The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  10.3 PHILOSOPHICAL NATURALISM AND NIETZSCHE’S THEORY OF MIND AND ACTION

  ‘Naturalism’ as a tradition in philosophy views human beings as not really different from the rest of the natural world, and thus one understands and explains human behaviour just as one understands and explains other natural phenomena. Nietzsche found variations of that vision in a variety of philosophers he studied and admired, including Thales, Spinoza, Herder, Schopenhauer, and the German Materialists; indeed, his own philosophical perspective on most topics bears the most striking resemblance to that of the Scottish philosopher David Hume (whom Nietzsche, alas, knew little about). Like Hume, Nietzsche notices that reason underdetermines what humans believe and what they value; and like Hume, he thinks the explanation for human beliefs and values must be sought in non-rational dispositions characteristic of creatures like us. (Unlike Hume, he does not think the non-rational dispositions that actually explain our beliefs and values tend to vindicate them.) Nietzsche’s own speculative ‘science’ of human nature owed much to what he learned from his readings of the German Materialists and from Schopenhauer, as well as his own unparalleled gifts at psychological observation.

  Central to Nietzsche’s naturalism about persons was his general conception of the mind and of agency. According to Nietzsche, (1) conscious mental states are largely (perhaps wholly) epiphenomenal; therefore (2) the conscious experience of willing misleads us as to the actual genesis of our actions; (3) actions, as well as the conscious evaluative beliefs that precede them, arise from unconscious psychological processes, especially affective or emotional ones, of which we are, at most, only dimly aware; and, given (1) through (3), Nietzsche believes that (4) no one is morally responsible for his or her actions. Let us say a few words about each of these distinctive theses in turn.

  ‘Consciousness is a surface [Oberfläche]’ (EH II: 9), and it is a surface that conceals what is actually causally efficacious in our mental lives, namely, our unconscious mental states, especially our affects and drives. When we talk of the ‘will’ or of the ‘motive’ that precedes an action we are referring to ‘error[s]‌’ and ‘phantoms’, ‘merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness—something alongside the deed that is more likely to cover up the antecedents of the deed than to represent them’ (TI VI: 3). Only our ‘ridiculous overestimation and misunderstanding of consciousness’ (GS: 11) leads us to fail to recognize that ‘the greatest part of our spirit’s activity…remains unconscious and unfelt’ (GS: 333), that ‘everything of which we become conscious…causes nothing’ (WP: 478). There is some debate in the scholarly literature about the extent and character of the epiphenomenal nature of conscious mental life according to Nietzsche (see Leiter 2002: 91–5; Katsafanas 2005; Riccardi 2013), but the most plausible interpretation is that while we are aware in consciousness (both conscious perception and conscious cognition) of various things and ideas, these mental states are only efficacious in action in virtue of being internalized into unconscious mental processes. (Interestingly, this view has been supported by much recent work in cognitive science, e.g. Wegner 2002 and Rosenthal 2005; for discussion in relation to Nietzsche, see Leiter 2007 and especially Riccardi 2013.)

  Of course, if the conscious mental states that precede action are not causally efficacious, then that means our conscious experience of willing an action is also misleading. ‘[T]‌he feeling of will [may] suffice[] for’ a person ‘to assume cause and effect’ (GS 127) as Nietzsche notes, but this assumption is faulty. As Nietzsche puts it, in one of his more dramatic denials of freedom of the will:

  We laugh at him who steps out of his room at the moment when the sun steps out of its room, and then says: ‘I will that the sun shall rise’; and at him who cannot stop a wheel, and says, ‘I will that it shall roll’; and at him who is thrown down in wrestling, and says: ‘here I lie, but I will lie here!’ But, all laughter aside, are we ourselves ever acting any differently whenever we employ the expression ‘I will’? (D 124)

  Throughout his corpus, Nietzsche’s answer to this last rhetorical question is in the negative. His key insight is that ‘a thought comes when “it” wants, and not when “I” want’ (BGE 17), and that includes the thoughts associated with willing. If the ‘willing thought’ that precedes an action is itself causally determined by something else, then in what sense do I will the action? Nietzsche is quite clear that one does not, even in a late work like Twilight of the Idols:

  We believed ourselves to be causal in the act of willing…Nor did one doubt that all the antecedents of an act, its causes, were to be sought in consciousness and would be found there once sought—as ‘motives’: else one would not have been free and responsible for it. Finally, who would have denied that a thought is caused? That the ‘I’ causes the thought? (TI VI: 3)

  But it is, of course, Nietzsche who denies that ‘I’ cause my thoughts. He soon makes clear, in the same section, the import of this denial: ‘The “inner world” is full of phantoms’, he says, and ‘the will is one of them. The will no longer moves anything…it merely accompanies events. The so-called motive: another error. Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness’. There are no conscious mental causes at all, he concludes (TI VI: 3) (cf. Leiter 2007 for detailed discussion).

  Unsurprisingly, this scepticism about the causal efficacy of what we experience as the will leads Nietzsche to conclude that no one is morally responsible for his actions, an idea he endorses throughout his philosophical career. So, for example, in the early 1880s, he writes:

  Do I have to add that the wise Oedipus was right that we really are not responsible for our dreams—but just as little for our waking life, and that the doctrine of freedom of will has human pride and feeling of power for its father and mother? (D 128)

  We may have other motives for thinking ourselves free, but we are as little responsible for what we do in real life as what we do in our dreams. It is hard to imagine a more bracing denial of freedom and responsibility. The same themes are sounded in one of his very last works, The Antichrist:

  Formerly man was given a ‘free will’ as his dowry from a higher order: today we have taken his will away altogether, in the sense that we no longer admit the will as a faculty. The old word ‘will’ now serves only to denote a resultant, a kind of individual reaction, which follows necessarily upon a number of partly contradictory, partly harmonious stimuli: the will no longer ‘acts’ [wirkt] or ‘moves’ [bewegt]. (A 14)

  Denial of the causality of ‘the will’ (more precisely, what we experience as willing) is central, as we have just seen, to Nietzsche’s scepticism about free will. It also explains why he frequently denies ‘unfree will’ as well: what we experience as ‘will’ does not, in fact, cause our actions, so the causal determination or freedom of this will is irrelevant. If the faculty of the will ‘no longer “acts” or “moves”’ (A 14)—if it is no longer causal—then there remains no conceptual space for the compatabilist idea that the right kind of causal determination of the will is compatible with responsibility for our actions. If, as Zarathustra puts it, ‘thought is one thing, the deed is another, and the image of the deed still another: the wheel of causality does not roll between them’ (Z I, ‘On the Pale Criminal’), then there is no room for moral responsibility: I may well identify with my ‘thoughts’ or my will, but if they do not cause my actions, how could that make me responsible for them?

  How, one might ask, does Nietzsche’s famous rhetoric about the ‘will to power’ square with this picture of mind and agency? Nietzsche does think he can discern a tendency in human action towards power, which, following the influential account in Richardson (1996), is most plausibly understood as a tendency of each drive in the human psyche to try to dominate the others, to redirect their psychic energy towards the dominant drive’s ends, whatever they may be. Sometimes, of course, Nietzsche casts the idea of will to power in psychologistic terms that would make it the natural opponent of psychological hedonism, that is, rather than seeking feelings of pleasur
e, ‘every animal…instinctively strives for…his maximum feeling of power [Machtgefühl]’ (GM III: 7). On either rendering—as the tendency of all drives to dominate others, or as a desire for the feeling of power—it represents a psychological hypothesis that is supposed to be explanatory of observed behaviour.3 Yet Nietzsche frequently asserts that we are in the dark about the real genesis of our actions. As he writes in Daybreak, ‘The primeval delusion still lives on that one knows, and knows quite precisely in every case, how human action is brought about’, yet the reality is that ‘all actions are essentially unknown’ (D 116). Indeed:

  However far a man may go in self-knowledge, nothing however can be more incomplete than his image of the totality of drives which constitute his being. He can scarcely name even the cruder ones: their number and strength, their ebb and flood, their play and counterplay among one another, and above all the laws of their nutriment [Ernährung] remain wholly unknown to him. (D 119)

  Yet Nietzsche is confident that values ‘belong among the most powerful levers in the involved mechanisms of our actions, but…in any particular case the law of their mechanism is indemonstrable’ (GS 335). Notice, however, that all these passages are compatible with the hypothesis that we can know, from the third-person perspective, that, whatever the particular mechanism, whatever the particular drives, at play in individual human actions, they manifest a general pattern, namely, that particular drives try to gain dominion over all other drives in the psyche and that, in many instances, that phenomenon is associated with a feeling of power. That is enough for Nietzsche’s doctrine of will to power.

  Nietzsche’s famous method of ‘genealogy’ is also a key part of his naturalistic approach to morality and to human beings. Nietzsche thinks of genealogy as history correctly practiced (cf. Nehamas 1985: 246 n. 1), and as correctly practiced it reveals contemporary phenomena that might seem to have an atemporal status (e.g. the demands of morality as we understand them) or supernatural origin (e.g. morality as God’s commands) to have, in fact, complicated natural histories, in which a variety of differing human purposes are at work (cf. Leiter 2002: 166–73). Genealogy also avoids the ahistorical mistake of thinking that some institution’s or practice’s current meaning or value necessarily explains why that institution or practice originally came into being. Thus, most famously, in On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche shows that our current moral views arose from an historical process that included, inter alia, the efforts of oppressed classes in the late Roman Empire to score a victory over their oppressors by reconceptualizing their lives as morally reprehensible; the internalization of cruelty that is a precondition for civilized life, which gives rise to a capacity for ‘conscience’; and the role of ‘ascetic’ moralities—like the moralities of all the world’s major religions, which preach denial of basic human desires for sexual gratification, cruelty, and power—in rendering suffering meaningful and thus making life bearable for the majority of mortals.

  Nietzsche is explicit that he deploys the genealogical method in order to critique morality, though he also notes it is ‘one means among many’ for doing so (e.g. GM Pref: 5). But how can a genealogy have any critical import? Nietzsche recognizes and repudiates what we now call the genetic fallacy; he says, for example, that ‘[e]‌ven if a morality has grown out of an error, the realization of this fact would not so much as touch the problem of its value’ (GS 345). Instead, Nietzsche uses genealogy to make two kinds of critical points. First, as we will see in section 10.4, central to Nietzsche’s objection to morality is that its demands have a deleterious effect on the flourishing of exceptional individuals. The origin of a morality, however, has a special evidential status as to the effects (or causal powers) of that morality, for example, as to whether morality obstructs or promotes human flourishing. On Nietzsche’s view, moralities (except in cases of false consciousness) are adopted for prudential reasons, that is, because they are in the interests of certain types of people. On Nietzsche’s Calliclean picture, persons adopt moralities for self-interested reasons, because each ‘instinctively strives for an optimum of favourable conditions in which fully to release his power’ (GM III: 7). Thus, people would not have adopted a morality in the first place if its effect wasn’t to produce ‘favourable conditions in which’ they can ‘release [their] power’. That is, morality must have the creation of those conditions in which certain types of people flourish as one of its effects. As Nietzsche puts it in the Nachlass:

  Thus in the history of morality a will to power finds expression, through which now the slaves and oppressed, now the ill-constituted and those who suffer from themselves, now the mediocre attempt to make those value judgments prevail that are favorable to them. (WP 400; cf. BGE 187; Z I: 15; WP 134, 254, 258, 675)

  If this is right, then it follows that insight into the origin of our morality gives us insight into its causal powers: namely, that it favours the flourishing of certain kinds of persons, and thwarts the flourishing of other kinds. The genealogy of morality is, of course, but one way of discovering this fact: for we discover, in the Genealogy, that, at its origin, our morality (because of its distinctive effects) was in the interests of the weak, base, and wretched. If that was its effect, then perhaps that is its effect now?

  Genealogy supports another line of critique for Nietzsche, as when he observes that by revealing the ‘shameful origin’ of morality, the Genealogy simply brings ‘a feeling of diminution in value of the thing that originated thus and prepares the way to a critical mood and attitude toward it’ (WP 254; cf. GS 345; second emphasis added). We can state the point more formally. If it turns out that our moral beliefs arise from an epistemically unreliable process—for example, the desire of oppressed peoples to seek revenge against their oppressors—then that fact gives us reason to wonder whether the resulting beliefs are warranted (cf. Sinhababu 2007). Suppose, for example, an acquaintance recommends a restaurant in glowing terms, making it sound almost too good to believe. One then learns that the origin of the acquaintance’s enthusiasm for this restaurant is that he is a part-owner of the establishment. The origin does not, to be sure, refute the acquaintance’s reasons to patronize the restaurant, but the discovery of this ‘shameful origin’ surely ‘prepares the way to a critical mood and attitude toward[s]‌’ these reasons. One will revisit the reasons with a sceptical eye, knowing what one now knows about the origin. So, too, Nietzsche clearly hopes that the readers of the Genealogy will stand ready to revisit (indeed, revalue) morality given what his naturalistic account shows them about its origin and its effects.

  10.4 NIETZSCHE’S CRITIQUE OF MORALITY AND THE AESTHETIC ‘JUSTIFICATION’ OF EXISTENCE

  Nietzsche’s two central concerns are the problem of suffering, posed by Schopenhauer, and the ‘revaluation of values’ as he called it, meaning, in particular, a critique of the dominant morality. The problem of suffering, recall, is the problem of how life can be ‘justified’ in the face of the terrible truth that suffering, loss, pain, and ultimately oblivion await us all, as well as everyone we care about. Most of Nietzsche’s writing, however, is devoted to attacking ‘morality’ (Moral). We shall return in a later section to the connection between these two dominant themes.

  Let us start with the critique of morality. Nietzsche does not, needless to say, reject every code of conduct governing human interactions that one might call ‘moral,’ so it will be helpful (following Leiter 2002: 74) to introduce the term ‘morality in the pejorative sense’ (MPS) to pick out those values to which Nietzsche centrally objects. Nietzsche’s critique of MPS proceeds on two fronts. On the one hand, he attacks as false (as we have seen) certain assumptions about human agency that undergird MPS, assumptions, for example, about freedom of the will and moral responsibility (for more detail, cf. Leiter 2002: 80–112; see also, Robertson 2012). But Nietzsche’s main objections do not pertain to these mistakes about the true nature of mind and action: that is, ‘[i]‌t is not error as error that’ he objects to fundamentally in MPS (EH IV: 7),
although Nietzsche’s two most frequently named—and closely related—targets, Christian and Kantian morality, share such assumptions about agency. Nietzsche’s central objection to morality is that it is harmful to the highest human beings, the exemplars of human excellence whom Nietzsche values above all others. ‘The demand of one morality for all’, he says, ‘is detrimental to the higher men’ (BGE 228), and that is because the prevalent morality, MPS, is in the interests of the ‘herd’, the lower types of human beings. In the preface to the Genealogy, Nietzsche sums up his basic concern particularly well: