in “becoming who one is”—​in the work of “making a self ” out of one’s collection of drives and values. Why does Nietzsche think unity is better than disunity?86 His basic reason is his conviction that power increases by synthesis. When separate wills to power combine (in the right way) they form a higher order will to power that is more than the sum of those parts. They make the organism more consistent and effective. In 88:14[219] (WP.46, LNp266): “The multiplicity and disgregation of the drives [Antriebe], the lack of system among them results as ‘weak will’; their coordination under a single one results as ‘strong will’;—​in the first case it is oscillation and lack of weightiness [Schwergewicht]; in the latter precision and clarity of direction.” A synthetic will also has an epistemic advantage that is very important to Nietzsche. By holding these manifold drives together in a single intentional space, the synthetic will has all their perspectives and values available to it. It sees and assesses the world through all of them at once. It can feel, as it acts, that it does so out of the multiple values it holds together. Such a synthetic will has the potential to grasp the lesson of perspectivity, which I’ve claimed is Nietzsche’s ultimate aim. See 84:27[59] (WP.966): “The highest human would have the greatest multiplicity of drives, and in the relatively greatest strength that can still be borne. In fact: where the plant human has shown itself strong, one finds instincts driving strongly against one another (e.g., Shakespeare), but controlled.” But it makes a huge difference just how unity is achieved—​and what kind of unity it is.87 A unity imposed by the conscious subject or agent on the drives has an artificial character—​is not a true synthesis of them. The unity must come ultimately out of the drives themselves: they must communicate to one another by

84 Cf. Gerhardt [2006, 290–​4], who treats Nietzsche’s “self ” as mediating between the body and the I: it “transposes the body into a possible sense,” and though not itself conscious, “stands on the threshold of consciousness” by meaning something “accessible to conceptual understanding.” 85 So Nietzsche would disagree, I think, with Freud’s idea of the unconscious—​at least on Lear’s account of it: its “orientation does not have sufficient structure to count as a reason” [2005, 28]. 86 I’ll return to this question in §3.5, and then again, more fully, in Chapter 10, where we’ll see that this self-​unification is one of two requisites for becoming a full-​fledged “self.” 87 See the helpful account in Gemes [2009a, 46–​52].

108  Body Values forming the intricate relations of command and obedience we’ve seen. These relations can’t be replaced by a subject commanding out of its choices. EH.ii.9: “That one becomes what one is presupposes that one does not in the least suspect what one is.” To the extent that agency can play a useful role, it must be only as a tool and instrument of one or more drives. The unity must also be a genuine synthesis in that it does not suppress the drives that obey in it. Suppression would prevent these drives from adding their perspective and values to the whole, which would be less rich as a result. GS.47 says that suppressing [unterdrücken] the expression of the passions eventually results in suppressing the passions themselves, the crucial engines of our will. It’s better that subordinate drives be allowed partial expression so that their activity is woven, in a controlled way, into the organism’s behavior. But it’s even better, in Nietzsche’s view, if these lesser drives are sublimated and given a role not alongside the commanding drive’s activity, but within it, in sublimated form. Nietzsche thinks that, in the best case, this synthesis will not only come out of the drives, but also will express a single dominant drive. He often stresses the importance of such a single passion in the individual’s drive-​economy. 88:14[157] (WP.778): “the dominating passion, which indeed brings with it the most supreme form of health: here the coordination of the inner systems and their working in one service is best achieved—​but this is almost the definition of health!”88 Such a dominating drive need not be innate; it may well be synthesized.

3.4  New relation to the drives So Nietzsche offers not just a theory of drives—​his psychology—​but practical advice on how to manage them. He advocates above all a certain kind of “unification” of our drives. I want to develop this ideal and show its setting in his larger lesson for us. This takes a first look at arguments we’ll come back to in Chapter 10, when we see how one “becomes who one is” (i.e., becomes a full-​ fledged self). Here we focus on how this unification changes one’s relation to one’s drives. Nietzsche doesn’t do psychology for its own sake. He claims practical lessons from it: what we learn about the drives gives us reason to change our relation to them. Or—​since this relation is in fact one of compositional identity (a person is his or her drives)—​it gives these drives reason to change their relation to

88 EH.ii.9 says that one mustn’t become conscious of one’s task too soon, so that “the organizing ‘idea’ that is due to be master grows and grows in the depths,—​it begins to command.”

Drives: Psychology of Drives Not Agents  109 themselves. As we’ve been seeing all along, this is the key challenge Nietzsche poses us: to appropriate the perspectival insight “down” in our drives so that they themselves operate in this understanding of their own status. The drives themselves must “learn from experience”—​as we’ve seen they’re well able to do—​but now, for the first time, from experience of their own character and status. In 80:6[274]: “But all our drives must become more anxious and distrustful, to gradually acquire more reason and honesty, becoming more clear-​ sighted and increasingly losing the ground for distrust against one another; in this way a greater joyfulness can arise. . . .” This insight by the drives brings them better (more trustingly) together with one another:  it accomplishes the unity we’ve been seeing Nietzsche so stresses. Our drives, remember, are all the ingrained aimings that steer our behavior from moment to moment, so they include what we would also call “habits.” Drives steer by signs, their values, which they shape initially from their memories of “what worked.” They retain the sensory cues of previous success. And their ultimate criterion for such success is the feeling of power; that is, the feeling of improving or extending their distinctive activity—​of imposing it on more of the world. They steer at their projected memories of such growth in their own control. Each of us is a vast collection of such drives, of varying strengths, and fixed in us to varying degrees (as it were at different depths in us). These are what we are, and a clear-​headed egoism will find nothing of “our own” to favor other than these drives (and their ends), and in particular those that are strongest and most deeply rooted in us. Others can be adjusted to these, but not these to others. So what’s good for us is precisely what these strongest and deepest drives in us want. This is the upshot of the internalism we attributed to Nietzsche in Chapters 1 and 2. Realizing the authority of our own drives obviously puts us on a different footing with them. We set aside the narrative of opposition between our body and our soul or ego. There’s nothing that this soul or ego should want other than fulfillment of drives’ ends. So I, as conscious reflector, can stand in a relation of trust and deference to my strongest and most enduring inclinations. I accept their authority and judgment as to what they want. In 80:7[178]: “Let us trust the drives, they will create ideals again! as love constantly does.” But now why does this not leave everything just as it is? Since my drives are already running me according to Nietzsche, why would it change things for us now to recognize that they do? It’s not clear what practical implications—​what lesson—​that recognition could have. These drives are already pressing their interests, and Nietzsche’s point seems simply to be that it’s right that they do so. This may change how I consciously think or feel about the drives, but why would it change what they—​the real effective parts of me—​do?

110  Body Values The problem is that a special drive has been lodged in us that opposes all our other drives on behalf of certain “outside interests.” This is our agency, as steered by moral values. For these values have been mainly designed to “tame” all our (other) drives for societal life. Nietzsche aims to shift the allegiance of that special drive, our agency. He tries to persuade or induce it to take the side of the other drives and not of that taming interest. Our agency needs to be weaned from its hostility to the drives and trained to care for them. D.119 hints at this expectation: “the laws of [drives’] feeding remain quite unknown to us. Their feeding is thus a work of chance: our daily experiences throw prey now to this drive, now to that one, which they seize greedily, but the entire coming and going of these events does not stand in any rational relation to the nutritional requirements of the drives as a whole, with the result that some of them are starved and waste away, while others are overfed.” Agency must learn to tend to the drives. But what strategies does Nietzsche have in mind? A first important lesson is to strengthen and energize these drives within us. It is above all the experience of Rausch—​intoxication or “rush”—​that is effective here. This is the sexual and aesthetic condition we touched on in Chapter 2 (§2.3) and will meet again in Chapter 9’s treatment of “the Yes,” and in Chapter 12’s account of Nietzsche “new religion.” To be sure Nietzsche thinks that not everyone is capable of this experience. But for those who are, art can be an important stimulant of these crucial psychic parts. In 87:9[102] (WP.802, LNp160): “Art reminds us of states of animal vigor; it is . . . a rousing of the animal function through pictures and wishes of intensified life;—​a heightening of the feeling of life, a stimulus to it.” But let’s focus here on a second kind of thing we can do for our drives: bring order to them. Nietzsche preaches a particular kind of unification of the drives. This synthesis happens by drives’ coalescing into more-​or-​less stable relations of command and obedience so that they “understand” one another—​recognize one another’s signs for their ends. They then stand in a common “space of meaning” in which their respective values address one another. By this mutual understanding drives constitute a “higher level” unit that wills power in its own right: it wills growth in the common project. A particular kind of commanding and obeying accomplishes this unification best. It’s important that the obeying drive’s own distinctive activity not be suppressed; it must add to and enrich the overall activity. Yet it must, on the other hand, be subordinated to the commanding drive’s aim. Both are possible through the “sublimation” of the obeying drive’s activity: some “similar” activity is found that both contributes to the commanding drive’s aim and is enough like the obeyer’s original activity to engage its best effort and allegiance. So the obeying drive complicates and enriches the dominant activity.

Drives: Psychology of Drives Not Agents  111 Nietzsche envisions one’s whole system of drives as bound together in this way. The result is to preserve the “otherness” of subordinate drives while yet commanding them into an overall project set by some dominant drive. Lesser drives are sublimated, not excised. Nietzsche often insists on this. HH.i.276 speaks of the “task to force opposing powers into harmony by means of an overpowering aggregation of the remaining, less incompatible powers, yet without suppressing or shackling them.”89 So the commanding drive “sees the value” of those that obey—​sees how they can add, in sublimated form, something of their own to its project. In this way the forces of the body are neither stifled nor wasted in spasmodic unleashings. They are channeled into an overall activity enriched by their distinct contributions. For this to happen, we must learn a different way of commanding drives than is usual for us. We must escape the yoke of morality and cease trying (as reflective agents) to impose external and purportedly real values on ourselves.90 We must learn, above all, to recognize the positivity of (so-​called) wicked drives as well.91 So 88:15[113] (WP.351) attacks the “hemiplegia” (paralysis on one side) of virtue, in insisting that one be only good and not also evil: it demands “that human should castrate himself of those instincts with which he can be an enemy, can cause harm”; “it desires that the good should renounce and strive against the evil down to its ultimate roots—​it therewith actually denies life, which has in all its instincts both Yes and No.” Nietzsche’s point is not to “unleash” our evil instincts—​all those impulses which, in their original and full-​blooded forms involve hurting others. These need to be redirected toward indirect or imaginative expressions in which they can add to a positive project. Such sublimation is, to be sure, a very difficult task requiring unusual strength. Morality denies the drives precisely because most of us lack this strength. See 87:10[206] (WP.385): “Morality’s intolerance is an expression of the weakness of a human: he fears his ‘immorality,’ he must deny his strongest drives because he still does not know how to use them.” It’s in this way, of course, that Nietzsche handles his own sex-​drive: denying it concrete expression, but infusing its sexual energy into his writing. He sublimates it, we can see, in the swaggering male persona he often adopts, in his slighting 89 87:9[139] (WP.933): “mastery over the passions, not their weakening or extirpation! /​the greater the master-​force of the will is, the more freedom may be given to the passions /​the ‘great human’ is great through the free play [Freiheits-​Spielraum] of his desires and through the still greater power, which knows how to take these magnificent monsters into service.” Cf. 85–​6:1[5]‌. Also 85–​6:1[122] (WP.384; LNp63), regarding the affects. 90 80:6[70]: “our own drives appear to us under the interpretation of the other: while they are at basis all agreeable, through these learned judgments about their value they are so mixed up with disagreeable associated feelings that many are now experienced as bad drives.” 91 85–​6:1[4]‌: “Goal: the hallowing of the most powerful most terrible and best discredited forces, said in the old image: the divinization of the devil.” See too GS.4.

112  Body Values remarks about women, and in the way he insistently imagines his relations to life and truth as erotic (as we saw in Chapter 2). He did not, it seems, try to live out this persona in his in-​person interactions with the women he knew. So the drive finds expression only in his writerly voice—​that is, in the intellectual adventures and deeds of the psychologist and philosopher he dominantly is. This unification not only constitutes a “higher” unit that is more (stronger) than the sum of its parts; it also has epistemic benefits. Indeed an important aspect of its “greater strength” is this better understanding inasmuch as the latter is itself a way of taking control. We’ve seen how two drives united by these particular forms of command and obedience thereby “understand” one another. Each recognizes the other’s signs for its ends—​its values—​and indeed responds to them. So the commanding drive values what the obeying drive adds from itself, and the obeying drive sees the dominant project as including something of its own. When all one’s drives are pulled together in this way the body possesses a single intentional space in which its manifold values are available together (i.e., where they communicate). So the body holds together, at the level of its drives, its diversity of aims and values in a kind of agreement comprising all of those relations of command and obedience. This intentional space, as in the drives, lies “beneath” our consciousness, in an immediate and unreflective orientation and responsiveness. It lies in the body’s ingrained habits: these judge and steer, in the constancy with which we’ve seen drives work, on the basis of those manifold drive-​aims. Such a body, whose unreflective responsiveness holds so many considerations in view, possesses a synthetic understanding that clearly surpasses that of a body whose drives lack this synthesis. And this body will know all the more, to the extent that its synthesis includes more and more disparate drives. And here we must recognize that Nietzsche’s ideal of unity is paired with a second ideal of multiplicity. But the latter is subordinate: one is worse off with more drives if these can’t be unified. It’s better to be a simple but cohesive thing than a complex but chaotic one (these are the types of master and decadent). But, on the other hand, to the extent that one is able to unite a greater multiplicity, one is not only stronger but wiser. So Nietzsche’s fuller ideal is not just to be a single thing, but also to be a comprehensive thing—​and to be so in one’s drives held together as a bodily intelligence. So BGE.212 says that today a philosopher “would be compelled to set the greatness of a human, indeed the concept ‘greatness’ in his inclusiveness and multiplicity, in his wholeness in many.” His favorite example of this achievement is Goethe.92 (In Chapter 10, we’ll see how his “ideal self ” is even more than this.) 92 TI.ix.49: “What he willed, was totality [Totalität]; he fought the separation of reason, sensibility, feeling, will . . ., he disciplined himself to wholeness [Ganzheit], he created himself.”

Drives: Psychology of Drives Not Agents  113 Indeed Nietzsche even imagines a kind of “completeness” here: one can aspire to encompass, in one’s own drives, the full range of human viewpoints and even the full range of living (organic) viewpoints. This is feasible (on Nietzsche’s optimistic view) because so much of the past of our culture, our species, and even of our biological line has been deposited in us in our body’s structures and drives. Viewpoints proper to very simple organisms are borne by us, too, as well as those of the many human types that have successively left something of themselves in our values.93 To the extent that we can bring this multiplicity into that unified intentionality, we will be able to view matters from this comprehensive range of perspectives. Nietzsche offers this as his new standard for adequacy, in place of the usual standard of “objectivity” understood as a perspectiveless “view from nowhere.” In 81:11[65]: “Task: to see things, as they are! Means: to be able to see them from a hundred eyes, from many persons!”94 We can now see how this mutual recognition in the drives gives them an understanding of their own perspectivity—​that very insight which, I am arguing, Nietzsche thinks it’s our historical challenge to incorporate. Earlier, such an insight seemed too sophisticated to attribute to mere drives. But I’ve tried to make plausible that they have a communicative intelligence and that their synthesis holds their multiple viewpoints together, all available to one another in a shared understanding. A person whose drives command and obey one another in the right way will encounter a situation in the light of their manifold aims and values. He or she will recognize, in that implicit and bodily way, the bearing of these many viewpoints in constituting “the value” in this situation. Now I’ve been speaking of this understanding as happening in the drives themselves. I think Nietzsche holds that it needs to be grounded here. But he also thinks that this understanding can be taken up into consciousness and be the basis for insights in psychology. He thinks he does this himself: it’s by his manifold bodily drives, and the way these are available all together in his unified stance, that he is able to analyze so acutely the many psychological types he treats. It’s not just that he bears each of these viewpoints in himself and can enter it (as it were in isolation from the others). It’s even more that he bears, in that unified stance, also the criticisms and diagnoses of this drive that are made by the others that command it. So, for example, it’s not just that he “knows what it’s like” to feel

93 85:36[35] (WP.659, LNp27): “The human body, in which the whole most distant and most recent past of all organic becoming regains life and corporeality.” This persistence of the past in our drives is a main theme in HH.i, as I discuss in Chapter 4. 94 GS.337: “to have this all finally in one soul and to compress it into one feeling:—​this would have to produce a happiness that humans so far have not known.” See how 81:11[119] also stresses the epistemic benefit of multiplicity, but because it makes it more likely that one hypothesis will “hit.”

114  Body Values ressentiment, but that he holds this insight together with that of another drive that judges it to be small-​minded (let’s say). He understands each drive from both the third-​and first-​personal standpoints we distinguished in §3.1. Psychology works, then, by bringing to consciousness and putting into words a network of perspectives held by the psychologist’s drives upon one another. It’s Nietzsche’s own ability to pass so fluidly among diverse perspectives on a topic that so distinguishes his writing. This is rooted in an uncommon connectedness among these perspectives “down” in his drives (i.e., in his immediate and intuitive stance). It’s this “shared space” of his bodily intentionality, the unity already there in his drives, that Nietzsche, as psychologist, makes conscious—​and not a scatter of isolated feelings or viewpoints. These, then, are Nietzsche’s lessons about the drives. Or rather these are first statements of these lessons. Since the drives are so crucial to Nietzsche’s psychology, we will be referring to them almost constantly. Many of our later topics will be addressed by showing how they are clarified by Nietzsche’s drive-​ psychology. And these later treatments will also clarify the drives themselves and the special relation to them that Nietzsche advocates.

4

Affects Memory and Suffering

We’ve been looking at Nietzsche’s account of the original and underlying way we humans value—​the kind of valuing we share with all animals, indeed all living things. We’ve studied his ideas of life and the drives and seen how both of them value. But our account of these “bodily” values has left out something vital—​a whole dimension, even a “reverse side” to this valuing. Our body values not just in our drives, but in our affects—​in how we feel about things. This affectivity plays a major role in Nietzsche’s view of our bodily nature, and this role reverberates throughout his thinking. We’ll see how affects make dramatic appearances at several decisive points. We paid attention to the affects in Chapter 3 (§3.2), but without noticing this fuller significance. We saw that Nietzsche treats affects as capacities closely paired with drives, even as parts of drives. Our drives press ahead at ends by means of signs—​their values—​and affects are the ways we “feel” how well we’re doing at these projects. They are a kind of assessment of one’s state or condition in relation to drive-​ends, an assessment made (and held) not in a claim or belief, but in feeling. The basic such assessments are our feelings of pleasure and pain: the body’s positive and negative appraisals of its condition. Our subjection to affect is the way we “undergo” experience. Feelings and passions impress themselves on us, by contrast with our active contriving and devising in our drives. As such they amount to a broad second way we “mean” things in our experience: we mean them not just in what we’re trying to make of them, but in how we are made to feel about them—​how we’re “impacted” by them. Affects are thus also a second way we value: we do so not only in aiming our practical efforts, but also in the feelings and emotions that charge our experience of things. I suggest that Nietzsche uses “affect” to allude to this passive and felt dimension of our experience. This affectivity plays a large role in Nietzsche’s psychology, as we’ll see in §4.1. Although he puts more evident emphasis on will and drives (i.e., on the forward-​directed, striving, contriving, and aggressive side to living

Nietzsche’s Values. John Richardson, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190098230.001.0001

116  Body Values things), Nietzsche is also unusual in the attention he pays to feeling. Other philosophers have underplayed its explanatory role, he thinks. And we ourselves fail to notice a way that we all deeply prioritize this side to ourselves over the active stance in our drives. Affectivity is important but needs to be put in its place. But affectivity is not just important in Nietzsche’s psychology. It also opens up into wider and more “metaphysical” themes in his thought, which I’ll also explore in this chapter. These themes occur in what we might think of as the “affective sector” of his thinking. I’ll try to show that our subjection to feeling poses two deep problems for him. One concerns our relation to the past, and the other the prevalence of suffering. Both problems arise especially for humans, we’ll see, due to special forms this affectivity takes in us. In looking at these we’ll be starting into the topic of Part II, the special character of our human valuing. We find the way to these broader themes by pursuing the “temporal” difference between drives and affects. They are our bodies’ two basic ways of “being in time,” our two deep temporal stances. Our drives “press ahead” toward ends, and their values are signs used in this pursuit. Our affects by contrast “turn back” in feeling how well (or poorly) we’ve done. Our affectivity is thus a “retral” or backward stance built into our bodies—​indeed into all living bodies—​alongside our forward-​projecting drives. So feeling relates us to the past. This is true for all organisms, but it is most emphatically true for humans, in whom this retral turn has hugely and unhealthily grown. Nietzsche has great qualms and concerns about our relation to the past. Our human temporality, the way we “live time,” has a crucial flaw here. Nietzsche’s persistent concern suggests personal roots to the issue. He has even a kind of obsession with this topic, which is expressed in his treatments of such phenomena as memory, history, ressentiment, guilt, and fate. In §4.2, I’ll examine this “problem of the past.” It encompasses a surprising blend of metaphysical and existential ideas, which will come into play repeatedly in the rest of the book. Our affectivity—​our subjection to feeling—​poses another basic problem for life. For there is one kind of feeling that, in its conspicuousness, dreadfulness, and inevitability, suggests that life may be “not worth living.” This is suffering, which I’ll treat in §4.3. This problem also had personal resonance for Nietzsche, given his physical and mental miseries. As a theoretical topic he takes over the problem of suffering from Schopenhauer, who draws from it his pessimistic conclusion: life is bad. Nietzsche wants to accept Schopenhauer’s premise about the prevalence of suffering in life, but to deny that conclusion. We take a first look here at Nietzsche’s analysis of suffering and at his idea of its “tragic” but life-​ affirming significance.

Affects: Memory and Suffering  117

4.1  Affects Nietzsche’s term “affect” [Affekt]1 is one of his more mysterious. He uses it extensively, but largely takes it for granted and makes little effort to specify what he means by it. He gives, in different contexts, examples of affects that seem too diverse to be fit together.2 Yet he also uses the term with a prominence and weight that suggest he means something particular by it. I’ll try to say what this might be. Although Nietzsche’s principal explanatory term is surely “drive,” affects play the main supporting role in his psychology. Often he pairs the terms; for example, in 83:7[76]: “Animals follow their drives and affects: we are animals. Do we do anything other?”3 Sometimes he uses “affect” in the very place we might have expected him to use “drive”; for example when, in 85:40[37], he calls intellect a tool of the affects.4 He might even seem to treat the terms as interchangeable.5 So just how are drive and affect related? I think that Nietzsche seems sometimes to interchange Trieb and Affekt because they’re both ways of referring to what is broadly one thing: the body’s underlying intentionality, its ability to “mean.” But (usually) the terms pick out this intentionality under different aspects or in different parts. These aspects are strongly implied by the terms themselves. A drive is an arc ahead at goals; it is active and futural. An affect is a feeling one undergoes; it is (in this respect) passive and received. Nietzsche’s idea is that our bodily intentionality has—​and must have—​both dimensions; its meanings and values are constituted by them both together. But these are only the rudiments of the relationship between affects and drives. Let’s start by saying more fully what affects are before turning to Nietzsche’s idea how they interact with drives and the practical lessons he draws for our stance toward our affects. 1 He sometimes writes Affect instead. On Nietzsche’s idea of affects see Janaway [2009], Anderson [2012], Silk [2015], Katsafanas [2016]. 2 Janaway assembles [2007, 205–​6], just out of BGE and GM, a very long list of things Nietzsche calls affects—​including, besides obvious cases like anger and love, “calmness,” “the desire to justify oneself in the eyes of others,” and “demand for respect.” Notice how the last two seem to be kinds of “will” rather than feeling—​contra the distinction I go on to draw later. I acknowledge that his use is not consistent, but think I get at its “center of gravity.” 3 BGE.12 postulates “soul as social structure of drives and affects.” Cf. 87:9[173] (WP.315). 85–​ 6:1[54] speaks of “die treibenden Affekte.” 4 Also 84:25[185], 86:1[28], and 86:1[75]. Compare these with GS.111, which says that the course of our “logical thoughts and inferences . . . corresponds to a process and struggle of drives”; also 85:40[61] (LNp46). Similarly, when BGE.258 speaks of “the foundation of affects, which is called ‘life,’ ” he might as readily have said this of drives (I suggest). Likewise parallel to his drive-​talk (e.g., in D.109) is 83:7[120]: “an affect always affirms itself at the expense of other affects, whose force it takes away.” 5 See, e.g., how 81:11[73] passes back and forth between Trieb and Affekt in making its points. Janaway [2009, 55]: “We may wonder whether drives and affects are even properly distinguishable kinds.”

118  Body Values

4.1.1 Analyzing affects Affects are, above all, felt. This is the primary point for Nietzsche as it is (I think) for us, in our usual notion of them.6 In the most primitive case, perhaps, the organism feels an impact upon it, experiences the impact as received. And this is the tightly linked second point: affects are undergone and submitted to—​they are ways one is passively “affected.” Feeling-​an-​effect is thus an affect’s distinctive way of meaning, whereas a drive’s way of meaning is willing-​to-​cause. Whereas the body’s drives try to impact the world, its affects register the world’s impacts upon it by feeling them. We should notice an important multivocity in “affect”: it can refer (a) to an “event” of feeling a certain way, or (b) to this (general) way of feeling, or (c) to a standing ability or disposition to feel this way. Nietzsche needs the term to cover all three of these senses; it will be clear enough from later context which sense is in use. But his main interest, I suggest, is in (c), and it’s here that his main innovation lies. Nietzsche sees affects (and drives) as habits and practices that have a certain stable presence in persons and societies. When he speaks of ressentiment, for example, his focus is on a certain settled disposition of feeling that belongs to the “psychic repertoire” of some person or some society. He asks why particular such affective habits get established in individuals and why they spread through societies. So principally: an affect is the habit of feeling (impacted) in some way in some situation or condition. Because affects are essentially felt, we might say that an affect is just any “feeling” [Gefühl].7 But Nietzsche thinks especially of feelings that carry a heightened sense that they’re imposed—​that they’re effects upon one by some external cause.8 This sense of subjection in our affects is consistent with their being very aggressively outward, as love and hatred are. One feels these emotions as caused in one by the thing: one is not just subjected by these emotions, but in them, precisely as felt. Nietzsche himself experienced feeling as imposed upon him in this way.9 6 Anderson [2012, 218] says that this “common technical term in moral psychology . . . refers to a class of attitudes that combine a passive, receptive responsiveness to the world with a reactive motivational output . . . standardly with a prominent feeling component.” 7 Janaway [2007, 206; cf. 2009 52]: “all [affects] seem to be feelings of one sort or another”; he shows how this feature of affects is missed by some other interpreters’ focus on “interests.” 8 88:14[124] (WP.135): “The psychological logic is this: the feeling of power, when it suddenly and overwhelmingly overcomes human,—​and this is the case in all great affects—​arouses a doubt in him about his person: he dares not think of himself as the cause of the astonishing feeling.” We’ll look at the religious implications of this in Chapter 12. 9 A letter to Overbeck on December 24, 1883: “What can the most reasonable way of life accomplish when at any moment the vehemence of feeling can strike through like lightning and overturn the order of all bodily functions[?]‌”

Affects: Memory and Suffering  119 So Nietzsche often thinks of affect as “passion” [Leidenschaft]—​as intense, irresistible feeling. Nevertheless I  think he does attribute this “affectedness” to all feeling—​indeed offers it as feeling’s crucial character. It is the dimension in which feeling most differs from our propulsive drives. Even our weak and passing feelings recognize their own passive character—​how they are done-​to rather than doing. “Affect” therefore covers a whole third of our experience, as Nietzsche commonly splits it up among “thinking, willing, feeling.”10 As a way of “meaning something,” an affect also interprets. It is not a mere “raw sensation,” if there are such things; feeling is itself interpretive. Affects are originally, Nietzsche thinks, the body’s interpretations of its own underlying physiological states—​how these are impacted.11 So, for example, a “rushing of blood to the brain” is interpreted as “anger” [83–​4:24[20] (WP.670)].12 The physiological disturbance (the rushing blood) is interpreted as blameable on the impingement of the person the anger is thus felt “against.” Similarly love is the interpretation of some “heightening” of the physiological system as due to the beloved. As these examples suggest, affects not only interpret, they also evaluate: the feeling itself involves an assessment.13 Most simply: feeling feels itself affected either for better or for worse. I think Nietzsche takes every affect to involve an evaluation, its “for” or “against.”14 This is a different kind of evaluation than we’ve seen is carried out by the drives. Whereas a drive’s values are the signs (of means and goals) that it steers by, an affect’s values are the help or hurt, the growth or decline it feels. Like the drive’s values, these feelings are expressed in behavior.15 Perhaps the simplest forms of affect are the feelings of pleasure and pain. In 87–​8:11[71] (WP.669, LNp211):  “Feelings of pleasure and displeasure are reactions of will (affects) [Willens-​Reaktionen (Affekte)] in which the intellectual center fixes the value of certain encroaching changes for the total-​value, at the same time introducing counteractions.” Nietzsche stresses how these feelings involve interpretation and assessment; earlier in the note: “All feelings of pleasure 10 E.g., 84:27[19], 84:27[29], 85:40[24], 85:40[38] (LNp45). I’ll return to this partition in Chapter 12 (§12.2), where I’ll use it to organize Nietzsche’s diagnoses of religion. 11 Sometimes Nietzsche treats this underlying state as the reality of the affect, as in 83:7[87]: “Courage, shame, anger have in themselves nothing to do with conceiving /​[they are] physiological facts, whose name and mental [seelischer] concept is only a symbol.” And notice 80:4[218]: “in the affects the intestines are active.” 12 Also 83:9[44], 84:25[391]. Nietzsche makes the point as early as 81:11[128]. 13 85:35[6]‌reads:  “ ‘Soul’:  toward description of a system of valuations and value-​affects [Werthaffekten].” 14 Katsafanas [2015, 169] points out that Nietzsche tightly links values not just with drives but with affects. But I disagree with his further claim [172–​3] that a “value” arises not by individual (and possibly fleeting) affects, but only by broader “affective orientations.” I also dispense with his further condition [175] that the person “does not disapprove of this affective orientation”; I think Nietzsche holds that our drives and affects do indeed value many things of which “I” consciously disapprove. 15 See Anderson’s suggestion [2012,  221] that although an affect has a “default behavioral response,” this is relatively unfocused and requires the collaboration of drives to direct it.

120  Body Values and displeasure already presuppose a measuring by total-​ usefulness, total-​ harmfulness: thus a sphere where willing a goal (state) and a choice of the means are involved. Pleasure and displeasure are never ‘original facts.’ ”16 What these feelings ultimately assess is the growth or decline of power. 88:14[80] (WP.693, LNp247): “If the innermost essence of being is will to power, if pleasure is all growth of power, displeasure all feeling unable to resist and become master: mightn’t we then posit pleasure and displeasure as cardinal facts? Is will possible without these two oscillations of yes and no?” Pleasure is simply the feeling of power.17 And will to power depends on these feelings. 88:14[82] (WP.689, LNp248): “Can we assume a striving for power without an experience of pleasure and displeasure, i.e., without a feeling of the increasing and diminishing of power?” Nietzsche’s idea of affects is thus rather close to Spinoza’s.18 In the founding case, there is a physiological change in the organism which strengthens and/​or weakens its system. An affect is the body’s interpretation of that change in itself: it feels that strengthening or weakening, and it also explains it in some way, as caused by something. So the physical pain is interpreted into an attitude toward something outside, something that caused this pain, something the pain is felt “toward.” Pain is thus felt as inflicted. And the evaluation of the state itself—​of the pain—​is extended to what caused it, the root form of blame. Not only do our affects interpret and evaluate, they do so with the kind of “intelligence” that we saw drives to have. Although affects are undergone, they are “active” in another respect: they can “learn from experience” in the same way as drives. My experiences of success and failure adjust not just how my drives devise and plan, but also my habit of feeling; I remember my past successes in how I’m now ready to feel. See 84:25[514]: “The affects are symptoms of the formation of memory-​materials—​continual survival and combining.” This learning can involve not just attaching different affects to particular things, but even changing the character of affects I’m subject to: I can learn, in body (practice) and not just in mind (theory), to feel (e.g., anger) more moderately (or at least less overtly). We’ve seen that affects are interpretive responses to physiological changes. These affective interpretations are expressed in turn in our conscious-​linguistic value-​judgments. Nietzsche puts both points in 83:7[60]:  “Moralities as sign-​ languages of the affects: but the affects themselves a sign-​language of the functions

16 Also 85–​6:1[97] (LNp62), 85–​6:2[77] (LNp73), 86–​7:7[18] (LNp134), 86–​7:7[48] (WP.700, LNp137). 17 88:14[129] (WP.434): “Pleasure is the feeling of power: if one excludes the affects, one excludes the states that give most highly the feeling of power, hence pleasure.” Also 86–​7:7[18] (LNp134). 18 Ethics, Part 3, Def. 3: “By affect I understand affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections.”

Affects: Memory and Suffering  121 of everything organic.”19 Some change in the body’s normal functioning is interpreted in a feeling, and this feeling then “puts itself into words.” The affect aims to have a role in the person’s conscious agency, so it expresses itself in some worded value. Morality is a highly developed form of this self-​expression by affects.20 So, for example, was “the feeling of ‘sin,’ of ‘sinfulness,’ foisted upon a physiological discomfort—​one always finds a reason for being unhappy with oneself ” [TI.vi.6]. Affects supply a different element of meaning in those value-​judgments than the one we’ve attributed to the drives. They value not in the active directedness of the drive, but in a passive, undergone feeling. They interpret the world from one’s affectedness, and hence in a reactive manner that responds to the world as provoking or disrupting it. It’s for this reason, I’ll eventually suggest, that they contribute a whole side to morality: its stress on guilt and responsibility, which are rooted in the “blame” that is built into affectivity. This affective valuing is expressed in morality’s insistence that we owe something from the past—​stand under a burden from the past. And it’s this affect-​valuing—​especially by the affect of ressentiment—​that underlies our moral intent to find others guilty for what they’ve done to us. But this lies some ways ahead.21

4.1.2  Affects and drives Now if affects evaluate, what “standard” do they use? Where do they get their values? Why do we feel as we do? I think the beginning of Nietzsche’s story is that affects get their values from drives. This is a crucial link between drive-​and affect-​values. An affect arises as a judgment on how one is doing in a drive.22 But Nietzsche thinks these affective values can then develop on their own, independently of the drive they were drawn from. He has a complicated story here that will take unpacking. Nietzsche thinks, to begin with, that a certain affectivity is already a necessary part of a drive or will.23 Just now we saw that 87–​8:11[71] (WP.669, LNp211) calls the feelings of pleasure and pain “reactions of will (affects),” which suggests 19 Then used in BGE.187: “moralities too are only a sign-​language of the affects.” 20 85–​6:2[190] (WP.254):  “moral evaluation is an interpretation.  .  .  . The interpretation is itself a symptom of determinate physiological states, as well as a determinate spiritual level of ruling judgments. Who interprets?—​Our affects.” Also 84:25[113]. 21 I discuss the role of affects in morality in Chapter 7 (§7.2) and their role in religion in Chapter 12 (§12.2). 22 So Janaway [2009, 55]: “An affect would then be a positive or negative feeling that occurs in response to the success or failure of a particular drive in its striving, or . . . of more than one drive.” By contrast Anderson [2012, 221] seems to treat drives and affects as arising independently of one another, but then (as he puts it) “recruiting” one another. I try to find a middle ground. 23 85:34[251]: “In willing is an affect.”

122  Body Values that will carries out affects. When a drive wills growth in its distinctive activity it seems it must feel dissatisfied with its current condition.24 Such discontent with the status quo seems a necessary ingredient in will to power’s effort at more. Here the disposition to feel a certain way seems just an element in a larger disposition, the drive itself. So an affect is originally a way that a drive regularly feels. It is the drive’s way of assessing its own states, prospects, and path. The drive “feels how it’s doing” with its aim—​how likely its prospects are. In a simple kind of case, the affect attaches to some perceptible marker—​a look, sound, smell, etc.—​that the drive uses to steer by. Imagine for example that the eat-​drive interprets the smell of cooked food as a sign to its goal (eating well). The drive then—​this is its affective side—​ feels pleasure in this smell, and this feeling helps render the sign more salient and effective. It helps the eat-​drive’s case in the body’s intentional space. When an affect thus serves a drive, the drive’s own development can refine the affect (adjusting the smells to which it feelingly responds) or even eliminate it altogether (if the drive ceases to favor cooked food). But when Nietzsche speaks of “affects” I think he usually means factors on a par with drives, not their mere parts. This is because, I suggest, those original affective elements of drives are able to detach and become dispositions in their own right. The tendency to feel a certain way gets reproduced in its own right, as a habit in the individual and as a practice in the society. The affect is acquired and developed separately from its parent drive; it acquires “a life of its own.” It becomes a separate member of the psychic community. So, for example, one can continue to respond feelingly to smells of foods one no longer wants to eat. Since this affect originated in a drive and was designed to serve that drive, it will at first still feel to be good or bad the things that help or hurt the aims of the drive. But when a habit of feeling is set up in this way, it becomes available to be taken over by some different drive and adapted to fit its different aim. Perhaps the smell of a certain cooked food reminds us of a treasured past; now the smell pleases not (so much) as a sign for good food, but as an aid in a nostalgic revery. In this way an affect can acquire multiple functions by coming to serve various drives. So its affect-​values—​its feelings of pleasure and pain—​are aligned with those various drive-​values. If there is an overall congruity between drives and affects, one will feel about things according to one’s degree of success in drive-​pursuits. When aligned with the drives in this way, affects judge by the drives’ ultimate aim, which we’ve seen is power. 83–​4:24[20] (WP.670): “Judgments are already 24 87–​8:11[77] (WP.694, LNp214): “as every force can only release itself on what resists, every action necessarily contains an ingredient of displeasure. But the effect of that displeasure is to stimulate life—​and to strengthen the will to power.”

Affects: Memory and Suffering  123 stuck into ‘pleasure’ and ‘displeasure’: stimuli are differentiated by whether or not they further the feeling of power.” Indeed affects develop out of will to power; so 88:14[121] (WP.688): “That the will to power is the primitive form of affect, that all other affects are only its developments.”25 So affects originally feel, above all, either gains or losses in strength—​which, as the capacity to do, is the strength of drives. It’s because affects originally and deeply judge by the standard of power that Nietzsche puts such weight on feeling the enhancement of power. The strongest affects feel “how one is doing” with respect to power, not utilitarian goals.26 We’ll see that Nietzsche has a number of ways of describing this feeling of power. He speaks for example of “the affect of command,” which is the feeling of exercising power. BGE.19: “the will is not only a complex of feeling and thinking, but above all an affect: namely the affect of command [Affekt des Commando’s].”27 We’ll see that Rausch is another affect of this kind. We’ll return to these strong positive affects in §4.4 (and then much later when we look at religion in Chapter 12). At the other extreme Nietzsche is also very interested in strong feelings of deficiency in power—​feeling oneself too weak to grow, feeling doomed to a losing effort even to maintain the status quo. Such feelings of incapacity, frustration, and decline add up to the affect of despair, the feeling that life—​such a life as one can have—​is “not worth living.” Nietzsche spends much time mapping these negative affects in many different forms and contexts. The Genealogy’s three essays attribute such affects to (respectively) the slave-​type, the human animal being tamed for society, and holders of the priest’s ascetic ideal. We’ll return to these negative affects in §4.3. We’re still speaking of affects that judge by the standards of a will or drive. But, as we’ve seen, Nietzsche thinks that affects, as dispositions in their own right, can persist and even develop apart from their spawning drives. The habit of feeling a certain way can last long after the conditions it originally responded to (of drive success or failure) have passed. Indeed ways of feeling are transmitted as social practices far beyond their original conditions. So, D.30: “For when the habit of some distinctive action is inherited, the thought behind it is not inherited with it (only feelings are inherited, not thoughts).”28

25 87:10[57] (WP.786): “the derivation of all affects from the one will to power: equal in essence.” Also 86–​7:6[26]. 26 87–​8:11[89]: “All his affects and passions will to have their right—​and how far from prudent utility of self-​interest [Eigennutzes] is the affect!” 27 87–​8:11[114] (WP.668, LNp222): “ ‘willing’ is not ‘desiring,’ striving, demanding: it stands out from these through the affect of command.” GS.347: “the will, as affect of command [Befehls], is the decisive mark of self-​mastery and force.” Cf. 84:25[436], 84:27[2]‌, 84:27[24], 85:38[8] (LNp36). 28 And D.35: “But feelings are nothing ultimate, original, behind the feeling stand judgments and valuations which are inherited by us in the form of feelings (inclinations, aversions).”

124  Body Values Nietzsche thinks that such a habit or practice of feeling can even begin to “will power” itself. The affective habit can become an end in itself, an end for itself. Where the feeling is strong enough, it can extend its scope beyond the situation or condition in which it was first felt. And Nietzsche thinks it’s possible for such an affect to rule in some psyches. Some strong (habit of) enjoyment, or even suffering, can become “the most important thing in one’s life” and change the tone of everything else. So here we have “feeling for the sake of feeling.” And we could call a life lived for the sake of feeling an “aesthetic” life. Due to this persistence of affects as habits and practices, they can get out of sync with drives. Our feelings can judge the world by standards different from the aims and efforts of our drives.29 This is an important kind of sickness, Nietzsche thinks. TI.ix.45 describes how “the criminal type” is often conflicted in this way, as strong drives are rejected and penalized and so come to be linked with negative affects: “His virtues are excommunicated by society; the liveliest drives he has are quickly entangled with depressive affects, with suspicion, fear, dishonor. But this is almost the recipe for physiological degeneration.” In such a case the feelings and emotions cease to be responsive to the aims of one’s drives—​to what one wants. The result is a psychic space in which drives and affects interact and compete as independent forces, each with its own interests and values, each trying to “command” others to its use. We’ve already looked (in Chapter 3 [§3.4]) at the “conflict and synthesis of drives,” and I think our analysis there can be extended pretty readily to include affects as comparable factors.30 Each of my dispositions to strive and my dispositions to feel competes to continue and extend itself.

4.1.3  Lessons for the affects As we did in Chapter 3 (§3.5) regarding the drives, we should ask what lessons Nietzsche offers us on the basis of these (claimed) insights about our affects. We can borrow and build on some main points from that earlier discussion. Many lessons are the same for affects as for drives. The main question will be whether Nietzsche treats affects as properly subordinate to drives. Nietzsche’s broad formal aim is to unify the psyche while yet preserving—​ and even increasing—​the diversity of its parts. These two sides to the aim pull against one another. It would be easier to impose unity by reducing diversity—​by 29 Anderson [2012, 221] points out that “drives and affects do not always work together.” 30 Anderson [2012, 223] tells a persuasive story how drives and affects interact, as a “mutually supporting structure of attitudes . . . with drives supplying a target object for affect-​motivated action and affects supplying activation cues and also value-​laden, nuanced specification to a drive’s object perception and manner of expression.”

Affects: Memory and Suffering  125 eliminating minority opposition (i.e., drives that contradict the dominant project). And this tactic of simplifying might look still more appealing in the case of affects. To unite myself, it seems best to get rid—​as much as I can—​of habits of feeling that conflict with my unifying aim. But Nietzsche insists on cultivating diversity in one’s affects, too. We should want our affects to be not just diverse but strong, he thinks. In 87:10[133] (WP.931): “the most powerful affects are the most valuable: insofar as there is no greater source of strength.”31 And the strongest affects are those that are most directly and viscerally the enjoyment of power—​what Nietzsche calls the “affect of command.” We need to overcome our moral prejudice against these feelings of domination and control. Morality condemns them, but they are vital to the “healthy selfishness” we require. The survival and prevalence of such enjoyments of power shows how indispensable these affects have always been.32 So BGE.23 speaks of “the affects hatred, envy, covetousness, lust to rule as life-​conditioning affects, as something that must be present in the total economy of life, which hence must even be enhanced if life is to be further enhanced.”33 This is true not just for societies but for individuals. See 87–​8:11[353] (WP.928): “Greatness of character does not consist in one’s not possessing these affects—​on the contrary, one has them in the most frightful degree: but one holds them in reins.” So our aim must be to harness these strong affects, not suppress them. Nietzsche presents Socrates as adopting the strategy of suppression, morality’s usual way.34 Socrates feels unable to control his affects, so he tries to stifle them. To be sure the proper control will require a very strenuous discipline (which may be hard to distinguish from Socrates’ practice). 85–​6:1[122] (WP.384, LNp63) describes this discipline: “Overcoming the affects?—​No, if this should mean their weakening and destruction. Rather to take them in service: which may involve a long tyrannizing of them. . . . Finally one trusts them with freedom again: they love us like good servants and go voluntarily where our best [interest] wills.”35 Nietzsche believes that a surprising degree of manipulative control of one’s affects is achievable. We’ve already seen that affects, though (in a way) passive, can themselves learn from experience. And they can also be taught to obey. 31 81:11[73]:  “All great humans were great through the strength of their affects.” 87:10[203] (WP.386) calls the affects the “greatest natural powers [grössten Naturgewalten].” 32 84:26[95]: “Since hatred, inclination, desire, anger, lust to rule [Herrschsucht] etc. are still here, one can suppose that they have their functions of preservation. And ‘the good person’—​without the mighty affects of hatred, of outrage, of disgust, without enmity, is a degeneration or a self-​deception.” 33 Also EH.iv.4. 34 On Socrates, see especially TI.ii, though there the point is in terms of drives or instincts. But the diagnosis is common elsewhere and is put in terms of affects; e.g., in 83:7[97]. On morality’s strategy of suppression see, e.g., 88:14[163] (WP.383): “Affect, great desire, the passion of power, love, revenge, possession—​: moralists want to extinguish and rip them out, to ‘purify’ the soul of them.” 35 Also 87:10[203] (WP.386) and 88:14[163] (WP.383) on taking the affects “in service.”

126  Body Values BGE.284: “To have and not to have one’s affects, one’s for and against, as voluntary [willkürlich], to condescend to them, for hours; to seat oneself on them, as on a horse, often as on an ass:—​for one must know how to use their stupidity as well as their fire.” Nietzsche has in mind here a kind of “care of the self ” with roots in Greek and Roman practice.36 This discipline aims, while enhancing the strength and variety of our affects, to “unify” them—​unify them both with one another and with the drives. This unification will happen by these psychic parts entering into stable relations of command and obedience toward one another. In the shared intentional space of the body, they “understand” one another in these relations. And, in the best case, Nietzsche thinks, there will be a single dominant drive and project that effectively commands all the other drives and affects to its purpose. Affects will be multiplied and enhanced but will still obey that dominant drive. Nietzsche speaks of this discipline as a “tyrannizing” of the affects, but we must hear this the right way. First, what tyrannizes is not a conscious intellect or will, but that dominant drive itself. This works not by conscious acts of decision and resolution, but in that subconscious space of meaning in which we’ve seen (§3.4) that the drives and affects all understand one another. The dominant drive or project “commands” in this space not by episodically issuing orders, but by its having persuaded the affects to adjust themselves to serve it. Second, the drive’s “tyrannizing” is really a training and even an educating of these affects. It shows them how to be better off in subordinating themselves to the overall project. It teaches them that their interest lies in seeking these sublimated expressions within its project—​that they find a richer expression there. So the drive’s commands appeal to an intelligence in those obeying drives and affects themselves. And, in the end, the affects “go voluntarily” into those expressions, understanding them as their own higher forms. I’ve spoken of the affects being ruled and unified by a dominant drive. But might it be instead a dominant affect that organizes the psyche? Might it be some strong state of feeling that serves as the focus and point of one’s life? What gives plausibility to this idea is the importance Nietzsche gives to the Dionysian. For this is, above all, a certain “state” [Zustand] in which feeling is uppermost: it involves an overall intensification of the affects. (By contrast I think the Apollonian has more to do with the devising drives.) TI.ix.10: “In the Dionysian state . . . the entire affect-​system is aroused and heightened”; there is an “inability not to react,” and one “enters into every skin, into every affect.” It is a state that values affects above all. See 88:18[16] (WP.576): “A kind of creature overloaded and playing with force would call good in a eudaemonistic sense precisely the 36 This part of Nietzsche’s thinking anticipates—​and probably inspires—​the treatments by Hadot [1995] and Foucault [1984/​1986] on this attention to a personal practice in the Greeks.

Affects: Memory and Suffering  127 affects, the irrational and change, together with their consequences, danger, contrast, destruction.” In elevating the Dionysian in this way it seems that Nietzsche may be casting his lot with (intense) feeling. It won’t be until Part III, when we examine Nietzsche’s new values, that we’ll be able to judge the overall role he ascribes to affects. But here we should go on to consider the two large problems Nietzsche associates with the affects. These problems must have answers before that Dionysian reveling in affectivity can be a good thing. That we feel—​that our experience has this affective side—​brings with it two deep difficulties. Feeling is all too often suffering, which is bad for us. And feeling turns us back to the past, which is also bad for us. Let’s start with the problem of feeling’s “turn back.”

4.2  The problem of the past Nietzsche has a problem with the past. He thinks we all have a problem with it—​indeed several interlocking problems whose chief root he tries to identify. Let me start by reminding us of a few places where he treats the topic explicitly and with emphasis. In each of them, our—​humans’—​relation to the past is a problem we have difficulty addressing—​and Nietzsche both points out the problem and offers to help us with it. (a) First an early passage. The second Untimely Meditation (“On the Helps and Hindrances of History for Life”) focuses on certain kinds of misuse of history that Nietzsche thinks are symptomatic of the present age. UM.ii.Foreword: “we are all suffering from a consuming fever of history and ought at least to recognize that we are suffering from it.” And then in ii.1 (par.3): “there is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of the historical sense, which is harmful and ultimately fatal to the living thing. . . .” This criticism of history and of a certain “historical attitude” which characterizes our age is probably the most emphasized point in this essay. Nietzsche claims that this modern misuse of history is connected to (rooted in) something broadly and in fact essentially human: what distinguishes us from animals is that we remember the past, but this memory is also our great burden. UM.ii.1 (par.2): “Human . . . braces himself against the great and ever greater pressure of what is past: this pushes him down or bends him sideways”; “it was” is “that password which brings conflict, suffering and surfeit to human so as to remind him what his existence basically is—​an imperfect [tense] that can never be completed [ein nie zu vollendendes Imperfectum].” (b) Next, a passage from Nietzsche’s “midday,” in Zarathustra. His famous explication there of the eternal return—​the climax of the book—​presents this idea as responding to a deep human worry over the past. The past disturbs us because it is utterly beyond the will’s reach: the will “can’t will backwards.”

128  Body Values So, Z.ii.20 “On Redemption”: “ ‘Willing’ liberates [befreit]; but what is it called that puts even the liberator in chains? /​‘It was’: so is called the will’s gnashing of teeth and loneliest sorrow. Powerless against what has been done—​it is an angry [böse] spectator of all that is past. /​‘The will cannot will backwards [zurück]; that it cannot break time and the desire of time,—​that is the will’s loneliest sorrow.’ ” And soon after: “ ‘This, yes this alone, is revenge itself: the will’s ill-​will [Widerwille] against time and its ‘It was.’ ” Later in this section Zarathustra has an inkling of how eternal return can solve the problem, but he is only able to embrace that thought in Part iii. By willing eternal return, the will is able to redeem the past and to say (truly) “Thus I will it, thus shall I will it,” thus meeting the challenge that had been set in ii.20. And this is the dramatic turning point of the book, which therefore hinges on the problem of the past. Eternal return is needed above all to meet this challenge; its chief function is to change our relation to the past and solve that problem with it. (c) Finally, a late passage, in the Genealogy. The second essay’s opening genealogy is of memory: this capacity didn’t come to us from our animal past but had to be trained into humans by ages of brutal punishments. This memory was imposed against the grain of our natural “forgetfulness,” which is an active repression of the past, requisite for healthy and effective functioning. So GM.ii.1: “there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present, without forgetfulness.” Originally, what humans were trained to remember were their past promises, including especially their promise to obey the social rules. People were trained to “remember” them not just as past facts, but also in the strong practical sense of keeping allegiance to them, taking themselves to be bound by them: GM.ii.1: “an active desire not to rid oneself, a desire for the continuance of something desired once, a real memory of the will.” This memory for the rules was a necessary condition for increasingly close, large-​scale, and efficient social life. This training in memory is the key first step in the “taming” and “civilizing” of humans, their socialization. But, Nietzsche says, both this new capacity (memory) and that long training for it by means of terror, pain, and punishment have had the overall, pervading effect of sickening and depressing us, even today. It’s this training in memory, above all, that has rendered us “the sick animal.” Now seeing Nietzsche returning so often and so critically to the past and memory raises the simple question: Why is the past so important to him? And we can mean this question in at least two ways: (i) What psychological factors induced Nietzsche to worry over the past (and his relation to the past) in this way? (ii) What does Nietzsche avow as the past’s importance (i.e., what reasons or grounds does he offer)? Let’s notice a few points regarding (i), that is, on the personal-​psychological weight of the past for Nietzsche, and what might be at its root. Certainly there are

Affects: Memory and Suffering  129 reasons to think that his philosophical attention to the past reflects a “fixation” running down at the level of his personal psychological character. His professional field, classical philology, is itself a major statement of his special fascination with the past. We should take seriously the oddity in this, that a philosopher who later prided himself on being so far ahead and futural, should have originally occupied himself with not just history but ancient history. Famously, he later regretted this decision and that he hadn’t studied in the sciences instead. So he expresses a retrospective regret at his own retrospectiveness.37 We find another expression of Nietzsche’s personal problem with the past in the hostility he so characteristically shows to his predecessors—​and especially to those who have clearly influenced him. His hyperbolic rejections of Socrates, Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Darwin show him bothered by their influence—​ by the debt he may owe to others’ ideas and the threat to his independence and originality. This is mixed with a sense of the flaws and failures in these sources. He expresses some of this in HH.i.249: “He who has come to a clear understanding of the problem of culture suffers from a feeling similar to that suffered by one who has inherited a fortune dishonestly acquired. . . . He thinks with sorrow of his origins and is often ashamed, often sensitive about them. The whole sum of the energy, will and joy he expends on his property is often balanced by a profound weariness: he cannot forget his origins.”38 I don’t know, and do ask, whether Nietzsche’s relation to his personal past was troubled—​whether he struggled against unpleasant memories. Are there things in his past that he regrets and feels guilty or ashamed of? Perhaps the Lou Salomé episode—​his lack of success with her, his own resentful reaction to her and Paul Rée? Perhaps his father—​as a “priest,” as having gone mad? Perhaps his rather embarrassing mother and sister, surely deflating to his own grand ambitions and self-​conception? If this could be filled in, it might license a psychologistic suggestion:  that Nietzsche found himself obsessed with or fixated on the past in ways he felt to be troubling and self-​undermining—​and that he was both expressing and working through this personal issue in his basic philosophical thinking.39 Given the importance he places on the deep structure of one’s drives and affects, we see that this self-​healing would be important to him.

37 Notice, in the 1886 Preface to HH.ii, how Nietzsche says that all of his works except one (surely Zarathustra) “are to be dated back—​they always speak of something ‘behind me.’ ” Each of them describes a viewpoint Nietzsche had lived through at varying distances in his past. So most of his writing is retrospective. 38 In this light, HH.ii.110 may be read as a confession. 39 Notice BGE.269’s diagnosis of several great poets (and “greater names” he will not mention) as “often taking revenge with their works for some inner contamination, often seeking with their flights to escape into forgetfulness from an all-​too-​true memory.”

130  Body Values He purports to have eventually succeeded in this. For in Ecce Homo we find an utterly positive account of his past: he claims to be completely content with it, seeing it all as the path by which he “becomes who he is.” (We can read his glad emphasis here as a sign of how very much discontent he overcame.) In the introductory paragraph (“How could I not be grateful to my whole life?”) he depicts himself as exemplifying the kind of gratitude toward the past, and will to have it just as it was, that is involved in willing eternal return.40 Biographically, again, we may wonder whether he really did achieve the reconciliation with the past he wanted so long. However, more important than these biographical speculations is the task—​ (ii) above—​of clarifying the main structure of Nietzsche’s philosophical views about the past and memory. Do his various reflections on memory fit together into a coherent theory? Let’s go on now to formulate this “problem of the past” more carefully, to try to get at the gist of the problem as he came to see it in his maturity. I’ll present the problem as lying in the conflict between two large points: (a) that the past is far more important than we suspect, but (b) that attention to the past is harmful to us. UM.ii.2 presents both points: “That life needs the service of history must be grasped as clearly as the proposition . . . that an excess of history harms the living thing.” So, it seems, we’re damned whether we do or we don’t pay attention to it.

4.2.1  The past’s importance The past is important because we don’t and can’t “leave it behind”: it is the secret meaning of who we are (and what we do). I think this is a point on which Nietzsche disagrees with both common sense and (then-​current) science. He thinks the past “gives our meaning” not just in the (scientific and commonsensical) sense that it did make us and hence explains us as a cause (something externally determining); this is the relevance the past usually seems to us to have. Rather, the past “gives our meaning” in the stronger sense that it has a kind of “presence” in us, constituting us now as who we are, determining the meaning of what we now do. The past has this presence because, first, there are structures or instruments in us that were made long ago in very different conditions—​that are “remnants” of 40 In the same paragraph he says “I looked backwards [rückwärts], I looked out [hinaus], I have never seen so many and such good things at once.” These terms for the retrospective and prospective stances echo those in a key passage on eternal return in Zarathustra, which we’ll look at in Chapter 12. Nietzsche here claims the simultaneous satisfaction of both stances that I’ll argue eternal return is supposed to represent.

Affects: Memory and Suffering  131 those past times. And it is present because, second, these structures were made by wills, and hence express the aims of these wills, which carry their intentions ahead into us. Together these points make the past constitutive of the present: of who I am, of the meaning of what I do. The first point is more to the fore in Human, All-​too-​Human. Nietzsche states it most broadly at the opening of HH.ii.223: “Direct self-​observation is not nearly sufficient for us to know ourselves: we require history, for the past continues to flow within us in a hundred waves; we ourselves are, indeed, nothing but that which at every moment we experience of this continued flowing [Fortströmen].”41 This section builds to the lesson that one might study the sedimented layers of the past within oneself, discovering all of our cultural and even organic past deposited there. Such a one will rediscover the adventurous travels of this becoming and changing ego [dieses werdenden und verwandelten ego] in Egypt and Greece, Byzantium and Rome, France and Germany, in the age of the nomadic or of the settled nations, in the Renaissance and the Reformation, at home and abroad, indeed in the sea, the forests, in the plants and in the mountains.—​Thus self-​knowledge will become universal knowledge [All-​Erkenntnis] with regard to all that is past. . . .

This passage from HH.ii states the lesson behind much of the discussion that opens HH.i. Notice, for example, HH.i.43’s description of cruel people as stages of earlier cultures that have remained behind: the mountain ranges of humanity here openly display the deeper formations that otherwise lie concealed. . . . In our brains there must also be furrows and whorls corresponding to that state of mind, just as reminders of our existence as fishes should be ascertainable in the form of individual human organs. But these furrows and whorls are no longer the bed along which the stream of our sensation now rolls.42

Note again the reference to past evolution as layering structures into us. This past is also deposited, very importantly, in our language.43 By the time of the Genealogy, the second point—​the intentionality of those past “causes” and that they constitute meaning now—​is clear.44 Those past processes 41 Already in 72–​3:19[162] (P&Tp35):  “the human carries around the memory of all previous generations.” 42 See also HH.i.250: “the past is still too powerful in their muscles. . . .” 43 Already in 72–​3:19[117] (P&Tp31): “The spiritual activity of millennia laid down in language.” 44 Indeed we find it already in Gay Science 54: “I have discovered for myself that the old humanity and animality, indeed the entire Urzeit and past of all sentient [empfindenden] being continues to create, love, hate, infer [fortdichtet, fortliebt, forthasst, fortschliesst] in me.” And GS.57: “You still always carry with you the estimations of things that have their origin in the passions and loves of earlier centuries!”

132  Body Values created meanings and purposes that our parts and processes continue to bear. So the book elaborates (i) how our practices of punishment, bad conscience, and religion have been designed for certain functions and (ii) how the genealogy of this design shows the “meanings” these practices now have. The practices carry along the aims their selection-​design has given them so that Christian values, for example, still carry the slavish and resentful purposes with which they were first formulated.45 Ultimately, perhaps, Nietzsche is attacking what might be called a “psychology of presence.” He opposes our commonsense confidence that we determine what we want and mean by our present acts of intending. HH.i.18 already states the point. [W]‌hen the sensate individual observes itself, it takes every sensation, every change for something isolated, that is, unconditioned, without connection: it rises up from within us without any tie to earlier or later things. We are hungry, yet do not originally think that the organism wishes to be sustained; instead, that feeling seems to assert itself without any ground and purpose, it isolates itself and takes itself as voluntary. Therefore: the belief in the freedom of will is an original error of everything organic. . . .

Against this Nietzsche argues what might be called a “temporal externalism” for meaning. In Chapter  3 (§3.2) we saw that this is one aspect of drives’ aiming:  their “functions” are the outcomes they were selected to have. By contrast with the “goals” that drives actively pursue via signs that they adjust by experience, drives’ functions are set into them by the evolutionary or historical processes that “designed” them. The drive itself may be quite unable to adjust or even notice these aims—​as the sex-​drive may have no inkling of its reproductive function. And the point extends much more widely: all of our desires and values are doing further things, serving further purposes, than what shows up within them, to their own point of view. When drives are shaped by social processes there is a further problem: these processes design social practices and values in the interest of the types of people ascendent at the time of design. Such a practice can be quite unsuited to the types who take it over, perhaps in much later and very different social contexts. So the Genealogy diagnoses Christian values as a “slave morality” designed in the

45 This is why a critique of moral values depends on “a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances out of which they have grown, under which they have developed and shifted” [GM.p.6].

Affects: Memory and Suffering  133 interests of the reactive, sick, and suffering. This history builds into us meanings we don’t understand; our values “mean” things we’re unaware of.46 Recall also the famous genealogy of punishment in GM.ii. In investigating “why” we punish, Nietzsche turns not to our present and conscious intentions. Instead he considers the practice as a complex set of procedures, and he asks how different parts of this complex have been designed at different times in the past for different functions now. These many functions have been layered into the practice, which now has all these meanings. And it has also built into us a host of metaphysical errors. HH.i.16: “What we now call the world is the result of a host of errors and fantasies, which emerged gradually during the overall development of organic beings, merged together as they grew, and are now passed on to us as the accumulated treasure of the entire past. . . .”47 For all these reasons, we are in thrall to our past. This is the first threat in the past: that it controls us. It deprives me of a freedom I have always supposed myself to have. It means that I lack the responsibility I’ve claimed for myself in acting and valuing. Of course we’ve always believed that the past was the threat to our freedom, but because we might be causally determined by the past. Instead, it’s because the meanings of what we do are (“logically”) constituted by past selection: this selection supplies the really explanatory “ends” of what we do. Now, given these ways the past controls us, it seems attention to the past is requisite both for the sake of understanding ourselves and for the sake of really accomplishing the autonomy or agency we had supposed ourselves already to have. Nietzsche challenges us to overcome the past’s control. 83:16[61]: “To overcome the past in us: to combine the drives anew and to direct them all together upon a single goal:—​very hard!” And he insists that philosophy must become “historical.” HH.i.2: “A lack of historical sensibility is the original failing of all philosophers. . . . They do not want to learn that humanity has come to be, that even the faculty of cognition has also come to be. . . .” Later: “From now on therefore, historical philosophizing will be necessary, and along with it the virtue of modesty.” And HH.i 16: “The steady and laborious process of science, which will someday finally celebrate its highest triumph in a genetic history of thought. . . .”

46 87:10[23] (WP.110, LNp181): “the feeling of value is always antiquated [rückständig], it expresses survival—​[and] growth-​conditions of a much earlier age.” 88:11[227] (WP.39, LNp234): “we not only have to struggle against the states resulting from all the present misery of degeneration, but all previous décadence remains behind, i.e., living.” 47 85–​6:1[22] (LNp55): “Our ethical [sittliches] feeling is a synthesis, a sounding-​at-​once of all masterful and subservient feelings that have ruled in the history of our ancestors.” See, too, 81:11[316].

134  Body Values

4.2.2  Problems with retrospection And yet, Nietzsche also thinks, when we do retrospect or remember or study the past—​which would be requisite for understanding ourselves—​this tends to hurt or damage us. It also reflects badly on us—​reflects a kind of sickness. Put simply:  “Not to become finished with an experience is already a sign of décadence” [88:14[155] (WP.233)]. Strong and healthy natures will instead have the virtue of forgetting.48 As we’ve seen, Nietzsche’s repeated attention to the ways retrospection is harmful amounts almost to obsession. We looked at three sets of passages (from UM, Z, and GM) that presented this harm in three different ways. Is there a crux to his critique? Nietzsche’s mature and most considered account of retrospection is—​by the very lessons just reviewed—​his genealogy of it:  his analysis how this human stance arose and developed by the kinds of historical processes we’ve been noticing. We need a retrospective study of our retrospection if we’re to understand what it’s doing in us now. It’s this genealogy that best shows how retrospection is harmful by exposing “functions” designed deeply into it. Thus, it seems, genealogy diagnoses and undermines itself. So how did our capacity and propensity to remember and (in general) “regard” the past arise and develop—​and what functions has it been selected for? I take this to be the central topic of the Genealogy’s second essay, which presents memory [Gedächtnis] as the decisive ability acquired by the earliest humans, upon and around which our striking higher capacities were then built. All the phenomena the essay treats—​including debt, guilt, bad conscience, responsibility, and gods—​are built on memory. Nietzsche’s suspicions against retrospection are rooted in his analysis of what this ability was selected for. Humans developed memory, Nietzsche claims, only when they came together in social groups; memory was selected because it made such groups possible—​and stronger. This faculty or ability arose so that society could be the more possible and successful.49 Nietzsche gives the name Sittlichkeit der Sitte (ethic of custom) [GM.ii.2] to the very long early phase of our history in which memory made social custom and vice versa.50 Human’s retrospectivity, which

48 Succinctly in a poem in GS, jcr.4: “gesund ist, wer vergass [healthy is he who forgets].” See also GM.i.10, GM.iii.16. 49 Nietzsche says that the beginnings of memory precede society in the more primitive relation between “buyer and seller, creditor [Gläubiger] and debtor [Schuldner],” which he says is “older than even the beginnings of any societal associations and organizational forms” [GM.ii.8]. But clearly the main work of developing memory is done socially—​and indeed he goes on at once to focus on the community [Gemeinwesen] as the most important “creditor” [ii.9]. 50 We met this “ethic of custom” in Chapter 2 (§2.4) and will return to it repeatedly, most fully in Chapter 6 (§6.4) and Chapter 7 (§7.2).

Affects: Memory and Suffering  135 distinguishes us from all the rest of nature and life, was originally selected—​ “designed”—​to facilitate our socialization—​to make us creatures of habit and custom. Indeed it might not be too strong to say that originally memory just was the ability to acquire (social) habits or practices, distinct from the innate drives. Memory was first and foremost the ability to remember what the practice is for different situations. It was the ability to remember the rules, even when one’s drives push hard the other way. As GM.ii.3 puts it, it was the ability “to keep a few primitive requirements of social co-​existence present for these slaves of momentary affect and desire.” One remembers not to steal the fruit in the marketplace, even when one’s eat-​drive impels. So memory’s original work is to “give one pause,” restraining one from acting on the immediate excited drive by inserting a glance “back” at one’s commitment to the social rules.51 Early humans were trained to remember this commitment by “burning” into their bodies and senses certain vivid and powerful experiences of the horrific punishments inflicted on those who break the rules. After many generations of this training “one finally retains in memory five, six ‘I will nots,’ in connection with which one has given one’s promise in order to live within the advantages of society” [GM.ii.3]. These dramatic punishments train into us the ability to interpose between drive and action that memory of the rule. And the capacity to remember all of the rules is the ability to impose, on top of one’s “animal” drives, that new layer of social practices to which one is committed to subdue those drives.52 All of this shows how the first function of memory was to socialize us—​to make us abide by the rules necessary for social existence. Nietzsche likes to call this our “taming” [Zähmung]. Memory’s original function of binding us to social rules ramifies into many further phenomena that Nietzsche finds problematic. It is entangled with the “herd instinct” that pushes us to make ourselves just like others and that renders us averse to being anything all alone. Memory binds us to traditions and introduces an inertial drag in societies that makes them poor at coping with changed circumstances. And, most importantly, memory’s chief function is to control and suppress our aggressive “animal” drives, and this sets up a deep and constant tension within us that pains and sickens us. So memory is at the root of many of Nietzsche’s targets.

51 Or, perhaps rather, to “rehear” a verbal statement of the rule. Although I’m calling this ability “retrospective,” it is perhaps less a matter of what “the mind’s eye” sees than of what the mind’s ear hears—​verbal formulations of rules, couched as commandments. 52 Among the drives subdued in this way is that to revenge oneself for injuries received—​one learns to treat these as offenses against “the law,” to be punished by it. Thus “the eye is trained for an ever more impersonal appraisal of deeds, even the eye of the injured one himself ” [ii.11].

136  Body Values Memory gives us a past in order to bind us to it. And so it experiences the past principally as debt: we owe something “on account of ” something past, which we need to pay off. A debt is a burden we bear from the past, reaching forward to command us in the present; a debt requires us to obey something past.53 And, as social beings, we owe a pervasive and constant such debt to society, constraining our present and future behavior to follow society’s rules. GM.ii tells a rich story of how this sense of indebtedness is developed into guilt and then bad conscience. The aggressive drives that need to be controlled crave expression. So a way is found to make them subserve our taming:54 these drives are turned back to vent their aggression against themselves, against the “entire animal old self ” [ii.18]. Members are trained to feel guilty for their instincts, and this self-​infliction is a covert expression of those very instincts. Our memory of the social norms is reinforced by the habit of paining ourselves with regret at the drives that violate those norms. It’s this coopting of members to punish themselves with a retrospective guilt that distinguishes morality [Moral] from the ethic of custom. Nietzsche also roots religion in this socializing memory. The social group reveres its ancestors as the founders of the customs and laws that have made the group strong (and the good life within it possible): “all customs, as works of ancestors, are also their statutes and commands” [ii.19]. This retrospective feeling of debt binds each member more tightly to those customs. And as the group grows stronger, those founders are magnified into gods—​and members’ debt to them is magnified as well.55 Humans had gods in order to reinforce memory of those statutes, the social rules. Besides its roles in religion and morality, that retrospective stance is at the root of another main human achievement, which Nietzsche likewise views with a famous suspicion. This is our reason, our cognition—​the attitude or stance in which we understand and know. Theory and science are at root retrospective.56 We should notice how often Nietzsche takes memory to represent and epitomize the theoretical attitude—​an attitude we take to be different and broader than memory. So his critique of “history” becomes a critique of all science, and his critique of “memory” becomes a critique of all self-​reflection (all looking at one’s aims or values from outside). Those broader phenomena are built on that retrospective turn.

53 Nietzsche struggles against a related feeling of indebtedness when he fights (as we saw earlier) to distinguish himself from the philosophical predecessors who most influenced him. 54 It is “found” by selection at the social level—​and not necessarily by the conscious discovery and design of determining individuals. 55 We’ll return to this story when we look at Nietzsche’s account of religion in Chapter 12 (§12.2). 56 Notice how UM.ii.10 (par.9) says that science “sees everywhere things that have been, things historical.”

Affects: Memory and Suffering  137 Our theoretical attitude, in which we try to know things “as they are,” objectively, depends on that ability to pull back from our usual engagement—​to put a pause in our effort. But it uses this pause not to recall practical aims distinct from the drives (those social norms and promises), but instead to “just look” at things in that space apart from drives’ effort. This begins to explain why Nietzsche thinks that this theoretical attitude, our “will to truth,” belongs to the ascetic ideal. It is ascetic, ultimately, precisely because it takes this stance contrary to the willing in our body and drives. It turns away from our aims and ends and binds us to something independent of them. Indeed, in this regard, our will to truth is an ultimate form of that contrary stance—​“that ideal itself in its strictest, most spiritual formulation” [GM.iii.27]. This new stance, in which we front the world differently than in willing, becomes most contrary to willing when it turns to study this willing itself. Knowing, just as retrospective, already absents itself from our effort to enact our drives. But when it turns back to look at those drives themselves—​at the aims by which we really set our behavior—​it works actively against them. When we turn this retrospective eye upon our values and aims, we chill and kill them. So the historical or genealogical study of our values is the most ascetic of all. Already in UM.ii.1, An historical phenomenon, known [erkannt] purely and completely and analyzed into a phenomenon of knowledge, is, for him who has known it, dead: for he has known the delusion, the injustice, the blind passion, and in general the whole earthly and darkening horizon of this phenomenon, and has thereby also known its historical power. This power has now become powerless over him, the knower [Wissenden]:  but perhaps not yet for him, the living thing [Lebenden].

So knowledge kills passion, though it may not do so right down to its roots. Overall, this genealogy of memory or retrospection shows it in a very unfavorable light. It reveals how this back-​turning stance has been designed for a group of functions we were unaware of and which are often immediately unappealing—​not functions we would want our attitude or stance to play. These disadvantages lie very near the center of Nietzsche’s diagnosis of our human predicament. Memory pulls us back, out of the momentum of our drives’ thrust at ends, and this begins an alienation of human beings from their drives, which has made us the (uniquely) “sick animal.” Hence we find Nietzsche strongly ambivalent about humans’ distinctive retral turn: it provides basic truths about us, yet it is dangerous and even intrinsically harmful. Nietzsche’s critique of humans’ backward turn is a central piece of his broader diagnosis of our limits, which we’ll examine in Part II. In Chapter 7 we’ll see

138  Body Values how guilt and bad conscience are built into a morality that makes a nihilistic judgment against life. Then, in Chapter 8, we’ll see the beginnings of Nietzsche’s antidote or “way out”: his strategy to redirect our retrospectivity into a healthier positive project. This will marshal the science of history to the work of “freeing” us from the past values that now control us. Finally, in Chapter 12, we’ll see how the idea of eternal return is meant to model a healthier relation to our past. But before we defer this “problem of the past” to these later discussions, let’s remind ourselves just how deeply this problem goes. It’s a distinctively human problem, but with roots in a constitution we share with all living things. Memory has roots at the biological level.57 Even animals are “toward” the past—​and humans are, too, even without remembering. We saw in Chapter 3 (§3.2) that drives exercise a kind of memory simply by “learning from experience”: their habits absorb this past experience into ongoing expectations.58 We might call this “drive-​memory”; Nietzsche attributes it even to plants.59 Past success is turned into a sign for present willing. This adjustment of the drive’s aiming on the basis of experience requires no conscious reference to the past as past, merely its persistence in the form of a new mark by which to steer. This persistence is, of course, highly selective: the vividly successful (or unsuccessful) case remains as a sign while all the other cases are “forgotten.” This drive-​memory lacks the unhealthy and harmful aspects we’ve been noticing, however. It doesn’t involve consciousness of the past, it doesn’t even involve meaning the past: it needn’t think of the past—​and thus indeed is not fully “memory.”60 Moreover this “memory” is a tool of the drives, a tool that can work well or poorly but doesn’t represent the kind of counterforce to healthy willing that we’ve seen Nietzsche is worried about. Let’s recall another deep root to our retrospectivity. We’re turned back toward the past in our affects and feelings. And in these we are directed toward the past as past. For our affects are reactions to events—​to physiological changes and “impacts” upon us. In our affects we dwell on these impacts, hold them in view behind us precisely by/​in still feeling them. We feel feelings as from the past, though of course often a very immediate past. Whereas in our will and drives we turn principally ahead, to what we’re trying to be/​do, we’re pulled “back” from

57 84:25[514]: “The arising of memory is the problem of the organic. How is memory possible?” 58 See Deleuze’s account [1968/​1994, 74] of the “contraction of habit,” as the first, organic “synthesis of time.” 59 72–​ 3:19[161]:  “Memory preserves the established [gemachten] reflex-​movements. /​ . . . [M]‌emory is older than consciousness. E.g., we have memory in the mimosa [tree], but no consciousness. Memory naturally without picture, in the plant.” 60 Compare James [1892/​1992,  272]:  “No memory is involved in the mere fact of recurrence.” Memory requires the addition “that the fact imagined be expressly referred to the past, thought as in the past.”

Affects: Memory and Suffering  139 this calculating effort when we feel how things are. So our mere pleasures and pains involve a retral stance. The problem of the past reaches down into the logic of feeling, then. But it is not the only problem with roots there. There is a second and more obvious one: the problem of suffering, as the way, being liable to feeling, we all too often do feel. This second problem likewise occurs at the intersection of feeling and time and is entangled there with the first one.

4.3  Suffering and pessimism Nietzsche’s view of life’s affective side gives a principal role to the affect of suffering [Leiden]. This poses another great problem for life generally, though, once again, it bears especially on human life. Nietzsche has both philosophical and personal reasons for dwelling on it. His views about suffering will have consequences for his critique of morality (Chapter 7) as well as for his own positive conception of “the Dionysian” (Chapter 12). His philosophical reasons are best addressed in relation to Schopenhauer.61 The prevalence of suffering is Schopenhauer’s central argument against life—​and the ground for his pessimism (i.e., his overall judgment that life is bad).62 It is also the object of the feeling he most strongly values, pity [Mitleid]. So it’s not surprising that suffering is Nietzsche’s main point of engagement (and disagreement) with Schopenhauer. He undertakes to assess and reply to the latter’s claims about the value and significance of suffering—​and of pity as a response to it. But Nietzsche also has a more intimate relation to the topic. As is well known, he himself was regularly subjected to an unusual degree (given his era, age, social class, etc.) of acute and debilitating physical suffering.63 We get a sample in a January 1880 letter to Dr. Eiser: “My existence is a dreadful burden. . . . Constant pain, several hours of the day a feeling of half-​paralysis closely related to seasickness, when speaking becomes difficult for me, for a change raging attacks

61 I focus on Nietzsche’s “mature” critique of Schopenhauer on the topics of suffering, pity, and pessimism. Obviously there are many other dimensions of their relationship; for these, see the papers in Janaway [(ed.) 1998]. Janaway’s own paper in this volume begins by surveying Nietzsche’s earlier view of Schopenhauer. 62 Shapshay [2019] argues persuasively that there is also a more optimistic strand in Schopenhauer’s thinking—​that he is not just the “knight without hope” that Nietzsche finds him to be. Nevertheless I think this pessimism is at least the dominant view in WWR. Note that Nietzsche also says, in GM.iii.7, that Schopenhauer “was not [a pessimist], as much as he wished it” since he personally found life worth living for the sake of his struggle against enemies. 63 I think this is the beginning of a reply to Nussbaum’s [1994, 159] judgment that Nietzsche was acquainted only with “bourgeois vulnerability” and not with “basic vulnerability,” thus rendering his judgments about suffering and pity unreliable and suspect.

140  Body Values (the last made me vomit for 3 days and nights, I thirsted after death).”64 Such attacks recurred through most of his adult life. Less conspicuously, he was also well acquainted with a “mental” or “spiritual” suffering, often interwoven with his physical pains.65 So he has personal reasons to agree with Schopenhauer’s stress on “the problem of suffering.” Indeed Nietzsche thinks that he has better such grounds for emphasizing suffering than Schopenhauer because he knows suffering better.66 I suspect he was even a bit scornful of the suffering to which Schopenhauer was personally subject—​it didn’t really amount to very much. Moreover Schopenhauer suffered in a way that kept him from seeing into it as well as Nietzsche claims to do. He particularly denies that Schopenhauer knows suffering any better through his feeling of pity; this, too, is a poor way of finding out suffering’s real nature and significance.

4.3.1 Defining suffering Our obvious first challenge is to say just what suffering is, in Nietzsche’s understanding of it (and use of the word). This is, as always with him, harder and harder the closer we look. To begin with:  suffering is a “negative” affect. That is, suffering is a “bad feeling”—​or better, a “feeling bad.”67 For the badness of suffering is not (as it were) a property that it has by some external assessment, but instead lies in the way suffering assesses itself: it feels itself as bad. We’ve seen that all affects involve valuing: for example, when I love I feel the great positive value of what I love. Suffering is an affect that negatively assesses itself—​that feels itself bad—​hence a “negative reflexive affect.” We must keep in mind that the assessment is in the feeling itself and not in a thought appended to the feeling. 64 See the samples of this and other letters in which Nietzsche describes his sufferings in Klossowski [1969/​1998, ch. 2], which also offers interesting suggestions how Nietzsche interpreted and coped with these sufferings. 65 We get insight into the particular character of some of his “spiritual” suffering in GS.251, which says that “great natures” suffer not from the “tortures” their task demands of them but from “the ignoble, petty agitations of some evil moments—​in short, from their doubts about their own greatness.” I suggest he means in his own case his agitations over (for example) Salomé and his sister. 66 And Schopenhauer likewise lacked personal experience of Mitleid or pity. 85–​6:2[29] (LNp70) says that he “deceived himself about music as about pity and for the same reason—​he knew both too little from experience.” 67 Nietzsche also hears in “suffering” a second sense which emphasizes not the badness but the way a feeling is imposed—​i.e., the aspect of “affects” stressed in §1. See how 85–​6:2[141] (LNp88) speaks of the “cleavage” between “doing and doer, doing and suffering, being and becoming, cause and effect.” 85–​6:2[145] (WP.546) clarifies the point. See, too, 86–​7:7[1]‌(LNp129). And perhaps 82–​3:5[1.257]: “As soon as will occurs, feeling has the impression of liberation. Feeling is, that is, suffering—​and as soon as will occurs, it pauses and doesn’t suffer. One calls this freedom of will.”

Affects: Memory and Suffering  141 We should distinguish this affect from some important “second-​order” affects that can be directed upon it (i.e., ways we can feel about suffering). These will play major roles in Nietzsche’s treatment of the topic—​so much so that we will eventually consider whether his main point is to shift the real problem from suffering to these feelings about suffering. We can organize them using two simple dichotomies. First, one can feel either pleasure or pain about—​can either enjoy or suffer from—​some (“first-​order”) suffering. (a)  Pleasure about suffering—​and especially pleasure in making-​suffer68—​is cruelty [Grausamkeit], toward which Nietzsche takes a disturbingly positive view. BGE.229: “Almost everything we call ‘higher culture’ rests on the spiritualizing and deepening of cruelty—​this is my proposition.”69 (b) Pain about suffering—​and especially suffering-​with70—​is of course pity [Mitleid], which he attacks so relentlessly.71 GM.p.5: “This preference and overestimation of pity by modern philosophers is something new: previously philosophers were in agreement on the disvalue of pity.” Second, these two feelings can be directed either at others’ suffering or at one’s own. The former are the more obvious cases, but it’s the latter, self-​directed forms of cruelty and even of pity that will matter more to Nietzsche. He diagnoses bad conscience as a cruelty turned against oneself: one enjoys making-​suffer oneself.72 BGE.229 says the “foolish psychology of the past” couldn’t see “the rich, over-​rich enjoyment in one’s own suffering, in making-​oneself-​suffer.” On the other side, less conspicuously, he is deeply worried about a tenderness and sensitivity to one’s own pain or suffering, a kind of self-​pity, which he thinks is typical today. We will want to see what way of feeling about our own suffering he does want, given these two criticisms. Suffering is, then, a negative reflexive affect. But it seems not to be the only such affect. We need next to try to place it in relation to the many other ways of “feeling bad” that Nietzsche also often mentions, including pain [Schmerz], displeasure [Unlust], agony [Qual], torture [Marter], misery [Elend], distress [Noth], dissatisfaction [Unbefriedigung], discomfort [Unbehagen], and unhappiness [Unglück]. Does Nietzsche’s idea of “suffering” take in all of these, or does he mean something more particular? 68 We’ll see that Nietzsche includes under “cruelty” the enjoyment of suffering by a mere “spectator.” But the primary case is the enjoyment of inflicting the suffering. 69 See, too, GM.ii.6–​7. 70 Just as “cruelty” extends from the inflicter to the spectator of suffering, so “pity” includes not just cases in which one takes oneself to “feel the other’s pain,” but cases in which one is pained (more abstractly) just by the fact that another suffers—​i.e., without supposing that one’s pain is “like” the other’s. 71 I’ll treat Nietzsche’s critique of pity more fully in Chapter 7 (§7.3). 72 GM.ii.18: “this uncanny and horrible-​pleasurable work of a soul willing-​conflicting with itself, which makes itself suffer out of pleasure in making-​suffer, this entire active ‘bad conscience.’ . . .”

142  Body Values One natural picture is that these negative affects lie along a continuum in the “degree of badness” they feel themselves to have—​in how intensely they feel their own badness. We might imagine a range running from mild discomfort to agony. Then how will we locate “suffering” along this range? Will it include every negative feeling, including the discomfort of (for example) an itch? I think both “suffering” and Leiden connote a much more intense feeling than this; we presume a lower bound for suffering, which minor pains and discomforts fall below. And yet the task of saying “how high” such a minimum for suffering might be looks daunting or even hopeless. How can we hope to specify any minimal “degree of painfulness” here? But I  think we can indeed formulate a certain standard for suffering’s “intensity” and can find it precisely in the use Schopenhauer makes of Leiden. Suffering, as reflective, involves an assessment—​in feeling—​of itself. And we can distinguish suffering from other ways of feeling-​bad by the content of this assessment. Suffering judges of itself that it is “not worth the living” (i.e., that this way of feeling is “worse than not-​living”). This is not the case, I suggest, with “discomfort,” nor indeed with most pains. So we can capture the “intensity” of feeling-​ bad proper to suffering by specifying how bad the feeling feels itself to be: it feels itself worse than not feeling anything at all. But, very importantly, we should understand suffering’s judgment as “local” or limited in two respects. First, when one suffers, this needn’t be all that one does. Suffering’s judgment is made in this affect, but one’s drives and even other affects may be operating as well. To be sure, suffering’s intense way of feeling has a tendency to squeeze out other ways of caring. But it’s also possible to care about particular goals while suffering—​and to judge, in that effort, this moment worth living for that striving, all the while one feels it worthless in suffering. Second, when one suffers, this suffering assesses only itself—​only this way one feels now and not one’s whole life, much less life in general. So there’s still a gap between suffering and Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Pessimism is the “global” judgment that life in general is bad—​is worse than not-​living. Suffering judges this only about itself, about its way of living now. Schopenhauer will try to bridge this gap by arguing either (a) that suffering is universal and constant or (b) that suffering is so prevalent, dominant, and dreadful that its judgment of life outweighs all others.73 This definition of suffering—​as the affect that feels itself worse than not-​ living—​fits with Nietzsche’s use of Leiden, too, I suggest. We can then frame the issue this way: Should suffering’s judgment be decisive for our overall assessment of life? Should I, suffering as I do and suffering in a way I may see is prevalent, 73 WWR I 59 [p323] distinguishes these as a priori and a posteriori routes to the conviction that human life is suffering.

Affects: Memory and Suffering  143 accept its evaluation of life? Nietzsche suffers, Nietzsche prides himself in his suffering, but he denies its authority to determine his overall view of life. Let’s look at how he rebuts Schopenhauer’s arguments from suffering to pessimism.

4.3.2  Reply to Schopenhauer Schopenhauer’s first and more official argument for his pessimism is (a)  that suffering is essential to every entity, as “will”—​so that suffering’s judgment against life is indeed the judgment of all life against itself. It belongs to the very structure of will that it suffers—​that it suffers constantly and without any positive balancing-​out of this suffering. So WWR I 56 [p309]: “We call [the will’s] hindrance through an obstacle placed between it and its temporary goal, suffering.” And indeed there needn’t even be an “obstacle”; willing itself involves dissatisfaction: “all striving springs from want or deficiency, from dissatisfaction [Unzufriedenheit] with one’s own state or condition, and is therefore suffering as long as it is not satisfied” [p309].74 As Schopenhauer also famously puts it, this suffering tends to oscillate between the two forms of pain and boredom.75 For purposes of this essentialist argument Schopenhauer defines “suffering” so that it can apply extremely broadly—​so that suffering can be present in all experience. Even very minor and passing frustrations of petty aims will count as suffering, indeed even the having of such aims. But—​I suggest—​he thereby here trades, illegitimately, on that implicit connotation of intensity in “suffering.” He treats every feeling-​bad as if it judged itself “worse than not-​living’ and then generalizes this judgment into his pessimism. So he gets illicit rhetorical force by extending the term that way.76 But Schopenhauer also argues for his pessimism a second way: (b) he vividly describes varied cases of suffering—​cases in which the physical or psychological pain is indeed intense. These cases are also explained by the world’s essential nature as will. But they’re due not to the feeling-​bad intrinsic to each willing, but to the impact on a willing by other wills. Metaphysically: the one will is divided against itself and wars and feeds upon itself. And this metaphysical reality is expressed in “appearance” as a struggle among individual wills inflicting suffering upon one another. WWR II 46 [p581]: “This world is the battle-​ground of 74 WWR I 65 [p363]: “all willing as such springs from want, and hence from suffering.” 75 WWR I 57 [p312]: “The basis of all willing . . . is need, lack, and hence pain, and by its very nature and origin it is therefore destined to pain. If, on the other hand, it lacks objects of willing . . . a fearful emptiness and boredom come over it; in other words, its being and its existence itself become an intolerable burden for it. Hence its life swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents.” 76 Cartwright [1988, 58–​9] criticizes this step from “dissatisfaction” to “suffering”; see Janaway’s defense [1999, 329–​30] of Schopenhauer.

144  Body Values tormented and agonized beings who continue to exist only by each devouring the other.” Living things suffer by being hurt, oppressed, indeed eaten by other living things—​due to those others’ essence as will.77 Schopenhauer’s cases have strong emotive impact but are less satisfactory for his argument since they lack universality—​as he himself acknowledges at WWR I 59 [p323]. He wants to show all life to be bad, but those many vivid cases leave open that some lives happen not be made to suffer (be “eaten”) by others. Nor will most lives involve such suffering constantly (which was the upshot of the essentialist argument). The argument needs to rely on an estimate that there is a preponderance of suffering in life—​or enough of it that, given its horribleness, its judgment against life should prevail. And this preponderance must hold, it seems, not just within the set of living things, but also within the life of each one of them: no one can live a life not spoiled by suffering. (Sometimes, to be sure, Schopenhauer tries to close this gap by insisting that any suffering is too much, but I think this carries little conviction.) Now how does Nietzsche reply to these arguments from suffering to pessimism?78 Generally:  his strategy is, as always, two-​pronged. He rebuts the arguments, but he also diagnoses them. So he argues, first, that suffering’s judgment against life is not authoritative or decisive. And he argues, second, that granting that authority to suffering expresses sickness in Schopenhauer and other pessimists. Nietzsche makes both arguments, however, while also accepting some of Schopenhauer’s key points, above all his insistence on the great importance of suffering. Let’s see how he responds to Schopenhauer’s two routes to pessimism. First, regarding Schopenhauer’s claim (a)  that suffering is essential to all willing, Nietzsche sometimes accepts this premise while still denying the pessimistic conclusion. He argues, in parallel to Schopenhauer, that suffering is intrinsic to all living—​is built into its nature as will to power (even leaving aside impacts from other wills). In 84:26[275]:  “Thus the will to power strives for resistances, for displeasure. There is a will to suffering at the ground of all organic life (against ‘happiness“ as ‘goal’).”79 But I  think it’s telling that more often when Nietzsche argues this way he uses weaker terms to speak of the feeling-​bad involved in all will to power. He calls it not “suffering” but “displeasure,” for example; 88:14[174] (WP.702, 77 WWR II 46 [p577]: “The chief source of the most serious evils affecting human is human himself; homo homini lupus.” And the next page speaks of the world “as a hell, surpassing that of Dante by the fact that one human must be the devil of another.” 78 Notice the interesting argument by May [2016] that, to the extent that Nietzsche takes on the task to “justify” suffering, he is still in the grip of an historical need expressing life-​denial. I believe Nietzsche does take suffering to be a great problem; his main effort is not so much to justify its existence as to show how a healthy will can cope with it. 79 Perhaps also 85:39[16]: “I want to say: perhaps suffering is something essential for all Dasein.”

Affects: Memory and Suffering  145 LNp264): “[d]‌ispleasure, as hindering [Hemmung] of his will to power, is therefore a normal fact.”80 Reginster [2006, 285 n24] adopts the assumption that Nietzsche uses Leiden and Unlust interchangeably, being “even less rigorous” here than Schopenhauer.81 But I think that Nietzsche keeps better hold of the special intensity of suffering than Schopenhauer does—​and also pays more accurate attention to the displeasure intrinsic to willing. Schopenhauer, we saw, finds suffering in any obstacle to the will, even in the mere gap between a will and its goal. Nietzsche concurs that a certain “bad feeling” is built into all will to power. Willing power is willing (always) something more; it involves a discontent with the status quo, a discontent that one doesn’t have that more.82 But this dissatisfaction is not at all a judgment against life, Nietzsche thinks. In 87–​8:11[76] (WP.697, LNp214): “The normal dissatisfaction [Unbefriedigung] of our drives, e.g., of hunger, the sex-​drive, the drive-​ to-​move, involves as yet nothing depressive; it works much more to agitate the feeling of life . . . : this dissatisfaction, instead of spoiling life, is the great stimulus of life.”83 We should distinguish two points here—​two ways that Nietzsche disputes Schopenhauer’s characterization of the dissatisfaction intrinsic to willing. First, as just noted, there’s the matter of the “intensity” of this dissatisfaction—​how bad it judges its own state to be. The dissatisfaction intrinsic to willing—​and present in most willing—​does not judge itself so bad as to be unlivable. Second there’s the way this dissatisfaction is “taken up” (as I will put it) into a fuller positive project: it is taken up into the willing itself. The displeasure a healthy will feels as it strives is indeed a “negative affect,” but it is subordinate to the will’s fuller judgment that this striving is good. So the “pain” intrinsic to willing is just an ingredient in a larger “pleasure.” Again 87–​8:11[76] (WP.697, LNp214):  “One could perhaps generally describe pleasure as a rhythm of small Unlustreize [displeasure-​incitements].”84 The pleasure proper to will lies not in its satisfaction but in this dissatisfied striving. So 87–​8:11[75] (WP.696, LNp213): “the feeling of pleasure lies indeed in the dissatisfaction of the will.”85 80 Also 87–​8:11[77] (WP.694, LNp214), quoted in note 24. 81 Reginster [2006, 176]: “Suffering, as I take [Nietzsche] to understand this notion, is the experience of dissatisfied longing or desire.” 82 In a late note [88:14[4]‌(LNp240)] Nietzsche suggests that desire [Begierde] is agreeable if one believes oneself strong enough to reach its object; but if not: “Desire becomes a state of distress: as with Schopenhauer.” 83 88:14[174] (WP.702, LNp264): “So little is it necessary that displeasure results in a diminishing of our feeling of power, that in average cases it works indeed as incitement of this feeling of power,—​the hindrance is the stimulus of this will to power.” 84 The point is repeated in 88:14[173] (WP.699, LNp263), with the examples of “tickling” and “the sexual tickling in the act of coitus.” See, too, 85:35[15] (WP.658, LNp18). 85 86–​7:5[50] says that feeling pleasure “is a feeling of power which, to be aroused, presupposes as necessary small hinderings and feelings of displeasure.” See, too, 87–​8:11[111] (WP.704, LNp221),

146  Body Values Schopenhauer reveals his own hypersensitivity and “softness” in his interpretation of this omnipresent dissatisfaction as “suffering.” This is characteristic of our age, which shows “a sick sensitivity and excitability for pain” [BGE.293] and is determined “to see suffering everywhere” [83:8[21]].86 This sensitivity is due to our having now so little first-​hand experience of great pain, as GS.48 argues: it’s precisely because we know so much less about distress [Noth] and pain [Schmerz] than did people in the “age of fear, the longest of all ages” that “pain is hated more now than formerly; one speaks much worse of it.”87 So if Schopenhauer really does “suffer” from his will’s constant dissatisfaction, this is due not to the nature of willing, but to his uninformed and unhealthy attitude toward it. He suffers not in the necessary dissatisfaction but (in a second-​order feeling) about it; it is a kind of self-​pity. Schopenhauer’s essentialist arguments don’t address genuine suffering, then. But we’ve seen that his arguments “from cases” do. How does Nietzsche reply to (b) these many examples of the ways living things so often inflict dreadful suffering on one another? Here, too, he agrees with much of Schopenhauer’s picture of the world. Living things are indeed at a kind of war against one another. Driven by their separate wills to power, they do as a matter of course inflict suffering on one another; indeed they enjoy doing so. At issue, again, is the significance of this suffering.88 Here again Nietzsche thinks that what matters most is the setting of this feeling-​bad in the individual psyche. The question is whether this suffering is “taken up” into a positive project or instead draws attention away from such projects. Schopenhauer has assumed that suffering can only have negative value there unless it leads to the denial of the will to life.89 But just as the dissatisfaction involved in all willing is contained in the affirmative will to be more, so even those intense cases of suffering can be parts of a healthy and flourishing overall psyche (understood as a system of drives and affects). What’s important is the role of suffering in this full psychic economy. Even the feeling “this is worse than not living” can be incorporated (“taken up”) by a strong and positive will, and indeed the strongest such wills will even need to undergo such suffering.

88:22[20]. 88:14[173] (WP.699, LNp263) argues, on these grounds, that pain is not the “opposite” of pleasure. 86 GM.p.6, with regard to pity: “I am an opponent of the disgraceful modern softening of feeling.” Cf. von Tevenar [2019] on Nietzsche’s critique of this Verzärtlichung (becoming more tender). 87 86–​7:7[7]‌: “Our condition: prosperity makes sensibility grow; one suffers at the smallest suffering; our body is better protected, our soul sicker.” 88 Schacht [1983, 459] puts it well: “The issue is not whether suffering is an eradicable [sic] and pervasive feature of life, or whether it is onerous, but rather how much it matters, and what attitudes with respect to it are detrimental and conducive to the flourishing and enhancement of life.” 89 See Janaway [2007, 73].

Affects: Memory and Suffering  147 In his attention to the psychic context of suffering Nietzsche treats it as chiefly a human affect—​and this is another large difference from Schopenhauer, who needs to find it in all living things. To be sure, Schopenhauer does emphasize that humans suffer more than animals do. WWR I 56 [p310]: “in proportion as knowledge attains to distinctness, consciousness is enhanced, pain also increases, and consequently reaches its highest degree in man; and all the more, the more distinctly he knows and the more intelligent he is. The person in whom genius is to be found suffers most of all.”90 But Schopenhauer thinks that animal suffering is the same in kind, only less aware. So, in saying [p310] that he will focus on human cases: “Everyone will readily find the same thing once more in the life of the animal, only more feebly expressed in various degrees. He can also convince himself in the suffering animal world how essentially all life is suffering.” Nietzsche agrees that humans suffer more than animals.91 But the difference is so great as to be even a difference in kind.92 It’s not merely that we are more fully aware of physical pain; we have our own peculiar ways of suffering. Suffering is also more widespread among humans: it has been humans’ prevalent and even usual condition and a key factor in our psychic economy. Both its special character and its prevalence reflect the way suffering is entangled with the basic capacities, such as agency, that make us human and on which we most pride ourselves. Nietzsche undertakes to observe and study this distinctive human suffering as Schopenhauer never attempts to do. Schopenhauer is deterred (or exempted) from this empirical work by his supposition that suffering has a metaphysical source behind all living things. He doesn’t make use of the history and psychology needed to expose just how and why we typically suffer. And one consequence is that he lacks the perspective to interpret his own suffering.

4.3.3  Suffering’s genealogy and types As we look at Nietzsche’s genealogy of suffering we should remember that it’s an “affect” in his special sense. I’ve been calling suffering a “feeling” and will continue to do so. But a feeling, as we usually think of it, is a state that we pass in and out of. And we’ve seen (in §4.1) that Nietzsche’s focus (when he speaks of “affects”) is on the disposition behind the state—​on the standing ability and 90 Also WWR II 46 [p581]. 91 82–​3:4[177] says that human is “the most suffering creature.” Also 83:7[73], 85:37[3]‌(WP.990). 92 This makes him sometimes dismissive of the animal suffering to which Schopenhauer is so admirably attuned. So GM.ii.7 infamously says that the sufferings of all animals undergoing vivisection don’t compare to “one painful night of a single hysterical educated female.” See Shapshay’s defense [2019] of Schopenhauer’s “ethics of compassion” as extending inherent value to animals.

148  Body Values tendency, stronger or weaker, to be in such a state. Suffering is a “habit of response,” a habit that is partly instinctual but partly learned. It’s as a disposition to feel a certain way that suffering participates in the “economy” of drives and affects that makes us up: it’s this habit that struggles with other forces and that argues its judgment of life against theirs. GM.ii-​iii is Nietzsche’s most extended account of the development of human suffering.93 These two essays share the topic; suffering is little mentioned in GM’s first essay, but the second begins a treatment that the third completes. They give a complex genealogy for human suffering. They show its central role in the “taming” of the “human animal” for life in city and society. Suffering was a means in that taming and also, in a new form, a by-​product of it. This new form of suffering is then the cause of the “ascetic ideal,” with its pessimistic assessment of life: that ideal is an unsuccessful response to this suffering. Nietzsche’s story relies on a crucial background premise that we should get before us at once. Humans can put up with suffering, he insists, so long as they have a “meaning” [Sinn] for it. GM.ii.7: “What really outrages [one] against suffering is not suffering in itself, but the senselessness [Sinnlose] of suffering.” And GM.iii.28: “Human . . . does not negate suffering in itself: he wills it, he even seeks it out, presupposing that one shows him a meaning for it, a to-​this of suffering.” What kind of meaning does he mean? We think first, perhaps, of a justifying argument, but really he means (as he says) a “to-​this’ (i.e., a goal or value for a drive or will). Suffering, we’ve seen, is a habit of feeling-​bad “intensely”—​of feeling “this is worse than not living”; it makes a “local” judgment against life. But this affect is only one element in an individual’s overall “economy” of drives and affects. The question is whether this part’s assessment will prevail—​will induce an overall judgment against life. Such a judgment might lead to inertial despair or suicide, which both societies and their members have reasons to avoid. What one needs, to avoid this, is some strong positive project to oppose the depressive weight of the suffering. One needs a drive or will that controls this affect, that “commands” it into serving the positive project. One needs a drive that gives suffering a use. Just as lesser pains can be encompassed into pleasures, so even suffering can become a moment or element within a larger project that energizes and binds one to life. One suffers and feels the worthlessness of this living, but this suffering is “taken up” (as I’ve put it) as a step in a striving that judges life very much to be lived. This, I suggest, is what it is for suffering to be “given a meaning.”94 The suffering is thereby controlled and “commanded” into a positive effort. 93 My reading of these essays is indebted to Janaway [2007, esp. chs. 8 and 13], but I bring the problem of suffering more to the center than he does. 94 Gardner [2009, 25] proposes that it is a “non-​naturalistic moment” when GM.iii.28 introduces human’s “need for a meaning”: “no attempt is made to naturalize it: it is not treated at the physiological

Affects: Memory and Suffering  149 In the primary case, suffering provokes its own countermeasure: the drive for revenge. This is the way the body knows how to take up its suffering—​to “give a meaning” to it. One has the will to strike back at what causes the suffering—​to make it suffer in turn. One tries to correct the balance of power with that cause by returning the injury. This response to suffering is built deeply into us as instinct; it belongs to our animal past.95 GM.iii.15: “For every sufferer instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering; still more precisely, an agent, still more specifically, a guilty agent who is receptive to suffering.” This will to retaliate gives life a point, in immediate rebuttal to suffering. Indeed it also gives suffering a point: to fuel that project of revenge. And when suffering is given this purpose, its very character changes. One suffers “less,” in that the feeling “worse than not living” becomes an energizing lead-​in to the retaliating strike. This “primal” way to give meaning to suffering is crucial to Nietzsche’s story. Among other things, it is the root of ressentiment—​which is the frustrated state of this drive for revenge.96 So GM.i.10 attributes the slave revolt to “the ressentiment of creatures who, denied the authentic reaction, that of the act, compensate themselves by an imaginary revenge.”97 In ressentiment one suffers (or feels-​bad) over one’s inability to respond to some suffering by revenging oneself on the cause (or a stand-​in). Ressentiment is how one feels the damming-​up of a first-​ order suffering; when it can’t be taken up into the positive project, it becomes (as it were) “suffering squared.”98 GM.ii–​iii describe the many ramifications of this accumulating, unused suffering, and the many strategies to discharge it; morality is one. I think we can break up Nietzsche’s story about human suffering into three main points99; each makes an important correction of Schopenhauer. (1) The first point regards cruelty. As we saw, this is also a second-​order affect, a “positive feeling about suffering”—​ and especially an enjoyment of level, not historicized or made to seem a product of history, and nothing is said about its origin.” I try here to offer a plausibly Nietzschean account of this need. 95 D.15: “The oldest means of solace.—​First stage: human sees in every bad state and misfortune something for which he must make someone else suffer,—​in doing so he becomes conscious of his still existing power and this consoles him.” EH.i.6 speaks of “the genuine instinct for healing, which is the human instinct for weapons and war.” 96 In Nietzsche’s System [1996, 60] I treated ressentiment as the mix of envy and hatred that typifies the slave’s stance toward the master. But I now think that this is just one (important) case of the more pervasive phenomenon of ressentiment I now describe. 97 Cf. Jenkins [2016], who interprets ressentiment as “just a matter of experiencing vengefulness (Rache)”; instead, I suggest, it is to feel “vengefulness frustrated.” Jenkins well describes how interpreters have shied away from giving due attention to the importance that revenge has for Nietzsche. 98 We might also say that in ressentiment one suffers over the fact that another—​the inflicter of one’s suffering—​is not suffering, whereas pity is suffering that another is. 99 These points correspond to Janaway’s analysis [2007, 125–​6] of GM.ii’s argument about cruelty.

150  Body Values making-​suffer. Schopenhauer of course notices cruelty and adds it to the weight of things that make life bad. But it is a special condition for him, the mark of “very bad people” [WWR I 65 [p363]. Nietzsche’s revision of will into will to power builds a stronger motive for cruelty into life’s essence. Living things will power over others; they enjoy this power and enjoy the signs or evidence of it, which can include the suffering of those this power is over. And we’ve seen how cruelty has a further value within our instinctive response to our own suffering: the project of revenge aims to enjoy the other’s suffering. This enjoyment—​or the prospect of it—​is the natural antidote to one’s own suffering. When we feel life unlivable, we instinctively live to enjoy that another should feel it unlivable, too. Thus cruelty is the “meaning” (the value) the body gives to one’s suffering: it takes it up into the effort to make-​suffer, or at least to see-​suffer. Cruelty is our instinctual and bred-​in way to “take up” our own suffering. Thus human has a deep disposition to cruelty. GM.ii.6: “Seeing-​suffer does [one] good, making-​suffer still better—​this is a hard proposition, but an old, mighty, human-​all-​too-​human principle, to which perhaps even the apes would subscribe: for one says that they already richly herald and ‘prelude’ human in thinking up bizarre cruelties.” Early societies condoned and instituted means of venting this cruelty in public executions etc.; spectating suffering was “the great festival joy [Festfreude] of older humanity.”100 Because cruelty was “innocent” then [GM.ii.6]—​there was no moral opprobrium attached to it—​it could be openly recognized as giving value to suffering. Suffering was good because it could be enjoyed—​by spectators and especially by the one who inflicts it. GM.ii.7 says that “suffering is always marshalled forth as first among the arguments against existence,” but that formerly one saw the ability to make-​suffer as a “seductive lure to life.” Nietzsche speculates that gods were needed as spectators of all the human suffering not otherwise accessible to be enjoyed—​spectators to make this suffering not “meaningless” [ii.7]. And this meaning helps the sufferer insofar as he or she has the prospect of inflicting or at least spectating the suffering of some stand-​in for the cause. The sufferer may even feel that his or her suffering is a service to the community by helping its appeal to cruel gods [D.18]—​a motive especially powerful in an age in which members did not distinguish themselves from the community [D.9]. (2) Nietzsche’s second main point is that human suffering is historical. Schopenhauer can’t see the importance of history. He doesn’t see how humans, in becoming human, developed their own distinctive kind of suffering. The main event was the human animal’s “taming” for life in city and society—​the taming



100

See, too, D.18.

Affects: Memory and Suffering  151 that turned us into (by making us view ourselves as) agents.101 He thinks we underestimate how long and bloody this training has been—​how much suffering it imposed on our ancestors and how much it still imposes on us. GM.ii.3 says that “something of the terribleness still operates [nachwirkt]” in the “gloomy color in the life of a human and people.” The discipline was carried out by the threat of one kind of suffering—​ punishment by great physical pain—​but its effect was to subject us to a new and distinctively human kind of suffering. For this discipline has induced the suppression, disvaluing, and denigration of our aggressive drives and affects (including cruelty). Yet these drives and affects are rooted so deeply in us that they continue to work just as powerfully as ever. So we suffer from their frustration—​ from the constant conflict between the aims of our drives and the societal values that condemn them. GM.ii.16: “the greatest and strangest of sicknesses . . . from which human has not yet recovered, the suffering of human at human, at himself: as the consequence of a forceful separation from his animal past . . . a declaration of war against the old instincts on which his energy, desire, and terribleness had so far rested.”102 GM.ii and GM.iii treat this suffering as the great unrecognized fact about human history, the main explanation for morality, religion, and the “ascetic ideal.” Human was adapted for life in society—​well and good. But the great side effect of this training was to embed a split and conflict within human, which broadly sickens us. The result is a great depression of spirits in which life is felt—​ by too many too much of the time—​not worth living. GM.iii.13 says that the success of the ascetic ideal “expresses a great fact: the sickness in the type of human so far, at least of the human made tame, the physiological wrestling of human with death (more precisely: with the surfeit with life, with tiredness, with the wish for the ‘end’).”103 The “taming” of human not only spread this new form of suffering, it also curtailed that natural antidote to suffering: cruelty. Life in society requires that one not strike back in all the natural ways. So the new suffering can’t be taken up, and it builds and worsens. Its negative judgment against living isn’t countered by the positive, life-​engaging goal of being paid back by the suffering of others. Those spectacles of public tortures and executions are, after all, inadequate substitutes. Thus ressentiment becomes widespread. There is a great need

101 I elaborate Nietzsche’s genealogy of agency in Chapter 5 (§5.3). 102 GM.iii.20 speaks of human as “suffering from himself . . . somewhat like an animal shut in a cage.” 103 GM.ii.16 says that when the human animal’s instincts were “devalued and “disconnected,” “I believe there was never on earth such a feeling of misery, such a leaden unease [Missbehagen]—​and yet those old instincts had not all at once stopped making their demands!”

152  Body Values for suffering “to have a meaning” precisely because it has lost its original meaning and vent. Nietzsche’s account builds suffering into all of us just by being agents tasked to deny our drives. But it’s not that we all suffer equally. This affect is much stronger in some than in others. For there are, after all, great differences in the degree to which social members are required to deny their drives. There are also great differences in how far they are able to transmute their suffering into the natural pleasure of “striking back.” So this peculiarly human affect will be stronger for those at the bottom of the social hierarchy—​and will be reinforced there by more of the original kind of suffering from physical wants and pains. It is this (large) group who are closest to despair and pessimism. Nietzsche means these (but not himself), we’ll shortly see, when he refers to “the suffering” as a sector of the population.104 (3) Nietzsche’s third main point describes the fateful solution to this dilemma—​the new way human societies have found to take up that suffering. This is of course “bad conscience” [schlechtes Gewissen]. The priest induces the sufferer to blame the suffering on him/​herself. So he “changes the direction of ressentiment” [GM.iii.15]. The sufferer has been unable to vent his or her suffering on others but learns to vent it reflexively, upon him-​or herself. And this provides not just a meaning for the suffering, but a version of the primal meaning: the pleasure of cruelty, in making-​suffer, even though it is of oneself. Bad conscience is built on the simpler human attitude of “guilt” [Schuld]. This is, in the earliest and broadest sense, the feeling of “owing” something—​of a debt incurred in the past that one feels a need to repay (as we saw in §4.2). One “feels-​ bad” about this unpaid debt. The long “taming” of humans has greatly cultivated this sense of guilt, has intensified it into a new kind of suffering. Guilt is cultivated, in particular, over the member’s relation to society: he or she owes a debt to the society, and feels-​bad when it is not repaid. In this suffering in guilt we find the intersection between our two problems (of the past, of suffering).105 Bad conscience is then an enjoyment in inflicting this guilty suffering on oneself. So it is a three-​tiered phenomenon. One suffers first from those frustrated drives, repressed for social life. One then suffers a second way in feeling guilty over those drives and in blaming their first-​order suffering on them and on oneself. And yet, in imposing and embracing that guilty suffering, one finds something to enjoy: the cruel pleasure of inflicting this second-​order suffering on oneself. GM.ii.18:  bad conscience “makes itself suffer out of pleasure in 104 87:10[3]‌(LNp174) and 88:16[32] (WP.1041) distinguish “the suffering,” “the herd,” and “the majority.” BGE.62 says that Christianity and Buddhism are “religions for the suffering . . . who suffer from life as from a sickness.” 105 GM.ii.6 speaks of “that uncanny and perhaps now inextricable yoking of ideas ‘guilt and sorrow [Leid].’ ” We’ll return to Nietzsche’s account of the origins of guilt in Chapter 5 (§5.3).

Affects: Memory and Suffering  153 making-​suffer.” So bad conscience copes with that first suffering by the enjoyment of inflicting the second suffering upon oneself. Nietzsche thinks bad conscience is the main strategy invented so far to cope—​ at a social level—​with widespread suffering.106 It shows how we can (in a way) have that natural release for suffering after all if only we carry out this revenge on ourselves. This kind of self-​cruelty is something new in the world. And in this cruelty toward ourselves we are also able to enact and “unfrustrate” at least one of those bodily drives: the drive to exert power over some “other” by making it suffer. This strategy is closely related to the “ascetic ideal,” the main topic of GM.iii.107 Bad conscience blames our suffering from the drives’ dissatisfaction on those drives themselves, and this complaint expands to “the body” as the locus of these drives, to the material goods these drives desire, and, indeed, to the whole physical world. This rejection of the body and its world is supplemented by the invention of another “self ” with its proper home in another world. Z.i.3: “It was suffering and incapacity—​that created all afterworlds.” Here again we see the priest’s function of making suffering bearable and livable. Suffering’s judgment against life is turned into a stance “one can live with.” The practice and ideology of bad conscience spread because, in this way, it does work: it really does give the sufferer a positive project that takes up (employs) the suffering and so gives it a “meaning.” It takes up suffering into a strategy by which to live. GM.iii.20:  “with this system of procedures the old depression, heaviness, and weariness was basically overcome, life became very interesting again.” Nevertheless Nietzsche is clearly very critical of this strategy. His principal complaint is that bad conscience “makes sicker.” GM.iii.21: “such a system, even assuming it makes the sick ‘better,’ in any case makes them sicker.” How does it do so, despite giving the sufferer a sustaining project?

4.3.4  Sick and healthy suffering Here we turn from Nietzsche’s genealogy of human suffering to his assessment of its different forms. He distinguishes two basic kinds of suffering. They differ not in “how bad it feels,” but in this suffering’s causes and effects in the psyche. What’s crucial is whether this suffering—​with its judgment against life—​is controlled and used by positive and flourishing drives or is instead the leading voice

106 GM.iii.20: “The chief stroke the ascetic priest allowed himself . . . was to make use of the feeling of guilt.” 107 I treat the ascetic ideal more closely in Chapter 7 (§7.4) and will be very brief here.

154  Body Values and viewpoint in the person. We can call these, for convenience, healthy and sick suffering. We looked at Nietzsche’s distinction between health and sickness in Chapter 2 (§2.5). We defined health as “aiming well at power”; sickness is a deficiency in this basic directedness. One aims well or poorly in the values-​signs by which one tries to grow. So the distinction is tied to the idea of will to power. We should also bear in mind that Nietzsche applies this criterion in his usual two ways; he asks: (i) does the thing express/​result from health or sickness, and (ii) does the thing cause/​promote health or sickness? But he thinks that the answers usually agree: if x expresses sickness, it’s most likely also to further sickness and vice versa. How then does this healthy/​sick criterion apply to cases of suffering? Nietzsche often links suffering with sickness in a way that may suggest that he thinks them interchangeable. So BGE.62 speaks of “the excess of failures, of the sick, degenerating, infirm, who suffer necessarily”; it says that Christianity and Buddhism are “religions for sufferers, they agree with all those who suffer life like a sickness and wish to establish that every other feeling about life should count as false and impossible.” And GM.iii.15 says that the priest’s Reich is “mastery over sufferers.” But of course he can’t think that all suffering expresses or causes sickness because he attributes suffering to his highest types—​and to himself—​and thinks that it there takes a healthy form. BGE.270:  “Deep suffering makes noble; it separates.’ ”108 So when he speaks of “the suffering” as if they were ipso facto sick, he must mean those who are “ruled” by their suffering—​those in whom suffering’s judgment against life prevails, commanding their other drives and affects to adopt its view. Suffering thus infects their other drives and affects with its negative view; it depresses and undermines them, deflating their sense of their own worth. This is what bad conscience—​enjoyment in inflicting guilt on oneself—​does and why Nietzsche thinks it “makes sicker.” It damages one’s active will to grow, as this is distributed through one’s drives and affects. For it adopts, at bottom, suffering’s negative view of life. With the allied ascetic ideal, it agrees with this affect that our life—​this real life we live in our bodies—​is “not worth living.” So although bad conscience “takes up” suffering into a striving, that striving retains suffering’s judgment against life, a verdict that inhibits and diminishes all one’s other affects and drives. It discredits and disheartens this bodily life, all the while it helps one to bear up under the suffering it involves. However it’s also possible to suffer just as intensely yet within an active and expanding life that “masters” the suffering and “takes it up” (as I’ve been putting

108 BGE.225: “The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—​do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of human so far?”

Affects: Memory and Suffering  155 it) into a positive effort.109 Here the point is not that a bad period of suffering gets replaced by a good period of enjoyment. The very character of that suffering is transmuted without ceasing to be suffering. All the while one feels it “better not to be,” one feels this as part of a life one loves. The positive project doesn’t just replace the suffering in a new episode, it interprets and uses the suffering while one suffers. This, I suggest, is the “tragic” stance Nietzsche attributes to the Greeks and to “the Dionysian.”110 For this healthier taking-​up of suffering one needs strong positive drives. In 84:25[157]: “The highest humans suffer the most am Dasein—​but they have also the greatest counter-​forces.” Only strong drives can give suffering a positive point. Their capacity to “master” suffering in this way is a principal mark or indicator of their strength. They are able to control other wills in part because of this greater capacity to tolerate suffering in their struggle. Indeed Nietzsche thinks that those “highest humans” will not just be better able to bear suffering, they will even inflict it on themselves. For these are the individuals who want not just “more of the same” but to make a qualitative advance: a leap, into a new kind. Such “self-​overcoming” imposes suffering on oneself as it destroys old habits to make new ones. The old drive-​and affect-​values, still potent, condemn the new activity; one suffers in the struggle to settle new habits and values into oneself. One of Nietzsche’s names for this kind of leap is “creating,” which therefore inflicts suffering but also redeems it.111 It inflicts suffering on itself, and hence involves, like bad conscience, a kind of self-​cruelty. But unlike bad conscience it inflicts this suffering within a strategy to grow, which makes it healthy. This aim gives a positive meaning to the suffering even as it happens, without however reducing its intensity; the obvious analogy, which Nietzsche often makes, is childbirth.112 Nietzsche addresses the difference between healthy and sick suffering in GS.370: “there are two kinds of sufferers, first those suffering from overfullness of life, . . . and then those suffering from impoverishment of life.” It is also the distinction he makes between Dionysus and Christ, both of them suffering martyrs. So 109 88:20[84]: “this alone redeems from all suffering—​/​choose now: /​quick death /​or long love.” (Earlier versions of the thought: 82–​3:5[1.207], 83:12[16].) 110 87:10[167] (WP.852): “It is the heroic spirits who say Yes to themselves in tragic cruelty: they are hard enough, to experience suffering as pleasure.” TI.iii.6: “The tragic artist is not a pessimist,—​he says Yes to everything questionable and frightful, he is Dionysian.” 111 Z.ii.2:  “Creating—​that is the great redemption from suffering, and the becoming-​lighter of life. But that the creator may be, that itself requires suffering and much transformation.” I discuss Nietzsche’s idea of creating in Chapter 11 (§11.2). 112 TI.x.4: “In the mystery-​teaching pain is pronounced holy: the ‘woes of the child-​bearer [Wehen der Gebärerin]’ sanctify pain in general. . . . So that there is pleasure of creating, so that the will to life eternally affirms itself, there must eternally also be the ‘agony [Qual] of the child-​bearer.’ ” Also Z.ii.2 and (its draft) 82–​3:5[1.226].

156  Body Values 88:14[89] (WP.1052): “the problem is about the meaning of suffering: whether a Christian sense, or a tragic sense . . . In the first case it should be the path to a holy being [i.e., an otherworldy existence], in the latter being counts as holy enough, to justify an enormity of sorrow.” In both cases, sick and healthy, suffering is embraced and even willed: it’s built into the idea of god. But they give opposite meanings to it. In the first (sick) case the suffering is valued as a means to get one out of life. Suffering is enthroned as the appropriate and most useful attitude toward life: in particular the suffering in guilt, which we inflict on ourselves and learn to enjoy the sight of. This way of “taking up” suffering is cultivated by the prevailing morality and religion; it makes life livable despite its acceptance of suffering’s judgment against life. In the latter (healthy) case suffering is valued as inherent in the greatest, transformative growth. In 83:16[79]: “The will to suffering is immediately there, when power is great enough.” And 83:16[49]: “The will to suffering—​to taking suffering deeply, as means to transformation.” Finally 82:1[36]: “To reduce suffering and to rid oneself of suffering (i.e., of life)—​is that moral? /​To create suffering—​for oneself and others—​to make them capable of the highest life, that of the victor—​ would be my goal.” Suffering is especially needed by the drive Nietzsche values most—​the drive to face and understand reality. BGE.270 speaks of: “[t]‌he spiritual arrogance and disgust of every human who has suffered deeply—​it almost determines rank-​ order how deeply humans are able to suffer—​, his shuddering certainty . . . that by virtue of his suffering he knows more than the cleverest and wisest can know.” And D.18: “Every smallest step on the field of free thinking, of life shaped personally, has always had to be fought for with spiritual and bodily tortures.” By contrast it is the sick wills, in which suffering has shaped the overall judgment of life, that are least able to face truth. A.15: “Who alone has grounds to lie himself out of reality? One who suffers at it. But to suffer at reality means to be an unsuccessful [unverglückte] reality. . . . The preponderance of displeasure-​feelings over pleasure-​feelings is the cause of that fictional morality and religion: but such a preponderance gives a formula for décadence.” There will be much more to say about Nietzsche’s notion of suffering and his strategy for “redeeming” it.113 But most of this lies some ways ahead, when we turn to Nietzsche’s own values in Part III. And first we need to see much more fully his diagnosis of the problems to which these new values respond. These problems have their roots, we’ve just seen, in our “animal” nature—​in deep 113 In Chapter 7 (§7.3) we’ll look at Nietzsche’s attack on the virtue of pity, as Mitleid or suffering-​ with. In Chapter  12 (§12.2) I’ll develop the positive meaning that his “new religion” will give to suffering.

Affects: Memory and Suffering  157 features we share with all living things. So the problem of the past and the problem of suffering are both rooted in our basic affectivity. But human problems go far beyond these. We turn next, in Part II, to Nietzsche’s account of the human and to the ways he finds us “all-​too-​human.” Humans value in their drives and affects in the ways all animals do. But they also value in a distinctive new way superimposed on that “bodily” valuing. This new way of valuing (i.e., of having signs for ends) makes possible their great achievements. But it is also deeply flawed both epistemically and practically. Nietzsche diagnoses these flaws and commends a general strategy: by working to “incorporate the truth” about this valuing into that valuing itself, we can correct not just its epistemic defects—​can make it true—​but also its practical ones—​can make it healthy.

PART II

HUMA N  VA LU E S

5

Human Agency as Our Life-​Condition

Our focus so far has been on what Nietzsche often calls our “animal” nature and on the way it values. In one sense this is “all” of us: we’re nothing more than our body with its drives and affects. And yet, he thinks, although we humans are animals we have also become something more. Our drives and affects have taken special forms and been joined into a special structure. These changes produce a distinctively “human” kind of valuing—​to which we now turn. Nietzsche has a complex and divided view of “the human” and of its values. This part’s four chapters treat in turn human’s agency, language, morality, and freedom. In turning to this human way of valuing we are turning to what we usually call (simply) “values.” We’ve seen that Nietzsche himself applies the word much more broadly: all living things value—​and we value as they do merely in our drives and affects. But he also has—​of course—​ideas about the conscious and worded values to which we usually restrict the term. Characteristically, he tries to deflate our pride in these human values; he suggests that they are less reliable guides to our good than the values in our drives and affects. He is largely, distinctively, critical of these values, agitating for another radical shift: we should be reaching for a “superhuman” way of valuing values. Here we begin to see why. Nietzsche’s chief term on this topic is Mensch, which I will consistently translate as “human.” But I will employ a special usage of the word: it will help to use “human” just as Nietzsche does “Mensch,” and as we use “man” or “woman”: to speak in a way that fuses a collective referent—​to the sum total of humans—​with an individual one, taking that sum as concentrated in and represented by a “typical” human. Hearing “human” in this way, we can use it in place of the gender-​ specific “man.”1 So, in this new locution, “human” (not just “man”) values in a new way that we need to determine. First a word on the “scope” of the term, the concrete things to which Nietzsche applies it: these are the members of what we would now call a clade. Humans are all the organisms descended from a common ancestor and sharing a 1 Where feasible (not grating to my own ear) I’ll also translate the linked pronoun as “it” rather than “him”: e.g., “human wills its own power.” Of course I’ll translate Nietzsche’s (less common) uses of “Mann” as “man.” Nietzsche’s Values. John Richardson, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190098230.001.0001

162  Human Values distinguishing innovation with that ancestor and one another. Or, as he sometimes thinks it, human is the clade itself, the whole developing “line” that carries that innovation. 86–​7:7[2]‌(WP.678, LNp129): “Human is not just an individual, but the onliving organic totality in one particular line.” The innovation that inaugurated the type human is a cluster of capacities involving consciousness and language—​those we now need to identify. These capacities are transmitted both genetically and culturally. Crucially, they make possible a new way of having values. Humans are all the offspring from that innovation. And—​in Nietzsche’s particularized use of Mensch—​he embodies them in a new character who now comes on stage, a token human who stands in for all the kind. Here, in the part’s first chapter, I examine Nietzsche’s account of these central capacities that make us human [menschlich]. We humans conceive of these capacities as our “subjectivity” and “agency”—​this is our sense of what’s happening as we exercise these capacities. We take it, in particular, that it’s as subject and agent that we value. This assumption has been built into our human way of valuing: as human values, it views itself as a subject and agent. As we know, Nietzsche argues over and again that this self-​conception is false: we are not subjects or agents as we’ve taken ourselves to be. This chapter’s main challenge is to map the consequences of this denial. How does Nietzsche explain human’s new way of valuing if there’s really no subject or agent that carries it out? And is it really a “mistake” to posit ourselves as agents if this posit is indispensable for us—​part of our human perspective? Wouldn’t that make it, by Nietzsche’s own lights, “true for us’ (i.e., perspectivally true)? And if he does insist that it’s false, does he want us somehow to give up this posit? I’ll begin in §5.1 by surveying Nietzsche’s arguments against the subject and agent. These are fictions; our thinking and acting are carried out by factors—​ drives and affects—​quite different in kind. Still, these fictions play crucial roles in making us human; they make possible what we might call “agency without an agent.” A key part of the innovation that distinguishes human is that its drives and affects operate under these fictions. Some of our drives, that is, take themselves to be such a subject, while others—​it’s important to add—​take themselves to be outside and against this subject. Agency consists in these conditions and attitudes of the drives. Nietzsche’s account of our special human capacities is naturalistic. They are the capacities of an organism, capacities that evolved and that now (as we saw) constitute a clade. He offers this naturalistic story in contrast to Kant’s “transcendental” treatment of subjectivity and agency; §5.2 examines this relationship. Whereas Kant found (belief in) subjectivity and agency to be “conditions of the possibility” of experience and of acting, Nietzsche finds them conditions of a Darwinian sort. We posit ourselves as subjects and

Human: Agency as Our Life-Condition  163 agents because doing so improved our ancestors’ fitness—​helped human to survive and increase and indeed founded its clade. By thus naturalizing Kant’s transcendental conditions Nietzsche thinks that he strips away their power to justify. He insists that the posits of subject and agent are false and refuses the inference—​which we might have expected his perspectivism to favor—​that they are “human truths.” The key reason, I will argue, is that Nietzsche thinks the naturalistic explanation shows that these posits of subject and agent might not be inevitable and immutable. Once again our guiding question comes into play: Can the truth be incorporated? Can human “live in the light of ” what it really is—​ in particular, in the recognition that it is not a subject or agent? I will argue that Nietzsche’s great difference from Kant—​his reason for rejecting transcendental justifications of our agential posits—​is that he thinks it’s an open question whether we can learn to live without these posits. He holds fast to the falsity of those posits in order to challenge human to make this attempt. It’s not enough to deliberately think or say that we’re not subjects/​agents—​it’s easy enough to do this. We must push this insight down into our implicit and habitual viewpoint. Or at least we should “experiment” whether this is possible for us. The viability and value of “seeing through” the illusion of oneself as subject and agent will be clearer when we understand just why we view ourselves so. On Nietzsche’s evolutionary view this is the question of what functions this self-​ conception was selected and designed for. So we turn next, in §5.3, to his genealogy of the subject/​agent (i.e., of our conception of ourselves as such). When we see that this self-​conception was designed particularly to “socialize” us in certain ways—​as he puts it, to “tame” and “herd” us—​we understand better how it works and why we should try to overcome it. So the first three sections show, in turn, that we are not subjects or agents, that thinking ourselves so has evolved as a life-​ condition, but that the functions for which this self-​conception evolved give us further reasons to distrust it: it’s not just false, it’s harmful. Closely connected to this idea that it’s a subject/​agent who values is an assumption about the status or force of human’s values: they make an implicit claim to truth. We’ll look at this further posit in §5.4. This truth-​claim amounts to a kind of meta-​value presupposed by all our particular human values: they’re all meant “as true.” And this, Nietzsche thinks, is what’s most deeply problematic about them. By this truth-​posit built into all of our (conscious-​linguistic) valuing, we humans have acquired a second basic allegiance, besides that to life or power (which we share with animals) and partly at odds with it. Nietzsche thinks that human’s two valuative projects—​one (for life/​power) in its bodily drives and affects, the other (for truth) in its values “as a person”—​are in powerful tension; it’s our pressing task to find some resolution for it.

164  Human Values

5.1  Doubts against the subject/​agent Nietzsche is a frequent and emphatic critic of “the subject” [das Subjekt]. This is “the thing that thinks,” in the broad Cartesian sense of being the thing that “is conscious”—​to whom conscious experience is (as it were) presented. And together with this he is also a critic of what he calls das Thäter, which I will translate as “the agent.” This is “the thing that acts,” in the sense that it steers (and so causes) its behavior by choices and reasons; Nietzsche mainly questions this agent by attacking our idea that we have a faculty of “will.” So he wants, it seems, to talk us out of both of these usual views of ourselves: we are not such things, indeed there are no such things. Let’s consider them in turn. a. The subject. Nietzsche’s attacks on the subject [Subjekt] are especially prominent.2 They are closely linked with his attack on the “I” [Ich].3 This critique is stressed in Beyond Good and Evil, beginning in the Foreword, which speaks of “the soul-​superstition, which as subject-​and I-​superstition has even today not yet ceased to found confusion.” I think there are three main points in our standard conception of the subject or I that he particularly attacks. The first is suggested by this linking of subject and I: our confidence in the subject is rooted in grammar. The subject is the referent of the grammatical subject, above all where this occurs as “I.” This subject is (purported to be) the thing that “has” the property or “does” the doing the predicate names. So the subject is a thing or substance on which those predicates depend. Second, this subject-​thing is one thing not just at a moment but through time. It is something that lasts, indeed through all the length of a person’s life. This aspect of the subject is prominent in another associated term, “soul” [Seele], in which this duration is imagined extended to immortality. Third, the subject essentially does just one (kind of) thing: it “thinks” in the broad Cartesian sense, it “is conscious.” The subject does this one thing, and this doing is completely transparent to it: the subject knows what it’s conscious of more immediately and indubitably than it knows anything else. It’s important to bear in mind where Nietzsche thinks these three self-​ conceptions occur. Of course they are accepted and voiced by many humans—​ philosophers or not—​as explicit claims to themselves and others. But this isn’t what makes these views important; they have a broader and deeper presence in us. Nietzsche is addressing errors he thinks have been made not just episodically by some in their stated positions, but by all of us constantly, in our background 2 In 87:9[91] (WP.552): “Once one has grasped that the ‘subject’ is nothing that effects, but only a fiction, many things follow.” 87:9[108] (WP.370): “The ‘subject’ is only a fiction; the ego [Ego] of which one speaks when one censures egoism does not exist at all.” 3 TI.vi.3 links them; it continues: “[the I] has become a fable, a fiction, a play on words: it has quite thoroughly ceased to think, to feel, and to will!” Also, e.g., 85–​6:2[67].

Human: Agency as Our Life-Condition  165 and structuring views.4 They are “sunk ‘into the unconscious’ ” as 86:4[8]‌ (LNp104) puts it. Paradoxically, it’s in this unconscious that we principally posit ourselves as subjects; we do so even if our stated positions contradict it. BGE.54 stresses the role of grammar in this illusion: “Once one believed in ‘the soul’ as one believed in grammar and the grammatical subject: one said, ‘I’ is condition, ‘think’ is predicate and conditioned—​thinking is an activity, for which the subject must be thought as cause.”5 This might suggest that the error is just an unfortunate happenstance of language. But Nietzsche sees that not all languages work this way; some have grammars that don’t thus presume subjects.6 He thinks that faith in a subject is still universal because it’s lodged beneath language in a deeply working “reason” that structures our experience.7 The separation of subject from predicate is tightly linked with the distinction between cause and effect. The subject is understood as the cause of the thinking, and this is in fact our original model for all causality. In 85–​6:1[38] (LNp57): “NB. The belief in causality goes back to the belief, that it is I that effects, on the division of ‘soul’ from its activity. Thus an age-​old superstition!”8 And in 85–​6:1[39]: “The tracing back of an effecting to a cause is: back to a subject. All changes count as brought forth by subjects.” We have an immediate (but false) impression of our own efficacy as subjects, and then we extrapolate: we posit a cause—​a doer—​for changes quite generally. (We’ll return to this when we look at the agent.) BGE’s critique most targets the subject’s second aspect: its (claimed) lasting unity or oneness. We attribute a very strong kind of unity: it has no parts and so can’t be taken apart. Both the grammatical use of “I” and the apparent singleness of consciousness seem to support this. On the basis of this unity we then assign a special stability and lastingness to the subject. So BGE.12 attacks “soul-​ atomism” as the belief in “the soul as something unbreakable, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon.”9 It goes on to say that if we reject this atomism we needn’t therefore give up “the soul,” but that “concepts like ‘mortal soul’ and ‘soul

4 85–​6:2[83] (WP.550, LNp74): “The entire full deep belief in subject and predicate or in cause and effect is stuck into every judgment.” 5 85:35[35] (LNp21): “Belief in grammar, in the linguistic subject, object, in the action-​words has up to now subjugated metaphysicians: I teach swearing off this belief.” Also BGE.34, GS.354, TI.iii.5; 85:40[23]. 6 BGE.20 says that the concept of the subject is less developed in the Ural-​Altaic languages. 7 GM.i.13:  “the seduction of language (and the basic errors of reason petrified therein) . . . understands and misunderstands all effecting [Wirken] as conditioned by an effecting [thing] [Wirkendes], by a ‘subject.’ ” 8 Also 85–​6:2[83] (WP.550, LNp74), which asks whether animals might also see “intentions in all happening.” 9 This, too, is then applied elsewhere. 85–​6:1[32]: “the assumption of atoms is only a consequence of the subject-​and substance-​concept. . . . The atom is the last descendant of the soul-​concept.” Cf. HH.ii.17.

166  Human Values as subject-​manifold’ and ‘soul as social structure of drives and affects’ have from now on citizenship in science.” Notice how this passage licenses us to continue to speak of one thing, one soul, if we understand it as a synthetic kind of thing: really a multiplicity of things, though with a structure that to some extent unites them.10 Nietzsche doesn’t deny that there can be “one thing” there where the subject was taken to be. In 85:34[46] (LNp2]: “If I have anything of a unity in me, it certainly does not lie in the conscious I and in feeling, willing, thinking, but somewhere else: in the preserving, appropriating, eliminating, watchful prudence of my whole organism, of which my conscious I is only a tool.”11 Nietzsche insists, however, that this one thing is a (structured) plurality of the real thinkers of my thoughts—​things he’s even willing to call “subjects.” In 85:40[42] (WP.490):  “The assumption of one subject is perhaps not necessary: perhaps it is just as allowable to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interplay and struggle lie at the basis of our thinking and of our consciousness generally?” Of course he means our drives and affects as these “subjects.” During their “interplay and struggle” they form passing combinations, and it’s these that are more strictly the “things that think.” However, these balances of drives and affects are typically quite fleeting. See 87:9[98] (WP.488):  “No subject-​‘atoms.’ The sphere of a subject constantly growing or shrinking—​the mid-​point of the system constantly shifting.”12 Nietzsche’s third objection to our idea of the subject attacks its claimed consciousness. We take the subject to be “conscious” in a particularly thorough way:  all it does is be conscious, and its consciousness is an illuminated field within which anything that appears is also known. One of Nietzsche’s main points about the drives and affects is that they work mainly unconsciously so that their doings are very much not available that way. Our conscious thinking is preceded and underlain by unconscious yet intelligent processes. In 85:40[15] (WP.532, LNp43): “Before the judgment occurs, the process of assimilation must already have been done: thus here too there lies an intellectual activity that doesn’t enter consciousness.” In Chapter 3 we saw the rich intentionality Nietzsche attributes to the drives, lying in their use and communication of a complex array of signs that need not “rise” to consciousness. 10 85–​6:2[87] (WP.561): “All unity is unity only as organization and interplay.” 11 85–​6:1[87] (WP.371, LNp61): “The ‘I’ (which is not one with the unitary management of our being!) is indeed only a conceptual synthesis.” Also 85–​6:1[72] on an underlying “physiological ‘unity.’ ” 12 85:40[42] (WP.490) goes on to cite “the constant transitoriness and fleetingness of the subject.” 85–​6:1[61] (LNp60): “Every thought, every feeling, every will is not born from one determinate drive, but is a total state, a whole surface of the whole consciousness and results from the momentary power-​fixation of all of the drives that constitute us. . . . The next thought is a sign of how the whole power-​situation has shifted in the meantime.”

Human: Agency as Our Life-Condition  167 We must interpret the drives’ unconsciousness carefully, however. If the drives and affects (or syntheses of them) are the real “subjects,” then it must be they that think. And where thinking is conscious, it must be they that think consciously. They “step into the place” of the ego, as Nietzsche puts it.13 So he allows that it’s the drives that “are conscious,” but only with the proviso that most of their doings lie quite outside that “illuminated field”. The drives carry out our conscious thinking, but most of their workings take place below the “surface” of that consciousness. Thus drives are not transparent to themselves in the way we take the subject to be. Yet when drives think, they themselves enter this illusion intrinsic to conscious thinking, of being that single subject that knows itself and its motives. A drive (or drive-​synthesis) takes itself, as it thinks, to be not the drive it really is but the one single and persisting subject of all the human’s thoughts. This illusion helps produce a certain real constancy in the person. In 85:35[35] (LNp20–​ 1): “What separates me most basically from the metaphysicians is this: I do not grant them that it is the ‘I’ that thinks: much rather I take the I itself as a construction of thinking, . . . hence as regulative fiction, with whose help a kind of constancy, therefore ‘knowability’ is set into, invented into a world of becoming.” b. The agent. Let’s leave the notion of the subject here for the moment and turn to Nietzsche’s critique of the agent.14 I will usually translate his term Thäter as “agent,” though at times it has a broader sense that might better be rendered “doer” (which, however, I’ll reserve to translate Thuende). With it he targets the (supposed) thing that doesn’t merely cause effects, but that acts, in the rich sense of producing effects with a special causality involving a motive [Motiv] (or intention [Absicht]) and will. The agent is, we might say, the subject in its practical side, as a doer.15 So the agent likewise has those three features we’ve just distinguished. Agency adds two further features, I suggest. First, the agent operates (it supposes) by a certain “causal schema”: out of a choice among reasons, it arrives at a motive (or intention) that it then carries out by its will. These points belong (I suggest) to our ordinary sense of the special way in which we humans “act,” and Nietzsche treats—​and criticizes—​all of them. Second, this agent, causing its actions in this 13 In 80:6[70] Nietzsche analyzes the ego as “a multiplicity of person-​like forces, of which now this, now that one stands in the foreground as ego” and regards the others as external to it. And in 83:7[239]: “when the drive steps into consciousness.” 14 Compare the analysis by Leiter [2002, 78–​112]; he says that Nietzsche criticizes three “descriptive claims about the nature of human agents pertaining to free will, the transparency of the self, and the essential similarity of all people” [78]. I treat the first two points here, and address issues of similarity in Chapter 6. 15 But Nietzsche also suggests that the agent was posited before the subject. TI.vi.3: “the conception of a consciousness (‘spirit’) as cause and later still that of the I (the ‘subject’) as cause are born later, after the causality of will is established as given.” Also relevant here is 85–​6:1[16] (LNp55): “Thoughts are actions [Gedanken sind Handlungen].”

168  Human Values special way, is (it supposes) “free.” In its capacity to choose, the agent is able to will anything: nothing outside it determines its choice. Nietzsche addresses that “causal schema” for agency in his frequent attacks on will. These target not (of course) the sort of will he believes in, will to power, but “the will” as a faculty or instrument of an agent. This will is (supposed to be) the agent’s effective part, its ability-​and-​effort to act on the basis of motive, choice, and reasons. We have great confidence that we really are effective this way; so TI.vi.3: “We believed ourselves causal in the act of will; we thought that here at least we caught causality in the act.” But Nietzsche rejects the whole picture. Later in TI.vi.3: “The will moves nothing any more, hence also explains nothing any more—​it merely accompanies processes, but can also be absent. The so-​called ‘motive’: another error. Just a surface phenomenon of consciousness, something “to the side” of the act, that sooner hides the antecedentia of an act, than shows them.”16 Nietzsche’s critiques of will and agency take several forms, in seeming conflict with one another. In fact he articulates four distinct positions regarding the agent as cause. (i) The agent doesn’t exist. All that’s real are the doings, and there isn’t any “doer behind the doing.” (ii) Agency is epiphenomenal. Things are quite thoroughly settled elsewhere in us—​in our bodily drives in particular—​and our “decisions” based on conscious values are mere secondary effects of those real causalities. (iii) Agency is effective but harmful. Nietzsche diagnoses moral agency as ascetic and anti-​life and as all-​too-​effective in suppressing and denigrating the drives. (iv) Agency is effective as a tool of the drives. Still elsewhere he diagnoses our conscious motives as steered by the drives for their hidden purposes. Let’s take these in turn. (i) Sometimes Nietzsche pushes his critique all the way: there’s no agent, nor indeed any subject—​nothing at all that thinks or acts. He hints at this point in BGE.17: “even with this ‘it thinks’ too much has been done: even this ‘it’ contains an interpretation of the process and does not belong to the process itself. One infers here after the grammatical habit ‘thinking is an activity [Thätigkeit], to every activity belongs something that is active [thätig], therefore—​.’ ” The radical point is stated outright in a famous passage in GM.i.13: “A quantum [of] force is just such a quantum [of] driving, willing, effecting [Wirken]—​further, it is indeed nothing other than just this driving, willing, effecting itself.”17 Here Nietzsche suggests

16 D.130 says that “perhaps there exist neither wills nor purposes, and we have only imagined them”; cf. D.124. 87:9[98] (WP.488, LNp158–​9) speaks of our “habit of regarding all our doing as a result of our will. . . . But there is no will.” 17 GM.i.13 famously goes on to compare this with the identity of the lightning with the flash. Cf. 85–​6:2[78], 85–​6:2[84] (WP.531, LNp75–​6), 85–​6:2[193] (WP.548, LNp96–​7). 87–​8:11[113] goes

Human: Agency as Our Life-Condition  169 an ontology of processes in place of things, which other passages develop. The world is becoming not being, and subjects are deleted from the world along with all other beings.18 (ii) Other times Nietzsche treats choices and motives as epiphenomenal to the causal circuit that really produces the action.19 They are offshoots or byproducts of that process. He compares them to a surface that conceals the real causes.20 In many cases they are constructed after the action and then back-​dated. See 85–​6:1[61] (LNp60):  “Everything that enters consciousness is the last link of a chain, a close.”21 What really produces the doing are the human’s drives and affects—​the combination of these that is uppermost at the moment.22 The conscious experiences of (as it were) choosing for a reason and acting from a motive run off apart from that main causal line. They are, above all, the ways that one interprets and “sells” one’s behavior to oneself and to others. In 85:34[53] (LNp4):  “the purpose [Zweck], the motive are means of making a happening graspable, practicable.” (iii) Still other times Nietzsche treats agency not as ineffective in this way, but as indeed harmful: it does have effects, but bad ones. This critique takes a couple of main forms. First, Nietzsche warns that agency represents the interests of society, not of the individual human itself. Human is trained into agency for the purpose of social control, which works largely on its homogenization with other social members. So the freedom and individuality the agent attributes to itself are largely deceptions. (I’ll treat this criticism especially in Chapter 6.) Second, Nietzsche warns that agency’s design for social control has also made it into a device for suppressing and denying the drives. Its principal function is to restrain us from acting on the most “aggressive” drives that would most disrupt social order. (I’ll treat this especially in Chapter 7.)

still further and denies even that thinking occurs: “both the doing [Thun] and the agent [Thäter] are faked [fingirt].” 18 I presented this “theory of becoming” in Nietzsche’s System [1996, ch. 1]. 19 Leiter [2007] reads Nietzsche to treat choice as epiphenomenal. 20 BGE.32: “all of [an action’s] intentionality, all that can be seen, known, ‘conscious’ about it, still belongs to its surface and skin—​which, like every skin, betrays something but conceals even more. In short we believe that the intention is merely a sign and symptom that still requires interpretation.” Cf. 85–​6:1[76]. 21 GS.111: “The course of logical thoughts and inferences in our brain today corresponds to a process and struggle of drives that are individually all very illogical and unjust; we ordinarily experience only the result of the struggle: so quickly and so secretly does this primeval mechanism now play itself out in us.” See 85:34[54] (LNp4) regarding this “reversed temporal order.” 22 83:7[76]:  “Animals follow their drives and affects:  we are animals. Do we do anything else? Perhaps it is only an appearance, when we follow morality? In truth we follow our drives, and morality is only a sign-​language of the drives?”

170  Human Values (iv) On still other occasions Nietzsche treats agency as effective in a more positive way:  the agent is a kind of tool for the drives.23 So Z.i.4:  “Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, stands a mighty commander, an unknown wise [one]—​he is called Self. In your body he dwells, he is your body. /​ . . . The creating body created spirit for itself as a hand of its will.” And GS.335: “our opinions, valuations, and tables of goods are certainly some of the most powerful levers in the machinery of our actions [Handlungen].” These are levers inasmuch as they are especially effective points through which to alter behavior. So choices, motives, efforts of will are effective, but as means and instruments wielded by the drives and affects. And the real aims, in the drives, may be different and even opposite to the motives we consciously steer by. Can we gather these positions into a coherent view? I  think we must start by setting to the side the sweeping denials of any doer collected in (i). As mentioned, these mainly express his overall ontology of becoming or process: they deny not merely the agent [Thäter], but also any doer [Thuende] at all, any thing distinct from a doing [Thun] or happening.24 So they apply just as much to drives and affects as they do to the agent. But obviously Nietzsche continues to speak of things and doers himself. If he takes his process ontology as settled, then he must mean these expressions as a simplifying façon de parler and must grant us the right to it, too. Whether speaking of drives or of agents, we agree to understand ourselves to be speaking of what are really certain continuities or patterns of behavior through time.25 By contrast (ii) bears more specifically against agents. It questions whether there are even any effective processes at work in agency. If our conscious purposes and willing are merely epiphenomenal, it seems we must give up speaking of “agency” as if it were a cause or explanation at all—​the main role we use it for. We can’t respond to this criticism by defending agency-​talk as a “manner of speaking.” But what helps us here is a crucial recognition, which opens the way to Nietzsche’s view of agency. We have so far been accepting agency’s own understanding of itself. We have taken “agency” to be defined by its self-​conception

23 See, too, 85–​6:1[124] (LNp63): “what we call ‘consciousness’ and ‘spirit’ is only a means and tool. . . .” Also 85:40[38] (LNp45) on intellect as a tool in the hands of the affects. Leiter [2007] calls this the “Will as Secondary Cause” reading. 24 85–​6:2[139] (WP.631, LNp88):  “The separation of ‘doing’ from ‘doer,’ of happening from a [something] that makes happen, of process from a something that is not process but lasting, substance, thing, body, soul etc. . . .” Also 85–​6:2[141] (LNp88), 85–​6:2[158] (WP.547, LNp92), 86:4[8]‌ (LNp105), 86–​7:7[1] (LNp129). 25 85–​6:2[152] (WP.556, LNp91) says that when we speak of a “thing” or “subject,” “the doing is summarized with regard to all the doing still anticipated (doing and the probability of similar doing).”

Human: Agency as Our Life-Condition  171 and by the prevailing theory about agency, rooted in that self-​conception. On this view agency is only these conscious motives and willings, which are indeed (on Nietzsche’s view) ineffective. But in fact—​I suggest it is Nietzsche’s view—​this conscious purposing is only the surface of agency. Agency is not only this surface; it has depths it is not itself aware of. To put it briefly, agency is itself a drive, a drive that is aware of only its own conscious surface. All that it sees of itself is that conscious choosing and willing, but in fact there’s more to it. So we shouldn’t accept its definition of itself, nor that standard view based on this. And when we recognize that agency is itself embodied in a drive, we see why Nietzsche thinks that it is effective in us after all. Thus agency is not the conscious willing we have taken it to be, but an unconscious directedness settled as a bodily habit. Agency is carried out by a drive (or synthesis of drives) that mistakenly interprets itself as an agent; this is the crux of Nietzsche’s “agency without an agent.” This drive interprets itself as that conscious willing but does so for purposes that don’t come to the surface in this way. Agency’s own real aims, the real explainers of its actions, are simply not visible to it. So rather than either eliminating agency or rendering it impotent, Nietzsche offers a revisionary conception of it as more than its own consciousness, and as effective in its hidden part.26 For, of course, Nietzsche recognizes that human acts in a way that sets it apart from all other animals. And he recognizes that, although agency is itself a drive, this drive operates in a different way from all the other drives. He wants to rebut false accounts of these differences and offer better ones. A better account will explain why the agential drive interprets itself as that conscious willing. This illusion is no accident, but part of the design of agency, integral to its effectiveness. Agency works through the efficacy wrapped up in this false self-​awareness, whether it works in a drive-​harmful (iii) or drive-​helpful (iv) way. And as to the choice between (iii) and (iv), we needn’t choose. They are true in different cases; indeed, even in a single case a human’s agency will always be harmful and helpful in different ways, Nietzsche thinks.27 When we see just how agency works we’ll be able to track these. Where then have we come? We’ve seen that Nietzsche often emphatically denies the existence of the subject and agent. But he also recognizes that human is distinguished from other animals by very special capacities and that these are entangled with our conception of ourselves as subjects and agents. 26 Here I  disagree with Gardner’s important work [2009], which presents Nietzsche as an eliminativist about the I, in a way that is incompatible with the “formal conditions” for the kind of valuing he promotes (i.e., that valuing depends on positing an I). I’ll mark my relation to Gardner’s position later. 27 In Chapter 9 (§9.2) we’ll see that this is one of the arguments Nietzsche gives against “opposite values.”

172  Human Values Indeed, the capacities are in large part precisely the ability to misconceive ourselves in just this way. What’s really there, and really responsible for the very special way in which human thinks and does, is in large part precisely these misconceptions.

5.2  Do life-​conditions justify? So it appears to be Nietzsche’s view that being human at all—​exercising the distinctive human capacities—​depends on taking oneself to be a subject and agent. These self-​conceptions appear to be false, but indispensable. I want to examine the interplay between these two claims, which stand in certain tensions with one another. Nietzsche seems to give us reasons not to believe that we’re subjects or agents, but then to have the unsatisfying afterthought that we have to continue to believe these things about ourselves after all. Is this indeed his view? And if it is, how are we to continue to believe after having had the error exposed? Now these juxtaposed positions, that belief in oneself as a subject or agent is strictly false, but unavoidable, put Nietzsche in Kantian territory. Kant agrees with much of Nietzsche’s skepticism regarding the subject and agent. He takes from Hume the lesson that we can never have evidence of a subject, and that it’s an error to treat the I as a substance. But he also agrees with Nietzsche’s (sometime) view that taking-​oneself-​to-​be a subject is necessary since the “unity of apperception” is a condition for any experience. Kant agrees, moreover, that we can never have evidence of an agent acting from a free choice among reasons. But he thinks that this posit, too, is necessary as a condition not for experience but for acting. So Kant uses these necessities in his distinctive way, in a “transcendental argument” that justifies the posits of subject and agent. CPR A107: “There must be a condition that precedes all experience and makes the latter itself possible, which should make such a transcendental presupposition valid.” In this case it justifies attributing all of one’s thoughts to an “I.” And in the practical sphere: “every being that cannot act otherwise than under the idea of freedom is actually free, in a practical respect, precisely because of that” [Groundwork 448]. Nietzsche has, it seems, the ingredients for such a transcendental justification, but he mainly refuses to take this Kantian route. He insists relentlessly on the falsity of the subject and agent and doesn’t meliorate it with the idea that it is after all true-​for-​us. He refuses this line despite the way it seems to fit with his idea of “perspectival truth.” I  want to examine why he proceeds so—​and consider in what different direction he carries the originally Kantian points.

Human: Agency as Our Life-Condition  173

5.2.1  Transcendental argument in Kant Kant’s use of transcendental arguments lies at the very crux of his great philosophical innovation, his “Copernican” reversal. These arguments operate both in his theoretical and in his practical philosophy, where they respectively ground what we’ve been calling the subject and the agent. Let’s consider the general structure of these arguments, focusing first on the theoretical side and the grounding of the subject. Familiarly, that Copernican reversal lies in Kant’s idea that “objects must conform to our cognition” [CPR Bxvi]—​not, of course, quite in general or completely, but for certain very basic structures of our cognition, in particular space, time, and the categories. We impose these structures on the objects of experience, and this is necessary for—​is a “condition of the possibility” of—​any experience. Here it’s important that “experience” be meant in some minimal sense, such that it is quite indispensable for us: we wouldn’t recognize as ours a life—​it wouldn’t be a human life—​that lacked it. Those structures are preconditions for what we can’t do without. Kant uses these necessities to justify our belief in certain intuitions and concepts, as applying to things in our experience. Kant here means to answer the challenge of skepticism, of global doubt: the assertion that all we believe, even about the general character of things, either is or might be false. Kant takes it as settled that we are unable to answer such a doubt—​for example Hume’s doubt against the I or subject—​by a straightforward proof of the belief. It’s this inability to prove directly (e.g., that I’m a subject) that dictates the transcendental form of argument that Kant innovates.28 We must employ those intuitions and concepts—​for example, we must think ourselves as subjects—​if we’re to have any experience of things at all. So the general schema for a transcendental argument is: i. we agree that X is indisputable/​indispensable, ii. but X is only possible on the basis of C (its condition), iii. therefore we should accept C, too. The argument purports to establish C on the basis of X. Let’s consider these elements. X is the starting-​point of the argument, what we agree in/​about. This beginning must be something so minimal that any interlocutor will have to agree with it. (So, in a way, the argument tries to “start at the beginning” as Descartes does.) 28 CPR Bxvi: “try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition.”

174  Human Values The weaker and less disputable this starting-​point, the stronger the argument will be. I  suggest that Kant’s principal starting point is (something like) “the having of experience”—​where the latter is understood initially just by ostension to what each of us knows at first hand. (So our X stands for experience.) It is on the one hand apparently indisputable that we do have experience—​how could we be wrong? And on the other it seems we wouldn’t or couldn’t dispense with having experience; to lose it would be to cease to be human. C is the condition we reason to, as what is required for X. It’s what the skeptic is shown she must accept, given that she already accepts X. Kant in fact produces chains of Cs: he argues that experience presupposes a C1, and that this in turn presupposes a C2, and so on. Indeed, conditions can even require one another and so be jointly necessary for experience. In the Transcendental Deduction, C2 is a set of a priori concepts, the categories, including substance and cause. And this condition is a condition for, first, being able to attribute all our thoughts to ourselves (i.e., for the unity of apperception, C1). This unity is itself a more direct (and obvious) condition for experience (X). Only in organizing the world by the categories can we attribute all our thoughts to ourselves and thereby have experience, as we do and must. Now notice, about the C, that Kant takes it to have a different epistemic status from the X, at least initially. It is after all something one might try to deny. It’s something that skeptics do deny—​as Hume denies the I or subject. It’s not presumed that these skeptics must accept C by its own immediate claims; this is why the transcendental argument needs to reason them into it, from that firmer beginning that they do accept (that they have experience). The argument shows that C is indispensable after all, though not as obviously or immediately as X. There should even be a certain surprise (as not for X), in being shown that C is necessary. The C’s necessity is hidden in a way the X’s is not. Seen in this light, the argument looks odd. It tries to show that the belief in C is necessary as a condition for X, which we all agree to. But it needs to show this precisely because C can be and indeed is doubted, by the skeptic in particular. Hume, for example, doubts whether he’s a subject, and yet it doesn’t prevent him from having experience of our typically human kind. How can belief in C be necessary for something we constantly do, yet it be possible to dispute it? The answer to this puzzle draws in another central feature of transcendental arguments, one that I think deserves more attention. These arguments depend on a distinction of certain “levels” at which a concept or principle can be employed. The “belief in C” that’s claimed to be necessary for experience is not an overt belief episodically affirmed in conscious thoughts and assertions but a “deep” or “background” belief that is claimed to structure our thinking quite generally. Such, for example, is how we rely on the concept “cause” not merely in science but in all of our tiniest expectations of how our bodies can act on things. I assume

Human: Agency as Our Life-Condition  175 I can cause changes in things around me. It’s this pervasive structuring role of the concept “cause” that we can’t dispense with, not those overt pronouncements—​ the skeptic is proof that these can be given up. The unity of apperception is something that happens at this deep or subliminal level. I may not, until I read Kant, notice myself attaching an “I” to (my) thoughts in this way. I needn’t attribute (my) thoughts and actions to this I explicitly and don’t need to affirm the proposition that they’re all my own. It is something of which I can become conscious, not something of which I always am aware. So CPR A123: “the standing and lasting I (of pure apperceptions) constitutes the correlate of all of our representations, so far as it is merely possible to become conscious of them, and all consciousness belongs to an all-​embracing pure apperception.” As I’ll put it, the unity of apperception plays a “structural” role. Finally let’s notice a certain limitation to Kant’s transcendental arguments, which will be important to us later; this limitation was pointed out by Stroud in a well-​known paper [1968]. Stroud argues that transcendental argument is unable, on its own, to defeat external-​world skepticism because the necessary condition it justifies is not the existence of external things but our belief in their existence. Stroud suggests that a transcendental arguer can bridge the gap between belief and things only by either a verificationism or an idealism. Kant’s way of bridging it is idealism: our deep beliefs structure the things we experience, so that the latter are phenomenal not noumenal: they are “things of experience.” Now we’ve noticed these general features of transcendental arguments as they occur in the theoretical philosophy of the first Critique. But they’re present as well in the practical philosophy’s grounding of the agent.29 There the starting point for these arguments—​their X—​is our adoption of the practical standpoint in which we take ourselves to be deciding between different things we could do and deciding by weighing the reasons for doing these things. Kant tries to show that this standpoint depends on understanding oneself as free insofar as one acts by reason—​which, he then argues, one only truly does when one acts from the categorical imperative and not from inclination or desire. So our status as free and rational agents is the condition C for adopting that practical standpoint, which we can’t do without.

5.2.2  Against transcendental argument Nietzsche operates within a broadly Kantian framework. He is a modern, in the philosophical age founded by Kant. So he is constantly struck by how we 29 This practical version of the argument is much less explicit in Kant’s texts, however. What I attribute to him is perhaps more Korsgaard’s [e.g., 1989a] elaboration of Kant than Kant himself.

176  Human Values “construct” the things we experience and make theories about. Indeed Nietzsche is notable for how vastly he multiplies the respects in which we so make things.30 His wide-​ranging psychology diagnoses in one way after another how our conception of things has been steered by interests other than truth and objectivity. They suggest that in wide-​ranging respects our “truths” are “for us”—​they are “human truths.” Pursuant to this, Nietzsche takes over Kant’s idea that there are deep structuring posits serving as “conditions” for our human experience. (He also follows Kant in calling these posits the “synthetic a priori.”) Very importantly for our future purposes, he thinks of these structuring posits as having been “incorporated” in us; incorporation consists precisely in a notion or judgment being pushed down into our body’s habitual, instinctive viewpoint. Those posits are built into us “before” or independently of any overt thinking of them. Nietzsche often seems to accept Kant’s account of just what (some of) these posits are31: beliefs in substances and causality and belief that one is oneself a conscious “I.” In 86–​7:7[63] (WP.487, LNp140): “Here is a limit: our thinking itself involves that belief [‘in the I, as a substance, as the only reality’] (with its distinctions of substance-​accident, doing, doer, etc.), to let it go means no-​ longer-​being-​able-​to-​think.” Like Kant, Nietzsche thinks the crucial feature of these posits is the way they allow us to organize our experience in time. But Nietzsche transforms the status of these posits, above all by naturalizing them. This naturalizing has one central effect on transcendental argument:  it converts Kant’s possibility-​conditions into life-​conditions.32 Nietzsche makes this change with reference to some of those very categories that are Kant’s Cs: instead of being possibility-​conditions, beliefs in substances and causes are life-​or existence-​conditions for us. He harps on this point so often that it’s a plausible sign of what he thinks his own innovation is. Consider, for example, 87:9[38] (WP.507): Preservation-​ and growth-​conditions [Erhaltungs-​und Wachsthums-​ Bedingungen] express themselves in valuations /​all of our knowledge-​organs and -​senses are developed only with regard to preservation-​and growth-​ conditions /​trust in reason and its categories, in dialectic, therefore the

30 E.g., 81:14[8]‌: “This entire world that counts as something real for us, in which our needs desires joys hopes colors lines phantasies prayers and curses are rooted—​this whole world we humans have created—​and have forgotten this.” 31 Sometimes he argues that the deeper root to these Kantian posits is the posit of logic itself, with its “principle of non-​contradiction.” So, e.g., 87:9[97] (WP.516, LNp157–​8] says that “logic would be an imperative, not to know the true, but to posit and arrange a world that shall be called true by us.” 32 Schacht [1983, 162] recognizes how Nietzsche diagnoses categories as “conditions of life for us.” See, too, Constâncio [2011, 113].

Human: Agency as Our Life-Condition  177 valuation of logic proves only their usefulness for life, proved through experience: not their “truth.”33

Nietzsche has a number of terms for this idea; I  think they are for the most part interchangeable, though we’ll need to come back to talk about nuances. Let me list a few, with occurrences in his published works:  Life-​condition [Lebens-​Bedingung]: BGE.188, A.25. Lebensbedingung: GS.110, BGE.4, BGE.62, BGE.268, BGE.276. Bedingung des Lebens:  GS.110. Existence-​condition [Existenz-​Bedingung]: GS.1, GS.7, GS.335, EH.iv.4. Existenzbedingung: GM.i.10, EH.iv.4. Preservation-​ condition [Erhaltungs-​Bedingung]:  A.26, EH.iii. BT.3. Erhaltungsbedingung:  A.16. Growth-​ condition [Wachsthums-​ Bedingung]:  BGE.188, A.25. These uses of these terms in his books are the iceberg-​tip to a great many more uses in his notebooks.34 Now in what way is a life-​condition a “condition?” What is the nature of the step back from X to this kind of C? The relation is not logical but biological, and Nietzsche understands this in broadly Darwinian terms. Life-​conditions are the drives, views, and values that enable an organism to thrive, and they are there in the organism because they have so allowed it. Thus the relation is not just causal, but doubly causal: a) the condition tends to cause/​promote life, and b) its causing/​promoting life has caused it to be there. That is, the C is a “function” not just in the propensity (forward) sense, but in the etiological (backward) sense, too: C explains why the feature is there.35 Nietzsche usually means that the drive or value evolved in order to play that role. With this notion of life-​conditions there is also a relativization to kinds of life. Every kind of life will count as an X with its own Cs (i.e., the structural posits it makes in order to live that kind of life). Our interest is principally in the kind “human life” (in general), but we should keep in mind that there are also such conditions for more particular types of persons, such as, for example, masters or slaves. In consequence of this, Nietzsche’s notion of the “synthetic a priori” is much more diverse than Kant’s. Indeed, he thinks of our own structurings as standing in an evolutionary order within us: we have deeper structures that were deposited in our animal ancestry and later, superimposed ones that turned us into humans.36 33 See 81:11[262] on the “incorporation” of “life-​conditions.” 34 There are more than fifty occurrences of either Existenz-​Bedingung or Existenzbedingung in KSA vols. 9–​13. 35 See my [2004, 26–​35] for discussion of this distinction as it bears on Nietzsche. 36 85:40[69] (LNp47): “But our valuations betray something of what our life-​conditions are (in smallest part the conditions of the person, in greater those of the species ‘human,’ in greatest and

178  Human Values On first view the epistemic impact of Nietzsche’s change looks simple and obvious: it’s to spoil Kant’s transcendental arguments, destroying their ability to justify those beliefs (e.g., in causation), at least as true. When possibility-​conditions become life-​conditions, they are revealed as mere contingent causes of particular forms of life. The categories, for example, are just what we have had to believe in order to develop our distinctive human life. But, Nietzsche insists, this does not show these beliefs to be true. In 87:10[158] (WP.484): “one comes not to something absolutely certain, but only to a fact of a very strong belief.”37 GS.121: “Life not an argument.—​We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we are able to live—​by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith no one could endure living! But that does not prove them. Life is not an argument; the conditions of life might include error.” D.90: “what presumption, to decree that everything that is necessary for my preservation must really be there!” Indeed, if anything, Nietzsche suggests, this conversion into life-​conditions reverses the argument’s force, making it count against C’s truth. Diagnosing these beliefs as life-​conditions shows that we don’t hold them on epistemic grounds; it exposes our lack of (non-​pragmatic) reasons to believe them. The diagnosis explains these beliefs as established in us for quite non–​truth-​seeking motives; it would be mere accident if they were true. This critique of the Kantian argument-​form begins with Nietzsche’s recognition of Stroud’s point (from §5.2.1), that the argument can carry us only to belief: it shows we must believe in, for example, the categories, not that they’re true.38 It does nothing to prove them. 84:26[74]: “The law of causality a priori—​ that it is believed, can be an existence-​condition of our kind; thereby it is not proved.” And BGE.11: [I]‌t is high time to replace the Kantian question, “How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” by another question, “Why is belief in such judgments necessary?”—​and to comprehend that such judgments must be believed to be broadest the conditions under which life in general is possible).” 85–​6:2[77] (LNp73) suggests that “absolute space” and “substance” involve “human-​animal value-​measures of security.” 37 81:11[156]:  “The achieved similarity of experience (about space, or the feeling of time, or the feeling of large and small) has become a life-​condition of our genus, but it has nothing to do with the truth.” 88:14[152] (WP.515): “the categories are ‘truths’ only in the sense that they are life-​ conditioning [lebensbedingend] for us: as Euclidean space is a conditioning ‘truth.’ (Between ourselves: since no one would maintain that there is any necessity for there to be humans, reason, as well as Euclidean space, is a mere idiosyncrasy of a certain kind of animal, and one among many.)” 38 Again 87:9[38] (WP.507): “what is needed is that something must be held to be true; not that something is true.” And 86–​7:7[63] (WP.487): “But that a belief, necessary as it may be to the preservation of a creature, has nothing to do with the truth, one knows e.g., from the fact that we must believe in time space and motion. . . .” Also 85:35[35] (LNp20–​1).

Human: Agency as Our Life-Condition  179 true, for the sake of the preservation of creatures like ourselves; though they might, of course, be false judgments for all that! Or, to speak more clearly and coarsely: synthetic judgments a priori should not “be possible” at all; we have no right to them; in our mouths they are nothing but false judgments. Only, of course, the belief in their truth is necessary, as a foreground belief and visual evidence belonging to the perspective optics of life.

Here the point is not that categorial judgments are false but that they might be, and hence are not known (are false “in our mouths”). But Nietzsche further holds that these beliefs are not just unproved, they are indeed false. BGE.4: [W]‌e are fundamentally inclined to claim that the falsest judgments (which include the synthetic judgments a priori) are the most indispensable for us; that without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-​identical, without a constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, human could not live—​ that renouncing false judgments would mean renouncing life and a denial of life. To recognize untruth as life-​condition. . . .

Indeed Nietzsche gives a positive account of the true character of the world that the categories are false about:  it’s “becoming” in such a way that it lacks the properties we project onto it. In 87:9[38] (WP.507): “we have projected our preservation-​conditions as predicates of being in general /​because we need to be stable in our believing, in order to thrive, we have made the ‘real’ world one not changing and becoming, but being.” He purports to know this different character of the world on independent grounds. And these points apply in particular to our posit of an I or subject. What’s needed is that this posit be believed, not that it be true. In 81:11[330]: “It requires no subject or object for representing to be possible, but the representing must believe in both.” So Nietzsche sometimes says that this posit may be false, as, for example, at 85:38[3]‌(WP.483): —​through thinking the I is posited; but so far one believed as the people do, that in “I think” there lay something immediately certain, and that this “I” was the given cause of thinking, by analogy with which we understood all other causal relations. However habitual and indispensable this fiction may now be,—​this by itself proves nothing against its inventedness: a belief can be a life-​condition and nevertheless be false.

And elsewhere he says that it is false, as at 87:10[19] (WP.485):

180  Human Values Subject: this is the terminology for our belief in a unity among all the different moments of [the] highest feeling of reality. /​“Subject” is the fiction, as if many equal states of us were the effect of one substratum: but we have first created the “equality” of these states; the setting equal and the making ready are the facts, not equality (—​this is much more to be denied—​)

Nietzsche suggests in BGE.54 that Kant may have “seen through” the subject: “Kant basically wanted to prove that [starting] from the subject the subject could not be proved,—​nor the object either: the possibility of an apparent existence of the subject, hence of ‘the soul,’ may not always have remained foreign to him.” Hill [2003, 181] points out the oddity to this since Kant seems clearly to hold that “the self of apperception is only an apparent unity.” Kant’s stated position looks remarkably like Nietzsche’s: “The identity of the consciousness of myself in different times is therefore only a formal condition of my thoughts and their connection, but it does not at all prove the numerical identity of my subject, in which—​despite the logical identity of the I—​a change can go on that does not allow it to keep its identity; and this even though all the while the identical-​sounding ‘I’ is assigned to it. . . .” [CPR A363]. Hill suggests, plausibly, that Nietzsche hedges his compliment because he thinks that Kant still believes in a noumenal self that carries out the synthesis of the unity of apperception. This would give Kant a reason to think that the unity of apperception’s posit of a self is not just phenomenally but noumenally true. Nietzsche claims to know the reality that the I-​posit gets wrong. He stresses, as we saw in §5.1, that the reality is something plural, lacking the unity the I-​posit claims. 85:40[42] (WP.490) puts the point tentatively. The assumption of one subject is perhaps not necessary; perhaps it is just as permitted to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle lie at the basis of our thinking and our consciousness generally? A kind of aristocracy of “cells,” in which mastery rests? To be sure, of equals [pares] which are accustomed to rule with one another and know how to command? /​My hypotheses: /​ the subject as multiplicity[.]‌

Many other passages stress this multiplicity. These many attacks on unity seem to leave little of the Kantian argument still standing.

5.2.3 Necessary perspectives And yet, as we’ve noticed, Nietzsche has all the ingredients for a Kantian justification of these posits, strictly false though they are. For in agreeing them to

Human: Agency as Our Life-Condition  181 be “conditions” for human life he gives them the kind of credit that (it seems) should be important to him. If he makes truth itself perspectival, shouldn’t these Kantian posits count as true-​for our human perspective? Isn’t this the very kind of truth we should aspire to—​given that Nietzsche denies the coherence of an objective truth about things in themselves? So he seems to have strong philosophical motives to take conditionality as justifying: strong reasons to recognize a kind of internal truth—​internal to the necessary human perspective—​and to be every bit as satisfied with such truth as Kant. Indeed, it might be argued that this is Nietzsche’s position, and that its real shape is merely disguised—​disguised by the far greater vehemence of his assertions that these necessary posits are (strictly, externally, transcendentally) false than of his reminders that they have the only kind of truth we can achieve, a human truth. His position would really be Kant’s, only with a lot more rhetorical weight on the falsity.39 We might hear this Kantian stance, for example, in the important note 80:6[441]: “There is ‘truth’ really only in things that human invents, e.g., number. [Human] lays something in and then finds it again—​that is the kind [of] human truth. . . . The world is thus for us the sum of relations to a limited sphere of erring basic assumptions.”40 Clark’s well-​known reading [1990] is relevant here. (I will offer perhaps only a caricature of it in order to locate it quickly in my problematic.) She argues that Nietzsche abandons his early denial of truth because it has rested on a “metaphysical correspondence theory of truth,” which understands truth as correspondence to things-​in-​themselves. He gradually realizes that the very notion of a thing-​in-​itself is incoherent and that truth is dependent on our “cognitive interests.” Clark calls this Nietzsche’s “neo-​Kantian position on truth” and thinks that he expresses it metaphorically in his so-​called “perspectivism” [1990, 135]. Clark thus distinguishes two notions of truth which she claims Nietzsche holds in sequence. But this reading faces, I think, an insuperable problem: Nietzsche doesn’t stop, at any point in his career, calling these categorial beliefs false.41 In her more recent book [2012], co-​written with Dudrick, the suggestion is that when he does so (in BGE.11 at least) Nietzsche is speaking a “new language” in which “false” means “without outside or transcendent justification,” so that “[i]‌t is not an objection to [those founding judgments] precisely because it is not a claim that they are false” (in the usual sense) [82]. Clark and Dudrick are

39 This would contradict Gardner’s claim [2009, 12] that Nietzsche seems to have “failed to absorb the Kantian lesson that there is a middle way between ‘soul-​substratum’ and Humean impersonalism.” 40 85:40[15] (WP.532, LNp43): “ ‘Something may be ever so strongly believed: therein lies no criterion of truth.’ But what is truth? Perhaps a kind of belief that has become a life-​condition? Then its strength would indeed be a criterion. E.g., with respect to causality.” 41 Cf. Green [2002, ch. 1].

182  Human Values forced into this unpersuasive reading42 by their guiding thesis that Nietzsche takes himself to see that without any “things in themselves” there is no “standard beyond man” that the humanly necessary beliefs fall short of, hence no reason for Nietzsche still to hold the “falsification thesis.” This compels them to read away the clear evidence that he does still hold that the categorial beliefs are false. I concur that there are two notions of truth, but I think that Nietzsche holds both in mind right to the end. Some posits are necessary for human’s perspective and hence true for it. But these posits are nevertheless false by a higher standard—​and we can even know that they are. Nietzsche can hold these two points together by applying them (as we’ve seen) at different “levels.” We only need to believe in our unity as a subject “down” at the level of our implicit and structuring “basic assumptions”; it’s there that it’s true for us. So BGE.11 says that “belief in their truth is necessary, as a foreground belief and visual appearance [Augenschein] which belongs to the perspective-​optics of life.”43 When however we think explicitly about the claim, we find it false by a different standard: the standard of our human “will to truth,” which simply sees better than our structuring processes do. Let’s call this reading bifurcation. We must worry whether such bifurcation could be psychologically sustainable: Won’t the theoretical truth about ourselves tend to seep into our subliminal viewpoint? Or does Nietzsche think that the latter operates so deeply and automatically in us that our conscious beliefs can have no force against it? GS.110: “the strength of knowledge lies not in its degree of truth, but in its age, its embeddedness, its character as a life-​condition.” The most deeply deposited posits—​laid down in our animal past—​will be the most unshakable in us.44 I think that Nietzsche does accept bifurcation with respect to the posit of “things”—​supposed beings in a world that in fact has only becomings. Here is a truth that we just can’t incorporate, I think he supposes. These assumptions were deposited deep in our evolutionary line—​at the point of becoming animals, or sooner. Our bodily systems for perceiving and handling and aiming must surely continue to posit such things: How could we hope to reflect the process ontology in these implicit and instinctive systems? Moreover Nietzsche tolerates bifurcation on this point (becoming) even within his own explicit and considered thinking. We’ve seen (§5.1.2) that despite his denial of any “doer behind the doing” he continues to think in terms of 42 It attributes to Nietzsche a “new language” that inexplicably keeps the old standard (correspondence to things in themselves) he now rejects. 43 Nietzsche here puts in the foreground what I would rather locate in the background. But in either case there is the contrast with a different ground or field of vision in which we can see things better. 44 HH.i.16 says that by exposing its falsehoods “rigorous science is only able to release us from this world of representation to a limited extent . . . inasmuch as it cannot break essentially the power of age-​old habits of experience.”

Human: Agency as Our Life-Condition  183 thing-​like drives and wills and humans. He makes no effort to keep their status as becomings in steady view, either for his readers or for himself. But nor does he think that he needs to deliberately forget that status; this forgetting happens inevitably, abetted by the very grammar of our language. So here bifurcation sustains itself. But to the extent that a posit is not immutable, but rather subject to erosion by contrary conscious thinking, it seems that we might—​if it’s indeed a life-​ condition for us—​need somehow to forget and steer clear of the theoretical truths that could undermine it. Notice how Nietzsche’s view of the “death of morality” is relevant: here the theoretical insight is effective. The will to truth will undermine morality because its theorized truths—​no god, no real external values—​will gradually work down into our valuing, into that subliminal level of valuing that sets our everyday course. Finding out these truths will sap our ability to care and strive for “higher values.” We are living through the long period—​nihilism—​in which the truth about morality is being incorporated.45 In this case, then, philosophical or scientific discoveries aren’t “insulated” from an implicit valuing, but erode and ruin it. Does Nietzsche expect a similar effect on the faith that we’re subjects, or does this lie more deeply and fixedly in us? Morality can’t survive incorporation of the truth about itself; can the unity of apperception survive our insight that there is no subject? Besides this danger of being unsustainable, we should notice how “bifurcation” somewhat unravels the neo-​Kantian point. For it now appears that there are two “human truths,” one that it is necessary for us to believe subliminally, the other that we have reason to think consciously. But if in fact we can “see better” in our conscious reflection, there’s less reason to call the necessary subliminal posits “true” after all. Human is not limited to them, except in that implicit functioning. I think that bifurcation regarding subjectivity is a live option for Nietzsche, but that he rates it a fall-​back position. It may turn out necessary to sustain an implicit false faith in our subjectivity. But we don’t know yet—​we have something better to try first. His ambition is to “experiment” whether another and more satisfying strategy can succeed: we should venture, courageously, as he thinks it, to incorporate more of the truth than we’ve so far been able to do. We should aspire to believe in the truth that there is no subject, not just in our episodic conscious thoughts, but also in the implicit comportment that steers us all the time. If we fail, then we will find ourselves forced to accept bifurcation. Nietzsche’s stance toward these human-​making posits is not conservative but subversive. He tries to push the boundary by experimenting “how far the truth



45

We’ll look at nihilism more carefully in Chapter 7 (§7.1).

184  Human Values can be incorporated.” To what extent can our implicit and habitual suppositions about “what thinks/​acts” be revised in the direction of truth? To what extent can this truth be absorbed at that level without damaging us? And here at last we come to Nietzsche’s ultimate difference from Kant’s transcendentalism, to why he rejects the use of transcendental arguments to establish the truth of science and other human knowledge. He thinks it is an open question which of the limits Kant thinks he finds to human cognition really are limits. He wants above all for us to experiment whether we can live without the illusions of the categorial and agential posits. We are to push to extend human’s general capacity to live with the truth about itself and its world. Kant is too quick to live with lies. We must see whether human can make new abilities for itself to live with more of the truth than we thought we could. So it is a tremendous optimism about human’s capacity for truth that makes Nietzsche break with the Kantian line. It’s not that Nietzsche thinks we can get knowledge of “things-​in-​themselves.” There are no such things—​and in this I concur with Clark’s landmark reading. But this isn’t the only standard that our human understanding falls short of. Of course Nietzsche doesn’t compare human knowing unfavorably with an impossibly “objective” “view from nowhere.” Rather he compares it with “higher perspectives,” views that see what we see, but more. Such higher perspectives are at least imaginable. Nietzsche indeed thinks there probably are creatures with such better views. And most of all, he thinks that it’s possible we can become such creatures ourselves; perhaps this would involve becoming something “superhuman.” Kant tries to constrict horizons that should be kept open. We find Nietzsche’s justification for this project by going back to his naturalization of the Kantian a priori posits. The latter are revealed to be selected as needed for the flourishing of particular kinds of life—​for the life of different species or even of different kinds of human. However these kinds are not themselves fixed, but in flux. There are circumstances when one kind of life can or must evolve by revising its structuring assumptions to serve as basis for a new kind of life. This has happened repeatedly in human and indeed animal history.46 This means that Nietzsche has no allegiance to a human “essence” that must be defended from variation. He anticipates and hopes that human will develop into something else, something higher. So 87:10[17] (WP.866) speaks of the aim “to bring to light a stronger species, a higher type that has different Erstehungs-​ and Erhaltungsbedingungen than the average-​ human.”47 And 87:9[153]

46 When the change is forced for survival it’s more likely the assumptions will be pushed quickly into deep-​seated habits that will last beyond the threat. 47 86–​7:5[61] (WP.953, LNp114) says that for the “new aristocracy,” “many virtues will be outlived, that now were existence-​conditions.”

Human: Agency as Our Life-Condition  185 (WP.898):  “That which partly necessity, partly chance has achieved here and there, the conditions for the production of a stronger type, we are now able to comprehend and consciously will:  we are able to create the conditions under which such an elevation is possible.” Here Nietzsche claims another difference from Kant: he creates new values and thereby a new kind of life, whereas Kant was only a “critic” [BGE.210]. Nietzsche’s most famous statement of this ambition is of course his reference to (the character) “superhuman” [Übermensch], who again is imagined as an individual representative of a kind. Superhuman is most distinguished, I suggest, precisely by its incorporation, into the background “operating assumptions,” of more of the truth about things—​and about its “self ” in particular. Superhuman is higher than human by virtue of living (and not just consciously thinking) with more of the truth.48 GS.11 already states the challenge: “It is still a quite new task, just dawning on human eyes and hardly recognizable, to incorporate knowing and make it instinctive,—​a task only seen by those who have grasped that so far only our errors were incorporated and that all our consciousness relates to errors!”49 I suggest: this is the set of experiments Nietzsche calls his readers into: investigating how much truth we can come to recognize in our bodies (i.e., in our habitual and operative background structuring). Can we replace the “age-​old incorporated errors” [GS.110] with (incorporated) truths? He puts it most dramatically at the end of GS.110: The thinker: this is now the creature in whom the drive to truth and those life-​ preserving errors fight their first fight, once the drive to knowledge has proven itself a life-​preserving power. Compared to the importance of this fight every other is a matter of indifference: the final question about the condition of life is here posed, and the first attempt is here made, to answer the question through experiment. How far does the truth bear incorporation?—​that is the question, that is the experiment.

It’s Nietzsche’s will to push us in this direction that sustains his insistence that our founding beliefs are false. He continues to press his attack because he is not content—​as he thinks Kant is—​with believing these falsehoods, believing them in the implicit structuring of his experience. Can he not just think but live in the truth about himself? He may, to be sure, be ready to create new falsehoods there—​in new background assumptions—​but these will at least overcome the



48 49

I return to the superhuman in Chapter 12 (§12.1). 81:11[164] also connects incorporation with instinct.

186  Human Values previous falsehoods, and thereby let us surpass the life lived under them. His new structuring posits at least see better than the old. Nietzsche encourages us to rate kinds of life by how much of the truth they can recognize in their conditioning beliefs. So EH.iv.4 says that to evaluate a type of human one must know its Existenzbedingungen, but that a condition of the (morally) good is the lie. The strongest are those who can bear to see the most clearly and who are able to “incorporate” these truths into their deep stance. Of course Nietzsche also expects that there are limits to just how much of the truth can be incorporated. He speculates at times what truths might turn out not to “bear incorporation.”50 But quite generally he admires the effort to push up against these limits experimentally. Now what would it be like to incorporate the truth instead of our current lie about the subject and agent, in particular? The reality of “me,” Nietzsche thinks, is the set of drives and affects that, with their shifting strengths, alliances, and competitions, make me up. So 83:7[94]: “As cell stands physiologically beside cell, so drive beside drive. The most general picture of our essence is an association of drives, with continual rivalries and alliances with one another.” (We looked at this drive-​psychology in some detail in Chapter 3.) What would it be like to think of myself—​at that implicit and structural level—​as being this that I really am? Could we modify the unity of apperception to reflect this truth? One great issue is the “unity” in the unity of apperception: How thoroughly would we need to give this up? We saw earlier (§5.1) Nietzsche’s great suspicion against the unity of the subject. Is there any one thing “behind” all our thinking or doing—​any one thing that carries them all out, that I can (truly) take myself to be? Now, on the one hand, it may seem that such unity is not hard to find. When I “attach an I to all my thoughts,” when I attribute them all to myself, why can’t I just attribute them to the set of drives and affects? Why can’t I take this as “my I?” Moreover Nietzsche treats these drives and affects as just the willful and affective aspects of my body, which seems a single enough thing.51 Isn’t it my body, according to Nietzsche, that ultimately does all my thinking? So why isn’t it just a matter of thinking of this body as the I that gives unity to my thoughts? In this

50 81:11[162]:  “this error will not be destroyed otherwise than with life [itself]:  the final truth of the flux of things does not bear incorporation, our organs (to life) are erected on this error.” 81:11[330]:  thinking “must maintain [behaupten] substance and the same, because a knowing of complete flux is impossible, it must invent properties of being, to exist itself.” 51 81:11[316]: “the consciousness of unity [Einheit], in any case something highly imperfect and often mistaken in comparison to the really inborn incorporated working unity of all functions.” 84:27[8]‌: “Human as multiplicity: physiology gives only a hint of the wonderful interaction among this multiplicity and subordination and ordering of parts to one whole. But it would be false to conclude from one state to one absolute monarch (the unity of the subject).”

Human: Agency as Our Life-Condition  187 case he would not be disputing the unity of apperception per se, just the way in which we identify this “I.” But clearly Nietzsche doesn’t think the problem can be solved so easily—​and for reasons we’ve seen already. He so often stresses the multiplicity of drives in each of us to suggest that the apparent unity of the body, just like that of consciousness, is misleading.52 This is especially the case for us moderns. My drives’ perspectives don’t combine into a single space and perspective that shares them. Instead, separate drives think (occasion) my different thoughts. So it would be false once again to imagine my body as the one thing that thinks all my thoughts. The problem goes deeper. What thinks and acts “in me” is never really a single drive but a temporary synthesis of several drives in relations to one another. (These drives will include those “dedicated” to thinking and acting—​our will to truth and our agency—​but as wills among others.) It is the momentary coming-​ together into quite particular relations of command and obedience among a subset of drives, that thinks “my” thought or does “my” deed. But such a passing coalescing of forces is not at all substance-​like, even to the extent that individual drives might be. There’s nothing that persists, from any one thinking or doing to another, that can count as the same source. So the unity of apperception couldn’t accommodate the truth just by reidentifying (as the body) the thing that thinks. Its faith in unity itself is under attack. It’s in a different direction, I suggest, that the unity of apperception mainly needs to be modified. It must be converted, above all, from a presumption to an aspiration. The thoughts thought in this body aren’t all thought by the same thing. But this body can acquire a will to think an ever-​greater share of its thoughts out of one drive—​or out of one stable synthesis of drives—​with its own perspective. This is Nietzsche’s principal lesson from his fragmentation of the self: not to give up on unity, but to work to make, so far as we can, a single thing out of our multiplicity. This must be the right kind of single thing. We must pursue a kind of unity we can have, which is unity under a single aim, the aim of a dominant drive, or of a stable synthesis of the drives. And we must pursue a form of this unification that is “healthier”—​more on the track of power or growth. This will come by a single aim that doesn’t deny and suppress other drives and interests but gathers them into itself. This is a different model for unity than the subject’s, which pictures itself as a thing different in kind from the drives and opposed to them. But, it should be asked, would we still be able to think if we deeply viewed ourselves in this way? If my thinking gives up that presumption of unity, it seems it might have to stop using “I”—​and even need to invent some different 52 85–​6:2[91] (WP.518, LNp77) says that, by contrast with our “perspectival illusion” of unity, the “guide of the body shows a tremendous multiplicity.”

188  Human Values grammar to speak in, which looks a hopeless task. How would the new thinking even think of that lesson I’ve said Nietzsche proposes: to work to make a single thing of oneself? Doesn’t “my” thinking need to presume that there’s a single “I” that now takes on the task? It might be doubted that thinking is possible at all in the absence of this presumption. And indeed we’ve already noted Nietzsche’s expression of this doubt in 86–​7:7[63] (WP.487, LNp14): “Here is a limit: our thinking itself involves that belief [‘in the I, as a substance, as the only reality’] (with its distinctions of substance-​accident, doing, doer, etc.), to let it go means no-​longer-​being-​able-​to-​think.” It’s clear that the task—​to incorporate the insight that there’s no subject—​is extremely difficult. As I’ve said, Nietzsche offers it only as an “experiment,” and one that human will need to work at for a long time to come. The goal, I suggest, is something like this: for one’s thinking to realize, at the implicit and background level, that it is in each case carried out not by anything that is already and automatically the same thing that thinks all the other thoughts that happen in this body. When this thinking says “I” it does so without presumption that it is the same I as the ones that do this body’s other thinking. Thinking learns a new modesty about itself: not to claim to express an abiding subject. Instead of presuming that unity—​and taking it as something complete and inevitable—​this thinking aspires to express an I that gathers and unifies this body’s many particular I’s, the drives that have done its other thinking. Let’s review the line we’ve just traced. Nietzsche shares Kant’s ingredients for his transcendental arguments:  he agrees that our thinking depends on structuring posits that cannot be proved and indeed are false. We assume them not as theoretical doctrines, but as implicit, background assumptions constantly at work. And yet Nietzsche doesn’t, despite his advocacy of truth’s perspectivity, affirm these posits as “true for us” (the Kantian turn). He rather insists on their falsity. This is not because he thinks those implicit assumptions are immune to a conscious skepticism. Rather, he wants to experiment how far that skepticism can revise them and the whole manner of thinking that depends on them. He wants human to aspire to “incorporate” the truth about itself into the very way it thinks and says “I.” This will change not just what it thinks, but—​and especially—​ how it values; it will lead to the new values we’ll look at in Part III.

5.3  Genealogy of agency In considering Nietzsche’s relation to Kant, we focused on the posit of a subject since Kant’s transcendental argument is clearer there. Let’s now shift our attention to the agent as we add a crucial dimension to our account.

Human: Agency as Our Life-Condition  189 We’ve seen how Nietzsche changes the posit of oneself as a subject/​agent from a possibility-​condition to a life-​condition and understands the latter Darwinianly. The human animal became truly human by evolving this self-​ understanding (“I’m a person”). Now let’s examine why (Nietzsche thinks) this agency evolved—​what that self-​understanding was selected for.53 What was this conception of ourselves as agents designed to do? Its original functions still persist, Nietzsche claims, as deep tendencies that are most germane to saying and assessing what agency is now. So we must ask how proto-​humans developed this capacity—​what forces shaped it, and therefore what functions this agency still serves.54 When we uncover these functions we find further reasons, besides its falsity, to try to overcome it. Now I’ve spoken of “agency without an agent,” and we need an orienting sense of this. Our agency lies not in our being agents, but in our “positing” ourselves as such. Now it might seem that in order to “posit” (or “think” or “see”) ourselves as agents, we must indeed be conscious things—​subjects. Agency seems a matter of how we’re aware of ourselves. But it’s important to remember that this isn’t Nietzsche’s point. Here, as in general, the real efficacy lies in our drives and affects. It’s how their unconscious intentionality defers to an imaginary agent that gives that posit its force. It’s how our drives interpret themselves in terms of an agent that constitutes our distinctively human “agency.” Our great challenge is to see how this can be. Nietzsche’s principal idea is that agency was selected for the good of the social group. It is a product of the prehistoric work to “tame” the human animal—​house-​ break it for life in society. This installs agency as a second system of dispositions in us, one superimposed on the original “animal” drives and affects. So there is a deep conflict between agency and those original drives. Taming human to be a social “member” works often against the interests of those drives; it depends on the control and even suppression of some of them. But they also struggle against this imposition. They contrive to colonize and subordinate agency, to use it as their instrument. So human expresses a balance of power between agency and drives. Let’s fill in this outline. To unfold Nietzsche’s genealogy of agency I’ll use two texts in particular: GS.354’s account of the evolution of consciousness and language, and the second essay of the Genealogy, which tells an elaborate story how the “ability to

53 85:34[81] (LNp6) puts the evolutionary point: “That spirit [Geist] has become and is still becoming, that, among countless kinds of inferring and judging, the one now most familiar to us is in some way the most useful for us and has descended [vererbt] to us because the individuals thinking so had better chances: that thereby nothing about ‘true’ and ‘untrue’ is established, —​ —​ —​.” 54 I’ll add to this genealogy in Chapter 8 (§8.2.2) by treating why and how the agent conceives itself to be “free.”

190  Human Values promise” developed. Together these give the gist of his ideas on how and why agency evolved. I’ll quickly survey GS.354’s story by quoting selectively from it. Nietzsche argues in this long paragraph that “the development of language and the development of consciousness . . . go hand in hand,” because both have the function to facilitate “communication [Mittheilung].” In the primary case, one becomes conscious of something about oneself in order to put it into words and to share it with others. The drives were already well able to think, and what distinguishes conscious thinking is that it “takes place in words,” hence is readied or prepared to be shared. So “[c]‌onsciousness is really just a binding-​net [Verbindungsnetz] between human and human—​only as such did it have to evolve; the solitary and predatory human would not have needed it.”55 This means that “consciousness actually belongs not to the individual-​existence of a human, but rather to the community-​and herd-​nature in him.”56 Nietzsche infers (still in GS.354) that consciousness “is finely developed only in relation to its usefulness to community or herd.” It is designed to serve the interest of the community in binding us more tightly up in it. And this is the effect it still has in us, so that “each of us, even with the best will to understand himself as individually as possible, . . . will always bring to consciousness precisely the ‘not-​individual’ in him, his ‘averageness’—​that through the character of consciousness . . . our thought itself is continually . . . translated back into the herd-​perspective.” So the problem in consciousness and language is that they design us to be average—​the better to fit us into a society whose overall interest they serve. Now we might have expected Nietzsche to explain consciousness and language differently. Given (his view) that drives and affects are constitutive of us, why aren’t they the designers of these new abilities? Mustn’t consciousness and language have evolved to serve the interests of the drives?57 And indeed we saw at length in Chapter 3 that Nietzsche routinely treats thinking and speaking as steered by the drives and affects. His “drive psychology” insists on the drives as the principal explainers of what we think and do. Nevertheless, his genealogy of these special capacities is the social one we’ve seen, and this expresses a major judgment and verdict by him.58 He thinks that 55 87–​8:11[145] (WP.524, LNp228): consciousness “is only a means for communicability.” 56 GM.ii.16 likewise associates the development of an “inner world” with humans” subjection to society, but as an effect: society prevents drives from discharging outwardly so they “turn themselves inwards.” 57 In 81:11[243] Nietzsche gives this different genealogy: “Reason [Vernunft] is a support organ [Hülfsorgan] that evolves slowly, that through long ages fortunately has little force to determine human, it works in service of the organic drives, and slowly emancipates itself to equal authority with them.” 58 Earlier, in D.26, Nietzsche likewise links self-​consciousness with sociality, but with two differences. He argues that this already occurs among animals: the animal “observes the effects it produces upon the representing of other animals, from this it learns to look back upon itself, to take

Human: Agency as Our Life-Condition  191 consciousness, language, and (we’ll see) agency originated to serve society’s interests, not those of the (original) drives and affects. And society’s main interest is in “socializing” us—​in Nietzsche’s terms, “taming” us into good “herd animals.” The root and basic features of consciousness and language reflect this design to strengthen the group by making human identify as a member of the group. They serve the interests of the group; they induce one to identify with the group instead of with one’s own body-​self. What then of the drive psychology? We need to see that consciousness and language are instantiated in drives of their own: in wills-​and-​abilities that must be so deeply settled in us that they operate implicitly and instinctively. Human must acquire new drives in order to operate with awareness and words; these must be added to those settled in its long animal past. So Nietzsche’s drive psychology works with a broad distinction between (a)  drives rooted in the “animal” past of human and counted as “body” and (b) drives enabling the distinctive human practices of consciousness and language and counted as “spirit.” Nietzsche claims that these latter drives were imposed on the first set by social pressures, not designed for their own betterment. I’ll treat language, and Nietzsche’s critique of its “commonizing” character, in Chapter 6. Here let’s focus on consciousness [Bewusstsein]. We should bear in mind that Nietzsche means by this something more than just “a light being on”—​more than merely “phenomenal consciousness,” as an awareness of pain, pleasure, or other such sensations. He means in fact self-​consciousness—​as we saw back in Chapter 2 (§2.2).59 In GS.354: “All of life would be possible without seeing itself as if in a mirror.”60 He means consciousness that is, in essential part, reflexive (i.e., directed back upon itself); it involves an awareness of itself as itself. So, consciousness (in this sense) of pain includes awareness “of itself ” as feeling the pain. Consciousness, as thus reflexive, essentially involves a kind of hypothesis about itself, and here is where the social purpose operates: our “sense of ourselves,” our idea of what we are, has been designed to make us better social members.61 It’s itself ‘objectively,’ it has its degree of self-​knowledge.” And he attributes these developments to the animal’s pursuit of its own interest in the social setting (and not to its subversion by society); this gives it a non-​moral interest in truth (unlike the interest we’ll see that he attributes to our own will to truth). 59 Again, on this see Riccardi [2016], and 85:34[87] (LNp6): “In the end we have a double brain: the capacity to will, to feel, and to think something about our willing, feeling, thinking itself, we hold together in the word ‘consciousness.’ ” 60 Later in GS.354: “he needed consciousness, i.e., to ‘know’ what distressed him, to ‘know’ how he felt, to ‘know’ what he thought.” 61 In his notebooks Nietzsche has the thought that the ability to “look at oneself ” had to begin by taking the viewpoint of something bigger than oneself upon oneself. The earliest “self ”-​consciousness sees its self as it looks to a higher authority for which it serves a function. 81:11[316]: “Our judgments about our ‘I’  .  .  .  are carried out by the introduction of the outside-​us, the power reigning over

192  Human Values this function that explains why that self-​conception is false in the several ways that we saw in §5.1. Consciousness understands itself as the one thing that was, is, and will be conscious throughout this body’s life. It understands itself as a thing apart from the drives—​as the person’s real self. And it understands itself as causing actions by its own conscious motives. So when consciousness “looks at itself in a mirror,” it sees this enduring and effective subject/​agent. But just how does this posit serve social interests? We find Nietzsche’s answer in the Genealogy’s second essay. This has the title “ ‘Guilt,’ ‘Bad Conscience,’ and Related Things,” but it really amounts to Nietzsche’s speculative genealogy of agency or personhood—​indeed of “human” itself. It tells the fuller story of which GS.354 gives just part. It hypothesizes how the decisive capacity that makes us human arose and developed in a distant prehistory. Nietzsche presents this as “the ability to promise,” but it is something more elaborate and far-​reaching than this (with some irony) makes it seem. Promising, first of all, is something complex:  it depends on a number of interlocking sub-​capacities. One of these is the capacity to remember what one has promised or committed to do.62 Another is the capacity to commit oneself (to remember in the future). Moreover that remembering must be a “memory of the will” [GM.ii.1]; that is, an effective memory that is able not just to retrieve commitments but abide by them. It’s by developing these capacities—​I think Nietzsche thinks—​that human acquires the ability to identify itself across time and the sense of itself as a subject-​agent. It’s these commitments that stretch human’s sense of itself out through time, as a “long chain of the will” [ii.1]. But promising arises for societal purposes and must be understood in this social setting. Promising is needed as the heart of the creditor–​debtor relationship which society itself depends on.63 Members need to be mostly reliable to one another, need to recognize and honor their own commitments. Each member must feel that by its past promises it stands in debt: it owes payment on them. Here we see the root of obligation [Verpflichtung] and also of guilt [Schuld], which is the feeling of debts unpaid. And one such debt stands above all, Nietzsche thinks: the member’s debt to society, which is as enormous as obviously are the benefits to us. We mean ourselves to be just what we count as in the higher organism—​universal law.” Again 81:11[316]:  “Consciousness arises in relation to the being, of which we could be a function—​it is the means to incorporate us. So long as it has to do with self-​preservation, consciousness of the I is unnecessary.” 62 GM.ii.3: “How does one make a memory for the human-​animal? How does one impress something onto this partly dull, partly scattered momentary understanding, this embodied forgetfulness, so that it remains present?” This memory must be developed against a deep-​rooted tendency to forgetfulness [Vergesslichkeit], which suppresses consciousness of “whatever we live, experience, or take into ourselves” [ii.1]. 63 In Chapter 4 (§4.2) we took a first look at debt, as a relation to the past. In Chapter 12 (§12.2) we’ll return to treat its role in religion.

Human: Agency as Our Life-Condition  193 being a member rather than an outcast enemy. This debt is paid only by following the society’s rules, the norms; this is one’s ultimate promise. When one promises to do X at time T, satisfying the promise will require more than simply wanting at T to do X. If X is paying money, one undertakes to ensure that one has the money at T. So a promise involves a commitment to effect a certain outcome in the world despite whatever obstacles or difficulties might arise. One undertakes to control the situation so as to bring that outcome about; one takes responsibility for its occurring. And so promising likewise initiates this idea of responsibility [Verantwortlichkeit].64 The promiser, among all the things in the world, must be responsible for X occurring or not occurring. Nietzsche gives promising the central place in constituting our connectedness through time, rather than memory, where the stress usually falls. Our sense of a lasting I, he thinks, depends not just on having recollections and expectations (of what I did or will do), but on a practical commitment, undertaken and followed. It’s not in mere “sightings” of oneself across time, but in binding and taking-​ oneself-​bound that one becomes “the same person” before and after—​and indeed a person at all. Mere memory can’t pull us together enough. In promising, human commits itself to be the same thing across time, to be something in fact predictable and regular. It subjects itself to a rule or a law, as we might put it—​it renders lasting obedience to a certain lasting command. This practical commitment is the basis not just of agency but of subjectivity. Human thinks itself the subject of all its body’s thoughts by committing to be that same thing. This is Nietzsche’s genealogy for the “unity of apperception”: we’re prepared to attach an “I” to all our thoughts because we’ve been designed to accept responsibility for them. So it’s the agent, the doer, that comes first, and the subject—​the mere conscious thing—​is abstracted off from it. One commits first to consistency in deeds and only secondarily to be the abiding conscious subject. This complex capacity to promise and commit oneself is, like the capacities for consciousness and language, in effect a new disposition or drive that gets added to the drives original to the human animal; it is the first form of agency. The emerging human acquires a drive to undertake and to honor commitments, which then interacts with its other drives. This capacity is unlike the other drives in the way it reaches across time: it insists that it will be the same one there to fulfill the promise as now makes it. This new drive also comes along with new affects, such as guilt whenever one fails in an obligation. This agency is thus one drive among others, but it is also a drive that separates itself from the others and indeed opposes them. It calls all those other drives “body” and sets itself against them. EH.iv.7: “one lied a ‘soul,’ a ‘spirit’ [into being]



64

GM.ii.2 begins: “Precisely this is the long history of the origins [Herkunft] of responsibility.”

194  Human Values in order to make the body a shameful [thing].” Commitments are, above all, commitments not to act by whatever happens to be one’s uppermost drive—​by one’s urge of the moment. The promiser must be able to abide by commitments even or especially when strong drives incline it not to. So the capacity must include a strong inhibitive power to refrain from acting immediately upon one’s drives. In 87:10[167] (WP.804, LNp202): “The understanding is essentially an inhibiting-​apparatus [Hemmungsapparat] against the immediate reaction to the instinct-​judgment.” The promiser is able to “insert a pause” in which to consult its commitments and determine what these require in this circumstance. In its strong will to restrain the drives, this capacity for commitment is “ascetic”:  it expresses itself by inhibiting bodily efforts and pleasures. (Here it draws, perhaps, on existing forces of restraint present already in the drives.) TI.viii.6: “This is the first preschooling for spirituality: not to react immediately to a stimulus, but instead to take in hand the inhibiting, excluding instincts.” Notice how this story requires that agency be more than epiphenomenal: to constrain our animal drives, it must be highly effective in us.65 It’s because this new disposition must be really effective against the drives that such hard training has been needed in order to breed it into us. It has had to be worked in among our animal drives and enabled to compete with them; indeed to control them. Nietzsche distinguishes two main historical phases in human’s training.66 In the earlier and much longer “ethic of custom” [Sittlichkeit der Sitte], the training worked mainly via persons’ fear—​fear of the public torturing punishments. It relied on pain as “the most powerful aid of mnemonics” [GM.ii.3]. In the more recent phase, which Nietzsche calls “morality” [Moral], the training works more subtly by bad conscience, a form of guilt in which the individual’s own aggressive drives are enlisted to punish themselves as breakers of the moral rules. GS.354’s account—​how consciousness and language evolved to socialize us—​ can be set into this larger story about promising. Consciousness and language are elements in that complex ability to “remember the rules.” Those social rules are stated in language and remembered as such. They are remembered and applied in consciousness—​in that pause inserted before acting from a drive. As the drive inclines me toward an inviting act, memory must jolt me into awareness of the rule that prohibits it.67 What consciousness and language give me to share with my co-​members is the whole set of social rules and practices. 65 GS.335: “our opinions, valuations, and tables of what is good certainly belong among the most powerful levers in the involved mechanism of our actions, but . . . in any particular case the law of their mechanism is indemonstrable.” 66 I give a fuller account of these in [2004, 88–​94] and return to them in Chapter 7 (§7.2). 67 So what’s promised is put into words. And conversely, learning a language involves a kind of promise: one commits to use words in the normal and common ways.

Human: Agency as Our Life-Condition  195 We saw that Nietzsche means this consciousness to be a self-​consciousness. This now finds its identity in the capacity that promises: it’s this capacity that becomes aware of itself. And it lays claim to be the person or human itself. So in remembering the rules one also “remembers oneself ” (i.e., thinks of oneself as the subject and agent framed by commitments). And since this power to promise distinguishes itself from the drives it combats, its self-​consciousness views them as not really part of the person it takes itself to be. Now just what are the “social” purposes for which this new power to promise restrains the drives? GM.ii begins by talking about commitments to particular other individuals in relations of trade, but Nietzsche soon shifts to what I think is really more important to him: commitments to society. As we’ve begun to see, this capacity (for agency) is above all designed to give humans the capacity to remember (and abide by) the social rules. “With the help of such images and proceedings [the horrific punishments inflicted on breakers] one finally retains in memory five, six ‘I will nots,’ in connection with which one has given one’s promise in order to live within the advantages of society” [GM.ii.3; cf. also ii.9].68 It is the social rules—​norms—​that supply the content of the distinctively human values this history produces. Of course different societies have very different rules, but we can also predict some common content owing to the general features we’ve reviewed. The social member is obligated to follow its society’s particular rules, but it is also obligated to improve and perfect in itself certain dispositions that enable it to follow these rules more reliably. First, one commits to be or become able to follow social norms (i.e., able to promise).69 The social member has an obligation to (strive to) improve and perfect its agency—​its ability to control the drives and to act according to rules. The member commits to identify itself as the agent that, by its abiding consciousness of the rules, controls bodily drives. It identifies with what it calls its “conscience” [Gewissen] [GM.ii.2]—​which is really no other than this power to remember the rules.70 Second, one commits to (strive to) be like others. Values are valuable as shared norms. GS.143: “To be hostile to this drive to one’s own ideal: this was formerly the law of all ethics [Sittlichkeit]. There was only one norm [Norm]: ‘the human’—​ and every people believed it had this one and ultimate norm.” This disposition 68 In 83–​4:24[36]: “Moral drives are the history of self-​regulating and function-​forming of a whole (state, community): how will the singular [Einzelne] be brought to a feeling of function? /​ The individual is an egg. Colony-​building is the task of every individual.” 69 Cf. GS.296 on how society shapes us to be dependable, to have a reliable character in this way; it frowns on self-​transformation. 70 GS.305: “Those moralists who command the person first and above all to take control in himself thereby bring a peculiar disease upon him: namely, a constant irritability by all natural stirrings and inclinations. . . . Whatever may henceforth push, pull, beckon, impel him from within or without will always strike this irritable one as endangering his self-​mastery.”

196  Human Values (to be normal and alike) has been bred so strongly into us that it is now a powerful drive in its own right. So 86–​7:7[6]‌(WP.275) answers the question “who speaks in our values?” (which used to be answered “god”): “My answer, taken not from metaphysics but from animal physiology: the herd-​instinct speaks. It wills to be master: hence its ‘thou shalt!’[:] it will allow the individual to matter only in the sense of the whole, for the good of the whole.” These two commitments interact. I think of myself—​my I—​as the one thing that thinks all this body’s thoughts and does all its deeds, but I think of this I as a social member. I am a thing that has identity and meaning in its being a part of the group, indeed in its being a “normal” member of the group. This self-​ identification still operates in us, only more covertly. So 82–​3:5[1.273]: “Once the I was hidden in the herd: and now the herd is still hidden in the I.” In Chapter 6 we will examine this social identity, and in Chapter 10 we will look at Nietzsche’s advice how one can “make oneself a self ” out of it. We should bear in mind that these social commitments are instantiated in drives, which compete with all the other drives. Since promising is so complex, there must be many different drives that support it. But for simplicity let’s imagine these capacities as collected into a single drive, the drive to be an agent who satisfies social rules. Then it’s this drive that projects the “unity of apperception.” When “I” think of myself as the subject of all my thoughts, what really thinks it is this drive that takes itself to be such an abiding I.71 It’s this drive that does all these cognitive things, but it does them by misunderstanding itself. It thinks and acts under the fiction that it is the one abiding subject and agent distinct from the drives. As a drive in the midst of drives, this power to promise is engaged in an ongoing struggle which involves—​at different times and even at the same time—​ both its commanding them and their commanding it. It succeeds sometimes in subduing them to the social interests it represents. But it is also covertly shifted and steered by the strongest “bodily” drives. Human’s thinking and acting expresses the shifting “balance of power” between this agential drive—​developed by the social-​historical processes we’ve seen—​and all those other, more ancient drives it is planted among.

5.4  Human means values as true We’ve identified the “who” of our human valuing as that complex “agential” capacity (or drive) that remembers commitments and interprets itself as a (single, 71 85–​6:2[190] (WP.254): “what is the meaning of valuation itself? . . . Answer: moral valuation is an interpretation [Auslegung], a kind of interpreting [interpretiren]. . . . Who interprets?—​Our affects.”

Human: Agency as Our Life-Condition  197 free) agent. We’ve also begun to see the distinctive “how” of this human valuing:  this capacity remembers commitments by consciously recalling worded rules. So these human values are conscious and linguistic, unlike the values in our “bodily” drives and affects. But there’s another crucial part of this distinctive “how”—​another way that human values with a novel “force”: we mean our values “as true.” This is a further key way human valuing differs from (other) life’s valuing—​and also from its own valuing in its drives. As agential, human means its values as true. This truth-​claim has vast consequences, Nietzsche thinks. With it humans have a second basic meta-​value—​a value used in judging other values—​added beside (both with and against) the meta-​value of power that is already meant in our drives and affects. It’s because we mean our values as true that truth itself becomes a value—​a structural or conditioning value, presupposed in our human way of valuing. This deep allegiance is at once our sickness and our pride. Nietzsche sees his own main challenge as being to reconcile these two basic values, of power and truth, rooted in our organic but also human nature. This topic—​truth or, more germanely, the will to truth—​is also central to this book’s overall project. This book claims that Nietzsche thinks our human task is to “see how far the truth can be incorporated”—​in particular the truth that our values are perspectival. Clearly this project attributes great value to truth. Yet Nietzsche is famously critical of truth and of the will to truth. To establish my reading I must show that his attacks aren’t meant to be “fatal” to the truth-​aim and that Nietzsche still keeps and prioritizes this value. I begin this work here and continue it in Chapters 7 and 8. So what is Nietzsche’s “theory of truth?” We must bear in mind from the start that his characteristic angle of approach gives him a quite different kind of answer than we expect. Truth is not for him something “in-​itself ”; it has its identity as the object of a certain will. And this means that he just doesn’t have the kind of “theory of truth” that I think interpreters still too often look for in him.72 Because truth is essentially, constitutively the object of this human will, it has a complexity that rules out its being simply (any of) “correspondence” or “coherence” or “what works.” There are two dimensions of complexity here. First, the will to truth is an historical phenomenon, such that its goal or object shifts through time. The topic needs to be treated historically by asking what truth has been, is, and might become. Second, and just as importantly, “what truth is” is partly a matter of how this will “conceives” or “thinks” of its goal, but it is also a matter of what this will is “really doing.” For Nietzsche will insist that the will to truth is drastically 72 I  think I  still disagree with Gemes [1992] insofar as he denies Nietzsche has any theory of truth: the theory is precisely that truth is the “object” of a certain will.

198  Human Values mistaken about itself and about what it is actually pursuing. What the will to truth is doing is different from what it thinks it’s doing—​and both contribute to “what truth is.” Consider first what the will to truth thinks it’s doing (i.e., how it conceives of truth). Although we’ll see that (Nietzsche thinks) this truth-​notion evolves, there is one primary character that wills mean truth to have—​an original and still dominant sense. Truth is intended to be a “correspondence”: a matching between human’s state and something outside it. The idea is of course unsurprising, but Nietzsche will give it his turn. The will to truth is, originally and still dominantly, an effort to bring one’s own state into correspondence or alignment with some outside thing. It therefore involves a different “direction of fit” than drives (which try to change the world to match their aims) and affects (which feel themselves changed by the world). But that the will to truth supposes it’s pursuing and achieving correspondence doesn’t yet mean, Nietzsche stresses, that this is what it’s actually doing. The reality of truth (the truth about truth) includes that will’s own idea of truth, but also that idea’s context: why it’s there (in the human will) and what it’s doing—​what’s really going on in human’s use of the idea. Most of Nietzsche’s critiques of truth are aimed to show that we don’t achieve correspondence and that, “deep down,” beneath our self-​conception, it’s not even what we’re trying to achieve. He gives reasons to think that what we’re really finding is (e.g.) “what coheres,” or “what works”—​though we’ll see that neither of these is really adequate to his point. We see Nietzsche’s view that truth is meant as correspondence in his early critique of truth in the unpublished essay “On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense.” In an influential passage, he argues that our beliefs are separated from what they claim to match by a series of “metaphors” which involve jumps and discontinuities that rule out correspondence. So we “possess nothing but metaphors for things which do not correspond [entsprechen] in the slightest to the original entities” [ENp256]. And so “correct perception—​which would mean the adequate expression of an object in the subject—​seems to me a contradictory nonentity [widerspruchvolles Unding]” [p260]. Here is his famous summing of the point: “What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms . . . which, after long practice [Gebrauche], seem firm, canonical and binding to a people: truths are illusions, of which one has forgotten what they are, metaphors that have become worn out and without sensory force, coins that have lost their design and are now considered only as metal and no longer as coins” [ENp257]. Nietzsche’s point is that what we take to be truths (i.e., to match their objects) in fact differ by gaps, bridged by metaphors which we no longer recognize as such. He is “defining” truth only in his own distinctive fashion: by saying both what we aim it to be and what’s really going on in this aim.

Human: Agency as Our Life-Condition  199 Both of these sides to the will to truth—​we might loosely call them “subjective” (how it thinks of itself) and “objective” (how it is)—​change through history. The will to align one’s own state with the world outside passes through various forms on its way to becoming the will to truth we now have. This will changes its idea of the truth it pursues due to the way its pursuit is steered by changing forces. So, as with all of Nietzsche’s major topics, the study of truth is indispensably historical and must include a genealogy of that will to truth.73 Here we’ll look at the beginnings of this genealogy and the primitive forms of the human effort at truth; I’ll continue this genealogy in Chapter 7 (§7.4).74 Why, then, does human seek this kind of matching or correspondence? Nietzsche considers two broad kinds of explanations, expressing two main ways he thinks of the will to truth. One is what we would likely expect from his insistence on will to power: we seek truth as a means to power.75 Certain ways of “matching” the world outside can improve our capacities to work our will on it; they give a “pragmatic” reason for wanting truth. Sometimes Nietzsche sees it so, but he is also often dismissive of such explanations, insisting instead that the will to truth has a “moral” source. This means, to begin with, that we want truth for a reason different from its use to us—​a reason trumping considerations of advantage. We want it, indeed, despite its frequent disuse to us, and this makes it (in this weak sense at least) a “moral” aim. But why do humans want anything that doesn’t serve their own power, if indeed they are wills to power? The ultimate culprit here, in Nietzsche’s firm view, is humans’ social nature (i.e., how they have been adapted for life in large social groups—​in cities). As we’ve seen several times by now, this was accomplished by a very long “taming” and “herding,” which Nietzsche thinks is the central thread of human history. Societies compete, and their strength depends especially on their unity through members’ strong sharing of social norms. It’s to strengthen members’ obedience to norms that the will to truth developed. Already in 72–​ 3:19[230] (ENp155): “The drive to truth begins with the strong observation how opposed the real world and the lie are, and how all human life is insecure when the conventional truth does not count as unconditional: it is a moral conviction of the necessity of firm convention if human society shall exist.” Originally and deeply, then, the will to “correspond” to something outer is directed not at (what we might call) “the facts,” but at the social group’s attitudes,

73 85:38[14]:  “What distinguishes us most basically from all Platonic and Leibnizian ways of thinking is this: we believe in no eternal concepts, eternal values, eternal forms, eternal souls; and philosophy, so far as it is science and not legislation, means for us only the widest extension of the concept ‘history.’ ” 74 I give a rather different genealogy of the will to truth in Nietzsche’s System [ch. 4 §3], though I think these accounts are largely consistent with one another. 75 85:43[1]‌(LNp50): “the ‘will to truth’ develops in the service of the ‘will to power.’ ”

200  Human Values and especially its values—​its norms. It’s these above all that the human animal must be trained to accept, to “match,” for life in dense social groups to be possible. And this means, paradoxically, that the will to truth is originally a will to match values. Human was trained first to strive to make its values “true” (i.e., to correspond to the values “out there” in the community). The human practice of truth takes its start in a truth about values, not about facts. We find the point already in TL, which says that a “peace settlement” [Friedensschluss] with others seems to be “the first step toward achieving that mysterious truth-​drive [Wahrheitstriebes]” [ENp255]. This will arises from our social life, whereas our individual interests instead favor “pretence” [Verstellung]. This agreement fixes “what from now on shall be ‘truth,’ i.e., a constantly valid and binding designation of things is invented and the legislation of language gives the first laws of truth: for here arises for the first time the contrast between truth and lie” [ENp255]. Truth is just following communal practice; “in this dice game of concepts ‘truth’ means using every die as it is marked” [ENp258].76 It therefore belongs to our distinctively human and agential values that we mean (intend) them to match or correspond to an external standard—​the standard supplied by “what one says” in one’s community, by how the latter uses its words, and especially its words for values. We suppose there to be real values outside us to which our own must be brought into alignment. This claim doesn’t occur in the prior and underlying “animal” values embedded in bodily drives. These bodily drives value what they want with no inclination or impetus to bring their ends into agreement with anything else. But in becoming human we learn to subject what we want to correction. Since, as we’ve seen, it is the drives themselves that do the meaning or intending here, it is they that must accept this authority if that “taming” is to work. They must lose their confidence that the good is simply what they want—​that they make things valuable just by wanting them. They must see the good as something independent of them, as an authority to which they must subordinate their aims. They must give this authority to, in particular, the social norms codified in the community’s Do’s and Don’ts. Drives themselves must feel these norms to be real or true values which their own should be judged against. A society needs its members to obey social norms and so must appeal to an authority that can effectively command. This authority has taken a series of historical forms, as we saw in Chapter 2 (§2.4), when we traced Nietzsche’s genealogy of arguments of the form “You should value V because X values V.” We saw how the external authority (X) was originally a dominant social member—​ a ruler or master issuing direct commands. But as a society grows and ages it 76 72–​3:19[229] (ENp155):  “Being true just means not deviating from the usual meaning of things.” Cf. HH.i.11’s claim that language begins with the faith that it “finds out the truth.”

Human: Agency as Our Life-Condition  201 forms a picture of itself as lasting and as held together through many generations of rulers by customs and laws. These lasting rules are originally attributed to ancestors who founded the society. Then, in a development Nietzsche describes in GM.ii.19, these ancestors are gradually inflated into gods, so that social norms (are taken to) rest on divine authority. By a further development, this authority is secularized. It’s not god but nature whose values we should align to—​nature as the essential character of the world or of life. Since this nature is ours as well, the authority is now partly “within” us. And by a further development it becomes more fully so: the authority is identified as our own conscience—​a voice within, separate from the drives and dictating to them. But all of these are really strategies, Nietzsche thinks, to shape us to conform to social norms. In 87–​8:11[100] (WP.7): “one has built these social values over human with the goal of strengthening their voice, as if they were commands of god, as ‘reality,’ as ‘true’ world, as hope and future world.” We now see how these stages are so many ways of taking our values to be true—​or rather, as subject to the demand or requirement of truth. The values given in our immediate desires have no standing by themselves but must be compared with and corrected by the values of that separate authority. At first the authority rests, pragmatically, in the fear of the master’s present and effective power to hurt. But as the locus of authority becomes less and less immediate, its “moral” claim to (its values’) truth takes the place of that immediate power. The sense that values are subject to this truth-​demand is our distinctively human form of obedience. It’s this deeply ingrained presumption that our values should be true that constitutes the “metaphysical need” Nietzsche attributes to us in GM.iii.28. “The ascetic ideal means just this: that something is lacking, that an enormous gap surrounds human,—​it doesn’t know how to justify, to explain, to affirm itself, it suffers from the problem of its meaning.” We need—​for reasons we examined in Chapter 4 (§4.3)—​a meaning in particular for the suffering characteristic of human life. And we need this to be one we discover, not invent, a meaning independent of us. Nietzsche here presents the ascetic ideal as a response to the prior demand for a meaning.77 But I think he really sees them as threads interwoven in a single development. The suffering that human is outstandingly subject to (and needs meaning for) is due to the suppression of animal drives involved in its “taming.” But (conversely) the capacity to suppress these drives depends on seeing one’s immediate values as tasked to be true to an independent standard. So the need 77 Gardner argues [2009, 25] that Nietzsche introduces this need for meaning on transcendental and not naturalistic grounds. Against this I tried to show in Chapter 4 (§4.3) how GM does indeed give this need a naturalistic source.

202  Human Values for external values (or meaning) and the suffering from suppressed drives are parts of a single phenomenon. Thus the main root of the value of truth is the demand that our values correspond to an external standard, whether custom or morality. And a similar social function developed the virtues of truthfulness [Wahrhaftigkeit] and honesty [Redlichkeit]. In order to monitor whether members do pledge allegiance to that standard, society needs them to report truthfully their own intentional states. In 83–​4:24[19] (WP.277): “Morality of truthfulness in the herd. ‘You shall be knowable, express your inner [state] through clear and constant signs—​otherwise you are dangerous: and if you are evil, the capacity to disguise yourself is the worst for the herd.  .  .  .’ ”78 And the most important thing society needs members’ truthfulness to display is how well they are aligning their aims to its norms. In deeply meaning our values to be true, we take truth itself as a value. So a will to truth is built into us just as human. We will truth in a pervasive way that reaches far beyond the theoretical, scientific, philosophical enterprises we might first think of. We “will truth” in our deep effort to align our ends to a standard independent of them. It operates as a second “meta-​value,” standing in tension with our (still deeper) will to power. The will to power wants to change the world, the will to truth to take on its character. We take its character by perceiving and understanding it and, more basically, by aligning ourselves to an authoritative aim “out there” in the world. This is only the beginning of Nietzsche’s genealogy of the will to truth. But we can see how it already gives him several main grounds for suspicion against it. Its basic aim of “matching” gives it a passive, reactive, mirroring character that contrasts unfavorably, in his view, with the aggressive, active, and creative character of will to power. Moreover what this will to truth most deeply tries to match is the social norms, and this makes it “moral” in the (thin) sense of being independent of and even opposed to the pragmatic and selfish interests of one’s drives. The will to truth thus sets itself against the drives and affects in a way that opens up an unhealthy divide within human. We’ll return to this will to truth in Chapters  7 and 8.  In Chapter  7 (§7.4) we’ll look at Nietzsche’s critical diagnosis of this will as ascetic, which extends the story we’ve just reviewed. And in Chapter 8 (§8.2) we’ll turn to the positive use he nevertheless finds for this will in the project of freedom. Thus the will to truth is strongly bivalent. It plays a central role in the great historical drama of

78 Cf. 85:40[43] (WP.278). Already in 72–​3:19[175] (P&Tp34–​5): “Truth appears as social necessity.” And 72–​3:19[177] (P&Tp45): “Need produces, in [some] cases, truthfulness, as existence-​means of a society.” ENp257: “the obligation that society, in order to exist, imposes on us—​the obligation to be truthful, i.e., to use the customary metaphors or . . . to lie in accordance with a firm convention.”

Human: Agency as Our Life-Condition  203 morality and nihilism; as entangled with these, it belongs to a dangerous ascetic and anti-​life tendency in human history and values. Yet still Nietzsche sees this will to truth as the main agent of a “way out” of this predicament: by exposing the design-​history of our values we can (with effort) free ourselves from the control of alien interests. This will set us on course to the “superhuman” values we’ll examine in Part III.

6

Words Language and Community

We’ve made a start on Nietzsche’s account of “the human”—​of what most distinguishes us from other living things. We’ve seen how human views itself as a subject and agent. This self-​conception is mainly false and yet, just by being held and lived with, has worked real changes in us. Coupled with it is the view that, as such an agent, one needs to act by true values (i.e., values with an authority “out there,” independently of one’s own valuing). Nietzsche insists that both views are strictly false: human is not really an agent, and there aren’t really any external values with that kind of authority. So being human depends on believing two large lies, he claims. There’s one main reason we hold these false views, he supposes. Humans conceive themselves agents, subject to true values, because doing so has, over historical time, strengthened their groups.1 They’ve been “designed” to see themselves so, so that they’ll be better group “members.” These lies thus have the function of (as he likes to put it) “taming” and “herding” us. Thus Nietzsche makes human’s social character even more basic than its self-​claimed agency: that agency is really a (well-​disguised) device for group control. And in fact I think he singles out this social design as human’s decisive turn. He’s well aware that there are other “social animals,” but he thinks human is social in a different, transformative way. So our topic now is this special social character—​on which Nietzsche has emphatic, often renegade views. And of course our interest is especially in how (he thinks) human’s social nature changes the way it has values. I suggest that we can summarize this change in a word: we humans have our values as norms. We have them, that is, as the values of the group: as shared, and as to-​be-​shared. What each of us most deeply and pervasively values is what’s “normal” to the group. We identify these norms as the “true” (independent) values that we, as agents, are required to match.2 And here we see the original purpose of our allegiance to truth: to bind us more strongly to norms for the sake of the group. This taming or socializing function stands behind not just our agency, but also our language and consciousness, as Nietzsche says in GS.354, as we just saw in

1 2

Nietzsche posits a kind of group selection here—​as I argued in Nietzsche’s New Darwinism. For this use of Norm (which is not a frequent term in Nietzsche), see GS.143.

Nietzsche’s Values. John Richardson, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190098230.001.0001

Words: Language and Community  205 Chapter 5 (§5.3). These other distinguishing abilities are developed for their role in articulating and noticing these taming norms. They facilitate our allegiance to norms. We share norms above all by sharing our words for virtues and vices; it’s these words (and maxims using them) that largely steer our behavior. And we make these norms effective by becoming conscious of them—​even though it is not this consciousness itself, but instead drives’ use of it, that has these effects. Despite its crucial role in making us human, however, Nietzsche seems strongly critical and scornful of this social identity. His favorite term for this aspect of human is “herd” [Heerde]. He stresses the value of solitude; he promotes individuality and a stance of opposition toward norms. D.p.2: “he who goes on such a path of his own encounters no one: that belongs to a ‘path of one’s own.’ ” Many readers conclude that his ideal is a person who lives apart from and opposed to society. He may seem himself to exemplify this role of the “lone wolf ” and “outsider” in his solitary transits through Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. He insists that nobody understands him and that no one around him is his equal. He seems, in so many ways, in thought and deed, markedly “anti-​social.” And yet of course Nietzsche doesn’t really mean to cast off his social identity. It’s not just that this aspect is indispensable—​that even the freest free spirit couldn’t live without sharing in society and norms. We’ll see that Nietzsche also embraces this identity in such a way as to agree that his own (great) worth lies in what he does for the group or kind. His own stance against the group will turn out to be a way of serving it: he’s really acting as its organ or part after all. He thinks he acts as a better such part precisely by his individualizing turn. But this lies some ways ahead. We begin (§6.1) with a quick tour around this neighborhood of terms, topics, and problems. Beginning with Nietzsche’s uses of “common” [gemein] we uncover a network of claims and questions that zigzag across epistemic, ontological, biological, psychological, political, and valuative ground. We see how he opposes “the common” to a variety of “opposites,” which reveal different senses at work in his idea of it. One sense is primary: the common arises by a certain kind of sharing. And this shows us how to hear his related notion of “community” [Gemeinschaft]. We then begin to make a path through these topics by examining (in §6.2) Nietzsche’s views about language as the main locus of “the common” and community. We can see the radical character of his views by pursuing the question “who speaks?,” given that (as he claims) it is not the ego or subject that does so. The obvious candidate to be the “one who means” what we say is our drives. But we’ll see that Nietzsche also has a second answer: it is language itself that speaks in us, or more particularly the past persons and drives that made this language. We turn next (§6.3) to Nietzsche’s criticisms of language for the ways it “makes common.” On the one hand he has an epistemic complaint. Language

206  Human Values falsifies, and indeed it does so in two ways. It treats things with concepts that count them as “equal” to one another, suppressing their true singularity. So language falsifies the world, but it is also false to what the individual is trying to say. Its general terms can’t express the quite unique drives and affects that speak. Moreover language does more than falsify; it also damages our particularity and keeps us from being true “individuals.” In it we submit to a group identity. We then (in §6.4) widen our scope to look at Nietzsche’s broader doubts against “the common.” We examine his idea of “the herd” and of its role in human history and societies. We see how, with the shift from the phase of “custom” to that of “morality,” the (self-​described) agent comes to think of itself as an “individual” apart from the common. Understanding oneself as a “moral agent” includes imagining oneself to be deciding by one’s own reason, independent of the group. Yet this independence is indeed imaginary; that “reason” is in fact a strategy for binding that (self-​conceived) moral agent more tightly to norms than ever. Finally (in §6.5), we take a first look at Nietzsche’s lesson from all this. We see that his advice is not for human to exit or rid itself of the common as much as it can. He insists, in the end, on the indispensability of the common—​not just as a social class (the herd), but also as the ultimate character of even the most uncommon individuals. These individuals—​like Nietzsche himself—​are really just twigs on a tree, and their individuality has its point in how it advances the group and kind. The individual is ultimately a device of the common to improve itself: its way to raise itself to a higher level by revising its norms. These points emerge as we turn once again to the case of language and see how Nietzsche responds to those complaints he raises against it.

6.1  Community and the common Nietzsche’s idea of the common [gemein] is at the center of a web of questions and concerns bearing especially on (the particular) human’s relation to his or her community [Gemeinschaft] or group. He hears this idea not just in gemein and Gemeinschaft, but in a host of other cognates including gemeinsam, Gemeinheit, Gemeinwesen, Gemeinde, allgemein, and verallgemeinern. (These connections are often lost in English translations so that his treatment of the common can be hard to trace. I’ll try to preserve the links in translations here, with the exception of allgemein, which I render “general.”) Nietzsche expresses—​most often and most emphatically—​very negative attitudes toward both the common and community. Let’s have before us a

Words: Language and Community  207 few passages from Beyond Good and Evil. BGE.43: “One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. ‘Good’ is no longer good when one’s neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a ‘common good [Gemeingut]!’ The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: . . . all that is rare is for the rare.”3 BGE.268: “One must invoke tremendous counter-​forces in order to cross this natural, all too natural progressus in simile, the continual development of human toward the similar, ordinary, average, herdlike—​ common!” BGE.284:  “Jede Gemeinschaft macht, irgendwie, irgendwo, irgendwann—​‘gemein.’” We can distinguish a number of resonances in Nietzsche’s gemein. They are most visible in the different terms he has for alternatives or “opposites” to the common. Each of these alternatives goes off in a different direction—​is a quite different way of being “uncommon.” (i)  A  first opposite Nietzsche has for common is “rare” [selten]. (Another common term here is wenig.) This suggests a statistical sense for gemein. The common is the frequent, the plentiful or prevalent.4 Nietzsche often seems to have frequency in mind. TI.viii.5:  “Nothing great or beautiful could ever be common property [Gemeingut]: pulchrum est paucorum hominum.”5 Indeed the very term Gemeingut is a contradiction, as we’ve seen BGE.43 say. I think it’s clear that this statistical sense is an element in Nietzsche’s view of the common. He has an immediate aversion to properties shared by most and a preference for rare ones. But I think it’s also clear that this isn’t his principal point. After all, “the few” he favors are the few best and not the few worst: they are few in having some fine quality, and the common are many in lacking it. So it must be the common’s lack, and not their frequency, that is his true complaint against them. (ii)  A second of Nietzsche’s favorite opposites for gemein is “noble” [vornehm, edel]. (Another term is höher.) This suggests a ranking sense for gemein.6 Here the common is the low, the vulgar. And the noble is a higher type and class, raised above the common. In 83:16[27]: “Moral evaluation relates first to the

3 There’s a draft of this point in 85:42[6]‌. 4 Z.i.22.1: “ ‘how did gold come to have the highest value? Because it is uncommon. . . .’ ” 5 He likes this Latin enough to use it also in HH.ii.118, CW.6, A.57; 85:40[26] (WP.783), 85:41[2]‌. 6 This implication is especially strong in early sections of The Gay Science, which treat the gemein as the opposite of the noble: what becomes widespread is inevitably viewed by the noble as vulgar; see GS.20, 31. GS.1 contrasts the höchsten und gemeinsten, and GS.3 the edel und gemein. BGE.253 associates Gemeinheit with “plebeianism.” But we should keep in mind that nobility is itself a type, and so a common (we’ll see that this is even so for individuality itself); there are also “aristocratic communities” [TI.ix.38].

208  Human Values distinction of higher and lower humans (or castes). . . . Not ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ but ‘noble’ and ‘common’ is the original sensation.” This idea of “the noble” is of course important to Nietzsche. We first meet it now because it is a social notion: the noble are a group of the peculiarly human kind that this chapter is considering. One is noble by identifying as belonging to a “class” that shares a higher way of life than the common’s. So the noble versus common distinction is between “members” of different groups (or between the properties that make one a member). What distinguishes these noble and common classes? Originally they were distinguished as ruler and ruled: the class that commands, the class that obeys. The noble were those who exercised political, economic, legal, life-​and-​death power over the common class. But Nietzsche has in mind now a “spiritual” elite, higher by virtue of their psychic type. If these still “rule,” it is spiritually—​above all by refashioning values. They have this subtler but more sweeping way to exercise “power” over others. Yet not all who exercise such power belong to this elite. What then does their “spiritual” superiority consist in? I think Nietzsche gets to the gist of it in 85:40[56]:  “About noble and common morality. /​Ethic: a type of human should be preserved. Noble morality. /​The human in irgend welchem Maasse should be preserved: common morality.” The noble are distinguished by their effort to be a type of person more difficult to achieve, whereas the common aim to join in and continue the general life of the society. Nobility lies in the effort to belong to a group that shares a kind of life that does more than the life of the mass, and hence is harder to do. (iii)  But, I suggest, Nietzsche has something different in mind as the crux of the common. This lies in its difference not from a noble class, but from the “individual” [Individuum or Einzelnes]. (Another common term is einmalig.) Here what matters is whether one wills to be a member of any group or to stand away and outside. What matters is whether one wants to share or instead wants to be an “exception” [Ausnahme]. The individual wants to be independent even of the noble group, which from this point of view is just another “common.”7 In this third sense of “common,” what’s crucial is “sharing.” We should distinguish some senses for this as well. (a) In a flat or weak sense of “share,” two things “share” any property they have in common, as two apples can share redness. (b) This weak sense can be restricted to intentional attitudes or values: two

7 I’ll come back to Nietzsche’s distinction between common and noble in Chapter 11’s (§11.4) treatment of rank-​order.

Words: Language and Community  209 people, quite unknown to one another, can share a fear of spiders. (c) In a stricter sense we might say that these people “share” that fear only if they recognize that they do have it in common with one another. (d) And in a still stricter sense we might say that they “share” it only insofar as each has this fear (at least partly) in order to share it with the other. The common is most distinguished, I suggest, by this effort to share. Most importantly, it is wanting to share a value. One is common insofar as one acquires and/​or keeps a value because it’s the value of a group. With this aim, one gives the group the authority to set one’s values—​which (remember) are the signs one steers by, often implicitly in one’s drives. In having this aim to share values with a group, one is a “member” of the group. One is like a bodily “member” that “takes direction” and is used. The member is commanded by the group, again mostly implicitly, by its will to copy its values from the group. To the extent that one has one’s values as a “member” in this way, one is no more than an average or anonymous piece of the group. One has, we might say, merely a “group identity.”8 To be sure, one is not merged indistinguishably into the group. One is separate from others in interacting as a self-​interested body among and against their bodies. One’s deep-​set biological drives pursue that body’s interests, and to an extent this is legitimated by the norms. But these norms—​the conscious and worded values we share with others—​ also subordinate that self-​interest to a “higher interest,” which one has as a member. Those norms require one to identify not, primarily, with one’s body but with one’s membership—​one’s belonging to the group. Thinking of oneself as such an average member of the group, a group consisting in just such average members, one views all of these members as “equal” to one another and to oneself. The aim to share values is what Nietzsche famously calls the “herd-​instinct” [Heerden-​Instinkt]. This instinct to “copy” others plays an indispensable role in human development, beginning with the infant. HH.i.216:  “The imitated [nachgeahmte] gesture leads him who imitates back to the sensation which it expressed in the face or body of the one imitated. So one learns to understand: so the child still learns to understand the mother.” And this copying-​herding aim also operates at the most sophisticated levels. 85–​6:2[203] diagnoses why philosophers don’t question morality: “they want to be herds. Initially they all will to have their ‘thou shalt’ and ‘thou shalt not’ common with everyone. . . . And what is their criterion for a moral prescription? They are all agreed on this: its common validity [Gemeingültigkeit], its disregard for the person. This I  call



8

As Heidegger puts it in Being and Time §27, one’s self is merely das Man-​Selbst.

210  Human Values ‘herd.’ ” As 87:10[59] (WP.886) puts it, for “the average human . . . humanity is contagious.” Given this definition of “common” in terms of the motive of wanting to share, we can understand “the common” as all those driven by this motive. A group of people bound together in this way—​by their shared will to share—​counts as a “community.” As we’ll shortly see, it is above all by sharing a language, and in particular words for virtues and values, that a community is held together. We might also understand “the common” as the “content” shared in such a community: the values that are its common property (i.e., its “norms”). Since the community—​by definition—​wills to share these values, one value they above all share is the value of sharing—​of having the same values. The ultimate common value is the value of the common. Upbringing and education function above all to embed one in such a common. HH.i.228: “The individual is treated by his educators as if it is indeed something new, but should be a repetition.” In 87:9[139] (WP.933, LNp163–​ 4): “Upbringing: essentially the means of ruining the exception—​a distraction, seduction, enfeeblement—​in favor of the rule.  .  .  ./​Education:  essentially the means of directing taste against the exceptional in favor of the average.” Now why is there this instinct in us to copy and share and herd? And why do our practices of upbringing and education effect this? Nietzsche gives the obvious answer: this herd-​instinct has benefited the groups so formed. Not only the value of sharing, but most of the other values that belong to the common content are there because they strengthen the group. The common values are designed to serve the interests of the group. Let’s notice a few passages making this (obvious but) crucial point. First GS.116: “These valuings and rank-​orders [of a morality] are always the expression of needs of a community and herd: that which benefits it first—​and second and third—​, that is also the highest measure for the value of all individuals. With morality, the individual is trained to be a function of the herd, and to ascribe value to itself only as function.” Next, 86–​7:7[6]‌(WP.269): “The apparently crazy thought that the action one does for another should be counted higher than those one does for oneself, and likewise for the other . . . has its meaning:  namely as instinct of the common sense [Gemeinsinns] resting on the valuation that little rests on the individual but very much on all together, presuming that they form a community, with a common-​feeling and common-​ conscience.” And then 87:10[188] (WP.216): “It lies in the instinct of a community (family, race, herd, Gemeinde) to feel the conditions and desires to which it owes its preservation as valuable in itself, e.g., obedience, reciprocity consideration, moderation, pity.” Now mostly Nietzsche has in mind the whole society as the community. But we should bear in mind that we will-​to-​share in this way with groups of all

Words: Language and Community  211 sizes—​with our whole human kind, with ethnic groups, with cultures, with urban or rural communities, with co-​religionists, co-​professionals, work-​groups, families, and even friends. Some of these commons we grow up into, others we join with differing degrees of awareness and choice. But what’s crucial in all these cases is that, to the extent that we do become a “member,” we have values (in the given sphere) because we suppose the group has them, small as the group may be. We’ll come back to push further this account of the common in §6.4, where we’ll also look at Nietzsche’s “opposite” for the common, the individual. But first we should take a look at what he thinks is the key tool for sharing, language.

6.2  Who speaks? The individual’s complex interaction with the common and community takes place especially in his or her relation to language. It’s our words that most decisively render us “common” and set us toward (or within) our community. BGE.268 begins: “What, in the end, is commonness [Gemeinheit]?—​Words are sound-​signs for concepts; concepts, however, are more or less definite image-​ signs for often recurring and associated sensations, for groups of sensations. To understand one another,  .  .  .  one must in the end have one’s experience common with one another.” Language requires that we already have common experiences. Moreover (we’ll see) it also tends to make our experiences common. So it’s in language that the problem of the common most resides and where Nietzsche most treats it. Since language is where individual and community most decisively interact and conflict, he views it as a kind of battleground. It’s in our language that society most insidiously herds us, and he is perpetually suspicious and alert to the ways words do this. But it is also in words that the individual can most powerfully work on community, against that herding impetus. So the crucial arena is not “out there” in our dealings with society through police or courts or fellow-​citizens, nor with neighbors or friends or family, but in the language that runs through and structures all these dealings. Of course language is Nietzsche’s own medium—​words are what he does best. His many strong doubts against language do not at all dissuade him from it. He has then a strategy for coping with this “common” intrinsic to language, and his distinctive way of writing—​and thinking—​must reflect this. Does Nietzsche think that his words, when he thinks and writes, do something better than commonize him and us? Or do his words bring him and us into a common (community) that is somehow more reputable? I’ll make my way into these issues by looking first at his “theory of language,” a topic that of course also deserves attention in its own right.

212  Human Values Let’s start with two quick background points before turning to a larger issue. First, Nietzsche chiefly thinks of language in terms of words, with grammar as the rules for saying and combining them.9 The simplest linguistic moment is the hearing, thinking, speaking of a word. And Nietzsche clearly thinks of words as words for (i.e., as names for things, or rather names for types of things which particular cases then fall under).10 For reasons obvious by now, one class of words is especially important and gets his special attention. These are the words that name “virtues” [Tugenden] and other values (i.e., that set goals for the conscious agent, the ways it tries to be). (Whereas Heidegger treats ontological terms as ultimate, I think Nietzsche gives priority to value-​and virtue-​words.) Second, and as we’ve already noted, Nietzsche has an idea about the chief origin and function of language: it is for sharing. A word’s principal use is to share an attitude with another or others in such a way that each both transmits and receives some common stance in which both “take part.” This sense is embedded in the German (and Nietzsche’s) word for communicating, Mittheilen. As such, language is a development from gestures, which similarly function to share and which are rooted in a bodily tendency to mimic and to feel what belongs to the facial expression or movement adopted; as we’ve just seen from HH.i.216: “[t]‌hat is how people learned to understand one another: that is how a child still learns to understand its mother.”11 As a sharing, language works to make people have “equal” experiences (wants and feelings), to bring them into a “common” stance or view.12 Now let’s turn to a larger question of how language works for Nietzsche. This is the question “who speaks” (and hears) in language. Who is it that “means” things by words? Where is what they mean settled or determined? We usually suppose, of course, that the answer is clear: it’s in each case a person who speaks, thinks, hears, and means with language. But Nietzsche’s critique of our usual faith in persons (subjects, agents, selves) involves doubts about such “responsibility.” In the end, although he will allow that a person is one of the types of things that can speak and mean, he insists that there are others, too. This multiplicity in meaners, this way that responsibility for words’ meaning diffuses outward, is one of his main lessons about language. He recognizes at least three “whos” that speak, sharing responsibility for what’s said and with a different one uppermost in different cases. 9 See Constâncio [2011, 82] on Nietzsche’s treatment of grammar. 10 Cf. Katsafanas’s claim [2005, 3] that for Nietzsche (all) words are “signs for concepts” (citing BGE.268). 11 GS.354 says that language isn’t the only “bridge between persons,” but also “look, touch, and gesture.” 12 Where language falls short and experiences are not shared, it has become mere convention; so UM.iv.5 says that we suffer from “convention, that is to say from a mutual agreement as to words and actions without a mutual agreement as to feelings”.

Words: Language and Community  213 a. The “agent.” Although Nietzsche is skeptical of the subject and agent, we saw in Chapter 5 that he thinks that there’s “something in the neighborhood” that requires an account. Something important happened when human began to view itself as a subject and agent. The human body acquired a new ability, a very complex ability comprising connected capacities for language, for self-​ consciousness, and for this idea of itself. This ability also includes the capacity to “promise,” as Nietzsche develops it in GM.ii. For it’s this that lets agency see itself as “the same thing” as (e.g.) the speaker that earlier promised—​to identify itself across time. What’s there for Nietzsche in place of the subject/​agent is this ability, which really amounts to a new disposition or drive or will that has been introduced among all the others that the “human animal” already had. It’s this ability that, most immediately, wields the capacity for language so that it is the most immediate “thing that speaks.” It is, as it were, the “proximal speaker” of whatever we say. Nietzsche insists, however, that this agential ability is usually just a tool or vehicle for something else which really settles the meaning of what one says. The (self-​conceived) agent may mean these things, but only because an ulterior viewpoint means them through it. So agency isn’t “in charge” of language in the way it thinks. “Behind” that ability, making it and still steering it, and meaning things with its words, are other factors with interests of their own. Once we notice these controlling factors, we see how our confidence that it is we persons who mean, serves their more effective rule. Nietzsche thinks of two kinds of factors here, two quasi-​agents that are principally responsible for what a person says—​and that settle what the person means. One lies below, the other above the level of the person: the first is the person’s system of drives, the second is his or her community. b. The drives. Nietzsche’s view often seems to be that it’s not the person but his or her drives that speak. In 80:6[264]: “Words are like a keyboard of drives, and thoughts (in words) are chords upon it.”13 Nietzsche often stresses that morality is a “sign-​language” [Zeichensprache] for the drives or affects,14 and this clearly goes, too, for the words and thoughts in which morality is expressed. In 85–​6:1[28] (LNp56): “Thinking is still not the inner happening itself, but likewise only a sign-​language for the power-​balance of affects.”15

13 83:7[62]: “The philosopher is only a kind of opportunity that makes it possible for [his strongest] drive to come sometime to speech.” 14 E.g., BGE.187; 83:7[58], 83:7[76]. More broadly, 70–​2:8[41]: “Unsere ganze Erscheinungswelt ist ein Symbol des Triebes.” 15 As discussed in Chapter 4 (§4.1), I think Nietzsche often uses “drive” and “affect” interchangeably to pick out the psychic structure of interwoven drives and affects. I’ll speak of “drives” later but think the same points could be made about affects.

214  Human Values What does Nietzsche mean when he calls a word a “sign” of a drive? Is it just that this word is a clue from which we can infer the drive—​in the way that a footprint or other mere caused trace might be a clue (i.e., “without meaning it”)?16 Nietzsche does indeed want to treat words diagnostically this way. But I think he mainly means that words are “signs” of drives in a stronger sense: drives signal with words, for the sake of sharing. Most simply put, a word is meant by a drive to bring some “other” into its own project—​to align it with its end. As we saw in Chapter 3 (§3.2), in the crudest and original case a sign is a kind of “shove” [Stoss] to another (Nietzsche mentions ants); so 83:7[173]: “the sign is the (often painful) impression [Einprägen] of one will upon another will.” The drive “communicates” and “shares” by making the other “see things its way.” Of course drives become adept at getting their way by less direct strategies for sharing than this. So, roughly, a word is a way for the drive to get what it wants by getting the other to want it (or what serves it), too. These drives have, importantly, an intentionality of their own, prior to language: they mean things, they interpret the world, they aim. They mean things by words, but they mean things without words, too, things (we’ll see) that can never really be put into words. It’s through this pre-​linguistic intentionality that thinking moves, I take it, when we think without words, as Nietzsche insists we can do. And it’s this pre-​linguistic intentionality that words always fall short of. GS.244: “Thoughts and words. One cannot completely reproduce even one’s own thoughts in words.” GS.354:  “Human, like every living creature, is constantly thinking but does not know it; the thinking that becomes conscious is only the smallest part of it, let’s say the shallowest, worst part:—​for only that conscious thinking happens in words.”17 It may seem Nietzsche wavers on this point. Consider 86–​7:5[22] (WP.522, LNp110): “now we read disharmonies and problems into things because we think only in the form of language . . . /​we cease thinking when we no longer want to think within the constraints of language, we just manage to reach the suspicion that there might be a boundary here. /​Thinking rationally is interpreting according to a scheme we cannot cast away.” And D.257: “Words present in us.—​We always express our thoughts with the words that lie to hand. Or, to express my whole suspicion: we have at any moment only the thought for which we have to hand the words.” I suggest, very simply, that in such passages Nietzsche is speaking

16 Leiter [2015, 575] argues that Nietzsche means by “sign-​language” merely a “symptom” or cause. In Chapter 3 (§3.1) I tried to show that although he does often use “sign” in this way, he more often means something stronger: a communicative intent. I think the latter sense is usual when he speaks of “sign-​language.” 17 GM.iii.8: “whoever thinks in words thinks as a speaker and not as a thinker (it betrays the fact that he basically does not think facts, not factually, but rather only with respect to facts, that he really thinks himself and his listeners).”

Words: Language and Community  215 just of conscious thinking—​but that he does also recognize an unconscious and wordless thinking. It will be important that Nietzsche tends to think of a person’s system of drives as quite particular, even unique to him or her. This is especially due, I think, to the great diversity of drives and to the infinite complexity of syntheses—​balances of power—​possible for these many drives. Each person has a particular set of drives, of particular relative strengths, and their interaction, with one another and the person’s environment, gradually settles them into an extremely complex system of power relationships. This decides how and when particular drives are able to express themselves in what’s said in particular situations. But as we’ve noticed, the drives’ control over linguistic meaning is not complete. In particular, there are ways in which the drives themselves are controlled and “commanded.” This happens above all in their “values”—​by something else controlling the signs by which they steer. Drives acquire these signs—​in the form of words for virtues and goods—​from the community. When the drives speak, they do so with words designed in the social group. And by playing this role, Nietzsche thinks, the group speaks too.18 c. The group. So when a person speaks—​or writes or thinks or means—​it’s not just his or her drives that express themselves, but viewpoints from the herd or community.19 It is, in particular, the viewpoints of the past types of people who made the values now received from the community. Those types very often had interests different from those of the drives that take values from them. So a drive often operates with signs that don’t steer it well because they were made for different purposes. And the drive will then express itself poorly in its words for what it wants because those other interests are also “talking” in them. How are a group’s interests embedded in words? We can distinguish two kinds of process that Nietzsche has in mind. First there is the general design of words in favor of the common—​their general function to bring us into community and sharing. Second there is the more particular design of words by groups or classes to express their particular aims. There’s one main and most common “function” that human values (norms) have been “designed for”:  the strength and success of the group. They were shaped for this function partly by the deliberate choices of societies or leaders, but more largely and anciently by a quasi-​Darwinian “group selection”: societies 18 Cf. the account of the relation between the “semiotics” of the impulses (drives) and consciousness in Klossowski [1969/​1998, ch. 2]. 19 This second “meaner” is treated in GS.354, in a passage we looked at in Chapter 5 (§5.3): consciousness “belongs not to human’s individual-​existence but much more to its community-​and herd-​nature . . . [so that] each of us . . . will always bring to consciousness only the not-​individual in him, his ‘average,’—​that through the character of consciousness . . . our thoughts themselves are constantly as it were outvoted [majorisirt] and translated back into the herd perspective.” Cf. 85:34[187] (LNp12).

216  Human Values that survive and grow preserve and spread the norms and practices that have favored this success. Z.i.15: “Whatever allows [a people] to rule and conquer and shine, to the dread and envy of its neighbors: that counts for it as the high, the first, the measure, the meaning of all things.” And there’s one main way our values make us serve the group’s good: they make us common, they herd us. Group strength depends above all on cohesion, on like-​thinking: it is the interest of society itself to “socialize” or “tame” us. Language in general is a device for this, and so, too, are many of a language’s words for virtues and goods. Not only do we adopt these values from the motive to share, but their content also promotes that motive in us. So, for example, Nietzsche thinks, with the virtue of pity [Mitleid]: this gives us the goal to share in a particular affect, suffering [Leiden].20 So a first thing that speaks in our values is a “herd-​instinct,” as 86–​7:7[6]‌ (WP.275) puts it:  “An authority speaks—​who speaks?  .  .  .  God speaks!  .  .  .  /​ Supposing now the belief in god is gone: so the problem poses itself anew: ‘who speaks?’—​My answer, taken not from metaphysics but from animal physiology: the herd-​instinct speaks. It wills to be master: therefore its ‘thou shalt!’ ” This instinct speaks as a drive in its own right within us, but also as the past, communal will that shaped all the values we grow up into. 82–​3:4[64]: “The conscience is a ventriloquist, when it speaks we don’t believe any more that its voice comes from us.” But second, there are also more particular groups that speak. When a community’s values are designed for its own success they are tuned to favor the particular life that community leads. But often some group within the larger society determines what this particular life will be. Nietzsche’s idea is that periodically some new group within the society “takes power” and remakes values for its own sake—​to promote the kind of life it favors (and that favors it). Nietzsche’s most dramatic example is of course the “slave revolt” in which values were revised in the interest of the “lower” (ignoble) class.21 This Christian “slave morality” makes life more livable for a general class and type of person; this is its “function.” But this morality is made into the “norms” for the whole society, so that it’s shared by persons of all classes and types. Such norms can last long after the social conditions for which they were designed have passed. In consequence the values we inherit are a patchwork of signs “said” by the many past groups that successively remade them. In 80:6[70]: “our own judgment is

20 I discussed suffering in Chapter 4 (§4.3) and will treat pity in Chapter 7 (§7.3). 21 Earlier it was the masters who embedded their values in language. GM.i.2: “The master’s right to give names goes so far that one should allow oneself to grasp the origin of language itself as the expression of power of the rulers.”

Words: Language and Community  217 only a propagation [Fortzeugung] of the combined foreign ones! Our own drives appear to us under the interpretation of the other.” So, in sum, I think of myself as “the one who speaks”—​who sets the meanings of the words I say or think. But this “I” I take myself to be doesn’t exist in the way I imagine it: there is, strictly speaking, no subject or agent. What’s there is a complex capacity for awareness with words; this is the proximate “thing that speaks.” But this capacity is also used by two other kinds of forces. It is used by the (other) drives amid which that agential capacity is set. And it is used by the social forces that made the words that it uses and that the drives themselves steer by.

6.3 Language’s risks Let’s turn now to Nietzsche’s critique of language—​to his critical judgments against it. Our main interest will be in his complaint that it “makes common,” but we should look at his judgments more broadly to see how this one fits among them. Since language is Nietzsche’s own medium or tool, his doubts against it have an immediate application to himself: they express a distrust or suspicion against his necessary instrument. Yet this doubt is omnipresent in him. Note for example how often he puts scare quotes around words, or otherwise calls attention to words as unapt, unable to say what he wants to say. D.423: “I begin to hate speaking, to hate even thinking; for do I not hear behind every word the laughter of error, of imagination, of the spirit of delusion?”22 I offer a quick catalogue of these doubts; the broadest division is between epistemic and existential ones. Language’s involvement in “the common” is an obstacle both to truth and to individuality. (1) Language falsifies. This is Nietzsche’s most prominent doubt against language and has been amply discussed. Language, due to deep structural features, conceals or distorts the true character of the world. He raises this doubt from early on; so HH.i.11, on “language as putative science,” says that in naming things people thought they were getting at the truth about them, but that it now emerges “that in their belief in language they have propagated a tremendous error.”23 And

22 D.47: “Words lie in our way! Wherever primitive mankind set up a word, they believed they had made a discovery. How different the truth is!—​they had touched on a problem, and by supposing they had solved it they had created a hindrance to its solution.—​Now with every piece of knowledge one has to stumble over dead, petrified words, and one will sooner break a leg than a word.” 23 And in HH.iii.11: “Through words and concepts we are still continually misled into imagining things as being simpler than they are, separate from one another, indivisible, each existing in and for itself. A philosophical mythology lies concealed in language which breaks out again every moment, however careful one may be otherwise.”

218  Human Values he expresses it still very late; so TI.iii.5 says that language is a constant advocate for error. Language belongs in its origins to an age of the most rudimentary form of psychology: we enter a crude fetishism when we bring to consciousness the basic presuppositions of the language-​metaphysics, that is, of reason. This sees everywhere agent and doing: it believes in willing as cause generally; it believes in the “I”, in the I as being, in the I as substance and projects this belief in the I-​substance upon all things. . . . I am afraid we will not get loose of god because we still believe in grammar. . . .

This doubt is a frequent theme, from beginning to end, in his notebooks.24 We noticed it earlier in Chapter 5’s (§5.1) treatment of the subject. There are difficult questions regarding the force of this doubt. Is it Nietzsche’s view that everything said in language is false? This would be much too blunt. We need, for a start, to add the qualification that it is in (something like) the “strict” or “literal” sense of our language that what we say in it is false. And we need to consider whether Nietzsche changes his views about the status of that strict sense.25 This in turn affects how we should feel about falling short of it and how we should cope with this. To some extent at least we might abate the error by taking account of the limits in language.26 I will return to these issues later. Our interest is in one main ground Nietzsche has for this falsification claim: that language involves equating unequals (i.e., treating as the same things that are different). For this is where that claim connects with Nietzsche’s worry about “the common.” (In Chapter 7 [§7.3] we’ll pursue this attack on equality into his critique of morality.) Words, as general terms or concepts, collect multiple instances into commonalities, with many things (purportedly) sharing a property or even an essence. Nietzsche proposes that this presumption of equal things, which also underlies logic, grew out of our social instinct to see members

24 Cf. 86–​7:6[13] (LNp124–​5) on how the oldest errors are “incorporated” in language and how difficult it is to get free of them, and 88:14[79] (WP.634, LNp246) on language as leading us to believe in subject, object, and doer of the deed. And note the Wittgensteinian 72–​3:19[135] (PTp42, ENp133):  “The philosopher caught in the nets of language.” Similarly 75:6[39] (ENp218):  “The seducers of philosophers are words, they wriggle in the nets of language.” 25 Clark [1990] has influentially argued that Nietzsche abandons his “falsification thesis” once he realizes that if there’s no thing-​in-​itself language can’t be faulted as false about it. But I  think Nietzsche’s epistemic doubts about language extend much more widely and persist: it misleads us about the non-​noumenal things there really are. 26 Nehamas argues [1985, 96] that it’s not that language itself makes metaphysical posits, but that we mistakenly take it to do so: “He claims not that our language is wrong but that we are wrong in taking it too seriously.” So, too, Clark [1990, 106–​7].

Words: Language and Community  219 as equals.27 And he has doubts against a sharing or common here, too: this way that language gathers or unites particulars is false to their particularity. It’s vital to notice that there are two quite different ways this falsifying equating works; we might call them objective and subjective. On the one hand language falsifies by equating with one another its objects or referents, what it’s about. Here there is a mismatch between words and things and a failure in words’ referential use. But on the other hand language also falsifies what we mean to say or express, our thoughts or feelings; once again it does so by an illegitimate equating of (e.g.) these feelings with one another. Here there’s a mismatch between words and our own attitudes and a failure in words’ expressive use. (a) False reference. Consider first the falsification of facts. Words, by virtue of being general terms and so purporting to apply to types, treat unequals as equals and so falsify the world. Things themselves are unique, Nietzsche claims, and it is false to them to treat them as the same or even similar. So the early essay “On Truth and Lie . . .” [TL] speaks of “how concepts are formed” by the need to fit “countless more or less similar cases which, strictly speaking, are never equal” [ENp256]. The error lies in finding something “common” between things—​some property that is the same in both (or all) of them, and justifies the equating.28 The cases Nietzsche has most in mind, of course, are not words for “natural kinds” such as elements or species, but for human attitudes and experiences. In TL he makes the point first about leaves, but as a step to the example of “honesty”: “We know nothing at all about an essential quality called honesty, but we know of many individualized and therefore unequal actions, which we equate by omitting the inequalities between them and which we now describe as honest actions” [ENp257]. Here the uniqueness owes to what we saw before: each of us has a quite particular drive-​constitution, which changes through time and also confronts quite specific situations. A person’s “honesty” in different cases reflects different drive-​sets dealing with different situations and not anything always the same; still less is it like cases of “honesty” in a different person. The words we have to describe experience are inadequate to such complexity. BGE.19: “Willing seems to me to be above all something complicated, something that is a unit only as a word—​and it is precisely in this one word that the popular prejudice lurks. . . .”29 27 86–​7:7[41] (WP.509, LNp136): “The soil of desires from which logic has grown: herd instinct in the background, the assumption of equal cases presupposes the ‘equal souls.’ ” And I suggest this is what he means when he says in 87:10[2]‌(WP.1021, LNp173) that science “makes common cause” with the herd instinct. 28 This doubt isn’t easily defused, I think, by the reply that in applying the same term we mean only that the things are similar, not identical. For it’s presumed that the property they have in common is identical—​e.g., that red is just red in things with different red shades. 29 HH.i.14: “Here again, as so often, the unity of the word is no guarantee of the unity of the thing.” D.133: “how coarsely does language assault with its one word [‘pity’] so polyphonous a being!”

220  Human Values (b) False expression. Not only does language falsify the inner when it speaks about it, it also falsifies it when it expresses it. It’s important to see—​what is often overlooked—​that words’ singleness is not only false to the facts, but also to our own sense: to what we are trying to mean. What, in each case, we attempt and mean to say is likewise unique and likewise misspoken by our general terms. But what is it we’re “trying to say?” What settles what’s “meant to be meant” when we speak? Here again I think we should distinguish two sub-​points that appear to stand in tension with one another, but both of which Nietzsche states. They issue respectively from those two alternatives (in §6.2) to the subject as “who means” in our words: the drives or the group. On both counts a word, in its singleness, is inadequate to the complexity meant. But in the first argument this complex meaning is projected by one’s drives, in the second by the culture-​wide language. (i) What we try to mean by words—​our quite particular feeling or stance—​ greatly exceeds what their generality lets them say. Language equates unequals in relation to what we mean: we mean to express the singular complexity in which our unique drive-​structure confronts this specific case, but language converts it into something common or general. When we try to express how we feel, or what we want, the words we have available can only say something common to others. Nietzsche voices his sense that his own ideas are not well expressed by his words. TI.ix.26. We no longer value ourselves enough when we communicate ourselves. Our authentic [eigentlichen] experiences are not at all chatty. They could not communicate themselves even if they wanted. This is because the word for them is missing. What we have words for we are already beyond [hinaus]. In all speaking lies a grain of contempt. Language, it seems, was invented only for the average, mediocre, communicable. With language the speaking vulgarizes itself. —​From a morality for deaf-​mutes and other philosophers.30

Words not only falsify my individual experiences, but de-​ individualize them in a way we’ll explore later. But first there’s another form of the epistemic-​expressive  doubt. (ii) Words seem to be single names for single things, but in fact have a complex meaning layered into them historically. Here words get their meaning from the history of the social practice and carry much of its depth and intricacy. So now Nietzsche thinks that words do mean a multiplicity and that we mean a 30 GS.354: “At bottom, all our actions are incomparably and utterly personal, unique, and boundlessly individual, there is no doubt; but as soon as we translate them into consciousness, they no longer seem to be. . . .” Also UM.iv.5; 87:9[106] (WP.569, LNp161).

Words: Language and Community  221 multiplicity through them, but aren’t aware of this and are misled by the singleness and apparent simplicity of each word. Here the problem is that words have surface simplicity but deep complexity. HH.iii.33: “The word ‘revenge’ is said so quickly it almost seems as if it could contain no more than one conceptual and perceptual root. And so one continues to strive to discover it. . . . As if every word were not a pocket into which now this, now that, now several things at once have been put!” The GM.ii discussion of punishment speaks to this. That word (or Strafe) is tangled up with an evolved system of practices; it names all the varied things we are doing in these practices. We should notice that the word names them as a virtue and as one virtue: to punish is a thing it is right and proper to do—​ and that needs to be done in the right and proper way. And we take ourselves to be doing the same right thing as we carry out (usually in proxy) the diverse practices grouped by the word. But really, Nietzsche insists, these sub-​practices are very different and in the most important way: they were designed toward very different ends. Different punitive procedures, or modifications on existing procedures, have been worked into the overall practice down through history, each expressing a very different social interest. So we think we have the one virtue and purpose, “to punish,” but behind this stand multiple ulterior purposes, all submerged in the single name.31 Nietzsche famously sums this point in a well-​known passage [GM.ii] so relevant here that I will quote it again. [T]‌he concept “punishment” in fact no longer represents one meaning at all but rather an entire synthesis of “meanings”: the previous history of punishment in general, the history of its exploitation for the most diverse purposes, finally crystallizes into a kind of unity that is difficult to dissolve, difficult to analyze and—​one must emphasize—​completely and utterly undefinable. (Today it is impossible to say for sure why we really punish: all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically summarized elude definition; only that which has no history is definable.)

This then is a way a word means more than we (and our drives) try to mean by it. Not only do words fall short of expressing our complex individuality, but they express a foreign complexity not evident to us. A word’s singleness conceals this complex surplus, which is supplied by the sedimented traditional practice. Here

31 GM.ii.12: “one imagined punishment as invented for punishing. . . . The form [of a practice] is fluid but the ‘meaning’ is even more so”; these points are developed in ii.13. HH.iii.190 tells a story of how virtues come to hold sway in a society: as different kinds of people build their own ideals into it, “a virtue at last becomes an assemblage of all that is good and worthy of reverence.”

222  Human Values our usual error is to treat as single all the many different things the word does mean—​in the community, in the general practice—​and not in the word falling short of what our drives try to say. So there are two quite different multiplicities hidden by the word’s superficial simplicity. (2) Language makes common. The first general complaint against language was epistemic; the second we might call existential. It treats the unequal or different not as a fact, but as a goal—​and the equal, conversely, not as a lie but as a danger. The problem with language is that it makes us “common,” it “commonizes” us. In doing so it stunts or harms our individuality; it prevents us from opening up the differences from others involved in “becoming who we are.”32 We notice at once that this criticism stands in some tension with the first. It warns us not to be “equal” (common) with others—​but how can there be any danger of this if there can be no equal things? Clearly either the standard for equality is set higher in one of these arguments or they mean different kinds of equality. I think it is both. Language makes us more equal (similar) to one another, even though we could never be fully so. But the danger is less this degree of similarity than it is the will to be equal or similar. We’ve already seen how language is “for sharing”: its chief function is to bring a pair or a group into “the same” way of seeing, acting, feeling. This will never of course be precisely the same, but only “more nearly” so. And it is also, more crucially, “the same” (way of seeing) by being meant and understood as the same by both parties. Thus our seeing/​acting/​feeling is more similar, and we mean it to be so. But we lose something vital when we let ourselves be commonized this way. We degrade the uniqueness that our thoughts, acts, feelings do have. And by understanding them as equal, we deny and lose touch with that uniqueness. Nietzsche famously puts this point in Z.i.5:  “My brother, when you have a virtue, and it is your virtue, then you have her in common with no one. /​Of course you want to call her by name and caress her . . . /​And see! Now you have her name in common with the people and have become people and herd with your virtue! /​You would do better to say: ‘inexpressible and nameless is that which gives my soul torture and delight. . . .’ ” We can retain our true uniqueness only by resisting our impulse to give common names to everything. The common names in our language, and our virtue words in particular, bind us to customs and norms. They give us the community’s sense of our virtues, so that we aim ourselves at the common idea of, for example, honesty or kindness. When I pity I have the word “pity” ready for what I’m doing, for what I’m trying to do well; this word gives its meaning to my aspiration. I try to pity as one properly pities, to do “what it means to pity.” And what it means to pity is, by default,



32 HH.iii.55: “Danger of language for spiritual freedom.—​Every word is a prejudice [Vorurtheil].”

Words: Language and Community  223 the communal sense, the sense “pity” has in the language overall. The member takes its virtue words to mean what they commonly do, and this keeps it on the straight and narrow, within the community’s service. In order for words to be able to induce shared attitudes in this way, we must already share a tremendous amount. Language both promotes and depends on commonality. So BGE.268: “To understand one another, it is not enough that one use the same words; one also has to use the same words for the same species of inner experiences; in the end one has to have one’s experience in common.”33 In 84:25[425]:  “The commonality [Gemeinsamkeit] of our sensory judgments is also the point of departure for our moral and aesthetic valuations.” Either by “blood” or by training our minute bodily judgments must be tuned (roughly) the same way as others’ judgments; language depends on this sharing. We experience this sharing as a kind of “being the other.” In hearing or reading I feel myself to enter the other’s perspective. Sometimes, where the sharing is most complete, I feel myself quite one with that perspective—​it is very much mine as well. This sense of fused identity is perhaps what most characterizes “the herd” in the worst sense. One takes oneself to occupy a common space with other members, one in which “we” all see and feel alike, in which “our” viewpoints are interchangeable and identical. One loses one’s sense of separate identity altogether, perhaps, and wants only to will and feel as the group does. But language can also make us “share” in more nuanced ways. In hearing or reading I need not “lose myself ” in the other’s perspective. I can occupy it only in part while also keeping, to a greater or lesser degree, my own view in its difference from this other’s. Still I am in some ways commonized even here. It’s not just that I’m partly occupying the other’s perspective; it’s that even my own perspective is now directed toward the other’s, has its meaning in relation to the other’s. In conversation I stand on common ground with the other. I understand myself to pass back and forth between our perspectives—​and I understand the other to be doing so, too. I “am” the whole dialogue, as well as being especially my side in it. Even in vehement argument and disagreement we enter into such a shared space. We share all the presuppositions that bring us up to the point of this disagreement. We share in its mattering so much just what the answer to this question is. Our effort to persuade or out-​argue another requires that we inhabit the other’s viewpoint enough to understand it. Every such exchange is “commonizing” in such subtle respects.

33 Later in BGE.268: “In all souls [in a people] an equal number of often recurring experiences has won the upper hand over those coming more rarely: one understands on the basis of these, faster and always faster—​the history of language is the history of a shortening-​process—​; by this faster understanding one binds oneself, closer and always closer.”

224  Human Values Nietzsche expresses doubts against reading on this very score. He reports in EH.ii.3 that when he is working he reads nothing, so as not to expose himself to any “alien thought”: “[p]‌erhaps it is not my way to read much or many things:  reading rooms make me sick.” And EH.ii.8:  “Early in the morning, at break of day, when everything is fresh, in the dawn of your strength, to read a book—​that is what I call depraved!”34 Nietzsche sums up many of these criticisms of language we’ve now surveyed in 87:10[60] (WP.810): “In relation to music all communication through words is shameless; the word dilutes and makes stupid [verdünnt und verdummt]; the word depersonalizes [entpersönnlicht]:  the word makes the uncommon common.” In §6.5 we’ll see how, in his own use of language, he tries to learn from these criticisms.

6.4  Commons and individuals Having seen language’s role in commonizing us, let’s now return to “commonness” itself to try to determine Nietzsche’s overall judgment on it. At first glance his view seems altogether hostile. But as we look, with him, at the operation of the common in human history we see that it plays an indispensable role, standing in a certain dialectical relation to the individual. We also see how this role develops and makes a kind of progress. This gives the individual—​and Nietzsche himself—​an indispensable relation to the common and a strong positive interest in it. We noticed in §6.1 that Nietzsche’s usual opposite for the common is the “individual.” The contrast and conflict between individual and common is of long interest to him, going back to Birth of Tragedy, where it has a quite different aspect. There he treats the Apollonian art-​drive as a principle of individuation and the Dionysian as returning to a generality [Allgemeinheit] in which one has the sense of losing one’s separate identity in “belonging to a higher community” [BT.1]. Here the state of community—​the shared view—​claims insight into deep reality. Whether or not Nietzsche accepts this (Schopenhauerian) claim, in Birth of Tragedy he at least clearly favors the Dionysian state and precisely as commonizing and de-​individualizing us. But we’ve seen how his later judgment seems quite the reverse: the common falls into his strong disfavor, as indicated by its frequent labeling as “herd.” In 86–​ 7:5[108] (WP.766): “Basic error: to place the goal in the herd and not in the single individuals [einzelne Individuen]! The herd is means, not more! But now one



34

Also EH.iii.HH.4.

Words: Language and Community  225 tries to understand the herd as individual and to ascribe a higher rank to it than to the individual,—​deepest misunderstanding!!! Likewise to characterize what makes us herdish, pity [die Mitgefühle], as the most valuable side of our nature!” At the start of §6.1 we noticed several passages from Beyond Good and Evil expressing a kind of contempt toward the common—​which indeed is one of the resonances of the German gemein, perhaps more strongly than of our “common.” They express, we might say, a view of the common as “bad” in the sense of a master morality; they look down on those who want to “share” in this way, from a life—​an individual life—​confidently superior. We can hear this attitude in that Latin phrase we saw he uses in TI.viii.5 and elsewhere, pulchrum est paucorum hominum. This “master’s view” of the common is clearly important to Nietzsche. And he does want to evoke and use it in his readers. But his new values are not (we’ll see) just a master morality, and this scorning judgment against the common is not his ultimate view of it. To see his overall verdict we need to look—​as we have for other topics—​at his genealogy of the common. We need to look at how the common—​this instinct for sharing—​arose and evolved and how it did so in relation to the (contrasting) individual. Nietzsche’s “revaluation” of the common, just as of other things, follows and uses his genealogy. He assesses the common in the light of a historical and psychological understanding of it: of how the human practice of “norms”—​values shared as communal—​has evolved. Most broadly, it’s human’s ability to have such norms—​common values, values as common—​that makes it human. We’re distinguished from other animals by this special way of having “social practices”: by sharing norms that steer (as signs) those practices.35 Through these norms, practices can be adjusted to changing conditions much more quickly than an animal’s (and our own) genetic instincts can be. In animals, GS.143 says, the “ethic of custom” has been “translated definitively into flesh and blood,” whereas human remains flexible. Living by acquired practices, human can “learn from experience” on the scale of historical time; it learns by revising those shared steering signs, its norms. These practices bind us together into groups that amount to “superorganisms” able to act as more powerful units, whereby we are “masters of the earth.” And indeed each member feels itself magnified by belonging to this greater power.36

35 Compare Kant in Critique of Judgment [5:355]: “humanity means on the one hand the universal feeling of participation [Teilnehmungsgefühl] and on the other hand the capacity for being able to communicate [mittheilen] one’s inmost self universally, which properties taken together constitute the sociability [Geselligkeit] that is appropriate to humanness, by which it distinguishes itself from the limitation of animals.” 36 GM.iii.19 describes how a “communal power-​feeling” numbs the single person’s discontent with himself.

226  Human Values These advantages depend on (at least) two structural features of norms. On the one hand these values must indeed be shared in the group: members need a widespread and strong allegiance to them, a “herd-​instinct” to match and agree. Only by sharing norms can they share the practices that those values guide. On the other hand there must be some means for changing these values—​for replacing one set of norms by another, so that human can not only adjust to changing circumstances but also advance. Changing values requires that some person or group within the community breaks allegiance to the prevailing norms and makes and imposes new ones. Moreover this revising element must have some likelihood of improving the norm. Nietzsche has this simple logic in mind in a surprising array of cases. Consider this extended passage from 82:1[35]: It is the ancient practice within the herd: the genuine dishonesty, to see only the allowed judgments and sensations. This common practice of all the good produces the uniformity of common actions:  it gives them their enormous force. . . . /​The Pharisee is the ur-​type of the preserving human, always necessary. /​Opposite: /​the strong evil /​and the weak evil, who so feel themselves. /​From him arises sometimes the good-​of-​itself [Sich-​selber-​Gute], the devil become god.

Here the devil is the one who breaks with the common (is evil) by making his own good into a new common (for whom he then becomes god). Thus Nietzsche sees a broad cyclicality to human history: periods of stasis in norms, separated by intervals of revolutionary change. And he sees a broad distinction between those who cleave to prevailing norms and those (fewer) who break them and make new ones.37 He tends to imagine the change as happening not steadily and gradually but in sudden breaks, dramatized in Z.iii.12’s image of norms as bridges over a river—​bridges whose apparent fixity is exposed when “the thaw wind blows”—​as of course he thinks is happening now.38 Some of these transformations are more fundamental: they change not just the content of the norms, but also the character or ground of members’ allegiance to them. As we’ve seen more than once, Nietzsche thinks of human history as having two main parts, the first lasting far longer and being mostly “pre-​historical” in leaving no written record. The second is the period we now 37 Nietzsche expresses the indispensability of both herd and individual in 87:10[59] (WP.886): “one should not evaluate the solitary type by the herdish [heerdenhafte], nor the herdish by the solitary /​ Viewed from high: both are necessary; equally their antagonism is necessary.” 38 Notice the rather different scenario in A.57, which imagines a period of experimentation in a society, from which a conclusion is drawn as to “what works best,” and these values are then insulated from any further scrutiny by being treated as sacred tradition.

Words: Language and Community  227 occupy, though it may be in the drawn-​out process of coming to an end. Human may be on the verge of transition into a third phase. These phases are distinguished above all by the character of the common (i.e., by the way members’ allegiance to norms takes place). Society—​and humans—​first formed in the long period of the Sittlichkeit der Sitte, the “ethic of custom.”39 Its “enormous stretches of time” were “the effective and decisive main story [Hauptgeschichte] that has settled the character of humanity” [D.18]. Perhaps what most characterizes this phase is that persons understand themselves just as members, not as individuals standing independently from the group. As HH.ii.89 puts it, each is raised “not as an individual, but as a member of the whole, as a cipher in a majority.”40 They hold their values precisely as the norms of the group; that these values are common or shared is all the justification the member can even imagine them having. D.9: “ethic [Sittlichkeit] is nothing other (and so nothing more!) than obedience to customs [Sitten], of whatever kind these might be; but customs are the traditional way of acting and evaluating.” And D.16 speaks of “the great proposition with which civilization begins: any custom is better than no custom.”41 Nietzsche is emphatic that “human” first arises as such a group member. In 81:11[193]: “Before egoism, herd-​drive is older than the ‘willing to preserve itself.’ Human first evolves as function.”42 But even here he presupposes, I think, prehuman ancestors who were not merged into a group in this way but instead pursued their separate and selfish interests.43 This selfishness didn’t amount to an egoism because these prehumans lacked the capacities for consciousness and words—​capacities that only evolved through community. But this selfishness is important because it continues to work in the social member, too, in his or her bodily drives, often in opposition to that will to share. So, against our herd-​will to “be like” others, our selfish drives push to overcome them. In this age of custom it’s clear and blatant that these norms are meant to serve the interest of the group. So HH.i.96 says that tradition [Herkunft] “is above

39 Very unfortunately most English translations obscure or conceal Nietzsche’s treatment of custom by translating Sittlichkeit as “morality”; they make it impossible to recognize the distinction we’ll see he often has in mind. My term “ethic” is meant to recall the Greek ēthos, “custom, usage.” We’ve met this important notion already, and will return to it in different contexts, in particular in Chapter 7’s (§7.2) treatment of morality; see note 30 there. 40 83:7[114]: “Die Gemeinsucht ist älter als die Selbstsucht, jedenfalls lange Zeit stärker.” 41 Daybreak begins with an extended examination of this phase (and level) of valuing. 42 Also 81:11[130]. 81:11[182] suggests that the affects show their design for social purposes by the way one still “fears and hates more and most strongly as member [Mitglied] of a lineage [Geschlecht] or state, not his personal enemy but the public one.” 43 Perhaps these non-​social ancestors were also pre-​ape, since in 81:11[130] Nietzsche speculates there were also “ape-​herds.” Back in 76:19[115] he says that the social group arose because the individual [Einzelnes] sees that it can preserve itself by joining into the band—​a selfish basis that is later forgotten when the social good becomes “habit and heredity.”

228  Human Values all directed at the preservation of a community [Gemeinde], a people.”44 And HH.i.224: “It’s to be learned from history that the branch of a people preserves itself best in which most humans have a living sense of commonality [lebendigen Gemeinsinn] as a result of the equality of their habitual and undiscussable principles, hence as a result of their common [gemeinsamen] belief.” This allegiance to the group involves viewing individuals as enemies of the group due to their lack of and threat to this allegiance.45 Hence, says GS.117, “for the longest period of humanity’s existence there was nothing more frightful than feeling individual [einzeln].  .  .  . To be a self, to esteem oneself by one’s own measure and weight—​that went against taste then.” 82:3[1]‌puts it more strongly: “Originally herd and herd-​instinct; the self felt as exception, nonsense, madness by the herd.” Nietzsche treats this age of the ethic of custom as now mostly past. D.9 (entitled Begriff der Sittlichkeit der Sitte) begins: “In relation to the way of life of whole millennia of humanity we current humans live in a very unethical [unsittlichen] time: the power of custom [Sitte] is astonishingly weakened and the feeling of ethos [Sittlichkeit] so rarefied and carried so high that it can be described as having as good as vanished.” However, as with other past phenomena, he thinks this stage still survives in us. Each person still passes through this way of having values on his or her way to maturity. And indeed it continues to work subliminally in us.46 Nietzsche’s name for what supplanted—​or rather was superimposed upon—​ this ethic of custom is “morality” [Moral], though as we’ll see he also uses this word with a broader scope that includes the earlier stage.47 There is a crucial shift as members begin to understand themselves as “free moral agents” who stand alone with the task to do right by relying on their reason and conscience. Members are brought up to think of themselves as individuals for whom the social norms have no ultimate authority, being subject to assessment by their private use of reason and conscience. They think of themselves as “sovereign

44 Again HH.ii.89: “The origin of custom lies in two ideas: ‘the community is worth more than the individual’ and ‘an enduring advantage is to be preferred to a transient one’.” 45 D.9 again: “Every individual action, every individual way of thinking arouses dread.” And cf. GM.ii.9’s account how the community views its members as its debtors, who are subject to being cast out and treated as enemy others if they fail to honor this debt. 46 So D.18 concludes:  “You suppose that all this has changed, and that humanity must have exchanged its character? O you human-​knowers, learn to know yourselves better!” 47 We see Nietzsche’s recognition of this ambiguity in 85–​6:2[170] (WP.265):  “Knowledge and consciousness are lacking of what revolutions moral judgement has already gone through. . . . I have [indicated] one of these displacements with the opposition ‘ethic of custom’ and —​—​.” I suggest he had intended to conclude “morality,” but noticed that he had just used “moral” for the whole genus. (Kaufmann misrenders the German in his translation of the note in WP.)

Words: Language and Community  229 individuals’ who are übersittlich and thereby autonomous, as GM.ii.2 famously puts it.48 Nietzsche thinks of Socrates as emblematic of this new moral view. In 80:4[77]: “Morality for individuals despite the community and its statute begins with Socrates.” And D.9 speaks of “[t]‌hose moralists . . . who by following the Socratic footsteps set the morality of self-​mastery and restraint into the heart of the individual as his ownmost advantage, as his most personal key to happiness.” But Socrates’ advance was just part of a much broader, species-​wide phenomenon. Why did it happen that human began to see itself not as a social member but as an individual? Nietzsche offers various hypotheses how and why this transition occurred. (a)  Sometimes he makes individuality arise by the underlying wills to power of members—​from the deep selfishness he thinks was embedded in our bodies before our social formation. When social restraint of these wills weakens, they pull us apart as separate, selfish individuals. So HH.iii.31: “Because humans have, for their security, set themselves equal to one another in order to ground the community [Gemeinde], but this conception goes deeply against the nature of the individual [Einzelnen] and is imposed, so, the more general security is guaranteed, new offshoots of the old drive to dominance assert themselves.” (b)  This social restraint weakens in times of extended peace and prosperity. This weakening is the “decadence” of customs that had forged members of a single type. And so types inevitably proliferate, as well as a tolerance for individuals. As BGE.262 puts it: “Variation . . . suddenly appears on the scene in the greatest abundance and magnificence; the individual dares to be individual and to stand out.” Nietzsche may think that it is members’ separate wills to power that generates this diversity; so (a) and (b) can work together.49 (c)  There is a different kind of loosening of social constraint in polytheistic societies. Here, says GS.143, members were allowed “to see a plurality of norms [Normen]: one god was not the denial or profaning of another! Here one first allowed oneself individuals, here one first honored the right of individuals.” And eventually “one gave oneself in relation to laws and customs and neighbors” the freedom one saw the gods to have. Monotheism, by contrast, is the “rigid

48 See Chapter 10 (§10.3) on this passage and the way its sense is often distorted by the mistranslation of sittlich as “moral.” 49 See 81:11[182] on how “test-​ individuals [Versuchs-​Individuen]” arise in periods of “Entsittlichung, of so-​called corruption.” Cf. the draft of BGE.262 in 85:35[20] (LNp19).

230  Human Values consequence of the teaching of one normal-​human [Einem Normalmenschen]” and allows no such scope for individuals. (d)  Nietzsche has yet another suggestion:  that a sense for individuality arose within a noble caste, out of their pride in themselves. So 87:11[286] (WP.773):  “feelings of pity and community are the lower, preparatory stage at a time when personal self-​esteem [Personal-​Selbstgefühl, so literally ‘self-​ feeling’], the initiative of valuation in the individual is still not possible”; “the height of collective self-​esteem [Collektiv-​S.], pride in the distinction of clan, feeling-​oneself-​unequal . . . is a school of individual self-​esteem [Individual-​ S.],” because “it compels the individual to represent the pride of the whole.” This attribution of individuality to the nobles seems quite different from (b)’s to decadence. What evolved, by one or more of these paths, was the social member’s new sense of itself as not just a member, but an individual independent of the group—​something with resources of its own for finding out the good and the right. However, there is a large element of illusion in this new self-​conception. It is, after all, a conception members are raised up into and that they acquire as part of the normal practice. And if it is indeed “normal” to be an individual in this way, it seems that these individuals won’t really be very individual. So I think says GS.116. Wherever we encounter a morality, we find an evaluation and rank-​order of human drives and actions. These evaluations and rankings are always the expression of the needs of a community and herd: that which avails it first—​and second and third —​, that is also the highest measure of value for all individuals. With morality the individual is instructed to be a function of the herd and to ascribe value to itself only as a function. . . . Morality is herd-​instinct in the individual.

Morality is the way that herd-​instinct still expresses itself in members who now think of themselves as (agential, übersittlich, autonomous) individuals. It’s not just that this moral agency is acquired as normal, but that it also has been designed for the community and not the individual him-​or herself. It’s designed to make the individual a “function” of the group, as GS.116 put it. Those tools—​reason and conscience—​by which the agent thinks itself able to find the supra-​societal true values, have been designed to discover reliably as right precisely what serves the social interest—​pretty much the same behaviors (not lying, not stealing, not killing, etc.) as had been prescribed by the ethic of custom.

Words: Language and Community  231 Nietzsche speaks enough about conscience [Gewissen] to suggest that he knew struggles with his own. His main stance is deflationary: we had thought that our conscience spoke as the truest part of us, but now we see that it was really our common and herd that was speaking. 76–​7:23[103] says that when, prompted by the pain of the Gewissenbisse, we investigate its grounds, we discover “that not much was there apart from habit and the general opinion within the society in which one lives.” And 80:5[13]: “Humans already had in themselves the norm by which they had to act—​this enormous foolishness is still believed to this day! Conscience! It is a sum of sensations of liking and disliking in relation to actions and opinions, imitated sensations, that we found from parents and teachers!”50 Finally 85–​6:2[170]: “To what extent even our conscience, with its apparent personal responsibility, is still indeed herd-​conscience.”51 Our other presumed route to moral truth, “reason,” is just as unreliable—​ just as much a tool of interests not our own. Philosophers presume themselves models of the use of this capacity and yet the values and virtues it has led them to are always the very same values and virtues their society presumes. Reason is really a device for rationalizing values already assumed because the philosopher’s will to share and obey has been so decisive and ultimate in him. Nietzsche especially likes to point out how Kant’s own reason was in thrall to his own need for morality. In 86–​7:7[4]‌(WP.412): “Being accustomed to unconditional authorities finally gives rise to a deep need for unconditional authorities:—​so strong, that even in a critical age such as Kant’s . . . it knew how to make the whole work of critical understanding subordinate and useful to itself.” Nietzsche is, then, highly skeptical of our claim, as self-​supposed “moral agents,” to be genuine individuals. Morality is just a subtler way of engaging us in a herd and common, and those tools it offers to evaluate values are biased and unreliable. Nevertheless I think Nietzsche still holds that morality—​this way of having norms—​makes a major advance over the ethic of custom. Those who value in its way live a higher life than those who live by custom. Their life is better precisely in the way that they aspire to be individuals and have rudimentary abilities for it. Thus their failures to meet this ideal can be exposed and (to some degree) made good. We can state these advances very simply: in morality human learns to think of itself as an individual independent of community, and in “what comes next” human learns really to be such an individual. To be sure this needs qualification on both sides. We’ll see that the “moral agent” does gain a kind of independence,

50 84:25[307]:  “Basic proposition. All previous valuations have arisen from falsely supposed knowledge about things:—​it no longer obligates, even when it works as feeling, instinctively (as conscience).” 51 Also GS.335, 86–​7:5[105] (LNp123).

232  Human Values and the post-​moral individual won’t be completely “individual.” But I  think Nietzsche broadly conceives of human’s task now as being to make real an individuality morality has taught it to value—​and falsely claimed it to have. This will also involve improving those tools, reason and conscience, so that they can really do the work they claim. Thus the direction of the movement in this history past and future is to increase individuality. And it increases not just in the individuals themselves—​they are more and more individual—​but even, paradoxically, in the herd. Members are trained up to value individuality in certain forms and degrees; this is a more refined strategy for taming them. So, for example, the moral agent is still controlled by society-​serving norms but controlled (as it were) on a longer leash. It now has the ideal of individuality, as not before in the age of custom. The moral agent is licensed and even required to try to decide for itself; it acquires a sphere of independence, a right to choose at least its path to compliance with the rules. And Nietzsche thinks even higher achievements can be made “normal” for us. Recall the dialectical relation we noticed earlier between “the many” who share in social norms and “the few” who, at epochal moments, break and remake them. Human’s great strength of living by adaptable social practices depends on both sides to this dialectic. It depends, moreover, on those exceptions living a “higher” life that can then be made common practice through new norms. So the advances of those exceptions can be preserved, in some part, within that normal life which all members are raised up into. The role of the common is thus to sustain the new level inaugurated by individuals. It thereby serves as a higher platform from which still higher individuals can then emerge. An individual’s role, in this scenario, is not simply to exit the community and live as an exception in pristine isolation, but to bring the community to a higher level by changing its norms. This task involves both breaking the old norms and making new ones. An individual performs both of these “in public”—​out in the common space. She tries to induce that “many” to share both her hatred for the old values and her love for the new ones. If she succeeds she will have greatly extended her own power by embedding her own values in social norms.52 Nietzsche stresses the violence and insult involved in breaking norms. It’s not a matter of adding new values to the existing stock, but of attacking and undermining the community’s faith in the values it lives by in order to replace (or revise) them. It’s here that he draws, I suggest, on that “noble” contempt for the common we noticed before. And yet, we now see, this is for the sake of instituting

52 83:7[107]: “the higher human must create i.e., imprint his being-​higher on others, whether as teacher or as artist. For the artist wills to communicate himself and precisely his taste. . . . It is the same with philosophers: they will to make their taste rule in the world—​therefore they teach and write.”

Words: Language and Community  233 a new common. I’ll come back to discuss the new norms he anticipates in Chapter 11. The individual makes new norms through such a picture of a higher life than the common practice now. It’s less important for Nietzsche whether the individual does indeed live this higher life him-​or herself. What’s crucial is that he or she articulates this life in a way that can make it common. Above all the individual must articulate this life by giving words to its values—​or else by changing the senses of the words used for the prevailing values. How might this work?

6.5  New language, new community Nietzsche claims and feels himself to be, of course, one of these individuals: someone who breaks with old norms and makes new ones. He thinks that he does so at a decisive point in human history—​and that he offers not just new norms, but new “ways of having” norms. We can better understand these intended changes, I suggest, by returning to the topic of language as that which chiefly constitutes a common. We see how Nietzsche articulates new (ways of having) norms through the changes he works in language.53 Notice how Nietzsche remains, in his writing, within a “shared space” of understanding with his audience, his readers. He knows that they bring to him the common senses for the words he uses. He himself grew up into those shared senses and hears and reads them around him every day. His writing uses and engages with these common senses in the effort to revise them. He doesn’t, by contrast, build a technical language as an isolated and self-​sufficient alternative to the common senses.54 This engagement with the common language indicates, I suggest, the way he himself, as (quintessential) individual, still keeps within the common. But let’s step back to consider his lessons about language more generally. We saw that he has two kinds of complaints against language, epistemic and existential. The latter is his argument that language “herds” or “commonizes” us. The former is his argument that language “lies,” and in two ways: it lies in its representations of its objects, and it lies in its expression of what the “speaker” wants or thinks or feels. Does Nietzsche think that language can be improved in these respects?

53 Contrast the account of Nietzsche’s new language in Clark and Dudrick [2012]. 54 Heidegger tries to build such an independent language in Being and Time; it’s part of the shift in his “turning” to adopt the different relation to language I here attribute to Nietzsche. I discuss Heidegger’s later views on language in my [2012, ch. 8].

234  Human Values Sometimes his lesson seems quite negative: he seems to advocate a more thorough break with language. He promotes reticence. Or he seems to “give up on language” by insisting that his true or genuine ideas just can’t be put into words. Sometimes he suggests that music is better than language at expressing ideas or feelings—​so that words need to be either replaced or at least supplemented by it. Z.iii.16.7: “Are all words not made for those who are heavy? Do all words not lie for one who is light! Sing! speak no more!” But of course Nietzsche very much doesn’t give up on language. It’s his favored medium, and he clearly prides himself in his use of it. So his lesson must be (not language-​denial but) a revised relation to language, a way of “using” it that: (1) is not deceived by its implications of sameness in either the “object represented” or the “subject expressed” and (2) is not herded by it (but uses it to improve or preserve one’s individuality). 1. Answering the epistemic doubt. Nietzsche’s first complaint against language was that it falsifies. We focused on his arguments that it does so by “treating unequals as equals.” With its general terms, language counts as “the same” things that are really different—​things each of which is indeed unique. By this “equalizing,” language falsifies in both its referential and expressive functions. It falsifies when I apply to many different cases the one label “fear”; it also falsifies when I express my own unique feeling at some moment with that flattening word “fear.” But of course none of these arguments, which we looked at in §6.3, persuades Nietzsche himself not to continue to use general terms both referentially and expressively. Indeed, as we’ll see in Chapter  8 (§8.4), he even insists that his own crucial discipline, psychology, “speaks only of types” (of persons) and not of single cases.55 This seems to flaunt contradiction with all those critiques he makes of types. And this seems most dramatically the case with his ultimate type, the will to power: Isn’t it his point that this is the same in each of us? So it may seem that those arguments against equals make no difference to him in how he uses words. However I think Nietzsche does try to learn from those critiques, in at least two ways. First, and more obviously, he repeatedly reminds himself and his readers that the things picked out by our general terms are in fact deeply different. He nags us to keep this in mind despite our ingrained tendency to slip constantly back into seeing them as “same.” Moreover, although his psychology does treat types, its standard procedure is to divide these types. He practices, with distinctive frequency, a deliberate fragmenting of our psychological concepts. He shows, by vivid examples, how many different ways of being, for example, “afraid” there are. What might seem “the same fear” in me and in you is vastly different, due 55 Notice, e.g., how very often Nietzsche uses “Psychologie” in phrases like “psychology of the ‘improver’ of humans” [TI.vii.5], “of the redeemer” [A.28], “of the priests” [A.49], “of ‘belief ’ ” [A.50].

Words: Language and Community  235 especially to the very different settings “it” has in each of our psychic systems. Nietzsche tries to inculcate the habit of expecting and noticing such differences. So he qualifies that standard of sameness embedded in general terms. But he also, second, tries to base his “types” on something more than sameness. Sameness—​as sharing properties—​is not the best criterion for grouping phenomena that pertain to humans, nor to living things generally. The more germane connection is “genetic”: human phenomena are grouped together within lines of descent. The real types are what we now call “clades.” A type’s members are engendered by other members, so that the type is—​by analogy from the debate about biological species—​a diachronic “individual” encompassing the whole clade descending from a common ancestor.56 Humans are human in that we belong to that great “tree” of transmission and reception. And similarly a psychological concept such as “fear” picks out, properly, an affect with a history—​a habit of feeling initiated in our animal past and then repeatedly, cumulatively modified through many generations. So my types are the viewpoints and behaviors that I receive from others and ultimately from the types’ inaugurators. Unlike with species, transmission is principally not by inheritance but by communication, broadly understood to include all of our display-​and-​imitation behavior. My types are the families of practices that run in this way through me. I acquire these practices by the same sharing and copying that we saw belongs to “the common.” In me these practices may well take different (unequal) form, but I belong to the type by sharing in that source, not by any strict similarity. Since it is imitation or copying that connects members of these families, similarity does play a role. It’s by new members trying to be similar to established members that transmission occurs. So again what matters is less the actual sharing of properties by members of a group and more their aiming and taking themselves to share. I enter a common with others by supposing my viewpoint the same as theirs; they enter it in this way, too. It’s not needed that we be, in fact, just alike: our confidence in this sharing overrides our particularities and brings us into a type. So, I share a virtue V with a type, not by V being quite the same in me as in others, but by my trying, in my practice of V, to align myself with the general practice of it. We belong to types—​the kind of types that matter for humans—​by such self-​typing. My effort to share in a type is embedded in my use of a word to pick out the type. I mean to fear in the way we call “fear.” I have a will to mean, when I say it, what the whole common of users means by it, and I defer my difference and particularity to this communal sense. I belong to the type by this deference to 56 87:10[136] (WP.682): “the species is a mere abstraction from the multiplicity of these chains [of members] and their partial similarity.” I discuss this in [2004, 44] and cite further passages.

236  Human Values its linguistic authority, over the words it has for itself. This also appears in how I think of my virtues: I want to be (e.g.) brave by the standards of the language itself, by “what it means to be brave.” Nietzsche locates within himself the types he studies, and, as he describes them, he is therefore also (he claims) expressing them. His words for them purport to issue out of the very experiences they detail. So they are subject not only to the referential form of the epistemic doubt, but also to the expressive: How can these type-​words express Nietzsche’s quite unique and individual viewpoint? Mustn’t they always be false to it? The answer follows, I think, from what we’ve seen. In finding, on bases besides similarity, the commons or types for his words to be about, he also finds, in himself, the commons for his words to express. There are these ways he is not unique, ways he is, by intent and reception as well as similarity, “of a kind” with others, something generic and common. 2. Answering the existential doubt. But this brings us back to the second problem Nietzsche finds with language: that it commonizes and herds us. How does he deal with this threat? We noticed that he is sometimes so disenchanted with language that he advocates alternatives: silence or music.57 But of course this doesn’t at all shake his will to write. So what does he do in response to the worry that language—​every word he writes—​commonizes him and his thinking? How can he “individualize” himself and his writing against this commonizing tendency? I think the simple answer is that Nietzsche individualizes not by “opting out” of the common, but within and against it. He knows full well that his innovations are really moves in a game begun long before him and played in common with many others. These moves only have meaning within the scope of that shared enterprise. We can illustrate this with his very effort to be an “individual.” Even this is a “type” in the sense just offered: it is a virtue with social and historical scope, an evolving ideal tied to a word. And each of us adopts it, in whatever form, precisely as such. Nietzsche’s own ideal of individuality is a move in this large game; he offers it, and we hear it, as an effort to “get right” this ideal so long meant. Without so sharing in this common enterprise his move would have no point, for him or for us. It has its meaning in this common space—​for this community. The effort to be an individual is, fully considered, the effort by all of the humans who have shared this value, down through that network of transmissions. When “I” embrace this value and try to be an individual, I do so within this tradition—​ as I likely failed to notice, but as Nietzsche now helps me to see. The aim to have values of one’s own, to have values not because others have them, is itself a value 57 80:3[118]: “When we are quite given over to music there are no words in our heads,—​a great relief.”

Words: Language and Community  237 I have from my group. I value individuality as a member of this group. Or—​we could also say—​it is really the group that values individuality in or through me. It is really this tradition that is trying to make an individual of me. To be sure, Nietzsche tries not just to realize this ideal—​to be an individual—​ but to revise it. After all the ideal isn’t timeless but evolves. So he aspires to show how to be an individual in a new way. He tries, as it were, to “individualize his individuality”—​he carries it to this second level. But even this more radical way of individualizing still has a view to the general practice. Nietzsche tries to be an individual in his own new way, but also in a fuller and better way that can then be incorporated into the ongoing practice. He wants not just to mean something new and his own by “individual” but to change—​and improve—​the common meaning of the word and value. Nietzsche takes, in this way, an active stance toward the common—​and it’s this, rather than a “separation” from it, that is the gist of his response. He sees full well, in the end, that all his values are communal ones and that he can aspire only and at best to improve them. His individuality lies in working on the common, rather than simply undergoing it or going along with it. He wants not to escape the common understanding into a perspective uniquely his own, but to shift the community he remains within. He wants to be a pre-​eminent member. All of this happens especially in his virtue words. Take, for example, his favorite such word: “honesty.” Nietzsche gives new sense to it by making it track his own will to lay bare the aims and motives behind morality. Nobody has ever been “truly” honest because they’ve failed at this. They’ve failed at a fuller, more adequate form of honesty that can face the real genealogy of its values. His new sense for honesty is layered onto the old: its sense contains and surpasses what honesty has been before. Nietzsche means to improve the historical practice of honesty—​ not to gesture at some unique and incommunicable private sense. To be sure, this active stance toward the common requires, Nietzsche thinks, a periodic estrangement from it. To create his new meanings for words like “honesty” he needs to pull himself temporarily out of the discourse in which the current meaning is so strongly shared and reinforced. This revisionary work must be done in solitude.58 This is dramatized in Zarathustra’s ten years of isolation, mentioned at the opening of the book. By such withdrawal one is able on the one hand to take the critical eye on shared values that is required really to judge them. And one is able as well to give one’s words fresh and individual meaning by tying them to one’s own immediate feeling. One can ingrain the habit of meaning them

58 EH.ii.3 says that when he is working he tries “not to be around anyone who is talking or even thinking”; “[i]‌n spiritual pregnancy a certain cleverness of instincts directs you to wall yourself in.”

238  Human Values in relation to such feeling. Using solitude in these ways, one can pry one’s virtue-​ words a bit away from the moral sense that is the prevailing common.59 But this purifying turn toward oneself is just episodic; it’s contained within an overall will to improve the community or kind. Isolation is a preparation for engagement—​is indeed a form of engagement: Zarathustra spends his hermitry making values he can later teach; he returns with a new vocabulary, above all new meanings for the old words for virtues and vices.60 He tries to infuse these new meanings into the community or else to build smaller communities around them. He tries, in other words, to make his individualized senses into a “new common.” And so, too, of course, does Nietzsche. He wants the power and achievement in changing others by spreading his own values—​for example, his virtues of individuality and honesty. Sometimes he thinks of himself as building a (mini-​) community around himself, as Zarathustra does. This will be first of all the community of his readers. Familiarly, he often despairs that this community won’t come in his lifetime (“I say ‘we’ to be polite” [TI.iii.5]); it lies in the future, and he will join it only by his works. His new words/​senses will help constitute the common for this community—​what they identify themselves as sharing. Nietzsche anticipates an intellectual elite who grapple with the problems he names.61 But I think he also thinks of impacting much wider communities—​of changing society (even, grandly, human history) by spreading his truth and values. He aspires to use these insights to shift the common—​the broad cultural values that get spread and transmitted as the usual. And these effects will come, of course, through his changes in language. Nietzsche tries to establish a new common in our language by new virtue-​words especially. And by this he hopes to take away some of the “taint” the word “common” has carried [UM.iv.10]. He identifies with the viewpoint of a “good European” and wants community at least as wide as this.62 59 BGE.230: “But we hermits and marmots have long persuaded ourselves in the full secrecy of a hermit’s conscience that this worthy verbal pomp, too, belongs to the old mendacious pomp, junk, and gold dust of unconscious human vanity, and that under such flattering colors and make-​up as well the basic text of homo natura must again be recognized.” Z.ii.5: “so that you, my friends, might grow weary of the old words that you learned from the fools and liars: /​Grow weary of the words ‘reward,’ ‘retribution,’ ‘punishment,’ ‘revenge in righteousness.’ ” 60 So he doesn’t himself stop where we’ve seen he advises his audience to: “My brother, when you have a virtue, and it is your virtue, then you have her in common with no one. /​Of course you want to call her by name and caress her. . . . /​And see! Now you have her name in common with the people and have become people and herd with your virtue! /​You would do better to say: ‘inexpressible and nameless is that which gives my soul torture and delight. . . .’ ” [Z.i.5]. 61 Compare this with the community of culture he advocates in UM.iii.6, in which the point is not the well-​being of the group, but that each member aspires to a higher self and contributes to a common effort to bring it about. 62 HH.iii.87: “we want to make ourselves understood, not merely beyond the city, but out over the nations. That is why everyone who is a good European now has to learn to write well and ever better”;

Words: Language and Community  239 So Nietzsche’s new language (as he calls it) introduces new equalities and tries to bring people together under them into a new common or shared. But his language builds into this new common something never true of the old: repeated cautions against a passive relation to these values and spurs to adopt toward them the same active and creative role that Nietzsche has exemplified to us. There’s a lot still missing in this account of how an individual breaks with the common. We’ll return to the topic in Part III when we turn to Nietzsche’s own values, and in particular in Chapter 10, treating his idea of how one “becomes a self.” Then, in Chapter 11 (§11.1) we’ll recapitulate the herd-​individual contrast in order to begin to answer the question of what society Nietzsche proposes.

this means “to become translatable into the language of one’s neighbor; to make ourselves accessible to the understanding of those foreigners who learn our language.”

7

Nihilism Against Morality—​and Truth?

We are examining Nietzsche’s account of “what it is to be human” and have reviewed several of his dissatisfactions with our condition. He finds fault with some of the capacities most distinctive of us—​those that seem most to separate our type from other living things. Our sense of ourselves as subjects and agents, our self-​consciousness, and our capacity for language have always appeared to be unqualified strengths, but, in fact—​he claims—​they rest on or involve us in falsehoods and have unnoticed tendencies to weaken and sicken us. Still, we haven’t yet come to what he most holds against us—​to his principal target, the object of his most virulent attacks. This is morality, and above all Christian morality. He views the diagnosis and critique of morality as his main calling, his most important work. By this critique he prepares for the epochal revaluation of values human can now carry out. But parts of this attack are among the hardest of Nietzsche’s ideas to stomach: they bear against values we are likely to hold very dear. I want to try to do justice to the dangerous thrust of this critique. Nietzsche’s attack on morality is tightly entwined with his account of “nihilism.” The latter involves a condition of “valuelessness” he claims our history is entering, due especially to the working of the will to truth. This will, established by morality, comes to understand morality, and this very gradually undercuts and collapses it. This leaves vacant the role morality has played: it has provided the subject/​agent an ultimate end that organizes and motivates other goals under it—​that gives a final point to one’s efforts. Nietzsche claims that as Christian morality self-​diagnoses and self-​dissolves, we are landed in this valuelessness. His view of our “modern” age as nihilistic is one of his most famous and striking views and will be (in §7.1) a useful approach to his account of morality. We’ll turn next (§7.2) to his treatment of morality itself. As always Nietzsche insists on viewing it as a historical phenomenon:  morality is the chief topic and target of his genealogies. But rather than retracing the details of his story how morality came to be (which we have already looked at in Chapter 5 [§5.3]

Nietzsche’s Values. John Richardson, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190098230.001.0001

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  241 and Chapter 6 [§6.4]1), I will focus here on the evaluative accompaniment to these genealogies—​the value-​judgments Nietzsche makes about morality after, and indeed while, he genealogizes it. He himself insists that the task of understanding morality’s origins is very different from that of evaluating it, and yet he quite interweaves them as he goes. Examining this evaluative strand, we will see what his main complaints against morality are. This will also return us to basic questions about the ground Nietzsche thinks he has for his evaluative stance. But these attacks on “morality” are probably too abstract to enable us to judge their impact on us, our attitudes, our lives. To face better the troubling force of this critique it will help to treat some cases: parts of our moral outlook that are meant to be most powerfully affected by it, judging from the frequency and violence of Nietzsche’s attacks on them. So we’ll look next (in §7.3) at two of his favorite targets in morality: its virtue of pity or compassion and its value of equality. Probably very few of us can imagine renouncing or abandoning these: Is that what Nietzsche is calling us to? Just how thoroughly does he mean to sweep these values away? This is another particular place to test his overall theory’s “livability” for us. As mentioned, Nietzsche gives the will to truth a starring role in his predictive history of how morality is collapsing into nihilism; the will to truth exposes what morality is. However he also insists that the will to truth must and will subject itself to the same scrutiny—​a self-​scrutiny—​and that this will reveal it to be something moral itself. The will to truth discovers itself to be another expression of the “ascetic ideal,” another way of denying bodily life. We’ll look next (§7.4) at this diagnosis of the will to truth as ascetic. This diagnosis appears to discredit the will to truth, just as it discredits morality. It makes the will to truth seem to fail Nietzsche’s ultimate criterion: it turns out to be anti-​life. Here we face a major decision-​point in interpreting Nietzsche: What lesson does he draw from his critique of truth? I’ll return to this issue from different angles, but here (§7.5) I will develop ways that the critique requires that we revise our notion of truth. We must revise it to be a truth “by perspectives about perspectives,” which will alter it deeply. These revisions are not so radical, however, as to turn it into something-​other-​than-​truth. Nietzsche casts his allegiance with the (effort at) truth despite his very many questionings of it. And—​most germane to our topic—​true remains a key criterion in judging values, although it’s applied to them in an altered way. 1 I present this development as working by a neo-​Darwinian logic of “social selection” in [2004, 81–​94].

242  Human Values

7.1  Nihilism It is part of the “prophetic identity” that Nietzsche assumes for himself that he is a herald of nihilism. There are many references to nihilism in the books from Beyond Good and Evil on, as well as closely linked treatments of “the death of god.” And the topic is handled still more often and more dramatically in the Nachlass notebooks.2 The importance of the topic is clear in Nietzsche’s sketch of a Preface for his planned book The Will to Power, 87–​8:11[411] (WP.p): “What I tell is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what no longer can come otherwise: the advent of nihilism. This history can already be told: for necessity itself is here at work. . . . Our entire European culture has been for a long time moving with a torture of tension that grows from decade to decade as toward a catastrophe.” Nietzsche describes himself as “the first perfect nihilist of Europe who has already lived through nihilism to the end,—​who has it behind him, beneath him, outside him.” And he presents his own role as being to found a countermovement to nihilism, which however presupposes it. The first thing to say about Nietzsche’s notion of “nihilism” is the first thing to say about almost every one of his main terms: that he means a great variety of things by the word. He uses it in a welter of senses that can’t be reconciled by supposing that his view evolves. Indeed the problem is even greater than usual here; interpreters have often remarked on this diversity.3 It is even at issue whether Nietzsche considers himself to be a nihilist or not.4 “Nihilism” is perhaps more a sector of his thinking than a concept or doctrine. Ideas coalesce in him from different directions, and he tries to pull them together with incomplete success. This sector borders certain others—​different topic-​areas, such as “morality,” “value,” and “life.” On each of these borders Nietzsche mulls over a network of problems. So any adequate treatment of the topic will have to distinguish different kinds of nihilism.5 It will also need to organize the multiplicity, indicate 2 Heidegger, favoring the Nachlass (and the compilation The Will to Power), puts great weight on nihilism in his reading of Nietzsche. See especially “European Nihilism” and “Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being” from Nietzsche, Vol. IV: Nihilism [1961/​1982], and “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God Is Dead’ ” from Off the Beaten Track [1950/​2002]. In later notes I’ll touch on Heidegger’s important treatment of the topic. 3 White [1987] lists the many different forms or types of nihilism that Nietzsche seems to distinguish. 4 Stegmaier [2011b ch. 1] argues that Nietzsche considers nihilism a “normal condition” and not something he overcomes. Heidegger maintained that Nietzsche tried but failed to overcome nihilism and that his very conception of nihilism was an expression of it [1961/​1982, 22]. 5 So, e.g., White [1987] distinguishes “religious,” “radical,” and “complete” nihilism. Reginster [2006], as we’ll see, distinguishes nihilisms of “disorientation” and “despair,” which are close cousins to the kinds I’ll propose.

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  243 principal senses, and explain how they are related to one another. We’ll judge a reading of Nietzschean nihilism by how well its typology pulls together his diverse remarks into a view with the weight he tries to give it. My own suggestion is this: Nietzsche’s idea of nihilism runs between two “poles”—​two distinct conceptions of it. His thinking about nihilism concerns these, and the relation between them. The first pole is the belief and (in its most developed form) the philosophical position that there are no real values—​or no “true” values, or (by a certain extension) no “higher” values. I’ll refer to this as “no-​values nihilism.” Here Nietzsche principally has in mind a certain theory, a philosophical or more generally “intellectual” view: a denial that any values are “real” or “true” in the way they’ve been taken to be. So 85–​6:2[127] (WP.1, LNp83): “nihilism, i.e., the radical rejection [Ablehnung] of value, meaning, desirability.” It’s in this sense of the term that Nietzsche presumably adopts it—​from its then-​current application to Russian nihilism, as treated (critically) in, for example, Dostoevsky and Turgenev.6 So GS.347 speaks of “nihilism on the Petersburg model (meaning the belief in disbelief . . .).” Now although (I suggest) Nietzsche’s principal topic here is a belief or claim, he also associates this belief (no values) with a “way of living”: not valuing anything. The “last human” mentioned near the beginning of Zarathustra approaches this condition of valuelessness. More accurately, the last human lacks “higher values”—​values that are hard to achieve, that open up differences among people. Z.i.p.5: “For the earth has now become small, and upon it hops the last human, who makes everything small. . . . Everyone wants the same thing, everyone is the same.” The last human, product of nihilism, lacks values for anything “higher” than what’s common to all.7 Notice the discrepancy between the theoretical and “lived” versions of “no-​ values nihilism”: the former denies any (real) values, the latter denies only any higher values. There’s no lived analogue to the full theoretical denial for the simple reason that one can’t live without values. One can’t live, that is, without signs to navigate by, signs for ends and means. One needs such signs for one’s bodily drives in order to function as an organism, and one needs conscious and worded values in order to live as a human in society. But one can live without “higher” values—​and indeed they are “higher” partly by this fact that one doesn’t need them. This “life stance”—​this way of living without higher values—​needn’t accompany the theoretical stance. For (a) I can adopt the no-​values theory among my 6 Müller-​Lauter [1971/​1999, 41–​2] discusses these sources as well as the influence of Paul Bourget. 7 Cf. Pippin’s idea [2010, 54] that the problem of nihilism consists in “a failure of desire, the flickering out of some erotic flame.”

244  Human Values “intellectual positions” while still living by all my prior values. And (b) I can live without higher values, without taking the theoretical position that “nothing is valuable.” Nevertheless we might expect that the life-​stance and theory would tend to produce one another. For (a*) the conviction that “there are no real values” may tend to erode any superfluous valuing. And (b*) the stance of not-​ valuing might naturally “come to consciousness” and be expressed in the denial that anything is valuable. The no-​values belief and stance are hard to distinguish in some of Nietzsche’s formulations. In 87:9[35] (WP.2, LNp146):  “Nihilism:  the goal is lacking; the answer to the ‘Why?’ is lacking. [W]‌hat does nihilism mean?—​that the highest values devalue themselves.” Here and often elsewhere it’s not clear whether it is the valuing, or the theoretical position on valuing that is meant. But as mentioned I think that Nietzsche’s main weight is on the latter, when he has this no-​ values nihilism in view. By contrast, the second main pole to Nietzsche’s idea of nihilism is weighted on the other side. It is principally a valuative stance reaching down into one’s drives and affects: one’s values “say No to life,” or to the world as it is. I’ll call this “no-​to-​life nihilism.” Nietzsche’s emphasis here is on a “bodily” stance occurring beneath the level of consciousness and language; one’s “physiological” condition rejects or disvalues life. So 88:14[13]: “Physiology of the nihilistic religions . . . /​ Christianity as symptom of physiological décadence.”8 In this case it’s the theoretical position that is secondary—​the explicit belief or theory that “life is bad.” Here it matters less to Nietzsche whether one puts this judgment into explicit words. Indeed most often one does not, so that it requires psychological diagnosis to detect the negative valuative stance beneath one’s positive pronouncements about life. For example a Christian may well count him-​or herself “pro life,” but this disguises (Nietzsche thinks) an underlying antipathy to it—​to life as it really is. These two senses of “nihilism” are often run together by interpreters and sometimes by Nietzsche himself. They might seem to be two ways of saying the same thing. But in fact they are quite distinct and, in fact, strictly speaking, incompatible. To “say no to life” is to disvalue life, and so is not a case of positing or having “no values.” Yet we’ll see that they’re entangled with one another. I’ve distinguished “no-​values” and “no-​to-​life” versions of nihilism, and I’ve claimed that each occurs in both a cognitive/​theoretical and in a lived/​bodily form. But I’ve suggested that Nietzsche primarily has in mind the cognitive form

8 88:17[8]‌(WP.38): “The pessimistic movement is only an expression of physiological décadence.” Also 88:15[34]. But note 85–​6:2[127] (WP.1, LNp83): “it is an error to point to . . . ‘physiological degeneration’ . . . as cause of nihilism”; however this is because nihilism is “a very particular interpretation” of that physiological condition, which doesn’t necessitate it.

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  245 of no-​values nihilism and the “lived” form of no-​to-​life nihilism. And the reason for these respective emphases is that he has in mind one principal relation between these two versions. He thinks of no-​values nihilism as principally theoretical because this is the overt, observable phenomenon of his age, whereas no-​to-​life nihilism, in that bodily form, is his diagnosis of that phenomenon. So the axis between these two kinds of nihilism consists mainly in this explanatory, diagnostic claim. We can go a step further: Nietzsche adopts the term “nihilism” from its use in the no-​values sense—​as current in reference to that “Petersburg nihilism”—​and innovates by extending it to apply to no-​to-​life values. Since he sees these values as the real root of the theoretical position to which the term is originally attached, his ambition is to apply it much more broadly, and in particular to apply it to the very values—​the Christian values—​that “nihilism” was originally taken to deny.9 So, for example, Dostoevsky takes himself to be an opponent of nihilism, understanding it as a rejection of the Christian values to which he calls us back. But Nietzsche will hold that Dostoevsky and those values are themselves nihilistic and, indeed, that their “no to life” is more deeply problematic than the Petersburg nihilism they reject.10 So he claims that nihilism is a vast phenomenon stretching almost the length of human history—​stretching at least the length of human morality. This suggests that Nietzsche treats no-​to-​life nihilism as the crucial phenomenon and no-​values nihilism as merely a local expression or manifestation. And yet I will try to show that no-​values nihilism, even in its narrow cognitive form, is still of crucial importance to him. It is the culminating form of the no-​to-​life nihilism embedded in morality, the form human history must crucially pass through, to make a major advance. Moreover there’s a truth in this no-​values nihilism, a truth we must hold on to despite the anti-​life stance it expresses. And so rather than its roots in no-​to-​life nihilism judging and condemning the no-​ values nihilism, the latter (as our way forward) redeems the former—​shows it to have been a means to something higher. Let’s now look more closely at these two versions of nihilism. I want to locate this distinction against the important treatment of nihilism by Reginster [2006] and to defend my account of Nietzsche’s program against his rather different one.

9 Besides the claimed diagnosis, Nietzsche may have a further ground for connecting these positions: both are ways of “valuing nothing.” No-​values nihilism does this in the obvious way: by not valuing. But no-​to-​life nihilism can be understood to do so, too: insofar as it values something that is not life, it values something “that is not”—​inasmuch as, Nietzsche thinks, life is everything there is (on this, see Chapter 2 [§2.1]). 10 On Nietzsche’s relation to Dostoevsky, see especially Stellino [2015].

246  Human Values

7.1.1  No-​to-​life nihilism We may begin with this form of nihilism since Nietzsche takes it to be the more general phenomenon.11 But it is much less recognized by readers and interpreters than the other form.12 In 88:17[7]‌: “The nihilistic instinct says No; its mildest claim is that not-​being is better than being, that the will to nothingness has more value than the will to life; its strongest [claim is] that, if nothingness is of the highest desirability, this life, as opposite to that, is absolutely valueless—​becomes reprehensible.” To “say no” to life is to disvalue life, which involves assessing it by some standard whose value is presumed and by which life is found wanting. So Schopenhauer, one of Nietzsche’s main models for this kind of nihilism, values above all the avoidance or overcoming of suffering, argues that life fails this standard, and judges it bad. And Christianity values a kind of spiritual purity it judges impossible for our embodied, worldly life. Beneath these doctrines, and motivating them, Nietzsche thinks, is a deeper judgment against life made by the person’s drives, in their frustrated effort at life. Let’s start by distinguishing some of the ways one might “disvalue life.” First, one might either (i) disvalue life as one takes it to be or (ii) disvalue life as it really is. Nietzsche thinks that many or most people misunderstand the real character of life. For example many people suppose that “life” is lived by an immortal soul under the watchful eye of a loving god; they may well affirm life so understood and hence not fall under (i). But this affirmation issues out of values that would or do reject and disvalue life as it really is. When Nietzsche treats Christian values as anti-​life, this is because they denigrate life as it is in favor of an illusory life. So the relevant sense of no-​to-​life nihilism is (ii). Next, one might either (iii) disvalue life in general, in all of its forms, or (iv) disvalue life in its higher forms, in which life most furthers and advances itself. Nietzsche often interprets morality as anti-​life because it disvalues those aspects of life that are most important for its advancement—​in particular the aggressive drives that most manifest will to power. Morality thus says no to life even when it favors and seeks to preserve weak or sickly life—​even when it values “all life.” In 86–​7:5[98] (WP.897, LNp122): “A life-​hostile tendency thus belongs to morality

11 GM.iii.11 says that, read from afar, the earth might appear “the genuine ascetic star,” given “how regularly, how generally, how in almost ages the ascetic priest appears.” GM.iii.28 says that the ascetic ideal has so far given human its only meaning. 12 Reginster [2006] stresses it—​or a form of it—​and I discuss him later. Constâncio [2016, 90] also reads nihilism so: “My thesis is that, on Nietzsche’s view, values are ‘nihilistic’ when they entail a negation, devaluation, and indeed a perspectival reduction of this earthly world to “nothingness’ (nihil).”

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  247 inasmuch as it wants to overpower the strongest types of life.” So here the relevant sense of no-​to-​life nihilism is (iv). It’s especially due to these gaps between (i) and (ii) and between (iii) and (iv) that it can be hard to identify this no-​to-​life nihilism on the basis of a person’s explicit pronouncements. Very few people announce themselves to be anti-​life. But Nietzsche thinks that their faulty conceptions of life, or their errors about the most crucial forms of life, are in fact symptoms of an underlying hostility to life as it really is. “Deep down” they recognize how it is and react against it by sustaining themselves in illusions about it. So we need to diagnose this underlying stance not by seeing whether they say that they’re for or against life, but by how they describe the life they’re for. This no-​to-​life nihilism is a cousin to what Reginster calls “the nihilism of despair”: “the conviction that our highest values cannot be realized” [2006, 28]. Here (Reginster thinks) one judges against the world—​disvalues it—​because one holds it up against a standard it cannot meet. That one has this value-​standard shows, as Reginster astutely points out, that one does not deny that any values have “objective standing.” Hence one is not in the kind of nihilism Reginster thinks interpreters have usually noticed and which he calls “the nihilism of disorientation” (and which is cousin to my “no-​values nihilism”). I think Reginster is also right that the world-​disvaluing nihilism is more basic and pervasive than the value-​denying nihilism. But here I can begin to register disagreements. First, as Gemes has argued [2008, 461], Reginster presents this nihilistic despair as principally a cognitive position, whereas for Nietzsche it is mainly “affective” (as Gemes puts it).13 It lies in how we disvalue life in our drives and affects—​in the ways we will and feel—​ and not (as importantly) in how we might do so in our explicit judgments. Thinking mainly of a cognitive disvaluing, Reginster treats morality as the root of the problem of nihilism. We despair of this world because morality has set up a hopeless ideal for us. If we can remove these beliefs and set up this-​worldly ones, we would cut off the motive for nihilism. But I think that, for Nietzsche, morality is only a symptom of something deeper that needs to be addressed directly as well. Morality indeed sets up a hopeless ideal, but there’s one main reason it does so: to express a pre-​existing despair—​and to ease it. And so second, as May [2009, 100n26] has noticed, Reginster’s definition of nihilism excludes the centuries of Christians who did not question its otherworldly ideal, yet who were nevertheless all nihilists for Nietzsche.14 They all 13 This is perhaps just a matter of emphasis; Reginster does say (about the disoriented nihilism) that it is “not merely the theoretical recognition that facts of a certain (moral, evaluative) kind do not exist, but the practical sense of loss or disorientation that proceeds from this recognition” [2006, 26]. 14 However May finds those believing Christians nihilistic not because of their deeper despair, but because they affirm an intelligible world of “the unconditioned”: since this doesn’t exist, they affirm “The Nothing” [2009, 100]. But I think this once again makes the problem too “cognitive.”

248  Human Values “said No” to life at a deeper level than Reginster recognizes. So it’s not because (e.g.) Christianity sets up an otherworldly ideal that its members despair of this world; it’s because they already despaired that Christianity set up that ideal.15 Christianity’s idea of a pure and immortal soul distinct from the sinful body responds to a rejection of life “in the body.” See 88:14[168] (WP.586): “General insight: the instinct of life-​weariness and not of life has created the other world.”16 Here we get to the bottom of nihilism. As usual when we get to the bottom we find will to power. The ultimate root to no-​to-​life nihilism is a frustration and despair in human’s effort at power. Reginster is right that despair’s judgment against life depends on accepting a value that it fails, but this is not a cognitive ideal set up by morality; at bottom this value is just that of power or growth, a value built into all our drives and affects. No-​to-​life nihilism is a disaffection with life that rests ultimately in a felt inability to grow. It expresses a failure in one’s drives, their judgment that there is no way for them to satisfy their will for more.17 So the judgment “against life” that Nietzsche is most interested in is one made “in the body” (i.e., in one’s drives and affects). These can “say no to life” whether or not one ever becomes conscious of being “anti-​life.” GM.iii.25 speaks of “a more laborious metabolism, a struggling, harder-​working life,” and something as physiological as this may be at the root for Nietzsche. In line with my treatments of the drives (Chapter 3) and affects (Chapter 4), we can elaborate the ways that these are respectively involved in this deep “no to life.” Nietzsche’s emphasis is on the role of the affects, so that Gemes speaks appropriately of “affective nihilism” [2008, 11]. I suggest that the crucial affect in such nihilism is the feeling that one needs to contract—​that, against the weight of the world, one must give ground in order to hold on at all. It is the feeling that “life is too much,” that one is tired of the struggle. One gives up the effort to advance and expects only diminishment.18 This affective nihilism is a weariness [Müdigkeit] over life itself—​life as one meets it in one’s drives.19

15 Creasy [2017, ch. 1] argues that it was to escape “affective nihilism” that “nihilistic conceptions” of truth, purpose, and value were set up by Christian morality. 16 Also Z.i.3. Or in 87:8[2]‌(WP.579, LNp141): “hatred against a world that makes suffer expresses itself in the imagining of an other, a valuable [world].” 17 Reginster acknowledges [2006, 46] that Nietzsche sometimes says these values “were invented in order to condemn life in this world,” but argues that “even this moral condemnation of life must necessarily evoke and refer back to positive values.” But he has in mind positive moral values, not the values implicit in our bodies and drives. 18 Dunkle [2017] lists some of the words Nietzsche has for these affects: Verzweiflung, Sättigung, Müdigkeit, Ermüdung, Ekel, Überdruss, and Verdruss. 19 See TI.ii.1 on the Müdigkeit am Leben of Socrates and others, and again 88:14[168] (WP.586) on Lebens-​Müdigkeit. GM.i.12: “the sight of human now makes tired [müde]—​what is nihilism today if it is not that?”

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  249 Thus this affective response is a bodily judgment regarding the inefficacy of one’s drives:  they’re not strong enough to advance against the forces arrayed around them. It’s not just that one suffers from resistance to the drives: Nietzsche agrees with Schopenhauer that suffering is endemic and essential to life. But as we saw in Chapter 4 (§4.3), suffering makes only a “local” judgment against “this moment now,” that it is “not worth living.” At issue is whether one extends this into a verdict against one’s whole life or life generally. Again, the no-​to-​life nihilist makes this judgment in the body and not necessarily in any worded thoughts or theories. But of course it can be so expressed; TI.ii.1: “The wisest of every age have judged the same about life: it’s no good [es taugt nichts].”20 Nietzsche has a story to tell why this affective nihilism, this despair and disgruntlement with life, has been pervasive in human history. This is due to our “taming” for the purpose of social, civic life, which has required a forcible suppression of our animal drives. Human has been largely prevented from enacting its drives, and gradually trained—​by millennia of bloody punishments—​to repress these drives in itself by itself, through “bad conscience.” This regimen has kept large parts of humanity on the very edge of finding life intolerable and unlivable. So GM.ii.16: “the greatest and most uncanny sickness was introduced, one from which humanity has not yet recovered today, the suffering of human from human, from himself: as a consequence of a forceful separation from his animal past, . . . of a declaration of war against the old instincts.” So the root of this no-​to-​life nihilism is an affective recognition of an incapacity in one’s drives, an inability to enact them. And here I  think Nietzsche distinguishes two effects this affective nihilism can have on our drives, to which we now turn. First, and more obviously, this despair over life can demoralize and wither the drives. It is after all a despair of these drives, their own feeling of incapacity. One “gives up on life” and carries on with weak and etiolated drives. They don’t, as it were, care as much about power, so that their failing at it is not as painful. But their capacities are also diminished so that they fail even more. This path leads down to the will’s demise. But second, Nietzsche thinks that the prospect and risk of such a loss of values can give rise instead to a new drive, a drive against life. Out of a need to will something, just anything, once one’s hopes in life are gone, one finds a will to deny and denigrate life. One constructs a new purpose out of the despair at one’s previous purposes: one undertakes a campaign against life. Nietzsche speaks of such a drive as a Widerwillen gegen das Leben [BT.asc.5, GM.iii.28], or a Widerstand gegen das Leben [TI.ii.1], or an Auflehnung gegen das Leben [TI.v.5], or a 20 As Reginster points out [2006, 52], this verdict is expressed already in Birth of Tragedy as “the terrible wisdom of Silenus.”

250  Human Values Todfeindschaft gegen das Leben [EH.ii.10, EH.iv.8]. Here nihilism is not merely an affective assessment of life, but a will or drive hostile to it.21 This life-​hostile drive expresses itself in ascetic ideals—​the topic of the Genealogy’s third essay. In the ascetic priest, the source of these ideals, our life “is set in relation to a quite different kind of existence, which it contradicts and excludes, unless it were to turn itself against itself, to negate itself” [GM.iii.11]. The priest does this to counteract an affective nihilism that is threatening to undermine effort altogether: “with all great religions the main concern is to combat a certain tiredness and heaviness [Schwere] that have become epidemic”—​a “physiological feeling of inhibition [Hemmungsgefühl],” a “feeling of listlessness [Unlustgefühl],” a “deep physiological depression” [GM.iii.17]. Ascetic ideals—​ and that campaign against life—​give the sick and suffering new projects to care intensely about, thus arresting their descent into valuelessness. This is how Nietzsche answers what is for him a prima facie puzzle: How is a drive that denies life possible? How can a living thing be anti-​life? Why, indeed, has this ascetic will dominated human history?22 His answer is that such a drive, with its ascetic values, is developed in order to avoid the more dangerous possibility of losing values altogether. He offers this explanation in GM.iii.28’s concluding account of what the ascetic ideal expresses: this hatred of the human, still more of the animal, still more of the material,  .  .  .—​all of this means—​let us dare to grasp this—​a will to nothingness, an aversion [Widerwillen] to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it is and remains a will! . . . And, to say again at the end what I said at the beginning: human would much rather will nothingness than not will.

So here it is the threat of losing values at the level of one’s body and drives that sharpens a new drive against life, whereby “the will itself was saved” [also GM.iii.28]. We thus see that the ascetic drive is not completely “anti-​life.” As a drive it is a will to power, and it seeks to enhance itself by carrying its distinctive activity to a higher level: “the will to the end, the nihilistic will wills power” [A.9].23 So this ascetic drive itself wants “more life”—​more of its own particular form of life. Thus it covertly contradicts itself. Its activity is that of opposing life—​of denouncing 21 Cf. Müller-​Lauter’s discussion [1971/​1999, ch.  3] of a “will to disintegration” or “will to nothingness.” 22 88:14[140] (WP.401):  “the will to nothingness has become master over the will to life.” Also 88:14[123] (WP.685, LNp259). 23 Müller-​Lauter [1971/​1999,  46] stresses how “[e]‌ven the will to nothingness is thus will to power.”

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  251 it, of restraining and undermining the aggressive and propagative drives that are central to life. Yet as itself a form of life, it is all the while seeking aggressively to enhance itself—​to enhance its “life turned against life.” Indeed, Nietzsche claims that this denial of life serves a further, higher purpose: to sustain and further life generally. It’s not merely that a nihilistic drive seeks more of its own life, but also that it is a way that life finds—​somehow “using” the ascetic priest—​to maintain and even enhance itself in conditions of special difficulty and threat. Hence this nihilistic no-​to-​life is more deeply a peculiar way of saying yes to it.24 GM.iii.13: “the ascetic ideal springs from the protective and healing instincts of a degenerating life that seeks with every means to hang on, and fights for its existence”; it is “an artifice for the preservation of life.” Despite these ways the no-​to-​life nihilism nevertheless serves life—​a good thing for Nietzsche!—​I think it’s clear that he wants not to be a nihilist in this sense. One of his strongest self-​identities is as Schopenhauer’s antithesis—​as replacing Schopenhauer’s No to life with a Yes. We’ll examine this affirmative stance in Chapter 9 and will also consider in a different light the accusation that some values (and persons) are “anti-​life.” But let’s turn now to the other sense of “nihilism,” in which it’s harder to say whether Nietzsche counts himself a nihilist or not.

7.1.2  No-​values nihilism The second main way Nietzsche thinks of nihilism is as positing the nonexistence of real values—​and/​or as not valuing anything. He has particularly in mind the former: the theoretical position that nothing is valuable, that there are no real values, that everything is “meaningless.” So 86–​7:7[54] (WP.617, LNp138) says that nihilism is “the belief in absolute valuelessness, that is meaninglessness.”25 This claim that there are no real values is very close (as we’ve noted) to what Reginster calls “the nihilism of disorientation”; it is the form of nihilism most noticed by other interpreters.26

24 It is especially so in those strong-​willed individuals, the priests, who most develop the ascetic morality. See, e.g., 86–​7:7[5]‌(LNp131). 25 86–​7:5[71] (WP.55, LNp117): “Nihilism appears now not because the displeasure in existence [Dasein] is greater than before, but because one has become generally mistrustful of a ‘meaning’ in evil [Übel], indeed in existence.” GS.357 poses as “Schopenhauer’s question”: “does existence have any meaning at all?” 26 Heidegger interprets nihilism as the historical movement in which “the highest values devalue themselves,” although it also includes the “revaluation” of these values, and the positing of new ones [e.g., 1950/​2002, 166–​8]. The values devalued posit a “supersensible” and hence are “metaphysical”; the new values will not be. I think the question of whether values are “real,” in the sense we’ll discuss, goes deeper than these terms “supersensible” and “metaphysical” suggest.

252  Human Values Now I’ve stated it as the view that there are no “real” values, and a great deal rides on this, beginning with the question whether Nietzsche himself is a nihilist regarding values. Does he deny that there are any “real values?” This brings us back to the metaethical terrain we covered in Chapter 1; now we can extend that account. We distinguished two ways Nietzsche “posits” values, valuative and descriptive. When he values he posits things as “valuables,” as to-​be-​valued. But when he studies values he posits them as “valueds,” as in-​fact-​valued. We saw that each of these standpoints views its values as “real” in a way that the other’s are not. From the valuing standpoint, real values are the things that should be valued, whereas study can only find things that are valued—​mere claimed or purported “values.” From the studying viewpoint, by contrast, real values are precisely all those things that are valued, and the posit that some should be valued goes beyond what study can find. When nihilism denies any real values, it is not in the latter (descriptive) sense:  it doesn’t deny that some things are valued. Instead it denies that any values exist with the status attributed to them in the valuing attitude: any values that should be valued. This valuing attitude presumes—​as we saw in Chapter 1 (§1.2)—​that it values what it does because the latter is already good, prior to and independently of its own valuing it. In this way the valuing attitude involves an “externalism” about values. Nihilism denies that any values have this “external” status—​that any are to-​be-​valued. So it denies a “reality” (of values) that’s not so much metaphysical as operational, lying in the authority (of “real” values) to direct our valuing. Against this, no-​values nihilism holds that the only reason we can have to value anything is the fact that we already do. It thereby undercuts the legitimacy of valuing. Now we saw that Nietzsche is himself a strong advocate of internalism:  he insists that values depend on valuings, that they are essentially valueds. Does he then agree with nihilism that the valuing attitude’s posit is illegitimate, in making that externalist claim? Then he would indeed be a no-​values nihilist, I suggest. He would agree that there is nothing we “should” value, beyond what we do, and that absorbing this lesson would undermine valuing. However we also saw that there are many versions and degrees of externalism and of internalism, too. We pictured these as running along a scale between two extremes. At one end lies “full value realism”: “what’s good for P is (completely) independent of what P does value.” And at the opposite end lies “full value perspectivism”: “what’s good for P is (precisely) what(ever) P does value.” It’s obvious that Nietzsche denies the former, but he also (I claim) denies the latter. He makes room for ways in which a person can go astray in his or her valuing—​and can have reasons to change his or her values. So we must place him somewhere in

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  253 the range between those extremes—​at least to some degree an externalist about values. Whether Nietzsche is a no-​values nihilist depends, then, on whether he denies the degree or kind of externalism that he thinks valuing requires. I claim that he does not. Valuing requires the supposition that it has reasons to value what it does, but Nietzsche thinks it can have such reasons—​and indeed that he can give them. These reasons are grounded in the values he claims we already have and hence are consistent with his internalism. How can Nietzsche justify his values without abandoning his idea that values are merely valueds and not independent goods? He holds onto that internalism by understanding those reasons as generated within the values he and his readers already have. The reason to change one’s values is that one already values changing one’s values. This second-​order value—​to improve one’s valuing—​is either built into the first-​order valuing or governs it. What kind of improvement of our valuing does Nietzsche claim we already value? I have argued that he attributes two meta-​values to us. First, we want to improve our values for the sake of power. Our values are ultimately signs by which we try to steer ourselves ahead—​try to grow. Second, we want to improve our values in the light of truth. That is, we want to value on the basis of a better grasp of “the facts” about the thing we value, its context, and our relation to it. These deep aims at power and truth are embedded in us, Nietzsche thinks, at the biological and cultural levels, respectively. Human’s great challenge, now that it is able to understand itself, is to find a way to reconcile and synthesize these principal aims. Nietzsche offers his own values on this ultimate basis. He grounds his own values’ appeal in these second-​order values that he believes we already have. He appeals to our pervasive interest in improving our values’ grasp on the world (their power) and improving how well they see the world (their truthfulness). It’s these that project the “valuables” that are independent of our first-​order values. So these valuables are valueds after all—​valued as the improvements we want in our first-​order valuing. They depend on our second-​order valuing. Do we have reasons to value power and truth? Nietzsche does sometimes appeal to certain other values that he presumes we have in order to justify these second-​order values. He cites how we share the criterion of power with other living things and how we share the criterion of truth with our human kind. He thereby appeals to the value we place on “solidarity” with life or humanity. But I don’t think this valuing of solidarity is as universally shared as those values of power and truth themselves: Nietzsche is surer that we all already value the latter two and is ready (I think) to forego the claim that we have any further reasons to do so. So I don’t think he takes them to have the same externality they enable him to claim for his first-​order values.

254  Human Values Thus, in the end, Nietzsche rejects no-​values nihilism as a theory. His main aim is to show us a better way of valuing, and for this he needs grounds to say that we should value different things than we do—​which the nihilist denies. And of course he also rejects such nihilism as a practice: he very much doesn’t want to not-​value-​anything. How does Nietzsche think this second kind of nihilism is related to the first—​ to the no-​to-​life nihilism? Seen as life-​denial, nihilism is a vast phenomenon encompassing all of Christian morality and most of human values as ascetic—​ hostile to this world and the body. By comparison the theoretical denial that values are real looks like a tiny and local thing: something that some philosophers or intellectuals do at certain points in that human history, just one of many secondary expressions of those ascetic values.27 And similarly for the practical version of no-​values nihilism, not-​valuing-​anything; this seems a rare phenomenon. But I think that this no-​values nihilism is much more important than this: rather than a blind alley, as Reginster in effect makes it, it is in fact Nietzsche’s own way forward. It is the all-​important culmination to that vast ascetic phenomenon in which it finds an expression that lets it pass into something different—​and better. The denial of external values needs to be felt as destroying all values in order for us to learn to have values in a new way. This is the crucial pivot-​point in human history—​and of course Nietzsche places himself right at this point. Something unique is beginning to happen, now, in him, something of species-​wide importance, and not just an event in European history.28 So in EH.iii.D.2: My task, to prepare for humanity’s moment of highest self-​reflection, a great noon when it looks back and looks out, when it escapes from the domination of chance and priests, and poses for the first time the questions “why?”, “what for?” as a whole —​, this task follows necessarily from the insight that humanity is not of itself on the correct path. . . . The question of the source [Herkunft] of moral values is a question of the first rank for me because it determines the future of humanity.

Never before has the perspectivist and internalist truth been faced with as clear a view as biology and psychology can now give us of what values are. But we need to hear more of Nietzsche’s critical story before we can understand what he wants. Let’s turn next to his principal target, morality. 27 Reginster, in line with this, treats the nihilism of disorientation as a sidepath trying unsuccessfully to escape from the nihilism of despair: “Nietzsche calls into question the objective standing of all values, including the nihilist’s highest values, in order to overcome the despair at the unrealizability of these values” [2006, 68]. 28 85–​6:2[128] (WP.134, LNp84):  “Basic contradiction in civilization and the elevation of the human. It is the time of the great noon, of the most fruitful brightening.” Previous analogues to this nihilism in other cultures didn’t fully see through morality. So 85–​6:2[127] (WP.1, LNp83) says that Indian Buddhism isn’t complete nihilism because it hasn’t overcome morality, it’s still “full of morality that is not overcome.”

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  255

7.2 Morality Nietzsche’s attacks on morality are perhaps his most frequent, striking thoughts. Our obvious questions are: What is morality, and why is it bad? Here I’ll address what I think are the main general issues, then, in §7.3 will try to make things more concrete by focusing on two important values within morality, pity and equality, and his attacks on these.

7.2.1  What it is Nietzsche uses the term “morality” [Moral] to signify many things, as interpreters have often noted.29 He sees it differently in different contexts, and his views also shift over time. He distinguishes a great many kinds of morality, and it seems he has in mind sometimes one and sometimes another of these. But I think we can put his core idea in the following way. Morality is a certain stage in the historical development of a society’s values. The stage has been reached, it seems independently, in many different cultures, although Nietzsche largely focuses on European, Christian morality. Its emergence is entangled with two others we’ve already traced. Morality addresses itself to the subject/​agent and evolves together with it; we looked at the agent’s genealogy in Chapter 5 (§5.3). And morality is a stage in the development of our social nature—​of “the common” we discussed in Chapter 6. We saw how morality is built over a prior stage of “custom,” which involves its own way of valuing. We best grasp morality through this contrast and transition. In the ethic of custom [Sittlichkeit der Sitte]30 a human doesn’t fully distinguish itself from the group.31 She or he self-​identifies as a “member’ and has his or her values in this group identity. So values have their authority directly and explicitly by their status as “what one does”—​“one” being the anonymous and

29 Schacht [1983, 417–​75] begins his chapter by noting the diversity to Nietzsche’s uses of “morality.” Leiter [1995; 2002, 73–​163] gives a finely detailed account of “morality in the pejorative sense”—​the sense in which it’s Nietzsche’s target. May [1999, 104–​7] offers six ideas as collectively constituting the kind of morality Nietzsche rejects. 30 As we saw in Chapter 6 (§6.4)—​see note 39 there—​the common translation of Sittlichkeit der Sitte as “morality of custom” is lamentable; it obscures Nietzsche’s distinction between this ethic and morality [Moral]. In Chapter 11 (§11.4) we’ll see how this mistake distorts the sense of the famous account of “the sovereign individual” in GM.ii.2. I give a fuller account of the ethic of custom in my [2004, 88–​92]. Nietzsche treats it especially in Human, All-​too-​Human and Daybreak. See, e.g., HH.i.96, HH.i.99, D.9, D.16, D.18. Already in 77:23[96] he claims that morality originated in allegiance to Sitten (and not, as moralists think, in the “unegoistic”). 31 81:11[193]: “Before egoism, the herd drive is older than the ‘will to self-​preservation.’ Human first evolved as function.” Also D.9, 82:3[1]‌.255.

256  Human Values undifferentiated group member one identifies as.32 To act as one ought is to act from this group identity—​to “remember who one is” by remembering the social norms and rules that define the group. The member says these rules to itself in this group-​voice, which it calls its conscience. Now where is the subject or agent in this? It is developing, but not yet fully arrived. Members hold custom-​values consciously and in words. One is called back consciously to that group identity, as embodied in formulated rules (“don’t steal”). Custom is effective against the unconscious drives through the member’s “becoming conscious” of its reason not to do what comes naturally. But this consciousness doesn’t attribute itself to an individual separate from the group. It understands the self that thinks as the group-​self.33 The stage of “morality” arrives as members come to see themselves as full-​ fledged subjects and agents who are tasked to do what’s right and rational. The voice in them that remembers the rules, their conscience, is no longer understood as a group-​self but as a “voice of reason,” their own voice, since it’s the voice of a rational self that is (supposed to be) the best part of themselves. This rational self is also, however, meant to be the same in each of us, in that it finds (when properly exercised) the very same things good. Morality thus addresses the person as individual (and not mere member), but it also calls this individual toward a universal good understood as shared not just by all members but by all humans. In its capacity to follow morality the individual takes itself to have an absolute freedom, which however renders it responsible and reprehensible where it fails to choose and follow what’s right. The real function of morality, then, is to secure adherence to social norms by inducing members to self-​police. The kind of individual it allows its members to be is one that finds its true self in choosing precisely those norms. Members can think of themselves as “their own person,” indeed as particularly potent and free, while all along following faithfully those norms. For they’ve been trained to feel themselves free precisely when they do “what’s right,” and the “reason” by which they find this right has been designed to validate the social norms. This is why they understand freedom as from the drives, which they view as separate and alien forces.

32 HH.ii.89 says that one has been raised into custom “not as an individual, but as a member of the whole, as a cipher in a majority [Majorität].—​So it constantly happens that through his ethic [Sittlichkeit] the individual outvotes [majorisirt] himself.” 33 GS.354 is the key text developing consciousness as originally social; e.g.: “only as a social animal did human learn to become conscious of himself—​he does it still he does it more and more.” Again see Chapter 5 (§5.3) on this passage.

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  257 So morality is different from custom in the way it values, but is largely the same in what it values. The ultimate function of morality is, after all, the same as that of custom: to bind people together into communities that are strong enough to compete against others.34 Both do so by inducing adhesion to norms. While custom’s values are the group’s overtly, morality’s are, too, but in a certain disguise. Custom binds members to social rules by inducing people to identify as group members. Morality does it by inducing people to see these same social rules as picked out and justified by their own reason. We should think of custom and morality not only as two phases in cultural history, but also as layers in every individual. They are two reinforcing ways that any individual values social norms. There are situations in which one acts out of “group solidarity”—​from the immediate sense that “this is what one does” and must do as a member of this group. And there are situations in which one asks what is the right and rational thing to do. These two kinds of motives are also often present together. We all have values both by custom and morality—​ as also by both master and slave forms of morality; we differ of course in the preponderances of these. The function of morality, like custom, is to secure adherence to norms and thereby to sustain a successful society. Owing to this function, morality has a typical content: much the same things are labeled “good” and “evil” in moralities across cultures. I will pick out four main points, which are especially evident in Christian morality. (a)  Hostility to the drives and body. Social values have had the long-​standing aim to prevent members’ strong aggressive drives from acting in their natural ways, which would disrupt group harmony and solidarity. So both custom and morality have a bias and animus against these drives, which they depict as other and alien to the person’s real self (either the group-​self of custom or the rational self of morality). In morality these drives are discredited as irrational and evil. GM.ii.22: “He grasps in ‘god’ the ultimate opposites of his own real and irredeemable animal instincts, he reinterprets these animal instincts themselves as guilt before god.” (b)  Pity for the suffering of others. Morality, with the function to tame us, also addresses the suffering that taming inflicts; it has been designed for sufferers. Indeed, at least in its now dominant “slave” form, morality is designed for the struggling and disadvantaged part of the population for whom suffering is the great fact of life—​and who also feel that they suffer more than certain privileged

34 85–​6:2[206] (WP.789, LNp99): “the good or evil action is to be called good or evil not in itself but only from the perspective of what favors self-​preservation among particular kinds of human community!” Also GS.116.

258  Human Values others.35 By inducing those who are not suffering to “suffer with” (cf. Mitleid) those who do, morality helps the latter not just by extracting charity from the former, but by diminishing the former—​by spreading suffering to them and reducing their privilege and advantage. (c)  Altruistic self-​sacrifice as true nobility. Morality, made for the struggling and suffering part of the group, holds up the ideal of a new kind of nobility. Rather than success and distinction in material-​practical life, the old nobility from which those sufferers are excluded—​“true” nobility is now a certain way of not caring about material-​practical goods:  sacrificing one’s own to others. Altruism is difficult enough to be a plausible mark of distinction. It is, we might say, the one way morality can tolerate distinction or exceptional individuals: they can only be exceptional in how they deny their own selfish drives and subordinate their own good to that of others. (d)  The equality of persons. We’ve seen that morality claims to apply equally to everyone since each is simply, abstractly a subject/​agent; that all are equal before the moral law is a kind of procedural assumption that morality depends on.36 But morality also values equality—​has it as part of its typical content. Again this is due to its design for sufferers especially: they’ve given up on excelling themselves and want only to level those above them. Morality aims to bring persons to the same level; it does so especially by inhibiting and discouraging any exceptions who would much exceed that level. If pity and altruism are virtues for individuals, equality is morality’s virtue for societies.

7.2.2  Why it’s bad Let’s turn now from the question what Nietzsche thinks morality is to his critique of it. He separates these tasks in a famous passage in GM.p.6: “we need a critique of moral values, for once the value of these values is itself to be set into question—​ and for this we need a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances out of which they have grown, under which they have developed and shifted.”37 Here the study of moral values seems meant to precede the critique, but Nietzsche’s practice is much more to intertwine them. And indeed he thinks they depend on

35 BGE.260: “Suppose the violated, oppressed, suffering, unfree, who are uncertain of themselves and weary, moralize. . . .” 36 Leiter [2002, 80] says that one of morality’s “descriptive components” is its claim that human agents “are sufficiently similar that one moral code is appropriate for all.” 37 GS.345 regrets that there have been so few “efforts to explore the history of origins of [moral] feelings and valuations (which is something quite different from a critique of them and different too from a history of ethical systems).”

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  259 one another since one can only get a good idea what morality is by “stepping out of it” and occupying a critical view upon it, which, however, must view it accurately. We have to mistrust it in order to understand it, but also vice versa. What is Nietzsche’s principal rationale for this critique? By what ultimate standard does he think morality fails? We again face the daunting task of sorting a great mass of diverse material, for he attacks morality from many directions.38 I’ll distinguish four main arguments I think he uses. The third and fourth will be the most important: they are indeed the “meta-​values” of truth and power we discussed back in Chapter 1 (§1.4). With them he makes the “internalist” appeal that we saw his justifications must rest on. A first prominent line of attack on morality condemns it for the types of people it helps and hurts. Moral values favor the herd, the mass of society, at the expense of exceptional individuals. So: i. Morality is bad because it favors the rule at the expense of the exception.

We’ve just reviewed Nietzsche’s story how moral “norms” have been designed in the interest of the community or group—​how tradition “is above all directed at the preservation of a community, a people” [HH.i.96]. Norms strengthen the group by the cohesion and solidarity they impart. They impart this just by being held as norms, but also by their content. They are deeply hostile to exceptions—​ to individuals. This feature of morality is one of Nietzsche’s favorite objections to it. Leiter considers it his most important.39 However this first line of attack on morality seems to suffer from an obvious limitation. The value Nietzsche instead puts on exceptions, on the highest individuals, seems to express just his own personal bias and preference. It expresses it in at least two ways: in favoring a few rather than a many, and in favoring the particular few he does. He favors these, but why should we? These values seem indexed to his single perspective, with no grip on anyone who doesn’t share them. His “highest individuals” may be most valuable for him, but a contrary value of “the general good” would be valuable for those who esteem it—​and Nietzsche has no obvious way of claiming priority for his own perspective. Sometimes indeed he seems to agree that these perspectives are on a par, in being each valid in its own terms.40

38 Leiter [2002, 78] distinguishes morality’s “Descriptive and Normative Components” as objects of Nietzsche’s attack. I’ll comment on his analyses of these as we go. See also Schacht [1983, 441–​75] on the attack on morality. 39 Leiter [2002, 113–​15] argues that Nietzsche’s ultimate objection to morality (“in the pejorative sense”) is that it is “harmful to higher men.” He argues [125–​7] that this is Nietzsche’s criterion rather than “life” or “nature.” 40 87:10[59] (WP.886): “one should not evaluate the solitary type according to the herdish, nor the herdish according to the solitary.”

260  Human Values Leiter is content to let this be the end of argument for Nietzsche: he has his value, we have ours, and he makes no further claim that his is truer or better than ours—​except from his own perspective. Nietzsche is “simply giving expression to the evaluative taste of a certain type of person” [2002, 150], and it “is not an objective fact that [those Nietzsche views as higher types] are really higher” [152]. But I think this hears Nietzsche to give up too early. As we’ll eventually see, his value of highest individuals is grounded in something that does give him an argument—​an argument he very much wants to use in favor of the value of highest individuals. So Nietzsche faces a general challenge in justifying his critique. If values are essentially perspectival (i.e., essentially “valueds” and hence indexed to perspectives) then any standard he holds up against morality seems to be just good by and for his own valuing of it. And so it seems that there are simply two opposed perspectives, morality’s and Nietzsche’s, each just as justified by and for its own valuing. The dispute seems to land in a “perspectival stand-​off.” I suggest that we think of Nietzsche’s challenge in this way. He is addressing readers with some allegiance to morality. He wants to show that it fails certain standards. He can’t depict these standards as “real goods” that his readers should accept—​there are no such goods. He must instead mean these standards to be ones his readers already have—​or standards their own values project. He needs an argument with this internalist force. He must show that, by virtue of what we already care about, we should disvalue morality. A second line of argument against morality seems designed to meet this challenge. Nietzsche claims that morality is condemned by its very own criteria or values. So: ii. Morality is bad by its own standards.

The values morality itself posits, when accurately applied, judge morality and the moral agent very harshly. Morality “contradicts itself ” in certain ways. Different parts of its values contradict one another. Moreover—​and this is what Nietzsche most stresses—​morality contradicts its own motives: people’s real reasons for allegiance to moral values are themselves “very immoral.” Nietzsche delights in exposing self-​contradiction and hypocrisy in morality and moralists. One main theme of the genealogies is to show that the historical and psychological sources of morality are very ugly things by morality’s own standards. In 86–​7:7[6]‌ (WP.266): “Morality as work of immorality. /​A. For moral values to come to mastery many immoral forces and affects must help. /​B. The arising of moral values is itself the work of immoral affects and considerations.”41 And then 41 This note outlines arguments against morality; besides its source in immorality: “Morality as work of error. /​ Morality in general contradiction with itself.” And later: “How far morality was harmful to life,” though it concludes with a “counter-​reckoning” of ways it has also benefited life. On morality’s immoral roots see also 86–​7:7[6]‌(WP.306)

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  261 88:14[103] (WP.583): “Moral values as the highest would be refuted if they could be proven to be consequences of immoral valuation.”42 This strategy has the virtue of not needing to hold up a standard that morality rejects; it avoids that threat of a perspectival stand-​off. If morality is bad by its own standards, we don’t need to posit any independent standards in order to sink it. But this first strategy has limitations that give Nietzsche reasons to want something more. First, this attack gives a kind of credit to morality’s own values that Nietzsche himself denies them. Many of the motives that morality would view as evil are instead goods in his own view. So he would not agree that they count against morality except insofar as morality holds that they do. The problem is not with the motives, but with morality’s own objections to them. Second, Nietzsche himself seems prone to contradict himself—​he even seems to revel in doing so. So it’s not clear that he himself holds that self-​contradiction or inconsistency is a bad thing: this criterion, too, may be just morality’s. And as to one’s values contradicting one’s motives, he seems to think that such hypocrisies are a “condition of life.” He is happy to say that some very good things have had very unsavory sources. So how can he be entitled to hold morality’s roots against it? Third, this attack seems to leave much of morality’s content unaffected. It leaves open the general possibility that one might learn to value this same content from different motives—​or on the basis of different arguments—​ones that don’t contradict morality. For example Nietzsche attributes the ideal of equality to a herdish and slavish ressentiment of higher persons. But he is well aware that any such ideal can be adopted by many kinds of persons for many reasons. Perhaps the moralist could even learn, from Nietzsche’s diagnoses of these ugly motives, to value the very same things on healthier grounds. It’s hard to see why morality couldn’t eventually make itself self-​consistent. A third strategy will require a fuller account. It attacks moral values not as inconsistent, but as depending on certain factual claims that are, however, false. Even if moral values themselves might be, as perspectives, impregnable, they are built on errors and falsehoods—​and should lose credence on this ground. So, in a formula: iii. Morality is bad because it depends on lies.

It’s false not qua values (since there are no real goods for values to be “true to”), but in those factual claims it presupposes and depends on. As he puts it in D.103: “I deny ethics [Sittlichkeit] as I deny alchemy, i.e., I deny its presuppositions.”

42 88:14[134] (WP.461): “It suffices [to abolish morality] to demonstrate that morality is also immoral, in the sense in which the immoral has so far been condemned.”

262  Human Values Nietzsche thinks that he uncovers many different kinds of falsehoods in or behind morality. One key lie is morality’s claim that its values are themselves true (i.e., real and existing independently of any valuing of them). Here it makes a factual mistake—​about the true character of values, what they truly are (they are valueds). TI.vii.1: “Moral judgment has this in common with religious [judgment], that it believes in realities that are not.” A second key lie is morality’s picture of the agent to which it addresses itself. Morality requires that one think of oneself as a persisting subject of consciousness, one that wields executive power in the psyche and that does so by its freedom to decide by reasons. We looked at this self-​conception in Chapter 5 and saw that Nietzsche denies that there is any such thing; really there is just that self-​ misconception, which is effective in its own right. He denies especially morality’s conception of its agent as free.43 Morality rests on other important errors. It has historically been entangled with religion and has commonly posited a god or gods rewarding moral and punishing immoral behavior in an afterlife. These claims have been extremely important sources of morality’s motivating force. But there are also related, more secular versions of these—​about the rewards of virtue and the inevitable miseries of vice. All of these are largely false, Nietzsche thinks. So, too, are the conceptions of nature—​our human nature in particular—​as somehow aimed or designed for this moral goodness. The world and we are instead selfish and competing wills to power. We should notice that this standard of truth charges morality not just with lacking but with concealing the truth. Nietzsche deplores how morality makes it harder to see the truth about ourselves and our values. Indeed he accuses morality of aiming to conceal these truths—​in particular the truth about the reasons and motives that really explain our actions and values. Morality doesn’t just rest on lies, it embraces these lies in order to avoid difficult truths about the motives and functions of its values. Nietzsche very often attacks morality this way. Moreover he thinks that it’s this standard whose judgment against morality will be most effective—​effective in actually pulling down morality, in inducing people to give it up. So D.95, entitled “Historical refutation as the definitive [sort].” Morality is undermining itself by its own truthfulness about itself; this is the “self-​sublimation of morality” [D.p.4].44

43 D.148: “If only those actions are moral that are done in freedom of will—​as another definition says—​, then there are likewise no moral actions!” Cf. TI.vi.7; 87:10[57] (WP.786). Leiter [2002, 80] distinguishes three “descriptive theses about human agency” that he thinks Nietzsche attacks; they regard the agent’s freedom, transparency, and similarity (to other agents). 44 Cf. GM.iii.27; 86–​7:5[71] (WP.5, LNp116).

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  263 However there are also puzzles in how Nietzsche could rely on this criterion of truthfulness. It seems that the same issue arises as for the first criterion: truthfulness likewise seems to be “just Nietzsche’s value”—​part of his own perspective but with no grip on our own. If I choose not to value truthfulness, it seems I enter a perspective different from Nietzsche’s and impregnable to any arguments he could give against it. I seem quite within my rights not to value truthfulness. And a defender of morality seems entitled to reject this value—​at least in application to morality’s premises. So we’ve arrived, it seems, at just another “perspectival stand-​off.” Moreover it’s not even clear that Nietzsche accepts this standard himself. He questions the value of truth or truthfulness and questions its use as a standard to judge values by. GS.345: “A morality could even have grown out of an error: yet with this insight the problem of its value would still not even be touched.” I’ll come back to elaborate these doubts against truth in §7.4. I’ll try to show in §7.5 that they have a different significance than many have supposed. They have the point not of dismissing or demoting the value of truth, but of showing how this value needs to be improved. But if Nietzsche does rely on the criterion of truthfulness, how would he defend it against the charge that it is “just his own value,” with no grip on someone who doesn’t share it? He would deny, I think, that this other person truly doesn’t share it. He thinks that all of us value this “truthful valuing.” It is the crucial posit that founds our distinctively human way of valuing; the drives that we share with animals don’t make it. We all presume that our valuing has a target, that there is something we should value, so that our valuing will be true. Chapter 5 (§5.4) reviewed how this value of “truthful valuing” has been set into all of us by that long ancestral training (“taming”) that made us human by making us (regard ourselves as) agents. And so now, as we saw in Chapter 1 (§1.4), truth functions as a “meta-​value’ by which we assess and improve our first-​order valuing. But this standard works so deeply in us that we can fail to notice it and even deny it. It works mostly “in the background” and without our conscious supervision. It is one of Nietzsche’s main intents, I suggest, to arouse and appeal to this criterion of truthfulness we all already have. He tries to induce his readers to apply this criterion more honestly and accurately than they currently do. It’s the virtue of truthfulness or honesty that he most strives to exemplify to us. To be sure, this truthfulness needs to take a new form. It needs to be improved in the ways we’ll see in §7.5. And this will involve, above all, revising this value in the light of a second meta-​value that is set even more deeply into us. When Nietzsche criticizes the current will to truth as “ascetic,” he is judging it by this standard. This brings us to his fourth and most important ground for attacking morality.

264  Human Values Nietzsche’s ultimate criticism of morality is that it hurts or inhibits humans’ pursuit of power or growth. As we saw in Chapter 2, he attributes this aim at power to all “life.” So: iv. Morality is bad because it’s contrary to life.

His ultimate charge against morality is that it is “anti-​life.”45 In 86–​7:7[6]‌ (WP.266): “opposition of life and morality: morality judged and condemned from life.”46 His commonest argument here is that morality “says no to life”—​that it is a version of the “no-​to-​life nihilism” we examined in §7.1. It may not say this explicitly: morality may well claim to be on life’s side. But it disvalues what life really is—​life in the forms in which it is most productive and “most what it is.” It values the forms of life in which life turns against itself: ascetic life, or life that feels guilty about being alive. But it attacks the forms in which life advances itself, such as sexuality and selfishness. This charge that morality “says no to life” objects to its stance or attitude toward life. Nietzsche furthermore objects to its effects on life, to how it hurts and hinders it. These are the two directions from which he assesses everything: for what it expresses and for what effects it will have. He distinguishes these two approaches to morality in a parenthesis in GM.p.6: “morality as consequence, as symptom, as mask, as Tartuffery, as sickness, as misunderstanding; but also morality as cause, as medicine, as stimulus, as constraint, as poison.” Nietzsche evaluates in the first way both more often and more characteristically: it’s his distinctive philosophical practice to “psychologize” problems and positions (i.e., to uncover the psychological states that various views and values express). He offers innumerable diagnoses of the unsavory roots and motives of morality. Besides his charge that it is “anti-​life,” he argues that it expresses decline or sickness.47 He is constantly tainting morality in these ways. But although such diagnostic judgments against what moral values express are dominant in Nietzsche’s texts, I think it is instead these values’ effects that are the main issue for him. His main charge is that morality is harmful to us. His 45 E.g., EH.iv.7: morality “negates life in the deepest ground.” Leiter [2002, 126] suggests that “when he speaks of the value for ‘life’ he means simply the value for the preservation and enhancement of the highest men.” But this skimps the role in this argument of Nietzsche’s extensive treatments of “life” in a broader sense. See again Chapter 2. 46 The Nachlass note presents this as the third and last stage in shifting relations between morality and life. It goes on to give lists of ways that morality “has been harmful to life,” and then of “its usefulness for life.” 47 86:4[7]‌(WP.395, LNp103): “might there be a causal connection between morality and sickness in general? . . . [I]s our morality—​our modern, tender-​hearted morality in Europe . . .—​the expression of a physiological decline?”

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  265 focus is forward, which makes effects more important than sources. So he treats the sources and motives his genealogies uncover as signs of what to expect the thing’s effects will be. If morality is so hostile to life, we must expect that it’s also bad for life—​that its dislike for life tends indeed to damage life. Finding out what morality has been designed to do is indispensable for understanding its effects. Nietzsche is well aware that values can be retooled and re-​aimed. But for this it is all-​important to see what they’ve been made for so far. Consider in this light an important passage in GM.p.3; Nietzsche states his new problem: “under what conditions did human invent those value-​judgments good and evil? and what value do they themselves have? Have they so far hindered or helped human flourishing? Are they a sign of distress, of impoverishment, of degeneration of life? or on the contrary do they betray in themselves the fullness, the force, the will of life, its courage, its confidence, its future?” I suggest that here the background purpose is to judge whether these moral values will help or hinder us and that the other considerations are all evidences for that judgment.48 If these values have hindered us, it’s likely they will do so in future—​unless something is changed. And if these values express declining life, they’re likely to have harmful effects—​unless the impetus or motives behind them are changed. Thus a certain expectation lies at the core of Nietzsche’s fourth argument against morality. We may state it in the form of a principle:

If x “says no to life,” x is likely to be harmful to life.

Nietzsche’s attack on morality makes great use of this principle, though he is also prepared for exceptions to it: ways in which even something life-​negating can be beneficial. Of course a lot needs to be said to specify just how morality “says no to life,” as well as the kind of harm it’s claimed to have. But these are the rough lines of his fourth and ultimate criterion for judging morality. As with the criterion of truthfulness, Nietzsche thinks that this standard of “life” is deeply embedded in us as a meta-​value for assessing and improving our first-​order values. It is, of course, what he calls our “will to power”; this is our effort at “more life.” We saw in Chapter 2 how this is a disposition in all living things to judge their values—​the signs by which they steer—​by how well these values enable them to “grow in control.” Again this works mainly beneath the level of awareness. Our bodies do this judging by their feelings of growth and decline, expansion and contraction.

48 GM.p.6 glosses “of higher value”: “in the sense of its furtherance, usefulness, beneficiality—​with respect to human in general (taking into account the future of human).” It goes on to warn that morality might be “the danger of dangers.”

266  Human Values This standard of life or power assesses not just our first-​order values but also the first meta-​value: truth. Nietzsche’s charge that the will to truth is “ascetic” judges it by this deeper meta-​value of power. One large question is whether this non-​epistemic value restricts or diminishes the value of truth. Briefly: Are we to sacrifice some truth in order to have more power? I’ll come back to this question in §7.5, where I’ll consider further the relation between these values of power and truth. This standard also underlies and justifies the first criterion we considered (i.e., Nietzsche’s assessment of values by whether they favor the rule or the exception). His full view—​as we saw in Chapter 6 (§6.4)—​is that both rule and exception are necessary by the general logic of human progress: the exceptions are those who advance beyond the rule and thereby establish a new and higher rule. The new rule is a platform from which still higher exceptions can launch themselves. So both are needed for long-​term human growth, but it is especially the exceptions that drive this growth. If the rule is so dominant as to preclude exceptions to it, human power stagnates. Thus Nietzsche appeals to life or power in order to have an answer to the perspectivist challenge against his elitism. Each of us should realize that we deeply want the growth of our human kind, and the truth (Nietzsche claims) is that exceptions are the main means to this. So we have an internalist reason to value exceptions ourselves. His appeal to “life” is not simply to a term with high positive emotive pull among his readers—​though of course it works that way, too. Nietzsche means something different by “life” than his readers do, but something he thinks they have a deep preference for. So he claims to judge morality by a standard that is, whether we see it or not, already at work in us.

7.3  Critiques of moral values We’ve looked at Nietzsche’s argument against morality only schematically so far. We need to concretize it: to see how the charge that morality is anti-​life applies to cases—​to particular moral values. We need to do so, moreover, in a way that brings Nietzsche’s argument up against our own values. For he will insist that we only understand him when we feel our own values assaulted by his claims about them. For this purpose I’ll focus on two elements in morality—​in any morality, Nietzsche thinks, but especially in Christian morality. They are pity, understood as an important and even primary virtue for persons, and equality, understood as a crucial good for societies (and as more, we’ll see). He thinks both are key

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  267 parts of morality.49 Probably most of Nietzsche’s interpreters and readers today are strongly attached to these values themselves. So there’s the prospect, if we dig with his critiques of them far enough, that we’ll touch sore spots in ourselves—​ where his attacks can trouble us. That Nietzsche’s interpreters are mostly committed to pity and equality poses them (i.e., us) a challenge: how to square one’s overall confidence in Nietzsche with one’s rejection of his position here. Why do his arguments, which have such grip and force elsewhere for us, have so little here? There are several natural strategies available to us to explain and justify the absolute solidity of these values in us after all Nietzsche’s vehement attacks; I’ll distinguish three. Sometimes his attacks on pity and equality are discounted as, by his own account, dispensable elements in his thought. They belong, together with his views on women, which he explicitly presents this way, to his personal and idiosyncratic perspective.50 So he makes no claim to “have it right” about pity and equality in a way that would give his rejection authority over our own valuing of them. Thus (this reading concludes) he really has no arguments against pity or equality, and we don’t need to pay much attention to what he says against them—​ it’s just rhetoric. It’s fair to tune it out because it expresses the bias of his private perspective. A second strategy is to attribute Nietzsche’s attacks on pity and altruism to certain factual mistakes in his arguments for them. That is, we detach these attacks from the main part of his thinking by claiming that they follow from it only with the addition of those mistaken premises. We now (claim to) see that, correcting those errors, his main philosophical views are (at the least) consistent with valuing pity and equality as we do. For example, it might be argued that Nietzsche wrongly supposes that all suffering is potentially beneficial or that all suffering is due to sickness or weakness—​and that his rejection of pity hinges on these mistakes.51 Still a third way to discount his attacks—​and reconcile them with our own undisturbed allegiance to pity and equality—​is to hear them as bearing only against quite particular kinds of pity and equality, different from our own.52 For example, when he

49 See how 85:34[176] (WP.144) singles them out: herd morality’s “two best preached doctrines are called: ‘equality of rights’ and ‘sympathy [Mitgefühl] for everything living.’ ” The point is repeated in 85:37[8]‌ (WP.957; LNp31–​3). 50 Leiter [2002, 154] argues that Nietzsche promotes his own values with the implicit proviso “if you share my evaluative taste for the flourishing of higher men.” Nietzsche qualifies his views about women as only “his” truths in BGE.231. 51 So Nussbaum [1994]; I return to this critique later. 52 Kaufmann [1950/​1974, 371]: “Nietzsche thus attacks only one kind of pity and neighbor-​love, and this is not the kind which is ‘Christian’ in the ideal sense.”

268  Human Values attacks pity for the motives it expresses, perhaps he only means motives we’re pretty sure we can avoid, such as a covert aim to “lord it over” those we pity. And perhaps when he attacks equality he means to favor “spiritual” inequalities and not material (economic or political) ones. By such readings interpreters steer Nietzsche’s attacks away from the moral values most settled in them. I think we should avoid the first and second strategies—​discounting his attacks on pity and equality either as “just his perspective” or as resting on secondary errors. He thinks these judgments are bound up tightly with his other views—​are near the center of his thought. He claims that the values of pity and equality really are anti-​ life. And he insists that our own confidence in these values is seriously and broadly harmful to us. It is a sign of the grip morality still has on us, a grip that prevents the step away and out of morality that we need if we’re to see it adequately.53 And if we don’t understand his critique of morality, he thinks we’ve missed his main point. My approach will be closest to the third. I  share with it the hope to find a Nietzschean view of pity and equality that “we could live with.” But my full account of this view won’t come until I turn to Nietzsche’s positive views regarding self and society in Chapters 10 and 11; there we’ll see with what he means to replace our values of pity and equality. Here I’ll point toward that account, but the main work is to lay out his critique—​and to do so in a way that shows how thoroughly integrated it is with the other ideas we’ve been examining.

7.3.1 Against pity Nietzsche’s word is Mitleid, which says “suffering with.”54 We face an immediate choice whether to translate it “pity” or “compassion.”55 The latter reflects (in Latin) the structure of Nietzsche’s word, but it connotes to me something more high-​toned and rare than I think he usually means. It connotes a degree of empathy and identification with the other that is not at all usual. So it may not aptly apply to many of the ordinary cases he diagnoses. I think “pity” is a better label 53 85–​6:2[203] (LNp98–​9) says that even philosophers, “with their will to independence,” “all believe, honestly, unconsciously, undisturbedly, in the value of what they call morality, that is, they stand under its authority.” 54 On Nietzsche’s treatment of pity, see Nussbaum [1994], Janaway [2007], von Tevenar [2007], and Reginster [2012]. Nussbaum’s attack on Nietzsche’s attack has been influential but gets Nietzsche’s view importantly wrong. She overstates his continuity with the Stoic critique of pity. The crux to Nietzsche’s attack is not his disregard for “material conditions” but his revaluation of suffering—​a point of difference from the Stoics on which Nussbaum is silent. Unlike the Stoics, he doesn’t reject pity because he thinks that suffering is avoidable. But see further on this n. 74. 55 My sense is that “pity” was long standard for Nietzsche’s Mitleid but that there has been a recent preference for “compassion.” See von Tevenar’s [2007] extended treatment of the difference, as well as Janaway [2007, 63–​7]. Both argue that Schopenhauer means “compassion” by his Mitleid, and that while some of Nietzsche’s criticisms are directed just against “pity,” others do bear against compassion.

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  269 for the very common attitude he has mostly in mind. And Nietzsche will insist that those high-​toned cases are just variations on the common attitude. The difference is just a matter of degree; they share the same structure. So they both count as Mitleid for him.56 Nietzsche thinks that pity plays a major role in morality and in nihilism. In GM.p.5 he calls the “pity-​morality” [Mitleids-​Moral] “the most uncanny symptom” of our nihilistic culture. He says that it was out of his attention to the “problem of the value of pity and of the pity-​morality” that he learned to be suspicious of morality more generally [p.6]. His attention was most forcefully drawn to pity by Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche takes the latter’s weighting of pity to throw light on the role it has in the great religions. His usual procedure is to reverse Schopenhauer on every point, beginning with pity. So 88:15[13] (WP.54): “That virtue of which Schopenhauer still taught that it is the highest, the only, and the foundation of all virtue, even that pity I recognized as more dangerous than any vice.”57 But we need to say just what “pity” is. We’ve already had a first look at it, back in the discussion of suffering [Leiden] in Chapter 4 (§4.3). We saw that Mitleid is one of two “opposite” second-​order feelings about suffering. To pity is to suffer or feel pain over some suffering—​whether another’s or one’s own. Cruelty [Grausamkeit] by contrast is taking pleasure in some suffering and, more particularly, pleasure in making-​suffer; again this can be directed either at another or at oneself. And “suffering,” the common object of pity and cruelty, is itself a “feeling bad”: it is a “negative reflexive feeling”—​it feels itself as bad. It feels itself, more particularly, as worse (at this moment) than not-​living so that, contra Schopenhauer, not every frustration or discomfort counts as “suffering.” So we saw, in that earlier discussion, that pity is a suffering about suffering. But this is still very schematic. I suggest that we can fill out Nietzsche’s conception of pity by distinguishing six aspects that are present in all cases—​or rather, in all cases of pity toward others—​though present to very varying degrees. It’s because it encompasses this diversity that Nietzsche remarks in D.133:  “how coarsely does language assault with its one word [‘pity’] so polyphonous a being!” In different cases differences among these six aspects will be most prominent; we can use the word “pity” to highlight any of them. (By contrast “compassion” has a narrower use, in which (i), (v), and (vi) are stressed.)

56 In translating Mitleid as “pity” rather than “compassion” I thus choose Nietzsche’s interpretation of the phenomenon over Schopenhauer’s. It’s to be expected, then, that translations of Schopenhauer have usually preferred “compassion.” 57 See, too, TI.ix.37 on Schopenhauer’s “pity-​morality” as “the genuine décadence-​movement in morality.”

270  Human Values (i) I think the core idea for Nietzsche is just Mitleid’s literal sense: a suffering-​ with. To pity is to take oneself to “step into” the other’s suffering: one adopts his or her suffering perspective and sees and (especially) feels as he or she does.58 To pity is to take oneself to do this. (ii) For of course one can’t really step into another’s perspective; the degree or extent of the actual “sharing” is often very low. Usually one shares at best a very generic suffering and can little approach the quite personal character it takes in the other.59 The pitier suffers due to the pitied’s suffering, but usually in a very different way. But there’s more to pity than just sharing; it involves certain framing attitudes toward the other who suffers—​when it is another who suffers. (iii) For in pity one also experiences the other’s suffering quite safely, with the framing recognition that the suffering is not “really one’s own”; one knows that one can step out of it at will. This optionality is one key difference between the pitier’s suffering and the pitied’s. The more strongly the pitier feels this optionality, the more his or her suffering loses its sting. (iv) And tied up with this is also a sense of superiority to the pitied, who is subjected to the suffering in a way the pitier is not. As D.138 says, “in pitying lies something that elevates and makes superior [Überlegenheit-​ Gebendes].”60 The pitier is (after all) strong enough to voluntarily adopt this suffering the pitied is mastered by. This feeling of superiority is intrinsic to pitying even when it takes the form of compassion: the latter knows its own nobility in feeling its intense concern for the other. (v) Nevertheless the pitier also, in sharing the other’s suffering, adopts the other’s interest in ending that suffering.61 And I suggest that this is not just 58 We might call this sense of entering the other’s perspective “empathy” or “sympathy.” 80:4[280] says that the ability to “represent” what another is experiencing is present already in animals, e.g., in the predator’s interpretation of the prey; this would make these animals capable of pity and cruelty. See HH.ii.62. 59 GS.338 stresses how little the pitier usually understands the pitied: “he knows nothing of the whole inner sequence and interconnection that means misfortune [Unglück] for me or for you!” Also HH.i.104, D.133. Reginster [2012] points out how Nietzsche’s denial of the identity of the pitier’s with the pitied’s suffering rebuts Schopenhauer’s claim that it’s only by feeling the other’s suffering as my own that I can take an altruistic interest in this other. 60 Nietzsche points out already in 76:19[71] how the pitier feels stronger than the pitied. See, too, HH.iii.50 on how showing pity “is felt as a sign of contempt”; also D.135. von Tevenar [2007] argues that this sense of superiority belongs to “pity” but not to “compassion”; the latter, “with its attentive and benevolent concern for persons who suffer, is based on awareness of our common humanity.” I suggest that some such “benevolent concern” is indeed another ingredient in “pity”—​it’s (v) in my analysis—​and that it coexists with that sense of superiority, in a single complex attitude. 61 von Tevenar [2007] says that “compassion focuses on persons who suffer while pity focuses on the condition suffered” [263]. But I think ordinary pity is also focused on persons—​as suffering—​ and that the sense of superiority she associates with pity belongs to that focus. Moreover many of

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  271 true of compassion, but must be present to some degree even in pity’s most selfish forms: they wouldn’t count as pity without some regret for the other’s suffering. (vi) And it’s sharing that interest in the other’s good that makes pity prompt action. For all these feelings are joined by a certain practical aim or will: to help the other, indeed to give up one’s own to the other. This aim must be present if only to some minimal degree in even the least giving forms of pity. (And, indeed, this benevolence also serves the pitier’s will to be superior; D.138 thus diagnoses it as “good revenge.”) These I think are the main elements of the “pity” Nietzsche has in mind; they fit together with a natural logic and show why the one word “Mitleid” can apply to his great range of cases. “Compassion,” as mentioned, tends to be used more narrowly: I think that it usually omits or even denies the presence of superiority (iv) and perhaps also of safety (iii); its stress is on (v) and (vi). By contrast the gloatingly superior kind of pity stresses a different subset of these features. We see in the last—​pity’s impetus to help the pitied—​the link between this virtue and that of “altruism” [Altruismus], another of Nietzsche’s favorite targets. It belongs to pity that it gives a motive or push toward altruism (i.e., toward helping the other at, in some way, one’s own expense). Of course we all know that no altruistic deed may ensue. And we act altruistically from other motives besides pity.62 But it’s largely for the sake of these helpful acts that pitying is esteemed; there seems something incomplete with the feeling without an incentive to help.63 So the virtues of pity and altruism are linked: pity, as a feeling that pushes toward altruism, and altruism, as the helping and self-​sacrificing behavior itself. If this is what pity is, how does Nietzsche attack it? As we know his basic charge is that it’s anti-​life. But just how does he argue this? Antichrist 7 distinguishes two harms done by pity. First, it is depressive, it saps strength, it “makes suffering into something infectious.” But second, and more importantly A.7 suggests, pity spoils selection by preserving “things that are ripe for decline”; it does this, clearly, through the altruism it prompts. So the first point is the way pity hurts the pitier, the second the way it hurts (not the pitied but) the larger social-​biological process by which any society advances. Let’s consider these in turn.

Nietzsche’s criticisms of pity are directed against the altruism it prompts; he takes pity to involve that benevolence. 62 80:3[126] speaks of cases in which we act to prevent an evil, such as saving a child who is playing on an open bridge: we do such things not from pity but from habit, the sources of which we don’t know. 63 Nietzsche tightly links pity with the altruistic upshot; see, e.g., GS.338.

272  Human Values 1. Nietzsche’s first criticism, against the feeling of pity in its bearing on the pitier, itself works from the two directions we distinguished in §7.2 regarding his attack on morality generally. Sometimes he criticizes pity for what it expresses about the pitier, sometimes for what it does to him or her. Above all it expresses a “no to life,” and above all it hurts the life of the pitier. We take these, too, in turn. a. What does our pity (i.e., our habit, inclination, and will to pity) say about us?64 Most rudimentarily, pitying—​as imitating another’s suffering—​belongs to human’s general imitative and “apish” tendency.65 But there’s one usual reason this imitative tendency gets focused on suffering in particular: it gives one, to put it plainly, a cheap or easy success and status. Here Nietzsche emphasizes aspects (iii) and especially (iv): the pitier suffers-​with from a position of security and indeed of power (compared to the pitied). This power gives a stronger pleasure in our pitying than we admit or suspect. As an easy superiority—​since the sufferer stands as low as can be—​it appeals especially to those without other ways to exceed. GS.13: “Pity is the most agreeable feeling among those who have little pride and no prospects of great conquests.” Pity, as a lazy way to feel oneself higher, is also a temptation for those flagging on the harder road. So GS.338 says that pity appeals to those who are looking for “permission to deviate from their goal . . . a detour with a good conscience.” More broadly, pity—​or a taste for it—​expresses a deep-​seated misunderstanding of life’s point and of the significance of suffering. It misses how, as GS.338 puts it, there is “a personal necessity of unhappiness” since “the path to one’s own heaven runs always through the delight [Wollust] of one’s own hell.” And here is where pity deeply “says no to life.” It judges life by a pleasure-​pain calculus that counts suffering as an unmitigated and ultimate evil. Those prone to pity show their own preoccupation with suffering and that they themselves are fighting a defensive and likely a losing battle against it.66 They show themselves disposed to side with suffering’s rejection of life. To one focused instead on growth and achievement, suffering is something secondary and not always to be regretted. To this healthier view, there are much worse things than suffering.

64 Janaway [2007, 64] argues that this attack doesn’t affect Schopenhauerian “compassion,” which involves genuinely putting oneself on a par with the other—​“assuming there is such a feeling,” as Janaway tellingly adds. I imagine Nietzsche quite confident that his diagnosis applies to whatever such feeling Schopenhauer himself felt—​but misunderstood. 80:3[30] suggests that to phantasize about pity as Schopenhauer did shows that one doesn’t know it from experience. And 80:6[6]‌says that Schopenhauer idealized pity because he “suffered the most from its opposite.” 65 80:3[34]: “Perhaps human pity belongs here, insofar as it is an involuntary inner imitating.” 80:3[22] compares it to the contagiousness of yawning. 66 GS.338 suggests that adherents to the “religion of pity” worry over the suffering of others because they are so averse to suffering in themselves, being devoted to a “religion of comfortableness [Behaglichkeit].”

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  273 b. What does our pity do to us? The harm to the pitier begins with the simple fact that by sharing in the other’s suffering one suffers oneself. D.134: “Pity, so far as it creates real suffering—​and this is here our only viewpoint—​, is a weakness, like every losing oneself in a harmful affect. It increases the suffering in the world.”67 So where pitying is a common virtue, suffering becomes “infectious.” In 86–​7:7[4]‌(WP.368):  “the foreign suffering infects us, pity is an infection [Ansteckung].” The way we suffer in pity makes us sick and weak.68 However we’ve just noticed that suffering isn’t always a bad thing according to Nietzsche. It is also indispensable for certain kinds of growth. So why does it count against pity that it “increases suffering?” The problem is with the way we suffer when we pity: it has no positive side because it’s of no use for one’s own growth/​power. Pity’s suffering is vicarious: it happens in that safety we noticed. But this robs it of its power to improve: it’s not hot enough to remold you. Instead it has merely a “depressing effect” on the pitier [A.7]. 2. Nietzsche’s second attack is against pity’s effect on the pitied (i.e., on its practical results via altruism). As A.7 says, by aiding the pitied it “crosses [kreuzt], in large part, the law of evolution, which is the law of selection.”69 So 88:15[13] (WP.54) says about pity:  “To cross fundamentally selection in the species, its purification from waste—​that has so far been called virtue par excellence.” Pity crosses selection by sustaining the “weak and failures” who “should perish [zu Grunde gehn]: first principle of our love of human. And one should even help them to it” [A.2]. Nietzsche voices strong Social Darwinist ideas here. BGE.225 opposes “pity with social ‘distress,’ with ‘society’ and its sick and unfortunate, with those depraved and maimed from the start, though they lie on the ground all around us; . . . pity with complaining, depressed, rebellious slave strata who strive for mastery—​they call it ‘freedom.’ ” Nietzsche thinks that some (many) should be allowed to die, even encouraged to die, and not helped to hold on, as pity tempts us to do. He seems an enemy of any “social safety net,” whether by government or by charity. All of this horrifies and offends our moral ear, as Nietzsche intends.70 Moreover this attack on pity’s results seems to close off a way we might have

67 80:2[35] say that pity “doubles” the suffering. Cf. 80:3[16]. 68 80:1[122]: “If we chew over all the past misery that humanity has suffered, we become sick and weak. One must turn the gaze aside.” 69 Nietzsche says often elsewhere that Christianity “crosses” or “counters” this law of selection (but with regard to altruism rather than pity); e.g., EH.iv.8; 88:14[5]‌, 88:15[110] (WP.246). 70 Russell, as usual, turns a phrase [1945, 771] to denounce his view: “An ethic such as that of Christianity or Buddhism has its emotional basis in universal sympathy; Nietzsche’s, in a complete absence of sympathy. (He frequently preaches against sympathy, and in this respect one feels that he has no difficulty in obeying his own precepts.)”

274  Human Values hoped to ameliorate the attacks on the feeling of pity—​by taking them to bear only against unsavory motives for helping others (which we might have hoped he’d still favor). It seems that aid to the struggling is altogether rejected. Or is it? This brings us to the question of what lessons Nietzsche means to draw from his critique of pity. Given these objections to that affect, what does he want to happen to pity—​to the personal habit and the social practice of it? Does he object to any feeling of pity at all, or just to giving it too much presence, too much weight in one’s valuing? GS.338 opens by asking “Is it beneficial for you yourself to be above all [vor Allem] a pitying human?” Here we might suppose that he’s objecting only to an excess of this feeling. Schopenhauer, after all, makes it his cardinal virtue, and Christianity is “the religion of pity” [A.7]. Perhaps Nietzsche only disputes such overestimations and would allow pity to be sometimes a good thing—​a more minor and limited virtue. Yet Nietzsche’s attacks on pity seem more unrelenting than this. He seems to think that every time one pities in this way one damages and diminishes oneself. He seems not just to demote the virtue of pity, but to convert it into a vice. We should see this feeling as a weakness and avoid it—​as he thinks strong societies teach members to do. Again A.7: “in every noble morality [pity] counts as a weakness.” He goes on to approve the Greek practice described by Aristotle of using theater (tragedy) to vent this feeling of pity—​to get it out of one’s system. He seems to want us to do our very best to get out of the habit of pitying. Sometimes Nietzsche suggests a replacement virtue: Mitfreude. HH.ii.62 says that “the lowest animal” is able to represent the pain of another, but that “to represent to oneself a foreign joy, and to rejoice at it oneself, is the highest privilege of the highest animal” and rare even there. And GS.338 concludes its meditation on pity: “You will also want to help: but only those whose need you fully understand, because they have with you one suffering and one hope—​your friends: and only in the way that you help yourself: I want to make them braver, more persevering, simpler, gayer! I want them to learn what is now understood by so few and by those preachers of pity least of all:—​die Mitfreude!”71 Nevertheless, Nietzsche also does something more positive with pity—​and this is even consistent with those vehement attacks. For those attacks all bear against what this virtue of pity has been. Here, as elsewhere, he thinks the existing practice is malleable, reformable. Now that we understand the existing virtue’s flaws, we can see what it should be. So Nietzsche repurposes the word for an affect he can call a virtue. This “new pity” is no longer a “suffering-​with” since its object is not the other’s suffering. Instead it is suffering over some human’s failure to be better. In



71 On Mitfreude, see also 80:7[285].

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  275 84:25[20]: “I often experience ‘pity’ where there is no suffering there, but where I see wasting and keeping-​back. . . .” This new pity suffers, that is, over what is genuinely bad for human: its failure to be more, its failure to carry itself to a higher level of command and capacity. BGE.225 calls this “our” pity, and 85:36[7]‌ (WP.367; LNp22-​3) presents it under the heading “My ‘pity.’ ” This new pity results from realigning pity so that it “feels bad” about what genuinely is bad for other persons—​their weakness and decline. It results, as BGE.225 describes, from giving up the value-​standard of pleasure-​pain and recognizing that “the discipline of suffering . . . has created all enhancements of human so far.” Human is both “creature and creator [Geschöpf und Schöpfer],” and while the prevailing pity is directed at the creature’s passive suffering, Nietzsche suggests (as I read him) that his (“our”) pity is for the creator. Is it for the creator’s suffering? I think instead it’s for any weakness of this creative aspect and for its unwillingness to inflict suffering, above all on (the creature in) oneself. One suffers over another’s (or one’s own) failure to suffer fruitfully. We can see this as part of a more general reorientation pointed up by the contrast between creature and creator. Nietzsche thinks our virtue of pity expresses a broader misfocus on the passive and affective side to our nature. He sees it in the idea that suffering is the worst that can happen to one, as well as in the complementary idea that happiness, as a state of feeling, is the best. What matters more, he insists, is one’s activity—​what, and how well, one does. Our care and concern for others and ourselves needs to be re-​aimed at this “agency.”72 This new pity does, we should notice, feel bad about human’s failure to be as much as it can be. It suffers from the failure of human generally and also of particular others. Thus Nietzsche’s promotion of this virtue suggests that he does care about other people: he just has a different idea of their best interest. If he doesn’t care about others’ suffering, it’s because he cares about what’s more important for them—​their empowerment. It seems that this new pity might even be the basis of a “new altruism” in which one helps another to grow, perhaps sometimes by helping the other to “suffer better.” This new pity can thus involve a cruelty, according to our earlier definition of it: one is glad for another’s suffering, but insofar as it carries them ahead. In 82:3[1]‌(215): “The cruelty of the feelingless is the opposite of pity; the cruelty of the feelingful [Gefühlvollen] is the higher potency of pity.” The kind of cruelty he commends, I suggest, is pleasure in the kind of suffering that one undergoes in the effort to grow out of an old life and into a new one. So his well-​known note 87:10[103] (WP.910, LNp191): “For such humans who matter to me I wish 72 Compare Korsgaard’s argument [1989b] against the view (which she associates with Parfit) that “a person is first and foremost a locus of experiences” and her defense of a Kantian stress on “agency.” Nietzsche rejects Kant’s picture of our agency but agrees with this priority of our active side.

276  Human Values suffering, abandonment, sickness, mistreatment, degradation,—​I wish that they don’t remain unacquainted with deep self-​contempt, the torture of mistrust of themselves, the misery of the overcome: I have no pity with them, because I want the only thing that today can prove whether Einer has value or not,—​that he holds his ground [dass er Stand halt].”73 This new pity will not, however, treat suffering as always good, nor as never bad. What matters is whether the suffering is potentially fruitful, and this will depend on the type of suffering, the type of person, and the situation. We will learn to distinguish kinds of suffering. For of course not all kinds of suffering are even potentially fruitful for all kinds of persons and situations. We will recognize that some suffering simply ruins prospects for growth and has no redeeming power.74 And this shows the way for Nietzsche’s “new pity” to suffer over some of the same kinds of suffering that our prevailing pity does; it now regrets them for the damage they do to growth. But in closing on this topic I  should acknowledge two problems with this reading. First, it’s not clear that such a virtue would be consistent with other things Nietzsche strongly holds. It seems subject to the same objections we’ve seen that he makes against Christian pity: that it simply increases the amount of suffering—​and of a detached and “safe” kind of suffering that doesn’t have the challenging and uplifting potential of “one’s own” suffering. Very relevant here is an important plot element of Zarathustra: the character’s great “disgust” [Ekel] and “surfeit” [Überdruss] with human. This is what Zarathustra suffers from worst, and we see now that it is an extreme form of the “new pity.” He is pained by how poorly human is advancing. This disgust has its emblem in the snake stuck in the shepherd’s throat in Z.ii.2; as Zarathustra explains later in the climactic iii.13: “ ‘All-​too-​small the greatest!—​That was my surfeit with the human! And eternal return even of the smallest!—​That was my surfeit with all existence!’ ”75 The drama of Zarathustra turns on the overcoming of this disgust, achieved at last in the embrace of eternal return. Does this involve overcoming what I’ve called “the new pity?” Second, even if Nietzsche does care about and suffer over human’s failure to grow, this is confined, it seems, to the small percentage of humans who, he 73 82:1[36]: “To reduce suffering and to rid oneself of suffering (i.e., of life)—​is that moral? /​To create suffering—​for oneself and others—​to make them capable of the highest life, that of the victor—​ would be my goal.” 74 I suggest that Nietzsche should recognize these distinctions and that he sometimes does. But he also tends to speak as if all suffering is potentially uplifting, and it’s here that I think Nussbaum’s main criticism [1994, 158] of Nietzsche can get a grip: that he doesn’t recognize how the suffering in some kinds of deprivation may be stifling in the way even his own physical maladies and solitude are not. 75 Z.ii.9: “In caring [Schonen] and pitying my greatest danger always lay.” See, too, Zarathustra’s overcoming of pity at the book’s very end [Z.iv.20]. Cf. GM.iii.14, which worries about a future union of deep disgust for human with great pity for him; together these will “beget . . . the ‘last will’ of human, his will to nothingness, nihilism.”

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  277 believes, are capable of pushing forward “what it is to be human.” It seems he doesn’t care about the growth of particular humans except insofar as they live at a high level and advance the kind. To put it in the terms of BGE.225, he thinks that only a few have a potential “creator” within—​that most of us are “creature” through and through. So it seems his “new pity” might be directed toward very few indeed. And this leads us to our next topic: his attack on equality.

7.3.2 Against equality Under morality pity is a key virtue for individuals: persons should pity, they’re better if they pity. Equality [Gleichheit] is a more diverse kind of good.76 There is indeed a moral virtue (parallel to that of pity) to treat others as equals, but this presence in “personal morality” is only part of equality’s role. Morality also makes it a good for societies—​they should treat their members as equals—​but it’s also more and deeper than this. Equality is built into the very framework of morality—​the way it means its values as good. Morality claims its values to be right for everyone alike, right for them all equally; it addresses them in a respect in which they are (presumed to be) equals.77 So there are multiple interlocking ways that morality requires equality, and Nietzsche attacks them across the board. In 84:26[243]: “I feel myself in opposition to [the] morality of equality.” He objects to every one of morality’s claims in the previous paragraph. Indeed his antipathy to equality extends beyond the moral or human domain and into his very ontology. As we saw in Chapter 6 (§6.3), he argues against general terms that they group things that are not really equal (two things are never equal). He sees around him a world of “difference” in which everything is unalike, and all type-​grouping of things is not merely simplifying but falsifying. In 83:7[21]: “my movement: is by contrast the sharpening of all oppositions and clefts, elimination of equality, the creating of the super-​ powerful [Über-​Mächtiger].” As we see here, Nietzsche criticizes not only the value of equality, but also the claim that things or persons are equal. Clearly it’s important to keep these distinct; for purposes of quick reference I’ll call them equality-​as-​value and equality-​ as-​fact. Notice that the claim that persons are equal can take the form that they

76 On Nietzsche’s critique of equality, see Schacht [1983, 326–​40], who says that “there is perhaps no view he advances for which he has been more vehemently attacked—​and also . . . more seriously misunderstood” [326–​7]. 77 Most of what follows concerns morality and not the “ethic of custom” that preceded it. But many of the points find analogues there. Under custom all are equal “as members.” But they’re not yet fully differentiated from the group or from one another, as individuals who could then be claimed equal. In this respect custom involves only a proto-​equality, not yet that of agents.

278  Human Values are equal in value; this is still a claim for how they are, not how they should be. But clearly the claims are closely connected, as are Nietzsche’s critiques of them. Nietzsche’s attack on equality-​as-​value needs to be reconciled with his claim that an aim at equality is not just indispensable to humans, but a part of life (as will to power) itself. He thinks that all life depends on a certain “making-​equal” of non-​equals and that it is also built into our human language and thinking. In 86–​7:5[65] (WP.501, LNp115): “All thinking, judging, perceiving as likening [Vergleichen] has as presupposition a setting-​equal [Gleichsetzen], still earlier a making-​equal [Gleichmachen].”78 More deeply, it is built into will to power itself, inasmuch as this tries constantly to “assimilate” the other to itself—​to make-​ equal the different and strange. So the last passage continues: “The making-​equal is the same as the incorporation of the appropriated material in the amoeba.” And 85–​6:2[90] (WP.511, LNp77) says that “spirit wills Gleichheit,” just as the body assimilates inorganic matter into itself; “the will to Gleichheit is the will to power.” As an element in will to power, a (kind of) making-​equal must even count as a fundamental good for Nietzsche. So clearly there are limits to his rejection of equality-​as-​value. Similarly there are limits to his denial of equality-​as-​fact. For as the example of the amoeba shows, living things find power by indeed “incorporating” the alien into themselves. Power is success at this, so involves the accomplished “equality” with oneself of what had been different (The model is Aristotle’s account of life’s basic threptic or nutritive capacity to change the different—​food—​into the same: one’s own tissue.) So Nietzsche needs there to be a factual equality, as what will to power can achieve. And he also needs to recognize sameness at another point: in the herd, persons share values and are thereby “all the same” (he wants to say) as one another. Nietzsche’s critique of the common (see Chapter 6) complains against precisely the sameness of this mass that have not differentiated themselves as individuals. And we’ll see that there are still other ways he relies on a factual sameness or equality—​from which we need to distinguish the kind of equality he denies. The focus of his complaint against equality is of course its role in morality, and here his opposition is unrelenting. Let’s distinguish three ways that morality posits equality, either as a value or as a fact. We feel strong allegiance to them all, I suggest, and will need to work to take Nietzsche’s criticisms at all seriously. The first equality-​ posit I’ll call social equality:  morality wants society’s members to be “more equal.” Here equality is posited as a social good, to be built into laws, institutions, and practices. Equality in what can vary: political or economic, in opportunity or in condition, and in many other ways. As morality 78 HH.i.11 says that logic rests on the false presupposition of “the equality of things”; see, too, HH.i.19. HH.i.18 says that we have inherited this belief in “equal things” from “lower organisms.”

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  279 evolves, Nietzsche thinks, it expands or deepens the kind of equality so valued. This “progress” has happened sometimes in leaps, as in the French Revolution, but also more deeply and subtly, and despite contrary interludes such as the Renaissance. Rousseau, “this first modern human,” especially expresses it, as TI.ix.48 complains; it continues: “The doctrine of equality! . . . But there is no more poisonous poison: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, while it is the end of justice.” This progressive (creeping) egalitarianism is culminating in our own age, with its democracy and socialism. The second equality-​posit I’ll call personal equality: morality wants members, in their personal values and virtues, to view and treat others “as equals.” The golden rule is a version of this,79 but there are many subtler ways one’s values can aim at equality. One assumes that one’s own ideal should be the same as others’ ideals; one requires it to be something that it’s plausible everyone should value. Of course one attempts to do better at this good than others do; this equality in valuing is consistent with striving to excel and exceed others. But one wants to excel by a measure shared with others.80 One wants to be the same kind of person as others—​just a better version of what we’re all trying to be.81 The third equality-​posit I’ll call moral equality: morality addresses itself “to everyone equally” because it presumes that we ultimately are equal and, indeed, equal in value. It insists that humans are all on a par in their subjection to its demands. Christianity justifies this equal application by humans’ universal possession of an immortal soul, “equal before god.” BGE.219:  “they fight for the ‘equality of all before god’ and almost need god [just] for that.”82 Secular morality justifies it by humans’ being each a subject/​agent—​a rational consciousness that is free to choose the right. Everyone, as free, is equally capable of doing what’s moral. Hence the true human good—​moral perfection—​is within the same reach for everyone. Each human has, just by being an immortal soul or a rational agent, exactly as much value as any other. Now moral equality is different in kind from the first two: it’s not offered as a value, but rather as a premised fact that affects the status or force of our valuing. Morality presupposes, in the very way it offers its values, that people are 79 88:22[1]‌(WP.925): “it is the instinct of the herd that formulates itself in [the ‘golden rule’]—​one is equal, one takes oneself for equal: as I to you, so you to me —​.” 80 87–​8:11[127] (WP.926) suggests that Mill views interpersonal actions as a kind of mutual service, which presupposes an “equivalence of value of actions”; this expresses the belief of “the crowd [Menge]” in equality, hence that persons can “compensate” or “reciprocate” one another’s actions. 81 See Clark’s very effective statement of this point [1999/​2015, 176–​7]. 82 A.43: “That everyone as ‘immortal soul’ has equal rank with everyone, that in the commonality of all beings the ‘grace’ [Heil] of every individual makes claim to an eternal importance. . . .” 87–​ 8:11[226] (WP.339): “The grace of the eternal soul! . . . Most extreme form of equal entitlement, tied to optical magnification of one’s own importance to the point of insanity.” 88:15[30] (WP.765) says that the Christian doctrine of the “equality of souls before god” was the “protype of all theories of equal rights.”

280  Human Values equal this way. Moreover the fact that they are equal in value is taken to justify the values of social and personal equality. That we are equal in value shows why societies should treat members equally, and why persons should treat others as equals. Despite this justificatory role, however, Nietzsche thinks that morality’s posit of equality-​as-​fact is itself explained by its own deeper valuing of equality.83 Morality interprets agents as equal because it values their becoming more equal. The value comes first, and the factual claim belongs to an ideology devised to support it. What then are Nietzsche’s arguments against morality’s posits of equality? Let’s start with his argument against the factual claim: moral equality. He holds that it’s false that we’re equal to one another; indeed, this is “the greatest of all lies” [85:37[14] (WP.464)].84 We’ve seen (in Chapter 5) how he attacks the ontology for persons on which morality bases this claim: human is not a subject or agent and is not free. What we are is systems of drives and affects, and, as such, our inequalities are manifest, Nietzsche thinks. So, for example, 85:41[7]‌ (WP.1051) speaks of “the immovable rank-​order and value-​inequality of human and human.” To be sure this inequality is a matter of degree, and can be diminished by morality’s will to “make-​equal.” Morality’s main failings are not this factual claim but the ways that it (i) aims societies at their members’ equality and (ii) aims persons to be the same as others. And these are bad (of course) by Nietzsche’s usual criterion:  life’s standard of power. Here, too, he applies this criterion in the two ways we’ve often seen: he judges equality-​as-​value by its aim and by its effects. It fails both tests: it (a) expresses an anti-​life aim, and (b) it hinders or diminishes life. This gives us four arguments to review. (i) The social ideal of equality, where it is strong and ascendant, (a) expresses a deficiency of will in the society as a whole. It indicates a tired and epigonal stage in a people’s historical cycle, when the hierarchic and discriminating values instituted at a past time of crisis have loosened their grip. TI.ix.37: “ ‘Equality,’ as a certain factual becoming-​similar-​to [Anähnlichung], that finds expression in the theory of ‘equal rights,’ belongs essentially to decline.”85 It expresses the social group’s loss of a single focusing ideal in the image of a kind of person it is better to be.

83 84:25[437] says that “the moralities of Kant, Schopenhauer” share a “moral canon”: “the equality of humans, and that what is moral for one must also be [moral] for the others. This is however already the consequence of a morality, perhaps a very questionable one.” 84 84:26[364] speaks of this “democratic age,” which takes the “great lie ‘equality of humans’ as its motto.” 83:9[48]: “Humans [are] not equal; so speaks justice.” 85 TI.ix.37 continues: “the rift between people, between classes, the myriad number of types, the will to be yourself, to stand out, what I call the pathos of distance, is characteristic of every strong age.”

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  281 The strength of this ideal also expresses the dominance of the herd.86 As we saw in Chapter  6 (§6.1), the “herd” is picked out by a motive for having values: having them in order to share them with others. This herdish will to share is a will to be “the same” as others. One wants to be a “member” of the group equal to every other member, and one resents anyone who presumes to stand above this common level. Z.iv.13: “But the mob [Pöbel] blinks: ‘We are all equal.’ /​‘You higher humans’—​so the mob blinks—​‘There are no higher humans, we are equal, the human is human; before god—​are we all equal!’ ”87 Nietzsche wants us to hear the ideal of social equality as voicing a herdish mediocrity. This ideal of social equality doesn’t only express sickness/​weakness, it also (b) worsens society in these respects. It has some success in “leveling” the valuable differences between individuals. The herd stigmatizes and suppresses any members that threaten to ascend out of it; it stifles the forceful individuals who would have best helped society forward. So 88:14[158] (WP.354) suggests that “it seems to be all over for a kind of human (people, race) when it becomes tolerant, allows equal rights, and no longer thinks to will to be master.” And BGE.62 concludes that it is “humans not noble enough to see the abysmally different rank-​order and rank-​cleft between human and human:—​such humans have, with their ‘equal before god,’ so far ruled over the fate of Europe, until finally a shrunken, almost laughable kind, a herd-​animal  .  .  .  has been bred, today’s European.” (ii) The personal ideal of equality—​ again where it occurs with special strength—​(a) expresses a similar deficiency of will in the individual, a shying away from the effort to excel. One aims at the second-​best of being-​just-​as-​good as others; one tries to prevent anyone else from excelling, insisting that the good is just to be like everyone else. A will to think oneself equal to others expresses above all the dominance of one’s herd-​instinct [e.g., 87:9[173] (WP.315)]. And again Nietzsche thinks that this ideal not only expresses sickness/​weakness, but (b) worsens it. For of course if one aspires only to be as good as others one will not get far—​one won’t carry human ahead in one’s own case. Living by this egalitarian ideal has a retarding and hindering effect on one’s life, understood as an effort to grow. The aim to be the same as others—​in how one values, especially—​ruins one’s own chance to become an individual and a self, which involves making values of one’s own. Trying to become equal prevents one from “becoming who one is,” as we’ll see in Chapter 10.

86 85:35[74]: “Basic insight: ‘good“’ and ‘evil’ are now considered as from the eyes of the ‘herd-​ animal.’ Equality of humans as goal. Against this [stand] I.” 87–​8:11[341]: “in a herd equality can rule.” 87 80:6[163]: “[T]‌he common and equal human is only so desired, because the weak human fears the strong individual and wills rather the general weakening, instead of evolution to individuals.”

282  Human Values These are Nietzsche’s main arguments against equality. I think they’re little likely to sway our deep allegiance to the value. But he may have more effect if he can give us an appealing account of the inequality that he favors instead and that is lost or diminished by morality’s aim at equality. Nietzsche’s term for his alternative to morality’s ideal of equality is “rank-​ order” [Rangordnung], a major idea we must now begin to treat. Although I’ll reserve a full look until Chapter 11 (§11.4)—​when we look at Nietzsche’s new politics—​we should make a start now. We need at least a rough idea of what his alternative to equality might be. Nietzsche posits rank-​order in the same two ways we saw morality posits equality: as a fact, as a value. We humans already do stand in a rank-​order; we are better and worse, “higher” and “lower” than one another. (So it is a fact that we are different in value. We’ll see in Chapter 11 that there is another sense of “rank-​order” that is more purely descriptive—​in which higher and lower are not counted better and worse.) Moreover (Nietzsche thinks) we should value rank-​order: we should try to preserve and indeed enhance the differences there already are—​enhance them both at the societal level and in one’s personal comportment. We should increase the gaps between people, rather than striving to shrink and close them as morality does. Now the criterion for higher (better) and lower (worse) in Nietzsche’s rank-​ order is of course life or power. In 87–​8:11[36] (WP.858, LNp208):  “What decides about rank is the quantum of power that you are; the rest is cowardice.” One is higher by controlling more other forces or wills. But there is one most vital thing to bear in mind about this rank-​order of human power: it has, like everything else in Nietzsche’s view, a historical character. Rank-​order is a ladder that human has climbed over historical time; it makes the ladder as it climbs. At any historical moment, then, “the highest” is the way of living that is right then “at the cutting edge” of human’s development. It’s the way of living that now most uses and advances human’s basic capacities. Thus rank-​order today is established in terms of the new basic ability that human is now developing. One ranks higher to the extent that one is advancing this ability—​the transition to this higher level of human power. And we’ve been seeing all along where Nietzsche claims this “cutting edge” lies: in the work of incorporating the truth about ourselves and (especially) our values. At the top of his rank-​order, then, are those “free spirits” who, in our age, are living through and beyond nihilism: they are constructing the way to live in the light of the truth that there are “no real values.” This, I suggest, is the quite particular way in which Nietzsche has a “spiritual” conception of power. The kinds of power that we think of first when we hear of “rank-​order” are merely primitive forms of it. There were times, in our historical and prehistorical past, when various forms of political and economic power were

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  283 the best abilities then in development. But the gists of these abilities have been absorbed into the common life we all grow up into. One doesn’t really distinguish oneself in deploying these kinds of power because the abilities are the same in kind as those possessed by all. One is not living a kind of life that has potential to help the human type advance. When we see Nietzsche’s rank-​order in this light it looks more viable, I think. The “nobility” who stand above in this rank-​order are not a political or economic elite, but those with a dominant will to truth—​human’s distinguishing ability—​ who are seeing and feeling “the death of god” and inventing how to live in the face of it. The aspiration toward this kind of inequality may furthermore seem to supply a more reasonable reason to criticize the ideal of equality. These free spirits’ incorporation of truth is more than just a private act for Nietzsche. They carry it out in a public cultural space, and they are important because of the way they affect this space. These free spirits need to write so as to share their advance in a way that carries forward not just the individual him-​ or herself, but a community of followers, and indeed humanity in general. The advance is eventually built into the values of the society, where it extends the advances of others up this ladder. Now part of the truth to be incorporated is that persons do stand in a rank-​ order. This is essential to the insight Nietzsche has in mind: it affects the force of the truth that “values are perspectival.” Without the addition “and these perspectives stand in a rank-​order,” we might have supposed that perspectivism places perspectives on the same level—​treats them all as equally valid, just qua perspectives. And this is why the perspectivist insight doesn’t undermine itself—​ by treating itself as not really an insight, as a perspective no better than others. But to pursue these points we need to turn more directly to the topic of truth.

7.4  Genealogy of the will to truth Nietzsche’s diagnosis of our age’s nihilism and the associated critique of morality draw in a crucial further target. He famously identifies “the will to truth” as the very core of the ascetic ideal, thus binding it up with morality in its aspect as saying-​no to life. This critical diagnosis of our effort at truth is linked with doubts and denials of the very possibility of truth. Nietzsche’s apparent campaign against truth is one of the most radical and unsettling elements in his thought. What we interpret its upshot to be has enormous repercussions for our overall reading of him. It also has a strong bearing on my main argument in this book. I claim that Nietzsche calls us, above all, to experiment with “how far the truth can be incorporated.” This presumes that he strongly values truth despite those doubts

284  Human Values against it. I just claimed this in §7.2, and indeed already back in Chapter 1 when I said that truthfulness serves Nietzsche as a “meta-​value” for evaluating values. Now I need to try to redeem these claims. I need to show that his doubts against truth don’t diminish its importance to him. I’ll develop his principal doubt in this section, then examine Nietzsche’s response to it in §7.5. Against this reading, Nietzsche’s many ways of questioning truth have persuaded a sizable share of his readers that he is (to put it bluntly) an opponent of the effort at truth—​that he thinks the will to truth is part of the problem, not the solution. This interpretation is especially common in—​and is even characteristic of—​“continental” (or at least “postmodern”) approaches to Nietzsche.88 But I think this reading misses his ultimate allegiance to the will to truth and the central role truth plays in what he considers his own new way. I can’t rehearse all the variety of attacks Nietzsche makes against truth.89 Sometimes he suggests that the very notion is incoherent—​and elsewhere that truth is unachievable. But I think the attack most important to him is directed at the value of truth, or at the value of the effort at truth. And the key statement of this attack—​or rather challenge—​occurs in the well-​known sections near the end of the Genealogy’s third essay, where the “will to truth” is diagnosed as yet another manifestation of the “ascetic ideal.” GM.iii.27: “This will [to truth], however, this remnant of an ideal is, if one is willing to believe me, that [ascetic] ideal itself in its strictest, most spiritual formulation, completely and utterly esoteric, stripped of all outworks, thus not so much its remnant as its core [Kern].” It’s clear that this is meant to raise a major challenge against truth. He treats the problem, very importantly, by way of a genealogy of the will to truth. The will to truth’s worth is a major topic for Nietzsche in his last few years. His plans for his projected book The Will to Power show that he meant to devote a chapter to it.90 In GM.iii he tells this overall story: the will to truth originated within morality—​this is why it expresses that ascetic ideal—​but it is now in the (very long) process of turning back against morality, to undermine its authority and sway. Among other things the will to truth uncovers the ascetic or anti-​life malice morality expresses. But in doing so the will to truth also turns back against itself and sees that it, too, is both moral and ascetic.91 Our main question is what lesson Nietzsche draws from this diagnosis.

88 Habermas says that Nietzsche “renounces a renewed revision of the concept of reason and bids farewell to the dialectic of enlightenment” [1985/​1990, 86]. Of course Haberman rejects this position that he attributes to Nietzsche, unlike most other continental readers. 89 I treat this critique of truth at length in ch. 4 of Nietzsche’s System. 90 E.g., 88:13[3]‌, 88:18[17]. 91 The idea of the will to truth turning back against itself is present from early on; 72–​3:19[35] (PTp12): “The knowledge-​drive [Erkenntnisstrieb], arriving at its limits, turns against itself, in order to proceed to the critique of knowing [Wissens].” See, too, HH.iii.43.

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  285 How then is the will to truth “moral?” We took a first look at this topic in Chapter 5 (§5.4) by seeing the beginning of Nietzsche’s genealogy of this will. He explains it as a product of the human animal’s “taming” for social life. Human’s will to “correspond”—​to match its state to something outside—​begins with a trained-​in need to match its views and especially its values to the norms of its social group. It belongs, that is, to the copying Nietzsche often calls the “herd instinct.” This will is “moral” in the first, thin sense of being a value separate from one’s “selfish” aim at power. We want our values to match social norms even though this inhibits that aim. Hence it is a will to obey something external to oneself; this is the root of the problem. So far went our earlier account. But it took in only the first phase in Nietzsche’s genealogy of the will to truth. We should extend it now. His answer to the problem of truth lies in the lesson he draws from this genealogy—​and in where he projects its further development. We should bear in mind that the stages in this genealogy are preserved as levels in each of us. Let’s start again with that thin sense of “moral”—​the first phase. Here the will to truth is the will to believe and value as the group does. This first form of the will to truth is already “unconditional” in the sense that it views truth as an “absolute” good.92 The truth-​aim, even in this simplest form, aims not to be directed or limited by our pragmatic self-​interest; it is, to give it a label, (i) intently “impractical.” We want truth not because it’s useful for other purposes, but for itself. And we want it so much as to sacrifice those other interests to it. GS.344 (another key passage) says that “science too rests on a faith,” its “unconditional [unbedingte] will to truth”; “[c]‌onsequently, ‘will to truth’ does not mean ‘I do not want to let myself be deceived’ but—​there is no alternative—​‘I will not deceive, not even myself ’; and with that we stand on moral ground.”93 Our practical interest can’t explain that aversion since it itself favors (sometimes) deceiving others and even ourselves. This claim to overrule selfish interest has its roots in the demand that we be “true” to social norms. So this will is first “moral” just in its claim to overrule other aims. But it also conceives of those other aims in a way that makes it “moral” in a further sense: it

92 In notes from 1872–​1873, Nietzsche speaks not of a “will to truth” but of a “knowledge-​drive”—​ which he attacks when it is not “selective” [wählerisch], or “restricted” [beschränkt] or “restrained” [bändigt]. See, e.g., 72–​3:19[21] (PTp7), 19[27] (PTp9), and again 19[35] (PTp11–​12). See HH.iii.43 on the supposed “duty” to truth, which is supposed to make it “undiscussable.” 84:26[334] speaks of “what has so far called itself ‘will to truth’ ”: “It is one of the most dangerous exaggerations to will knowledge not in service of life, but in itself, at any price.” 93 D.p.4: “there is no doubt that a ‘thou shalt’ still speaks to us [knowers] too, that we too still obey a stern law set over us” (our will to truth); “we still feel ourselves related to the German integrity and piety of millennia.” GM.iii.25: science and the ascetic ideal “stand on one and the same ground . . . namely on the same overestimation of truth (more correctly: on the same belief in the inassessibility, the uncriticizability of truth).”

286  Human Values views them as “interested” and indeed as “selfish” and contrasts itself from them in just this respect. It sets itself apart from and against the aims embedded in one’s own drives and affects; it is, to use a second label, (ii) intently “selfless.” It gets this trait, too, from its original social function. The will to “match” social norms needs to do so against the interests of those drives. Hence that taming trains this will to think that truth needs to be won against those private and selfish interests. It requires that one detach and ascend to the larger point of view embedded in society-​wide  norms. So far we’ve considered the will to truth’s first phase, in which truth lies in matching the social givens. One’s community—​its shared views and values—​ serves as the standard for truth. This early will to truth belongs to the period of human development we’ve seen Nietzsche calls the “ethic of custom” [Sittlichkeit der Sitte], in which members identify with their community and don’t yet distinguish themselves as individuals. As we saw in §7.2, that distinguishing happens in the gradual shift from custom to “morality” [Moral]. Here members learn to view themselves as subjects and agents tasked to discover, by their individual rational powers, values really there in the world independently of both them and their society. Under morality, values have authority not by social fiat but by being “objective” and “rational.” The will to truth takes a new form after this transition—​its second phase. It interprets itself as independent from the authority of the social group. It aims to mirror not social norms, but “the facts”—​including valuative facts—​conceived of as there in the world regardless of whether one’s society sees them or not. The will to truth now understands itself as carried out by a subject pursuing the truth by its individual rational power. One takes oneself tasked to use this reason to bring one’s beliefs—​including valuative beliefs—​into correspondence with those facts. The latter are the new “external target” it feels tasked to match its valuing to (replacing the social, “normal” beliefs). In this new form the will to truth is more what we commonly take it to be. To be sure there is a large share of illusion (and even fraud) in this transition. The will to truth claims to abandon its allegiance to communal views and values, but largely it doesn’t. Its picture of the “real” and “objective” facts and values is only a rationalizing and organizing of the communal picture, different at most on the margins. At bottom these “facts” are only what are generally taken as facts, so that the correspondence is still a matter of conforming to a social practice. And the thinker’s felt need to “get it right” is still deeply fueled by his or her need to align with the community’s viewpoint. Nevertheless this new will to truth fosters the conception of oneself as a rational agent tasked to reflect, in one’s beliefs and values, the real character of things. One conceives oneself free to choose this aim even in the face of one’s importuning drives and as responsible and guilty if one fails. So one imparts to

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  287 this aim all the metaethics and psychology associated with “morality”: one treats truth as a moral value, in now a very thick sense of “moral.” And all of this is built upon the simpler ways it’s moral, noticed before: it remains intently impractical and selfless. Indeed the metaethics and psychology amount to a justification of the aim to overrule one’s own “selfish” drive-​interests: these drives aren’t one’s real self after all, but rather an irrational body appended to the rational subject that one really is. Under morality not just the will to truth but all of a person’s wills reinterpret themselves according to this metaethics and psychology. But the will to truth is unique in the role it plays within those operating assumptions. Morality depends on the claim that its values are really there in the world—​there to be known by a rational subject. Being moral depends on possessing the truth about those values. Indeed, applying those values to cases also depends on having true information about those cases; so morality demands a will to truth about non-​valuative facts as well. Thus the will to truth is woven into the distinctively moral way of valuing. This account of how the will to truth is “moral” has begun to show how it is also “ascetic.” To be “ascetic” is to oppose or disrupt the effort in one’s drives (or body) for power, and we’ve seen how this belongs to the will to truth’s effort to be impractical and selfless. This hostility to the drives and affects is then reinforced by the full ideology of morality: one identifies as the free rational agent metaphysically distinct from the body and drives. One finds truth, one believes, only by embracing this real identity, so that one is swayed by reason alone, not at all by the drives or affects. One thinks one must put those bodily interests quite out of play in order to find out the truth about things. One disengages those interests and abstains from working on the world, in a passive and reactive attempt merely to “mirror” it. The moral character of the will to truth also shapes its conception of the world that’s there to be matched. One attributes to the world the same qualities one takes on in that effort to “mirror” it. Since “knowing” involves stilling the drives and affects into a placid and stable contemplation, the world must itself have this same stability. Hence the will to truth seeks a “true world,” uncovered not by the unreliable senses but by reason, its own defining power. The true world must be such that reason can match it. It must be a world not of becoming and change, but of persisting, stable objects—​of “being.” Nietzsche thinks there is another kind of motive at work here. We’ve been looking so far at the social source of the will to truth—​at how that practice developed historically in human’s long taming. But this practice and will to truth is of course stronger in some members than in others. Nietzsche thinks it’s those in whom this will is strongest who most develop it. And this will, with its ascetic turn against the drives and affects, is most appealing to those who are most unhappy in them—​to those unable to act on the world as they’d deeply like. The

288  Human Values preference for a stable and ideal world there to be matched by a placid contemplation reflects a weakness in one’s power to make the world as one wants. Much of this is expressed in 87:9[60] (WP.585). “Human seeks ‘the truth’: a world that does not contradict itself, nor deceive, nor change, a true world—​a world in which one does not suffer.” “Clearly the will to truth is here only the desire for a world of the constant.” “What kind of human reflects so? An unproductive, suffering kind; a kind tired of life.” “The belief that the world that should exist is, really exists, is a belief of the unproductive, who do not will to create a world, as it should be. . . . ‘Will to truth’—​as impotence of the will to create.” So in this second phase of the will to truth it operates within morality’s understanding both of the self (as agent not drives) and of the world (as being not becoming). This understanding is, however, on both points false. Thus this will pursues truth on the basis of certain general errors or lies, which it is prevented in multiple ways from discovering. The will to truth is “restricted” and allowed to work only within a space bounded and structured by these falsehoods. And this shows, Nietzsche holds, that it is still controlled by that original social command: it still serves the function of strengthening social norms. This moralized will to truth really functions to justify those norms. But Nietzsche thinks we live in a new and third phase of the will to truth, in which it begins to free itself from that social command. It really achieves the independence it had falsely claimed in its second phase. It slowly becomes able to lay bare those founding lies—​to see, to put it very simply, that human is not an agent and the world not the “true world” of “being.” It sees morality’s metaethical and psychological premises to be false—​as we saw in §7.2. Freeing itself from these moral assumptions, the will to truth becomes “unrestricted.” It becomes, thereby, “more itself ”: better able to pursue its goal of correspondence—​to find truths that really do match what human and world both are. In the will to truth’s first phase it was obviously subservient to social norms: truth just was correspondence to those norms. But even in the second phase of morality, which means truth to match an objective reality not tied to those norms, it still goes on to “discover,” by “reason,” those very same norms. It can’t yet “step back” from them to find out the real truth about them—​how they came to be and their real status now. So in those earlier phases the will to truth was effectively “restricted” or “limited” (in the terms from Nietzsche’s 1872–​73 reflections). It was unable to apply itself, honestly and critically, to those social norms. It’s only now, when the will to truth “becomes itself,” that it ceases to underwrite morality and begins to disrupt it. And yet this freer will to truth is still, Nietzsche insists, both moral and ascetic.94 We see this in the new problem it poses, the central problem of our

94

D.p.4 says that in Daybreak “trust [Vertrauen] in morality is cancelled,” but “[o]ut of morality!”

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  289 age: “nihilism.” As “unrestricted,” the will to truth shows no discretion in the illusions it exposes; it works just as eagerly against presumptions we depend on. And when this will frees itself from morality’s restriction and roots out those metaethical and psychological premises, it undermines not just morality, but also the status and justification we’ve felt that any (true) value must have. We have always meant values to be real, and, as we absorb the truth that they are only ever perspectival, this shakes our valuing at its foundations. It carries us into the “no-​values nihilism” we analyzed in §7.1. The will to truth’s effort to expose these indispensable lies suggests that it may be hostile and/​or detrimental to life itself. By exposing the roots of any value, it disrupts it. And when it does this quite generally it pushes us toward a nihilistic inability to value—​to care very much about anything. Nihilism is the ultimate realization of this will’s more general anti-​life tendency as it gradually “freezes” and nullifies every value it turns its objective gaze upon.95 In 85:40[39]: “we must raise here the question of truthfulness: given that we live by virtue of [in Folge des] error, what can the ‘will to truth’ be then? Mustn’t it be a ‘will to death?’ ”96 Nietzsche dramatizes this problem in Zarathustra’s competing allegiances to life and to truth [Z.ii.10]. Nietzsche worried from early on over the way an “unconditional” truth-​aim might gradually destroy long-​standing illusions that our life and growth depend on.97 We can see his later warnings about nihilism as the ultimate version of that concern. The will to truth is now exposing the illusions that not just morality, but our “agential,” distinctively human valuing has presupposed. We see that values cannot have the status we had always presumed. This leaves largely untouched, we saw, the “bodily” valuing of our drives. But it undercuts and deflates the “higher” values we have always adopted as agents. We are losing our idea of how to be anything much better than we are. We lose our will and incentive to struggle for something hard. By now I think we’ve seen the gist of Nietzsche’s critical diagnosis of the will to truth. It passes through three stages, which seem to carry it from bad to worse. It begins (in the ethic of custom) as a will to match social views and values, which already alienates human from its own body and drives, the better to turn it into a tame social member. It then becomes (in morality) a will to match real

95 E.g., 85–​ 6:2[131] (WP.69, LNp85):  “Nihilistic tendency in the natural sciences. (‘Meaninglessness’—​) Causalism, mechanism.” 96 GS.344: “ ‘Will to truth’—​that could be a hidden will to death.” In those 1872–​1873 notes he says that the knowledge-​drive furthers decline. 72–​3:19[182] (P&Tp44): “Humanity has in knowledge a beautiful means for decline.” Also 72–​3:19[21] (P&Tp7), 72–​3:19[198] (P&Tp46). 97 This is the dominant theme in the notes from 1872–​73 collected by Breazeale [1979, 3–​58] as “The Philosopher.” And HH.i.109: “the danger arises that human bleeds to death from knowing the truth.”

290  Human Values or objective facts and values, a will that understands itself as a free and rational subject but that is really still a tool of the social group, operating always within its assumptions. But finally, when (in nihilism) the will to truth does overcome its subjection to social norms and can at last uncover the truth about them, it undermines not just contingent norms but the basic claims human has always made about its (agential) values—​and which perhaps we couldn’t live human lives without. So when it finally becomes itself, the will to truth seems to show itself truly a “will to death.”

7.5  Assessing the will to truth Given this critical genealogy of the will to truth, what lessons does Nietzsche draw? How does he think these truths should affect how we want and value truth? It may seem evident that he wants us to value truth less. Are we to value it at all? Let’s lay out the options here.98 (i)  A first and most drastic lesson would be to stop valuing truth. Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the will to truth as moral, ascetic, and nihilistic may seem to show it simply bad for us, so that we should weed this will and value out of ourselves as much as we can. (ii)  A more moderate lesson would be not to “abolish” the will to truth, but to demote it within one’s hierarchy of drives and values. Perhaps Nietzsche objects to the ultimacy and inviolability we’ve seen this will has claimed. He wants other, healthier drives to have priority over it and authority to limit or constrain the effort at truth. (iii)  A third lesson would be still more generous to the will to truth: to keep it as one’s dominant drive and control it not by promoting any other drive over it, but by “healing” it of its moral and nihilistic tendencies, so that it better controls itself. Truth stays as important as it was, but one aims at it better. These possible lessons are, then:  to deny, demote, or heal the will to truth. Nietzsche explores all three avenues. In examining them in turn we can survey and organize his varied statements on the topic. We’ll see that he has many things to say about the second option in particular; these fit together into a complex view. But I  will also try to show that the third option is his most considered position. (i)  Denying the will to truth. The dismissive verdict seems indicated not just by Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the will to truth as moral, etc. (just surveyed in §7.4), but by a second and quite different kind of attack he makes on truth: against



98

I divide the options similarly in Nietzsche’s System [252].

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  291 its very possibility. It’s not just that the effort at truth hurts us, but also that it aims at something we can never have. Correspondence, he suggests, is impossible. In an early passage from TL [ENp260] we noticed before:  “correct perception—​which would mean the adequate expression of an object in the subject—​seems to me a contradictory no-​thing [widerspruchvolles Unding].” Later he will often say that the world, as becoming, can never be known.99 So our will to truth leads nowhere, it seems. How can it make sense to pursue something we can never have? The cumulative force of these two attacks—​against the possibility of truth, against the value of pursuing it—​seems calculated to condemn our will to truth altogether. But this is not how we should take them. Such a reading conflicts with the very clear ways in which Nietzsche continues, right to the end, to show his strong allegiance to truth. In Ecce Homo [iv.1]: “the truth speaks out of me.—​But my truth is terrible; for so far one has called lies truth. . . . I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience—​to smell—​lies as lies.” That he has more of the truth is, I suggest, the main claim he makes on his own behalf. Nietzsche can continue to want and claim truth because those arguments against it—​against both its value and its possibility—​are meant not as refutations but as correctives. That is, they point to how we must revise our will to truth so that it’s no longer “moral” and no longer aims at an impossible goal. I will eventually try to outline the corrections he wants us to make. (ii) Demoting the will to truth. Even if Nietzsche wants to rescue the possibility and value of truth, he might still demote it within his hierarchy of drives or aims. He might think that there are other, healthier drives—​for example, a will to create or even a will to deception—​that should rank higher and should command and limit the will to truth. We should tolerate and even value this truth-​will in us but also dislodge it from the leading role that thinkers and philosophers have commonly given it. So perhaps D.507:  “I do not know why one should wish the sole rule and omnipotence of truth; it suffices for me that it has a great power.” He would teach us to subordinate truth to other more worthy interests. We should subordinate it, most generally, to our aim to thrive; we must not become “martyrs” or self-​sacrificers for the sake of truth [BGE.25]. I think this reading is very plausibly Nietzsche’s main verdict about truth. He considers a variety of reasons for limiting the will to truth and ways of doing so. The idea goes back to his 1872–​73 notebooks, which, we’ve just seen, argue that the will to truth needs to be (not denied but) “restrained” or “restricted.” Later, in 99 85:36[23] (WP.520, LNp26): “A world of becoming [werdende Welt] could not in the strict sense be ‘grasped,’ be ‘known.’ ” Also 87:9[89] (WP.517).

292  Human Values his mature psychology, he sees this restraint as imposed by certain drives, which prevent the will to truth from undermining the false assumptions they depend on. But which drives does he want to play this role? Here again we must distinguish options. (a) Saving the categories? First, there’s a sense in which every drive must “rule” the will to truth. In Chapter 5 (§5.2) we looked at Nietzsche’s treatment of Kant’s synthetic a priori. We saw that he thinks that our drives (and affects) depend on these “categorial” judgments—​which are false. But drives need these judgments (lies) not in explicit theories, but as implicit and background “operating assumptions” by those drives and affects themselves. They need them in their own implicit and non-​conceptual navigation by their signs—​as when my hunger smells this as edible food. It’s these implicit judgments that keep me functioning in the world. In my theory I  can easily believe (with Nietzsche) that “there are no substances,” or no equal things, or no lasting things. The problem would come if I held these judgments “outside the study” (as Hume puts it)—​that is, in my actual steering and coping with the things around me, which of course goes on in the study as well. If I were to “incorporate” those truths into my bodily steering, my practical activity would collapse. In order to reach for the glass or the keyboard, my physical skills must treat them as lasting substances. If I denied this in my drives, they—​and I—​would no longer be able to cope.100 In Chapter  5 (§5.2.3) we called “bifurcation” a persisting discrepancy between one’s conscious theory and the judgments (and values) in one’s drives. Bifurcation is the failure (or refusal) of incorporation, the maintenance of disagreement between conscious and bodily belief. If we can believe Nietzsche’s truths “in theory” but continue to judge things to be substances in our bodily functioning, there will be no harm in those true theories. It’s only if theories tend to work their way down into the “look” of things for our drives and affects that their truth will hurt. The feasibility of bifurcation differs for different “background” assumptions. Nietzsche presumes that, for the most part, the older an assumption is, the more deeply it is deposited in us and the harder to shake or overturn. Those categorial judgments were built into our distant animal ancestors: their ability to “learn from experience” already depended on, for example, their assimilating present cases to past ones—​on their viewing them as “equal.” In 81:11[268]: “the subject could arise by the error of the equal, e.g., when a protoplasm receives only one

100 81:11[162]: “In order for any degree of consciousness to be possible in the world, an unreal world of error must arise: a being [Wesen] with belief in the persisting, in individuals etc. . . . [T]‌his error will only be destroyed along with life: the final truth of the flux of things cannot bear incorporation, our organs (for life) are established on this error.”

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  293 stimulus from different forces (light electricity pressure) and infers the equality of causes from the one stimulus . . . so it must happen in the organic of the deepest level . . . this belief—​i.e., this error!—​is already there in the process of assimilation of the organic.” Deposited thus deeply in us, these judgments are made by subconscious perceptual and motor systems and are immune to revision by our conscious beliefs. They are a “biological compulsion”101 and are in no danger of being shaken by a contradicting theory. In the case of these “deepest” illusions, then—​the ones presupposed by every drive because they are required by our very navigation through the world and through tasks—​it seems that the will to truth might not be a threat. It will be able to have all the true beliefs it can find on these topics, but these will remain just beliefs in its theory of things, resisting “incorporation” into our bodily systems. When Nietzsche worries about the will to truth’s corrosive effect, he doesn’t have these most basic, categorical illusions in mind, I suggest. He points out that our bodies believe these false things not because he wants us to stop, nor because he’s worried that we might stop, but to pose the question of what other lies we might depend on and be in real danger of losing. Now I’ve spoken so far of “incorporation” and “bifurcation” as concerning the relation between one’s conscious thinking and one’s bodily drives. But we should notice that there is also the question of incorporating an idea even into the rest of one’s conscious thinking. If Nietzsche convinces me that there are really no equal things, this thought—​episodic or even recurrent—​doesn’t inevitably revise the rest of my “theory of things” to accord with it. I may well continue to hold many other beliefs that are—​as I would see on inspection—​inconsistent with the theoretical denial of equal things. Sometimes Nietzsche says that I can’t make the rest of my thinking cohere with that insight because thinking itself depends on the posit of equals. He puts the general point famously in 86–​7:5[22] (WP.522, LNp110): “Rational thinking is an interpretation according to a schema that we cannot throw off.” I treat things as equal whenever I sort them into kinds—​which I constantly do in my use of general terms. In this case the theory of becoming, as much as Nietzsche might persuade himself or us of it, would have no power to affect our thinking’s structure. Even if I can amend my conception of “types” in the way we explored in Chapter 6 (§6.5), I would still be positing a “sameness” or “equality” that isn’t really there.

101 88:14[152] (WP.515): “Here no preexistent ‘idea’ has worked: instead the utility, that it’s only when we see things made coarse and equal that they become reckonable and handleable for us. . . . The subjective compulsion, not to be able to contradict here, is a biological compulsion: the instinct of utility, to infer as we infer, is stuck in our body, we almost are this instinct.”

294  Human Values A bifurcation would then be necessary, but also feasible, even within our conscious thinking—​a partition between our episodic “official” beliefs and those embedded in us structurally. And Nietzsche wouldn’t try or want to incorporate into the rest of his thinking (much less into his drives) the truths that equality, substance, causality etc. are lies. He would be convinced that it’s simply not possible to live or even to think while holding these deep truths about becoming in view. In this case there would be a way in which all the drives and affects do and should rule the will to truth: inasmuch as they need to operate with categorial posits that are false. But it would not be a matter here of imposing restrictions on the will to truth. There are limits to how far this will to truth can push its recognition due to the very nature of our drives. The will to truth can expose all the lies it can in our deepest assumptions because none of these insights will shake the body’s confidence in them. It will never be able to push the truth of becoming down into bodily habit nor into the structural premises of our thinking. So this is not a limit that needs to be imposed or defended. (b) Saving higher values. The question of “restricting” the will to truth arises not for these categorial posits built irrevocably into our drives and thinking. It arises for our human or “agential” posits—​the ones involved in our sense of ourselves as agents. And it arises especially for the values our agency pursues. These set its sights “above” our drives—​they are “higher values.” It’s these values by which we try to live above “what comes naturally” to those drives, that the will to truth most threatens. So the question is whether and how to restrict the will to truth so that it doesn’t sweep aside all such higher values. The values in our bodily drives are not at risk from the will to truth—​for the same reason that the categorial posits were not. Just as the body’s reliance on the categories is unshakable, so, too, for our bodily values. These include the ur-​ value of power, the structural aim of all our drives and affects. And they include also the values of deep-​seated drives such as those for food, for warmth, for sex. Efforts and feelings toward these are built into the very chemistry of our bodily systems. Whichever way we change our thinking about these goods, these drives and affects will go on valuing (steering) by their signs. The threat in nihilism is that human, losing its higher values, will be reduced to these bodily ones—​as happens in the “last humans” [Z.p.5]. So it’s not deep bodily values that the will to truth threatens, but values we have in more recent and changeable layers of our structure. It threatens—​of course—​ only values we could actually be trained or persuaded out of. Such values are held in what we might prefer to call “habits” rather than “drives,” though Nietzsche does extend the latter term to them. They are values we hold “as agents,” values centered on becoming a better agent. They include the values of custom and morality, but (we’ll see) more besides.

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  295 These higher values are, to be sure, settled into us more deeply than we might suppose. We hold them not merely at the times we notice them—​not merely when we think or feel, for example, “lying is wrong.” They are carried not just in how we use such words, but in standing dispositions that operate constantly in us. Disvaluing lying, for example, is a matter not mainly of thinking that it’s bad, but of ingrained habits of response. These habits are only partly oriented by the word “lie” (and its relatives); they respond more immediately to non-​worded perceptual cues. We feel (e.g.) distaste for a lie before we think the word; we use the word to explain to ourselves this feeling we already have—​in Nietzsche’s prescient reversal of the order we usually assume. Thus these “higher” values operate in us—​we steer by them—​beneath the level of our conscious recognition or control. But they are not set so deeply as to be unchangeable: they are of historical not evolutionary vintage, carried in habits not “blood.” These habits, including the language they’re bound up in, can be revised. So it’s here that our questions arise. Should we try to face the truth about these agential values? Or would this truth sweep away too much of that higher valuing—​which we must somehow protect from it? Should we somehow avoid or overlook or forget the falsehoods involved in such valuing? Nietzsche seems strongly inconsistent on these points. On the one hand he stresses over and over how it can be bad for us to uncover the truth about values—​how it is leading to the loss of values, nihilism, the great problem of the modern age. But on the other hand, and seemingly against that advice, he is also constantly thrusting upon us all kinds of ugly and alienating insights about our values—​forcing these truths to our attention. So he gives us, as medicine, what he at other times labels poison. We need a way to understand this clash. The obvious start to an answer is that Nietzsche thinks the truth will undermine “moral” values but let us keep or make other higher values. It will show that our values don’t come from god—​aren’t authenticated by being god’s commands. And it will show that there is no “other world” that following these values gives access to. So it will undermine the Christian morality built on those posits but leave a great many higher values untouched. And indeed it seems that many people have already abandoned those posits while still strongly holding higher values. But Nietzsche thinks that these common atheists haven’t yet absorbed the full implications of the “death of god”: it’s the death of the illusion of real values. Valuing fairness, or equality, or freedom, or truth, we take them to be “real goods”: we take them to have value independently of our valuing them and suppose that our own valuing “tracks” or corresponds to this real value independent of us. Moreover we suppose this not (necessarily) as a deliberate theory, but in the very patterns and procedures of our valuative thinking.

296  Human Values We saw that this claim wasn’t made in our bodily valuing. The posit of real values was invented and refined in order to give authority to social norms, in their struggle to control that bodily valuing. Members were taught that these norms stated the real goods their valuing needed to match, and this is how the aim at truth-​as-​correspondence was first set into us. Thus not only is the posit of real values false, it is also fundamentally coercive. Both points are exposed by the will to truth once it’s free from morality’s restraints. Thus the will to truth’s deep threat is not to our religion but to our implicit metaethics—​to the very way we value, the status we impute to our higher values. It undermines assumptions that common atheism still makes—​and that we ourselves make. Genealogy undermines the presumption that our values could match real goods. Already in HH.i.34: “For there is no longer a should [Sollen]; morality, insofar as it was a should, is destroyed by our kind of examination just as religion is.” By undermining these illusions about our agency and the reality of value, the truth threatens higher values in general. It threatens to reduce us to the simple, “low” valuing of our bodily drives. HH.i.519: “Truth as Circe.—​Error has made human out of animals; might truth be in a position to make an animal out of human again?” So it’s here that the question of “controlling” or “restricting” the will to truth most arises. How can we protect or insulate some of these higher values from thus falling victim to the truth? For this purpose we need, Nietzsche often suggests, a contrary will, a “will to deception.” This is, in particular, a skill or ability to let or make a value “look real”—​to depict and see it as a real good, thereby solidifying and strengthening attachment to it. Above all one needs this for one’s own sake: one needs a capacity to self-​deceive. To take Nietzsche’s own case, even his will to honesty uses this deceptive skill to make honesty look really good—​in the first place to himself, but then also to his readers. He portrays his free spirits as heroic; their honesty is a highest kind of courage. Each of his own values deploys this ability to embellish itself in this way. In creating values he projects this deceptive aura about them. Nietzsche’s praise for deception is a key challenge for my claim that he is fundamentally committed to truth—​that he thinks our great challenge is to incorporate the truth about values. If he not only tolerates but cultivates this disposition to make and believe lies, it may seem that he cares less about truth than we’d like. And this inference then ramifies into a suspicion against all the other things he says. He alerts us that he aims to deceive both himself and us (his readers) regarding the status of his values in particular; we might expect this to infect his “factual” claims as well. He seems to show himself not to be trusted. Indeed, not only does Nietzsche advocate a will to deception, he sometimes elevates it above the truth-​will. He presents it as a conclusion the will to truth reaches, against itself. So 86–​7:6[25] (WP.1011): “This belief in truth goes to its

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  297 ultimate consequence in us—​you know what it says:—​that if there is anything to be worshipped, it is appearance that must be worshipped, that the lie—​and not the truth —​is divine . . .?”102 The truth turns out to be that falsehood is more valuable than truth. Is this the only truth worth having? Elsewhere Nietzsche says that both of these wills are requisite. In 81:11[162]:  “So we discover here too a night and a day as life-​condition for us: willing to know and willing to err are ebb and flood. If one rules absolutely, the human perishes.” To hear the will to falsehood apparently put on a par with the truth-​will, much less above it, is unsettling. But I think the view looks better when we fill out how Nietzsche wants these wills to be related. He advocates a certain dialectic between deception and truth. We need these to succeed one another by a certain cyclical logic, in order to grow in our human way. Abstractly put, this growth lies in an “ascent” in the values that steer the habits of our lives. An ascent by what criteria? By those of the two “meta-​values” we noticed in §7.2. Improvement lies in our values becoming more truthful, which is our distinctively human way of making them better markers of power. So Nietzsche uses truth as a standard for evaluating values, and the value of deception will be settled by its contribution to truth. So 81:11[162]: “We must love and cultivate error, it is the womb of knowledge. Art is the cultivation of illusion [Wahnes]—​our cult. /​For the sake of knowing to love and further life, for the sake of life to love and further error [and] illusion. To give existence an aesthetic meaning, to increase our taste in it, is the basic condition of all passion of knowledge.” We judge our values by the meta-​value of truthfulness, but first we have to have these values. We have to be committed to living the particular kind of life these values target. And for this we have to feel this kind of life to be worth living. We need to believe that we value this life because it’s good—​rather than its being good just by our valuing it. We therefore need some degree of externalism. As we saw back in Chapter 1 (§1.4), however, there are many forms of externalism, some of which may even be compatible with the internalist, perspectivist truth. Nietzsche thinks that the most important work of the will to truth is to whittle down this externalist claim so that it approaches, as nearly as possible, that radical truth. Through this slow and drawn-​out work, human learns how to satisfy the externalist need with less and less of a lie. For example, instead of positing values as god’s commands, they are interpreted as reason’s commands, which brings the

102 88:17[3]‌(WP.853): “The truth does not count as the highest measure of value, still less as the highest power. The will to appearance, to illusion, to deception, to becoming and change (to objective deception) counts [in this book] as deeper, more original, more metaphysical than the will to truth, to reality, to being.” Cf. BGE.2 and BGE.34 (re: the value of “appearance”).

298  Human Values authority into human itself, a step toward the truth. But as the old lie is discarded, a new and subtler one is invented in order to provide that external authority that human still needs for its valuing. Nietzsche’s own account of power as commanded by “life”—​so that its goodness is settled by a deep will in all living things—​brings us still nearer the truth. This picture still gets its emotive force by presenting power as a “real good” established by an authority (“life”). This new lie lets the justification appeal to that archaic need embedded in us for real values. But (as we saw in Chapter 2) behind this lie is the truth, that power is my good because I do value it and because this valuing is my strongest and most durable aim. Thus picturing power as life’s real good is a kind of metaphor for the internalist truth: that it’s good due to the way we value it. But further, this internalist truth can claim a certain externalist force even without such illusions. The value of power is “external” to the values it assesses in important ways. It lies, as it were, in a different and deeper part of us and so judges our first-​order, agential values “from outside.” Power is good just because we value it, but we value it independently of all the agential values we use it to assess. Now if power does indeed play this ultimate role for Nietzsche, it may seem that he does “demote” truth after all. He subordinates it not to that will to deception, but to this will to power. And this opens up the possibility that truth might be limited or sacrificed for the sake of more power or control. But my suggestion will be that the meta-​value of power applies to the truth-​will in a different way: it functions not to limit that will, but to heal it. (iii) Healing the will to truth. Nietzsche does indeed subordinate the will to truth to the will to power. But the latter is not an alternative and competing drive, but rather a second-​order effort at growth or improvement in any given drive. Pursuing truth for the sake of power is therefore a matter of improving one’s pursuit of truth—​raising it to a higher level. Better aiming our will to truth at this kind of growth is the same thing as “healing” it, making it healthy. But why should Nietzsche still give priority to thus empowering his will to truth, given all his vehement critiques of it?103 Why should he feel any allegiance to this will at all if it is moral, ascetic, and even nihilistic—​all anathema to him? As BGE.1 famously asks: “Suppose we will truth: why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance?” Granting that (as I’ve claimed) he might hope to “heal” it by ameliorating those negative features, it’s still puzzling why he should take this trouble with it, rather than (perhaps) shifting his effort into other wills that are already healthy. Once we see that truth is (along with every other value) not a “real” good—​that its goodness depends on human’s valuing it—​why 103 I trace Nietzsche’s own development into this embrace of the will to truth, as his mature position, in Nietzsche’s System ch. 4 §3.3.

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  299 continue to value it above all the other ends our many drives have in view? It doesn’t seem the will to truth can keep its preeminence once it strips itself of its claim to real value. The first reason Nietzsche continues to value truth is simply that this has always been his dominant will. It’s strong enough to hold onto this status despite its discoveries about its own character. So, in a note for Z, 83:16[63]: “Why [Wozu] truth? —​it has become the strongest drive, the will to truth! Zarathustra can’t do otherwise!” On the unshakability of our strongest values we may notice 87–​ 8:11[376] (WP.314): “Our most sacred convictions, our unchangeable with respect to the highest values, are judgments of our muscles.”104 D.p.4 says that “trust in reason” is “the last morality that makes itself heard even by us, that even we still know how to live.” But this is not just a personal idiosyncrasy, Nietzsche thinks. Nor is this allegiance just peculiar to his free spirits. Although he accuses the will to truth of all those faults, he also ascribes a preeminent importance to it: it is human’s distinguishing aim. It’s this will to truth that makes us most decidedly unique among animals.105 With it human sets the first really new aim into the living world. Nietzsche aspires to advance human—​its great line of development—​by healing and empowering this will. He also thinks that the will to truth is the one drive and passion that can carry us ahead, out of nihilism, and into new values. Although it is a crucial agent of that nihilism, it will also supply the momentum to move us beyond it. We can’t, after all, make values out of nothing. A value, to function as such, must operate down where we really act; it needs a deeper presence than we are able to confer just by acts of decision. What such decision can do is shift or amend values that are already ingrained in us in this way. We make new values by re-​aiming passions we already have.106 I’ve suggested that the will to truth disciplines itself by turning itself better toward power—​and that power is what this will has deeply wanted all along. However, this may seem to be contradicted by the genealogy we’ve seen Nietzsche gives of this will: that it is a will to match values and facts outside oneself, a passivity built into us in order to tame us for social life. This genealogy makes the will to truth a device implanted in us by society’s will to power, but a device that opposes the human’s own.

104 Pippin [2010, 14]: “What matters is what inspires some great erotic striving, and what most matters to us is in an odd way quite ‘independent’ of us, ‘always already there,’ to invoke another Heideggerian phrase.” 105 Already in 72–​3:19[104] (PTp453, ENp124]): “To be completely truthful—​noble heroic desire of human, in a mendacious nature! But possible only very relatively!” 106 See Pippin’s compelling account [2010, 27] of our “depth commitments.”

300  Human Values Nevertheless, Nietzsche thinks that the will to truth, though set into us with the function of taming us, becomes a will to power in its own right and gradually frees itself from that service. It is the more suited to do so, we must now begin to see, because Nietzsche has had a second diagnosis of the will to truth in mind all along, one that gives it (for him) a more positive source and aim. We want truth not just as allegiance to norms, but because it advances our own power. We distinguished this “pragmatic” source from the “moral” one in Chapter 5 (§5.4). The simple point here is that finding out the truth about X is a way of taking power over that X. So this will isn’t just (as the first diagnosis made it) a counterweight installed in us to restrict our aggressive drives, but an aggressive drive itself. In 88:14[103] (WP.583): “ ‘The will to truth’ would then need to be investigated psychologically: it is no moral power [Gewalt], but a form of will to power. This would be proved by [the fact] that it employs all immoral means.”107 And it’s precisely this, in Nietzsche’s subversive view, that gives it its positive potential. It’s important to distinguish two ways the will to truth expresses will to power. First, the will to truth serves the drives in their pursuit of power. Most obviously, it is used by the drives for information about the world they operate in. So for example it helps the eat-​drive by distinguishing the signs for food and for poisons. Presumably this is a still more ancient source than its development by social forces in opposition to the drives. In 88:14[122] (WP.480, LNp258): “For a particular kind [of animal] to survive—​and grow in its power —​, it must in its conception of reality grasp so much calculable and constant [Gleichbleibendes], that a scheme of comportment can be constructed on it. The utility for survival, not any abstract-​theoretical need not to be deceived, stands as motive behind the development of the organs of knowledge.”108 It’s this first way the will to truth serves power that explains why this will has been for so long blind to the categorial and normative “lies.” It can’t discover the false assumptions those steering drives depend on, including the categorial ones that all drives depend on. In 85:43[1]‌(LNp50): “the ‘will to truth’ develops in service of ‘will to power’: genuinely seen its real task is to help a particular kind of untruth to victory and duration, to take a connected whole of falsifications as basis for the preservation of a particular kind of living thing.” So in helping the drives to power the will to truth embraces helpful fictions—​which count for it as “truth.”

107 See HH.i.252’s three reasons for why knowing is pleasant: “First and above all, because one is thereby conscious of one’s force. . . . Second, because one . . . gets beyond old representations and their advocates, and becomes or at least thinks one becomes victor. Third, because through even minor new knowledge we feel ourselves elevated over all and as the only one who knows correctly.” 108 Much earlier, in TL (ENp255): “He desires the agreeable, life-​preserving consequences of truth; he is indifferent to pure knowledge with no consequences, he is even hostile to truths that are perhaps harmful and destructive.”

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  301 But second, and gradually, the will to truth takes power on its own behalf. Irrespective of any other drive’s ends, it becomes itself a way of “mastering” the things it understands. It thus becomes a will to power in its own right, aiming to improve or grow its control over other things. In 86–​7:7[3]‌: “the correct representing of an object is originally only a means to the end of grasping, holding, and mastering it /​Later this correct representing itself comes to be felt as a grasping, as a goal, by which satisfaction enters. /​Thinking finally as overwhelming and exercising of power: as a fitting together, an ordering of the new into old rows.”109 It’s only once the will to truth has freed itself from those drives that it can now expose their grounding lies. GS.110 gives important statement of the point: [K]‌nowledge and the striving for the true finally took their place as a need among the other needs. From then on not only faith and conviction, but also scrutiny, denial, suspicion, and contradiction were a power. . . . Thus knowledge became a part of life and, as life, a continually growing power, until finally knowledge and the ancient basic errors struck against each other, both as life, both as power, both in the same human.110

GS.110 then continues: The thinker: that is now the creature in which the drive to truth and those life-​ preserving errors fight their first fight, once the drive to truth has proven itself a life-​preserving power. In comparison to the importance of this fight every other one is insignificant: the ultimate question about the conditions of life is here posed, and the first attempt will here be made to answer this question by experiment. How far does the truth bear incorporation?—​that is the question, that is the experiment.111

I take this to be Nietzsche’s sense of his own principal task. He reiterates this allegiance to truth in GS.324, which is likewise worth quoting at length: 109 87:9[60] (WP.585): “It is a measure of the degree of will-​force, how far one can forgo the meaning in things, how far one endures to live in a meaningless world: because one organizes from oneself a small part.” 110 81:11[243]: “Reason is a support organ that slowly develops itself, . . . it works in service of the organic drives, and slowly emancipates itself to equal authority with them—​so that reason (belief and knowledge) fights with the drives, as itself a new drive—​and late, very late [comes] to preponderance.” 111 HH.i.107 already speaks of this experiment: “The butterfly wills to break out of its cocoon, it tears at it, it rips it: then it is blinded and confused by the unfamiliar light, the realm of freedom. In such humans, who are capable of that grief—​how few they will be!—​the first attempt will be made whether humanity could transform itself from a moral to a wise humanity.”

302  Human Values From year to year I  find life much truer, more desirable, and more mysterious,—​from that day when the great liberator came over me, the thought that life should be an experiment of the knower. . . . And knowledge itself . . . is for me a world of dangers and victories in which heroic feelings also have their dance-​and playgrounds. “Life as a means to knowledge”—​with this principle in one’s heart one can live not only bravely but gaily. . . .

Notice how he stresses the aggressive and combative nature of this will to truth that he embraces. He affirms the will to truth as a will to power in its own right, pursuing its own power and not used as a means to the power of anything else. It is this kind of power—​in grasping the truth—​that Nietzsche prizes most highly. So EH.p.3: “How much truth a spirit bears, how much truth it dares? this became for me ever more the genuine measure of value. Error (—​belief in the ideal —​) is not blindness, error is cowardice. . . .”112 So here the will to truth is an independent path to power. When the will to truth casts off the ways it has served other interests, it aims itself more adequately at truth. When, by contrast, it serves social norms, truth is for it just a matching of those norms. Similarly, insofar as it serves bodily drives, truth is just “what works” for those drives, and a pragmatic analysis is apt. But Nietzsche shows contempt for those who still today “will truth” in these ways; they lack “intellectual integrity.”113 It’s only when the will to truth takes hold of itself and seeks its own power that it can genuinely seek truth. It seeks to grow in its own grasp of truth—​in its own way of taking power over things. But what is truth for the will to truth that thus finally comes into its own? Is it now, at last, truly a correspondence to things as they are—​what the will to truth has always supposed itself to be, but never truly or even honestly? As I will try to show in Chapter 8’s discussion of science, it is something related to this, perhaps a version of this. The idea of “correspondence” is not quite right for what Nietzsche has in mind because it leaves out the aspect most important to this truth, the way in which it involves a “grasp,” a “power over” that which is understood. But this is not a practical power over it, which would be a power for the drives. It is a power “just in the knowing.” As we’ll see it involves a kind of embrace and incorporation of what’s understood. When the will to truth achieves this freedom from the social and drive forces that had ruled it, it faces the task of ruling itself. It rules itself for the sake of

112 Though note HH.iii.4: “some who would like to be accounted initiates [of science] tell us that the effort required to attain to truth is to decide the value of truth! This mad morality derives from the idea that “truths” are really nothing more than gymnastic apparatus. . . .” 113 The virtue of intellektuelle Rechtschaffenheit becomes a frequent topic in the 1888 notebooks.

Nihilism: Against Morality—and Truth?  303 itself—​for its own power or growth. Doing so properly—​aiming itself well at power—​is simply its own “health.” This, I suggest, is Nietzsche’s ultimate idea of how the will to truth ought to be “restricted” or “limited”: not by any other drive or drives, but only by itself, in its healthy pursuit of its own power—​growth in its own pursuit of truth. Thus Nietzsche wants his own will to truth to remain his dominant drive. And the readers he prizes most will share this priority. But its dominance doesn’t mean that this will to truth is undisciplined—​that it observes no limits or boundaries. It will impose such limits on itself, not for the sake of anything other than truth, but so that it will have the most truth it can.

8

Freedom Science, History, Psychology

By now we’ve distinguished several main threads in Nietzsche’s critique of “what it is to be human”: it’s to be constituted by the false idea of oneself as a subject and agent, to be falsely (and submissively) meaning one’s values to be true, to be framing one’s meanings in a commonizing language, and to be ascetically hostile to one’s drives. The sum of these critiques threatens to drag us down into a thorough dissatisfaction and despair with our own human character and possibilities—​an attitude we might hear in his title-​word “allzumenschliches.” If being human dooms us to all this, it will seem a very tarnished thing. These critiques express a pessimism about human life that looks a lot like nihilism itself. But of course that’s not where Nietzsche wants to leave us—​nor to remain himself. Here we begin to look at his way out. The first part of this way is accomplished by the will to truth. So it belongs still to the human domain of values centered on the claim that they’re true; it belongs in Part II. This will to truth, in the culminating sciences of history and psychology, exposes the roots and functions of our values; it thus puts us into a position of choice toward them. This enables the philosopher to create the new, more-​than-​human values that will be the topic of Part III. This creation depends on prior work by the will to truth. Nietzsche subjects the will to truth to many attacks. We’ve just seen how he places it at the core of the “ascetic ideal” that is the great target of GM.iii. But I’ve begun to argue that, despite these critiques, he keeps his dominant allegiance to truth. He thinks that the will to truth is our best route to power: human grows best by its pursuit of truth. Thus GM.iii’s sharp critique of this will as ascetic, and as deeply involved in morality and nihilism, is not fatal to this will and doesn’t even reduce its status within his (recommended) system of drives and wills. Instead it shows him how to “make-​healthy” this will, so that it best advances itself—​and human with it. Nietzsche thinks it is precisely this will’s ascetic character—​the way it “cuts into life”—​that makes it so valuable once we turn it the right way. When we turn it to understanding our own values, it works to free us from them, which is a freedom more genuine than any we’ve had before. Unfortunately it’s much Nietzsche’s Values. John Richardson, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190098230.001.0001

Freedom: Science, History, Psychology  305 harder to expose truths about our values than we’ve ever realized. We’ve never noticed the ways that our sciences have been “moral” all along and therefore ill-​ suited to find out the truth about morality itself. History and psychology need to be reformed if they’re to serve us this way. I’ll proceed by first surveying (§8.1) Nietzsche’s critique of science. He questions its ability to get truth at all and doubts the value of whatever truth it can have. And yet he is also a great advocate for science and indeed claims to be himself a major innovator in the science of psychology. He counts himself to have been a scientist,1 although of course he thinks he’s more besides. He advocates science above all because he thinks it can give us, properly adjusted and aimed, power over our own values. We must begin to see how this re-​aiming of science responds to his key criticisms of it, that it is ascetic and even “anti-​life.” I’ll turn next (§8.2) to this idea that the scientific will to truth, once redeployed, is our path to freedom. Nietzsche means to take up the age-​old philosophers’ ideal of freedom and to give it new form. He tries to improve it by first finding out the scientific truth about “freedom” itself; this truth is achieved in a genealogy of freedom, as an evolving human practice. By this genealogy of freedom Nietzsche promotes his new ideal of a freedom through genealogy—​he promotes it as a further stage in that evolution. Next is to see how Nietzsche uses the sciences of history (§8.3) and psychology (§8.4) in this project to free us. History is requisite due to the way social norms get created and fixed in societies: we carry values shaped in different historical epochs for different functions—​to serve the interests of different groups. We need history to expose these tangled roots and purposes if we’re to understand what our values have been designed to do to and with us. But it’s not enough to expose these historical roots in theory; one needs to recognize them at work in one’s own case. This is the role of psychology—​of the new psychology Nietzsche thinks he inaugurates. Nevertheless, with all this, the will to truth only brings us so far. I’ll turn finally (§8.5) to Nietzsche’s dissatisfaction with this truth about values, taken as a stopping-​point. By itself such genealogical truth has a merely critical and destructive effect—​as befits the deeply “ascetic” character of the will to truth itself. It can help us to loosen the grip of unhealthy and constricting moral values, but it leaves us with the task of making healthier values to replace them. This will lead us into the topics of Part III.

1 In BGE.204 he says that he has “the memory of a scientific human.” Cf. HH.i.256: “To this extent it is very valuable [schätzbar], with respect to everything one will later pursue, once to have been a scientific human [ein wissenschaftlicher Mensch].”

306  Human Values

8.1  Doubts about science So far (in Chapter 7 [§§8.4–​8.5) I have presented the will to truth’s new, healthy form only schematically, leaving quite vague just how it would work. I  want now to make this role more concrete by looking at Nietzsche’s views about science [Wissenschaft], understood as the preeminent form of the will to truth.2 “Science” here refers—​by the ordinary sense of Wissenschaft—​to the theoretical disciplines generally. These disciplines have in common their allegiance to a certain method, which, however, they don’t always well practice. Nietzsche wants science to follow better the really valuable parts of this method it already has, but also to revise this method in some key ways—​so as to suit it better to the kind of truth (he thinks) there is. To get at these revisions we must start with his critique of science since the changes will respond to the criticisms. He raises very many doubts against science, which I’ll try quickly to organize. Nietzsche’s main criticisms of science treat it as a project of truth. And he has two basic types of complaints against it in this regard. (A) Sometimes he attacks science because it doesn’t (or even can’t) attain truth: science is inept or unapt for truth, whether or not we can have it by other means. (B) But other times he attacks science precisely as wanting and attaining truth. So whereas sometimes he judges science as failing in its aim at truth, at other times he criticizes that aim itself. Let’s consider these in turn. I’ll try to show how both kinds of attack are taken up into reforms of science. (A) Doubts against science's capacity for truth. We can distinguish at least these several points: (i) science expresses distorting interests3; (ii) science rests on unexamined premises; (iii) science relies on fictions and metaphors (such as a “law” of nature)4; (iv) science can’t explain, only describe5; and (v) science can only deal with quantities, can’t grasp qualities.6 I think all of these are familiar to most of Nietzsche’s readers. These criticisms of science can and should all be read—​I suggest—​not as condemning science, but as showing how it needs to improve if it is to find out the truth about things. They identify the reforms that science requires in order 2 On Nietzsche’s views on science, see the papers in Heit, Abel, and Brusotti (eds.) [2012]. 3 E.g., 86–​7:5[10] says that “[f]ear of the unpredictable [is] the hidden instinct of science,” and that this prompts it to search for a “rule,” which however doesn’t make anything “known.” The main such distorting interest is morality, as we’ll see later. 4 HH.ii.9, entitled “ ‘Naturgesetz’ ein Wort des Aberglaubens.” Also BGE.22; 85:39[14]. 5 GS.112:  “ ‘Explanation [Erklärung]’ we call it:  but it is ‘description [Beschreibung]’ that distinguishes us from older stages of knowledge and science. We describe better,—​we explain just as little as all [our] predecessors.” 6 86–​7:6[14] (WP.565, LNp125) says that “knowledge” [Erkenntnis] applies to quantities, whereas qualities are individual and inescapably perspectival.

Freedom: Science, History, Psychology  307 to make it better at truth. So his attacks are directed only against “science so far” and project a “new science” that will emerge by learning his various lessons. So 88:14[156] says about the “yes-​saying type” of the present: “one must grasp the enormous fact that a good conscience of science exists.”7 To get there science must improve its observance of its current method but also adapt that method. The failings of science so far are its failures to carry out the method that is proper to it and which Nietzsche holds in high regard. A.13: “The most valuable insights are discovered last; but the most valuable insights are methods.”8 Science is only now discovering its proper method and correcting itself by its means. So 88:15[51] (WP.466, LNp268): “What distinguishes our 19th century is not the victory of science, but the victory of scientific method over science.” A key element in this method, and key also to Nietzsche’s admiration for it, is its suspicion against all presuppositions.9 But some other aspects of its method need to be revised. The central change, I suggest, is that science needs to recognize the importance of perspectivity for truth and adjust its method accordingly. Truth is about life, and this reality is essentially perspectival: living things are essentially “interested viewpoints.” They are what we might have called “subjective” except that these viewpoints are not—​as we saw in Chapter 5—​exactly “subjects.” But as we might have put it if those terms were suitable, one must use one’s own subjectivity to understand subjects. To understand a living thing is to understand a perspective, and this requires, in part, “taking” or “occupying” that perspective. This means that science’s aim at “objectivity” must be reconceived. There is indeed something to it: to understand a perspective it’s not enough to “see things its way”; one must also grasp why it sees things this way, what it means that it sees things so. And the latter requires that one also view the thing “from without.” Already in 76–​7:23[160]: “One must understand religion and art [by ‘personal experience’]—​otherwise one cannot be wise. But one must be able to see out over them; if one remains within, one does not understand them.”10 7 Cf. HH.ii.90, which says that science began with a bad conscience. 84:23[1]‌(WP.594): “science (as the way to knowledge) acquires a new charm [Zauber] after the removal of morality.” Brobjer [2012, 51] argues that in his 1888 notebooks Nietzsche opens a dichotomy between “old” and “new” science. 8 A.59: “the methods, one must say it ten times, are the essential, also the most difficult.” 88:15[52] (WP.457): “Truth, that is to say, the scientific method [Methodik].” See the references to “historical method” in GM.ii.12–​13. 9 GS.344: “In science convictions [Überzeugungen] have no citizens’ rights, as one says with good reason: only when they decide to descend to the modesty of a hypothesis, of a provisional experimental standpoint, of a regulative fiction, may they be entitled to entry and even a certain value within the realm of knowledge.” 10 BGE.45: “To guess and settle . . . what kind of history the problem of knowing and conscience [Wissen und Gewissen] has had in the soul of the homines religiosi, one perhaps must be oneself as deep, as wounded, as monstrous as Pascal’s intellectual conscience was:—​and then one would still need that spanning heaven of bright, malicious spirituality, which is able to survey this swarm of dangerous and painful experiences from above, to order and force them into formulas.”

308  Human Values This view from without is, however, always from other perspectives, which will themselves always be interested, too. Objectivity can’t be a “view from nowhere”—​a view without interests and values of its own. It must instead be a view “from above.” What matters is which interested viewpoints it directs on the thing to be understood. It must, in a nutshell, be a viewpoint that includes the studied perspective, but includes it as an element in a fuller view. When science revises its method to suit this “perspectival objectivity,” it can answer the five earlier presented criticisms. Consider first the charge (v)  that science deals only in quantities, missing qualities. This is because it has so far been based, Nietzsche thinks, in perception. For, on its own, perception gets only at the outsides of things and not at their inner will: it deals only with signs of this will, radically unlike it.11 In 85:36[31] (WP.619): “The victorious concept ‘force’ . . . still needs a completion: an inner will must be ascribed to it, which I designate as ‘will to power.’ ” To science’s external and “mechanist” view things have appeared as mere quantities; their qualities lie (Nietzsche holds) in their will and viewpoint, which science so far has missed.12 Science must extend its method to allow it to grasp its objects’ aims. It’s also this will that is genuinely explanatory. Science has been limited to describing the world (iv) because its external view hasn’t gotten at the real explainers, which are perspectival wills.13 Indeed, because it has failed to get at these, its descriptions have really been misdescriptions.14 To understand why a living thing is as it is requires grasping how it has been made by other interested viewpoints, including those of its own drives. Science must find out its aims, which include all the ways it has been aimed by other wills. It must see the thing from the perspectives that have aimed it, and thereby see the point and meaning of its motion, which perception and mechanism cannot provide. So GS.373 speaks of “ ‘[s]‌cience’ as prejudice,” due to the insistence by “the intellectual middle class” that “the only rightful interpretation of the world should be one to which [they] have a right . . . one that permits counting, calculating, weighing, seeing, grasping, and nothing else.” But, Nietzsche continues, a “ ‘scientific’ interpretation of the world, as you understand it, might be one of the stupidest of all possible interpretations of the world. . . . [A]n essentially 11 88:14[122] (WP.625, LNp258): “the mechanistic concept of motion is itself a translation of the original occurrence into the sign-​language of the eye and fingertip.” Also 88:14[79] (WP.634, LNp246). And perhaps 84:25[507]: “All physics is only symptomatic.” 12 85–​6:2[157] (WP.564, LNp91–​2): “growth itself is a desire to be more; the desire for an increase in quantity grows from a quale; in a purely quantitative world all would be dead, rigid, unmoving.” 13 85–​6:2[76] (WP.660, LNp72): “ ‘Mechanistic view’: wants nothing but quantities: but force lies in quality: mechanistics can thus only describe processes, not explain [them].” 14 85–​6:2[139] (WP.554, LNp87–​8): “Within the mechanistic view of the world (which is logic and its application to space and time) that concept [causality] reduces to the mathematical formula—​ with which, as one must always re-​emphasize, nothing is ever understood, but is denoted, misdenoted [bezeichnet, verzeichnet].”

Freedom: Science, History, Psychology  309 mechanistic world would be an essentially meaningless world.”15 Yet this is only “science” (in scare quotes), or science “as you understand it”; a science that is really more scientific will find a way to get at perspectivity and will. The other attacks on science’s adequacy likewise expose weaknesses that can be (not completely corrected perhaps but) improved. The metaphors and fictions it has always relied on (iii) can be gradually weeded out—​and replaced by metaphors closer to the reality of things. So, for example, the fictional “laws of nature” can be replaced with the view of things as wills to power, as BGE.22 proposes. We can replace the false presuppositions (ii) with truer ones as we see better how we and the world are. Thus BGE.12 demands, of the belief in the soul as an indivisible atomon, that “one should expel it from science” and replace it with other versions of the “soul-​hypothesis.” And we can also pursue science out of worthier motives (i), for example not out of fear but courage—​which I take to be the principal point of Zarathustra’s chapter “On Science” (iv.15).16 The biggest help toward those truths will be to recognize and oppose one particular motive that has always misled science: morality. We need to overcome the ways morality has inhibited and misled science—​ the ways Christianity in particular has held back progress since ancient times. In 88:14[103]: “the method of research is first achieved, when all moral prejudices are overcome.”17 (B) Doubts against science as wanting or finding truth. But what about Nietzsche’s second kind of doubt against science—​against its very effort at truth? As GS.344 insists, the presupposition that science discovers at its heart is its moral faith that truth is the ultimate good—​a faith quite unjustified. And GM.iii claims that the will to truth expresses the ascetic ideal—​suggesting that it’s “anti-​ life,” which counts for Nietzsche as an ultimate complaint. How can improving science’s ability to find truth, and so answering (A), be a benefit if truth itself is of questionable value, along with the whole effort at it? This second kind of argument seems at odds with the first. The charge that science’s truths are bad for us presumes that it can find truths after all. But I think 15 85–​6:2[131] (WP.69, LNp85): “Nihilistic tendency in the natural sciences. (‘Meaninglessness’—​) Causalism, mechanism.” To be sure, perception and the senses will still be crucial evidence regarding drives and wills; TI.iii.3: “We possess science today precisely as far as we have decided to accept the evidence of the senses,—​as [far as] we have learned to sharpen, arm, and think them through to the end.” “Thinking them through” will be to use them to get at perspectives. 16 Here the character called “the conscientious one” attributes science to the motive of fear (including fear of the “beast within”):  “This long ancient fear, finally become refined, spiritual, intellectual—​today, it seems to me, is called:  science.” But Zarathustra replies that he’ll turn this “truth” on its head: courage has been the prehistory of humans. “This courage, finally become refined, spiritual, intellectual, this human courage with eagle’s wings and serpent’s cleverness: this, it seems to me, is today called—​.” At this moment he’s interrupted by the group, who complete the thought with “Zarathustra.” But surely Zarathustra himself was going to say “science.” 17 Cf. 88:14[109].

310  Human Values the two arguments really point to the same lesson, a lesson of reform. Science must be made better at finding truths, and truths that advance and improve us. Science needs to change the kind of truth it aims at to something that is valuable and can be the object of a healthy valuing. We have already noticed this lesson about the will to truth generally in Chapter 7 (§7.5); here the task is to recognize how this point applies to science in particular. Now we’ve seen how Nietzsche was, around the time of Birth of Tragedy, preoccupied with the necessity of limiting or restricting science, as exemplar of the knowledge-​drive.18 So, for example, 72–​3:19[24] (ENp99): “It is not a question of annihilating science but of controlling it.” And 72–​3:19[27] (ENp100): “If we are ever to achieve a culture, unheard-​of artistic forces are needed to break the unrestricted knowledge-​drive, to bring forth a unity once again.” There are topics and sectors that our scrutinizing will to truth must not be unleashed upon, he insists, at the risk of social unhealth. Is this his ambition later as well, to “put science in its place?” But Nietzsche turns away from this truth-​restricting view and never comes back to it. In his so-​called “positivist” period (of Human, All-​too-​Human and Daybreak especially) he turns strongly in favor of science and its project of truth. And although in his later, “mature” works he reintroduces many doubts and challenges to truth and science, these never undercut his deep allegiance to them.19 He upholds this allegiance in opposition to Wagner and what Wagner still represented to him long after their break: romanticism and a merely artistic temperament that turns culpably away from reality. Nietzsche prides himself in his contrasting clear-​headed realism, in his “courage before reality” [TI.x.2]. BGE.230: “To translate human back into nature; . . . to make it the case that human henceforth stands before human as even today, hardened in the discipline of science, he stands before the rest of nature, with unfrightened Oedipus-​ eyes and sealed Odysseus-​ears, deaf to the decoy calls of old metaphysical bird-​catchers, who have all too long been piping to him: ‘you are more! you are higher! you are of different descent!’ ”20 It will be, we’ll see, the sciences of history and psychology that will let us understand human as a piece of nature.

18 In his 1886 preface to BT: “What I had got hold of at that time was something fearsome and dangerous. . . : today I would say that it was the problem of science itself, science grasped for the first time as something problematic, as questionable.” 19 Brobjer [2012] very helpfully surveys Nietzsche’s treatments and mentions of science in his last year (1888); he says that Nietzsche “is overwhelmingly positive to science” [39]. 20 BGE.230 goes on to say that this naturalizing of human “may be a strange and wild task, but it is a task—​who would want to deny it! Why did we choose it, this wild task? Or put differently: ‘why knowledge at all?’—​Everyone will ask us that. And we, pressed this way, we who have asked just this of ourselves a hundred times, we find and found no better answer. . . .” I take the answer to be “that we must.”

Freedom: Science, History, Psychology  311 Nietzsche’s allegiance to truth and science are clear in A.59’s complaint against Christianity, that it robbed our culture of the chance to continue the advances in science in the ancient world. The entire work of the ancient world in vain: I have no words to express my feeling over something so enormous. . . . All the presuppositions for a learned culture, all the scientific methods were already there . . . natural science was on the very best path, together with mathematics and mechanics,—​the factual sense, the last and most valuable of all the senses had schools and traditions that were already centuries old!

Christianity needed to suppress this realism, and Nietzsche thinks it has only slowly been won back. He stands with science against Christianity, metaphysics, romanticism—​so many of his principal targets.21 But what about his diagnosis of science and the will to truth as a branch of morality—​as indeed the “kernel” of the ascetic ideal? We can distinguish two problems here. First there are the ways that “truth” has been valued as a mere means to moral ends distinct from it. For example we’ve seen how this value originated (Nietzsche thinks) as a way to bind us to social norms: prevailing norms were interpreted as truths to which human valuing needed to “correspond.” And science has been steered by metaphysical and psychological suppositions that have moral point. In such ways the will to truth has always served morality. But—​Nietzsche clearly holds—​this service can and should be cast off. It has prevented that will, and science, from getting at the (genuine) truth. It has kept science from applying its method rigorously and thoroughly since moral convictions were always held above it, immune to it. Science is now in process of freeing itself from this service, the better to find out the truth about morality itself. But second and more difficult is the way the value of truth, understood as ultimate, is itself something moral, and ascetic, and even “turned against life.” Here it’s not a matter of a motive “behind” it, which could be cast off, but of an aim intrinsic to the truth-​goal itself. This is the harder problem of science’s asceticism: how it is ascetic “in itself ’ and not merely in its service to morality. I suggest that Nietzsche has two main points here: the former diagnoses the will to truth as regrettably passive, whereas the latter sees it as actively hostile (to life).

21 A.49 calls it “the greatest crime against humanity” when “the presupposition for knowledge is destroyed” by superstitions like “god,” “spirit,” and “soul.”

312  Human Values (a)  Quite apart from any allegiance or subjection to particular norms, science is a will to mirror something external, “the facts,” and thereby a will to obey something other than oneself. This movement of matching is intrinsically suspect for Nietzsche. It is something that should never be primary since obedience and passivity can never be the best and primary case. The essential or healthy will of life is the active and practical effort to work on the world by imposing one’s own character upon it in a way that makes it “one’s own.” So it involves an opposite “direction of fit” than the aim to bring oneself into a “correspondence” with the way things already are. Life’s point is to change the world, not to mirror it. (b)  But science’s will to mirror reality doesn’t merely distract us from a healthy will (to control reality and make it “our own”). It also actively undermines and spoils that healthy will, by exposing the “lies” it always depends on. When science turns its attention to our own projects and values, it discovers the gaps in our justifications for those projects, the inflated and indeed lying claims we make for them and by which we sustain our energies at them. Here it is the sciences of history and psychology that are most dangerous since it is these that expose the real roots of the “human” (agential) values by which we steer. Science’s will—​ embedded in its method—​to question premises and convictions collides with life’s need for such convictions. Notice how this second worry about science attributes a much more active motive to it than does the first complaint. It sees it as an aggressive aim to expose those founding lies. And here I think we see the beginning of Nietzsche’s way to redeem the will to truth from these defects in it. He finds a healthier potential in the will to truth by uncovering a second side to it—​a side it has always had but more rarely shown. This is the way this will to truth is a will to power in its own right, as we began to see in Chapter 7 (§7.5). It’s not merely a will to a passive mirroring, but a will for power and control. This already answers worry (a). Thus science, too, is a strategy for power—​an effort to overcome and “incorporate” the foreign, to bring it under one’s control, to “assimilate” [aneignen] and make it one’s own. In 88:14[142] (WP.423): “The so-​called knowledge-​drive is to be traced back to a drive to assimilate and overpower.”22 This is a quite different diagnosis, we should notice, than the one that links it to morality and the ascetic ideal. And it gives the will to truth a more promising potential, in Nietzsche’s view: as a will to power, it can grow—​both in its capacity for truth and in its ability to “command” in a healthy soul.



22

85–​6:2[7]‌(LNp66): “The spirit that we comprehend—​, we’re not equal to it: we’re superior to it!”

Freedom: Science, History, Psychology  313 It’s when we see science as a will to power that we can recognize its two basic sides—​and here we come to a crucial point that will recur when we turn to the exemplary sciences, history and psychology. Science’s effort to control the world divides into two parts, Nietzsche thinks.23 First there is its will to assimilate the new and unfamiliar to the old and familiar; this is one of his commonest accounts of what “knowing” really consists in.24 It belongs to what BGE.230 calls “the basic will of the spirit”: “to incorporate new ‘experiences,’ to file new things in old files,—​to growth, then; more precisely to the feeling of growth, to the feeling of increased force.” Here we “grow” in a straightforward way: in interpreting a strange and foreign world into our own framework, we align it with ourselves, we make it our own. Here “our own” is precisely “the known”: the stock of beliefs and values we assume and rely on in living. And our will to truth is the effort to assimilate new things into that domain: to extend the scope of “our own.” This effort by “spirit” and science is just an extension of an assimilating that our sense organs already carry out.25 But second, science must pair this “positive” work of assimilation with a contrary will that is rarer and more difficult. This is the will to make the familiar unfamiliar (i.e., to find out that we don’t know the basic things we thought we did and to which we’ve been trying to assimilate the new). This will to identify and question one’s own presuppositions is what Nietzsche calls “intellectual honesty [intellektuelle Rechtschaffenheit]” [88:15[25] (WP.445)].26 Whereas the first task of science is to assimilate the alien to oneself, the second involves making-​alien what had seemed parts of oneself. It is a will to estrange what has so far been one’s own by enforcing a more discriminating standard for one’s own. This critical side to science manifests the way its own will to power is a will to “self-​overcoming.”27 It’s this second, “negative” side of the scientific will to truth that is expressed in its principle of method: to question all convictions. It’s this side that Nietzsche most prizes, and most prides himself in practicing. Already in HH.i.483: “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.” BGE.25: “a more praiseworthy truthfulness may lie in every small question-​mark that you place behind your favorite words and doctrines [Liebworte und Lieblingslehren]. . . .” 23 I’ve been much helped here by Dellinger [2012], which distinguishes these two sides in an exegesis of 86–​7:5[14] (WP.608, LNp108). This note begins: “The development of science dissolves the ‘familiar [Bekannte]’ ever more into an unfamiliar: yet it wills exactly the opposite, and starts from the instinct to lead the unfamiliar back to the familiar.” 24 GS.355:  “what do the people actually understand knowledge to be?  .  .  .  Nothing more than this: something unfamiliar is to be led back to something familiar.” Also 86–​7:5[10] (LNp107). 25 E.g., 84:26[448], 85:38[10] (LNp37–​ 8), 85:40[15] (WP.532, LNp43). 87:9[151] (WP.656, LNp165) finds the deep root of this assimilating in organisms’ will to power. 26 88:14[109] (WP.460): “reverence is the high test of intellectual honesty: but in the entire history of philosophy there is no intellectual honesty.” 27 Pippin [2010, ch.  6] emphasizes the critical eye, the self-​ dissatisfaction crucial to self-​overcoming.

314  Human Values This preference is reflected in Nietzsche’s tendency to associate the first (positive) side of science with fear, but the second (negative) with courage. He has these two aspects of science in mind, we just saw, in Z.iv.15 (“On Science”), with its competing diagnoses—​offered by the sorcerer and Zarathustra respectively—​ of science as due to fear and to courage.28 Too often, at least, we want to assimilate the new because we’re afraid of it. GS.355: “is not our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar . . . ? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know?”29 By contrast the critical side to science requires a pioneering courage: one casts loose from suppositions one had relied upon in a way that Nietzsche images as sea-​goers pushing off from land.30 The preference is also reflected in his view that the first, assimilating move is mainly falsifying, whereas the critical and alienating move gives a crucial truth. In 85:34[252]: “Knowledge: the making-​possible of experience, through . . . the enormous simplifying of the real occurrence: so that there appear to be like and equal things. Knowledge is falsification of the manifold and uncountable into equals, similars, countables.  .  .  . [It involves] the force of assimilation:  which presupposes a will to make something equal to us.” It is the critical turn that uncovers differences that the assimilating move had suppressed. But it’s also this negative side of science that Nietzsche most warns us about. It’s this side that threatens to undermine suppositions we can’t live (well) without; this brings us back to worry (b). This danger is uniquely great today because science is only now escaping morality’s control and overcoming inhibitions that had long tempered this negative side. All convictions now become fair game, which threatens to leave us with none to live by. It threatens to put out of operation that first side of science—​to destroy that stock of “the known” to which it tries to assimilate more and more. Nietzsche’s answer to worry (b), I suggest, is to show how this undermining critique of standing values can serve in a project of growth—​what we might think of as an “addition by subtraction.” This critique can be used in a project to “free” ourselves from values that had always controlled us. This of course is the work of genealogy. And this, I suggest, is the beginning of his answer to the challenge that the scientific will to truth is “anti-​life”: even its negative and critical side is a route to power and growth. It is even our best route to growth, the distinctively human kind of strength, in which we can take justifiable pride. Turned this way, the will 28 See note 16. 29 And again the parallel 86–​7:5[10] (LNp107). 86–​7:7[3]‌: “thinking that distinguishes as consequence of fear and caution through the will to assimilation.” 30 84:25[307]: “Like the sailor on unknown seas.” Z.iv.15 again: “Rather courage [Muth] and adventure and pleasure in uncertainty, in the untried—​courage seems to me the entire prehistory of human.”

Freedom: Science, History, Psychology  315 to truth becomes a path to new power—​even to a new level of power. So, as we saw, EH.p.3: “How much truth a spirit bears, how much truth it dares? that became for me more and more the genuine measure of value.”31 Our challenge is only to pursue this power in a healthy and effective way. It’s by doing this, I suggest, that Nietzsche thinks we can avoid the ascetic and nihilistic dangers he stresses. And this, I propose, is his new notion of “freedom,” to which we turn next.

8.2  Freedom My claim is that Nietzsche thinks science (and the will to truth) can be redeemed by being turned to the project of freedom.32 But of course “freedom” is a long-​ traditional philosophers’ ideal against which he has very many critical things to say. His attacks on the possibility of free will are important parts of his campaign against morality, which he claims relies on the picture of us as free in this way. So by linking science to freedom it may seem that I’ve done it no favor for him. Nietzsche often expresses his negative verdicts on freedom as unqualified denials: freedom or free will is impossible, indeed the very idea—​as positing a causa sui—​is incoherent. In 87:10[57] (WP.786):  “moral judgment in general relates only to one species of intentions and actions, the free. /​But this entire species of intentions and actions is purely imaginary.” These denials are generally not tempered as being only against freedom “in one sense.” Moreover Nietzsche similarly rejects as nonexistent or impossible many of the other things we closely associate with freedom, including in particular responsibility [Verantwortlichkeit]. Already in HH.i.39: “Thereby one arrives at knowledge that the history of moral sensations is the history of an error, the error of responsibility: which rests on the error of freedom of the will.”33 So he seems to lay waste the whole ground around freedom, leaving nothing with which to build a positive account.34 Nevertheless I  think he has such an account and that we only understand those denials by subordinating them to the positive notion.35 A  reliable rule for interpreting Nietzsche, evident by now, is to hear his assertions that “there is no X” as provocative and simplifying statements within a nuanced account 31 Also A.50, EH.iii.BT.2; 85:35[69] (LNp21), 87:10[3]‌(LNp173). 32 On Nietzsche’s treatment of “freedom” see especially the papers collected in Gemes and May [2009]—​which includes my [2009], an early version of this section. 33 For a later critique of “responsibility” see, e.g., TI.vi.7–​8. 34 Some interpreters, Leiter [2002, 87–​101; 2011] most prominently, have taken these negative expressions to be the main or only part to Nietzsche’s position on freedom; they have taken him to be a freedom denier. 35 My account has affinities with that offered by Katsafanas [2016, ch. 9], as I’ll develop in notes as we go.

316  Human Values of what X truly is. Nietzsche doesn’t retire words into purely negative uses. In virtually every case he wants to speak about Xs himself—​to make claims that depend on there being such things. And so in particular for freedom: he tells us what it’s not as a step to the really important point: what it is. His denials apply to freedom as it has been understood, his affirming uses to freedom as he proposes to understand it. Just as Nietzsche’s criticisms of science are meant to reform, not dismiss it, so with the ideal of freedom. He means to take it up from his predecessors, Kant above all, and to improve it—​do better than they—​in two crucial respects. A first way he means to advance this ideal of freedom is by getting at the scientific truth about it—​by “naturalizing” it. We must understand freedom as an ability or behavior of a certain kind of organism, a variety of “life.”36 His predecessors, Kant most notably, attribute freedom to a metaphysical subject severed from its true biological root. Nietzsche treats freedom as “natural” to the extent of finding its beginnings in our animality. As a biological phenomenon, freedom has evolved, within a certain kind of animal, from abilities that were at first merely like those of other animals. And freedom is something evolving still. This means that freedom has a history. It has taken different forms and understood itself differently at different times in the past. It is naïve to think that there is a question of “what freedom is” independently of this history. And it is naïve of interpreters to presume that there is a single “real” question we need to pin down Nietzsche’s views upon.37 Any definition of “freedom” we might rely on in posing this question would have its meaning and authority by and in its place in this history. Nietzsche’s interest is not in determining what freedom “really is’ but in understanding what it (at various points) has been and proposing what it should become. This naturalizing story about freedom will also, necessarily, be about “freedom”—​that is, about an idea or notion of freedom. As freedom has evolved in this (kind of) animal, it has done so in tandem with a conception this animal has had of itself as free. And Nietzsche is at least as much interested in this idea—​and aim and value—​of freedom as he is in freedom itself. For indeed “it is unspeakably more important what things are called than what they are” [GS.58].38 Or, as we might also put it, a central part of what freedom is, is our 36 In this his account is comparable to Dennett’s well-​known one in his [2003]. 37 This presumption is too common in interpretations of Nietzsche on freedom. The failure to take account of freedom’s historical character in his view damages nearly all readings of it. May [2009] is an interesting exception: he makes history relevant not (as I do) by treating freedom itself (that intertwined idea and practice) as historical, but by viewing it as (essentially, fixedly) requiring that the self “affirms itself as a product of its history”—​which for us today means “coming to grips with nihilism.” Constâncio [2012] is another exception; he argues that Nietzsche “tries to conceptualise freedom genealogically.” 38 GS.58 goes on to describe how the “reputation, name, and appearance,” originally an error thrown over the thing, “has, through belief in it and its growth from generation to generation, gradually grown onto and into the thing and has become its very body.”

Freedom: Science, History, Psychology  317 evolving use of this term “freedom.” This point greatly complicates the logic of his discussion. In this naturalizing account we might identify freedom as a certain skill or capacity, a dunamis, passed on from organism to organism as an instinct or habit. But this capacity does not have a stable character or essence. Rather it has evolved, by biological and social processes, through different forms in different historical settings. And in each case the skill involves or includes a certain view of itself, an idea of what is being done, of what this freedom is that it’s achieving. The skill involves, that is, a certain perspective—​most importantly a perspective on itself—​of what it is and is trying to be.39 So freedom is a skill aimed at an idea of freedom. We need to track the evolution of skill and idea in tandem. One crucial question will be to what extent the skill’s perspective on itself is true. As we practice freedom, do we conceive ourselves to be free in the very way we are? Nietzsche’s second main aim in revising the ideal of freedom is to de-​moralize it. The naturalizing study reveals that this practice(-​and-​concept) has been designed to socialize us, to make us better herd animals. In recent millennia it has done so by making people moral (this connection is expressed revealingly in Kant). Nietzsche gives reasons for resisting and refusing this moral ideal. He promotes a personal and also a social project to his readers, to change the practice to serve ends he advocates in place of morality’s. So what we need is to revise freedom for a different function, to “exapt” it.40 In “de-​ moralizing” freedom Nietzsche’s point is not, then, to render it valuatively neutral. The aim isn’t to view freedom solely in a naturalistic or scientific spirit, to strip the practice or concept of all valuative implications whatsoever. Instead, one strips one’s values of those moral tendencies but keeps them as one’s values. Freedom remains an ideal—​is indeed a better ideal by the scrubbing away of its moral aspects. Nietzsche means to sustain and indeed revitalize the practice of pursuing and desiring freedom. Nietzsche’s story about freedom has—​I will argue—​three principal phases or stages. This tripartite schema is typical for him; we’ve seen it often before. The three kinds of freedom map onto his schema of animal-​human-​superhuman. Each kind of freedom is a certain capacity or skill which involves, as we’ve seen, a certain idea of itself, of itself as “free.”

39 GS.353 says that founders of religions invent both a practice and an interpretation that gives this practice highest value. 40 I treat Nietzsche’s recognition of exaptation in Nietzsche’s New Darwinism [44–​5].

318  Human Values

8.2.1  Animal freedom as drive-​unity It’s inevitable that freedom should be a deep-​rooted value for Nietzsche, given his guiding notion of will to power. All living things, willing their own power or growth, attempt to subordinate other wills and thereby to extend their scope. And in consequence they experience as confinement and indeed enslavement the reciprocal efforts of other wills to subordinate them. When forced to obey other wills, living things feel themselves unfree. And these points apply as well to each of the drives that make up a living thing. Freedom, then, is an implicit aim in all organisms and drives—​something they want, in wanting power. They compete for control and for the freedom in commanding rather than obeying competitors. So valuing freedom begins, as a value, in our animality—​in our condition simply as (an instance of) “life.” An organism feels this freedom as achieved in its feeling of power, as it commands other forces for its ends. It feels itself free in the “affect of command.” So BGE.19: “the will . . . is above all also an affect: that affect of command. What is called freedom of the will is essentially a feeling of superiority over the one who must obey: ‘I am free, he must obey’—​this consciousness is present in every will.”41 And 85:34[250] (LNp16): “Free: means ‘not pushed and shoved, without a feeling of compulsion’ ”; “it is the feeling of our More of force that we call ‘freedom of the will,’ the consciousness that our force compels in relation to a force which is compelled.”42 This simplest capacity of freedom already has an idea of itself, and this idea is already partly false, Nietzsche thinks. For this commanding will sees only how it aims, not how its aiming has been aimed; it looks only ahead. So it has the beginnings of the metaphysical faith in “freedom of the will.” HH.i.18: “We are hungry, but originally do not think that the organism wills to sustain itself, but that feeling seems to make itself valid without cause or purpose, it isolates itself and considers itself voluntary [willkürlich]. Thus: belief in freedom of the will is an original error of everything organic.” So this aim at freedom is present already in individual drives. But it takes a more complex form at the level of the organism, understood as a synthesis of many drives. Chapter 3 (§3.4) showed how this synthesis is constituted by these drives’ relations of command and obedience to one another. These pull the drives together into one thing that pursues its own power and growth by enforcing and 41 Drafted in 85:38[8]‌(LNp36). Earlier, 84:25[436]:  “ ‘Freedom of the will’ is the ‘superiority-​ feeling of the commander’ in relation to the obeyer: ‘I am free and that one must obey.’ ” 85–​6:1[33] (WP.720, LNp57): “human’s most terrible and basic desire, his drive for power,—​one calls this drive ‘freedom.’ ” GM.ii.18 refers to “that instinct for freedom (spoken in my language: the will to power).” 42 80:3[48] suggests that “the feeling of freedom of the will” arises when we act from such an “overflow of force” that the action’s goal seems arbitrary: one doesn’t feel a “slave” to that goal.

Freedom: Science, History, Psychology  319 sustaining the particular balance among the drives that makes it up. Thus the organism is a system of drives that regulates itself. It pursues a power that begins with control of internal forces and only then controls external ones. Here we see the relevance to freedom. This way in which the synthetic will is turned not just outward but also inward gives its aim at “freedom” a new side: it is also the ability to control its own parts—​to sustain its unified project against internal disrupters. In 85–​6:1[44] (LNp57): “Obedience to one’s own will one does not call compulsion: for there is pleasure in it. That you command yourself, that is called ‘freedom of the will.’ ” For a synthetic will freedom thus lies in unity: in inducing one’s drives or efforts to collaborate. The value of this kind of freedom is already present in the body as a system of drives—​and will be amended in the context of human agency. It is by no means all of Nietzschean freedom, however, as some interpreters have suggested.43 It’s important to recall (again from Chapter  3 [§3.4]) that Nietzsche takes drives to “synthesize” with one another in a strong sense: so as to form a single intentional space. To command and obey one another, drives need to understand one another. The system of drives’ relations of command and obedience, in a given organism, holds together all their viewpoints and feels their different successes and failures all together. And this complicates the feeling of freedom, that “affect of command.” It means that this affect involves not just the feeling of command, but the simultaneous feeling of obeying.44 The organism experiences itself at once as both commander and obeyer. Again BGE.19: “ ‘Freedom of the will’—​that is the expression for the complex state of delight of the willer [Wollenden], who commands and at the same time counts himself one with the executor of the order.” Earlier: “we . . . at the same time are the commanding and the obeying, and as the obeying we know the feelings of constraint, impulsion, pressure, resistance, motion.”45 The synthetic feeling of such internal control or self-​mastery is the organism’s fuller kind of freedom.

8.2.2  Human freedom as agency We’ve already seen (in Chapter 5 [§5.3]) how human becomes human by conceiving itself to be a subject and agent. Now we add how this new organization

43 Katsafanas [2016, ch. 7] argues against such analyses of (Nietzschean) freedom as unity. I am in broad agreement with him here, though I prefer to see unity as a form or aspect of freedom. 44 So the organism experiences itself as constraining one aim to suit another, as when a cat needs to eat in an uncomfortable posture and is at once both gratified and bothered. See especially BGE.19. 45 In the draft for this, 85:38[8]‌(LNp36): “A human who wills—​commands a something in himself which obeys, or which he believes will obey. . . . [I]n a given case we are simultaneously the commanders and the obeyers, and as obeyers know the feelings of resisting.”

320  Human Values involves a new kind of freedom—​which is crucially a new way of thinking oneself free. It amends that “internal” freedom that we’ve seen lies in control of the drives: in animal this is carried out by the drive-​synthesis, but in human the role is transferred to (something that conceives itself as) the agent. The agent’s conception of itself as free is a key feature of this new entity. Human’s self-​conception as agent involves identifying itself as the persisting doer of all the body’s deeds. But this identification is not a mere theoretical posit; it lies in the commitments that human takes on to fulfill its promises.46 Above all it lies in human’s overall promise to live by the social rules. Human can only make this promise because it does have the ability to “remember the rules” and to control, in the heat of the moment, strong drives that might break them. And this capacity of agency to control drives to honor commitments is another kind of power and self-​mastery, and hence another kind of freedom. In the animal unity lies in a balance of power among the drives—​an equilibrium that maintains itself against excesses in individual drives. It’s this drive-​ synthesis that controls and that enjoys the feeling of freedom in its affect of command. But human imposes that different kind of unity on its drives. So it feels its freedom not in a controlling balance of the drives, but in a viewpoint—​its agency—​that purports to step back from all of them and to control them from an independent stance. Freedom is now taken to lie in the unity achieved by this agential control.47 We’ve seen (again in Chapter 5) that Nietzsche thinks there’s something real in this agency and in its feeling of freedom. But this truth is mixed up with certain lies that are crucial to human’s conception of itself as subject and agent. Nietzsche’s critiques of this agential self-​conception are also denials that it is really as free as it takes itself to be. Nietzsche affirms the power and freedom in agency in his account of the sovereign individual in GM.ii.2. Here are phrases that describe this agential control of the drives: “a true consciousness of power and freedom”; “this lord of the free will”; “this mastery over himself also necessarily brings with it mastery over circumstances, over nature and all shorter-​willed and more unreliable creatures”; “[t]‌he ‘free’ human being, the possessor of a long, unbreakable will”; “this power over oneself and fate” [GM.ii.2]. So Nietzsche himself sees reasons to think that a distinctive new power is here, before and without which we were “slaves of momentary affect and desire” [GM.ii.3].48 46 Again, see Chapter 5 (§5.3) on the special role of promising in the “genealogy of the agent.” 47 We might see this as Nietzsche’s account of the “second-​order standpoint” Frankfurt [1971] presents in his analysis of “person.” It’s our felt ability to “step back” from the drives so as to decide which to enact. 48 Katsafanas presents well [2016, 223–​4] the admiration Nietzsche expresses for this agential power in his account of the “sovereign individual” in GM.ii.2 and of the power of memory in GM.ii generally.

Freedom: Science, History, Psychology  321 Yet Nietzsche thinks this feeling of freedom is illusory in several respects. First, he attacks a metaphysical self-​conception embedded in our agency. It takes itself to be a simple and abiding substance, the subject and haver of consciousness, quite a separate thing from the drives. It fails to see that it is itself another drive-​like disposition inserted among the “animal” drives and competing with them. It commands them in ways and at moments, but it also obeys and is steered by them. It interacts with them “on their level”: its efficacy runs beneath the conscious thoughts and motives that are all it sees of itself. Second, he rejects its claim to be an uncaused cause. We’ve seen how this claim was already implicit in the drive’s much simpler freedom. But agency has reasons to make it explicit and official. It takes itself to be able (free) not only to restrain particular drives—​which it often is—​but to choose and will in complete independence from them all. This illusion both enspirits it in its struggle against drives and prepares it to feel guilty wherever it fails. So the idea of free will is an ally of bad conscience, which is the distinctive moral form of social control through values.49 It harnesses the aggressive impulses against themselves: it sublimates them into a cruel blaming of the self whenever any of these impulses manages to act outwardly. But worst of all is a third point: agency secretly serves foreign interests. Agency chiefly expresses not my individual interests, but social and generic ones. So all its I-​ing is a kind of sham, implanted in the interests of taming and herding me. In this respect my drives are really more “me” than my conscious thinking and choosing. Agency has been designed as an enemy of these drives. So the idea of agency’s freedom conceals its own main function: to conform the individual to social rules and values. The agent prides itself on its autonomy but is all the while choosing according to the social script. Nevertheless there are exceptions. Nietzsche’s heroes from the past are those who managed to forge a synthesis of the two kinds of freedom—​freedom in the drives, freedom in agency. In 83:7[52]: “The freest act is that in which our own strongest, most finely practiced nature springs forth, and in such a way that at the same time our intellect shows its directing hand.” For this synthesis, the unifying impetus must come out of the drives, and as agents we must wait and watch for a dominating drive to gel. EH.ii.9:  “The whole surface of consciousness—​consciousness is a surface—​has to be kept clean from all of the great imperatives. . . . In the mean time, the organizing, governing ‘idea’ grows and grows in the depths,—​it begins to command.” Once this drive emerges, conscious agency should give itself over to it. 49 EH.iv.8: “The concept of ‘sin’ invented along with the associated instrument of torture, the concept of ‘free will,’ in order to confuse the instincts, in order to make mistrust of the instincts second nature!” Also TI.vi.7.

322  Human Values Goethe is Nietzsche’s exemplar of this unity, this double freedom. TI.ix.49: “What he willed was totality; he fought against the separation of reason, sensibility, feeling, will. . . . Goethe conceived of a strong, highly educated, self-​ respecting person, skilled in all things physical and able to keep himself in check, who could dare to allow himself the entire expanse and wealth of naturalness, who is strong enough for this freedom.”50 Some interpreters have taken this to be Nietzsche’s idea of freedom.51

8.2.3  Nietzschean freedom by genealogy We have by now a pretty complicated picture of freedom before us. Yet I think it’s still incomplete: there’s a third kind of freedom that Nietzsche thinks is his main innovation. Goethe achieved that double freedom, that confluence of drives and agency, better than anyone, and Nietzsche highly admires Goethe. But he also aspires, I think, to a kind of freedom that even Goethe didn’t have.52 We might see this as a higher order control: the ability to “step back” not just from the drives, but from that second-​order standpoint involved in agency. One discovers how agency itself has been a form of control; one ascends to a position that decides in the light of what agency really is. This higher freedom depends on knowing what agency is—​which depends on science and genealogy.53 The greatest individuals of the past never understood their own values. They never knew what values are, how they depend on valuings, nor how they’ve been shaped by historical and psychological processes. Their own values can only be for them what they must take for granted. Their conscience must count as ultimate judge for them since they’ve no way to step back from it—​no access to an external stance from which to view it. By this ignorance these greatest individuals were at the mercy of the values they absorbed; they were made and used for 50 87:9[139] (WP.933, LNp163): “the ‘great human’ is great through the freedom of play of his desires and through the yet greater power that knows how to press these magnificent monsters into service.” 51 Gemes [2009b] presents this as Nietzsche’s idea of “agency free will.” Katsafanas [2016, ch. 7] interprets Nietzschean unity to lie in a certain “harmony” between one’s reflective and unreflective aspects but argues that this unity is Nietzsche’s criterion not for freedom but for action (vs. mere behavior). Again I prefer to say that such unity is one form of freedom for Nietzsche, though one he thinks is being outgrown as human becomes able to question its agency and morality. 52 EH.iii.Z.6 says that “a Goethe, a Shakespeare, would not know how to breathe for a second in this incredible passion and height” of Zarathustra. 53 I presented a similar account of “self-​selection” as “freedom through genealogy” in Nietzsche’s New Darwinism [2004, ch. 2 §§4–​5]. Katsafanas develops a related view in [2016, ch. 9]: “Nietzschean freedom is self-​ determination,” and “genuine self-​ determination requires self-​ understanding,” followed by assessment by the standard of will to power [255]. One significant difference from Katsafanas, I  think, is my view that Nietzsche sees freedom itself as something historical and as rooted in aims in drives and animals.

Freedom: Science, History, Psychology  323 the functions for which those values were designed. Steered and commanded by forces they couldn’t see working on them, they obeyed and were unfree without knowing it. It’s here that Nietzsche proposes a new kind of freedom—​a distinctively Nietzschean freedom that he thinks is his unique achievement and contribution. Although the agential freedom promoted by Kant (et al.) does wield a real power, which it enjoys as “freedom” in its affect of command, it rests on a metaphysical misconception of itself as the “uncaused cause” of its deeds. This serves precisely to conceal the forces and interests that do stand behind its choices. Since these sources lie both in its society’s past and in its own unconscious drives, they are not readily visible to the agent. We’re well aware of some ways of being (or not being) free from control by outside forces: political freedom, economic freedom, religious freedom. We’re also alert to ways of being controlled by inner forces such as desires and emotions. But we have largely overlooked, Nietzsche thinks, another kind of control we are subject to, through our values. We experience our own choice as the determining and responsible factor in our thinking and acting, but in fact this choice—​where it is effective at all—​merely executes the aim or will embedded in the norms and values by which we choose. GS.335: “Your judgment ‘that is right’ has a prehistory in your drives, inclinations, aversions, experiences, and what you have not experienced; you have to ask ‘how did it emerge there?’ and then also, ‘what is really driving me to listen to it?’ ”54 Values—​in particular our moral values—​developed in historical processes stretching back long before us; we merely grow up into them. And the main function that those processes have shaped these values to serve is to socialize and “herd” us, in particular by suppressing our drives. Thus in our struggle against the drives we are trying to wrest freedom from the wrong oppressor. We have missed how our agency is itself an “agent for” foreign forces, how it controls the drives for (on behalf of) those forces. Our agency was designed to bind us to moral norms. The values this agency steers by express this overall intent, as well as the calcified interests of the particular herds, in various past ages, that successively redesigned these values to favor their own types.55 Nietzsche announces his new idea of freedom in his account of the “free spirit.” Already in HH.i.225: “what characterizes the free spirit is . . . that he has liberated himself from tradition”; “he demands reasons, the rest demand faith.” GS.297:  “the acquired good conscience accompanying hostility toward what 54 GS.57: “You still carry around with you the valuations of things that have their origin in the passions and loves of earlier centuries!” 55 80:3[159]: the sway of religion is the sway of chance [Zufall], in letting the chance facts “that we were born in this land and have these humans around us, to have become a law over us and to take away spirit, which seeks only the individual best.”

324  Human Values is familiar, traditional, hallowed . . . constitutes what is really great, new, and amazing in our culture; it is the step of all steps of the freed spirit.” The free spirit is free from convictions [Überzeugungen].56 A.54: “Convictions are prisons.” In 86:2[206] (WP.789, LNp99): “What a feeling of freedom it is to experience, as we freed spirits experience, that we are not harnessed up to a system of ‘ends!’ ”57 It is genealogy that exposes these controlling forces and makes this new freedom possible.58 And here we come back to the positive use of science that we began to look at in §8.1. Genealogy is, very roughly, anthropology done in the light of Nietzsche’s biological, neo-​Darwinian lessons. He thinks that this genealogy, carried out by the revised sciences of history and psychology, will at last allow us to understand the agential capacity that has made us human and the values by which this agency has steered. Such genealogy is the highest achievement of the will to truth because it penetrates to the most hidden, most difficult, and most important truths—​the facts about why our values are as they are. As such it is also the most dangerous form of that will. It is powerfully ascetic: it “cuts into life” by exposing that prehistory of our values—​all the ways they were shaped by forces and interests before us. As we diagnose ourselves in this way and understand the forces that made these values, we chill or enervate them as never before.59 We step out of our (projective) valuing and expose it to a (retrospective) look that flattens and disenchants it. This is why genealogy can be a route to nihilism, alienating us from our values, one after another. But Nietzsche claims we can turn this dangerous instrument to a positive purpose, a purpose rooted in the abiding core of our will and drives. There’s a way we can put genealogy to work within a life-​plan that promises us a superior kind of power and accomplishment. We can use genealogy to make ourselves stronger by taking an increasing control over the values and practices built into

56 GS.347: “When a human comes to the basic conviction that he must be commanded, he becomes ‘a believer’; conversely one could think of a pleasure and force of self-​determination, a freedom of willing, by which a spirit takes leave of every belief and every wish for certainty. . . .” 57 84:25[484]: “The way of freedom. /​—​To sever oneself from one’s past (against fatherland, faith, parents, comrades /​—i​ ntercourse with outcasts of every kind (in history and society) /​—​overturning the most revered, affirming the most forbidden. . . .” 58 It should be noted that Nietzsche does not often use the word Genealogie, even in the work in whose title it occurs. Schuringa [2014] points this out and rebuts “the impression, created by interpreters across philosophical traditions, that Nietzsche introduced a novel approach called ‘genealogy’ into philosophy”; rather, Nietzsche takes himself to be doing “what historians have been doing all along, insofar as they have practiced their craft ‘correctly.’ ” I’ll return to Schuringa’s account of Nietzschean “history” in §8.3. But I disagree regarding the novelty Nietzsche claims for himself: he thinks he is using history for a purpose no one had before and that this purpose requires that history’s method be revised in order to carry it out. “Genealogy” is a convenient term for this new use. 59 See HH.i.34 for an early statement on how discovering how our values are rooted in untruth results in one’s “finding his present motives, such as that of honor, absurd, and setting mockery and contempt against the passions which reach out to the future and to a happiness in it.”

Freedom: Science, History, Psychology  325 us by social-​historical processes. So we make it serve our deepest aim at power and control, which amounts, as we saw in Chapter 7 (§7.5), to “healing” this will to truth.60 By exposing how other forces have made us, genealogy gives us the chance to work, prospectively, toward a kind of control that was never possible before. We can act on these parts and constituents of ourselves for the first time knowingly—​ with an understanding of why we have them and what they are doing (have been aimed to do) in us. By genealogy, we can judge those designed-​in purposes of our ways of thinking and acting—​and decide whether we favor those purposes. And if we don’t favor them, we can try, at least, to redesign those thoughts and acts for different ends.61 We can try, as Nietzsche often urges us, to reconfigure them so that they suit our individual physiologies—​the peculiar mixture of animal drives at the bottom of each of us. So genealogy is indispensable for the revaluation of our values that Nietzsche has further in mind: a revaluation in awareness of the wills embedded in these values. GM.p.6: “we need a critique of moral values, for once the value of these values is itself to be put in question—​and for this we need a knowledge [Kenntniss] of the conditions and circumstances out of which they have grown, under which they have developed and shifted.” To be sure, the genealogical insight into the origin of our values is only a preparation for revaluing them. Nietzsche stresses the difference between these tasks.62 Revaluing values will need to deploy some criterion for assessing them, a criterion that science can’t give. Nevertheless genealogy is an indispensable preliminary. As we’ve seen, it does two main things. First, it gives insight into the origins of our values and thereby into their inbuilt functions and tendencies. The revaluation will then assess them in the light of these facts. And second, genealogy has that chilling or distancing effect. It helps to put these values “out of play” within one—​to step one back to an external vantage point from which assessment is possible. It begins to open the affective distance from these values, needed also for genuine revaluation of them.63 This detachment is the freedom that makes a revaluation feasible. 60 GS.347 begins by saying that the extent to which someone needs “faith” to flourish is “a measure of the degree of his strength” and concludes that “a delight and force of self-​determination, a freedom of the will is thinkable, in which a spirit takes leave of every faith [Glauben], of every wish for certainty.” 61 85–​6:2[131] (LNp86): “One can get behind the origin of this kind of interpretation [of oneself as evil]; one can make the attempt in this way to slowly free oneself from the deep-​rooted compulsion to interpret morally.” 62 85–​6:2[131] (LNp86) says that the belief that finding out the source of values amounts to critique itself rests on a moral supposition that something with immoral origins must be bad. 63 GS.380: “ ‘Thoughts about moral prejudices,’ if they are not to be prejudices about prejudices, presuppose a position outside morality, some point beyond good and evil to which one has to rise, climb, or fly. . . . One has to be very light to drive one’s will to knowledge into such a distance and, as

326  Human Values So 85–​6:2[189] (WP.254, LNp95): “The question about the source [Herkunft] of our valuations and tables of goods does not at all coincide with the critique of them, as is so often believed: certain as it is that the insight into any pudendo origo brings with it for [our] feelings a diminution of value of the thing that so arose, and prepares a critical mood and bearing against it.” And GS.335: “The insight into how in general moral judgments ever arose would spoil these emotional words [‘duty’ and ‘conscience’] for you.” I have spoken of this diagnosis of values and agency as something each “free spirit” is to do for itself. But Nietzsche has in mind that these personal efforts will be cumulative, will together build a new practice and idea of freedom. So he sometimes speaks of this revaluation as carried out at the social or even species level. EH.iii.D.2: “My task, preparing for humanity’s moment of highest self-​ reflection, a great noon when it will look back and look out, when it will escape from the mastery by chance and priests and for the first time pose the questions of why? and what for? as a whole.”64 Elsewhere however he anticipates a single transformative individual—​as in his great peroration in GM.ii.24:  “this bell-​ stroke of noon and the great decision, that makes the will free again, that gives back to the earth its goal and to human its hope; this antichrist and antinihilist; this conqueror of god and of the nothing—​he must one day come. . . .” This then, I suggest, is Nietzsche’s full conception of freedom. We might sum it up with the slogan: freedom is not, it becomes. It must be studied as a long cultural process, within which we now find ourselves to stand at a certain point. Most broadly, freedom is an ability—​with a linked idea of itself—​that has been built very gradually through human history and in such a way that earlier stages are layered beneath more recent ones. To say what freedom “is” we must tell this history and also show how this history is now embodied in us, in a stratified capacity that works in our drives, in our agency, and now also in our genealogical insight into that agency. Freedom now means what this history has shaped it to mean. But it is still becoming, and we can participate in advancing it. Nietzsche argues that with this last step freedom really accomplishes much of what it had claimed to do in agential freedom—​it makes one sovereign and an individual, in senses not yet really true so long as our agency failed to diagnose how its own taming and moralizing design made it work in the interests of foreign forces. Only

it were, beyond one’s time; to create for oneself eyes to survey millennia and, moreover, clear skies in these eyes.” 64 EH.iv.1:  “Revaluation of all values:  that is my formula for an act of humanity’s highest self-​ reflection, an act that has become flesh and genius in me.”

Freedom: Science, History, Psychology  327 genealogy lets us understand the design of the values and powers we have taken for granted, opening the way to the new and more adequate freedom Nietzsche commends to us. The two Wissenschaften Nietzsche deploys for genealogy are history and psychology, and we turn next to see why they’re needed for this work and how he adapts them for it. So we see how the lessons from his critique of science, introduced in §8.1, get applied in these two cases. And we see how it is that in these two revised sciences, “the truth will set us free.”

8.3  History Nietzsche’s views on history undergo some striking shifts, and it will be useful to trace this development, the better to see how it culminates in the discovery of a genealogical use that redeems the discipline for him.65 We saw in Chapter 4 (§4.2) Nietzsche’s more general reservations and anxieties over the retrospective stance, which I called his “problem of the past.” His worries over history express this broader concern, which he resolves by turning history to that new use. This new use is, of course, liberatory. History’s main task is to expose the forces and interests that have made our values—​so equipping us to make genuine choices about them. So it has that practical purpose, but this purpose requires getting right what those forces and interests are. We can only free ourselves from what really does control us. Thus this science won’t sacrifice truth for its practical end. But it will have an eye for truths of a particular sort: truths about past factors that “command” us now, in ways we don’t see. History will expose particular “implicit biases,” which operate—​Nietzsche stresses just as our contemporary literature does—​below the level of our explicit intentions and notice. History, as a science, will adapt its method to suit that main task in ways we must see. What this new historical science accomplishes is freedom. But this freedom is itself to be understood—​as we saw in §8.2—​by this science. That is, freedom is itself “something historical.” It is, for us, too, a value, but this now means (we now see) that it is really a valued; it is not something “in itself ” but “merely” the object of a valuing. This valuing, moreover, is itself a historical practice. It has the depth in each of us of such a practice. There are different “meanings” and valuings of freedom embedded in us at different depths by our incorporation of those historical practices. So it is history that lets us understand the very value of freedom for which we practice that science. We must keep in mind this

65 See on this topic the work of Jensen [2013] and [2016]. I’ve also been much helped by Schuringa [2012a] and [2014]. See Brobjer [2008] and Emden [2008] on Nietzsche’s shifting view of history.

328  Human Values surprising interinvolvement (mutual determination) of history and freedom as we proceed. First a technical point. Nietzsche uses two terms that are usually translated “history”: Geschichte and Historie. These terms tend to express either (or both) of two distinctions. First there’s the distinction between a past process [Geschichte] and an interpretation or recounting of that process [Historie]. Then there’s the distinction between a more informal or folkloric recounting [Geschichte again] and a scientific or disciplinary study of the process [Historie]. Nietzsche’s uses of the terms often express these distinctions—​but also often ignore them. Our main interest here is in his assessments of the wissenschaftlich study of the past, which he usually calls Historie. In translations I’ll render both with “history” but mark the second by italicizing its first letter: so “history” for Historie (or “history” when the whole word is italicized).

8.3.1  Nietzsche’s path from UM.ii Let’s start by looking at Nietzsche’s early doubts against history, expressed mainly in On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life (UM.ii).66 (Also very relevant are the Nachlass notes from 1872–​73.67 The doubts are also related to the critique of Socrates in the still-​earlier Birth of Tragedy.) As he puts the point of UM.ii much later in Ecce Homo: “In this essay the ‘historical sense [historische Sinn]’ that this century is so proud of is recognized for the first time as a disease, as a typical sign of decay” [EH.iii.UM.1].68 And as he warns in the essay’s Forward: “there is a degree of pursuing and esteeming history by which life becomes stunted and degenerate.” I think there are two features of history that stand out as problematic for Nietzsche: its focus on the past and its effort at a detached and objective truth. It is an unrecognized puzzle about this essay just why he so tightly connects these points. Both features make history potentially damaging to those who “have too much” of it. Nietzsche’s eventual idea of history as a science for diagnosing present bias will give him answers to both doubts. It’s the unhealthiness of remembering the past that’s to the forefront at the start of UM.ii.1. Animals “live unhistorically,” by living only in the present,

66 See Jensen [2008] on the essay’s context in then-​current debates about philology and history. 67 These appear in KSA.7; many are translated in P&T. 68 In the 1886 preface to HH.ii Nietzsche says that “what I  had to say [in UM.ii] against the ‘historical sickness’ I said as one who had slowly, laboriously learned to recover from it and was not at all willing henceforth to renounce ‘history’ because he had once suffered from it” [HH.ii.p.1]. He claims that the views expressed in UM.ii are to be “dated back” even before the period in which he wrote BT.

Freedom: Science, History, Psychology  329 whereas we humans “cannot learn to forget but cling relentlessly to the past.” Here “historical” applies to any (intentional) relation to the past, including to the organism’s own: to be historical is just to be retrospective. This broad use of the term is clear in Nietzsche’s statement of the problem: “there is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of the historical sense, which is harmful and ultimately fatal to the living thing, whether a human or a people or a culture.” Hence we need to determine “the boundary at which the past has to be forgotten.” As UM.ii.1 continues Nietzsche shifts focus from the retrospective attitude (memory) in general to an objective or scientific stance toward the past. Increasingly this is his referent with “history” (both Historie and Geschichte), and he dwells on how this science or knowledge is in tension with “life.” “A historical phenomenon, known purely and completely and resolved into a phenomenon of knowledge, is, for him who has perceived it, dead.” “History thought as pure science and become sovereign, would be for humanity a kind of conclusion of life and a settling of accounts with it.” The limit to be imposed on history involves seeing that it never becomes a “pure” science like mathematics. UM.ii.2–​3 turn to the positive uses of history, which are famously sorted into the monumental, antiquarian, and critical; I’ll return to these shortly. But already in UM.ii.4 Nietzsche returns to the disadvantages, stemming now from “the demand that history should be a science.” The problem is that we are unable to “digest” or “incorporate” these “stones of knowledge” into a successful way of life. And in UM.ii.5 he announces that “the surfeit of an age in history seems to me to be hostile and dangerous to life in five respects”; he elaborates these in this and the following four sections. Two points in this critique of history seem to me of particular importance. First is the idea that an objective self-​understanding exposes illusions without which one cannot live. The point is developed especially in UM.ii.7:  a thing “ceases to live when it is dissected completely, and lives a painful and morbid life when one begins to practise historical dissection upon it.” For living things require “an atmosphere around them, a mysterious misty vapor”; to mature they need an “enveloping illusion.” Second is the lesson that to protect life from such undermining some “restraint” or “limit” needs to be imposed on our scientific self-​understanding. This idea is extremely common in Nietzsche’s writings at this time.69 UM.ii.10 says that “the antidote to the historical is called—​the unhistorical and the superhistorical,” of which the former is “the art and strength of forgetting and of enclosing oneself within a bounded horizon [begrenzten Horizont].” But it remains unclear just what form he envisions this boundary taking. 69 The Nachlass notes collected in P&T often warn against the “unrestricted knowledge-​drive,” and stress the necessity to “control” or “limit” it.

330  Human Values The dominant tenor of the essay’s treatment of history is negative, but there are the three positive uses discussed in UM.ii.2–​3.70 Of these it is the third, critical history, that is closest to the genealogical use he has for history in his maturity—​although the monumental and antiquarian forms of history also find echoes there.71 UM.ii’s treatment of critical history is very brief; Schuringa says [2012a 46] that Nietzsche’s notebooks show that it was an “afterthought,” “tacked onto the end” of ii.3. But it points the direction in which he will go. Critical history’s role is to “serve life” by “breaking up and dissolving a past” [UM.ii.3]. Subjected to this critical view, “every past is worthy [werth] of being condemned—​since  .  .  .  in [all human things] human violence [Gewalt] and weakness have always been powerful.” Here is his account how this works: Since we are just the results of earlier generations, we are also the results of their confusions [Verwirrungen], passions and errors, indeed crimes; it is not possible to detach oneself fully from this chain. If we condemn these confusions and consider ourselves relieved of them, this does not alter the fact that we stem from them. In the best case we bring into conflict the inherited, ancestral nature and our knowledge, and by a struggle of a new strict discipline against the old inborn heritage, we inplant a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that the first nature withers away.

Such change is dangerous, he continues, “because second natures are usually weaker than first.” Still, we can be reassured by knowing that “this first nature was once a second nature and that every victorious second nature will become a first” [still UM.ii.3]. Some interpreters have identified UM.ii’s idea of critical history with his later use of genealogy, but there is still a large gap between them. Most importantly, in UM it is not history “as a science” that is to carry out this critical work (nor the monumental or antiquarian tasks). To be sure Nietzsche speaks of “knowledge [Erkenntnis]” as confronting the criticized past. But he has as yet no developed idea of a method that critical history can use to secure such knowledge. He has first to decide that the history he values is a science, and then gradually to develop the method and working hypotheses for this science. This involves elaborating an account of the field of entities this science treats—​an account that

70 Schuringa points out [2012a, 39] that Nietzsche treats both advantages and disadvantages in each of these three kinds of history. Nevertheless it’s here we find the essay’s positive points. 71 Monumental history plucks exemplars of greatness out of the past to inspire the present, with little interest in their historical context or in historical development. Antiquarian history shows ways that the present is the heir of, and continuous with, great past achievements, which can buoy it up now. It’s clear enough that Nietzsche continues to make both kinds of use of history in his maturity; we see them in his relations to Goethe and to Greek culture, respectively.

Freedom: Science, History, Psychology  331 locates these entities with respect to those treated by other sciences, which he likewise reconceives. The central ideas in this account are those of will to power and values. The crucial shift, then, is in his view of science since this sets under way his development of history as a science. As we saw in §8.1, Nietzsche enters what is often called his “positivist” period, represented especially by Human, All-​too-​ Human [HH.i], along with the two further works later incorporated into it, Mixed Opinions and Maxims [HH.ii] and The Wanderer and His Shadow [HH.iii]. He blames his earlier hostility to science on Wagner’s tempting him away from himself, into a romanticism that undervalues truth. He now ranks science above art, which he links to religion.72 In 83:16[23]: “Behind my first period grins the face of Jesuitism: I mean: the conscious holding-​fast to illusion and the forcible incorporation of this as basis of culture.” After the break he finds his identity in an allegiance to truth and only gradually reintroduces the illusion-​making artistic viewpoint, now as subordinate to that allegiance. When he eventually readopts the critique of objectivity from UM.ii, it is within the scope of that commitment. This changed view of science is expressed from the start of HH.i and with respect to history. In UM.ii history was advantageous only when it did not become science; now he values it when it does. HH.i.1 introduces, in contrast with “metaphysical philosophy,” “[h]istorical philosophy . . . which can no longer be separated from natural science, the youngest of all philosophical methods. . . . All that we require and that can first be given us due to the present height of the individual sciences, is a chemistry of moral, religious, aesthetic representations and sensations.” The next section [i.2] continues the point: “what is needed from now on is historical philosophizing,” which pays attention to how human has “become,” especially during our long prehistory, in which “everything essential to human development” occurred.73 By this historical work “the steady and laborious process of science, which finally celebrates its highest triumph in a history of the arising of thought, will be in a decisive way finished” [HH.i.16]. Whereas in UM.ii history’s “critical” use had secondary weight, here in HH it gets great stress. Nietzsche, I  suggest, now recognizes that science has the “second side” that we treated in §8.1: originally and usually it is the effort to assimilate the new into existing frameworks; but it must also include a will to question those frameworks, to make the familiar strange. This second, critical side is now coming to the fore: “humanity can no longer be spared the cruel view of the psychological dissecting table and its knives and forceps. For here rules the 72 HH.i.222:  “The scientific human is the further evolution of the artistic.” Also HH.i.272, HH.ii.206, HH.iii.123. 73 HH.iii.16: “we need the history of ethical and religious sensations.” HH.iii.285 says that Plato lacked “the history of moral sensations, insight into the origin of good [and] useful properties of the human soul.”

332  Human Values science that asks after the origin and history of the so-​called moral sensations” [HH.i.37]. The “hammer-​blow of historical knowledge” can sharpen the axe to cut the root of our “metaphysical need.” And this makes possible a crucial progress:  “humans can consciously decide to evolve themselves to a new culture, whereas formerly they evolved unconsciously and by chance” [HH.i.24]. Nietzsche now stresses that history is indispensable for present self-​ understanding. In a passage we noticed in Chapter 4, HH.ii.223 begins: “Direct self-​observation is not nearly sufficient for us to know ourselves: we require history, for the past continues to flow within us in a hundred waves; we ourselves are, indeed, nothing but that which at every moment we experience of this continued flowing [Fortströmen].” So Nietzsche is also developing an answer to UM.ii’s worry over history’s retrospectivity. What’s needed for this work is a “historical sense”—​which Nietzsche now favors. Earlier phases in human development are layered into each of us; we pass through them in our individual maturing [HH.i.272]. The historical sense is an ability to become conscious of these phases. “It is a sign of superior culture consciously to retain certain phases of evolution, which lesser humans live through almost without thinking and then wipe from the tablet of their soul, and to draft a faithful picture of it” [HH.i.274]. “Historical studies . . . challenge us, when faced with a piece of history, of the life of a people or of a human, to represent a quite distinct horizon of thoughts, a distinct strength of sensations. . . . It is in this, that one can rapidly reconstruct such systems of thoughts and feeling on given occasions, . . . that the historical sense consists” [i.274]. So we get our sense of an earlier era by bringing to consciousness its distinctive outlook still resident in us. Nietzsche also now stresses the importance of method for science. “On the whole scientific methods are at least as important an outcome of research as any other result: for the scientific spirit rests on insight into the methods, and all results of science could, if those methods were lost, not prevent a renewed prevalence of superstition and nonsense” [HH.i.635].74 It is only once the methods have been more fully developed that science can extend its scope to “the most fruitful regions” [HH.iii.195], by which Nietzsche means (I think) the domains of human history and psychology. By the time of Daybreak [D]‌history’s critical and undermining work is directed more distinctly against morality. As Nietzsche says in his 1886 preface to the book, “I commenced to undermine our faith in morality” [D.p.2]. The book’s very first section attributes to history this critical role: “Does not almost every precise history of an arising strike our feelings as paradoxical and wicked? Does 74 HH.i.3: “It is the mark of a higher culture to rate higher the small inconspicuous truths, which were found with strict method, than the pleasing and blinding errors that metaphysical and artistic ages and humans pass down.” Also HH.i.270, i.272, i.633, i.634.

Freedom: Science, History, Psychology  333 the good historian not, at bottom, constantly contradict?” And D.95, entitled “Historical refutation as the definitive [sort],” says that “[f]ormerly one sought to prove there is no god,—​today one shows how the belief there is a god could arise and how this belief held its weight and importance: a counterproof that there is no god thereby becomes superfluous.” So Nietzsche recognizes, as he had in UM.ii, history’s strongly undermining force, but he now views this with strong favor.75 In The Gay Science [GS] the project to use history to diagnose our moral values comes into still sharper focus. Nietzsche’s allegiance to science is expressed in the book’s very title, though he also makes clear that the science he has in mind will bring not just joy but great pain. GS.12, “On the aim of science,” argues that since pleasure and displeasure are tied together, science must either diminish or magnify them both—​and Nietzsche clearly wants the latter.76 The science he has particularly in mind is history, which will study “moral things,” as GS.7 elaborates: “So far everything that has given color to existence has still had no history: or where was there a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of conscience, of piety, of cruelty?” GS.7 goes on to pose “the trickiest of all questions . . . , whether science is in a position to give goals for action, after it has proven that it can take and destroy them.” It also emerges that historical study will bring that pain and joy above all to the studier him-​or herself since its insights will be felt. GS.337 builds the point to a great crescendo, describing an apotheosis that the “historical sense” is capable of: “who[ever] knows [how] to feel the history of humanity all together as [his] own history, experiences in an enormous generalization all that pain of the sick [one] who thinks on health,” etc. etc.; “if one could finally have all this in one soul and condense it in one feeling—​this would have to result in a happiness that human has not yet known.” This experiential element in history will be important for us. It indicates an involvement of psychology in history; although the original four books of GS don’t mention psychology, the later-​added Preface and Book V do, and pair psychology and history.77 As Nietzsche proceeds through GS and into his mature works, he increasingly challenges his own dominant positive view of history (and science and truth) by raising again the worries in UM.ii, doubts that were largely absent in the positivist interlude—​which he comes to see as too strong a reaction against Wagner’s

75 History’s destructive impact is also emphasized in D.180: “The great wars of the present are the effects of historical study.” 76 GS.12: “Perhaps [science] is as yet better known for its force to deprive human of his joys and make him colder, more statue-​like, more stoical. But it could also still be found as the great bringer of pain!—​And then perhaps its counterforce would be found, its enormous ability to let new galaxies of joy flare up!” 77 GS.p.2, GS.345.

334  Human Values Romanticism.78 So the doubts against history’s turn toward the past, and against the self-​knowledge it involves, make a reappearance within his later view.79 They do so, however, as subordinated to what remains a positive overall stance. Philosophy requires history.80 Nietzsche wants to do full justice to the dangerous and corrosive character of history, but he sees a way to use precisely this character to help shape a new ideal, a new way for a person to be.

8.3.2  The new science of history Having seen Nietzsche’s gradual approach toward his mature idea of history as genealogy, let’s now lay out the main working assumptions and aims of this new historical science he advocates. What method must history use to treat its proper objects? And what are those proper objects or topics? Although Nietzsche never makes a concerted effort to elaborate a method for this science, I think we can pull together the principles and procedures he has in mind. These are the ways that he tailors the discipline to treat the historical phenomena he takes there really to be—​and to give the kind of insight into them that will serve history’s further purpose. This purpose is, of course, freedom. History is, with psychology, so crucial a discipline because it is necessary for the new kind of freedom now possible for us. It’s this use of history that redeems the discipline and answers the doubts he has raised against it, both about its focus on the past and about its character as a will to truth. History’s new role, in brief, is to free us from the societal forces that control us through our values. It does so by revealing those forces behind and within these values—​and in a way that loosens their grip on us. In being suited for this overall purpose, history is not changed by being unhinged from truth. The challenge is to get at the truth about the forces that shaped our values.81 Only by correctly identifying the interests embedded in our values will we be able to contest their control. Thus GM.p.7 aims to study “the morality that was really [wirklich] there, that was really lived”; it aims to give the “real 78 85–​6:2[131] (LNp86) says that positivism is “a reaction against Romanticism, the work of disappointed Romantics.” 79 E.g., EH.iii.BGE.2: our age is proud of “the ‘historical sense’ that subordinates itself to alien tastes, prostrating itself before petits faits.” TI.i.24: “When you look for beginnings, you become a crab. Historians look backwards; and they end up believing backwards too.” 80 85:38[14]: “philosophy, so far as it is science and not lawgiving, means for us only the widest extension of the concept “history.’ ” See, too, 85:34[73], 85:36[27] (LNp26). 81 I can’t here address arguments that reduce history’s relation to truth (in Nietzsche’s mature account of it), either by suggesting that it dispenses with objectivity or that it is actively myth-​making. See, e.g., the argument by Jensen [2013] that Nietzsche shifts from an early “representational realism” to a later “representational anti-​realism.” I treated the broader topic of Nietzsche’s stance toward truth in §8.1, and before that in Chapter 7 (§7.5).

Freedom: Science, History, Psychology  335 history of morality.” Nietzsche decries, by contrast, the falsifications of history involved in the founding of Judaism and Christianity.82 But to get at these freeing truths history needs a new orientation; the existing discipline isn’t adequate for it.83 I will distinguish six features of this new orientation for history. (i) History’s principal stance will be critical: it seeks out errors in prevailing conceptions of how practices and values came to be. Again D.1: “Does not almost every precise history of an arising strike the feelings as paradoxical and outrageous? Does the good historian not, at bottom, constantly contradict?”84 It’s this critical and undermining force that makes history so dangerous—​but also so valuable if we aim it against convictions that control us. For one effectively “refutes” convictions only by diagnosing them.85 By contrast history so far has usually tried to justify present values—​has been a kind of “Whig history” that interprets the past as aiming toward those values.86 So history has usually played the first role we attributed to science (and the will to truth) in §8.1: to assimilate the strange (the past) to the familiar values we take for granted. Nietzsche wants to tilt history instead toward the second, negative role we’ve seen that science must also take on: to “make the familiar unfamiliar,” to estrange us from beliefs and values we had depended upon. The new history will pull down the justifying stories told in that Whig history, which has largely ruled. In 84:26[161]: “It would then be the case that all the force of moral valuations was bound up with the legitimacy of their ancestry . . . : so that when one sees through the error, the force of conviction in the value falls away.” Just showing that these values came to be and are not the deliverances of revelation or reason already undermines the authority they had claimed. And they are undercut still more when their source is shown to lie in motives they themselves condemn. So history will have a special eye for roots that are ugly, or petty, or (at the least) at odds with our ideas of those phenomena themselves. (ii) History’s critical eye is directed above all at the roots of current values, and in particular of prevailing societal norms (rather than the idiosyncratic values of individuals). It’s these norms that are the decisive factors regulating behaviors, viewpoints, and feelings in societies. They are, as we’ve seen, the signs by which members are trained to steer, signs framed in virtue-​terms and ethical precepts.

82 A.26: “in an unparalleled act of scorn for tradition and historical reality, [the Jewish priests] translated the history of their own people into religion. . . . This is the most disgraceful act of historical falsification that has ever taken place.” A.42 says that Paul later “perpetrated the same enormous crime against history . . . he invented for himself a history of the first Christianity.” 83 See Brobjer [2008, 52–​4] on Nietzsche’s critique of the prevailing way of doing history. 84 Cf. Prinz [2016, 193]: “Nietzschean genealogy is debunking.” 85 See again D.95. And 83:16[14]: “For overcoming the previous ideals (philosopher, artist, saint) a history of arisings [Entstehungs-​Geschichte] is necessary.” 86 Geuss contrasts [1994] Nietzsche’s genealogy with the justifying practice of “tracing a pedigree.”

336  Human Values History needs to turn its attention from the minutiae of facts and events to this powerful undercurrent of evolving values.87 Norms, by their standing as shared tradition, have enormous persistence or stability. They compel allegiance precisely as shared, and this imposes a heavy drag against the current of other change in the society and its circumstances. These norms are built into the society’s language, as we saw in Chapter 6. Thus they are transmitted (relatively) faithfully from generation to generation. GS.57: “You still carry around the assessments [Schätzungen] of things that have their origin in the passions and loves of former centuries!” History’s task is to expose the sources of these norms still effective today—​the forces that made them and the aims it embedded in them. It thereby explains these norms—​as we saw in §8.1 a merely mechanistic science could never do. This explanation is of much more than “merely historical” interest because it reveals not just past causes of our norms, but also present meanings not otherwise discoverable. For this genealogical work Nietzsche proposes a number of “working hypotheses” as to the very general ways in which values change. (iii) Values are invented and amended not by any rational faculty that homes in on valuative truths, but by forces with interests. Values are always “for something further”: behind every value there is, as it were, a further value, the interest it serves, the reason it is there. A value V1 is designed for the sake of a different value V2. We might think of this further purpose as the “function” of the value. Values have these functions because they were made—​ and repeatedly remade—​by wills. They were designed (and redesigned) by things with aims; they were designed to further those aims. Nietzsche has, of course, a most general account of this aiming: it is will to power. So values are designed to enhance the scope and control of the wills that work on them; this is the general character of that V2. But such will to power occurs, Nietzsche thinks, at manifold levels; there are many different kinds of things that “will power,” ranging from drives to persons to social groups, and norms can express the interests of any (and all) of them. As norms persist, so, too, do their functions. But, very importantly, these functions are very commonly forgotten as those founding events recede into the past. It is forgotten who made the value—​what type of person or life it was designed to promote. As values are transmitted over generations, the interests they were made to serve are ever less accessible to those who adopt them.88 And 87 The note added at the end of GM.i famously calls for work on the “history of development of moral concepts.” HH.iii.16 already speaks of our need for “a history of the ethical and religious sensations.” GS.345 complains that nobody “has dared a critique of moral valuations”; a “history of arisings of these feelings and valuations is missing.” 88 D.19: “Custom [Sitte] represents the experience of earlier humans of the supposed useful and harmful,—​but the feeling of custom (ethic [Sittlichkeit]) refers not to that experience as such, but to the age, holiness, indiscussability of custom. And thus this feeling works against one’s having new

Freedom: Science, History, Psychology  337 this is the main reason history is so important. Functions are not explicit or transparent in norms and need to be exposed by history. (iv) The principal interest that norms have been designed to serve is that of the community as a whole: its ability to sustain itself against neighboring societies that threaten or compete with it, its ability to cope with other environmental challenges, and its ability to hold itself together as a functioning unit. This design happens partly by the deliberate choices of groups or leaders, but more largely and anciently by a quasi-​Darwinian “selection”: communities that survive and grow preserve and spread the norms and practices that have favored this success. But a society’s changing conditions can reduce the “fitness” of certain norms, which generates pressure for redesign. Nietzsche thinks there is a common cyclical logic to this adjustment of values to societal need. When societies face crises, such as threats from neighbors, they embrace one kind of value, but when the danger recedes their values adjust for this different circumstance. BGE.201 develops this scenario. In periods of threat, “[c]‌ertain strong and dangerous drives, like . . . vengefulness, craftiness, rapacity, and the lust to rule, . . . had to be trained and cultivated to make them great (because one constantly needed them in view of the dangers to the whole community, against the enemies of the community).” But when the external threat recedes, “fear of the neighbor” becomes uppermost: “step by step, the herd instinct draws its conclusions. How much . . . is dangerous to the community, dangerous to equality . . . now constitutes the moral perspective.” In this scenario, values serve the group either by, so to speak, sharpening it or by compacting it. That is, values tend either to favor exercise of aggressive drives that push individuals to excel and dominate—​when the group needs these traits as a blade against enemies—​or else to bind members more tightly together in a uniform mass—​when “herd” virtues and a more suppressive control of the selfish drives are favored. Nietzsche imagines and labels these two kinds of values—​or rather two kinds of functions embedded in every value—​as those of “master” and “herd.” He also has often in mind a third condition, which he tends to call décadence: a slackening of selective pressure on norms that results in a weakening of their enforcement and grip. It is perhaps a late and devolved form of the second condition in which long security and maybe a mixing of heterogeneous populations results in a weakening of the grip of an overall, society-​wide “herd.”89 So values

experiences and correcting custom.” See also D.30 and D.35 on this way inherited feeling conceals the judgments of ancestors that were behind these feelings. 89 87–​8:11[380] (WP.180) says that Christianity “is a typical form of décadence; the moral softening and hysteria of a sick mishmash-​populace become tired and goalless.”

338  Human Values become “more optional,” and there is a consequent multiplication of available norms and a fragmentation of the society into groups opting for different sets. Nietzsche thinks that Greek society passed into such decadence at the historical point many others thought was its climax.90 But although he often thinks of historical periods in this way, he also stresses that these different human types and motives are present in all ages. In 87–​ 8:11[226] (WP.339, LNp232): “It is no whole, this humanity: it is an indissoluble multiplicity of ascending and descending life-​processes—​it does not have a youth and then a maturity and finally an old age. For the layers lie through and over one another—​and in some thousands of years there can always still be a younger type of human than we can detect today. Décadence on the other hand belongs to all epochs of humanity. . . .” (v) However values don’t only serve the overall societal interest, but also the interests of particular sects or castes—​the groups that are dominant in certain periods, dominant at least in their power to revise social norms. Different groups ascend to this role, and each revises the handed-​down values to favor and propagate its own way of life. They re-​aim the values—​the meanings of basic virtue-​ and goal-​terms—​in the interests of their own kind of person, facing the kind of dangers and challenges they do. Many of the values trained into each of us have passed through a long series of such redesigns by the wills and interests of various groups and person-​types long before us. Nietzsche sorts these ascendant groups in many different ways. Most generally he uses that simple distinction just noted. Sometimes it is an elite group that institutes values, sometimes it is the average many. Often this happens by the cyclical “logic” we’ve seen: the aggressive virtues of the dominating elite have more sway in periods of external threat, whereas the homogenizing and herd values of the many ascend when that threat recedes. But this is only a very blunt division, and Nietzsche pays much more detailed attention to the many different kinds of masters and herds and the very different ways they see their own aims. History must carry this work much further. (vi) The successive redesign of our values results in a layering of meanings into them. Therefore their first meanings aren’t decisive for their functions now—​a point Nietzsche often stresses.91 GM.ii.12: “for history of every kind there is no more important proposition than . . . that the cause of the genesis of a thing and its final usefulness, its actual employment and integration in a system of purposes, 90 87–​8:11[375] (WP.427, LNp237). 91 E.g., 84:26[174]: “In all questions about the descent of customs, rights, and ethics one must beware of seeing the usefulness which a certain custom or ethics has, whether for the community or for the individual, as also the ground of its arising; as the naïve in historical research suppose.” And already in 80–​1:8[13]: “The experiences which we have for certain customs and ethics, the grounds for them that are in circulation, have nothing at all to do with the origin, the grounds for their arising.”

Freedom: Science, History, Psychology  339 lie toto caelo apart; that something extant . . . is again and again . . . transformed and rearranged for a new use by a power superior to it[.]‌” However—​and this is crucial for him, too—​these redesigns do not altogether erase and replace earlier ones. Due to that inertial drag in norms, each rewriting tends to persist and survive beneath the later ones, so that there is indeed a layering of all these redesigns within a society’s norms. These norms thereby become more and more complex and reflect the interests of all (or most) of the groups that have laid their hands on these values in the society’s past. Nietzsche develops these ideas in the important statement of historical method in GM.ii.12: “all purposes, all utilities, are only signs that a will to power has become lord over something less powerful and has stamped its own functional meaning onto it; and in this manner the entire history of a ‘thing,’ an organ, a practice can be a continuous sign-​chain of ever new interpretations and arrangements[.]‌” And GM.ii.13 illustrates this with a long list of meanings that have been embedded in our notion (and practice and value) of punishment—​ embedded by the interpretive impulses of social groups in different ages. History will study how our values were built by such a layering of meanings and aims, expressing different wills and interests. The historian’s challenge, then, is to expose all these superimposed functions in the values of a culture—​in particular his or her own. He or she must expose them, moreover, in the critical light that “steps back” from these values and frees us from them. This requires the special skill which we’ve seen that Nietzsche sometimes calls the “historical sense” [historische Sinn].92 It deserves a section of its own.

8.3.3  The historical sense Nietzsche speaks of this historical sense—​as he does of every recurring topic—​ in different and seemingly inconsistent ways. Sometimes he treats it quite negatively, even [e.g., EH.iii.UM.1, iii.BGE.2] in the later writings that more often praise it. We can understand this “inconsistency” just as we have his handling of other ideas such as freedom. He is, in a nutshell, critical of what the historical sense has commonly been, but evocative of what it can become. Regarded generally, it is a powerful, transforming human ability capable of great damage or great benefit. It is a main ingredient in our nihilistic lostness today. But it has the potential to advance us out of this nihilism to a radically higher way of having values.



92

He also calls it the “historical spirit” [GM.i.2] and the “historical instinct” [GM.ii.4].

340  Human Values Nietzsche expresses this stance toward the historical sense in GS.337. Headed “The future ‘humanity,’ ” it begins: “When I look with the eyes of a distant age at this one, I can find nothing more remarkable about present human than his peculiar virtue and sickness, called ‘the historical sense.” It is the start of something quite new and strange in history.” To be sure, this sense “is still something so poor and cold, and many are seized by it as by a frost and made still poorer and colder by it.” As the ability “to feel the history of human altogether as one’s own history,” it can oppress one with melancholy and grief over the great sum of human suffering and failure. But if human becomes able to bear this, it can achieve a “new nobility” and a “happiness unknown to human so far,” indeed a “divine happiness.” Generically, then, the historical sense is the tendency and ability to “enter into” viewpoints from other historical epochs. Most often this sense is damaging, in the several ways Nietzsche catalogues, surely from his own case. But he sees how this ability can be sharpened for a certain use—​use by the new historical science to understand the values we live by, making possible a more genuine freedom from them.93 It thus becomes part of that science’s method. Let’s start with Nietzsche’s account how the “historical sense” arose. Considered as a theoretical position, it arrives only with Hegel; it is one of German philosophy’s important contributions.94 It has been missing in most philosophy, to the latter’s great detriment.95 But this theoretical elevation of history by Hegel et al. is also a symptom or expression of an earlier and broader cultural change that shows it in a more dubious light. Modern Europe is “historical” due to “a democratic mingling of classes and races,” by which “the past of every way and form of life . . . now flows into us ‘modern souls’ thanks to that mixing”—​as Nietzsche puts it in BGE.224, another main statement on the topic. Many different ethnic and cultural groups are mixed together in our society—​and so in us. We bear not only these groups’ current viewpoints, but their past ones as well, layered into the values and practices we acquire. This makes the historical sense especially potent in us: we can imagine our way into a great range of views. However Nietzsche here judges the capacity a “semi-​barbarism” and an “ignoble sense” since it is a taste for everything and lacks “the very definite Yes and No of [the noble] palate.” That internal diversity tends to disperse and weaken the personality. So far this historical sense is more a susceptibility than a skill: a tendency to see things from many different points of view, including those of all the past epochs 93 As the last point from GS.337 suggests, it also makes possible an ecstatic identification with “the all” of human life, which we’ll return to in Chapter 9 (on Nietzsche’s “Yes”) and then again in Chapter 12 (on his “divine”). 94 E.g., BGE.204, GS.357. Also GS.377 on the German propensity for this sense. 95 84:26[393]: “The historical sense: of this Plato and all philosophy have no concept.” Also TI.iii.1.

Freedom: Science, History, Psychology  341 that converge in us. To harness this empathic capacity so that it serves a science, the historian needs to impose a certain discipline on it. This discipline does two things. First, it shifts that passive “susceptibility” to feel past perspectives into an active strategy. Second, it supplements that empathic view “from within” with a second kind of view, which “steps back” to judge those past standpoints “from outside.” Consider first the capacity to “enter” past perspectives. As we’ve seen, HH.i.274 already describes the historical sense as the ability to “rapidly reconstruct . . . systems of ideas and sensations” typifying some earlier age. One must reconstruct them in oneself, by experiencing how it is to see and feel so.96 So 84:26[393] describes the historical sense as “a kind of actor’s art [Schauspieler-​ Kunst], to take on temporarily a foreign soul: result of the great mixing of races and peoples, through which there is in everyone a piece of all that was.” But it is the ability to take on a past viewpoint truly, as Nietzsche denies that professional actors do [D.324]. Fortunately we do indeed have such access to past viewpoints “from within.” We’ve seen how they are layered into our own psychic-​affective structure: they’re built into our values and are accessible to us there if we pay proper attention. It’s a matter of raising them to the surface and adjusting their ratio or strength. This involves the ability “to separate out pieces in our own development and set them out independently” [HH.i.274]. So BGE.224 opens by clarifying the historical sense as “the capacity quickly to guess the rank-​order of valuations by which a people, a society, a human has lived, the ‘divinatory instinct’ for the relations of these valuations. . . .”97 But this ability to enter into past epochs’ viewpoints is not enough. One must also withdraw from them in order to understand them better than they understand themselves. So the historical sense, as needed for the new science of history, must be able to see those past viewpoints “from outside.” This is not a matter of seeing them “objectively,” however, if this means from a perspectiveless and disinterested stance—​a “view from nowhere.” Nietzsche rejects this kind of objectivity in history.98 Instead, I suggest, the historian must do two further things. First, he or she must discern, behind the “goals” the studied viewpoint itself has—​and which are understood “from within”—​the “functions” that this viewpoint has been

96 Already in UM.ii.Foreword:  “the experiences which evoked those tormenting feelings were mostly my own and . . . I have drawn on the experiences of others only for purposes of comparison.” Janaway [2006, 345]: “Might ‘real history,’ as Nietzsche conceives it, demand a personal, affective responsiveness to the investigation?” 97 Cf. the draft for this, 85:35[2]‌(LNp17). 98 E.g., 83:7[268]: “The appropriation of history under the direction of stimulus and drive—​there is no ‘objective history.’ ” Cf. Brobjer [2008, 53–​4].

342  Human Values designed for, by the forces and interests that shaped it. (See Chapter 3 (§3.2) on this distinction between goals and functions.) Those goals are the signs the viewpoint itself steers by and are accessible to it. But its functions are ways other forces have aimed it and are not visible within it. One sees them only by occupying the perspectives of those shaping forces and so seeing their own steering values. Second, the historian must also see the studied viewpoint from competing and opposed perspectives. These reveal, as we might put it, what the viewpoint is not: its limits, lacks, and blindnesses. We well know Nietzsche’s practice and preaching of “reversing perspectives” for the sake of a fuller view of anything whatever, and the step is vital in history as well. It is needed in particular for history to give the understanding we need in order to make choices about the values it studies. We must see these values’ weaknesses as well as we can. We can illustrate both points with one of Nietzsche’s most conspicuous examples:  his genealogy of Christian values in GM.i. He exhibits throughout this essay the ability not just to understand these values “from within,” but also to see them in those two further ways. He uncovers the “ulterior motives” that shaped those values but don’t show up within them—​the functions they served in the lives and psyches of the priests and “slaves” that made and embraced them. And he also shows how these values appear—​and what value they have—​for the contrasting perspective of the “master” type. As we read GM.i we sample the historical sense as we pass fluidly among these different perspectives; our understanding depends on all three parts. The historical sense, then, is this ability to pass repeatedly among these views with an intuitive and flexible skill for which it is very hard to give rules. This ability is crucial for the overall project that this book attributes to Nietzsche: living with the perspectivity of values. Carried to the completion he imagines, this sense is nothing less than the ability to incorporate the truth of how our values are “human-​made.” It incorporates this truth not in the abstract and as a theoretical proposition, but by grasping “in feeling” the real history of the human value-​ making that stands behind one’s own values. We need this in order to be able at last to value while recognizing the “human perspective” in which this valuing has its only reality and justification.

8.4  Psychology We’ve traced Nietzsche’s long-​standing allegiance to the science of history. By contrast it’s only quite late that he comes to identify himself with the science of psychology—​around the time he was writing Beyond Good and Evil; before this point (1885–​86) the word is scarcely used.

Freedom: Science, History, Psychology  343 This is of course not to say that he hadn’t always been “doing psychology.” Indeed his treatment of problems had always been distinguished by its psychological character. Nietzsche of course notices his special angle of approach and gradually refines and “codifies” it. By the time of BGE he thinks of it as a science, with its own method—​a science and method he means to advance. Indeed he even shifts his allegiance to psychology from history and prides himself as a pioneer in this science above all. We took a first look at Nietzsche’s psychology in Chapter 3 (§3.1), unfolding it as a “drive psychology” offered to replace the reigning “agent psychology.” I’ll rely and draw on that account here. Our main interest now is in psychology’s character as a science and in Nietzsche’s redesign of (what he thinks is) this science’s current method. He redesigns it, we’ll see, to suit it better for truth, but also for freedom and power. Now, as we’ve already witnessed for “science” and “history,” Nietzsche expresses diverse and seemingly opposite views and verdicts upon “psychology.” Again, I suggest, the simple main reason is that he passes back and forth between attacking psychology as it has been practiced and promoting what he wants it to become. So he attacks it with an eye to reforming it. Nietzsche is highly critical of psychology so far—​“bisherige Psychologie” [BGE.47; 88:15[13] (WP.692)]. He says that it has been “rudimentary” (88:14[125] (WP.136), 88:14[129] (WP.434)) and “naïve” (88:14[126] (WP.288)). BGE.229 calls us to chase away “the clumsy psychology of before [von Ehedem].” And I think he also means psychology as it has been when, in TI.iii.3, he groups it with metaphysics, theology, and epistemology as “pre-​science.” By contrast he claims himself to put psychology at last on the right footing: “What philosopher before me was a psychologist instead of its opposite, a ‘higher fraud,’ an ‘idealist?’ ” Psychology did not exist until I appeared” [EH.iv.6]. He claims, that is, to be the first (true) psychologist, founding a new practice; he takes great pride in himself as such. BGE.12 says that it is “the new psychologist” who will put an end “to the superstitions which have so far flourished . . . around the idea of the soul.” Nietzsche aspires to reorganize the rest of the sciences around this revised psychology as their “queen,” as he puts it in the famous BGE.23. This paragraph plays a crucial strategic role in that book: positioned at the end of Part I, it sets the stage for all the rest. It sums up how “the prejudices of the philosophers” are exposed and the way opened up to a new philosophical practice. This practice is arrived at by converting philosophy’s old metaphysical questions into psychological ones. Here’s how the paragraph begins and then ends: All psychology so far has got stuck in moral prejudices and fears; it has not dared to descend into the depths. . . . Never yet did a deeper world of insight

344  Human Values reveal itself to daring travelers and adventurers, and the psychologist who thus “makes a sacrifice”—​it is not the “sacrifizio dell” intelletto,” on the contrary!—​ will at least be entitled to demand in return that psychology shall be recognized again as the queen of the sciences, for whose service and preparation the other sciences exist. For psychology is now again the path to the fundamental problems.

We need to see what he wants this new science of psychology to be. Nietzsche identifies one main culprit for what’s wrong with psychology so far: morality has controlled it. Again BGE.23: “The power of moral prejudices has penetrated deeply into the most spiritual world, which would seem to be the coldest and most devoid of presuppositions, and has obviously operated in an injurious, inhibiting, blinding, and distorting manner.”99 Morality has, first, ruled its own self-​justifying stories off-​limits for psychological scrutiny. It has also, second, dictated psychology’s assumptions about the character of the psyches it studies: psychology assumes “subjects” and “agents” because these are responsible and punishable entities such as morality needs. But psychology is now breaking free from this moral control. It is questioning morality’s assumptions, as well as (previous) psychology’s own assumptions about its objects. It is investigating the true psychological character of “being moral,” as was never possible before. And it is becoming suspicious of the subject, agent, and other psychic entities it had always assumed. In doing better in these ways its duty as a science, psychology gets more of the truth—​understands better what human is. Before we look at this culmination, however, let’s say what “psychology” more broadly is for Nietzsche. What does he mean by it, whether old or new? Psychology treats why people live as they do—​where “live” includes all of their actions, behaviors, attitudes, feelings, etc. Psychology offers reasons why this life is as it is, it explains it. Psychology is, moreover, a science committed to such explanations, which means that it operates with the general method we took a first look at in §8.1. This method involves a systematic “assimilating of the new to the old” by interpreting every new appearance within the framework of theory assembled to date. But it also involves—​and this is the side Nietzsche more presses—​questioning the old, making it new and unfamiliar by doubting its own convictions. Psychology is not the only science that explains human life. Nietzsche often contrasts it in these late years with physiology. Psychology explains by citing 99 BGE.47 says that psychology so far has “suffered shipwreck” because it believed in opposite moral values. 88:14[108] (WP.271) says that psychology has been corrupted by the predominance of moral values.

Freedom: Science, History, Psychology  345 intentional entities such as subjects, agents, minds, desires, drives, and affects. So it deals with perspectival stances that it is possible to enter or occupy. Physiology explains by citing “physical” structure: the workings of the micro-​parts of the body. Nietzsche thinks (sometimes) that these micro-​parts should themselves be understood as wills. But we have no access to them as such; we can’t study them first-​personally. Instead we must rely on the “sign-​language for the senses,” our ontology of matter moving through space and interacting mechanically. So psychology explains human by those factors we have first-​personal access to. But again it’s not the only science that does so. We’ve just seen that history—​ the new history—​does so, too. How then are these sciences of history and psychology related? Where does Nietzsche draw the border between them? It’s not, to begin with, that psychology deals with individual cases and history with broader social groups. Nietzsche insists that psychology treats not particular psyches but types. So TI.ix.7 attacks “Colportage [book-​peddler, i.e. popularized]-​Psychologie,” psychologizing “in the act,” in individual cases; the psychologist “never works ‘from nature’ . . . only the general case enters his consciousness.”100 Psychology delineates “psychological types” and explains behavior by these. Notice how extremely often “Psychologie” occurs in phrases like “psychology of the ‘improver’ of humans” (TI.vii.5), “of the redeemer” (A.28), “of the priests” (A.49), “of ‘belief ’ ” (A.50). This emphasis on types seems a surprising Aristotelianism in Nietzsche’s idea of psychology. I suggest a simple and obvious way to distinguish these Nietzschean sciences: history is cross-​generational. It is offers explanations that are diachronic in this way. Psychology by contrast remains within the scope of a single human life—​it studies types of such lives—​and is diachronic only within this narrower span. So psychology studies, for example, the type “priest” by explaining such a person’s characteristic values, thoughts, and deeds by the drives and affects that underlie them, all within the scope of that single life. History by contrast studies how the priest type has been shaped by previous generations and shapes generations to come. Understood so, psychology and history are necessarily close partners for Nietzsche. To understand why a certain type of person lives a certain way, one must crucially refer to the views and values he or she has grown up into—​which are in turn to be explained by their design over generations. To understand that design, on the other hand, one must also see how, at each historical stage, a value is remade by a certain type, itself to be understood within the scope of its single

100 Cf. the draft for this, 87:9[110]. 87:9[99] (LNp159) suggests that whereas the “clever” looking for “advantage” proceed “from the general to the most particular case,” by contrast “we see from the most particular out.”

346  Human Values life. Each science must pass over into the other in order to complete its own explanations. As it studies its types psychology needs the same dual view we’ve just seen that history takes. Chapter 3 showed how the “drive psychology” treats drives as “signs” in two ways. A drive is, on the one hand, a “symptom” of some force that aimed it and, on the other, a “signal” it makes itself. To understand the drive, psychology must comprehend the signal by knowing what it would be like to signal so oneself. But psychology must also step back to diagnose what this signaling is in turn a symptom of. So 85:34[147]: “To describe e.g. what moral conscience is, one must be deep and wounded and enormous like Pascal’s conscience and yet still possess that stretched-​out heaven of bright and malicious spirituality, which surveys from above this crowd of experiences, orders and laughs at them.” Understanding “from within” is hard, but in a different way than we might expect. We might have thought that the difficulty lies in the gap between our own and other viewpoints—​that human perspectives are so alien to one another that the gap just can’t be bridged. But we’ve seen that Nietzsche thinks we have internal access to a great variety of other types because of the way these viewpoints have all been embedded in the broad societal practice we grow up into. The views and values that flow into others from history flow into us as well.101 Nietzsche claims the ability to see from all their perspectives. 87:9[177] (WP.1031, LNp171): “To run through the whole ambit of the modern soul, to have sat in every one of its corners—​my ambition, my torture, and my happiness.”102 The real challenge is to access these viewpoints within ourselves—​which is very hard due to these viewpoints’ depth or thickness. Our immediate “inner sense” gives us only their surface—​what we “seem to mean” in these viewpoints. Take for example Nietzsche’s view (e.g., in GM.i) that the slave’s moral judgment against the master expresses ressentiment. His claim is that the slave does feel this ressentiment, but that this feeling doesn’t show up to the slave’s own introspection. The affect knows to hide itself. The psychologist needs the ability not just to step into the slave’s point of view, but also to “raise to the surface” those deeper and self-​concealing parts of that viewpoint. In doing so it discovers, better than the slave has done, what the “goals” of the slave’s ressentiment are in designing its values. Nietzsche thinks that even this heightened first-​personal access to a perspective isn’t enough. The psychologist must add a third-​personal recognition of how the viewpoint was shaped by forces not present in it, even at a deeper level. So for

101 HH.i.292: “Do not disdain your having been religious; find out fully how you have still had a genuine access to art. Can you not, precisely with the help of these experiences, follow with greater understanding enormous stretches of earlier humanity?” 102 Cf. HH.i.223: “So self-​knowledge becomes universal knowledge with respect to all the past. . . .”

Freedom: Science, History, Psychology  347 example in that story in GM.i, the slave’s values get adopted by masters. The latter then make the same moral judgment—​against their own type—​but they do so without that submerged ressentiment. The value gets transmitted without (initially at least) that affect. And yet ressentiment still explains the value, even in the master. It just explains it in a different way: not by unconsciously motivating it in the master, but by having previously “designed” the value in the slave. This value in the master still has the features and tendencies imprinted on it by the resentful slave. As we might put it, science here uncovers not the “goal” of the value, but its “function.” In most cases, perhaps, that prior design happens in past generations, so that pursuing some value’s function belongs to history. We grow up into values designed long before us and need history to uncover what these values were made for:  what kinds of persons, with what drives and affects, needed and profited from them. But we can also imagine such functions getting established at earlier stages within a particular life. So a person might, in a youthful phase, be strongly inclined to ressentiment and adopt a certain set of values in that mood—​ values that he or she might adhere to even after some strong shift has eliminated this affective tendency. Thus we can distinguish two kinds of “meaning” that psychology needs to recognize and explain: what the valuer means by his or her values, but also what these values were made to mean in him or her. Of course these two interact. We’ve just seen how goals become functions. But there will also be pressure in the opposite direction. That moral judgment against the master, adopted by a master not prone to ressentiment, can then encourage or promote that affect in him. The judgment after all was (by hypothesis) designed to express, to justify, to make that affect more livable. Psychology’s identification of its types must rest on an account of what these are types of—​some account of the overall kind of its objects. A science needs an ontology for its objects, and Nietzsche thinks he has a better one than the traditional ontology of the subject (or agent or mind or soul). Psychology must see that it has to do with wills to power. The particular types it will find, such as master and slave, are types of wills to power; they show up once we learn to see human that way. Once more BGE.23: “To understand [psychology] as morphology and evolution-​doctrine [Entwicklungslehre] of the will to power, as I do—​nobody has yet come close to doing this even in thought” (much less incorporated it into his or her will and values).103 In understanding psychic types as types of will to power the psychologist sets up an assessment of these types. This assessment works by two standards.



103

88:13[3]‌: “Psychology (doctrine of affects) as morphology of the will to power.”

348  Human Values How strong is this way of willing power—​how able is it to grow itself? And how healthy is this way of willing power—​how well-​directed at where its growth lies? Psychology can legitimately deploy these notions of strength and health in its descriptions and explanations of psychic types because they are integral to its grounding picture of its objects. To be sure, psychology itself doesn’t make these assessments. For it “strong” and “healthy” are just descriptions: they describe a will’s relation to the goal it most deeply has. They describe, we might say, the “quality” of its will to power. Psychology’s descriptions, and especially its accounts of the degrees of strength and health in its types, will be crucial data in turn for the philosopher, who creates values by creating a valuative response to the psychologist’s descriptions. Psychology prepares for assessment not just in the very special case of the value-​creating (and epoch-​making) philosopher, but for each of us. By giving us the truth about the causes and quality of our human views and values, it has the special power to free us in having those views and values. It confers on us a new power that human has never had before: the power to judge one’s own views and values in the light of knowing what they are. It frees us from the passive subjection to those values that had been the universal human lot before. Psychology so frees us, we should notice, only to the extent that it gets right the causes and qualities of those values.104

8.5 What’s next This book’s overall claim is that Nietzsche’s main challenge to us is to incorporate the truth that values are perspectival. We now see how the sciences of psychology and history can serve to deliver this truth. They deliver it not just as the abstract claim or belief that “all values are perspectival,” but in an understanding of which perspectives our own values express. They show us what psychic types and interests made these values and what aims and feelings we ourselves express in them. The perspectives of our values had been opaque to us before this genealogical work. Still, to see these truths is not yet to “incorporate” them.105 What does this next step require? Nietzsche’s ultimate rationale for the task to incorporate this truth is of course power: living with the truth about our values is a way of overcoming and growing. Indeed it is a way of overcoming that ratchets us up to a higher level and a new dimension of power—​just as the historical evolution (described in GM.ii) of the able-​to-​promise “agent” did. Nietzsche thinks that this kind of growth—​in

104 105

Prinz [2016, 194–​5] discusses the reasons that “historical accuracy” matters to Nietzsche. See again GS.11 and GS.110 on our task to “incorporate” truths.

Freedom: Science, History, Psychology  349 understanding our values—​will carry us beyond that agential identity; it will give human a new kind of self with a new kind of power. Genealogy shows how the freedom the “agent”-​self takes itself to have is illusory or at least incomplete. The “sovereign individual” of GM.ii.2 felt itself free in its power over not just its drives but also its society’s customs. But this individual controls the drives and judges the customs according to the valuative criteria of a morality it still takes for granted. It believes in the story that this morality is grounded in reason itself and so is under the thumb of the forces that really did make it. Genealogy reveals this deeper way we’re controlled—​by the psychic types that shaped our values. Our values were designed in the interest of these types, but we have had no inkling of this design. All the while we have valued, we’ve been blind to the functions built into these values. We have been unwitting puppets, controlled by the value-​signs we steer by. We are only now able to contest that control by finding out the truth about those shaping processes. But of course discovering how we’re controlled does not suffice to overcome it. Indeed such a discovery might often have no effect on that condition. What do we now need to do, once genealogy has exposed this control through our values, to free ourselves from it? Obviously we must use these genealogical truths to reverse the power relation between us and our values—​so that we control them and not vice versa. This is what it will be to “incorporate” these truths. Our values, remember, are not just propositions we affirm or assent to. They are the signs we steer by, and it’s in this real operational role that we need to control them by our new knowledge of them. Consider a particular value (e.g., pity) and a genealogy that explains why we have it. We incorporate that genealogical truth by determining, in the light of it, whether and how we go on to value pity. It’s not enough just to “choose” to value pity differently. We must make this choice effective in the automatic and subliminal ways we steer by this value. My existing values are built into my drives and socialized habits, and I don’t annul them just by saying that I do. I need to push genealogical insights down to the very points at which these drives and habits operate. I must build into my everyday responses those countering diagnoses supplied by genealogy so that I see why I will, while I will. Willing only really takes up theory into its own projective stance when it takes practical regard of it in its concrete and everyday moments of willing. So, in the case of pity, I bring the insight of its motives into the very cases in which I feel this affect—​and the moments when I value it in myself and others. That insight becomes part of the subliminal conversation in which my drives and affects arrive at my stance toward things. It draws into my “choice” about pity the voices of drives that dislike the motives pity is now shown to have. It strengthens those countervailing tastes and weakens those that depended on illusions about

350  Human Values pity’s motives. By injecting that genealogical insight into this struggle/​debate among my drives, I make it effective in the arena that really sets my course. Now it may not be possible for human to incorporate every truth in this way. To “incorporate” a truth is to build it into a life—​but a flourishing or successful life, not one disabled by the burden of that truth. There may be truths that human can discover “in theory” and can know “as propositions” but which it would be unable to live with in its drives. Perhaps they can have no effect on the drives. Or perhaps the drives and affects could absorb these lessons—​but it would disable them. One or the other of these might be the case (as we saw in Chapter 5) for our “categorial” posits. Perhaps I simply can’t stop seeing things as discrete and lasting substances.106 Or perhaps I can, but only at the expense of being no longer able to cope with them. It is an open question whether this might be the case for some truths about our values as well. The task of our current age, Nietzsche thinks, is to experiment with how much of the genealogical truth about our values can be incorporated in this way—​can be absorbed deeply into a life that flourishes despite (and/​or thanks to) that insight.107 This amounts to testing, we can see, how much freedom human can live with. The work of genealogy, by the sciences of psychology and history, is primarily critical: it discredits and undermines the moral values we have lived by. To build this insight into a flourishing life it will be necessary not just to subtract, but to add new values that allow life to flourish while sustaining this insight. It is the main task of Part III to describe the package or system of values by which Nietzsche hopes to make this genealogical insight “livable.” These values will include, we’ll see, cultivation of a compensating or balancing “other side” to our will to truth and science. It will constitute an aesthetic and religious side to one’s life, whose purpose is to support a certain way of feeling about oneself and the world. Central is the new value I call “saying Yes”: this value functions to make one able to bear and indeed welcome all the “ugly truths” our psychology and history will gradually expose, including above all the truth of our values’ perspectivity.

106 HH.i.41: “the motives influencing [a human being] cannot ordinarily scratch deeply enough to destroy the imprinted script of many millennia.” 107 Pippin [2010, 23] says that Nietzsche faces “the ‘Montaigne problem’ ”: “how one might combine an uncompromising, brutal honesty about human hypocrisy and bad faith . . . with an affirmative reconciliation of some sort with such a weak and corrupt human condition, and all this somehow below, deeper than, the level of conscious belief or attitude.”

PART III

N IET ZSC HE VA LU E S

9

The Yes Value Monism

We come now to the lesson Nietzsche thinks he learns from his critique of the human—​from his critique especially of morality. How does he change his own values—​and how does he propose that we change ours? Let’s try to determine what new valuing he advocates given his diagnoses of all the things that are wrong with human—​surveyed just now in Chapters 5–​8. How do we live with the truth that we are not subjects/​agents? How do we correct our herdish subordination to old shared norms? How do we escape the grip of the life-​and body-​ denying morality that has been our historical fate? How, in sum, can we profit from the insight we now can have of ourselves thanks to an unblinkered history and psychology? These questions issue out of the two large motivations that we’ve seen lie behind Nietzsche’s revaluation of values. These are his ur-​values of life and truth, the first rooted in our body, the latter in our human “agency.” So these ur-​values aren’t new. They are also so general as to be little usable as values—​steering signs—​on their own. Nietzsche’s new values are those he invents as strategies for life and truth—​for having as much as possible of both, at this point in human history. These meta-​values have so far been largely at odds with one another. Nietzsche thinks he sees a way to synthesize them so that we can have more of each. His new values are this way. The centerpiece to these new values is Nietzsche’s advocacy of the Yes, as I will put it. This is a stance or attitude that “affirms life” in a certain absolute or universal way that I will try to specify.1 This stance says Yes to all of life, and so, most pointedly, it says Yes to the sides of life that have usually been dreaded and feared. In 87:9[42] (WP.1005, LNp149): “my instinct wanted the opposite from Schopenhauer’s: a justification of life, even in its most frightful, ambiguous and mendacious: —​I had in hand for this the formula ‘Dionysian.’ ” All life is good. These “glad tidings” are expressed in several of Nietzsche’s ultimate thoughts, including his ideas of eternal return and amor fati. He means to affirm to a degree that nobody ever has before.2 1 On the “affirmation of life,” see especially Reginster [2006]. Also Han-​Pile [2018]. 2 85:34[204] says that he has sought “a way of thinking which is the most high-​spirited most lively and most world-​affirming of all possible ways of thinking.” Nietzsche’s Values. John Richardson, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190098230.001.0001

354  Nietzsche Values I call this teaching the “centerpiece” to Nietzsche’s new values. It sustains that best synthesis of life and truth. The stance that says Yes itself embodies this fusion: it explicitly favors the ur-​value of life, but it also furthers truth. For the affirmation must be to life as it is; it depends on a (relatively) adequate and true recognition of what life is. It’s not enough to say Yes to life under an unrealistically rosy picture what it is. Does Nietzsche think that this judgment that all life is good is itself true? It must see life as it is and then judge it good—​but does the judgment that it’s good somehow follow from seeing the truth about it? We’ll find that Nietzsche is divided here. He tries out arguments to prove this “value monism” but also insists that the question of “the value of life” is unanswerable and even incoherent. I’ll try to specify the special status he ultimately claims for this judgment. Nietzsche treats this “saying Yes” as an ideal or ultimate stance—​as the best one can be. He thinks one reaches a quasi-​divinity here. But he does not think that anyone can live persistently in this stance; it is not “for everyday.” We have to live mainly and usually not with a universal Yes, but with a yes-​and-​no: valuing some things and disvaluing others. The other parts to Nietzsche’s new values are meant for this everyday use. They raise up some things as good in preference to others, which they slight. Nietzsche’s new valuative stance is distinguished by this interplay—​by how he passes back and forth between the Yes and his yes-​and-​no values. One of our main challenges will be to determine the relation between these two valuative stances—​and how the former orients the latter. That ultimate stance, the Yes, treats everything, qua “life,” as good. But his other, judging values pick out certain kinds or cases of life as valuable in preference to others. How can these judging values get any discriminating criterion out of a universal Yes? Like that affirmation, Nietzsche’s yes-​and-​no values are designed to synthesize those ur-​values of life and truth. We should especially bear in mind how they favor truth. History and psychology are most crucially teaching us how our values are perspectival. Human’s species-​level task today, Nietzsche thinks, is to find a way to live—​and flourish—​while holding fast to this insight. The new values he offers are meant for this service. So they are meant to be values we can value while holding on to a recognition of their particular perspectivity—​and not value as real goods “out there” that our valuing tracks. But on the other hand Nietzsche thinks that the will to truth can only be sustained—​in an individual, in a culture—​if a certain complement to that will is also present. This is an aesthetic and religious habit or practice, which above all plays the role of cultivating a certain state of feeling. We need this feeling, and above all that universal Yes, in order to live with all the “ugly truths” the will to truth keeps uncovering. But this aesthetic complement to the will to truth is also a kind of opposite: it creates and sustains certain appearances that are not true.

The Yes: Value Monism  355 This aspect of Nietzsche’s new values will concern us throughout but won’t take center stage until Chapter 12. I’ll begin (§9.1) by presenting Nietzsche’s “value monism” as a surprising, more radical analogue to the ontological monism we’re more familiar and more comfortable with. His denial of the Cartesian dualism and insistence that I am one thing, my body, and that my soul is just a fact about my body, are well-​known parts of his view—​and too obvious features of it to have received much attention earlier. Now we consider Nietzsche’s critique of dualism more generally, seeing how the application to values—​which I think has been very little noticed—​may indeed be its primary form. One way that Nietzsche expresses this value monism is in his attack on “opposite values.” Examining this (§9.2) we see better the meaning of that monism: in just what sense it denies the “opposition” of good and bad. Some of Nietzsche’s denials of opposite values make it appear less radical—​merely a denial of distinct domains such as the soul (as source of all good) versus the body (of all bad). But he pushes the point to an extreme: all of life is good, and the bad is only a form of the good. As he puts it succinctly in 87:10[108] (WP.235, LNp192): “We hold that every kind of action is at root identical in value.” But although Nietzsche gives this universal Yes a preeminent place in his thinking, by far the greater share of his writing expresses a different and seemingly incompatible stance:  it says yes to some few favored things, but a resounding and often vitriolic no to others. It depicts negatively most (I would say) of the things it treats; it depicts them as “bad’ in one or another of his distinctive ways: as sick, as weak, as self-​deceived. We must examine (§9.3) how Nietzsche can sustain his highly critical stance alongside that value monism. We will see that he thinks the universal Yes affects and orients these emphatic no’s he goes on to say. It still remains to consider just how Nietzsche thinks we “say Yes.” For it is not enough to utter these words, nor even enough to assert and believe that “all life is good”—​as we began by presuming. This affirmation must value in the sense we’ve seen that Nietzsche has for valuing. So it must involve not just our cognitive side, but also our willing and feeling as well. We need to “incorporate” it into our drives and affects. I’ll try to specify (§9.4) the fuller willful and affective stance involved in “saying Yes.” Finally we must address (§9.5) the question of justification:  What reasons can Nietzsche give in support of his new values—​beginning with this value of the Yes? Does he claim that they are “true” or that they are somehow based on truths? And if so how could he be entitled to this claim, given his basic principle that values are perspectival? We must examine what justification he gives for the Yes and also for those judging values that promote some things in contrast with others. Why does the Yes merit its preeminent role?

356  Nietzsche Values

9.1  Monisms and dualisms I think every reader of Nietzsche quickly sees that he is a vigorous opponent of “dualism”—​for example the dualism of body and soul. He insists to the contrary that soul, to the extent that it exists at all, exists only as a part or feature of the body. He promotes, that is, some version of monism.3 This may be most vividly expressed in a famous passage from Zarathustra, i.4: “But the awakened one, the one who knows, says: Body am I through and through [ganz und gar], and nothing besides; and soul is merely a word for something about the body.” To many readers this monism looks pretty straightforward—​both as Nietzsche’s view and as a position in its own right; it’s easy to accept this anti-​dualism and skip past it to other things. I want to show, though, that the issue is both more complex and (I hope) more interesting than it might at first seem. I want to show that, on the one hand, Nietzsche’s attack on dualism carries him very far, much further than we initially expect. It extends, very importantly, from being to values—​and it carries him there to a radical value monism that is, however, very hard to square with some of his other strong commitments. And so Nietzsche is repeatedly pulled back from this monism to dualist views at seeming odds with it. This opens up a great tension—​an apparent contradiction—​in his thinking and poses the question of what philosophical means he has for addressing it. It will also lead us into a key part of his new values. Now, as I said, I think our first reaction is that he rejects dualism altogether. Let me start with a sketch of his familiar attack on mind–​body dualism. He doesn’t especially identify this dualism with Descartes, but he clearly has in focus a view we ourselves call Cartesian, distinguishing immaterial mind (a thinking thing) from body defined entirely as extended. On this view, thinking and extension, matter and mind are of such utterly different ontological categories that they support completely different sets of properties. It’s nonsense to suppose that mind could have a weight or a shape or that matter could have feelings or thoughts. Let’s define: “being dualism” = (the claim that) there are two basic kinds of entity, neither reducible to the other (i.e., neither a way of being the other). Nietzsche’s attack mainly runs against the “mind” side of this dualism, of course. So A.14 says that Descartes boldly viewed animals as machines, but “we” go further and view humans as such too: “ ‘Pure spirit’ is a pure stupidity: when we count out [rechnen . . . ab] the nervous system and the senses, the ‘mortal shroud,’ we miscount [verrechnen]—​nothing more!” Mind is just a capacity of the body, he suggests. 3 Note however that he sometimes diagnoses Monismus as an expression of (spiritual) poverty: 69–​70:3[73], 85–​6:2[117] (WP.600), 85–​6:2[133] (WP.601, LNp87).

The Yes: Value Monism  357 But Nietzsche in truth rejects both sides of the Cartesian duality: there’s no “merely material” body, any more than there’s an incorporeal mind. If he absorbs mind into body, it is into a body with very different properties than Descartes’ matter. Indeed Nietzsche argues that Cartesian extension is something we interpret into the world: it’s not “real,” much less essential.4 Instead—​and as we have seen in detail in Chapters 2–​4, he thinks of body as essentially a capacity (a dunamis), or rather as a system of capacities. He broadly divides these capacities into drives and affects. Moreover he crucially thinks of all these capacities as intentional, in the sense that they mean and aim at things. So body, the one kind of substance there is, has as its most important properties not extension (or weight or shape) but intendings (willings and feelings) that Descartes would have restricted to mind. Since Nietzsche attributes such intending to all living things and also thinks that “everything’s alive,” he offers this account of body as his full ontology. Ultimately there is only this one kind of entity, this one basic way of being an entity. I’ll generally call this his “being monism.”5 Everything is of the same sort. Indeed, Nietzsche even (thinks he) has reason to say that everything is in fact one thing: that the only one thing is the sum of all. For the interinvolvement of everything means that nothing is determinate—​is anything—​in its own right, but only in its relations to all other things (i.e., only in the context of the whole).6 Nietzsche associates this monism—​and many of the related views we’ll examine—​with Heraclitus. He does so from early on: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks [PTAG] says that Heraclitus “denied the duality of totally diverse worlds—​a position which Anaximander had been compelled to assume. He no longer distinguished a physical world from a metaphysical one. . . .” [5]‌. The ideas we’ll examine mark some of Nietzsche’s closest ties to Heraclitus, and I’ll point out connections at various points as we go. So, according to this being monism, there is one kind of entity (or even only one entity) and for it Nietzsche has one term he overwhelmingly prefers: life. As we saw in Chapter 2, this is really his crucial notion, more basic than “will to power”—​which is, after all, offered as an hypothesis about life. When he thinks of the stuff of the world he thinks of it not as matter but as “body” because he thinks of it as alive. Its aliveness lies in just what we’ve seen: that this body has capacities that aim (mean). All of this belongs to his campaign against a Cartesian dualism.

4 He argues so especially against “motion”: “Mechanism [Mechanik] as a teaching of motion is already a translation into the sense-​language of human” [88:14[79] (WP.634, LNp246)]. Also, e.g., 88:14[123] (WP.625, LNp258). 5 This of course includes the denial of any “other world,” immaterial and transcendent—​a view he associates with Plato and with Christianity. 6 I develop this as Nietzsche’s “contextualism” in Nietzsche’s System (1996, ch. 2). I come back to it later.

358  Nietzsche Values Still, we know that everywhere values are much more important to Nietzsche than facts—​even than very basic ontological facts. So, more important than his attack on ontological dualism is a parallel campaign he fights against a dualism about values. Indeed, I think his main objection to being dualism is its service as a prop for value dualism:  people have needed to believe that being is dual in support of their faith that values are dual. This is why Nietzsche cares about Cartesian dualism so much: it’s tied to a sickness in our values, our “faith in opposite values.” Nietzsche’s attack on this value dualism plays a major role in his thought. It’s not too much to say (I think) that this rejection is his main reply to morality, his main motive for replacing moral with “aesthetic” values. Or, to put it another way, it’s his main motive for replacing a morality of good versus evil with values of good versus bad. These fundamental reorientations he intends in our values—​ in the very way we have values—​are meant to follow from the insight that values are not opposite or dual. This attack on “opposite values” has been widely noticed, but it may be more controversial to claim that Nietzsche intends to offer instead a monism about values. Note that I mean this expression differently than its main current use in moral philosophy, by which “value monism” refers to the claim that all intrinsic value lies in a single property (e.g., happiness, or pleasure, or power). I mean instead the more radical claim that everything has the same value—​good. Everything is good, perhaps even equally good. So rather than the view that power (e.g.) is the only good, his value monism holds that good is the only value. Everything has this one value—​and the bad is just a way of being good (as mind is a way a body is). Now initially this doesn’t seem like an appealing or even a coherent position, nor something we might recognize in Nietzsche. Yet I think it’s one of the views he holds dearest. It finds expression in many places, in different degrees of completeness. Let me quickly remind of this value monism’s ultimate form, where it’s expressed in several of his most famous ideas: saying Yes, eternal return, amor fati, and the Dionysian. These ideas are so entangled with one another that we usually find them together. (i)  Nietzsche most prides himself as someone who “says Yes.” He says Yes to everything, even what seems most unsatisfactory in or about life—​both his own life and life in general:  “a Yes-​saying [Jasagen] without reservation [Vorbehalt], even to suffering, even to guilt, even to everything questionable and strange about existence” [EH.iii.BT.2]. He says Yes not just piecemeal, to things here and there, but in some special, ultimately encompassing way whose character we’ll examine. Let me introduce a usage: I’ll capitalize “Yes” when the affirmation has this special, totalizing character. By contrast we “say yes”

The Yes: Value Monism  359 (in lowercase) when we affirm some particular things (but not others).7 The principal application of the Yes-​saying is to life, which we’ve seen is his chief ontological term. One says Yes to life generally, and above all one says Yes to one’s own life—​to all of it.8 Nietzsche famously commends and indeed preaches this attitude to us. This is Zarathustra’s identity:  to be the ultimate Yes-​sayer, “the opposite of a no-​ saying [neinsagenden] spirit” [EH.iii.Z.6].9 And Nietzsche often presents himself either as aspiring to it, or as realizing it. In GS.276 he presents it as his new year’s ambition: “I want to learn more and more how to see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful in them—​thus I will be one of those who make things beautiful. . . . I do not want to wage war against ugliness. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse the accusers. Let looking away be my only negation! And, all in all and on the whole [Alles in Allem und Grossen]: some day I want only to be a Yes-​sayer [Ja-​sagender]!” Ecce Homo is quite thoroughly preoccupied with expressing this affirmative view of his own life; this is even its main point.10 (ii)  The idea of eternal return is bound up with this saying Yes. EH.iii.Z.1 introduces eternal return as “the highest formula of affirmation [Bejahung].” One’s ability to embrace eternal return is telling because it shows that one can say Yes to everything, even the most repellent features of life: one affirms their coming back eternally. So the thought of eternal return serves Zarathustra as “one more reason for himself to be the eternal Yes to all things, ‘the incredible, boundless Yes-​and Amen-​saying’ ” [EH.iii.Z.6]. (iii) And amor fati is another expression of this affirmation. It is the way this affirmation views the all that’s affirmed as fated—​and affirms it as such. So EH.ii.10: “My formula for greatness in a human is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary . . . but love it.” And NCW.e.1: “As my innermost nature teaches me, everything necessary, seen from up high and in the sense of a great 7 In translations of Nietzsche, however, I follow the capitalization (or not) of the original, where it generally depends on whether the ja is built into a noun or into a verb or adjective. 8 He uses “Jasagen zum Leben” in TI.x.5, AC.56, EH.iii.BT.3,4. I agree with Reginster on the importance of this idea to him: “Nietzsche regards the affirmation of life as his defining philosophical achievement” [2006, 228]. He thinks that Schopenhauer, by contrast, “said No to life, also to himself ” [GM.p.5]. 9 EH.iii.Z.8: “Zarathustra rigorously determines his task—​it is mine as well—​, and there can be no mistake over its meaning: he is yes-​saying to the point of justification, to the point of salvation even of everything past.” 10 EH.ii.9: “I do not have the slightest wish for anything to be different from how it is; I do not want to become anything other than what I am.” The book (after its Preface) begins: “On this perfect day . . . I have just seen my life bathed in sunshine: I looked backwards, I looked out, I have never seen so many things that were so good, all at the same time.”

360  Nietzsche Values economy, is also useful in itself,—​one should not only bear it, one should love it . . . Amor fati: that is my innermost nature.” So amor fati affirms the world (and one’s life) in one particular aspect: in how it must be just as it is. (iv)  Finally, the Dionysian also involves this universal Yes-​saying, with the special emphasis on how it affirms suffering, destruction, death—​or, abstractly, “becoming.” TI.x.5:  “Saying Yes to life, even in its strangest and harshest problems; the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types—​that is what I called Dionysian.” In 88:16[32] (WP.1041): “a Dionysian Yes-​saying to the world as it is, without subtraction, exception, or selection. . . . The highest state a philosopher can attain: to stand dionysianly to existence.”11 This Dionysian stance is also that of “tragedy.”12 Now it might be doubted that this “saying Yes”—​even saying Yes to “everything”—​really involves a “value monism.” Let’s quickly consider two such doubts. We might doubt, in the first place, that saying Yes involves a judgment—​the judgment that everything is good. Doesn’t this make “saying Yes” too cognitive and theoretical to be Nietzsche’s point? Mightn’t he rather have in mind a stance distinguished by a certain character of feeling? Why think it needs to involve a judgment about good or about values? And indeed he seems to think of the “dualist” way of valuing as chiefly a way of feeling. In the first essay of the Genealogy, for example, he stresses repeatedly the special intensity of hatred associated with ressentiment, the chief motive in slave morality. He says of priests: “Out of their powerlessness their hate grows into something enormous and uncanny” [i.7]; perhaps the separation of good and evil into opposites consists just in this emotive intensity with which the evil is denied. I do agree that this affective or emotive side to saying Yes is important: it’s essential that it be done with a certain feeling. The particular character of this feeling—​t he particular tonality of joy Nietzsche means—​a lso matters. I’ll come back in §9.4 to examine how the Yes is expressed in feeling and also in a way of willing. But Nietzsche’s favored phrase “saying Yes” itself puts weight not on feeling but on judging, or assessing—​and positively. Saying Yes makes a positive judgment about life and doesn’t merely feel it a certain way.13

11 He goes on:  “my formula for this is amor fati.” 88:14[89] (WP.1052, LNp250) says that the Dionysian state “counts being as holy enough to justify even a monstrous amount of suffering.” 12 See, e.g., TI.x.5 and EH.iii.BT.3–​4; the latter shows how he also associates the Dionysian stance with Heraclitus. I come back to treat Dionysus in Chapter 12 (§12.2)’s account of “Nietzsche’s gods.” 13 It should be added, against the idea that he criticizes good/​evil values for their “emotive intensity,” that Nietzsche values sharp oppositions himself and condemns wishy-​washy valuing—​as we’ll see in §9.3.

The Yes: Value Monism  361 A second doubt against attributing a value monism to Nietzsche denies not that he states this position, but that he thinks it’s true. Perhaps he just thinks that it’s good for us to judge (and feel) that everything is good, even though it’s not true. So the saying Yes would have a pragmatic justification, not an epistemic one. Indeed it may seem that Nietzsche can’t think it’s true that everything is good since he denies that values are “real” in the sense of existing independently of valuings of them. If there’s no value really there in things how can it be true that they’re all good? Nevertheless I think there are other ways that Nietzsche can think there is a “truth” in this saying Yes—​in judging everything good. I’ll develop this later, but for now, note just that he does call this affirmative judgment an insight, a truth: EH.iii.BT.2: “This final, most joyful, effusive, high-​spirited Yes to life is not only the highest insight, it is also the deepest, the most rigorously confirmed and supported by truth and science.” We’ll see later how he thinks the judgment “all life is good” can be justified by abstract metaethical grounds. So it’s not just the useful effects of saying Yes that are important to him, but also its status as an insight or truth. But what does it mean to say Yes to “everything?” How are we to interpret the scope of what’s affirmed (as good)? Let’s distinguish some possibilities. (a) Might Nietzsche’s point be that the sum or totality of life is good, not that every single instance of it is? Mightn’t there be a lot of things that are not good in that totality, though outweighed by the good things? In this case the affirmation would not be “distributed” over all individual entities; it would be not to “everything” individually, but only in toto. So in this case the affirmation is “only”: yes to the sum.14 Often it seems that Nietzsche is indeed judging the aggregate and not inclined to say that the weak or sick or herdlike are good. We might so hear him when he tells us that in affirming any particular thing we are obliged to affirm the “eternity” that produced it. In 86–​7:7[38] (WP.1032, LNp135): “If we say Yes to any single moment, we have thereby said Yes not only to ourselves, but to all existence [Dasein].”15 (b) But I will argue that he means—​at least at these moments when he thinks “ultimate” thoughts about eternal return, etc.—​that we must say Yes to each thing (i.e., recognize each thing as good). It “calls good and sanctifies even the most terrible and questionable qualities of life” [88:14[14] (WP.1050)]; it sees that “everything actually goes as it should go” [87–​8:11[30] (WP.1004, LNp207)]. So the affirmation is also at least: yes to each. We’ve already seen that willing eternal 14 So May [2016, 216–​7]: “affirmation of life can only be an attitude toward life, or my life, considered as a whole,” and is “consistent with negating or despising aspects of one’s life and the world.” 15 May [2016, 219] cites TI.ix.49 in favor of this reading: “only the particular is loathsome . . . all is . . . redeemed and affirmed in the whole.” But he omits the end of the sentence, which seems to me at odds with his reading: “he does not negate any more.”

362  Nietzsche Values return requires saying Yes to even the most repellent parts or aspects of life. The drama of Zarathustra hinges on the difficulty of this last step, to will the recurrence of even the most loathsome. Zarathustra remarks [iii.13.2] how it is easy to turn eternal return into a “lyre-​song” depicting the cyclical character of everything beautifully (Apollonianly). What’s hard is to think this with respect to what one dislikes most—​in Zarathustra’s case, the “small human,” the tawdry in himself and others.16 The challenge is not just to say Yes to a world that contains this (I suggest), but to say Yes to this particular, detested thing itself. Also notice in this regard how, in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche develops the indispensability of the small and the sick in himself; he loves even this about himself.17 This “distribution” of value down to every individual “bit” of life is a further result, he thinks, of the metaphysical insight that everything is necessary. Nothing in the world in all its history could be different without everything being different. And inasmuch as everything is necessary, to say Yes to anything requires saying Yes not just to the totality (“eternity”) but to each part of it, including especially those we would otherwise disvalue. Z.iv.19.10: “Did you ever say Yes to a single pleasure? Oh, my friends, then you said Yes to all woe as well. All things are chained together, entwined, in love—​/​ —​if you ever wanted one time a second time, if you ever said ‘You please me, happiness! Quick! Moment!’ then you wanted it all back!”18 (c) Nevertheless even this isn’t as strong as Nietzsche sometimes makes the point, for although it distributes value (goodness) to each thing, it doesn’t so distribute intrinsic value. It still allows that many things could be good only because they are necessary means for things that do have this intrinsic value. But (I claim) Nietzsche is not content with this. He wants the point to be that all things are also good intrinsically; that is, good in their own right or for themselves. So the affirmation is still stronger: yes to each for itself. It’s not enough to value the weak for the use they serve (to the strong or to the economy of the whole). We must somehow value weakness “for itself.” As we’ll see, one main argument Nietzsche makes is that weakness (e.g.) is not just causally necessary for certain goods—​means to them—​but essential (or logically necessary) in such a way that it is a “constituent” or element of those goods. What’s good is a situation (world) in which there are both strong and weak as essential parts. Another argument is that everything is good just as living. It is because he thinks intrinsic goodness is distributed to all things that he 16 See note 111 in Chapter 12 (§12.3) on eternal return. 17 Janaway [2007, 257] discusses this question of the affirmation’s scope, and I think defends a version of (b). He takes the affirmation to be directed upon oneself and to affirm one’s “whole life” as including many negative parts; one affirms those parts because they belong to one’s own, actual life which one loves as a whole. Janaway associates the next position—​(c)—​with Magnus and rejects it. 18 Also 86–​7:7[38] (WP.1032, LNp135–​6).

The Yes: Value Monism  363 holds that everything is in itself “holy” and in some sense of equal value. EH.iii. BT.2: “Nothing in existence should be excluded, nothing is dispensable.”19 I’ll come back to the question how to explicate this “intrinsic” goodness. These ideas bring Nietzsche into harmony with certain mysticisms and pantheisms. So Heraclitus D.67: “The god: day night, winter summer, war peace, satiety hunger.” Nietzsche is similarly inclined to deify all life: it is not just good, but holy. So (again) 88:14[14] (WP.1050) says that the Dionysian is “the great pantheistic sharing of joy and suffering that calls good and sanctifies even the most terrible and questionable qualities of life.” And 88:14[89] (WP.1052, LNp249) says that the Dionysian is “the religious affirmation [Bejahung] of life, life whole and not denied or in part.”20 I will return to this religious aspect of the Yes in Chapter 12. However, as mysticisms are, this is both very hard to spell out and very hard to adhere to. There are reasons to suppose that a value monism is unlivable and, indeed, that the very notion is incoherent. Moreover there are reasons that it seems Nietzsche in particular should reject it as inconsistent with his other strong views: mysticisms commonly promote a “not-​willing” and selflessness, so how can the value monism be consistent with Nietzsche’s advocacy of willing and selfishness? We’ll address these problems in §9.3, but first I think it will help to approach this value monism by a second route through Nietzsche’s thought.

9.2  Against opposite values Let’s focus on one famous way that Nietzsche states his value monism: as an attack on “opposite values.” The most prominent locus for this is his critique of metaphysics in BGE.2: “The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in opposite values [Glaube an die Gegensätze der Werthe].” BGE.2 goes on to say that “one may doubt, first, whether there are any opposites at all”; moreover it’s possible that “what constitutes the value of these good and revered things is precisely that they are insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these wicked, seemingly opposite [entgegengesetzten] things—​maybe even the same in essence [wesensgleich].” This line of thought is developed in many other places, both later in Beyond Good and Evil and elsewhere. It is a version of the more general 19 Compare 88:14[31] (WP.293, LNp244): “If becoming is a great ring, then everything is equally valuable, eternal, necessary.” 20 87:9[42] (WP.1005, LNp149) says that Schopenhauer “did not understand how to deify the will”: “He failed to grasp that there can be an infinite variety of ways of being different, even of being god.” Z.i.1 attributes to “the child” (the highest transformation of the spirit) a “sacred Yes-​saying [heiliges Ja-​sagen].”

364  Nietzsche Values denial of opposites21 applied particularly to values.22 BGE.47: “the dominion of morals . . . it believed in moral value-​opposites [moralischen Werth-​Gegensätze] and saw, read, interpreted these opposites into the text and the facts.” Nietzsche thinks the historical Zarathustra was an early inventor of opposite values, so that his own book is the story of that culprit’s recanting—​of his further wisdom (see EH.iv.3). So it is Zarathustra’s sense of himself that he overcomes this opposition and makes evil good again: Z.iii.16.4: “If I myself am a grain of that redemptive salt which ensures that all things in the mixing-​jug23 are well mixed:—​/​  —​for there is a salt that binds good to evil; and even the most evil is good for spicing and for the ultimate foaming-​over: —​“ ; “—​for in laughter is all evil compacted, but pronounced holy and free by its own blissfulness.” This rejection of opposite values is part of Nietzsche’s complaint against the values of “good” versus “evil”—​against the kind of valuing he often calls not just “slave morality” but (plain) “morality.” Some of Nietzsche’s criticism of these values is directed against what they value (their content), but some is against how they value this content. And much of the latter, formal criticism is directed against the way good/​evil values “polarize” or “bifurcate” the world. When, on the other hand, Nietzsche offers his own valuations of things as “healthy” and “sick,” as “strong” and “weak,” as “high” and “low” (we may sum these as “good” and “bad”), he presumably means these pairs not as “opposite values.” I think we can take it that the sense in which he denies that values are “opposite” is a key to the sense in which he rejects value dualism, hence to the way that he is a value monist. It’s not at all easy to say, however, just what Nietzsche means by his denial of “opposite values.” It seems a natural and obvious distinction in his voice, but what does it really consist in? What is it, to have one’s values “as opposites?” And how can he not mean his own pros and cons as such? A special challenge is to understand this critique in a way that is consistent with Nietzsche’s frequent talk elsewhere of viewpoints and values as “opposite,”24 and indeed his frequent praise for oppositions—​as when he says that 21 Nietzsche had a critical eye for belief in opposites from early on. HH.i.1 says that philosophy’s problems all ask “how can something originate in its opposite [Gegensatz]”; metaphysicians reply that highly valued things have their source in the “thing in itself,” but historical philosophy discovers “that there are no opposites.” And HH.iii.67: “Habit of seeing opposites.—​The general imprecise way of observing sees everywhere in nature opposites (as, e.g., ‘warm and cold’) where there are, not opposites, but differences of degree. This bad habit has led us into wanting to comprehend and analyse the inner world, too, the spiritual-​moral world, in terms of such opposites.” 87:9[91] (WP.552, LNp155): “There are no opposites: only from those of logic do we derive the concept of the opposite—​ and from them falsely transfer it to things.” 22 Already in HH.i.107. 23 This is perhaps an allusion to Heraclitus D125: “Even the potion separates unless it is stirred.” 24 E.g., BGE.21. Certain “opposites” play important roles in Nietzsche’s thought. Apollonian and Dionysian are described as opposites in Birth of Tragedy [BT.1–​2]. We’ll see later how he depicts himself (and Dionysus) as opposite to Christianity (and Christ).

The Yes: Value Monism  365 new philosophers give the stimuli for “opposite values [entgegengesetzten Werthschätzungen]” (BGE.203). There’s an important sense in which he doesn’t deny “opposites” but indeed affirms and promotes them—​as real, as valuable. The greatest are those who combine opposites. EH.iii.Z.6: “This most yes-​saying [jasagendste] of all spirits [Zarathustra] contradicts with every word he speaks; all opposites are combined into a new unity in him.” In his “openness to oppositions [Zugänglichkeit zum Entgegensetzten] Zarathustra feels himself to be the highest type of all that is.” The idea seems to be that this opposition is somehow annulled by that fusion—​in a “unity of opposites,” as expressed once again by Heraclitus.25 But how is this ideal of a “unity of opposites” squared with the denial of opposites we’ve seen? Here as always we must proceed to distinguish senses. Not surprisingly, analysis shows that Nietzsche means a variety of things in his critiques of “opposite values’ in the various passages in which he treats this theme. His mind, remarkably able to keep out of ruts, explores crisscross over this terrain and marks a rich range of points. I want to try to organize some of this variety—​to cut some ruts.26 I will arrange these ways of denying opposite values from weakest to strongest, starting with the more obvious and ordinary things he means and building to the more radical and difficult. These easier and weaker points are (as it were) the steps by which he tries to help us—​and himself—​up to the ultimate lesson. Each of them has its own argument and support. When we get to the most radical sense, we will have arrived back at the strong value monism I surveyed before but with a better sense why Nietzsche holds it. I will then return to the question of how he can fit it with his other views. (i) Source (not otherworldly). A first thing Nietzsche means by denying opposite values is that values (good/​bad) don’t originate in—​aren’t somehow grounded in—​different ontological realms (e.g., the body vs. an immaterial soul or god). Good, in particular, doesn’t issue from another realm than this physical one we see and feel around us: good actions don’t have supraphysical causes. Sometimes it seems that this is all the “oppositeness” Nietzsche denies: the assumption of (what I called in §9.1) a being dualism. This is how BGE.2 initially describes the faith in opposite values: “the things of the highest value must have another, peculiar origin—​they cannot be derived from this transitory, seductive, deceptive, paltry world.”

25 PTAG.6: “if everything is fire, then in spite of all its transformations there can be no such thing as its absolute opposite.” PTAG goes on [.9] to interpret Parmenides as recasting his predecessors” opposites as negations of one another. 26 I am not aware of any efforts at a careful separation of senses, which of course may be my fault.

366  Nietzsche Values Nietzsche often argues against such opposite sources. He insists that good actions must be explained by the same naturalistic principles that apply to the bad. In particular, the same aggressive and sensual bodily drives that have long been blamed for bad behavior are also the ultimate source of even our most altruistic and saintly acts. Just as he absorbs soul back into body, so he absorbs altruism back into selfishness. In 87:10[154] (WP.272, LNp200): “My purpose: to demonstrate the absolute homogeneity of all events and the application of moral distinctions as occasioned by perspective; to demonstrate how everything praised as moral is essentially the same [wesensgleich] with everything immoral and was made possible, as in every development of morality, with immoral means and for immoral ends.”27 Similarly he stresses how good and evil traits morph into one another. HH.i.107: “Good actions are sublimated evil ones; evil actions are coarsened, brutalized good ones.” (Compare Heraclitus D.88: “The same . . . : living and dead and waking and sleeping and young and old. For these transposed are those, and those transposed again are these.”) So on this reading value dualism is defined by its “metaphysical” postulation of another world. Nietzsche here cleaves to the literal sense of “metaphysics,” “beyond nature”; it is postulating something apart from nature-​life. GM.iii.11: “The idea we are fighting about here is the valuation of our life on the part of the ascetic priest: he relates our life (together with that to which it belongs: ‘nature,’ ‘world,’ the entire sphere of becoming and of transitoriness) to an entirely different kind of existence, which it opposes and excludes, unless, perhaps, it were to turn against itself, to negate itself.” So understood, Nietzsche’s critique of value dualism is straightforward: there is no such “other world”—​no separate kind of cause. In 87:10[57] (WP.786): “one has invented an opposite to the driving forces, through a psychological misunderstanding, and believes one has described another kind of [force;] one has imagined a primum mobile that does not indeed exist. According to the valuation that evolved the antithesis ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’ in general, one has to say: there are only immoral intentions and actions.” EH.P.2: “You rob reality of its meaning, value, and truthfulness to the extent that you make up an ideal world. . . .”28 However this denial of an otherworldly source for goodness is not today, I think, a very surprising or interesting claim; it’s the default view. It is simply naturalism, but in the abstract, without any of the more particular character 27 86–​7:7[24] (WP.375, LNp134): “All the drives and powers that morality will praise seem to me essentially the same [gleich] as those it defames and rejects[;]‌e.g., justice as will to power, will to truth as a means of the will to power.” GS.14: “Greed and love: how differently we experience each of these words!—​and yet it could be the same drive, named twice”; “this love has furnished the concept of love as the opposite of egoism when it may in fact be the most unabashed expression of egoism.” BGE.24 claims similarly that the will to knowledge is a “refinement” of the will to ignorance. 28 GS.151: “what led in ancient times to the assumption of an ‘other world’ was not a drive and need, but an error in the interpretation of certain natural processes, an embarrassment of intellect.”

The Yes: Value Monism  367 Nietzsche gives it. The next points take up more of his particular idea of the natural world and draw its consequences for values. And they rebut ways of having “opposite values” that don’t involve an implausible being dualism. After all, as we’ve noted, Nietzsche thinks belief in opposite values “comes first,” or lies at the psychological root; dualist ontologies are just one strategy devised to support it.29 (ii) Instantiation (never pure). A second way that Nietzsche denies opposite values is by insisting that values (good/​bad) are never instantiated “purely” or “completely.” Hence no X is ever solely good or solely bad; to any X to which one value-​predicate applies, the other applies as well. Thus 88:15[113] (WP.351) attacks “that dualistic conception of a merely good and a merely evil creature (god, spirit, human); in the former are summarized all the positive, in the latter all the negative forces, intentions, states.” Here good and bad are “not opposites” in the sense that things are never polar opposites in their value—​all-​good or all-​ bad. Whereas the first point concerned the source of good and bad, this concerns the way they occur in the things that are good or bad. They are always mixed together in these things. Everything is bivalent. Again the lesson follows from Nietzsche’s naturalizing of values. The first point, against an otherworldly source for values, was merely the naturalism in the abstract (“nothing is supernatural”). This next point is a consequence of naturalizing the things to which values are applied. When we see, in particular, what people and their deeds and experiences really are, on Nietzsche’s naturalistic story, we see that any value-​standard we might apply to them will—​when strictly and accurately applied—​always find them somewhat good and somewhat bad. The most obvious application of this point is to humans:  no person is purely good or purely bad. But Nietzsche even applies it to particular acts and experiences. Every human event has this mixed value—​is good but also bad. He thinks this is true by morality’s standards—​and also by his own. He applies the latter in 83:8[27] (WP.1012): “To distinguish in every movement /​(1) that it is in part exhaustion from a preceding movement (satiety from it, malice of weakness against it, sickness[)]‌/​(2) that it is in part newly awakened, long slumbering, accumulated force, joyful, exuberant, violent: health.” We should notice that the point has to do not with the perspectivity of values—​ that a thing is valued as good by judge A and as bad by judge B—​but with dual aspects of the thing itself, which show up no matter what standard it’s judged by. And Nietzsche thinks of these good/​bad aspects as occurring in two directions. A thing is “both good and bad” in that it always has some sources that are good and others bad, and in that it always has some results that are good and others bad. So he brings out the great complexity, and consequent bivalence, both of 29 D.p.3 says of Kant:  “to create room for his ‘moral realm’ he saw himself obliged to posit an undemonstrable world, a logical ‘Beyond.’ ”

368  Nietzsche Values an act’s motives—​the wills and purposes that explain it—​and of its effects—​the impacts it has on the subtle psyches of the agent and others. Each of these is bivalent, and indeed the difference between the motives and effects is often (as in the last passage) a further bivalence. We’ve just noted how often he tries to show morality’s sources to be immoral; this point about “mixing” is another lesson he draws from these cases. So 87:9[140] (WP.308, LNp164): “In sum: morality is just as ‘immoral’ as any other thing on earth; morality itself is a form of immorality. /​The great freeing that this insight brings, the opposite is removed from things, the homogeneity of all that happens is rescued.” Consider the two sites of bivalence in turn. (a) Impurity in source:  everything happens for manifold reasons, some of them good, others bad. Nietzsche often thinks this way about persons, whose doings are explained by their multiple drives and affects, each with a selfish project in competition and conflict with others. By any value-​standard we apply to a person—​whether the master’s or the slave’s, for example—​he or she will always have some drives “good” and others “bad” by this standard. Indeed we are strengthened by this motivational bivalence:  the success of “good” drives depends on a psychic economy of contrary drives.30 When we grasp this necessary complexity, and how a person’s doings always express these conflicting aims, we see that they can never be all-​good or all-​bad. Nietzsche is often pleased to point out how the persons we might judge just good are as they are because of wills or attitudes we judge (by the very same standards) bad—​and vice versa.31 (b) Impurity in effects: everything is good in its effects on some other things, but bad in relation to others. Again Nietzsche thinks this not just about persons, but about particular acts and experiences. Anything I do works on such diverse kinds of people that it will inevitably affect some pairs in opposite ways—​again by any value-​standard one might apply. (Heraclitus D61: “Sea: purest and foulest water, for fish drinkable and sustaining, for humans undrinkable and deadly.”) Anything we might count good is so only in some contexts, but would be bad in others.32 Again he is happy to point out contrary effects: EH.i.5: “If you are rich enough for it, it is even good luck to be wronged.” Moreover the context changes, inevitably: qualities now good prepare the conditions that will make them bad, 30 88:15[113] (WP.351) denounces the “hemiplegia” of the “good human,” who separates off one side of various dualisms and insists on just it: “One is good on condition one also knows how to be evil; one is evil because otherwise one would not understand how to be good. Whence, then, comes the sickness and ideological unnaturalness that rejects this doubleness—​, that teaches that it is a higher thing to be efficient on only one side?” 31 See 87:10[105] (WP.1015, LNp192)] on his insistence on seeing the “reverse side” of both good and bad things. 32 Nehamas [1985,  209] seems to understand Nietzsche’s critique of “absolutism” this way: “attaching positive or negative value to actions or character traits in themselves, it presupposes that their worth is fixed once and for all and in all contexts.”

The Yes: Value Monism  369 as did the “strong and dangerous drives” that were necessary in earlier stages of society [BGE.201].33 Nevertheless, although Nietzsche does hold all these points and rejects “value purity” in all these ways, it still isn’t the gist of his denial of opposite values. We should suspect this when we see how easy it is to agree with most of these claims—​and how trite they then seem. We’ll readily agree that “nobody’s perfect.” Perhaps we’ll also be happy to extend this even to the motives for particular acts or experiences: Isn’t there always at least a tinge of something dubious? And we’re also well aware that acts’ effects are multifarious and so also both good and bad. If Nietzsche’s argument against “opposite values” is only a denial that there are any saints or demons, it won’t hold much interest. This argument against “purity” doesn’t address the logic of good and bad themselves, but only the way they’re distributed in the world: they’re mixed together, never concentrated or pure. The claim is only: any X which is good is also bad—​and vice versa. The next point is a claim about values themselves, rather than about how they get instantiated in things. (iii) Meaning (not detachable). A third way Nietzsche denies opposite values is by claiming that good and bad are involved or contained in one another by the underlying structure of valuing. It’s not just due to the enormous complexity of things’ sources and effects that they are always good and bad both, but due to the “logic” of good and bad themselves. They are comparative and scalar rather than intrinsic and bifurcated, which involves them in one another in ways we don’t suspect. Any X, just qua good, is also bad; its badness is not a separate feature of it, but required if it is to be good. So good and bad are not only (as in (ii)) always alongside one another; they depend on one another. This point comes out of Nietzsche’s theory of what values are. When we see, in particular, the way values rest ultimately in life’s nature as will to power—​how values are all strategies for power—​we see the deep logic of good and bad. We began to look at these points in Chapters 1–​2. Ultimately, values are strategies for power—​for the organism’s striving to overcome. Most basically, the living thing strives to overcome a current condition of itself—​it strives to grow. And usually it pursues this self-​overcoming by trying to overcome something else—​a problem or situation, or some other organism or will. By this structure of will to power, good and bad are projected in a certain relation to one another, quite prior to the way we relate them in our

33 GS.4 suggests that societies need periodically to be rejuvenated by persons who are “evil” insofar as they want “to overthrow the old boundary stones and pieties”; hence both good and evil are “expedient” for societies—​only in different periods. We looked at this dialectic in Chapter 8 (§8.3b) and will come back to it in Chapter 11 (§11.1).

370  Nietzsche Values conscious valuing. In the way life wills power, good and bad are (a) essentially interinvolved, and also (b) scalar or hierarchical. (a) For first, as overcoming, this deep will in life crucially involves a no, a disvaluing or valuing as bad, of what’s to be overcome. And of course it also involves a yes, a valuing as good, of the event and achievement of growing by overcoming that bad. So a yes and a no are simultaneously embedded in the basic stance of living things: a will to further and promote, but by destroying and rising above.34 This yes and no—​the judgments good and bad—​are not just co-​present, but require one another. Or at least, the affirmative judgment requires the critical: it is precisely the aspiration to better something viewed relatively as bad. So the “no” is built into the underlying effort in all life. This argument is Nietzsche’s version of a simpler, more familiar argument of why good requires bad: to call something “good” requires that there be a “bad” that it’s contrasted with. So there is something incoherent about hoping for a world in which bad, the contrast-​case, is eliminated. Heraclitus D110–​111: “For humans to get all they want is not better. Disease makes health sweet and good, hunger satiety, weariness rest.”35 Nietzsche’s point is that good requires bad not just for contrast, but as an ingredient in itself. We can call the point containment. Good is (as we might put it) a larger phenomenon than we had recognized: it is not just the better outcome on its own, but the whole sequence including the bad that is overcome. As an ingredient in the good, the bad shares in the good. So for example with suffering: Nietzsche wants us to see it as a part of the successes that overcome it.36 The full good contains not just that overcome bad but also a violent rejection of it—​a will to destroy it. This is a second reason Nietzsche likes to say that the good involves bad: that aim to destroy is bad by morality’s standards—​though not, it turns out, by his own. So Zarathustra says [Z.ii.12] that creating requires destroying, and “[t]‌hus does the highest evil belong to the highest good:  but the latter is the creative.”37 When morality imagines good and evil as the aims of quite different kinds of people, it fails to see how destroying is embedded in every will and how ascent along that ladder involves a growing capacity to destroy (overcome); life says no to more and more that it leaves behind as it says

34 88:15[113] (WP.351): “it takes good and evil for realities that contradict one another (not as complementary value concepts, which would be the truth), it advises taking the side of the good, it desires that the good should renounce and oppose the evil down to its ultimate roots—​it therewith actually denies life, which has in all its instincts both Yes and No.” 35 Compare GS.12: “what if pleasure and displeasure are so intertwined that whoever wills to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other. . . ?” 36 Reginster [2006, 231] says that suffering is valued for its own sake because it is “metaphysically necessary” for creativity as overcoming; creativity is essentially an overcoming of suffering. 37 EH.iv.4: “negating and destroying are conditions of Yes-​saying.”

The Yes: Value Monism  371 yes to higher things ahead.38 The Dionysian joy in destroying is for the sake of a positive project that makes a new future.39 Hence good and bad stand in an asymmetric relation: the latter is presupposed by (even contained within) the former as what it overcomes, but bad doesn’t in the same way contain good (is not intrinsically a descent from a good). Nietzsche draws the lesson from this, applied not to good/​bad but pleasure/​pain, that they are therefore not opposites: 88:14[173] (WP.699, LNp262): “Pain is something different from pleasure,—​I want to say it is not its opposite.” For displeasure is an ingredient in pleasure (as we see from tickling and sex, which Nietzsche thinks are pleasures composed of “a certain rhythmic succession of small unpleasurable stimuli”), but pleasure is not similarly contained within pain. This asymmetry—​the way the good contains or encompasses the bad—​has a metaphysical aspect for Nietzsche. It is perhaps a consequence of our asymmetric relations to future and past. My willing (intending) is not “toward” past and future symmetrically, such that each is meant in the same way, just in opposite directions (forward, backward). Rather my willing is principally futural, and the past is primarily encountered within the scope of that germinative project—​ as what it overcomes. (This priority of the positive will be important later.) I also think we should interpret this containment of bad in good in line with Nietzsche’s idea of becoming: for life as will to power, the good is precisely the overcoming of the bad and not the resultant state existing independently of the bad. Good is a movement, a becoming, rather than a goal-​state reached. (b) But further, the good, as this creative movement, will indeed result in a new state, which in turn will be our future will’s bad. Hence overcoming is progressive and climbs over a sequence of levels. This idea is expressed, of course, in Nietzsche’s frequent depictions of values in terms of a scale or ladder up which we aspire to ascend. This scale is projected by the nature of (life as) will to power: by the way it constantly outruns its successes—​wants always progressively more. Schopenhauer sees will’s dissatisfaction as constantly reinflicted, but Nietzsche sees how this reiteration strings a series of successes into a “ladder of overcomings.” Power, the good, lies not in the rungs or levels themselves, but in the ascents from each to the next. By being strung after one another this way, the good of these ascents accumulates: the ascent from B to C is better than that from A to B.

38 GS.371: “we drive our roots ever more powerfully into the depths—​into evil—​while at the same time embracing the heavens ever more lovingly and broadly. . . . Like trees we grow—​it’s hard to understand, like all life!—​not in one place, but everywhere; not in one direction, but upwards and outwards and inward and downwards equally.” 39 GS.370: “The desire for destruction, for change and for becoming can be the expression of an overflowing energy pregnant with the future (my term for this is, as is known, ‘Dionysian’).”

372  Nietzsche Values As degrees (“values”) along a single scale, all values are homogeneous.40 There are upward and downward directions, but no top or bottom, hence no full or perfected opposites. Any ascent along this scale is good with respect to the positions it has overcome and climbed above, but bad with respect to the ascents that move beyond it. So rather than a dualism of values we have a great pluralism of degrees. We might call this point gradation. Each higher level sees those below it as its opposite—​as bad—​and so misses this scalar logic. In 81:11[115]: “In benevolence is refined pleasure of possession . . . etc. /​As soon as the refinement is there, the earlier stages will no longer be felt as stages, but as opposite. It is easier to think of opposites, than of grades.” Since these are grades along a single scale of value, we can say that the pluralism is still contained within a monism. This scalar character of value is veiled by the polar separation of a good and a bad that characterizes each episode. The bad—​what’s now to be overcome—​is judged just bad. It’s not seen as the good of an earlier overcoming, nor as ingredient in this current overcoming. We “lose perspective” in our effort to grow, and this is perhaps at the root of the posit of opposite values. Standing at the divide between this good and this bad, they seem indeed to be radically opposed. But Nietzsche thinks that when we step back to look at the underlying structure of valuing, where it’s lodged in our deepest effort, we find in this way that good and bad are both required in it and stand in this scalar and comparative relation. We see that containment and gradation belong to this ultimate valuing. We see that life values the good only as overcoming a bad, so that both yes and no, creative and destructive projects, are essential to it. And life values the good along a ladder of overcomings, by which it ascends through a hierarchy of bads and goods. But this doesn’t exhaust Nietzsche’s critique of opposite values. We still haven’t arrived at the value monism. Containment recognizes bad as an ingredient in every good but still holds it to be bad. And gradation depicts values along a single scale but doesn’t think of everything on that scale as “good.” Yet he wants, we’ve seen, to say Yes to everything—​to say a Yes that somehow finds nothing bad. And he claims to have a reason for moving beyond life’s yes and no to that transcending Yes. None of (i) through (iii) yet gives this reason. (iv) Ultimacy of good. The fourth way Nietzsche denies opposite values is the most radical. Everything is (truly) good. Bad is simply a kind or degree of good. I suggest that this last step involves a discrete change in perspective for Nietzsche. He experiences it as a jump out of his individual viewpoint to one at a higher, transcending level—​to a “height and bird’s-​eye view” [87–​8:11[30] 40 Nietzsche thinks a parallel point about true and false. So BGE.34 rejects the “essential opposition of ‘true’ and ‘false,’ ” since there are only “degrees of apparentness and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance.”

The Yes: Value Monism  373 (WP.1004, LNp207)]. He is less sure just how to think of this shift. He most often characterizes it as a step into the perspective of “life itself ”—​life in its generality or essence, abstracted from every particular life. He feels himself now able to value from this higher perspective, which leaves behind the limitation to his own life that his values had always had. He values just as life does, qua will to power. Nietzsche also depicts this perspective as that of his god, Dionysus; I take this to be metaphorical for the ontological point, about life as will to power (and give a fuller account in Chapter 12). For this general viewpoint, all life is good. For it there are no “opposite values” in a still stronger way than in (i)–​(iii): there is really only one value—​good—​ and its seeming opposite is really a qualification of it (i.e., a way of being good). Moreover Nietzsche thinks that this universal affirmation is grounded in a metaethical insight—​a kind of wisdom—​and is not merely a matter of feeling. 88:16[32] (WP.1041) says that the Dionysian, amor fati, is “the highest state a philosopher can attain.” And recall EH.iii.BT.2: “This final, most joyful, effusive, high-​spirited Yes to life is not only the highest insight, it is also the deepest, the most rigorously confirmed and supported by truth and science.” We saw the beginning of this argument back in Chapter  2. In the deepest logic of valuing, it is by life for life. There are values only by virtue of life; value is only in life’s valuing. TI.v.5: “life itself values through us when we posit values.” Moreover, what life values (as good) is power, and since power is its own growth (i.e., the more of life itself), the ultimate value is really just life itself. At its core, valuing’s good is always and simply life. So life, as the transcendental condition of all values and as the built-​in aim of all values, is the ultimate and essential good. We can fill out this argument by considering Nietzsche’s difference from Schopenhauer, who argues to an opposite conclusion from some of the same premises. He emphasizes the negative element in life as will: the way life is the ground of suffering, the way it always involves a judging-​bad and saying no. Schopenhauer infers that life’s fundamental aim is to eliminate the suffering that is essential to itself. So he states the opposite overall evaluation of life, in its pure and honest form: all life is bad, all “goods” are merely lesser degrees of bad, including even escape from willing, which is (in effect) a zero or minimal degree of bad, the best we can do. What is Nietzsche’s argument for his more positive stance? If we accept that life is will to power and that it always says both yes and no—​no to life as needing to be overcome and yes to its overcoming—​why take the affirmative judgment as primary? Isn’t Schopenhauer just as justified in generalizing from the negative aspect? But Nietzsche insists that the negative aspect is merely an element in a fuller, positive project: toward growth, or the more of life. This is the point we called containment. Schopenhauer has failed to notice how this positive aim contains the negative—​how it makes suffering, in particular, not a bad opposite

374  Nietzsche Values to good, but a bad that’s a necessary part of good. Power is not just the negation of suffering, but also an increase that contains the suffering as a subsidiary part. This much is rather abstract argument about some transcendental features of valuing. But Nietzsche wants this argument to lead us to a certain perspective that embodies this insight—​the perspective of “life itself.” A person can occupy this transcendental standpoint and from it see the one value for all life: good. What we can say, from this broadest perspective, is just that life is good. The distinctions we then go on to make will speak for only one kind of life; this finds some life good and other life bad. So below the monist perspective of life itself, there’s a value pluralism: there are different goods internal to the different perspectives. But from the transcendental point of view life is essentially good. In 88:14[31] (WP.293, LNp244): “In all correlations of Yes and No, of preference and rejection, love and hate, all that is expressed is a perspective, an interest of certain types of life: in itself, everything that is says Yes.”

9.3  Saying Yes and saying yes-​and-​no Once we arrive at this strongest version of Nietzsche’s rejection of “opposite values,” we wonder how we can stay there—​the position looks untenable. It’s hard to see, as we noted at the end of §9.1, how this value monism can be coherent, livable, and consistent with Nietzsche’s other views. It seems to fail all three of these obvious tests—​as let’s now see. We should distinguish two ways this value monism seems incoherent—​to contradict itself. One occurs within the viewpoint itself; the other occurs in the promotion of this viewpoint as a virtue or ideal. So the universal Yes seems incoherent both intrinsically, as a “way of valuing” and also in the role Nietzsche claims for it, as the best way to be. First, to value everything as good seems not really to be valuing at all since the latter depends, it seems, on also disvaluing—​counting as bad—​the situation without that good. Mustn’t there always be some implicit alternative to what we value, an alternative we reject? Didn’t we just see Nietzsche arguing that bad is not ‘detachable’ from good? It seemed that we can’t rate anything good without implicitly judging its absence bad, which it seems the universal Yes could not do. Second, Nietzsche’s offer of the value monism—​his suggestion that we should value so—​commends it in preference to our ordinary ways of saying yes-​and-​no, and yet the value monism itself seems to count these as all good. When we say Yes to everything it seems that we are also saying Yes to saying no.41 But then how 41 Indeed the Dionysian is precisely the “saying Yes to opposition [Gegensatz] and war” [EH.iii. BT.3].

The Yes: Value Monism  375 can it be justified to commend “saying Yes” rather than saying no? Isn’t he in effect saying yes to saying Yes, but saying no to saying no—​hence not universally affirming after all? The value monism looks unlivable on a plausible psychological ground. It seems that to live we need, if we are not to lapse into apathy and inertia, to view many things as bad—​as needing to be overcome and bettered. Only by shoving off from something we see and feel as bad can we muster the momentum to act, it often seems. Or, at the very least, our action is energized by that no-​saying. So the Yes, as the undiscriminating view of everything as good, cannot be our attitude for everyday. As we live we need a stance that says yes-​and-​no—​indeed very often says an emphatic no and then yes. And it seems that Nietzsche himself agrees with this, which poses the third problem, that the value monism looks inconsistent with many other things he says. Indeed he explicitly rejects a blanket affirmation: Z.iii.11: “Verily, nor do I like those for whom each and every thing is good and this world is even the best. Such as these I call the all-​contented. /​All-​contentment, which knows how to taste everything: that is not the best taste! I respect the rebellious selective tongues and stomachs, that have learned to say ‘I’ and ‘Yes’ and ‘No.’ ”42 He himself says yes-​and-​no not just in living his life, but in his writings, which (as we’ve noted) are usually quite far from expressing that universal Yes. They are more often highly critical—​and indeed of many things we’re not used to hearing criticized. So he gives the impression of saying many more no’s than most people do.43 And this seems inconsistent with the value monism he offers. Nor is it just that Nietzsche is constantly saying no. He also defends this practice, and in doing so seems to reply quite directly to value monism. He defends no-​saying as essential to life. BGE.9: “Is not living—​evaluating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, willing to be different?” And he defends it in the very face of the value monist argument that rejecting one thing is to reject everything. In 86–​7:7[15] (WP.333, LNp133): “to desire that something [Etwas] is other than it is means: to desire that everything is other,—​it involves a rejecting [verwerfende] critique of the whole. . . . But life is itself such a desire!”44 As we saw just now in 42 A.1: “Formula for our happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal. . . .” See GS.32’s doubts over a disciple who “can’t say ‘no.’ ” 43 Even though he says about Daybreak that “there is not a single negative word in the entire book” [EH.iii.D.1]. But EH.iii.Z.6 says that Zarathustra “says No, does No to an unheard-​of degree, to everything to which one so far said Yes.” TI.x.1 says regarding the ancient world that his taste “even here is far from saying Yes in Bausch und Bogen: in general it does not gladly say Yes, even rather No, or best of all just nothing.” 44 He says that life involves desiring, although desiring is itself a “wanting to be other” that is, strictly, a rejecting of the whole. 86–​7:7[62] (WP.331, LNp139): “Very few make themselves clear what the standpoint of desirability [Wünschbarkeit], every ‘so it should be but is not’ or indeed ‘so it should have been,’ comprises: a condemnation of the total course of things. For in [this course] nothing exists in isolation: the smallest things bear the greatest”; later: “what? is the whole perhaps composed of dissatisfied parts, which all have desiderata in their heads? is the ‘course of things’

376  Nietzsche Values §9.2, life as will to power essentially wills to overcome something viewed as bad; abandoning negative judgments seems at odds with life’s very essence. Indeed life requires us not just to “say no” but even to hate and fight against some things, as Nietzsche himself obviously did—​and so to say an especially emphatic and vehement no. Indeed, when the Dionysian stance loves destruction, it loves the most violently practical way of “saying no” to something: to try to kill it. TI.x.5 says that the Dionysian state is “over and above all horror and pity, so that you yourself may be the eternal pleasure in becoming,—​the pleasure that includes even the eternal pleasure in destroying [Vernichten].”45 And so Nietzsche says very emphatic yes’s and no’s. He says an emphatic no to a wishy-​washy “yes and no”: A.1: “This modernity made us ill—​this indolent peace, this cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous filth of the modern yes and no.”46 So it seems his “no” doesn’t also mean “yes.” These attacks include, most notably, certain arguments that look inconsistent not just with the value monism, but with the broader attack on opposite values. When Nietzsche brands his opponents “anti-​life” he puts them in opposition not just to himself but to the very essence or principle of things. He is pulled back toward a bifurcation of organisms or persons or drives into two opposite kinds reflecting their sharply different intrinsic value. So he bifurcates into active/​reactive and healthy/​sick—​as if these are distinct kinds of persons (or organisms). Everything is “life,” indeed, but life comes in two antithetical kinds, one of which has even lost part of what is essential to life and fights traitorously against life. In his most vehement moments Nietzsche uses bifurcations to express a kind of fervor or even fury that is comparable to the moral denunciations he criticizes. This dualist tendency is most active where he offers his values most shrilly, in Antichrist. A.18: The Christian idea of god—​god as a god of the sick, god as spider, god as spirit—​ is one of the most corrupt conceptions of god the world has ever seen; this may even represent a new low in the declining development of the types of god. God having degenerated into a contradiction of life instead of its transfiguration and eternal Yes! God as declared aversion to life, to nature, to the will to life! God as the formula for every slander against “the here and now”, for every lie about the “beyond”! God as the deification of nothingness, the canonization of the will to nothingness! perhaps precisely this ‘away from here? away from actuality!’ eternal dissatisfaction itself? is desirability perhaps the driving force itself? is it—​deus?” 45 EH.iii.Z.8: “For a Dionysian task the hardness of a hammer, the joy even in destroying belongs decisively to the preconditions.” 46 Also CW.e.

The Yes: Value Monism  377 Such denunciations seem to dualize values in just the way he elsewhere rejects. Nietzsche himself is well aware of the apparent discrepancy between his claimed identity as the ultimate Yes-​sayer and his constant, devastating attacks and criticisms.47 EH.iv.2: “ . . . I obey my Dionysian nature, which does not know how to separate No-​doing [Neinthun] from Yes-​saying.” Nietzsche, more acutely and aggressively than any of us, wants to bring out valuative differences and distinctions—​and in particular the ways that many things (people) fail and fall short of what they might and should be. Indeed one of the things he heatedly attacks in this way is value dualism. And yet the very character of these attacks seems to land him back in a value dualism himself. The question is: How can Nietzsche “say Yes” to life—​not just in the aggregate but also in every individual—​yet also go on and say no; that is, disvalue (evaluate as bad) so many things? How can he consistently disvalue anything? In EH.iii. BGE.1 he says that after, in Zarathustra, “the yes-​saying part of my task was solved, the no-​saying, no-​doing half came next.” But why doesn’t the sweeping character of that Yes preclude his following it with any no? He is aware of the seeming contradiction: EH.iv.1: “I contradict as nobody has ever contradicted before, and yet in spite of this I am the opposite of a no-​saying spirit. I am a bearer of glad tidings as no one ever was before.” It’s possible that he’s content with such contradiction.48 But I think he also has ways to reconcile these views. I think the key to resolving these discrepancies is to recognize the particular role Nietzsche wants his value monism—​that universal Yes—​to play. He does not offer it as an attitude for everyday use. He doesn’t mean it to replace the attitude that says yes-​and-​no. He gives it—​this stance in which one feels the goodness of all—​a privileged place in his ideal psyche; it plays a crucial sustaining and guiding role. But his assumption is that this is an exceptional attitude to which one feels oneself temporarily ascending from a mundane attitude to which one will return, refreshed and improved. This means that we haven’t really understood Nietzsche’s universal Yes until we have determined just how it affects the judging, no-​saying values he elsewhere advocates. As an only occasional viewpoint, its importance must lie in this impact on the rest of one’s life. So just what such impact does he want it to have? How does it affect the yes-​and-​no values that shape the broader life and thinking he commends?

47 EH.ii.3: “It is also not my way to love much or many things” (he has been speaking specifically of what he reads). 48 See Müller-​Lauter’s account [1971/​1999] of Nietzsche’s “philosophy of contradictions.”

378  Nietzsche Values

9.3.1  The Yes and everyday values Let’s distinguish three kinds of relations in which the Yes can stand to the yes-​ and-​no values he wants us to live by. (a) There might be no effect—​no way the Yes changes the judging and steering values. The value monist embrace of all is perhaps just a refreshing vacation from which one returns to one’s everyday yesing and noing with new energy, but in no otherwise different a way. (b) Saying Yes might change the way one holds one’s yes-​and-​no values, but not the content of those values. (c) Saying Yes might change which yes-​and-​no values one lives by. (a) First answer:  The Yes is a kind of R&R for the spirit:  it refreshes and reinvigorates it for its everyday battles but doesn’t inform or alter the values by which it fights those battles. So Nietzsche simply passes back and forth between two discrete perspectives: the transcendental perspective that sees life as essentially good and a perspective within a life, his own, that finds many kinds of life (and many features of his own life) bad. It may be a special privilege to occupy that divine perspective. It may help to sustain one in one’s human efforts. But it doesn’t steer those efforts in any new way. Compare Heraclitus [D.102]: “For god all things are beautiful and good and just, but humans have taken some things as unjust, others as just.” (I believe these are generally not taken to be Heraclitus’s own words.) And Nietzsche says in PTAG.7 about Heraclitus: “Before [the god’s] fire-​gaze not a drop of injustice remains in the world poured all around him.” We’ve seen that Nietzsche identifies his god, Dionysus, with this transcendental stance, that finds all things good. (I come back to the role of gods in Chapter 12 [§12.3].) Perhaps he calls this stance divine precisely because it is beyond us to live entirely in it: it can only be temporary and episodic. Nietzsche does indeed treat this value monism as a perspective; for example, 87–​8:11[30] (WP.1004, LNp207): “To attain a height and bird’s eye view, so one grasps how everything actually happens as it should happen: how every kind of ‘imperfection’ and the suffering over it belong within the highest desirability.” And he describes this perspective as taken in very special, exceptional moments; for example, in GS.341, at the introduction of eternal return: “Or have you ever experienced a tremendous moment [Augenblick] when you would have answered . . . .”49 In “inspiration” we experience “a depth of happiness in which the bleakest

49 83:8[14] (WP.417): “Dionysian: temporary identification with the principle of life (including the delight of the martyr).” Nietzsche says that this attitude was strongest in him during the period of Zarathustra: “the yes-​saying [jasagende] pathos par excellence, which I have named the tragic pathos, was alive in me to the highest degree” [EH.iii.Z.1]. Note however that GS.341 goes on to speak of becoming thus “well disposed . . . to yourself and to life,” which suggests a more settled condition; I explore this later.

The Yes: Value Monism  379 and most painful things work not as opposites, but as conditioned, demanded, as necessary colors within such an overflow of light” [EH.iii.Z.3]. So this is one way to accommodate the dualism: see the monism as offered from a god’s-​eye, supra-​individual position, the dualism as offered from within Nietzsche’s personal view. In the monist ideas regarding life and eternal return he ascends to the transcendental stance, whereas the dualist bifurcations into strong/​weak etc. are just expressions of his own will to power, in which he speaks as “just Nietzsche.” This would relativize the saying Yes to one perspective, the saying yes-​and-​ no to another. We might even take it that these two perspectives mean their affirmations in different senses: when the overall perspective judges “good,” it means something different from when a within-​a-​life valuing does so; we might mark these different senses by speaking of Good and good. The latter (as we’ve seen) is meant as a contrast-​term with “bad,” whereas the former counts bad as only an instance of Good. Notice however that as it stands this reading itself performs a bifurcation of Nietzsche’s position into two views that don’t affect one another. The transcendental Yes-​saying approves of the within-​life saying no—​it is, after all, part of “life”—​but it doesn’t affect how we say no, nor what we say no to. So it is, in this respect at least, otiose; it turns no wheel. It releases us, from its own universally affirmative view, to say no to things just as we like, independently of it. But surely this can’t be Nietzsche’s view; we’ve already noticed some ways he wants to improve his yes-​and-​no valuings through that monist insight. The monism supports, for example, the rejection of good/​evil morality in favor of good/​bad values, and this change is meant to occur within the individual’s personal yes/​no valuing. So the god’s-​eye perspective can and should alter the human valuing: they’re not completely insulated from one another. So let’s determine what this effect will be. (b) Second answer: Once we learn to say Yes we go back to our everyday yes-​ and-​no values “in a different spirit” or with a different strategy. We perhaps say no to the very same things, but in a different way, with a different force. Although (according to this answer) the “divine” perspective doesn’t (can’t) determine any particular values for us, it can affect how we hold such values. There are several ways it may plausibly change the manner of our affirming/​denying. The central lesson, according to the guiding theme of this book, concerns the perspectivity of values. Once we see/​feel, within the optics of the Yes, that everything is good, we return to our yes-​and-​no values with the recognition that they are “just our” values. We remember that it’s only their perspectivity that singles out, within the field of the all-​good, distinctions of good from bad. We remember, even while we make those distinctions, that what we label bad is also, as an expression of life, unreservedly good. Z.iii.11: “But he has discovered himself who

380  Nietzsche Values can say This is my good and evil.” All of this improves the metaethical “truthfulness” with which we value. This central lesson ramifies into others—​further ways of remembering that the Yes changes how we value. Recalling that all is ultimately good, we don’t demonize the bad—​we moderate our antipathy toward it. We learn to say our no to things as (merely) bad, and not as evil. Having felt the Yes, one is less prone to ressentiment, with its intense and obsessive dislike of the other. One becomes more able to value others’ viewpoints. One embraces a diversity of perspectives in oneself, as Nietzsche takes pride in doing.50 I also learn to temper my no in other ways. I direct my critical and negative impulses into positive projects. I say no only in order to say yes: I train myself not to say no wherever it can’t serve such a project. I avoid in particular saying no to things already done. So EH.ii.1 says that instead of bad conscience, “to honor something that has gone wrong all the more because it has gone wrong—​that is more in keeping with my morals.” I try indeed to “say no as little as possible” [EH. ii.8]. So I push my personal valuing—​though still with its yes-​and-​no—​at least in the direction of the universal Yes. All of this amounts to a new personal hygiene in valuing, which Nietzsche presents especially in Ecce Homo. So the value monism, recognized episodically in feeling the Yes, can have strong consequences for how we hold the yes-​and-​no values we then go back to. Still, I think Nietzsche wants even more from that Yes: he wants it to give content, too. That is, he wants it to affect not just how but what we value when we return to our partial and interested view. The advantage of this next and stronger view is that it saves Nietzsche’s position from the relativism into which the second answer strays. It valued all perspectives by finding them all on a par. But of course Nietzsche wants to make distinctions. And with this in mind he denies that it is a virtue to regard my values as “just my perspective”—​and to sympathize with others in theirs; so A.1: “This tolerance and largeur of the heart that ‘forgives’ everything because it ‘understands’ everything is sirocco for us.” I am “truthful” to my perspectivity not by putting it on a par with other perspectives this way, but in seeing its “rank” among them. The problem with this stronger view will be, that it breaks down the border between the universal Yes and certain particular no’s—​it makes the transcendental value monism bear the seeds of the dualism that marks some things as bad. For now the monism needs not just to license saying no in general, but to dictate

50 EH.i.1: “This double birth, from the highest and lowest rungs of the ladder of life, as it were, simultaneously decadent and beginning—​this, if anything, explains that neutrality, that freedom from partisanship in relation to the overall problems of life, that is, perhaps, my distinction.”

The Yes: Value Monism  381 saying no to particular things. And this makes it appear that the saying no is somehow already there in the universal Yes. (b) Third answer: Once we’re able to say the universal Yes we see that we need to change what we’ve been saying yes-​and-​no to. We need to revise, that is, our criteria for good and bad, the values we live by. This means that the value monism—​the Yes to life just as life—​must generate, seemingly against its nature, a basis for viewing some life as good and other as bad. The Yes already makes a distinction within life, which then revises the everyday values to which we go back. We can only make a way here, I think, if we take the value monism to allow degrees of goodness. (It can’t be a monist about this.) To be sure it sometimes seems that Nietzsche rejects this; he implies that in saying Yes one feels the equal perfection of all. As Zarathustra’s animals put it:  “The center is everywhere” [Z.iii.13.2]. But this radical version of the value monism makes the problems of coherence, livability, and consistency all much harder. And it leaves Nietzsche with no footing within the value monism from which to build out his distinctions in rank and value. So I think we must read his value monism as indeed judging everything good, but not equally good. It involves the claim we called gradation, in interpreting his denial of opposite values just now. So the Yes can allow that some things are “less good,” and this can give a basis for an everyday distinction of good and bad. While of course the value monism doesn’t concur in the judgment “bad,” it seems a short step from its own judgment “less good.” If instead it held everything to be equally good, it would rule out distinctions altogether. So Nietzsche’s value monism must be able to see life as good to different degrees. What difference does it make, then, that the value monism speaks of “less good” instead of “bad?” This might seem to be just a verbal matter. And the value monism would look a bit cheap if it only relabeled the bad in this way. Moreover it seems that any set of everyday values could then be converted into a value monism just by switching its vocabulary from “bad” to “less good.” So the value monism would not favor any particular yes-​and-​no values after all. It seems that in looking for a way to connect the value monism and our everyday values, we’ve trivialized it. But these doubts are answered when we see where the value monism gets its “degrees of good.” It gets them not by converting some (of the person’s) existing yes-​and-​no values, but from the character of what it says Yes to. It finds degrees of good in the real character of the “life” it affirms. The value monism is not, we should remember, simply a matter of judging as good an abstract “everything.” It finds life good, and finds it good while seeing—​to some minimal extent at least—​what life really is. It sees, in particular, the harsh and selfish side so often suppressed; it sees life’s character as will to power. BGE.259: “life itself is

382  Nietzsche Values essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the foreign and weaker, suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation, and, at the least, at the mildest, exploitation.” So the value monism affirms life as will to power, and this gives it a criterion for evaluating particular living things. It gives it life’s own ultimate criterion, power. We examined Nietzsche’s position in Chapter 2: what he means by power, why he thinks it’s life’s aim, and in what sense this justifies power as good. Now we can add that Nietzsche’s ideal Yes—​the affirmation it makes in its love of fate and embrace of eternal return—​must see life with this aim, as ranked and graded in this aim. It says Yes to life, as a landscape with hills and valleys. The value monism sees every living thing as good just as a will to power, but also sees that they instantiate this good to different degrees, at different levels. So the universal Yes has an unexpected side: although it gives up feeling anything as bad, it doesn’t give up value distinctions. It’s not a value uniformism. It feels that even the least of living things are good, but less good. And this distinction of degrees of good is then translated, in the values the Yes-​sayer goes on to live by, into a yes-​and-​no that speaks of the less good as “bad.” Hence the Yes to life as will to power has consequences for the (content of the) yes-​and-​no values one goes on to live by. The Yes, seeing life, sees the ultimate aim of life, and this guides the everyday judgments it resumes. In 85–​ 6:2[190] (WP.254, LNp95-​6): “what are our evaluations and moral tablets of goods themselves worth [werth]? what results from their rule? For whom? In relation to what?—​Answer: for life. But what is life? Here we need a new, more definite formulation of the concept ‘life.’ My formula for it is: Life is will to power.” Since the point of life is “power,” we now evaluate a particular instance of life—​ say yes or no to it—​by how it stands with respect to power. Does an organism will power effectively (so as to reach it)? What degree of power is it able to achieve (or will)? Individual cases of life are judged by their capacity for life’s ultimate end. Nietzsche is confident that strength versus weakness, and health versus sickness, can be distinguished from the point of view of “life itself,” and used as a standard for our deliberative values (recall Chapter 2 [§2.5]). Thus the individual is able to “take the point of view of life” and make differential judgments on its behalf; (s)he can use these as a standard for the values to adopt as an agent. The lesson is far from being “this is just my perspective.” Life itself judges that some acts are higher and others lower. Life itself judges that some acts advance the essential end and other acts inhibit it. A.2: “What is good?—​Everything that enhances in humans the feeling of

The Yes: Value Monism  383 power, the will to power, power itself. /​What is bad?—​Everything that stems from weakness.”

9.3.2 Dualism redux So Nietzsche thinks that his universal Yes to life equips him to rank and evaluate living things—​using the criterion of life (as will to power) revealed in that Yes. What we must notice next is that Nietzsche goes on to apply this criterion in ways that sometimes lose sight of the arguments that ground his value monism. He goes on to excoriate some human types as “bad” in ways that his arguments against “opposite values” exclude. We can distinguish, I suggest, two ways that Nietzsche uses his criterion of life or power to make value distinctions. In both cases he uses it to judge them good or bad, high or low. So both give up the final and strongest way of denying opposite values, (iv) (in §9.2), the step that led to value monism itself. But usually Nietzsche stays faithful to his other arguments against opposite values, including to gradation, in (iii). He mostly remembers that good and bad are scalar and comparative. But sometimes he abandons this, too, and turns his values into opposites as extreme as in the old value dualism. We’ve seen how the ur-​value of power gives Nietzsche a scale—​a ladder of degrees of power, along which different living things can be placed. In 88:14[105] (WP.710, LNp253): “The experiment could be made whether a scientific ordering of values couldn’t be constructed simply on a number-​and measure-​scale of force . . . /​ —​all other ‘values’ are prejudices, naiveties, misunderstandings . . . /​everywhere they are reducible to this number-​and measure-​scale of force /​ —​upwards on the scale means every growth in value; /​ —​downwards on the scale means diminution of value.” This scale is the ladder of life, along which it is graded as stronger and weaker. The weak are less good at willing power, can reach only lesser degrees of it, but they are not opposites to the strong. They are, just by being alive and willing power, good, only to a lesser degree than those stronger. Weak-​strong is easily read as such a scalar difference. And when Nietzsche judges something “weak” he means it in this gradational and affirmative sense. But sometimes he wants his attacks to have more bite than this. He wants to use life’s transcendental standard not just to place some people/​ideas/​values low (i.e., to judge them weak and lesser degrees of the good), he wants to make them opposite to the good. I suggest that Nietzsche most often expresses this more emphatic critique by calling them not weak but sick [krank]. For this lets him treat them as representing a kind of negation and opposition to life.

384  Nietzsche Values To be sure, sometimes Nietzsche avers that the healthy-​sick contrast is just as scalar as the strong-​weak contrast. He copies the physiologist Claude Bernard (in 88:14[65] (WP.47): “Health and sickness are not essentially different. . . . In fact there are only differences of degree between these two kinds of existence.”51 But more commonly, I think, he treats these as more opposed and dichotomous. Of course one can be healthy in some respects and sick in others, and people might be scaled by their proportions of health. But healthy/​sick are themselves bifurcated, since (as I proposed in Chapter 2 [§2.5]) the former ultimately means for Nietzsche “well-​directed at life’s end (power),” the latter “misdirected at life’s end”; that is, aimed at something different from the good.52 So whereas the weak are less capable at pursuing power, the sick aim somehow away from and even against power itself—​they don’t know what’s good for them.53 The merely weak still strive upward, for the more of life, but slip back out of incapacity; the sick however Nietzsche depicts as aiming downward, against the essential tendency of life itself. The ultimate form of sickness is to be anti-​life. It is here that Nietzsche’s dualist urge finds its clearest and final expression within the scope of, but also in some tension with, the value monism of life as will to power. Nietzsche insists that the ruling morality—​the values that did and do prevail—​is hostile to life. EH.iii.CW.2:  “Christianity, this denial of the will to life become religion!” EH.iv.7: “Christianity is criminality par excellence—​the crime against life”; “This, the only morality that has been taught so far, the unselfing-​morality, betrays a will to the end, it negates life in the deepest ground.”54 It is in order to bring his attack on his enemies (Christianity above all) to its highest pitch that Nietzsche resorts to this ultimate charge. It’s not enough to say that they rank low by life’s standard—​he insists that they oppose life itself, that they aim perversely contrary to life’s essence. This dualism is expressed in the opposition Nietzsche stresses at the very end of Ecce Homo, in EH.iv.9: “—​ Have I been understood? Dionysus versus the Crucified. . . .” And back near the book’s beginning, EH.p.2 says that the prevailing values are “the reverse

51 Reginster [2013, 723] points out this copying of Bernard, which Nietzsche doesn’t flag in his note. But Reginster goes on to find a kind of self-​contradiction in sickness, on Nietzsche’s view; this treats the notion as “dichotomizing” after all, but in a different way than I will propose. 52 EH.i.2: “complete decadents always choose the means that hurt themselves.” 53 Another term Nietzsche favors here is “degenerate” [entarten]. EH.iii.D.2: “But the priest wills precisely the degeneration of the whole, of humanity”; and “I consider anyone who disagrees with me about this be infective [inficirt].” 54 EH.iii.BT.2:  “I was first to see the genuine opposition [eigentlichen Gegensatz]:—​the degenerate instinct that turns against life with subterranean vengefulness . . . and a formula of the highest affirmation.”

The Yes: Value Monism  385 [umgekehrten] values of those that might begin to guarantee it prosperity, a future.” This depiction of the prevailing values as his (polar) opposite,55 and as negating life and its essential end, is a common move by Nietzsche, prominent also in the diagnosis of these values as expressing the ascetic ideal at the end of the Genealogy. However by heightening his critique in this way, Nietzsche generates problems in his theory of life; these problems are ultimately traceable to the difficulty of fusing a value dualism upon a value monism. Nietzsche holds, we’ve seen, that the transcendental value is life, and hence also the power life essentially wills; life itself and in all its varieties is the good. But now Nietzsche wants to add—​ in order to sharpen his attack—​that some life aims against the essential aim of life. Some life not only fails to will power, it also aims at something opposite to power: it aims to diminish life rather than to grow and upbuild it. Some life, that is, is anti-​life. Nietzsche faces, here, his peculiar version of the “problem of evil”: How, if life is “all good” by the way it is the source and aim of all values, can there arise this life-​ negating principle within life itself? Why, when life is essentially will to power, should some life have values that oppose and damage life? Indeed this causes problems for his argument that life is will to power since this rests on his ability to diagnose, in even the most misguided, an underlying ambition for growth and control. It’s the plausibility of these many particular diagnoses he gives that may persuade us that life does essentially want more of itself and is therefore the transcendental good. The claim that some life wants not more of life but less threatens the claim about essence and so the inference to life’s ultimate value. This sharpened attack also generates problems for the value monism. It is harder to see how the transcendental insight that all life is good is preserved within one’s yes-​and-​no values when these separate off some life as thoroughly hostile to life, as diametrically opposed to its essential end. The judgment against such life seems now built into the essence of life, which hence no longer seems to be universally affirmed after all. So we have arrived, of course, back at the tension I surveyed in §9.1. I think that this tension is lastingly present in Nietzsche’s thinking: he didn’t find a steady answer to it. He’s strongly pulled in both monist and dualist directions. It is part of his philosophical method to give free play to these countervailing impulses and not to subject them to the discipline of a finished theory. This doesn’t mean, however, that he doesn’t have such a consummation in view—​that he doesn’t 55 EH.ii.10: “I want to be the opposite of all this: it is my privilege to have the finest sense for all signs of healthy instincts. I do not have any sickly tendency [Zug].” EH.iii.BT.3: as a tragic philosopher, Nietzsche is “the uttermost opposite [äussersten Gegensatz] and antipode of a pessimistic philosopher.” Also, e.g., EH.iv.3, A.8.

386  Nietzsche Values expect that his views could crystallize and harmonize were he ready to be done with his experiments. In conclusion I want to propose how I think that settling would go—​the dominant line on these issues. I think his ultimate allegiance is to the monism, and the dualist excoriations of his opponents as “anti-​life” were recognized, in the back of his mind, as rhetorical and polemical. He knew that “this too is life—​this too is on behalf of life.” He regularly reminds himself that even sickness, and the ascetic ideal, and nihilism arise and spread because they “serve life.” At the individual level, they are a route to personal power.56 So, too, for societies or peoples.57 And at the species level they have all helped us humans get through the trauma of “taming” into cities—​and agency. We find this concession, for example, in the treatment of the ascetic ideal in the third essay of the Genealogy. GM.iii.11: “It must be a necessity of the first rank that makes this species that is hostile to life grow and prosper again and again—​it must be in the interest of life itself that this type of self-​contradiction not die out.” And iii.13 says that the ascetic ideal seems to be “life denying life,” but physiologically such a contradiction is “simply nonsense.” Asceticism isn’t really against life; it “springs from the protective and healing instincts of a degenerating life”; “the ascetic ideal is an artifice for the preservation of life.” And so, Nietzsche allows: “this ascetic priest, this seeming enemy of life, this negating one—​precisely he belongs to the very great conserving and yes-​creating forces of life.” And, speaking of the human generally: “As if by magic, the No that he says to life brings to light an abundance of tender Yeses; even when he wounds himself, this master of destruction, self-​destruction—​afterwards it is the wound itself that compels him to live. . . .” This affirmative stance toward even his greatest enemies is, I  suggest, Nietzsche’s more considered view, the one that fits best with the value monism expressed in his core thoughts of eternal return, amor fati, and the Dionysian. It allows him to keep the idea that good and bad are scalar and comparative and that bad is really just a kind of good. Even the ascetic Christian priest, ultimate voice of nihilism, is a life willing power, whose position expresses a widespread

56 GM.ii.18 says that “[o]‌ne should guard against forming a low opinion of this entire phenomenon [of bad conscience] just because it is ugly and painful from the outset,” since it is due to an active force like state-​building, an “instinct for freedom (speaking in my language: the will to power),” but applied inwardly rather than outwardly. GS.27 makes a much more specific application of the general point: “The renouncer. . . . This sacrificing, this throwing away, is now precisely what alone becomes visible in him and leads people to call him the renouncer. . . . But he is quite satisfied with the impression that he makes on us: he wants to conceal from us his desire, his pride, his intention to soar beyond us. Yes, he is cleverer than we thought, and so polite toward us—​this affirmer [Bejahende]! For he is just as we are even in his renunciation.” 57 A.24 tells how the Jews, themselves with “the toughest life force,” “took sides with all the instincts of decadence” for the sake of power.

The Yes: Value Monism  387 interest of life. And the no Nietzsche says to him is not the kind of no that is opposite to a yes, hence not at odds with the Yes he says to all life.

9.4  How to say Yes However we have not yet faced the problem of just what it is to “say Yes.” We were able to proceed so far without this specification because we made the natural assumption that the Yes is some kind of verbal and propositional act, as the expressions “affirmation” and “saying Yes” suggest. We took it to be something like the assertion and belief that “all life is good”—​as a view or position that Nietzsche wants his readers to accept. We saw how this belief was related to the critique of opposite values—​likewise a theoretical position; we asked about the coherence of this Yes considered as such a position. Yet we’ve seen from the beginning that Nietzsche thinks that “valuing” is not mainly a matter of naming or asserting or believing goods. To be sure, this is the most obvious part of our distinctively human and “agential” way of valuing: the principles, maxims, and virtue-​terms to which we refer, more or less consciously, in acting. But we’ve seen that Nietzsche thinks that this way of valuing is importantly superficial and secondary: another kind of valuing goes on “beneath the level” of these conscious, worded values and largely steers them. Indeed, we’ve seen that agential valuing itself mainly works at that “hidden” level. This underlying valuing occurs in two ways, we’ve seen. First and principally, it occurs in the signs used by our forward-​pressing drives. We value by virtue of steering by these signs, which are therefore our values. But second, we also value in the feeling associated with our affects. We feel the world’s impacts upon us as helps or hurts, pleasures or pains. In Chapter 4 we saw how this affective valuing begins as an assessment, in feeling, of how well one is doing in the drives, but that affects can detach from this reference to drives and value on their own. We can immediately recognize, I think, that Nietzsche’s Yes must involve these willful and affective sides, besides that cognitive and positing one.58 It can’t be enough, given all we’ve seen of his views about values, just to believe that “all life is good.” One needs to “incorporate” this thought at the level of one’s drives and

58 Gemes [2008, 463] criticizes Reginster’s account of affirmation as “too cognitive” and as missing Nietzsche’s accounts of it (and nihilism) as “affective psychological states rooted in the constitution and interrelations of the drives.” See, too, Han-​Pile [2018] and May [2016]. We took a first look at this point in Chapter 2 (§2.5).

388  Nietzsche Values affects and not let it float free above them. So how does Nietzsche want the Yes to be incorporated into one’s willing and one’s feeling? a. Willing the Yes. Take first how the Yes can be expressed in one’s willful effort at ends. The value would show up in the signs by which we pursue these ends. But there’s an immediate puzzle how this could work. For a value to play the role of a route-​setting sign, it needs to distinguish and discriminate: the sign must pick out some things and not others to aim at. But to “value all life” seems to be to treat everything as such a sign—​and steering at everything would amount to not steering at all. Willing can’t aim if every course of action (and inaction) looks good. Now notice how EH.ii.10 says that in amor fati “one wills to have nothing different [man Nichts anders haben will], not forward, not backwards, not in all eternity”: Doesn’t this commend just such a will? But in that case Nietzsche would have to mean a very different kind of willing than he usually has in mind—​a kind of willing that doesn’t try to bring about what it wills. It is not, surely, the kind of “striving” will he means in will to power. We’ll see that the same thing is true of “willing eternal return” (which is a temporalized form of this “will” that everything be just as it is). I can’t in that full sense “will” that my life repeats exactly through all eternity, nor that everything happens as it does and must. They’re true (or not) independently of me, and nothing I do can make either any more likely. And to “will that nothing be different” is effectively an injunction not to will. It’s tempting to say that what Nietzsche here means by “willing” is instead something like “hoping” or “wishing.” I can “hope” for something I have no way to bring about; I can “wish” that some past event had gone differently. Might these be the weaker or derivative forms of “will” that he here has in mind? But I don’t think this is right either. Since he wants us to believe that things’ being as they are (and as they were and as they will be) is necessary and inevitable, surely it’s not something I can hope or wish for, either. I am to see it as a fait accompli. Instead, I suggest, what he means by “willing” this fatedness is rather reacting to it by feeling a certain way—​glad or joyful. He is in effect speaking of a change in the affects, not in the drives. I’ll come back to this role of feeling shortly. Although this universal affirmation “just says Yes,” we’ve seen that it licenses (as it were) one to go on to hold certain yes-​and-​no values. It’s in the latter, I suggest, that the main effects of the Yes on willing will be. The Yes affirms all life as good while allowing its goodness to come in degrees, life’s “ladder.” One descends from this god’s-​eye Yes to values that say yes to the higher and no to the lower. In doing so one still “affirms life,” but not in that universal way. One affirms life by willing “the more” of it—​by willing higher forms and saying no to and struggling to overcome the lower. One affirms life by trying to advance life up that ladder.

The Yes: Value Monism  389 I suggest that we think of it this way: The perspective of the universal Yes is that of “life itself ”; it occupies no particular position within life, so that for it there’s no “above” or “below.” This is why it can only affirm life in general. But when I return to my own life I find myself at a particular level from which there are “above” and “below.” Now I say yes to what’s above and no to what’s below this rung I occupy. And I will and strive for more (i.e., higher life). So although the Yes—​loving everything about life, loving it all as fated—​itself involves no (genuine) willing, one descends from it into particular yes-​and-​no values that do set up discriminating signs to will and steer by. One strives up that ladder—​to grow one’s type—​and this means that one strives healthily. Thus the pay-​off for will happens not in the Yes itself but in this interested life to which one returns.59 b. Feeling the Yes. But what about the feelings and affects? Does the Yes find direct expression in these, or is it again only in the yes-​and-​no values we “descend” to? I suggest that the situation is very different here: when the Yes values all of life, this valuing is crucially carried in a way we feel. The main locus of the affirmation is not in the affirmer’s will, nor in his or her “posit” of life as good, but in his or her affects. This is how we most have to “mean” that Yes. We affirm life not mainly by thinking or willing it as good, but by feeling it so. When we examined Nietzsche’s “affects” in Chapter 4 we saw that they are habits or practices of feeling: my affect of anger is my habit of feeling certain ways in response to certain situations or prompts. In my feelings I judge myself helped or hurt—​strengthened or weakened—​by these situations; I so value them in these feelings themselves, not in a separate reflective act. Although affects may often begin as adjuncts to drives—​assessing how a situation bears on a drive—​ they can persist and develop in their own right, independently of any reference to drives’ ends or values. It is this independence from the drives that lets feeling make “global” judgments. By contrast with willing, feeling needn’t discriminate:  we can feel everything as good without the difficulty and even incoherence involved in willing everything as good. Indeed we are all already familiar with feelings with this global scope. In elation or depression we take ourselves to respond to the whole world—​it looks all good or all bad. Nietzsche thinks that the Yes needs to be felt this way—​in “the yes-​saying pathos” that EH.iii.Z.1 says “lived in [him] to the highest degree” in the period of Zarathustra.

59 Han-​Pile [2009] distinguishes Nietzsche’s amor fati from his life-​affirmation by interpreting the former to involve an “agapic” love that is non-​preferential and non-​acquisitive and the latter an “erotic” love that desires its object, which it singles out as good. I’ve been much helped by her papers, but think that what she calls life-​affirmation is really the yes-​and-​no valuing that follows and is guided by it; I disagree similarly regarding amor fati.

390  Nietzsche Values What kind of feeling does Nietzsche have in mind? Sometimes, we should note, he speaks of “affirmative affects” in the way we saw him speak of affirmative willing: to refer not to what’s involved in the universal affirmation itself, but in the yes-​and-​no values it prompts. So 88:14[11] (WP.1033, LNp242) gives a long list of “the Yes-​saying affects,” beginning with “Pride /​joy /​health /​sexual love /​animosity and war /​reverence.” Here I suggest he is speaking of affects that will accompany the healthy willing that follows after the Yes—​which says yes to “more life” and no to “less life.” So these affects will include “feeling bad” with respect to the present one wills to go beyond. But elsewhere he means an affect with the universal scope of the Yes. He has several favorite terms for this. The most obvious feeling involved in the Yes is joy [Freude].60 So EH.iii.BT.2 speaks of “this final, most joyful [freudigste], effusive, high-​spirited Yes to life.”61 But what is joy? Just qua affect, it is a felt response: it feels itself affected by the world a certain way. Joy, specifically, is the affect that feels itself affected in the supreme positive way.62 It’s supreme both in how highly joy rates this effect—​ how well-​off it takes itself to be—​and in how intensely it feels this assessment. Joy is the strongest feeling of the best well-​being. This intensity gives joy an absorbing or encompassing character that distinguishes it from mere “enjoyment” (or pleasure): mostly we enjoy things without feeling (genuine) joy.63 In the Yes this encompassing character is pushed farthest, and I feel joy over everything together. Nietzsche especially wants this joy. In 80:6[289]: “So to live, that our energy is at [its] greatest and most joyful—​and for that to sacrifice everything. NB.” But there seems to be nothing surprising (or interesting) in this. Who doesn’t want to experience the supreme positive feeling—​to feel joyful? The question is whether and how it’s at all possible to bring this joy about in oneself. As a “felt response” joy seems not the sort of thing one can will oneself into: either you feel it or you don’t. So how could this joyful Yes be any kind of goal? But in fact we can do something. If the Yes’s joy is the feeling that all the world makes one stronger or better, there are two ways one might produce this feeling. I can produce it “honestly” if I can become stronger or better by means (somehow) of the world. I can produce it “dishonestly” if I can falsely believe

60 Note that some translations are unreliable for this term:  they translate Lust as “joy,” too. Nietzsche does sometimes use Lust for this highest affect, but more often for mundane “pleasure” (by which I render it). 61 TI.ix.49 attributes to Goethe “a joyful and trusting fatalism in the midst of all.” 62 87–​ 8:11[285] (WP.917, LNp234) begins:  “To feel oneself stronger—​ or expressed otherwise: joy. . . .” This is one of Nietzsche’s points of connection with Spinoza. 63 Cf. Reginster’s suggestion [2006, 224] that joy differs from mere pleasure in requiring that the experience it’s of be (or be viewed as) perfect.

The Yes: Value Monism  391 myself made stronger—​and believe it in a way that penetrates into my feelings. Which strategy does Nietzsche have in mind? The former, honest route to joy is that of the strongest individuals. They feel joy because they recognize their own power and growth. In 85:41[6]‌(WP.1051, LNp48): “As is proper, only the rarest and best-​formed come to the highest and most illustrious human joys, in which existence celebrates its own transfiguration.”64 It’s because they grow the most that they feel this joy, and their joy has the rich texture of their achievement. Nietzsche thinks he feels this joy himself in his maximally creative moments, as in writing Zarathustra. But perhaps it’s not very helpful advice to be told “become strongest and then you’ll feel joy.” The joys of a creative genius are very likely inaccessible to us. Besides, this route to joy doesn’t seem to account for the universal scope of the Yes. Why does one feel joy at everything? Why should one experience that the whole of things makes one stronger? The answer, I suggest, is that in these moments of the Yes one feels oneself ascending into a larger identity. One identifies with the whole and thereby feels oneself supremely improved by it: it lets me share in its magnitude. It is this “mystical” step, in which one feels one’s own identity suddenly expanded to cover all the world, that explains this joy. We’ve already seen how the Yes involves taking the “global” point of view of “life itself,” leaving behind one’s local situation as a particular instance of life. We saw that it’s from this “god’s-​eye” viewpoint that one judges all life to be good. And now we see that this ascent also explains the joy one feels in the Yes: one feels precisely one’s growth into that higher perspective. But now the question returns of whether this is an “honest” route to power. Is one’s sense of ascending to a higher perspective true? Is the joy felt for a genuine growth, or only an illusion of growth? The answer, I suggest, is that Nietzsche thinks it’s partly each. There’s genuine growth here, but it’s aided by a certain artistic and indeed religious illusion: one feels oneself divine.65 But I want to defer these topics until we discuss Nietzsche’s religious ideas in Chapter 12. Another affect involved in the Yes is love [Liebe]—​a love for all of life, including all of one’s own life. Nietzsche operates, I suggest, with Spinoza’s general idea of the relation of love to joy: love is joy accompanied by the idea of its external cause—​what’s loved. Our joy in our own felt growth is naturally joined by love for the cause of that growth. In the Yes the joy is felt to be due to all life, so this is what’s loved. But what is the character of this love?

64 So this joy was most felt by nobles. A.56 attributes to Manu’s nobility “a saying-​Yes to life, a triumphant feeling of well-​being [Wohlgefühl] in itself and in life.” 65 85:41[6]‌(WP.1051, LNp48): “From that height of joy, where human feels itself, and itself completely, as a deified form and self-​justification of nature. . . .”

392  Nietzsche Values Sometimes Nietzsche gives this love an erotic character, as we saw in Chapter 2 (§2.1). In Zarathustra’s two “dance-​songs,” Z.ii.10 and Z.iii.15, life is personified as a woman whom Zarathustra loves in an erotic or sexual way. Indeed the implicit culmination of the book is Zarathustra’s marriage to life, with the ring of eternal return. But it’s hard to see what such an erotic relation to all life could be. Is this erotic element merely dramatization? Han-​Pile [2018] has interpreted Nietzsche’s life-​affirmation as indeed erotic. But she takes this to mean that its love is “preferential, acquisitive,” which she counts against it.66 I put the emphasis in a different place. If our joy is over the expansion we feel in identifying with “all life,” then our love is not an “acquisition” (or controlling or owning) of life but rather a merging or fusion with it. This, I suggest, is the character of the Yes’s love: it loves all life as it loves itself for it suddenly feels itself coextensive with it all. So this love’s eroticism has a strongly empathetic character: it enters and feels the viewpoints of other life, but feels it all as divine and good. So recall 88:14[14] (WP.1050) on “the great pantheistic sharing of joy and suffering that calls good and sanctifies even the most terrible and questionable qualities of life.” It affirms life as suffering not from a detached view of, but in an empathetic identification with that suffering. And this shows that suffering must also be part of how one feels the Yes: the encompassing joy must be felt about this suffering, which one must also feel. This is the “Dionysian” aspect of the Yes, which Nietzsche also calls the “tragic pathos” [EH.iii.Z.1]. (This tragic attitude should not be severed, however, from a comic one:  it passes over into the comic, just as Zarathustra’s fourth part does, mirroring the structure of Greek drama.67 The comedy makes explicit the affirming force the tragedy already bore.68 The sufferings depicted in tragedy never had the force of disvaluing or rejecting life, and this is made manifest in the comedy that comes as last. The comedy preserves the lesson of the tragedy. So Nietzsche’s humor bears a notably critical and mocking edge; he laughs at some of the worst things about us—​and transmutes them in the humor into grounds for gladness at life. This capacity for laughter shows his high achievement. So GS.1: “To laugh at oneself as one would have to laugh in order to laugh from the whole truth—​for that not even the best have had enough sense of truth. . . .” The ultimate Yes to life would be expressed in this laughter.69)

66 She contrasts it unfavorably with the “agapic” love she thinks is involved in amor fati. 67 On humor and the comic in Nietzsche see especially Higgins [2000]. 68 Cf. Hatab [1988, 28–​9]: “In Nietzsche’s eyes, the tragic and the comic are two sides of the same coin, two ways in which negation can be acknowledged and affirmed.” 69 BGE.294 suggests that philosophers might be put in rank-​order by the “rank of their laughing”; it speaks of a “golden laughter” and evokes gods who “know how to laugh in a superhuman and new way.”

The Yes: Value Monism  393 The Yes’s love is also erotic in feeling its object as beautiful.70 In the Yes the whole world looks beautiful, including all of one’s life. A.57:  “The world is perfect—​so says the instinct of the most spiritual, the Yes-​saying instinct.” Nietzsche stresses the aesthetic character of the Yes’s response to life: I feel joy in feeling elevated by the beauty of the whole. We’ve just seen that this elevation comes in feeling my identity merged into the whole; now we add that this merging feels like elevation because that whole looks beautiful. The erotic character of the Yes’s love is also marked by the presence of Rausch.71 This is a bodily condition of excitement and “intoxication” that was built into our sexual responsiveness by ancient evolution. One feels joy in merging with the beautiful whole by feeling this Rausch. This is the physiological undercurrent of this joy—​the deep way one “feels stronger.” TI.ix.8: “What is essential in such Rausch is the feeling of increased strength and fullness.” The joy one feels in the Yes is an ultimate use and development of a deep “animal” sexual mechanism. It’s in this joy and love, I suggest, that Nietzsche thinks we must “feel” the Yes we say. Indeed we only really “say” this Yes in these feelings, and if we lack them no assertions or beliefs will do us any good. Such life-​affirming assertions need to be grounded in these feelings—​and not, we’ve just seen, in willing, since affirming all life gives one nothing to will. But, we may ask, what’s the point of such feeling, if indeed this joy at everything gives us no direction? We’ve already seen the gist of Nietzsche’s answer: feeling this Yes with the requisite depth and intensity changes the yes-​and-​no values to which one returns when one “descends” from the viewpoint of the Yes. Indeed, Nietzsche thinks, we couldn’t bear more than “five, six seconds” of this joy of feeling suddenly “the presence of the eternal harmony” [87–​8:11[337]].72 But such episodes can have lasting effects on how one lives after or between them. Finally let’s return to the role of the assertion or “posit” of the Yes. I’ve argued that this mere posit can’t be sufficient for the affirmative stance Nietzsche has in mind and that, in fact, the most important part to “saying Yes” is affective. But this does not mean that the concrete belief and assertion of the Yes (i.e., that “it’s all good”) plays no role. Its principal roles, I suggest, are to prepare us for this felt experience and to help us to interpret it if/​when it happens. Believing in the Yes “prepares” us by helping us to put ourselves “in the vicinity” of that feeling. We can’t think or will ourselves into it, but we can (as it were) foresee a route that our feeling can then, by its own impetus, better find. And the belief also helps us to hold onto

70 Cf. May [2016, 215]. 71 So, too, Young [2006, 175]. I treat Rausch as the key to Nietzsche’s aesthetics in Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (2004, ch. 4). 72 Paul Loeb has pointed out to me that Nietzsche is here quoting a passage from Dostoevsky’s The Demons.

394  Nietzsche Values the lesson of this joy and love for the yes-​and-​no values we go back to. The belief formulates that lesson in a way that can be used to improve those values.

9.5  The value of the Yes Let’s turn now to consider the “metaethical” status of this Yes that Nietzsche values. What justification does he offer for it? What claim to our attention does he argue it has? The Yes, I suggest, is the central value that Nietzsche thinks he creates—​he creates it in its complex relations to various further values. Let’s step well back and approach the monism’s status by considering this claim he makes to have “created” this value. (This anticipates a topic we’ll return to in Chapter 11.) Nietzsche famously asserts (e.g., in BGE.211) that the philosopher’s task is to create values, and he announces that he does so himself. There is something unsettling about this. It suggests that he “makes up” his values instead of aiming them at any standards, such as truth, that we think values should satisfy. This belongs to his general “artistic” or “aesthetic” orientation. He so often praises art as deceptive that we worry his creation of values is a creation of lies. But really Nietzsche’s will to create values doesn’t make him less committed to truth. His new values elevate truthfulness as a high virtue. They are designed to make that truthfulness more livable, we’ll see. Moreover Nietzsche’s own creative act is informed by his own truthfulness. His pride in creating is that he creates on the basis of truths—​and above all truths about values. His new values are informed and oriented by science—​by psychology and history in particular, as sciences explaining values. So the values Nietzsche creates are informed by already existing values he thinks he has found out the truth about. Although he claims to create values, he does not think he has created all of the values he articulates. Some values he thinks he has discovered, and he offers them to us as his discoveries, which we can confirm ourselves. We need to distinguish which status he claims for the different values he posits. Most importantly, when the philosopher “creates values,” it is not the value of power. Nietzsche thinks he reads this value off the world and that an honest psychology will concur. This aim (power, growth) is the principal character of the drives—​the willful dispositions—​that explain what we do. Nietzsche suggests, to each of us his readers, that we ourselves already have this composition, this deep aim built into us. And because he discovers it in us already (he thinks), he can use it as a basis for argument, as a criterion for judging other and alterable values we may hold. When he appeals to it, it is only as to something we already value.

The Yes: Value Monism  395 Nor, when the philosopher (Nietzsche) creates values is it the value of truth. Nietzsche relies, we’ve seen (especially in Chapter 7 [§7.5]), on the established character of this value—​the strength of the passion for truth passed on to us from morality. Truth, as the kernel of the ascetic ideal, is indeed the crucial and distinctive human value. And it is only because we already care about truth, though partly for the wrong reasons, that his answer to the problem of nihilism can work. So Nietzsche thinks he finds, not creates, both of these values he so stresses: the value of power, the value of truth. He discovers them in (and only in) our valuing of them. However he also thinks he finds a deep and debilitating conflict between these two values. He finds, as we’ve seen, that the will to truth has helped push us toward the nihilistic loss of values that now threatens us; it threatens to sicken and disrupt our effort at power. The values Nietzsche creates, by contrast, are values which, he suggests, can enable us to pursue the passion for truth in a way that serves our underlying will to power. He creates values that let that passion for truth carry out its devastating genealogies of values without depressing and weakening us. This “heals” the will to truth, as we saw in Chapter 7 (§7.5). He creates the values that make possible a “gay science”—​gayety even in seeing through values and overcoming them. I think the key point in the new values Nietzsche “creates” is the “saying Yes” to everything, the universal affirmation. It is this overall or ultimate positive view that lets us take joy in diagnosing and exposing the truth about ourselves (our values). It allows us to love even the ugly truths. It keeps the insight from alienating us from what it exposes. So 88:18[17]: “The will to truth (first justified in the yes-​value of life).” It is “justified” in being made livable. This universal Yes is the heart of the “new values” Nietzsche means to create. Adopting these values will let us love what we come to understand—​though not in a way that blunts the diagnostic critique. We love these things in the very badness we expose in them, and finding out its particular manner of badness is the way to find out just how it is also more deeply good. This universal Yes is a kind of theology of life that finds all life good and indeed holy. This value’s status as created is reflected, I think, in a certain ambiguity as to just what this value is. I’ve called the value “saying Yes” or “value monism,” which is viewing everything as good. So the value is not the first-​order “goodness of everything,” but the (act of) valuing things so; the value is a way of valuing, and so second-​order. Nietzsche makes this clear in all the strategies and exercises he offers to help us achieve this valuing. The principal of these exercises employs the idea of eternal return: by striving to will each and every thing to be eternal, we inculcate in ourselves the habit of valuing he advocates. (We’ll come back to this in Chapter 12 [§12.3].) Nietzsche commends this value to us not by trying to show us that everything is good, but by such indirections.

396  Nietzsche Values Of course this universal Yes mustn’t blunt our critical eye: the new psychology looks always for the unacceptable—​for what needs to be overcome. In the yes-​ and-​no values by which one lives, the no is more prominent. The constant aim is to grow, to become different, to be better than the present which is “not good enough.” But this destroying bent of the will to truth (as of the will to power) is contained within—​or one always comes back to—​a gladness in everything, even (and most importantly) in the case of the weakness and sickness one discovers in oneself, in the world. This prevents that diagnostic exposure from disenchanting the world and robbing it of value. We should think of this Yes-​valuing as operating in a particular context or situation: in the stance in which we “look back” at something already done, already extant, and assess it. It’s not meant to intrude on the prospective stance in which we assess what’s to be done—​there we continue to find bad things, there we continue to “say no.” So the critical eye dominates in psychology’s prospective effort to find out the truth about our values; Nietzsche preaches a merciless exposure of the sick and petty in them. The affirmative view comes afterward, as it were, in the moment of reflection on what we now see exposed before us—​these ugly new truths. (“Truth is ugly [hässlich]” [88:16[40] (WP.822)].) Nietzsche wants to say Yes in that reflective moment because this timely Yes can prevent the diagnosis from spoiling what it reveals. It lets us find beauty even in life’s ugliness. Nietzsche offers this new value to us tentatively, “as experiment”: to be tried out to see whether it furthers us, and life. Hence this value he takes himself to create—​the universal Yes—​is to be judged by the standards of the two chief values he believes we already have. These are power—​valued at the bottom in all our drives—​and truth—​valued in us as heirs of the long cultural process that made us humans. Nietzsche’s argument is that we should value saying Yes because we already do and must value these other things, and because saying Yes is the best way to keep these two values from defeating one another—​the best way to bring them into fruitful interplay. Let’s come back finally to the question of truth. Nietzsche thinks, I suggest, that the highest power lies in living with the most truth—​so long as that truth is used to free ourselves from hindering values, in an affirmative project (a way to grow). We grow by seeing how much of the truth about our values we can incorporate. When Nietzsche speaks of how life depends on error and falsehood, this only makes clearer the extent of the accomplishment, the power, in seeing through that error nevertheless and living with more and more truth. In his early writings (see the notes collected by Breazeale as Philosophy and Truth) Nietzsche insists that the “knowledge-​drive” needs to be limited or restricted for the sake of a healthy culture. I  suggest that later on he thinks he creates a way to avoid this—​a way to give the will to truth the most unrestricted

The Yes: Value Monism  397 scope, yet without making it life-​hostile. We can do so if we cultivate the virtue of saying Yes. But what about that value itself: Is it off-​limits to the will to truth, or can it be safely exposed to it? I’ve said that Nietzsche mainly conveys this new value not as any kind of thesis, but in stories, images, tasks, koans that are not evaluable as true or false. He refrains from presenting things’ goodness as a value “really there” in them independently of our valuing. What he claims to be true is not that all things are good, but that we can solve a deep problem by learning to value them so. As experiments, these new values are to be tested by whether they indeed have these effects. Of course these new values are also subject to psychological scrutiny and diagnosis, but Nietzsche thinks they will withstand it. The motives for these new values aren’t such that exposure will deflate them. The will to truth can live with these values and still respect itself, indeed respect itself the more because the values make its own asceticism livable. They give the will to truth the opportunity of the very widest scope of exercise and let it be what it best can be.

10

Self To Become Who One Is

It is a common theme in authors usually labeled “existentialists” that a “self ” is not something every human is (or has) already and by default, but a condition that he or she needs to achieve: I am challenged to make myself into a self. Although Nietzsche in some ways stands quite apart from that existentialist tradition (with its paradigms Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre), still this is one theme we do find in him.1 He expresses it most famously in his advice to “become who you are.” In this chapter I’ll examine his treatment of “the self ’ and try to show how he thinks a human can (best or most fully) become one.2 This story about “the self ” is not as conspicuous in Nietzsche as it is in those (other) existentialists. But inspection shows that it plays a surprisingly important role at key points in his thinking. It’s embedded, we’ll see, in his idea of will to power. And it’s also a part of his pervasive notion of “values” since he means these as crucially self-​referring:  our deep values aren’t principles held third-​ personally as right for all, but ambitions a person has for him-​or herself. The self ’s importance to Nietzsche is also reflected in his advocacy for “selfishness” [Selbstsucht]. And we find it, too, in the weight he puts on our mistakes in self-​ reference, in particular our misconception of ourselves as “subjects.” He thinks that this misconception grounds our belief in beings, substances, causes—​and many other “metaphysicals” he rejects. So that faulty self-​reference has sweeping consequences. In treating the self we’ll draw on what we’ve already seen on the related topic of the “individual.” In Chapter 6 we looked at Nietzsche’s critique of “the common” and saw the individual as a kind of antithesis to this. The individual is picked out by his or her effort against the motive of sharing: by the effort not to have values because others have them and even the effort to have values that others don’t have. The aim not to be common is however a negative aim and leaves undecided what Nietzsche wants one to be for. Having suspended allegiance to norms or

1 Other readers have of course found this view in Nietzsche, most notably Nehamas [1985]. Anderson [2012, 208] lists others, including himself. 2 On this topic, see the papers collected in Constâncio, Mayer Branco, and Ryan (eds.) [2015]. Nietzsche’s Values. John Richardson, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190098230.001.0001

Self: To Become Who One Is  399 common values, where or how do we find values to replace them? We’re to find them by identifying our “self ” or “own,” but how do we recognize these? The first key to Nietzsche’s notion of the self is the recognition that he treats it not as a substance but as (or in terms of) a relation: it arises through a “self-​ relation,” or reflexivity. This helps to distinguish the notion from various related ones such as “individual,” “subject,” “ego,” “agent,” and “person.” Unfortunately interpreters standardly run it together with one or more of these. As rooted in reflexivity, the self is intimately tied to (the idea of) “one’s own.”3 So we’ll start (§10.1) by laying out certain structural features of a reflexive view of the self. We’ll distinguish several options for where to locate the self within such a self-​ relation. And we’ll see how this reflexive approach to the self grounds the task to “become” or “create” a self that Nietzsche shares with existentialists. Once we recognize the general logic of this reflexive view, we can survey more cogently Nietzsche’s distinctive handling of the self. This handling is—​as we’ve seen is usual for him—​essentially historical. So we look next (§10.2) at Nietzsche’s genealogy of the self. He finds the roots of reflexivity in will to power itself, so that there’s a way in which even a drive is related to itself. This reflexivity then develops into the more complex structures that are built out of drives, both by biological and by historical-​cultural processes. This development brings us up to our own “sense of ourselves” here and now. But as usual Nietzsche thinks that our current condition is not the last word. He projects and proposes a “next step” in our reflexivity—​a new relation to oneself, thereby a “new self.” He anticipates a selfhood that even such heroes of the past as Goethe did not achieve. We look next (§10.3) at the general character of this Nietzschean self and at the way it is made possible as a next step in that historical development by the person’s incorporation of “the truth about itself ” only now feasible. The new self arises, in short, by that “incorporation of the truth about values” we’ve been centered on all along. This epistemic advance is sustained by the individual’s saying Yes. Incorporating this truth about oneself is the key step to Nietzsche’s higher self. But we’ll see (§10.4) that this truth also sets this self certain tasks. Working at these tasks is part of being this new self; it is the way one becomes this self. One establishes this self by distinguishing it on two sides, from entities lesser and greater. One must work, on one side, to pull together and unify one’s parts—​the multiplicity of one’s drives and affects. And one must work, on the other side, to distinguish oneself from one’s group—​and from the “others” that make it up. Who speaks, and who lives, must be neither one’s separate drives, nor one’s community, but something distinct “between” them.



3

As when GS.335 speaks of creating “one’s own, ownmost ideal [eigenes, eigenstes Ideal].”

400  Nietzsche Values Finally there is the further question of how, as such a self of one’s own, one now values one’s values. As I’ll propose (§10.5), when the individual becomes a Nietzschean self she acquires an individualized perspective and values her values as from this perspective. The achievement of this new self therefore carries with it a recognition of the perspectivity of values, which Nietzsche has been looking for all along. This new self “incorporates” the deep truth about values: that they are valuable not in themselves but only for a valuing—​for the very valuing it itself is, now truly seen by itself for the first time. It’s by having one’s values express this self that one incorporates the understanding of what they are.

10.1  Selfhood as reflexivity Each of us is, it seems, many things. I, for example, am an organism, a human, a deliberating agent, a male, an American . . . and on and on. Am I, in addition to all of these, also a “self?” What is my “self,” among these many candidates? Is it just another way of referring to all of these things that I am? Or does it pick out some one or some few among them as most fully or decisively “me?” (1) One view is that my self is a kind of core or center of me, by comparison with which some of these things “I am” are secondary, perhaps properties or relationships rather than my “true” or “very” self. For example, Descartes famously identifies himself with his mind, as “the thing that thinks,” whereas his body is something he merely “has.” So the self is, as it were, a center around which there adhere parts or aspects that are “mine” but not “me.” (2) But there’s another view: my self lies in how I am “toward myself ” (i.e., reflexively refer to myself). It is something that arises in this self-​referring, some feature or aspect of it and not a prior or independent thing or part. The most famous statement of the idea is Kierkegaard’s: “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation” [1849/​1980, 13]. It’s a version of this view, I’ll argue, that Nietzsche mainly holds. I’ll call this latter view of the self the “reflexive” view. It is in its broad lines familiar from a diverse literature, though I will develop it in my own way, with only sporadic mentions of that literature.4 I will try to introduce, from the simple structure of this view, a framework of terms and relations that can help us to organize Nietzsche’s accounts of the self. This framework allows us, I hope, to state 4 Fichte [1795/​1982, 34]: “It is only through this act [reverting into itself], and first by means of it, . . . that the self originally comes to exist for itself.” Nozick [1981, 78]: “To be an I, a self, is to have the capacity for reflexive self-​reference.” Velleman [2006, 354]: “I don’t believe in the self [as] a proper part [of a person] that is both the source of his autonomy and the target of his self-​regard because of being the basis of his identity. . . . In my view ‘self ’ is just a word used to express reflexivity. . . .”

Self: To Become Who One Is  401 the gist of his positions more exactly—​or, sometimes, to see where his position is unsettled or ambiguous. There’s a clear aptness to such a reflexive account of the idea “self ”: the very word is entangled with reflexive uses, including within such terms as “itself,” “myself,” etc. Where these terms are the objects of verbs, as in “x moves itself,” they constitute a reflexive action: the x does something to itself. It doesn’t just (e.g.) move, but moves itself, standing in a certain self-​relation. We should take Nietzsche’s idea of “the self ” to involve this reflexivity and not treat the term as if it were interchangeable with, for example, “the person.” We find the idea not just in what he says about das Selbst, and in such locutions as Selbst-​Überwindung (self-​overcoming), but also in (e.g.) sich überwinden (to overcome itself). Nietzsche mainly rejects that “core” view of the self and especially one dominant version of that view, which understands the core “me,” my “true self,” to be myself as ego or subject (i.e., the subject of consciousness), the thing that thinks and (as also the agent) decides.5 Nietzsche’s attacks on the subject, which we reviewed in Chapter 5 (§5.1), rule out that it could be such a core self. What he puts in its place, I’ll argue, is the idea that it’s our capacity to “self-​relate” that makes us selves and that this self-​relating happens, in the primary case, “beneath” consciousness. Nietzsche makes strong use of a certain flexibility or play that the notion of the self acquires by being thought of this way. There is a deep ambiguity, we’ll see, in just where in this reflexivity to locate the self. Moreover, since the self arises by a certain activity, and since this activity can be better or worse performed, the self can be more or less adequately formed. So this reflexive view lies at the bottom of Nietzsche’s well-​known idea that the self is something one needs to “create” and “become.” Rather than being a central part of a thing that is already there, the self will be “something more” that this thing needs to bring about. Before I turn to Nietzsche’s positions, though, I’d like to introduce some structure or machinery to use in developing this reflexive view of the self. Begin with the contrasting “core view” of the self. This interprets the self as the central part of a more encompassing thing, the part of it that “I am” above all or in a superlative sense. While the more peripheral parts may be “mine,” they are secondarily so, by the relation in which they stand to this crucial “me.” This core self is conceived as a substance, in the simple sense of being a thing that persists “beneath” the changing properties and periphera. This innermost self continues steadily as it is, grounding my personal identity through time. The dominant version of this core view interprets this underlying substance-​ self as a subject; that is, as the subject of consciousness, that “to which” all one’s



5

When Nietzsche denies there’s any self [e.g., 85:34[1]‌] he means “self ” in this sense, I suggest.

402  Nietzsche Values experience appears. The paradigmatic statement of this view is surely Descartes’ when he identifies himself as a thinking thing. In Meditation 2: “I am therefore precisely nothing but a thinking thing; that is, a mind, or intellect, or understanding, or reason.” This thinking includes, familiarly, all his mental acts and receptions—​all that he does in awareness and all that comes to his awareness.6 He is the thing that thinks, so that this thinking is a first ring around his core, already “his” but not “himself.” And his body and its actions are then more peripheral rings: his but still less himself.7 By contrast the “reflexive view” interprets the self in terms of a certain activity—​what I  will call “self-​pointing or “self-​referring.” It’s what happens when an entity “intends” or “means” itself—​and we’ll see that Nietzsche thinks this happens very widely. It does not include cases of an attenuated “self-​relation” that lacks this intentionality.8 This view offers the opportunity, which Nietzsche craves, to treat the self as neither a substance nor a subject. This outcome requires, however, that the reflexive view be filled out carefully since some plausible versions will license a substance-​or subject-​self after all. For example one plausible reading of that view would identify the self as the thing that self-​refers, and this might yet be something that persists as a substance. And one might suppose that this self-​referring involves a consciousness of oneself, so that it’s still the work of a subject. So a substance-​or subject-​self is still a risk even once we focus on reflexivity. To avoid slipping back to such a self, Nietzsche must offer some different version of the reflexive view. Let’s call reflexivity “self-​referring,” taking this in a very broad sense. We might take it to involve three components: A: what refers B: the referring C: what’s referred to.

I’ll call these, respectively, the self-​referrer, the self-​referring, and the self-​referred. Let’s leave it open, for the moment, where among them we are to locate “the self ” and ask some questions about these three elements.

6 Again Meditation 2: “what then am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, and that also imagines and senses.” 7 Even though, as Meditation 6 famously qualifies the point, he—​as his mind—​is “commingled” with his body in such a way as to “constitute one single thing.” 8 Gemes and Le Patourel [2015, 602] point out that “a bridge can be self-​identical or collapse on itself without it having an actual self ”; such self-​relation is clearly not intentional. But in the cases where it is intentional, I suggest, a self does occur by virtue of the self-​relation.

Self: To Become Who One Is  403 A first key question concerns the nature of B, the referring. How does this happen? In the cases we think of first, it happens both consciously and in language. I am aware of myself and describe myself as being such-​and-​such. But although Nietzsche is of course highly interested in the linguistic and conscious forms of reflexivity, he denies that these forms are basic; our primary self-​referring goes on “beneath” our consciousness and without words. This non-​linguistic and non-​conscious referring is still a matter of intentionality, however. It still involves a meaning or intending of some content: “what’s meant.” (We saw how Nietzsche attributes this intentionality to all living things in Chapter 2 [§2.2]; we looked at its application to the drives in Chapter 3 [§§3.1–​ 2].) When Nietzsche attributes “perspective” to us, to our drives, and to all living things, he attributes an intentionality—​and indeed a reflexive intentionality—​ that is prior to awareness and words. A second question is whether there are really three elements here. For since this is self-​reference, it seems that A (self-​referrer) and C (self-​referred) should be identical with one another. If we distinguish them, mustn’t it be just as different aspects of one single thing: first its aspect “as referring” and second its aspect “as referred to?” But we will need to see C as more distinct from A. This is due above all to the way this self-​reference always happens “under a description.”9 That is, one always does two things in saying “I”: (1) one points back at the thing that does the saying, whatever this thing might be, but (2) one also, implicitly, points at this thing as being some kind of thing. Self-​reference involves a view of oneself, in which one appears as something. I suggest that we think of the C, the self-​ referred, as this self-​description, what one views oneself as. And this can be more or less different from what the referring thing is. When one tries to point back at oneself, one may not point straight back at what does the pointing, but aside or askew—​at something else, which may or may not be there (there in fact not just in description). As 82:3[1.352] succinctly puts it: “I and myself [Ich und Mich] are always two different persons.” However, this way of thinking of the C as a kind of hypothesis about the A is only half of the story. By itself it encourages the idea that the real self is the A and that the C is just a more or less false theory about it, with no claim to be the self. This would return us to the core notion of the self, the core now being the thing that self-​refers. But Nietzsche treats the C, the self-​description, as much more crucial to the self: it helps to constitute the self, which is thus something dependent on both A and C. He attributes a deep ambiguity to the self due to its constitution by both A and C.



9

Thanks to Mattia Riccardi here.

404  Nietzsche Values But why should the C play this role? To begin with, this C isn’t meant just as a theory or description of the referring thing, but also as its aspiration or aim. The reflexivity that makes a self is active and practical: A refers to C as the who it is trying to be. So the claim is that, in trying to be C, one thereby makes one's self in part be C—​in one aspect or to some extent, needing account. The obvious point here is causal: the view of itself as C is to some extent self-​fulfilling, for the way A is trying to be C tends to make it more like C.10 But the crucial claim is constitutive: even before A is changed by its effort, its self is already partly this C it is trying to be. Its self is (constituted by) its aspirations. I am (as well) the self I’m trying to be. One of my main claims later will be that Nietzsche posits both kinds of self-​ referring: he thinks of this reflexive turn back on oneself as operating both theoretically and practically. So on the one hand I “mean” myself in a way that tries to “get right” what I already am; this is a project of “discovery.” But on the other hand I also mean myself as I’m trying to be; here I have the project of “creating” or “becoming” myself.11 See how he distinguishes these in HH.ii.366: “ ‘Will a self [Wolle ein Selbst].’—​Active, successful natures act not by the saying ‘know yourself [kenne dich selbst],’ but as if the command hovered before them: will a self, then you will become a self [so wirst du ein Selbst].” How could a “self ” be given in both of these projects? They seem to pick out different selves. Sorting out just how Nietzsche connects these two kinds of self-​ referring, which I  will call “descriptive” and “formative,” is crucial for understanding his account of the self. Now where, among A, B, and C, do we find “the self?” For a general reason that we’ve already noticed it seems that Nietzsche’s “strict” answer must be B. Since “there’s no doer behind the doing” in his world of becoming, the reality can only be the process. But we’ve also seen that he licenses both himself and us to go on speaking of “things” as a façon de parler—​understanding these things as really aspects of processes. This leaves us a choice between A, the self-​referrer, and C, the self-​referred. Is my self the thing that points back at itself, or is it the way it “means” itself? How we answer this question may hang on how we decide between those descriptive and formative views of self-​referring. If referring tries to “get right” what’s already there, then it seems the self must be what refers, since this is already there.12 If on the other hand referring tries to “make” the self, then the 10 D.115: “But our opinion about ourselves, that we have found on this false path, the so-​called ‘I,’ works then together on our character and fate.” 11 Nehamas [1985] gives a landmark reading of Nietzsche as viewing the self as not so much discovered as created. 12 Nozick [1981, 72]: “let us say, as a first approximation, that ‘I’ refers to that being (entity, x) with the capacity of referring to itself which (who) produces that very token ‘I.’ ”

Self: To Become Who One Is  405 self must be what’s referred to, since this comes to be through the referring. Nietzsche, in embracing both the descriptive and formative views, will want “the self ” to be somehow both A and C.13 It is the self-​referrer, but also the way it interprets itself. Due to this ambiguity where to locate the self, there’s a great difficulty in writing about the topic. Once the referent of “I,” “me,” “self ” etc. is put into play in this way, every time we use one of these terms the question arises: In what sense? I think this difference is implicit in the contrast between two common idioms: I can say either that I “am” a self or that I “have” a self. The former idiom suits the idea that my self is what the self-​referrer already is; the latter suggests that it’s something this self-​referrer does or has. We should notice one last feature of this self-​referring:  it refers back to its “self ”—​in contrast with everything else, everything other and not-​self. So it involves this exclusion or contrast of the not-​self or “other.” This exclusion looms large in Nietzsche’s treatments of the self. They are concerned not with my separation of myself from the physical things that adjoin my body. Rather, the “other” that’s especially contrasted with and excluded from self is, for Nietzsche, the herd. The problem will be that, in trying to point to myself, I actually point to this generalized “other.” With these clarifications in hand, let’s turn more intently to Nietzsche. Crucially, he interprets the self reflexively, in terms of an attitude of self-​relation. And he interprets that self-​relating as a natural occurrence, something biological and historical. It is a feature of organisms and of humans by the way they have specially evolved. The challenge is to understand how reflexivity came into the world (i.e., how living things came to be reflexive) and the form this has taken in our human case. Before we can see how Nietzsche thinks a human can “become a self ” we must see how the idea and reality of being-​a-​self has itself come to be.

10.2  Genealogy of the self We therefore find Nietzsche’s idea of the self in his account of how reflexivity has arisen by biological-​social processes. The self is not an ahistorical thing, but rather—​like freedom—​something constituted within an evolving practice. We can extract from Nietzsche’s texts his genealogy of this practice of reflexivity; this interacts with the genealogy of freedom we reviewed in Chapter 8 (§8.2). 13 Compare James [1892/​1992, 174]: “the total self of me, being as it were duplex, partly known and partly knower, partly object and partly subject, must have two aspects discriminated in it, of which for shortness we may call one the Me and the other the I.” He says that, at least initially, we should treat these as aspects not things since their identity is “perhaps the most ineradicable dictum of commonsense” [174].

406  Nietzsche Values And here, too, we must distinguish within the practice—​of self-​referring—​this practice’s conception of itself. In “meaning oneself ” one simultaneously has an idea what one is doing in meaning oneself. a. Reflexivity in drives and affects. Reflexivity begins at the very simplest level. Nietzsche lodges it within will to power itself as the principal character of all living things. They aim deeply at growth and mastery. This entails that will to power itself depends on a distinction between the “self ” or “own” that’s to grow, and the “other” it’s to master and incorporate. A will to power wants not just more, but more of the activity by which it identifies itself: hence its essential “selfishness.” And it grows by turning the not-​me into mine; that is, by incorporating what’s other and resists it. Will to power is essentially reflexive. Notice how reflexivity is involved in this very typical passage, 87:9[98] (WP.488, LNp159): “No ‘substance,’ rather something that in itself strives after strengthening; and that wills to ‘preserve’ itself only indirectly (it wills to surpass itself —​).” Here the German construction, sich erhalten, sich überbieten, does not contain selbst, but it does clearly mark this willing’s reflexivity. Nietzsche’s insistence that will to power is a will to “overcome itself [sich überwinden]” (e.g., in Z.ii.12) brings out this reflexivity still more clearly; in the Nachlass especially he very often speaks of this as Selbst-​Überwindung. The self-​reference involved in all will to power is, of course, mainly non-​ conscious and non-​linguistic. We find it at work, Nietzsche claims, in our bodily drives. Each of these strives, beneath our awareness and without words, to enhance and develop “its own” activity by imposing itself on what is “other,” both within us (other drives) and around us. BGE.6: “every single one of [the basic drives of humans] would like only too well to represent just itself as the ultimate purpose of existence and the legitimate master of all the other drives. For every drive wants to be master.” Every drive has an understanding of itself, of its “own,” and it distinguishes this from what’s other. And by this reflexivity, every drive has a self of its own, pressing its selfishness against that of other drives. We must remember, however, that Nietzsche attributes to us not just drives but affects. The latter involve reflexivity as well. An affect is a feeling “how one is doing”—​in the original case, how one is doing in the effort of some drive. I feel my success or failure in pleasure or pain, which are not brute sensations but involve—​ Nietzsche insists—​ a judgment or assessment. So 87–​8:11[71] (WP.669, LNp211), a passage we noticed in Chapter  4 (§4.2):  “All feelings of pleasure and displeasure already presuppose a measuring by total-​usefulness, total-​harmfulness: thus a sphere where willing a goal (state) and a choice of the means are involved. Pleasure and displeasure are never ‘original facts.’ ” And affects judge this usefulness “selfishly”: they feel harm or help to oneself. Drives and affects are reflexive in different ways, which I  think we can align with the distinction between descriptive and formative selves. A  drive

Self: To Become Who One Is  407 understands itself in terms of the activity it tries to grow in, but it identifies itself (I suggest) with the higher level of that activity it presses toward. The drive identifies its self as this more it’s trying to be—​with the higher or fuller level of activity it pursues. An affect, by contrast, is a kind of “reality principle” that assesses one’s position with respect to that goal: it feels where one now is with respect to it and so is (in this respect) descriptive rather than aspirational. We thereby stand in two relations to the self, or in relations to two selves, just in our body. My body understands itself both as its drives aspire to become and as its affects feel it so far to be. b. Reflexivity of the body. Every organism is a complex or synthesis of such selfish drives and affects whose “power relations” with one another constitute a more or less stable system that can be treated as having an overall will to power of its own. This overall will has an overall reflexivity, and constitutes a further “self.” This is true of the “human animal” as well; we looked at its drive-​synthesis in Chapter 3 (§3.4) and now can add how it involves a self. Indeed I think this reflexivity plays a crucial role in that “synthesis” of drives and affects. What makes it the case that some set of drives is “united” as a will “of its own” is precisely its reflexivity: that it has a sense of “itself,” of the own that it strives to further by imposition on “others.” A  higher-​order will (to power) is synthesized once a group of drives begins to operate with a single self-​ description: it’s this above all that constitutes that group as a single thing. It’s by coming into this relation to itself that a group of drives becomes a single thing. This synthetic will is built from interlocking relations of command and obedience among the drives and affects.14 Since drives command and obey only by understanding one another and one another’s aims and values, the system of these relations constitutes a single “intentional space,” as we saw in Chapter 3 (§3.4). Drives understand themselves as participants in this space. And this means that the synthesis also involves a shift, at least to some degree, in the individual drives’ own sense of themselves.15 Each, to the extent that it is well-​integrated into the whole, will now view its “self ” as a component or member in this whole. Where the drive plays a leading role, it will understand itself as a member of the “ruling committee” that runs the organism.

14 Anderson [2012] gives an admirable account of how drives and affects unite into a “minimal self ” by organizing for “mutual recruitment” [226]. To this I would add that these “recruitment”-​ relations gather the drives and affects into a single “intentional space” in which they (reflexively) see themselves as one thing. I think this unity doesn’t depend on (but rather explains) the global “moods and higher-​order attitudes” that Anderson introduces for this purpose [228]. 15 To be sure Nietzsche doesn’t always think of it this way. In 84:27[27] for example he seems to think that drives “affirm the whole” only incidentally; it says that a human is “a multiplicity of living beings which, partly fighting one another, partly arranging and subordinating one another, involuntarily affirm the whole in affirming their individual being.”

408  Nietzsche Values To be sure, this larger sense the drive has of itself may be only loosely and temporarily superimposed on its underlying allegiance to its own activity: it may still seize its opportunities to act out of this deeper identity. And to this extent the synthesis will be incomplete. The system will struggle to keep its constituent drives from breaking out on their own and asserting their narrower self-​ identities against one another as others.16 But even this struggle presupposes that the system has its own “sense of itself,” in that combined intentional space, as a unit tasked to hold itself together. Since the synthesis can be more or less complete, whether the drive-​synthesis is a self will be a matter of degree.17 It’s by this system’s reflexivity that Nietzsche thinks of the body as my self: “Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, stands a powerful commander, an unknown wise [one]—​he is called Self. In your body he dwells, he is your body” [Z.i.4]. This body is “a manifold with one sense [ein Vielheit mit Einem Sinne]”—​which I take precisely to describe its shared space of meaning.18 Zarathustra stresses how the body’s intentional powers converge: “The Self also seeks with the eyes of the senses, it also hears with the ears of the spirit.” Although the body lacks words, it is in itself self-​relating: the body “does not say I, but does I” [still Z.i.4]. It distinguishes itself from what’s other, and this gives it a first-​ personal view. The body’s unified sense of itself is not just without words, but also beneath consciousness. In the synthetic self the “descriptive” and “formative” aspects of self-​relation are closely connected. It’s that a set of drives refers to itself as a unit that constitutes it as a unit—​a drive-​synthesis. Meaning itself one makes it one. It’s the individual drives’ meaning themselves to be parts in a larger self that lets there be this encompassing self. The latter is really no more than this agreement and concession by the drives within their shared intentional space. c. Reflexivity of consciousness. But none of this yet reaches what we usually think of as the self. We take this to be the “I” of conscious and linguistic self-​ reference: the object of self-​awareness and referent of first-​personal language. We’ve already seen (first in Chapter 3 [§3.1]) that by “consciousness” Nietzsche means “self-​consciousness.” It involves that reflexive turn back on itself, so that in being conscious of an object it is also conscious of itself as conscious of it. So consciousness involves a self-​interpretation: it takes itself to be, in particular, 16 See, e.g., 80:6[70]. The “selfishness” of every drive also makes it (in another sense) “unegoistic,” Nietzsche says, inasmuch as it is prepared to sacrifice the interests of “the whole ego” [83:8[23] (WP.372)]. 17 Gemes and Le Patourel [2015, 606] distinguish “egalitarian” and “elitist” readings of Nietzsche here, according to whether every human is taken to have such a self, or only some few. But I think that the reflexive approach lets Nietzsche find degrees of more or less adequate selves here. 85:40[8]‌ speaks of “grades of intensity on the way to the individual, to the ‘person.’ ” 18 I suggest that this is what Nietzsche means by the “organic feeling of unity,” with which 81:11[14] says we must not confuse “the I.”

Self: To Become Who One Is  409 the subject, as the thing that is conscious. In being conscious of the object it understands itself as a subject that is thus conscious; it understands this subject as its self. Now we’ve also already seen (in Chapter 5) Nietzsche’s critique of the subject or agent. He is eager to cut down the pretensions of the conscious I. He stresses its dependence on the drives and body and often treats it as merely “a small tool and toy” [again Z.i.4] of the body-​self.19 At other times he seems to deny that this conscious (and linguistic) self-​reference picks out anything at all. There is consciousness, to be sure, but nothing that is conscious—​nothing there for it to point at, and indeed nothing there to do the (conscious) pointing.20 Self-​consciousness seems to be illusion through and through. But we also saw that, despite such flat denials of any subject, Nietzsche still agrees that there’s “something there”—​something more going on than in a mere drive-​synthesis, which happens in animals, too. This “extra” crucially involves our idea that we’re subjects or agents:  interpreting ourselves so was a “life-​ condition” that enabled us to become “human” at all. Being human depends on this special kind of self-​reference, superimposed on those involved in both drives and drive-​syntheses. This self-​understanding involves illusions, however—​lies not told by the simpler selves. What’s involved in understanding myself as a subject? I  view myself as an abiding I whose current thoughts and desires are linked (I take it) to those I had or will have hours or days or years behind or ahead in this life I know myself living. This rich phenomenon is far removed from the way the unconscious body acts as a synthesis of drives.21 So how have we humans come to be “self ’-​aware in this characteristic way? We traced Nietzsche’s genealogy of self-​consciousness in Chapter 5 (§5.3). He claims that it evolved, paradoxically, in the process of “socializing” and “herding” us.22 The long and largely prehistoric “ethic of custom” redesigned the human animal so that it could live together in cities and societies. This extended harsh training gradually superimposed on our simpler aggressive drives a layer of social dispositions, which members learn by copying. Our linguistic and conscious reflexivity—​our saying and thinking “I”—​arises within this development. 19 84:27[26]: “The multiplicity of drives—​we must accept [annehmen] a master, but this is not in consciousness, since consciousness is an organ, like the stomach.” 85:34[46] (LNp2): “If I have anything of a unity within me, it certainly doesn’t lie in the conscious I and in feeling, willing, thinking, but somewhere else: in the preserving, appropriating, expelling, watchful prudence of my whole organism, of which my conscious I is only a tool.” 20 Gardner [2009, 2–​5] assembles much evidence for Nietzsche’s “theoretical conception of the self ” as “fictive”; he contrasts this with Nietzsche’s reliance on the self in his “practical thought.” 21 Gardner [2009] forcefully brings out the distance between these. 22 Recall GS.354: “My idea is clearly that consciousness actually belongs not to human’s existence as an individual but rather to the community—​and herd-​aspects of its nature.”

410  Nietzsche Values The germ of that self-​awareness was the primitive ability to remember social rules. It was the habit of recalling, in moments when some stimulus arouses a drive, the verbal formula that preserves the rule:  don’t strike! don’t steal! This memory is an ability to commit across the stretch of one’s life—​as long as one lives in society—​and it’s this practical commitment that originally bears the new self-​understanding. I interpret my “self ” as extended through time by this commitment to keep promises and to follow the rules. However, in the earliest phase, under the ethic of custom, this self is not the “individual” self we now take ourselves to be. One understands oneself as a generic member of the community, so that the “I” really expresses a “we.” The rules are understood in the form “we don’t steal”: as stating a communal viewpoint in which the member merges. In obeying, one enters into a group identity. As Z.i.16 puts it: “The you is older than the I; the you has been pronounced holy, but not yet the I.” Reflexivity intends what is really a group-​or herd-​self. In 82:3[1]‌: “Originally herd and herd-​instinct; the self felt as exception, nonsense, madness by the herd.”23 So here the herd-​instinct is something more radical than we expect: it’s not a drive by which the individual seeks to join the herd, but a condition in which he or she hasn’t yet emerged from it. Nietzsche thinks the sense of having an individual self emerged in the transition from “custom” to “morality.” In this new social milieu, the member is understood to be broken off as a unit on its own, answerable to the moral or right rather than (overtly) to the group. The member takes itself to stand before the moral rules as an individual alone—​as an agent called to morality by its own reason and conscience. It prides itself in its freedom to follow these guides; it accepts that this burdens it with an ultimate responsibility for any moral failures. This, as I read it, is the position of the famous “sovereign individual” of GM.ii.2. Yet this sense of being an individual self is largely deceptive, Nietzsche thinks. For morality was likewise designed to serve social ends. Its moral rules pick out as to-​be-​done very much the same (group-​friendly) comportments required in custom. So while the member interprets itself as a free agent, master of its own thinking and doing, this very sense of itself serves social ends. The transition from the ethic of custom to morality is therefore not as freeing as it seems. So 82:5[1]‌: “Once the I was hidden in the herd: and now the herd is still hidden in the I.” This I, the moral agent, is a tool for social cohesion, which makes its “selfishness” not real. And so 81:11[226] says, of several types of person usually considered prime examples of “egoism”: “they think only of themselves, but

23 GS.117, speaking of this earlier period: “To be a self [Selbst sein], to esteem one’s self [sich selber] by one’s own measure and weight—​that went against taste then.” Nietzsche often makes this point; cf. 81:11[185], 81:11[192], 81:11[252].

Self: To Become Who One Is  411 of ‘themselves’ [sich] insofar as the ego is developed through the herd-​forming affects.” Thus the moral agent is unlike its sense of itself: the self that refers is different from the self it finds. The self-​referring will (A) is a behavioral stance designed to align us with our group. But this will conceives of itself (C) as a subject and agent that thinks and acts in each moment by itself and for its own interests. It’s in this guise that it distinguishes itself from the bodily drives that it needs (for those social purposes) to oppose and control. When I say “I,” what speaks in me is a herd-​ self, steered by the manifold moral values I  imbibe from my society—​values created at varying depths of history in the interests of various then-​ascendant groups. So the agent is, unknowingly, a “double agent,” representing foreign (societal) interests against those of my body and drives—​which have a more original claim to be my “self.” Self-​consciousness originates, then, with a certain bias and indeed error.24 It operates under an ideology of the I as ultimate and autonomous; this ideology serves the social aim to “tame” us. It’s to serve that social aim that this new reflexive self counts all bodily drives as “other” to it, as not itself. And it’s this utter opposition between the will of this socialized self and the will of the many bodily appetites and drives that makes the fatal split and division in us—​makes us “the sick animal” [GM.iii.13]. The gap between (A) and (C)—​between the self-​referrer and its idea of itself—​ is indeed an error and even a lie, which it’s Nietzsche’s agenda to expose. We misunderstand ourselves in thinking of ourselves as subjects-​agents. And yet, we really are something different by so understanding ourselves. We are as well the self we aspire to be, by this very aspiration. The thing that self-​refers is a new kind of will by this self-​conception. It’s the very having of this self-​conception that constitutes this will, “the subject,” as an ongoing disposition and effort in the body. This self-​conception enters into the drive-​economy of the human body as a new will: a will to imagine oneself as a subject-​agent. The will to see oneself so—​ this special reflexivity—​inserts itself into the struggle of drives. It tries to grow and command: to get the drives to acknowledge this identity—​that one is really the subject-​agent. It wants them to accept their own secondary status, even to feel guilty for themselves, whenever their own activity obstructs the subject’s aims. What has this corrosive power is not a subject, but a will to see oneself as a subject.

24 85:40[21] (WP.492, LNp44): “The direct questioning of the subject about the subject, and all self-​reflection of the spirit has its danger, that it could be useful and important for its activity to interpret itself falsely. Therefore we question the body. . . .”

412  Nietzsche Values

10.3 A Nietzschean self Nietzsche doesn’t think this is the end of the story. As we’ve seen with the other genealogies we’ve traced, he plots the arc of a development the better to project and anticipate its next step. In quasi-​Hegelian fashion he finds ways that the studied practice is not what it takes itself to be and then imagines how it can become so. We are not selves as we suppose ourselves to be, but by this genealogy, which uncovers how that conscious but moralized I has served foreign interests, we can (in the ideal case) find the path to a more adequate self-​reference. Grandly, Nietzsche claims to inaugurate a major new phase. Our discussion so far has been of what the self is (and has been). We now go on to see how Nietzsche wants it to be, how he hopes it will be, how he thinks it should be. And, he sometimes even thinks, this is how it can become a genuine or complete self, a self indeed. Here Nietzsche moves (as noted before) on “existentialist” ground. And so we now pass (as it were) from a descriptive to a valuative use of “self ’ in which “being a self ” is honorific and refers to a special achievement.25 One needs to “become a self.”26 But just what does Nietzsche think this involves? A first possibility is that he has in mind the Goethean self we met in Chapter 8 (§8.2). A full or genuine self would be formed by the happy unity of one’s drives both with one another and with one’s conscious values. Goethe represents a maximum in human health, a harmonious ordering of drives and thinking. Some readers have supposed that this is the crux to the kind of self or person Nietzsche wants. His ideal would be the fullest uniting of the drives, both with one another and with one’s worded awareness. This would amount to healing the division between body and spirit and resolving the tension that has sickened us. All of this sounds very plausibly Nietzsche’s ideal. A second possibility, suggested by other remarks, is that selfhood is not a harmony between one’s drives and agency, but rather a matter of one drive taking control in oneself and organizing other forces, including agency, for its project.27 Nietzsche touts the importance of having such a dominant drive, which can give not just focus but intensity to the person.28 In making success (at selfhood) thus

25 Katsafanas [2016, 200]: “Nietzsche usually treats selfhood as an honorific or aspirational term”; he cites several passages. Cf. Gemes [2009b]. 26 See especially Nehamas [1985], Anderson [2012 et al.], and Katsafanas [2016] interpreting this expression. 27 Katsafanas [2011] criticizes this view as a “predominance model”; Gemes and Le Patourel [2015] defend it against this critique. 28 88:14[157 (WP.778, LNp262): “the antagonism of the passions, the twoness, threeness, multiplicity of ‘souls in one breast’: very unhealthy, inner ruin, disintegrating, betraying and heightening an inner division and anarchy—​: unless one passion finally becomes master. Return of health—​” Also 88:14[219] (WP.46, LNp266).

Self: To Become Who One Is  413 depend on a drive, Nietzsche seems to remove it from conscious control:  we can’t choose our drives, nor can we give an artificial boost to some drive just by choosing to. On the other hand our drives have a certain intelligence on Nietzsche’s view; they can respond to reasons, including even, perhaps, to an argument for psychic monarchy. Both of these ideas are surely pieces of Nietzsche’s new idea of the self, and I’ll return to them later. But I think both lie apart from the main point, which (again) concerns reflexivity—​the relation to self that makes a self. Nietzsche’s “new self ” must be a self made by some better kind of reflexivity. He thinks he sees a “next stage” in our self-​relation, one that improves both its descriptive and its aspirational roles. It lets us form a more adequate self than the historical practice has permitted before. (a) To begin with, one must see oneself as one is. Here again it is truth that helps us ahead. In Chapter 8 we saw how the new sciences of psychology and history let us understand ourselves in a way that can “free” us from previously unnoticed control. Now we see how this better understanding can also make us more adequate “selves.” Before, when human tried to point at itself, it pointed askew, at something not itself. By acquiring the truth about itself human is finally able to be “toward itself ” in a way that can begin to make it a self. (We’ll soon see that it also needs to do something with that truth about itself. But let’s start with this truthfulness.) What “truths” about oneself does Nietzsche have in mind? In a nutshell, they are truths about one’s own perspectivity—​one’s way of “meaning” the world. They range from general truths about every human, through more particular truths about the type(s) of person one is. One’s perspectives, general and particular, are carried especially in one’s values. To understand oneself is therefore especially to understand one’s values—​one’s steering signs. It is to understand the perspectives carried by these values and to understand them not just “from within” but also as they are exposed by psychological and historical study. The future Nietzschean self will value while at the same time understanding what it is doing in valuing. The most important general truths about human perspectivity concern the ways its values are made by (on one side) drives and affects and (on the other) by social forces. These truths are suppressed by the trained-​in conception of oneself as the persisting subject or consciousness. The new Nietzschean self will see through this supposed authority. It will see, as it consciously thinks, that “what thinks” is always also some interested drive—​or confluence of drives—​with aims not (previously) present to consciousness. And it will see how that consciousness, and even those drives, have been made by social and historical forces, which impose on it from outside.

414  Nietzsche Values By this insight into itself, this new self goes beyond that happy unity of agential will with bodily will that Nietzsche attributes to Goethe. He aspires—​for himself, and for the coming “superhuman”—​to something more even than Goethe.29 His new self needs to be achieved, like his fuller freedom, by a new psychology and history. It involves seeing and incorporating truths about human valuing that Goethe never reached. This is the change that will carry human to a higher level or type. (We’ll see shortly that the Goethean harmonizing of agential and bodily will may still be a goal the Nietzschean self could adopt.) Now this understanding is, to begin with, something that happens in consciousness—​in conscious reflection guided by psychology and history. But we’ve seen more than once that Nietzsche is not satisfied with such “theoretical” or “intellectual” understanding. The challenge is always to “incorporate” the truth, which means to push the truth down into the bodily understanding by which one lives one’s life. One must “see” this truth in the very act of living, at the level of the drives and affects that carry out that living. Thus the new self must extract not just abstract lessons from genealogy, but also an ability to see itself in the light of them. It must recognize the role of drives not just “in theory” and in the abstract, but all through the everyday detail of its (his or her) life. By seeing, “in real time,” which drives and social forces are working in its attitudes and actions, it grasps its “perspective” even as it takes it. So it “knows what it’s doing” while it does it, in a way human could never manage before. (b) This is how the new self will improve the descriptive side to its reflexivity, but what about the aspirational side? The latter is rooted, we saw, in the will to power of drives, which identify with the higher and better condition toward which they push. The new self mustn’t lose this relation to itself. It must answer the threat of nihilism, played out now within the individual’s own relation to him-​or herself. Seeing the truth about one’s own perspective threatens to deflate that perspective—​to rob it of the fervor it needs to strive and succeed. Once I  see well what I  am, what aspirational image of myself will be left to sustain me? Nietzsche of course wants each of us to make his or her own such ideal. But he also offers us all a common core around which to build our own identities. This core is: the aspiration to advance that descriptive reflexivity—​to live with more and more of the truth about oneself. He invites and seduces the reader into a certain heroic quest: the daunting but romantic attempt to face truths and live honestly. He offers himself as example of the relentless “free spirit” who exposes 29 We can hear the thought in GS.1: “To laugh at oneself as one would have to laugh in order to laugh from the whole truth—​for that, not even the best have had enough sense of truth, and the most gifted have had far too little genius!”

Self: To Become Who One Is  415 and casts off all of our comfortable faiths about ourselves. He models for us a person courageous in the force of his will to truth. This aggressive honesty, this epistemic ruthlessness, is the great virtue he tries to impress on us. So, we might say, the new aspirational self is just “getting the descriptive self right.” And yet this may make Nietzsche’s position—​answering the threat of nihilism by promoting the effort at truth—​look inept or puzzling by his own lights. If the problem of nihilism is that facing our perspectivity hurts our effort at life, it seems a very odd answer to insist that we should pride ourselves precisely on facing it—​should try to face it all the more. Why pride ourselves on pursuing a course that hurts us? The rope Nietzsche throws us, by which we’re to pull ourselves out of the nihilistic loss of values, seems just more of the reason we lost those values. By intensifying the will to truth it appears we’ll just drop deeper into nihilism. How could doubling the dose of the poison help? Nietzsche needs to justify that quest for honesty by something more than the value of truth. He has diagnosed ways the will to truth hurts life, and he needs to defend it on this same level by showing how it furthers life. We saw a part of the justification in Chapter 8, when we studied how the will to truth advances our freedom. The new sciences of history and psychology give us the unprecedented ability to free ourselves from forces—​in drives, in society—​ that had always covertly controlled us. They make possible a more genuine freedom than the kind we long supposed we had. That aggressive honesty is good insofar as it finds a truth that “frees” us. And now we can add that the will to truth also advances our selfhood. In recognizing and then freeing ourselves from foreign or alien forces, we take authority for ourselves and “become who we are.” Again this honesty lets us accomplish more genuinely something we had always claimed as our human badge of distinction, our awareness of ourselves. But we still have to ask—​and Nietzsche insists on these questions—​whether we should want to be free, or selves. These values aren’t sacrosanct, but are subject to diagnosis and doubt just like all others. And this brings us to Nietzsche’s ultimate justification for that “quest,” which as always is by the value of power or growth, taken as the aim of our deepest and most powerful drives. We should want to be free, and want to be a self, because we deeply want to grow, and freedom and selfhood offer a privileged way to grow. The doubts against the will to truth concerned ways it can damage us at this basic level, and Nietzsche’s defense of it must, in the end, point out ways it can strengthen us here. So the will to truth, and that heroic honesty, are ultimately grounded in our human effort at power. One way Nietzsche defends the “power” of the will to truth is by arguing that it requires (and displays and expresses) strength. He stresses the elite strength

416  Nietzsche Values in honesty.30 The quest for self-​truth is heroic precisely because of the high kind of courage it demands. Merely undertaking to face, and to live facing, one’s human reality is a mark of distinction. So, in a passage we’ve noticed from EH.p.3: “How much truth a spirit bears, how much truth it dares? that became for me more and more the genuine measure of value.” And EH.iii. BT.2: “Knowledge, saying Yes to reality is just as necessary for the strong as cowardice and flight from reality—​the ‘ideal’—​is for the weak, under the inspiration of weakness.” But Nietzsche’s more important point is that the will to truth improves strength. It does so not merely because this honesty is so hard (and because one gets stronger by attempting hard things). The truths it finds out let it take a new control over things—​a new level or domain of control that human had never had before. This expansion of control is a factor in both Nietzschean freedom and selfhood. Each of them not only casts off control by other wills, but also brings those wills into its own control and command. Freedom is not merely an ability to cut loose from prevailing values—​to cease to obey them—​but an ability to absorb them into one’s own projects. And selfhood is not just a matter of ejecting foreign forces but of “incorporating” them: one doesn’t just pare down to one’s own—​one grows it. It’s because the will to truth, in that new honesty, makes possible this freedom and this selfhood that Nietzsche supposes it carries human to an epochal new level and kind of power. This new kind of power will belong to a new kind of self, crystallized more fully out, as a full-​fledged thing, in the ontological space between its parts—​its drives—​and the wholes of which it’s a part—​the group, the society, the species. Human has habitually supposed that it is a single, well-​bounded thing just by virtue of being an ego or subject or consciousness. But Nietzsche’s genealogies erode the edges of this supposed thing. They show how our lives are “meant”—​ get their meanings—​not just by this consciousness, but also by wills both below and above it. What “means” in us—​including what “self-​refers” in our reflexivity—​are on the one hand the wills and interests of our drives and affects and on the other the encompassing groups and types that made our values. The subject in us is controlled—​”commanded”—​on both sides: by the “internal other” of its unrecognized drives and by the “external other” of the group-​history that made these drives. We think it’s our ego that’s there at the center of us, meaning what we do, but really it’s this tangle of other forces. It’s these that are truly the A from §10.1—​ the self-​referrer. 30 87:10[45] (WP.327, LNp182): “one should, from shame before one’s ever more commandingly speaking ‘honesty,’ unlearn the shame which wishes to deny and lie away the natural instincts.”

Self: To Become Who One Is  417 The two ways one must work on oneself, to become who one is, distinguish the self on the one side from the drives, on the other from groups. One makes one’s self out of the drives by unifying them, and one makes one’s self a discrete part of the group by becoming an individual in it. These projects involve collecting one’s drives, but also culling them, the better to make a self that is single and one’s own. These are the two main strategies Nietzsche gives us—​beyond that self-​insight—​ for becoming the self we had thought we were. Both belong to the heroic “aspirational self ” he commends to us: I am to think of myself as engaged in the high achievement of creating a genuine self of myself: I am becoming something rare and fine by this “selfing.”

10.4  How to become a self Let’s make this account of Nietzsche’s new self more concrete by examining further the two tasks he thinks this self will take on—​the two ways it will try to “become itself.” It will strive to make itself more genuinely one, out of its drives, and also to become more genuinely its own, out of its group. These tasks interact with one another and must be pursued in tandem. These tasks respectively address the two main hurdles to selfhood that self-​ insight, guided by psychology and history, reveals: fragmentation and assimilation. These are the threats posed to the self from the ontological levels below and above it: from its composition by drives and from its membership in the group. It loses its self on the one side to its drive-​parts and on the other as a mere social member. Now that human better knows what it is—​a complex of drives and affects, each shaped by history in the interests of various past types and now jumbled together in this body by birth and upbringing—​it recognizes these two ways to improve and complete itself. Becoming who one is, so as to be/​have a self properly, is then a matter of (1) unifying a disordered internal multiplicity and (2) making one’s “own” from a social identity. By overcoming fragmentation and assimilation one claims authority, as an individual human, from one’s parts and from one’s group. One casts off the command and control of these forces below and above it. But, as we’ve begun to notice, the point is not to deny and disavow those forces—​to ignore and cease to obey them. It’s not a matter of paring them away from a core identity. Instead one learns to command and control (“master”) them: one incorporates these formerly foreign forces into one’s own project. So, in his characteristic way, Nietzsche treats the tasks of “unifying” and “individuating” oneself both as a matter of controlling other forces. We see here once again why the will to power is not principally a will to overcome resistances; it is a will to grow, which happens not merely by overcoming but by “incorporating”

418  Nietzsche Values those other forces.31 We’ll see that and how, in the case of both drive-​parts and group-​wholes, the point is to grow by incorporating them.

10.4.1  Self out of multiple parts Consider first the challenge to make a self out of one’s parts. How does one “discipline oneself to wholeness,” as he says [TI.ix.49] Goethe did? Our obvious questions concern what kind of unification or synthesis Nietzsche has in mind and just how he thinks it lets us “become a self.” How are we to “unite” our drives and affects with one another, and to what purpose? We’ve already looked at Nietzsche’s call on us to unify our drives, back in Chapter 3 (§3.4). Let’s remind ourselves of what we saw there and then consider its bearing on the self. Humans are distinguished from other animals by the many more drives and affects they comprise.32 In simple societies these manifold drives are organized, within each member, into a cohesive system. This unifying discipline is imposed especially when such a society must “pull together” to deal with existential threats. By radical contrast with such enforced unity, Nietzsche thinks, our modern age exhibits a most extreme multiplicity of drives and values that do not cohere. TI.ix.41: “I even define modernity as physiological self-​contradiction.” The accumulations of history, and the mixings of different ethnic and cultural groups in modern societies, mean that the drives and values designed for many different peoples and ages are all jumbled together in us.33 We moderns face most acutely the challenge of unifying these parts. We should also remember how drives “differ” from one another: they do so by opposing one another, which they do “intentionally” (i.e., on the basis of understanding one another). That drives understand one another is evident from their crucial ability to stand in relations of command and obedience to one another. To obey another drive is not to be mechanically pushed onto a different heading by it; it’s to adopt a new sign (value) to steer by and to adopt it as because it is “what the other drive wants.” Similarly, to command another drive is to impose one’s own aim on what one understands to be a will with a contrary aim of its own. We live by the many commandings and obeyings of our drives.34 31 Here I disagree with Reginster [2006], as I developed in Chapter 2 (§2.3). 32 Again 84:27[59] (WP.966):  “Human has, in contrast to the animal, bred large in himself an abundance of opposite drives and impulses; by this synthesis he is master of the earth.” 33 See BGE.262 regarding the simplifying and complicating effects of war and peace. And see BGE.224 on the modern age: “The past of every form and manner of life, of cultures that earlier lay next to one another, upon one another, now flows into us ‘modern souls,’ thanks to this mixing.” 34 Again 85:37[4]‌(LNp30): “Along the guiding thread of the body . . . we learn that our life is possible through an interplay of many intelligences [Intelligenzen] that are very unequal in value, and thus only through a constant, thousand-​fold obeying and commanding—​put morally: through the incessant exercise of many virtues.”

Self: To Become Who One Is  419 As we saw further in Chapter 3, it’s by these relations of command and obedience that drives are synthesized; these relations are (as it were) the glue that binds separate drives together. Without them, two drives simply push against one another, each seizing its chance at opportune moments; in this case they form no fuller unit. These relations join drives into units by a kind of inclusion of the obeying drive within the commanding drive (or its project). This enhances the commanding drive, but it does not, ordinarily, completely “digest” and homogenize the obeying drive: it includes it with its difference. And this means that the resulting unity is not just (as it were) larger, but also richer and more complex: it includes the competing value as a minority voice. This new unit formed by the commanding and obeying drives is, moreover, itself an intentionality: it is a shared intentional space in which these drives “understand one another.”35 My behavior is aimed by the mutual understanding in this shared space. We saw as well that there are different forms of this command-​obedience relation and that these vary precisely in how far the commander allows the obeyer to express its difference. These result in different ways in which that space is “shared.” In suppression the obeying drive is not allowed any voice in the understanding. It’s not allowed to express its own aim, can’t enact its own project. In permission the obeyer is allowed to pursue its own activity where this doesn’t interfere with its service of the commanding drive. It has a minority and regulated voice as to what’s good, what’s to be done. And in sublimation the obeying drive is allowed to express itself but only in some partial or indirect way—​in particular “inwardly,” so that the drive is “spiritualized.” With these reminders from Chapter 3 we can now return to our topic: how to become a self. The new self will work to make itself “one” or “whole” by means of these relations of command and obedience.36 It will work to bring its manifold drives and affects under the command of a single will and project. But it will do so, Nietzsche thinks, in a way that preserves and even enhances the diversity of obeying drives that are gathered into this project. Unification is valuable, after all, insofar as it makes a “one” that is greater by virtue of the many it unites. And for this it needs to preserve the difference in that many: each part should be not just “one more of the same,” but also contribute something its own.

35 85:43[1]‌(LNp50) says that the human body is a “social formation” whose “living individual beings feel with one another.” See again BGE.19’s account how, in “acts of will,” we experience ourselves both as commanding and as obeying, knowing the sensations of both. 36 Nehamas [1985, 188]: “The creation of the self therefore appears to be the creation, or imposition, of a higher-​order accord among our lower-​level thoughts, desires, and actions.” Anderson offers a developed account of this unity, in which “the minimal self is a diachronic, structured whole within which enduring drives and affects stand in causal and functional relations” [2012, 224]. He presents drives and affects as combining by “recruiting” one another. I will prefer Nietzsche’s own terms: commanding and obeying.

420  Nietzsche Values Thus the goal is a unity that is not homogeneous but preserves diversity. Indeed, the ideal is a unity that preserves a maximal diversity.37 In 84:27[59] (WP.966): “The highest human would have the greatest multiplicity of drives, and in the relatively greatest strength that can be borne. . . . Indeed, where the plant human shows itself strong, one finds instincts striving powerfully against one another (e.g., Shakespeare), but controlled [gebändigt].” As we might put it, his ideal is to make oneself not just a “unity” but also a “whole”: to unite not just the parts one happens already to have, but the parts needed in order to be a “complete” human. So the problem is not just that we’re internally fragmented, but that each of us is, altogether, merely a fragment [Bruchstück]. Each of us has managed to unify only a subset or sector of that multiplicity of drives we bear. So Zarathustra imagines his contemporaries as individually mere pieces that would need to be put together to make a full person. Z.ii.20: “ ‘I walk among humans as among fragments and limbs of humans! . . . /​‘And this is all my composing and striving that I compose into one and bring together what is fragment and riddle and cruel accident.’ ” The superhuman will overcome not just internal disunity, but this way that the human type has itself been fragmented.38 The aim at the unity of multiple drives is obviously very schematic. Can we give a more definite and usable idea of what it involves? How are the proper relations of command and obedience among our drives to be brought about? What am I to do, in order to (enrich and) unify myself this way? We can make the talk of drives more concrete by improving our sense of that intentional but largely unconscious “space” in which the drives understand one another. Let’s consider further this shared understanding and then think how “uniting a many” would work in it. The drives (recall) are habits of directed activity; for example, the eat-​drive is the habit (and instinct) of seeking and consuming food. Each habit steers by certain signs, which are its values; for example, the cat’s eat-​drive’s signs (and values) are such things as the look of a bird, and one of our own might be the smell of a certain food. The drives understand one another, I suggest, by recognizing one another’s signs. My effort to finish a task can recognize the salience of the smell of prepared food; it can defer, or not, to that competing value, but in either case it understands it as a competing value. And it can do so, I suggest, without this registering in consciousness. In this way that shared “space” of the drives is populated by their different values, deployed in a kind of argument with one another. 37 Nehamas [1985, 187]: “success consists in having the minimum level of discord among the maximum possible number of diverse tendencies.” 38 On this idea of many persons as only “fragments” of a “complete” human, see also 83:7[44], 84:27[16] (WP.997). And 87:10[111] (WP.881):  “Most [humans] represent human as pieces and particulars: only when one adds them up does a human appear.”

Self: To Become Who One Is  421 This argument makes up the texture of our intentional stream—​the successions of ways that we “mean” the world, the series of stances we take toward it as we live through an hour, a day, a year. Some of this “intentional stream” is conscious, but much of it proceeds quite without reflective awareness. Our habits of action and response use many signs that operate subliminally and without ever being put into words—​as, for example, with many of our responses to odors. These values, whether conscious or not, inflect or populate the world with meanings, and we make our way through it accordingly. Our perceptions of our situation, as well as our subconscious sense of our own physiological states, are interpreted by these values. A perception can trigger or activate a value, make it salient—​as does (e.g.) the smell of a favorite food. The value gives a meaning to the perception, a meaning with a temporary strength in that intentional space of the drives; this strength can include a power to steer action. What is it, then, to complicate but also unify this shared space of drives and values? (i) To take the “complicating” first: it is to become more finely and diversely sensitive to meanings in one’s perceived situations and sensed states. It is to view them with respect to a wider variety of purposes—​to see more various values (including disvalues) in them. It is, moreover, to see opposed values bearing on a situation. It is to give more divergent viewpoints and interests a voice in that debate—​a chance to aim choice and action in the given case. Thus, among the types of command-​obedience relation we distinguished, the new self will be held together mainly by permission and sublimation, not suppression. Nietzsche illustrates this psychic multiplicity in the persona he projects in his books.39 His extraordinarily rich array of critical diagnoses show the all-​ important habit of reversing perspectives. He finds a way to take a critical view of any value—​and a way to assess any given thing from an angle askew from the one usual to us. He allows these different values voices in him, which explains his many contradictions and inconsistencies. His authorial voice shows how to move fluidly through multiple conflicting points of view and how to sustain these together so that they stand as aspectual truths about the thing. It’s important, moreover, that these multiple “perspectives” or “viewpoints” are not merely theoretical posits; they are the views and values of his various drives and affects. This is another evident feature of that writerly persona: he constantly shows that he fully wills and feels his viewpoints by the color and emphasis of his prose. He gives voice to drives and affects already there in him, and which we see to be there in us but not yet voiced. 39 Recall 87:9[177] (WP.1031, LNp171): “To run through the whole ambit of the modern soul, to have sat in every one of its corners—​my ambition, my torture, and my happiness.”

422  Nietzsche Values The reader’s challenge is (as usual) to “incorporate” this ability into an overall habit. This will be the habit, first, of steadily pushing to expand the range of viewpoints from which one sees and assesses a thing. And it will be the habit of giving these viewpoints an ongoing voice in oneself, not annulling them in favor of the dominant view. (ii) What is it, second, to “unify” this multiplicity of drive-​perspectives? It is to pull this variety of interests into a single project—​some overall aimed activity. As Nietzsche puts it, one needs a single dominant drive in order to become a self—​a drive strong enough to command all the others. We’ve seen that drives are held together by their command-​obedience relations; what he advocates then is a unification “from above” by a single drive that commands (directly or indirectly) all the others.40 Like Plato Nietzsche thinks there must be a king of the soul, but he makes it something other than reason. What does Nietzsche have in mind by such a dominant drive? Sometimes it seems it might be something as simple and generic as the eat-​drive or the sex-​ drive—​any one of these might happen to be strongest in a given individual. In this light having a dominant drive looks largely a matter of fate and inheritance. It seems one couldn’t do very much to give oneself a drive with such dominating force: Don Juan is born not self-​made. And Nietzsche is of course eager to warn us how much about us is settled by our constitution, beyond any chance of being deliberately revised. But mainly I think he means something different. He thinks of the dominant drive not as generic and pregiven, but as individual and produced. One’s dominant drive is something unique and distinctive to oneself. And it is something distinctive one makes oneself into. It may seem mysterious how we could “make a drive,” but this is really, recall, just a matter of making a certain habit of effort—​a strong and settled habit of doing/​trying, which is why I  spoke earlier of a “project.” One needs to create such a dominant drive—​such a unifying project—​out of the many “local” habits of effort that make up one’s intentional stream. Or rather, such a drive or project needs to create itself. Nietzsche describes this process in his own case. He—​or something in him—​ had been at work at his dominant project, the critique of morality, long before he recognized it explicitly or could put it in words. He had been developing abilities that would serve this project without realizing that he was doing so. The drive for this project is formed by a unification of those disparate abilities—​carried out by

40 So—​in a first piece of the important GS.290 (we’ll see more soon): “the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste!”

Self: To Become Who One Is  423 those abilities themselves. Nietzsche makes clear that it was not himself as subject or agent who accomplished it.41 EH.ii.9 is Nietzsche’s well-​known account of this.42 Let’s recall some of it. “To become what one is presupposes that one doesn’t suspect in the least what one is. . . . In the meantime there grows and grows in the depths the organizing ‘idea’ that is called to mastery.” And then: “The task of revaluing values perhaps needed more abilities than have ever been at home with one another in any one individual, and above all contradictory abilities that could not be allowed to disturb or destroy one another.” He describes the special skills needed to hold these disparate capacities together: “Rank-​order of abilities; distance; the art of separating without antagonizing; mixing nothing, ‘reconciling’ nothing; an incredible multiplicity that is nonetheless the opposite of chaos—​this was the precondition, the long, secret work and artistry of my instinct.” He speaks of “artistry” in this passage, and this marks another aspect of “unifying” that we need to do justice to: its aesthetic character.43 These many contrary parts must be brought together into a beautiful unity. Nietzsche’s most famous statement of the point is in GS.299 (“What one should learn from artists”): “we however will to be the poets of our life, first of all in the smallest and most everyday [things].” And GS.290 begins:  “To ‘give style’ to his character—​a great and rare art! It is practiced by the one who surveys the totality of strengths and weaknesses that his nature offers, and then fits it into an artistic plan until each appears as art and reason and even the weaknesses delight the eye.” There’s a straightforward reason for this aesthetic requirement. The unifying project needs to “look attractive” to the drives and affects that are being called to join in it. Again GS.290: “For one thing is needed: that human achieve satisfaction with itself, be it through poetry or art.” So one is not self-​beautifying for an external audience, but for the taste of one’s own drives and affects. The dominant drive needs, as part of its appeal to the rest of the psyche, a beautifying picture of the overall life it allows all the supporting drives and affects to participate in. We should notice, finally, that this “unity” is not merely synchronic but also diachronic. The aim is to unify not just the parts at some moment, but also one’s life as a whole. In particular, later stages are to count as culminations of earlier

41 GM.p.2: “with the necessity with which a tree bears its fruit, there grow out of us our thoughts, our values, our Yeses and Nos and Ifs and Whethers—​connected and related all together with one another and signs of one will, one health, one realm, one sun.” 42 See also D.552, which compares the condition to pregnancy: “one knows nothing of what is going on, one waits and tries to be ready. So there reigns in us a pure and purifying feeling of deep irresponsibility, almost like a spectator before the closed curtain,—​it is growing, it is coming to light: we have nothing at hand to determine either its value or its hour.” 43 This aesthetic character to self-​uniting has been memorably developed by Nehamas [1985, ch. 6].

424  Nietzsche Values ones—​to show a fuller meaning the earlier ones are now revealed to have been preparations for.44

10.4.2  Self out of enveloping other The self needs to be established by distinction not just from its parts, but from the wholes of which it is a part. Whereas the first problem was fragmentation, the second is assimilation: one is not well differentiated from the groups to which one belongs, one merges into a kind of group self in them. So the second challenge in making a self is to crystallize it out of the social matrix in which it is originally set. UM.iii.1 already expresses this: “The human who wills not to belong to the mass needs only to stop being comfortable with himself; he follows his conscience, which calls to him: ‘be your self! [sei du selbst!] You are not all of that which you now do, mean, desire. . . . There exists in the world a single path along which no one can go except you.’ ” The new self, understanding itself, sees that it has this second task, too. It sees how it has so far been chiefly a social “member,” an organ functioning for social purposes. And it sees how its drives and affects have been designed by social groups with different interests than its own. By understanding this social design, helped by the sciences of history and psychology, human at last becomes able to assert and establish its independence. It can make itself a self that is more than just a social member. As things stand one’s own selfishness is spoiled because one takes the group’s view of one’s self—​what one is. So D.105 says that most people, although thinking that they’re egoists, “despite this do nothing their life long for their ego, but only for a phantom of the ego, which has been formed in the heads of those around them and communicated to them”; “no individual in this majority is capable of setting up against the general pale fiction, and thus destroying it, a real ego that is accessible to him and fathomed by him.”45 It’s the primary task of genealogy to expose the alien interests embedded in our habits and values. So long as we are under this control we don’t act as “persons.” In 87:10[59] (WP.886): “Nothing is rarer than a personal action. A class, a rank, a Volks-​Rasse, an environment, an accident—​all express themselves sooner in a work or deed than a ‘person.’ ” Even our basic drives are spoiled this way.46 These alien interests 44 See again Anderson [2005], which illuminates Nietzsche’s point with the case of Jimmy Carter, who “redeemed” his unsatisfactory presidency with an admirable “ex-​presidency.” 45 See 80:6[70] on how others give us our picture of ourselves:  “our own judgment is only a Fortzeugung of the combined foreign ones! Our own drives appear to us under the interpretation of the other.” 46 82:3[1.306]: “Even in the satisfaction of their desires (for food, woman, property, honor, power) most humans act as herd-​animal and not as persons—​even when they are persons.”

Self: To Become Who One Is  425 dictate what we think is best about us. In 86–​7:7[6]‌(WP.326): “Virtues are as dangerous as vices, insofar as one lets these rule from outside as authority and law and does not first generate these from oneself, as is correct, as most personal defense and need, as condition of just our existence and success, which we know and recognize, indifferent whether others grow with us under the same or different conditions.” I don’t think this second side to becoming-​a-​self has been as well-​noticed as the first. Whereas the first introduces a more aesthetic tone to self-​making, in the goal of a “beautiful” unity of parts, the second adds a more scientific element. One needs to find out the truth about the functions built into one’s drives and affects, and for this the sciences of history and psychology are indispensable. It requires facts not just about oneself—​which drives and values one has—​but about the causes that made these drives and values. This second task also sets us into a more critical stance toward our drives than did the first. The effort to unify our drives under a single dominant project treats them as resources for synthesis: they look all potentially useful to assist and enrich that project. But the discovery of the social design and functions of these drives reveals that many of them represent “alien” interests—​the interests of society generally, or of particular groups within it. It develops a suspicion against these drives, and in particular against the values these drives steer by. It shows, in a nutshell, that although these drives and values are all “in us,” they are not all truly “our own.” Now one might have expected that any drive or value a person has would be his or her own. If a drive is “in” you, isn’t it yours? Indeed this might seem to be Nietzsche’s own reply to the attack on drives that morality makes. Priests and philosophers have viewed drives (or desires or inclinations) as “in” us and yet not truly or centrally “ours”—​claiming that we are rather the rational subject or agent that steps back from and judges them. This long-​standing idea that the “core” to human is itself as subject-​agent tends to treat all the drives as alien forces requiring strict control. By contrast we’ve seen that Nietzsche wants to identify us with our drives. Nevertheless he also thinks that there are elements in our drives that aren’t really our own. These occur especially in the values by which drives steer. Drives adopt as signs for their own ends markers that—​in some cases—​actually steer them for quite different ends, ends serving outside interests. We can’t trust “our own” values to be truly our own. Many are (as it were) agents for alien interests.47 47 84:26[119] (WP.259): “Insight: all evaluation has to do with a determinate perspective: preservation of the individual, a community, a race, a state, a church, a faith, a culture /​—​by forgetting that there is only a perspectival valuing [Schätzen], there teems in one human a sum of contradictory values [Schätzungen] and consequently of contradictory impulses. This is the expression of the sickness of humans in contrast to animals.”

426  Nietzsche Values They express, above all, the interest of some social group.48 We can distinguish two kinds of problem Nietzsche raises here—​two ways we can be “not our own selves” in our values. There is firstly the phenomenon he refers to as “herd” and which we discussed in Chapter 6 under the heading of “the common.” This is the way all of us—​and not just those who are especially “conformist”—​have most of our values: as/​because “this is what one does.” We have values in order to have them in common with others. We are, in this regard, merely anonymous members of the herd; we haven’t separated ourselves out as discrete selves.49 But Nietzsche also finds a second, quite different problem: our values have been made by past social groups who shaped them in their particular interest—​ to further their type of person. So we grow up into values designed by and for various types of human who, at points in our culture’s past, were able to remake the overall norms. Nietzsche very broadly divides these norm-​makers into “master” and “slave” types; each of these has, in different historical moments, left imprints on the values we now inherit. In this way one inevitably takes over, unawares, many values not suited to the type of person one is. Such values are alien impositions on us; they are ways we are “commanded” by those other types, in the signs by which we steer. The two problems, then, are that our values are designed to herd us and that they are designed in the interest of “other” human types. We can see these problems as rooted respectively in the two crucial parts to human’s distinctive capacity for social practices (which we met in Chapter 6). These practices are founded, on the one hand, by human’s powerful ability and will to share—​to have the same values others do. But human also has the capacity, in moments of crisis especially, to remake these practices by revising the norms that guide them. So human’s remarkable development depends on a general and usual will to copy, but also on members who periodically innovate and change the content copied. And each of us, receiving our values from this process, is “commanded” by—​and loses his or her self to—​both that instinct to copy and those remakers of values. Nietzsche raises the first problem whenever he speaks of the “herd instinct.” We have a deep need to share values with others—​to receive and obey norms as the values of the group. BGE.199: “the herd instinct of obedience is inherited best, at the expense of the art of commanding.” GS.50 tries to convey the power of this instinct: 48 GS.21: “Education proceeds without exception so: it seeks to determine the individual through a series of stimuli and advantages to a way of thinking and acting which, when it becomes habit, drive, and passion, rules in him and over him against his ultimate advantage, but ‘to the general good.’ ” 49 So I  suggest that Nietzsche anticipates the point Heidegger expresses [Being and Time §27] with his term das Man: having values only for their commonality, we have only this anonymous das Man-​self.

Self: To Become Who One Is  427 The reproach of conscience is, in even the most conscientious, weak against the feeling: “This and that is against the good custom of your society.” A cold look, a wry mouth on the part of those among whom and for whom one was raised, is still feared even by the strongest. What is really feared here? Isolation [Vereinsamung]! as the argument that refutes even the best arguments for a person or cause.—​So speaks the herd instinct out of us.50

The norms we thus share in are, unsurprisingly, designed in the interest of the group.51 This lets us place Chapter 6’s problem about “the common” in its larger setting of the task to become a self. This failure to “individualize” oneself from the common or herd turns out to be only one way of failing to be a self. As we might conceive it: the herd is only one kind of “other” the self needs to distinguish itself from. Another kind of other are the particular types of persons that have rewritten the values we inherit. And still another kind of other are the drives, understood as separate and recalcitrant wills. The second problem, that our values are designed for different types, is less obvious; it’s not embodied in a single term like “herd-​instinct.” But the problem is raised, explicitly or not, by most of Nietzsche’s genealogies of norms. These offer historical explanations for how given norms were created or adapted by certain types or classes of people with certain needs and aims. And—​these genealogies thrust the question immediately upon us—​we must ask whether we ourselves are or want to be such people with such needs and aims. In most cases the invited answer is no. Nietzsche’s most obvious use of this strategy is in his diagnosis of Christian values as a slave morality. These values were designed to suit the psychic condition of an oppressed and suffering underclass who feel ressentiment toward the dominant group and make their own life bearable by inventing an afterlife to which their own traits, rebranded as “virtues,” are tickets. The main impact of this diagnosis—​I think it’s clear—​is to alienate the reader from those values, out of his or her strong wish not to be such a person as the values were designed for. We should distinguish Nietzsche’s critiques of the slave and the herd, though clearly these types have affinity. But there can be herds of nobles as well as herds of slaves. One is herd insofar as one values with the will to belong; one is slave insofar as one values from the conviction that the good life is reserved for others. 50 85–​6:1[202]: “The attempt to adapt, the pain of solitude, the desire for a community: this can so express itself in a thinker that in his own case he subtracts precisely the most personal and most valuable and, in generalizing, he also commonizes.” 51 GS.116 says that morality’s “evaluations and rankings are always the expression of the needs of a community and herd: that which avails it first—​and second and third—​, that is also the highest measure of value for all individuals.”

428  Nietzsche Values All norms, just as norms, have their appeal to the herd instinct in each of us. But some norms have been designed, Nietzsche claims, for the benefit of that resigned and resentful type of person he calls “slave.” Such values, becoming part of the whole society’s inheritance, are then taken on as norms by persons healthier in type—​taken on to their detriment. But “the slave” is only one of many types Nietzsche identifies as makers-​ of-​values. We should think of these types as often quite particular to a certain historical setting, which imposes a specific set of challenges and opportunities and shapes a certain psyche to address them. In each case this type makes (or remakes) the values for its own sake (i.e., as strategies for whatever psychic needs and aims pick out that type). And in every case the questions arise: are these my needs and aims? and do I want them to be my needs and aims? These questions must be posed even for the contrast-​type for slave, “master.” Although Nietzsche’s handling of this type is of course more favorable, he doesn’t shy from stressing aspects that are sure to alienate most readers.52 Here, too, I am to ask myself whether the values were made for me—​judging this with respect to that unifying project I feel growing in me. I am to ask myself, then, whether the type of person these values are “good for” is the type of my own “self,” where this self has those linked descriptive and aspirational senses. Is this on the one hand the type of person I discover myself to be? Does it fit the package of drives and affects that make me up? Does it, as well, contribute to the overall project I feel those drives and affects organizing toward? Where the answer is no, I then try to modify the value, the better to suit what I am/​want to be. I try to reposition, within my world, the sign that the value is. I try, in other words, to revalue this value. We shouldn’t think that this only works in a conscious and calculating way. The main work must be carried out down at the level of my drives and affects—​ by those drives and affects themselves. Nietzsche’s critique of the subject/​agent is meant to restore a confidence to the implicit tastes and judgments of these wills in my bodily habits. These drives and affects are much more intelligent than we suppose. They can learn this strategy—​can be educated where the overall interest lies. Much of this education comes just by removing the moral critique of these drives and affects; by their having believed this critique, our bodily wills have been estranged from themselves. So consciousness does not play the role of directing these drives and affects, but rather of helping them to take back a healthy authority for themselves.

52 GM.i.11:  “they step back into the innocence of the beast-​of-​prey conscience, as jubilant monsters, who perhaps walk away from a hideous succession of murder, arson, rape, torture with such high spirits and equanimity that it seems as if they have only performed a student prank.”

Self: To Become Who One Is  429

10.5  Being one’s own There’s a lot more to say about how these efforts to unify and separate the self would work concretely. But we must press ahead to look at two further points. First, we should notice how this project to “become a self ” accomplishes the recognition and incorporation of the perspectivity of values that has been our ultimate topic all along. And second we should consider what this theory implies about the “selfishness” Nietzsche so often advocates.

10.5.1  One’s own perspective Human’s great challenge today is to experiment with how far it is possible to live with the truth about its values: to hold that truth in view while it values. How far is it possible for me to value things—​and difficult things—​while recognizing (as we first put it) that these values are “my own perspective?” As Nietzsche puts it, the question is whether this truth can be “incorporated.” So—​in a passage we’ve noticed several times—​GS.110: “To what extent can the truth endure incorporation?—​that is the question, that is the experiment.”53 So it’s not enough to hold “value perspectivism” as a theoretical position. It needs to be absorbed into one’s practical attitude—​and as this operates not just in explicit choices, but in the background steering and striving that carries us through most of the day. It must be brought into one’s “body’ (i.e., into one’s drives and affects, with their largely implicit valuing and aiming). It needs to be “made instinctive,” as GS.11 puts it. All of this is familiar to us already. And becoming a self—​we now should see—​is a crucial part of so incorporating this truth. We only adequately understand the perspectivity of our values, after all, if we have some idea which perspectives these values express. Of course I can believe “in the abstract” that “my values are perspectival” without any inkling what their perspectives might be; as I value something, I might know only that “some perspective or other is at work here.” But this would be a very meager kind of understanding. It’s not clear that I would even know what a perspective is without acquaintance with cases. I  only really understand my values’ perspectivity by recognizing the particular perspectives that “speak” in these values, that “mean” them.

53 We noticed two other passages back in Chapter 1. GS.11: “It is still a quite new task, now first dawning for the human eye, to incorporate knowledge and make it instinctive, a task that will only be seen by those who have conceived that so far we have only incorporated our errors and that all of our consciousness refers to errors!” 81:11[141]: “in summa to wait [to see] how far knowing and the truth can be incorporated.”

430  Nietzsche Values Now it had always seemed obvious whose perspective my values express: my own. Isn’t this involved in identifying them as “my values” in the first place? But Nietzsche teaches us to make distinctions here. We should distinguish, on the one hand, a minimal sense of “my” in which “my values” are all the things this human body values, both implicitly in its drives and explicitly in what it thinks and says that it values. But there’s also a second, stronger sense of “my”—​let’s speak here of “my own”—​which involves responsibility: it requires my having made or chosen these values, my being their reason or cause. In valuing we think we “own” our values in this fuller way. It’s in the failure of this responsibility that “my” values now appear not genuinely “my own.”54 A value, remember, is a sign to steer by. It is a sign only by being used as a sign (i.e., valued) by some living thing. But now why does the living thing so use that sign? In one kind of case, the living thing adopts that sign as a means to ends it already has; it makes some kind of judgment that this sign will guide it where it wants to go. Even animals, Nietzsche thinks, can learn from experience and adjust some of their signs this way. But in another kind of case the living thing plays no such active role. The sign is (as it were) inserted into it by some other living thing. This can happen “in the blood” (i.e., genetically), or it can happen by upbringing-​training-​teaching. A sign can be transmitted and passively acquired in this way through long chains of valuers. But originally, Nietzsche thinks, it was set up as a sign by some living thing to serve as a means to its ends. We can speak of these as “active” and “passive” relations to a value. In the latter case, where some value has been (as it were) “installed” in me without being suited to my (other) ends, the value will be “mine” but not “my own.” It will be a part of “my perspective,” but it will also, and more tellingly, express the perspective of the will that set this sign up. It expresses that will’s aims and interests and not my own. In receiving the value thus passively, I am in effect “commanded” to value so; the meaning of the value is set by the commander. Therefore to understand the perspectivity of such a value one must not only see the perspective it’s “in,” but also the perspective that “put it there”: see what perspective made it and what it made it for. It’s part of the illusion in agency that I suppose I have my values by choosing them—​by seeing or judging that these things are good, either in themselves or as means to other things I  value. I  take myself to have direct and “non-​ observational” knowledge of what I value and why. But this is no more the case with my values than 85:38[1]‌(LNp34) says it is of a “thought”:

54 So perhaps UM.iii.3 (see context): the great human “fights in himself that which hinders him from being great, which only means in his case: to be free and completely himself [ganz er selbst]. From which it follows that his animosity is fundamentally directed against what is indeed an ihm selbst, but what is not genuinely himself [nicht eigentlich er selbst ist].”

Self: To Become Who One Is  431 It arises in me—​from where? by what? I don’t know. It comes, independently of my will, usually surrounded and obscured by a crowd of feelings, desires, aversions. . . . [W]‌ho does all this,—​I don’t know and am certainly more observer than originator of this process. . . . That every thought first comes many-​ meaninged . . . and in itself merely as occasion for an attempt to interpret or to fix it arbitrarily, that in all thinking a multiplicity of persons seem to take part —​: this is not so easy to observe. . . .

I don’t have charge of the perspectivity of my values in the way I had supposed, which makes clearer how inadequate that abstract acceptance that “my values are perspectival” really is. The first step to understanding the perspectivity of “my” values is to recognize those “others” that speak in them. We’ve seen how our new and improved human sciences will expose these other perspectives that have, in effect, “commanded” me to value in the ways I do. Psychology can help me to recognize how my drives and affects speak—​can help me to become more alert to the workings of these psychic forces in me. And history can help me to see the societal forces that shaped the worded values I try to steer by. But now, what happens when I  try to “incorporate” such a truth, exposed by diagnosis or genealogy, about these “other” perspectives expressed in some value? When I try to value this thing “in the light of ” this truth about why I’m valuing it, I’m brought up short. The recognition that this value expresses the aims and interests of some “other” disrupts this valuing. It shows me that I must, if I’m to go on valuing the thing, find a reason of my own to do so. I can only sustain my valuing by reclaiming it for myself. It’s by this effort to make my values my own that I become who I am, at last my own self.55 Now I can truly see, for the first time, that my values express my perspective. We started out by supposing that “facing my values’ perspectivity” involves seeing how my values express “my own perspective.” Then we noticed that Nietzsche means his diagnoses to show us that they don’t express this “own perspective.” And now we see that, in order to face this perspectivity and still value, I must make it the case that my values express my own perspective. So it’s my task, in “incorporating the truth,” not to see that values are “my own perspective,” but to make them so.

55 Here I agree with Katsafanas [2016, 209]: “I’ll argue that Nietzsche’s aspirational notion of selfhood is this: a person qualifies as a self to the extent that she revalues her values.”

432  Nietzsche Values

10.5.2  Selfishness This work of “becoming a self,” both by unifying oneself out of drives and by individuating oneself from communal values, is the key to the “selfishness” [Selbstsucht] Nietzsche commends to us.56 He advocates a selfishness grounded in this more adequate self-​relation. Seeing his selfishness in this light somewhat eases, I will try to show, the worries we surely have over his promotion of it. These concern both (1) the harm we believe selfishness does to others and (b) the harm it does to the selfish individual him-​or herself by (we believe) excluding positive attitudes and feelings toward others (e.g., love) that we highly value. We’ll look at Nietzsche’s replies to these worries. And in doing so we’ll notice a surprising last twist to his notion of the self. Let’s start with an overview. Nietzsche is of course an outspoken advocate of selfishness—​which he also calls “egoism” [Egoismus], despite his reservations about the ego or I.  Selfishness, he claims, has been greatly undervalued. In 80:2[15]: “It is the lack of selfishness from which humanity suffers.” The relentless moral attack on selfishness has robbed it of its good conscience and largely spoiled it where it does occur. He wants to restore its honor. It is a crucial virtue—​ or even (we’ll see) a still more basic requirement than all of our virtues and values. Attacking selfishness, morality offers the contrary virtue of selflessness [Selbstlosigkeit], which Nietzsche relentlessly attacks. So GM.p.5: “At issue . . . was the value of the ‘unegoistic,’ of the instincts of pity, self-​denial, self-​sacrifice. . . . Precisely here I saw the great danger of humanity.” And in GS.345: “Selflessness has no value in heaven and on earth.”57 Selflessness is not just a lack or deficiency in selfishness, but an active hostility toward it. Its close cousin is altruism [Altruismus], which we might distinguish as a positive will to benefit others. Nietzsche states his diagnosis of altruism concisely in 87:9[156] (WP.296, LNp168):  “Egoism as I-​ification [Ver-​ichlichung], altruism as other-​ification [Ver-​Änderung].” Selflessness and altruism express decadence, he claims, and when they spread as virtues they ruin society. TI.ix.35: “An ‘altruistic’ morality, a morality in which selfishness withers —​, is in all circumstances a bad sign. This counts for individuals, it counts even more for peoples. The best is missing when selfishness begins to fail. . . . It’s all over for him when human becomes altruistic.” Here we see yet again Nietzsche’s two-​sided critique: selflessness is (historically and psychologically) caused by decline, and it tends to cause it as well. 56 On this topic see especially Janaway [2007, ch. 4]. Also Reginster [2012] on Nietzsche’s critique of selflessness, and Acampora [2013a, 2013b] on his advocacy of selfishness. Risse [2007] reviews changes in Nietzsche’s view of selfishness. 57 See, too, EH.iv.7:  “The unselfing-​ morality [Entselbstungs-​Moral] is the decline-​ morality [Niedergangs-​Moral] par excellence . . . it betrays a will to the end, it negates life in the deepest ground.”

Self: To Become Who One Is  433 Now, we’re familiar with this virtue of selflessness already since it belongs to our existing norms, our morality.58 And we looked at Nietzsche’s attack on altruism back in our discussion of pity in Chapter 7 (§7.3). But what does he mean by the “selfishness” he advocates? He stresses that he does not mean what the word usually does. He thinks that we usually have in mind a defective, “stupid” kind of selfishness, not the real thing. A proper selfishness is in fact advantageous to others; it’s a defective form that we’re judging harmful. Nietzsche asserts this already in 76–​7:23[45]:  “One praises the unegoistic originally because it is useful, one blames the egoistic because it is harmful. But what if this were an error! If the egoistic were useful to a much higher degree, even to other humans, than the unegoistic! What if in blaming the egoistic one were always thinking only of the stupid [form of] egoism!” If people were more fully and truly selfish they would seem less selfish in the usual sense. So 82:3[1.261]: “When selfishness becomes greater, cleverer, finer, more inventive, the world will appear ‘more selfless.’ ” But what is this genuine form? Let’s distinguish some senses. I suggest that we understand selfishness most generally as any prioritizing of oneself—​any way of giving oneself preference or precedence, in comparison, at least implicitly, to “others.” Let’s call this generic selfishness. It depends, we can see, on one’s possessing some idea of “oneself,” as what’s to be given this priority. It depends, that is, on the reflexivity or self-​ relation we’ve had in view all along. This generic selfishness gives preference to what it finds in this self-​relation over what it regards as “other.” But what is it about oneself that one thus gives priority to? We think first, I suggest, that it’s prioritizing the pursuit of one’s aims, over the aims of others. Let’s call this everyday selfishness. I interpret myself as defined by my aims—​my drives, desires, values—​and take my interest to lie in realizing or achieving them. This is involved just in my having “aims.” But when I’m selfish, I pursue these aims at the expense of others’ (pursuit of their) aims. I can do so either by being unaware of others’ aims, or by discounting and undervaluing them. This is the kind of selfishness we usually think of, and revile. However we’ve seen that Nietzsche believes that many of our aims are, sadly, unhealthy, in the sense that they lead away from our own power or growth. For example ressentiment gives one an aim to “bring down” the other rather than uplifting oneself, and this inhibits my progress. My interest does not lie in pursuing or satisfying such aims. So against this Nietzsche promotes a healthy selfishness, defined as prioritizing the pursuit of one’s healthy aims—​again over the

58 EH.iii.D.2:  “The loss of Schwergewicht, opposition to the natural instincts, ‘selflessness’ in a word—​that has so far been called morality.”

434  Nietzsche Values aims of others.59 Selfishness has merit, he thinks, only when it really does move one ahead. But as we’ve further seen, even aims that are healthy can still fail to be “one’s own.” This will be the case with healthy drives if one hasn’t synthesized them into a unified project; it will be the case with healthy norms if one hasn’t “individualized” them. It’s only once I’ve unified my drives and crystallized myself out of groups that my aims and values are truly “my own.” And it’s only by prioritizing the pursuit of aims truly my own (again over others’ aims) that I am truly selfish. Let’s call this genuine selfishness. It is the selfishness of one who has “become a self.” These terms let us see the broad line of Nietzsche’s position on selfishness, I suggest. He thinks that our objections are directed against that everyday selfishness and don’t hold against a healthy or a genuine selfishness. The latter are the two ways he thinks of the selfishness he favors. He often depicts it as a “noble” selfishness, shown already in various healthy elites. But sometimes he imagines it as an übermenschlich selfishness that will be achieved only once a human has truly understood him-​or herself and so become a genuine self. Let’s look first at his defense of healthy selfishness. Consider the important statement in TI.ix.33 (which is entitled Naturwerth des Egoismus); it begins: “Selfishness is as valuable as the one who has it is physiologically valuable. . . . Every individual will be considered by whether he represents the ascending or descending line of life. With a decision about this one has a canon what the value of his selfishness is.” Nietzsche preaches selfishness as a virtue only to those who “represent the ascending line”—​those with the potential to carry the type or lineage ahead. What picks out members of ascending lines is their health and strength. Strength, we’ve seen (Chapter 2 [§2.5]), is the capacity to control other forces, and health is aiming well to improve this control—​aiming well at growth or power. They tend to coincide: the strong tend to be healthy, and health tends to improve strength. So Nietzsche passes freely between them, as in (e.g.) Z.iii.10.2: “And then it also happened,—​ and truly it happened for the first time!—​ that [Zarathustra’s] word counted selfishness holy, the wholesome, healthy selfishness that wells out of a powerful soul.”60 By contrast the selfishness of the weak tends also to aim away from real growth, which ruins it; sick selfishness pushes “ahead” into decline.

59 And not merely over the pursuit of one’s unhealthy aims. Nietzsche’s “healthy selfishness” is not just the “selfish” will to be healthy. 60 EH.iv.7 says that “strong [strenge] selfishness” is “the deepest necessity for flourishing.” 80:6[163]:  “I by contrast see the individual grow, who represents his well-​understood interests against other individuals.”

Self: To Become Who One Is  435 Nietzsche defends healthy selfishness for its benefits to “others”:  it benefits the whole species or lineage that contains these “ascending and declining lines.” Healthy selfishness “advances the type.” The group, the society, the species—​all of these “others” are improved by the selfishness of the strong because it inaugurates a higher level of existence to which they then rise. But the strong can only serve this function by selfishly prioritizing the aims in which they themselves best grow. And these groups or types are also best served if the “declining lines” do not press their selfish interests; Nietzsche welcomes the embrace of selflessness and altruism by members of these. This defense of the broader benefits of a healthy selfishness doesn’t seem to involve its caring in any way for others, however. It seems that those benefits are supposed to accrue by one’s caring unrelentingly about only oneself, and this may leave us still repelled by such selfishness. But Nietzsche tries to answer this second worry as well. He claims that a healthy selfishness will have reason to care about others. As thus selfish, one indeed gives precedence to oneself, but one finds one’s own good to lie in giving to and loving others. So Nietzsche tries to show us a “kinder, gentler” egoism that both gives and loves.61 In Z.i.22.1 Zarathustra says that “a bestowing virtue [schenkende Tugend] is the highest virtue”: “You compel all things to you and into you, that they shall flow back out of your wells as gifts of your love. /​Truly, such a bestowing virtue must become a robber of all values; but I call such selfishness hale and holy [heil und heilig]. /​There is another selfishness, all-​too-​poor, hungrier, that wants always to steal, that selfishness of the sick, the sick selfishness.” Nietzsche stresses Zarathustra’s love and his will to give (which is often frustrated).62 Great love depends on a proper selfishness.63 Nietzsche finds a giving and loving selfishness where we might little expect it: among the “noble masters” of Greece and Rome, his favorite exemplars of the “strong and healthy.” They see themselves, he supposes, as possessing the capacity to live an exemplary life, a life that fulfils the potential in the generations before them. And they see themselves, too, as setting a model and standard for generations to come. They do so by living the very best life they can; by this selfishness they carry forward their line.64 61 Acampora [2013a, 184]: “Selbstsucht is not simply self-​absorption or withdrawal but rather a form of storing up for the purpose of enhancing expressive capacities and sharing them with others.” 62 See von Tevenar [2013] on the treatment of love in Z. 63 87:10[128] (WP.388, LNp196–​7): “It is wealth of personality, plenitude in oneself, overflowing and giving away, instinctive well-​being and saying Yes to oneself which enables great sacrifices and great love: what these affects grow from is strong and divine selfhood [Selbstigkeit]. . . .” 64 D.552: “This is the right ideal selfishness: always to care for and watch over and keep still the soul, so that our fruitfulness reaches beautifully its end! So, in this mediating role, we care and watch for the benefit of all.” Cf. BGE.258 on the character of a “healthy aristocracy.” In Chapter 11, I return to discuss Nietzsche’s idea of “the noble.”

436  Nietzsche Values Let’s turn now to Nietzsche’s second idea of a higher selfishness, what I’ve called genuine selfishness. This, I suggest, is really a special version of the “strong and healthy” selfishness we’ve just been treating: it’s the form the latter takes at this key point in human history. It is Nietzsche’s idea of “the next step” that human’s overall “ascending line” is in process of making. We’ve been fated to this step by the growth of our will to truth, as the “kernel” of morality and the ascetic ideal. For human today, the “strong,” those who have most to give, are those pushing forward the task to incorporate the truth about themselves—​to live in the light of this truth. These of course are the “free spirits,” who incorporate especially truths about morality’s real origins and its lies. The “gift” each gives to human is his or her pioneering example of how to live with the truth about the real perspectivity of norms. They thereby give it models of a “genuine selfishness.” To make my selfishness genuine I need to recognize the other forces that have dictated my values to me. These forces are present even in my simplest bodily drives: even these express not “my own” interests, but those of the species or type. So 83:17[81]:  “The drives whose working is called most strongly selfish [selbstsüchtig], are so least of all, e.g., the desires for eating, sex, and wealth. Here there isn’t yet thought of one self [Ein Selbst], but only of the preservation of an exemplar ‘human.’ /​The constraint of these desires (or making more difficult their satisfaction!) is a result of the craving [Sucht] for self, the feeling of self.” When one of these basic drives steers my behavior, I act in the interest of a simple and generic version of the human type; I’m not genuinely selfish. And we’ve seen that this is still more true of the values and virtues society raises me into. In 80:6[70]: “That which others teach us, want from us, call us to fear and pursue, is the original material of our soul: foreign judgments about things. That gives us our picture of our selves, by which we measure ourselves, are well-​or poorly-​satisfied with ourselves!”65 These norms we grow up into express the interests of the various past types of persons that made them. I must diagnose the types behind these norms and then ask whether these types contribute to the person I’m trying to become. Thus a genuine selfishness requires the adequate self-​relation or reflexivity we’ve had in view all along. It requires “self-​seeking.”66 We’ve seen that this self-​ relation is not just descriptive but also formative. Seeing what one is one sees also what one must become. I try to take authority from those separated drives and from the societal values that set the interests of “others” into me. I remake my values—​those steering signs—​to lead toward my own good, the unifying project

65 Recall 81:11[226]: “they think only of themselves, but of ‘themselves’ [sich] insofar as the ego is developed through the herd-​forming affects.” 66 Acampora [2013a, 232] suggests translating Selbstsucht not as selfishness but as “self-​seeking, conceived as part of a process of self-​formation.” See her fine treatment of this [2013a, 164–​5, 184–​5].

Self: To Become Who One Is  437 I have bound those drives and affects into. And I do so, remember, “from the bottom up”: this project must crystallize first at the level of the drives, as a synthesis in those drives, and only later emerge to reflection. Nietzsche makes the same defense of this genuine selfishness as he does of the healthy: this is how the type moves ahead. We live at the historical node at which human is learning to live with an understanding of itself—​to live, by this adequate self-​relation, as a full-​fledged “self.” The task is to pioneer ways to become oneself. In doing so one serves the whole type. And again Nietzsche thinks that this selfishness will involve the same attitude of a “loving giving.” Indeed it’s only by becoming a self and being genuinely selfish that one is able to love others adequately. EH.iii.5: “One must sit firmly [fest] upon oneself, one must bravely stand on one’s own two legs, otherwise one can not love.” By contrast the love that’s more common issues out of a failure in selfishness. Z.i.16: “your love of the neighbor is your bad love for yourselves. . . . You can’t bear yourselves and don’t love yourselves enough: now you will to seduce the neighbor to love and gild you with his error.” I still haven’t said why Nietzsche thinks his ideal person—​healthily and genuinely selfish—​will take an interest in “advancing the type,” nor why he or she will “give” and “love.” If selfishness is and should be basic in me, why doesn’t it stifle such positive interests and feelings for others as mere hindrances to my self-​ interest? Here we come to the final surprising twist to Nietzsche’s ideas about the self and selfishness. I care about my human type and lineage because—​Nietzsche claims—​this is the deepest allegiance in any living thing. So GS.1 says that “nothing in [humans] is older, stronger, more relentless and insuperable than this instinct [to do what benefits the human species].”67 And this allegiance reflects what Nietzsche often presents as our ultimate being or identity. I am, essentially, a piece or part of the human clade. Nietzsche adds this last point to his “ontology” for humans and living things; it effects an abrupt volte-​face. As we glimpsed back in Chapter 2 (§2.2), a person is not a thing in its own right, but a “twig on the tree” of its clade. In 81:11[7]‌: “We are buds on one tree—​what do we know about what can come to be from us in the interest of the tree!”68 Each of us is a representative or exemplar of the kind. So TI.ix.33: “The Einzelne, the ‘Individuum,’ as people and philosophy have so far understood it, is an error: he is nothing for himself, no atom, no ‘link in the chain,’ no mere inheritance from the past,—​he is the whole single line human up

67 See, too, 81:11[122]. 68 This note (81:11[7]‌) is headed “Hauptgedanke!” and insists that “the individual itself is an error.” Nietzsche says (to himself?) “Stop feeling yourself such a fantastical ego! Learn step by step to cast off the supposed individual!”

438  Nietzsche Values through himself.”69 As such a “bud” on the human clade each person has its ultimate meaning by its role in that clade’s development. Each person crystallizes all the ancestral lines that converge on it, and each carries the prospects of humanity. Now it might seem that this surprising ontology pulls the rug out from under the account of the self and selfishness I’ve been attributing to Nietzsche. It seems to undercut that virtue of selfishness and the ambition to distinguish oneself from the group. Moreover this claim about our being or essence seems to return us to that “core” view of the self that we rejected in favor of “reflexivity” back in §10.1. It looks as if this species-​being must be what I essentially am—​my self. Regarding selfishness: the motive to advance the kind gives a new ultimate reason to be properly (i.e., healthily and genuinely) selfish. For it is precisely this effort to grow one’s own capacities that best improves the type. One carries the larger group—​the clade—​ahead precisely by breaking radically from the “local” group as this is formed by current norms. It’s by selfishly growing and individuating oneself—​making a self by overcoming fragmentation and assimilation—​ that one helps advance the line. And regarding the self: this identity as a piece of humanity doesn’t amount to a “core self.” It remains the case that “the self ” arises by a reflexive relation to oneself, a relation that is not merely descriptive but aspirational. So the adequacy of this self-​relation lies not just in how truthful it is, but in how effectively it enables my constitutive drives and aims to grow. That species-​being is another datum about myself that my self-​conception will properly recognize, but the point is not just to identify with it, but to project myself as realizing it in a new, personal way. Thus I become a self, ultimately, not for the sake of myself narrowly conceived, but for myself as a representative of the human kind.70 I have, in a way, been doing so all along, but now see how to do it knowingly. I understand myself as an experiment by my kind, as it searches for a way ahead. So GS.1 speaks of the laughter (“gay science”) that will be possible “when humanity has incorporated the proposition ‘the kind is everything, the one [Einer] is always nothing,’ and everyone has access all the time to this ultimate liberation and irresponsibility.”71

69 86–​7:7[2]‌(WP.678, LNp129): “Human is not just an individual, but the onliving organic totality in one particular line.” 70 80:7[105]: “Strange! I am ruled in every moment by the thought that my history is not just a personal one, that I do something for many when I so live and form and report myself: it is always as if I were a majority, and I speak to them intimately-​seriously-​comfortingly.” 71 GS.1 goes on to describe this insight in Hegelian style, as a matter of “the comedy of existence” “becoming conscious” of itself.

11

Creating Founding New Social Norms

We’ve seen—​in Chapter 9—​how Nietzsche’s new values are centered on the Yes he calls his readers to say/​think/​feel to life, and above all to their own lives. The challenge is to say this Yes about things as they are and to do so while seeing the truth about them. These new values need to be valued in a different spirit than the old, which is indicated in the special character of the ideal of saying Yes. This new ideal “wears on its sleeve” its status as a value-​only by-​being-​valued and so promotes the incorporation of this fundamental metaethical truth (as Nietzsche thinks it to be). We saw next—​in Chapter 10—​how incorporating this “perspectivist” truth is the way one “becomes a self.” A self comes to be only through an adequate self-​relation, which begins with a better self-​understanding. A human must see, for a start, that it is no pristine subject aloof from the messy drives and affects but is just the very play of them. And it must see how its values are not yet “its own” but rather group-​values. Responding to this self-​discovery, human then works to unify and separate a self, rendering it distinct from its drive-​parts below and its group or kind above. Only so does human truly see how its values express its own perspective. But there’s a further issue regarding the incorporation of the new values. So far we’ve thought of them as addressed directly to individual persons—​as if, reading alone, each stands (sits) in separate relation to Nietzsche. We’ve seen his teaching to offer them each a path to an ideal selfishness and individuality. We haven’t considered whether he means his new values to become part of a shared, common, or public understanding. Does Nietzsche hope that his values, the value of “the Yes” and of “becoming a self,” will eventually become part of the societal values members are raised up into? This, after all, is what he thinks (genuine) philosophers before him have done. So BGE.211 famously announces that the philosopher’s task “demands that he create values”—​and do so, moreover, not in a private deed:  “genuine philosophers . . . are commanders and law-​givers: they say, ‘so shall it be!,’ they first determine the Whither and What-​for of human. . . .”1 Does Nietzsche aim to change values at the social or even species level? 1 85:38[13] (WP.972, LNp39–​40) distinguishes two kinds of philosophers, “those who have established some great fact [Thatbestand] about valuations, i.e. previous value-​positings and value-​ creatings (logical or moral), but then those who are themselves law-​givers of valuations.” Nietzsche’s Values. John Richardson, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190098230.001.0001

440  Nietzsche Values There are some prima facie reasons to think not. It very often seems that he just doesn’t care about “the many” or the norms they live by. He takes himself to preach a way of living that could never become common practice. So it seems he couldn’t mean to make values for common use. Zarathustra quickly realizes that he can’t speak in the market; he turns his attention to a small group of followers. And there are many signs that Nietzsche means to do the same. He stresses that his books are “not for everyone.” His frequent expressions of contempt for the herd, his strident rejection and mockery of so many shared and settled values, seem calculated to alienate and repel “the many.” He seems happy to leave it to them to make values for themselves. Yet despite this avowed intent to convey his values to some very few, an elite, I think it’s clear that his ambition extends vastly beyond these. He anticipates, after all, a society-​wide turning, one out of morality and into a new kind of social normativity he wants to take some credit for. So EH.iii.D.2: My task, to prepare a moment of highest self-​reflection of humanity, a great noon, when it looks back and looks out, when it escapes the rule of chance and priests and poses the question of why?, of what-​for? for the first time as a whole. . . . The question about the source of moral values is for me a question of the first rank because it conditions the future of humanity.

It’s not just our own society but humanity in general that faces the threat of nihilism, and humanity in general will move beyond it. And this makes clear, I suggest, that he wants his new values—​or some subset of them—​to be incorporated not just into the private values of his favored individuals, but into social and indeed human-​wide norms. We hear this ambition already in HH.ii.362: “On the rank-​order of spirits.—​It places you far beneath him that you seek to establish the exceptions, but he the rule.” Nietzsche thinks his core ideas are of such magnitude that they will (as it were) change everything once they are properly absorbed. They divide our human history in two.2 They can do so because they are not his idiosyncratic notions, but articulations of where our cultural and indeed species-​wide “destiny” is bringing us. As human achieves, by its will to truth, insight into the real status of its religious and moral values, it will very gradually revise all its values and practices in the light of this fundamental insight. It will rethink its social and political

2 EH.iv.8: “The uncovering of Christian morality is an event that has no equal, a real catastrophe. Whoever explains it is a force majeure, a fate,—​he breaks the history of humanity into two pieces.”

Creating: Founding New Social Norms  441 arrangements once it understands their genealogy and design. In 85–​6:2[57] (WP.960, LNp71): “the time is coming when one will relearn [umlernen] about politics.” Nietzsche aims to advance this process and to steer it a certain way. This begins to suggest how he wants that perspectival truth about values—​our guiding topic all along—​to be “incorporated” not just by individuals but also—​ if to a lesser degree—​into the prevailing norms. So a version of the “truthfulness” practiced by individuals will be shared in the herd as well. It will become common property in the society to pride itself in seeing its own values for what they are. This new truthfulness in the shared and public values is connected with several other basic reforms he anticipates. My main aim in this chapter is to develop and defend this account of Nietzsche’s hopes for our common practice. So our topic now is what might be called Nietzsche’s “politics,” understanding this in a very general sense as his theory of the community and society.3 Our topic is the positive part of his politics, what he hopes for. (We touched on the negative side in examining his critique of equality in Chapter 7 [§7.3]; I’ll draw on that here.) Of course he doesn’t try to model a political system in any detail. He doesn’t even commit himself to any general kind of social-​economic order. His focus is on what we might call a “spiritual order.” His main “political” aim is that this take a particular form. Such an order is mainly sustained by certain values—​norms—​being shared among members. Political and economic systems should be judged by how well they fit with and further such new norms.4 This new order has mainly to do with the relation between a norm-​governed herd and the individuals who stand apart from it. So we’ll start (§11.1) with Nietzsche’s ideas of the herd and individuals. We’ll carry forward Chapter 6’s account of “the common.” We saw that his idea of the herd has much broader scope than its deliberate offensiveness tends to suggest; we too readily limit it to the especially egregious kinds of conformism that Nietzsche sometimes points out. But the herd is not merely this crass group one can readily feel oneself outside of. It is a tendency (an “instinct”) far more pervasive, an aspect in every one of us. When we see the herd’s scope, we see why Nietzsche cares so much about it—​and wants so much to affect it. Nietzsche expresses his aspiration to effect social change in his well-​known claim to “create values.” We’ll turn next (§11.2) to this important theme. We’ll distinguish two sites or levels where value-​creation occurs: in a person, in a society. Nietzsche treats on the one hand how individuals make values for their particular cases and on the other how some persons make values for their whole 3 Young [2006, 179]: “the heart of Nietzsche’s philosophy is, in a broad sense, a political vision, a vision, albeit relatively abstract, of the shape and structure of a healthy polis.” I’ve been much influenced by Young’s [2006] and [2015] in this chapter and the next. 4 Again Young [2006, 194]: “get the ‘spiritual’ side of things right, develop a healthy culture, and the nuts and bolts of practical politics (which are not the concern of the philosopher) will follow.”

442  Nietzsche Values society by changing its norms. For clarity I’ll call the latter kind of creating “founding.” In both cases what’s required is that the values be incorporated—​into the life and “body” of the person or society. But there is a special problem incorporating Nietzsche’s own values into societal norms: his value of truthfulness seems to contradict and undermine the lies about their own status that norms seem to depend upon. Using these accounts of the herd and of founding we can then address (§11.3) the chapter’s central question, what kind of norms—​and herd—​ Nietzsche wants to found. Nihilism is a culture-​and species-​wide event that will transform not just individuals but herds: herds, too, will live in the light of the lesson that the old religion and morality are false. Nietzsche wants to found new norms that profit from this insight by being cleansed of the harmful features of the old religion and morality. He wants to “de-​moralize” social norms by “healing” and “perspectivizing” them. Society in general will thereby get some of the self-​understanding the individual has in “becoming a self ”: it will see, though less fully or well, how its values are “its own.” I hope to show that this constitutes a much more favorable view of future “herds” than some of Nietzsche’s other remarks (such as those anticipating “slavery”) suggest. If the new norms recognize the perspectivity of values, it might seem that they would put all values on a par and so promote a “relativism”—​viewing all ways of living as equally good. But then what kind of norms would these be, if they don’t single out some ways as better-​to-​be? Nietzsche denies that his perspectivism flattens values this way. The new norms can face perspectivity while still elevating some ways-​to-​be because these norms recognize rank-​order, as we see next (§11.4). Yet this introduces another problem: Nietzsche wants his new society to be structured by a rank-​order, such that a small class of “nobles” “rule” a much larger “herd”; this elitism or aristocratism looks unappealing to many of us. But I will try to show that when we understand Nietzschean rank-​order properly we see that it gives a much higher place to the “new herd” than we have probably supposed.

11.1  Herds and individuals Given Nietzsche’s very sparse readership in the years he was writing and publishing, it is remarkable that he aspired and even expected to have an impact not just on philosophers, scholars, and intellectuals, but on society more generally. Ecce Homo’s fourth part, entitled “Why I Am a Destiny [Schicksal],” begins: “I know my lot. One day the memory of something tremendous will be tied to my name,—​a crisis like none before on earth, the deepest collision of conscience, a

Creating: Founding New Social Norms  443 decision made against everything until then believed, demanded, hallowed. I am no human, I am dynamite.” To be sure, we’ve just seen that he often insists he is addressing only a narrow audience—​the very few. Zarathustra announces (in Z.i.p.9): “ ‘A light has gone on for me: let Zarathustra not talk to the people, but to companions [Gefährten]! Zarathustra shall not become shepherd and dog to a herd!’ ”5 And Nietzsche says about himself in EH.iv.1: “And with all this there is nothing in me of the religion-​ founder—​religions are mob-​affairs . . . I never speak to masses.” As noted, this encourages the idea that Nietzsche doesn’t care about the herd and its norms. If he doesn’t address “the many” we might infer that he intends nothing for or about them. Perhaps he thinks that it doesn’t much matter how the great majority live—​free spirits will in any case float above them. Perhaps this is why he has so famously little to say about the particular political arrangements he favors. It is often denied that he offers any “political philosophy.”6 To put it plainly, it can seem that all Nietzsche cares about are his select few, his highest, and that it matters not at all what happens to the rest—​what social or political arrangements they might set themselves into. It can seem that the spiritual achievements of the few happen at a level quite disengaged from all the current events and concerns going on “down below.” They themselves turn their attention up and ahead, not back at what they’ve climbed above. So Nietzsche may seem indifferent to herds and norms. Or, still worse, it can seem that when Nietzsche does take an interest in the shape of the future herd, it’s with the idea of designing it to favor his elite individuals—​and that he thinks this requires diminishing or degrading this herd. To make possible the highest individuals, there must be a herd that is all the more herdlike and indeed “slavish.” GS.377: “we reflect on the necessity of new orders, even of a new slavery—​since to every strengthening and elevation of the type ‘human’ there also belongs a new kind of enslavement.”7 In this spirit he argues that the gap between herd and individuals should be as wide as possible.8 5 He goes on to say that his aim is “to lure many away from the herd” and that he seeks “fellow creators,” but “what can he create with herds and herdsmen?” 6 Nehamas [1985,  225]:  “Nietzsche  .  .  .  does not advocate and does not even foresee a radical change in the lives of most people. The last thing he is is a social reformer or revolutionary.” Leiter [2002, 296]: “Nietzsche . . . has no political philosophy, in the conventional sense of a theory of the state and its legitimacy. . . . He is more accurately read . . . as a kind of esoteric moralist . . . who has views about human flourishing . . . he wants to communicate at least to a select few.” 7 BGE.188: “it appears that slavery, in a cruder and in a subtler sense, is also the indispensable means for spiritual discipline and breeding.” BGE.239: “as if slavery were a counterargument and not much rather a condition of every higher culture, of every elevation of culture.” Cf. BGE.242, BGE.257. 85–​6:2[13] (LNp68): a “masterful species of human . . . that requires slavery in one form or another and under one name or another as its basis and condition.” 8 87:10[59] (WP.886) speaks of “tearing more deeply apart the cleft [Kluft]” between the solitary and the herd; it says that degeneration occurs when either takes on qualities of the other. 86–​7:5[61] (WP.953, LNp114) imagines the cleft created by preserving the highest and lowest kinds, but “destroying the middle.”

444  Nietzsche Values So now Nietzsche’s preference for his individual seems to make him hostile to the interests of the herd. I will try to show that Nietzsche is neither indifferent nor hostile toward the herd. The suggestion of indifference can be ruled out quickly. He cares enormously what happens to society as a whole and very much wants and expects his ideas to have an impact there. This is part of his extraordinary ambition—​to do what philosophers have always done before, but to do it better. It is also his idea how he can achieve for himself a preeminent kind of “power”: shaping the direction of the whole species, and shaping it for the better. It’s less evident that Nietzsche is not “hostile” to the herd in the sense of wanting it “lower” so that his elite can rise all the higher. But I will argue—​building on points made in Chapter 6 (§6.4)—​that his conception of human’s long-​term historical development crucially involves the idea that the advances of individuals can and must be taken up and shared by the herd—​which then makes possible still higher individuals. So rather than the inverse relation those passages about “slavery” suggest, Nietzsche thinks that progress depends on herds and individuals ascending together by a dialectic I’ll present. Human depends thoroughly on both for all that it has and will become.9 My argument for this more positive view of the herd will extend through the rest of this chapter. Regarding Nietzsche’s political or social aims interpreters have disputed over a few natural questions. If he does care about the whole society or culture, does he care about it “for its own sake’ or only because it affects the production of the best few? More broadly: does he assign intrinsic (non-​instrumental) value to societies, or to the best, or to both (or to neither)?10 And if he attributes intrinsic value to both, does he give more such value to societies or to the best?11 I will try to expose an intimate relation between herd and individual that ties them so tightly that these questions of priority can’t have answers. And indeed these seeming opposites are involved with and depend on one another. Each, we will see, “contains” the other. These mutual involvements are easy to miss because we tend (I suggest) to think of Nietzsche’s “herd” and “individuals” in only one way: as referring to distinct and discrete groups, the former the great bulk of society, the latter those very few “free spirits” standing somehow apart. Of course he does sometimes so present them. But this is only one manifestation of a more basic contrast between two stances or attitudes, which he mainly has in view.

9 87:10[59] (WP.886): “one should not evaluate the solitary type by the herdish [heerdenhafte], nor the herdish by the solitary /​Viewed from high: both are necessary; equally their antagonism is necessary.” 10 Needless to say, “intrinsic” does not here mean that the value is (meant to be) “real” in the sense of existing independently of any valuing. 11 See on these topics: Young [2006], Clark and Wonderly [2015]; also Ward [2011].

Creating: Founding New Social Norms  445 What then is the “herd” [Heerde]? Like most of Nietzsche’s terms, this is putty in his hands: it carries quite different force in different places. But I suggested in Chapter 6 (§§6.1, 6.4) that at the core it refers to a certain way of valuing: it is to value as one does because that’s how (one believes) one’s community values. The main dimension of variation in Nietzsche’s use of the term is in how powerfully (or not) he takes this motivation to operate in a person. His trick is to let it shift all along this range so that the distaste we feel for extreme degrees of “herdishness” flow down to the subtler forms. In its most encompassing sense, “herd” refers to any valuing that attaches to its valueds because they’re valued by others: it values what it does because that’s “what one values”—​to adopt the idiom that Heidegger bases his term das Man upon. A “herd” is then any group of persons held together this way; each person is, as so valuing, a “member” [Mitglied].12 So the herd is not at all to be associated with a certain economic level; those in the top economic tier are every bit as likely to have their values in this way. Nietzsche thinks that a will or drive to have values this way is deeply and strongly set into all of us: it’s what he calls our “herd-​instinct.” This is a certain kind of will to obey.13 It obeys by copying values from the group—​by adopting the signs they steer by. This will to copy works in a huge variety of ways, ranging from an infant’s mimicking of its parents’ expressions and attitudes, through the many more sophisticated ways we pattern ourselves after others.14 This ground for valuing is most overt in what Nietzsche calls the “ethic of custom”15: here values are explicitly the customs—​what’s taken to be “proper practice” in one’s community. But the same copying goes on, covertly, where members have no explicit sense of following “custom.” Let’s call values held from this motive “norms”—​a term I  think it is very unadroit to extend to Nietzsche’s own values. (At issue is whether he wants his values to become norms.) Norms are values valued as what’s “normal” for members to value. They are the public values of a community, instilled in principles, phrases, and words, which members are understood as obliged to take on, just as members. These norms are “inscribed,” as Nietzsche often puts it, on “value tablets.”16 Very often when he speaks of “values” he means these 12 Another term Nietzsche uses here: Zugehöriger, belonger. 13 BGE.199 famously says that “the herd-​ instinct of obedience is inherited best.” 82:3[2.398]: “ ‘Thou shalt’ sounds more agreeable to most than ‘I will’: the herd-​instinct always still sits in their ears.” 14 GS.50 says that the herd-​instinct speaks in our fear of “being alone” [Vereinsamung]; it is why “the reproach of conscience is weak . . . compared to the feeling ‘This or that is against the good custom of your society.’ ” 15 See again Chapter 6 (§6.4) and Chapter 7 (§7.2) on the ethic of custom versus morality. 16 Z.i.15: “A tablet of goods hangs over every people.” Z.i.p.9: says that creators “write new values on new tablets.” See, too, GS.335 on Gütertafeln.

446  Nietzsche Values norms—​though also often not (since we all also have values in our body-​drives and since some can create values that go beyond norms). When we see this full extent of the herd we see how thoroughly society depends on it—​indeed is it. There only are societies by the power of norms, so that herding belongs to the very structure of human community. Practices can only be transmitted if there is a powerful tendency to copy: the transmission is a copying. Societies hold together and persist through generations only by the readiness of members to accept norms as their ultimate standards. Every community—​every group whose members take themselves to belong to it—​is a herd. And indeed every person belongs to many different herds. We’ve spoken so far as if the herd coincides with the whole society with its overall norms. But each of the groups and sub-​communities one’s life runs in and out of is really a herd of its own. In joining the community of, for example, Nietzsche scholars—​in thinking of myself as such—​I take on its norms for good practice. Notably, some of these “sub-​herds” define themselves to themselves as not being herd—​as standing outside and above the many, the masses, “popular culture.” Still, by the very logic of community, each is just a more select herd. Nobody could live a human life without constant little mimickings and alignings—​not only in infancy and childhood, but right through to the end. Language—​as we also saw in Chapter 6 (§§6.2–​6.3)—​depends on a will to similarity and sharing: I must implicitly will to mean the same thing by my words as others do. And this applies to my words for my “virtues”—​for all the ways I’m trying to be.17 This shows that Nietzsche can’t want or hope for anyone to give up this sharing, copying, merging tendency altogether. Although the individual is defined by his or her break from the herd, this can only ever be a “focused” or “localized” break: a refusal to copy in this and that, while continuing to accept a great background of other norms—​and trying to align with groups in these. And so, too, in language: Nietzsche tries to give us new meanings for many words but can only do so by following normal use for vastly more others, as we started to see in Chapter 6 (§6.5). Now just who or what, by contrast, is the “individual” [Individuum or Einzelne]? I think his or her defining trait is having certain values not because they’re shared by a group. As we’ve just seen this can only hold true for some of the person’s values, while he or she cleaves to the norms on the great host of others. It happens, very importantly, not just by ignoring the authority of the group, but by

17 Zarathustra says in Z.i.5 that even naming one’s virtue makes one “people and herd” in one’s effort at it.

Creating: Founding New Social Norms  447 actively exposing and opposing it. If just ignored, this instinct continues to work, implicitly: one continues to have values because they have been norms. So the individual can revoke norms’ authority only piecemeal—​by deliberate attention to particular cases. One can’t decide to give up all norms and put them at once out of play. One’s copying is so omnipresent, works at so many levels, that one must work very hard to identify the norms one assumes and still harder to disarm and disengage them. We saw in Chapter 8 the roles of history and psychology in this work. Using these tools the individual, who is in this aspect “the free spirit,” concentrates fire on a relative handful of norms. Hence even the most exceptional individual—​say Zarathustra—​is still really a hodge-​podge of herd and individual traits. Thus no individual can be fully individual. And it’s even less conceivable that there could be a whole society of individuals with no herd. Individuals depend on the herd much more deeply than (I think) is generally noticed. Individuals need herds not just for the economic reasons often given by interpreters—​not because others must perform the practical chores that let a few devote themselves to intellectual or artistic practice. The herd, as the system of norms and abilities even the individual grows up into, sets the base or ground within the individual herself, from which her achievement can spring. The constant undercurrent of the individual’s own psychic stance is the will to share meaning with others. The interinvolvement of individual and herd goes still deeper. Not only do individuals depend on a herdish background within themselves, against and upon which their focused individuality is achieved, but their very goal or virtue of individuality is taken from the herd. Norms always require a certain kind and degree of individuality of each member of their herd. They train members to exercise certain kinds of independence. What genuine individuals achieve is always a pushing-​further of an “individuality” already inculcated by norms. If individuals and herds are related in these ways, we can see better why the herd matters to Nietzsche.18 The person who becomes an individual is first formed in the herd, and his or her achievement depends on the level of this original endowment. The better the herd’s abilities, the higher individuals will go in extending them. So perhaps 82–​3:4[88]: Je mehr Individuum, um so weiter soll die Heerde, zu der es gehört. Humankind’s aim should be not just to have as many of these individuals as possible, but to have individuals of higher and higher kinds. And for this it’s necessary that their advances be “incorporated” into the shared 18 GS.55 says that “the noble” are distinguished by their “singularity”—​by being exceptions—​and that this leads them to undervalue “the rule”: “everything usual, closest, and indispensable, in short, that which most preserved the kind, and in general the rule of humanity so far, was unfairly judged and on the whole slandered in favor of the exceptions.” Clark [2015a, 159]: “common culture is for Nietzsche the essential prerequisite for the development of anything of value.”

448  Nietzsche Values norms, where they can give higher footing for still others to push beyond.19 Although herd and individual are opposed tendencies, they must “cooperate” for human’s long-​term progress. There has been progress in individuality itself: it is now possible to be “individual” in ways never feasible before. This is due to the achievements of individuals in the past, but only because their advances were absorbed into the norms of a herd that later individuals could grow up into and then surpass. Progress in individuals depends on progress in the herd. But, today at least, the latter depends on individuals for its own ascent.20 Individuals, by their disenchantment with the herd, innovate values and abilities beyond it, whereas the herd itself tends toward stasis, or indeed decline, and is not innovative.21 So there is a dialectical interplay between herd and individuals. The latter inject into norms the value of their difficult achievement: it becomes normal practice to strive to do this harder thing, which perhaps not all are quite able to do. A higher normal gets set. But the herd-​instinct is (as it were) always looking for easier things to copy and share. So it exerts a kind of gravitational pull that draws norms’ ideals down within easier, commoner reach—​making them more fully sharable. BGE.268:  “One must invoke tremendous counter-​forces in order to cross this natural, all-​too-​natural progressus in simile, the training of human into the similar, ordinary, average, herdlike—​common!” We can see a case of progress—​in individual and then herd—​in the epochal shift we’ve looked at before (Chapter 6 [§6.4], Chapter 7 [§7.2]), from the “ethic of custom” to “morality.” The transition between these was initiated by individuals such as Socrates, who questioned the authority of customs and norms. They created a new way of having values: to have them as a moral agent who relies on his or her own reason and conscience to judge traditional norms. The moral agent’s allegiance is not to custom but to a (supposed) objective morality that binds him or her not as a group-​member but just as a rational being.22 This moral way of having values, articulated by Socrates and others, eventually became common practice. It was “incorporated” into norms and became the way of living that all members are now meant to grow up into.23 One acquires this 19 Young [2006, 49]: “So gradually the characteristics of the ‘higher’ (more adaptive) type become the rule of the species rather than the exception.” 20 GS.23 speaks of individuals as “the seed-​bearers of the future, the authors of spiritual colonizing and new-​founding of states and communities.” 21 84:27[17] (WP.285): “The tendency of the herd is toward stasis [Stillstand] and preservation, there is nothing creative in it.” But notice that Z.i.15 says that initially it was groups that created values. 22 D.9 describes the hostility of the older ethic of custom to those who, “following Socratic footsteps, [offer] the individual a morality of self-​control and temperance as his ownmost advantage.” 23 GS.117 describes this transformation: “for the longest time of humanity there was nothing more frightful than feeling individual [einzeln],” whereas “[t]‌oday one feels responsible only for what one wills and does, and has one’s pride in oneself ”; “[i]n this have we relearned most of all.”

Creating: Founding New Social Norms  449 independence from custom—​a kind of individuality—​but without ever leaving the herd. It’s now “normal” to give allegiance to abstract moral principles and to treat socially local norms as subject to judgment by them. So the moral agent is “more of an individual” than the custom-​follower, but is so without ever really striking out on his or her own. It’s not just that the “reason” and “conscience” this moral agent relies on have been designed and aimed in advance to pick out the same group-​serving behaviors that custom had. More significantly, the moral agent accepts this agency just as “what one does.” By incorporating this limited individuality into the normal practice that all members grow up into, the herd has re-​formed itself at a higher level. Each member now has possibilities for self-​direction not available under the custom-​ values—​it has these just by being like everyone else. And this higher kind of herd makes possible a better kind of individual. Now instead of Socrates we have Nietzsche himself, whose step out of the herd involves stepping out of morality, by seeing through its motives and its lies. But he steps out of it, we see, only in order to make a higher herd by founding new norms. So Nietzsche wants to incorporate some part of his higher individuality into a new herd. But it’s higher because it’s harder. It’s harder, in particular, because it’s more truthful about its own values. So it is still more opposed by that gravitational tendency in the herd-​instinct to “make easier” the norms it pledges allegiance to. Over the next several sections we’ll see how Nietzsche tries to appeal to that instinct nevertheless.

11.2  Creating values, founding norms When Nietzsche speaks of “creating values” he means to pose the challenge that is the central topic of this book.24 By our usual understanding of values they can’t by their nature be created; they must instead be discovered since, if they’re “real,” they must already be there in the nature of things. This supposition is embedded deeply in us even if our metaethical position is anti-​realist. So I think we tend to suppose that when he speaks of creating values he must mean just “so-​called values”—​values understood just as “things that are valued,” not as “things that are valuable” (as we discussed in Chapter 1). And it’s puzzling what persuasive force his values then can have for his readers—​when he says so explicitly that he’s making them up.25 24 82–​3:5[1.242]: “The value of life lies in valuations: valuations are created, not taken, learned, experienced.” See the discussion of this note in Dries [2015]. 25 Clark [2015b] poses the problem of how Nietzsche thinks philosophers can “create values” in not merely a “descriptive” but a “normative” sense of values—​the sense in which “I indicate that I do take [e.g.] justice to be valuable” [99]. Her answer is that they do so by “instituting practices of reason giving.” It’s this (Sellarsian) “space of reasons” that makes a value not just “something valued,” but

450  Nietzsche Values Nietzsche speaks of “creating values” in two kinds of case.26 On the one hand he thinks about how a human can and should create values for him-​or herself. We’ve just touched on this question in Chapter 10, in discussing how one “becomes a self.” One makes oneself a self by unifying one’s drives and by individualizing from one’s group; on both sides one revalues one’s “passive” values—​ those one had simply received and obeyed. One “creates values” not from thin air but by revising those one finds oneself with, to make them “one’s own.” One creates values to suit one’s particular case: the unique system of one’s drives and affects, one’s situation, and above all one’s defining project. But there’s a second thing Nietzsche means by “creating values”: making values not for oneself but for the group or society. I think in fact this is mainly what he means by the expression; he tends to think of the first, personal self-​making as just a step to making values for the group. This is the kind of value-​creating he most values in others and aspires to for himself. For he has (of course!) ambitions far beyond himself: to make values not just for himself but for the whole society or culture. He wants (as I will put it) to “found” certain values by building them into the norms and practices by which the whole society maintains itself. Or, more modestly and accurately, he means to contribute to a long historical process of founding such new values. Recall that for Nietzsche values are crucially signs: they are “set up” to guide or steer how one acts, thinks, feels. So creating values is creating some new set of signs that are used either by oneself or by the group. And one only really “creates”—​as Nietzsche thinks of it—​if these new signs are “set up” in the sense of being adopted as signs, either by the individual herself or by the group. (He uses “creating” as, in this way, a success-​word.) I don’t create values just by imagining them. I would have to establish them either in my personal practice or in some group’s norms: they would have to be incorporated at one of these levels.27 Notice how these individual and group projects stand in a certain tension with one another. The first is precisely the effort to craft values for oneself: values that are suited to one’s particular case, peculiar and contingent as it is. The latter is the effort to make values common or shared. But why should the values suited for also “something valuable,” in Clark’s reading. But since all the values Nietzsche condemns, including Christian values, are also supported by such reasons—​occur in such a “space of reasons”—​I don’t see how that criterion can open up the contrast Clark wants. Nietzsche sees those reasons as principally “rationalizations” not to be trusted, and not as constituting values as (in his view) valuable. 26 Nietzsche’s usual word for “create” is schaffen. On creating values, see especially the multiauthor debate in Nietzsche-​Studien 2015 [5–​175]. Although I focus on creating human values here, we should bear in mind what we’ve seen from the beginning: that Nietzsche attributes values to all living things. Plants and animals have values, too, so that the question arises whether they might “create” these values. See Lemm’s first contribution [2015] to the just-​mentioned debate. 27 Dries [2015] develops Nietzsche’s description of values as “living”; so my point could be put: values “live” only when functioning as incorporated signs.

Creating: Founding New Social Norms  451 one’s particularity also be commendable to others? Indeed Nietzsche seems to warn against this in GS.335, which argues against Kant’s categorical imperative that “it is selfishness to consider his judgment as universal law; and a blind, petty, and trivial selfishness at that, because it betrays that you have not yet discovered yourself, have not yet created [geschaffen] for yourself your own, ownmost ideal:—​for this could never be that of an other, much less of everyone, everyone!” This prompts the further question whether Nietzsche wants to build the very same values he creates for himself into societal norms. Are the values he tries to found identical to the values he creates for his own use?

11.2.1  Creating Let’s start with the idea of “creating values for oneself,” noticing first several passages in Zarathustra. They stress the particularity of the values so made. Z.i.5: “ ‘This is my good, this I love; . . . thus alone do I want the good.’ ” And Z.i.17: “Can you give yourself your evil and your good and hang your will over yourself like a law? . . . /​Solitary, you are going the way of the creator: you will to create a god for yourself out of your seven devils!” Finally Z.iii.11.2: “ ‘This—​is now my way,—​where is yours?’ so I answer those who asked me ‘about the way.’ For the way—​does not exist!” Nietzsche makes the point elsewhere, too. GS.335, just noticed, dwells on it. It calls for “the creation of one’s own new value-​tablets,” and for creating “one’s own, ownmost ideal [eigenes, eigenstes Ideal].” And it famously announces: “We, however, will to become those that we are [wollen Die werden, die wir sind],—​those new, those unique, those incomparable, those giving-​laws-​to-​themselves, those creating-​themselves [Sich-​selber-​Schaffenden]!” And in 86–​ 7:7[6]‌(WP.326, LNp132): “Virtues are as dangerous as vices insofar as one lets them rule over one from without as authorities and laws and does not first, as is right, create them out of oneself, as most personal defense and need, as condition of precisely our existence and success, which we know and recognize quite apart from whether others grow by the same or a different condition.” We just saw in Chapter 10 how making values “one’s own” is the key to “becoming a self.” I find myself with values expressing the interests of all the types of people that made them. My challenge is to revise or re-​aim these values so that they suit my own case. Ideally I will have committed myself to a single defining project and unified my manifold drives and affects around it. Then the task is to adapt my received values to this project. I thereby make them my own and value them no longer passively but actively. “Creating values” for oneself in this way is much more than a matter of conceiving of certain new things as good—​for the reason just noted. It’s not enough

452  Nietzsche Values to say, “This X [then described] is a value for me,” it’s not even enough to resolve to make it my value. I must actually adopt this value as a sign in living my life: I must use this sign, it must be effective in guiding my thoughts and behavior. I must use it, indeed, implicitly and habitually, which is where my thoughts and behavior are mainly made. This is what it is (for a person) to incorporate this value, and Nietzsche’s view is that the value hasn’t really been created unless it has been incorporated in this way. I don’t create values by fiat, but by installing them as effective signs.28 One thing we didn’t ask in Chapter 10 is how widely Nietzsche wants this new virtue of self-​creating (and making one’s own values) to extend. We should tackle this now as we look for his social or political ideal. Which kinds of people, and what share of society, does he want or hope will try to “create values for themselves?” Does he want everyone to aspire this way? Does he want this virtue to be a general norm? Now it’s clear that Nietzsche anticipates a world in which most people will still be “herd”; he has no utopian vision of a society of free spirits. He supposes, in the first place, that due to the long, strong selection for a “herd-​instinct,” it will always be a powerful presence in human populations. (Again BGE.199: “the herd-​ instinct of obedience is inherited best.”) He may even think that human has been bred to make most persons herd and only rare ones exceptions—​since, as we saw, this ratio is the secret to its developmental success. So there would be a strong biological inevitability to the herd. But we’ve also seen that some degree of individuality can become “normal” for a herd. Norms lay out areas of freedom in which members are expected to fine-​tune their values for themselves. And these areas can grow: members can be given greater responsibility to apply the norms in their own cases and situations. We just saw how the transition from custom to morality involved such an expansion. Herd-​norms came to require that members view themselves as free agents charged to use their own reason to pick out the right. To be sure, this freedom has been partly illusion since that rational power was designed to find precisely the prevailing norms to be right. Nevertheless this new form of normativity develops in all members an ability and a will to judge norms by a separate standard—​which is a beginning of independence from them. I think Nietzsche anticipates an analogous next step. The new normal will be for members to make values for themselves within a broader domain. A skill for self-​creating will be developed as a virtue, though always subordinate 28 I think this answers some of the incredulity some authors in Nietzsche-​Studien [2015] express at the idea of “creating values.” It does require more than simply “dubbing” things as values. But another part of that incredulity is at the idea that values are “not discovered but made,” and here I think that Nietzsche truly wants to have it that way. Their difficulty reflects their inability to incorporate the perspectivist, anti-​realist truth about values that we’ve been treating all along.

Creating: Founding New Social Norms  453 to a primary allegiance to the dominant norms—​and not in such a way as to threaten these. We might imagine, for example, the kind of attention to the concrete conditions of climate, locale, and diet that Nietzsche puts such surprising weight on in EH.ii. The benefit of personal attention to such mundane factors can be enormous, Nietzsche thinks. And we might more broadly imagine a new normal practice of “choosing one’s virtues”—​from a normal (pre-​approved) list of options, of course. In Chapter 12 we’ll see that he counts in favor of polytheism the way it licenses this. Thus Nietzsche expects—​I suggest—​some degree of self-​creating to become norm and virtue for the new herd. But let’s turn now to the matter of founding the norms that will make this higher kind of herd.

11.2.2  Founding When Nietzsche speaks of “the philosopher” creating new values I  think he means not a private act, but the effort to found these values in societal norms. Here again he thinks that values must be incorporated—​now not just in the individual’s own life, but in the social practice. There may be some individuals who make values for themselves with no thought of sharing them, but these wouldn’t be philosophers. So BGE.211 says (we saw) that the philosopher’s “task . . . demands that he create values”; for “genuine philosophers,” “[t]‌heir ‘knowing’ is creating, their creating is a law-​giving, their will to truth is—​will to power.”29 Their vaunted power lies in their imposing their vision on the whole society or culture. Indeed their impact will extend to the species itself. So BGE.61: “The philosopher as we understand him, we free spirits —​, as the human of the most comprehensive responsibility, who has the conscience for overall development of human.”30 This of course is what Nietzsche aspires to himself. Indeed this is usually what he means when he speaks of “creating values”: creating norms (i.e., values that some group adopts as its own). In 82:4[36]: “Only 29 Also 85:35[47] (WP.979). Elsewhere he allows there to be a non-​creative kind of philosopher. So 84:26[407]: “After trying for a long time to connect a determinate concept with the word ‘philosopher,’ I found in the end that there are two kinds[:]‌(1) those who try to establish [feststellen] some [existing] facts[,] (2) those who are lawgivers of valuations.” Cf. 85:35[47] (WP.979); 85:38[13] (WP.972, LNp39–​40). The first, he goes on to say, gather an existing world into signs that make it more intelligible and manageable; they rationalize and prop up existing values. “But the second command and say: so shall it be!” BGE.211 counts Kant and Hegel as doing the first, and says that this makes them mere “philosophical laborers”; “[b]ut genuine philosophers are commanders and law-​givers: they say ‘so shall it be!’ ” Kaufmann [1950/​1974, 109] argues that Nietzsche thinks of himself (at least in BGE) as merely a critical precursor of the legislating philosophers of the future. 30 85:37[7]‌(WP.980): “Assuming one thinks of a philosopher as a great educator, powerful enough to draw up from his lonely height a long chain of generations. . . .”

454  Nietzsche Values the esteemers and the inventors of new values are creating: the world revolves around them alone. The one who makes the faith in new values is called by the people ‘creator.’ ” So creating values means “incorporating” them not just into the creator’s own habits, but into the practices of some group—​usually of society generally; it is not a private act but a social one. The philosopher fixes these values into the group so that they are passed down within it through generations of members. By “founding” values in this way the philosopher gives his or her creative act not just wider but more lasting presence. We’ve seen that a value is a sign. In personal value-​creation one makes signs for oneself, to guide one’s ongoing life. In founding a value one makes a communicable sign—​one that inserts itself into the group’s or community’s norms. In 82–​3:4[23]: “Alles Schaffen ist Mittheilen.” The philosopher creates words that the community comes to live by: names for virtues and goals, statements of principle, stories about ideal lives. It become “normal” to refer to these when one thinks what to do or say. The philosopher must build the new values into words and images that make it a shareable meme. Philosophers aren’t the only ones who found values. 84:26[258] lists as “value-​ creators [Werthe-​Schaffenden]”: “a) the artist, b) the philosopher, c) the law-​giver, d) the religion-​founder, e) the highest human as world-​ruler and future-​creator [Zukunft-​Schöpfer].” Generally, founding values is “just” a matter of creating signs that some community comes to share. The community is in each case characterized by some common mix of drives and affects on which the signs operate, as well as by an “environment” that these drives and affects “are up against.” The founder creates values that spread through the population by appealing to these drive-​affect complexes.31 There are better and worse ways of founding values. The priest serves as a cautionary case. His characteristic mistake is to stand in the wrong relation to the herd for which he makes his values: he stands in the relation Nietzsche sometimes figures as the “shepherd” [Hirt]—​a role he emphatically disavows. His complaint is that the shepherd “lives with the herd”—​lives mainly in the viewpoint of the herd and shares its typical needs and desires.32 The shepherd creates values that suit the herd’s own conception of its good, values that favor precisely its herd tendency.33 The shepherd (priest) lacks the wider concerns Nietzsche claims that he (as philosopher) has. 31 See GS.39 on how strong individuals “tyrannically enforce  .  .  .  the judgment of their taste . . . which gradually becomes a habit of more and finally a need of everyone.” 32 GM.iii.15: “The ascetic priest must be counted as the foreordained savior, shepherd, and advocate of the sick herd,” and for this “he must be sick himself.” 87:9[152] (WP.879, LNp165): “it makes him part of the herd—​even if as their most pressing need, as ‘shepherd.’ ” 33 82–​3:4[241]:  “I recognized that shepherds and herd-​breeders created these tablets:  so they grounded the life and duration of their herd.” 82–​3:4[4]‌says that the shepherd is only a “golden tool of the herd.”

Creating: Founding New Social Norms  455 These founders of norms are the real drivers of human history. GS.301 compares this role to that of the “poet” who creates a play that is then performed by actors before an audience: It is we, the thinking-​sensing ones, who really and continually make something that is not there: the whole perpetually growing world of valuations, colors, weights, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations. This poem that we have invented is constantly internalized, drilled, translated into flesh and reality, indeed, into the commonplace, by the so-​called practical humans (our actors).34

We need to be aware of Nietzsche’s intent to found new norms this way. This opens up a point about his true audience—​those to whom he most speaks. Despite all his restrictions on this audience—​his many insistences that he is speaking only to a very few—​I think he fully expects that the role of most of his readers will be to help in this founding of his values as norms: in spreading his words, principles, stories through the shared public space. His writings speak not to new individuals so much as to the advance element of a new herd. His appeal to us as if we were individuals is of course part of the enormous appeal of his writing, but it disguises a rather different view of (nearly all of) us. He expects us to respond not by creating values for ourselves, but by embracing and sharing his new norms.

11.3  De-​moralizing norms Now that we have a fuller idea what’s involved in “founding” values for a community, let’s try to specify better what values Nietzsche wants to found. What kind of community does he hope for, held together by what norms, and by what kind of allegiance to norms? The ultimate point is to redesign norms to enhance human’s power—​to favor most effectively its “growth in control.” The highest such achievements will of course always be by a few individuals. But as we saw in §11.1, these will rise above and stand upon the shared level of a community: their abilities will be improvements on those acquired by their having grown up into the common norms and practices. So that they can ascend from a high base, it’s vital, for human to advance, that the group practice be elevated, too. The norms must 34 The passage continues: “Whatever has value in the present world has it not in itself, according to its nature—​nature is always value-​less—​but has rather been given, granted value, and we were the givers and granters! Only we have created the world that concerns humans!”

456  Nietzsche Values make a herd whose members share, as what they take for granted, a new degree of control or competence—​so that the individual, finding and surpassing limits even in it, can initiate—​and model—​a still higher power. We’re concerned with improving a distinctively human kind of control—​the distinctive form of power that our human history has been building our capacities for. One might perhaps have expected Nietzsche to think here of the kind of control that is surely our species’ most blatant achievement—​its enormous practical and technological power over its environment. One might have imagined his heroes of the future to be Ayn Randian wielders of the greatest instrumental (or political) power and that the new social norms would be platforms for them. But it’s clear that Nietzsche has in mind instead a “spiritual” growth and power.35 It’s “spirit” (and not physical or instrumental force) that most distinguishes human from other animals; it opens up for us a new dimension of power not available to other organisms. As we saw in Chapter 5, human becomes human by language and self-​awareness, by its false but controlling conception of itself as a subject/​agent, and by its allegiance to truth. It’s these that most make us a thing apart, and it’s in this dimension that humanity will most genuinely grow. It will so grow not just in a few isolated exceptions, but in the widespread “normal” practice they depend upon. By his new norms Nietzsche thinks human will above all grow in the aspect we’ve been stressing all along:  in its understanding of itself and especially of its own willing and valuing. This is a decisive and epochal advance in human power: it becomes able for the first time to control its own values, which had always before controlled it. So it “frees” itself from those values—​a crucial kind of freedom it really can have. What Nietzsche anticipates, I  suggest, is another advance in human self-​ awareness, comparable to that by which human passed from “custom” into “morality”—​a transition we’ve looked at several times already.36 The step to morality made possible the “sovereign individual,” who is justifiably proud, but also deceived as to just how free he or she is. Human’s next advance will achieve some of the powers the moral agent falsely credits itself with. And like the advance to agency, it will happen at the whole societal level: new capacities will be trained into members generally via new shared norms. These new norms will be the outcome of the “revaluation of values” Nietzsche so famously calls for. EH.iv.1: “Revaluation of all values: that is my formula for an act of humanity’s 35 Consider in this regard 86–​7:5[63] (WP.403, LNp114–​5): “Development of humanity. /​A. To win power over nature and for that a certain power over oneself. Morality was necessary so that human could prevail in the struggle with nature and ‘wild beast.’ /​B. When the power over nature is achieved, one can use this power freely to shape further one’s self: will to power as self-​heightening and strengthening.” 36 See again Chapter 6 (§6.4) and Chapter 7 (§7.2) on this contrast, and, more recently, §11.1.

Creating: Founding New Social Norms  457 highest self-​examination [Selbstbesinnung], an act that has become flesh and genius in me.” (The passage goes on to talk about “great politics.”) So here we come to the point. The overall way Nietzsche means to “revalue” our norms is by “de-​moralizing” them. Since we’ve just seen that he thinks morality represented an advance in human power, this de-​moralizing obviously removes only certain negative aspects of moral valuing.37 Morality, while giving us a new kind of individuality, has also hindered us with respect to both of the basic values we’ve mentioned. Morality has held us back from the truth and from power. Hence we need on the one hand to “perspectivize” norms—​to make them more truthful—​and on the other to “heal” them—​to aim them better at power. (a) Perspectivizing norms. Nietzsche wants human to grow in its truthfulness, and this growth must happen in the herd with its norms and not just in his favored individuals. The kind of truthfulness that matters most concerns values: facing their true character, both in general and in the particular case of one’s own values. Nietzsche wants—​I suggest—​some part of this hardest kind of truth to be “incorporated” into the shared understanding that social members—​the herd—​are raised and trained into. He wants, in other words, some part of his insight to become “common.” Members will understand better than before why they value what they do. They will recognize better the perspectivity of their shared norms. To be sure, it is a matter for experiment and adjustment just how much of this truth norms can acknowledge while still playing their herd-​sustaining role. But the challenge, here too, is to press this as far as possible. This is the experiment we now undergo, in the midst of nihilism’s destruction of our old ways of holding values. Our response should not be to conceal and forget the destructive truths about values that history and psychology are giving us. These truths wipe away the kinds of reasons we thought we had for our values. We must consider what different kinds of reasons we can find that are consistent with those truths. We need to replace the expectation of “externalist” reasons with a satisfaction in reasons grounded in our own valuing. And we need to do this, Nietzsche thinks, in our common practice. The reasons we really do have to change our values, Nietzsche claims, are those deep drives for power and truth. These are linked: the latter drive is our distinctively human way of pursuing power. These drives are set so deeply into us that power and truth function as meta-​values by which we implicitly judge all our other values. Because they work in the background in this way, we do indeed need to “discover” them; we experience them as external to all those particular



37

Here again we can recall Leiter’s phrase “morality in the pejorative sense” [1995; 2002, 73–​163].

458  Nietzsche Values values we use them to judge. In these ways these two values, though already in us, mimic the externality we have wanted. The new norms will base themselves on these drives. They will hold that every member already has these reasons to value them:  that they give her the best available way to advance in power and truth, which she already deeply wants. This is the justification Nietzsche thinks that the group can honestly give to its members: in obeying the norms they are really obeying their own deepest and strongest wills. How do these norms advance members in power and truth? We’ll consider their relation to power when we turn to these norms’ “health.” But we are already seeing how they advance the meta-​value of truth. They do so by giving up the lie of being real or non-​perspectival goods. The new norms offer themselves as good in the way values truly can be good—​good for certain valuings. They offer themselves as good for certain valuings that their members already deeply carry out, including their valuing of truth. To be sure, these new norms also revise that value of truth. It turns out that the kind of truth we have wanted in our valuing—​a correspondence to real goods—​it cannot have. Instead of claiming to be “true” in this so-​far-​usual way, the new norms claim (as we might put it) to be “truthful”—​truthful about their own status. Moreover they are truthful about the character of the humans they address themselves to. They don’t imagine these as Platonic souls or Cartesian subjects or Kantian agents. They let members understand themselves as they truly are: as complexes of drives deeply willing power. They appeal to members as what they are, and not in one of those imaginary guises. (b) Healing norms. Hand in hand with this change in the new norms’ force (their self-​claimed status) is a change in their content (what they value). Put briefly: norms must be redesigned to serve as more adequate signposts for human power (i.e., for growth in the human type). As we saw back in Chapter 2 (§2.5), aiming well at power is just what Nietzsche means by “health.” So the main way he wants to change norms’ content is by healing them.38 By contrast, Nietzsche claims, our prevailing “moral” norms are mostly unhealthy or sick, in the sense that they misaim society and its members at power. These norms value (and steer us toward) things that in fact prevent or inhibit our growth. They are thus “contrary to life.” They display this most openly whenever they say directly that “life is bad,” but we’ve seen (Chapter 7 [§7.1]) how morality’s “No to life” takes many subtler forms. Healing norms is thus partly a matter of converting that No into a Yes—​and a Yes that sees better the real character of the life it affirms. It must become 38 As Young has persuasively argued [2006, 2015], Nietzsche was intent on a “healthy culture.” This health will be located, I suggest, in society’s norms; that is, in its public (herd) values.

Creating: Founding New Social Norms  459 normal to value this life in this world, in a body constituted by wills and feelings, all striving to advance. The old norms threw this life into shade and gloom by conceiving us with immortal and rational souls at home in a better world. They deplored members’ wills to power and made it reprehensible to be the kind of thing we just are. The new norms will teach members to embrace this deep will in themselves. They will learn better what they are and will grow up to the task to “grow humanity” in them. This change alters first the member’s drives—​the wills that aim its behavior. The new norms will make the end of power more visible to each member and will improve the signs by which it pursues that end. They will do so especially by a revised list of “virtues”—​of the personal traits members are trained to measure themselves by. It will eliminate the virtues that have inhibited us, beginning perhaps with pity, and raise up new ones, as we’ll shortly see. But the change alters also the member’s affects—​the habits-​of-​feeling in which it judges its life. The Yes is importantly (as we saw in Chapter 9) a matter of one’s affective response to the world. These responses are, indeed, themselves signs by which the drives steer; a drive will re-​aim in the light of a feeling “how things are going.” So norms must make these feelings track better the member’s success at power. They will encourage and educate each member’s “affect of command.” But if these new norms cultivate members’ wills to power, won’t they unleash all the selfishness held in check by existing moral norms? How can the society still hold together if current restraints—​already barely sufficient perhaps—​are removed? This elevation of members’ selfish wills seems to threaten the unity that Nietzsche thinks is so important a feature of a healthy society. Nietzsche stresses, however, that a healthy unity depends on a certain kind of internal conflict. It depends on members standing in an agonistic or competitive relation to one another.39 The unity must take a Heraclitean form: must lie in a tension among conflicting parts. In sharing norms—​the picture of a best human life—​they also compete with one another: each tries to get closer to that ideal than others do. And this shows us, I suggest, the form in which members’ wills to power need to be cultivated by the new norms so that their selfishness doesn’t splinter the group.40 Members are to will their own advancement in a struggle they conceive along the lines of a contest [Wettkampf]. This is a struggle under limitations or restrictions. Above all it is a struggle in which each aims not to “annihilate” the other, but to surpass him or her.41 Each tries to excel in living up to the difficult 39 On Nietzsche’s idea of the agon see especially Acampora [2013a], Owen [2018], and Siemens [2018]. 40 Siemens [2018] points out 71–​2:16[16], in which Nietzsche names “contest” as one of the “means against the measureless selfishness of the individual.” 41 See Acampora [2013], Siemens [2018].

460  Nietzsche Values ideal that the norms project. Its success lies not in living an easier and pleasanter life, but a harder one that requires training and self-​discipline.42 Moreover it is a struggle in which each has an allegiance as well to the overall practice, to the agon in which it participates. Each understands that its own success would be an achievement of the practice as well; it strives also as a representative of the whole group. But what is the activity at which members compete? I can only address what I think is its most important aspect. The challenge is to live post-​morally—​in the light of the truth about morality, and indeed about valuing and values in general. Human’s distinguishing project is its will to truth, and the new social practice will make an advance in this especially. So—​I suggest—​the freedom that Nietzsche thinks is only possible by understanding one’s values will be to some extent shared in the common practice. So that practice will take a step above morality, just as morality—​life as a moral agent—​took a step above the older life of custom. So although members will of course compete on many fronts—​professionally, for example—​the new norms will give ultimate importance to what we might have called “moral intelligence.” (We could have called it that if “moral” were not so otherwise inflected for Nietzsche.) It is knowing what one is doing when one values, which depends on a broader understanding of human valuing—​and so of what others are doing, too. It is the kind of psychological acuity we might (in a jarring connection) associate with Jane Austen. Members compete in their ability to live with this truth. Thus there will be a new justifying ideology for these norms, one with these better claims to truth. They will claim that they make possible a way of life that does better for the two deepest aims their members have. It does better, that is, than the old norms did. It thereby gives members a sense of living, by their fidelity to these norms, a higher and better human life than possible before—​of being “at the cutting edge” of humanity. This, I suggest, is the pride that Nietzsche thinks the new herd can legitimately have. It is of course a version of the pride that strong societies have always had in themselves; the difference is that the new herd has it with more right. Its faith rests on fewer illusions and on more of the truth about human valuing. Of course Nietzsche thinks that a still higher and better human life will be lived by the not-​yet-​imaginable “free spirits” who will go beyond this herd. As we will shortly see, the new norms need to make a certain allowance for these dissenters. But these norms—​or those obeying them—​can with justice be proud as well. They can truthfully claim to live in a knowingness never achieved before, 42 Owen [2017] takes this effort at mastery to involve a practice of agon toward oneself, preparatory to undertaking it with others.

Creating: Founding New Social Norms  461 in an “enlightenment” more genuinely realized than in any past age. They can pride themselves on having outgrown morality—​on living in a better understanding of what they and their values are. So they are sustained by a pride in their common rank—​by the rank of the way of life they all together live. This brings us to the topic of rank-​order and its key role in Nietzsche’s idea of the new society.

11.4  Recognizing rank-​order Now one might have expected that if a society’s norms “recognize perspectivity” in the way we’ve seen, the result would be a kind of liberal relativism. There would be the presumption, shared by all, that each person’s values, expressive of his or her specific perspective, sets the standard for him or herself. Each perspective with its values would stand on a par with all others. But as we’ve begun to see, Nietzsche’s insistence on rank-​order [Rangordnung] rules this out.43 Perspectives do not stand all on the same level but rather higher and lower than one another. Nietzsche’s perspectivism coexists with rank-​order, and this prevents it from devolving into a relativism. We need to look at his idea of rank-​order, and consider how it bears on his conception of the new norms—​ and new herd—​he hopes for after nihilism. We should also notice the wider importance that this idea of rank-​order clearly has for Nietzsche’s overall “political theory.” He knows well that he here goes against the grain of “enlightened” thinking. In 84:26[9]‌(WP.854): “—​I am compelled, in the age of suffrage universel, i.e. anyone may sit in judgment of anyone and anything, to establish rank-​order again.” And 85:34[156]: “There is something that in an age of ‘equal rights for all’ has an unpleasant ring: that is rank-​order.” Nietzsche thinks of “rank-​order” in pointed contrast with “equality.” In Chapter 7 (§3.2) we looked at his critique of equality and saw how diversely he treats it: he pursues it across metaphysics, metaethics, ethics, politics, and psychology. His favored idea of rank-​order is just as comprehensive. It comes up everywhere for him. It does so because it lies so close to his basic idea of will to power. In their simplest form, rank-​order and equality are the two ways two wills can stand in relation to one another, either as equals or one “above” the other. Our main interest here is in political applications of “rank-​order,” but we will need to place these in that broader context.



43

See on this topic Guay [2013].

462  Nietzsche Values My main aim is to show that this idea of rank-​order has very different implications for the herd than is usually supposed. Roughly, we suppose that the herd and rank-​order are antithetical: that being “in” the herd involves rejecting rank-​order, so that the latter is valued only by elite individuals who stand outside the herd. Moreover we suppose that rank-​order involves a certain subordination or subjugation of the herd. Against this, I  will argue that Nietzsche hopes for a herd that believes in rank-​order and that this has a great advantage: it enables the new herd to sustain its allegiance to its norms despite acknowledging their perspectivity. For it can truthfully see its own high rank on the ladder of human development. I  will offer this reading even in the face of Nietzsche’s pronouncements that he hopes for a herd that is as “low” as possible. Let’s start with a distinction quite indispensable for treating Nietzsche’s use of the term. A failure to keep this difference in clear view vitiates—​or at least confuses—​most or many treatments of rank-​order. We must recognize that “rank-​order” has the same ambiguity we noticed about “value” back in Chapter 1. I can speak of things as standing in a rank-​order either with or without the implication that (I judge that) the higher-​ranking is better. So on the one hand I can “rank” things as better and worse, and on the other I can speak in the way I do of military ranks—​as facts about relations of command, without any implication that I think the general is better than the captain. Consider these uses in turn; each is itself complex. (1) Start with the “descriptive” (or “factual”) sense of rank-​order. The most obvious example of this might be the “brute fact” that, in a given society, one group “ranks higher” than another in the sense that it can or does command it. We think first of legal or political or economic power here—​of these concrete ways one group may command, another obey. This rank-​order is perhaps most overt when the ranked classes are castes, such as those set up by “Manu” [A.57]. I can recognize such a “social hierarchy” without, of course, thinking that those on top are better than those below.44 Notice some other applications of this descriptive sense of rank-​ order. First, besides the legal-​ political-​ economic kind of command we think of first, there’s another kind Nietzsche puts great weight on: the “spiritual” command exercised by philosophers, poets, priests, and other value-​creators. In 84:25[355] (WP.999): “Rank-​order: he who determines values and directs the will of millennia, so that he directs the highest natures, is the highest human.” Such individuals command by inducing whole societies to “see things their way”—​to adopt their values. Nietzsche thinks (clearly self-​servingly!) that this is a higher or fuller achievement of power and command than that wielded by an economic



44

See, e.g., Nietzsche’s account of the development of such rank-​order in 87:10[82] (WP.784).

Creating: Founding New Social Norms  463 elite. And this kind of power thus constitutes a second “social hierarchy” that is far less obvious but (in Nietzsche’s view) more important. Second, Nietzsche extends the idea of rank-​order to the “psychic structure” of each particular person. We’ve seen his Plato-​like readiness to treat political and psychological structure in parallel. He thinks that the psychic parts of a person—​ his or her drives and affects—​likewise stand in a rank-​order by their own relations of command and obedience.45 These relations are “intentional’ and rest on the ways the drives and affects understand one another’s aims and values, and adjust their own accordingly. In 85–​34[123] (LNp8): “human is a multiplicity of forces which stand in a rank-​order, so that there is a commander, but the commander must create everything the obeyer needs to preserve itself, so that it is conditioned by [the obeyer’s] existence.”46 This rank-​order of drives is at the same time a rank-​order of the person’s values (as the signs he or she steers by). So BGE.6: “his morality bears . . . witness to who he is—​that is, in what rank-​order the innermost drives of his nature stand to one another.”47 All of these rank-​orders rest in “facts” about the command-​obedience relations in which wills stand. In judging one will “higher” than another in this sense I make no value-​judgment about it; I simply describe or report its command-​ relation to the other will. (2) But Nietzsche also speaks of rank-​order in a second way, in which the ranking does express an evaluation by the ranker. He very emphatically ranks people himself as more or less valuable. He insists, against “enlightened” opinion, that humans are of unequal value, that they stand in a rank-​order in which the higher is better. BGE.228: “there is a rank-​order between human and human, hence also between morality and morality.”48 When he says that there is such a rank-​order, he is clearly not describing any existing relations of commanding and obeying. When Nietzsche posits rank-​order in this valuative way—​claiming that some persons are better than others—​what status does this evaluation have? We know that there are no “real values” for him (i.e., none that is “there in the world” independently of valuings). So his valuative ranking can’t match a real better-​and-​ worse in the world. What then is its status? Is it “just his perspective?” This is yet another iteration of one of our basic puzzles. 45 84:25[411]: “Difference of lower and higher functions: rank-​order of organs and drives, shown by commanding and obeying.” 46 85:34[123] (LNp8) goes on to say that “in more delicate cases the roles between them must temporarily switch, and the one that usually commands must for once obey.” So there can be great flexibility built into these structures of command/​obedience. 47 On the rank-​order in a person’s values, see, too, HH.i.42, HH.i.107, GS.116, BGE.194, BGE.224, BGE.268. 48 GM.i.note says that the philosopher’s task will now be “to determine the rank-​order of values.” See, too, EH.BT.2.

464  Nietzsche Values There’s another kind of value judgment Nietzsche makes regarding rank-​order that we should keep separate from this last one. It is a judgment about rank-​order in the first, descriptive sense—​about social hierarchy. Nietzsche values such hierarchy: he claims that societies are better off when they are strongly structured this way. He thinks this has been true back through human’s history: societies with distinct higher and lower classes have achieved more. Such distinction has been an engine for human improvement. BGE.257: “Every elevation of the type ‘human’ has so far been the work of an aristocratic society—​and so it will always be: a society that believes in a long ladder of rank-​order and difference in value of human and human, and has need of slavery in some sense.” Nietzsche thinks that by studying the kinds of hierarchies that have been most productive in this way, we can actively design a better form of social hierarchy. in 85:35[47] (WP.979): “How the highest kinds so far (e.g. the Greeks) have been raised: to consciously will this kind of ‘accident.’ ” Within limits, we can therefore take Nietzsche’s accounts of “what worked” in the past societies he admires most as clues to the society he hopes for “after morality.” Now the most obvious way to relate Nietzsche’s two valuative claims regarding rank-​order—​that humans are better and worse and that social hierarchy is good—​is to suppose that he favors a hierarchy in which the better command the worse. So the factual ranking—​the social hierarchy—​would correspond to the valuative ranking: social standing and personal merit would be aligned.49 But we should bear in mind that one motive others have had to favor this alignment—​the idea that this would make social hierarchy fair—​is not likely to be a consideration for Nietzsche. What matters is that a society should produce higher individuals. We’ll see that this is the key relation between the two senses of rank-​order. It remains a possibility that people grow best not by ruling but by struggling against others’ rule. But let’s look more closely at both of these valuative claims.

11.4.1  The ladder of human types Nietzsche insists that humans are more and less valuable than one another. 85:36[17] (WP.988) says that “we new philosophers . . . begin with description of the factual rank-​order and value-​differences of human.” Here he means, I think, not the “descriptive” rank-​order we just spoke of, but an evaluative rank-​order that he claims is a fact. We of course know, in a general way, what his ultimate criterion for this ranking will be: power, as life’s end. In 87–​8:11[36] (WP.858,

49 Young [2006, 188]: “Nietzsche’s overall conception of the healthy society is a hierarchy of classes where one’s position in the hierarchy is determined by natural need and ability.”

Creating: Founding New Social Norms  465 LNp208): “What determines rank is the quantum of power that you are; the rest is cowardice.” The inevitable first question is whether this ranking, as a valuing, isn’t then perspectival, like all values on Nietzsche’s view. Isn’t his ranking of persons as higher and lower “just his perspective?” Or if A ranks itself over B, and B ranks itself over A, then isn’t each simply right “from its perspective?” This threatens to swallow rank-​order back into an equal-​perspectivism: each person just has a different view how to rank, all of them equally good. We saw the gist of Nietzsche’s answer back in Chapter  2. In a nutshell:  he claims that this criterion of power has “authority” for us because we already value it: we have this will to power built into our drives and affects as their strongest character. We have power, irrevocably, as our ultimate aim, and we view other goals as strategies toward it. This deep aim has been obscured and suppressed by our social morality but can now be recognized and credited. Nietzsche is calling on his readers to align their (agential) values not with some goods outside them, but rather with their own deeper valuing. So Nietzsche claims that his valuative rank-​order is grounded in life’s basic value:  power. Still, he seems not to rank things (wills, humans) directly by their power. For power, remember, is growth in control, and hence is not a state or quality but a change, a process. By contrast Nietzsche seems to rank wills (humans) by their state and capacity. As we might put it: he ranks wills not by how much they improve (from their starting-​point), but by the level they reach. Thus he ranks wills by their strength, which we saw in Chapter 2 (§2.5) is a “capacity for control.” (And I think it’s such strength he really means when he speaks of “quanta of power” in that last passage.) Thus the picture is this. There is a long ladder of wills, of human wills in particular. Each higher rung is a higher level of strength: a capacity to control more, more effectively. It is our ultimate will, our will to power, that has made this ladder, pushing always higher and higher, adding new rungs on top as it goes. This will to power makes a new rung by creating a new discipline of control. This is inaugurated by a few individuals who render it communicable as a shared practice. This rank-​order of human types is therefore the residue of the species’ development and progress through time. 85:34[199]: “Rank-​order as stages [Stufen] of the education [Erziehung] of human (through many generations).” It has a scalar structure (whereas the rank-​order of classes Nietzsche advocates will be bipartite). Nietzsche thinks that earlier stages are embedded in us and that personal development lies in ascending through them.50 50 HH.i.p.7 describes how free spirits discover the problem of rank-​order: “ ‘Here—​a new problem! Here a long ladder upon whose rungs we ourselves have sat and climbed,—​which we ourselves have at some time been! . . .’ ”

466  Nietzsche Values The historical underpinnings of Nietzsche’s idea of human rank has important implications. When we see that this ladder stretches behind and ahead of us and that its rungs are stages in our species’ long-​term development; we see better how we have a stake in rank-​order. And we see, too, how social groups—​ herds—​themselves can rank higher or lower on this ladder. These points respond to some of the strong reservations I think we immediately feel to Nietzsche’s insistence on ranking humans. Nietzsche’s idea is that in human’s development the whole type ascends this ladder—​though it does so behind and more slowly than individuals do; we began to look at this logic in §11.1. The individual pioneers a new kind of strength and so prepares for the advance of the type.51 So 87–​8:11[55] (WP.252, LNp210) speaks of “the more strongly made exceptions and lucky cases of human, in which the will to power and to growth of the whole type human makes a step forward.” The new capacity and discipline the individual invents get assimilated by a new herd; they become part of the common endowment members grow up into. Nietzsche thinks the general tendency of human growth has been to unite parts or aspects that arise separately. As we’ve often seen, he thinks that history tends to run through phases: a period of diversification associated with (relative) peace and equality but then, often forced by new dangers and conflicts, a phase of consolidation, in which that diversity gets subsumed into a single way of life and practice. Whereas before human was fragmented into those diverse options (lives), now these parts are synthesized: a way is found to live all of them together. So human becomes “more complete” by this development. The individuals’ high value is therefore not self-​contained. It lies in what they do as humans—​as exemplary members of the type. Each—​as we saw at the end of Chapter 10—​is a “twig on the tree” of the human clade, the great network branching up from a primal ancestor, transmitting not just genetic but “spiritual” traits. Or rather, in the best case, the individual is new growth at the top of the trunk of this tree. The whole type participates in his or her advance. The individual demonstrates a possibility that can become a new norm, a new common higher level. It’s along these lines, I  suggest, that we should understand passages like 84:27[16] (WP.997):  “I teach:  that there are higher and lower humans, and that one individual can in [some] circumstances justify whole millennia—​i.e. a fuller, richer, greater, more whole human in comparison to countless incomplete fragment-​humans.” Nietzsche is presuming, I suggest, that this “complete human” has value not in isolation, but by setting a new benchmark and model 51 So Siemens [2009, 30]: “Exceptional or singular individuals figure not as the exclusive beneficiaries but as the great experimenters, as the key to realizing a perfectionist demand that has a generic or general orientation toward humankind.”

Creating: Founding New Social Norms  467 by which the whole kind is raised, by having its potential advance shown to be livable. We’ve been seeing what kind of human control Nietzsche thinks lies ahead of us now; this is the criterion for true rank today. Our human form of control lies in the incorporation of truth—​as we saw in Chapter 5 (§5.4), and then further in Chapters 7–​8. GS.301: “Higher humans distinguish themselves from the lower by seeing and hearing, and thoughtfully seeing and hearing, immeasurably more—​and just this distinguishes humans from animals, and higher animals from lower.” So, too, HH.i.p.6 on “the problem of rank-​order, and how power and right and comprehensiveness of perspective grow into the heights together.”52 Higher rank lies in exercising more of this distinctively human kind of control—​control of and through the truth. Today we stand at a momentous point in this development, at which human begins to understand its own values and to “see through” morality. A human’s rank is determined today above all by how much of this truth about itself it can “incorporate” (i.e., absorb into a flourishing life). In 85:34[240]: “The rank-​order of humans /​for what? how much they have force to bear the fearful natural fact of human, and despite this —​”

11.4.2  Social classes: noble and herd The second way Nietzsche thinks of rank-​order speaks more directly to this chapter’s interest in his social-​political views. Here “rank-​order” is the way a society is structured into higher and lower classes. What structuring—​if any—​does Nietzsche advocate? He wants, we now see, the structuring that will best advance us—​our culture, our kind—​up that ladder of human types. We can understand his political judgments as his several, shifting hypotheses on just what social order will best improve “human.” His most obvious insistence is on a strong system of classes. By contrast with Plato’s three-​class and Hinduism’s four-​class partitions, Nietzsche tends to speak of a division into two classes. The higher are the “noble,” the lower the “herd.” We’ll see that he insists, in different ways, on the importance of a sharp or wide difference between these classes. He opposes the ideal of a classless society and deplores a modern tendency to make classes more similar to one another: this deadens human progress. Just how we understand this gap or difference he wants between the classes is very likely to settle our judgment about his “politics.”

52 And 85:35[69] (LNp21):  “NB How much of the truth one bears without degenerating, is his measure. Likewise how much happiness —​ —​likewise how much freedom and power! /​On rank-​order.”

468  Nietzsche Values Our judgment will importantly depend on whether Nietzsche thinks that this structure is also best—​or at least good—​for the lower class. Does he mean it to serve them, too? Or does he instead want their interests to be sacrificed so that the noble class can flourish? He thinks, exploringly, along both of these lines: he states both positions. But I will try to show that the more favorable expectation for the herd fits better with his broader picture. A more slighting and disdainful attitude toward the herd is much easier to notice in Nietzsche’s texts, however. He enjoys throwing it in his readers’ faces. He proclaims his readiness to sacrifice the welfare of the many for the few. He suggests that there may be a (positive) correlation between the height to which the nobles can reach and the depth to which the herd must be depressed: he seems to want the latter as “low” as possible, indeed even to be, in some sense, “slaves.”53 He expresses, that is, what we might call a “predatory” stance to the herd. At other times he suggests that the level or condition of the herd is simply irrelevant. He offers the image of the great creators as isolated peaks scattered across a landscape. The particular conditions or values of the herd matter little since the individual is defined by his or her break from them. And individuals are all similarly great in the strength they needed for their independence, which pulls free of whatever herd is there. But neither this indifference nor that predatory stance toward the herd can be Nietzsche’s considered view. Neither fits with his framing historical picture, as we’ve just seen it. The ladder of human types is built historically and climbed en masse. Human advances only by absorbing the innovations of the few into a common practice that can then become habit and instinct for new generations and the ground of further advances. That image of peaks scattered across a plain leaves out this crucial developmental idea. And the idea to “lower” the herd for the greater glory of an elite forgets Nietzsche’s settled idea that the herd must progress, too. How then does Nietzsche think of the relation between these two classes, “herd” and “noble?” Let’s start with his general ideas of these types before trying to specify the particular kinds of herd and elite he hopes for. We’ve looked at Nietzsche’s “herd” several times before, most recently in §11.1. We saw that the root to the phenomenon is a “herd-​instinct,” which is above all a way of having values. I am herd to the extent that I have my values—​want and aim at things—​because they are my group’s values. When Nietzsche speaks of “the herd” as a class, he means all those in a society who are dominated by this instinct. They are pulled together as a class by this will to share common norms.



53

See note 7 for passages regarding slavery and note 8 for passages hoping for a wide “cleft.”

Creating: Founding New Social Norms  469 Each principally understands herself as a member of this community. And together they understand themselves to be all “equal” in this identity.54 This grounding will to share gives the herd’s values certain typical features. Its norms tend to favor practices that can be most readily and widely shared. The herd-​instinct exerts constant pressure toward valuing the “lowest common denominator” in us, which are our basic bodily drives. Our will to share encourages us to think that what matters most is to satisfy these wants all of us have. And this in turn suggests why the herd aims typically, Nietzsche thinks, at “comfort” [Behagen]. 85:34[176]: “this morality is the genuine herd-​instinct, which longs only for comfort, lack of danger, alleviation of life.”55 In 82–​3:5[1]‌78: “Do you will to have an easy life? Then remain always with [bei] the herd and forget yourself in [über] the herd.” We looked at Nietzsche’s idea of “the noble” briefly back in Chapter 6 (§6.1), but we have our main work to do on it now. I suggested then that the noble are distinguished by a conception they have of themselves:  that they are living a higher life than “the common”—​higher by being more difficult and depending on fuller exercise of strength and other virtues. They are ennobled by their very effort to be noble—​to live a life harder to achieve than the one laid out by the common norms. As we can succinctly put it now, the noble are defined by an “instinct for rank-​order,” which is their counterpart to the herd-​instinct.56 They are gripped by the effort to be better at being human.57 And they think that the good of their society lies in this higher achievement.58 This different basic impulse gives the noble values a different typical content. They reject the herd’s goal of comfort.59 What binds the noble together instead, I suggest, is their dedication to some particular contest.60 This contest is in some defining activity which they take to elevate them above the common. Down through history there have been many different such defining contests. 54 Z.iv.13: “In the market no one believes in superior humans. And if you want to speak there, very well! But the mob blinks: ‘We are all equal.’ ” 55 This phrase is reworked in 85:37[8]‌(WP.957, LNp31), and then again in BGE.44, which speaks of “the green meadow happiness of the herd, with security, lack of danger, comfort, alleviation of life for everyone.” BGE.260: “Slave-​morality is essentially utility-​morality.” 56 GM.ii.20 says that the noble type has a “basic psychological disposition to establish rank-​orders.” 57 84:26[282] (WP.752):  “Aristocracy represents the belief in an elite-​humanity and higher castes.” And recall 85:40[56]: “About noble and common morality. /​Ethic: a type of human should be preserved. Noble morality. /​The human in irgend welchem Maasse should be preserved: common morality.” 58 BGE.258: “The essential in a good and healthy aristocracy is that it feels itself not as function (whether of the monarchy or the community), but as its meaning and highest justification.” 59 GS.318 says about “the heroic humans”: “They are kind-​preserving, kind-​furthering forces of the first rank: if only because they resist comfort and don’t hide their disgust at this kind of happiness.” Z.iv.13.3: “Overcome for me, you higher humans, the small virtues, the small clevernesses, . . . the pitiful comfort, the ‘happiness of the many’—​!” BGE.260 describes how the masters look down on “those thinking of a narrow utility.” 60 See again Acampora [2013a] on Nietzsche’s treatment of contest or agon.

470  Nietzsche Values Zarathustra names some in his account of the “tablets” of value peoples have set over themselves: “ ‘You shall always be first and stand ahead of others: your jealous soul shall love no one, unless it is the friend’—​this made the soul of a Greek tremble: he thereby went on his path of greatness. /​‘To speak truth and handle bow and arrow well’—​this seemed both dear and hard to that people from whom my name comes” [Z.i.15]. The difficulty of these noble aims enables them to view discomfort (and worse) as valuable.61 Now notice two things about this noble class. First, they are bound together by virtue of sharing this contest: they care about excelling in it precisely because these others do—​because there already is this established practice, governed by norms, into which they have been trained. So the noble class is itself a kind of herd united by a will to share this competitive practice. And yet, second, because what they will to share is this contest, that will to assimilate to one another is counterbalanced by a strong effort to distinguish themselves, not just from the lower herd but also from others of their own class. Their strong “instinct for rank-​order” makes valuative distinctions against the equalizing grain of the herd-​instinct. So whereas the herd’s strongest drive is to assimilate, the noble want to distinguish. They are confident moreover in their own high rank; so BGE.287: “The noble soul has reverence for itself.” Their commitment to the contest makes them also ready to acknowledge a “higher” outside themselves.62 But most importantly it requires them to establish a higher and lower within themselves. In prioritizing the contest, the noble are also prioritizing a drive to excel in this activity, a drive that commands their other drives. This effect of nobility in giving one this internal hierarchy is one of its most valuable features.63 We should remind ourselves now that there is a third main character in Nietzsche’s story:  the individual. The nobles, we’ve seen, are a kind of higher herd, committed to a common practice defined by shared norms that they have taken over. An “individual” is someone who steps to some extent out of even this higher herd by making a defining practice and value for herself. It’s because these individuals are individuals that they don’t form a third class, and Nietzsche doesn’t have a Platonic tripartition after all. We’ve seen that the individuals he mainly has in mind are the (genuine) philosophers who create values not just for their own particular use, but also for a social group. He depicts the philosopher as emerging from and then “commanding” the “rulers”—​the noble—​who command in turn the herd. In 85:35[47]

61 87:10[10] (WP.889, LNp175–​6): “That one gladly does disagreeable things—​aim of ideals.” 62 BGE.263 begins: “There is an instinct for rank that, more than anything, is already the sign of a high rank; there is a pleasure in nuances of reverence that lets one guess a noble heritage and habits.” 63 See especially BGE.257; also the draft for it, 85–​6:1[13] (LNp68).

Creating: Founding New Social Norms  471 (WP.978): “The new philosopher can only arise in connection with a ruling caste, as its highest spiritualization.” These mundane rulers are the instruments of those value-​creators. 84:25[270] (WP.998): “Basic principle: beyond the rulers, set loose from all limits, live the highest humans: and in the rulers they have their instruments.” Here we might imagine Plato with the ear of the Syracusan king, but I think Nietzsche has something different in mind. The philosopher is not a confidant or advisor. Nietzsche thinks there is a long time-​lag in the philosopher’s influence—​ that the philosopher is only understood in later generations and his values only incorporated (and obeyed) posthumously.64 The philosopher must not expect honor or recognition in his own time, but rather to be reviled and scorned since creating values is always an insult and assault on the old. Given that the philosopher commands the rulers in this “spiritual” way, by changing (eventually) their values, we should ask how the rulers then command the herd. Most overtly, they have done so militarily, legally, politically, economically. But I suggest that here, too, Nietzsche thinks the crucial control is over the herd’s values—​the signs it steers by. It changes what looks choiceworthy to them by changing their norms. This, we’ll see, is the key way Nietzsche wants his “new nobility” to command the new herd. We’ve been looking so far at the generic forms of herd, nobility, and individuals and should now turn to the particular forms Nietzsche wants these to take in the new, post-​moral society he hopes for. We’ve noted that there have been, through human history, many different ways that a noble type has distinguished itself from the common. Nietzsche has in mind now a new way—​an aristocracy based on a new conception of human’s “way ahead.” Z.iii.12.12: “O my brothers, I dedicate and direct you to a new nobility [Adel] . . . /​—​truly, not to a nobility that you could buy like shopkeepers and with shopkeepers’ gold: for everything that has its price has little value. /​Not where you come from will now constitute your honor, but where you are going!” They are ennobled not as descendents from but as predecessors to the higher practice. We best describe the new nobility by specifying the “contest” they will pride themselves in sharing. I think there can be little doubt that Nietzsche conceives of this defining activity as self-​understanding: this is what the new elite will compete in. This is the self-​understanding, however, not of private and idiosyncratic individuals—​”self-​absorbed” in our usual sense—​but of members who see themselves as embodying and living out the way of life projected by the culture. Each



64

BGE.285 compares this delay with the transmission of light from “the most distant stars.”

472  Nietzsche Values competes to improve the culture’s understanding of itself by exposing illusions and illicit motives it has so far overlooked. Such advancing of our understanding of ourselves—​which Nietzsche tries to make our ultimate task—​is not just an academic and theoretical exercise. It’s not just psychologists and historians and anthropologists who contribute to it, but also artists, including popular artists. Understanding needs to be taken up not just in propositions, but by our drives and affects, and art greatly assists in this. The scientist will need to have his or her ideas embodied by artists. Insights need to be willfully and affectively established in us through images, stories, poems, music. Nietzsche’s elite is, then, the class of those who see themselves as explaining us to ourselves. They compete in how tellingly they can expose our unacknowledged motives—​especially unadmirable motives. They pride themselves in their insight into who and what we, as a society, are—​and in their ability to communicate this insight “where it counts”: in our immediate and implicit bodily effort and responsiveness—​changing our habits in these. It is the hard work of this diagnostic and communicative task—​the need to commit to it at the expense of comfort—​that elevate these persons to nobility. This shared project of self-​understanding in which the members of this class compete is clearly a preparation for the further, still higher achievement of philosophers and other epochal value-​creators. The skills for cultural diagnosis and communication that norms train into this whole class are crucial for the philosopher’s task. Indeed the philosopher is perhaps just a more radical practitioner of that class’s diagnostic craft—​one who is able to expose especially deep and structural assumptions and to improve on them. The philosopher steps back from and diagnoses motives set so deeply into the culture as to be unnoticeable without a radical break. (The ultimate case of this will be the Übermensch we’ll treat in Chapter 12 [§12.1].) But if the elite norms and practice play this role of grounding the philosopher’s advance, it may seem that the (lower) herd might not be needed after all for the work I’ve claimed it does. Perhaps Nietzsche doesn’t think that the progress that innovators make needs to be incorporated into the norms and lives of the mass of society, but only into those of that elite. And in that case he might indeed hold either the predatory or the indifferent view of the herd that we’ve seen he expresses, but that I’ve claimed he just entertains. Now I  acknowledge that Nietzsche’s remarks on the herd and rank-​order could be put together around either the predatory or the indifferent position. One would then credit his sometime suggestion that the gap between elite and common be heightened as far as possible. One would take seriously his sometime gladness at the “herd-​animalization” at work in modern Europe, as setting the conditions for the most extreme exceptions to rise above them [e.g., BGE.242].

Creating: Founding New Social Norms  473 His tendency to “biologize” the difference between nobles and herd by treating them as not just classes but castes [e.g. BGE.251], whose division is to be sharpened by selective marriages, also points this way. However Nietzsche develops as well a different line on these questions. He says that the new “rulers” will have a will and even a duty to “tend” to the herd, to advance its interests. And they will do so by opposing its own inertial tendency to sink toward that “slavish” comfort. They will oppose it by, above all, giving it values with a different purpose than has been usual so far. So far it has been mainly the “priest” who has made values for the herd, and he has done so as “shepherd”—​which we saw in §11.1.2 signifies for Nietzsche a kind of pandering relation to the herd. The priest makes values that address the needs of the herd as the herd sees them. But the herd doesn’t see what’s good for it—​what in fact strengthens it. Nietzsche thinks the new elite will take a more “paternalistic” interest in the herd.65 Their concern for the herd is even their new form of nobility.66 We will have reservations against this paternalism, of course. He justifies it by his idea that the herd have been sickened—​made poor judges of their own interest—​by the dominance of their own herd-​instinct. They are therefore already “slaves,” in the quasi-​Aristotelean sense of being unable to choose properly for themselves. Their herd-​instinct is a will to copy and so a passive will to obey general practice. Its tendency is to reduce one’s values to the satisfaction of simple bodily drives. So it overvalues comfort, and it over-​disvalues suffering. Nietzsche thinks that the elite’s “paternalism” will manifest in an effort to give the herd norms that aim members better at their own growth. This ambition is reflected in the insistence that the herd’s norms recognize rank-​order against the natural tendency of their own strong herd-​instinct.67 This acts as a counterweight to that instinct, impeding its inertial slide into comfortableness. When the priest makes values for the herd, or when the herd makes them for itself, they cater to this worst impulse. Then the society-​wide norms insist on the equality of all ways of living a life. This is damaging to members of the

65 87:10[175] (WP.893, LNp203): “Hatred of mediocrity is unworthy of a philosopher: it is almost a question mark over his right to ‘philosophy.’ Precisely because he is the exception, he must take the rule under his wing, must help everything average to keep up its faith in itself.” 87:9[34] (WP.763, LNp146) advocates “placing the individual each according to his kind in such a way that he can achieve the highest which lies in his sphere.” 66 GS.55: “Hitherto, then, it was rarity and the unawareness of this rarity that made noble. Note, however, that by means of this standard everything usual, near, and indispensable, in short, that which most preserved the species, and in general the rule [Regel] of humanity hitherto, was inequitably judged and on the whole slandered in favor of the exceptions. To become the advocate of the rule—​that might be the ultimate form and refinement in which noblemindedness manifests itself on earth.” 67 BGE.221: “One must compel moralities to bow first of all before rank-​order. . . .”

474  Nietzsche Values herd; it reduces their aspirations. And it also imposes a drag on the elite’s effort to live a harder life; it subverts their stricter values.68 I think Nietzsche anticipates a greater “solidarity” in the new society: all levels share the project to live a higher life—​to carry the human kind ahead. The larger part do so by living up to the high standard already achieved. The best few find ways to raise the standard still higher—​they contest with one another in this. That project is shared ground for both herd and elite. Thus the new herd accepts rank-​order and accepts that it itself ranks below those who advance the practice. But it also sees—​sees truly—​that it sustains a higher practice than humans ever lived before and that it does so by virtue of its truthfulness. The herd sees itself not at the bottom of a current hierarchy, but at the so-​far top of that ladder of human lives. It prides itself, in particular, on having seen through the illusions of morality and religion—​on being strong enough to live without these illusions, such as the faiths in god and heaven and absolute values. It sees itself to stand at a “high point of humanity” [TI.iv]. The herd can therefore “incorporate” the perspectival truth about values. It can give up the insistence that its norms are true to valuative facts independent of human valuing. It can replace this externalist illusion with the internalist truth: that its norms are human values, singled out by their historical achievement—​by their constituting a way of life that stands higher on the ladder of human lives than any before. These norms claim a comparative merit for themselves, which is grand enough to hold the social group allegiant to them despite that inertial pull of the herd-​instinct. And the very sense that members have of the difficulty of their task—​which includes living without absolute values—​is also the ground of their pride in it.

68 BGE.62 concludes that it is “humans not noble enough to see the abysmally different rank-​order and rank-​cleft between human and human:—​such humans have, with their ‘equal before god,’ so far ruled over the fate of Europe, until finally a shrunken, almost laughable kind, a herd-​animal . . . has been bred, today’s European.”

12

Dionysus New Gods and Eternal Return

A natural way to think of Nietzsche’s theological position is that he denies the existence of any god or gods1 and “puts human in place of god.”2 So 87–​ 8:11[333]: “The absolute transformation that the negation of god introduces—​ /​ . . . [T]‌here is no higher authority over us: so far as there could be god, we are ourselves now god.”3 Instead of human letting itself be steered by the imaginary commands of an imaginary god and living in a secondary and inferior role, it now sees that it (human) has full authority to give values to itself. The inhibiting pressure of a god over us is now released, and we can ascend and expand and strengthen “the human” as never before. More precisely it seems that Nietzsche puts superhuman where god was. Z.ii.2: “Once one said ‘god’ when one looked upon distant seas; but now I have taught you to say:  superhuman.” We now have as “the best”—​as an ultimate good—​not a non-​human lord over us, but a further type that human itself might become (i.e., change into). We thereby have, it might be said, a properly human best and don’t imagine ourselves judged and commanded by anything other than ourselves. We free ourselves from that fictitious commander and find at last a properly human way of valuing. And yet, we’ll find, Nietzsche still makes room for gods. Although highly hostile to Christianity, he speaks very favorably of the Greeks’ relation to their gods and gives signs of wanting to revive something like it. He often singles out Dionysus with a favor suggesting that this is his own god; indeed in BGE.296 he announces himself “the last disciple and initiate of the god Dionysus.”4 Moreover 1 I’ll use “god” in the way I  have been using “human,” to refer (usually) to an individual as representing all the type (i.e., gods in general). I won’t follow the convention of capitalizing references to the Judaeo-​Christian god; in Nietzsche’s German there’s no such distinction, and (I think) he gives us no motive to capitalize as a mark of special honor or respect. 2 Heidegger [1950/​2002, 190] attacks this reading: “One could, thinking crudely, suppose that the word [‘god is dead’] says that the mastery over entities passes from god to human, or, still more crudely, that Nietzsche sets human in place of god.” Instead he does something more radical: “The superhuman doesn’t and will never step into the place of god, but rather the place where the superhuman’s willing occurs is an other realm of an other grounding of entities in an other being.” 3 87–​8:11[87] (WP.Book II motto, LNp215): “All the beauty and sublimity we’ve lent to real and imagined things I want to demand back, as the property and product of human.” 4 And BGE.295 affirms this allegiance against those who are “reluctant today to believe . . . in god and gods.” Note however that in EH.p.2 he calls himself a disciple of the “philosopher” Dionysus. Nietzsche’s Values. John Richardson, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190098230.001.0001

476  Nietzsche Values Nietzsche displays in multiple ways a religious sensibility that goes well beyond his explicit mentions of gods. Ideas such as amor fati and eternal return, and the universal Yes we discussed in Chapter 9, are meant to carry an emotional weight toward the world in toto, in ways that seem strongly religious. This religious aspect to Nietzsche’s thought has of course been recognized. Although the anti-​religious picture of him is surely much more common,5 a number of interpreters have pointed out and examined this religious side. Of special note is Lou Salomé’s first-​hand impression [1894/​2001, 24]: “Of all his great intellectual dispositions, none is bound more profoundly and unremittingly to his whole intellectual being than his religious genius.” Recently Julian Young has stressed and clarified Nietzsche’s religious aims.6 Others have made the case, too.7 We come to the topic informed by the terrain we’ve covered so far, and so with special interests and questions. Our guiding idea has been that Nietzsche tasks us to experiment with how far we can incorporate, into our daily valuing, the truth of how our values are perspectival. And so now surely, as well, he must want us to recognize that any gods are perspectival, too—​are constituted by our human views of them. Gods, like values, are ideal not real—​and we are tasked to believe in them as ideal, even in the act of revering them. Just as we have asked whether it’s possible really to value while seeing the valued’s perspectivity, so we now face a parallel question regarding religious reverence. Is it possible to revere or “have” a god in a full and genuinely religious way if one views this god as a human product or invention? To stand in a religious relation to one’s god, mustn’t one (at the very least) believe that god to be real? These problems about credence arise, as we by now expect, at two levels: where it is an individual who “believes” and where it is a society and herd that does so. At the first level are questions about Nietzsche’s own case: In what sense (if any) does he “believe” in his gods? He must think of them in some very special way, it seems, if he’s to sustain a genuinely religious relation to them while also seeing them as his own inventions. And even if he were able to hold this particular attitude himself, could he really hope for a “new religion” in which that way of having gods was widely and publicly shared? Could it ever be part of the outlook all grow up into, that we project our gods onto the world?

5 Brobjer [2000, 11]: “Nietzsche’s atheism was, perhaps, more radical than that of any previous thinker.” 6 See especially Young [2006]. 7 Benson [2008] argues that “Nietzsche not only begins as a Pietist but also ends as one” [3]‌, evolving from the Christian Pietism of his childhood to the Dionysian Pietism of his maturity. See also the papers collected in Lippitt and Urpeth [2000] and Santaniello [2001], as well as Roberts [1998] and Taha [2005/​2013].

Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return  477 We might suspect that such problems of credence lead Nietzsche to reduce the role of gods. Perhaps his “new religion” in fact dispenses with gods and involves only such thoughts as amor fati and eternal return?8 There are, after all, “atheistic religions,” as he himself considers Buddhism to be.9 GM.iii.27 says that “unconditional honest atheism” is “the only air we breathe, we more spiritual humans of this age!” But the religious attitude can be directed not at these “best beings”—​ gods—​but instead at “the all”; that is, at (some aspect of) everything that is. This seems to be the character of those ideas of amor fati and eternal return. So does Nietzsche solve the problems of credence by replacing gods with these? I think there is indeed a shift of emphasis in Nietzsche’s religion from gods to those totalities or alls. But he very pointedly does not renounce gods altogether; he still wants them in his religion. He sees, I will suggest, an important role for them to play in giving shape and content to the religious attitude he wants to cultivate. They are needed as objects for certain powerful affects he highly values. However this returns us to our previous worry, which is worth restating. How can these powerful feelings toward gods be possible if one has “incorporated” the truth that these gods aren’t real? Can an individual, or a society, feel reverence (e.g.) toward what it knows to be fictions? If Nietzsche “keeps gods” only by reducing their status to that of fictions, he may seem to have taken the religion right out of them. He may seem to have replaced a religious attitude with an aesthetic one—​which indeed sometimes appears to be his explicit intent.10 But if gods are now the objects of an aesthetic play, do they still remain “gods?” I think we find answers by getting clearer about the specific affect Nietzsche directs on his gods. It’s here, in a particular “pathos,” that he hopes to aestheticize religion while preserving its religious character. Here we’ll see the special importance of Rausch, the quintessential aesthetic condition for Nietzsche11 and the main joining-​point between aesthetic and religious. Nietzsche’s account of this pathos contrasts it with a different and even opposite set of affects characteristic of religions that are not aesthetic but moral—​Christianity especially of course. So aestheticizing this pathos goes hand in hand with “de-​moralizing” it. The main

8 BGE.53:  “It seems to me that the religious instinct is indeed in the process of growing powerfully—​but the theistic satisfaction it refuses with deep suspicion.” 80–​1:8[94] lists among the features of “Religion nouvelle”: “no god, no beyond, no reward and punishment.” 9 A.20 says that, due to a previous philosophical movement, “the idea ‘god’ has already been dismissed when Buddhism arrives”; it is “the only genuinely positivistic religion in history,” and is “a hundred times more realistic than Christianity.” 10 HH.i.150: “The wealth of religious feeling, grown to a torrent, breaks out ever again and wants to conquer new realms; but the growing Enlightenment has shaken the dogmas of religion and injected a basic distrust: so the feeling that was expelled from the religious sphere by the Enlightenment, throws itself into art. . . .” 11 In Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (2004, ch. 4 §2) I develop aesthetic drives as distinguished by their capacity for Rausch.

478  Nietzsche Values role of eternal recurrence, I’ll try to show, is to help arouse and focus in us the special aesthetic-​religious affects Nietzsche most prizes. Our path through the chapter will be as follows. We begin (§12.1) by looking at Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch and the other ways he indicates the superlative development of human which at first seems his replacement for god. We then turn (§12.2) to his views about religion and gods, seeing why the superhuman-​ideal is not enough. We consider why his critical historical and psychological diagnoses of religion do not deter him from wanting a “new religion.” We then see (§12.3) how his idea of eternal return is meant to instill the same aesthetic-​religious affect as is directed at gods. This famous idea will be an appropriate culmination for this book.

12.1  Superhuman Nietzsche’s idea of the superhuman [Übermensch]12 is clearly a part of the elitism we have treated at other points. We saw just now (in Chapter 11 [§11.4]) the important role he wants for “rank-​order” within both personal values and social norms. But we didn’t consider the top of this rank-​order, the very best human can become, for which Nietzsche’s preferred, revealing term is Übermensch. This idea has been the target of some derision.13 But it functions in some unexpected ways in his unusual system of values. “Übermensch” is not a term Nietzsche uses often, or persistently. It first appears in his books in Thus Spoke Zarathustra,14 where it is introduced very prominently near the start—​it is the first topic of Zarathustra’s first preaching—​and then often returned to. In later works it makes only sparse appearances. So Zarathustra is our crucial source for this topic—​as with many others in this chapter. But we will also have to weigh the possibility that Nietzsche’s later disuse of the term reflects a change in view on these issues. Nietzsche’s talk about superhuman is obviously related to his touting of heroes. His new values give special weight to persons rated as highest instances of the human type. He invests various historical figures with an aura and status that is one of the more striking features of his books. It is one main device by which he ramps up his readers’ aspirations. Among those he favors in this way are Napoleon, Caesar, and above all Goethe. 12 On Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch, see Kaufmann [1950/​1974, 307–​16] and Havas [2013]. 13 Russell quips [1945, 760]: “Nietzsche’s superman is very like Siegfried, except that he knows Greek.” And Copleston [1965, 188]: “In fine, Superman is all that ailing, lonely, tormented, neglected Herr Professor Dr. Friedrich Nietzsche would like to be.” 14 There is a passing reference to Übermenschen in GS.143. The adjective übermenschlich occurs more often in previous books.

Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return  479 Nietzsche offers these heroic figures as models and exemplars of traits he commends to us. Their most important and general feature is of course their strength; that is, their capacity for control, which is itself a capacity to command (see again Chapter 2 [§2.5]). Napoleon exercised command in the most obvious military and political ways, but even in his case I think Nietzsche has mainly in mind a more lasting kind of effect in Napoleon’s persisting impact on Europe’s outlook and institutions. So the crucial kind of control is exercised post mortem. Napoleon’s impact crucially lay in advancing the unification of Europe. And something like this is true for the other figures, too: they are great by bringing many into one. Nietzsche has a psychological theory of how this works. The hero’s ability to command others without is based on an ability to control and unite elements within him-​or herself. The hero appears at the right moment by organizing widespread social forces as they appear as elements (drives and affects) in his or her own psyche. The hero discovers a new way of synthesizing competing forces and so pioneers a new outlook that gets transmitted to later generations. But I  don’t think superhuman is just one of these heroes. They represent high achievement in the past, but Übermensch is a possibility in the future. Z.ii.4:  “Never yet has there been a superhuman.  .  .  . Truly, even the greatest I found—​all-​too-​human!”15 This puts us in a different relation to this figure: it’s not something to emulate and re-​achieve, but something never yet done. Moreover Nietzsche thinks that superhuman will stand at a unique and decisive point in human history. Like those heroes, superhuman will respond to a social-​ historical challenge, but one that occurs at the level not just of one society but of the species itself. Superhuman marks human’s transition to something higher. In 83:16[6]‌: “The superhuman is our next stage [Stufe]!” The superhuman is thus something contrasted with human. In 84:26[232] (WP.1001); “Not ‘humanity’ but superhuman is the goal!” This figure represents a rejection of human’s essence—​at least as this has been understood so far.16 Nietzsche stresses how this new goal expresses a great dissatisfaction with human and its defining features.17 The superhuman is a new type that is in some basic ways beyond the human, in the way that human is beyond the beast. Z.i.p.3: “What is the ape for human? A joke or a painful embarrassment. And human shall be just that for superhuman.”

15 83:13[26]: “There are still no superhumans!” Also 83:10[37], 83:10[41]. 16 Heidegger [1961/​1987, 215]: “The superhuman is the unconditional negation of the previous essence of human, particularly willed.” 17 The idea of superhuman contains a certain “contempt [Verachtung]” for human [e.g., 82–​ 3:4[214], 82–​3:5[1.269]]. Notice Clark’s interesting argument [1990, 276] that the Übermensch ideal, by giving human life value only as a means to something else, expresses Zarathustra’s own “need for revenge.”

480  Nietzsche Values Zarathustra opens his first speech: “I teach you the superhuman. Human is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome it?” [Z.i.p.3] The ambition to “overcome” [überwinden] what one is, to create beyond oneself something new into which one passes and “goes under,” is a main theme of the book. Nietzsche links the ambition with will to power itself: when one strives in this radical way, one embraces or realizes life’s character as will to power and becoming. One doesn’t cling to what is—​even to the human—​but presses for something radically more. Nevertheless, of course, this superhuman is conceived as something that human can and should aspire to become. There is a route to superhuman—​as not to god—​though it requires a radical or deep-​seated change.18 It requires renouncing and overcoming features that have long been essential to human’s self-​definition. So Übermensch, the new ideal, is not a god but also not merely “the very best human.” Rather it is an individual who will push past certain deep flaws and weaknesses in human, leading the way of a more general advance. This is why, I  think, none of those heroic figures from the past, not even Goethe, can count as an Übermensch.19 None of them made the radical break from deep human traits that Nietzsche wants; they are in this regard all “all-​ too-​human.” None of them pushed up against the limits of “the human” and pioneered a way to live beyond them. Übermensch is thus the name for a new type. In 87:10[17] (WP.866, LNp177):  “a stronger kind [Art], a higher type [Typus], that has different origin-​and preservation-​conditions than the average-​ human. My concept, my parable [Gleichnis] for this type is, as one knows, the word ‘superhuman.’ ”20 So this new type, as something human grows into, both is and isn’t “human.”21 Superhuman overcomes and renounces some things that were key parts of human’s sense of itself—​that it had taken to be its very essence. But it also more

18 But notice that in 88:14[125] (WP.136) Nietzsche uses übermenschlich to describe the way that religion places gods too far beyond us: “Religion has debased the concept ‘human’; its extreme consequence is that everything good, great, true is superhuman and only given through grace.” 19 To be sure, in the years after Zarathustra Nietzsche sometimes uses Übermensch to apply to past heroes. A.4: “In another sense there is a continual success, in the most different parts of the earth and the most different cultures, of individual cases that in fact represent a higher type: something that in relation to the totality of humanity is a kind of superhuman.” Cf. 87–​8:11[413]. Nevertheless the idea that an epochal break lies before us, for which we need a super-​creator, remains important to him. 20 87:9[153] (WP.898, LNp167) speaks of a “sovereign kind [Art],” a “race with its own life-​sphere.” And 85:35[72]: “There must be many superhumans: every good develops only among its equals. . . . A ruling race. To ‘the masters of the earth.’ ” 21 87:9[154] (WP.1027): “Human is nonanimal [Unthier] and superanimal; the higher human is nonhuman and superhuman: they belong together.” GM.i.16 calls Napoleon “this synthesis of nonhuman and superhuman.” Sometimes Nietzsche denies that a new species is involved. A.3:  “The problem I here pose is not what shall replace humanity in the sequence of beings [Reihenfolge der Wesen] (—​human is an end—​): but what type of human one shall breed, shall will, as of higher value, more worthy of life, surer of a future.” Cf. 87–​8:11[413].

Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return  481 thoroughly realizes other traits—​showing perhaps that these better deserve to be considered “essential.” Let’s start with the traits it overcomes. We can partition these by our diagnoses of the three basic problems with human we treated in Chapters 5–​7—​problems with our agency, our herd-​nature, and our morality. Superhuman’s chief overcoming is of morality. Morality is a system of norms purporting to be true or real, designed to “tame” members into the social group and, to this end, denigrating their strong bodily drives and desires. The first role of the Übermensch is to make the break with morality—​not merely by leaving it behind, but by making new values to replace it.22 When morality is overcome by exposing its lies, human will become something different. In 83:16[43]: “The ‘truth,’ the ‘annihilation of illusions,’ ‘also of moral illusions’—​as the great means of overwhelming humanness (their self-​destruction!).” Superhuman will even overcome—​at least partly, I suggest—​human’s posit of itself as a subject and agent.23 This posit is entangled in morality but lies even more deeply in us. Our biological species became human by each member’s learning to think of itself a certain way: (a) as a subject, the one abiding thing that is conscious and that “has” all this body’s experiences, and also (b) as an agent, with the abiding power to determine, by its acts of will, what the body does. In preparing for the Übermensch we are to experiment in dispensing with these misconceptions and incorporating the truth that we are complexes of drives and affects. Superhuman will also overcome—​I suggest further—​the kind of sociality or commonness Nietzsche labels “herd.” Or rather, superhuman will step outside the herd to a new degree, since we’ve seen that one must always keep roots in the common. Superhuman will institute a new sharable practice that brings persons into a less herdlike relation to a common perspective. Superhuman will found norms that cultivate a new degree of “individuality” in herd members. In ways as basic as these Nietzsche wants human to aspire to change itself. Übermensch is his name for the target of these hopes—​an individual who makes these related breakthroughs personally but, more importantly, who founds a new social existence that incorporates them. By founding a new practice, with its new values, words, and meanings, Übermensch initiates a new type; he or she also stands for this type. Although this new type breaks with human in these basic ways, there are other respects in which it “does better” than human some of the very things in which the latter most prides itself. Above all this is so for the will to truth. Übermensch 22 83:16[65] says that “the overcoming of morality is necessary” for superhuman. EH.iv.5 says that Zarathustra “does not hide that his type of human is a relatively superhuman type, is superhuman precisely in relation to the good, that the good and just would call his superhumans devils.” 23 Compare Havas’s account [2013] of the overman as distinguished by the different “temporal structure” of his or her agency.

482  Nietzsche Values is crucially distinguished by his or her ability to face the truth about the world and itself.24 So EH.iv.5: “At this point and nowhere else one must make an effort to understand what Zarathustra wills: this kind of human that he conceives of, conceives of reality as it is: it is strong enough for that—​, it is not estranged, displaced, it is [reality] itself, it has all of its frightful and questionable [character] even in itself, thus only can human have greatness.” Human becomes superhuman by incorporating truths: the truth that it itself is a system of drives and affects, the truth that its values can have no real authority other than their fitness for its own case. Another claim human has long made for itself is that it is free in a way no other creature can be; it takes this freedom to rest on its identity as subject/​agent. Although Nietzsche disputes that identity and denies that we are or can be free in the long-​standard sense of being a “first cause,” he does still take up that traditional ideal—​and transforms it, as we saw in Chapter 8 (§8.2). And this will be another of superhuman’s main achievements: by showing how to “incorporate” those truths into a shareable way of life, he or she makes possible a “free society” such as there has never been. This will be a society whose members are “free” in ways that really matter. They will be free from the guilt and bad conscience of morality, free from the agent-​illusion which so alienates human from its body, and free from at least some of the need to match their values to others’. They will have more of the ultimate freedom, to create values of their own.

12.2  Religions and gods Once Nietzsche has his ideal of the superhuman, it might seem he will have no need for gods. Indeed it is part of Zarathustra’s point to put superhuman in place of god; we’ve already noticed in Z.ii.2: “Once one said ‘god’ when one looked upon distant seas; but now I have taught you to say: superhuman.”25 Nietzsche’s plan is to “humanize” our ultimate ideal and to credit ourselves—​not an imaginary other—​as the source of our values. So it may well seem that the death of god is final for him—​that he leaves all gods quite behind in the same way that he rejects morality. Consider further how Thus Spoke Zarathustra treats gods. If Nietzsche meant this as scripture for a new religion,26 it would seem to be a religion 24 So Ansell-​Pearson [2006, 230–​1]: “when Nietzsche inquires after the incorporation of truth, he is in essence asking after the possibility of our becoming overhuman.” 25 Z.i.22: “ ‘Dead are all gods: now we will that the superhuman lives.’ ” Z.iv.8: “God has died: now we want—​the superhuman to live.” Also Z.i.22.3. 84–​5:31[27]: “—​just as the lower humans looked up to god, so should we rightly one day look up to my superhuman. Zarathustra 6.” 26 Young [2010, 366]: “Zarathustra is, in a word, intended to be the central, sacred text of the new religion that is to replace the now-​‘dead’ Christianity.”

Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return  483 without god or gods. One of Zarathustra’s earliest pronouncements is that “god is dead,” and he later embraces the title “Zarathustra, the godless” [Z.iii.5; repeated Z.iii.13, Z.iv.6].27 In Z.i.3 he associates faith in god with belief in an “afterworld” [Hinterwelt] and diagnoses both as expressing a suffering weariness with life: “that is what created all gods and afterworlds.” Zarathustra goes on (in i.3) to say, about a god he had once accepted: “Ah, you brothers, this god that I made was human-​work and -​madness, like all gods!” He seems on the whole quite anti-​god.28 And yet, despite Zarathustra’s claimed godlessness, the book’s overall view of gods is complex and ambiguous. Zarathustra’s hostility to gods is diagnosed, both implicitly and explicitly, and it is set in context. It is hedged by Zarathustra himself: when he first proclaims himself “Zarathustra, the godless” [iii.5] he does so only “for the ears” of the “teachers of submission.” And later [iv.14] he locates himself within the melancholy period when “the old god has died and no new god lies as yet in cradles and swaddling clothes.” His godlessness is also diagnosed by the “old pope” in iv.6: “ ‘Is it not your piety that no longer lets you believe in a god?’ ” So his rejection of god is not the book’s ultimate word. In addition Zarathustra’s overt hostility is undercut and opposed “from within” by the ways he shows himself to have—​in his own way—​gods himself. In Z.i.7 he expresses an openness to belief—​“I would only believe in a god that knew how to dance”—​and then reports a feeling of possession: “now a god dances through me.”29 And it is precisely in the book’s two “dance-​songs” [ii.10 and iii.15] that Zarathustra most speaks (sings) of his gods. In ii.10 he sings while the “little god” Cupid dances with girls; his song depicts Life and Wisdom as women—​his goddesses (though the word isn’t used). In iii.15 Life is again a woman/​goddess who now dances and converses with Zarathustra. When we widen our view beyond Zarathustra we find a similar ambiguity in Nietzsche’s stance toward god and religion:  sometimes highly damning assessments that seem dismissive of religion quite generally, but elsewhere approvals of religious sentiment and (it seems) even an embrace of his own god, Dionysus. Our challenge is to see how this favorable view of and indeed devotion to gods can be held together with that intense critique. In the end blanket judgments are not options for Nietzsche. He’s content with no utter judgment against or for religion or gods. Instead we must distinguish

27 In Z.iii.5 he asks “who is more godless than I, that I  might enjoy his instruction?” Brobjer [2000] points out that in 82:19[12] Nietzsche entitles one of GS’s planned chapters “Gedanken eines Gottlosen.” 28 81:12[21]: “The first book [of Z] as funeral address [Grabrede] on the death of god.” 29 But note the retrospective word in 88:17[4]‌(WP.1038): “Zarathustra himself indeed is merely an old atheist. One should understand him right! Zarathustra says he would [believe in a god who could dance]—​; but Zarathustra will not.”

484  Nietzsche Values kinds of religions30 and kinds of people they are or are not suited for. The crucial question for Nietzsche is, as always, what role a particular religion plays in a particular psyche or society. He saw himself, like Zarathustra, as overreacting in an earlier antipathy to gods. On better consideration he sees that what’s important about religion is why and how one has it—​what role it plays in one’s psyche. We’ve seen how the wrong turn by nihilism was its inference that once moral values are discredited there can be no values at all. And Nietzsche thinks it would be similarly misguided to infer from the death of our Judaeo-​Christian god that there can be no gods at all. In 85–​6:2[107] (WP.151, LNp79): “Religions perish by the belief in morality: the Christian-​moral god is not tenable: hence ‘atheism’—​ as if there could be no other kind of god.”31 As 85:39[13] puts it, “only the moral god is refuted.” And, vividly, 82:3[1.432]: “You call it the self-​decomposition of god, but it is only a skin-​shedding [Häutung]:—​he casts off his moral skin! And you shall soon see him again, beyond good and evil.” Our task, then, is to see how these positive views of religion can survive all those scorching objections to it. As so often elsewhere, even in this inauspicious case his lesson is not to jettison the attacked phenomenon but to refashion it to play a healthy and affirmative role. Before turning to the negative and positive moves, a few orienting points are in order. First, we must bear in mind that Nietzsche’s views about religion and gods shift. Our focus, as always, is on the “mature” works. But Nietzsche arrives at these mature views after passing through, first, Birth of Tragedy’s enthusiastic plea for a revival of a Greek-​like religion, and second, the “positivist” phase we’ve noticed before, in which he takes—​especially in Human, All-​too-​Human—​a distinctly more negative view of religion.32 I’ll touch on these earlier phases from time to time, but mostly focus on the “mature” views—​generously understood as those from the 1880s (i.e., from Daybreak on). Second, it will be helpful—​I’ll try to show—​to sort Nietzsche’s many diagnoses of religion into the three aspects or dimensions of experience he so often has in mind: thinking, willing, feeling.33 Sometimes his diagnosis focuses on religion as belief, sometimes as drive, sometimes as affect. Each of these can appear the main thing required if one is to “have” a god. 30 Golomb [2000] distinguishes “positive vs. negative religion” in Nietzsche’s view. See, too, Taha [2005/​2013]. 31 Also 86–​7:5[71] (WP.55, LNp118). 32 Reflected, e.g., in HH.i.115’s account of those religion is good for:  “People whose daily life appears to them too empty and monotonous easily become religious: this is understandable and forgivable; only they have no right to demand religiosity of those whose daily life is not empty and monotonous.” 33 See GS.354; 85:35[15] (WP.658, LNp18), 85:37[4]‌(LNp29), 85:38[8] (LNp36), 88:14[152] (WP.478). I  suggest that we understand these in broadly Kantian fashion, as meanings meant as (a) matching, (b) changing, and (c) being changed by the “referent.” A thought means itself to match what it’s about, an aim to alter it, or a feeling to have been altered by it.

Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return  485 Sometimes having a god seems a matter of “belief.” The word Nietzsche especially uses here, Glaube, means belief but more especially “faith.” Religion then seems to be a matter of positing a god, of thinking and claiming that a god exists. One includes a god or gods within one’s picture of things. Nietzsche is highly interested in different kinds of credence or belief and in the kind of “existence” or reality a god is posited to have. But belief can’t be sufficient for a religious relation to a god.34 One must also orient one’s values toward this god—​the values (as orienting signs) that direct one’s will. Believing in a god won’t count for much unless it affects how one tries to live. Gods have commonly stood in one or both of two relations to values: a god is taken as a model and value itself and/​or as the one who commands and legitimates a value. Yet even this isn’t enough for a fully or genuinely religious relation to a god. Indeed, as Nietzsche came to think, it’s still not the most important thing. For one must also feel in certain ways, both about this god and about the world in the light of this god. Here we come to religious sentiment—​to the religious affects and pathos that (I’ll try to show) are in the end most important to Nietzsche.

12.2.1 Diagnosing religion As we begin to look at Nietzsche’s diagnosis and critique of religion and gods, the first point must be that gods aren’t real. Gods are, one and all, human inventions and have no independent or real existence.35 It will eventually become a task, of course, to say just what “real” means here. But I think we can take it as a main point for Nietzsche, that there’s a very important—​and even primary—​sense (of “real”) in which it’s true. What is real (in this sense) are the attitudes humans have about gods, the complexes of human believing-​willing-​feeling in which (ideas of) gods figure; we might call this “religiousness.” These attitudes are entangled in and give meaning to certain social and individual practices (ways of life); these are the “religions.” These practices develop historically, in a way that layers many meanings into them. Seeing religion so, Nietzsche is supremely aware of the enormous complexity and diversity of these forms—​in how many different ways gods are meant

34 Indeed faith may be antithetical to true religiousness. 82:1[77]: “The believing [gläubige] human is the opposite of the religious human.” And 82:1[74]: “The free spirit as the most religious human there now is.” 35 HH.ii.225 compares belief in god to belief in witches; what works is the belief, not the god: “For all those occasions on which the Christian expects the direct intervention of a god but does so in vain—​because there is no god—​his religion is sufficiently inventive in reasons and excuses to pacify him.”

486  Nietzsche Values (believed in, aimed at, felt) and gods of how many different kinds. His diagnoses use psychology to identify the drives and affects that constitute those religious attitudes, and use history to describe the social processes that shape religions as transmitted practices. Often Nietzsche’s diagnoses hypothesize about the origin of religions. It’s notable how many such accounts he gives, and how different—​and seemingly incompatible—​these often are. Some of them assign principal motives to the “founders” of religions; others give more functional explanations of why religions occur in societies. In both cases they identify some aim or outcome of religion, which is relevant to assessing it. Often these accounts are offered in (published) sections or (Nachlass) notes entitled “The origin of religion.” Now of course a human thing’s origins are not, as Nietzsche himself stresses, conclusive as to its present meaning. By the principle we’ve often cited from GM.ii.12, any such original motives will have been overwritten by a great many others, as religious practice is reinterpreted for different interests down through the ages. Still, the motives he attributes to sources are revealing. I’ll discuss three, which we can correlate with the three aspects of “having” a god we distinguished just now. (i)  First, insofar as the religious relation to god is a matter of belief: Nietzsche speculates in HH.i.111 (which is headed “Origin of Religious Cult”) that human first posited gods in order to understand and explain the world. Without any notion of “natural causality,” human thinks everything must work by hidden human-​like wills:  “The whole of nature is in the conception of the religious human a sum of actions by conscious and volitional beings. . . .” In the belief that gods are these hidden causes, religious cult tries to influence them and thereby natural events. And insofar as religion does have this purpose, it is “once and for all closed to us” because we now understand nature better and reject those hidden wills.36 (ii)  Second, insofar as religious relation to god is a matter of willing: here the story of GM.ii has pride of place.37 Nietzsche explains (belief in) gods as arising as a strategy for social control. Society needs the allegiance of its members to the shared practices and values. Members must obey, and this is worked by inducing them to feel a debt and obligation to obey. At first, in very simple groups, it is the present leader (master) who commands. But as groups develop a memory and an allegiance to custom and heritage, they need authorities to command these as well. Initially these were the society’s (idealized) founding fathers. Then

36 See how D.96 hopes to unite “the ten to twenty million humans among the different peoples of Europe who no longer ‘believe in god.’ ” 37 We traced this story in Chapter 2 (§2.4) and can here go more quickly

Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return  487 GM.ii.19: “The fear of the progenitor and his power, the consciousness of debts toward him necessarily increases . . . to exactly the same degree that the power of the clan itself increases. . . . [I]‌n the end the progenitor is necessarily transfigured into a god. This may even be the origin of the gods, an origin, that is, out of fear!” Gods are introduced as commanders (and validators) of the social rules, invented to control members’ wills.38 (iii)  Third, insofar as religious relation to god is a matter of feeling: Nietzsche suggests that gods arise out of certain powerful affects. In 88:14[124] (WP.135, LNp261) (the note is headed “On the origin of religion”):  “The psychological logic is this:  the feeling of power, when it suddenly and overwhelmingly overcomes human,—​and this is the case in all great affects—​arouses a doubt in him about his person: he dares not think of himself as the cause of the astonishing feeling—​and so he posits for this case a stronger person, a divinity.”39 Here we suppose that we feel the collaborating presence of a god. I suggest that these three origin stories indicate Nietzsche’s path regarding religion. Although he pays attention to all three dimensions of religious experience from the start, he gradually reweights them in the order I’ve given. When he stresses that the ways of “having” a god is a matter of belief and will, he is largely negative. But when the weight comes to fall on religious feeling, he finds his main reason for a positive view of gods. It’s not surprising, to begin with, that the first origin-​story, which centers religion in belief, is offered in Nietzsche’s “positivist” book Human, All-​too-​Human. In his rebound from Wagnerian romanticism he elevates truth and reason.40 So he chiefly explains and also judges religion in this dimension. Thus he thinks of religion as principally an effort at understanding the world—​and judges it to stand now exposed as a failure and fraud in this role. Hence the more fully negative view.41 But as his vision of will to power grows on him, the stress shifts from belief to will. It’s not that he stops caring about truth. And he continues to judge religion for the false beliefs it involves; after all, he’s convinced (we’ve seen) that gods aren’t real. But now what matters most about religion is its effect on will; again

38 This analysis is anticipated in HH.i.96; see, too, HH.i.99. 39 This is anticipated in HH.i.134, 138. 40 We can hear this reaction against Wagner in 80:6[71]: “Indescribable disgust, when our educated phantasize about the necessity of . . . a renewal of religion! this lying rabble, that wills to become religious again through music and drama, and . . . lets go all honesty of thought and dives headfirst into the mystical mud!” 41 E.g., HH.i.129: “There is not enough love and goodness in the world for us to be permitted to give any of it away to imaginary things.” In a note from the period, 76:19[100]: “Religions do not express some kind of truth sensu allegorico, but no truth at all. . . . Not an age-​old priestly wisdom, but a fear of the inexplicable is the origin of religion.” See, too, 76–​7:23[99].

488  Nietzsche Values this determines both how he explains and how he judges it. So in GM.ii he sees religion as not chiefly a matter of belief, but of values (i.e., of the signs by which a will tries to grow). His judgment is still negative, but not for how religion is false. Instead he diagnoses how it spoils one’s values to have them as commands by an alien will. It’s also revealing that the third origin-​story, in a note from Nietzsche’s last year, shows religion in a more favorable light—​and does so by stressing its affective character. The affects are of ever greater importance to Nietzsche. They don’t displace drives nor his view that life is chiefly will to power. But the affective motives for religion become more perspicuous. And it’s here, I suggest, that Nietzsche finds its main positive point.42 He most values in religion the strong feeling or pathos it involves. He recognizes such feeling’s importance in himself and seeks to rescue it for those after him. He therefore looks for ways in which those negative impacts of religion on belief and will can be alleviated or removed. So let’s now examine more details of Nietzsche’s critique of religion—​his reasons against having gods—​sorting them as they bear on these three basic attitudes. (i) Religious belief. Nietzsche’s main objection to religious belief is that it is false. The principal such belief is of course belief in (the real existence of) gods, but religion also very often and very importantly involves belief in an “other world,” an “afterworld,” which is the domain of god(s) and to which human souls may be destined after death. Religion can also include belief in overall forces such as fate, which are not “personified” as gods yet have a supernatural status. But really there are no gods, no other world, and no such cosmic forces or aims.43 Let’s return to HH.i.111. This not only presents religion as mainly a matter of belief, but explains the belief (in gods) as adopted for the sake of understanding and explaining the world. Gods are posited in order to explain great natural forces. It’s a god that throws the lightning or raises the seas, and this explanation then supports practical efforts to influence these forces by supplication and appeasement. However the belief is (quite simply) false, and the believers’ reliance on it makes their practical efforts ridiculous.44 Nietzsche continues, in his later works, to judge religious belief as simply false. In GS.151 (another section headed “On the origin of religion”): “what led in early

42 Urpeth [2000] says that Nietzsche “stresses the primacy of affectivity” in religion. 43 80:3[133] lists ways moral and religious judgments are alike, including: “both imagine beings that do not exist, the religious judgments gods, the moral judgments good and evil humans and the like.” 44 85–​6:1[46] (LNp58) says that religion arises pre-​morally out of fear of hostile spirits and the effort to placate them. Also 85–​6:1[5]‌.

Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return  489 times to the assumption of an ‘other world’ was not a drive and need, but an error in the interpretation of certain natural processes, an embarrassing lapse of the intellect.”45 He further diagnoses this false belief as adopted in order to avoid facing disturbing truths. BGE.59: “Piety [Frömmigkeit], the ‘life in god,’ seen in this way, would appear as the subtlest and final offspring of the fear of truth . . . as the will to the inversion of truth, to untruth at any price.” A.9: “What a theologian feels as true must be false: one has here nearly a criterion of truth.” The epistemic failings of religious belief run deeper than this. Nietzsche often calls such belief not merely false, but a lie [Lüge]. Sometimes he seems to mean just to add rhetorical intensity in his abuse of falsehoods. But usually I think he means to say that the “believer” who states or accepts the falsehood realizes that it’s false and therefore means to deceive. In the main case this is a matter of lying to oneself (i.e., self-​deception). In this case the falsehood is “realized” only subconsciously. If piety indeed expresses a fear of truth (as in BGE.59), the believer must see the truth “at some level,” but then conceal it. So Nietzsche speaks of the priest’s “holy lie” [heilige Lüge].46 A.55: “The ‘holy lie’—​common to Confucius, the lawbook of Manu, Muhamed, the Christian church. . . . ‘The truth is there’: this means, wherever it is said, the priest lies.” He attributes such lies to the “religion-​founder” [Religionsstifter] in particular and returns many times to his peculiar psyche. HH.i.52 says that all “great deceivers” are so effective because at a certain point (in performance) they deceive themselves—​and that religion-​founders are distinguished by how they never or rarely “emerge from this state of self-​deception.”47 They lack the “intellectual conscience” that is so important to Nietzsche. So GS.319 says that religion-​founders lack one kind of honesty [Redlichkeit]: “they have not made their experiences a matter of conscience for knowledge.” Science is now publicly exposing the falsity of religious belief, in part by exposing the origins of that belief. It makes those self-​deceptions much more difficult to sustain. In 76–​7:23[13]:  “Science is the death of all religions.” HH.i.133: “with insight into its origin [Entstehung] that belief falls away.”48 As 45 Similarly 80:6[290] says that “what drove [human] to the posit of an other world, were errors of interpretation of particular events, hence false judgments of the intellect—​” whereas the feeling of “metaphysical need” is “an after-​effect of [religion’s] decline.” See also 80:6[218] on the shabby intellectual basis of religion. EH.ii.1 says that “God is a crude answer, an undelicatesse against us thinkers.” Back in HH.i.28: “but what thinker still has need of the hypothesis of a god?” 46 See also 88:15[42] (WP.141), 88:15[45] (WP.142). 47 By contrast (with this confidence in the efficacy of self-​deception) HH.i.122 suggests that a religious teacher needs “blind pupils” who can believe in the teaching more unreservedly. See also D.62 (headed “On the origin of religions”), which gives a very nuanced account how a religion-​founder is able to interpret his own opinions as “revelation” [Offenbarung]. 48 Already in UM.ii.7: “a religion which is to be known scientifically through and through, is at the same time, at the end of this path, destroyed.” HH.i.9: “When one has exposed these methods as the foundation of all present religions and metaphysics, one has refuted them.”

490  Nietzsche Values we know, Nietzsche’s broad story is that the will to truth, evolved from Christian morality, attacks and undermines the religious faith that had grounded that morality. Now Nietzsche seems to side very much with science here—​and with all those epistemic complaints against religious belief. Surely he holds fast to the truth that gods aren’t real. He prides himself on his own intellectual conscience, as GS.319 goes on to say: “But we, we others, reason-​thirsty, want to look our experiences so strongly in the eye, like a scientific experiment, hour by hour, day by day!” Self-​deceiving himself by believing in gods couldn’t survive such constant self-​ scrutiny. And so A.36:  “We alone, we spirits who have become free, have the prerequisites for understanding something that nineteen centuries have misunderstood,—​the honesty that has become instinct and passion, that makes war on the ‘holy lie’ more than any other lie.” (ii) Religious will. We’ve already noticed that the will’s practical interests are hurt by the fact that religious belief is false: one wastes one’s effort in supplicating gods to favor one’s success. Will adopts illusory means in pursuing its ends. But religion has another kind of impact on will that is much more damaging. It gives will the wrong ends, and (even worse) it gives it the wrong way of having ends. Nietzsche’s main objection to religious will is that it obeys. It takes its values—​ the signs it steers by—​from an ultimate authority, god, whom it considers to validate and command those values. This estranges us from our proper role of making our own values, suited to our own case. And the further problem is that we take on the wrong values. For religious will uses the gods not just as commanders of values, but as models—​as ideals one tries to emulate. Yet gods are imagined as so radically different from us that these ideals are unsuited and indeed impossible. So it “sickens” the will.49 (a) Consider first how religion sets up an “inhuman” ideal. HH.i.133:  “The Christian who compares his being with god’s is like Don Quixote, who undervalued his own courage because he had in his head the miraculous deeds of the heroes from knightly romances; the standard of measurement in both cases belongs to the realm of fable.” Now of course in one sense gods are not really foreign: they’re our own fictions, after all. But human makes this religious ideal by negating some of its own irremovable features. This god-​ideal excludes, in particular, our human drives and affects. So GM.ii.22: “In ‘god’ [human] conceives the ultimate opposites he can find to his genuine and inescapable animal-​instincts”; this reflects “his will to set up an ideal—​that of the ‘holy god’—​, so that in the face of this he can be tangibly certain of his absolute unworthiness.” The god-​ideal excludes the human body, so



49

85–​6:1[247] (LNp65): “How humans were sick in god and estranged from the human.”

Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return  491 that the social member will model itself as a subject-​agent (or spirit or soul) distinct from all the bodily drives and affects and tasked to control them. Living with this inhuman ideal has a demoralizing effect. So HH.i.132 speaks of the harmfulness of having to compare oneself not with other humans but with “a being which is capable only of those actions that are called unegoistic, and lives in constant consciousness of a selfless mode of thought, with god; it is because [human] looks in this bright mirror that his own being appears to him so dismal, so uncommonly distorted.” And HH.i.141 adds that Christian moral requirements are set so high that they’re unattainable precisely because their purpose is “not that [human] should become more moral, but that he should feel as sinful as possible.” Besides demoralizing us, this god-​ideal spoils our ability to make distinctions among humans; it makes it harder to notice rank-​order. So 85–​6:1[66]:  “The human-​love of Christians, which makes no distinction, is first possible by the constant view of god, in relation to which the rank-​order between human and human becomes vanishingly small, and the human itself becomes so insignificant that the scale excites no interest: as from a high mountain great and small become antlike and similar.” (b) Even more damaging than the way religion sets up god as its ideal, is the way it makes god the authority who commands all ideals and values. Here it appeals to and strengthens our instinct to obey. I think Nietzsche sees this as the main reason for religion’s widespread appeal: it meets a need we all have by our ingrained herd-​instinct, our need to obey. Religion takes advantage of that need and sets human’s whole framework of values into this passive, obedient mode. Zarathustra rejects gods because he refuses to obey in his values this way.50 Religion does this, moreover, in service of society and its norms. Society needs a general conformity to norms. This conformity is worked by positing authoritative commanders of those norms:  first the people’s ancestors, then its gods (as we saw from GM.ii.19). So gods are set up as mouthpieces for these social norms. HH.i.472: “the unknowledgeable will think they see the hand of god and patiently submit to instructions from above (in which concept divine and human government are usually fused).” The Christian god plays this role of commanding values in an especially extreme or emphatic way. This god demands the strictest obedience and surveils and judges us even in our thoughts and feelings. It pursues us, as HH.i.132 puts it, with a “chastising justice.” So Christianity appeals especially to those who

50 Z.i.5: “I do not will [my good] as the law of a god.” In Z.ii.2 Zarathustra says about his own will to create: “Away from god and gods this will has lured me: what would there be to create if gods—​were there!”

492  Nietzsche Values strongly need to obey. D.60: “Christianity has embraced within itself the collective spirit of countless submissives [Unterwerfunglustiger].”51 The universal herd-​instinct gives everyone some will (and need) to obey, but Nietzsche thinks that persons, societies, and social periods differ in the strength of this will. GS.347: “Faith is always most desired and most urgently needed where will is lacking; for will, as the affect of command, is the decisive mark of sovereignty and strength. That is, the less someone knows how to command, the more urgently does he desire someone who commands, who commands severely—​a god, prince, the social order. . . .” The remark goes on to say that Christianity and Buddhism owe their rise to a widespread “sickening of the will” that made people ripe for faith (i.e., for belief in a commanding authority). This story helps explain religion’s unholy alliance with morality. They are deeply entangled because they share that main function of reinforcing obedience to norms. In the early note 76–​7:23[87]: “We call that moral, which subordinates itself with respect to a recognized law and acts according to it, be it a state-​law, be it the voice of god in the form of religious command, be it only the conscience itself, or philosophical ‘duty.’ ” This two-​pronged critique of religion’s effect on will seems deeply damning by Nietzsche’s own standards. Religion expresses and furthers a basic misdirection of will. It gives us an inhuman ideal (a)—​and so a wrong aim, an aim away from our own power. And it cultivates obeying rather than commanding (b)—​and so a wrong way to have aims, a deference to another’s power (the commander’s). By Nietzsche’s basic value-​standard of power—​which we saw in Chapter 2 he claims to extract from life—​religion seems fatally flawed. (iii) Religious feeling. But Nietzsche comes to see—​I suggest—​that it is the feeling or affect in religion that matters most. There is a way that a religious attitude can feel, that is indispensable for the life he advocates. But before turning to this positive point let’s look at the other, undesirable affects Nietzsche also associates with religion. For he has complaints to raise against it in this dimension as well. GM.ii’s story about religion’s function of social control—​how it tightens allegiance to social rules by treating them as god’s commands—​describes not just its impact on will (as earlier) but also on affects. He describes here a negative religious pathos which he attributes especially to Christianity. The affects, like the drives, are designed to favor obeying. One affect especially has served for this:  societies cultivate a feeling of debt toward themselves—​and toward the gods that stand for them. This debt is a burden felt from the past, felt indeed as a guilt over what one has owed and not repaid.52 And mixed in with this guilt 51 84:26[407] suggests that religion-​founders interpret their “thou shalt” as the command of god because they lack the courage to command these values themselves. 52 See again Chapter 4 (§4.2) and Chapter 5 (§5.3) on Nietzsche’s genealogy of debt and guilt.

Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return  493 is a fear of being punished for this lack—​by society and by the gods that represent it. These affects of guilt and fear serve the main social function of religion. GM.ii.19: “Perhaps here is the origin of the gods, an origin, that is, out of fear!” Nietzsche goes on in GM.ii.20–​22 to describe how this sense of debt grew in pace with god so that, under Christianity’s “maximum god,” there is also “a maximum of feelings of guilt” [ii.20]. This guilt is, moreover, transmuted into “bad conscience” by the priest’s retargeting of drives against themselves; guilt becomes a will to hurt oneself by denying and vilifying the drives. In Christianity, “this human of bad conscience has taken over the religious presupposition in order to drive his self-​torture to its most gruesome severity and sharpness” [ii.22]. This maximal god now examines every one of our thoughts and feelings and judges us for them under threat of eternal damnation. When bad conscience is added to guilt and fear, the religious pathos becomes especially toxic. Nietzsche’s harsh analysis of this affective cluster is a large part of his critique of Christianity. He has this pathos in mind in 84:25[512]: “The religious affect is the most interesting sickness that human has so far fallen into.” This negative pathos can’t have formed just as a strategy for binding to social norms. Nietzsche thinks it must have had some other large-​scale function and appeal. He explains it as a response to widespread suffering—​to the situation of all those stymied in life, unable to act on their aggressive drives, unable to see a path to growth, and struggling just to hang on. Such religion appeals to a depressed and despairing type of human. It offers, first, an alleviation of that suffering by inventing an “afterworld” one can hope to escape to.53 And it also offers a distraction from and substitute for that suffering in that very cluster of affects we’ve described. This negative pathos spreads through a population of sufferers; they adopt it because it sustains them in life.54 Nietzsche stresses that it doesn’t cure them or make them any stronger. Indeed it might even be better for the whole were they not sustained. It also spreads their discontent with life: it infects with those negative affects those not in need of them. So D.53 says that “life has been made most gloomy” by religion’s invention of sin. It might seem that this account leaves little room for any positive religious feelings. The guilt and fear toward god serve the broad societal function of religion. Their intensification and mixing with bad conscience responds to human’s widespread condition of suffering. Christianity’s pathos thus seems not just an unfortunate turn by religion, but a kind of ultimate version of it—​an intensification of the very feelings that serve religion’s main purposes. 53 Z.i.3 “the body it was that despaired of the earth”—​and invented an afterworld. 54 84:25[300]: “Sense of religion: the failures and unfortunates should be preserved, and through an improvement of mood (hope and fear) held back from suicide.”

494  Nietzsche Values But Nietzsche thinks that, all along, there have also been other strong affects involved in religion. Other types of persons—​healthier and stronger ones—​ have also taken hold of it and imparted their own affective coloring to it.55 This happens especially when a reigning “nobility” remakes the religion to express and further its own active and affirmative stance. Nietzsche sometimes imagines this as a healthy middle historical stage, intermediate between religion’s raw beginnings and its later democratic (“slave” and “herd”) turn. His main case of a “noble religion” is, once again, that of the ancient Greeks. Its deep affective basis is a strong satisfaction and gratitude for life, and this is what its religious feeling expresses.56 When religion is redesigned for that active and affirmative stance, its gods cease to function as targets of guilt, bad conscience, and fear. Indeed the Greeks use their gods not to magnify their guilt (as Christianity does), but to ease it: they blame their misdeeds on interfering gods [GM.ii.23]. More importantly, they also associate their best moments with gods—​the moments in which they feel the greatest heightening of power. They feel this sudden access of power as the inspiration of an indwelling, collaborating god. It’s for the sake of such special moments, I suggest, that Nietzsche promotes a new religion and gods. That religion’s main purpose is to glorify, cultivate, and orient such moments by interpreting them as achieved unities with god. Let’s try to mark at least some general features of this hoped-​for religion. The critical diagnoses we’ve just reviewed help us delineate what he does want.

12.2.2 New religion We saw in Chapter 11 Nietzsche’s will to found new shared values or norms; he thinks these norms will need the help of a new religion. So BGE.61: “The philosopher, as we understand him, we free spirits —​, as the human of the most comprehensive responsibility, who has the conscience for the overall development of human: this philosopher will use religions for his work of cultivation and education.” This religion will abet and support the new values we’ve been looking at in Part III. But these values aren’t moral values, and religion won’t support them in the way Christianity supports morality. It won’t treat its gods as commanding these values. It won’t even posit its gods as real: they won’t belong to a theory of

55 I think it’s too simplifying to say, with Taha [2005/​2013, 88], that there are “two kinds of religiosity, two kinds of gods: the god of masters and the god of slaves.” But Nietzsche does tend to think of two opposite religious sensibilities. 56 BGE.49. Also 80:7[175].

Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return  495 things. Nietzsche’s new religion will instead serve his values by contributing (to the new human life) a certain affectivity or pathos. It’s to support a particular feeling that he wants a new religion for his (imagined) post-​Christian and post-​moral society. Religion can express and foster a certain affect that his new values can’t do without. And grouped around it are a few further affects that abet it; together these make up the religious sensibility or pathos he favors. Its importance reflects, personally, the effects of a series of intense experiences he underwent in the early 1880s, which left lasting effects on his affective temperament.57 So having-​a-​god is justified by the way of feeling it supports, and this advantage overrides the belief-​and will-​centered disadvantages. Religion is non-​optimal by the criteria of thinking (it lies) and willing (it obeys). But it is optimal by the criterion of feeling, and this motivates Nietzsche’s effort to ameliorate those risks religion poses to belief and will. He wants to find a truer way of believing in gods and a healthier way of valuing them because he wants to accommodate—​in his life, in his imagined society—​that valuable feeling. Let’s go back over the three aspects of religiousness, now in reverse order. (iii) The new religious feeling. The indispensable religious pathos is an extreme and sudden “feeling of power”—​feeling an increase of strength. But it experiences this heightening not just in relation to itself, but in a joy directed at everything around it. It therefore expresses its own elevation by “saying Yes” in the way we met in Chapter 9. Nietzsche’s new religious pathos is, first, feeling this affirmation of all. So it is a love of the world, including oneself: it is feeling them to be transcendingly beautiful (or sublime). Since the ideal is to say Yes to everything, religious feeling must extend just as far. So the new religion will be, in one way, a pantheism—​will feel everything to be divine.58 It’s important that these are special moments, moments that stand out from the main pattern of one’s life. One feels oneself elevated above all the rest of one’s life and indeed even above the world whose divinity one feels. These moments are felt as discontinuous, felt as inexplicable, and as therefore needing to be attributed to a god. So D.62: “he does not dare to consider himself the creator of such happiness and ascribes the cause . . . to god.”59 But here (as not in the case of our misdeeds) it is a god in alignment with us, one who adds to our own powers that

57 See Jaspers’s account [1936/​1997, 91–​101] of this transformation and suggestion that it must have had a biological basis. 58 Young [2006, 199] ascribes pantheism to Nietzsche. 59 BGE.292 says that the philosopher “is struck by his own thoughts as from outside, as from above and below, as by his kind of experiences and lightning strikes.” And we should remember here the famous GS.341: “Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘you are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.’ ”

496  Nietzsche Values inexplicable surplus.60 This feeling of divine possession is the second ingredient in the new religious pathos. This pathos occurs especially where there is indeed the greatest achievement of power, which is in the moment of creation: the act of inventing a new meaning by embedding it in a work. The founding case is Homer, who feels the goddess singing through him.61 In Ecce Homo Nietzsche retrospectively attributes this experience to himself, back when he was writing his new bible, Zarathustra. He gives [EH.iii.Z.3] a remarkably detailed account of his experience of such “inspiration” [Inspiration]; this is “involuntary to the highest degree, but happens as in a storm of feeling-​free, of being unconditioned, of power, of divinity.” His great confidence in that book reflects his confidence in the special experience he had in writing it. We should remark that there are two ways this ideal pathos “feels divinity.” The first is that pantheism: one feels all life to be divine, in its deep and innocent effort to expand and grow. This does not involve “personifying” all these divine entities individually. They are, each and every one of them, divine, but not gods; nor is their whole a god. Where this pathos feels a personified god, I suggest, is not “out there” in the all it affirms, but within the feeling itself. One feels the presence of a god in this feeling, by feeling this feeling as raised above the common divinity of that all; this is the second way this pathos “feels divinity.” In feeling everything divine, one also feels this feeling especially divine—​and in a way that inspires the posit (in feeling) of an assisting god. So there are, as it were, different “levels of divinity.” To be sure, sometimes Nietzsche does speak of that all as “god,” in thinking of it as united into and constituting a single thing. In 86–​7:5[71] (WP.55, LNp118):  “Does it make sense to conceive of a god ‘beyond good and evil?’ Would a pantheism in this sense be possible? If we remove the idea of purpose from the process do we nevertheless affirm the process?—​This would be the case if something within that process were achieved at every moment of it—​and always the same thing.” Nietzsche associates this idea with Spinoza, whom the note goes on to cite. But I think he is largely skeptical about any such unity. He is reluctant to think that the all hangs together into any single intentionality. The world’s divinity lies mainly not in any overall order or structure, but in the character of every 60 I must acknowledge that Nietzsche also develops a diagnosis and critique of the practice of attributing one’s powerful experiences to a god; so, e.g., 88:14[124] (WP.135, LNp261) treats it as “naive.” 88:14[125] (WP.136) attributes this to human’s “self-​belittlement.” Also 86–​7:7[3]‌(WP.677, LNp130), 88:14[127] (WP.137). Nietzsche thinks he escapes these risks by keeping in mind the “metaphorical” status of his gods, developed later. 61 85:36[35] (WP.659, LNp27) speaks of artists” “wonderment” at how their best work is done. But note the skepticism about artists” claims to “inspiration” in HH.i.155–​156 and about religious “possession” in 88:14[68] (WP.48).

Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return  497 individual thing. We saw in Chapter 9 how Nietzsche wants the affirmation to apply not just to the whole but to each and every part of that whole. Every part is to be felt as good and indeed divine. And the attitude to be directed on all of these parts is love—​another link with Spinoza. Nietzsche aspires to found a more honest religion of love—​one not built on a deeper, concealed hatred, as he takes Christianity to be.62 This love must be for the world as it is and not in a prettified image (as within the Apollonian in Birth of Tragedy). One must love it while recognizing its character as becoming and the prevalence of suffering and destruction—​must love it despite seeing that Schopenhauer was mostly right. 87:9[42] (WP.1005, LNp149): “—​against [the view] that an ‘in-​itself-​of-​things’ must necessarily be good, holy, true, one, Schopenhauer’s interpretation of the in-​itself as will was an essential step: only he did not understand how to deify [vergöttlichen] this will; he remained stuck in the moral Christian ideal. /​ . . . He did not grasp that there can be infinite kinds of abilities-​to-​be-​different, even of abilities-​to-​be-​god.” We ourselves must deify, in feeling, the world as it is—​and especially as it is a world “of becoming.” Nietzsche compacts into this term both metaphysical and existential sense—​as we saw in Chapter 4. It is, first, the moment of transition, in which one thing is destroyed and another begins. One feels the divinity of this passage in the creative act, in the joy of making and destroying. And second, “becoming” designates all the “evil” inherent in such a world. It includes all the suffering involved in the melee of warring wills that make up life. One must feel the divinity of this very suffering, exemplified in the sufferings of childbirth.63 It is in seeing the world as divine in its suffering that Nietzsche feels himself inhabited by his god, Dionysus. This god personifies the elevation one feels in seeing how the world’s suffering is redeemed as good after all. In 87:10[203] (WP.1035): “God conceived as becoming free from morality, pressing into himself the whole fullness of life’s opposites and redeeming, justifying them in divine agony: god as the beyond, the above of the wretched loafers’ morality of ‘good and evil.’ ” All of that suffering becoming is divine, but still more divine is the godly recognition of it. Nietzsche tasks us to feel the divinity of whatever seems worst to us. What’s worst to Zarathustra is the “small human”; what’s worst to us, perhaps, is innocent suffering. The task is to “feel divine” not just the world-​as-​a-​whole but its parts, and above all the very parts of the world that one finds it hardest to bear. Only so does one reach that pantheistic feeling of love for all. 62 Contrast Russell’s verdict [1945 767]: “It does not occur to Nietzsche as possible that a man should genuinely feel universal love, obviously because he himself feels almost universal hatred and fear, which he would fain disguise as lordly indifference.” 63 As we noticed in Chapter 4 (§4.3), Nietzsche approves the Greek mystery-​religion’s sanctification of “the agony of the child-​bearer” [TI.x.4].

498  Nietzsche Values This ability to affirm life in what is most terrible about it is the “tragic” stance. TI.x.5: “The psychology of the orgiastic, as an overflowing feeling of life and strength where even pain acts as a stimulus, gave me the key to the tragic feeling. . . . Saying yes to life, even in its strangest and harshest problems, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types—​that is what I called Dionysian.” Thus he proposes “that you yourself may be the eternal joy in becoming,—​the joy that includes even the eternal joy in negating.” So the new religious pathos loves all the world as divine, but it feels a personal divinity in the special character of its own state; Dionysus is here, not everywhere. In 82:3[1]‌: “To see the tragic natures perishing and still be able to laugh, despite the deepest understanding, feeling, and pity for them—​is divine.”64 And, I suggest, this pathos therein feels its own state as elevated above the divinity it recognizes in the all. It feels the particular divinity of its very feeling of the divinity of all. The fusion of these two points—​that everything is divine, but that feeling this is especially divine—​is central to the new religion. The second point adds to the pantheism a way of “ranking” things all recognized as divine. It adds an ideal, which would be missing in an equal deification of all. The high status of this experience is a crucial part of the experience itself. It is, after all, a fullest or most intense form of “the feeling of power,” the feeling of stepping up to a new and higher level of control. So it feels itself as a heightening, an elevation and ennoblement of life itself. In fullest form, it feels itself ascending to “the viewpoint of god”—​from which, as Heraclitus puts it, “all things are beautiful and good and just” [DK 102]. One feels oneself “one” with a god.65 It belongs to this feeling that all life is divine, but that not all life succeeds in seeing life so. The religious pathos feels itself exceptional. This second relation to divinity involves the feeling of gratitude [Dankbarkeit].66 One is grateful not merely for being a part of the all, but for being raised to this loving recognition of the all. We might see this as what guilt is transmuted into. One feels grateful for this sudden surplus of power. So, bringing together many of these points, A.16 describes a healthy religion:  “A people that still believes in itself will still have its own god. In the figure of this god, a people will worship the conditions that have brought it to the fore, its virtues,—​it 64 87–​8:11[138] (WP.341, LNp227): “ ‘deification’ felt in the highest fullness /​in the most delicate selection /​in the destruction and scorning of life.” Note EH.i.3’s reference to Nietzsche’s own “divinity.” 65 84:26[312]:  “Misunderstanding of the body:  Rausch, lust, ecstatic cruelty as divinization [Vergöttlichung], as being-​one with a god.” 66 BGE.49: “What is astonishing about the religiousness of the ancient Greeks is the unrestrained fullness of gratitude that flows from it.” 84:25[300] says that the sense of religion “among the noble” is “an overflow of thanks [Dank] and elevation, which is too great for a human to have been able to produce.” 84:25[339] speaks of the “amount of gratitude in Greek religion.”

Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return  499 projects the pleasure it takes in itself, its feeling of power, into a being that it can thank for all of this.” This sense of possession and elevation by an indwelling god also has an important sexual force for Nietzsche. The relation to that indwelling god is a sexual relation, even involving an imaginary intercourse. We should remember that this pathos happens especially in those creative moments in which one “brings forth” a new vision of things in a lasting work. Patient and god meet sexually to bring to birth the new being, the work, that embodies this vision. So the aid the god is felt to contribute includes a sexual heightening. This is why Nietzsche often characterizes this special pathos as Rausch. This feels that elevation in power,67 but in an “intoxication” or “frenzy” with a strong sexual element. One is possessed in love for the god or goddess. One loves him or her as beautiful, and the sexualized quality of this beauty is transferred to the world as a whole. Aroused in the feeling of sharing (with god or goddess) that creative moment, one loves all the world as beautiful in this same way: one feels it all to have the power to excite this same Rausch. Religious feeling, the aesthetic love of beauty, and sexuality are all fused in this idea of Rausch.68 We’ll come back to this religious pathos in §12.3 when we look at eternal return; this will add to how that pathos feels about “the all.” But here let’s pull together the main elements of this special feeling into a single formula. Nietzsche’s religious pathos involves: (a) feeling an extreme boost in power, (b) in which one is raised to a height by a favoring power, (c) a height from which one sees the beauty and divinity of all, (d) even in its character of becoming, (e) so that one welcomes the idea that it will all come again. (ii) The new religious will. Although I think the main point of Nietzsche’s new religion is to promote and cultivate this special feeling, he also wants it to have certain effects on will. He wants to reduce or eliminate the adverse effects identified earlier, but also wants religion positively to help will, both by stimulating and by directing it. Religion will have these effects by putting references to god into our values. To begin with, even Christianity has had some positive effects on will. Although it ultimately sets its ideal “too high” (in an inhuman god), it does at least set it high. It sets human toward goals that are difficult; it thereby cultivates (in some) aspiration and effort. This is the real good of the Christian saint: he impresses by the great strength of will he shows his power over his drives and affects. So BGE.51 describes how “the most powerful” have always “bowed

67 TI.ix.8:  “What is essential in such Rausch is the feeling of increased strength and fullness.” 88:14[117] (WP.800): “The state of pleasure that one calls Rausch is precisely a high feeling of power.” 68 I offer a somewhat differently oriented account of Rausch in Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (2004, ch.4 §2).

500  Nietzsche Values worshipfully before the saint” because they “sensed the superior force that sought to test itself in such a conquest”; “they honored something in themselves when they honored the saint.” Even the saint’s asceticism has a positive side, as a lesson in discipline.69 It’s the loss of such difficult ideals that Nietzsche most regrets as Christian faith declines. Our challenge, as we saw in Chapter 11, is to find, on the other side of nihilism, a new strenuous goal for human. Nietzsche offers his ideal of saying Yes, which has built into it, we must remember, an epistemic component or criterion. It is not just any gladness at things, but a wise gladness, a love for the world that sees it as it is; it sets the double task of loving the world even in the truth of it. The epistemic half of this task is itself never-​ending since one can never face reality well enough. The need to love even in the face of the ugly truth is especially hard in one’s own case as one grows ever more honest about oneself. Thus the new religion, setting up this special pathos as the ideal to be aimed at, sets a high hurdle for the wills of its holders. In 80–​1:8[10]: “To turn us religious out of pity for others? Pfui! We must raise them to our courage! And this is possible! Be it precisely through fatalism!” (We’ll return to fatalism in §12.3.) Religion must sustain this hard task, but without the negative impacts on will and values he thinks Christianity has also had. So it will avoid (a) depicting its gods as inhuman and unattainable ideals and (b) presenting these gods as commanding or imposing values. In both respects Nietzsche thinks the ancient Greek religion did better; this is one way it’s “higher” than Judaism and Christianity.70 This reflects that religion’s “nobler” character: it projects its gods as a higher stratum of nobility who are to be emulated but not obeyed. So HH.i.114: “The Greeks did not see the Homeric gods as set above them as masters. . . . They saw as it were only the reflection of the most successful exemplars of their own caste, that is to say an ideal, not an antithesis of their own nature. They felt interrelated with them. . . .” They felt indeed in a competitive relation to them, as van Tongeren [2000, 111] well develops: the Greeks thought god and human unequal, but “in a productive manner; they are bound to each other in contest.” So the presence of gods fosters not an obedient and reactive stance, but an active and agonistic one. The Greeks could stand in this competitive relation because their gods were on the human scale—​didn’t so far and decisively exceed them that their only plausible option was to obey. Nietzsche wants religion to recover some of these features.

69 BGE.61: “Asceticism and puritanism are almost indispensable means for educating and ennobling a race that wishes to become master over its origins among the rabble.” 70 85–​6:1[4]‌(WP.1042). Compare the early 70:3[77]: “The Greek religion higher and deeper than all later ones; its union with art.” See van Tongeren [2000] on the course Nietzsche taught at Basel in 1875–​1876 and 1877–​1879 on “The Religion [Gottesdienst] of the Greeks.”

Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return  501 (a) So the new gods will be humanlike gods. They will be thought of as if embodied; that is, as possessing (and being possessed by) the same drives and affects as human—​only all the more so. They are modeling, after all, the ultimate intensifications and feelings of power by these drives and affects. They are personifications of these attitudes in which one feels the world divine. Hence we must “de-​moralize” gods: they, too, are beyond good and evil, in viewing everything as good. They feel this Yes in a human-​like way. Thus they sanctify the human body, and in particular the sex-​drive, as the key drive of life. So GM.ii.23 says that the Greek gods were “reflections of noble and autocratic humans in whom the animal in human felt itself deified and did not tear itself apart, did not rage against itself.”71 (b) The new gods will not be commanders of values, but chosen models for them. The new religion won’t control its practitioners’ wills by offering rules it presents as god’s commands. Instead it will enhance these practitioners’ ability to set values for themselves by offering a plurality of gods available as models for different kinds of lives, each best chosen by a different kind of person.72 One chooses a god to model the highest form of the activity in which one finds one’s best moments—​and this choice is revisable. The goal in each case is to achieve that feeling of elevation in whatever is the distinctive activity whose emblem is one’s god. So Dionysus is one among many. The new religion will be not just a pantheism (in its view of the divinity of all) but a polytheism: it makes available a variety of personified gods as available collaborators in one’s highest moments. By this polytheism the new religion encourages the individuality of its holders. It recognizes that they will be suited for different versions of that pathos and need different models for these highest moments.73 88:17[4]‌(WP.1038) speaks of Nietzsche’s own multiple gods: “—​And how many new gods are still possible! . . . For myself, in whom the religious, i.e., god-​forming instinct wants from time to time to become living again: how otherwise, how differently has the godly each time revealed itself to me!” Later: “I would not doubt that there are many kinds of gods.”74 71 See GS.139 on Paul’s “evil eye” for the passions [Leidenschaften] and the opposite relation to passions of the Greeks. 80:6[357] asks why the Greeks “did not have such a tension between divine beauty and human ugliness.” 72 72–​3:19[110] (PTp29): “The ancient Greeks without normative theology: everyone has the right to invent [dichten] about it and can believe what he wants.” 73 So GS.143 on “the greatest advantage of polytheism”: one is able to behold “a plurality of norms [eine Mehrzahl von Normen]”; this made it possible for there to be individuals. “In polytheism the free-​spiriting and many-​spiriting of human attained its first preliminary form—​the strength to create for ourselves our own new eyes.” 74 van Tongeren [2000, 109], drawing on Nietzsche’s Basel lectures on Greek religion: “The principle of development of Greek religion, as well as its greatness, consists in this plurality which it harbors.” The Greeks had not only multiple gods, but multiple versions of these gods, with different cults in different locales.

502  Nietzsche Values But behind Dionysus and these other gods stands Nietzsche’s ultimate god, or rather goddess, Life. Dionysus and the others are avatars for Life. They represent various highest forms of life—​highest, that is, among those available to human in this age. They represent life in its creative, transformative moments, in which it reaches a new mastery and command. In making gods signify heights of real human life, Nietzsche thinks he reverses an age-​old motive for having gods. EH.iv.8: “The concept ‘god’ invented as a counter-​concept to life.” A god now stands not for a bodiless, timeless perfection, but for life as it is—​as becoming and will to power. These gods are “models” for human lives, but they will also stand in more intimate relation to us. They will be imagined as sometimes “entering” human, such that the divine will either supersedes or fortifies the human one. This experience of “possession” was important to Nietzsche and will be central in the new religion. But it’s important to think of this possession a particular way, so that it helps and doesn’t hurt our will. Again his model is the Greeks: such possession takes away responsibility for “bad” acts anomalous to one’s dominant will but enhances that responsibility for peak performances. This is the opposite, he thinks, of how Christianity has usually worked on the sense of responsibility. So on the one hand gods are available to alleviate guilt. Each represents a different balance of the psychic powers, the drives and affects. When one has acted from the sudden eruption of a particular such motive—​or by the sudden coalescence of several—​one retrospectively imagines this as the intrusion of a foreign will and uses it to take off the burden of this disturbing past. Indeed, the guilt is further reduced by the idea that the act was a god’s—​and not, for example, a devil’s. That act was itself divine—​only by a different divinity than one has chosen as one’s own. But on the other hand this idea of “possession” by a god must not sacrifice pride in one’s own best achievements. Here one should feel not that one’s own will has been disengaged and replaced by the god’s, but that one has risen to the level of god—​so that, as it were, one occupies or possesses the god as much as the reverse. One feels oneself to act as the god, who indeed stands for the highest. This “possession” by and of a god has the sexual aspect we’ve noticed. Zarathustra stands in an erotic relation to his goddess Life: his worship lies (as we saw) in “dance” with her—​and this is not ballroom dancing. Nietzsche so stresses “dance” in his idea of relation to god for (I suggest) these several reasons.75 It signifies that god models and engages us in our bodies and drives; we share in divinity only in the activity of these. It signifies that these culminating experiences have the character of Rausch and also of play, but a play that follows or gives a



75

88:17[4]‌(WP.1038): “Light feet perhaps belong even to the concept ‘god.’ ”

Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return  503 rhythm and order. Nietzsche feels himself to “dance” when he writes with inspiration, playing within the rhythms of his words and ideas. And he feels himself “dancing” with a goddess, through whom he brings forth his works. The new religion will strengthen willing, then, by raising up the ideal of this inspired Yes. We might worry, however, that this universal affirmation might itself have an adverse effect on will. In ascending to a god’s perspective one sees the divinity of everything, and the problem is that this seems to favor a “quietism”—​ discouraging any striving by eliminating dissatisfaction with the status quo. How can will sustain itself if it sees everything that is as divine? Willing seems an effort to change something one dislikes as it is and so depends on a “saying no.” We’ve faced this problem already in Chapter  9 (§9.3). I  suggested that Nietzsche doesn’t offer his universal Yes as an attitude for everyday use. It is a stance one ascends to in special moments, which then orient the yes-​and-​no valuing one goes back to. And this affects as well one’s relation to one’s god. One can’t be constantly “with god.” The goal isn’t to take up residence in the divine perspective, but to keep it near and accessible. It affects the force with which we say our everyday yeses and noes, and even their content—​what in particular we affirm and deny. (i) The new religious belief. Finally we turn to Nietzsche’s strategy for removing (or at least alleviating) religion’s problem for belief. The problem is that religious belief is false: there really are no gods, nor any of the large-​scale unities posited in ideas of (e.g.) “fate” or “eternal return.” This was the problem for religion that seemed decisive in Human. All-​too-​Human, and Nietzsche felt its force right up to the end. So in 88:14[120] (WP.808), a note from his last sane year, he stresses the falsity involved in all love, including love of god. The lover is “fooled” [genarrt]; love of god is a Rausch, a “fever” that “does well to lie about itself.” Nor is Nietzsche happy to countenance such lies even on good pragmatic grounds. He prides himself on his honesty; it is demanded by one of his strongest identities, that of “free spirit.” Having seen through gods, how could he lie himself back into belief in them? This will be all the less possible for one self-​trained into such high alertness to psychological tricks and deceptions—​to one “whose task is wakefulness itself ” [BGE.p]. Moreover his ideal of “saying Yes” itself requires truthfulness since it requires that one affirm the world as it is and not in a beautified image, as the posit of gods seems to be.76 So doesn’t facing up to the world of becoming require that one see it as not divine? I think this makes clear that the new religion cannot involve belief in the reality of gods. Nietzsche has two options here. He (his religion) might abandon “belief in gods” altogether: might call on us to “feel about them” without “believing in 76 Birth of Tragedy ascribes the Olympian world of gods to an Apollonian religiousness [3]‌; the Dionysian doesn’t project them “out there” in this way.

504  Nietzsche Values them.” Or, he might try to mark out a different way to believe in gods than in their reality. I think he takes the second line, but let’s quickly consider the first. Might Nietzsche simply leave belief out of his religion? Can he cultivate a certain feeling about gods and even use them in values while desisting from “positing” them as existing, as entities, as there in the world?77 Perhaps the new religion confines itself to feeling and willing about gods and avoids shaping any theories about them. Nietzsche indeed thinks that religions are healthier when they pay less attention to theology: “God choked on theology” [82:3[1]‌]. But this limits the “theoretical” relation to gods, it doesn’t eliminate it. And it seems we can only feel about gods, and refer to them in our valuing, if in some way or other we do take them to exist, posit them as being there to be willed and felt about. The new religion needs to include some idea of what its gods are, to allow them to play the roles in feeling and willing Nietzsche wants for them. And indeed he attributes to himself some kind of belief.78 But how can one believe (in gods) without telling a lie—​without positing in the world something that isn’t there and that one (deep down) knows isn’t there? One needs—​of course!—​to posit these gods precisely as what they are. So here we meet one more iteration of the challenge we’ve been looking at all along, the challenge to “incorporate the truth.” What then are these gods? A number of terms offer themselves here. Gods are “creations,” “constructions,” “fictions,” they are “imagined” or “imaginary.” So perhaps we are meant to believe in gods as we believe in fictional characters: we “posit” them in the world in the way we think of Huck Finn as (down there, back then) on the Mississippi. We know full well that if we go we’ll never find him there, but his imagined presence changes our feelings about the river and makes us value it more. But I don’t think mere fictions would suffice for Nietzsche’s religious purposes. Belief in fictions would not be “belief enough” to bear the weight of feeling (and value) that he wants to rest on them. Belief must (as it were) be better satisfied if it is to do that work. Belief needs there to be a “truth behind the fiction.” So rather than a mere fiction I suggest that a god is a “metaphor” for Nietzsche: it stands in for something real, which is grasped indirectly in the posit of gods. Belief can then know that in positing gods it is referring, in images or metaphors, to important truths. While one’s thinking recognizes that it is “just a metaphor,” the trope

77 So perhaps Roberts [2000, 221]: “insofar as Nietzsche discusses a feeling of divinity and makes no ontological claim about this ultimate source of the feeling, he invokes the divine as a figure.” But he goes on to say that this figure is not mere appearance according to Nietzsche, but “reality once more.” 78 88:16[16] (WP.1034): “we are probably the first to grasp what a pagan faith [Glaube] is: having to represent to oneself a higher creature than human, but this creature beyond good and evil. . . . We believe [glauben] in Olympus—​and not in the ‘crucified.’ ”

Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return  505 of gods works where it is needed: on feeling. In those inspired moments one feels the metaphors forced upon one.79 What are the realities that stand behind the metaphors? Let’s start by going back to 88:14[120] (WP.808), which (we saw) treats love—​including love of god—​as a falsifying Rausch. But the note goes on to say that although this Rausch is “finished with reality in one way [in einer Weise],” “we would err if we stopped with its power [Kraft] to lie: it does more than merely imagine, it shifts values. And it’s not just that it shifts the feeling of values. . . . The lover is more valuable, is stronger.”80 And something like this was Christ’s original message, Nietzsche thinks; A.33: “Blessedness is not a promise, it has no strings attached; it is the only reality—​everything else is just a symbol used to speak about it.” There is thus a “truth behind the metaphor” when one feels the presence of a god in one’s sudden experience of “flow” and mastery in one’s favored activity. This will be so for different such activities, each symbolized in a god. The moments of greatest mastery are those in which one remakes the activity, creates something new in it. These moments have the best title to be called “god.” In 87:10[138] (WP.639, LNp199): “The only possibility of maintaining a meaning for the concept of ‘god’ would be: god not as driving force but as maximal state, as an epoch. . . . One point in the development of the will to power, out of which both the subsequent development and what went before, the up-​to-​that-​point, were explicable.”81 We should notice that by this criterion Nietzsche thinks that he has himself especially good credentials to be a god. He offers himself as the model for a new kind of life, suited to stand among others in the new polytheism. EH.iii.1: “At some point people will need institutions where they can live and teach the way I understand living and teaching.”82 And he says in a letter (to Overbeck, 21 May 1884): “If I do not take things so far that whole millennia will swear their highest oaths upon my name, then in my eyes I will have achieved nothing.”83

79 EH.iii.Z.3, describing his experience writing Zarathustra: “The involuntariness of the picture, of the metaphor is most remarkable.” 80 Again 88:14[120] (WP.808): “one lies well when one loves, before oneself and about oneself: one appears to oneself transfigured, stronger, richer, more perfect, one is more perfect.” 81 87:9[8]‌(WP.712): “ ‘God’ as culmination-​moment: existence [Dasein] [as] an eternal deifying and undeifying [Vergottung und Entgottung]. But therein no high point of value but only high point of power.” 82 88–​9:25[11]: “One would do well to found everywhere societies, so as to give me in hand, at the right time, a million disciples [Anhänger].” 83 And another letter (to Seydlitz 12 February 1888): “it is not impossible that I am the first philosopher of the age, indeed perhaps a little more, something decisive and fateful, who stands between two millennia.” And another (to Köselitz 30 October 1888): “it appears to me that I have the destiny of humanity ‘in the hand.’ ” Compare, too, Z.ii.2: “if there were gods, how could I stand not to be a god! Therefore there are no gods.”

506  Nietzsche Values Of course Nietzsche well recognizes that he ascends to this divine viewpoint only sporadically and is mostly living on its afterglow—​in its orienting memory—​in the way we have seen. He struggles to sustain this encompassing Yes, just as he struggles to “will eternal return” to the full degree he imagines and as we’ll examine in §12.3. We find a number of expressions of his regrets on this score, for ­example 82–​3:4[81]: “I don’t will life again. How have I borne it? Creating. What has made me endure the sight? the look at the superhuman, who affirms life. I have tried to affirm it myself—​Ah!”84 Nietzsche’s own activity is (of course) philosophy, and he himself has a god for this activity—​Dionysus. There is “truth behind the metaphor” in all ecstatic feelings of divine presence, but there is more of the truth when one’s god is Dionysus. This is why he is the highest god in Nietzsche’s new Olympus. When one’s highest state is the Dionysian Rausch, one best faces the world as it is. Nietzsche thinks (in EH.iii.BT.3) that he is the first to transpose “the Dionysian into a philosophical pathos.” He insists (in BGE.295) that Dionysus has a philosophy and speaks of “his explorer and discoverer courage, his daring honesty, truthfulness, and love of wisdom.” Dionysus models the new stage of the will to truth, human’s characteristic will, in which it casts off the moralistic inhibitions that had brought it out of sync with life and also kept it from being able to face the world as it is. He models human’s new capacity to see life as it is. It’s here, I think, that we discover how Nietzsche’s idea of divinity bears on this book’s overall theme, the task to incorporate the perspectivity of values. The ascent to the Dionysian viewpoint achieves a privileged grasp of that perspectivity. It views our everyday values from the viewpoint of “life itself,” for which all that life wants is good, and those everyday values are partial and blinkered examples. That everyday perspective says yes-​and-​no, and the divine and Yes-​ saying perspective sees its perspectival limits in this—​in its difference from that universal Yes. This Dionysian state retains, then, the epistemic strengths Nietzsche claims for it back in Birth of Tragedy. To be sure, these epistemic strengths are somewhat tempered by the metaphorical or symbolic form in which the truth is “seen.” But the main point of the experience, as we’ve already noted, is affective. Belief in gods serves mainly to support the feeling—​and the metaphor finds value here. The belief, even when it knows itself metaphoric, can be intense enough to enhance the feeling because it knows that crucial truths stand behind the metaphor.

84 This passage was pointed out to me by Paul Loeb, who argues that although Nietzsche thinks he can “love fate,” he counts himself unable to will eternal return—​unlike Zarathustra. But I think this unfavorable comparison is only an occasional view and that at other moments he thinks he rises to the height.

Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return  507 Let’s recall two of these truths. First, it imagines the world in all its parts as divine—​as “all good,” such that badness is just a lesser degree of goodness. And behind this is the truth that all value is by and for life, such that life is, in the abstract and in all its forms, the ultimate good. Second, it imagines that in seeing the world with all its suffering as good in this way, it has ascended to the viewpoint of a personlike god. And behind this is the truth that this viewpoint steps up a level from what this person had always been—​realizing its characteristic will to truth as never before, but in a way that suits it to its deeper will to power. This Dionysian state is Nietzsche’s version of the divine perspective Heraclitus speaks of. It involves a development and radicalization of the content of Heraclitus’s vision that the world is strife and flow. But I think the idea of this god’s-​eye view plays a similar role in the “believer’s” life: the point is not to occupy this perspective constantly, but to experience it occasionally (or even just once) and have it work an orienting and healthening effect on the “human” perspectives to which one returns.

12.3 Eternal return We’ve already made a start on the topic of eternal return85 in noticing (in Chapter 9) how this expresses “the Yes” (i.e., the affirmation of all life, both as a whole and in its parts). Now we’ll see further how this teaching affirms life as divine. It gives life a kind of divinity not requiring the presence within this world of person-​like gods. This idea, together with associates such as amor fati, makes up the “non-​theistic” part of Nietzsche’s new religion, which (we noted) he somewhat shifts emphasis toward. Nietzsche makes high claims for this new religion. He imagines his teaching of eternal return as taking hold on all humanity at a climax of human history he likes to call “midday.” So 81:11[148]: “This ring [of recurrence], in which you are a grain, shines ever anew. And in every ring of human-​Dasein there is always an hour when the most powerful thought emerges, first to one, then to many, then to all, that [thought] of the eternal recurrence of all things—​it is in each case the hour of midday for humanity.” This thought of eternal return is the central sacrament in a new religion that will lift the whole species to a higher plane.86 We saw in §12.2 that the principal locus of person-​like gods is within the religious pathos itself. In those feelings of creative power one feels oneself ascended 85 I’ll translate Nietzsche’s Wiederkunft as “recurrence” and Wiederkehr as “return.” But I believe he uses them interchangeably and will do so myself. He seems to prefer the former in the title for his teaching [die ewige Wiederkunft]. But I prefer the simplicity of “return” and will more often use it. 86 Admittedly Nietzsche sometimes treats this religion as adopted only by an elite; 81:11[339]: “It [the thought of eternal return] shall be the religion of the most free[,]‌cheerful[,] noble souls.”

508  Nietzsche Values to the viewpoint of a favoring god, from which the whole looks good. We saw that Nietzsche occasionally thinks of this whole as gathered into a unity he can also call god—​but that he is much more reluctant here, and more inclined to think of that whole, and all its separate parts, as indeed divine, but not as a god or gods. He thinks of gods not as effective components of the world, but as viewpoints upon it. As to the efficacy of the world, his religious idea of this is eternal return. Eternal return is the way the new religion teaches followers to picture the overall structure of life and to see themselves within this whole. More fully, it is the way it teaches followers not just to think, but also to will and feel regarding their lives in this whole. As we did in discussing Nietzsche’s gods, here, too, it helps to partition these three aspects of Nietzsche’s “teaching” of eternal return. The attitudes he preaches involve our thinking, willing, and feeling—​and again (we will see) feeling most of all. (a) Thinking eternal return. Nietzsche’s “teaching” [Lehre] of eternal return involves a certain picture of the world; the teaching tells followers to take a certain stance toward this picture (this “content”). He sometimes calls this picture the “thought” [Gedanke] of eternal return. In thinking it, he wants us to “entertain” or consider this picture a certain way, to do something with it. But let’s start by trying to specify the picture itself, suspending the questions how Nietzsche wants us to think it—​whether, for example, by believing or imagining it—​as well as how he wants us to will and feel about it. Eternal return’s “picture” is of my life as set within a world or universe that cycles endlessly through precisely the same sequence of events, a “great year” that returns always to the beginning and within which my life is repeated as a miniscule part.87 It’s crucial that the repetition is exact, so that my life happens always the same down to the slightest detail, and including (of course) all my mental attitudes, feelings, and thoughts.88 Everything—​every smallest thing—​must happen just as it does, and just as it already has, back through the infinite past. So, to begin with, the teaching of eternal return says: Picture the world like this. Now the most important part of this picture is the view of one’s own life as repeating. Some elements in Nietzsche’s teaching can dispense with the idea that the whole cosmos repeats. But the idea of this larger repetition is important in at least two ways. First, it plays an evidential or justificatory role: the repetition of my own life is inevitable because it is bound up in a world that must repeat.

87 Zarathustra’s animals summarize [Z.iii.13.2]: “You teach that there is a great year of becoming, a monster of a great year: that must, like an hourglass, always turn itself over again, so that it runs down and runs out anew: —​/​ —​such that all these years are the self-​same, in the greatest and also in the smallest,—​such that we ourselves are the same in that great year, in the greatest and in the smallest.” 88 GS.341: “there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every pleasure and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small and large of your life must come back to you, and all in the same order and sequence.” (This is part of the “demon’s” presentation of the thought.)

Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return  509 Second, this way the whole cosmos settles the details of my life is some of what Nietzsche means by “fate” and is important to his fuller idea of eternal return. My life is a sequence I have already lived—​lived all the way through, to an end I don’t yet know, but which has nevertheless (in earlier iterations) already occurred. It is held fast to this course by the weight of the whole world around it. Notice how this picture of my life “steps back” from my everyday stance in living it, to a perspective that sees it “third-​personally” and as if “from above.” It views my life as a whole—​a completed whole. I see it as a settled piece, repeated over and over, within a vast process. This view transfers me from the A-​series time (of present-​past-​future) in which I usually live, to a B-​series time (of earlier and later) that treats my life as (in a sense) “all there already”—​something whose overall course is set, has indeed already (in a previous cycle) happened. This step back is a crucial part of the “picture” of eternal return. It’s from this point of view that one views it as a “circle,” which is so prominent in Nietzsche’s account of it. But this third-​personal view isn’t all of that picture. I “think” eternal return not just by seeing it from above, but by then absorbing this into my first-​personal, A-​ series view. And this is the really difficult part of “getting the picture.” Zarathustra emphasizes this aspect of the picture by, in his first presentation of the thought [Z.iiii.2.2], presenting it as arising at the gateway “moment” [Augenblick], from which paths stretch into the future and past. And it’s this first-​personal application, I suggest, that the dwarf, and later Zarathustra’s animals, fail to make; it’s why their statements of the thought fall short.89 I must see this present life—​as I’m involved in living it—​as going-​to-​be lived again in the future and as having already been lived, all the way through to its end, in the past. When I “first-​personalize” the picture this way, it effects a certain disruption of my A-​series time. Events that will happen in the future (e.g., my death) are also in the past—​have already happened, in previous cycles. And things that I’ve already done lie ahead of me, too. So my future lies behind me and my past lies ahead. Moreover, when I draw out this first-​personal stance fully, I see that although these past and future livings are separated by vast stretches of (third-​ personal) world-​time, from my own point of view they follow immediately on one another: closing my eyes in death, I will open them at once on my birth.90 89 As Zarathustra is first articulating the thought in Z.iii.2, the dwarf anticipates that “time itself is a circle”; Zarathustra tells him not to “make it too easy” for himself. I suggest the dwarf pictures eternal return third-​personally and doesn’t apply it within. In Z.iii.13 Zarathustra charges his animals with having made a “lyre-​song” of the idea, i.e., of having “Apollonized” it: they’ve removed its engagement with one’s own suffering. 90 81:11[318]: “You suppose you have a long rest before the rebirth [Wiedergeburt]—​but don’t deceive yourselves! Between the last moment of consciousness and the first appearance of the new life lies ‘no time’—​it goes by fast as lightning, even if living creatures measure it in billions of years and [still] can’t measure it.” Cf. Heidegger [1961/​1984, 136–​8] on the two temporalities distinguished in this note.

510  Nietzsche Values Now, regarding this picture of my life—​and all the world—​as recurring behind and ahead of me this way: How does Nietzsche want me to “think” (or “posit”) it? What attitude does he want me (as a follower of this new religion) to adopt toward this picture of my life in the whole? The most obvious suggestion is that he wants me to believe it (i.e., to posit it as true) as the real character of my life and the world. And it’s also most natural to suppose that Nietzsche wants me to believe it because he believes it himself. As we’ll see, there are important evidences and arguments in favor of this reading, which has been powerfully defended by Paul Loeb. But there are also strong grounds for doubt against both of those suppositions. It’s hard to see how Nietzsche, great skeptic of metaphysical and supernatural positions, can believe in such recurrence himself. And since he openly shares that skepticism with us in his writings, it’s hard to see how he can expect us—​ prospective disciples in his new thinking—​to believe in it ourselves. To be sure, Nietzsche does offer an argument purporting to prove or establish the truth of recurrence.91 It has an elegant simplicity: if time is infinite, but the number of possible total states of the cosmos is finite, then a state will recur and will necessarily cause the same sequence of following states, all the way up to the point at which that state recurs yet again. This argument has an imaginative power, but its premises and steps could not, it seems clear, survive the kind of sharp-​eyed suspicion that Nietzsche directs at other philosophers’ efforts to prove timeless truths. It’s notable as well that he doesn’t show the same persistence in exploring many arguments for and against this picture as he does, for example, regarding his view of life as will to power. He pays it noticeably slight critical attention. Indeed the key part of the picture—​the idea that “I” have lived and will live this same life—​is perhaps not even coherent, given other of Nietzsche’s views. If the cosmos does return to exactly similar configurations in this way, is it really the “same thing” that returns?92 Most importantly, is it really I who returns in that later cycle, or instead another person who lives an exactly similar life—​ through exactly similar events and experiences?93 If I think that it will be “I” who lives each of these lives, am I not implicitly relying on a remnant belief in a soul 91 88:14[188] (WP.1066) is probably the most careful presentation of this argument. We also find it in Z.iii.2. His plans for treating the teaching anticipate a “proof ” [Beweis]; e.g., 83–​4:24[4]‌(WP.1057). 92 Nietzsche suggests one way to ensure a strict identity: to think of time itself as a circle, so that the return is not to an exactly similar world at a later time, but to the very same time. But I don’t think this can work. The picture of return requires earlier and later cycles; if these go repeatedly through “the very same time,” there must be a second kind of time that distinguishes them as earlier and later. And the problem about identity would arise within this. Indeed, even if the life is “relived” in the very same time, it seems that it is still a numerically different life and that it would a numerically different person who lives it. 93 Simmel [1907/​1991, 174] already makes this objection: “But in reality I do not return, but a phenomenon appears which is identical with me in all its traits and experiences.”

Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return  511 or mind that persists somehow throughout the process? But of course Nietzsche rejects any such soul: “Souls are as mortal as bodies” [Z.iii.2]. There’s nothing that persists through the interval and is there to support the phenomenological continuity in “reopening my eyes at birth.”94 So when I picture those future lives as “mine” it seems that I’m wrong; this part of the picture seems an illusion. Now, I suggest, if the main point of eternal return were to think it, it would have to be because the picture is (Nietzsche thinks) true—​and the proper way of thinking it would have to be to believe it. But as we’ve noticed it’s not just our “thinking” that Nietzsche wants the teaching to engage, but also our willing and feeling. Nietzsche wants me to “think” (or picture) eternal return not just for the sake of thinking it, but so that I can then “will” and/​or “feel” about it a certain way. And the way I’m to think it is in fact set by those ways I’m to will and feel regarding it. I need to posit recurrence in whatever way is needed in order for me to will and feel it in the right way. It’s for this general reason, I think, that analytic interpreters have dominantly understood eternal return as (something like) a “thought experiment”—​and as not positing the picture as true.95 To be sure, Loeb has argued valiantly [e.g., 2013] for the other side. He thinks that Nietzsche wants us to care about eternal return because that’s the way the world really is: Nietzsche believes it himself and wants his followers to believe it, and its practical use flows from this. Loeb points out the serious difficulties involved in explaining why Nietzsche would think the “test” of eternal return to be appropriate if the picture isn’t true. I’ll return to these problems shortly. But I agree with the prevailing view that Nietzsche is more interested in the “practical” effects of the thought of eternal return. Although he may well at times believe that the thought is true, and although he explores arguments to prove it, these are subordinate to a different kind of use he has for the idea. Those arguments are mostly confined to his notebooks and look like after-​thoughts—​ justifications for something he already has other grounds to hold. The idea has a significance far greater than the confidence he could ever have had in these arguments. So we should turn to these other uses he has for the idea of eternal return. We won’t leave the question of belief behind, however. As we examine those other uses we’ll ask whether they require belief or can rest on other ways of “thinking”

94 This independence of separate livings of “my life” counts against (I think) Loeb’s striking reading [2013] of eternal return. Loeb takes Nietzsche to hold that we can remember previous livings of our lives and can therefore have memory of things still in the future in this living. But what chain of causes could there be that would transmit—​through the eons of cosmic time that separate these lives—​such memories? We imagine such a chain only by supposing a persisting soul or self, which Nietzsche thinks isn’t there. 95 See, e.g., Soll [1973], Magnus [1978], Nehamas [1985], Clark [1990], Reginster [2006].

512  Nietzsche Values the picture that make weaker epistemic claims. I will argue that Nietzsche wants something less than belief, or a kind of belief that is inflected or qualified, because this is all he thinks we need in order to support the ways of willing and feeling about the picture that he is commending. (b) Willing eternal return. Nietzsche stresses the importance of this teaching for our will—​for how it can and should affect our “practical” effort. He has, however, several quite different ways of relating will to eternal return—​ways that have not been clearly distinguished by interpreters. Let’s organize the options here. (i) First lesson for will. The simplest lesson is simply to will eternal return itself; that is, to will that all things happen over again, endlessly, and in particular that one’s own life does. So the teaching of eternal return is: Will that the picture be true. I will that the cosmos does go through these great cycles, so that I will come back and live exactly the same life in each one. More briefly: I will to live this same life over again. As GS.341 concludes, I “want [verlangen] nothing more than [I do] this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal.” This makes eternal return—​its truth, that it happens—​the immediate object or goal of this willing. It’s this way of relating will to eternal return that Nietzsche uses to answer his “problem of the past,” as we saw in Chapter 4 (§4.2). In Z.ii.20 (“On Redemption”) Zarathustra diagnoses revenge as “the will’s ill-​will [Widerwille] against time and its ‘It was.’ ” Because the will “cannot will backwards [zurück],” it is powerless toward the past; it takes revenge on this frustration by lashing out in many directions. But, as Zarathustra here in ii.20 first guesses, the will can “will backwards,” in a surprising way, if the world and one’s life endlessly repeat. For now I can will that things in my past do happen again—​in my next living.96 Notice that this first option seems quite compatible with not believing that the picture is true. Indeed when we will something to be true it’s usually because we think it is not yet true. That this option doesn’t require this epistemic sacrifice—​ believing in something that is unproven or false or (most likely) incoherent—​is a point in its favor. But this option is not yet clear. Just as we had to ask how Nietzsche wants us to “think” eternal return, so we should ask how he wants us to “will” it. For it cannot here be, it seems, the usual kind of willing, which involves taking steps to bring something about. This is how we’ve understood willing all along—​as directedness at some goal toward which one steers (using values-​signs). But eternal return can’t be such a goal. Nothing I do can make it any more the case that my own life does repeat—​much less that the whole course of the universe does—​much less that it already eternally has repeated. Eternal return is either true or not, and

96 So perhaps 85–​6:1[125] (WP.593, LNp64): “To change the belief ‘it is so and so’ into the willing it should become so and [so].”

Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return  513 nothing I do can affect this. There’s nothing for me to put any effort into. So the idea of “willing eternal return” looks like a kind of category mistake.97 It seems that when Nietzsche does speak of “willing” eternal return he must rather mean “hoping” that it’s true, or (idly) “wanting” it to be true, where the hoping or wanting has no action-​guiding role. Or rather, I suggest, he is mainly speaking of a way of feeling about eternal return: being glad at the thought of it, even loving it. It’s a matter of how we (passively) respond or react to the picture of eternal return—​a matter of the impact it has on our affects—​and not on how we act so as to bring it about. We love the mere idea of coming back to live precisely this life again. So we see that this first kind of willing is valuable only for the sake of a kind of feeling; we’ll come back to it when we examine ways of “feeling” about eternal return. But we haven’t finished with the role of will. For “willing eternal return” is not the only way Nietzsche relates will to that picture. There are other, less direct ways in which he uses the picture as a guide for will. (ii) Second lesson for will. If what’s important is that feeling, perhaps what we should will is to feel this feeling. So the teaching of eternal return would be: Will that you be able to welcome this picture of the world. Since there are practical strategies by which—​Nietzsche thinks—​I might try to develop this ability in myself, this would be a more genuine kind of “willing” (than fruitlessly hoping that my life will repeat). It gives me the goal to develop my ability to welcome the thought. Nietzsche very often seems to have this lesson in mind.98 Without yet trying to determine this feeling very particularly—​the business of the next section, (c)—​let’s ask what this willing’s practical project might be. What does he think we can do in order to make ourselves more capable of that affective response? What strategy or strategies does Nietzsche have in mind? Here again we must distinguish options, each with a basis in his texts and each with defenders. (ii-​a) One way I can try to improve my ability to welcome the recurrence of my life is by changing the character of my life (the other will be to change the way I look at it). I can try to make it easier to be glad to relive my life by improving my life. So the first strategy is: Make your life more affirmable. Try to live in a way that you can be glad to live again. In 81:11[161]: “so live, that we will to live again, and will to live so in eternity!” (Note how Nietzsche again puts it in terms of “willing” to live again, which I’ve tried to show he means in a very weak sense.)

97 I think Nietzsche touches on the oddity in 81:11[163]: “My teaching says: so live, that you must want [wünschen] to live again, to live again is the task—​you will [do] it in any case!” 98 Clark [1990, 251–​2]: “The formula of affirmation provided by eternal recurrence is that of being a person who would respond joyfully to the demon’s message if she accepted it uncritically as the truth.”

514  Nietzsche Values One obvious way to try to make one’s life easier to affirm is to adopt the rule, to do only things one could want to repeat. In this use, eternal return serves as a kind of decision procedure, analogous to Kant’s categorical imperative (though of course on very different grounds). I am to choose among options by asking which of them I  could be glad to repeat eternally. So, famously, GS.341:  “the question in each and every thing ‘do you will this once more and countless times more?’ would lie as the greatest weight upon your actions!”99 By doing only what I can will to repeat I expand the affirmable content of my life. But this strategy of judging acts individually in this way is not Nietzsche’s main lesson. It is too piecemeal, it doesn’t take account of the whole life. If the goal is to be able to welcome the return of my whole life, then even if I could go on to do only things I would be glad to repeat, this wouldn’t touch all the past things I regret. We’ve seen (Chapter 4 [§4.2]) Nietzsche’s obsession with this weight of the past. And what could we possibly do to make this past more affirmable? Surely we can’t retroactively shape it for that goal. However we can change the meaning of that past by what we do now. Here I take up Anderson’s important contribution [2005; also 2009]. His example is Jimmy Carter, who (let us say) responded to the perceived failure of his presidency by living an admirable post-​presidency that “redeemed” it. He changed the meaning of his past by making it turn out to lead to this fine future. So he made his past years affirmable by shaping his later years in a way that retroactively gave them more value. By how he went on to live, he made his whole life more affirmable (by himself). I think Anderson is right that such redemption [Erlösung] is important to Nietzsche. It is some of what will can do to help one to welcome eternal return. Carter’s “redeeming” of his past was not just a matter of changing the content of his life, however. It also involved constructing a certain “narrative” of his life, as Anderson also develops. And this makes it clear that, together with improving how one lives, one must also improve one’s view of one’s life. Here we pass over to the second strategy. (ii-​b) The other general way to improve my ability to welcome return is to change (not my life but) my view of my life. I can try to learn to look at it in a different way, from which it all looks good to live again. So the second strategy is: Change how you view your life. One might even try to change this “narrative” without much changing how one lives. But since one only really “welcomes” one’s life’s return when one has a true and realistic view of what this life is, the narrative that makes life look affirmable must not be an outright lie.



99

Cf. the draft of this, 81:11[143].

Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return  515 How then might I change my view of my life in a way that sees it for what it is yet makes me more able to love it? Here the critique of morality comes into play. Morality makes it harder to want everything back by its dichotomizing values of evil and good. If there are evils—​pure negatives—​in the world, we can’t want them to repeat. Morality makes me find such evils in my own past actions; it fingers me as the sole perpetrator of them, responsible due to my freedom to have acted differently. When we expose morality’s errors and its sickness, we remove these artificial obstacles to welcoming all things again. So 84:26[283] (WP.1060): “In order to bear the thought of return: /​freedom from morality is necessary.” More positively, I change my view of my life (so as to make it more affirmable) by revaluing my values, in the ways we’ve seen Nietzsche advocates. So 84:26[284] (WP.1059): “Means to bear [the thought]: /​the revaluation of all values.” I change what I value by seeing that things I had always abhorred, such as suffering and cruelty, are valuable and indispensable elements in life as will to power. And I change how I value by seeing that even “the badness” in life is a lesser degree of the goodness of everything alive. This revaluing makes me better disposed to my own life’s negatives—​to both my suffering and my misdeeds. Again 84:26[283] (WP.1060): “new means against the fact of pain (pain grasped as instrument, as father of pleasure—​there is no summing consciousness of displeasure).” And it can reduce or remove the guilt with which morality poisons life. These two strategies for improving my ability to welcome the picture of eternal return can obviously be combined. I change how I live in order to fit and validate a new narrative I tell myself about the meaning and value of my life. But we need to see better—​in (c)—​what that feeling of “welcome” might be before we treat these strategies further. If this second way of willing about eternal return requires that one believes in that picture, it will be because that feeling does. (iii) Third lesson for will. There’s (at least) one more way Nietzsche suggests that we set our wills in relation to eternal return. Rather than willing that my life repeats, or that I be able to welcome its repeating, I should will in the way that would be appropriate if my life does repeat. So the teaching of eternal return is: Will as if the picture were true. I change how or what I will, to make it suit a world in which everything returns. This is a quite different lesson from the other two; again I think these simple distinctions have not been well noticed. But different interpreters have attributed to Nietzsche (what are in effect) several versions of this third lesson. A first plausible reading is that (Nietzsche thinks that) the picture places enormous importance on everything I do.100 This lesson is encapsulated in the title 100 Soll [1973] reads Nietzsche so, but argues that the appropriate reaction to the thought is instead indifference. I return to this later.

516  Nietzsche Values of GS.341, the first announcement of the teaching: “The greatest weight [Das grösste Schwergewicht].”101 We’ve already noticed how the passage clarifies this weight: “the question in each and every thing ‘do you will this once more and countless times more?’ would lie as the greatest weight upon your actions!” Earlier we understood this as a strategy to make one’s life more affirmable by how one goes on to choose. But Nietzsche might instead want it because of its energizing impact on our willing. It makes us “try harder” when we think that whatever we do we’ll be doing eternally. There’s a plausibility to this effect: if I feel that my choice now is a choice for all of the times I will do it, I may choose with more care. And if I feel that what I’m doing/​thinking now is a performance to be repeated infinitely, I may act/​think with more spirit or intensity. So it seems I might use the picture of return as a technique to sharpen my attention in any given moment. For the picture to have this intensifying effect, do I  need to believe it? Presumably the impact will be stronger to the extent that I do believe that my life will recur. But perhaps I can get some or even much of this effect simply by vividly imagining the picture to be true. I would overlook, in this imagining, the key flaw and even incoherence we’ve seen the picture involves: its supposition that it is I who would relive this exactly similar life. Soll [1973] seems right that, without this illusion of identity, the more appropriate reaction to all these parallel lives would be indifference. For I need, remember, to think this picture first-​personally: to think that I will experience—​or have experienced—​each of these recurring lives. I imagine that my consciousness inhabits these lives; I picture myself “reawakening” immediately to my next birth, as we’ve seen. This rests on imagining a “substance,” a consciousness or soul, that persists through them all. Nietzsche’s naturalism—​not to mention our own—​leaves no room for such a posit. Yet the illusion is pragmatically justified, he may think, by the heightening impact it has on my willing. But there’s another kind of problem how this picture can have this heightening effect. Its use to “intensify effort” seems to be undercut by another aspect of the picture itself. If it seems to intensify effort it’s because I’m looking ahead and imagining my choice now as settling all the lives to come. But if instead I look back (through this A-​series time given by the picture first-​personally), I see that this “choice” has already been made and that I will, necessarily, only repeat it. I see the choice, and my whole life, as “fated.” And this can tempt me to stop trying altogether. Thinking of my life as merely repeating all those previous ones, it may seem that more careful choice and more intense effort now—​the supposed



101

Nietzsche often speaks of the “weight” of the teaching; e.g., 81:11[141], 81:11[143].

Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return  517 lesson for my will—​would be futile: since everything is settled in advance, what does it matter how hard I try? Löwith [1935/​1997] argues that this is the impact Nietzsche wanted the picture of eternal recurrence to have. The fatalism involved in the picture should teach us resignation and will-​lessness. (Notice that this is not the “indifference” toward “my” other lives suggested by Soll.) So willing as if eternal return were true means not to will. This advice is quite clearly un-​Nietzschean, I think.102 But although it is surely not what he wanted, we might wonder whether it isn’t a more suitable response to the picture than the “intensification” just suggested. For the picture imagines the whole course of my life already settled by a thoroughgoing determinism, which makes every least event and thought causally necessary. It presents this determinedness in a dramatic way by imagining that my life has already happened, indeed has happened infinitely many times. Isn’t this calculated to make me abandon hope? Now Nietzsche agrees that, as a matter of fact, this is the effect the teaching will have on many or most who confront it. It’s mainly by this effect, I think, that he expects the picture to act as a “breeding agent”: some will be deflated and depressed by it, others energized and inspired.103 So it will favor and multiply those who are able to welcome it. The main factor distinguishing these is the ability or strength to “say Yes” to their own lives, as we’ve seen. Those too “weak in spirit” to be glad for life will be still more oppressed by the thought that they are eternally fated this way. Those glad for their lives will be able to be glad for this fate: they will love their fatedness, in (of course) amor fati. In the long term, selection will favor that positive response and spread it in the population by (somehow) diminishing those unable to make it. But won’t this fatalism reduce everyone’s sense of the efficacy of their own choices and effort? Even if they’re strong enough to bear and love their fatedness, won’t it still diminish them?104 I  think Nietzsche believes that it needn’t and shouldn’t. The fatalism doesn’t show that it makes no difference what I will, just that what I will is fated, like everything else.105 Similarly, I am fated, perhaps, to respond to the picture of eternal return in one of these directions. Of course it makes a difference whether I try hard or not and how well I choose—​it’s just 102 See Reginster’s critique [2006, 206–​9] of Löwith: he points out how different Löwith’s “indifference” is from the “love” Nietzsche speaks of. 103 E.g., 84:25[211] (WP.862), 84:26[376] (WP.1053), 87:9[8]‌(WP.462). He calls it a “selective [auswählendes] principle” [83–​4:24[7] (WP.1058)]. 104 Reginster [2006], while rejecting Löwith’s reading, agrees that if Nietzsche’s picture of return does involve a “metaphysical fatalism” then “the affirmation of life can amount to nothing more than reconciliation with the fatality of its course” [209]. He argues that Nietzsche’s fatalism instead “designates only certain features of our existence that are essential and therefore necessary to it,” for example “suffering.” Against this, I think Nietzsche’s fatalism extends not just to general features of life, but to all its details—​but that he still thinks this shouldn’t prompt resignation or reconciliation. 105 I take Nietzsche to be making this point in 81:11[143].

518  Nietzsche Values that both of these happen (or don’t) as they must, given what happened before. Human has long understood itself to have a kind of freedom it really doesn’t. It must learn to incorporate the truth that it cannot be an “uncaused cause,” that its choices don’t make a clean break in the world. Willing in the light of eternal return will have this different sense of itself. We were looking at problems with the suggestion that the picture of return will change our willing by intensifying it. Considering the way the picture stresses our fatedness, we seemed to find an effect in the opposite direction—​one deflating or discouraging our effort. But we’ve seen that really it should not. How intently I live makes just as much difference if I’m fated in how intently I live. Moreover there’s another way of seeing this fatedness that can act in a second way to intensify effort. My life’s fatedness shows me that “the whole world wills through me.” And here we come to an important positive nuance in amor fati—​a way it can improve willing. It’s not just that what I  do now repeats the lives I’ve already lived in other world-​cycles. My life’s fatedness is also the way it has been shaped by the whole world around me and by all the past of that world. The whole cosmos makes me, and settles each thing I think and do. I can feel myself at the very heart of the world.106 So I will with a sense of solidarity with it all and share responsibility with it. Giving up the illusion that my will, by its freedom, can be a first or uncaused cause, I can escape the burden of guilt this imposed. Feeling the fatedness of my life, I can recover an “innocence” lost under morality. There’s a third way Nietzsche thinks the picture of eternal return can improve our willing. Besides intensifying effort and enhancing my willing’s sense of its own innocence, that picture can also change what I will in a quite basic way. This eternal cycling of the cosmos shows me its nature as “becoming,” not “being.” So, as Clark [1990] has developed, the picture of return teaches me to value process in preference to the outcomes in which process concludes. The theological idea of an eternal life after death is just an instance of a pervasive bias: the assumption that processes find their whole value in stable states in which they conclude. But when I see my life as just this passage from birth to death, repeated endlessly, I learn to value the process itself. I learn, as Clark puts it [272] “to value living for the sake of the activity itself, to value the process of living as an end and not merely as a means.”107 So the picture of eternal return can improve our willing in several respects. But none of these, I think, is what he most wants the teaching to do. I’ve argued

106 Z.iii.13.2: “In every now being begins; around every here rolls the sphere there. The middle is everywhere.” 107 Cf. Reginster’s idea [2006, 225] that willing eternal recurrence forces recognition of the “impermanent perfection” of becoming.

Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return  519 all through this chapter that Nietzsche views religion’s main importance to lie in its impact on feeling—​much more than on thinking or willing. And this is true for his thought of eternal return, too. (c) Loving eternal return. It’s not surprising that the main impact should be on feeling—​on how we are “affected” by the picture. For it is, after all, a picture of the very large-​scale structure of reality and one’s inevitable place in it; therefore one’s primary stance toward it, as it had been toward god, must be a (passive) response to something of a scale unaffected by anything one wills. I can’t really do anything about eternal return. Although Nietzsche suggests those several ways that the thought might improve our willing, what he wants directly and mainly to change is our affectivity: how we “respond” to the world, how we judge it in the way we feel. The picture’s main function is to tune the follower’s feelings a certain way. We suspected the involvement of feeling when we noticed that Nietzsche can’t want us to “will eternal return” in the sense of striving to bring it about. The picture is precisely that this recurrence must happen and has indeed already eternally happened just as it must. Nietzsche instead seems to mean something like “feeling glad” at the thought of eternal return. And we saw that he values this gladness because he thinks it’s some kind of test or sign of one’s “saying Yes to life”; that is, of a fully positive judgment about life (his key “new value,” I’ve claimed). Nietzsche suggests this role for eternal return as a test of one’s ability to say Yes, in GS.341: “Or how good would you have to become toward yourself and your life in order to want nothing more than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?” But it will only make sense to “test” how well I can say Yes if either preparing for the test, or taking it, or what I learn from it helps me to improve how well I affirm. So although a test is itself retrospective, our use of it will be prospective. With this in mind we might prefer to think of eternal return not so much as a “test” as an exercise: trying to welcome eternal return somehow enhances my affirmativeness. It focuses my attention on a particularly difficult way to “love life.” It sets an especially high standard for affirmation and so spurs effort at it. So it helps me to raise the level or degree of this affirmative affect in myself. Thus the main role of the teaching of eternal return is to cultivate this affectivity in the follower—​a certain habit of feeling about his or her life and the world. But just as eternal return demands a special kind of thinking and willing, so, too, it provokes an unusual kind of feeling. Most importantly, it inspires not a single and stable feeling, but a sequence or movement of feelings. “Feeling eternal return” involves a certain affective shift. The gladness arrives as an achievement—​a culmination of that shift. This movement begins in a despair at the idea of return, but then “overcomes” this by absorbing it into a love for the idea. So Nietzsche’s ideal individual will

520  Nietzsche Values not, I suggest, live constantly in love with life and the world. Rather he or she will repeatedly feel disgust and aversion toward what he or she notices about self and life and world. But the ideal is then further to “convert” this aversion into love. Responding adequately to eternal recurrence requires the aversion and the overcoming of it—​and it requires repeating this movement. So it manifests what Nietzsche calls “the great health—​a health that one doesn’t merely have, but also constantly acquires and must acquire, because one always abandons it again, must abandon it” [EH.iii.Z.2]. Disgust [Ekel] or nausea is a powerful emotion in Zarathustra and in Nietzsche. In cultivating his teaching of eternal return, I think he means to point attention to this affect in us and to cultivate it, too. Disgust is an aversion felt bodily. It is centered, I suggest, in the palate and digestive system—​which were so very sensitive and the source of so much suffering for Nietzsche himself.108 Disgust is over the (potential) incorporation of something foreign—​it is one’s body’s inability and refusal to accept and absorb that thing. It rejects it as wretched—​something that would weaken and sicken one if taken in.109 The kind of incorporation Nietzsche cares most about is of course “spiritual,” and indeed epistemic. As we’ve been seeing all along, human’s great question is how much of the truth it can live with (i.e., incorporate into its immediate and implicit stance). So here disgust is an inability to accept and bear the sight of “ugly truths”—​a resistance to absorbing them into one’s picture of the world. GS.107: “Honesty would lead to disgust and suicide.” Disgust is thus a kind of occupational hazard for the project Nietzsche most commends to us. There’s one most basic such “ugly truth”: the truth that values are perspectival, not “there” independently of valuings. The world lacks the kind of meaning that our socialization has trained us to expect it to have. We’ve seen all along how hard it is to incorporate this truth. It is the source of a pervasive disgust characteristic of our modern age: the world is, in this unsettling way, valueless.110 This “great disgust” is “the will to nothingness,” is nihilism itself, as GM.ii.24 says. Nietzsche likens it to the sickness of those who find themselves “at sea.” Z.iii.12.28: “I shipped human out on its high sea. /​And now there first comes to him the great terror, the great looking-​about, the great sickness, the great disgust, the great sea-​sickness.”

108 Cf. BGE.282. We looked quickly at Nietzsche’s “suffering” in Chapter 4 (§4.3). 109 81:11[134]: “Every body constantly eliminates, it secretes what is not useful to its assimilating essence: what human despises, what he has disgust for, what he calls evil, are excrements.” Nietzsche also thinks of disgust gastrically with his related affect “surfeit” [Überdruss], which is a nausea at having incorporated too much. Cf. Z.iii.13.2, Z.iv.11. 110 Z.iv.14.2 attributes “the great disgust” to “those for whom the old god has died and no new god yet lies in cradle and diapers.”

Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return  521 This nihilistic disgust is a shared historical phenomenon, but particular persons will also have their own sources of disgust. The particular object/​target of Zarathustra’s disgust is “the small human”: he can’t bear the truth that so many humans will be so petty and incomplete. He can’t bear the dominance of the common.111 But I suggest that more often and more pointedly the object of disgust will be some truth about oneself: some episode in (e.g.) my past, some feature of my character, that I cannot absorb into my conception of myself and my life. Or it is some truth about why, really, I do what I do.112 This disgust is then intensified by applying the picture of eternal return: one imagines precisely this disgusting thing repeating infinitely. This heightens the aversion into a genuine suffering—​one feels it unbearable to contemplate a world in which this thing eternally recurs. This nausea over the picture of return is an essential phase of the proper affective response. For one must then overcome this disgust and convert it into a joy and love for this thing, as an indispensable element in the world one embraces as a whole.113 Now let’s return to the crucial issue that has come up again and again: Why should we use the picture of eternal recurrence in these ways Nietzsche advocates if it’s not true? For although—​as we’ve noted—​he seems at times to believe it and even tries to prove it, his proofs and evidences seem weaker than others he routinely scorns. Moreover the picture seems to rest on an illusion of my “personal identity” with the livers of all “my” repeating lives. Nor do most of us find the idea believable ourselves. Nietzsche, as we’ve noticed, gives signs of thinking that its value is independent of its being true. But why should we entertain this picture, or will and feel as if it were true, if it’s not? Now the reason it matters whether I can feel glad at this picture of the world is that it tests and improves my ability to “say Yes,” to affirm life and in particular my own life. Nietzsche commends gladness at eternal return not for its own sake, but in relation to this saying Yes. So he sets up the goal of being able to welcome return as a means (of some kind) to the further or higher goal of affirming life. I argued in Chapter 9 (§9.5) that this “Yes” is the main value Nietzsche thinks he 111 Z.iii.13.2: “All-​too-​small the greatest! That was my surfeit with human! And eternal recurrence of the smallest too!—​That was my surfeit with all existence!” Z.iv.13.3: “What is of women’s kind, what stems from the underling’s kind and especially the rabble mishmash: that now wills to become master of all human destiny—​o disgust! disgust! disgust!” Cf. the end of BGE.203; also GM.i.11, GM.iii.14, EH.i.8, EH.iii.Z.8, EH.iv.6. In EH.i.3 Nietzsche says, I think jestingly, that in his own case “the deepest objection against the ‘eternal recurrence,’ my genuine abysmal thought, is always [my] mother and sister.” EH.iv.6: “My danger is disgust with people.” 112 81:11[112] says that our actions are in themselves as unpalatable as foods would be without spices; we spice our actions with (false) moral justifications and so avoid disgust with them. 113 Admittedly Z.iv.8 suggests that Zarathustra has overcome disgust once and for all; the “voluntary beggar” says: “ ‘This is the human without disgust, this is Zarathustra himself, the overcomer of the great disgust.’ ” See, too, Z.iv.11, where Zarathustra says that he is waiting for those who lie beyond “the great longing, the great disgust, the great surfeit.”

522  Nietzsche Values “creates”: he creates it to “heal” the relation between the two fundamental values we already have, as alive and as human—​the values of power and truth. The picture of eternal return is in service to that value of saying Yes. This affirmation, we’ve seen, must be to life as it is and not in a prettified image that leaves out what’s troubling about life. So if Nietzsche thinks the picture of eternal return is true, then of course affirming life as it is requires affirming it as recurring. But if he thinks that the picture is not true, or even that it might not be true, it’s much harder to say just why he favors this test.114 Why should affirming the world as it isn’t either test or improve our ability to affirm it as it is? Why not work directly at the latter and leave false pictures of the world aside? Nietzsche’s core reason here is the simple idea that if you love this life completely, then of course you will want it “again.” If you love everything about your life—​which the affirmation demands—​then you will be glad to live it again in precisely the way that you have. You will “insatiably shout da capo,” as he puts it in BGE.56. Any reluctance to repeat some part of your life would reveal a limitation in your ability to affirm it. Moreover, if you love your life enough, a single reliving of it would seem not enough: you’d want to repeat it eternally. In 87–​ 8:11[94] (WP.1065, LNp216): “For me everything appears to be much too valuable to be so fleeting: I seek an eternity for everything: should one pour the most precious salves and wines into the sea?—​and my comfort [Trost] is, that everything that was is eternal:—​the sea washes it up again.” But this way of putting the point exposes the problem in it. The aim is to set a hard test for affirming life, a test which, if one passes it, shows that one affirms in a superlative way. Nietzsche even thinks that the picture of one’s life returning will be such a horror for some—​so impossible to want or even to bear—​that it will somehow “select against them” and so serve as a breeding agent. And yet that note exposes a way in which the picture seems to be easier to accept. For mightn’t we well prefer to live this life again, instead of permanent nihilation? Nietzsche often points out how living the same life again is harder for most to accept than the Christian alternative of an eternal afterlife. But let’s compare it with an alternative more germane and believable today: I live this one life once and that’s it; I didn’t and won’t exist in the eons before and after this finite span.115 (And so, too, with every other person and thing.) Nietzsche, in the last-​quoted note, diagnoses his own need for eternity—​a need that arises in the face of that “once only” vision. He gets comfort from the picture of everything happening eternally—​comfort over the pain of its fleetingness, its becoming. But how then

114 Again, see especially Loeb’s statement [2013] of these difficulties. 115 Rilke gives famous voice to this alternative in the ninth Duino Elegy: “Once /​each, only once. Once and no more. And we also /​once. Never again.” See the context, and also Kaufmann’s argument [1955] that Rilke’s point is really no different from Nietzsche’s.

Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return  523 is it a good test of his ability to affirm life as it is, that he can welcome this eternity? Nietzsche seems to be making it too easy for himself—​to be setting the bar for saying Yes too low. This problem occurs in pointed form with respect to death—​this glaring way that life is “fleeting.” To be able to say Yes to my life, it seems that I must also say Yes to my death as its inevitable end: I must love my life as a mortal life. This is of course very hard: death seems the very worst thing about life. If I picture my life as recurring eternally, I imagine my death as not final, which, it seems, makes it easier to affirm it. In setting up this test, doesn’t Nietzsche show that he’s not strong enough to love a life in which becoming is genuinely fleeting and death is a conclusive end? But I think we can answer these doubts on Nietzsche’s behalf. We can answer first its suggestion that his own motive for willing eternal return is that it’s easier for him than accepting the finality of death. Nietzsche, I suggest, was not much perturbed over death. He shared to some extent the Schopenhauerian (and ultimately Indian) idea that the real problem in life is suffering and that death, if final, would be a kind of answer to that. Here we should remember the remarkable physical suffering he experienced, which led him to thoughts of suicide116; death often looked like an easier alternative than having more of life. Moreover he was bothered by a painful retrospective tendency, as we noticed in Chapter 4 (§4.2) in discussing his “problem of the past.” So for Nietzsche it looks and feels harder to want to repeat the past—​and suffering—​than it does to accept the finality of death. And, second, I  think we can also see that in fact the terror at death is not removed but intensified by thinking that one dies many times. In each case one really does die with all the loss that involves: one is “dead to” all that happens afterward in the world (e.g., the fate of one’s loved ones and work); one doesn’t know it, one never will know it.117 And then one will start from the beginning and make one’s same limited way toward that complete loss. Nietzsche must suppose that the things we regret most about death—​loss of the ability to go on, to see and participate in what comes next in the world and for everyone we care about—​are not helped but even worsened by the picture of this happening again and again. This reply regarding death suggests how the picture of eternal return might indeed serve as a kind of intensifier of all of the regrets and disappointments we feel about ourselves and the world, thus setting a “high bar” for us to challenge

116 See the survey of Nietzsche’s views on suicide in Stellino [2013]. 117 The picture of eternal return gives me, of course, only an extremely large-​scale view of the cosmic cycle; it gives no specifics as to what intervenes between my “relivings.” Obviously I mustn’t imagine myself hovering over and observing what happens in between.

524  Nietzsche Values our affirmativeness against. For this role it may well seem that we don’t at all need to posit any truth in the picture. We merely need to imagine things so, not at all to believe in eternal return. We imagine our lives repeating while suspending our doubts that this may not be true, even that it cannot be true.118 We use this imagined picture of return to spur on our effort to love all of life. However I don’t think this bare imagining of eternal return, as an artificial intensifier, catches all of Nietzsche’s point. I think he believes there’s “more truth” in the picture than this recognizes. The picture doesn’t merely serve to “multiply my woes’ by imagining them repeated again and again. It also reminds me of certain basic truths about my condition and that of the world. It states these truths not directly, but in metaphors, and it is by these that it evokes the feelings it does, feelings about those truths.119 So there are important isomorphisms between the picture and the true structure of the world. What are these truths (as Nietzsche believes them to be)? They are correlated, I suggest, with those three ways we’ve just seen one might “will as if eternal return were true.” It’s not true, but behind it lie truths that ground those very ways of willing. Picturing my life as recurring eternally within a repeating world drives these points home more vividly and effectively than merely asserting them can do. (a) There is the negative truth that there is no other world—​and I live no other life—​than this very one; this life is everything to me and not to be wasted. The picture of eternal return leaves no room for any other life or world. By imagining that I live this same life repeatedly I make vivid the infinite importance it has for me, an importance I otherwise constantly forget. (b) There is the positive truth that my life is knotted so firmly into the world by a web of causal connections that tie me to everything, that nothing about me could be different without the whole world being different; everything in my life is me and must be just as it is. This is, of course, my life’s fatedness. By imagining this life compelled to repeat so precisely I make vivid the intricate causal necessity that settles everything I do. (c) And there is the truth that this world is characterized by constant change never arriving at any stasis; I should realize that I simply am my living and should live for the act and not for any lasting result. By imagining the whole world

118 Clark [1990, 269] says it requires that one “imagines recurrence unrealistically, on the model of a later occurrence in one’s present life.” In 81:11[203] Nietzsche supposes that it’s enough if the recurrence is a possibility for the thought to work—​as the thought of “eternal damnation” has worked just by being possible. 119 Notice EH.iii.Z.3’s description of the experience of inspiration and how it generates metaphors, such that “upon every metaphor you here ride to every truth.”

Dionysus: New Gods and Eternal Return  525 cycling unceasingly through the same vast sequence I make vivid that it simply is this sequence—​is becoming not being and arrives at no goal.120 As we might put it, then, the picture of eternal recurrence “dramatizes” the importance, fatedness, and transience of our lives in ways that help us to align our feeling and willing with them. Therefore the picture, although not true, even helps us epistemically by helping us to hold in view those truths that lie “behind” the picture: the truths that this is my one and only life, that it is fated by the whole history of the world, and that it is essentially a process and becoming. So although this picture is perhaps another case of a “holy lie,” Nietzsche thinks it is backed by much more of the truth about our place in the world than religion’s previous picture, which concealed and denied all three points. In 81:11[159]: “Let us press the image of eternity on our life! This thought contains more than all religions, which despise this life as fleeting and teach looking away at an indeterminate other life.” Here Nietzsche distinguishes the picture from “all religions,” but in a more expansive sense he views it as the core to a new religion. In imagining the eternal repetition of the world-​process this religion “divinizes” the process as a process, which has never been done before. It thereby shows our own lives in a light that makes them affirmable in toto, as sharing in that divinity. So eternal return functions as a kind of keystone for the new values and new way of life that Nietzsche projects after morality and nihilism. It sustains that Yes to all life which we need in order to advance in our human way, to live with more and more of the truth about ourselves.

12.4  In lieu of a conclusion So we come to the end of this examination of Nietzsche’s philosophical thinking. Or at least I arrive here—​maybe no longer in company! I’ve tried to show the full scope of Nietzsche’s thinking about values, which, as the heart to his enterprise, required looking at pretty much all of his main philosophical topics and ideas. I’ve tried to do justice to them individually, but also to show how they fit together into this interlocking—​indeed systematic—​overall view. I’ve argued that his naturalistic study of values—​of the signs by which we steer—​begins by uncovering a deeper level to this valuing, in our bodily drives and affects. We are mostly unaware of this valuing, yet it is the principal explainer of what we think and do. This hidden valuing has, as a kind of meta-​value, an aim

120 See, e.g., the argument in 85:36[15] (WP.1062, LNp23–​4) that the world has no goal, arrives at no “being.” Also 85:35[54] (WP.1064).

526  Nietzsche Values at power, as growth in control. We share this kind of valuing, Nietzsche supposes, with all animals, even with all living things. By contrast the conscious and worded values that we do notice—​our distinctively human valuing—​has been designed for social purposes and, above all, to “herd” us. It posits its values—​originally just the prevailing societal norms—​as “true” the better to induce members to subordinate their bodily values to them. This assumption of “true” values that we feel required to make our valuing “match” is the illusion that has most made us human. Out of this assumption we have acquired a “will to truth” that stands in some tension with the will to power built into our animal nature. This tension has taken an especially unhealthy form in the Judaeo-​Christian morality that continues to rule European (and descendent) societies. Nietzsche anticipates, and begins to construct, a third way of valuing, which he sometimes presents as superhuman: its difference from our current, “human” values may be comparable to the latter’s from animal values. We will gradually learn to value in the recognition of what we are doing. As we thus hold onto the truth about our valuing even as we value, we will take a kind of power and control over our aiming that was never possible before. At last our will to truth will begin to realize the Enlightenment promise of freedom by freeing us from a kind of control that movement had never noticed: control by the illusion of ourselves as moral agents subject to “true” values. Psychological and historical truths will give us a new power to control our own values. It will, however, be extremely hard to uncover these truths—​hard not intellectually but emotionally—​since it involves stripping away assumptions our valuing has always depended upon. We will need, to sustain us in the exposure of “ugly” and undermining truths, a new ideal, one that we will embrace not as true, but as our own choice to sustain us in our project of truth. This is the ideal of saying Yes—​yes to all of life and especially to all of one’s own life. This ideal, together with the framing project of a freeing truth, gets the power to address our feeling—​where we need it most—​by taking metaphorical form in the culminating teachings of Dionysus and eternal return.

Bibliography Primary Sources For Nietzsche’s German text I have used the Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980). For his letters I have used the Sämtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe in 8 Bänden, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986).

Nietzsche’s Published Works I use the following near-​standard acronyms in citing the works Nietzsche completed for publication. I present them here with their approximate years of composition in order to facilitate comparisons with the Nachlass references. 1869–​71: [BT] The Birth of Tragedy [.asc] “Attempt at a Self-​Criticism,” and Introduction written 1886. 1973–​76: [UM] Untimely Meditations [.i] “David Strauss the Confessor and the Writer” [.ii] “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” [.iii] “Schopenhauer as Educator” [.iv] “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” 1876–​79: [HH] Human, All-​too-​Human [.i] Volume I [.ii] Volume II, Part I: orig. pub. as Mixed Opinions and Maxims [.iii] Volume II, Part II: orig. pub. as The Wanderer and His Shadow [.i.p], [.ii.p] Prefaces to both volumes written 1886 1880–​81: [D] Daybreak [.p] Preface written 1886 1881–​82: [GS] The Gay Science [.p] Preface written 1886 Book V [§§343–​83] written 1886 1882–​85: [Z] Thus Spoke Zarathustra [.i]–​[.iv] Four parts [i.p] “Zarathustra’s Preface” to Part I 1885–​86: [BGE] Beyond Good and Evil [.p] Preface 1886: BT.asc, HH.i.p, HH.ii.p, D.p, GS.p, GS.343–​83 1887: [GM] On the Genealogy of Morality [.p] Preface [.i]–​[.iii] Three essays 1888: [CW] The Case of Wagner [.e] Epilogue

528 Bibliography 1888: [TI] Twilight of the Idols [.i]–​[.xi] Eleven chapters 1888: [A] The Antichrist 1888: [EH] Ecce Homo [.i]–​[.iv] Four parts  iii.BT] etc. Subparts of Part III on Nietzsche’s earlier works, cited by the codes for these works 1888: [NCW] Nietzsche contra Wagner [.e] Epilogue

Nietzsche’s Nachlass In citing Nietzsche’s Nachlass I use the system described earlier in Citations: year (of the notebook)—​colon—​notebook number—​note number (in brackets). I append references to a note’s appearance (if it does appear) in the following English translations from the Nachlass. I cite the first by note number, the last three by page number. [WP] The Will to Power. Available in two recommendable translations: —​Ed. W. Kaufmann; Tr. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. —​Ed. R. K. Hill; Tr. R. K. Hill and M. A. Scarpitti. London: Penguin Classics, 2017. [P&T]  Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s. Ed. and tr. D. Breazeale. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979. [EN]  Writings from the Early Notebooks. Eds. R. Geuss and A. Nehamas; Tr. L. Löb. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. [TL] On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense. I cite this early unpublished essay by page number in EN. [LN]  Writings from the Late Notebooks. Ed. R.  Bittner; Tr. K.  Sturge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. [PTAG]  Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Tr. M.  Cowan. Chicago:  Regnery Gateway, 1962.

Secondary Sources Abel, G. 1998. Nietzsche: Die Dynamik der Willen zur Macht und die ewige Wiederkehr. 2nd Edition. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Acampora, C. 2013a. Contesting Nietzsche. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Acampora, C. 2013b. “Beholding Nietzsche: Ecce Homo, Fate, and Freedom,” in (eds.) K. Gemes and J. Richardson. Anderson, R. L. 2005. “Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption,” in European Journal of Philosophy 13(2):185–​225. Anderson, R. L. 2009. “Nietzsche on Redemption and Transfiguration,” in (eds.) J. Landy and M. Saler, The Re-​Enchantment of the World. Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press. Anderson, R. L. 2012. “What is a Nietzschean Self?,” in (eds.) C. Janaway and S. Robertson. Ansell-​Pearson, K. 2006. “The Incorporation of Truth: Towards the Overhuman,” in (ed.) K. Ansell-​Pearson.

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532 Bibliography Jonas, H. 1966/​ 2001. The Phenomenon of Life:  Toward a Philosophical Biology. New York: Harper & Row. [Repub. Evanton, IL: Northwestern University Press 2001.] Katsafanas, P. 2005. “Nietzsche’s Theory of Mind: Consciousness and Conceptualization,” in European Journal of Philosophy 13(April):1–​31. Katsafanas, P. 2011. “The Concept of Unified Agency in Nietzsche, Plato and Schiller,” in Journal of the History of Philosophy 49:87–​113. Katsafanas, P. 2013a. Agency and the Foundations of Ethics: Nietzschean Constitutivism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Katsafanas, P. 2013b. “Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology,” in (eds.) K. Gemes and J. Richardson. Katsafanas, P. 2015. “Value, Affect, Drive,” in (eds.) M. Dries and P. Kail. Katsafanas, P. 2016. The Nietzschean Self: Moral Psychology, Agency, and the Unconscious. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Katsafanas, P. (ed.) 2018. The Nietzschean Mind. London: Routledge. Kaufmann, W. 1950/​1974. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, Fourth Edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kaufmann, W. 1955. “Nietzsche and Rilke,” in The Kenyon Review 17(1):1–​22. Kierkegaard, S. 1849/​1980. The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, tr. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Klossowski, P. 1969/​1998. Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, tr. D. W. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Korsgaard, C. 1989a. “Morality as Freedom,” in (ed.) Y. Yovel Kant’s Practical Philosophy Reconsidered, Dordrecht: Kluwer. Korsgaard, C. 1989b. “Personal Identity and the Unity of Agency: A Kantian Response to Parfit,” in Philosophy and Public Affairs 18(2):101–​132. Lampert, L. 1986. Nietzsche’s Teaching:  An Interpretation of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lear, J. 2005. Freud. London: Routledge. Leiter, B. 1995. “Morality in the Pejorative Sense: On the Logic of Nietzsche’s Critique of Morality,” in British Journal for the History of Philosophy 3(1):113–​45. Leiter, B. 2000. “Nietzsche’s Metaethics:  Against the Privilege Readings,” in European Journal of Philosophy 8(3):277–​297. Leiter, B. 2002. Nietzsche on Morality. London and New York: Routledge. Leiter, B. 2007. “Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will,” in Philosopher’s Imprint 7(7):1–​15. Leiter, B. 2015. “Moralities Are a Sign-​Language of the Affects,” in (eds.) J. Constancio, M. J. M. Branco, and B. Ryan. Leiter, B. and Sinhababu, N. (eds.) 2007. Nietzsche and Morality. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lemm, V. 2015. “What We Can Learn from Plants About the Creation of Values,” in Nietzsche-​Studien 44:78–​87. Lippitt, J. and Urpeth, J. (eds.) 2000. Nietzsche and the Divine. Manchester, UK: Clinamen Press. Loeb, P. 2010. The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Loeb, P. 2013. “Eternal Recurrence,” in (eds.) K. Gemes and J. Richardson. Löwith, K. 1935/​1997. Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence, tr. J. H. Lomax. Berkeley: University of California Press 1978.

Bibliography  533 Magnus, B.  1978. Nietzsche’s Existential Imperative. Bloomington:  Indiana University Press. May, S. 1999. Nietzsche’s Ethics and His War on “Morality.” Oxford: Oxford University Press. May, S. 2009. “Nihilism and the Free Self,” in (eds.) K. Gemes and S. May. May, S. (ed.) 2011. Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality:  A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. May, S. 2016. “Is Nietzsche a Life-​Affirmer?,” in Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 78:211–​226. Müller-​Lauter, W. 1971/​1999. Nietzsche:  His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of His Philosophy, tr. D. J. Parent. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Nehamas, A. 1985. Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge, (MA): Harvard University Press. Nozick, R. 1981. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, M. C. 1994. “Pity and Mercy: Nietzsche’s Stoicism,” in (ed.) R. Schacht. Owen, D. 2018. “Constructing the Agon,” in (ed.) P. Katsafanas. Parkes, G. 1994. Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pippin, R. B. 2010. Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press. Poellner, P. 2006. “Phenomenology and Science in Nietzsche,” in (ed.) K. Ansell-​Pearson. Poellner, P. 2007. “Affect, Value, and Objectivity,” in (eds.) B. Leiter and N. Sinhababu. Prinz, J. 2016. “Genealogies of Morals: Nietzsche’s Method Compared,” in The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 47(2):180–​201. Reginster, B. 2006. The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Reginster, B. 2012. “Compassion and Selflessness,” in (eds.) C. Janaway and S. Robertson. Reginster, B.  2013. “The Psychology of Christian Morality,” in (eds.) K.  Gemes and J. Richardson. Riccardi, M. 2015. “Inner Opacity. Nietzsche on Introspection and Agency,” in Inquiry. Special Issue on Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology 58(3):221–​243. Riccardi, M. 2016. “Nietzsche’s Pluralism about Consciousness,” in British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24(1):132–​154. Richardson, J. 1996. Nietzsche’s System. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richardson, J. 2004. Nietzsche’s New Darwinism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richardson, J. 2006. “Nietzsche on Time and Becoming,” in (ed.) K. Ansell-​Pearson. Richardson, J. 2008. “Nietzsche’s Problem of the Past,” in (ed.) M. Dries. Richardson, J. 2009. “Nietzsche’s Freedoms,” in (eds.) K. Gemes and S. May. Richardson, J. 2012. Heidegger. London: Routledge. Risse, M. 2007. “Nietzsche on Selfishness, Justice, and the Duties of the Higher Men,” in (ed.) P. Bloomfield, Morality and Self-​Interest. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roberts, T. T. 1998. Contesting Spirit:  Nietzsche, Affirmation, Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Roberts, T. T. 2000. “Ecstatic philosophy,” in (eds.) J. Lipitt and J. Urpeth. Russell, B. 1945. A History of Western Philosophy. New York: Simon and Schuster. Santaniello, W. (ed.) 2001. Nietzsche and the Gods. Albany:  State University of New York Press. Schacht, R. 1983. Nietzsche. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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Name Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Abel, G., 55n.46, 306n.2 Acampora, C., 432n.56, 435n.61, 436–​37n.66, 459n.39, 459–​60n.41, 469–​70n.60 Anaximander, 357 Anderson, R. L., 103–​4n.77, 117n.1, 118n.6, 119n.15, 121n.22, 124n.29, 124n.30, 398n.1, 407n.14, 412n.26, 419n.36, 423–​24n.44, 514 Ansell-​Pearson, K., 52n.37, 481–​82n.24 Aristotle, 71–​72, 274, 278, 345, 473 Austen, J., 460    Benson, B., 476n.7 Bernard, C., 384 Breazeale, D., 73, 289, 396–​97 Brobjer, T., 306–​7n.7, 310n.19, 327n.65, 334–​ 35n.83, 341n.98, 476n.5, 482–​83n.27 Brusotti, M., 306n.2    Caesar, 478 Carter, J., 423–​24n.44, 514 Cartwright, D., 143n.76 Christ, xvi, 155–​56, 505 Clark, M., 24–​25n.50, 82n.6, 92n.36, 94n.43, 103–​4n.78, 181–​82, 184, 218nn.25–​26, 233n.53, 279n.81, 444n.11, 447–​48n.18, 449n.25, 479n.17, 511n.95, 513n.98, 518, 523–​24n.118 Confucius, 489 Constâncio, J., 176n.32, 212n.9, 246n.12, 316n.37, 398n.2 Conway, D., 39n.1, 78–​79n.108 Copernicus, N., 173 Copleston, F., 478n.13 Creasy, K., 247–​48n.15    Daigle, C., 52n.37 Darwin, C., 16n.32, 47–​48, 50–​51, 55n.46, 87–​ 88, 95n.47, 129, 162–​63, 177, 189, 204–​5n.1, 324, 337 Deleuze, G., 138n.58 Dellinger, J., 313n.23

Dennett, D., 312 Descartes, R., 164, 173–​74, 355, 356–​58, 400, 401–​2,  458 Dostoevsky, F., 243, 245, 393n.72 Dries, M., 449n.24, 450n.27 Dudrick, D., 24–​25n.50, 82n.6, 92n.36, 94n.43, 103–​4n.78, 181–​82, 233n.53 Dühring, E., 54n.41 Dunkle, I., 73n.95, 73n.97, 248n.18    Emden, C., 327n.65 Euclid, 178n.37    Fichte, J. G., 400–​1n.4 Foucault, M., 125–​26n.36 Frankfurt, H., 320n.47 Freud, S., 84, 98–​99n.60, 105n.80, 106–​7n.85    Gardner, S. 148n.94, 171n.26, 181n.39, 201–​ 2n.77, 409n.20, 409n.21 Gemes, K., 92–​93n.38, 105n.80, 107–​8n.87, 197n.72, 247, 248, 315n.32, 322n.51, 387–​88n.58, 402n.8, 408n.17, 412n.25, 412–​13n.27 Gerhardt, V., 106–​7n.84 Geuss, R., 335n.86 Goethe, J. W., 112, 322, 330n.71, 390n.61, 399, 412, 414, 418, 478, 480 Golomb, J., 483–​84n.30 Green, M., 181–​82n.41 Guay, R., 461n.43    Habermas. J., 284n.88 Hadot, P., 125–​26n.36 Han-​Pile, B., 353n.1, 387–​88n.58, 389n.59, 392 Hatab, L., 392n.68 Havas, R., 478n.12, 481n.23 Hegel, G. W. F., 340, 412, 438n.71, 453n.29 Heidegger, M., 1n.2, 62n.67, 209n.8, 212, 233n.54, 242n.2, 242n.4, 251n.26, 299n.104, 398, 426n.49, 445, 475n.2, 479n.16, 509n.90

538  Name Index Heit, H., 306n.2 Heraclitus, 74, 357, 360n.12, 363, 363–​64n.23, 364–​65, 366, 368–​69, 370, 378, 459, 498, 507 Hill, K., 180 Homer, 496, 500 Huddleston, A., 3n.10, 5n.12, 6n.15, 7nn.16–​17, 14n.24, 31n.60, 73n.95, 74n.98 Hume, D., 1–​2, 14n.23, 85, 172, 173, 174, 181n.39, 292 Hunt, L., 39n.1, 53–​54n.40, 69–​70n.89 Hussain, N., 10–​11, 30n.59, 31n.60, 32n.62    James, W., 95n.46, 97n.56, 138n.60, 404–​5n.13 Janaway, C., 117nn.1–​2, 117n.5, 118n.7, 121n.22, 139n.61, 143n.76, 146n.89, 148n.93, 149n.99, 268–​69nn.54–​55, 272n.64, 341n.96, 361–​62n.17, 432n.56 Jaspers, K., 495n.57 Jenkins, S., 149n.97 Jensen, A., 327n.65, 328n.66, 334–​35n.81 Jonas, H., 11–​12n.21    Kant, I., 25, 33–​34, 62, 65n.81, 69, 129, 162–​63, 172–​74, 175–​76, 177–​79, 180–​81, 183, 184–​ 86, 188, 225n.35, 231, 275n.72, 279–​80n.83, 292, 316, 323, 366–​67n.29, 450–​51, 453n.29, 458, 484n.33, 514 Katsafanas, P., 33, 56n.49, 57n.51, 69, 81n.1, 92–​93, 95n.47, 99–​100n.63, 117n.1, 119n.14, 212n.10, 315–​16n.35, 319n.43, 320n.48, 322n.51, 322n.53, 412n.25, 412n.26, 412–​ 13n.27, 431n.55 Kaufmann, W., 228–​29n.47, 267–​68n.52, 453n.29, 478n.12, 522–​23n.115 Kierkegaard, S., 398, 400 Klossowski, P., 139–​40n.64, 215n.18 Korsgaard, C., 175n.29, 275n.72 Köselitz, H., 505n.83    Lampert, L., 42n.8 Lear, J., 84n.9, 98–​99n.60, 106–​7n.85 Leibniz, G. W., 199n.73 Leiter, B., 19n.39, 30n.59, 31n.60, 167n.14, 169n.19, 170n.23, 214n.16, 255n.29, 258n.36, 259n.38, 259, 260, 262n.43, 264n.45, 267n.50, 315n.34, 443n.6, 457n.37 Lemm, V., 450n.26 Le Patourel, I., 402n.8, 408n.17, 412–​13n.27 Lippitt, J., 476n.7 Loeb, P., 393n.72, 506n.84, 510, 510–​11n.94, 511, 522n.114 Löwith, K., 517, 517–​18n.104 Luther, M., 65n.81

Magnus, B., 361–​62n.17, 511n.95 May, S., 39n.1, 144n.78, 247–​48, 255n.29, 315n.32, 316n.37, 361nn.14–​15, 387–​88n.58, 393n.70 Mayer Branco, M., 398n.2 Mill, J. S., 279n.80 Montaigne, M., 350n.107 Muhamed, 64–​65n.78, 489 Müller-​Lauter, W., 243n.6, 249–​50n.21, 250–​ 51n.23, 377n.48    Napoleon, 478–​79, 480–​81n.21 Nehamas, A., 33n.65, 79n.110, 218n.26, 368–​ 69n.32, 398n.1, 404n.11, 412n.26, 419n.36, 420n.37, 423n.43, 443n.6, 511n.95 Nozick, R., 400–​1n.4, 404–​5n.12 Nussbaum, M., 139–​40n.63, 267n.51, 268–​ 69n.54, 276n.74    Overbeck, F., 118n.9, 505 Owen, D., 459n.39, 459–​60n.42    Parkes, G., 81n.1, 102n.69, 102n.73 Parmenides, 364–​65n.25 Pascal, B., 307n.10, 346 Paul, 334–​35n.82, 501n.71 Pippin, R., 82n.6, 90n.32, 243n.7, 299n.104, 299n.106, 313n.27, 350n.107 Plato, 9, 64–​65, 129, 199n.73, 340n.95, 357n.5, 422, 458, 463, 467, 470, 471 Poellner, P., 89–​90n.28, 91n.34 Prinz, J., 335n.84, 348n.104    Rand, A., 456 Rée, P., 129 Reginster, B., 32–​33n.64, 39n.1, 57, 58, 144–​45, 242–​43n.5, 246n.12, 247–​48, 249n.20, 251, 254n.27, 254, 268–​69n.54, 270n.59, 353n.1, 358–​59n.8, 370n.36, 384n.51, 387–​88n.58, 390n.63, 417–​18n.31, 432n.56, 511n.95, 517n.102, 517–​18n.104, 518n.107 Riccardi, M., 50n.30, 85n.13, 86n.14, 191n.59, 403n.9 Rilke, R. M., 522–​23n.115 Risse, M., 432n.56 Roberts, T., 476n.7, 504n.77 Rousseau, J.-​J.,  278–​79 Russell, B., 273–​74n.70, 478n.13, 496–​97n.62 Ryan, B., 398n.2    Salomé, L., 41–​42, 129, 139–​40n.65, 476 Santaniello, W., 476n.7 Sartre, J.–​P., 398

Name Index  539 Schacht, R., 1n.1, 7n.17, 8n.19, 30n.56, 39n.1, 39–​40n.2, 43n.11, 54–​55n.45, 146n.88, 176n.32, 255n.29, 259n.38, 277n.76 Schopenhauer, A., 39–​40, 48, 54, 84–​85n.11, 89–​90n.29, 95n.47, 116, 129, 139–​40, 142–​45, 146–​47, 249, 251, 251n.25, 268–​69n.56, 269, 270n.59, 272n.64, 274, 279–​80n.83, 353, 358–​ 59n.8, 363n.20, 371, 373–​74, 497, 523 Schuringa, C., 324n.58, 327n.65, 330 Sellars, W., 449n.25 Seydlitz, R., 505n.83 Shakespeare, W., 107, 322n.52, 420 Shapshay, S., 139n.62, 147n.92 Shaw, T., 30n.59 Siemens, H., 459n.39, 459–​60n.40, 459–​60n.41, 466n.51 Silk, A., 3n.10, 13–​14n.22, 30n.59, 32–​33n.64, 34, 117n.1 Simmel, G., 510–​11n.93 Socrates, 28, 125, 129, 229, 248n.19, 328,  448–​49 Soll, I., 511n.95, 515–​16n.100, 516, 517 Spencer, H., 47–​48 Spinoza, B., 48, 120, 390n.62, 391, 496–​97

Stegmaier, W., 86n.15, 242n.4 Stellino, P., 245n.10, 523n.116 Stroud, B., 175, 178    Taha, A., 476n.7, 483–​84n.30, 494n.55 Turgenev, I., 243    Urpeth, J., 476n.7, 488n.42    van Tongeren, P., 500n.70, 500, 501n.74 Velleman, D., 400–​1n.4 von Tevenar, G., 146n.86, 268–​69nn.54–​55, 270n.60, 270–​71n.61, 435n.62    Wagner, R., 89–​90n.30, 310, 331, 333–​34, 487 Ward, J., 444n.11 White, A., 242n.3, 242–​43n.5 Wittgenstein, L., 218n.24 Wonderly, M., 444n.11 Wright, L., 49n.28    Young, J., 393n.71, 441nn.3–​4, 444n.11, 447–​48n.19, 458n.38, 464n.49, 476, 482–​83n.26, 495n.58

Subject Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. aesthetic, 79, 110, 124, 350, 354–​55, 393, 394, 423, 477–​78, 499 affect(s), xiv, 99–​100, 115–​16, 248 a. of command, 17, 100, 123, 318, 319, 323 as beginning in drive, 121–​22 as detaching from drive, 122, 123–​24 as evaluating, 119–​20, 121 as learning from experience, 120, 125–​26 as retral, 116, 138–​39 as undergone, 117, 118–​19 disciplining of, 125–​26 agency, xv, 20–​22, 162–​64, 167–​71 as a drive, 110, 171, 193–​94, 196, 213, 411 as designed for social control, 169, 230, 323, 411 as ‘speaking’ or meaning, 213 as tool of drives, 168, 170 critique of, 168–​70 whether epiphenomenal, 168, 169, 170–​71 a. without an agent, 162, 171, 189 aiming,  15–​17 altruism, 258, 271, 273, 275, 366, 432–​33, 435 amor fati, 359–​60, 388, 389, 477, 507, 517–​18 analysis, ix Apollonian, 126–​27, 224, 361–​62, 497 ascetic, 23, 24, 76, 137, 194, 254, 263, 266, 287,  304–​5 a. ideal, 137, 148, 151, 153, 201–​2, 250–​51, 309, 386 See also will to truth: as ascetic    bad conscience, 23, 136, 141, 152–​53, 154, 194, 249, 321, 493 beauty, 79, 393, 396, 423, 425, 495, 499 becoming, 18, 167, 168–​69, 170, 179, 182–​83, 287, 290–​91, 293–​94, 360, 366, 371, 404, 497, 518, 522–​23, 524–​25 bifurcation, 182–​83,  292–​94 body, 16, 23–​24, 52–​53, 67–​68, 78–​79, 83, 106–​ 7, 112–​13, 117, 153, 186–​87, 188, 190–​91, 193–​94, 209, 294, 355, 356–​57, 365–​66, 406–​8, 412, 429, 501

capacity, 71–​72, 317 categories, 173, 174, 176–​77, 178, 179, 292–​94 causality, 165, 176 clade, 60, 161–​63, 235, 437–​38, 466 cognitivism, 31, 32–​33 comfort, 469–​70,  473–​74 command, 25, 62, 63, 65–​67, 71–​72, 97, 103–​7, 200–​1,  418 common, 205–​11, 224–​33, 235–​39, 255, 278, 281, 398–​99, 426, 427, 441, 448, 457 master’s view of, 225 vs. individual, 208, 224–​25 vs. noble, 207–​8 vs. rare, 207 communication, 18–​19, 20, 88–​89, 90, 97, 113, 190, 212, 214, 235, 472 community, xv, 22, 190, 205, 206, 210–​11, 215, 222–​23, 230, 238, 257, 286, 337, 410, 441,  445–​46 compassion, 268–​69, 271 See also pity conscience, 65, 195, 201, 216, 230–​31, 255–​56,  489 See also bad conscience consciousness, 50, 164, 166 as self-​consciousness, 50, 191–​92, 195, 408–​9 origin of, 190–​92, 194 constitutivism, 33, 69 constructivism, 34 contest, 459–​60, 469–​70,  471–​72 control, 17, 72–​73 copying, 209–​10, 235, 446 creating, xvi, 155, 496 c. values, 14–​15, 394–​95, 441–​42, 449–​54 cruelty, 141, 149–​50, 151–​52, 155, 275–​76    death, 44–​45, 52–​53, 139–​40, 360, 509, 518,  523–​24 debt, 136, 192–​93, 492–​93 deception, 20, 90–​91, 285, 291, 296–​97, 394, 489 self-​deception, 296,  489–​90 despair, 123, 148, 152, 247–​50, 493, 519–​20

542  Subject Index Dionysian, 126–​27, 224, 360, 363, 376, 392,  506–​7 Dionysus, xvi, 155–​56, 378, 475–​76, 483, 497, 501, 506 disgust, 276, 519–​21 dissatisfaction, as intrinsic to willing, 143, 145–​506 divinity, 354, 378, 391, 495–​99, 507 See also god(s); religion drive(s), xiv, 17–​18, 81 as aiming at power, 98–​99 as attacked by human values, 22–​23 as expressed in human values, 23–​24 as intentional, 82, 89–​90, 101 as learning by experience, 96–​97, 109, 138 as sharing intentionality, 106–​7, 112, 114, 407, 418–​19,  420–​21 as ‘speaking’ or meaning, 213–​15 as unconscious, 84, 164–​65, 166–​67 as valuing, 16, 82, 92–​94 d.’s active goal, 88–​89, 95–​96 d. against life, 249–​51 d.’s passive function, 87–​88, 94–​95, 132–​33 eat-​d., 18, 82, 93, 104–​5, 122, 135, 300,  420–​21 knowledge of, 83–​91 multiplicity of, 102–​3, 112–​13, 166, 418 sex-​d., 18, 84, 88, 94, 95, 96–​97, 98, 99, 104–​5, 111–​12, 132, 501 synthesis of, 103–​8, 419 unification of, 74, 107–​8, 110–​11, 112, 187, 418–​24,  425 dualism,  356–​58 being d., 356–​57, 365–​67 value d., 358, 376–​77, 384–​85​    egoism, 109, 227, 410–​11, 432, 435 See also selfishness elite, 208, 238, 266, 283, 338, 434, 442, 443–​44, 462, 468, 471–​74, 478 equality, 218–​19, 258, 266–​68, 277–​83, 461 as fact, 277–​78, 279–​80 as value, 277–​79 moral e., 279–​80 personal e., 279, 280, 281 social e., 278–​79, 280–​81 equating unequals, 218–​19, 220, 222, 234,  292–​93 error-​theory,  32 eternal return, 359, 388, 477, 507–​25 feeling e. r., 519–​24 picture of, 508–​10 thinking e. r., 508–​12

whether meant as true, 510–​11, 512, 521–​25 willing e. r., 512–​19 ethic of custom (Sittlichkeit der Sitte), 64, 134–​35, 194, 227–​28, 255–​56, 286, 409–​10,  445 externalism, 8–​10, 12, 25, 26–​27, 28–​29, 30, 31–​33, 62, 63, 66, 69, 252–​53, 297–​98    fate,  517–​18 See also amor fati fear, 208–​9, 234–​36,  492–​93 fictionalism, 10–​11, 32n.62 first-​personal, 4, 87, 89, 91 founding, 64 f. values, 450, 453–​55 See also creating free spirit, 205, 282, 283, 296, 323–​24, 326, 414–​15, 436, 447, 452, 460–​61, 503 freedom, xv, 167–​68, 315–​28 as capacity with idea of itself, 316–​17 as agency, 319–​22 as aim of will to power, 318 as unity in drives, 318–​19 by genealogy, 322–​27, 349    genealogy of agency, 163, 189–​96 of commands grounding norms, 63–​65,  200–​1 of freedom, 305, 316–​22 of retrospection, 134–​37 of the self, 399, 405–​11 of suffering, 147–​53 of the common, 225–​33 of will to truth, 199, 283–​90 See also freedom: by genealogy genetic line, 51–​52, 60–​61, 161–​62 person’s identity with, 52, 60, 437–​38 god(s), 25, 64, 475–​78, 482–​508 as metaphor, 504–​17 as object for belief, 485, 486, 487, 488–​90,  503–​7 as object for feeling, 485, 487, 488, 492–​99 as object for willing, 64, 485, 486–​88, 490–​92, 499–​503 feeling of possession by, 483, 495–​96, 499,  502–​3 unreality of, 485, 487–​88 whether we can have as fiction(s), 476, 477 Zarathustra’s denial of, 482–​83 good as containing bad, 370–​71, 372, 373–​74 as gradated, 371–​72, 381–​82, 383

Subject Index  543 grammar, 164, 165–​66, 212 group, as ‘speaking’ or meaning, 215–​17 growth, 17–​18, 27 guilt, 121, 136, 152, 192–​93, 492–​93, 502    habit(s), 92, 118, 294–​95 health, 71, 73–​75, 154–​55, 384, 412, 433–​35, 458–​59,  519–​20 herd, 205, 209–​10, 223, 426, 427–​28, 441, 445–​46, 462,  467–​74 h.-​instinct, 209–​10, 426, 445, 473–​74 interest of, 468, 473 progress of, 232, 444, 447–​49 whether Nietzsche hostile to, 443–​44 whether Nietzsche indifferent to, 443–​44,  447–​48 hero,  478–​79 historical sense, 328–​29, 332, 339–​42 history, 305 as a science, 331, 334 dangers of, 127, 328–​29 new science of, 334–​39 Nietzsche’s evolving view of, 328–​34 philosophy’s need for, xi–​xii, 62 honesty, 219, 237–​38, 296, 313, 390–​91, 414–​16, 489, 500, 503 in valuing, xii–​xiii, xvi, 10–​11, 26, 28, 458 origin of, 202 human,  161–​62 as sick animal, 20, 75, 76, 137, 151, 411 taming of, 25, 63, 150–​52, 189, 199, 204, 249 human values, 161 as agential, 20–​22 as attacking drives, 22–​23 as claimed true, 24–​25, 31–​32 as expressing drives, 23–​24 as in group interest, 22–​23, 25, 210 meant as true, 196–​97, 199–​202    incorporation, 57, 58, 176, 292, 293–​94, 387–​88 See also truth: incorporation of individual, 22, 60, 190, 205–​6, 208, 224–​25, 227, 228–​30, 231–​33, 398–​99, 446–​48,  470–​71 as developing type, 236–​37, 447–​49 dependence on herd, 447–​48 internalism, xiii, 8–​10, 12, 25, 27, 29, 30, 32–​33, 62, 66–​67, 68, 69, 252, 260, 298    joy, 390–​91, 393, 495    language, xv, 165, 205–​6, 211–​24, 233–​39 as falsifying, 217–​22, 234–​36 as making common, 211, 220, 222–​23, 236

as sharing, 190, 212, 222–​24 critique of, 217–​24 expressive use of, 219, 220–​22 origin of, 190–​91, 194 referential use of, 219 life, xiv, 15–​16, 357 as grounding value of life, 53–​56, 381–​82 as grounding value of power, 53–​54, 55–​56, 69, 298 as layered, 51–​52, 131 as what values, 39–​40, 46, 48–​49, 69, 373 as what is valued, 39–​40, 54, 373 as will to power, 46–​48, 382 as woman or goddess, 41–​43, 65–​66, 483, 502 in biological sense, 43, 47, 51 in personal sense, 44–​45, 52–​53, 78–​80 in phenomenal sense, 44, 47, 50, 52 in poetic sense, 45–​46, 78–​80 point of view of, 372–​73, 374, 382–​83, 391 value of, 54–​55 life-​condition,  176–​78 love, 392–​93, 435, 437, 495, 496–​97    master, 63, 225 mastery, 58–​59, 72 See also control mechanism, 44, 50, 82, 84, 88–​89, 91, 93, 95–​97, 101, 308, 336, 345, 418 member, 196, 209, 445, 468–​69 memory, 127, 128, 134–​36, 138, 192, 193, 410 metaethics,  30–​35 See also cognitivism; constitutivism; constructivism; error theory; externalism; fictionalism; internalism; non-​cognitivism monism,  356–​58 being m., 357 value m., 355, 356, 358, 372–​76, 377 morality, 240–​41,  255–​83 as anti-​life,  264–​66 as contradicting itself, 260–​61 as depending on lies, 261–​63 as distinct from ethic of custom, 136, 194, 228–​32, 256–​57, 286, 410, 448–​49 as hostile to drives and body, 257 critique of, 258–​83 mysticism, 363, 391    nihilism, xii–​xiii, xv, 240, 242–​54 affective n., 248–​49, 250 no-​to-​life n., 244–​45, 246–​51,  254 no-​values n., 243–​45,  251–​54 noble, 207–​8, 230, 283, 467, 469–​74 new n., 471–​74

544  Subject Index non-​cognitivism,  31 norm(s), xv, 25, 92, 195, 204, 225–​33, 445–​46 as reviseable, 226, 232–​33 as shared, 226 creating n., 453–​54 de-​moralizing n.,  457–​61 in ethic of custom, 227–​28 new n., 440, 442, 452–​61 normative, 3n.6    obeying, 62, 66–​68, 103–​7, 200–​1, 445, 490,  491–​92 as permission, 105, 419, 421 as sublimation, 105, 108, 110–​12, 126, 321, 419, 421 as suppression, 104–​5, 108, 419, 421 opposite values, 355, 363–​73, 383    pantheism, 363, 495, 496, 498 past importance of, 130–​33 problem of, 127, 128–​30, 512 See also retrospection perspectivism. See value: v. perspectivism perspectivity, understanding of, 113, 413,  429–​31 pessimism, 139, 142–​44 philosopher, 5–​6, 34, 54, 62, 133, 231, 331, 348, 394–​95, 439, 444, 453–​54, 470–​71, 472 pity, 139, 141, 257–​58, 266–​67, 268–​77, 349–​50 as above other’s suffering, 270, 272, 273 as prompting altruism, 270–​71 as supposing to suffer with, 270, 273 critique of, 271–​74 new p., 274–​76 pleasure, 50, 59–​60, 100–​1, 119–​20, 141 as containing displeasure, 145, 371 politics, 441, 443, 461, 468 polytheism, 229–​30, 501, 505 possibility-​condition, 33, 162–​63, 173–​75, 176 power, 17, 61 as growth in control, 48–​49, 57–​59, 72–​73, 78, 465 as meta-​value, 27, 28–​29, 98–​99, 253, 265–​66,  353 as ‘more life’, 55 feeling of, 17, 59–​60, 99 indefiniteness of, 48, 56 value of, as grounded in life, 53–​54, 69,  382–​83 whether ‘overcoming resistance’, 57–​58 promising, 192–​94, 195

psychology, 81, 83–​84, 86, 89–​91, 305, 333,  342–​48 as first-​personally understanding goals, 88–​91,  346 as interpreting signs, 87–​91, 346 as third-​personally understanding functions, 87–​89, 91,  346–​47 drive p., 81, 83–​84, 343 method of, 86, 113–​14, 344 new science of, 343–​44 punishment, 135, 221    rank-​order, 30, 282–​83, 442, 461–​74 as ladder of abilities, 282–​83, 464–​66 as made historically, 465–​67, 468 as noble and herd, 467–​74 in descriptive sense, 462–​63 in valuative sense, 462, 463–​67 whether perspectival, 465 Rausch, 60, 100–​1, 110, 393, 477–​78, 499, 505 reason, faculty of, 65, 231 reasons, x r. for valuing, 10, 11–​12, 24–​25, 26–​27 relativism, 10, 11–​12, 380, 442, 461 religion, xvi, 136, 482–​507 as resting on lies, 489, 525 new r., 477, 482–​83, 494–​507, 525 origin of, 64, 486–​88 religious pathos, 477–​78, 488, 492–​93, 494–​99,  507–​8 responsibility, 121, 133, 193, 212, 256, 315, 410, 430, 502, 515, 518 ressentiment, 118, 121, 149, 151–​52, 261, 346–​47, 360, 380, 427, 433–​34 retrospection, dangers in, 134, 137 See also genealogy: of retrospection revaluation of values, 26, 325–​26, 456–​57 revenge, 149    science, 136, 305, 306–​15, 324, 327 as making familiar unfamiliar, 313–​14 as making unfamiliar familiar, 313, 314 critique of, 305, 306–​15 method of, 306–​7, 332 whether capable of truth, 306–​9 See also history; psychology selection, 16, 49, 60, 87, 94–​96, 189, 273, 337 self, xvi, 62, 398–​438 as reflexivity, 399, 400–​1, 402–​11, 413 becoming a s., 399, 404, 417–​28, 429, 432, 437, 439, 442, 451 by overcoming assimilation, 416–​18, 424–​28

Subject Index  545 by overcoming fragmentation, 416–​24 core view of, 400, 401–​2 new s., 399, 412–​17 See also genealogy: of self self-​contradiction, xi,  260–​61 self-​referring as descriptive, 403–​5, 406–​7, 408, 413–​14 as formative, 404–​5, 406–​7, 408, 414–​15 of body, 407–​8 of consciousness, 408–​11 of drives and affects, 406–​7 selfishness, 227, 398, 408–​38 genuine s., 434, 436–​37 types of, 433–​34 selflessness, 285–​86, 432 sexuality, 79, 84, 99, 110, 111–​12, 264, 392, 393, 499,  502–​3 See also drive(s): sex-​d. sharing, 89, 101, 190, 208–​10, 222, 223, 235 sickness, xii, 24, 73–​74, 124, 128, 134, 151, 153, 154,  383–​84 See also health; human: as sick animal; suffering: as healthy or sick sign, 86, 95–​97, 214, 420–​21 s.-​language, 19, 86, 88–​89, 91, 213 See also value: as a sign slave, 216–​17,  427–​28 solitude, 205, 237–​38 sovereign individual, 228–​29, 320, 326–​27, 349, 410,  456–​57 strength, 71–​73, 75, 434, 465 subject, 162–​67,  179–​80 sublimation. See obeying: as sublimation suffering, 116, 139–​57, 249, 269, 373, 493 as different from dissatisfaction, 145 as healthy or sick, 153–​56 as judging ‘worse than not-​living’, 142–​43,  269 as negative reflexive affect, 140, 141, 269 as object of cruelty and pity, 141, 269 as ‘taken up’ in a positive will, 146, 148–​49, 150, 152, 153, 154–​55 whether intrinsic to life or will, 144–​46 See also genealogy: of suffering superhuman, 26, 185, 475, 478–​82 symptom, 86, 87 synthesis, ix, 101    theoretical attitude, 136–​37 third-​personal, 4, 87, 88–​89, 91 tragic, 41, 116, 154–​55, 392, 498 transcendental argument, 34, 69, 172–​75, 178

truth as correspondence, 198–​200, 285, 286, 288, 290–​91,  302 as meta-​value, 27–​29, 163, 197, 202, 253, 263, 353, 458 incorporation of, xii–​xiii, 11, 26, 183–​84, 185, 186, 188, 283, 348, 350, 399, 429, 439, 441–​42, 457, 520 value of, x–​xi, xiii, 284, 289–​90 whether possible, 290–​91 See also will to truth type(s), as constituted by descent, 235–​36    unity of apperception, 172, 175, 180, 186–​87, 193, 196    value(s) as marker(s), 16–​18 as sign(s), xiii–​xiv, 18–​19, 430, 450 as tool(s), 15, 17, 18–​19 as valued(s), xiii, 14, 252 as object(s) of study, 1–​2 higher v., 243–​44, 294–​96 in descriptive sense, 2, 3–​5, 6–​8, 252 in valuative sense, 3–​5–​, 252 v. perspectivism, 9–​10, 11–​13, 252–​53, 400 v. realism, 9, 12–​13, 252–​53 whether ‘my own’, 430–​31 See also creating: c. values; founding: f. values; monism: value m.; opposite values ‘value of values’, 6 virtue, 20, 212, 221, 222–​37, 459    will as faculty of agent, 168 of life, 15–​16, 17, 19–​20 will to deception, 296–​97, 354–​55 will to power, 16, 17–​18, 69–​70 See also life: as will to power will to truth, 197–​203, 241, 283–​303 as ascetic, 137, 283, 284, 287, 288–​89, 304–​5, 311–​12, 324, 436 as freeing itself, 286–​87, 288–​89, 300, 311 as means to power, 199, 300–​2, 312 as moral, 199–​202, 285–​87, 288 healing of, 298–​303 originally a will to match values to norms, 199–​201, 202, 285 threatens higher values, 294–​96 whether needing restriction, 288–​89, 291–​92, 294, 296, 303, 310, 329, 396–​97 words, 212, 214, 218–​19, 224

546  Subject Index Yes, the, xvi, 353, 354, 355 as higher perspective, 372–​73, 378–​83, 388–​89,  391 as insight, 361, 373 as standard for judging values, 76–​77 feeling Y., 389–​94

makes will to truth livable, 395–​96 saying Y., 358–​59, 360–​62, 387–​96, 495,  521–​22 scope of, 361–​63 willing Y., 388–​89 yes-​and-​no, 354, 377–​83, 388