UC Berkeley has a program called “decal” in which students, under the guidance of an advisor, are able to offer a one to two unit course that other students can enroll and take. I’ve previously offered a course on Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols (you can view the page for it here) with R. Jay Wallace as the advisor. This semester, the course will be titled, “Nietzsche’s Psychology”, and it will look at Nietzsche’s psychological aphorisms and their philosophical implications (click here for its webpage).
Click here to view all my posts regarding the course: http://verhexung.com/tagged/nietzsche%27s-psychology
Click here to read the formatted pdf with footnotes: http://bit.ly/s4Cv8f.
1 — The Moral Point of View
Taking reflection as the moral point of view, I want to argue that reflection does not have the impartiality that certain moral philosophers take it to have. To begin, I want to look at the work of Thomas Nagel in his book The View from Nowhere and Christine Korsgaard in her book The Sources of Normativity. Both of them require a certain impartiality of reflection so that it can provide the sort of neutrality of perspective that is capable of assessing the legitimacy of entities that purport to be normative. Neutrality is required of reflection because reflection seeks to find reasons for action and values that are not just good for someone (i.e., preferences) but good in general (i.e., moral).
In discussing the ethical theories of these two philosophers, I want to focus on the way they describe reflection and on the role they give to reflection, so that I can launch a critique of their theories based on whether reflection works as they describe. My critique of their theories focuses on their described impartiality of reflection, and following Nietzsche’s critique against its impartiality, I want to argue both that Nagel fails to find a reliable procedure for assessing the objectivity of moral entities and that Korsgaard fails to find the impartiality that she requires of morality.
I’ve created a new website devoted to the discussion of Nietzsche’s texts.
The website will be conducted as a virtual reading group, where we’ll work through each of Nietzsche’s books at a rate of approximately one aphorism per day (or four shorter maxims a day).
I’ve chosen to begin with the text of Twilight of the Idols, and I warmly invite other interested readers to comment on the reading by visiting the comment box at the bottom of each aphorism’s page (which can be visited by clicking “read more” or by clicking on the title of the relevant aphorism).
Click here for a brief introduction to Twilight of the Idols. After Twilight, I plan on having us read Dawn, followed by On the Genealogy of Morality and The Antichrist.
The website for the reading group is: http://verhexung.com
Here is the problem: there are several passages in Nietzsche that make it seem as though agency is an illusion and has no causal force whatsoever. However, many philosophers of action would be at threat if this were true, since you need an agent in order to have genuine actions (as opposed to mere happenings). Although the passages that I will discuss from Nietzsche bring our conception of agency and personal volition into question, I believe that they do not have to be read as arguing that agency is an epiphenomenon; they do not have to be read as saying that the will is a mere illusion without causal force. Instead, I believe that Nietzsche has a positive conception of both agency and the will. I believe he must have a robust picture of agency in order to believe that a re-evaluation of values is possible. Without an agent that can operate with values and reasons for acting, a re-evaluation of those values would be futile.
In this article, I seek to show that Nietzsche has a conception of agency with causal efficacy. Toward this end, I will begin my article by (I) quoting several passages in Nietzsche that appear to be advocating that agency is an illusion and that the will is causally ineffective. Then I will (II) argue that what Nietzsche wants to do is offer a weaker (yet more sophisticated) conception of agency. Next, I will (III) re-examine those passages (from section I) in a broader context to show how they should actually be read as advocating the opposite of their initial, superficial reading. I will re-examine them to show that Nietzsche believes agency exists and that the will is causally effective. I argue that instead of dismissing agency and the will, all Nietzsche is trying to do in those passages is advise us with a few qualifications (e.g., the subject exists, but not a neutral subject; the will is causal, but not causa sui). Finally, I will (IV) give some direct textual evidence for Nietzsche’s belief in agency and the causality of the will.
Audio:
Nietzsche on Morality (Christopher Janaway)
Philosophy Bites published this podcast in which Janaway discusses the role of guilt in On the Genealogy of Morality.
Nietzsche’s Myths (Brian Leiter)
Philosophy Bites published this podcast in which Leiter dispels myths about Nietzsche. This is an excellent podcast for someone getting introduced to Nietzsche’s ideas.
Nietzsche on Morality (Brian Leiter)
Elucidations published this podcast in which Leiter discusses the scope of Nietzsche’s critique on morality.
Nietzsche on Freedom (Brian Leiter)
Oxford University published this podcast in which Leiter discusses his article, “Who is the Sovereign Individual? Nietzsche on Freedom”.
Nietzsche’s Value Monism (John Richardson)
Oxford University published this podcast in which Richardson, in the spirit of the conference’s theme: Nietzsche on Mind & Nature, discusses the merger of mind and nature in Nietzsche’s value monism.
Nietzsche on Art & Truth (Aaron Ridley)
Philosophy Bites published this podcast is which Ridley discusses the role of the Apollonian and the Dionysian in Nietzsche’s earlier philosophy and the metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological implications of these two concepts.
Nietzsche’s Metaphysics (Galen Strawson)
Oxford University published this podcast in which Strawson lays out the metaphysical assumptions in Nietzsche’s writings.
Schopenhauer (incl. Janaway)
In Our Time published this podcast in which Janaway, Grayling, and Han-Pile collaborate on explaining the basics of Schopenhauer’s philosophy in The World as Will and Representation.
Video:
Nietzsche on Mind & Nature (incl. Leiter, Richardson, Reginster)
Among Brian Leiter’s essays, the one that has generated the greatest amount of productive discourse is probably “Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will” (in addition, his essay “Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Action” is basically a shorter version of this essay). “Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will” is an important essay in the study of Nietzsche’s moral philosophy, philosophical psychology, and his philosophy of mind and action. My goal in this article is to summarize this important essay and to explain my reasons for why I believe the reading Leiter presents is mistaken.
Leiter argues that Nietzsche’s task in BGE 19, a task supported by the surrounding aphorisms, is to show how willing is causally ineffective. Leiter adds an additional qualification: even if the will does have some causal force, it is at least “not causally connected in a way that would underwrite ascriptions of moral responsibility” (2).
According to Leiter, Nietzsche believes that either the will is epiphenomenal and is “casually inert with respect to [] action” (i.e., token-epiphenomenalism) or the will is “casually effective only in virtue of other type-facts about the person” (i.e., type-epiphenomenalism) (11). (Type-facts “are either physiological facts about the person or facts about the person’s unconscious drives or affects” (7).) However, even if the will is “casually effective […] in virtue of other type-facts about the person” (11), Leiter believes that the will is “not causally connected in a way that would underwrite ascriptions of moral responsibility” (2; emphasis mine). The following figure shows token-epiphenomenalism (or simply, epiphenomenalism) on the left and type-epiphenomenalism (or will as secondary cause) on the right:
α — deep cause / drives
β — will / consciousness / thought
γ — action
Not only do I believe that Leiter’s stronger argument (token-epiphenomenalism) is an untenable reading of BGE 19, I also believe that his weaker argument (type-epiphenomenalism) is not sufficient to “underwrite ascriptions of moral responsibility”. I personally believe Nietzsche has something else in mind when he presents us with BGE 19 (an aphorism mirrored by the unpublished version: 38[8] of his Late Notebooks; click here to see the two aphorisms); Nietzsche does not want to make us believe that willing is causally ineffective; rather, he wants to present us with an analysis of willing so that we understand how it is tied to our nonconscious drives. I will now describe the problems with Leiter’s essay as I go through a summary.
I’d like to discuss the excellent essay by Ken Gemes titled, “Freud and Nietzsche on Sublimation”. This essay attempts to describe what “sublimation” means to Nietzsche and how he offers a criteria for the term that is purely psychological, self-contained, and free from cultural norms. The essay essentially uses Nietzsche to clarify a term in Freud, to define “sublimation” on a purely psychological basis. I will try to give a summary of the main ideas, interspersed with a few of my own extensions.
According to Freud, when a repression occurs, two components of a drive are repressed: the ideational component and the energetic component.
The first component is the ideational component, which includes the aim and object of the drive. For example, a sex drive may produce an image of a naked person in your mind; it may also make you direct your attention toward glancing at human bodies in a particular way. When the ideational component is repressed, no such images appear in your mind, and your attention is no longer guided in this way.
The second component that is repressed is the energetic component or the force that pushes you to pursue the aim of the drive. For example, in fully repressing the sex drive, not only are sexual images (the ideational component) kept from rising to consciousness, but also, the force or energy of the sex drive (the energetic component) is kept from expressing itself.
In repression, both the ideational component and the energetic component are inhibited:
Sublimation is the goal of psychoanalysis; hence, getting this concept straight is vital to understanding psychoanalysis. The term is important because “sublimation” is the means by which an individual is cured of his neurosis.
At the conclusion of a Schopenhauer & Nietzsche seminar that I completed in the previous spring semester, I wrote a paper titled, ”On the Role of Consciousness in Schopenhauer”.
The essay presents a look into how Schopenhauer conceives of consciousness and its battle with the unconscious. I then conclude the essay with several objections to Schopenhauer brought up by Nietzsche. Here is my abstract:
Schopenhauer presents us with a fascinating look into the power of the unconscious. However, the leading theme in his discussion, as detailed in The World as Will and Representation, is freedom from this unconscious. Nietzsche, heavily influenced by Schopenhauer, recognizes the great importance of the unconscious mind. However, he disagrees with Schopenhauer’s evaluation (that freedom from the unconscious is desirable), and he believes that such emancipation is impossible; Nietzsche does not believe consciousness can be severed (or that it can function when severed) from the unconscious drives. However, before detailing Nietzsche’s criticisms, I spend a great portion of the essay explaining Schopenhauer’s philosophy of consciousness.
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