Narziss

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. 

I — Agency is an Illusion; the Will is Epiphenomenal

At this point, I’d simply like to set the opposition; I’d like to reveal the main passages that can be used to vindicate the view that Nietzsche believes that agency is an illusion and that the will is epiphenomenal.  The first passage is an aphorism titled, “What is willing!” from Daybreak:

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 laugher aside, are we ourselves ever acting any differently whenever we employ the expression: ‘I will’? (D 124)

So in this passage we see Nietzsche giving us an account of someone mistakenly believing that inevitable events occurring apart from him are somehow the result of his will.  And then Nietzsche startles us with a rhetorical question: is it that different when we claim to have willed an action?  This rhetorical question seems to imply that we are just as deluded as the person who believes that they caused the sun to rise when we believe that we have caused an action.

Next, we have another passage, this one from a later work, where Nietzsche seems to state that our will is causally ineffective:  

[We mistakingly] believe[ ] that our acts of will [are] causally efficacious; [we were mistaken when] we thought that here, at least, we had caught causality in the act. (TI VI: 2)

In this passage, we see Nietzsche questioning the causal efficacy of our conscious acts.  Such an apparent negative criticism of agency and the will would not seem to bode well for prospects of an alternate reading.  

Finally, we have a passage where Nietzsche seems to dismiss the whole picture of agency.  Here Nietzsche outright says that there is no “doer” (or agent) behind the “deed” (or action):

[T]here is no “being” behind the doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is simply fabricated into the doing—the doing is everything. (GM III: 13)

This passage seems to say, surprisingly, that there is no agent—the agent is a mere fabrication.  All we have is the action or “the doing”.  This is strikingly problematic since under many models of action (in the philosophy of action), you can’t have an action without an agent to which to ascribe the action (otherwise you just have a mere happening).  Unless we are able to read Nietzsche’s text as giving us a picture of unreflective action, we need to somehow salvage some picture of agency in order to have genuine action (and not mere behaviors or happenings).  

II — The prospect of a Revisionary account of Agency and the Will

In this section, I’d like to take a second look at several passages that offer a glimpse of Nietzsche’s revisionary account of agency and the will.  First of all, I don’t believe Nietzsche wants to outright dismiss agency and the will.  On the contrary, I believe Nietzsche wants to develop a positive picture of agency and its causality.  Instead of dismissing agency, the passages that we will examine offer the prospect of a revisionary account, a revisionary account with some limitations and qualifications on agency.

When I say that Nietzsche accepts a picture of agency with some qualifications, what I mean to say is that Nietzsche does not outright dismiss agency but rather concedes to a weaker conception of agency.  His criticisms are therefore revisionary.  According to Nietzsche, it would be mistaken to believe that we possessed full fledged agency (that agency is causally autonomous), but I believe he accepts a weaker picture of agency where an agent acts but is not the sole cause of action.  

When we look at passage 19 of Beyond Good and Evil, we see that Nietzsche provides us with an analysis of the constitution of the will as a revisionary account.  He provides this revisionary account against Schopenhauer and other philosophers who thought that the will was a kind of entity of its own.  Nietzsche tells us that the will is not a sui generis psychic entity but is rather a top-level psychological phenomena composed of thought, feelings, and drive affect.   So here we see Nietzsche not outright dismissing the will, but rather, replacing a misunderstanding of the will with a qualified and limited conception of the will—in this case, a will that is constituted.  

In another passage of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche criticizes our belief in the Christian “atomism of the soul” only to turn around and qualify that the concept of the soul needn’t be outright dismissed but should be merely revised. Nietzsche believes the “soul hypothesis” could persist under stricter limitations:

But the path lies open for new versions and sophistications of the soul hypothesis – and concepts like the “mortal soul” and the “soul as subject-multiplicity” and the “soul as a society constructed out of drives and affects” want henceforth to have civil right in the realm of science. (BGE 12)

Lastly, we have a second passage where Nietzsche questions our overestimation consciousness.  Our mistake is thinking that consciousness is the sufficient and necessary condition for agency.  However, like the above passage where Nietzsche accepts the “soul” under certain qualifications, Nietzsche also holds on to an understanding of consciousness, albeit a much weaker version:

One thinks it [consciousness] consists the kernel of man, what is abiding, eternal, ultimate, most original in him! […] This ridiculous overestimation and misapprehension of consciousness has the very useful consequence that an all-too-rapid development of consciousness was prevented. (GS 11)

So the first idea in the last two passages from which I quoted (BGE 12 & GS 11) is that agency has been erroneously described in a way in which it seems essential to man and separate from the causal realm.  The second idea is we should not necessarily dismiss the “soul hypothesis” or “consciousness” but instead hold on to a more modest, weaker conception of these terms as part of agency (which is actually part of a complex picture of agency).  

Let me show you a shorter passage where we see these two ideas: the error followed by the qualification.  Nietzsche says, “[Consciousness] is not the directing agent, but an organ of the directing agent” (WP 524).  The first idea is that we are mistaken in erroneously describing consciousness as the directing agent; the second idea (the qualification) is that we should question the picture of agency qua consciousness in order to instead see consciousness as a part of a more complex picture of agency.  

What is interesting in all these passages is that Nietzsche is not outright dismissing agency but is instead providing us with a revisionary account.  The soul has been misdescribed as being separate from the causal flux, when it is actually part of it.  Agency has been misdescribed as being constituted by consciousness alone, when in fact consciousness is only a part of agency. 

III — Reexamining the Problematic Passages

In this section, I’d like to take a second look at the passages from the prior section (I) where the three quotes were provided in order to vindicate the view that agency is an illusion and the will is epiphenomenal.  My goal is to reexamine the passages in order to argue for the claim that these passages do not have to be read as avowing the dismissal of agency and causality of the will.  On the contrary, I believe Nietzsche wants to develop a positive picture of agency and its causality.  I will argue that a careful rereading of these passages reveals that Nietzsche merely wants to apply some limitations and qualifications to our mistaken commonsensical understanding of the terms “agency” and “will”.  We have already seen Nietzsche’s tendency to follow certain criticisms with qualifications in order to preserve a weaker conception of the term.  With these qualifications applied to the original three passages, we will finally see Nietzsche’s model of agency where an agent does act, and the agent contributes to her action because his will is causally efficacious.  

The first passage presented an analogy between absurd cases like an individual believing that they willed a sunrise and more modest cases where someone uses the phrase “I will” (e.g. “I will” an action) (D 124).  Brian Leiter comments on this passage saying, “If it is really true that this analogy holds, then it follows that the experience of willing which precedes an action does not track an actual causal relationship: the experience of willing is epiphenomenal […] with respect to the action” (Leiter 2007: 2).  However, I don’t believe Nietzsche is merely leaping from one strong claim to another: he is not jumping from the positive strong claim, “the will is the sole cause of action,” to the negative strong claim, “the will stands in no causal relation with respect to action”.  Rather, I believe Nietzsche is only telling us that we are mistaken in believing that the will, as a separate, autonomous essence, influences action.  Nevertheless, the will does factor into the etiology of an action.  It is okay to believe in this causal influence of the will when we understand the will as causally constrained, causally constrained because it is composed of thought, feelings, and affect (BGE 19).  

So it seems that although there is no free, autonomous will apart from the natural, causal order, there is still a will.  In this sense, what the analogy means is that believing that you willed a sunrise (whose true causes lie instead in the natural order) is not very different than believing that you willed an action (whose causes also lie in the natural order).  What I believe Nietzsche is actually trying to tell us is that these two scenarios are not that different because both the causes of your action and the causes of the sunrise arise from the natural world. 

With respect to clarifying the first passage’s naturalistic notion of agency and will, two further quotes come to mind:  

First, we must understand how rare Nietzsche thinks a personal action is.  Nietzsche says, “nothing is rarer than a personal action. A class, a rank, an environment, an accident—everything expresses itself sooner in a work or a deed, than a ‘person’” (WP 886).  Here he is saying that authentic agency is incredibly (perhaps impossibly) rare.  So even if a will appears, this is a will that is constrained by the person’s (adopted) values and their drives.  

Second, we must understand that Nietzsche dismisses both the concept of “free will” and the concept of an “un-free will”.  In Beyond Good and Evil 21, Nietzsche says that it is not that we should be contemplating which is correct between the “free” and “un-free will”.  Instead, he says, “in real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills” (BGE 21).  If Nietzsche really believed that the will was epiphenomenal, then he would concede to belief in the “un-free will”.  However, since he also refuses the un-free will, it shows that Nietzsche still believes that the will can factor into the etiology of an action.  Again, this will that we factor in is a will that is constrained by the natural world.

The second passage we are reexamining reads, we mistakingly “believe[ ] that our acts of will [are] causally efficacious”; we were mistaken when “we thought that here, at least, we had caught causality in the act” (TI VI: 2). 

Prima facie, this passage seems to dismiss the causal efficacy of consciousness.  In context, I will argue, this passage only scrutinizes the belief that consciousness is the sole or primary cause of action (or that the will is causa sui).  As Nietzsche says in the same passage, “Nobody doubted that consciousness was the place to look for all the antecedentia of an act” (ibid.).  From this line, I believe we can understand that what Nietzsche is actually scrutinizing is the belief that consciousness contains the antecedentia or primary causes of an act.  He doesn’t dismiss the efficacy of the will; he dismisses the idea that actions begin in the will.

In this way, I believe Nietzsche still leaves open the possibility of accepting a picture of the will as secondary cause, where the will factors into the etiology of an action but is not the primary cause.  And as we have seen from BGE 19, if the will is itself composed of thought, feelings, and affect, it seems that the values of our culture and our own drives provide the conceptual and affective context for our willing.  In this sense, our will would be second in the etiology of an action, second to something like historical conditioning, our character, biology, and our drives.  This further vindicates the crux of my argument that none of this rules out the causal influence of the will in the etiology of action.

The third passage we originally discussed brings the notion of a subject or agent into question.  In this aphorism, Nietzsche seems to dismiss agency by saying:

[T]here is no “being” behind the doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is simply fabricated into the doing—the doing is everything. (GM III: 13)

However, the context of this passage can change its meaning.  This above passage is preceded by the following sentence:

[P]opular morality also separates strength from the expressions of strength as if there were behind the strong an indifferent substratum that is free to express strength—or not to. (GM III: 13; emphasis mine)

The difference is that with this added sentence, the subject of Nietzsche’s critique is shifted.  It is not that there is no “doer” or “substratum” but rather that there is no “indifferent substratum” or “neutral doer” (GM III: 13; emphasis mine).  

In the greater context of the Genealogy, I understand Nietzsche as questioning the doer-deed relationship for the purpose of illuminating his claim that the reactive slaves rely on an error for holding the active master responsible for his action.  The error is the belief in a neutral subject, as if the master was somehow able to choose to act otherwise.  The master is strong; the master’s subject cannot be separated from his drives that compel him to act on his strength.  Since the doer is inextricably tied to the quality of a deed or action, a neutral “doer” cannot be separated out from the effecting of an action.  So if the “doer” is strong, he cannot help but act strong.  If the “doer” is weak, there is no way that he could choose to act strong.

Thus we see, in this rereading of the passages, how it would be a mistake to read them as vindicating the view that Nietzsche believes agency is an illusion and the will is epiphenomenal.  Instead, these passages paint us a portrait of much weaker conceptions of agency and the will, conceptions limited by subtle qualifications. 

Foremost, what we learn from Nietzsche is that the will is not a separate essence but inheres in the causal flux of thought, feeling, and affect.  Finally, we learn that the qualities of the agent’s actions are inextricably tied to the qualities of an agent (e.g. strong actions arise from strong agents, weak actions arise from weak agents).

IV — Textual Evidence for Agency and Causality of the Will

In this last argumentative section, I’d like to discuss some textual evidence to further solidify the view of a positive conception of agency in Nietzsche (with a will that factors into the etiology of action).  The first passage draws on the importance of interpretation and re-evaluation, the second passage focuses on the influence of consciousness (in virtue of values), and the third passage supports the second passage by discussing the influence of conscious ideas.  

The collected notes that were arranged and published by Nietzsche’s sister under the heading The Will to Power, begin with this fascinating passage:

Point of departure: it is an error to consider “social distress” or “physiological degeneration” or, worse, corruption, as the cause of nihilism. […] Distress, whether of the soul, body, or intellect, cannot of itself give birth to nihilism[…].  Such distress always permits a variety of interpretations.  Rather: it is in one particular interpretation, the Christian-moral one, that nihilism is rooted” (WP 1).  

The passage is fascinating because it draws emphasis away from a potentially biological explanation of the “cause” of nihilism (this sort of explanation is a temptation of a strong naturalist reading of Nietzsche).  These bio-psychological factors (i.e. “social distress”, “physiological degeneration”, “corruption”) may have provided the pre-conditions for nihilism, but according to Nietzsche, they cannot by themselves account for “giv[ing] birth to nihilism” (WP 1).  The true condition of nihilism, according to Nietzsche, is a particular type of interpretation, namely, the “Christian-moral one” (ibid.).

What is relevant about this passage for this essay is that we notice interpretation as having a causal force for giving rise to nihilism.  Presumably, interpretation is something that consciousness grapples with, and here we see it effecting on the individual.  Thus, we see a picture of agency where consciousness, a part of agency, has an impact on the rest of the individual.  In fact, this influence of our conscious ideas must be fairly significant because in the next passage, a passage from the work Ecce Homo, we see Nietzsche warning us about holding “great imperatives” in our conscious mind.  He writes:

The whole surface of consciousness – consciousness is a surface – has to be kept free from all of the great imperatives. (EH II: 9)

This passage indicates that values can have an influence on us.  He goes so far as to warn us against keeping some of these thoughts in our mind.  Further, ideas can also have an influence, as the next passage describes an individual “locked up inside all sorts of horrible ideas” (TI VII: 2; emphasis mine):

[H]e was stuck in a cage, locked up inside all sorts of horrible ideas … There he lay, sick, miserable, full of malice against himself. (TI VII: 2) 

And since thought can be part of willing, this claim about the effect of “ideas” further reinforces the argument that willing has a causal role, albeit as a secondary cause.  

These three passages, taken together with the previous discussion, paint a complex picture of agency (that includes both consciousness and non-conscious drives and) that operates through a notion of willing that is not separate from the causal order.  The passages solidify a reading of Nietzsche as someone who offers a revisionary critique of agency and the will (and not as someone who dismisses them altogether).

V — Conclusion

I have begun with three passages that seem, at first sight, to vindicate the view that agency is an illusion and the will is both epiphenomenal and causally ineffective.  I then provided examples that show Nietzsche’s tendency to criticize a thesis but then keep the thesis alive in a re-interpreted form.  I then took a second look at the original three passages in order to show how they can be read as part of a revisionary account of agency and the will.  Finally, I ended with some passages from Nietzsche that show him deeply concerned with the crucial role that agency plays in his philosophy.

Without agency, a re-evaluation of values would be impossible.  If our whole life was biologically determined, then the whole dance of values would be a bizarre illusion.  However, Nietzsche realizes the influence of the will, whether strong or weak.  What Nietzsche is showing us is how vital agency is to his re-evaluation of values.  Agency can act; it can will.  The picture of agency Nietzsche leaves us with is much more sophisticated and philosophically interesting than either the idea of an unconstrained, free will or an illusory un-free will.