Nietzsche’s Ethical Theory: Mind, Self and Responsibility 9781472547170, 9780826498748

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To my Parents, for their support throughout

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the help of many people. They include Michael E. Zimmerman, John Glenn, Jr and Bruce Brower, who helped to shape the early version of this book, Michael McCully and especially Julie Rudd, for reading the final draft.

Abbreviations

In-text citations of Nietzsche’s writings will use the following abbreviations and section number (Arabic numerals), along with essay number (Roman numerals) or essay title where appropriate. Footnotes provide reference to the page number for the translation listed. A

AOM

BGE

D EH GM

GS

HATH

The Antichrist, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1982) Assorted Opinions and Maxims, vol. 2 part 1, Human, All Too Human, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) Daybreak, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) Ecce Homo, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1979) On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith AnsellPearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Human, All too Human, vol. 1, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)

xii

NcW

TI WP

WS

Z

Abbreviations

Nietzsche contra Wagner, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1982) Twilight of the Idols, trans. Richard Polt (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997) The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House/Vintage, 1967) The Wanderer and His Shadow, vol. 2 part 2, Human All Too Human, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ed. Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pippin, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Chapter 1

Nietzsche, Ethics, Theory

The understanding of Nietzsche has undergone a sea change in the past thirty years, yet some misconceptions about his thought and writings remain. One of these is the notion that Nietzsche is primarily critical in his treatment of morality, and that his positive suggestions are untenable, repugnant or crazy. This is not so much due to a wilful misreading as to a superficial reading, against which Nietzsche warns while simultaneously inviting. On the one hand, his hyperbolic statements on war, warriors and blood help to perpetuate the popular image of the Superman as a broad-axe-wielding barbarian; on the other, he recommends ‘rumination’ and careful reading, and the images – such as philosophizing with a hammer – turn out to be something more subtle than they first appear. The careful reading places the comments on war and blood in a different light, but the images remain obstacles. One of the main difficulties in understanding Nietzsche’s ethical position is his complex views on self-consciousness. Becoming self-aware has led humanity to question the meaning of our existence; this is a theme throughout his writings, but is most fully explored in On the Genealogy of Morality. There, he produces a counter-myth to the social contract, in which the warlike ‘masters’ come to dominate the more sedentary people Nietzsche typically describes as herd animals. For the first time, the instincts of the members of the herd have no natural outlet as these new masters instil a few rudimentary ‘thou-shalt-nots’ to produce social order; the members of the herd thus gain awareness of

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their stifled instincts. Nietzsche describes this as the conceptual separation of doer and deed; that is, one’s abilities are taken to be distinct from one’s actions in a new way. He does not advocate a return to the ‘blond beasts’, because without this development of self-consciousness ‘the history of mankind would be far too stupid a thing’.1 Nietzsche describes the ‘masters’ as blond beasts precisely because they act like the large predatory animals, possessing a sufficient amount of consciousness to fulfil their requirements – hunting, mating – but acting on instinct without asking the paralyzing question, ‘why?’. This question stands at the beginning of what Nietzsche sees as the problem of consciousness. A constellation of concepts emerge from this question, including the idea of a unitary and enduring ‘soul’, ‘freedom of will’ and, with those, the notions of responsibility, guilt and punishment – the hallmarks of morality. Bernard Williams notes that ‘the Latin term from which ‘‘moral’’ comes emphasizes . . . the sense of social expectation’.2 Nietzsche questions morality in this sense by calling attention to the contingency through which our current valuations arose out of the slave’s reaction. Without the selfconsciousness, the ‘slave morality’ which Nietzsche attacks would not have been possible; at the same time, the individuation that self-consciousness allows has brought about the potential for the ‘deepening’ of humanity. This potential has been stunted by the only two responses that have been given to this question of meaning, what Nietzsche calls the ascetic ideal, and nihilism. The unhappy ones seek justification for their existence, but since they find this life unsatisfactory they seek justification ‘somewhere else’, either in Plato’s Forms or in ‘Platonism for the ‘‘people’’’, Christianity.3 Those who come to doubt the transcendent Good lapse into nihilism, the notion that there is no meaning, and thus that our actions have no moral significance. Nihilists thus reject the conclusions of

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religion but continue to share religion’s presuppositions, including the idea of a single Truth. Nietzsche sees both of these responses as contrary to life. An analogy can be made to illustrate the situation as Nietzsche sees it: life is like a piano. The ‘masters’ of old simply pound on it, the sides and top as well as the keys. They do not make music of any sort, but Nietzsche appreciates their joyful exuberance in making noise. Selfconsciousness brings about an awareness of the individual notes, and eventually scales and simple harmonies. Just as the beginner is halting and awkward, so our selfconsciousness has become an impediment to the initial joy of living. Nietzsche recognizes this as a necessary stage, but traditional morality has become a roadblock to further development; the awkward scales and exercises are taken to be the end in themselves, rather than a means to a further goal. Even more, Nietzsche sees religion and traditional morality as preventing people from moving beyond these exercises to more challenging pieces and eventually to the unselfconscious proficiency required for improvisation. Nihilism, on the other hand, is the domain of people who simply give up; the scales and exercises are clearly not ends in themselves, but they see no alternative and simply plunk at the keys. In both cases, self-consciousness has become the problem: their self-awareness has become selfdefeating. Nietzsche thus attacks both the ascetic idea and the nihilistic abandonment of meaning, but does so in a way that views further development of self-consciousness as the solution to the initial problem it raises. Because Nietzsche views our self-consciousness as developing out of natural processes, rather than as a supernatural endowment, the resolution of the dilemma presented above – ascetic ideal or nihilism – proceeds out of the requirements of life. Nietzsche rejects ‘morality’ in the social-expectation sense given by Williams above; however, Nietzsche draws inspiration from the older Greek

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authors who are not as concerned with conforming to social norms and are more concerned, as Williams notes, with ‘individual character’.4 Nietzsche does not develop a systematic and universal answer for the Socratic question, ‘how shall we live?’. However, as Williams notes, ‘It is possible to use the word ‘‘ethical’’ of any scheme for living that would provide an intelligible answer to Socrates’ question.’5 Nietzsche thus reformulates the ‘problem of consciousness’, which has become an impediment, into a new question: how can we understand and use our consciousness in such a way as to make it serve the instinct of life? This is not the ‘problem of consciousness’ that is discussed within contemporary philosophy of mind; however, there are important points of contact between this field and Nietzsche’s work. Philosophers in this field seek to accurately describe and explain consciousness, and their work draws liberally from the neurosciences as well as artificial intelligence. Not only is the subject matter foreign to Nietzsche, but also their understanding of the findings as ‘truths about the world’ sits uneasily with Nietzsche’s perspectivism. However, they share many underlying presuppositions. Most philosophers reject Cartesian dualism as well as post-Kantian idealism in favour of an account of consciousness’s immanent nature and origin. This physiological and deflationary approach is consonant with Nietzsche’s position that ‘mind’ is neither a separate substance nor a mystical property, but rather ‘something about the body’.6 The work of Paul Churchland and that of Daniel Dennett is particularly amenable to Nietzsche’s approach. Churchland addresses the problem of consciousness by looking at the brain itself, taking a radically reductive view of consciousness that echoes Nietzsche’s comparisons between consciousness and, for instance, digestion. Dennett is committed to materialism, and is particularly concerned with eliminating the residual dualism in what he labels the

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‘Cartesian Theater’, the idea that there is a particular locus of consciousness or agency within the brain. Dennett’s account has two further advantages in this context. Despite his radical reduction of the self, Dennett sees a need to retain the ‘intentional idiom’ – talk about beliefs, desires, etc. – even as he argues against their separate ontological status. Nietzsche follows a similar course, disparaging ‘the will’ and referring to mental entities as ‘optical illusions and mirages’7 while still relying on terms which acknowledge that mental activity occurs and is important for us. This sets Nietzsche and Dennett apart from Churchland, who argues that the current way of understanding consciousness will eventually be discarded. While Dennett does not draw Nietzsche’s sweeping conclusions about the impact of consciousness, he shares the idea that no controlling ego guides our actions. He calls the alternative concept of self the ‘center of narrative gravity’,8 which shares important similarities with Nietzsche’s concept of the self. For both Nietzsche and Dennett, this understanding of the self has a great impact on how ethics must be approached; yet Dennett seems to be either unable to see the consequences of his work or unwilling to accept them, and thus he stops short of the radical revaluation that this understanding of the self entails.9 Naturalism has been a productive approach for those working in the philosophy of mind; however, insofar as this work has ramifications for ethics, it has met charges of the ‘naturalistic fallacy’, the idea that ethical norms cannot be derived from descriptive features of the world. Two sorts of challenges have been forwarded in this respect. For instance, Virginia Held argues that the purely descriptive account assumed by a naturalistic approach necessarily omits the interpretive process that is involved in genuine moral judgement.10 That is, naturalistic approaches discard the idea of inherent meaning – and thus intrinsic moral features – but also overlook the larger context from which

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actions and events gain their moral characteristics. This approach thus leaves out the interpretive function (the normative evaluation) through which the action can be understood. Second, James Sterba worries that by emphasizing how we make moral decisions, an essentially conservative picture is produced. Sterba sees this method as conservative because it preserves whatever decision-making procedures are currently in place, and does not allow us to step back and see if the decisions we make are in accord with our stated norms.11 As he notes, common practices within a society can acquire a moral dimension over time, and by only looking at our current decision-making processes we fail to take into account our ability to make this kind of change. Both Held and Sterba assert that current efforts to apply the insights of philosophy of mind to ethics thus replicate the problems already diagnosed by David Hume and G.E. Moore. These pose challenges for Dennett and Churchland, but while Nietzsche shares their presuppositions, these criticisms do not apply to his work. Nietzsche begins with the description of consciousness; he uses it as a starting point for a larger critique of society, addressing Sterba’s fear. Nietzsche’s epistemology similarly addresses Held’s concern, holding that a thing or event must be interpreted in order to even count as an experience.12 This does not lead directly to an ethical theory, but lays the foundation for the affirmative ethics he develops. We see this both through the doctrines of the eternal recurrence and amor fati; it is here we find both the maturation of Nietzsche’s thinking and the indication of the possibilities beyond contemporary morality. I argue that the Nietzschean act of taking responsibility can be described in terms of contemporary philosophy of mind, and that the contemporary work of Dennett and Churchland supports this understanding of ethics. My main concern is to demonstrate that a robust

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notion of ethics can be built upon the rejection of the traditional notion of a responsible self. The most apparent problem facing any attribution of a positive doctrine of responsibility to Nietzsche is his apparent assertion of determinism. While many have taken the doctrine of eternal recurrence as a statement of determinism, the broader context of his writings shows that this is a dubious assumption. While he attacks the notion of free will (e.g., TI ‘The Four Great Errors’ 7), those denials of free will have a specific metaphysical target; moreover, as he criticizes the concept of free will, he simultaneously denies unfree will. Similarly, Nietzsche’s statements on amor fati have been taken as endorsing a form of fatalism. Commentators on amor fati do not typically recognize the difference in emphasis between it and the eternal recurrence.13 For instance, Richard Schacht writes that, with regard to our human existence and the world, amor fati is a way to ‘privilege their affirmation over both’,14 as opposed to the repudiation or attitude of indifference Nietzsche sees as typical of both Christianity and nihilism. He calls this a deification of ‘the world’s actual character’,15 apart from traditional evaluative schemes, and ‘[a] Dionysian affirmation of the world as it is’.16 In contrast, Gilles Deleuze emphasizes the element of chance in amor fati, as opposed to strict determinism, and sees it as the affirmation of the dice throw, ‘not a probability distributed over several throws, but all chance at once’.17 For both Schacht and Deleuze, however, there is no essential distinction between amor fati and the eternal recurrence. Both refer to the same basic set of entities and they use these terms interchangeably. Casting amor fati in a slightly different light, Michel Haar writes that it ‘has eliminated . . . the opposition between love, as an activity of the will, and destiny, as a purely passive determination of what has already been settled’.18 But the object of that love is not clearly differentiated in Haar, and again the eternal recurrence and

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amor fati are taken to be different ways of referring to a single idea. Haar recognizes there is a problem in the tension between the ego, as willing and making this affirmation, and identifying oneself with the totality of the cosmos; this is what Richard J. White refers to as ‘the complete dispersal of the individual with the immensity of eternity’.19 White does not articulate this in terms of amor fati, however. This problem of individuation and lack of differentiation is common to both the eternal recurrence and amor fati, but the self is reconstituted only in the latter. In Chapter 2, I undertake a detailed analysis of the doctrine of eternal recurrence in order to show that it does not entail determinism, but rather dispenses with the traditional free-will/determinism dichotomy altogether. This will clear the way for a new understanding of freedom, which is crucial for the notion of responsibility. Chapter 3 addresses the positive content of amor fati by analysing the passages in which it occurs, and providing a larger context in which to understand this obscure doctrine. This will involve a detailed look at the different uses of ‘fate’ in Nietzsche’s writings. Among these different usages, the positive content of amor fati provides an understanding of the self that serves as an alternative to the traditional conception of self as ego, or soul. Chapter 4 demonstrates that the understanding of the self argued for in the previous chapter serves as the basis of Nietzsche’s perspectivism. I will then draw the first connection between Nietzsche’s philosophy and Paul Churchland’s state-space semantics. I will show that Churchland’s naturalistic understanding of meaning as instantiated in the brain complements Nietzsche’s theory of meaning. This serves two important functions: first, it will show that Nietzsche can provide useful insight for philosophy of mind, and second, it will illustrate a powerful way in which Nietzsche’s account of meaning can be understood.

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At this point, I turn to the application of state-space semantics to ethics, the Moral Network Theory. Chapter 5 shows that the Moral Network Theory is inadequate because it fails to give a useful account of the self, and views ethical value as an intrinsic feature of various (social) situations. Dennett’s view of the self, in contrast, provides the proper theoretical background against which the account of taking responsibility can be elaborated. I argue that the conception of the self that Dennett has argued for implies precisely the Nietzschean view of the self developed in Chapter 3. The final chapter shows Nietzsche’s positive view of responsibility, and articulates what this entails. Nietzsche’s criticisms of traditional free will and responsibility are examined, and his alternatives to both are set forth. As with fate, I show that Nietzsche presents an alternative understanding of free will that provides the content of his positive ethical doctrine. Finally, I argue that this idea of taking responsibility is genuinely ethical, and not merely aesthetic. Nietzsche does not offer a theory in the traditional sense; as he writes, ‘I distrust all systematizers and stay out of their way’ (TI ‘Epigrams and Arrows’ 26).20 At the same time, he writes, ‘Do you think this work must be fragmentary because I give it to you (and have to give it to you) in fragments?’ (AOM 128)21 There is an underlying coherence in the approach to ethics that he develops throughout his writings; this can be discerned through close and careful reading. He does not offer an ethical theory after the manner of Kant, providing a rule or maxim with which to evaluate our actions, because a large part of his critique of traditional morality takes aim precisely at any universal approach that would give the same ‘thou shalts!’ to everyone equally. He does offer a sense of what an alternative would look like that is not directed to everyone, but is directed to all who might undertake this close and careful reading. Nietzsche summarizes it in the subtitle of his

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autobiography, and conveys the same message in various other places: ‘Become who you are!’ On the one hand, it is even more abstract, if not more formal, than Kant’s Categorical Imperative; on the other, Nietzsche recognizes that he cannot articulate any more than this, that the individual must ultimately determine the shape this takes. As a historical development, Nietzsche believes we can take control of the meaning of consciousness. The work being done in cognitive science and philosophy of mind gives us a better understanding of consciousness, and has the potential to redefine meaning itself, and thus to redefine ethics along Nietzschean lines. Nietzsche’s ethical theory demands that we cast off the responsibility that has been placed on us by traditional morality, but that we forge our own understanding of the world in which we take responsibility.

Chapter 2

Eternal Return: Determinism and/or Affirmation Nietzsche proudly proclaims himself teacher of the eternal recurrence,1 yet the few references to the doctrine of eternal recurrence in his writings have resulted in decadeslong debates on the proper understanding of this obscure idea. If the eternal recurrence is a coherent idea, it has serious implications for his positive ethical theory. A variety of tacks have been taken on this issue, but they tend to coalesce around two poles: either the eternal recurrence is a statement of determinism,2 or it serves as a test akin to Kant’s Categorical Imperative.3 If we follow the former interpretation, all of our actions (as well as our attitude towards those actions4) would be unalterable, making the question of responsibility moot and effectively eliminating anything that could pass for ‘ethics’.5 The latter interpretation recognizes the inevitability of all actions implied by the apparent circularity of time, but nevertheless suggests we have the ability to alter our attitudes towards our lives and the universe as a whole.6 In either case, the significance of the eternal recurrence is central to the understanding of Nietzsche’s ethical views; however, both tacks fail to recognize that, throughout his writings, Nietzsche attempts to dispense with the traditional freewill/determinism dichotomy altogether. Using the traditional framework to interpret the eternal recurrence is thus mistaken. Ivan Soll argues that ‘a proof of eternal recurrence [as cosmological theory7] is inessential to its significance’8 as

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an ethical doctrine. Soll continues that, no matter the reason for Nietzsche’s suppression of his ‘proofs’ of the eternal recurrence, the presentation of eternal recurrence in the published works without any substantive argumentation for its truth indicates that it was not primarily the doctrine’s truth or theoretical content that concerned Nietzsche but rather people’s attitudes and reactions to this theory.9

Many contemporary commentators support this basic position: the cosmological interpretation is superfluous to the significance that Nietzsche seems to grant the eternal recurrence.10 In other words, Nietzsche may have thought the eternal recurrence was an accurate description of a deterministic universe, but such a description does not make a difference for the eternal recurrence understood as an ethical hypothesis or imperative. As Robert Solomon has written, the eternal recurrence is ‘a great idea only so long as one doesn’t take it too literally or push it too hard’.11 This view is not universal, however; for instance, George Stack has suggested that Nietzsche ‘deliberately created’ the nihilistic-scientific version of the eternal recurrence in order to stress the affirmation required.12 The efforts of Heidegger and Deleuze13 to square the cosmological interpretation with the ethical significance of the eternal recurrence have not been successful, at least in part because of the difficulty in reconstructing a plausible theory of physics. Contrary to M. C. Sterling’s assertion that ‘Nietzsche paid . . . exclusive attention to the cosmological version of eternal recurrence’,14 it is difficult to find support in Nietzsche’s published work for the view that the eternal recurrence was intended by Nietzsche as a cosmological theory. In a similar fashion, Robin Small’s article ‘Boscovich contra Nietzsche’ does not even attempt to argue for the cosmological interpretation, taking this

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interpretation as already established. Small argues that, in the book of Boscovich’s that apparently inspired Nietzsche’s ‘proofs’ of the eternal recurrence, Boscovich was actually refuting something like the cosmological interpretation.15 Bernd Magnus has noted that virtually all references to the eternal recurrence as a cosmological hypothesis are in Nietzsche’s unpublished writings, discussed below; the published references all stress the normative aspect.16 Nietzsche’s published writings do not support a deterministic cosmology, and the unpublished writings do not support it well. Despite this, people have continued to attempt to find support for the deterministic doctrine.17 The persistence of this view is due in part to earlier writings from his ‘positivist’ phase that do support such an understanding of the universe. I will begin with those writings, which are not directly linked to the eternal recurrence, to show how this early position is overturned in his mature writings. In subsequent sections, I will examine writings from The Will to Power that various interpreters take to support determinism. Finally, I will turn to the published occurrences of the eternal recurrence in their larger context. In doing this, I will show that the eternal recurrence does not entail determinism, and that throughout his writings Nietzsche gives reasons to oppose such an interpretation.

The Naturalized Universe Throughout his writings, Nietzsche maintains a ‘naturalized’ view of the universe in the sense that there is nothing ‘supernatural’ over and beyond the physical realm.18 While Nietzsche does not view science as the key to ‘progress’ for humanity,19 he nevertheless appreciates the ability of the sciences to illuminate the world in which we

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live.20 Nietzsche’s early view of science includes a mechanistic cosmology, as in the following passage: if for one moment the wheel of the world were to stand still, and there were an all-knowing, calculating intelligence there to make use of this pause, it could narrate the future of every creature to the remotest ages and describe every track along which this wheel had yet to roll. The actor’s description regarding himself, the assumption of free-will, is itself part of the mechanism it would have to compute. (HATH 106)21

The now-naturalized universe entails belief in causal chains that are describable solely in terms of physical mechanisms, ‘a more essential connection than mere succession’22 (D 121). Every cause is an effect of a previous cause; therefore, there are no isolated instances of causes and their effects. This has the implication that no cause is self-caused, a view seen throughout his later writings.23 In these early writings, Nietzsche views the universe as a mechanism running through a sequence that, even if not pre-ordained, is in principle calculable.24 This early deterministic cosmology is rejected in his later writings, however, as he questions the role of science. The eternal recurrence has been more directly understood as a deterministic cosmology, from unpublished notes collected as The Will to Power, most notably fragments 55 and 1066. In section 55 he describes the eternal recurrence as ‘the most scientific of all possible hypotheses’,25 based on ‘scholarly presuppositions’,26 but also as ‘existence as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness’.27 This has been taken to imply the supremacy of a mechanistic doctrine of physics and to show that Nietzsche intended the eternal recurrence to be understood as a deterministic hypothesis.28 This cannot be maintained in the larger context of

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his writings, however; a year earlier, in Book Five of The Gay Science he had written: Thus, a ‘scientific’ interpretation of the world, as you understand it, might still be one of the stupidest of all possible interpretations of the world, i.e., one of those most lacking in significance. This to the ear and conscience of Mr. Mechanic, who nowadays likes to pass as a philosopher and insists that mechanics is the doctrine of the first and final laws on which existence may be built, as on a ground floor. But an essentially mechanical world would be an essentially meaningless world! (GS 373)29

Of course, to call something stupid is not necessarily to deny it30, and Nietzsche does not view ‘meaning’ as an intrinsic feature of the universe that the mechanist interpretation somehow misunderstands. Rather, Nietzsche points out that this particular interpretation has no value for human life, and goes on to call this formulation of the eternal recurrence ‘the most extreme form of nihilism’.31 The passage ends with a description of the type of person who is strongest and ‘richest in health’; the description concludes by asking, ‘[h]ow would such a human being even think of the eternal recurrence?’,32 suggesting the strong person would, at the very least, redefine the terms of the discussion. Fragment 1066 occurs in the section of The Will to Power labelled ‘The Eternal Recurrence’, but out of the fourteen fragments contained in this section only this one offers anything like a serious proof.33 In this fragment, Nietzsche criticizes the mechanical view while describing the universe as nothing but quantities of force and their combinations. While the criticisms function adequately (as well as reinforcing the true aim of fragment 55), Nietzsche’s argument as a cosmological theory of natural science is not particularly compelling.34 Perhaps Nietzsche hoped he would find

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a compelling argument for the eternal recurrence as a theory in physics, but he chose not to publish anything coming close during his productive life; moreover, even in The Will to Power the emphasis is overwhelmingly on the ethical impact of the eternal recurrence. It is inescapable that, as a theory of physics, the eternal recurrence entails the sort of mechanistic theory Nietzsche directly criticizes throughout the Nachlass and indirectly dismisses in his mature published writings, including his rejection of ‘natural laws’.35 The mechanistic view presented in his early writings is neither sufficient for determinism,36 nor entails the eternal recurrence, and this is rejected in his later writings in any case.

Published References to the Eternal Recurrence Although Nietzsche took it to be one of his most significant thoughts,37 the eternal recurrence only appears in two of his middle books, The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. While I have demonstrated that it cannot be understood mechanistically, the possibility remains that it might be understood as a non-mechanical theory that still entails determinism, such as what Brian Leiter has labelled ‘causal essentialism’.38 With this in mind, we shall now turn to Nietzsche’s published presentation of the eternal recurrence. The first explicit published reference to the eternal recurrence is found near the end of the first edition of The Gay Science. Earlier in The Gay Science Nietzsche writes something akin to the eternal recurrence, ‘the whole musical mechanism repeats eternally its tune, which must never be called a melody’39 (GS 109). As a description, this captures the tone of the other references found in the Nachlass, but it is not labelled directly as the eternal recurrence, and lacks the characteristic emphasis on one’s

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reaction to the idea. Walter Kaufmann indicates that section 285 of The Gay Science is the first occurrence, but this is certainly only the first occurrence of the phrase, and not the concept.40 In this passage, Nietzsche is rejecting ‘endless trust’, ‘ultimate’ wisdom, goodness and power, a ‘perpetual guardian’, a ‘final improver’, a ‘resting place’ and ‘any ultimate peace’, and in its place willing ‘the eternal recurrence of war and peace’, but this seems to refer to perpetual struggle within one’s own lifetime rather than the very same wars taking place in identical ways over and over again as history repeats eternally. The proper introduction of the eternal recurrence takes place in an aphorism entitled ‘The Heaviest Weight’41 (GS 341), which immediately precedes the passage that was soon to appear as the opening to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, thus hinting at the central role this idea was to play in that later work. The ‘heaviest weight’ confronts the reader as a challenge, but three things are particularly notable about the way in which Nietzsche presents it. First, it is not something one comes across during a leisurely period of reading; rather, it comes at one’s ‘loneliest loneliness’, suggesting the irreducibly personal impact the challenge is supposed to have. Second, the challenge comes not from Nietzsche, the author of The Gay Science, but instead from a demon.42 This is not to diminish the impact, but perhaps enhance it; in any case, it is not to be directly attributed to Nietzsche. Third, it is couched in the form of a hypothetical statement: ‘what if. . .’ These three things show it to be the opposite of a doctrine of physics. The challenge is as follows: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and

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sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’43

The three framing elements come together for Nietzsche in considering the extreme reactions one might have to this hypothetical: complete despair or complete affirmation.44 In contrast to the passages from the Nachlass considered above, there is no attempt at argument, proof, or even a substantive description of the mechanism of the eternal recurrence found in the passage; the description that is given – ‘the eternal hourglass of existence’ – is clearly metaphorical. Even if it is to be understood as a cosmology, the grains of sand falling through an hourglass hardly suggest determinism,45 and a dogmatic assertion about the nature of the universe would be uncharacteristic of Nietzsche. The placement of this passage in The Gay Science intentionally foreshadows the importance this doctrine is to play in the subsequent book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. While the explicit introduction of the eternal recurrence does not come until Book Three (in ‘On the Vision and the Riddle’), the idea colours the entire book, and thus cannot be properly understood outside of this larger context. The allusion to the ‘heaviest weight’ can be seen in the first section after the prologue, before Zarathustra enters the town called the Motley Cow: ‘The Three Metamorphoses’. Although he is not yet aware of it, and the reader does not know the nature of this weight, Zarathustra starts as the camel, carrying the doctrine of the eternal recurrence, that which ‘is heavy and heaviest’,46 and throughout the first two books of Thus Spoke Zarathustra the load grows heavier. Zarathustra only becomes aware of this load towards the end of the second book, when he hears the soothsayer suggest the vanity of cyclical time: ‘Everything is empty,

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everything is the same, everything was!’47 (Z II ‘The Soothsayer’) That we should hear a rudimentary form of the eternal recurrence coming from someone other than Zarathustra should not be surprising; as Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo, it is similar to the Stoic doctrine, which he suggests may have already been taught by Heraclitus.48 The world-weary proclamation acts as a catalyst for Zarathustra and transforms him into a sad and weary person. Soon after, Zarathustra has a prophetic dream in which he finds himself ‘a night watchman and a guardian of graves’.49 The brightness of midnight, loneliness, and silence of the dream are reminiscent of the demon’s challenge in The Gay Science; here the scene ends in a coffin bursting, sending out ‘a thousandfold laughter’ which ‘laughed and mocked and roared against me’.50 Zarathustra does not understand the dream at this point, but it is given an interpretation by one of Zarathustra’s disciples. The disciple states that this gale that sweeps dreariness away is the life of Zarathustra himself, casting off the spirit of gravity (although not named as such at this point) with childlike laughter, anticipating the final metamorphosis. Zarathustra is sceptical of this interpretation, but does not appear to draw an alternative of his own.51 The significance of the dream is revealed in the subsequent section, ‘On Redemption’, in which Zarathustra gives a speech that appropriates and transforms the themes of the soothsayer. This passages echoes the response of those crushed by the heaviest weight from The Gay Science 341: ‘It was’: thus is called the will’s gnashing of teeth and loneliest misery. Impotent against that which has been – it is an angry spectator of everything past. (Z, ‘On Redemption’)52

Zarathustra continues, but then ‘suddenly broke off and looked entirely like one who is appalled in the extreme’.53 Only now does the real significance of the dream come to

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Zarathustra: he finally understands and experiences this ‘heaviest weight’ of the eternal recurrence. He quickly regains his composure and finishes his speech; but a hunchback recognizes the change and asks, ‘But why does Zarathustra speak otherwise to us than to his disciples?’ Zarathustra responds by noting the difference in his audience.54 The hunchback accepts this answer but recognizes this is not the entire answer and presses: ‘But why does Zarathustra speak otherwise to his disciples – than to himself?’55 The hunchback’s question haunts Zarathustra, provoking the loneliest loneliness that accompanies his ‘Stillest Hour’. He knows the eternal recurrence, but cannot yet speak it: although capable of bearing it, he cannot digest this insight. After trying to evade that which cannot be evaded, Zarathustra finally admits, ‘I am ashamed.’ His Stillest Hour responds by referencing the three metamorphoses: ‘You must become a child again and without shame.’56 This passage links two important concepts for Nietzsche, the role of shame and the possibility of transformation, and it is here that we find the direct connection between the eternal recurrence and amor fati. There is a parallel between the introduction of amor fati in The Gay Science (section 276, discussed in the next chapter) and the explicit introduction of the eternal recurrence in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The Stillest Hour’s pronouncement on shame closes Book Two, and Book Three of The Gay Science ends with a similar note on shame: ‘What is the seal of having become free? – No longer to be ashamed before oneself. (GS 275)57 In both cases, the next section opens with an affirmation that takes one beyond shame: in The Gay Science, Book Four (‘St. Januarius’) opens with the original statement of amor fati, and near the beginning of Book Three Zarathustra is able to find the courage to speak the eternal recurrence. Although they represent distinct doctrines, this parallel indicates their true point of contact.58

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Before Zarathustra can ‘become a child again’, as his Stillest Hour directs, he must make the intermediate transformation into the lion so he can do battle with his ‘last master’, ‘last god’ and ‘last dragon’.59 Zarathustra relates this transformation near the beginning of Book Three, in the section ‘On the Vision and the Riddle’; here, he confronts his ‘last master’, the spirit of gravity, in the form of a ‘half-dwarf, half-mole’ creature.60 Here we find the first true hint of the eternal recurrence within his description of the courage it takes to face the spirit of gravity: ‘Was that life? Well then! One More Time!’61 In marked contrast to the soothsayer’s weary pronouncement, this is a joyful embracing of life, indicating he has overcome his shame. However, Zarathustra has here jumped ahead of his own story; we have not yet seen how he accomplishes this overcoming. The narrative continues after a break, and Zarathustra challenges the dwarf he has been carrying: ‘You do not know my abysmal thought! That – you could not bear!’62 At this point the two encounter the symbol of the eternal recurrence, the gateway ‘Moment’. The spirit of gravity interprets it according to the soothsayer’s doctrine: ‘All that is straight lies, all truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.’63 Zarathustra rejects the dwarf’s interpretation as being too easy: the spirit of gravity fails to either affirm it in the manner of Zarathustra – ‘Once more!’ – or to be crushed by it. What follows is a longer monologue by Zarathustra, which echoes the earlier passage in The Gay Science, 341: are not all things firmly knotted together in such a way that this moment draws after it all things to come? . . . And this slow spider that creeps in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and I and you in the gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things – must not all of us have been here before?

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And return and run in that other lane, outward, before us, in this long, eerie lane – must we not return eternally?64

While this ‘knotting of all things together’ has been taken as a presentation of a way of understanding the universe – and therefore at least potentially suggesting determinism – there are several reasons to question Nietzsche’s intention here. The image of the spider and the moonlight indicates Zarathustra has taken on the role of the demon, suggesting it be understood hypothetically rather than doctrinally. Moreover, the dwarf seems an unlikely ‘first pupil’: as ‘lion’, Zarathustra is engaged in battle, creating freedom for himself, rather than acting as teacher. As Alexander Nehamas asks, ‘Could it be that Zarathustra tells the story only in order to frighten the dwarf . . .?’65 In Book One Zarathustra states, ‘Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughing. Up, let us kill the spirit of gravity!’66 If this monologue is how Zarathustra defeats and banishes the spirit of gravity, it seems more likely Nietzsche is concerned with doing something with the text, rather than revealing his innermost thought. The howling of a dog interrupts Zarathustra’s reverie, and as he becomes aware of his surroundings the spirit of gravity seems to have disappeared. Here we encounter the Riddle in the form of a shepherd, choked by a snake crawling down his throat. The shepherd cannot remove the snake by pulling it out, and is forced to bite the head off. As Zarathustra later reveals, the snake is the thought of the eternal recurrence, and the shepherd is Zarathustra himself (Z III ‘The Convalescent’). Even if the formulation of the eternal recurrence Zarathustra presents to the dwarf is not the full-fledged doctrine as he understands it, it still cannot be dismissed: a new freedom has been created with the defeat of the spirit of gravity, but for some reason the eternal recurrence remains, choking Zarathustra. That is, he can only bear the burden for a finite period of time

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before he realizes it will crush him if he does not conquer it as well. The mere possibility of the eternal recurrence physically nauseates Zarathustra, not because he recognizes the smallest man must recur eternally, but because the precondition for the smallest man also necessarily returns: ‘Thou shalt!’ This is the significance of the spirit of gravity in the vision, that Zarathustra must also affirm the unconditional and universal ‘good for all, evil for all’67 that the spirit of gravity represents (Z III ‘On the Spirit of Gravity’). Although Zarathustra has defeated the spirit of gravity, thus casting off the eternal recurrence as a burden and beginning to clear the ground for his ‘New Tablets’, he does not simply return to his disciples to teach the doctrine he now embraces. Instead, the next explicit reference to the eternal recurrence in Thus Spoke Zarathustra occurs near the end of Book Three, ‘The Convalescent’. Zarathustra’s animals give a very straightforward account of the eternal recurrence as if it were about the nature of time and the universe, much as the dwarf and the soothsayer had. Again, Zarathustra baulks: ‘Oh you foolish rascals and barrel organs! . . . you have already made a hurdy-gurdy song of it?’68 When confronted with any understanding of the eternal recurrence as a doctrine about the nature of time and the universe, Zarathustra indicates this understanding is fundamentally inadequate and the real significance has been missed.69 After the animals have given their final, perhaps superficial, reiteration of the eternal recurrence, Zarathustra falls silent. Following Heidegger, Gary Shapiro interprets this silence as indicating an absence of non-metaphysical language to express the thought of the recurrence70; that is to say, Zarathustra can only formulate the recurrence in traditional terms, which lend themselves to easy reduction in the manner of the dwarf and the animals. Since, at this time, he is unable to express the doctrine of recurrence in any other way, he falls silent rather than fuel the misreading which those who have heard it have given.

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This is particularly problematic since, strictly speaking, he never teaches the doctrine of the eternal recurrence to his disciples: the first statement is to the spirit of gravity, which casts a shadow on it, and later his animals repeat their understanding of the doctrine, which seems too close to the soothsayer’s original version to please Zarathustra. If this is true, then Zarathustra could not be called the teacher of the eternal recurrence, and Nietzsche could not claim the eternal recurrence, ‘the highest formulation of affirmation that can possibly be attained’, as the ‘basic concept of the work’.71 This is resolved in a song which Nietzsche calls ‘the fundamental idea of Zarathustra’,72 which Zarathustra sings twice, the first time at the end of Book Three (‘The Other Dance Song’), and again at the end of Book Four with a song ‘The Sleepwalker [trunkne] Song’. It makes no reference to physics or to the understanding of time, but this song explicitly links affirmation and eternity: O man, pray! What does deep midnight have to say? ‘From sleep, from sleep – From deepest dream I made my way: – The world is deep, And deeper than grasp of day. Deep is its pain –, Joy – deeper still than misery: Pain says: Refrain! Yet all joy wants eternity – Wants deep, wants deep eternity.’ (Z IV ‘The Sleepwalker Song’ 12)73

The affirmation here avoids both cosmological and deterministic interpretations; the juxtaposition of agony and joy again brings out the possibilities of the greatest burden while simultaneously echoing an earlier passage in The Gay Science.74 While not explicitly a teaching of the eternal

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recurrence, it is noteworthy since here Zarathustra is delivering it to the higher men rather than the dwarf or his animals. The second occurrence of this song underscores the significance as teaching of the eternal recurrence, following this passage that highlights the interconnection of all things: Have you ever said Yes to one joy? Oh my friends, then you also said Yes to all pain. All things are enchained, entwined, enamored – – if you ever wanted one time two times, if you ever said, ‘I like you, happiness! Whoosh! Moment!’ then you wanted everything back! – Everything anew, everything eternal, everything enchained, entwined, enamored, oh thus you loved the world – (Z IV ‘The Sleepwalker Song’ 10)75

Keith Ansell-Pearson describes the eternal recurrence as a theory of time rather than physics: ‘The affirmation of the moment leads to the affirmation of time itself, for no single moment is self-sufficient but is connected to all the other moments of one’s life.’76 While this avoids the interpretation of the spirit of gravity (‘time is a circle’), it fails to take into account other aspects of the eternal recurrence. This leads Ansell-Pearson to take an additional unwarranted step: ‘In affirming the eternal return of the moment we are not affirming the literal return of every moment of the past, but simply the moment’s momentariness, which is the very nature of time.’77 The gateway serves as the symbol for the eternal recurrence, and we find ourselves continually in the ever-abiding and ever-elusive Moment; however, the affirmation is not merely of the interconnected moments of one’s own life, or even those moments that make one’s life possible, but of ‘the whole play and performance’ that Nietzsche describes in his subsequent book Beyond Good and

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Evil (56). There he writes of ‘the most high-spirited, worldaffirming individual, who has learned not just to accept and go along with what was and what is, but who wants it again just as it was and is through all eternity, insatiably shouting da capo not just to himself but to the whole play and performance’.78 We also see this in the late book Twilight of the Idols: ‘One is necessary, one is a piece of destiny, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole. . . . there is nothing outside the whole!’79 The eternal recurrence is not a theory of physics as it was for the Stoics, or a statement on the nature of time, both of which Zarathustra consistently rejects, whether voiced by the soothsayer, the spirit of gravity, or his animals. However, it can be understood as a cosmological doctrine in the sense that it proclaims the interconnectedness of the entire cosmos. Throughout Thus Spoke Zarathustra and into subsequent books, the pattern is the same: not only accepting, but confronting and affirming all aspects of the world, even the universalizing ‘ascetic ideal’. Whether linked with determinism or not, the interpretation of the eternal recurrence as a statement of theoretical physics describing the nature of the universe is unsupported and inessential, if not detrimental, to accepting it as ‘the highest formulation of affirmation’ and the ‘fundamental conception’ of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The question remains, however, whether the eternal recurrence stands as the core of Nietzsche’s ethical theory. Some, such as Bernard Reginster, see it as essential: ‘it is invoked to formulate a practical imperative and to point to a specific substantive ethical ideal’.80 Given the analysis presented in this chapter, however, the eternal recurrence seems unable to be employed in that specific a manner. It is suggestive and, as I will argue in the next chapter, important as part of the foundation for Nietzsche’s ethical theory, but cannot serve as such by itself. As Robert Solomon writes, ‘As a serious ethical proposal, say, along the lines of

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Kant’s ‘‘Categorical Imperative’’, I think the thesis is without substance.’81 By showing that the eternal recurrence is not a statement of determinism – which would render the question of a positive ethical theory moot – the ground has been cleared for a positive ethical theory. Moreover, we have seen that the eternal recurrence provides the broadest outline of what that theory needs to include: unconditional affirmation of the cosmos. However, this is insufficient; the mere description of the way things are does not necessitate the sort of revaluation that Nietzsche sees as necessary. Amor fati provides the next step in this theory, shifting the emphasis away from the cosmos as a whole and the individual as a ‘speck of dust’ within the cosmos, towards seeing the individual as an active and reflective agent.

Chapter 3

Amor fati: Self as Narrative

As the eternal recurrence suggests determinism, so amor fati suggests fatalism; but as determinism is distinct from fatalism, so the eternal recurrence is distinct from amor fati. Rather than the unbroken causal chain of determinism, fatalism leaves open the possibility that, at least in some cases, we have choice, but those choices may ultimately be irrelevant. Instead of being pushed along by the past, fatalism draws us along to a particular future.1 And, just as the eternal recurrence does not entail determinism, amor fati does not entail fatalism, at least not in the standard sense of the term. Thus, George Stack can accurately write of ‘[t]he centrality of fatalism in Nietzsche’s thought’, while missing the nuances of how Nietzsche employs the concept by referring to Nietzsche’s ‘tendency to understand determinism as fatalism’.2 The different ways in which Nietzsche uses the concept ‘fate’ need to be carefully distinguished. These different uses form the context required to understand the meaning of the ‘fate’ which is loved in amor fati, and indicate how amor fati plays a crucial role in the understanding of Nietzsche’s concept of responsibility. I will begin by analysing various passages in which Nietzsche refers to ‘fate’, showing the range of ways it functions in his writings. This will lead to a detailed examination of amor fati. I will argue that the ‘fate’ of amor fati is nothing other than a particular aspect of the self as Nietzsche conceives it. The view of the self presented here is similar in crucial respects to the interpretation presented by Alexander Nehamas in his book Nietzsche: Life as

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Literature. In light of this, I will consider criticisms of Nehamas’ interpretation of Nietzsche, insofar as they are relevant to the interpretation I present here, and offer responses to those criticisms. In this way, I will show that the self Nietzsche describes is capable of supporting a robust notion of responsibility.

Various ‘Fates’ Perhaps the most striking thing about ‘fate’ is the many forms it takes in Nietzsche’s writings, but even in the early Assorted Maxims and Opinions he already stresses the reaction to fate, as opposed to the doctrine itself: You have to believe in fate – science can compel you to. What then grows out of this belief in your case – cowardice, resignation or frankness and magnanimity – bears witness to the soil upon which that seedcorn has been scattered but not, however, to the seedcorn itself – for out of this anything and everything can grow. (AOM 363)3

Elsewhere, Nietzsche clearly rejects the notion of fate. In The Wanderer and His Shadow, he writes of ‘Tu ¨ rkenfatalismus’: ‘they think that man will stand before the future feeble, resigned and with hands clasped because he is incapable of effecting any change in it’.4 This sort of fatalism is characterized by a metaphysical separation in which ‘fate’ acts on ‘man’. Even here Nietzsche rejects both the metaphysical view that makes this stance possible and the submissiveness it engenders. We see this second theme emphasized in later passages, e.g., where he writes of ‘the fatalism of the weak of will’ (BGE 21),5 ‘a certain pessimistic gloom, something of a weariness, fatalism, disappointment, fear of new disappointment’ (GS 347),6 and where he links together ‘submission, weakness, fatalism’ (TI ‘Raids of the Untimely Man’ 7).7 The passivity which sees the future as

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already cast is not so much argued against as it is ridiculed and dismissed as a degenerate psychological trait. While the negative characterization of ‘fate’ and fatalism are recurrent from Nietzsche’s early writings through his final productive year, later writings describe a different, more positive sense of fate (which is still nevertheless not amor fati); this finds its sharpest form in his description of ‘Russian fatalism’. In On the Genealogy of Morality, he writes of ‘that brave, unrebellious fatalism which still gives the Russians, for example, an advantage over us Westerners in the way they handle life’ (GM II 15).8 In Ecce Homo, he explains this advantage and describes it as a ‘great cure’ for ressentiment: that fatalism without rebellion with which a Russian soldier for whom the campaign has become too much at last lies down in the snow . . . [T]he great rationality of this fatalism, which is not always the courage to die but can be life preservative under conditions highly dangerous to life, is reduction of metabolism, making it slow down, a kind of will to hibernation. (EH ‘Why I am so Wise’ 6)9

‘Russian fatalism’ does not replicate the separation of the individual and fate, but acknowledges that one’s fate may be distinct from one’s current circumstances. Resignation is thus allowing the storm to blow over and cause as little damage as possible. This attitude is also ‘without revolt’, lacking the gloom and fearfulness that characterizes Turkish fatalism, but is not the affirmation of amor fati. Several of Nietzsche’s autobiographical references to ‘fate’ fall somewhere between these two understandings without articulating the fate of amor fati: ‘There followed a melancholy Spring in Rome, where I merely put up with life – it was not easy . . . I tried to get away . . . But a fatality hung over it all: I had to return’ (EH Z 4).10 This passage is reminiscent of Russian fatalism, and echoes the beginning

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of The Antichrist: ‘We became gloomy, we were called fatalists.’ (A 1)11 In both cases there is pessimism and resistance; but his changing attitude towards fate is seen even within the passage from The Antichrist, where fatalism becomes a positive trait: ‘Our fatum – the abundance, the tension, the damming of strength. We thirsted for lightning and deeds and were most remote from the happiness of the weakling, ‘‘resignation’’.’12 Here, the contrast between a passive and active attitude towards fate is made explicit. The passage from The Antichrist in turn echoes an earlier passage from The Gay Science that is also removed from ‘Russian fatalism’ and closer to amor fati: we are no longer free to do anything individual, to be anything individual . . . This is our lot, as I have said: we grow in height; and even if this should be our dark fate – for we dwell ever closer to the lightning! – well, we do not honour it less on that account; it remains that which we do not want to share, to impart: the dark fate of height, our fate. (GS 371)13

This takes another step towards complete affirmation; there is no separation between the individual and fate, and nothing to be resisted or endured. The cosmic scope of fate is found in its most fully realized form in Twilight of the Idols, but without the affirmation that characterizes both the eternal recurrence and amor fati: ‘The fatality of our essence cannot be separated from the fatality of all that was and will be.’ (TI ‘Four Great Errors’ 8)14 These multiple uses and understandings of fate serve as the foundation for amor fati. The teleology and the pessimism are completely eradicated, and we are left with something much closer to the Greek conception of fate, moira.15

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Amor fati Just as with the eternal recurrence, amor fati has significance for Nietzsche that is out of proportion to its appearance in his writings. While it plays a central role in his thought and understanding of ethics, there are only four references to amor fati in the writings Nietzsche intended for publication. The first of these statements was written in 1882, before Nietzsche had started Thus Spoke Zarathustra and therefore prior to any publication of the eternal recurrence. It is found at the beginning of Book Four of The Gay Science, and, as mentioned in the previous chapter, it occurs within a larger context that gives it greater depth than the aphorism itself conveys. Book Three of The Gay Science closes by linking liberation with a lack of shame. This liberation can be understood in terms of confronting the past in the manner of Zarathustra: ‘‘‘All it was’’ is a fragment, a riddle, a grisly accident – until the creating will says to it: ‘‘But I will it thus! I shall will it thus!’’’ (Z ‘On Redemption’)16 Episodes of one’s past are seen as shameful and remain burdens until they can be redeemed through affirmation. The same liberation from shame is found in the greeting of the ‘new year’ which opens Book Four of The Gay Science: 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. Amor fati: let that be my love from now on! 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: some day I want only to be a Yes-sayer! (GS 276)17

A connection is drawn between those who accuse and the ugly. Standard Nietzschean targets suggest themselves here: Christians on the one hand, socialists and anarchists on the

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other, each devaluing this world in favour of a future in which things will be better. Understood in this way, we can see the connection between the wide scope of the eternal recurrence and amor fati; however, the subsequent section indicates that emphasis here is different. There, Nietzsche writes of how many seemingly insignificant things in our individual lives become integral: we so palpably see how everything that befalls us continually turns out for the best. Every day and every hour life seems to want nothing else than to prove this proposition again and again; be it what it may – bad or good weather, the loss of a friend, a sickness, slander, the absence of a letter, the spraining of an ankle, a glance into a shop, a counter-argument, the opening of a book, a dream, fraud – it shows itself immediately or very soon to be something that ‘was not allowed to be lacking’ – it is full of deep meaning and use precisely for us! (GS 277)18

These ‘bad’ things, in contrast to Zarathustra’s pronouncement of redemption, are not the return of the last man and nihilism. The context of liberation from shame and the personal details suggest that amor fati is a matter of introspection and confronting one’s past: to be no longer ashamed of ‘the ugly’ – the sickness, the slander – not merely accepting, but affirming all of one’s own failings and misfortunes. Whereas the last man and the utilitarian wish to reduce pain and discord to achieve a good night’s sleep, Nietzsche acknowledges the interconnected nature of what is normally labelled ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (e.g., GS 12). Nothing is irrelevant insofar as it has some impact, but this is not to say that every detail of one’s life is significant. The individual must recognize it as having some consequence – usually unexpected, given the examples he provides – for the course of one’s life. Amor fati disappears entirely from Nietzsche’s published writings until 1888, his last productive year. It is during this

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interim (1883–87) that the eternal recurrence finds a place in his writings. By the time of Nietzsche contra Wagner, though, he reclaims amor fati: I have often asked myself whether I am not more heavily obligated to the hardest years of my life than to any others. As my inmost nature teaches me, whatever is necessary – as seen from the heights and in the sense of a great economy – is also the useful par excellence: one should not only bear it, one should love it. Amor fati: that is my innermost nature. And as for my long sickness, do I not owe it indescribably more than I owe to my health? I owe it a higher health – one which is made stronger by whatever does not kill it. I owe my philosophy to it. (NcW Epilogue 1)19

Here we have no longer the wish of The Gay Science – ‘let that be my love henceforth’ – but a proclamation of attainment. He is not merely turning away from the ugly, but making beautiful the difficult aspects of life, even those that are most distressing. Unlike the earlier passages, those necessary things are internal rather than external: he applies his observation from Beyond Good and Evil to himself, that ‘sickness and health’ are constitutional traits and part of one’s inheritance, and that every philosophy is ‘an involuntary and unself-conscious memoir’ (BGE 6)20 and betrays the interests of one’s ancestors (BGE 264; cf. D 310). Nietzsche no longer sees, for example, sickness as something external that happens to him, but rather as something within him; similarly with regard to his approach to writing and life itself: all pieces of his life arise organically, and he actively appropriates these things, rather than merely allowing them to control him. The last two appearances of amor fati in his published writings are found in his final completed work, the autobiographical Ecce Homo. The first appearance of amor fati in that work is in the section entitled ‘Why I am so Clever’,

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following a list of Nietzsche’s personal ‘necessities’ regarding his own physical and psychological health. His ‘cleverness’ is here portrayed as helping him discover his own requirements in such things as food, climate and recreation. He ends by calling amor fati his ‘formula for greatness in a human being’: that one wants nothing to be other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear that which happens of necessity, even less to conceal it – all idealism is mendacious before necessity – but to love it . . . (EH ‘Why I am so Clever’ 10)21

His formula for greatness, then, is finding one’s own necessity, which here implies one’s requirements to flourish. Although the lambs and eagles of On the Genealogy of Morality offer a particularly vivid example of what different individuals’ requirements might look like (GM I 13), he also offers the image of the ‘sun-seeking Javanese climbing plant’, sipo matador (BGE 258).22 This plant analogy might be extended by noting that some plants (e.g., ferns) need much water and little sun, whereas others (e.g., cacti) need the opposite. The ‘idealism’ he criticizes points to the opposite, the irrelevance of personal details (e.g., that one could flourish equally well in any climate). Nietzsche attacks this idealism in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where it is represented by the Spirit of Gravity who proclaims, ‘good for all, evil for all’.23 Cleverness is required precisely because there is no single norm; one needs to discover one’s own requirements. He gives a specific example in Twilight of the Idols, written earlier that year: ‘for anyone who’s not a cold fish, it not only does good, but it is necessary to eat properly’ (TI ‘The Four Great Errors’ 1).24 Nietzsche observes that the then-famous diet of Cornaro, who advocated that one eat as little as possible, would kill anyone with a higher metabolism. Discovering one’s own

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causes and effects is the cleverness that allows one to ‘become who one is’. The fourth and final appearance of amor fati in Nietzsche’s published writings is also found in Ecce Homo, in the section on ‘The Wagner Case’. This section is almost entirely a criticism of the Germans, and ends by noting that they have failed to seriously engage his writings. He then asserts, ‘I am not injured by what is necessary; amor fati is my innermost nature’ (EH ‘The Wagner Case’ 4).25 He interprets the lack of recognition in his fatherland as a necessary antecedent for him to produce what was to be his major work, the Revaluation of All Values (as he refers to it in this text), creating a context in which he can properly work (perhaps undistracted by admirers, or the temptation to pander to his audience) and will play a role in future estimations of the Revaluation’s worth. He here demonstrates amor fati, as opposed to mere utility, by re-evaluating the seemingly ugly and shameful events of his life as a piece of necessity to be affirmed. There is only one reference to amor fati in The Will to Power, in fragment 1041 called ‘My new path to a ‘‘Yes’’’. It begins with the same theme of necessity of self-knowledge: Error is cowardice – every achievement of knowledge is a consequence of courage, or severity toward oneself, of cleanliness toward oneself . . .

In this first part, Nietzsche stresses the personal, but then continues: . . . a Dionysian affirmation of the world as it is, without subtraction, exception, or selection – it wants the eternal circulation: – the same things, the same logic and illogic of entanglements. The highest state a philosopher can attain: to stand in a Dionysian relationship to existence – my formula for this is amor fati. It is part of this state to perceive not merely the

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necessity of those sides of existence hitherto denied, but their desirability; and not their desirability merely in relation to the sides hitherto affirmed (perhaps as their complements and preconditions), but for their own sake, as the more powerful, more fruitful, truer sides of existence, in which its will finds clearer expression. (WP 1041)26

The larger scope of the world and cosmos is brought together with the personal cleverness required for flourishing according to one’s needs as two aspects of the same thing. These two aspects are also found together in Twilight of the Idols: The individual is a slice of fate both before and after, one more law, one more necessity for everything that is coming and will be. To say to the individual,’change yourself’, means insisting that everything should change, even retroactively . . . (TI ‘Morality as Anti-Nature’ 6)27

In bringing together the themes of personal knowledge and the interconnectedness of the cosmos, Nietzsche brings together amor fati and the eternal recurrence. They are clearly connected, but remain distinct, raising the question of the relation between the two. A beginning of the answer lies in this question: what is the fate Nietzsche loves?

The Fate Nietzsche Loves In The Other Nietzsche, Joan Stambaugh asks this question and answers by asserting, ‘The soul not only loves fate, the soul is fate.’28 In unpacking this, she entertains the possibility that the soul is ‘some theory of heredity or environment or, most likely, some inscrutable combination of both’,29 only to reject it. Stambaugh sees such understandings of heredity and the environment as the result of

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socio-psychological analyses which ‘inevitably lack precision and reliability; there are too many ‘‘exceptions’’’.30 They may influence one’s life, she argues, but influence is not fate; they lack the requisite necessity of amor fati. Stambaugh suggests the alternative must be something that escapes socio-psychological analysis, something that must be grasped ‘philosophically’, something she calls a ‘Dionysian relation to existence’. This means to ‘live the creation and destruction that lie at the very heart and core of existence’,31 and embrace Becoming rather than the ‘static persistence’32 of Being. However, this is problematic insofar as she rejects the idea of unchanging Being while simultaneously acknowledging that Nietzsche affirms what is ‘already there’.33 Rather than further analysing this ‘already there’ beyond calling it ‘the past’, she simply calls this a paradox. In fact, the ‘already there’ of the past is precisely heredity and environment, and is found throughout Nietzsche’s writings. As Brian Leiter writes, ‘natural facts about a person circumscribe what that person becomes, though within the limits set by the natural facts, the precise details of what the person becomes depend (causally) on other factors’.34 Stambaugh’s objections are limited by the unwarranted thought that our current theories are inadequate to capture the full force of these elements; Nietzsche already notes the inadequacy of theory in general (e.g., BGE 22), but does not thereby disqualify heredity and environment. For instance, Alexander Nehamas points out that the vulgar Freudian idea that the core of one’s self is always there, formed to a great extent early on in life, and waiting for some sort of liberation is incompatible with both Nietzsche’s view that the self is a fiction and with his general denial of the idea of a reality that underlies appearance.35

This criticism of Freud help to highlight the inadequacy of

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theory, but does not necessarily deny the cleverness Nietzsche claims and urges us towards. For instance, in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes of an ‘unteachable granite of spiritual fate’ (BGE 231),36 which seems to contradict Nehamas’ claim, suggesting a ‘soul’ that remains the same throughout one’s life. However, throughout his writings Nietzsche casts into doubt, and more often clearly rejects, the typical manner of understanding the ‘self’ in Western philosophy as soul or ego. For instance, he asks, ‘[w]hat gives me the right to speak about an I, and, for that matter, about an I as cause, and, finally, about an I as the cause of thoughts?’ (BGE 16)37 Rather than uncovering a fundamental fact of the universe – an immortal, unitary soul for every person38 – statements regarding the unity and persistence of the individual as an ‘I’ merely reflect the ‘grammatical custom’ (WP 484)39 of languages used. He formulates a hypothesis about the origin of this ‘I’ without constructing an argument against it, merely casting suspicion – ‘that famous old ‘‘I’’ – well that is just an assumption or opinion, to put it mildly, and by no means an ‘‘immediate certainty’’’ (BGE 17)40 – and goes on to suggest that the attribution of a soul is purely an Indo-European linguistic habit: Where there are linguistic affinities, then because of the common philosophy of grammar (I mean: due to the unconscious domination and direction through similar grammatical functions), it is obvious that everything lies ready from the very start for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems . . . (BGE 20)41

The subject/predicate grammatical structure of the IndoEuropean languages thus constrains and directs the possibilities of one’s thinking, and the conclusions of another language could be otherwise.42 Elsewhere he calls the soul a ‘fable, a fiction, a play on words’ (TI ‘The Four Great

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Errors’ 3),43 and proclaims that it is language ‘which believes in the ‘‘I’’, in the I as being, in the I as substance’ (TI ‘‘‘Reason’’ in Philosophy’ 5).44 Nietzsche elsewhere chastises philosophers for falling into ‘the snares of grammar’ (GS 354),45 and writes of ‘the seduction of language which construes and misconstrues all actions as conditional upon an agency’ (GM I 13).46 The ‘soul-hypothesis’, therefore, reflects language and not any deep metaphysical fact.47 With a shadow cast across the concept ‘soul’, Nietzsche pushes his scepticism to the related concepts of the ego as agent: ‘there is no ‘‘being’’ behind the doing, effecting, becoming; ‘‘the doer’’ is simply fabricated into the doing’ (GM I 13)48. The attribution of agency occurs after the event, but is assumed to come before; the ‘causal agent’ is merely a hypothesis or interpretation. ‘Is the ‘‘terrible’’ truth not that no amount of knowledge about an act ever suffices to ensure its performance, that the space between knowledge and action has never yet been bridged even in one single instance? Actions are never what they appear to us to be!’ (D 116; cf. D 124, AOM 78)49 With the rejection of a unified, enduring self as metaphysical fact – whether in Platonic, Christian, Cartesian or Kantian form – the related concepts of ‘free will’ and ‘responsibility’ collapse. First of all, we must also put an end to that other and more disastrous atomism, the one Christianity has taught best and longest, the atomism of the soul. Let this expression signify the belief that the soul is something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, that it is a monad, an atomon: this belief must be thrown out of science! (BGE 12)50

Since Nietzsche the deepest and notions, it is the Since there is

views the soul-as-causal-agent as perhaps most enduring concept supporting these most necessary concept to eliminate.51 no individual, immaterial and essentially

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unified soul that one is, the understanding of ‘soul as fate’ requires further investigation. As Richard White notes, ‘[b]y unraveling ordinary conceptions of subjectivity, [Nietzsche] poses the more difficult task of rethinking, as opposed to rejecting, the self’.52 The individual is the assemblage of components from one’s genetic heritage and one’s environment that can seem either accidental or absolutely necessary. Nietzsche affirms that either can be the case: ‘Active, successful natures act, not according to the dictum ‘‘know thyself’’, but as if there hovered before them the commandment: will a self and thou shalt become a self. Fate seems to have left the choice up to them.’ (AOM 366)53 In either case, they are interwoven with everything that has preceded them (cf. TI ‘The Four Great Errors’ 8). Robert Solomon writes about the constraints of this process: ‘Self-making, which is ultimately a kind of selfcultivation, is by no means independent or separable from one’s native talents, one’s ‘‘instinct’’, one’s environment, the influences of other people and one’s culture.’54 This remaking involves heredity and environment, but finds flexibility through the interpretative lens of language (cf. AOM 172, 174). Zarathustra proclaims that ‘the soul is just a word for something on the body’ (Z I 4),55 a sentiment which is echoed in the later note found in The Will to Power: ‘[t]o know, e.g., that one has a nervous system (– but no ‘‘soul’’ –) is still the privilege of the best informed’ (WP 229).56 As the contemporary neuroscientist Antonio Damasio writes, ‘the autobiographical self is based on a concept in the true cognitive and neurobiological sense of the term. The concept exists in the form of dispositional, implicit memories contained in certain interconnected brain networks.’57 Nietzsche does not merely identify the self with the body, however: this would potentially transfer the unity and simplicity of the soul to the body. In opposition to this, he writes that ‘[t]he evidence of the body

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reveals a tremendous multiplicity’ (WP 518).58 He offers other alternatives to the unified and eternal soul including a ‘mortal soul’, ‘soul as subject-multiplicity’ and ‘soul as society constructed out of drives and affects’ (BGE 12),59 and elsewhere notes that ‘nothing . . . can be more incomplete than [man’s] image of the totality of drives which constitute his being. He can scarcely even name the cruder ones.’ (D 119)60 It is important to recognize that these are hypotheses to be considered rather than a new dogma. However, it does indicate that one’s dispositions should be understood both physiologically and psychologically. This resonates with Patricia Churchland’s observation that ‘unity and coherence as exist in one’s self-conception depend not on transcendental necessity, whatever that might be, but on neuronal organization’.61 These have been shaped by one’s ancestors and the environment of one’s ancestors; the individual’s unique constitution is the product of biology adapted to particular natural and cultural environmental factors. Nietzsche writes, What a man’s forefathers like doing most, and the most often, cannot be wiped from his soul . . . It is utterly impossible that a person might fail to have the qualities and propensities of his elders and ancestors in his body: however much appearances might speak against it. (BGE 264; cf. 262)62

Nietzsche sees this unbroken and essentially biological chain as comprised of necessity stronger than law (e.g., BGE 22). This is not to see one’s character as fixed from before birth, however, because even those things we cannot change are always subject to reinterpretation. Leiter asserts, there are essential natural facts about persons that significantly circumscribe the range of life trajectories that persons can realize and that, as a result, make each individual’s life ‘fated’,

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not in the classical sense, but in the sense that what an individual can become is severely constrained from the start.63

However, the future is more open for Nietzsche than Leiter assumes. The revaluation that is part of loving one’s fate not only changes one’s attitudes, it has the effect of recasting both the past and the future. One’s heritage constrains and colours one’s actions without dictating a specific path: Nietzsche never says that the son of a shopkeeper must be a shopkeeper, only that, if one’s ancestors were shopkeepers, then the trait of, for instance, precise bookkeeping will find its way into one’s pursuits.64 Nehamas writes that ‘Nietzsche seems intent on undermining precisely the idea that there are antecedently existing possibilities grounded in the nature of things or people, even though (as on the view we are considering) we may not know in advance what they are’65. The love of fate is understood as loving the totality of one’s genetic heritage and experiences out of which the self is composed. However, both aspects must be interpreted rather than simply being taken as given. The problem with Stambaugh’s ‘something else’ is that, for Nietzsche, there is literally nothing else it could be. The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux summarizes the naturalist’s position that Nietzsche shares: ‘regarding questions of mind and behavior, nature and nurture are really two ways of doing the same thing – wiring up synapses – and both are needed to get the job done’.66 LeDoux also stresses the ‘plasticity’ of our synaptic connections, their ability to change configuration throughout our lives. This implies that our understandings of even these ‘unchangeable’ things can be modified in the way Nietzsche suggests (cf. GS 299). Since we only understand even these ‘unchangeable’ things relationally, they can be understood to change, since even our environment and heredity have no ‘essence’. Language is essential to this reinterpretation, and thus makes the creation of the

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individual in Nietzsche’s sense possible. The self is thus one’s autobiography.

The Narrative Self The idea of the self as autobiography in Nietzsche is the central theme of Alexander Nehamas’ book, Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Nehamas argues that Nietzsche views the self as a construction, and that the stories of one’s past are woven together and interpreted as a narrative that is one’s self. While explicitly based on language use, and thus grammar, Nehamas argues that Nietzsche’s view of the self avoids the soul-hypothesis by appealing to an explicitly literary model. Unlike the Christian soul, which is understood as containing unrealized possibilities, a literary character is no more and no less than the sum of what happens to him or her in the course of the narrative of which he or she is a part. One’s experiences and constitutional features serve as the ever changing and potentially multiple self – the autobiography in progress – in direct opposition to a ‘soul’ or unitary and unchanging source of our actions. Other contemporary philosophers have argued for understanding the self in a similar manner. Alasdair MacIntyre and Daniel Dennett are of particular interest because their contrasting narrative models help to bring out salient features in Nehamas’ theory. David Hume and Gilbert Ryle, rather than Nietzsche, influence Dennett, but his conclusions are in some respects remarkably similar to Nietzsche’s. Dennett has given detailed explanation of the mechanism of self-production, and of consciousness in general, which helps to understand how some of the suggestive passages in Nietzsche’s account might be understood in light of recent work in artificial intelligence and cognitive science.67 The contrasts are also significant. While Dennett assumes there is no central ‘I’ to which agency

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ascriptions apply, he sees actions themselves supplying a relatively unambiguous text for one’s narrative. This descriptive model stands in marked contrast to the decidedly normative approach of Nietzsche. Alasdair MacIntyre is another contemporary philosopher who writes about the importance of narrative for self-understanding, most notably in his book, After Virtue,68 where he writes, ‘man is in his actions and practices, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal’.69 Narrative is central to the unity and intelligibility of our lives: ‘The difference between imaginary characters and real ones is not in the narrative form of what they do; it is in the degree of authorship of that form, and of their own deeds.’70 Unlike Dennett, MacIntyre views the narrative in an explicitly normative manner. The purpose of the narrative is to bring together features that exemplify virtues in one’s life as a whole. A life without narrative cannot be good, for it is strictly speaking meaningless as a life. At the same time, MacIntyre relies on many features rejected by Nietzsche. At the fore is the notion of unity of character prior to the narrative; that is, he assumes an enduring subject whose narrative this is. Although for different reasons, Nietzsche and Dennett both reject this sort of subject, viewing the subject as constituted through the narrative. MacIntyre’s idea of the good also contrasts with Nietzsche’s. Following Aristotle, MacIntyre assumes that there is a telos for man, the search for which is part of the good for man as such. The specifics of the search will change according to an individual’s milieu, but there is nevertheless a single good. Nietzsche’s opposition to this sort of notion of the good has already been demonstrated in the previous chapter. One interesting similarity between MacIntyre and Nietzsche is found in the specific form this narrative takes; MacIntyre writes that ‘[t]he true genre of life is neither hagiography nor saga, but tragedy’.71 ‘The tragic’ will later

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be seen to be the central element in understanding Nietzsche’s final account of responsibility. This rough account of the basic similarities and differences of the narrative models of Dennett and MacIntyre compared to Nehamas’ Nietzsche helps to emphasize which features are relevant, and which of those relevant features are controversial. Contra MacIntyre, Nietzsche argues that there is no author behind one’s narrative that can simply be pointed out and named; there is at best a plurality of authors, all of whom are contributing. Dennett describes his understanding of the process of consciousness similarly: Instead of just a single stream (no matter how wide), there are multiple channels in which specialist circuits try, in parallel pandemoniums, to do their various things, creating Multiple Drafts as they go. Most of these fragmentary drafts of ‘narrative’ play short-lived roles in the modulation of current activity but some get promoted to further functional roles, in swift succession, by the activity of a virtual machine in the brain.72

If we view these specialist circuits as one’s drives, this view is already found in Nietzsche (e.g., BGE 12, TI ‘Raids of an Untimely Man’ 38, 41). One’s individual interests, projects and goals, which are ultimately derived from one’s drives, compete in an attempt to reach realization. In this striving, a large number of actions are taken, some reflecting the immediate aims of the drives and others reflecting long- or medium-range goals. The results of some actions may conflict with others; however, the overall unity of one’s narrative is not necessarily disrupted. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes that ‘soul is a word for something about the body’, but also that the body is ‘a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a shepherd’ (Z I 4),73 and ‘not ‘‘an immortal soul’’, but many mortal souls’ (AOM 17).74 The fictional self to which the narrative refers is the sum of one’s actions, which are

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produced by a multiplicity of drives. Nehamas attributes what Bernard Reginster has called ‘essentialist egalitarianism’75 to Nietzsche, a view which can be traced back to Leibniz: ‘Strictly speaking Nietzsche’s position is that every one of a person’s actions is without qualification equally a part of that person’s identity: no variations are possible.’76 This is incomplete as it stands, for Nietzsche does not hold Leibniz’s view that we live in the best of all possible worlds, even if Nietzsche does believe that we live in the only possible world. The revaluation entailed by amor fati complicates the picture while giving more depth; Nehamas continues, ‘though the occurrence of an action is in some sense given and unalterable, its significance, and thus ultimately for him its very nature, can still be variable’.77 A person cannot unwill actions now regretted, but amor fati as a normative doctrine can bring these pieces together and actively form them into a coherent narrative that gives meaning to one’s life as a whole. Nehamas takes this to be the basic thrust of Nietzsche’s philosophy.

Critiques of the Narrative Self The normative aspect, however, has been seen as problematic. Richard Shusterman has argued that there is no difference between what Nehamas takes as Nietzsche’s ideal, and what Nehamas takes to be the ‘fact of the matter’ for Nietzsche regarding ordinary people. That is, the unity of the self in Nehamas’ sense seems to be both an ethical ideal, normative as a rare triumph in humans, and descriptive as a logical necessity for all people, insofar as individuals are nothing but their actions. In other words, in Nehamas’ account of Nietzsche, a person is the sum of his or her experiences and actions whether or not those actions are deliberately chosen.78 Richard Schacht makes a similar critique. He argues both

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that an agent is not reducible to his or her actions, as Nehamas holds, and that the higher man – the person who has achieved such a unity – is ‘more than a unity as such’.79 Everyone who can tell his or her story in some coherent manner still qualifies as a ‘self’, even people who do not ‘turn out well’. Since Nehamas’ notion of the interrelatedness of all things makes everything necessary, it cannot also serve as an ideal towards which one strives. These objections fail to take into account the specifically literary model that Nehamas employs. Medium in the plastic arts, instrumentation and harmonization in music, and word choice in literature all play a crucial role in a work of art’s success or failure. For instance, Harold Bloom describes Shakespeare’s characters as having a reality which, ‘supposedly fictive, transcends our own’.80 The unity of effect has a profound impact on the success or failure of a work of art, but most people may be the equivalent of a newspaper, adopting a more or less consistent perspective on some issues but with no real effort to shape the pieces into anything suggesting a work as a whole, a mere spatiotemporal identity. Nehamas is not merely giving a description of Nietzsche’s view of the ontological status of humans. If that were the case, his end point would then be the same as Dennett’s. Each action contributes to our understanding of a successful character. There are no superfluous actions, and the elimination or addition of actions and events would change one’s identity. Events both comprise unique characters and inform us about them, particularly such successful characters as Shakespeare’s Hamlet. While maintaining a distinct identity, he cannot be reduced to a stereotype or a conjunction of habits; as Bloom notes, part of what gives Hamlet his veracity is that he ‘notoriously changes every time he hears himself speak, which is why there can be no central passage in this four-thousand-line play, fifteen hundred of which constitute his part’.81 Hamlet possesses what Nehamas refers to as ‘interpretive

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unity’, in contrast with ‘causal unity’.82 Causal unity is a unity in name only: the body, or the name, supplies the only connection between the actions. Nehamas uses poorly written characters to illustrate those who do not turn out well – the majority of human beings. In life, our body is individuated in space and identified through the process of socialization. Most people’s actions are unified causally by the body, but, as with poorly written characters, the specific actions often seem to be interchangeable: that one could have gone to a different college, married a different person, gotten a different job, lived in a different city and still have been the same person. But the poorly written literary character at least may have the purpose of driving a plot, even though the plot itself may be hackneyed; the failed person does not even possess that (slightly) redeeming quality, and the life collapses into a mere series of disconnected events. MacIntyre makes a related complaint about the tendency within analytic philosophy to treat actions in this disconnected fashion, rather than seeing them as necessarily embedded within some narrative.83 But this is how Nehamas views Nietzsche’s diagnoses of the lives of the many. The actions are put into a sequence, but there is neither rhyme nor reason to the whole. Most people’s narratives exhibit only a causal unity because they see their actions as separate and disconnected from themselves. ‘‘‘If only I were some other person!’’ is what this glance sighs: ‘‘but there’s no hope of that. I am who I am: how could I get away from myself? And oh – I’m fed up with myself!’’’ (GM III 14)84 They do not want to bring their lives together in a unity because they cannot bear their own actions. The very idea that one could ‘be someone else’ depends upon the soul-hypothesis, even though even in literature and film it is recognized as impossible.85 An interpretive unity is simulated in the sense that one’s life is seen as a whole, but this unity is only possible by attributing it to the persistence of a soul that

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would have been exactly the same under different circumstances. These actions are causally held together through one body and a socially constructed identity – which itself is often fragmented into different roles – but many of the specifics are seen as accidental, pieces of chance which may affect one’s circumstances but not one’s self. Interpretive unity, as seen in the passages on amor fati above, bring together all of these ‘accidents’ and form them into a whole in which anything can be seen as significant, and every significant point must not be missing. There is no reservation or thought of ‘I could have done otherwise’ (e.g., GM I 13); each action and event informs the whole. Schacht objects that Nehamas’ stress on unity and coherence over tension and variety would seem to produce bland and predictable people, and not ‘higher men’. More damaging, both Schacht and Bernard Reginster argue that Nehamas’ version of amor fati leaves out the transformative dimension, the essential aspect of self-overcoming; as Reginster describes, their affirmation does not require that I abandon the standards by which I find them detestable and horrible. It only demands that I ‘redeem’ them, for example, by creating a context in which they precisely cease to be detestable and horrible . . . it does not demand that I revaluate my values themselves.86

According to Schacht, Nehamas’ ideal has the higher man embrace the entire past and make it whole without relying on a model which would create ‘a different self with a new specific unity’.87 This idea, though, that unity must be bland – ‘too monolithic, too homogeneous, or at any rate too democratic and harmonious’88 – is to confuse discord and tension.89 Discord in this context is inner strife between one’s drives. This manifests, for instance, when a person acts in ways that are self-defeating, or is paralyzed in

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the face of equally attractive options (e.g., BGE 200, 224). Tension, on the other hand, is necessary for beauty in a work of art, and thus necessary within the personality of the higher man. As Nehamas writes, unity is found in ‘having the minimum level of discord among the maximum number of diverse tendencies’.90 The diverse tendencies provide an unpredictable variety within one’s actions, without lapsing into complete chaos (e.g., BGE 257, 262). Without tension between one’s actions, a static form emerges which realizes the herd’s ideal, a mediocratization that does not speak of the higher man. In contrast to this blandness, Nietzsche suggests that diverse drives have the potential to compete with one another in such a manner as to drive their expressions to new heights: ‘one must still have chaos in oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star’ (Z P 5).91 Damasio describes the mechanism of dynamic unity: those personalities that appear to us as most harmonious and mature from the point of view of their standard responses, I imagine that the multiple control sites are interconnected so that responses can be organized, at varied degrees of complexity, some involving recruitment of just a few brain sites, others requiring a concerted large-scale operation, but often involving both cortical and subcortical sites.92

This understanding of tension addresses Schacht’s criticism: the person in question transforms him or herself in the conscious appropriation of one’s own actions, embracing the widest possible array of drives (thus preserving tension) while reducing to a minimum the kind of discord which undermines one’s ability to act. There are two unresolved issues at this point. First, not every action throughout one’s entire life can be transformative in this manner. In order for an action to be significant, it must have some significance for the subject, even if that significance is not immediately recognizable.

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There is a sense in which actions are chosen, though, even if they will not acquire significance. Some choices, such as the specific pair of socks worn on a particular day, may gain significance under unusual circumstances, but many mundane choices have no discernible impact. In the odd case, the original decision will acquire significance, but this is precisely what sets it apart. That which might cause shame or injury is significant for this reason; these events and actions must be seen as necessary and affirmed, and we find a transformation effected precisely through this affirmation. As Solomon notes, ‘That which doesn’t kill me most likely leaves me debilitated.’93 So when Nietzsche writes, ‘What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’ (TI ‘Epigrams and Arrows’ 8),94 it seems that what injures one is not physical, but rather one’s own memory: that which causes one to be ashamed before oneself. This brings us to the second problem: the finality of events. One does not have to merely accept events as they come and accept their significance as unalterable. They can be put into different contexts; one can frame the past, view it from a distance, ‘all this we should learn from artists while otherwise being wiser than they’ (GS 299).95 As opposed to Reginster’s understanding, the transformative element lies in this reinterpretation of one’s past, but it should be understood as a dynamic and ongoing process rather than a single ‘conversion’ moment that is oriented towards the future (e.g., BGE 31).96 For Nietzsche, meaning is fluid (GM II 12); a thing or event in one sense remains the same – be it forms of punishment, internal organs or one’s past – and yet it can be transformed through this act of appropriation and reinterpretation. ‘From this point of view, even the blunders of life – the temporary sidepaths and wrong turnings, the delays, the ‘‘modesties’’, the seriousness squandered on tasks outside the task – have their own meaning and value’ (EH ‘Why I am so Clever’ 9).97 Richard White describes this by noting that for Nietzsche,

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‘[t]he individual is more than just a product of nature . . . This is not to affirm an impossible doctrine of absolute selfcreation ab nihilo, but to describe the basic structure of selfbecoming that allows the individual to be an individual in the first place.’98 This brings us back to the active and passive versions of fate from the beginning of this chapter. Nietzsche consistently rejects the passive fatalism in which the individual merely accepts what has happened and proclaims it necessary through resignation. Amor fati, in contrast, is the accepting and affirming of all things important, and is complementary with LeDoux’s understanding of our selfinterpretive process: If cells processing sensory events can undergo plasticity as a result of the kind of activity those events trigger in sensory systems, then why can’t cells processing a thought change the connections of cells with which they communicate? Obviously, they do . . . With thoughts empowered this way, we can begin to see how the way we think about ourselves can have powerful influence on the way we are, and who we become.99

The transformative dimension in Nehamas’ view of the self in Nietzsche is just another aspect of the transformative element in amor fati. This transformation is made both possible and necessary because of the fluidity of the meaning of the world. Yirmiyahu Yovel argues that Nietzsche’s experience of the world: leaves man in a metaphysical wasteland, a world of conflict and transience which cannot be captured by rational categories and from which all metaphysical consolation is banned. Consequently, the assent and celebrating acceptance of immanent existence in Nietzsche’s amor fati must take the defiant and self-overcoming form of a ‘nevertheless’.100

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The idea of a ‘nevertheless’ is found throughout Nietzsche’s writings. It is seen in Beyond Good and Evil 56, where Nietzsche writes of a world-affirming person who desires life ‘again just as it was and is through all eternity, insatiably shouting da capo not just to himself but to the whole play and performance’,101 as well as to the cry of Zarathustra, ‘Was that life? Well! Once more!’ (Z ‘On the Vision and the Riddle’ 1)102 The bad – detestable and horrible – are acknowledged as such and affirmed anyway: ‘The great epochs of our lives come when we gather the courage to reconceive our evils as what is best in us’ (BGE 116).103 An additional problem remains: if the self is in some sense a fiction, it is unclear how it can impose an interpretation on the whole. That is, one’s actions are the product of a multiplicity of drives, which have a causal unity, but in the absence of a ‘Central Meaner’ – to borrow Dennett’s pejorative term – it is unclear from where the interpretive unity comes, either retrospectively or prospectively. The problem of consciousness is at the same time for Nietzsche the problem of meaning, ‘the sickness from which man suffers’. Memory and the reflexive capacity of consciousness (i.e., self-consciousness) give the individual the ability to envision alternatives, but also give one’s actions a feeling of contingency. Most of Western metaphysics, including the soul-hypothesis, claims to find an intrinsic meaning but is really only an attempt to give significance to our actions to combat this feeling of contingency. Amor fati addresses the problem of meaning in the sense of appropriation and affirmation, creating meaning through revaluation. How is this sort of transformation possible? And how is meaning at all possible in a strictly naturalized world? The next chapter has two primary goals. First, I will sketch an account of Nietzsche’s theory of meaning, taking

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into account both his naturalism and his perspectivism. Second, I will show how this theory of meaning can be understood in terms of current work in contemporary philosophy of mind, and how the physical mechanisms of the brain suggest the implementation of something along the lines of Nietzsche’s perspectivism.

Chapter 4

Conferring Meaning on the Whole: Nietzsche, Churchland and Holism As shown in the previous chapter, Nietzsche rejects the idea of self as a unified, substantial soul. Amor fati provides an alternative sense of self that is rooted in the interconnectedness of all things, in which the individual is the result and fundamentally part of the universe as a whole. Rather than simply allowing the self to dissolve into the universe, however, Nietzsche reconceives it as a sort of narrative. This narrative is necessarily perspectival, because one must construct a unique story from one’s own position within the universe, and the universe lacks any intrinsic meaning that could be revealed from a God’s-eye ‘view from nowhere’. The idea of conferring meaning in a universe that is lacking intrinsic meaning but which is intimately interrelated suggests ‘meaning holism’, described by Paul Churchland as follows: no term can be meaningful in the absence of systematic connections with other terms. Meaning, it appears, is something a term can enjoy only in the context of a network of other terms, terms connected to one another by means of general statements that contain them.1

The narrative is essentially part of the whole, and every piece of the whole contributes to understanding (even if it is something ‘not understood’). Any particular fact about a person – for instance, being married – not only cannot be understood outside the narrative, including the story of

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how one met one’s partner, the wedding ceremony and so forth, but also not outside the larger whole, such as a description of the institution of marriage and why people typically get married. Although this is not a universally recognized feature of Nietzsche’s philosophy, it is significant because it serves as a bridge between Nietzsche’s work and that of contemporary philosophers working in the Anglo-American tradition. Cornel West makes a similar claim in his essay ‘Nietzsche’s Prefiguration of Postmodern American Philosophy’.2 There, West emphasizes three aspects shared by Nietzsche and ‘postmodern’ philosophers such as W.V. Quine, Wilfred Sellars and Nelson Goodman: ‘anti-realism or conventionalism in ontology’; ‘anti-foundationalism in epistemology’; and ‘detranscendentalization of the subject’. Anti-realism refers to the rejection of an objective reality that simply presents itself to us, instead seeing our apprehension of the objects of the world as fundamentally shaped by culture, particularly through language (hence the term ‘conventionalism’). Anti-foundationalism builds on this idea by denying that there are any uninterpreted – ‘self justifying, intrinsically credible, theory-neutral’3 – facts for us to discover. The third aspect, detranscendentalization of the subject, refers to the notion that any science of the mind will be continuous with the rest of science, rather than a separate sphere; in other words, there is no mental substance, or ‘soul’, that stands apart from the rest of the world. Conventionalism and anti-foundationalism, taken together, imply meaning holism; this is clearly articulated in Quine’s statement that we evaluate our truths, ‘not individually but only as a corporate body’.4 That is to say, if there are not self-justifying facts that serve as a foundation for all other facts, then everything must be evaluated within a larger context. Articulating Nietzsche’s theory of meaning, particularly in light of accusations of nihilism, will constitute the first part of this chapter. In the second part, I

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will turn to Paul Churchland’s connectionist theory of mind, which brings meaning holism together with the detranscendentalization of the subject by providing a naturalized account of meaning based on the structure of the brain. This has a deep resonance with Nietzsche’s various hypotheses about the nature of the self – the body as ‘a society built out of many souls’5 (BGE 19), the soul as ‘a society constructed out of the drives and affects’6 (BGE 12) – despite the differences in background and motivation. Articulating the basics of the connectionist theory of mind and the relevant parallels to Nietzsche’s writings will be the task of the second part of this chapter. The final part of this chapter will outline Paul Churchland’s application of meaning holism and indicate the ways in which it can be read as an operationalization of Nietzsche’s theory of meaning. This will include an account of criticisms of connectionist meaning holism, both general objections to the enterprise of naturalizing meaning and Jerry Fodor’s specific objections to Churchland. After examining the consequences of these criticisms for Churchland, as well as Churchland’s responses, I will return to Nietzsche’s account and show that these criticisms turn out to be expected and unproblematic features for Nietzsche. In other words, even if Fodor’s criticisms are valid for Churchland’s account, they are not valid criticisms of Nietzsche’s position.

Nietzsche and Meaning Throughout his writings Nietzsche is concerned with the problem of meaning, both the way in which things and events are evaluated, and the reasons given for those evaluations. He rejects the dominant Platonic/Christian view, which sees meaning as an intrinsic feature of the universe; this can be seen with regard to the meaning of the

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will to truth (e.g., BGE 1; GS 344) and the meaning of morality, i.e., ‘There are absolutely no moral phenomena, only a moral interpretation of the phenomena’ (BGE 108; see also, e.g., GS 345; TI ‘Raids of the Untimely Man’ 37; and all of On the Genealogy of Morality). He shows that meaning is never fixed, least of all for human institutions: ‘The form is fluid, the ‘‘meaning’’ even more so’ (GM II 12; cf. 13).7 By showing the antecedents of how evaluations came to be, Nietzsche reveals their ultimate contingency. Arthur Danto takes the rejection of inherent meaning to entail the rejection of meaning altogether, and understands the eternal recurrence as a doctrine of determinism, which frees us from this ‘dubious gift of meaning’.8 While the deterministic interpretation of the eternal recurrence was rejected in Chapter 2, Danto sees the eternal recurrence implying more than mere determinism. The fact that all of history repeats itself exactly undermines the value that even a unique-but-determined universe would have: ‘iteration dissolves meaning, and infinite iteration erases it totally. [The eternal recurrence] is a rock against which history as significance must shatter.’9 Danto takes this to be positive because it ultimately reduces the total amount of pain in the universe, based on his distinction between two categories of pain: ‘extensional’ and ‘intensional’. Extensional pain primarily refers to physical pain, but also includes pain such as losing a child or being betrayed by a loved one. Intensional pain, on the other hand, is the additional pain that comes about through the ascription of meaning to extensional pain, for instance, in feeling oneself to be responsible in some way for the occurrence of the extensional pain. Nietzsche writes, ‘What actually arouses indignation over suffering is not the suffering itself, but the senselessness of suffering’ (GM II 7)10 but the meaning given to suffering has caused much more additional suffering than the original, ‘extensional’ pain it attempted to explain. Danto takes this elimination of inherent meaning as

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central to Nietzsche’s thought: ‘if there is any single moral/ metaphysical teaching I would ascribe to him, it would be this: suffering really is meaningless, there is no point to it, and the amount of suffering caused by giving it a meaning chills the blood to contemplate’.11 Insofar as Nietzsche denies the ‘Christian’ notion of responsibility, there is a sense in which this is correct, but Danto fails to recognize that Nietzsche sees people suffering, in a more fundamental sense, from a lack of meaning,12 and that the ascetic ideal – the source of this intensional suffering – is an attempt to provide meaning to existence, since man ‘suffered from the problem of what he meant’ (GM III 28).13 Danto thus sees Nietzsche as trying to reduce the amount of human suffering in the world by eliminating the significance assigned to pain, as does M. C. Sterling: ‘we would be prudent to put forth every effort to maximize our joy and to minimize our suffering in this life’.14 However, Nietzsche argues for the opposite: Should you decide . . . to decrease and diminish people’s susceptibility to pain, you also have to decrease and diminish their capacity for joy . . . But [science] might yet be found to be the great giver of pain! – And then its counterforce might at the same time be found: its immense capacity for letting new galaxies of joy flare up! (GS 12)15

Both Danto and Sterling attribute to Nietzsche an essentially utilitarian goal, which is the opposite of what Nietzsche desired: the diminishment of pain is at its core the diminishment of the possibility for great human beings.16 Nietzsche’s problem is not with pain, but with interpretations of pain that further weaken humanity, particularly when those interpretations claim universal validity. This is not the same as the nihilistic claim that there is no meaning in the universe; instead, Nietzsche sees meaning as both conferred and perspectival, rather than intrinsic.

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That is, meaning is created, not discovered, and it is always created by someone who occupies a particular (social, economic, historical, geographical) position: ‘the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself under its perspectival forms, and solely in these’ (GS 374).17 We see this idea of conferring meaning in a variety of contexts throughout Nietzsche’s later writings. For instance, in both Book Five of The Gay Science and in On the Genealogy of Morality he writes of endowing a way of life with a particular meaning. The creation of meaning is not necessarily a conscious activity; in On the Genealogy of Morality, he writes of the ‘nobles’ creating meaning by naming actions ‘good’ and ‘bad’; they do not contemplate what ought to be called good and bad, but simply recognize the value of these actions for themselves. This un- or semiconscious bestowing of meaning is taken up again in Twilight of the Idols, both in the form of bestowing meaning to events in dreams (TI VI 4) and through reference to instinct: a born painter or psychologist ‘never works ‘‘from nature’’ – he trusts his instinct, his camera obscura, to sift through and express the ‘‘case’’, ‘‘nature’’, the ‘‘experience’’’ (TI ‘Raids of the Untimely Man’ 7).18 In each case, meaning is read into an event, invented rather than discovered, even – and perhaps especially – when the individual is unaware of this. For Nietzsche, everything is necessarily interpreted: ‘Facts are precisely what there are not, only interpretation’ (WP 481).19 Meaning is a more mundane thing than truth: ‘we are fundamentally inclined to claim that the falsest judgments . . . are the most indispensable to us’ (BGE 4).20 Because of this, the question of meaning is more insistent than questions about truth. ‘The question of values is more fundamental than the question of certainty: the latter becomes serious only by presupposing that the value question has already been answered’ (WP 588).21 According to Nietzsche, it is precisely this question that has not even been asked; this is why he returns again

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and again to the question of meaning in his works, and why he must reject the nihilist answer. This conferring of meaning leads precisely to the ‘conventionalism in ontology’ Cornel West describes: there is no simple, uninterpreted ‘true’ or ‘real’. What one understands as ‘real’ are interpretations taken to be indisputable insofar as they conform to the expectations of values of the culture in which one resides. The radical implications of this have been well expressed by Quine: ‘Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries – not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits, comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer.’22 This is consonant with the fragment from Nietzsche’s Nachlass, ‘A ‘‘thing’’ is the sum of its effects, synthetically united by a concept, an image’23 (WP 551). Both Nietzsche and Quine recognize that interpretation does not come after perception; it is an integral part of experiencing.24 To hope for an uninterpreted world is, for Quine, simply absurd; for Nietzsche, it is potentially life-threatening (e.g., BGE 4). Steven Pinker expresses a similar view from a evolutionary standpoint: ‘Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness or to answer any question we are capable of asking.’25 Quine hopes for some science which could provide a standard interpretation, whereas Nietzsche not only does not think this is possible, but would not want it even it if were: ‘Above all, one shouldn’t wish to strip [existence] of its ambiguous character’ (GS 373).26 Rather than looking towards a convergence of individual viewpoints and an arrival at some stable and universal interpretation, Nietzsche sees the future of humanity in diversity and experimentation (e.g., GS 374). Given the understanding of amor fati developed in the previous chapter, we can see that it is not the world that changes but our interpretation of the world and ourselves

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(e.g., TI ‘Morality as Anti-Nature’ 6). Each revised interpretation has potentially far-reaching and unexpected consequences; no statements, either about our experience or about a priori truths, can be understood outside of some larger frame of reference. Perspectival interpretation, as in Quine’s account, should be understood as organizing and categorizing the world in some approximately holistic manner. That is, the object of interpretation is global – the world as a whole – and as such the interpretation must be global in its scope, since each belief affects all others. Thus, the new experience is interpreted in such a manner as to preserve the basic coherence of one’s entire belief set. Nietzsche does not provide a clear and unambiguous definition of meaning, but a more precise description is required to see how Churchland’s project operationalizes Nietzsche’s hypotheses. I will focus on two components of meaning: semantic content and intersubjective communication. The ‘semantic content’ of a concept is its representation of something else, that is to say, the term ‘book’ is meaningful insofar as it refers to objects of a certain type. ‘Intersubjective communication’ refers to the idea that a person can bring about a representation of a particular concept in another person. Both definitions are problematic, but they capture the underlying ideas that will be further refined through the chapter. For Nietzsche and the Anglo-American postmodern philosophers, meaning must extend beyond the semantic component and take into account the anti-realist position as defined above: our concepts represent things in the world by organizing and relating them through language and culture.27 Not only are distinctions between, for instance, frogs and toads, or trees and shrubs; culturally determined, but even the biological criteria used to justify those distinctions are cultural. Semantic content thus does not correspond to an uninterpreted and objective reality, but already flattens out the individuals’ experience.

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Communication appears to be a much simpler question than semantic content; once we give a naturalized account of meaning, it seems as though communication of that meaning would necessarily follow. However, given that no two people can share the same perspective, the question of communication is particularly problematic. The account of Churchland’s solution, described below, will suggest a way in which this challenge can be met, a way which also meets other parameters of Nietzsche’s philosophy. While Nietzsche writes of the possibility of communication, there is at the same time a suggestion that communication is incomplete. ‘One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood’28 (GS 318; cf. BGE 27). Nietzsche provides a suggestive but incomplete answer as to how much we can communicate, suggesting that our consciousness developed only under the need to communicate, and only to the extent that communication was necessary (e.g., GS 354). The link that Nietzsche recognizes between meaning and consciousness foreshadows more recent work in cognitive science. Nietzsche rejects any account which takes the mind as transparent to itself (e.g., BGE 16). For a number of reasons, though, he does not take up a concrete alternative, not the least of which is a dramatically incomplete understanding of the brain at the end of the nineteenth century. However, by looking at the features of the mind that are not explicit and self-transparent, and placing this account into an essentially evolutionary model, Nietzsche arrives at a position which anticipates some of the key findings of approaches which start with neuroscience. Churchland’s state-space semantics captures the relevant aspects of Nietzsche’s account of meaning, including a naturalized account of meaning, in which ‘facts’ are necessarily interpreted; moreover, his theory is based solely in the body – the brain – and he takes into account that most of the work

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in our heads is significant – in the sense of having semantic content – but that it is pre-linguistic.

Churchland’s Account of Meaning At first glance, the suggestion that Paul Churchland’s account of the mind can supplement Nietzsche’s seems strained at best. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is Churchland’s reliance upon contemporary work in neurobiology and in artificial intelligence, which go far beyond anything that Nietzsche could have imagined. While some early work was being done in the isolation of neurons and the basic structure of the brain during the nineteenth century,29 both of these fields only matured in the latter half of the twentieth century. Even given Antonio Damasio’s observation that ‘One of the values of philosophy is that throughout its history it has prefigured science,’30 there is no reason to think that Nietzsche somehow foresaw the technical developments from which Churchland draws inspiration. The artificial intelligence models Churchland relies on are loosely based on work in neurology, and exceed what was thought possible even in the mid-twentieth century. These models, inspired by – although abstracted from – the actual architecture of the brain, give some insight into the workings of the brain, the work in each field helping to inspire but also constraining the other. However, the conceptual aspects of Churchland’s theory – the philosophy inspired by these technological developments – have important similarities with Nietzsche’s philosophy. The artificial intelligence models that Churchland uses are ‘connectionist’, processing information in parallel through many individual ‘nodes’ which are interconnected in a web-like fashion, similar to the connections between neurons. The fact that this sort of architecture processes

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information in parallel rather than in the linear fashion typical of a desktop computer with a single central processing unit (CPU) is important for a number of reasons. Although the digital computer has provided a powerful metaphor for understanding the brain during the last fifty years, there is nothing like a CPU in the brain. The distributed nature of the processing of information in the brain undermines any attempt to instantiate or localize the soul somewhere in the central nervous system. The similarities of connectionist models in artificial intelligence and the architecture of the brain confer the advantages of the brain – particularly speed, flexibility and persistence – to the artificial intelligence models. Connectionist systems process more quickly than classical linear computers because there is no ‘bottleneck’ through which all the information has to flow (i.e., a CPU); this is the sort of processing speed which allows people to do multiple tasks simultaneously (e.g., walk and chew gum). These systems display an ability to learn by abstracting any useful pattern from the world without needing explicit criteria. They also display functional persistence, in that the loss of individual nodes has no appreciable effect on the overall function of the network. This is useful from an evolutionary standpoint; as Steven Pinker points out, even a person who is ‘tired, hung-over, brain-damaged does not lock-up and crash’31 like a typical computer with a bug. What follows is a brief account of the basics of connectionism, primarily drawn from the work of Paul Churchland, with additional information from Patricia Churchland, Andy Clark and Steven Pinker. This account will indicate how semantics can arise out of a natural system, without appeal to a soul or any other sort of ‘Central Meaner’.32

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Connectionism in a Nutshell In connectionist architecture, the basic unit is called a node, something which performs some arbitrary function in a mechanical fashion. As Andy Clark explains, ‘Each unit is a simple processing device that receives input signals from other units via a network of parallel connections. Each unit sums its inputs and yields an output according to a simple mathematical function.’33 These nodes are arranged in multiple layers; each node in each layer is connected to multiple other nodes, typically in adjacent layers. The nodes in the outermost layer receive information in whatever form is suitable, e.g., not just ‘light’, but the difference in brightness compared to those adjacent nodes on the input layer, in the case of light-sensitive cells.34 The simplicity of the input is important to the theory, because it does not presuppose intrinsic meaning; that is, the units are too small and too simple to ‘represent’ anything in isolation from one another. These outer nodes transmit this information to several nodes on the next layer, and each node on this next layer receives information from multiple input nodes. The nodes on this next ‘hidden’ layer take all the information presented by the input units, sum it, then multiply that figure by some specific value determined by ‘back-propagation’, a learning heuristic that provides feedback to the system until the output for a given input matches what is required. This transformed information is sent in turn to the next layer; when taken across a whole layer, the network abstracts information from the raw input. The process of summing and multiplying filters out ‘noise’ and finds patterns in the original information. The useful information comes not from the individual nodes, but from the layer as a whole. Taken across several layers, the information abstracted can be quite subtle; networks have been designed that can recognize faces of individuals, even as their expressions change or when part of the face is obscured.35

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The brain inspires the architecture; the nodes are analogous to either individual neurons or groups of neurons. As in the brain, the individual units do not matter that much, both in the sense that the output of the individual is not remarkable – no individual neuron conveys meaning – and in that the network as a whole continues to function even as individual nodes ‘die off’. This is important since it eliminates the need to assign content – let’s say, ‘dog’, or even a ‘dog howling’ – to any particular node or neuron: concepts are distributed across the network. Each concept only finds significance within a system of other terms, and no concept can be isolated within this whole. Single neurons do not represent specific concepts, but neither do isolatable clusters of neurons; each concept is irreducibly embedded in the network as whole.36

Putting Connectionism to Work: State-Space Semantics As stated above, there is no reason to think that Nietzsche’s philosophy suggests anything this specific; there is nothing in his writings to suggest a connectionist approach to the brain, since he was not particularly concerned with the details of the relation of the mind to the brain. However, given the bare bones sketch provided, we can see some important points of contact. First and perhaps foremost, connectionism suggests a manner in which the soul, or any residual causa sui, can reasonably be eliminated; there is no ‘executive’ which makes decisions, only local constraints.37 Others taking anti-dualist approaches, particularly functionalists, have not suggested a plausible way to break down such agency into suitably simple components that might be found or instantiated in the brain. Given Nietzsche’s firm commitment to naturalism in this sense, connectionism provides an attractive option regarding how this may work

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at a biological level. Second, connectionism provides a way of thinking about meaning holism at a very deep level. There is simply no room for individual propositions and inferential rules to be built explicitly into connectionist architecture; semantic content, or meaning, and the interrelations between contents, are embedded in the network as a whole. Connectionism provides the most attractive option for understanding how meaning can be naturalized in light of Nietzsche’s tacit reliance upon holism.38 Additionally, the implication that consciousness is an emergent property that naturally arises from more primitive elements not ‘designed for’ consciousness corresponds with Nietzsche’s account of the rise of consciousness as found in On the Genealogy of Morality, as well as other passages (e.g., GS 354). While Nietzsche does not suggest anything like connectionism, it meets the requirements set out for an account of consciousness. The above description of connectionism suggests a manner in which concepts are found within a connectionist network, but leaves many of the specifics vague. This is in part because there are competing accounts within connectionism to explain particular features; Churchland’s account is only one among several, although a particularly promising and useful one. Churchland explains the notion of semantic content in a network in the following terms. If each of the nodes of a layer is thought of as being correlated to a dimension in space, the layer as a whole then can be understood as representing a multi-dimensional space, with each dimension capturing the continuum between complete presence and complete absence of some relevant feature. This multi-dimensional space can be understood as having boundaries across the various dimensions which are either individual concepts (a discrete multi-dimensional area or ‘hyper-solid’) or distinctions between groups of solids (larger boundaries dividing the multi-dimensional space, or ‘hyper-planes’). Each hyper-solid represents a

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‘prototype’, and each hyper-plane represents boundaries between categories of prototypes. Prototypes are ‘the internally represented results of a process that extracts statistical central tendency information from the specific set of exemplars to which an individual system has been exposed’.39 An exemplar is a concrete instance. Very roughly, a person sees, for example, various dogs,40 and these dogs are individually plotted in the n-dimensional space along whatever dimensions the person finds useful, but which are typically not conscious. Together these points constitute the boundaries of the n-dimensional solid, which is the concept ‘dog’, and experiences that fall on or near these planes are interpreted as being ambiguous. Churchland’s theory is a version of meaning holism because prototypes get their meaning from the role they play in the entire cognitive economy. Prototypes cannot be in isolation from one another, because they only occur in a state space that is constituted by various dimensions. These dimensions convey various properties, and the overall relation within these dimensions conveys the meaning of the prototype. In a space representing colour, for instance, each colour is distinguished by its specific place within that space; there is not a ‘red’ dimension, but only a prototype area within the complete colour-space that distinguishes red.41 The dictum that ‘all observation is theory-laden’ is thus deeply imbedded for Churchland. People do not have uninterpreted observations, which later are interpreted according to some theory: it is theory as soon as it leaves the most peripheral input centres. The input is analysed as a whole and ‘simplified’ according to some global understanding of the world. The number of dimensions in which this theory is constituted is potentially unlimited, leaving open the degree to which an individual or species can or needs to discriminate; however, Churchland notes that for each type of processing there seems to be an ideal number of total units, and thus a limit to the number of dimensions.

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This again is an advantage of connectionism, for it implies that the processing tasks performed by the brain can actually be accomplished given the spatial constraints. That is, this not only conforms to the limitations of biology, but seems to emerge naturally within this sort of a system. An ideal configuration for complex tasks could require hundreds, thousands, even millions of dimensions,42 but this is still within the bounds of what we know about the brain, and allows individuals to tailor their discriminatory abilities to the needs of their environment. Although the network interprets experiences according to some theory, we do not have direct access to that theory. According to Churchland, we would not necessarily recognize the patterns constituted by the hyper-solids and hyperplanes, and the dimensions that constitute the state space do not necessarily represent any property we would recognize. The dimensions merely register whatever properties – micro or macro – are useful for the system as a whole. This takes into account both Nietzsche and Churchland’s observation that the mind is largely unaware of its own processes, as well as the notion that thought is in some sense pre-linguistic. The significance of the input for the network – which occupies some particular perspective – is the entire point of the processing; ‘truth‘ is not a relevant category at this level for the brain. As Pinker writes, ‘our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes the truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.’43 This echoes Nietzsche: ‘We simply have no organ for knowing, for ‘‘truth’’’44 (GS 354). The idea that our thought is necessarily pre-linguistic is one of the basic assumptions of connectionism; as alluded to above, this is an important feature because it takes into account the evolutionary process by not requiring highlevel processing – well-formed propositions – at lower levels of consciousness, both in the individual and in the species. In other words, connectionism does not expect human

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thought to be radically different from the thought of other animals, and models even linguistic behaviours on more primitive motor functions such as locomotion. Thus Churchland describes linguistic behaviour: According to the new theory, any declarative sentence to which a speaker would give confident assent is merely a one-dimensional projection – through the compound lens of Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas onto the idiosyncratic surface of the speaker’s language – a one dimensional projection of a four- or fivedimensional solid that is an element in his true kinematical state.45

Statements thus express semantic content because they reflect the inner concept; on the other hand, ‘they reflect but a narrow part of the reality projected’.46 As with Nietzsche, what gets expressed is a small part of the overall picture. This will be shown to be a crucial part of the account of meaning; however, the importance is best viewed in light of objections to this theory. It is to those objections we now turn.

Objections Both the project of naturalizing meaning and the notion of meaning holism have been the subject of numerous objections. The first is the argument that no system as described above could produce semantic content because it lacks appropriate connections to the world. That is, our brains may in fact be structured like a connectionist network, but the computer modelling leaves out the very thing it was supposed to explain: meaning. John Searle has made one of the most memorable critiques, but this position has been argued by a number of people over the past two decades. However, while his criticisms are suggestive, he has not given a clear account of his alternative. The second

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argument deals specifically with meaning holism. This argument, posed by Jerry Fodor, charges that any form of meaning holism will necessarily undermine the possibility of intersubjective communication. This objection, although directed at Churchland, takes aim at the difficulties inherent in the combination of perspectivism and holism, which I have argued are a necessary part of Nietzsche’s account. If Searle is correct, meaning is found ‘somewhere else’, although exactly where is never specified. On the other hand, Fodor suggests that the alternative to some kind of inherent meaning is a form of nihilism: meaning is lost and any hope of a genuine ethics with it. Both Searle and Fodor thus understand the alternatives to their understanding of meaning as nihilistic, eliminating meaning altogether. In a variety of books and articles, Searle has argued that meaning is necessarily a feature of brains; in this sense, he does not object to a naturalized account of meaning.47 His criticisms of a naturalized account of meaning of the type described above centre on what has come to be known as the ‘Chinese room’ argument.48 The set-up is quite simple: a native English-speaker with no knowledge of Chinese is in a room that contains a rulebook, in English, which explains how to ‘transform’ Chinese characters into other Chinese characters. Outside of the room, native Chinese-speakers put questions, written in Chinese, into a slot. The man inside the room then uses the rulebook to transform the characters into other characters, which he puts through the ‘out’ slot. The people outside the room interpret these results as answers to the questions originally asked, and conclude on this basis that this ‘system’ (the inner workings are unknown to them) knows Chinese. Searle notes that, not only does the man not know Chinese, but he will never come to learn Chinese in this manner; he has no way to correlate the Chinese with English. The people outside the room are thus mistaken, because the system, and certainly the man, does not know Chinese at all. The conclusion

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Searle draws is that no system such as this (e.g., a computer using the rulebook as a program) will ever display actual intelligence, for exactly the same reason that the man never learns Chinese. At best, a computer could mimic intelligence, but lacks semantic content. I will focus on two problems with Searle’s argument. First, Searle supposes that such a system of rules could be adequately captured in a book, which implies that the rules are discrete and follow a general pattern. This in itself is a highly dubious assumption; when coupled with plausible time constraints, the intelligence exhibited by the Chinese room drops considerably. Imagine, for example, that the people outside the room ask, ‘What is two plus two?’ Assuming that a manageable rulebook could be composed such that a native English-speaker could use it (more on this below), the amount of time it would take to look up each of the characters, sort through which rules are appropriate to the context and apply them, then our tendency to ascribe intelligence to the room would be greatly diminished and we do not typically ascribe intelligence to systems like a calculator which give answers to questions of this sort. To go through all the relevant steps in this imagined procedure in order to answer a more complex question (which we would assume requires genuine intelligence) would take far longer than such a simple question, further diminishing the warrant for ascription of intelligence. The first problem with Searle’s argument thus has two components: the ability to capture the relevant transformations in rules, and time constraints. Although Searle does not address it, time is an important factor in our assessment of intelligence; if the person inside the Chinese room were able to respond with the same speed that a native Chinese-speaker would respond, it would be difficult to believe that this person did not know Chinese, even if the person in question maintained their ignorance.49 The other aspect of this first problem is slightly more

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complex: the ability to capture all the relevant rules for ‘transformation’ in a rulebook. Serial computers need all rules to be explicit, and the computer cannot deviate from those rules – any exception to a rule must also be explicit. This is one reason why computers excel at tasks that have an explicit and finite set of rules, such as spreadsheets and other purely computational tasks, as well as games such as tic-tac-toe, checkers and chess. Serial computers have had more difficulty with tasks whose rules are more difficult to specify: speech recognition, motor skills, and visual recognition in complex environments. Searle’s argument relies on the intuition that these tasks cannot be given a complete description according to a finite set of rules; the ‘rules’ for such transformation are too vague and have too many exceptions. The deployment of these rules depends on knowing which rules are relevant to a given situation – the so-called ‘frame problem’ – and this sort of knowledge is difficult if not impossible to capture in a complete but finite set of rules. Connectionist architecture provides, if not a complete solution, at least a glimpse of how this difficulty might be worked out.50 A programmer does not formulate the rules employed by the connectionist network, nor are the rules in any way explicit within the network. Rather, a system is trained by giving it input and applying specific transformations on the individual weights according to the difference between the actual outcome and the desired outcome. The process by which a network is trained requires no knowledge of what the final transformation weights for the various nodes will be: the sets of nodes come to reflect certain patterns in the way they respond to input without any explicit representation or rule in the system. This has several advantages. First, whatever generalizations are utilized by the system reflect the same sort of vagueness that humans exploit. As Andy Clark says, ‘rules [in a connectionist network] depend on no special mechanism of

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rule generation and storage and are represented in a manner that makes them extremely flexible and sensitive to contextual nuances’.51 Second, the generalizations that the network employs do not have to be anything that we would even necessarily perceive as rules; the networks simply look for any useful regularity. Therefore, the rulebook in the Chinese room argument can be eliminated in a connectionist network. This is one of the main reasons it can operate with greater speed than a regular computer in which a CPU acts as a bottleneck. Nietzsche does not directly address the question either of time or of a rulebook, for obvious reasons, but the conclusions here fit well with the sort of concerns he brings to his writings, with individuals formulating their own heuristics rather than conforming to general laws. The second problem with Searle’s argument is more general; he does not indicate what an adequate account of consciousness would look like. While he repeatedly claims to be committed to naturalism, as opposed to any sort of dualism, he simultaneously sets his standards impossibly high for what would qualify as a naturalized account of consciousness.52 For Searle, it will not be enough to specify all of the various information processing aspects of the brain; even if the rules of Chinese could be captured in a book, and a person inside the room could look up all the appropriate rules as fast as a native Chinese speaker could subconsciously deploy them, Searle argues that the person is still ignorant of Chinese by virtue of the fact that consciousness – here, being aware that one knows Chinese – is ‘something else’. In a recent article, he describes consciousness as ‘ontologically subjective’,53 and therefore any account of what the brain does must necessarily have this additional feature. It is not clear what exactly Searle is looking for, or what would satisfy his account; Churchland compares this to looking for ‘life’ over and above all the biochemical processes found in living organisms.54 This

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search for ‘something else’ appears to be nothing other than residual dualism. This points to the persistence of the doctrines against which Nietzsche argues; the thoroughly anti-dualist approach of Churchland’s theory grants plausibility to ascribing such an account to Nietzsche. Jerry Fodor takes a different tack. Along with Churchland, Fodor denies the force of the Chinese room argument, and agrees that semantic content will be found in the brain via natural processes. However, Fodor argues that meaning is found in individual propositions, rather than in the whole of one’s linguistic capacities; that is, he denies the possibility of meaning holism.55 I will first focus on a general problem which faces all meaning holists, and examine Churchland’s response; I will then look at the more specific problem Fodor sees in Churchland’s connectionist account.56 As stated above, the basic tenet of meaning holism is that the interrelations with all other concepts determine the semantic content of a given concept. The problem as Fodor sees it is that, if meaning holism is true, then in order for two people to mean the same thing in uttering some proposition, the concept being expressed must share in all the same relevant dimensions and interrelations, the totality of which determines the semantic content of that proposition. Further, in order for all of these various relations to be ‘the same’, the concepts to which they are related must also have the same relations. In other words, for any two people to share any concept, they must share exactly the same global theory. Insofar as these features are part of the brain as a whole, the same implication holds for connectionism: two networks would have to be identical in order to capture all of the various relations between concepts, which seems to be necessary for identity of concept across systems. Acknowledging the problem with strict identity of concepts, meaning holists typically have relaxed the

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requirement and asked for similarity; viz., two people will mean the same thing by a proposition if the corresponding belief plays a similar role in their respective cognitive economies (the way in which one’s concepts interact). This move is captured in the notion of prototype described above: a particular concept might be a single point in ndimensional space, but the prototype it falls under will occupy a larger volume. The hyper-solid thus determines the boundaries of what counts as ‘the same’: as long as two concepts fall within this larger volume, they are ‘the same’. Fodor thinks appealing to similarity is inadequate, because ‘similarity’ is a vague concept that cannot be adequately defined, and any definition would already presuppose some notion of identity (which is precisely what the appeal to similarity tries to avoid in the first place). Similarity presupposes identity, according to Fodor, because of the way similarity is tacitly understood; two concepts are similar if they participate in mostly the same inferences.57 In identifying those inferences, we need to say the inferences they share are the same. The identity problem thus moves from the concept itself to the relations between the concepts, leading us to ask, under what conditions can we say that the inferential relations are ‘the same’? The easiest answer, that inferences will only be the same if they have identical premises and identical conclusions, has already been blocked; it was precisely to avoid the problem of the identity of concepts that their relations were invoked. If we try somehow to spell out those relations only in terms of other inferential relations, we are back at the level of the network as a whole: the entire network would have to be identical in order for two relations to be identical. Saying that two concepts are similar if they participate in mostly the same inferences therefore does not solve the problem. There is a second difficulty, which is potentially more serious. Even if not all relations need to be the same and we

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can somehow identify which relations are identical across networks, we are still left with this problem: which relations do need to be the same in order to claim similarity? The standard answer is that there are core relations that are the most important ones to a given concept. If, for instance, the only relation that two people’s concepts of ‘aunt’ shared were that ‘they’ often have unusual names, then it does not seem they really share that concept.58 The easiest way to specify what relations a concept has to have for two people to share it would be to appeal to primary relations: ‘aunt’, for instance, is determined first by the property of being a parent’s sister or the wife of a parent’s brother, which would require the concepts of ‘parent’, ‘sister’, ‘brother’, ‘wife’. Other important concepts might include ‘niece’, ‘nephew’ and ‘cousin’. Fodor envisions Churchland’s state space as having dimensions such as, for instance, a ‘sibling’ dimension, the ‘mother/father’ dimension, and so on. These axes would more significantly designate the concept than the ‘unusual name’ axis. Fodor points out that the appeal to analytic relations or central dimensions in state space is problematic for meaning holism because no statements, either about our experience or about a priori truths, can stand alone. All concepts for the meaning holist are potentially revisable, under some circumstance, whereas the appeal to analytic relations is precisely to identify those that are not subject to revision.59 Fodor argues that, without the analytic/synthetic distinction, there is no principled way to designate certain relations or dimensions as being more important or more closely related than any others. According to Fodor, this leaves Churchland without any mechanism for dividing a network into usable units. The network remains irreducibly global, which has the effect of mandating that either all individuals share the same global network of concepts and inferences – which we clearly do not60 – or we lack the capacity for communication. As mentioned above, being able to

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communicate is a crucial component for an account of meaning. The fatal flaw in Fodor’s argument is the presupposition that semantic content is the same as propositional content which Churchland explicitly denies. His account assumes that semantic content is more basic than propositional content, and picks up on features we do not necessarily recognize as relevant to semantics; the dimensions will probably not reflect anything with recognizable propositional content, such as ‘sibling’ or ‘mother/father’, as Fodor suggests.61 This is the point of insisting on the prelinguistic character of thought, a feature he shares with Nietzsche. A proposition, according to Churchland, is only a ‘subdimensional reflection’ of the concept; the proposition flattens out the richness of the semantic content in the brain. Moreover, Churchland argues that the semantic content is not constituted directly by the various dimensions in which a concept occurs (which is what Fodor assumes as ‘useable units’), but rather by ‘the role that this [concept] plays in the large cognitive and motor economy of which it is an interlocking part’.62 For instance, rather than a kittenconcept being constituted by dimensions such as ‘small, furry, four-legged, young, feline’, it derives its content because it ‘prompts a family of kitten-specific perceptual expectations and prepares one to engage in a family of kitten-specific behaviors’.63 Two people can thus have ‘identical input–output behaviors’64 despite the differences in their networks by virtue of the relation of their prototypes. People can also recognize kittens which deviate from the prototype: those with three legs, lion cubs, the offspring of hairless breeds of cat, etc. This still does not completely capture Churchland’s notion of content however, because he sees concept-to-concept relations playing the decisive role, rather than concept-to-world relations.65 The issue of shared dimensionality again looms, and Churchland

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concedes that two people probably do not have the same dimensional space; however, he envisions individuals’ prototypes to have basically the same shape and orientation vis-a`-vis one another. ‘It matters not whether the spaces involved have different dimensions. Distances within them can always be compared across distinct spaces.’66 Thus, the relative configuration is what matters: so long as the relevant information is somehow implicit in whatever sensory-input schemes happen to be employed, and so long as the training procedures impose the same requirements on recognitional performance, then diverse networks can and often will settle into almost identical abstract organizations of the similarity gradients across their hidden-layer activation spaces.67

In other words, Churchland expects all people within a given culture to have more or less the same basic prototypes, arranged in a manner that preserves their relative positions. This idea is already found in Nietzsche: ‘Using the same words is not enough to get people to understand each other: they have to use the same words for the same species of inner experiences, too; ultimately, people have to have the same experience base’ (BGE 268).68 Elsewhere Nietzsche writes, ‘where need and distress have for a long time forced people to communicate, to understand each other swiftly and subtly, there finally exists a surplus of this power and art of expression’ (GS 354; cf. 357, 358).69 The result is not merely communication of needs, but can produce ‘the most subtle feeling for the charms and nuances of association’ (BGE 262).70 The influence of shared experiences expresses itself as the tempo of a language (BGE 27, 28). Nietzsche emphasizes that this is not a superfluous aspect, distinct from the ‘words’, but rather the

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essence of genuine communication: ‘A misunderstanding about its tempo, for instance, and the sentence itself is misunderstood!’ (BGE 246)71 This returns us to anti-realism in ontology: while neither constituting nor creating the world in an idealist sense, the language of a people shapes what is real. People therefore need shared experiences in order to share meaning; if there is not a common background, there is no genuine communication. Churchland is perhaps predictably more optimistic about this state of affairs than Nietzsche. Rather than seeing similarity or identity at a deep level, Nietzsche argues that the propositional content will be the same between two systems because propositions gloss over differences at a deeper level, and that linguistic communication is necessarily superficial: the flattening out into a single dimension which Churchland describes does more violence than Churchland acknowledges. The passage quoted above from The Gay Science indicates this: ‘each of us, even with the best will in the world to understand ourselves as individually as possible, ‘‘to know ourselves’’, will always bring to consciousness precisely that in ourselves which is ‘‘nonindividual’’, that which is ‘‘average’’’ (GS 354).72 This reply nevertheless faces the difficulty that the sameness or similarity at the propositional level is still left unaccounted for; to this extent, I suspect that Fodor’s criticisms are still applicable.

The Possibility of Communication There is another possible reply to be made, however, which faces Fodor’s challenge more directly. If Fodor is correct regarding the need for matching global theories for any two people to communicate, what happens if they lack this? Could two people each have a concept, which plays similar roles in the cognitive economies of both only by virtue of

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the peripheral relations (e.g., ‘aunt’ to the concept of ‘odd name’), and if so, what does this indicate for a holistic theory of meaning? It seems that we usually rely on context in each case to tell us what the relevant relations might be. The analytic/synthetic distinction might be important in a static system, but over the course of a conversation, each person tries to trigger associations to amplify and sharpen the original concept, particularly when we get cues, mostly non-verbal, that our interlocutor has not understood us. Sometimes this works and sometimes it does not, but one basic motivation for adopting meaning holism is to avoid judging which relations will be important a priori. In the dynamic process of communication, the context continually changes, so that the different meanings ascribed to a ‘single’ concept might not be noticed during a conversation. Fodor’s concern seems to be that if Churchland’s state-space semantics is an accurate account of how the brain processes information, then there is no guarantee of intersubjective communication. That is, we are always in a situation of guessing what concept the other person has in mind and whether they have ‘properly’ understood us. This may yet pose a problem for Churchland, but as suggested in the above-quoted passage, Nietzsche sees this not only as a possibility, but as something that happens frequently. ‘Our real experiences aren’t chattery at all. They couldn’t communicate if they wanted to. That means there are no words for them’73 (TI ‘Raids of the Untimely Man’ 26). Nietzsche still sees communication as possible, but with serious constraints and the potential for failure. Inferences drawn reflect more about the person inferring than what the other person is trying to communicate: In the middle of a lively conversation I will often see the other person’s face expressing his thoughts (or the thoughts I attribute to him) with a degree of clarity and detail that far exceed the power of my visual ability: – such subtlety of muscle

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movement and ocular expression must have come from my own imagination. In all likelihood, the person had an entirely different expression, or none at all. (BGE 192)74

Our shared experiences within a community help us to carve up the world in a similar enough fashion to that of our community to be of use to us: we are taught, through language, what there is. Language forges a link with community by the necessity of expressing and responding to needs. At the same time, it allows for individual awareness of the inadequacy of language to express one’s thoughts, making the individual aware, for the first time, of uniqueness and isolation. This is because Nietzsche continues to see thought as ultimately pre-linguistic: ‘whoever thinks in words thinks as a speaker and not as a thinker (which indicates that basically he does not think in facts, factually, but in relation to facts, so that he is actually thinking about himself and his listeners)’ (GM III 8).75 We have the ability to think in words – something which he exploits, as will be seen in the subsequent chapter – but the biological substrate of our thoughts, and hence of meaning, are deeper than words The motivations behind Churchland’s and Nietzsche’s accounts are at odds with each other, thus the divergent reactions to Fodor’s concerns. The similarities between the overall requirements of an adequate description of how the mind works, however, are striking. For both Churchland and Nietzsche, our understanding of the world is a function of what we are made of and how we are put together. Nietzsche does not take the workings of the mind to be mysterious in principle, but has no way of explaining them. Although proceeding from a different school of thought in the history of philosophy, Churchland’s account of meaning implicitly takes Nietzsche’s concerns into account, places them in the contemporary setting of neurobiology, and suggests a manner in which they can be understood.

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Meaning is completely naturalized, and an emphasis is placed on ascription, rather than discovery, of meaning in both accounts. Nietzsche’s ethical theory is predicated on the ability to ascribe meaning (rather than finding inherent meaning), and Churchland’s account presents a way in which to understand how that might occur. The question of ethics brings out a serious point of difference between Nietzsche and Churchland, and shows the limitations of Churchland’s theory. The next chapter will explore Churchland’s application of state-space semantics to ethics, in what has been referred to as the Moral Network Theory. The shortcomings of this theory will be examined, and an alternative will be suggested. Any alternative must fall within the boundaries set in this and previous chapters, including the naturalization of meaning, the elimination of the substantial self and conception of a narrative self.

Chapter 5

Connectionism, Ethics and Narrative: Body and Mind Connectionism is a powerful theory that helps explain how we are able to do many of the things we do without an appeal to some ghostly substance to fill the gaps. Moreover, it does so in a way that is congruent with Nietzsche’s descriptions of the mind, going far beyond the Freudian tripartite division. Connectionism is also essentially holistic, providing an important link to Nietzsche’s similarly holistic vision of the cosmos. This shared approach allows us to imagine how Nietzsche might have drawn upon these new developments, extending his naturalized theory of mind and of our self-understanding. Contemporary philosophers are not without their own reflections on the implication of this theory for ethics; however, they stop short of the transformative ethics found in Nietzsche’s writings. In this chapter, I begin by outlining Churchland’s theory of ethics as instantiated in the connectionist network, then move on to the shortcomings of this theory. I then discuss how Churchland’s theory gives a concrete model for the sort of consciousness Nietzsche attributes to the masters in On the Genealogy of Morality, and use the transition in types of consciousness described in that book to move to Dennett’s theory of higher-order consciousness. I show how the narrative understandings of the self as articulated by both Dennett and Nietzsche address the problems of the Moral Network Theory, and finally discuss the strengths of Nietzsche’s version as compared to Dennett’s.

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The Moral Network Theory Paul Churchland has developed a naturalized theory of ethics based on state-space semantics, which Owen Flanagan calls the ‘Moral Network Theory’.1 As described in the previous chapter, the ‘state space’ is a model for understanding how information is stored and accessed in the brain or a network that mimics the relevant features of the brain. Reactions take place across a wide range of nodes, each reacting to different features of the environment, with additional information being teased out as the initial input moves through the network. This information can be thought of as activating a particular prototype, or combination of nodes, within the multi-dimensional space that abstractly represents the different possible configurations across the network. Since the network as a whole must be ‘trained’ to give a sought-after response to any given input, experiences must be interpreted according to some theory in order to count as knowledge at all. This is true, even if the details of this theory remain opaque to the connectionist network as in the case of a computer, or to humans when considering the brain. Churchland argues that moral knowledge, like all other kinds of knowledge, is theorybased but fundamentally oriented towards practice.2 With a theory in place, a person can ‘see’ the features of the environment that incorporate those elements of theory (for instance, the effects of gravity on falling objects, or the heliotropism of plants) in ways that seem concrete. In a similar manner, Churchland argues that moral features are real features of our social environment in the same way colours are; these include such things as ‘fair distribution’, ‘unprovoked cruelty’ and ‘breach of promise’.3 Flanagan notes the Moral Network Theory does not beg any questions with regard to the ontological status of moral features of the world, since all features are cultural constructs. Because of this, Churchland compares the learning of these

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discriminations in our human ecology to a fish learning how to swim; the sceptic’s question, ‘Why be moral?’, is simply not applicable,4 and our moral education is the learning the structure of social space and how to navigate through it.5 According to Churchland, moral education is not merely the teaching of explicit rules for two reasons. First, such rules are not represented in the brain as propositions; rather, to the extent that they are found in a neural network, they are captured in a variety of ways. The second, closely related, reason is that attempts to capture our moral intuitions through a single overriding and universal principle – such as the categorical imperative or the principle of utility – are always partial, and we often have difficulties applying them to actual situations.6 That is, rules fail in important instances to capture the nuances of our moral evaluations; as Churchland writes, ‘[s]tatable rules are not the basis of one’s moral character. They are merely its pale and partial reflection at the comparatively impotent level of language.’7 Flanagan illustrates this by showing the inadequacy of a definition of ‘lie’ which relies on necessary and sufficient conditions. When analysed, the feature typically associated with lying – falsehoods – turns out to be of only secondary importance in determining actual instances of lies; Flanagan points out the counter-examples of practical jokes and fairy tales, which are intentionally produced falsehoods, yet not lies.8 While findings such as these are incorporated into traditional theories only with difficultly, this result is exactly what is predicted by the Moral Network Theory: the concepts we have, and regularly and consistently deploy, are constituted by criteria of which we are not fully aware. The Moral Network Theory also accounts for borderline cases, where an action is not clearly subsumed under any explicit rule. Classical theories typically necessitate discreteness, e.g., something either is or is not a lie. The Moral

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Network Theory, in contrast, allows for the ambiguity in our experience that resists easy categorization, not only with lies but also with the full range of moral features. These cases simply fall on or near a border between two prototypes; since we are not explicitly aware of the important features of the competing prototypes, they seem to defy resolution. In these instances, too, the Moral Network Theory offers a more realistic understanding of the way in which we actually make moral decisions. Moral decision-making is also subject to change and development. Correspondingly, another important feature of the Moral Network Theory is that the categories are mutable, and are constantly being revised depending on how one’s performance compares to expectation. Experiences are categorized according to one’s prototype, but also have the potential to revise the prototype, adding further relevant criteria or dimensions as they become useful. As one’s judgement gains refinement and subtlety with practice, one’s moral space acquires additional prototypes and boundaries along with additional criteria. Again, the person need not explicitly or consciously represent these, making necessary and sufficient conditions for categorization unnecessary. This is consonant with experience: performance in making a moral judgement does not always carry over into ability to explain the relevant features of that judgement. Churchland summarizes it thus: ‘Our traditional language-centered conception of cognition is now confronted with a very different brain-centered conception, one that assigns language no fundamental role at all.’9 Differences in moral judgement can be captured in two ways in the Moral Network Theory. One way is to recognize the ambiguity of our social ecology as similar to ambiguity in other areas; Churchland gives the example of an action being seen as unprovoked cruelty by one person and as just retribution by another.10 This can be seen either as competition between prototypes – the action having some of

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the typical features of cruelty but also some of the typical features of retribution – or as falling along the boundary of a hyper-plane between two areas within the state space. In this way, Churchland and Flanagan recognize the need for contextual sensitivity in determining the relevant features of the situation. However, another way of understanding differences is to see different people with different interpretations of a single situation as acting out of different theoretical spaces; that is, even if moral education is similar across a population, we can expect local differences. Moreover, since the individual identifies whatever features of a situation he or she finds relevant on a subconscious level, there is no guarantee that two people will operate out of the same theory, even if they make similar judgements in most cases.11 As indicated in the previous chapter, this may pose a problem for Churchland, even as Nietzsche anticipates this as inevitable. This theory also gives a framework for understanding other kinds of differences and continuities. As with Nietzsche’s understanding, we can see continuity with other species. That is, every animal will have a social ecology with varying degrees of complexity depending on the sociality of the species. While their discriminations may not have the reflective aspect that humans at least in principle employ, we have reason to think that their environment includes features of interactions between the members that are similar to the features Churchland describes.

Critiques of the Moral Network Theory The Moral Network Theory provides a serious alternative to traditional accounts of moral knowledge; however, several aspects of this theory are still problematic. While Churchland’s move away from a language-based account of morality gives his view a certain amount of explanatory

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power, his complete rejection of the role of language is unwarranted and unwise. Andy Clark points to studies that suggest that while expertise does not rely exclusively on rule-following, explicit rules still play a role in performance. These rules seem to act as higher-level heuristics, correcting trends in one’s behaviour that can be steered off course by strictly lower-level considerations.12 Clark admits that ‘our individual moral knowledge and reasoning may not be fully reconstructible in the linguistic space afforded by public language moral dialogue and discussion’,13 but explicit rules still play a significant role in moral education. The Moral Network Theory has several other shortcomings as well. One is the static nature of the prototypes as described by both Churchland and Flanagan. While they allow that an event necessarily unfolds over time, the event itself is still taken to be isolatable. This runs contrary to our actual understanding of ethical situations; as Alasdair MacIntyre states, ‘We cannot . . . characterize behaviour independently of intentions, and we cannot characterize intentions independently of the settings which make those intentions intelligible both to agents themselves and to others.’14 Similarly, almost all of the examples given by Churchland and Flanagan are from the standpoint of an observer rather than an agent. A problematic ambiguity, as in the example given above – the question of whether a particular action is unprovoked cruelty or justified retribution – typically only occurs to one who is not directly involved. While this is certainly an important perspective, we are most concerned with ethics as agents: the crucial question is, ‘how ought I act in this situation?’ Although Churchland suggests that moral competence is a matter of being able to recognize the various competing prototypes that are potentially relevant to a given situation, he does not directly deal with the point of view of the agent contemplating potential courses of action.

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Churchland’s account of consciousness is very good at describing certain features, but fails to capture some of the most important features of human consciousness. He lists the ‘salient dimensions of human consciousness’ as including short-term memory, independence from sensory inputs, steerable attention, capacity for alternative interpretations of data, and a single, unified experience.15 These are the features of consciousness we share with at least some, if not many, other animals. The omission of other features of consciousness is a larger problem which stands behind these other problems. Michael Tye makes a distinction between various levels of consciousness that is helpful for indicating what Churchland’s account lacks. At the core of state-space semantics Churchland describes the ability to pick out features, whether it is identifying faces or morally relevant situations; this is what Tye calls ‘discriminatory’ consciousness.16 For the closed-loop motor functions that Churchland describes, including a cat flicking her tail in reaction to encountering an unexpected obstacle or the complex coordination of muscles required for walking, we have ‘responsive’ consciousness. Churchland never describes the sort of reflexive self-awareness that is mostly the domain of humans, which Tye labels ‘higherorder’ consciousness.17 Discriminatory and responsive consciousness captures the advantage of the Moral Network Theory listed above of being continuous with other species. They can use their own prototypes for navigating their social ecology without ever being self-aware; however, as Dennett points out, ‘In most of the species that have ever lived, ‘‘mental’’ causation has no need for, and hence does not evolve, any elaborate capacity for self-monitoring.’18 Humans have this capacity, though, and Churchland does not account for the larger contextual space that seems to be uniquely our domain. There is an interesting parallel between Churchland’s omission and Nietzsche’s observation in The Gay Science that

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the ‘problem of consciousness’ only becomes an issue when we recognize that self-consciousness is superfluous: ‘All of life would be possible without, as it were, seeing itself in the mirror’ (GS 354).19 In the rest of this passage, Nietzsche suggests an account of how our self-consciousness came about through our need to communicate with others in our social milieu. In providing a naturalized account, he is deflating the value that has traditionally been accorded human consciousness; as he writes in the Genealogy, ‘this chamber of human consciousness is small!’ (GM III 18)20 The consciousness that Churchland describes, which includes both discrimination and responsiveness, provides an adequate theoretical framework for understanding the ‘masters’ Nietzsche describes in On the Genealogy of Morals. He writes that they ‘do not know what guilt, responsibility, consideration are’ (GM II 17).21 This is because they act on their impulses without reflection, and forget their actions almost immediately afterwards. In those they dominate, however, ‘the instinct of freedom is forced back, repressed, incarcerated within itself and finally able to discharge and unleash itself only against itself’ (GM II 17).22 The masters certainly navigate a social space (one in which they dominate), and because for the most part they are able to discharge their drives in a straightforward manner, there is no need for reflection. Self-consciousness only comes with those who cannot act on their impulses and whose drives thus turn back on themselves. In that case, internal selfrepresentation becomes both possible and necessary. The instinct of freedom turns inward against the individual, and in the process gives form to an inner world which he describes as the soul voluntarily split within itself (GM II 18). Out of necessity, they become aware of their drives before acting, in order to assess their ability of acting and fulfilling their desires; self-awareness is thus created, a becoming-conscious of oneself. A memory is also created, both through a few ‘thou-shalt-not’s (GM II 3) which

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provide some basic rules necessary for the preservation of the community and the need to make and keep promises. Both of these features also contribute to the making of higher-order awareness. Nietzsche calls this a decisive turn in the history of humanity: ‘man first became an interesting animal on the foundations of this essentially dangerous form of human existence, the priest, and that the human soul became deep in the higher sense and turned evil for the first time’ (GM I 6).23 It is important to remember that Nietzsche distinguishes evil from bad, and that throughout his writings ‘evil’ has an ambivalent assessment, ironically reflecting customary values. The assessment is important, though, because the distinction between ‘evil’ and ‘bad’ is only possible through the development of higher-order consciousness: ‘The history of mankind would be far too stupid a thing if it had not had the intellect of the powerless injected into it’ (GM I 7).24 Even as he criticizes the value structure of the slave morality, and diminishes the importance placed on our consciousness by giving a naturalized account of its origin, Nietzsche never hesitates to acknowledge the possibilities opened up through this unlikely development.

Language and Higher-Order Consciousness Connectionist networks give us a powerful way of understanding certain features of consciousness, but even as researchers apply their discriminatory and responsive abilities to language, they do not capture what is most important about language. Steven Pinker captures this importance when he writes, ‘It is the structuring of networks into programs for manipulating symbols that explains much of human intelligence. In particular, symbol manipulation underlies human language and the parts of reasoning that interact with it.’25 In his book Consciousness

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Explained, Daniel Dennett develops an account of consciousness and the self that addresses the problems described above for the Moral Network Theory, while using the same basic vocabulary and background as Churchland. That is, Dennett builds on rather than dismisses Churchland, and shares many of the same basic concerns, including the need for a naturalized account of consciousness and the elimination of what Dennett variously calls the ‘Cartesian Theater’ and the ‘Central Meaner’. One of the primary differences between Dennett’s account and Churchland’s is the relative importance of language. Both Pinker and Dennett recognize the need for language to complete a true picture of higher-order consciousness. At the same time, Dennett’s theory displays important similarities with Nietzsche’s account of the self, as set forth in Chapter 3. Language is important insofar as it allows for the possibility of a narrative, which structures our selfunderstanding and interactions with others. Dennett’s view of the self emerges from the functionalist position he has long been pursuing; yet he does not see the self merely as the product of the functional organization of the brain. Rather than seeing some larger unity already present in the brain, he views the brain as a ‘cobbled together collection of specialized brain circuits’,26 each of which responds to different sorts of situations and can ‘take charge’ depending on the situation. In a manner reminiscent of Nietzsche’s observation that willing is ‘something complicated, something unified only in a word’ (BGE 19),27 Dennett holds that the appearance of an enduring subject – a single entity that is in control of all actions – is really just an illusion. He argues that the self comes into being through connecting the stories that comprise the various episodes of the organism with one another to produce a larger narrative. In other words, the self is a linguistic product of the reflexive capacity of our awareness, a theoretical posit which he characterizes as the central fictional character of

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our autobiography.28 The self is still real, but in the way – to use Dennett’s primary analogy – that the centre of gravity of an object is real. The narrative itself is not produced consciously. As Dennett says, we ‘spin’ our ‘self-stories’ in the same way that birds build nests and beavers build dams. It is simply what we do: ‘Our tales are spun, but for the most part we don’t spin them; they spin us. Our human consciousness, and our narrative selfhood, is their product, not their source.’29 These provide a filter through which a situation can be interpreted; the agent sees the world as stories that are ‘trying to happen’.30 The narrative model is useful because the environment only minimally constrains the specifics of what narrative may be applied, and because it allows one to reinterpret an event after the fact.31 This fits well with MacIntyre’s assertion that ‘Narrative history of a certain kind turns out to be the basic and essential genre for the characterization of human actions.’32 We do not force narrative interpretations onto events without structure; rather, events are intelligible to us precisely insofar as they fit into some kind of narrative structure. Dennett builds the self as centre of narrative gravity on a connectionist foundation. We can understand the ‘specialized brain circuits’ as different state spaces within the brain, along the lines of Churchland’s basic conception of the brain. They are functionally, if not spatially, differentiated, and act independently of one another. Unlike Churchland’s account, however, Dennett sees these subsystems of the brain as concerned not only with recognizing and categorizing, but with acting. Much as Nietzsche suggests alternatives to the soul-hypothesis in terms of ‘soul as subject-multiplicity’ and ‘soul as a society constructed out of drives and affects’ (BGE 12),33 and describes the drives as running ‘along oligarchic lines’ (GM II 1),34 Dennett describes a multiplicity of subsystems, each trying to realize its own ends at any given time. Many of these ends are simply biological. Other subsystems focus on features of our

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social environment, such as ethical considerations in dealing with other people. Again, this corresponds to Nietzsche’s observation that ‘[o]ur body is, after all, only a society constructed out of many souls’ (BGE 19).35 The self as narrative, however, has goals and projects that the subsystems, taken individually, do not have; for instance, none of my subsystems desire a black belt in martial arts, although they may desire the things it signifies, i.e., respect, mastery, etc. This ‘self’ is obviously not an agent in any traditional sense, but the ‘specialized brain circuits’ are also not traditional agents in a reduced form. When looked at individually, they act in an opportunistic but ultimately unintelligent manner to meet specific goals. When the goals of separate subsystems come into conflict, the solutions to the different tasks compete to become realized in behaviour; in other words, each struggles to gain control in a given situation, and ‘the ruling class identifies itself with the successes of the community’ (BGE 19).36 Because of the chaotic interactions between the competing subsystems, this model is named ‘Pandemonium’. There are some conceptual problems with the model, as Dennett notes: Even if, thanks to an underlying Pandemonium-style architecture, the chaos soon settles, leaving one specialist temporarily in charge . . ., there are obviously at least as many bad ways for these conflicts to be resolved as good ways. Nothing guarantees that the politically most effective specialist will be the ‘man for the job’.37

However, this corresponds to our experience, as in esprit de l’escalier, finding the right words only after it is too late for them to be useful. Since there is no supervising agent, sense of self is simply the product of the interaction between the separate subsystems.38 This is good from a theoretical standpoint, insofar as it reinforces the

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detranscendentalization of the subject, but it is disconcerting since it fragments the Cartesian self into ‘shifting coalitions, with no king or presiding judge’.39 This is not to say that these shifting coalitions are not themselves effective in attaining their ends. As MacIntyre notes, ‘The difference between imaginary characters and real ones is not the narrative form of what they do; it is in the degree of their authorship of that form and of their own deeds.’40 The self as centre of narrative gravity is still a locus of agency, even if it is not the kind of agency handed down through the western philosophical and religious tradition. One problem with this account is that the ‘self’ seems passive in the face of certain actions that seem to undeniably originate within the self, more broadly construed. That is, an account of decision-making is ‘passive’; the individual becomes aware of an opportunity to make a decision, and subsequently becomes aware of the decision she has made. The decision itself simply appears in consciousness without having been made with conscious – traditional – agency.41 This echoes Nietzsche’s observation that ‘a thought comes when ‘‘it’’ wants, and not when ‘‘I’’ want’ (BGE 17).42 While various commentators on Nietzsche have argued that this points towards epiphenomenalism,43 Dennett points out that this is what we should expect from a detranscendentalized subject; the traditional locus of agency simply does not exist. Thus, in the account of decisionmaking, the decision is made, and the report of the person, ‘I have decided’, is referred back to that ‘fictional character’ that is the main character of our autobiography. As Graham Parkes notes, ‘the changing of the ruler [whichever drive is in control at any given time] is concealed by the mask of the first person singular’.44 Unity is gained since the process of getting the ‘right’ subsystems to take over in a given situation can incorporate meta-habits and trends, heuristics that themselves pertain to the management of these subsystems without actually dictating the

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outcome of one’s ultimate decisions.45 The heuristic can be as simple as consciously asking, ‘What have I done in similar situations?’ This is in line with the role of language suggested above by Clark; the questioning, as well as explicit rules, helps to focus attention on relevant features that might be otherwise overlooked as the subsystems deal with purely local considerations. As Richard White describes it, ‘[i]n one respect, the self or the ego is just an effect; but it is also an effect which is capable of subduing the manifold of its experience and appropriating itself ’.46 The rounds of queries and answers between these subsystems not only produce some consistency, but also serve as the basic elements of narrative. Description of events – ‘I did that’ – do not typically change, but the interpretations of events – ‘Who am I, such that I did that?’ – can be modified over time. Dennett seems conservative on the extent to which this can be modified compared to Nietzsche, who writes, ‘‘‘I did that’’ says my memory. I couldn’t have done that – says my pride, and stands its ground. Finally, memory gives in’ (BGE 68).47 At the same time, Nietzsche identifies the ability to make promises as making humans ‘undeviating’, ‘orderly’ and ‘predictable’ (GM II, 2),48 acknowledging at least the ideal of making ourselves consistent in the eyes of others. For both Dennett and Nietzsche, the past action cannot be changed, but interpretation plays a decisive role in recontextualizing oneself in the process. Dennett sees this recontextualizing as constitutive of every self, whereas Nietzsche sees this as something rarely attained. However, even for Dennett the answers to these questions do not constitute a discovery of pre-existing facts, but rather represent a form of confabulation that is usually constrained by past events and behaviours. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Dennett follows Quine in conventionalism, viewing objects and events as cultural constructs and not ‘real’ entities or natural kinds. However,

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Dennett does not give the individual much latitude in interpretation. The individual, in Nietzsche’s account, has greater leeway in interpretively shaping what there is. Both Dennett and Nietzsche view the self as a construct that allows explanation and predictions of a person’s behaviour and thoughts, in the same way that the centre of gravity of an object allows us to understand and predict its movements. Owen Flanagan observes that ‘A self can change, but the changes had better make sense, or so we prefer. I need to understand your conversion from hedonism to ascetic Buddhism in a way that locates you both before and after the conversion.’49 A story is thus told in which its main, fictional character – the self – holds together. This is why Dennett refers to the self as the centre of narrative gravity; without the self, there is simply a sequence of events. Even without the transformative dimension we find in Nietzsche’s sense of the narrative self, Dennett’s account helps to address the problems facing the Moral Network Theory. For instance, while the Moral Network Theory provides an abstract way to understand why certain social situations strike us as ambiguous, this ambiguity is typically resolved by placing the events in a larger narrative sequence. Among other things, a narrative provides roles into which agents can fit and, based on this narrative, the appropriate course of action, and the probable outcome of that action. However, ambiguity remains in a familiar sense: ethical ambiguity in a situation can be understood as being able to tell more than one story about the elements out of which the narrative is composed. Thus, while scripts can be thought of as prototypes, the prototypes must represent a whole range of events that together can be taken as constituting the relevant parts of the story to be told, rather than merely the causal antecedents. Narrative is essentially dynamic rather than static and invites observers to imagine themselves in the various roles that the agents take rather than merely judging disinterestedly.

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The narrative model also captures Churchland’s observation that moral rules fail to represent all of the relevant features of moral decision-making. Churchland views this in terms of learning to identify and discriminate between competing prototypes to produce some correct response. However, education in ethics comes more through stories than back-propagation. As Mark Johnson notes, ‘We learn from, and are changed by, [fictional] narratives to the extent that we become imaginatively engaged in making fine discriminations of character and determining what is morally salient in particular situations.’50 To the extent that training along the lines of back-propagation takes place, it does so through mechanisms such as fairy tales and fables, and continues both explicitly and implicitly in the evaluation of narratives both real and fictional. The main distinction between Nietzsche and Dennett with regard to the conception of consciousness and the narrative self is found in the role each sees the narrative ultimately playing for ethics. Dennett’s account of the narrative self is essentially descriptive, and as such, he sees this as a process that almost everyone raised in a community goes through. The unity of the self under this description might be described as a causal unity; however, the telling of the story itself alters the relative strength of the drives in relation to one another. As Nietzsche describes in the second essay of the Genealogy, the bad conscience changes how the internal drives express themselves unconsciously, and suggests that alternative interpretations are possible which would be healthier and more useful.51 This moves us beyond mere causal unity and back to the interpretive unity that Nehamas describes, but not in the sense of there being a single overriding subject who would again take the place of the Cartesian self and organize our drives and experiences:

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it is to be found, if it is to be found at all, in the very organization and coherence of the many acts that each organism performs. It is the unity of these acts that gives rise to the unity of the self, and not, as we often think, the fact of a single self that unifies our conflicting tendencies.52

For Dennett, narrative simply describes what we find when we look closely at humans, and his ethical reflections can take a broadly utilitarian approach.53 For Nietzsche, however, recognizing that we are our narrative opens up new horizons, with corresponding possibilities and perils. One reason for this difference between Nietzsche and Dennett (although by no means the only one) is their respective attitudes towards holism. Dennett recognizes the potential of holism but does not pursue it. What Nietzsche recognizes in the interconnection of all things is that changes in our ideas and understandings can have dramatic and unforeseen consequences throughout our cognitive economy. The sciences provide an apt analogy. Oxygen did not subsume the element ‘phlogiston’; a change in the understanding of the nature of combustion eliminated phlogiston. The ‘Copernican Revolution’ is the more common analogy, and Nietzsche chides Kant for not following through with the initial insights of the first Critique (BGE 71). The elimination of the soul-hypothesis has a chain reaction through our understanding of free will and responsibility. In each case, Nietzsche continually attacks the traditional notions; in the next chapter, we will see more direct arguments against ‘freedom of will’. However, in each case, Nietzsche also suggests an alternative; these alternatives hold together in a new configuration that mutually reinforce one another, while simultaneously pointing to other, as of yet unthought possibilities.

Chapter 6

Freedom and Responsibility

The question of freedom of will hangs over Nietzsche’s ethical theory; while some aspects were dealt with in earlier chapters, his direct statements on freedom, both denials and affirmations, have not yet been addressed. This issue re-emerges now in the context of the previous chapter, which raises the question of how we are able to direct the narrative that comprises our identity. The neurobiological models are helpful for understanding how Nietzsche’s understanding of the soul as both a multiplicity (e.g., BGE 12) and ‘a word for something on the body’ (Z I 4),1 might be interpreted today; however, neither theory leaves room for the self-caused cause that is typically associated with free will.2 The move from the neural networks up to the level of narrative does not appear to grant the sort of control necessary to be an ethical agent. Although Nietzsche often speaks metaphorically, we can understand some of his statements more literally than has been typically supposed. Despite Robert Solomon’s comment that contemporary understandings of the brain ‘do not match up at all neatly with the putative drives’3 that Nietzsche describes, Nietzsche’s description of the mind’s function broadly corresponds with work being done in cognitive science. Again, this is not to say that Nietzsche could have foreseen these technological developments, or even that his specific drives – such as a ‘will to truth’ – have been, will be or could be discovered in the brain. Recent work does, however, give us a fresh perspective from which to read and understand Nietzsche.

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At the same time, as already indicated in the previous chapter, the ethical theories put forward by contemporary philosophers such as Paul Churchland and Daniel Dennett have serious problems. Churchland’s Moral Network Theory gives a way of thinking about our social ecology from a connectionist perspective, but does not capture the richness of that ecology; as such, it can provide a foundation for an ethical theory, but fails to be a full ethical theory in itself. While Dennett uses this foundation to advance a theory of narrative that gives a more realistic account of that ecology, it remains descriptive rather than normative. Nietzsche’s writings can help to integrate the best features of both of these theories and push them farther towards a robust normative ethics.4 The problem of free will has also been a concern of Dennett’s over the course of his career. Given his naturalistic account of the brain, many have taken him to eliminate both the subjective element of consciousness and our free will. Dennett’s response in both Elbow Room and Freedom Evolves indicates that, while his theory of mind does not have room for free will as traditionally understood, the traditional understanding is not ‘worth wanting’ in any case. Instead, he gives an account of freedom of will that he thinks is defensible and worthwhile; this account runs in parallel with Nietzsche’s approach to free will, just as their accounts of the narrative self are parallel. In this chapter, I show how Nietzsche’s denials of free will do not entail determinism, but rather aim at undermining the traditional notions of morality, such as responsibility. This attack on the traditional notion of responsibility can be seen particularly in Nietzsche’s writings on the criminal. While not averse to using the label ‘evil’ when describing actions that go against ‘morality’, Nietzsche rarely calls the criminal ‘evil’, instead inviting us to view those who break the laws of society from different vantage points. One of these is to see the criminal as belonging to an older type of

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human, more closely related to the ‘blond beast’ he describes in, among other places, On the Genealogy of Morality. Thus, I consider the role the ‘masters’ of the Genealogy play in Nietzsche’s description of morality and freedom of the will. The masters are crucial to Nietzsche’s story about the origins of morality; insofar as they produced the conditions for it, they stand at the crux of Nietzsche’s writings on free will and responsibility. Rather than serving as models for us, however, they show both what we lack and what we have gained in the period since they ruled. The masters are unable to take responsibility in Nietzsche’s sense; articulating exactly what Nietzsche means is thus the task of the next section. From there, we finally arrive at Nietzsche’s positive conception of freedom, distinct but not unrelated to the traditional metaphysical concept. This sort of freedom allows for a tragic affirmation of the whole of which one is a part; it is in this ability to affirm that we find the core of Nietzsche’s ethical theory.

‘Compatibilist’ Freedom? Nietzsche’s project of ‘self-making’ is clearly indicative of the type of freedom we have, but must be carefully distinguished from the ‘compatibilist’ position. While this is clearly not the type of freedom Nietzsche endorses, some such as Brian Leiter see this route as blocked by Nietzsche’s underlying commitment to fatalism. That is, Leiter also views Nietzsche as rejecting compatibilism, but because of what he calls ‘Causal Essentialism’,5 rather than because he can articulate a different form of freedom. Leiter grants that we have the ability to change the environment and that our actions do have an effect in the world, but argues that our consciousness is epiphenomenal, that is, that our conscious willing is not what effects change. He argues,

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however, ‘even the choice to ‘‘create’’ particular values does not, in fact, satisfy the Autonomy Condition’.6 Leiter’s ‘Autonomy Condition’ is problematic, since he assumes the epiphenomenality of the conscious will in his definition of it, making his argument circular.7 Leiter bases his argument for the epiphenomenality of consciousness on passages such as this from The Gay Science: ‘Is the ‘‘goal’’, the ‘‘purpose’’, not often enough a beautifying pretext, a self-deception of vanity after the fact. . .?’ (GS 360)8 Even in passages that describe self-mastery such as Daybreak 109, Leiter shows that ‘the intellect is a mere spectator upon the struggle’.9 In contrast, Richard Schacht stresses that ‘Nietzsche stops well short of full epiphenomenalism, reserving at least the possibility of a genuine and significant role for intentions in the genesis of human actions’.10 Leiter criticizes Schacht for truncating the passage from The Gay Science quoted above ‘at a misleading point’,11 but Leiter himself misses the qualifying phrase upon which Schacht rests his argument. In this passage, Nietzsche contrasts the match with the powder keg, and the helmsman with the steam in terms of relative importance in cause; but even as Leiter rightly stresses that vanity and other motives lead the ‘helmsman’ to accord more agency to the conscious intention than is appropriate, he overlooks the careful qualifications Nietzsche places in the passage. Nietzsche does not ‘repudiate the very possibility that Schacht embraces’;12 rather than eliminating the effect of conscious willing, Nietzsche minimizes it by noting that it serves some other role ‘often enough’.13 Schacht takes the qualifying phrase in this passage to point to other instances where Nietzsche describes the conscious will as obviously effective: a very great deal indeed depends upon whether and how the quantitatively relatively insignificant ‘directive’ capacity to which he refers is brought to bear upon the potential for

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action he characterizes as a ‘quantum of energy that presses to be used up somehow’.14

Leiter makes the sort of assumption that Dennett consistently deflates, looking for a particular place where agency resides, rather than seeing it as distributed throughout the brain.15 What we sometimes take to be selfmastery may only be ‘one drive which is complaining about another’,16 but that does not prevent us from identifying with both drives. Both these passages make the same basic point, one found throughout Nietzsche’s writings: our conscious decisions often do not play the role we take them to be playing. This is not, however, the same as denying their effectiveness altogether; as Solomon notes, ‘Nietzsche has a robust sense of agency, even if he rejects the exaggerated notions of freedom that Kant and some existentialists attach to it.’17 Part of the affirmation articulated in earlier chapters involves precisely the claiming of events over which one does not directly have control. Exactly in what this robust sense of agency consists, however, must be placed in the context of Nietzsche’s various statements on freedom.

Denials of Freedom Nietzsche’s denials of freedom of will stand as a distinct category from his statements on the eternal recurrence and amor fati; as demonstrated in earlier chapters, both of these doctrines point to ideas that are only tangentially connected to the traditional categories of free will and determinism. His varied statements on freedom seem contradictory, since in different places he affirms and denies our freedom of will, sometimes doing both within the same book. When each statement is taken in context, however, we can identify a coherent pattern that is not a

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general metaphysical assertion. In many places, Nietzsche merely calls the motives of people who claim free will into question; in other places, he sees it as a mistake that fails to grasp the true nature of the world. For the most part, though, he thinks the entire framework that sets free will in opposition to determinism is mistaken. In the early work The Wanderer and His Shadow, Nietzsche examines the circumstances in which people note their freedom, rather than looking at free will directly: ‘Evidently . . . each considers himself most free where his feeling of living is greatest’ (WS 9),18 and ‘he is always living in manifold dependence but regards himself as free when, out of long habituation, he no longer perceives the weight of the chains’ (WS 10).19 We find several things here. First, he presupposes a lack of free will, but does not argue against it. More importantly, both of these statements foreshadow the cultivation of a feeling, something he develops in his later writings. These passages are followed by another which takes a more direct approach, where his analysis of what he sees as a linguistic error foreshadows similar criticisms of the ‘soul’ in Beyond Good and Evil and other writings: 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. Belief in freedom of will – that is to say in identical facts and in isolated facts – has in language its constant evangelist and advocate. (WS 11)20

Nietzsche deflates the notion of free will, but also indicates how the concept ignores both the uniqueness and interconnectedness of actions. In later writings, he points to ulterior motives for believing in free will; for instance, in Daybreak he compares our waking life to our dreams, saying

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that we are just as responsible for one as we are for the other – in both cases, meaning that we lack the sort of responsibility typically attributed to our actions. He places this in the category of pride, taking credit for something over which we have minimal control, and asks whether ‘the doctrine of freedom of will has human pride and feeling of power for its father and mother? Perhaps I say this too often: but at least that does not make it an error’ (D 128; see also D 124, BGE 21).21 This sense of power points to the feeling that one ‘could have done otherwise’ that was made possible through the development of self-consciousness. Self-consciousness has been examined in previous chapters, but is of particular relevance here because of the way in which it makes one aware of one’s instincts without immediately acting on them. This is a mixed blessing in Nietzsche’s estimation. On the one hand, it is an impediment to the easy discharge of one’s instincts that was the hallmark of the masters; on the other hand, it is through self-consciousness that new possibilities open up. As he develops an account of how the interrelated concepts of soul, freedom and responsibility came to be, Nietzsche discusses more self-interested motives in the assumption and attribution of free will. In On the Genealogy of Morality, he writes that ‘the weak and oppressed of every kind could construe weakness itself as freedom, and their particular mode of existence as an accomplishment’ (GM I 13).22 To the extent that they take a defect and turn it into a virtue, Nietzsche might admire this transformation as the sort of revaluation that he advocates. However, this fails to be an adequate transformation for two reasons. First, the weak use it as a weapon against others, rather than using it as an interpretive ploy to beautify and unify an otherwise unfortunate life. Second, the notion of freedom itself is taken to be something that, as Dennett might note, is not ‘worth wanting’. Rather than recognizing that we want our actions to be caused in the right way, whatever that may

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consist in under the circumstance, they seem to want actions to be entirely self-caused, without prior conditions playing a role. Nietzsche points to the problems with this understanding of free will in The Wanderer and His Shadow 23, where he notes that punishment either rests on decisions which have antecedents – and therefore go back further than the will of the one who committed the punishable action – or else they were ‘free’ actions, and thus are based on nothing. Either way, it seems that the actions in question should not be punished. Richard White points out that this is an early attempt at ‘a complete reductio ad absurdum of the concept of free will’.23 Insofar as it is limited to the justifications given for punishment instead of free will as a whole, however, it does not go sufficiently far to completely undermine the concept of free will, and at most shows the incoherent justification typically given for punishing. Nietzsche directly ridicules ‘free’ actions, in the sense of lacking causal antecedents, elsewhere in his writings. In Nietzsche’s view, the self-caused cause would be allowing the free rein of the drives without any sense of appropriate constraint or direction that we are given, for instance, through education. Thus, in Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche writes of ‘The freedom I don’t mean’, where the ‘instincts contradict and disturb each other, mutually destroy each other . . . the demand for independence, for free development, for laisser aller is raised with the most insistence precisely by those for whom no bridle would be too severe’ (TI ‘Raids of an Untimely Man’ 41).24 The ‘letting go’ he points in the sense of a lack of constraint is ultimately selfdefeating. This has been made possible through the development of self-consciousness, because the individual is now aware of multiple possibilities without a clear sense of direction. In Beyond Good and Evil, he refers to this laisser aller as the ‘all-too-great freedom’ (BGE 188);25 this freedom is not worth wanting, precisely because it is a freedom

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without purpose, a freedom that refuses any purpose. While this certainly stands as a denial of free will in a sense, it is still not an attack on the metaphysical underpinnings. In the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche writes about an earlier sense of freedom that is close to this laisser aller, insofar as it consists primarily in a lack of constraint, but that functions in a political rather than a metaphysical sense. Paradoxically, Nietzsche sees the imposing of constraints as part of the early development of this feeling of freedom through the development of selfconsciousness: ‘This instinct of freedom forced back, repressed, incarcerated within itself and finally able to discharge and unleash itself only against itself: that, and that alone, is bad conscience in its beginnings’ (GM II 17).26 It is through this removal of political freedom that the metaphysical sense of freedom originates. The ‘blond beast of prey’ acts as master over an unprepared and weak populace, imposing order externally but in the process creating a new realm of consciousness. The weak are unable to act directly on their impulses, and thus become aware of them in a new sense; insofar as some actions are still possible, the impulses find new ways to exercise their power. As he writes in Beyond Good and Evil, ‘What is called ‘‘freedom of the will’’ is essentially the affect of superiority with respect to something that must obey . . . But now we notice the strangest thing about the will – about this multifarious thing that people have only one word for . . . we are, under the circumstances, both the one who commands and the one who obeys’ (BGE 19).27 The role of the development of consciousness in our feeling of free will thus both gives it a naturalistic explanation and in the process serves to indicate that it is something other than what it is typically taken to be. Insofar as we are the mixed-race descendants of the people Nietzsche describes (e.g., BGE 260), our consciousness is more recent, more limited, more fallible than we would like to admit, and Nietzsche argues that we are

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fundamentally mistaken about the origin, extent and meaning of our freedom of will. Typically, instead of attacking the metaphysical doctrine of free will, Nietzsche takes aim at the dichotomy of free will and determinism as a whole; for instance, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘On the Old and New Tablets’: Once people believed in soothsayers and astrologers, and therefore they believed ‘Everything is fate: you should, because you must!’ Then later people mistrusted all soothsayers and astrologers, and therefore they believed ‘Everything is freedom: you can, because you want to!’ Yes, my brothers, so far we have merely deluded ourselves, but not known about the stars and the future, and therefore we have merely deluded ourselves, but not known about good and evil! (Z, III ‘On the Old and New Tablets’, ix)28

In both cases, Nietzsche sees people’s attention misdirected, interpreting according to categories which fail to match their own interests. Perhaps section 18 of Beyond Good and Evil is most instructive, where Nietzsche notes that the concept of free will ‘has been refuted a hundred times’ (BGE 18).29 This is one reason why he spends so little time on the metaphysical doctrine: it has already been defeated, to no effect. Nietzsche persists with his denials of freedom of will not because it is false, nor because people delude themselves about what freedom really consists in, but because of the uses to which this concept has been put, and the damage it has wrought. As he writes in Twilight of the Idols: Today we have no sympathy anymore for the concept of ‘free will’: we know only too well what it is – that most disreputable of all the theologians’ tricks, designed to make humanity ‘responsible’ in the theologians’ sense, that is, to make it dependent on them . . . (TI ‘The Four Great Errors’ 7)30

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This theme runs through On the Genealogy of Morality: the feeling of free will has been cultivated in order to punish others and inculcate a feeling of guilt, and if not that, at least to justify both the feeling of weakness – as if it were chosen – and the holding of others responsible. In this vein, Nietzsche writes that the weak ‘do not defend any belief more passionately than that the strong are free to be weak, and the birds of prey are free to be lambs: – and in this way, they gain the right to make the birds of prey responsible for being birds of prey’ (GM I 13).31 Nietzsche sees this as part of the weakening of humanity. Because of this, his denials of freedom of will rarely deal with it as a metaphysical doctrine, but rather in terms of its effects. Part of Nietzsche’s corrective to these effects, in conjunction with his denial of free will, is his denial of guilt and responsibility.

Denial of Responsibility Just as with the denials of freedom of will, Nietzsche does not make general statements about the notion of responsibility, but rather has specific targets in mind as he writes. Bernard Williams notes the centrality of the notion of responsibility for morality: The remorse or self-reproach or guilt I have already mentioned is the characteristic first-person reaction within the system, and if an agent never felt such sentiments, he would not belong to the morality system or be a full moral agent in its terms.32

Keeping in mind Bernard Williams’ distinction between ethics (as a general prescription for a way of life) and morality (as a particular development of ethics focused on the notion of obligation33), and that Nietzsche is a constant critic of the latter while carefully crafting the former, we

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can see why Nietzsche takes careful aim at the notion of responsibility. Nietzsche concedes the general usefulness of the system of morality, but as seen in the second chapter of this book, it constitutes more of a challenge to affirm these systems of morality than the atrocities of history. This is seen particularly in Zarathustra’s confrontation with the Spirit of Gravity, representing the unconditional ‘thou shalts’; Nietzsche sees much of the bloodshed in history as an ineliminable part of living, but the religious interpretation of this has added untold and needless suffering and limited the development of humanity. As argued above, Nietzsche does not object to suffering as such: he consistently opposes the utilitarian goal of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. The constraints which have been placed upon extraordinary individuals represent a loss that seems avoidable in the way that countless murders and war do not; the murders and war are part of our heritage, but the talented individual coming out of that heritage is truly the exception. As Williams’ quote suggests, the notion of responsibility is typically internalized by those within the system; however, Nietzsche stresses that this is only a second movement with regard to the understanding of responsibility. As such, it stands in contrast with the free ‘taking on’ of responsibility, and represents something more sinister. This reactive, internalized sense of guilt comes after the initial judgement of others: ‘the doctrine of the will was essentially invented for purposes of punishment, that is, for purposes of wanting to find people guilty’ (TI ‘The Four Great Errors’ 7).34 Punishment, like guilt, can be internalized, but always has an external origin from those who seek to punish others. Punishment thus stands as one of the prime problems for humanity; as Robert Solomon says, ‘In short, Nietzsche is against punishment.’35 One argument Nietzsche poses against punishment is that the past cannot be changed; in this vein he writes, ‘The sting of conscience is, like a snake

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stinging a stone, a piece of stupidity’ (WS 38).36 In a similar passage, he counsels people to ‘Never yield to remorse, but at once tell yourself: remorse would simply mean adding to the first act of stupidity a second’ (WS 323).37 He makes the connection between the attribution of guilt by others, the internalization of that guilt, and the complete lack of any real responsibility in The Gay Science: ‘Although the shrewdest judges of witchcraft and even the witches themselves were convinced of the guilt of witchcraft, this guilt still did not exist. This is true of all guilt’ (GS 250).38 Much like the feelings of freedom described above, the feelings of guilt do not count as an argument for the existence of guilt; as he writes elsewhere, ‘it is not things but opinions about things that have absolutely no existence, which have so deranged mankind!’ (D 563)39 Nietzsche does not deny that there are actions in society that are harmful to society, and his denial of responsibility in the sense of people holding others accountable for their actions leads us to question how Nietzsche understands the status of the criminal. In Daybreak, he compares the cost to society from criminals with the cost of the invalid, and suggests it simply be absorbed rather than becoming a source of revenge. This is neither a suggestion that we take pity on criminals – given Nietzsche’s frequent denouncements of pity – nor a suggestion that they be allowed free rein to do as they please, but rather a recognition that they do not fit into contemporary society. Moreover, the criminal has been determined through the same combination of heredity and environment that everyone has been. Thus in an earlier book Nietzsche notes, ‘If the knowledge the criminal’s defending counsel possesses of the case and its antecedents is sufficiently extensive, then the so-called extenuating circumstances he presents one by one must end by extenuating away his client’s entire guilt’ (WS 24).40 No action is isolated from any other, and if we are unable to illustrate the causal chain that extends backward from every

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action, it is due to the limitations of our abilities and not because those chains are absent. The heredity and environment have come together in the individual to produce a certain person. If that person commits some crime, then the cause lies elsewhere than the individual: ‘It is capricious to halt at the criminal if what one is punishing is the past’ (WS 28).41 Nietzsche’s writings on criminals come within specific contexts, however, and even in those, he is unwilling to give a universal statement about criminals. His classification of criminals falls into two basic categories, much as his classification of human beings as a whole. The first is the person who has turned out poorly, who is weak; the most striking picture of this type is in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘the pale criminal’. Nietzsche’s characterization follows the above comparison with the invalid, someone who costs the society but who should not be held responsible: ‘‘‘Enemy’’ you should say, but not ‘‘villain’’; ‘‘sick man’’ you should say, but not ‘‘scoundrel’’; ‘‘fool’’ you should say, but not ‘‘sinner’’’ (Z I, ‘Pale Criminal’).42 Nietzsche does not hold this criminal as someone to be admired, for he cannot make the affirmation central to Nietzsche’s ethics; he cannot face the past. ‘Often enough the criminal is no match for his deed: he cheapens and slanders it’ (BGE 109).43 Once again we find a careful qualification in Nietzsche’s writing, for he is unwilling to mark all criminals in this way. There is another picture in Nietzsche’s writing, however, in which the criminal does stand as at least a potential model. Here Nietzsche recognizes what is true of every culture but often left unarticulated, that those who challenge and flout the cultural norms help to alter them, even if only by demonstrating the contingency of those norms. The portrait Nietzsche paints is incomplete but suggestive. In Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche writes, ‘The criminal type is the type of the strong human being under unfavorable conditions, a strong human being who has been made sick’

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(TI ‘Raids of the Untimely Man’ 45).44 Here, the abilities that would be useful under different circumstances find no outlet in society; but rather than having the instincts forced in on themselves in self-destructive ways, they are exercised in new forms. Nietzsche suggests that, under different circumstances, these traits would be admirable: ‘the criminal very often gives proof of exceptional self-control, selfsacrifice and prudence, and keeps these qualities awake in those who fear him’ (D 50).45 While this steps aside from the question of responsibility, it demonstrates an alternative to the laisser aller Nietzsche sees as part of the decline of society. When responsibility is taken in an active sense, rather than reactively placed on a person, Nietzsche sees criminal actions as having the potential for redemption, in his sense: ‘Defenders of criminals are rarely artistic enough to use the beautiful horror of the deed to the advantage of the doer’ (BGE 110).46 That ‘beautiful horror’ is also the source of much discomfort with Nietzsche’s ethics; we will return to it below. The general point is clear, that the criminal is at least potentially a representative of a stronger type whose nature we should recognize if not embrace. The criminal in this positive sense resembles the masters of Nietzsche’s Genealogy, those who ‘do not know what guilt, responsibility, consideration are’ (GM II 17).47 Nietzsche describes the masters as having freedom in a certain sense; however, they lack the self-consciousness Nietzsche sees as valuable. It is precisely this lack of self-consciousness that blinds them to the ‘could have done otherwise’ that is typically taken as the hallmark of free will. They are free in the sense that their lack of self-consciousness prevents their drives from coming into conflict; but this is also not a freedom ‘worth wanting’. Richard White suggests that ‘the sovereignty of the master is intended as a model and as a prescriptive ideal; and this means that a self-gathering, or an affirmative relation of the self to itself, must complement the radical self-dispersion’.48 However, the ‘self-

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gathering’ is not something the master would understand, since it is precisely in the master that we catch the last glimpse of a truly unselfconscious human. That is, Nietzsche admires the master because the instincts have not been driven inside only in order to tear consciousness asunder. He cannot simply advocate a return to the masters’ morality, though, and Nietzsche consistently places an ambivalent value on the development of self-consciousness through this internalization. On the one hand, the internalizing of our instincts gave rise to ressentiment and slave morality; but it was only through this that ‘man first became an interesting animal’ (GM I 6),49 and ‘The history of mankind would be far too stupid a thing if it had not had the intellect of the powerless injected into it’ (GM I 7).50 White’s suggestion that the master stands as a model for us thus needs to be carefully qualified. The temporal horizon of the master is limited, so even those actions that can be affirmed without reservation lack scope. Further, without the self-consciousness required for the active taking responsibility, there is no sense of alternatives. Even if selfconsciousness does not confer the sort of freedom usually assumed, it does make space for an awareness of the range of possibilities and the apparent contingency that lurks behind all actions and events. This is why Nietzsche stresses the necessity of things: we imagine that things could be otherwise, but are powerless to actually make them so.

Taking Responsibility The active ‘taking responsibility’ stands at the core of Nietzsche’s ethical theory, bringing together the selfconsciousness, awareness of the cosmos as a whole as well as the wholeness of one’s life story. Given the lack of intrinsic meaning or teleology, taking responsibility stands as the

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only way to affirm the significance of life. As Solomon writes, ‘Taking responsibility for one’s destiny makes perfectly good sense within Nietzsche’s naturalistic outlook.’51 This is not possible for the masters of the Genealogy; despite the negative characterization of the slave morality that forms in reaction to the masters, Nietzsche can write without reservation of, ‘The proud realization of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the awareness of this rare freedom and power over himself and his destiny’ (GM II 2).52 The problem, in Nietzsche’s eyes, is that humanity has become complacent, thinking itself as the pinnacle of creation and its self-consciousness as the jewel. We do not recognize the limitations of consciousness as it stands, and do not see the possibilities that lie in its further development. One concern is frequently raised about the shape of the development of consciousness, particularly when it is viewed with master-morality in the background. Nietzsche is fond of stressing the blood, cruelty and ‘beautiful horror’ of the free individual and it is conceivable that a person might be willing to ‘take responsibility’ for actions we would find monstrous. Nietzsche does not advocate all courses of action, however; as seen above, he opposes the laisser aller that would allow any sort of action, as well as the mindlessness of the blond beast. Bernard Reginster notes, ‘The refusal to comply with moral demands may rather be motivated by the commitment to certain non-moral values.’53 ‘Non-moral’ is of course not to say ‘non-ethical’: while opposing the universal constraints on actions of traditional morality, Nietzsche recognizes the need for a different set of norms that are tailored for the individual and for the flourishing of the ideals claimed by the individual. Even on a small scale, we can see these norms at work; In this regard Robert Solomon writes of a conversation with a business executive who had laid off a large number of employees. While not suggesting that this businessman is or

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should be a model for the ‘great man’, Solomon notes that the man was acting under conflicting values, the same sort of conflict that we can recognize in our own lives. He writes, ‘His toughness lay not in callousness or indifference but in his insistence on doing what was necessary even in the face of his overwhelming feelings of guilt.’54 One of the key elements Nietzsche sets forth for taking responsibility is the ability to adhere to something regardless of the personal cost: ‘Sometimes the value of a thing lies not in what we get by means of it, but in what we pay for it – what it costs us . . . For what is freedom? Having the will to responsibility for oneself’ (TI ‘Raids of an Untimely Man’ 38).55 Reginster captures this well when he writes, ‘When the great individual does not yield to the ‘‘cry of the suffering of others’’, he is not moved by a sociopathic impulse, he is responsive to a value.’56 The values that lie behind taking responsibility in this sense may be foreign, but they still stand as legitimate values, and for the most part Nietzsche expects they will fall within recognizable limits: It goes without saying that I do not deny – unless I am a fool – that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged – but I think the one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto. We have to learn to think differently – in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently. (D 103)57

Nietzsche connects the idea of responsibility in this active sense with the feeling of freedom, something Solomon overlooks when he writes, ‘Nietzsche embraces the notions of responsibility – in particular, the responsibility for one’s character and ‘‘who one is’’ – but without invoking ‘‘free will’’.’58 As shown above, Nietzsche rejects the metaphysical causa sui, but we consistently find a separate sense of freedom in his writings, as when he writes of the ‘philosopher

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of the future’: ‘Is there enough pride, daring, courage, selfconfidence, will of spirit, will to take responsibility, freedom of will, for ‘‘the philosopher’’ on earth to be really – possible?’ (GM III 10)59

‘My Concept of Freedom’60 Mixed in with Nietzsche’s writings on the eternal recurrence, amor fati and outright denials of freedom are positive statements on freedom. Clearly Nietzsche has a concept of freedom that stands apart from the western philosophical tradition, but there is tension between the positive and negative statements. Richard White suggests a distinction between the theoretical understanding of free will and the performative perspective,61 but this misses Nietzsche’s denial of the traditional dichotomy. That is, Nietzsche is not merely acknowledging that from our first-person, subjective point of view our actions necessarily seem free, even though from a larger perspective everything is necessary. Instead, his positive statements on freedom form a cohesive vision which has two main components: first, finding the requirements necessary for one’s flourishing, and second, having the courage and conviction to follow those requirements through, no matter the cost. These may seem in conflict with one another, insofar as pursuing a path to one’s detriment appears to conflict with flourishing; however, Nietzsche does not conceive one’s requirements for flourishing as merely a regimen for pleasure or health (although it may include that). Instead, finding one’s place in the cosmos and affirming the meaning one creates implies recognizing that one is only an instrument for one’s ideals, and that as such, the ideals may be more important than one’s mere well-being – hence his attacks on the utilitarian’s ‘end’. Nietzsche notes that the feeling of freedom accompanies

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the finding of one’s requirements. His early writings hint at a slippage in necessity for certain types of people, such as in the second volume of Human, All Too Human, where he writes, ‘Active, successful natures act, not according to the dictum ‘‘know thyself’’, but as if there hovered before them the commandment: will a self and thou shalt become a self. – Fate seems to have left the choice still up to them’ (AOM 366).62 Even here, it is qualified with ‘seems’, indicating that the necessity is not overcome, but merely lived into in such a manner as to give a feeling of freedom. This freedom is opposed to the letting go of laisser aller, and in some respects resembles a bobsled: there is necessity and constraint, but the more aligned and balanced the bobsledders are, the faster they can go. [O]ne could conceive of a delight and power of self-determination, a freedom of the will, in which the spirit takes leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, practiced as it is in maintaining itself on light ropes and possibilities and dancing even beside abysses. (GS 347)63

Nietzsche’s sense of free will thus takes heredity, environment, and the cosmos as a whole into account as part of the larger configuration for ascertaining one’s requirements. The feeling does not confer any mystical release from the bonds of necessity, but is not illusory: the feeling itself is the freedom, where freedom and necessity reinforce one another: ‘Everything good is instinct – and consequently is easy, necessary, free’ (TI, ‘The Four Great Errors,’ 2).64 It is important to note that this is not something one has, but is rather something one achieves: ‘when the conscious mind has attained its highest degree of freedom it is involuntarily led to [moderation, justice, and repose of the soul] and comes to recognize how useful they are’ (WS 212).65 The responsibility one actively takes helps one to feel the sense of freedom that flows naturally from this activity, as

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opposed to the reactive feeling of guilt which saps one’s strength. The acceptance of necessity, as opposed to the merely bearing or enduring of it, channels and emphasizes the sense of freedom. Taking responsibility expands one’s sphere of concern beyond oneself; by recognizing the interconnectedness of the whole, we can see that the responsibility one takes is identical to the affirmation of the eternal recurrence, just as seeing one’s place within that whole is amor fati. In articulating his understanding of freedom (in the context of undermining attempts to find a locus of agency in the brain); Dennett writes, ‘You’d be surprised how much you can internalize, if you make yourself really large.’66 Nietzsche takes this to a cosmic extreme. The narrative that is the self is the story of the world in which we live. Nietzsche does not state a rule or general principle that one could apply as one applies the Categorical Imperative or the Principle of Utility, but this sense of taking responsibility for the cosmos is the heart of his ethical theory. In Twilight of the Idols he writes, well-constituted people, ‘happy’ ones, have to do certain acts and instinctively shrink away from other acts; they import the orderliness which is evident in their physiology into their relations to people and things. In a formula: their virtue is the effect of their happiness . . . (TI ‘The Four Great Errors’ 2)67

This will have ramifications that give pause – reminiscent of Zarathustra’s confrontation with the Spirit of Gravity. Nietzsche is not as concerned with the horrible actions as he is with the petty actions: ‘better to do evil than to think small!’ (Z I ‘On the Pitying’)68 For every sacrifice of others that Nietzsche endorses – for instance, Brutus’ sacrifice of Julius Caesar (GS 98) – there is recognition that one’s self is not the final measure of value, even if we must construct that value ourselves. Hence, he writes, in the context of the

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freedom that consists in taking responsibility for oneself, ‘Being ready to sacrifice people to one’s cause, not excluding oneself’ (TI ‘Raids of an Untimely Man’ 38).69 The shame is more likely one’s pursuit of the small goal rather than the large, the inability to literally give everything for the ideal. This is what taking responsibility for the whole ultimately entails. Throughout his writings, Nietzsche recognizes the tragic element, particularly when dealing with this notion of taking responsibility. Taking responsibility is an essential part of the affirmation of the whole, but this affirmation is necessarily tragic in two ways. The first is captured by MacIntyre’s sense of the tragic, that ‘the tragic protagonist cannot do everything that he or she ought to do’.70 That is, every choice leaves other possibilities unfulfilled, and there will always be missed opportunities along the way. We can identify necessity and affirm that as well, but the necessity of the incompleteness does not render the cosmos ‘whole’. The second aspect of the tragic is the sense of underlying commitment to an ideal beyond oneself that requires selfsacrifice. One’s cruelty towards others does not exceed the cruelty towards oneself, but even the cruelty towards ourselves is insufficient to achieve our ideal: it must consume us in the end. Nothing can ever be complete, final in itself, and we will always die before the final fruits, if any, become ripe. Nietzsche recognizes the potential of the tragic to overwhelm and paralyze us, so he tempers the tragic vision with possible new perspectives: ‘I myself have now in the fourth act slain all gods, out of morality! What is now to become of the fifth act? From where shall I take the tragic situation? Should I start considering a comic solution?’ (GS 153; cf. BGE 150)71 The theme of tragedy returns throughout his writings; his honesty will not allow that this is the ‘best of all possible worlds’, and yet in a world without intrinsic meaning or final goal, the meaning we make always seems

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insufficient to redeem the world. Nietzsche leaves us with two alternatives: either perish under the weight of all that was, or affirm it with a defiant, ‘Nevertheless!’.

Notes Chapter 1: Nietzsche, Ethics, Theory 1

On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994) I, 7, p. 18. 2 Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 6. 3 Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 4. 4 Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 6. 5 Ibid., p. 12. 6 Thus Spoke Zarathustra ‘On the Despisers of the Body’, p. 23. 7 Twilight of the Idols ‘The Four Great Errors’ 3, p. 32. 8 Daniel C. Dennett, ‘Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity’, in Frank S. Kessel, Pamela M. Cole and Dale L. Johnson (eds), Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 1992). 9 Daniel C. Dennett, ‘The Moral First Aid Manual’, in Sterling M. McMurrin (ed.), The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 8 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988). 10 E.g., Virginia Held, ‘Whose Agenda? Ethics versus Cognitive Science’, in Larry May, Marilyn Friedman and Andy Clark (eds), Mind and Morals (Cambridge, MA: A Bradford Book/The MIT Press, 1996). 11 James P. Sterba, ‘Justifying Morality and the Challenge of Cognitive Science’, in May, Friedman and Clark, Mind and Morals. 12 One of Nietzsche’s primary criticisms is that people fail to recognize their experiences as already interpreted, and thus assume that their theories reflect a pre-existing reality.

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One notable exception is Robert Solomon: ‘I do not think that eternal recurrence and amor fati are equivalent theses.’ Living with Nietzsche: What the Great ‘Immoralist’ Has to Teach Us (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 204. 14 Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (New York: Routledge, 1983), p. 346. 15 Ibid., p. 347. 16 Ibid., p. 397. 17 Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 27. 18 Nietzsche and Metaphysics, ed. and trans. Michael Gendre (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996), p. 32. 19 Richard J. White, Nietzsche and the Problem of Sovereignty (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), p. 115. 20 Twilight, p. 9. 21 Assorted Opinions and Maxims, p. 243.

Chapter 2: Eternal Return: Determinism and/or Affirmation 1

Twilight, ‘What I Owe to the Ancients’ 5; Ecce Homo. These include Arthur Danto, ‘The Eternal Recurrence’, in Robert Solomon (ed.), Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980); Robin Small, ‘Boscovich contra Nietzsche’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 46:3 (1986), 419–35; George Stack, ‘Eternal Recurrence Again’, Philosophy Today, 28:4 (1984), 242–63; and more recently, Linda L. Williams and Joseph T. Palencik, ‘Reevaluating Nietzsche’s Cosmology of Eternal Recurrence’, Southern Journal of Philosophy, 42, (2004), 393–409. 3 E.g., Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche contra Rousseau (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 176ff.; Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 119–20; and Bernard Reginster, Affirmation of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), who writes, ‘I believe we should prefer a practical interpretation according to which it is invoked to formulate a practical imperative and to point to a specific substantive ethical ideal’ (p. 223). 2

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This would follow from Nietzsche’s rejection of Kantian dualism; see analysis of Human, All too Human 106, page 14. 5 This interpretation sees Nietzsche as an ‘incompatibilist hard determinist’. E.g., Galen Strawson writes, ‘the truth of determinism seems to render so clearly impossible the kind of self-determination and responsibility that we continue willy nilly, and despite the most strenuous theoretical excogitations, to attribute to ourselves: so that it seems that a truly comprehensive or in the present terms ‘‘genuine’’ understanding of the truth of determinism must produce an experience of choice and action devoid of any sense of true responsibility’. Freedom and Belief (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 283. 6 This interpretation sees Nietzsche as a ‘compatibilist’, one who does not see free will and determinism as mutually exclusive. 7 In this context, a cosmological theory is typically understood as a theory about the physical nature and process of the universe. It can be understood along the lines of the contemporary hypothesis of the ‘Big Bang’ as the beginning of the universe, coupled with the related hypothesis regarding the end of the universe, the ‘Big Crunch’, assuming that the matter and energy coming together would produce another ‘Big Bang’ in which the entire universe unfolds exactly as it always has before. 8 Ivan Soll, ‘Reflections on Recurrence’, in Solomon, Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 325–6. 9 Ibid., p. 323; cf. Danto, ‘Eternal Recurrence’, p. 317. 10 E.g., Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 247, 269; Alan White, Within Nietzsche’s Labyrinth (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 68; Gary Shapiro, Nietzschean Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 84; Bernd Magnus, Stanley Stewart and Jean-Pierre Mileur, Nietzsche’s Case: Philosophy as/and Literature (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 114. However, note Williams and Palencik, ‘Re-evaluating Nietzsche’s Cosmology’. 11 Solomon, Living with Nietzsche, p. 202. 12 George Stack, Lange and Nietzsche (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1983), p. 44. 13 See Alexander Cooke, ‘Eternal Return and the Problem of

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the Constitution of Identity’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 29 (2005), 16–34; Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. David Ferrell Krell (HarperSanFrancisco, 1985); and Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 14 M.C. Sterling, ‘Recent Discussions of Eternal Recurrence’, Nietzsche-Studien, 6 (1977), 289. 15 Cf. Robin Small, ‘Eternal Recurrence’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 13:4 (1983), 585–605. 16 E.g., Bernd Magnus, ‘Nietzsche’s Eternalistic CounterMyth’, Review of Metaphysics, 26:4 (1973), 604–5. Most of the references in the unpublished notes gathered as The Will to Power also stress the normative aspect. 17 I.e., Williams and Palencik, ‘Re-evaluating Nietzsche’s Cosmology’. 18 E.g., Will to Power 498, Gay Science 109. It is interesting to note the similarities between these passages and the conclusion of Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999). 19 See Solomon, Living with Nietzsche, pp. 161–2. 20 For an interestingly ambiguous reference, see ‘The Leech’ in Book Four of Zarathustra. 21 Human, all too Human, p. 57. 22 Daybreak, p. 125; even here we can see the seeds of his later suggestion that ‘almost every word, and even the word ‘‘tyranny’’, would ultimately seem useless or like weakening and mollifying metaphors’. Beyond Good and Evil 22, 22. 23 E.g., Twilight ‘The Four Great Errors’ 8 and ‘‘‘Reason’’ in Philosophy’, p. 4; Zarathustra Book III, ‘On the Vision and the Riddle’ 2; Beyond Good and Evil 15, 21. 24 See Will to Power 69, 533, 552, 708, 712 in addition to ‘The Will to Power in Nature: The Mechanistic Interpretation of the World’, sections 618–39. 25 Will to Power, p. 36. 26 Ibid., p. 38. 27 Ibid., p. 35. 28 E.g., Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist,

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Antichrist. 4th edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 326; Danto, ‘Eternal Recurrence’, p. 316. In Lange and Nietzsche, George Stack concludes more weakly that ‘scientific’ implies ‘merely fictional’ (p. 44); yet Stack continues by saying that, not only did Nietzsche not reject it for being a fiction, but he even ‘deliberately created’ the nihilistic-scientific version to stress the affirmation required. Cf. John Wilcox, ‘Birth of Nietzsche out of the Spirit of Lange’, International Studies in Philosophy, 21:2 (1989), 85; and David Goldberg, ‘Nietzschean Recurrence: Science and the Moment’, Auslegung, 20:1 (1995), 3. 29 Gay Science, p. 239. 30 E.g., Gay Science 121: ‘Life is not an argument; the conditions of life might include error’ (p. 117). 31 Will to Power, p. 36; cf. Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Limits of Experience: Nihilism’, in David Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985), pp. 122–3. 32 Will to Power, pp. 38–9. 33 E.g., Will to Power 1057 mentions a proof; 1063 states (in its entirety) that ‘The law of the conservation of energy demands eternal recurrence.’ (p. 547) The other proofs mentioned take aim against teleology: 1062, 1064 and 1066. 34 This has been discussed elsewhere in detail, notably in Danto, ‘Eternal Recurrence’; but see Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), ch. 5. 35 Cf. Beyond Good and Evil 21, 22; Daybreak 119. See also Michel Haar, ‘Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language’, in Allison, The New Nietzsche, pp. 28–35. 36 See Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York: Penguin Books, 2003). 37 Ecce Homo ‘Zarathustra’ 1. 38 Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, p. 82. 39 Gay Science, p. 109. 40 See Kaufmann, Nietzsche, p. 325. 41 The word Schwergewicht indicates first that this weight may crush or stabilize, and also that it is not one among other ‘weights’. Cf. Heidegger, Nietzsche, pp. 21–2.

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It is possible that Nietzsche is alluding to Socrates’ daimonion; Gregory Vlastos notes, in commenting on the times in Plato’s dialogues where the daimonion is mentioned, that ‘none of them implies or even suggests that he would have been willing to accept a prompting from that source if it had offered counsel obnoxious to his moral reason’. Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 285. If the allusion is intended, it would explain both why Nietzsche would choose this form (rather than placing it in his own voice) and the reaction he expects to have from the challenge. 43 Gay Science, p. 194. 44 As we shall see, when Zarathustra’s interlocutors react in a neutral manner, his response is invariably that they have not understood the significance of this doctrine. 45 Thanks to a reader from the Journal of Nietzsche Studies for this insight. 46 Zarathustra, p. 16. 47 Ibid., p. 105. 48 Ecce Homo Why I Write Such Good Books, ‘Birth of Tragedy’ 3, p. 81. 49 Zarathustra, p. 106. 50 Ibid., p. 107. 51 The disciple’s interpretation foreshadows what Nietzsche calls the ‘decisive chapter’, ‘Old and New Tablets’. Ecce Homo, Why I Write Such Good Books, ‘Zarathustra’, 4, p. 104. 52 Zarathustra, pp. 110–11. 53 Ibid., p. 112. 54 This is a theme seen in the later passage from Beyond Good and Evil 30: ‘What helps feed or nourish the higher type of man must be almost poisonous to a very different and lesser type.’ (p. 31) 55 Zarathustra, p. 112. 56 Ibid., p. 117. 57 Gay Science, p. 153. 58 This will be more fully elaborated in the subsequent chapter. 59 Zarathustra, ‘On the Three Metamorphoses’, p. 16. 60 Ibid., p. 124.

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61

Ibid., p. 149; cf. Beyond Good and Evil 56. Ibid., p. 125. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid., p. 126. 65 Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 149. 66 Zarathustra I ‘On Reading and Writing’, p. 29. 67 Zarathustra III ‘On the Spirit of Gravity’, p. 158. 68 Ibid., pp. 175–6. 69 Cf. Stack, ‘Eternal Recurrence’, 254. 70 Shapiro, Nietzschean Narratives, pp. 78–80. Heidegger also expresses the same notion, by referring to Beyond Good and Evil 160: ‘You do not love your knowledge enough anymore, as soon as you communicate it.’ (p. 71; see also pp. 207–8) 71 Ecce Homo, Why I Write Such Good Books, ‘Zarathustra’ 1, p. 99. Daniel Conway suggests precisely this: Nietzsche is either ‘surprisingly unfamiliar with (or uncharacteristically silent about) his own signature teaching of affirmation’. Nietzsche and the Political (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 104. 72 Ecce Homo, ‘Zarathustra’, 1, p. 100. 73 Zarathustra, p. 264. 74 Gay Science 12: ‘if you want to decrease and diminish people’s susceptibility to pain, you also have to decrease and diminish their capacity for joy’ (p. 38). 75 Zarathustra, p. 263. 76 Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche contra Rousseau, p. 179. 77 Ibid., p. 191. 78 Beyond Good and Evil, pp. 50–1. 79 Twilight ‘The Four Great Errors’, 8, p. 36. 80 Reginster, Affirmation of Life, p. 223. 81 Solomon, Living with Nietzsche, p. 14. 62

Chapter 3: Amor fati: Self as Narrative 1

Two variations can be seen in literature: in the first, the apparently free choice, usually attempting to subvert the fated outcome, causes the outcome (Laius abandoning Oedipus on a hillside to avoid being killed, in conjunction with Oedipus’

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leaving his ‘home’ to avoid killing his father; or the servant fleeing to Samarra in W. Somerset Maugham’s retelling of an old tale). The second sense of ‘fate’ allows more variety of choice, but an inevitable outcome: for instance, two people’s various near misses, but eventually meeting and falling in love. In both cases, we see a teleological element absent in determinism: I will argue that Nietzsche rejects both of these understandings of fatalism as part of his larger rejection of teleology. 2 George Stack, ‘Nietzsche’s Antinomianism’, Nietzsche-Studien, 20 (1991), 114. 3 Assorted Opinions and Maxims, p. 293. 4 Wanderer and His Shadow, p. 325. 5 Beyond Good and Evil, p. 22. 6 Gay Science, p. 205. 7 Twilight, p. 55. 8 Genealogy, p. 60. 9 Ecce Homo, p. 45. 10 Ibid., pp. 103–4. 11 Antichrist, pp. 569–70. 12 Ibid. 13 Gay Science, p. 236. 14 Twilight, p. 36. 15 Joan Stambaugh, The Other Nietzsche (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), p. 91. 16 Zarathustra, p. 112. 17 Gay Science, p. 157. 18 Ibid. 19 Nietzsche contra Wagner, p. 680. 20 Beyond Good and Evil, p. 8. 21 Ecce Homo, p. 68. 22 Beyond Good and Evil, p. 152. 23 Zarathustra, p. 155. 24 Twilight, p. 30. 25 Ecce Homo, p. 124. 26 Will to Power, pp. 536–7. 27 Twilight, p. 29. 28 The Other Nietzsche, p. 90. 29 Ibid., p. 83.

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Ibid. Ibid. 32 Ibid., p. 84. 33 Ibid. 34 Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, p. 81. Presumably, these ‘other factors’ are elements of the environment. 35 Nehamas, Nietzsche, p. 173. 36 Cf. Beyond Good and Evil 24, where Nietzsche writes of a ‘granitnen Grunde von Unwissenheit’. 37 Beyond Good and Evil, p. 17. 38 E.g., Schacht, Nietzsche, p. 132. 39 Will to Power, p. 268. 40 Beyond Good and Evil, p. 17. 41 Ibid., p. 20. 42 This greatly oversimplifies Nietzsche’s thinking on this point. It would be more accurate to say that for Nietzsche, thought is pre-linguistic but necessarily filtered through language. This will be dealt with at greater length in subsequent chapters. 43 Twilight, p. 32. 44 Ibid., p. 20. 45 Gay Science, p. 214. 46 Genealogy, p. 28. 47 This conclusion is reminiscent of a passage from the founder of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory: ‘But what if those same tendencies [to represent dependencies] should lead us to imagine things and causes that do not exist? Then we’ll invent false gods and superstitions and see their hand in every chance coincidence. Indeed, perhaps that strange word ‘‘I’’ – as used in ‘‘I just had a good idea’’ – reflects the selfsame tendency.’ Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), p. 232. 48 Genealogy, p. 28. 49 Daybreak, p. 72. 50 Beyond Good and Evil, p. 14. 51 In this rejection, Nietzsche is making a point similar to the one Hume had made in the previous century. In A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume writes, 31

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when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are remov’d for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. (ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 252.) Both Hume and Nietzsche attack the idea that the self is immediately certain to us, and that it is a perfect identity and simplicity (e.g. BGE 16) Hume also notes that ‘[t]he identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one’ (Treatise, p. 259), and concludes that the questions about personal identity are grammatical, rather than philosophical (Treatise, p. 262). Similarly, Nietzsche sees the belief in the self as a ‘perspective illusion’ – something constructed by the apparent unity of our perceptions (cf. WP 518). Unlike Hume, however, who takes this to be a stopping point, Nietzsche uses the rejection of this sort of self as a starting point for a new conception of the self. The parallel is particularly important insofar as the philosophers I draw on from the Anglo-American tradition take their inspiration from Hume rather than Nietzsche. 52 White, Nietzsche and the Problem of Sovereignty, p. 150. 53 Assorted Opinions and Maxims, p. 294. 54 Solomon, Living with Nietzsche, p. 183. 55 Zarathustra, p. 23. 56 Will to Power, p. 132. 57 Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (San Diego, CA: A Harvest Book/Harcourt, 1999), pp. 173–4. 58 Will to Power, p. 281. 59 Beyond Good and Evil, p. 14. 60 Daybreak, p. 74. 61 ‘Self-representation in Nervous Systems’, Science, 296:5566 (2002), 309. 62 Beyond Good and Evil, p. 161. 63 Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, p. 83.

Notes 64

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The process is undoubtedly more complex than this, for one would need to take into consideration what specific features of, e.g., shopkeeping appeal to each individual: sociability, orderliness, providing for the needs of others, etc. 65 Nehamas, Nietzsche, p. 175. 66 Joseph LeDoux, The Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (New York: Penguin, 2002), p. 66. 67 This theory has been developed in a number of Dennett’s works, particularly Consciousness Explained (Boston, MA: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown, 1991), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York, Touchstone Books/Simon and Schuster, 1995) and ‘The Self as Center of Narrative Gravity’, in F. Kessell, P. Cole and D. Johnson (eds), Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1992), pp. 275–8. 68 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue. 2nd edn (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). 69 Ibid., p. 216. 70 Ibid., p. 215. 71 Ibid., p. 213. 72 Dennett, Consciousness Explained, pp. 253–4. 73 Ibid. 74 Assorted Opinions and Maxims, p. 218. 75 Reginster, Affirmation of Life, p. 213. 76 Nehamas, Nietzsche, p. 157. Cf. Gottfried Leibniz, ‘Discourse on Metaphysics’ §13: ‘Since the Individual Notion of Each Person Includes Once and for All Everything That Will Ever Happen to Him, One Sees in It the A Priori Proofs of the Truth of Each Event, or, Why One Happened Rather Than Another’, Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), p. 44. 77 Nehamas, Nietzsche, p. 157. 78 Richard Shusterman, ‘Nietzsche and Nehamas on Organic Unity’, Southern Journal of Philosophy, 26:3 (1988), 379–92. The question of what replaces an agent who would choose will be addressed in a subsequent chapter. 79 Schacht, ‘Beyond Aestheticism’, Making Sense of Nietzsche (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), p. 109.

140 80

Notes

Harold Bloom, Genius: a Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (New York: Warner Books, 2002), p. 18. 81 Ibid., p. 28. 82 Nehamas, Nietzsche, p. 89. 83 This point is made throughout chapter 15 of After Virtue. 84 Genealogy, p. 95. 85 The appearance changes, but the behavioural patterns persist: the change in external circumstances does not really change what is taken to be essential about the person. 86 Reginster, Affirmation of Life, pp. 220–1. 87 Schacht, ‘Beyond Aestheticism’, p. 110. 88 Ibid., p. 115. 89 Shusterman, ‘Nietzsche and Nehamas on Organic Unity’, 388–9, 392 n. 9. 90 Nehamas, Nietzsche, p. 189. 91 Zarathustra, p. 9. 92 Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, p. 223. 93 Twilight, p. 6. 94 Solomon, Living with Nietzsche, p. 32. 95 Gay Science, p. 170. 96 Also Damasio: ‘The changes which occur in the autobiographical self over an individual lifetime are not due only to the remodeling of the lived past that takes place consciously and unconsciously, but also to the laying down and remodeling of the anticipated future.’ The Feeling of What Happens, p. 224. But, like Dennett, Damasio takes this descriptively rather than normatively. 97 Ecce Homo, p. 64. 98 White, Nietzsche and the Problem of Sovereignty, p. 168. 99 LeDoux, Synaptic Self, p. 319–20. 100 Yirmiyahu Yovel, ‘Nietzsche and Spinoza’, in Yirmiyahu Yovel (ed.), Nietzsche as Affirmative Thinker (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1986), pp. 107–8. 101 Beyond Good and Evil, pp. 50–1. 102 Zarathustra, p. 269. 103 Beyond Good and Evil, p. 65.

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Chapter 4: Conferring Meaning on the Whole 1

Paul M. Churchland, Matter and Consciousness, revised edn (Cambridge, MA: A Bradford Book/The MIT Press, 1988), p. 55. 2 Cornel West, ‘Nietzsche’s Prefiguration of Postmodern American Philosophy’, boundary 2, 9:3 and 10:1 (1981), 241–69. 3 Ibid., 252. 4 W.V.O. Quine, ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, From a Logical Point of View. 2nd edn, revised (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 41. 5 Beyond Good and Evil, p. 19. 6 Ibid., p. 14. 7 Genealogy, p. 55. 8 Arthur Danto, ‘Some Remarks on The Genealogy of Morals’, in Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins (eds), Reading Nietzsche (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 25. 9 Ibid., p. 26. 10 Genealogy, p. 48. 11 Danto, ‘Some Remarks’, p. 24. 12 In the essay ‘The Importance of What We Care About’, Harry Frankfurt makes an important distinction between a lack of intrinsic worth – ‘nothing is worth caring about’ – and a lack of caring on our part – ‘nothing is of any importance to us’. Nietzsche (along with Frankfurt) holds the former, and accuses science of supporting the latter. Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 91 n. 3. 13 Genealogy, p. 127. 14 M.C. Sterling, ‘Recent Discussions of Eternal Recurrence’, Nietzsche-Studien, 6 (1977), 287. 15 Gay Science, p. 38. 16 See Jonny Anomaly, ‘Nietzsche’s Critique of Utilitarianism’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 29 (2005), 1–15. 17 Gay Science, p. 239. 18 Twilight, p. 55. 19 Will to Power, p. 267. 20 Beyond Good and Evil, p. 7. 21 E.g., The Will to Power 588, p. 322.

142 22

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Quine, ‘Two Dogmas’, p. 44. Will to Power, p. 296. 24 The biology behind this will be dealt with below in the exposition of connectionism. 25 Pinker, How the Mind Works, p. 561. 26 Gay Science, p. 238. 27 Cf. Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 201. 28 Gay Science, p. 245. 29 Patricia Churchland, Neurophilosophy (Cambridge, MA: A Bradford Book/The MIT Press, 1986), ch. 1. 30 Damasio, Looking for Spinoza (New York: Harcourt, 2003), p. 15. 31 Pinker, How the Mind Works, p. 128. 32 See Patricia Churchland, Neurophilosophy, and Patricia Churchland and Terence Sejnowski, The Computational Brain (Cambridge, MA: A Bradford Book/The MIT Press, 1992). 33 Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again (Cambridge, MA: A Bradford Book/The MIT Press, 1997), p. 55; see also Pinker, How the Mind Works, pp. 99ff. 34 Paul Churchland, Engine of Reason, Seat of the Soul (Cambridge, MA: A Bradford Book/The MIT Press, 1995), pp. 77–9. 35 Ibid., pp. 27–52. 36 This account primarily draws upon Andy Clark, Microcognition (Cambridge, MA: A Bradford Book/The MIT Press, 1989); Paul Churchland, Engine of Reason, Seat of the Soul; and Paul Churchland, A Neurocomputational Perspective (Cambridge, MA: A Bradford Book/The MIT Press, 1989). 37 Jeffrey L. Elman, Elizabeth A. Bates, Mark H. Johnson, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Domenico Parisi and Kim Plunkett, Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development (Cambridge, MA: A Bradford Book/The MIT Press, 1996), pp. 84ff. 38 For a related argument concerning Nietzsche’s holism, see Paul Katsafanas, ‘Nietzsche’s Theory of Mind’, European Journal of Philosophy, 13:1 (2005), 17. 39 ‘Introduction’ to May, Friedman and Clark, Mind and Morals, pp. 5–6. 23

Notes 40

143

The social dimension of meaning holism comes into play here: the person learning the concept is shown various exemplars in order to form the concept, and corrected if he or she mistakenly applies the concept to something outside the socially recognized concept – e.g., a child misidentifies a cat as a dog. This is the kind of ‘training’ which helps the child recognize further dimensions relevant to the concept. 41 Paul Churchland, A Neurocomputational Perspective, p. 104. 42 Ibid., p. 17. This account draws most heavily on ‘Eliminative Materialism and Propositional Attitudes’ reprinted as chapter 1, ‘Some Reductive Strategies in Cognitive Neurobiology’, reprinted as chapter 5, and ‘On the Nature of Theories: A Neurocomputational Perspective’, reprinted as chapter 9. 43 Pinker, How the Mind Works, p. 305; see also Clark, Being There: ‘Our brains . . . were not designed as instruments of unhurried, fully informed reason’ (p. 181). 44 Gay Science, p. 214. 45 Paul Churchland, A Neurocomputational Perspective, p. 18. 46 Ibid. See also Robert N. McCauley (ed.), The Churchlands and their Critics (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), p. 276. 47 John Searle, Minds, Brains and Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); and The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge MA: A Bradford Book/The MIT Press, 1992). 48 This argument first appeared in John Searle, ‘Minds, Brains, and Programs’, The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3 (1980), 417–24. I have also drawn upon Searle, Minds, Brains and Science, ch. 2. While the Chinese room more closely depicts earlier functionalist models of the mind, it is more generally applicable to all rule-following systems, including the connectionist model. 49 As mentioned above, one advantage of connectionist architecture is precisely its processing speed; rather than a single person looking through a rulebook, we might imagine instead a group of people, each one of whom performs some small operation. Of course, the conclusion is the same: these people certainly do not know Chinese, under the given description. The fact that the connectionist model reacts faster than its serial

144

Notes

counterpart does count in its favour with regard to assessment of intelligence. 50 Clark, Being There, p. 60. 51 Clark, Microcognition, p. 100. 52 E.g., ‘the impossibility of an ontological reduction in the case of consciousness does not give it any mysterious metaphysical status’. John Searle, ‘Why I Am not a Property Dualist’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 9:12 (2002), 62. 53 Searle, ‘How to Study Consciousness Scientifically’, in John Cornwell (ed.), Consciousness and Human Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 26. 54 Searle, Engine of Reason, pp. 204–8. 55 Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore, Holism: a Shopper’s Guide (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1992); Jerry Fodor, Psychosemantics (Cambridge, MA: A Bradford Book/The MIT Press, 1987), esp. ch. 3, ‘Meaning Holism’. 56 Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore, ‘Paul Churchland and State Space Semantics’ and ‘Reply to Churchland’, in McCauley, The Churchlands and their Critics. 57 Holism, p. 20. 58 E.g., one’s father’s brother has a wife named ‘Omalene’, whereas the other person is the child of only children, but had a cat named ‘Aunt Kipp’. 59 See Quine, ‘Two Dogmas’, pp. 42–3. 60 It might be possible to specify that we have innate concepts, and that therefore these interconnections are already in the head, and therefore that we share content on this basis; however, this would necessitate us relying in at least some instances on relations of which we are unaware in order to share concepts. 61 See, e.g., Paul Churchland, ‘Conceptual Similarity and Sensory/Neural Diversity’, The Journal of Philosophy, 45:1 (1998), 8. 62 ‘Semantics in a New Vein’, in McCauley, The Churchlands and their Critics, p. 275. 63 Ibid., p. 276. 64 Ibid., p. 281. 65 Paul Churchland, ‘Conceptual Similarity’, 30. 66 Ibid., 12.

Notes

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67

Ibid., 23. Beyond Good and Evil, p. 163. 69 Gay Science, p. 212. 70 Beyond Good and Evil, p. 159. 71 Ibid., p. 138. 72 Gay Science, p. 213. 73 Twilight, p. 65. 74 Beyond Good and Evil, p. 82. 75 Genealogy, p. 84. This resonates with an important feature of Paul Churchland’s position that language, and by extension communication, is secondary to thought. For both Churchland and Nietzsche, this also allows that our thinking is an extension of, and not radically different from, the cognitive processes of other animals. 68

Chapter 5: Connectionism, Ethics, and Narrative 1

Paul Churchland: A Neurocomputational Perspective, ch. 14; ‘Flanagan on Moral Knowledge’, in McCauley, The Churchlands and their Critics, pp. 302–6; Engine of Reason; ‘The Neural Representation of the Social World’, in May, Friedman and Clark, Mind and Morals, pp. 91–108. Owen Flanagan: ‘The Moral Network’, in McCauley, The Churchlands and their Critics, pp. 192–215; ‘Ethics Naturalized’, Self Expressions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 117–41. 2 Churchland cites Aristotle’s precedent in this regard. Engine of Reason, p. 150. 3 Paul Churchland, Neurocomputational Perspective, p. 299. 4 Paul Churchland, Engine of Reason, p. 150. 5 Paul Churchland, Neurocomputational Perspective, p. 300. 6 Flanagan, ‘Moral Network’, p. 193. On the necessary incompleteness of moral rules, see also Dennett, ‘Moral First Aid Manual’. 7 Churchland, Engine of Reason, p. 293. 8 Flanagan, ‘Moral Network’, pp. 198–205. 9 Paul Churchland, Engine of Reason, p. 323. 10 Paul Churchland, Neurocomputational Perspective p. 300; Flanagan, ‘Ethics Naturalized’, p. 126.

146 11

Notes

Churchland’s article, ‘Conceptual Similarity across Sensory and Neural Diversity: The Fodor/Lepore Challenge Answered’, Journal of Philosophy, 45:1 (1998), 5–32, which addresses the basic issues dealt with in the previous chapter (although in a significantly different manner than I addressed them), raises this same problem: while demonstrating that significantly different networks come to similar conclusions in categorizing certain features of the world, he fails to account for differences in categorization – the basic form of the problem I raise here. 12 Clark, ‘Connectionism, Moral Cognition, and Collaborative Problem-Solving’, in May, Friedman and Clark, Mind and Morals, pp. 118–19. 13 Ibid., p. 114. 14 MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 206. 15 Paul Churchland, Engine of Reason, pp. 213–14. 16 Michael Tye, ‘The Burning House’, in Thomas Metzinger (ed.), Conscious Experience (Scho¨ningh: Imprint Academic, 1995), p. 84. For a discussion of discriminatory consciousness in Nietzsche, see Paul Katsafanas, ‘Nietzsche’s Theory of Mind’, European Journal of Philosophy, 13:1 (2005), 8–9. 17 Tye, ‘Burning House’, p. 84. 18 Dennett, Freedom Evolves, pp. 246–7. 19 Gay Science, p. 212. 20 Genealogy, p. 105. 21 Ibid., p. 63. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., p. 18. 24 Ibid. 25 Pinker, How the Mind Works, p. 112. 26 Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p. 228. 27 Beyond Good and Evil, p. 18. 28 Dennett, ‘Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity’, Consciousness Explained. 29 Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p. 418. 30 Dennett, ‘Producing the Future by Telling Stories’, Brainchildren, pp. 212–13. This is not limited to the agent passively observing the world; cf. ‘Cognitive Wheels’, Brainchildren, pp. 191ff., on how these scripts can be used to guide an agent

Notes

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through a complex environment to realize a goal with many intermediate steps. 31 As with Quine, Dennett (and Nietzsche) holds that theory – in this case, an interpretation – is always underdetermined by one’s experience. In other words, a given experience does not compel a particular type of story, but is compatible with a number of competing and possibly mutually exclusive interpretations. 32 MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 208. 33 Beyond Good and Evil, p. 14. 34 Genealogy, p. 38. 35 Beyond Good and Evil, p. 19. 36 Ibid., p. 20. 37 Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p. 222. 38 Dennett, ‘Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity’, p. 113. 39 Dennett, Freedom Evolves, p. 254. 40 MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 215. 41 Daniel C. Dennett, Elbow Room (Cambridge, MA: A Bradford Book/The MIT Press 1984), p. 80; cf. Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), p. 512. 42 Beyond Good and Evil, p. 17. 43 E.g., Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, pp. 91–2. 44 Graham Parkes, Composing the Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 353. 45 Cf. Dennett, ‘Moral First Aid Manual’. 46 White, Nietzsche and the Problem of Sovereignty, p. 135. 47 Beyond Good and Evil, p. 59. 48 Genealogy, p. 39. 49 Owen Flanagan, Consciousness Reexamined (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991), p. 199. 50 Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Sciences for Ethics (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 196. 51 See Katsafanas, ‘Nietzsche’s Theory of Mind’. 52 Nehamas, Nietzsche, p. 180. 53 See, e.g., the concluding chapter of Dennett, Elbow Room.

148

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Chapter 6: Freedom and Responsibility 1

Zarathustra, p. 23. See, e.g., Beyond Good and Evil 21. 3 Solomon, Living with Nietzsche, p. 77. 4 The objections of both Held and Sterba, mentioned in the introduction, have both been addressed. Held’s objection – that appeal to the natural world omits the necessarily interpretative aspect of ethical evaluation – has been addressed in two ways. First, Nietzsche sees the interpretation of events as providing a significance they do not otherwise possess; thus, interpretation is deeply imbedded in his ethics. Second, the tacit meaning holism attributed to Nietzsche moves him from the static context of the Moral Network Theory into a dynamic narrative model. By conceiving the narrative in terms of an interpretative unity that affirms the entire universe from one’s own perspective, the evaluation resists any notion of a univocal interpretation, and does not appeal to consensus for ‘correctness’. Similarly, Sterba’s objection that naturalized ethics are intrinsically conservative because they appeal to current standards and modes of evaluation is also taken into account in the above theory. By viewing the individual as undertaking a fundamentally creative act, Nietzsche’s position blocks a simple appeal to past interpretative styles. The possibility that the individual can appropriate and utilize an older form remains, of course, but the theory is not inherently conservative. 5 Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, p. 83. 6 Ibid., p. 98. 7 He also includes being a self-caused cause as part of the autonomy that Nietzsche denies. Leiter stresses that, since forces in which we had no role or choice have already determined the background of our values, the ways in which we react against them and transform them are also already determined; thus, we are not autonomous in the way we typically think we are. This second part of Leiter’s argument will be addressed later in the chapter. 8 Gay Science, p. 225. 9 Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, p. 100. 2

Notes 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Schacht, Nietzsche, p. 303. Ibid., p. 101. Ibid. Gay Science, p. 225. Schacht, Nietzsche, p. 304. Dennett, Freedom Evolves, p. 123. Daybreak, p. 65. Solomon, Living with Nietzsche, p. 59. Wanderer and His Shadow, p. 305. Ibid., p. 306. Ibid. Daybreak, p. 79. Genealogy, p. 29. White, Nietzsche and the Problem of Sovereignty, p. 83. Twilight, p. 77. Beyond Good and Evil, p. 78. Genealogy, p. 63. Beyond Good and Evil, p. 19. Zarathustra, p. 161; cf. Beyond Good and Evil 21. Beyond Good and Evil, p. 18. Twilight, p. 35. Genealogy, p. 28. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 177. Ibid., p. 6. Twilight, p. 35. Solomon, Living with Nietzsche, p. 156. Wanderer and His Shadow, p. 319. Ibid., p. 390. Gay Science, p. 149. Daybreak, p. 226. Wanderer and His Shadow, p. 313. Ibid., p. 315. Zarathustra, p. 26. Beyond Good and Evil, p. 64. Twilight, p. 80. Daybreak, p. 33. Beyond Good and Evil, p. 64. Genealogy, p. 63.

149

150 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

Notes

White, Nietzsche and the Problem of Sovereignty, p. 134. Genealogy, p. 18. Ibid. Solomon, Living with Nietzsche, p. 200. Genealogy, p. 40. Reginster, Affirmation of Life, p. 190. Solomon, Living with Nietzsche, p. 171. Twilight, p. 74. Reginster Affirmation of Life, p. 192. Daybreak, p. 60. Solomon, Living with Nietzsche, p. 177. Genealogy, p. 89. Twilight, ‘Raids of the Untimely Man’, pp. 38, 74. White, Nietzsche and the Problem of Sovereignty, p. 86. Assorted Opinions and Maxims, p. 294. Gay Science, p. 206. Twilight, p. 31. Wanderer and His Shadow, p. 361-2. Dennett, Freedom Evolves, p. 122. Twilight, pp. 30–1. Zarathustra, p. 68. Twilight, p. 74. MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 224. Gay Science, p. 132.

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Index

agency 5, 41, 45, 69, 99, 108, 109, 125 amor fati 6, 7–8, 20, 27, 29–39, 48, 51, 54–5, 57, 63, 109, 123, 125 Anomaly, Jonny 141n.16 Ansell-Pearson, Keith 25, 130n. 3, 135n.76 anti-realism/anti-realist 58, 64, 83 Aristotle 46 art 49, 52, 82 artificial intelligence 4, 45, 66, 67 ascetic ideal 2, 3, 26, 61 autobiography 10, 45, 97, 99 autonomy Condition 108 bad 34, 55, 62, 95, 98 ‘become who you are’ 10, 37 biology/biological 43, 70, 72, 85, 97 Blanchot, Maurice 133n. 31 blond beast 2, 107, 113, 121 Bloom, Harold 49, 140n. 80 bobsled 124 categorical imperative 10, 11, 27, 89, 125 Cartesian Theater 5, 96 causa sui 69, 122

causal essentialism 16, 107 causal unity 50, 55, 102 character 4, 43, 46, 89, 102, 122 fictional/literary 45, 46, 49, 50, 96, 99, 101 child 20, 21 Chinese Room Argument 74–5, 77–8 Christians/Christianity 2, 7, 33, 41, 45, 59, 61 Churchland, Patricia, 43, 67, 142 nn. 29, 32 Churchland, Paul 4–6, 8, 57, 59, 64–5, 66–7, 70–4, 77–8, 80–94, 96–7, 102, 106, 141–6 Clark, Andy 67, 68. 76, 92, 100, 142n.36, 143n. 43, 144nn. 50–1, 146n. 12 Clark, Maudemarie 131n. 10 compatibilism 107 conscience 116 bad 102, 113 consciousness 2, 4–6, 10, 45, 47, 55, 65, 70, 72, 77, 83, 87, 93–7, 99, 102, 106–8, 111, 113, 120 higher-order 87, 93, 95–6 self 1–3, 55, 94, 111–13, 119–21

158

Index

Conway, Daniel 135n. 79 Cooke, Alexander 131n. 13 courage 20–1, 31, 37, 55, 123 culture 58, 63, 64, 82, 118 Damasio, Antonio 42, 52, 66, 138n. 57, 140nn. 92, 96, 142n 30 Danto, Arthur 60–1, 130n. 2, 131n. 9, 133n. 28, 141nn. 8–9, 11 Deleuze, Gilles 7, 12, 130n. 17, 132n. 13 demon 17, 19, 22 Dennett, Daniel 4–6, 9, 45–7, 49, 55, 87, 93, 96–103, 106, 109, 111, 125, 129nn 8–9, 133n. 36, 139nn. 72–3, 140n. 96, 146nn. 18, 26, 28–30, 147, 149n. 15, 150n. 66 determinism 7, 8, 11, 13, 16, 18, 22, 26, 27, 29, 60, 106, 109, 110, 114, 131nn 5, 6, 136n 1 Dionysian affirmation 7, 37, 39 education, moral 89, 91, 92, ego 5, 8, 40, 41, 100 Elman, Jeffrey 142n. 37 epiphenomenal/ epiphenomenalism 99, 107, 108 eternal recurrence 6, 7, 8, 11–27, 29, 32–5, 37–8, 41, 43, 60, 109, 123, 125 ethics 5–7, 9–11, 33, 74, 86, 87–8, 92, 102, 106, 115, 118–19

evil 95, 106 fate 8, 9, 29–32, 38–40, 42–4, 54, 114, 124 fatalism 7, 29–32, 54, 107 fiction 39, 40, 46, 55 Flanagan, Owen 88–9, 91–2, 101, 145nn. 1, 6, 8, 10, 147n. 49 Fodor, Jerry 59, 74, 78–81, 83–5, 144n. 55–7 Frankfurt, Harry 141n. 12 freedom 2, 8, 22, 94, 103, 105–7, 109–15, 117, 119–26 free will 7–9, 11, 41, 103, 105–7, 109–15, 119, 122–4 Freud/Freudian 39, 87 Goldberg, David 132n. 28 gravity, spirit of 19, 21–6, 36, 116, 125 guilt 2, 94, 115–17, 119, 122, 125 Haar, Michel 7–8, 133n. 35 health 15, 35–6, 102, 123 Heidegger, Martin 12, 23, 132n. 13, 133n. 41, 135m. 70 Held, Virginia 5–6, 129n. 10, 148n. 4 herd 1, 47, 52 higher men 25, 49, 51–2 history 17, 60, 97, 116 of humanity/mankind 2, 95, 120 holism 57–9, 64, 70–1, 73–4, 78, 80, 84, 87, 103 humanity 13, 61, 63, 95, 114, 115, 116, 121

Index

Hume, David 6, 45, 137–8n. 51 ideal 49, 51, 100, 119, 126 ascetic (see ‘ascetic ideal’) ethical 26, 48 herd 52 Nietzsche’s 48 individual 4, 8, 10, 26, 27, 31, 32, 34, 38, 40–8, 50, 54–5, 57, 62, 71, 72, 80, 82, 85, 91, 92, 94, 99, 101, 112, 116, 118, 121, 122 instinct 1, 2, 4, 42, 62, 94, 111, 112, 113, 119, 120, 124 interpretation 30, 41, 55, 61–4, 91, 93, 97, 100–2 of the eternal recurrence 11, 19, 21, 25, 26 cosmological 12–13 deterministic 24, 60 moral 60 religious 116 scientific 15 Kant, Immanuel 9. 10, 11, 27, 103, 109 Katsafanas, Paul 142n. 38, 146n. 16, 147n. 51 Kaufmann, Walter 17, 132n. 28, 133n. 40 Klossowski, Pierre 133n. 34 knowledge 41, 76, 88, 117 moral 88, 91, 92 self 37 language 23, 40–2, 44, 45, 58, 64, 73, 82, 83, 85, 89–92, 95–6, 100, 110

159

last man 34 laughter 19, 22 law 15, 16, 38, 43, 106 LeDoux, Joseph 44, 54, 139n. 66, 140n. 99 Leibniz, Gottfried 48, 139n. 76 Leiter, Brian 16, 39, 43–4, 107–9, 130n. 3, 133n. 38, 137n. 34, 138n. 63, 147n. 43, 148nn. 5–7, 9 Lepore, Ernest 144n. 55 lie 89–90 life 2–4, 15–17, 21, 25, 31, 34–5, 37, 39, 40, 43, 46, 48, 50, 52–3, 55, 61, 62, 63, 77, 94, 110, 111, 115, 120, 121 literary character 45, 49, 50 love of fate see amor fati MacIntyre, Alasdair 45–7, 50, 92, 97, 99, 126, 139n. 68, 140n. 83, 146n. 14, 147nn. 32, 40, 150n. 70 Magnus, Bernd 13, 131n. 10, 132n. 16 masters 1–3, 87, 94, 107, 111, 113, 119–21 metaphysics 55 Mileur, Jean-Pierre 131n. 10 Minksy, Marvin 137n. 47 morality 1, 2, 3, 6, 60, 92, 95, 106–7, 115–16, 120, 121, 126 Moral Network Theory 9, 86–93, 96, 101, 106 moment 18, 21, 25, music 3, 49

160

Index

narrative self 5, 45–8, 50, 57, 86, 87, 96–103, 105–6, 125 nature 44, 54, 62 innermost 35, 37 of self 59 of time 23, 25, 26, of the universe 18, 26, 110 naturalism 5, 56, 69, 77 naturalized account of consciousness/theory of mind 3, 5, 77, 87, 94, 95, 96, 106, 113 of meaning 8, 59, 65, 70, 73, 74, 86 Nehamas, Alexander 22, 29–30, 39, 40, 44–5, 47–52, 54, 102, 135n. 65, 137n. 35, 139nn. 65, 76–7, 140nn. 82, 90, 147n. 52 nihilism 2, 3, 7, 15, 34, 58, 74 Palencik, Joseph T 130n. 2, 131n. 10, 132n. 17 Parkes, Graham 99, 147n. 44 perspectivism 4, 8, 56, 74, pessimism 32 Pinker, Steven 63, 67, 72, 95, 96, 132n. 18, 142mm. 31, 33, 143n. 43, pity 117 power 82, 113, 121, 124 feeling of 111 -less 95, 120 priest 95, promise 88, 95, 100 punishment 2, 53, 112, 116

Quine, Willard Van Orman 58, 63–4, 100, 141n 4, 142n 22, 144n. 59, 147n 31 reactive 116, 119, 125 realism 49, 58, 73 Reginster, Bernard 26, 48, 51, 53, 121–2, 130n 3, 135n 80, 139n 75, 140n 86, 150nn 53, 56 reinterpretation 43, 44, 53 religious tradition 3, 99, 116 responsible, holding others 114, 115, 118 responsibility 2, 7–11, 29, 30, 41, 47, 61, 94, 103, 106, 107, 111, 115–17, 119, 102, 124 taking 6, 9, 10, 107, 120–3, 125–6 ressentiment 31, 120 revaluation 5, 27, 44, 48, 55, 111 revenge 117 science 13–15, 30, 41, 58, 61, 63, 66, 103, cognitive 10, 45, 65, 105 neuro- 4, 65 Schacht, Richard 7, 48, 51–2, 108, 130n 14–6, 137n 38, 139n 79, 140nn 87–8, 149nn 10–12, 14 Searle, John 73–77, 144nn 53–4 Sejnowski, Terence 142n. 32 self 5, 7, 8, 9, 29–30, 39–42, 44–9, 51, 54, 55, 57, 59, 86, 96–103, 106, 107, 119, 124, 125

Index

as center of narrative gravity 5, 97, 99, 101 becoming 54 Cartesian 41, 99, 102 – consciousness see consciousness, self knowledge 37 mastery 108, 109 overcoming 51, 54 Shapiro, Gary 23, 131n 10, 135n 70 Shusterman, Richard 48, 139n 78, 140n 89 slave morality 2, 95, 120, 121 Small, Robin 12, 130n 2, 132n 15 socio-psychological analysis 39 Soll, Ivan 11–12, 131n 8–9 Solomon, Robert 12, 26, 42, 53, 105, 109, 116, 121–2, 130n 13, 131n 11, 132n 16, 138n 54, 140n 94, 148n 3, 149nn 17, 35, 150nn 51, 54, 58 soul 2, 8, 38, 40–3, 45, 47, 50, 57–9, 67, 69, 94, 95, 97, 98, 105, 110, 111, 124 hypothesis 41, 45, 50, 55, 97, 103 Stack, George 12, 29, 130n 2, 131n 12, 133n 28, 135n 69, 136n 2 Stambaugh, Joan 38–9, 44, 136nn 15, 28–30, 137nn 31–33 state-space semantics 8, 9, 65, 84, 86, 88, 93

161

Sterba, James 6, 129n 11, 148n 4 Sterling. M.C. 12, 61, 132n 14, 141n 14 Stewart, Stanley 131n 10 Stoics 19, 26 Strawson, Galen 131n 5 subject detranscendentalization of 58, 59, 99 enduring 46, 96 – multiplicity 43, 97 suffering 60–1, 116, 122 tragedy/tragic 46, 107, 126 truth 3, 4, 12, 41, 58, 62, 72 a priori 64, 80 will to 59–60, 105 Tye, Michael 93, 146nn 16–17 utility/utilitarian 34, 37, 61, 89, 103, 116, 123, 125 virtues 46, 111, 125 Vlastos, Gregory 134m 42 West, Cornel 58, 63, 141n 2, 142n 7 White, Alan 131n 10 White, Richard J 8, 42, 53, 100, 112, 119–20, 123, 130n 19, 138n 52, 140n 98, 147n 46, 149n 23, 150nn 48, 61 Wilcox, John 133n 28 Williams, Bernard 2–4, 115–16, 129nn 2, 4, 149n 32 Williams, Linda L 130n 2, 131n 10, 132n 17

162

Index

Yovel, Yirmiyahu 54, 140n 100

Zarathustra 18–26, 33, 34, 42, 55, 116, 125