The Beginnings of Nietzsche's Theory of Language 9783110862522, 9783110113365

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Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung

w DE

G

Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung Herausgegeben von

Ernst Behler Wolfgang Müller-Lauter · Heinz Wenzel

Band 19

1988

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

The Beginnings of Nietzsche's Theory of Language by

Claudia Crawford

1988

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Anschriften der Herausgeber: Prof. Dr. Ernst Behler Comparative Literature GN-42 University of Washington Seattle, Washington 98195, U.S.A. Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Müller-Lauter Klopstockstraße 27, D-1000 Berlin 37 Prof. Dr. Heinz Wenzel Harnackstraße 16, D-1000 Berlin 33 Redaktion: Johannes Neininger Ithweg 5, D-1000 Berlin 37

Deutsche Bibliothek Cataloguing in Publication Data

Crawford, Claudia: The beginnings of Nietzsche's theory of language / by Claudia Crawford. - Berlin ; New York : de Gruyter, 1988 (Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung ; Bd. 19) ISBN 3-11-011336-8 NE: G T

Copyright 1988 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin 30 Printed in Germany Alle Rechte des Nachdrucks, einschließlich des Rechtes der Herstellung von Photokopien und Mikrofilmen, vorbehalten. Satz und Druck: Arthur Collignon GmbH, Berlin 30 Bindearbeiten: Lüderitz & Bauer, Berlin 61

Language is the most quotidian thing of all: it needs a philosopher to occupy himself with it. Those who find language interesting in itself and others who recognize in it nothing but the medium of interesting thoughts. Nietzsche, Notes for "Homer and Classical Philology"

Language did not return into the field of thought directly and in its own right until the end of the nineteenth century. We might have said until the twentieth century had not Nietzsche, the philologist, been the first to connect the philosophical task with a radical reflection upon language. And now, in this philosophical-philological space opened up for us by Nietzsche, language wells up in an enigmatic multiplicity that must be mastered. ... It is quite possible that all those questions now confronting our curiosity (What is language? What is a sign? What is unspoken in the world, in our gestures, in the whole enigmatic heraldry of our behaviour, our dreams, our sicknesses — does all that speak, and if so in what language and in obedience to what grammar? Is everything significant, and, if not, what is, and for whom, and in accordance with what rules? What relation is there between language and being, and is it really to being that language is always addressed — at least, language that speaks truly? What, then, is this language that says nothing, is never silent, and is called 'literature'?) — it is quite possible that all these questions are presented today (as) ... replies to the questions imposed upon philosophy by Nietzsche. Foucault, The Order of Things

Acknowledgements Acknowledgement is gratefully made to Walter de Gruyter & Co. for permission to translate and reproduce the sections of Nietzsche's notes from volume 7 of the Colli-Montinari edition of Nietzsche's Werke, Berlin, 1967 ff., and to C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung for permission to translate and reproduce "Vom Ursprung der Sprache," "Zur Teleologie," "Zu Schopenhauer," and the untitled notes from July, 1863, all published in volume Werke 3 of the Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, München, 1933 — 42. Acknowledgement is also gratefully made to Professor Ernst Behler, Chair of Comparative Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle and Editor of Nietzsche Studien for his continued interest in and encouragement of this project. Monika Stumpf deserves my gratitude for her careful review of my translations. Acknowledgement is made to the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota, for financial assistance and to my home Department of Humanities and Program in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society, University of Minnesota, for their support in time and materials. Finally, to my husband Larry, a special thanks for his invaluable assistance and unflagging support throughout the preparation of this work.

Preface This work initially grew out of a desire to write a comprehensive study dealing with Nietzsche's theory of language. Nietzsche's theory of language is an especially pertinent area of research for Nietzsche scholars, philosophers, and critics today. In the past three decades many works have been published about Nietzsche, almost all of which acknowledge the importance of his work with language in one of its dimensions or another. It seemed important, therefore, to trace and explore the genealogy of Nietzsche's theory of language from its beginnings through his mature philosophical works. My research revealed, however, that there are several specific phases in the evolution of Nietzsche's theory of language, each of which merits a study in itself. Nietzsche's view of language as a product twice removed from reality, or his "non-correspondence" theory of language, is a much quoted and interpreted idea. In his early unpublished essay, "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," Nietzsche writes that the physical world initiates a nerve stimulus in the human animal. This nerve stimulus is transferred into an image, and the image in turn is imitated in a sound. This rhetorical or metaphorical process ends by giving us words with which to form concepts. In addition, Nietzsche emphasizes that language only becomes possible within a community of speakers who agree upon commonly held conceptions and meanings of words, creating a system of language relevant to that community. Now the problem with taking this essay as a point of departure for understanding Nietzsche's theory of language is that it encapsulates ideas with which he had been working for years. It summarizes in a few sentences some very basic ideas which can be traced in detail in following the influences of Schopenhauer, Lange, and Hartmann upon the beginnings of Nietzsche's theory of language. It has recently been suggested that Nietzsche's essay "On Truth and Lies" as well as his notes for a course on "Rhetoric" take over the major ideas of Gustav Gerber's Die Sprache als Kunst {Language as Art), and thus, that Gerber stands as the most significant source for Nietzsche's early theory of language. 1 However, my research demonstrates that "On Truth and Lies" is a further genealogical development of ideas which Nietzsche had already formed upon the basis of the influences of Kant, 1

See my chapter 14.

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Preface

Schopenhauer, Lange, and Hartmann as they came into contact with Gerber's rhetorical model of language. Gerber offered Nietzsche a new metaphor, that of rhetoric, for a body of ideas concerning language which Nietzsche already had in place by 1871. For Nietzsche, the origins and ongoing process of language do not reside in community, rather, community only becomes possible with the conscious use of language. And conscious use of language itself only becomes possible as a result of purely unconscious instinctual activities of individual human beings. This idea, of the unconscious and instinctual origination of language, which Nietzsche's beginning theory of language demonstrates, finds a place in "On Truth and Lies" in two rather enigmatic sentences: "the artistic transference of a nerve stimulus into images is the mother, if not grandmother of every single concept;"2 and the metaphors which humans agree to use according to fixed conventions and through forgetting their origin in metaphor, originally consist of "a mass of images which streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination." 3 There is first, a continual physiological unconscious origination of language through instinct, and then, consciousness, community, the pathos of truth, and science, grow out of these origins as secondary, weakened processes. According to Nietzsche's beginning theory of language, conscious language provides only an image of an image, a symbol of a symbol, and after Gerber, the metaphor of a metaphor. The individual has a unique unconscious and artistic language of his or her own in images, an idea Nietzsche also expresses in "On Truth and Lies:" "each perceptual metaphor is individual and without equals and is therefore able to elude classification."4 However, when once translated into sounds and the conscious language of the community, it loses its uniqueness and becomes merely conventional, becomes herd language. Nietzsche expresses this contrast between the language of the individual and that of the community repeatedly throughout his work, for example, in Zarathustra, "On Enjoying and Suffering the Passions" or The Gay Science, aphorism 354. Conscious language poses a very definite limit, while in its unconscious artistic aspects, language exists as a most provoking possibility. As a result, in his beginning theory of language, Nietzsche comes to emphasize the artistic nature of the unconscious metaphorical production of language. In describing the intuitive being, as opposed to the rational being in "On Truth and Lies," Nietzsche reiterates his earlier insight, gained from 2

3 4

Nietzsche, WL 85, K S A 1: 882. Please refer to the Key to Abbreviations for Nietzsche's works. Where appropriate, quotes are followed by reference to English translation and original German. Ibid., WL 86, K S A 1: 883. Ibid., WL 84, K S A 1: 882.

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XI

Hartmann, that it might be desirable to make some conscious use of the artistic nature of unconscious language. The intuitive being would be guided by means of intuitions rather than by concepts. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard-of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition (my emphasis). 5

This passage characterizes the artistic, socially subversive, and transformative possibilities of language which Nietzsche's worldview in Anschauung6 first offers, where these very unconscious creative possibilities become an end in themselves. This period, in which Nietzsche thinks about language in terms of rhetoric, has yielded many rich articles for the Nietzsche literature. However, it fits into the overall development of Nietzsche's early theory of language more as a mid-point rather than as its beginning. Another very significant area of Nietzsche's theory of language which needs to be taken into consideration involves the relation of music to language. Nietzsche begins to write about this relation in 1870 — 71 and it remains a constant in his thinking up and through the Case of Wagner. In 1870 music becomes a paradigm against which to measure language, its limitations and possibilities. Nietzsche pursues the distinctions between various unconscious and conscious languages in essays like "The Dionysian Worldview," "Greek Musicdrama," and his fragment on "Music and Words." Music symbolizes the essence of things and represents world harmony. The gesture of the lips, and other gestures, symbolize the appearance of being of human beings. Gesture language, which is completely instinctual and without consciousness, Nietzsche equates with music dynamics. The language of words consists in the merging of the gesture of the lips and tone. Nietzsche considers the language of thoughts and concepts, which he equates with rhythm, to be unconscious feeling transferred into conscious representations. Concepts are a holding in memory of the symbol of the accompanying gestures after the tone has faded away. Because words and the symbolism of human gestures "are measured by the eternal significance of music," it is music which brings to words their force. It is significant to note that the scheme which Nietzsche builds with regard to music and language retains the same structure as his worldview in Anschauung and represents a modification of that scheme. Music corresponds with the Ur-Eine, while unconscious gestures connected to feeling correspond to the first image of the will-acts 5 6

Ibid., WL 90, KSA 1: 888-89. Nietzsche's worldview in Anschauung is offered for the first time in the present work.

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of the Ur-Eine, which humans perceive as tone. Words, then, correspond to human representation, and remain a mere image of this first image. In the worldview in Anschauung human representing can never know the Ur-Eine directly although human beings are one with it in their essence as appearance of its will-acts. In exactly the same way: Music can create images out of itself, which will always however be but schemata, instances as it were of her intrinsic general contents. But how should the image, the representation, create music out of itself! 7

The privileging of music as the most adequate form of expression of the will remains with Nietzsche throughout his thinking. In Zaratbustra singing is lauded over speaking. In his "Attempt at a Self Criticism," Nietzsche calls his own writing a "contrapuntal vocal art and seduction of the ear." 8 In The Case of Wagner Nietzsche writes: "one becomes more of a philosopher the more one becomes a musician." But "Wagner was not a musician by instinct," rather he "increased music's capacity for language," while Nietzsche attempts to increase language's capacity for music. Wagner required the gesture, literature to persuade the world to take his music seriously. Music was a mere means to him, "But no musician would think that way." Nietzsche demands that "music should not become an art of lying." 9 In The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche turns the tables of The Birth of Tragedy against Wagner, rather than for him, and precisely upon the question of the relation of music and words. The ranking in order of priority of effective communication of languages remains constant for Nietzsche: music first, then gesture, and finally the word and conceptuality. Thus, there is another whole study, or a related one, to be found in an examination of how Nietzsche emphasizes not just the language of lips and tongue, but also of facial and bodily gesture, dance, song, performance, imitation, flight, and laughter. 10 This merging of all the human symbolic possibilities or languages, Nietzsche brings together in the Dionysian dithyramb, which permeates the communications of Zarathustra, and which is tied so strongly to the last period of Nietzsche's work in Ecce Homo and the "Dionysus Dithyrambs" where he styles himself "the disciple of Dionysus and the inventor of the dithyramb." 11 With On the Genealogy of Morals yet another specific phase in Nietzsche's thinking about language takes form. Language finds its place in the context of force, in the play of active and reactive forces and the concept of the will 7 8 9 10

11

Nietzsche, MW 33, K S A 7: 362. Nietzsche, G T 25, K S A 1: 21. Nietzsche, DFW 158, 172, 177, 180, K S A 6: 14, 30, 3 5 - 3 6 , 39. For a beginning study along these lines, see Graham Parkes, "The Dance from Mouth to Hand," forthcoming in The Postmodern Nietzsche, Ed. Clayton Koelb. Nietzsche, EH 306, K S A 6: 345.

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to power. Still drawing upon its earlier formulations, Nietzsche now understands language as a force among forces. Language exerts its quanta of energy and is simultaneously acted upon by other forces. Thus, Nietzsche's thinking about language turns from an interest in its origins and manner of unconscious production to a concern with the effects of language change upon humans and cultures. In this context Nietzsche's method of genealogy, as it relates to his theory of language, assumes a pivotal role. In his genealogical analysis of how the slave morality "got its word (and its words) in,'" 2 Nietzsche is interested in tracing meaning changes within human interpretation of events as translations of those events into linguistic forms, as well as the reverse: how linguistic forms and values transform or shape human cultures. Words, when examined from a historical and genealogical point of view, are seen not simply as descriptors of events, but as the very shapers of those events.13 In the works of his last year another phase in Nietzsche's understanding of language is intensified and provides the material for a specific study. Language retains its effectiveness as force and play of forces, but now Nietzsche begins to lay more stress on the power which each individual instance of language production exerts as an instance of value and action. Although this had been integral to his genealogical analysis of ressentiment from a historical perspective, Nietzsche now emphasizes the creator of unknown futures for human beings as one who consciously wields the power of language. Language becomes a dynamic instance of interpretation and valuing, not in a critical sense of a subject who interprets values and then speaks or writes about those interpretations, but in a creative sense where the speaking or writing itself is the new value force embodied. Nietzsche's critique of grammar, yet another fundamental area of his theory of language which needs to be traced from its first formulations in the beginnings of his theory of language and throughout his thinking, rests on this distinction between language as the reportage of a "subject" and language as actually creating being. In 1885 Nietzsche writes: What sets me apart most fundamentally from the metaphysicians, is that: I do not agree with them that it is the "I" which thinks: further I take the "I" itself as a pure construction of thinking, along the same order as "material," "thing," "substance," "individual," "goal," "number:" only as 12 13

Nietzsche, G M 26, K S A 5: 260. Nietzsche poses a question in his note to the First Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals·. "What light does lingustics, and especially the study of etymology, throw on the history of the evolution of moral. concepts?" For ä beginning consideration of this question from a perspective which merges de Saussure's ideas on etymology • and linguistic value with Nietzsche's linguistic genealogy, see my article, "What Light does Linguistics, and Especially the Study of Etymology, Throw on the History of the Evolution of Moral Concepts" in The Paradigm Exchange II, Center for Humanistic Studies, University of Minnesota, 1987.

XIV

Preface regulative fiction, with whose help a kind o f constancy, that means something " k n o w a b l e " is put into a world of becoming, is poeticised (hineingedichtet) into it. The belief in grammar, in the linguistic subject, object, in verbs, has subjugated the metaphysicians up until now: I teach foreswearing o f this belief. 1 4

Nietzsche's theory and practice of language in his last year changes us, moves us, not through its informational or referential nature, its logical arguments, its conceptual wanderings, but by the effectiveness of its metaphorical force. Language no longer names things, rather Nietzsche's language creates things. Because there is no "thing in itself," no truth, to which a word is referred for verification, the word itself stands as the thing. Its power engraves, as Nietzsche expresses it in Twilight of the Idols, "sign upon sign on bronze tablets with the sureness of a destiny." Language, becomes action which makes a difference. Each act of language has the potential for reinforcing or changing the existing value moment, both within the system of language itself, and at the same time, in the broader cultural or moral systems of a people which depend on it. By this time, Nietzsche has contradicted his earlier belief, based upon Lange's "standpoint of the ideal" that metaphysical worlds may and should be created, not as proffering truth about the world, but more in the sense of comforting artistic visions; this is the "metaphysical comfort" of The Birth of Tragedy. However, in his "Attempt at a Self Criticism," written fourteen years later, Nietzsche offers his new perspective that when we use language to will a world, it is always this world that we create. We ought to learn to use the art of language for /to-worldly comfort and "dispatch all metaphysical comforts to the devil — metaphysics in front.'" 5 From the beginnings of his thinking about language, Nietzsche believed that its formal aspects, its unconscious forms and physiological processes (in his later formulations, the will to power) condition any conscious use of conceptuality and abstraction. As a result, as his theory of language evolves, Nietzsche comes more and more to emphasize that if human beings could develop the capacity of exploiting the unconscious forms of language as creative possibilities, and translate them in terms of a conscious willing into force and action, it would be in this essential transforming quality of language, that any hope of transvaluation of values could find its arena of action. Nietzsche's own practice of language in his last year, his value actions, leads him, as Charles Altieri expresses it, not to idealize the will to power as a concept, but to perform

KSA 11: 526. Nietzsche, G T 26, KSA 1: 22. " Charles Altieri, "Ecce Homo: Narcissism, Power, Pathos, and the Status of Autobiographical Representations," Boundary 2, Vols. IX, No. 3 and X, No. 1, Spring/Fall 1981. 14

15

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XV

In an effort to persuade through performance, Nietzsche critiques several instances of philosophical and cultural discourse in which language has exerted its force upon the formation of Western civilization. Throughout his mature work, though in no one text and in no systematic manner, Nietzsche develops a genealogy of five worlds which the Western philosophical tradition has so far interpreted and acted for itself by means of language: the actual, apparent, real, true, and other worlds. In Twilight of the Idols and his "History of an Error," 1 7 Nietzsche describes these worlds as effective instances of linguistic force and emphasizes each as a conceptual phase in an ongoing process of transformation. Each conceptual phase constitutes a creation, by means of words, which has prepared the very perception of life of Western culture and the quality of lives lived in it. Nietzsche then indulges in the freedom of destroying these worlds, of "breaking their words," and in the liberty of creating a new one. By staging a wor(l)d drama in which he replaces the old words with his own, in the most forceful and psychological of styles, by replacing the old worlds with his Dionysian world, Nietzsche desires to create a new phase in world transformation which will result in the actualization of lives of a higher quality. In Zarathustra, in "On Old and New Tablets," Nietzsche had already referred to the destroying and creating power of words when he links the breaking of the old tablets, the old laws, with the breaking of words: "Such words were once called holy ... where have there been such better robbers and killers in this world than in such holy words? ... Break, break this word of the softhearted and half-and-half." 18 In Ecce Homo, Altieri suggests, that Nietzsche heightens the stakes of his personal conflict with history. His autobiography is not offered as a history or an alternative to history, but stands as one of the most forceful tests of historicity itself. I would like to propose one last area of Nietzsche's theory of language which merits a study in itself. It would explore the relationship of Nietzsche's practice of language as transgression of language forms: the language of madness or impropriety, the language of seduction and excess; his refusal of decorum. I contend that this aspect of Nietzsche's practice of language consitutes a phase in his relationship with language which is consciously understood and exploited. Here, Nietzsche's "style" would have to be reexamined. Nietzsche's style cannot be adequately understood as merely exceptionally persuasive, or as constituting a labyrinth from which no redeeming thread need be desired, rather, Nietzsche redefines style altogether. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche makes a crucial distinction between "good style in itself,"

17 18

Nietzsche, G D 485, KSA 6: 8 0 - 8 1 . Nietzsche, Ζ 314, 324, KSA 4: 253, 265. This reference comes from Michael Ryan, "The Act," Glyph, No. 2, 1977.

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which is on a par with "idealism," the "good in itself," the "thing in itself," and his own art of style. Good is any style that really communicates an inward state, that makes no mistake about the signs, the tempo of the signs, the gestures — ... the art of gestures. 19

Nietzsche's "great" style communicates an inward state, "an inward tension of pathos," and not a knowledge. It communicates unique, individual states, but not in the sense of a "subject" telling about itself as "object." The communication uses all the possibilities of symbolic language, unconscious music, and the tempo of that music, and the art of unconscious gestures translated into the signs of a conscious language. To be mistaken about signs would be to use them without tempo, without the art of gestures, to use them merely as concepts. Nietzsche equates the number of his stylistic possibilities with the number of inward states at his disposal: "considering that the multiplicity of inward states is exceptionally large in my case, I have many stylistic possibilities."20 Each inner state has its own style. It is not the style which is constant, that is, "good in itself," "thing in itself," which unifies a host of states. It is rather, that the inward state, in each instance, enacts, performs, communicates the signs, tempo and gestures of its moment of being. In his style, the Dionysian dithyramb, Nietzsche carries to the ultimate point his idea that language is largely an unconscious creative will to power, that it is action, value, that it can, not only poetically, but actually, prepare a stage for its own silence and the beginning of our transvaluing action. The excess, the overfullness, and unheard combinations of metaphors of the intuitive being, referred to above in "On Truth and Lies," with which to break the old conceptual barriers, simply become pathos, gesture, and music in Nietzsche. This work, The Beginnings of Nietzsche's Theory of Language, seems a sober, if not pedantic introduction to Nietzsche's theory of language, as it takes its first forms from the influences of Eduard von Hartmann, Schopenhauer, Lange, Gerber, and others. Still, it is essential to give close attention to these beginning sources, because although Nietzsche modified and carried to their ultimate conclusions his work with language in the areas just outlined, the basic relationship of language to epistemology, the understanding of language as at once, a limit and a possibility of the greatest kind are prepared at this early point out of these influences.

19 20

Nietzsche, EH 265, K S A 6: 304. Ibid.

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To Nietzsche, then, whose language, and the multifarious art of that language, provides a source of continuing delight, riddle enough and more for any searcher and researcher. Minneapolis, Minnesota September, 1987

Claudia Crawford

Table of Contents Acknowledgements Preface Key to Abbreviations Introduction Theory and Method The Beginnings of Nietzsche's Theory of Language: 1863—1873 The Texts I. Eduard von Hartmann and the Unconscious II. Schopenhauer Language and Representation Schopenhauer's Departure from Kant The Subject-Predicate Relationship Nietzsche's Transformations of Schopenhauer's Language Theory

VII IX XXIII 1 2 11 14 17 22 23 30 31 33

III. Kant

37

IV. Nietzsche: "The deepest philosophical knowledge lies already prepared in language." Grammar Instinct

41 41 42

V. Schopenhauer and Hartmann: Will, Character, Instinct . . . . Schopenhauer's Will Schopenhauer's "Unconscious" Will Hartmann's Criticism of Schopenhauer's Will Schopenhauer and Hartmann: Instinct and Character . . . . Nietzsche: Instinct and Character

51 51 53 56 58 61

VI. Lange's: History of Materialism We are a Product of our Organization Sensory Synthesis Unconscious Inferences Lange's Thoroughgoing Skepticism

67 70 70 75 79

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Philosophy is Art Lange's Critique of Kant The Figurative Use of Language Force and Matter: Mere Abstractions Force-points Subject and Predicate Natural Science, Darwin, and Teleology

80 80 84 85 87 89 91

VII. "On Schopenhauer" Predication of the Will Principium individuationis and Origin of the Intellect

95 97 100

VIII. "On Teleology" or "Concerning the Concept of the Organic Since Kant" Kant's Teleology Nietzsche: "On Teleology" Concept of expedience (ability of existence) The alleged impossibility of explaining an organism mechanically (what does mechanically mean?) The recognized inexpedience in nature in contradiction to expedience Organism (the undetermined life concept/the undetermined individual concept) Teleological reflection is examination of forms Forms (individuals) belong to and are derived from human organization Life force = IX. Nietzsche and Hartmann: Unconscious Nature of Language

105 106 108 110 115 117 121 122 123 125

.

128

X. Hartmann's Worldview of the Unconscious Unconscious Will-Acts Hartmann's Criticism of Schopenhauer's principium individuationis Philosophy of the Unconscious and Human Consciousness Interlude

139 142

XI. Nietzsche's Worldview in Anschauung The Term Anschauung The Ur-Eine and Anschauung Space, Time, Causality Conscious Intellect and Anschauung Language and Anschauung

145 148 151 158 158 162 164 166 168

Table of Contents

XXI

Will and Action Loss of Identity Teleology and Goal of Anschauung Figure 1: Anschauung and Language

170 171 172 178

XII. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer Space, Time, Causality Identity of the Knowing Subject Will: Unitary or Multiple Will and Action Language Teleology of the Will

179 179 181 182 183 184 188

XIII. Reconciliation of Materialism and Idealism Language: Instinkt, Wahn, Kunst! XIV. Nietzsche's Notes for a Course on "Rhetoric" and "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" Gerber's Language as Art Language as Unconscious Art Genesis of Language All Words are from the Beginning Tropes The Impossibility of Language to Describe the Essence of Things Nietzsche's working methods

193 197 199 202 206 208 211 216 219

Appendix A: Notes on Translation 1. "On the Origins of Language" 2. "On Schopenhauer" 3. "On Teleology" 4. "Anschauung Notes" 5. "Untitled Notes"

221 221 222 226 238 267 291

Appendix B: 1. Genealogical nodes 2. Chronology 3. Index of scientific and philosophical names

295 295 298 298

Index of Subjects

306

Index of Names

312

Key to Abbreviations Nietzsche's Works Used KSA

KSB

MusA BA

GA

Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe. Ed. Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari. Berlin und München: Walter de Gruyter und dtv, 1980. Sämtliche Briefe. Kritische Studienausgabe. Ed. Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari, Berlin und München: Walter de Gruyter und dtv, 1986. Gesammelte Werke. Musarionausgabe. München: Musarion Verlag, 1920-1929. Werke und Briefe. Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe. München: C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1933—1942. Indicated in text as BAW for Werke. Grossoktavausgabe of Nietzsche's Werke. Leipzig: C. G. Naumann Verlag, 1 9 0 1 - 1 3 .

Nietzsche's Works Used in English Translation "Untitled Notes" (1863) "Zu Schopenhauer" (1867/68) "Zur Teleologie" (1867/68) "Vom Ursprung der Sprache" (1869/ 70) "Die dionysische Weltanschauung" (1870) " Anschauung Notes" (1870/71) "Über Musik und Wörter" (1871) Die Geburt der Tragödie (1872) "Notes-Summer 1872 —Beginning 1873"

"Untitled Notes" "On Schopenhauer" "On Teleology" "On the Origins of Language" "The Dionysian Worldview" "Anschauung Notes" "On Music and Words" The Birth of Tragedy "The Philosopher"

UN ZS ZT US

"Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne" (1873)

"On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense"

WL

DW AN MW GT Ρ

XXIV

Key to Abbreviations

"Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben" (1874) "Rhetorik" (1872?-74) Menschliches, Allzumenschliches II (1880) Morgenröte (1881) Also sprach Zarathustra (1883-85) Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882, Part V, 1886) Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886) Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887) Der Fall Wagner (1888) Göthen-Dämmerung (1889) Ecce Homo (1908) Die Nachlass-Kompilation, Der Wille Zur Macht (1930)

"On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life" "Course on Rhetoric" Human, All-too-Human Part II Daybreak Thus Spoke Zarathustra The Gay Science

HL

Beyond Good and Evil The Genealogy of Morals The Case of Wagner Twilight of the Idols Ecce Homo Will to Power

JGB GM DFW GD EH WM

R MA 2 Μ Ζ FW

I use my translations of: UN, ZS, ZT, US, AN, and DW. I use Walter Kaufmann's translations of: GT and DFW (Vintage Books, 1967), FW (Vintage Books, 1974), JGB (Vintage Books, 1966), GM and EH (Vintage Books, 1967), and Ζ and GD (Portable Nietzsche, Penguin Books, 1954). I use Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale's translation of: WM (Vintage Books, 1968). I use R. J. Hollingdale's translations of: HL (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), Μ (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), and MA 2 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986). I use Daniel Breazeale's translation of: WL and Ρ (Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's, Humanities Press, 1979). I use Carole Blair's translation of: R (Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 16, No. 2, 1983). I use the Oscar Levy translation of: MW (The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Vol. 1, Gordon Press, 1974).

Introduction Nietzsche's writings evince a complex, constantly modified and developing view of language. His view of language is concerned with the possible origins and qualities of language, with the interrelationships of power of effect between language and human consciousness and knowledge of the world. It is also very much concerned with the limitations of language. Although what I have chosen to call a theory of language can be abstracted from Nietzsche's writings, it would be inaccurate to assert that Nietzsche himself organized his thoughts about language in any systematic manner as an independent aspect of his overall philosophizing. Nietzsche does not single out and give specific form and priority to his theory of language, except at what appear to be sporadic intervals in his thinking. 1 It is the purpose of this work to demonstrate that, although on the surface this appears to be the case, Nietzsche carried with him, from his earliest writings, a passionate interest in language and its workings and a fundamental realization of the significance of certain advantages and disadvantages of language. In discussing Nietzsche's theory of language throughout this work, I inevitably simultaneously discuss his ontology and theory of knowledge. Nietzsche's theory of language is inseparable from his thinking about human knowledge of the world and the creation of a practical philosophy for living in it. When 1

Works dealing with language specifically are "On the Origins of Language" ("Vom Ursprung der Sprache," 1869-70), "Music and Words" ("Über Musik und Wörter," 1871), "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" ("Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne," 1873), and notes for a course on "Rhetoric" ("Rhetorik," 1874). Many references to language also appear in the unpublished notes of the period during which these essays are written. The next clear cut work with language comes in the Genealogy of Morals fourteen years later, which is ultimately an exercise in Nietzsche's theory of language. Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, again, return to theoretical statements about language, some of which repeat views developed in the early years. Ecce homo, stands as an example of Nietzsche's theory of language in practice. (See my article: "Ecce Homo: Problem of the Ί am'". Enclitic, 4 : 1 , 1980.) All other references to language specifically, from the period of Human All Too Human up until The Genealogy of Morals, including the Nachlass, while often extremely significant to the overall theory, are scattered. One can generally say that Nietzsche was most overtly concerned with language at the beginning of his thinking and again in the last year or so of his thinking. However, the period in between, of approximately ten years, demonstrates Nietzsche's continuing evaluations of language. See, for example, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "On Poets" and "The Song of Melancholy" or Beyond Good and Evil, especially the Preface and "On the Prejudices of Philosophers."

2

Introduction

taken together as a changing, but coherent perspective, his beginning theory of language can be seen to provide a rich grounding element for his later philosophical and artistic enterprise.

Theory and Method At the outset two questions present themselves in this undertaking: How is theory used; and, why language? I wrote that Nietzsche held a constantly modified and developing view of language, rather than, for example, a system of language, a conception of language. To have used such terms as system or conception would be to deny at the outset the insights which my following of Nietzsche's work with language yields. Theory is used primarily in its original Greek and Latin sense as "a looking at," a mental viewing or contemplation. Theory, here, is not to be understood as "a systematic statement based upon strongly verified underlying principles," or as "a mental plan of a way to do something," two of the primary dictionary definitions. Both of these definitions of theory imply that one has a plan, idea, some principles, into which the field of study is to be subsumed. Theory in the sense "of looking at" simply looks to see what is seen and then a formulation of apparent relationships of certain observed phenomena — in this case, the texts of Nietzsche, — which has been verified to some degree, results/Viewing is a transformation, a transfiguration, and not a prefiguration of that which is to be looked at. To a large extent theory as it is intended here, means speculation, even in some instances, plain old guesswork. The method used in this work does not assume that it is possible or desirable to recreate the "truth" of the moment in which Nietzsche himself wrote a text, to suggest with some claim to authority that this and only this was what he thought when he wrote it. Rather, this work is, in the sense of Foucault's archaeology, a rewriting, that is, Nietzsche's texts, "as a preserved form of exteriority, are subjected to a regulated transformation. It is not a return to the innermost secret of the origin; it is the systematic description of a discourse-object." 2 I have attempted a "regulated transformation" of Nietzsche's texts on language in the sense which Foucault defines regularity. Archaeological description is concerned with those discursive practices to which the facts of succession must be referred if one is not to establish them in an unsystematic and naive way, that is, in terms of merit. At the level in which they are, the originality/banality opposition is therefore not relevant: 2

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, A. M. Sheridan Smith, New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1972. A 1 3 9 - 4 0 .

trans.

Theory and Method

3

between an initial formulation and the sentence, which, years, centuries later, repeats it more or less exactly, it establishes no hierarchy of value; it makes no radical difference. It tries only to establish the regularity of statements ... it designates, for every verbal performance ... the set of conditions in which the enunciative function operates, and which guarantees and defines its existence. ... Thus, archaeology seeks to uncover the regularity of a discursive practice. A practice that is in operation ... 3

This work in regulated transformation, in theory as "a looking at" is pursued in all rigor and attention to detail. The attempt will be to bridge a gap which Bernd Magnus points to in his article "Nietzsche Today: A View from America." On one side, he writes: "to read Nietzsche as offering theories of knowledge, or morals or ontology — or in this case, language — is itself the product of a tacit conception of philosophy as an enterprise which confronts a reasonably fixed set of issues within timeless constraints," in other words, within the tradition of logic and analysis which characterizes Western philosophy. Magnus continues: "to give up this picture is essential to understanding Nietzsche's deconstruction of 'philosophy'." 4 On the other side, Magnus characterizes what he understands as a deconstructionist approach to Nietzsche which operates devoid of analysis or argument. These readings "must either stare at his texts in mute silence or use them to see whether they inspire us to say anything interesting, to reduce them to mere means in a free-association game, as has been done by some Derridians." 5 Theory, in the sense used in this work, falls somewhere in between these two characterizations. Although traditional philosophy and strictly held logical analysis is assuredly under attack by Nietzsche, and not only Nietzsche, still for a long time to come, any deconstruction of it is constrained to operate to a large, perhaps lessening, extent within it. Derrida said that, and Magnus also recognizes this constraint. Nietzsche's texts are a paradigmal instance of an attempt to both remain within traditional philosophy, insofar as it is necessary, and yet to offer practices of exploding it. However, theory in the sense of "to look at," especially with regard to Nietzsche's theory of language, is also, in some ways, compatible with the idea of "staring at 3 4 5

Ibid., A 144 - 45. Bernd Magnus, "Nietzsche Today: A View from America," in International Studies in Philosophy, Binghamton: State University of New York, XVβ, 1983. NT 102. Ibid. By selecting these remarks from Magnus' article, I do not want to create a false opinion of his relationship to the deconstructionist perspective. Magnus advocates the useful interaction and, when effective, merging of the three major research perspectives which he points to in this article: analytical, deconstructionist, and reconstructionist. I merely wish to point to the fact that Magnus has apparently divided deconstructionist interpretation into two categories: salvagable und unsalvagable. The staring at Nietzsche's texts in mute silence and using Nietzsche's texts as a means to free-association and game clearly belonging to the latter.

4

Introduction

Nietzsche's texts in mute silence." For to add language to looking, in itself already transformation, is for Nietzsche, to transform once again the shape of what is seen. To use Nietzsche's texts "to see whether they inspire us to say anything interesting, to reduce them to mere means in a free-association game," once again, is not only not far from the Nietzschean enterprise, but central to it. Assuredly Nietzsche wants us to say what we have to say; we cannot do otherwise. 6 Nietzsche's ultimate aim may have been to seduce us in all manner of ways to do just that. And certainly the Freudian, and most especially the Nietzschean perspectives should not allow us to scoff at either the idea of free association or game and the logics, assuredly of a different sort, which are attached to them. I would like to take a middle road. Theory, in this work, does attempt to get beyond the truth-oriented texts and methods of traditional philosophy, but from a perspective at least twice removed. I go to Nietzsche's texts in an attempt to see him looking at the problem of language. But this is always, as Nietzsche's perspectivism reminds us, my looking at his looking, and in this sense, his text will assuredly produce in me something of my own. It is not exactly a free association or a game because a logic is applied and an attempt is made to take my looking as "seriously" as possible. I take the stance of the genealogist, who is primarily a documentarian. The project, in Nietzsche's words, "is to traverse the enormous distant, and so well hidden land as it actually existed, has actually been lived ... as though with new eyes." 7 On the surface the job of the genealogist is not to act as an original voice, a creator and shaper, rather it is to decipher a hieroglyphics, to practice an art of exegesis, exegesis in Nietzsche's sense of it as rumination. Rumination is a slow, repetitive, grey activity. Thus, in discovering Nietzsche's beginning theory of language I work with documents in an effort to see Nietzsche seeing, and to make his seeing available to others. Yet inevitably something of those elements of game and free-association will have their effect. Again, Foucault's words may come to offer an addendum to what I am attempting to say about the orientation of my method in this work. He characterizes the "truth analysts" in the following way. By analysing the truth of propositions and the relations that unite them, one can define a field of logical noncontradiction: one will then discover a 6

7

Nietzsche makes this clear in many places. See, for example "On the Prejudices of Philosophers" in Beyond Good and Evil, 6, where Nietzsche attributes the productions of philosophers more to the prompting of the instincts, to drives other than "the knowledge drive," and more as "personal confessions of their authors and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir," than to the production of objective conscious thinking. Nietzsche, GM 21, KSA 5: 254.

Theory and Method

5

systematicity; one will rise from the visible body of sentences to that pure, ideal architecture that the ambiguities of grammar, and the overloading of words with meanings have probably concealed as much as expressed.

Foucault then suggests an alternative: But one can adopt the contrary course, and, by following the thread of analogies and symbols, rediscover a thematic that is more imaginary than discursive, more affective than rational, and less close to the concept than to desire; its force animates the most opposed figures, but only to melt them at once into a slowly transformable unity; what one then discovers is a plastic continuity, the movement of a meaning that is embodied in various representations, images, and metaphors. 8

In taking a "middle road," I not only intend to bring together such approaches to reading Nietzsche as the analytical, though non-truth oriented, or the approach of free association and play, but also to emphasize the dynamics of exegesis at work not only in my own method, but especially in Nietzsche's practice of reading and writing. The middle road is intended to be just that, travelling in the middle of texts, the texts of Nietzsche, and the texts which contributed to their genesis. The "event" of reading a text, or any other act of exegesis, according to Nietzsche, is our essential act. Exegesis "occurs when a group of phenomena are selected and united by an interpreting being." 9 Jaspers quotes Nietzsche: "Perhaps it is scarcely possible ... to read a text as text, without permitting any interpretation to commingle with it." 10 Perhaps it is even true that "all our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown and possibly unknowable but felt text. ... After all, what are our experiences? Much more that which we read into them than what they contain!"11 Thus, the word theory as it is used here, in the sense of a regulated transformation, implies a process of "looking at" in the sense of exegesis, in its sense as rumination, and again in its sense as an interpreting activity, both rigorous and fantastical at the same time. How do I propose to trace the single thread of Nietzsche's theory of language in a manner which bridges the gaps mentioned, which attempts to be as "faithful" as possible to Nietzsche's optics of language, while retaining a critical distance? By bringing to my aid Nietzsche's own method of pursuing such circuitous pathways, one already mentioned above — the method of genealogy. By contrasting and blending the genealogical and critical aspects 8 9 10 11

Foucault, A 1 4 9 - 5 0 . Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche, trans. Charles Wallraff and Frederick Schmitz, Chicago: Henry Regnery, Co., 1965. JN 288. Ibid., JN 289. Ibid., JN 290.

6

Introduction

of my study. Genealogical study concerns "the effective formation of discourse, whether within the limits of control, or outside of them," in other words, genealogical analysis follows the formation of discourse, at once scattered, discontinuous and regular. Criticism "analyses the process of rarefaction, consolidation and unification in discourse.'" 2 The genealogical method does not lend itself to a neat breaking up of Nietzsche's thinking into major periods, and the placing of them under structuring labels. This approach is a vestige of historical simplification. To some extent, aside from the prejudice of historical thinking, this has been a result of the state and availability of Nietzsche's texts themselves. Now, however, with the publication of the new Colli-Montinari Critical Edition of Nietzsche's works, as Breazeale says: "One of the most fertile fields of Nietzsche research is opened up. This concerns the evolution and development of Nietzsche's thought, as well as the influences upon and sources of the same." 13 In retracing the genealogy of Nietzsche's theory of language, I follow the evolution of an area of thought as it develops out of specific influences and transformations of those influences. However, I wish to emphasize that evolution or development in my genealogical method, as opposed to a strictly historical development of "logical" sequence and structuring labels, is applied in Nietzsche's sense of it where: The "evolution" of a thing, a custom, an organ is by no means its progressus toward a goal, even less a logical progressus by the shortest route and with the smallest expenditure of force — but a succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subduing, plus the resistances they encounter, the attempts at transformation for the purpose of defense and reaction, and the results of successful counteractions. The form is fluid, but the "meaning" is even more so.14

It seems reasonable to agree that the more of Nietzsche's "text" which is made available to us in its chronological completeness, the more able we are to assess the strands of his thinking. Rather than neat breaks in his thinking, the painstaking work of genealogical analysis reveals a winding, circuitous path, a forward and backwards movement, with however, enough consistencies, common terms, and reformulations of terms to allow an effective direction to emerge. In a genealogical sense, the entire history of a "thing", an organ, a custom can in this way be a continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations and adaptations whose 12 13

14

Foucault, A 233. Daniel Breazeale, "We Alexandrians," in International University of New York, XV/2, 1983. WA 50. Nietzsche, GM 7 7 - 7 8 , KSA 5: 3 1 4 - 1 5 .

Studies in Philosophy,

Binghamton: State

Theory and Method

7

causes d o not even have to be related to one another but, on the contrary, in some cases succeed and alternate with one another in a purely chance fashion. 1 5

Nietzsche's theory of language consists of a transforming and recombining of elements, experimentation, creation of forms and sloughing off of forms. Nietzsche often grows a new skin over which the old simultaneously begins to loosen, die, and fall off. Sometimes Nietzsche clings to the old skin long after it has lost value for him. Often it will seem as if I have gone out of the way of the thread of language which we are following, but only to find the thread again in more significance. In offering a genealogical exegesis of Nietzsche's beginning texts on language this work is also largely concerned with the texts of others and the manner in which these texts come to be integrated into Nietzsche's own text on language. Nietzsche was undoubtedly a valuable and unique thinker, but he was also very much a product of his times. I attempt to discover under what conditions Nietzsche devised his beginning theory of language and what value it possessed for him. It is in the small and painstaking work with the texts of others, that Nietzsche begins, through the process of rarefaction, consolidation, and unification, to form what is finally "his own." The genealogical method attempts to pull together the scattered, regular and discontinuous elements which result in the effective formation of Nietzsche's beginning discourse on language. I am putting into practice Nietzsche's method of tracing "conceptual transformations" ("Begriffs- Verwandlungen") and phases in such conceptual transformations.16 Therefore, in treating influences upon Nietzsche's beginning theory of language, the coincidence and interchange of texts is played out in some detail. To the genealogical exegete this offers the coincidence and juxtapositioning of documents upon which the practice of rumination can be applied. It is part of my purpose to allow a play of interactions between texts to arise in the reader, in conjunction with or independent of my interpretations. Certainly no attempt will succeed in following Nietzsche's thinking about language and the influences upon this thinking as completely and variously as it in all probability occurred. I indicate some of the influences which helped to form Nietzsche's beginning theory of language, but it can also be said with certainty that there must have been others as well. What the reader will confront, then, is in the nature of a nodal procedure of genealogical method. An attempt is made to provide a general on-going background, upon which moments in Nietzsche's thinking about language, 15 16

Ibid., GM 77, K S A 5: 314. Ibid., GM 27, KSA 5: 261 and GM 29, KSA 5: 263.

8

Introduction

in the context of influences upon that thinking, are enlarged upon, opened up, and played out in detail, in order to suggest certain, but far from all, relations moving between nodes. I will focus primarily on ideas surrounding and relating to the role of language in major influences upon Nietzsche as they seem important to him. The manner in which this is done is the following: what I present of Schopenhauer, Kant, Hartmann, Gerber, and other sources of influence should be read as telescoped versions of their thinking seen from the perspective of what we eventually come to understand as Nietzsche's theory of language. To put it simply, I take Nietzsche's view of language, from his discourse at a later time, primarily his 1873 unpublished essay "Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne" ("On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense"), and then look back at Schopenhauer, for example, to see what fits it, which ideas could have served to influence it. What is revealed is a sort of echo in advance, which allows us to trace a probable path of genealogical development. Of course, proceeding in this manner puts us in a position of advantage which Nietzsche himself did not have, that of knowing at the beginning approximately where his theory of language was heading. However, this in no way detracts from the effectiveness of the genealogical method, in fact, such a genealogical method presupposes it. To give the reader an indication of the nodal procedure of my analysis, I mention the progress of just two such nodes, of which at least twelve are offered. A brief description of each genealogical node is given in Appendix B.l. The procedure of nodes results in a cumulative effect, so that, what may appear as arbitrary and unnecessary detail at the beginning of the work comes to be used and reused throughout the work; detail, which, by the end, proves itself important to the overall economy of the genealogical method. The first nodal example, revolving around the progression in Nietzsche's thinking with regard to language, is the node of relations which pertains to the sensory perception of sight, its translation into images, and projection of images. When, in discussing Schopenhauer's theory of language, the reader finds a long passage on the sense of sight, a first piece in the overall node arises, which surfaces again in Lange's discussion of sight as an example of sensory synthesis and the question of projection of images. The node again surfaces in the discussion of images of representation as opposed to things in themselves, or Schopenhauer's will, or Hartmann's unconscious. Eventually Nietzsche develops his worldview in Anschauung which, in one of its aspects, is nothing less than a whole theoretics of viewing, images, and projection of images. The theoretics of language as arising out of a metaphorical imaging process is then discussed in light of "On Truth and Lies" and the influence of Gustav Gerber's Language as Art.

Theory and Method

9

A second example of the genealogical nodal procedure centers around Nietzsche's interest in and criticism of the basic grammatical forms of subject and predicate. Nietzsche works with this node of thought again and again, each time under a new influence and in a new context. He first meets with the problem in Schopenhauer and Schopenhauer's criticism of Kant. Again, in Hartmann and Lange. So ingrained does the subject predicate node become for Nietzsche, that he eventually turns it into use as a major weapon of criticism against Schopenhauer. Finally, in the worldview in Anschauung, Nietzsche's cumulative thought about the subject predicate relationship comes to ground his first stated non-identity of the subject and the purely representational nature of any predicates attached to such a non-identity. The subject predicate relationship is also at the basis of Nietzsche's view that appearance is all there is and that artistic or rhetorical language is the only effective, but not true, means of expressing it. It is important to note that these nodes with which Nietzsche is working in his beginning theory of language do not end with his worldview in Anschauung or his essay "On Truth and Lies." They continue to be reformed and worked with, in some cases, throughout his philosophical thinking. In my use of the genealogical nodal method a roughly chronological order is preserved. However, chronology is not strictly maintained in the interests of providing a synchronic aspect to the study. A chronology of the period studied is provided in Appendix B.2. An overall logical order of thought is maintained, but does not always prevail. The genealogical nodal method used is almost the technique of pointillism in which, when one backs up and takes the totality of points into view, each of which is uniquely necessary, something of a whole picture presents itself. Now to address my second question: Why language? First, because language has become one of the central and most widely developed objects of thought in the twentieth century. Language has become a study in itself, along with the recognition of its structuring effects on all fields of endeavor. In 1869 Eduard von Hartmann wrote, and Nietzsche read, in his Philosophie des Unbewussten (Philosophy of the Unconscious)·. Still to this day there is no philosophy of language, for what goes by that name is altogether fragmentary, and what is usually offered as such are pretentious appeals to human instinct, which afford no explanation at all ... yet philosophy, the farther it has progressed, has ever more clearly perceived that the understanding of one's own thinking is the first task, and that this is admirably furthered by raising the spiritual treasures which are buried in the language of the discoverer.17 17

Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious, 3 vols., trans. William Chatterton Coupland, London: Trübner and Co., 1884. In all cases reference to the English translation is followed by reference to the German Philosophie des Unbewussten, Berlin, 1869. PU 1: 295, PUG 2 2 8 - 2 9 .

10

Introduction

Since then philosophies of language have become abundant and respectable, if not necessary as precondition to philosophy in general, to understanding of human forms of interaction through communication and institutions. The study of language and discourse has brought about reevaluations of such ordering principles as history, mythology, psychology, and philosophy. The effects of research in such areas as linguistics, semantics, and semiotics are restructuring most others, literary criticism, psychology, education, social patterning and communications interaction. Language has been turned upon itself from a critical aspect. Such staples of Western thought as subject and object, logic, truth, and knowledge, are being reexamined from a new perspective of language which finds that language is not static, that meanings change, that unconscious drives and motivations contribute to the formation of and use of language often over and above that of rational thinking. Secondly, it is my aim to find Nietzsche's place within this series of events in which language has, as Foucault writes, "returned into the field of thought directly and in its own right." I am very much in sympathy with Foucault who gives Nietzsche credit for "opening up" the space wherein language has now become so central, in calling Nietzsche "the first to connect the philosophical task with a radical reflection upon language." 1 8 However, a note of criticism is needed here. It is surprising that Foucault, who, as we saw above, champions the nonrelevance of originality or priority of the authors of texts, but chooses to study, rather, the regularity of discourse-objects, should after all give Nietzsche priority here. It appears to be true that Nietzsche deserves much of this credit, however, my study demonstrates that Nietzsche's theory of language is itself largely the product of a "regulated transformation" of the texts of others. Much has been written in the last fifteen years or so about Nietzsche's unique relation to language, 19 usually in connection with what is currently Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. R. D. Laing, New York: Random House, 1973. OT 305. " See, for example: Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Phtlospher, New York: Macmillan Co., 1965; Paul de Man, "Rhetoric of Tropes" and "Rhetoric of Persuasion," Allegories of Reading, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979; Jacques Derrida, Eperons, Paris: Flammarion, 1976; Ruediger H. Grimm, Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1977; Sarah Kofmann, Nietzsche et la metaphor, Paris: Payot, 1972; Philippe, Lacoue-Labarthe, "Le detour" and "La fable," Le sujet de la philosophic, Paris: Aubier—Flammarion, 1979; Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, London: Harvard University Press, 1985; Bernard Pautrat, Versions du soleil: Figures et systeme de Nietzsche, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971; JeanMichel Rey, L!enjeu des signes, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971; J. P. Stern, A Study of Nietzsche, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979; Tracy Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975; Richard Schacht, Nietzsche, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983; and Gerold Ungeheuer, "Nietzsche über Sprache und Sprechen, Über Wahrheit und Traum," Nietzsche Studien, 12, 1983. 18

The Beginnings of Nietzsche's Theory of Language: 1863 — 1873

11

called his "theory of knowledge." Such articles and books have dealt with various aspects of Nietzsche's thinking about language: his ideas on rhetoric and language, genealogy (as a tracing of the formation of ideas and cultures upon the basis of linguistic transformations), the disassociation of language as a system of signs which does not correspond to a reality outside of itself, and language as dealing always and only with a fiction of the world. If Nietzsche's ideas about language are having an effect on our thinking today, or at least run concurrently with that thinking, then this work constitutes an attempt to follow the genesis and beginning development of those ideas.

The Beginnings of Nietzsche's

Theory of Language: 1863— 1873

The early years in Nietzsche's thinking, Hollingdale writes, "will seem a dull one unless you look beneath the surface." 20 In 1962 Karl Schlechta and Anni Anders published a book about this period entitled Friedrich Nietzsche: Von den verborgenen Anfängen seines Philosophierens (Friedrich Nietzsche: The Hidden Beginnings of his Philosophising). Aside from the obvious lack of access to many of Nietzsche's texts of this period until quite recently, which led Schlechta and Anders to characterize this period as "hidden," there exists in the texts themselves evidence that to talk of a surface and a beneath, of something hidden is a very appropriate description. Again, Hollingdale writes: "Ostensibly Nietzsche was playing a secondary role in his own life: he was a 'follower' of Schopenhauer and Wagner; under the surface, however, there was an intense conflict going on between these dominating influences and all those influences which resisted such domination."21 Nietzsche, himself, characterizes this period in his second Preface to Human All Too Human II, written in 1886, as a time when it was necessary to hold what was closest to him secret. When, in the third Untimely Meditation, I went on to give expression to my reverence for my first and only educator, the great Arthur Schopenhauer. ... [I] already 'believed in nothing anymore,' as the people put it, not even in Schopenhauer: just at that time I produced an essay I have refrained from publishing (ein geheim gehaltenes Schriftstück) "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense." ... Even my festive victory address in honour of Richard Wagner on the occasion of his celebration of victory at Beyreuth in 1876 ... a work wearing the strongest appearance of being 'up to the minute', was in its background an act of homage and gratitude to a piece of my own past ... and in fact a liberation, a farewell.22 20 21 22

R. J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. HN 51. Ibid. Nietzsche, MA 2: 2, KSA 2: 370.

12

Introduction

Why was Nietzsche in the position of leading an essentially double life at this time? That of the young, idealistic, yet critical professor of philology who made a stir with The Untimely Meditations and The Birth of Tragedy, with that of, as he calls himself, a skeptic and critic, one who "did not believe in a blessed thing," one who "hid away" those thoughts closest to him? Part of the answer to this question, is simply that Nietzsche was doing so much simultaneously. Many of his pursuits at the time were contradictory. And it appears as if he could not or did not wish to give up a part of them to concentrate on but a few. To follow the results of this straining of capacities and influences is fascinating. Nietzsche was a disciple of Schopenhauer, yet a subterranean critic of Schopenhauer. He became professor of philology at the early age of 24, and was soon writing notes very critical of philology. His real avocation, even at this time, was philosophy. The outline and many pages of notes for a dissertation in philosophy were written in 1867 — 68 with the title "Über den Begriff des Organischen seit Kant" ("Concerning the Concept of the Organic Since Kant"). Although Nietzsche eventually used his prize winning essay "De fontibus Laertee Diogenis" ("Concerning the Sources of Laertius Diogenes") as his dissertation, this other philosophical excursion into teleological questions was apparently a serious contender as a dissertation topic in his mind. He was a social and cultural critic of modern Germany as his Untimely Meditations were to show. Thus, he lived in two worlds, that of ancient Greece and of modern Germany. He was also early drawn to the study of the natural and physical sciences. The most influential early reading was F. A. Lange's Geschichte des Materialismus (History of Materialism ), which Nietzsche praised highly and to which he returned again and again. And, of course, Nietzsche was a "Wagnerian," but also a secret critic of Wagner. These competing facts and tendencies in the young professor Nietzsche resulted in work of the most interesting kind. Because he could not give up his love of the Greeks, of philosophy, of music, or of the natural sciences, he attempted, during these early years, to combine them in a grand plan which Schlechta and Anders point to and describe in some detail using plans and notes of Nietzsche's from the years 1872 and 1873. In this plan: The exemplary meaning of the Pre-Platonic philosophers, the anthropomorphic transferences, "Truth and Illusion," necessity of illusion, the relationship of philosophy and science, the relationship of philosophy and culture (art); all of these themes have their place. Through the inclusion of modern philosophy (Kant and Schopenhauer) the whole receives its topical importance.23

21

Karl Schlechta and Anni Anders, Friedrich Nietzsche: Von den verborgenen Philosophierens, Stuttgart: Bad Cannstatt, 1962. VAP 85 — 86.

Anfängen

seines

The Beginnings of Nietzsche's Theory of Language: 1863 — 1873

13

N i e t z s c h e ' s planned title for this c o m p r e h e n s i v e w o r k w a s " D i e P h i l o s o p h e n des tragischen Zeitalters" ( " T h e P h i l o s o p h e r s o f the Tragic A g e " ) . 2 4 In the S u m m e r o f 1872 N i e t z s c h e writes, o f these plans, that they s h o u l d "deal w i t h The Birth

of Tragedy f r o m another side." A n d , that it s h o u l d "receive its

c o n f i r m a t i o n f r o m the p h i l o s o p h y o f its contemporaries." 2 5 N i e t z s c h e ' s plans for such an ambitious u n d e r t a k i n g were never realized, but the n o t e s and essays w h i c h c o m e as a result o f this possibility constitute a w h o l e stream o f t h i n k i n g , a Gegenstück,

a geheimgehaltenes set o f texts w h i c h N i e t z s c h e did not

c h o o s e to publish. T h e thread o f l a n g u a g e can be f o l l o w e d profitably t h r o u g h o u t as a perspective f r o m w h i c h to draw these c o m p e t i n g interests together. 2 6 In his "Attempt at a Self Criticism" o f The Birth

of Tragedy,

Nietzsche

w r o t e o f this early period: H o w I regret now that in those days I still lacked the courage (or immodesty?) to permit myself in every way an individual language of my own for such individual views and hazards — and that instead I tried laboriously to express by means of Schopenhauerian and Kantian formulas strange and new valuations which were basically at odds with Kant's and Schopenhauer's spirit and taste!27 M y genealogical analysis o f N i e t z s c h e ' s b e g i n n i n g theory o f l a n g u a g e offers a basis for and direction t o the p e r i o d o f N i e t z s c h e ' s early t h i n k i n g to w h i c h h e refers above. It is c h a l l e n g i n g t o separate N i e t z s c h e ' s t h i n k i n g f r o m that o f his influences, to separate o n e concern o f his o w n f r o m another — s o m e t h i n g w h i c h , as he admits a b o v e , he c o u l d h i m s e l f n o t d o adequately f o r a time. T h e result o f this p r o c e s s will be t o demonstrate, that t o an extent, w h i c h N i e t z s c h e h i m s e l f w a s apparently unaware at the time, he did h a v e a l a n g u a g e o f his o w n , d e s p i t e the truth o f his claim that he o f t e n clothed it 24

25 26

27

The notes which Nietzsche gathered under the planned title "Die Philosophen des tragischen Zeitalters" (which can be found in KSA 1: 800—872), translated into English by Marianne Cowan in 1962 with the title Philosophy in (he Tragic Age of the Creeks, Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1962, represents only a part of the overall plan which Nietzsche had in mind. For a discussion of the details of the larger plan, see especially pages 77—99 of VAP. Schlechta and Anders, VAP 7 9 - 8 0 . Nietzsche's thinking about language during this early period, the natural and physical sciences, the modern philosophers, etc. was often being thought with reference to the Greeks and his philological and philosophical studies of them. No attempt is made in this work to connect Nietzsche's early theory of language, as I find it, with the Greeks, except where necessary. Nevertheless, this does not detract significantly from what I have to offer because my research indicates that the theory of language originates in his modern influences and may at most have been confirmed or prefigured, here or there, in the ancients. It is also clear that Nietzsche's readings in modern philosophy, and the natural and physical sciences were often used as a basis from which to evaluate, and reevaluate, his thinking about philological matters. Were someone with the expertise in Greek philology to attempt such research into Nietzsche's philological work, it is certainly possible that another dimension could be added to what I offer with regard to Nietzsche's beginning theory of language. Nietzsche, GT 24, KSA 1:19.

14

Introduction

in the terminology of others, and not only that he had a language of his own, but also a very definite theory about language. My genealogical nodal method will open up for the reader Nietzsche's statement that he "tried laboriously to express by means of Schopenhauerian and Kantian formulas strange and new valuations which were basically at odds with Kant's and Schopenhauer's spirit and taste." It will open up this statement by showing where Nietzsche does exactly what he claims, while providing a close look at the developing "new valuations" which do operate in a circle of thought whose direction diverges fundamentally from that of Schopenhauer and Kant. And my study reveals that these new valuations were strongly in place before the publication of The Birth of Tragedy. Part of Nietzsche's failure to permit himself a language of his own in The Birth of Tragedy was his new allegiance to Wagner, which in his mind entailed a continuing allegiance to Schopenhauer, one which, was for the most part already overcome. It is precisely because underneath, in his "secret" self that Nietzsche develops a theory of language and resulting worldview, that after 1876, he is strong enough to choose to let go of Schopenhauer, Wagner, and those aspects of philology of which he was highly critical.

The Texts In this work I translate and interpret several texts written by Nietzsche between 1863 and 1870/71 with the intention of retracing his development of a beginning theory of language. I take the most central of these texts, a fragment written in 1869/70 entitled "Vom Ursprung der Sprache" ("On the Origins of Language"), and offer a thorough exegesis of it. While "Origins" is the major text interpreted throughout and returned to again and again, I examine the various veins of thought represented by the other texts interpreted which feed into my reading of this text. These consist of Nietzsche's own texts and the texts of major influences contributing significantly to my exegesis. I go back to Nietzsche's reading of Schopenhauer beginning in 1865 and to his gleaning of an understanding of Kant. Nietzsche's relationship to Schopenhauer, especially his criticism of and the specific elements of his slow and considered breaking away from the influence of Schopenhauer's thinking, which took place under the surface of his continually avowed discipleship, is presented in detail. The importance of the influence of Eduard von Hartmann, is indicated in conjunction with my examination of Kant and Schopenhauer. I introduce, in great detail, the progress of this influence and demonstrate to what an

The Texts

15

extent Nietzsche's thinking begins with a full appreciation of Hartmann's unconscious. After having based Nietzsche's first forms of language theory in Schopenhauer, Kant, and Hartmann, I examine the great influence which Lange's book Geschichte des Materialismus (History of Materialism) had upon Nietzsche's perception of Kant and Schopenhauer, and how it prepared some of the ground for his further interest in Hartmann, and in the natural and physical sciences. My research integrates into its basic framework specific discussions of the importance of the natural and physical sciences to the evolution of Nietzsche's thinking about language. Prompted by his reading of Lange, in 1867/68, Nietzsche writes two texts in the form of notes. The first of these texts is a criticism of Schopenhauer entitled "Zu Schopenhauer" ("On Schopenhauer"). During the same period, Nietzsche also penned a copious set of notes for a planned dissertation topic to have been entitled "Über den Begriff des Organischen seit Kant" ("Concerning the Concept of the Organic Since Kant"), which is found in Nietzsche's notes under the heading "Zur Teleologie" ("On Teleology"). 28 A thorough examination of these two texts, taken in conjunction with Lange's and Hartmann's influences, as they relate to "On the Origins of Language" allow a rich understanding of the complex of thought material working its effects in the young Nietzsche's thinking with regard to language and introduces a new dimension to understanding Lange's influence on Nietzsche. In 1870/71, during the period when Nietzsche is beginning sketches for The Birth of Tragedy, he again, writes two sets of notes of interest to my study, notes, most of which were not included in that work. In these notes, which I have drawn together upon the basis of their similar ideational content, and to which I have given the title " Anschauung Notes," I maintain, Nietzsche fashioned his own first significant philosophic worldview, one which grows directly out of all I will have discussed up to that point. 29 It is a worldview which Nietzsche had already sketched out very briefly in some notes from 1863, long before his reading of Schopenhauer, Kant, Hartmann, and Lange, influences which to a large extent, offered Nietzsche the tools to work his early intuitions into a considered worldview. 30 The gathering together and interpretation into a worldview of the "Anschauung Notes" presents a model

28

29

30

"Zur Teleologie," "Zu Schopenhauer," and "Vom Ursprung der Sprache," are not included either in the Karl Schlechta, nor in the new Colli—Montinari Studienausgabe of Nietzsche's works. I have used the BAW 3 version of "Zu Schopenhauer," 352—361, and "Zur Teleologie," 371 — 394, and the MusA 5 version of "Vom Ursprung der Sprache," 467—470. These notes are reproduced in K S A 7. Additional notes, which I could not find in the K S A Edition, I have taken from the MusA 3 Edition, 336—37. These 1863 notes can be found in BAW 2: 2 5 5 - 2 5 7 .

16

Introduction

which allows the unifying elements of diverse activities in the early years of Nietzsche's thinking to be discovered. It creates a context for the further elaboration of Nietzsche's thinking about language and music and especially for a very fruitful reinterpretation of The Birth of Tragedy. The worldview in Anschauung is compared with specific elements of Schopenhauer's thinking and yields a thorough and interesting contrast between Nietzsche's own ideas as they reflect his breaking away from Schopenhauer before the publication of The Birth of Tragedy. This comparison with Schopenhauer also demonstrates how early in his thinking Nietzsche is anticipating the major elements of his mature philosophy. Nietzsche's beginning theory of language, as developed out of the analysis of these texts and influences, is then summarized in light of Nietzsche's notes for a course on "Rhetoric" and his unpublished essay "On Truth and Lies" and the influence of Gustav Gerber's Language as Art?x My discussion reveals that, although Nietzsche adopts Gerber's tropological framework as a working hypothesis for longstanding questions of his own, the major assumptions of Gerber's theory of language had already been worked out independently by Nietzsche before he reads Gerber in the fall of 1872.

31

Gerber's influence upon Nietzsche's notes for a course on "Rhetoric" and "On Truth and Lies" has only recently been established. See my chapter 14.

Chapter One Eduard von Hartmann and the Unconscious In Nietzsche's short fragment entitled "On the Origins of Language," written in 1869/70, the text reads: "Every conscious thinking first possible with the help of language," and "something expedient can be without consciousness."1 These two statements, when taken together, form the fundamental basis of Nietzsche's theorking about language. Since, as Nietzsche holds, language first makes human conscious thinking possible, he agrees with Schelling, whom he quotes in this context: Since without language there could be nothing philosophical, and in general no human consciousness is thinkable, the foundation of language cannot lie in consciousness. Yet, the deeper we look into it, the more surely it is discovered, that its depth far exceeds that of the most conscious productions. It is with language as it is with organic beings; we think we see them come blindly into existence and at the same time, cannot deny the unfathomable intentionality of their formation even in the smallest detail. 2

At the head of his fragment on the origins of language, Nietzsche writes and underlines the follwing: "Language is neither the conscious work of individuals nor of a majority."1' If language does not find its origins in consciousness, one can certainly assert, following Nietzsche, that language represents the method of its functioning, the condition upon which consciousness rests. Human consciousness is what it is at any given point in time and space owing to the particular shape of language which structures it. However, Nietzsche emphasizes repeatedly in his early writings about language that consciousness and its structuring method — language — no matter how intricately developed, ' "On the Origins of Language" (" Vom Ursprung der Sprache") was used by Nietzsche as the introduction to a course on Latin grammar taught in 1869/70, first published in the appendix of Volume II of the Philologica by Kröner (GA XIX: 385—387). In the case of my translations of Nietzsche's works, reference is made to the page number of the full translation provided in Appendix A. The German text follows each translation in Appendix A. Nietzsche, US 222 and 224. 2 Ibid., 224. Quoted by Nietzsche from Hartmann, PUG 227. Hartmann takes the quote from Schilling's "Philosophie der Mythologie," Sämmtliche Werks, Erster Band, Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta'scher Verlag, 1856, PM 52. 1 Ibid., 222.

18

I. Eduard von Hartmann and the Unconscious

remain inadequate for an accurate perception and expression of the world, in fact, that it may function as a detriment to its realization. In November 1868 Eduard von Hartmann's book Philosophy of the Unconscious, with the subtitle "Speculative results according to the inductive method of physical science," was published. In a letter to Gersdorff of August 4, 1869, Nietzsche writes: "An important book for you is 'Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious,' in spite of the dishonesty of the author." 4 On November 5, 1869 Erwin Rohde writes to Nietzsche: Have you read E. v. Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious? He plunders Schopenhauer while at the same time insulting him: posits the will, as if he had birthed it himself, with two blind eyes, an unconscious intellect, through which the whole becomes a kind of mole. Long terrible deserts of scholastic emptiness run through the book; however, if one can eventually conquer one's annoyance with the insolence against Schopenhauer, one reads much with interest. The so called method of physical science used in the book is stupid.5

Nietzsche, was, of course, already reading Hartmann's book and had recommended it to Gersdorff with the same qualifications of "dishonesty of the author." He replied to Rohde on November 11: "About Hartmann, I join with you in opinion and expression. However, I read him much, because he has the most beautiful knowledge and off and on knows how to strongly harmonize with the old Nornen-song of accursed existence." 6 Nietzsche is clearly taken with the book in spite of its disservice to his declared mentor, Schopenhauer. Why make much of Nietzsche's reading of Hartmann, and why here at the beginning of my discussion of his theory of language? Because the majority of ideas which Nietzsche promotes in his fragment "On the Origins of Language" come directly from Hartmann's chapter "Das Unbewusste in der Entstehung der Sprache" ("The Unconscious in the Origins of Language"). One could further counter: why make much of this? A fragment of writing influenced by a current reading is not an unusual thing. True; however, my study of Nietzsche's beginning theory of language will demonstrate that Hartmann not only provided some interesting ideas on the origin of language for the young Nietzsche, but that he filled a major gap in Nietzsche's thinking about language, one which had been opened up, but not satisfactorily filled, through his readings in Kant and Schopenhauer. Not only does Hartmann fill this gap, but he offers, what must have been for Nietzsche convincing, 4 5

6

Nietzsche, KSB 3: 36. Alwin Mittasch, Friedrich Nietzsche als Naturphilosoph, FNN 3 0 8 - 0 9 . Nietzsche, KSB 3: 73.

Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1952.

I. Eduard von Hartmann and the Unconscious

19

explanations as to why and where Schopenhauer and Kant fail to close it. We will find, in what follows, that Hartmann's influence, coming as it did, at a time to build upon Kant and Schopenhauer, and in ways already preshadowed by Nietzsche's own thinking about and criticism of these philosophers, becomes a major influence for him. In his book, Nietzsche als Natur philo soph, Mittasch writes: "How far, Nietzsche's idea of the unconscious was influenced by Schelling, Schopenhauer, Carus, and E. v. Hartmann, can remain undiscussed." 7 I will make significant inroads in opening up this question for discussion. Hartmann opens his chapter "The Unconscious in the Origins of Language" with the quote from Schelling which Nietzsche uses in his fragment, and which I quoted above. Hartmann writes, in view of this prompting from Schelling, that "all conscious human thought is only possible by the help of language." The position which Hartmann states very clearly, and which Nietzsche makes his own is that: Without language, or with a merely animal vocal language devoid of grammatical forms, a thinking so acute that the marvellously profound organism of universally identical fundamental forms could emerge as its conscious product, is, therefore, quite inexplicable. Rather, all progress in the development of language will be the first condition of progress in the elaboration of conscious thought, not its consequence ... 8 Nietzsche converts this thought into the following: "Every conscious thinking first possible with the help of language. Such an ingenious thinking completely impossible with a merely animalistic sound-language; the wonderful pensive organism." 9 To the question, then, what form of action of the human mind has produced language? Hartmann answers: unconscious instinct. 10 The 7 8

9 10

Mittasch, FNN 331. Hartmann, PU 1: 298, PUG 231. Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious first appeared in November 1868. It underwent nine editions between 1869 and 1882. It is the English translation by Coupland of the ninth edition which I use in this work. Between the first and ninth editions Hartmann revised and expanded his work several times. While the English translation includes these alterations, I am convinced that Nietzsche's study of Hartmann between 1869 and 1871 was conducted on the basis of the first or second (1869) edition based on the dates of the letters quoted above in which he discusses Hartmann. In this study, then, where Nietzsche is directly concerned, I remain only with what is contained in these editions. Where it seems relevant to the discussion, 1 append, in notes, references to the expanded material available in the English translation of the ninth edition. In some cases material included in the first two editions is not contained in the English translation. In those cases I offer my own translation. Nietzsche, US 222. In a later edition of the Philosophy of the Unconscious, Hartmann answers his question: What form of action of the human mind has produced language? even more specifically: "What other answer is conceivable to this than that of the unconscious spiritual activity, which with intuitive correctness acts here in natural instincts, there in intellectual instincts; here in the individual, there in the cooperative instincts; and everywhere alike, everywhere with infallibile clairvoyant accuracy answers to the greatness of the need" (PU 1: 300)?

20

I. Eduard von Hartmann and the Unconscious

proposition: an unconscious origination of language as the condition for conscious operations, is, at the time Nietzsche reads Hartmann, somewhat of a revolutionary idea. The idea of an unconscious foundation of all human activity, including that of language and rational thought, was a new and rather unprecedented perspective. Until approximately the first half of the nineteenth century and the blossoming of Romanticism, human beings viewed themselves as rational beings capable of translating their thinking will into actions effective in a more or less predictable world. Certainly, Schopenhauer shook these foundations for Nietzsche, with his idea of the irrational will. It was, to a large extent, precisely the revolutionary nature of Schopenhauer's thinking that Nietzsche found so appealing. However, even Schopenhauer stopped short of declaring an unconscious in Hartmann's sense. In the introduction to The Philosophy of the Unconscious Hartmann traces the origins of the idea of the unconscious first to Leibniz. He then follows a trail from Hume to Kant, Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, and then to Schopenhauer. The trail broadens into the physical sciences of his time with Herbart and Fechner, and into the natural sciences with Carus, Wundt, and Helmholtz. 11 Each of these contributions to the theory of an unconscious, with the exception of Carus, who Hartmann credits with a presentation of the idea of the unconscious in its pure form, are, according to him, more or less fragmentary and often peripheral to a definite statement of its existence and effects on human development such as he himself first offers in unified form in his book. Throughout the ensuing study I will return to the various contexts in which Nietzsche confronts Hartmann's theory of the unconscious, not only in its philosophical distinctions, but also as it relates to Nietzsche's acquaintance with the theories of the physical and natural sciences and the extent to which both influence his thinking about language. 12 " One of my major objectives is to demonstrate to what an extent Nietzsche's theory of language depends on his great interest in and reading of the physical and natural sciences. To my knowledge the only major works to deal with this aspect of Nietzsche's thinking are Alwin Mittasch, Friedrich Nietzsche als Naturphilosoph, Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1952, and G. J. Stack, Lange and Nietzsche, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1983. Mittasch's compendium of Nietzsche's work in the natural and physical sciences is outstanding, however, it should ideally be seen as a foundation for further extensive research in this area of Nietzsche studies. See also VAP (1962), which offers valuable information on these aspects of Nietzsche's thinking. To one extent or another, Nietzsche was familiar with the ideas of each of the men Hartmann mentions here. Appendix B.3 offers an introduction to each of the names in the physical and natural sciences mentioned in my work. This is done for two reasons: 1) to demonstrate the breadth of Nietzsche's interest, and, 2) because these names come into my discussion again, at a later point. 12 See Appendix B.3 on Hartmann. Nietzsche's relationship to Hartmann is interesting. There is evidence that Nietzsche often wrote of Hartmann in very unflattering light. If I continue, for example, the quote from Nietzsche's letter to Erwin Rohde of November 11, 1869 (KS13 3: 73) we find, after Nietzsche's praise of Hartmann, the following: "He is a very fragile

I. Eduard von Hartmann and the Unconscious

21

and stiff man — with a little spite it seems to me, and here and there also small-minded and ungrateful. And this is for me a footing in ethics and the ethical judgement of men and animals." However, as Mittasch wisely notes, Nietzsche uses sharp, but with that all too sharp words in his ambiguous references to Hartmann. "Already in the Basel years Nietzsche spoke of 'Schopenhauer's imitator Hartmann (who is really his enemy)' (GA X: 217, [KSA 7: 811]). 'Hartmann and Heine are unconscious ironists; scoundrels against themselves' (GA X: 283, [KSA 7: 659]). However, 'Hartmann has spirit (Geist)' (GA X: 304, [KSA 7: 740])!" (FNN 39). Later (1884) Nietzsche writes a few notes which specifically refer to Hartmann: "What a poor fate Schopenhauer had. His injustices found their exaggerators (Diihring and Richard Wagner), his fundamental view of pessimism a Berliner involuntary belittler (Eduard von Hartmann)" (KSA 11: 161). "Poor Schopenhauer! Eduard von Hartmann cut off the legs that he walked on, and Richard Wagner also cut off his head" (KSA 11: 153)! "I was in error at that time: I thought Eduard von Hartmann was a fine, superior head and wag (feiner überlegener Kopf und Spassvogel), who made fun of the pessimistic dilemma of the age; I found the discovery of his. "Unconscious" so mischievous, so clever, it appears to me a real mousetrap for the gloomy and dumb ones (of philosophical dilettantism, as it spreads more and more over Germany). Now one is determined to assure me that he meant it in earnest: and one almost forces me to believe it; — should he, however, therefore, cease to be cheering for me? Should I have to stop laughing when this Arria again and again urges its Paetus, not to be fearful of the Dolche, I mean of the Hartmannian pessimism? Paete, it calls tenderly, non doletX Paete, this pessimism does not hurt! Paete, Eduard does not bite! Eduard is full of consideration, agreeable, human friendly, blue, even friendly to the state, even prussian-blue — in short Eduard is a maid for all tasks and his pessimism leaves nothing to be desired" (KSA 11: 532—33)! "There are still many more cheerful things on earth, than the Pessimists admit: for example, Eduard von Hartmann himself. The Laokoon group, comprised of three clowns and just as many umbrellas, cheers me not as much as this Eduard 'wrestling' with his problems" (KSA 11: 232). It seems clear that Nietzsche had something of an ambiguous relationship to Hartmann's writings. He is consistent in asserting that Hartmann did not pursue pessimism in the full sense of the word (i.e., as did Schopenhauer), while at the same time offering a completely pessimistic point of view. This contradictory stance seems to have been arrived at in that Nietzsche felt Hartmann was playing at pessimism, while offering the view that pessimism does not or should not hurt. The whole dynamics, which we find at work in Nietzsche's references to Hartmann, naming him as unconscious ironist, joker, as perpetrating a sort of mischievous joke upon his "fellow" pessimists is not primarily derogatory, rather the opposite. One detects a definite tone of appreciation and admiration for such a source of "cheerfulness." And Nietzsche makes this perfectly clear in section 9 of "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," 1873, to which I turn in Chapter 10. It is probable that Hartmann's influence did not stop with the period I am reviewing, although that influence was most likely never as marked as in this early period. Nietzsche contained in his library two other of Hartmann's major works, the second of which was very heavily commented upon by Nietzsche in its margins. The two works were: Das Unbewusste vom Standpunkt der Physiologie und Descenden^theorie, Berlin, 1872, and Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins, Berlin, 1874. (See Oehler, Max. Nietzsche's Bibliothek. Vierzehnte Jahresausgabe der Gesellschaft der Freunde des Nietzsche-Archivs. Wiesbaden: Lessingdruckerei, 1942.) It is also significant that Nietzsche sent a copy of The Birth of Tragedy to Hartmann. See KSB 3: 310 and 316. It is part of my work to demonstrate to what an extent that book owes its birth to Nietzsche's work with Hartmann's ideas.

Chapter Two Schopenhauer Nietzsche's theory of language takes its first forms from a working with and working against the Kantian and Schopenhauerian philosophies, and in particular from Kant's thing in itself as seen through the filter of Schopenhauerian criticism. Kant's revolutionary distinction of the phenomenon from the thing in itself, based on the proof that between things and us there always stands the intellect and that on this account they may not be known according to what they may be in themselves, provides the foundation stone of Schopenhauer's philosophy, and subsequently of Nietzsche's early thinking about language and epistemology. In "On the Origins of Language" Nietzsche writes: "The deepest philosophical knowledge lies already prepared in language." ("Die tiefsten philosophischen Erkenntnisse liegen schon vorbereitet in der Sprache.") Then he quotes Kant and at the same time makes reference to a specific discussion in Schopenhauer's "Kritik der Kantischen Philosophie" ("Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy"): "Kant says: 'a great, perhaps the greatest portion of what our reason finds to do consists in the analysis of concepts which human beings already find in themselves'." (" 'Ein grosser Theil, vielleicht der grösste Theil von dem Geschäfte der Vernunft besteht in Zergliederungen der Begriffe, die er (der Mensch) schon in sich vorfindet.'") And then, referring to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche adds: "One thinks of subject and object, the idea of judgement is abstracted from grammatical sentences. Out of subject and predicate come the categories of substance and accident." ("Man denke an Subjekt und Objekt; der Begriff des Urtheils ist vom grammatischen Satze abstrahirt. Aus Subjekt und Prädikat wurden die Kategorien von Substanz und Accidenz.") 1 My discussion will break into Nietzsche's juxtapositioning 1

Nietzsche, US 222. The quote from Kant can be found in The Critique of Pure Reason, Introduction, Section 3. That this is the Kantian sentence quoted by Nietzsche is corraborated by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy in their article "Friedrich Nietzsche: Rhetorique et langage," Poetique, No. 5, 1971. In this article the authors translate into French and annotate early writings by Nietzsche concerned with rhetoric and language. However, in the course of my research I have found that Nietzsche does not take the quote directly from Kant, but rather word for word from Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious and in so doing repeats Hartmann's misquote of Kant's actual sentence which will be discussed in chapter 3. Nietzsche himself, provides the Schopenhauerian reference which can be found in Schopenhauer, WWR h 458, SW 2: 543.

Language and Representation

23

of these three statements in order to make them the opportunity of briefly schematizing Schopenhauer's philosophy, from the perspective of the part language plays in it, while examining its aspects as a reaction against and departure from Kantian philosophy. To approach Nietzsche's theory of language from this perspective is necessary and interesting for several reasons: 1) Nietzsche's theory of language, as already mentioned, forms itself to a large extent in agreement with and through a critique of these philosophies; 2) it provides a specific ground upon which to clearly delineate Nietzsche's breaking away from Schopenhauer, something which still remains to be analyzed in detail and with specific attention to particular terminology in their theories of language and the roles they play in their respective epistemologies; 3) it will provide the ground upon which Nietzsche is able to take such an interest in the natural and physical sciences, and outline a background of thinking which makes Hartmann such an attractive possibility; and 4) it will allow me to demonstrate how early in his thinking Nietzsche anticipates the major formulations of his later thinking about language and philosophy in general, and how they are in their earliest formation not only reactions to Schopenhauer, but also to a significant degree, reactions to specific Kantian principles. It is the basic conception of the mind shared by Spinoza and the Empiricists which Kant and subsequently Schopenhauer inherit. The mind is seen as an entity, immaterial or material, which receives representations of things in the world, reasons about the perceived representations, and translates thought about these representations into actions of the body willed by the mind. Kant and Schopenhauer draw this basic model more into the physical and empirical sciences, however, the major divisions of the mind, of impressions or images, to reasonable thought, and willed action remain, for the most part, unchanged. It is with this basic model, with its Kantian and Schopenhauerian modifications, that we will see Nietzsche working. Schopenhauer's philosophy provides a meeting place in which empiricism takes a role alongside the line of thinking which leads to philosophical idealism. It is this conjunction of idealism and empiricism around which Nietzsche is continually fighting his agon during his early years of thinking.

Language and

Representation

The most distinguishing element of Schopenhauer's philosophy, which draws its fundamental inspiration from Kant and the thing in itself, is that it starts neither from object nor from subject, but from representation, which contains and presupposes both.

24

II. Schopenhauer T h e perceived world in space and time, proclaiming itself as nothing but causality, is perfectly real, and is absolutely what it appears to be; it appears wholly and without reserve as representation, hanging together according to the law of causality. This is its empirical reality ... the whole world of objects is and remains representation, and is for this reason wholly and forever conditioned by the subject (and his understanding); in other words, it has transcendental ideality. 2

The subject, or the principium individuationis, has two ways of knowing, knowledge of perception (or intuitive knowledge) and knowledge abstracted from perception, that is, rational knowledge. What might exist outside of the principium individuations, the thing in itself, can never be known (though, later in my discussion we will find that Schopenhauer does claim to have identified the essence of the thing in itself under the name of the will). Within representation, the subject can only know his perceptions, and what he conceptualizes and thinks about those perceptions, as objects. Thus, representation means more precisely — object for the subject. However, the subject itself is also, necessarily, only object for its knowing consciousness. Representation of perception is arrived at through the understanding, which takes the sensation as a datum and applies the law of causality (space and time), allowing the sensation to be perceived as an effect, thus situating the object as cause. "All perception is not only of the senses, but of the intellect; in other words, pure knowledge through the understanding of cause and effect."3 Not experience first then understanding of cause and effect, but cause and effect as the conditions for experience. Rational knowledge, which is abstract consciousness, is the fixing in concepts of reason what has already become known according to perception. Schopenhauer calls this fixing of concepts "representations of representations:" Reflection is necessarily the copy or repetition of the originally presented world of perception, though a copy of quite a special kind in a completely heterogeneous material. Concepts, therefore, can quite appropriately be called representations of representations (Vorstellungen von Vorstellungen). ... the abstract representation has its whole nature simply and solely in its relation to another representation. 4

Although the representation of a representation may have its relation to a concept or abstract representation before it, this cannot, according to Schopenhauer, continue ad infinitum, the series of abstractions must end in the last 2

3 4

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2 Vols., trans. E. F. J. Payne, New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1969. Each reference is followed by reference to the German: Arthur Schopenhauer Sämtliche Werke, Herausgegeben von Julius Frauenstädt, Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1891. W W R 1: 15, SW 2: 17. Ibid., W W R 1: 13, SW 2: 15. Ibid., W W R 1: 4 0 - 4 1 , SW 2: 4 8 - 4 9 .

Language and Representation

25

analysis with a concept which has its basis in knowledge of perception. For Schopenhauer, the whole world of reflection rests on the world of perception as its precondition. Schopenhauer defines those concepts which are not related directly to knowledge of perception, but only through one or several other concepts as abstracta, and those which have a direct grounding in knowledge of perception as concreta. With his examples of abstracta, such as "relation," "virtue," "investigation," "beginning," and of concreta, "man," "stone," "horse," Schopenhauer demonstrates that by concepts, or rational knowledge he means conscious thinking made possible through language. In this context Schopenhauer makes an important qualification about the "reflex" of language: "although abstract rational knowledge is the reflex of the representation from perception, and is founded thereon, it is by no means so congruent with it that it could everywhere take its place; on the contrary, it never corresponds wholly to this representation."5 Schopenhauer emphasizes that even concepts denoted as concreta are to be considered as such in only a figurative sense "for even these too are always abstracta, and in no way representations of perception."6 It is clear, that for Schopenhauer, a concept is a representation of a second order nature as far as consciousness is concerned: it is abstracted from perception which already presupposes conscious operations of the intellect. Thus, for Schopenhauer, "the concept of consciousness coincides with that of representation in general of whatever kind it may be." 7 However, perception and language are never exactly congruent with that of which they are representations. Both these conscious operations remain inadequate to the thing in itself, which exists as a universal lying outside the world of representation and the basic functions of the principium individuationis — time, space, and causality. In Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde (The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason) Schopenhauer describes the process of the formation of conceptions out of objects of representation. The first objects of representation are intuitive, complete, and empirical representations. They are intuitive as opposed to mere thoughts, ... they are complete, in that ... they not only contain the formal, but also the material part of phenomena, and they are empirical, partly as proceeding, not from mere connection of thoughts, but from an excitation of feeling in our sensitive organism, as their origin, to which they constantly refer for evidence as to their reality.8 5 6 7 8

Ibid., WWR 1: 58, SW 2: 6 9 - 7 0 . Ibid., WWR 1: 41, SW 2: 4 8 - 4 9 . Ibid., WWR 1: 51, SW 2: 60. Arthur Schopenhauer, The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, trans. Mme. Karl Hillebrand, London: George Bell and Sons, 1891. FR 31, SW 1: 28.

26

II. Schopenhauer

The faculty of abstraction, however, reduces these complete intuitive representations into their component parts "in order to think each of these parts separately as different qualities of, or relations between, things." In this process the perceptions necessarily forfeit their perceptibility. "Although each quality thus isolated (abstracted) can quite well be thought by itself, it does not at all follow that it can be perceived by itself." 9 In chapter 6 of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation), Part Two, Schopenhauer reiterates: "abstraction is a throwing off of useless luggage for the purpose of handling more easily the knowledge to be compared and manoeuvred in all directions." Thus, "much that is inessential and therefore merely confusing, in real things is omitted, and we operate with few but essential determinations conceived in the abstract." 10 To conceive, then, is to think less than we perceive. Concepts would, according to Schopenhauer, "entirely escape our consciousness, and be of no avail to it for the thinking processes ... were they not fixed and retained in our senses by arbitrary signs." 11 These signs are words. According to Schopenhauer words are necessary to concepts, and language to the processes of reason, because our consciousness has time as its form and because concepts have arisen through abstraction and are thus universal rather than particular in character. It is the property of concepts to have an objective existence that does not belong to any time series. Therefore, to enter the immediate present of an individual consciousness, and consequently to be capable of insertion into a time-series, they must be to a certain extent brought down again to the nature of particular things, individualized, and thus linked to a representadon of the senses; this is the

word.12

Only by this means is the arbitrary reproduction, recollection, and preservation of concepts possible and only by this means are the operations possible which are to be undertaken with concepts, judging, inferring, comparing, limiting, and so on. Thus, for Schopenhauer, the reduction of the knowledge of perception to abstract conceptions "is the fundamental business of reason, and can only take place by means of language." 1 3 In maintaining this necessity of language, of word and speech as the means of abstract thinking Schopenhauer is careful to point to its limitations. But just as every means, every machine, at the same time burdens and obstructs, so does language, since it forces the infinitely shaded, mobile, Ibid., FR 1 1 5 - 1 6 , SW 1: 98. Schopenhauer, W W R 2: 64, SW 3: 68. " Schopenhauer, FR 116, SW 1: 99. 12 Schopenhauer, W W R 2: 66, SW 3: 70. 13 Schopenhauer, FR 116, SW 1: 100. 9

10

Language and Representation

27

and modifiable idea into certain rigid, permanent forms, and by fixing the idea it at the same time fetters it.14 Schopenhauer distinguishes two types of what we might call image thought. Thinking "in a wider sense" corresponds to perceptual knowledge and is composed of "all inner activity of the mind in general, (and which) necessitates either words or pictures of the imagination: without one or the other of these it has nothing to hold by." 1 5 By what mechanism does perceptual knowledge produce representations? Through a physiological occurrence in an animal's brain, whose result is the consciousness of a picture or image (Bewusstsein eines Bildes). In discussing the creation of images of objects from the senses Schopenhauer offers examples of images arising from the senses of hearing, touch, smell and taste, which appear to be the result of a cause and effect sequence. However, Schopenhauer finds that images created from the sense of sight are unique in that apprehension of an object appears to be direct. However, this is an illusion, and in describing the nature of this illusion, Schopenhauer offers a key passage in the mechanisms of perceptual thinking arising from the sense of sight. I quote at length, because the operations of sight and the making of pictures or images will become central to Nietzsche's thinking about language as we proceed, and it is very probable that some of his ideas stem from the reading of Schopenhauerian passages such as the following. In the case of seeing the transition from the effect to the cause occurs quite unconsciously (gan% unbewusst) and thus the illusion arises that this kind of perception is perfectly direct and consists only in the sensation of sense without the operation of the understanding — this fact is due partly to the great perfection of the organ, and partly to the exclusively rectilinear action of light. In virtue of this action, the impression itself leads to the place of the cause, and as the eye has the capacity of experiencing most delicately and at a glance all the nuances of light, shade, colour, and outline, as well as the data by which the understanding estimates distance, the operating of the understanding, in the case of impressions on this sense, takes place with a rapidity and certainty that no more allow it to enter consciousness than they allow spelling to do so in the case of reading. In this way, therefore, the illusion arises that the sensation itself gives us the objects directly. Nevertheless, it is precisely in vision that the operation of the understanding (des VerstandesJ, which consists in knowing the cause from the effect, is most significant. By virtue of this operation, what is doubly felt with two eyes is singly perceived; by means of it, the impression arrives on the retina upside down, in consequence of the crossing of the rays in the pupil; and when its cause is pursued back in the same direction, the impression is

14 15

Schopenhauer, W W R 2: 66, SW 3: 71. Schopenhauer, FR 121, SW 1: 103.

28

II. Schopenhauer

corrected, or, as it is expressed, we see things upright, although their image in the eye is inverted and reversed.16 With this we have a very good idea of what Schopenhauer means by a picture or image of perception, and the role of cause and effect in its production. However, Schopenhauer goes on to qualify this process of picturing or imaging: "Obviously the relation of such a picture to something entirely different from the animal in whose brain it exists can only be a very indirect one.'" 7 It is important to emphasize here, and it will become significant for my further discussion, that this picture or image thinking, even when it proceeds from sensation itself all takes place, for Schopenhauer, "inside our head." From the point of view of Schopenhauer's subjective idealism, the "outside us" to which we refer objects on the occasion of the sensation of sight described above, itself resides inside our head. In other words, although we can experience the determination of a thing "outside" directly, we do not have within us the representation of the perceived thing lying outside us which is different from our perception of it. "Therefore, these things that we perceive directly in such a manner and not some mere image or copy of them, are themselves also only our representations, and as such exist only in our head." 18 Schopenhauer describes a second type of image thinking "in a narrower sense" which corresponds to abstract reflection by means of words. He makes a direct analogy between "the directness and unconsciousness with which in perception we make the transition from the sensation to its cause," and the creation of abstract representations or thinking. When we read or listen, we receive mere words, but from these we pass over to the concepts denoted by them so immediately, that it is as if we received the concepts immediately·, for we are in no way conscious of the transition to them ... Only when we pass from abstract concepts to pictures of the imagination do we become aware of the transposition.19 This second type of picture thinking arises only after abstract conceptualization has taken place, and thus, Schopenhauer calls such pictures or images of the imagination a "representative of a conception" (Repräsentant eines Begriffs). Even when used to represent a conception, a picture of the imagination (phantasm) ought to be distinguished from a conception. We use phantasms as representatives of conceptions when we try to grasp the intuitive representation itself that has given rise to the conception and to make it tally with that 16 17 18 19

Schopenhauer, W W R 2: 2 3 - 2 4 , SW 3: 28. Ibid., W W R 2: 1 9 1 - 9 2 , SW 3: 214. Ibid., W W R 2: 22, SW 3: 26. Ibid., W W R 2: 23, SW 3: 27.

Language and Representation

29

conception, which is in all cases impossible; for ... we are always conscious that they are not adequate to the conceptions they represent, and that they are full of arbitrary determinations. 20

Because of the nature of the formation of abstractions, according to Schopenhauer, through reduction, similarity, fixing, etc., they are ultimately inadequate to what is represented, and thus carry with them some dangers. "All mere rational talk thus renders the result of given conceptions clearer, but does not, strictly speaking, bring anything new to light." 2 1 Again, Schopenhauer emphasizes the founding nature of perceptual intuition of the senses, which can bring new knowledge about, and the arbitrary nature of abstract conceptualization, which while useful, dispenses to a great extent with perceptibility. Perception is not only the source of all knowledge, but is itself knowledge 'par excellence'; it alone is the unconditionally true genuine knowledge, fully worthy of the name. For it alone imparts insight proper; it alone is actually assimilated by man, passes into his inner nature and can quite justifiably be called his, whereas the concepts merely cling to him.22

Thus, Schopenhauer's scheme of language proceeds roughly in the following manner: a sensation produces an image in perception, which is an intuitive, complete, and empirical representation. This image is subjected to the processes of abstraction. It is cut up and fixed in a concept through the application of a word. Concepts are used for purely logical reasoning, or are used as an activity of the faculty of judgment which "acts as the mediator between intuitive and abstract knowledge, or between the understanding and reason." 2 3 The attempt to "tally" a conception with the "intuitive representation itself' which gave rise to it, by "picturing" a representative of the conception, is a fundamental operation of conscious conceptuality. This type of image or picture of the imagination does not come from sensuous impressions and as a result can never tally with the intuitive representation which originally gave rise to the conception. Just as images created from sensation are not adequate to what is perceived, images arising from abstract conceptualization are equally as inadequate to what is conceived.

20 21 22 25

Schopenhauer, Ibid., FR 123, Schopenhauer, Schopenhauer,

FR 120, SW 1: 102. SW 1: 105. WWR 2: 77, SW 3: 83. FR 1 2 1 - 2 2 , SW 1: 103.

30

II. Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer's

Departure from

Kant

With the Statement: "The true kernel of all knowledge is that reflection which works with the help of intuitive representations; for it goes back to the fountainhead, to the basis of all conceptions," 24 Schopenhauer touches upon the fundamental separation of his own philosophy from that of Kant's. The more we depart from a grounding in perceptual knowledge and ascend in abstract thought, the more we deduct, the less therefore remains to be thought. "The highest, i.e., the most general conceptions, are the emptiest and poorest, and at last become mere husks, such as, for instance, being, essence, thing, becoming, etc." 25 For Schopenhauer, philosophical systems which consist of such very general conceptions without grounding themselves in the knowledge of perception, "are little more than mere juggling with words. For since all abstraction consists in thinking away, the further we push it the less we have left over." 26 Schopenhauer considers Kant's discovery of the a priori nature of time and space to have been a "lucky find" based on objective apprehension and the highest human thought. However, although Kant expressly states in The Critique of Pure Reason that "all thought must, directly or indirectly, go back to intuitions, i.e., to our sensibility," he went on to find pure concepts as presupposition in our faculty of knowledge which parallel the a priori categories of time and space on the perceptual leval. He imagined that empirical, actual thinking would be possible first of all through a pure thinking a priori, which would have no objects at all in itself, but would have to take them from perception. ... Thus a pure

understanding corresponded symmetrically to a pure sensibility.21

Schopenhauer considers that a boundary has been overleapt which leads to the precarious position wherein the abstracta come to predominate as categories of understanding the world. Kant does say that abstract thinking does "very frequently, though not always" go back to our perceiving in order to convince ourselves that our abstract thinking has not taken us too far from our ground of perception. This referring back of concept to perception, is that already discussed above as the process of using the second type of "picture of imagination" which attempts to grasp the intuitive representation 24 25 26

27

Ibid., FR 122, SW 1: 103. Ibid., FR 116, SW 1: 99. Schopenhauer, WWR 2: 64, SW 3: 69. Many of the passages from The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason were brought to my attention in an article by Morris S. Engel, "Schopenhauer's Impact on Wittgenstein," Schopenhauer: His Philosophical Achievement, Ed. Michael Fox, New Jersey: Barnes and Nobel Books, 1980. Ibid., WWR 1: 449, SW 2: 532.

The Subject-Predicate Relationship

31

which has given rise to the conception. Kant calls a fleeting phantasm of this kind a scheme: such a schema stands midway between our abstract thinking of empirically acquired concepts and our clear perception occurring through the senses, so also do there exist a priori similar schemata of the pure concepts of the understanding between the faculty of perception of pure sensibility and the faculty of thinking a priori of the pure understanding.28

Now this is the point at which Schopenhauer balks. Kant, in assuming schemata of the pure concepts a priori of the understanding, which are analogous to the empirical schemata, overlooks the original purpose of such schemata. Empirical thinking rests upon the material content of empirical perception and can refer back to that material content to assure ourselves that our thinking still has real content. However, with Kant's concepts a priori, which have no content at all, as they have not sprung from perception, but which first receive a content from within, "have as yet nothing on which they could look back." 29 Schopenhauer's differences with Kant can be summed up clearly. Whereas Kant starts from indirect, reflected knowledge, Schopenhauer starts from direct and intuitive knowledge. For Kant philosophy is a science of concepts, whereas for Schopenhauer, philosophy is a science in concepts drawn from knowledge of perception. Kant minimizes the world of perception and sticks to the forms of abstract thinking, a procedure which is "founded on the assumption that reflection is the ectype of all perception, and that everything essential to perception must therefore be expressed in reflection." 30

The Subject-Predicate

Relationship

To offer a concrete example of Schopenhauer's objection to Kant upon this score, let me refer back to my opening quote from Nietzsche's "On the Origins of Language" and his juxtapositioning of Schopenhauer and Kant. To reiterate, Kant says: "a great, perhaps the greatest portion of what our reason finds to do consists in the analysis of concepts which human beings already find in themselves." And then, referring to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche adds: "One thinks of subject and object, the idea of judgement is abstracted from grammatical sentences. Out of subject and predicate come the categories of substance and accident." Nietzsche's reference, here, to Schopenhauer 28 29 30

Ibid., W W R 1: 450, SW 2: 533. Ibid., W W R 1: 450, SW 2: 534. Ibid., W W R 1: 453, SW 2: 537.

32

II. Schopenhauer

gives no hint of the point of conflict with Kant which it contains — though the page to which Nietzsche gives reference in his footnote contains the essence of the conflict. The reference is to Schopenhauer's criticism of Kant's categorical judgement in his "Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy," where Schopenhauer maintains that the mistake Kant makes, a mistake which is commonly made, when the grounding nature of perceptual knowledge is left aside, is one of confusing the place of the abstract conceptions of subject and predicate with those of the external categories of substance and accident; a confusion which allows the projection of abstract knowledge onto the external world, as a precondition for the understanding of causality in knowledge of perception. The mistake of confusing subject and predicate with substance and accident comes about because the plurality of different immediate kinds of knowledge in perception are all abstracted through the combination of the two concepts of subject and predicate: For example, the judgements: "Water boils"; "The sine measures the angle"; "the will decides"; "employment distracts"; "distinction is difficult", express through the same logical form the most varied kinds of relations. From this we obtain once more the sanction, however wrong the beginning, to place ourselves at the standpoint of abstract knowledge, in order to analyae direct, intuitive knowledge. ... Now after this knowledge, like much that is quite different from it (e.g., the subordination of highly abstract concepts), has been expressed in the abstract through subject and predicate, these mere relations of concepts have been transferred back to knowledge of perception, and it has been supposed that the subject and predicate of the judgement must have a special correlative of their own in perception, namely substance and accident.31

This is the obverse of Schopenhauer's view that cause and effect themselves condition experience. Not experience first then understanding of cause and effect, but cause and effect as the conditions for experience. Schopenhauer asserts that the subject and predicate should be kept in the abstracta where they alone have significance. In order to attempt an explanation of how subject and predicate relate to abstract conceptualization, Schopenhauer develops a theory of conceptual extension wherein conceptual spheres overlap each other in varying ways. Because concepts are abstract representations and thus not completely definite representations, as are representations of perception, they have a range, an extension, or a sphere in which they operate. The sphere of any concept converges in part with the sphere of related concepts and vice versa, although if they are really different concepts each contains something the other does 31

Ibid., W W R 1: 458, S W 2: 543.

Nietzsche's Transformations of Schopenhauer's Language Theory

33

not. "In this relation every subject stands to its predicate. To recognize this relation means to judge.32 What needs to be emphasized is that Schopenhauer's relation of subject to predicate, or concept spheres to one another, remains strictly within the realm of the abstracta and have arisen only upon the basis of direct perceptual knowledge. Schopenhauer's objection to Kant's category of categorical judgement is that Kant seems to leave aside the "ground [direct perceptual knowledge] of the connection of concept spheres [the relationship of subject to predicate] which gives truth to the judgement ... (and) can be of a very varied nature." 33 Rather, Kant takes the abstract categories of subject and predicate as fundamental concepts with which to, then, perceive substance and accident. Kant, says Schopenhauer, by making this mistake, by supposing that the abstract relation expressed in subject and predicate characterizes the human relation with representation of an object and is thus used as a model for projection of substance and accident, makes, what he calls a "monstrous assertion" ("monströse Behauptung"): "that perception without concept is absolutely empty, but that concept without perception is still something!"34 For Schopenhauer thought is mere abstraction from perception which cannot furnish new knowledge, cannot establish objects which did not exist previously: the "material of our thinking is none other than our perceptions themselves, and not something which perception does not contain, and which would be added only through thought." 35

Nietzsche's Transformations of Schopenhauer's Language Theory It is significant to notice that Nietzsche, in "Origins," redirects Schopenhauer's conception of subject and predicate as abstract ideas used to illustrate the relationship of operations between spheres of concepts, and takes them, rather, in their purely grammatical sense. "One thinks of subject and object, the idea of judgement is abstracted from grammatical sentences." This is not what Schopenhauer says, as we have seen. He is speaking of the subject and predicate of the judgement, not of the subject and predicate of sentences, though one might at first glance take this meaning, as he gives examples of subject predicate sentences, which, however, he himself calls judgements. Schopenhauer is not talking about the formation of sentences here, he is talking about judgements which arise as a result of the application of the 32

33 34 35

Ibid., W W R 1: 42, SW 2: 50. For a more detailed discussion of Schopenhauer's ideas about concept spheres see W W R 1, Section 9, and W W R 2, chapter 10. Ibid., W W R 1: 458, SW 2: 543. Ibid., W W R 1: 474, SW 2: 562. Ibid., W W R 1: 475, SW 2: 5 6 3 - 6 4 .

34

II. Schopenhauer

relationship of subject to predicate, a relationship which determines the connection between possible concept spheres. He uses the idea of subject and predicate to illustrate that some concept spheres will have connections with others which have something in common while other concept spheres will have nothing in common and cannot stand in a relationship of subject to predicate. That Nietzsche replaces Schopenhauer's abstract notion of subject and predicate in concept spheres with a concern for the purely grammatical effects of subject and predicate as they relate to philosophical thinking in general is immediately understood if we refer to Eduard von Hartmann's chapter "The Unconscious in the Origin of Language" in his Philosophy of the Unconscious. This is the source (along with Lange, as we shall see) of Nietzsche's having juxtaposed these ideas in the first place. There, Hartmann writes: Let us consider first the philosophical value of the grammatical forms and the formation of concepts. In every more developed language we find the distinction of subject and predicate, of subject and object, of substantive, verb, and adjective, and the same conditions for the construction of sentences. In the less developed languages these fundamental forms are at least distinguished by their position in the sentence. Whoever is acquainted with the history of philosophy will know how much it owes to these grammatical forms alone. The notion of the judgement is unquestionably abstracted from the grammatical sentence by the omission of the verbal form. The categories of substance and accident are derived in the same way from subject and predicate; ... The philosophical notions of subject and object, which in strictness were wanting to the consciousness of antiquity but today openly govern speculation, have been developed from grammatical notions in which they lay involved unconsciously preformed ... 36

Schopenhauer's reflections on language never lead him to question the nature of grammar in itself. His assumption is that subject and predicate, having been determined in a grammatical sense common to all, can now serve as a model for the possible abstract relations between concept spheres. Nietzsche is not satisfied with accepting language as a given not to be studied in itself as a subject of speculation. Thus his interest in what Hartmann proposes. It is here, in Hartmann, that Nietzsche finds his idea, expressed in "Origins," that judgements are abstracted from the forms of the grammatical sentence and that the categories of substance and accident are derived from subject and predicate. Hartmann proposes something which Schopenhauer does not: namely that grammatical forms govern speculation because they lie unconsciously preformed in the human mind and as such must offer a set of predetermined 36

Hartmann, PU 1: 2 9 3 - 9 4 , PUG 2 2 7 - 2 8 .

Nietzsche's Transformations of Schopenhauer's Language Theory

35

forms and notions to the philosophical mind. Nietzsche's sentence, "The deepest philosophical knowledge lies already prepared in language," which immediately precedes his lines from Kant and Schopenhauer, can be understood more completely in light of Hartmann's words above. It implies an examination of language which proceeds from language itself. Schopenhauer's concern is not with language per se, rather he is interested in finding the place which language plays in the larger context of our coming to rational knowledge out of perception. The first fact for Schopenhauer is the principle of sufficient reason. For Nietzsche, on the other hand, the first fact is language itself, and what proceeds from it is conditioned by the very first fact of language. This is in sympathy with Hartmann's view that the philosophy of his time neglected what lies nearest to it, namely language, and that while there was no philosophy of language per se, yet "philosophy, the farther it has progressed, has ever more clearly perceived that the understanding of one's own thinking is the first task." 37 Nietzsche takes this suggestion very much to heart and it most likely fell in accord with thoughts already forming themselves in his thinking. Later in his theory of language (1872—74) Nietzsche's thoroughgoing criticism of grammar and its determining influence in philosophical thinking comes very much to the fore. He ultimately takes grammar back to the basic forms of sense perception itself. 38 For now, it is enough to point to the distinctions being made here, in the conjoining of Hartmann's suggestion and the examples of Schopenhauer with regard to Kant. It is from this starting point that, to quote Lacoue-Labarthe, Nietzsche's project will raise a "constant accusation of the ontological, metaphysical responsibility of language and of grammar." 39 This rather detailed summary of Schopenhauer's views on language and its relationship to perception as it comes to be formed both with and against Kant's philosophizing has been followed in such detail, because it provides, along with Hartmann's influence, the basis of much of Nietzsche's own theorizing about language. Nietzsche will apply some of these ideas more distinctly and in some cases with a very different emphasis in mind. The major ideas, which Nietzsche retains from Schopenhauer's writings on language are the following: 1) the division of representation from the thing in 37 38

39

Ibid., PU 1: 295, PUG 2 2 8 - 2 9 . See Breazeale's translation of Nietzsche's notes from 1872 — 75 and Nietzsche's notes for a course on "Rhetoric" (1874). In a forthcoming article, "Nietzsche's Physiology of Ideological Criticism," in The Postmodern Nietzsche, Ed. Clayton Koelb, I have discussed Nietzsche's idea of unconscious physiological perception. In that article, I maintain that for Nietzsche, the forms of conscious language, including its grammatical categories, are constituted as an imitation of a specific model of completely unconscious operations of perceptual tropology. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, "Le detour" in Le sujetde la philosophic, Paris: Aubier—Flammarion, 1979. D 2.

36

II. Schopenhauer

itself; 2) the idea that an image is the result of a physiological abstraction from the senses, i.e., perceptual knowledge; 3) the idea, however, that even perceptual knowledge does not correspond to the actual object of representation; 4) a distrust of abstraction and agreement with the necessity of grounding in the empirical; 5) the idea that words are arbitrary and second order representations; 6) therefore, that abstract thought is inadequate to express the world and can never have to do with truth; 7) and the prompting of Schopenhauer's criticism of subject and predicate as abstractions allowing the positing of substance and accident, which, when taken in conjunction with Hartmann's suggestions about the unconscious role of grammar in philosophical thinking, leads to his own criticisms of grammar. These gains which Nietzsche wins from Schopenhauer for his beginning theory of language must, however, be seen against the background of Schopenhauer's subjective idealism wherein the things that we perceive directly, the "outside of us" to which we refer objects on the occasion of perception itself resides inside our head. Therefore things can only be in space and outside of us in so far as we represent them. For Schopenhauer, the concept of consciousness coincides with that of representation in general whether perceptual or abstracted from perception. Representations are the consequence of the conditions of the principium individuationis which arises only as a result of the laws of space and time in causality. Although Nietzsche incorporates the items of language theory gained from Schopenhauer into his theory of language, he will not apply them in the context of a subjective idealism, but from a point of view which takes into consideration materialistic and scientific knowledge, along with a receptivity to the unconscious, pre-intellectual aspects of language, perspectives which eventually lead him to a strong criticism of Schopenhauer's basic premise of the nature of individuation.

Chapter Three Kant Let us turn again to the juxtapositioning of quotes from Nietzsche's "Origins." We find, interestingly enough, that Nietzsche has not only swerved away from Schopenhauer's meaning with regard to subject and predicate in favor of a purely grammatical concern, prompted by Hartmann, but that the Kantian quote is taken verbatim from Hartmann as well. Nietzsche writes: "The deepest philosophical knowledge lies already prepared in language." Then he quotes Kant: "A great, perhaps the greatest portion of what our reason finds to do consists in the analysis of concepts which human beings already find in themselves." ("Ein grosser Theil, vielleicht der grösste Theil von dem Geschäfte der Vernunft besteht in Zergliederungen der Begriffe, die er [der Mensch] schon in sich vorfindet.") Except for the addition of the word "man" in brackets, Nietzsche quotes Hartmann exactly. But in so doing, Nietzsche repeats an inaccurate rendering of Kant's actual sentence which is to be found in Section 3 of the Introduction to The Critique of Pure Reason. In actuality, Kant's statement reads: "A great, perhaps the greatest portion of what our reason finds to do consists in the analysis of our concepts of objects." ("Ein grosser Teil, und vielleicht der grösste, von dem Geschäfte unserer Vernunft besteht in Zergliederungen der Begriffe, die wir schon von Gegenständen haben.") 1 How Hartmann intends the permutation of Kant's quote is explained in part by his next sentences: It [reason] finds the cases of declension in the substantive, adjective, pronoun, the voices, tenses, and moods of the verb, and the immeasurable wealth of ready-made notions of object and relation. All the categories, which for the most part represent the most important relations, the fundamental notions of all thought, as being, becoming, thinking, feeling, desiring, motion, force, activity, etc., lie before it ready-made material, and it requires thousands of years only to find its whereabouts in this wealth of unconscious speculation.2 Hartmann can transpose "concepts of objects" into "concepts which it already finds in itself' because he believes that the concept of object is only possible 1 2

Immanuel Kant, Werke in Zwölf Bänden, Heraugegeben von Wilhelm Weischedel, Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1956. KW 3: 51. Hartmann, PU 1: 294-95, PUG 228.

38

III. Kant

upon the precondition of the already unconscious forms of language itself. This is a notion not entirely unjustified with reference to the Kantian context. Though there is no evidence that Nietzsche did so, let us turn to Kant for a moment to find what he means by "concept of an object." In Section 1 of the first part of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant tells us very clearly. W h a t e v e r the process and the means may be by which k n o w l e d g e reaches, its objects, there is one that reaches them directly, and f o r m s the ultimate material of all thought, viz. intuition. This is possible only w h e n the object is given, and the object can be given only (to human beings at least) through a certain affection of the mind. This faculty o f receiving representations according to the manner in which w e are affected by objects, is called sensibility. Objects therefore are given to us through our sensibility. Sensibility alone supplies us with intuitions. These intuitions become thought through the understanding, and hence arise conceptions. 3

The process which Kant describes as relevant, to human beings at least, is one which leads from object to concept through the means of sensibility and intuition which arise, however, only through a certain affection of the mind. Kant divides the phenomenon, the undefined object of empirical intuition, into two terms: matter, which corresponds to sensation, and form, that which causes matter to be perceived as arranged in a certain way. Matter is given a posteriori, but the form of matter, Kant writes, "must be ready for it in the mind a priori and must therefore be capable of being considered as separate from all sensations." Kant's reason for reaching this conclusion is that "it is clear that it cannot be sensation again through which sensations are arranged and placed in certain forms." 4 The affection of the mind, then, provides the a priori forms, which do not refer to direct sensibility. Thus, Kant makes a distinction between empirical intuition of the senses and pure intuition "which a priori, and even without a real object of the senses or of sensation, exists in the mind as a mere form of sensibility." 5 Concepts of objects, for Kant, can proceed without a real object of the senses, as a result of the a priori forms of the mind. Hartmann is implying that Kant's a priori forms can be understood as proceeding out of the unconscious ready-made forms of grammar which lie in human beings and which provide the predetermined directions of conscious speculation. If we, now, look at the context from which Hartmann draws the Kantian quote, we find Kant alluding to the basically unconscious nature of the formation of reason and its concepts. Kant writes: 3

4 5

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Trans. F. Max Müller, New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1966. PR 321, K W 3: 69. Ibid., PR 2 1 - 2 2 , K W 3: 6 9 - 7 0 . Ibid., PR 22, K W 3: 70.

III. Kant

39

The reason why during the time of building we feel free from all anxiety and suspicion and believe in the apparent solidity of our foundation is this: — A great, perhaps the greatest portion of what our reason finds to do consists in the analysis of our concepts of objects. This gives us a great deal of knowledge which, though it consists in no more than in simplifications and explanations of what is comprehended in our concepts (though in a confused manner), is yet considered as equal, at least in form, to new knowledge. It only separates and arranges our concepts, it does not enlarge them in matter and contents. As by this process we gain a kind of real knowledge a priori, which progresses safely and usefully, it happens that our reason, without being aware of it, appropriates under that pretence propositions of a totally different character, adding to given concepts new and strange ones a priori, without knowing whence they come, nay without even thinking of such a question. 6

The main point is that, for Kant, "the business of reason" allows us to "gain a kind of real knowledge a priori without knowing where it comes from." In this passage Kant admits the tentative and basically incomprehensible nature of the formation of such concepts of reason, but does not deny their validity. Again, this is the point at which Schopenhauer is not satisfied to follow Kant, he insists upon the necessity of having a specific grounding for such abstract reasoning in direct perceptual knowledge of the understanding. Hartmann, on the other hand, finds this passage useful in his pursuit of the unconscious. When Kant writes, that we do not know where the a priori concepts come from, nor even think to ask such a question, Hartmann jumps in to supply an answer. Hartmann opens his Philosophy of the Unconscious with a quote from Kant's Anthropology, Section 5: "Of the ideas which we have without being conscious of them," "To have ideas, and yet not be conscious of them, — there seems to be a contradiction in that; for how can we know that we have them, if we are not conscious of them?"7 Kant answers his question by writing that we may become indirectly aware of such unconscious ideas. It is these words of Kant's which Hartmann claims as a starting point for his investigation into the unconscious. Hartmann quotes another passage from Kant's thropology·. Innumerable are the sensations and perceptions whereof we are not conscious, although we must undoubtedly conclude that we have them, obscure ideas as they may be called (to be found in animals as well as in man). The clear ideas, indeed, are but an infinitely small fraction of these same exposed to consciousness. That only a few spots on the great chart of our minds are 6

7

Ibid., PR 6 - 7 , K W 3: 5 1 - 5 2 .

Hartmann, PU 1: 1, PUG 1.

40

III. Kant illuminated may well fill us w i t h amazement in contemplating this nature of ours.8

Nietzsche, along with Schopenhauer, rejects, for the most part, Kant's pure concepts of the understanding in favor of empirical conception based on perception of the senses. However, as I already indicated, Nietzsche is questioning on a more fundamental level than is Schopenhauer, and although Schopenhauer is critical of the category of pure intuition as we have seen, he too mystifies the idea of direct sensory impressions as much as does Kant with the conscious category of the understanding and causality. Both philosophers are unwilling, in the last analysis, to dispense with some form of conscious effects in the translation of sensation to concepts of reason. Drawing from both Kant and Schopenhauer, Nietzsche begins to form some basic questions about perception and its relationship to language, which we might suppose run something like the following. Why must consciousness, whether in the form of pure intuition or of perceptual understanding be shoved in to obscure the basic fact of sensory experience? What is direct sensory experience? Is there an unconscious language which has enough structure of its own unique kind to qualify it as a language, a language different from, and which operates as a precondition for language which abstracts from perceptions to form rational knowledge? We see, then, the gap which opens up for Nietzsche in his reading of Schopenhauer and Kant, and we can understand why his reading of Hartmann, approximately a year later, came as the possibility of helping to offer new avenues of thinking with regard to these and similar questions. The unconscious, something hinted at by both Kant and Schopenhauer, yet ultimately rejected in their spheres of reasoning, was offered by Hartmann as the necessary something, in the main unknown, it is true, but of which it may at least be affirmed, that besides the negative attribute "being unconscious," it possesses also the essentially positive attributes "unconscious willing and unconscious representing". 9

8 9

Ibid., PU 1: 20, PUG 1 5 - 1 6 . Ibid., PU 1: 4, PUG 3.

Chapter Four Nietzsche: "The deepest philosophical knowledge lies already prepared in language." Let us turn attention, now, to Niet2sche's own statement: "The deepest philosophical knowledge lies already prepared in language." We can read this statement from two perspectives.

Grammar Because language and its grammatical forms first allow the fixing of concepts and the conceiving of philosophical knowledge in the most fundamental sense, any such philosophical knowledge will inevitably come up against the limits of its production. That Nietzsche means this in the most literal sense is witnessed by his turning of Schopenhauer's abstract categories of subject and predicate, upon Hartmann's prompting, into the purely grammatical subject and predicate. The thought that purely grammatical categories determine the form of philosophical knowledge is a reversal of Rousseau's thought, which up until that time can be taken as representative of the usual view of language. In his "Essay on the Origin of Language," an essay with which Nietzsche was acquainted, Rousseau writes: " T h e study of philosophy and the progress of reason, while having perfected grammar, deprive language of its vital, passionate quality which made it so singable." 1 The important distinction is that for Nietzsche, along with Hartmann, it is rather, the perfecting of grammar in a purely linguistic sense which has allowed the study of philosophy and the progress of reason as we understand it. This is a thought which Wittgenstein, another worker with language, expressed in many forms, a thought which is not uncommon today: "Philosophical problems are, of course, not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to

1

Jean Jacques Rousseau, "Essay on the Origin of Language," On the Origin of Language, Two Essays by Jean Jacques Rousseau andJohann Gottfried Herder, Trans. John H. Moran and Alexander Gode, New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1966. EOL 68.

42

IV. Nietzsche: "The deepest philosophical knowledge

make us recognize those workings." 2 Both Kant and Schopenhauer, along with Rousseau, are not unaware of this linguistic limitation of philosophical knowledge, however, they do not choose to make it a major direction in their thinking. Nietzsche does, as demonstrated by my discussion of his beginning theory of language in this work, and in notes and lectures from 1872 through 1875 where he continues to devote specific attention to the formation of grammar and its philosophical and social consequences. This critical reflection on grammar becomes for his later philosophy a self evident precondition for thinking. As an example, I offer a famous line from Twilight of the Idols·. " 'Reason' in language: oh what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar." 3

Instinct The second way of reading Nietzsche's statement will be procured by repeating it and in adding to it. The deepest philosophical knowledge lies already prepared in language, as a product of instinct. What Nietzsche is doing, in sympathy with Hartmann, when he quotes Kant, "a great, perhaps the greatest portion of what our reason finds to do consists in the analysis of concepts which human beings already find in themselves," is to use Kant as a supporting authority for an equation different from Kant's: the deepest philosophical knowledge does not lie in our concepts of objects, as Kant would have it, but in language, and language is determined according to our human organization. That is, the forms of language lie as ready made material in the unconscious organization of human beings. Whether looked at from the point of view of empirical intuition or pure intuition, there is no doubt that Kant finds that the analysis of concepts as the business of reason lies already prepared in humans, whether in the direct sensory experience of empirical intuition or in the "certain affection of the mind" which is pure intuition, and which yields the a priori forms. However, Nietzsche is looking for an answer to his questions about language from a different point of view, from a point of view which takes into consideration Hartmann's theory of an unconscious. What Nietzsche means by equating language with human organization is that "Language is a product of instinct, as with bees — the anthill, etc." 4 Thus, the deepest knowledge of philosophy lies already prepared in language before the possibility of conceptuality or reason, and actually

2 3 4

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Nietzsche, G D 483, K S A 6: 78. Nietzsche, US 222.

Investigations,

New York: Macmillan, 1953. PI 47.

Instinct

43

determines the eventual shape of these. With this, Nietzsche pronounces his own opinion on the origins of language and begins his long attempt at a theory of language which examines the questions left unexamined or only partially examined by Kant and Schopenhauer. In "Origins" Nietzsche has occasion to quote Kant once again. He writes that after Kant a right understanding of the origins of language first becomes possible. The right knowledge comes about first with Kant, who in the Critique of Judgement "recognizes teleology in Nature as something actual, but on the other hand, emphasizes the wonderful antinomy that something expedient can be without consciousness." Nietzsche's next sentence reads: "This the reality of instinct." 5 What Nietzsche finds important here is that "something can be expedient without consciousness" and that this something, with regard to language, is for him "the reality of instinct." That Nietzsche is using Kant's meaning of the antinomy presented in the Critique ofJudgement for his own ends, is, of course, evident. According to Kant, we find in nature that the organic body is a material whose parts are joined together through expedience, and up to a certain point this expedience can be explained by purely mechanical laws. However, not everything can be explained this way and thus the reflective judgement must "think a causality distinct from mechanism." Kant's statements in the antinomy are: "All production of material things is possible on mere mechanical laws," and "Some production of such things is not possible on mere mechanical laws." Kant continues: For if I say: I must estimate the possibility of all events in material nature, and, consequently, also all forms considered as its products, on mere mechanical laws, I do not thereby assert that they are solely possible in this way, that is, to the exclusion of every other kind of causality.6 Of course, the other way Kant chooses is to follow the "principle of final causes." Nietzsche chooses another alternative with regard to organisms; he chooses to say that that which cannot be determined by reason is thus a product of unconscious processes, in this case, the reality of instinct. In his notes "On Teleology" to which I will turn in detail in chapter 8, Nietzsche writes, long before his acquaintance with Hartmann: "Why cannot there be a power which unconsciously creates the expedient, i.e., nature: one thinks of the instinct of animals." 7 5 6

7

Ibid., US 224. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, Trans. F. Max Müller, New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1966. CJ 3 7 - 3 8 , K W 10: 501. Nietzsche, ZT 239. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, in their translation of "On the Origins of Language," also note that Nietzsche is recasting Kant's antinomy for his own purposes. "It is at least necessary to note here, that in introducing 'instinct' as a solution of a sort, to the Kantian antinomy, Nietzsche is completely unfaithful to Kant, and operates a remarkable

44

IV. Nietzsche: "The deepest philosophical knowledge ..."

It is true, Nietzsche would have come across the idea that the origin of language lies in instinct in many places, in Schopenhauer, Rousseau, and Schelling, for example. In a short fragment, "On Language and Words," Schopenhauer writes of the origin of language that "the most plausible thing seems to me the assumption that man invented language instinctively" because there is in man an "instinct by virtue whereof he produces, without reflection and conscious intention, the instrument that is absolutely necessary for the use of his faculty of reason and the organ thereof." 8 Although Schopenhauer finds the origins of language in instinct, it is a very primitive stage, which only finds its justification in the dropping of such primitive stages towards the progress of reason. In his "Essay on the Origin of Language" Rousseau opens with the thought that when the need for communication by signs arose, because the only means of communication arises from the senses, it was a language of sensate signs which was invented. However, the "inventors of language did not proceed rationally in this way; rather their instinct suggested the consequence to them." 9 However, Rousseau too, only allows instinct at the primitive stage of language. Rousseau, along with Schopenhauer, assumes that the origin of language in instinct gave way to the language of grammar and reason. In both Schopenhauer and Rousseau's cases, this is ultimately a positive progress, though both thinkers rue the loss of the first "perfect" forms of language; Rousseau, its "singability," Schopenhauer, its "characteristic completeness and perfection." Nietzsche, while giving lip service to this idea, begins to break away from any notion of a once perfect language, which is steadily deteriorating, and supposes that unconscious, instinctual workings not only provide an origin, but also the paradigm of the operation of language at all times. The third source which might have prompted Nietzsche's ideas that the deepest philosophical knowledge lies already prepared in language and that the origin of language lies in the reality of instinct can be found in passages surrounding the quote which both Nietzsche and Hartmann take from Schelling, which I offered at the beginning of this work. Again, I do not

8

9

diversion of the idea of finality without consciousness," that is, the ends of nature may be unconscious ones. ("II faut au moins noter ici qu'en introduisant Tinstinct' comme solution, enquelque sorte, de l'antinomie kantienne, Nietzsche est tout ä fait infidele ä Kant, et opere un detournement remarquable de l'idee de finalite, sans conscience" (RL 138).) Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy did not have the information that Nietzsche is restating an idea which he already noted in 1867/68 in his notes "Zur Teleologie," a thought which is reinforced by his reading of Hartmann. Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. 2, Trans. E. F. J. Payne, Oxford: Claredon Press, 1974. PP 2: 566, SW 6: 625. Rousseau, EOL 5.

Instinct

45

know specifically if Nietzsche looked at the context from which Hartmann drew the quote, or whether he simply took it from Hartmann's text without further reflection. However, if he had, here is what he would have found: Is poetry already to be recognized in the simple material formation of language? ... how many treasures of poetry lie hidden in language, which the poet does not put in it, which he only so to speak draws out of it. ... In mythology a philosophy could not have worked, which first needed to find its form in poetry, rather this philosophy was itself and essentially poetry; and also the other way: the poetry, which created the forms of mythology, did not stand in the service of a philosophy different from itself, rather it itself was essentially also knowledge producing activity. ... Mythology is then really not only a natural thing, rather it is an organic production. Poetry and philosophy, each in itself, is for us a principle of free intentional invention, but because they are bound to each other, they can really have no independent effect. ... Mythology is therefore a product of a free activity that is here un-free; as the organic is a birth of free and necessary origin and, as far as the word invention still applies, is an unintentional-intentional instinctive invention {einer unabsichtlich-absichtlichen instinktartigen Erfindung).10

By this Schelling means that the organic invention of language, whether poetry, philosophy, or myth, in so far as the word invention can be applied to them, acquire their deepest dispositions and most material characteristics not merely from the work of chance, but more essentially, as instinctual invention. Hartmann and Nietzsche, as we shall see, also hold the forms and progress of language to be an organic process as Schelling suggests. As an ardent student of Schelling, it cannot be doubted that Hartmann had these passages in mind. What is most attractive to Hartmann in this passage is the unintentional intentional instinctive invention of language. In the same way that instinct operates in the production of animals, or the language of feature, gesture and sound of primitive man, "precisely in the same way must also human verbal language be a conception of genius, a work of the instinct of multitudes . . . " n Again, taking his cue from Schelling Hartmann expands on this idea: For the labour of an individual, the foundation is much too complicated and rich. Language is a work of the masses — the people. For the conscious labour of many, however, it is too indivisible an organism. Only the instinct of masses, as exhibited in the life of the hive and the ant-hill, can have created it. 12

In "Origins," Nietzsche takes over these ideas from Hartmann and appends a precise definition of what instinct is and is not in the creation of language. 10 11 12

Schelling, PM 5 2 - 5 3 . Hartmann, PU 1: 299, P U G 2 3 1 - 3 2 . Ibid., PU 1: 2 9 7 - 9 8 , P U G 231.

46

IV. Nietzsche: "The deepest philosophical knowledge

For the work of an individual it is too complicated, for the masses much too unified, a complete organism. It remains only to consider language as a product of instinct, as with bees — the anthill, etc. Instinct is not however the result of conscious reflection, not merely the consequence of bodily organization, not the result of a mechanism, which lies in the brain, not the effect of a mechanism coming to the spirit from outside, which is foreign to it, but the most particular achievement of individuals or of the masses, springing from character. Instinct is one with the innermost kernel of a being. 13

Without the knowledge of Nietzsche's source here, one would be hard pressed to come to terms with these qualifications of the definition of instinct. However, turning to Hartmann alleviates this problem. At the beginning of his chapter "Das Unbewusste im Instinkt" ("The Unconscious in Instinct"), Hartmann offers his definition of instinct: "Instinct is purposive action without consciousness of the purpose. " u In an attempt to explain instinctive actions in light of his definition Hartmann offers three possibilities: 1) they may be a consequence of corporeal organization, 2) the result of a cerebral or mental mechanism contrived by nature, or 3) the result of unconscious mental activity. To refute the position that the purposive action of instinct is a consequence of bodily organization, Hartmann offers two arguments supported by many examples of the habits of organisms taken from natural science. First, that "instincts are quite different with similar bodily structures," and second, "the same instincts appear with different organisations,"15 Bodily organization may be a factor, but not, in Hartmann's sense of it, the consistent explanation. What Hartmann has in mind "as a cerebral or mental mechanism implanted by nature" is that instinctive action could be executed without individual (if also unconscious) mental activity and without an idea of its purpose: "the end being conceived once for all by nature or a providence, which had so contrived the psychical organization that only a mechanical use of the means remained to the individual." 16 Hartmann, in refuting the two explanations of instinct above, is careful not to fall into the position of proposing that a psychical and not a physical organization is the cause of instinct. It is, rather, both. It is not purely a physical phenomenon because instinct always needs a motive to spur it into action. It cannot spring mechanically into action of its own volition. Each instinct waits upon a motive; which, according to our view, signifies the occurrence of appropriate external circumstances making possible the 13 14 15 16

Nietzsche, US 2 2 2 - 2 3 . Compare Hartmann, P U G 79. Hartmann, PU 1: 79, P U G 54. Ibid., PU 1: 7 9 - 8 0 , P U G 5 4 - 5 5 . Ibid., PU 1: 8 2 - 8 3 , P U G 57.

Instinct

47

attainment of the end by those means which instinct wills; not till then is instinct functional as actual will, with action at its heels; before the motive is present, instinct remains latent, as it were, and is not functional. 17

Hartmann concludes that the "causal connection between the sensuous presentation which serves as a motive and the will to act instinctively" can only be either "a (non-conscious) mechanical conduction and conversion of vibrations of the presented motive into the vibrations of the willed action in the brain or an unconscious mental mechanism.18 If ... an unconscious mental mechanism, be assumed, the process cannot well be conceived under any other form than that which holds good of mind in general, thinking and willing. Between the conscious motive and the will to the instinctive action a causal connection has to be imagined by means of unconscious ideation and volition, and I know not how this connection can be more simply conceived than by represented and willed purpose.19

Based upon this Hartmann modifies his first definition of instinct as "purposive action without consciousness of the purpose" to "instinct is conscious willing of the means to an unconsciously willed end." 20 Now, what the end may be for an individual or species which triggers purposive action of instinct is determined by what Hartmann calls the individual's inmost nature and character. As opposed to the idea that individual instinct is subservient to and must conform to a mind standing outside the individual like providence, "the end of the instinct is in each single case unconsciously willed and imagined by the individual and the choice of means suitable to each special case unconsciously made." 21 Hartmann elaborates upon his assertion that instinct is the individual's own activity, springing from his inmost nature and character, from the "inmost core of every being," and emphasizes the translation into conscious activity: Frequently the knowledge of the purpose of the unconscious cognition is not at all ascertainable by sense-perception. Then the characteristic attribute Ibid., P U 1: 83, P U G 57. Ibid., P U 1: 87, P U G 61. " Ibid., PU 1: 88, P U G 6 1 . 20 Ibid., PU 1: 88, P U G 62. 21 Ibid., P U 1: 1 1 3 , P U G 79 — 80. In a later edition Hartmann expands on what he means by the individual's inmost nature and character. "The sum of individual modes of reaction on all possible kinds of motives is called the individual character, and this character is essentially dependent on a constitution of brain and body in lesser degree acquired by the individual by habit, in greater part inherited" (PU 1: 89). Here, it is very clear that Hartmann's idea of individual character, which stems from bodily habit and inheritance, that is f r o m physiological factors, is far removed f r o m Schopenhauer's conception of the intelligible character which originates in the will and its unalterable representation in empirical character, a distinction which I will pursue in chapter 5. 17 18

48

IV. Nietzsche: "The deepest philosophical knowledge

of the Unconscious is shown in the clairvoyant intuition, of which there is an echo in consciousness as presentiment, either feeble and evanescent, or, as in the case of man in particular, more or less distinct; whilst the instinctive action itself, the adoption of the means to the unconscious end, is always vividly realized in consciousness, because otherwise correct execution would be impossible. 22

Hartmann is careful to defend his position that instinct arises from an unconscious mental mechanism against the misinterpretation that he asserts a wide gulf to exist between consciousness and his unconscious mental mechanism in practice. Hartmann sees unconscious and conscious activity as being combined in different proportions "so that through their intermixtures in different degree there occurs a gradual transition from pure instinct to pure conscious reflection."23 In the chapter to which Hartmann refers, "Das Unbewusste im Denken" ("The Unconscious in Thought"), he argues that unconscious processes are necessary if a transition from sense perception to abstract thought is to take place. Hartmann ascribes intuitive thinking to unconscious and discursive thinking to conscious processes. In all this we cannot doubt that in intuition the same logical links are present in the Unconscious, only what follows serially in conscious logic is compressed into a point of time. That only the last term comes into consciousness is due to the circumstance that it alone possesses interest for us; but that all the others are present in the Unconscious may be perceived, if the intuition be intentionally repeated in such a way that only the one before the last, then the term before that, etc., emerges into consciousness. The relation between the two kinds is then to be conceived as follows: The intuitive leaps the space to be traversed at a bound; the discursive takes several steps; the space measured is in both cases precisely the same, but the time required for the purpose is different. Each putting of the foot to the ground forms a point of rest, a station, consisting of cerebral vibrations which produce a conscious idea and for that purpose need time (a quarter — two seconds). The leaping or stepping itself, on the other hand, is in both cases something momentary, timeless, because empirically falling into the Unconscious; the process proper is thus always unconscious, the difference is only whether, between the conscious stations for halting, greater or lesser tracts be traversed. 24

The distinction of an unconscious process which operates in a stepwise fashion with only the last step emerging into consciousness is a process which Nietzsche finds attractive. By the time Nietzsche reads Hartmann in 1868 he has already met with the idea of "unconscious inferences" as a possible explanation of the transition from sensory perception to abstract thinking in 22 23 24

Ibid., PU 1: 1 1 3 - 1 4 , PUG 80. Ibid., PU 1: 9 2 - 9 3 , PUG 64. Ibid., PU 1: 3 1 6 - 1 7 , PUG 2 4 6 - 4 7 .

Instinct

49

his reading of Lange's History of Materialism, and thus his receptivity to Hartmann's unconscious already had a footing in his thinking. In 1872 Nietzsche writes: "Unconscious inferences (are) no doubt a process of passing from image to image. The image which is last attained then operates as a stimulus and motive." 2 5 After playing out Hartmann's definitions of instinct in some detail it is now possible to understand what Nietzsche means by his use of instinct in "Origins." Instinct is an unconscious purposive process in each individual which uses conscious willing to gain its end. Or, to repeat Hartmann's definitions: instinct is "purposive action without consciousness of the purpose," it is "conscious willing of the means to an unconsciously willed end." Here Nietzsche chooses to accept the idea of an unconscious mental mechanism which is understood by means of unconscious ideation and volition. And, in connection with Nietzsche's description above of the operation of unconscious inferences, which is so strikingly similar to Hartmann's description of unconscious intuition, Nietzsche adds: "Instincts likewise appear to be a variety of picture thinking, which finally becomes a stimulus and motive." 2 6 Nietzsche agrees with Hartmann's argument that such unconscious processes are necessary if a transition from sense perception to abstract thought is to take place. It is also significant to note Hartmann's characterization of unconscious processes as being compressed into a point in time (ZeitpunktJ, as being timeless, while conscious thinking must take its steps in time. This idea, in combination with atomistic and dynamic theories which Nietzsche finds in both Hartmann and Lange, finds a place in Nietzsche's worldview in Anschauung. Thus, while Schopenhauer and Kant point to the existence of ideas of which we are unconscious, they do not refer to these ideas as intuitive, but rather, more as a form of thinking which we are unable to grasp without conscious apprehension and thought. Hartmann, however, offers a definition of intuition which depends upon the unconscious in which he claims "the same logical links are present" as are found in discursive thinking. In reading Hartmann, Nietzsche comes to visualize a completely unconscious process of thinking which has a certain logic or inferential quality of its own and which functions as a basis for conscious discursive activity. It is a process which consists of an "interblending of the discursive and intuitive methods" of the unconscious and conscious aspects of mental activity. A process which arises out of the reality of instinct and the limits of human organization.

25 26

Nietzsche, Ρ 41. Ibid.

50

IV. Nietzsche: "The deepest philosophical knowledge

That Nietzsche was much influenced by Hartmann's insistence upon unconscious instinct at work in the production of language, is not only evident in "Origins," but evidence of this influence is found in other notes written during the same period, for example, notes for his talk "Homer and Classical Philology" delivered as his acceptance speech for the position of professor of philology at Basel. But as soon as we try to understand these superior men (of antiquity) and their thoughts, solely as symptoms of spiritual currents, as continuing instincts, we touch nature directly. It is the same when we continue to the origin of language. It is not the power of the single genius which history shows above all, much more the dark power of terrible instincts, unconscious willing. Elements of natural science. 1) the tendency to the naked truth 2) exact method, statistics 3) exposition of instinctual life (Triebleben), laws, etc. 4) origin of language, Darwinism 2 7 Philology ... is ... natural science, in the degree to which it tries to sound out the most p r o f o u n d instinct in man, the instinct of language ... 2 8 Everything that has not yet lost its effective force is worth living: (leaving out of consideration the apparently historical, i.e., languages which apparently belong to the products of nature). 2 9

In these notes Nietzsche is linking instincts and the unconscious with language. And, in addition to the suggestion that the origin of language could be looked at from the perspective of Darwinism, Nietzsche suggests that language can most profitably be studied from the point of view of the natural sciences: "Recognition by natural science of the nature of language."30

27 28 29 30

Nietzsche, BAW 5: 195. Ibid., BAW 5: 272. Ibid., BAW 5: 188. Ibid., BAW 5: 268.

Chapter Five Schopenhauer and Hartmann: Will, Character, Instinct In "Origins" Nietzsche rewrites Hartmann's ideas about the relationship between instinct and character in the following manner: "instinct is the most particular achievement of individuals or of the masses springing from character," and "instinct is one with the innermost kernel of a being." 1 Although we saw in our discussion of Hartmann's chapter "The Unconscious in the Origins of Language," that Nietzsche is using the terms "innermost kernel of being," "character," and "instinct," in the way in which Hartmann defines them, both Hartmann and Nietzsche are heavily indebted to Schopenhauer's definitions of them as they relate to his overall metaphysical principle of the will.

Schopenhauer's Will Until this point in my discussion, I have confined my description of Schopenhauer's philosophy to representation. However, Schopenhauer was not satisfied with knowing that we have representations and that they are such and such according to the principle of sufficient reason. If the world were nothing more than representation, it would be a meaningless dream. Schopenhauer identifies the will as synonymous with Kant's thing in itself, and as such: it is by its whole nature completely and fundamentally different from the representation and so the forms and laws of the representation must be wholly foreign to it. ... Here we already see that we can never get at the inner nature of things from without. However much we investigate, we obtain nothing but images and names. ... Yet this is the path that all philosophers before me have followed.2 This includes, of course, Kant, who in Schopenhauer's reading of him, was satisfied to stop at this limitation.

1 2

Nietzsche, US 223. Schopenhauer, WWR 1: 99, SW 2: 118.

52

V. Schopenhauer and Hartmann: Will, Character, Instinct

How does Schopenhauer get at the inner nature of things from inside the subject of knowing? The answer is given in the form of the word "will" and in an operation. The subject of knowing experiences his body in two entirely different ways. First, there is an experience of the subject which is not the immediate knowledge of perception, but is already a representation. Second, there is an experience which is one and the same with the body of the subject. This immediate knowledge of the body Schopenhauer denotes as will. The act of will and the action of the body are not two different states objectively known, connected by the bond of causality; they do not stand in the relation of cause and effect, but are one and the same thing, though given in two entirely different ways, first quite directly, and then in perception for the understanding. The action of the body is nothing but the act of will objectified, i.e., translated into perception. ... Only in reflection are willing and acting different, in reality they are one. 3 The operation which Schopenhauer then applies to the word will makes of it the all pervasive foundation upon which the world of representation and intellect rests. "Hitherto," writes Schopenhauer, "the concept of will has been subsumed under the concept of force·, I on the other hand, do exactly the reverse, and intend every force in nature to be conceived as will." Schopenhauer's argument procedes in the following manner. At the root of the concept force lies knowledge of the world of representation or phenomenon through knowledge of perception. On the other hand the concept of will is the only concept that does not have its origin in phenomenon or representation of perception. Rather the concept of will comes from within: And proceeds from the most immediate consciousness of everyone. In this consciousness each one knows and at the same time is himself his own individuality according to its nature immediately, without any form, even the form of subject and object, for here knower and known coincide. Therefore, if we refer the concept of force to that of will, we have in fact referred something more unknown to something infinitely better known, indeed to the one thing really known to us immediately and completely; and we have very greatly extended our knowledge. If, on the other hand, we subsume the concept of will under that o f f o r c e , as has been done hitherto, we renounce the only immediate knowledge of the inner nature of the world that we have, since we let it disappear in a concept abstracted from the phenomenon, with which therefore we can never pass beyond the phenomenon. 4

3 4

Ibid., W W R 1: 1 0 0 - 1 0 2 , S W 2: 1 1 9 - 2 0 . Ibid., W W R 1: 1 1 1 - 1 1 2 , S W 2: 133. That this operation on Schopenhauer's part made an impression upon Nietzsche is made clear in his "On Schopenhauer," where this and surrounding passages are specifically cited. It seems reasonable to surmise, that this reversal of the roles of force and will, making of the will the basic impelling force, served as the first possibility of what was later to become the will to power.

Schopenhauer's "Unconscious" Will

53

Thus, the will becomes the basic impelling and producing force of nature. Its nature is always the expression of the will to life. All knowledge is foreign to the will. The intellect, mind, knowledge, are brought forth by the will and remain in a secondary position with regard to it. The will is an original unity, an absolute, blind force upon which rests the multiplicity of representation as objedifications of its striving. Schopenhauer's reversal of force and will is a radical departure from an entire tradition, which rested on the idea that will receives content and direction from the mind or spirit, which really meant, humans or a god have control over fate. Schopenhauer relegates the intellect — except for its aiding of the will to higher stages of objectification — to a mere tool and mouthpiece of the will, placing human beings in a fundamentally powerless position at the mercy of the will.

Schopenhauer's "Unconscious" Will However, let us note that with all of this Schopenhauer has not left the realm of consciousness. We read that the will "proceeds from the most immediate consciousness of everyone. In this consciousness each one knows and at the same time is himself its own individuality according to its nature immediately, without any form ... for here knower and known coincide" (my emphasis). This conception of consciousness, as an immediate consciousness without form, is unusual for Schopenhauer as we have read him up to this point. Nevertheless, he is saying that consciousness, with regard to the will, can know without forms. It is true we are in two worlds with Schopenhauer, the world of representation and the world of the will, but to equate these respectively with consciousness and unconsciousness is to oversimplify. It is more accurate to say that there is the non-conscious irrationality of the will, which, however, is not without order and harmony. And that there are actually two types of consciousness for human beings, abstract consciousness drawn from representation and an immediate consciousness without forms deriving from direct knowledge of the will. There is confusion on these points in reading Schopenhauer because he uses the word unbewusst generally to mean unconscious, but by this usually means operations are occurring in the world, organisms, in us, of which we simply are not conscious or which are non-conscious for us because the will is, as stated above, "by its whole nature completely and fundamentally different from the representation and so the forms and laws of the representation must be wholly foreign to it." Let, us look, by way of contrast, at two isolated quotes from Schopenhauer, where he does approach the possibility of an unconscious thinking:

54

V. Schopenhauer and Hartmann: Will, Character, Instinct

The whole process of our thinking and resolving seldom lies on the surface, that is to say, seldom consists in a concatenation of clearly conceived judgments; although we aspire to this, in order to be able to give an account of it to ourselves and others. But usually the rumination of material from outside, by which it is cast into ideas, takes place in the obscure depths of the mind. This rumination goes on almost as unconsciously (beinahe so unbewusst) as the conversion of nourishment into the humors and substance of the body. Hence it is that we are often unable to give any account of the origin of our deepest thoughts; they are the offspring of our mysterious inner being. Judgments, sudden flashes of thoughts, resolves, rise from those depths unexpectedly and to our own astonishment. Consciousness is the mere surface of our mind, and of this, as of the globe, we do not know the interior, but only the crust.5 And again, in chapter 3 of Parerga Intellect," Schopenhauer writes:

and Paralipomena,

"Ideas Concerning the

We might almost imagine (Fast möchte man glauben) that half of all our thinking occurred unconsciously. ... In fact our best, most terse, and most profound thoughts suddenly occur in consciousness like an inspiration and often at once in the form of a striking or significant sentence. But they are obviously the results of a long and unconscious meditation and of countless apercus that often lie in the distant past and are individually forgotten. ... One might almost venture to put forward (Beinahe möchte man es wagen) the physiological hypothesis that conscious thought takes place on the surface of the brain and unconscious in the innermost recesses of its medullary substance.6 Let us note, however, the tentative way Schopenhauer offers his suggestion of such an unconscious rumination. "This rumination goes on almost as unconsciously as the conversion of nourishment into the humors and substance of the body." "One might almost venture to put forward the physiological hypothesis that conscious thought takes place on the surface." "We might almost imagine that half of all our thinking occurred unconsciously" (my emphasis). Thus, when one experiences the will immediately, it is with consciousness, but consciousness without forms. And, in both of the quotes above where Schopenhauer describes most of our thought as an almost unconscious activity, what he means, I maintain, is that it appears unconscious to us, but in reality it is the non-conscious striving of the will working in us. But in the last instance, or in the secret of our inner being, what puts into activity the association of ideas itself ... is the will. ... Now just as here the laws of the connection of ideas exist only on the basis of the will, so in the

5 6

Ibid., W W R 2: 1 3 5 - 3 6 , S W 3: 1 4 8 - 4 9 . Schopenhauer, PP 5 5 - 5 6 , S W 6: 5 8 - 5 9 .

Schopenhauer's "Unconscious" Will

55

real world the causal nexus of bodies really exists only on the basis of the will manifesting itself in the phenomena of this world. 7

Therefore, even in these passages concerning an unconscious thinking, Schopenhauer chooses, to remain at the division between consciousness and the will. What one can almost call an unconscious is really the will working in us to bring forth our conscious thoughts. To admit the existence of something like the unconscious in human intellect itself would be to place the reasoning abilities of human beings on a footing with the non-conscious operations of organic nature as a whole, and Schopenhauer was not ready to equate the operations of organic nature with those of conscious thought, not even in its "unconscious" operations. This would disturb the hierarchy of the coming to be of ever higher grades of objectification of the will into phenomena, and would have constituted a major contradiction in his thinking. In addition, we find that Schopenhauer's irrational, non-conscious will and its blind striving, is, in the last analysis, not as formless as it sounds. Its striving is harmonious in its antagonism, ordered in its conflict and purposeful. One could almost ascribe a teleological orientation to it. Therefore the instinct of animals generally gives us the best explanation for the remaining teleology of nature. For just as an instinct is an action, resembling one according to a concept of purpose, yet entirely without such concept, so are all formation and growth in nature like that which is according to a concept of purpose, and yet entirely without this. In outer as well as in inner teleology of nature, what we must think of as means and end is everywhere only the phenomenon of the unity of the one will so far in agreement with itself, which has broken up into space and time for our mode of cognition. ... That harmony goes only so far as to render possible the continuance of the world and its beings, which without it would long since have perished. Therefore it extends only to the continuance of the species and of the general conditions of life, but not to that of individuals.8

True, Schopenhauer never argues a teleological position from design, nor from his new perspective of the irrational will, did he ever allow the possibility that the harmonious aspects of the workings of the will could proceed from processes analogous to human intellect. However, we see above that though the will is non-rational, operating without the forms of consciousness common to human intellect, nevertheless, its overall direction of order and harmony proceeds from the principle of "the continuance of the world and its beings." Although on one level the will appears to be operating blindly, in the struggle for life of the individuals, nevertheless, it is careful to preserve the species, to preserve the continuance of the world and its beings, and 7 8

Schopenhauer, W W R 2: 136, SW 3: 149. Ibid., W W R 1: 161, SW 2: 192.

56

V. Schopenhauer and Hartmann: Will, Character, Instinct

toward an end, that of ever higher forms of objectification of the will through the ideas, 9 and eventually to the denial of the will by intellect. Thus, we find, upon closer inspection, that though Schopenhauer maintains a strict division between human intellect and the will, this division cannot be simply stated as conscious versus the unconscious. Schopenhauer relaxes theses boundaries to a point by suggesting a type of human consciousness without forms in addition to the abstract consciousness which operates according to the forms of representation. On the other hand, his will is formless, with, however, an overall operation of order and harmony with an end in view. To admit an unconscious in the human intellect per se would be to destroy these stretched, but carefully held boundaries. Nowhere does Schopenhauer admit of an unconscious thinking as a part of or condition upon which human consciousness itself rests.

Hartmann's

Criticism

of Schopenhauer's

Will

Hartmann disputes the claim that the will can be directly known. His arguments not only attempt to refute Schopenhauer's suggestion, but give evidence why, for him, the will must be unconscious. If, now, the man thinks to apprehend the will directly in consciousness in three ways (1) from its cause, the motive; (2) from its accompanying and succeeding feelings; and (3) from its effect, the act; and all the time (4) has the content or object of the will as representation actually in consciousness, — it is no wonder that the illusion of being immediately conscious of the will itself is very tenacious and firmly fixed by long habit, so that it allows the scientific view of the eternal unconsciousness of the will itself only with difficulty to make way and to obtain a firm footing in the mind. But let any one only once carefully test himself with several instances, and my assertion will be found confirmed. If any one at first believes himself conscious of the will itself, he soon observes, on closer examination, that he is only conscious of the conceptual representation "I will", and at the same time of the idea which forms the content of the will; and if he pursues the investigation, he finds that the ideal presentation "I will" has always simultaneously arisen in one of the stated three ways or in several, and nothing more is found in consciousness, even after the most searching examination. 10

9

10

Schopenhauer defines his use of Idea in the following passages: "Now I say that these grades of the objectification of the will are nothing but Plato's Ideas. I mention this here for the moment, so that in future I can use the word Idea in this sense. Therefore with me the word is always to be understood in its genuine and original meaning, given it by Plato" (WWR 1: 129, SW 2: 154). "By Idea I understand every definite and fixed grade of the mill's objectification in so far as it is thing in itself and is therefore foreign to plurality" (WWR 1: 130, SW 2: 154). Hartmann, PU 2: 101, PUG 3 5 9 - 6 0 .

Hartmann's Criticism of Schopenhauer's Will

57

Hartmann further makes the distinction that Schopenhauer recognized only the will as metaphysical principle, while Idea was for him a product of the brain in a materialistic sense. As a result, with regard to Schopenhauer "one can only speak of an unconscious will, but not of unconscious idea." According to Hartmann, Schopenhauer remains stuck in a subjective idealism, whereas he on the other hand, espouses an objective idealism. Because of this, writes Hartmann, Schopenhauer altogether fails to perceive that the unconscious will of nature presupposes an unconscious Idea as goal, content, or object of itself, without which it would be empty, indefinite, and objectless.11 Hartmann points to the fact that in Schopenhauer's observations on instinct, sexual love, life of the species, etc., the unconscious will is described as if it were bound up with unconscious representation, without Schopenhauer knowing or admitting it. Hartmann further indicates that because for Schopenhauer, every consciousness is consciousness of an object with more or less clearly conscious reference to the correlative notion of subject, a consciousness in which this opposition is lacking would be inconceivable. But for Hartmann an unconscious cognition without this consciousness of an object is possible and Hartmann writes that Schopenhauer very nearly approached it in his description of the intuitive idea.12

11 12

Ibid., PUG 18. In a later edition Hartmann expands greatly on these distinctions and argues very much along the same lines as I have done in the preceeding section for Schopenhauer's not having embraced the idea of the unconscious. He even quotes the same passages. Hartmann suggests that although Schopenhauer failed to recognize it, his will is "the sole metaphysical principle and is, therefore, of course, an unconscious will." Hartmann then continues: "Thought, on the other hand, which with him is only the phenomenon of a metaphysical principle, and therefore, as thought, not itself metaphysical, can, even where it is unconscious, never be comparable with the unconscious Idea of Schelling, which I myself place by the side of unconscious Will, as metaphysical principle of equal value. But, also, apart from this distinction of the metaphysical and phenomenal, the 'unconscious rumination', of which Schopenhauer speaks in two passages, which are in perfect accord [Here, Hartmann gives the two passages I quoted above.], and which he assigns to the interior of the brain, refers indeed only to the obscure and confused ideas of Leibnitz and Kant — ideas which are too weakly illuminated by the light of consciousness to stand out clearly, which are thus merely below the threshold of distinct consciousness, and are differentiated from the clearly conscious ideas only in degree (not essentially). Schopenhauer thus gets no nearer the true conception of the absolutely unconscious idea in these two apercus (which for the rest have had no influence on his philosophy) than in another place, where he speaks of the separate consciousness of subordinate nerve-centers in the organism. An opening for the true, absolutely unconscious idea is certainly afforded by the system of Schopenhauer, but only at the point where it becomes faithless to itself and self-contradictory, when the Idea, which is originally only another kind of intuition of the cerebral intellect, becomes a metaphysical entity, preceding and conditioning real individuation. ... Schopenhauer himself, however, shows no apprehension of this so that, for example, it does not occur to him to bring forward the Idea to explain the adaptation of means to ends in Nature, which rather in genuine idealistic fashion he regards as a merely subjective appearance, arising through the disruption of the One Reality into

58

V. Schopenhauer and Hartmann: Will, Character, Instinct

We now begin to understand Rohde's letter to Nietzsche, quoted above, in which he accuses Hartmann of plundering Schopenhauer and of proceeding as if he himself had birthed the will "with two blind eyes, an unconscious intellect." Hartmann essentially takes over Schopenhauer's system, but makes two significant alterations. 1) In place of Schopenhauer's will which manifests itself as representation through the different grades of objectification of the ideas, Hartmann posits the metaphysical order of the Unconscious which unites the unconscious will and the unconscious ideas. 2) While, for Schopenhauer, representation is the subjective knowledge of the will's striving, for Hartmann, the unfolding of the idea of the unconscious through willing is reality. It is the objective phenomenal-real order of nature, which is the physiological unconscious, which provides an unconscious ground for the total consciousness of an organism. Conscious thought first allows a knowledge of the unconscious, which exists completely independently of it. The subjective-ideal order of consciousness first becomes possible through conflict with this unconscious ground and is the bond by which knowledge of the transcendent but phenomenal-real order occurs. These distinctions become crucial for Nietzsche as we will see in chapter 11.

Schopenhauer and Hartmann: Instinct and Character With these general differences in mind, let us now compare Schopenhauer's ideas of instinct and character and their relation to will, with Hartmann's, and then attempt to find where Nietzsche is placing himself with regard to them. As I indicated briefly above, Schopenhauer subsumes instinct into a network of harmonious activities of the will. The will of animals and thus human beings as well, is set in motion in two different ways: either by motivation, which is triggered by an external occasion, or by instinct, which exists as an internal impulse. M o r e closely considered however, the contrast between the t w o is not so sharp; in fact, ultimately it runs back to a difference o f degree. The motive also acts only on the assumption of an inner impulse, that is to say, o f a definite disposition o r quality o f the will, called its character. The motive in each case gives this only a decided direction; individualizes it for the concrete case. In just the same way, although instinct is a decided impulse of the will, it does not act entirely f r o m within, like a spring, but it too waits f o r

the co-existence and succession of Space and Time, whereby essential unity is revealed in the form of a teleological relation essentially non-existent, so that it would be to turn things upside down to seek Reason in the purposive activity of Nature" (PU 1: 29 — 30).

Schopenhauer and Hartmann: Instinct and Character

59

an external circumstance necessarily required for this action, and that circumstance determines the moment of the instinct's manifestation.13 An example of motivation triggering instinct, which Schopenhauer offers, is that the season of the year acts as the external motivation, which allows the manifestation of instinct in the migratory bird. For Schopenhauer the difference between instinct and character lies in that instinct is to be understood as character set in motion only by a "quite specially determined motive," which always brings forth exactly the same kind of action. However, before motivation is possible, and it is only motivation which sets instinct into motion, character is assumed. "Character, as possessed by every animal species and every human individual ... is a permanent and unalterable quality of will." Character is the inner impulse of the will in its "definite (on going) disposition or quality," in its individual idea or objectification which is different in each individual. This character determines what will act as motivation for it which sets instinct into motion as "a decided impulse of the will." Yet this quality can be set in motion by very different motives, and adapts itself to them. For this reason the action resulting from it can, according to its material quality, turn out very different, yet it will always bear the stamp of the same character. It will therefore express and reveal this character; consequently, for the knowledge of this, the material quality of the action in which the character appears is essentially a matter of indifference. Accordingly, we might declare instinct to be an excessively one sided and strictly determined character.14 Why "excessively one sided"? Because of lack, of intellect. Schopenhauer continues: It follows from this statement that to be determined by motivation presupposes certain width of the sphere of knowledge and consequently a more perfectly developed intellect. It is therefore peculiar to the higher animals, and quite specially to man. On the other hand, to be determined by instinct demands only as much intellect as is necessary to apprehend the one quite specially determined motive that alone and exclusively becomes the occasion for the instinct's manifestation. For this reason, it occurs in the case of an extremely limited sphere of knowledge, and therefore, as a rule and in the highest degree, only in the case of animals of the inferior classes, particularly insects.15 In higher animals, the intellect — consciousness — moves away from the setting in motion of the will through instinct and develops the capacity to

13 14 15

Schopenhauer, W W R 2: 342, SW 3: 3 9 0 - 9 1 . Ibid., W W R 2: 343, SW 3: 3 9 1 - 9 2 . Ibid.

60

V. Schopenhauer and Hartmann: Will, Character, Instinct

set the will in motion through motivation. Motivation is tied to knowledge and a more perfectly developed intellect. Schopenhauer distinguishes two types of character corresponding to will and representation. First is intelligible character, which I have been describing above. It is a term which Schopenhauer gets from Kant. He defines intelligible character as "an extra temporal, and so indivisible and unalterable act of will." While the intelligible character belongs to the will, the "individual phenomena, illuminated by knowledge, in persons and animals, is determined by motives to which the character in each case regularly and necessarily always reacts in the same way." Schopenhauer calls this empirical character. The character of each individual man, in so far as it is thoroughly individual and not entirely included in that of the species, can be regarded as a special Idea, corresponding to a particular act of objectification of the will. This act itself would then be his intelligible character, and his empirical character would be its phenomenon. The empirical character is entirely determined by the intelligible that is groundless, that is to say, will as thing in itself, not subject to the principle of sufficient reason (the form of the phenomenon). The empirical character must in the course of a lifetime furnish a copy of the intelligible character, and cannot turn out differently from what is demanded by the latter's inner nature. 1 6

Thus, empirical character is tied to the manifestation of instincts in its various degrees according to amount of knowledge, according to the degrees of objectifications of the will. Man, with most intellect, acts according to motivation over instinct, and to many types of motivation, whereas the insect, as Schopenhauer's example of empirical character with least knowledge, acts with instinct according to a single motivation. Now we are in a position to compare Schopenhauer's use of the terms "instinct," "character," and "will," with Hartmann's use of these terms. For Schopenhauer, the intelligible character is an unalterable and "definite disposition or quality of the will." An external circumstance, the motive, sets in motion a specific instinctual act. The instinctual act expresses and reveals the intelligible character in empirical form. For Schopenhauer, the instinct is a necessary but relatively weak link in the process. It is an "impulse of the will" whose only purpose is the manifestation of character for the purposes of the will's striving for ever higher levels of objectification. Hartmann, however, places the willing of a purpose not with the unconscious idea, which is similar to Schopenhauer's will, but rather with the principle of the unconscious of individual character. Instinct is the result of this unconscious purposeful activity. And as we recall, from my discussion of Hartmann's definitions of instinct in chapter 4, the end of this purposeful 16

Ibid., WWR 1: 158, SW 2: 1 8 8 - 8 9 .

Nietzsche: Instinct and Character

61

activity does not come from something outside the individual but the end of the instinct is in each single case unconsciously willed and imagined by the individual, and the choice of means suitable to each special case consciously made. As we saw above, Schopenhauer wrote that "the material quality of the action in which the character appears is essentially a matter of indifference." For Hartmann, the unconscious instinctive action is crucial, as it produces a "conscious willing of a means to an unconscious end." It is purposeful activity willing a means to an end which arises from the unconscious of each individual "springing from his inmost nature and character." Here is a big difference. Schopenhauer's instinct is tied to the metaphysics of the will, whereas Hartmann's idea of character and individual unconscious volition proceeds from the history of the organism, from the phenomenalreal order of nature.

Nietzsche: Instinct and Character Hartmann owes much, of course, to the Schopenhauerian characterization of these terms, however, as we have seen, he reorganizes them creating the physiological order of unconscious individual ideation and volition in instinct resulting in conscious willing of a means to an unconscious end through instinctive action. At the time Nietzsche reads Hartmann, he is very familiar with Schopenhauer's use of these terms. However, at least in his attempts at arriving at a theory of the origin of language, Nietzsche is much more in sympathy with Hartmann's point of view in which instinct plays such a strong role. The point at which Nietzsche appears to draw away from Schopenhauer is in the distinction of empirical character. Schopenhauer wants intellect to draw toward motivation and away from instinct. This assumes that consciousness can will away instinct. Nietzsche finds instinct to be much more demanding; it is not so easily brushed aside and continues to manifest itself even with conscious knowledge and higher awareness of motivation. "Even knowledge of the instincts does not undo their effects." 17 It is true that Nietzsche's equation of the production of language out of instinct as synonymous with the instinctual production of bees and ants comes from Hartmann and even from Schopenhauer, yet for Schopenhauer, these are instincts of the lowest forms of objectification. Instinct is an impulse of the will which remains secondary to character. Nietzsche departs from Schopenhauer here and adopts a point of view with regard to the instincts which 17

Nietzsche, K S A 7: 98.

62

V. Schopenhauer and Hartmann: Will, Character, Instinct

falls in line with Hartmann's assertion that it is instinct which is the continual purposive action in all organic life. Nietzsche gives instinct the primary role. Let us review all of what Nietzsche writes of character and instinct during the period in question. In "Origins" as we recall he writes: "Instinct is the most particular achievement of individuals or of the masses, springing from character. Instinct is one with the innermost kernel of a being." In notes written in winter and spring 1870/71 he writes further: Character appears to be, then, a representation poured over our instinct life, under which all manifestations of that instinctual life come to light. This representation is appearance and the other one truth: one the eternal, appearance the transient. The will the universal, the representation the differentiating. Character is a typical representation of the Ur-Eine, which we on the other hand, only come to know as multiplicity of externalizations. Here we see how the representation is capable of differentiating between manifestations of the will: how all character is an inner representation. This inner representation is apparently not identical with our conscious thinking about ourselves. 18 Character is an inner representation through which our instinctual life is expressed. While character is a representation, instinct is one with the innermost kernel of a being. This life of the instincts revealed through character is not identical with our conscious thinking. When Nietzsche writes about instinct and character in "Origins" he is clearly adopting Hartmann's definitions as opposed to Schopenhauer's. During the same period of 1870/71 Nietzsche begins to transform these terms into specific elements of a larger worldview of his own. The Ur-representation, which makes up the character, is also the mother of all moral phenomena. And that occasional Auflebung of character (in artistic pleasure, improvisation) is a transformation of the moral character. Rigid constancy of the representation of the Ur-Eine, which however as appearance must carry out a process. The intelligible character completely fixed: only the representations are free and changeable? How we act, how we think — all process and necessary. 19 The individual, the intelligible character is only a representation of the Ur-Eine. Character is no reality, but only a representation: it is pulled into the realm of becoming and has therefore a surface, the empirical man. 20 And, one last, but significant passage:

Nietzsche, A N 276 - 77, MusA 3: 3 3 6 - 3 7 . " Nietzsche, A N 277, K S A 7: 213. 20 Nietzsche, A N 2 7 2 - 7 3 , K S A 7: 201. 18

Nietzsche: Instinct and Character

63

There is alone the one will: man is a representation born in each moment. What is firmness of character? An activity of the viewing will, as much as the potential of a character for education.21

In chapter 11, we will find Nietzsche creating his worldview in Anschauung, heavily influenced by Hartmann, in which there is what he calls the Ur-Eine. The Ur-Eine is simultaneously being and will. The Ur-Eine in its aspect as will projects representations to create what Nietzsche calls appearance. It is to these already existent phenomenal-real representations that humans come with consciousness to interpret a world. Intelligible character for Nietzsche must be a split entity: there is the intelligible character of that aspect of the Ur-Eine which is being, and there is the intelligible character which belongs to the activity of the will which leads to appearance. Humans in their aspect as unconscious instinct are part of this world of appearance; this constitutes their truer nature, their "intelligible character." As opposed to Schopenhauer's idea of empirical character which can only reflect in representation the fixed and unalterable intelligible character of the will, for Nietzsche, consciousness differentiates the represented outside of this intelligible character by gathering many expressions of it into the "empirical character." Thus, it is unconscious instinct which determines not only the intelligible character of appearance, but also consciousness of it. "We guard ourselves against instinct, as something animalistic. In this act itself an instinct is at work." 2 2 I will discuss in much more detail in chapters 10 and 11 how Nietzsche comes to posit a phenomenal-real world under the influence of Hartmann. For my present discussion it is relevant to look at Hartmann's specific criticisms of Schopenhauer's intelligible character: Schopenhauer, who assumes the establishment of character by a resolution taken once for all out of time, can hardly stand the test of criticisms derived from his own principles. Schopenhauer himself wishes to be an absolute monist; if, then, the will of the world is in its essence one; if further, the character likewise, according to his own assertion, is nothing but the peculiarity of the individual will, the individuality of character can manifestly only be conceived as possible in an individualised activity of the universal will, but not as directly based on the essential nature of the universal will, since this always remains universal. How, however, the activity of the will which produces character is to be thought as extra-temporal, of that I can form no idea. I can only imagine a being, but not its activity, as out of time, since activity at once supposes time, unless one also assumes as possible an activity in zero-time, in which case it is in the moment also again extinguished. The character, however, that is to live through the life-period of the individual manifestly requires also

21 22

Ibid., AN 275, K S A 7: 208. Ibid., K S A 7: 201.

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V. Schopenhauer and Hartmann: Will, Character, Instinct

an activity of the universal will, which lasts just as long. Otherwise expressed, the doctrine of the intelligible individual character is a contradiction to the monistic principle, a contradiction also to the transcendent ideality of space and time. For in the intelligible the principium individuationis is wanting, consequently also plurality and individuality, consequently also the many individual characters. The individual character /ire-supposes the individual, or rather individuals, thus plurality, individuality; in short, the world of appearances: like this, it only becomes possible through time, through the temporal activity of the Universal Intelligible Being. 23

For Schopenhauer, instinct is an impulse of the will, which upon the prompting of motivation, causes actions to form the empirical character, which only mirrors the unalterable intelligible character of will. Whereas, for Nietzsche and Hartmann, instinct is that which prompts the differentiation of the intelligible character as individual will from the unconscious idea or the UrEine as Being, and consciousness as that which allows the differentiation of empirical character from the merely represented intelligible character. Whereas Schopenhauer contends that empirical character can only repeat the form of intelligible character, Nietzsche, along with Hartmann, believes that the intelligible character is an activity which allows for the potential education or change of empirical character. Instinct becomes the basic element because a physiological real world of phenomenality is presupposed as basis of reaction, rather than that of a transcendental will. It is also significant that, for Nietzsche, instinct (the innermost kernel of being) and character (as inner representation) are not identical with our conscious thinking about ourselves, thus placing his definitions in the realm of Hartmann's unconscious. Many of these differences in the ways in which Nietzsche and Schopenhauer use the terms "character" and "instinct" can be detected without knowing of Hartmann's influence, however with knowledge of it, we are in a strong position to understand Nietzsche's emphasis on the role of instinct in human activity and in the production of language. We are in a much better position to understand why Nietzsche suggests that the study of the origin of language should proceed from the natural sciences and why he speaks of language as "a complete organism." The "organism" of language is a product of instinct. That Nietzsche has Hartmann's unconscious very much in mind is evinced by the sentence which immediately follows his definition of instinct in "Origins". "This is the real problem of philosophy, the unending expediency of organisms and the unconsciousness in their coming to be."24 The adoption of Hartmann's distinctions with regard to these terms is particularly significant for two major reasons. First, Nietzsche is, at this time, 23 24

Hartmann, PU 2: 3 4 5 - 4 6 , P U G 513. Nietzsche, US 223.

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65

wrestling with the question of metaphysics. Although both Schopenhauer and Kant develop their philosophies to a great extent from the evidence of physical and natural science, their projects are ultimately metaphysical. Nietzsche is, by the time he reads Hartmann, wary of metaphysics. Nietzsche, as we shall see, is skeptical of how the physical and natural sciences have been applied by Schopenhauer and Kant. His preference for Hartmann's "inductive method of the physical sciences," through which observation he champions a strong instinct acting as a result of unconscious idea and will, is interesting to Nietzsche in its adherence to a physiologically-real state of affairs, even though the exact methods of such a state of affairs are not yet fathomable. With this, I do not mean to suggest that Hartmann's philosophy of the unconscious is not metaphysical, however, in opposition to Schopenhauer and Kant, Hartmann divides his philosophy into parts according to the possible definitions of matter: one definition concerns the metaphysics of the unconscious will and idea, another the definition of purely physiological phenomenon, and the third concerns the purely sensuous definition of matter. The second problem Nietzsche is wrestling with is the question of teleology. If language is an organism, toward what purpose is it, along with all organisms striving? For Schopenhauer the will is ultimately blind and irrational, yet there appears to be an order and harmony to its striving in organisms at least at the level of species, something from which Kant, too, derives his natural teleology. However, whereas Kant derives his natural teleology from the organization of human intellect, Schopenhauer derives his teleology not from the human intellect, but from the striving of the will. In Über den Willen in der Natur (The Will in Nature) Schopenhauer writes: the universal fitness for their ends, the obviously intentional design in all the parts of the organism of the lower animals without exception, proclaim too distinctly for it ever to have been seriously questioned, that here no forces of Nature acting by chance and without plan have been at work, but a will. 25

Schopenhauer does not deny a teleological viewpoint as long as it is understood that it operates upon the aim of the will and is in no sense of human intellectual origin. Hartmann, in much the same sense, espouses the apparent purpose at work in the coming to be of organisms. "One of the most important manifestations of the Unconscious is instinct, and the conception of instinct rests on that of purpose."26 In his statement about "the unending expediency 25

26

Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Will in Nature, Bell and Sons, 1891. WN 255, SW 4: 37. Hartmann, PU 1: 43, PUG 24.

Trans. Mme. Karl Hillebrand, London: George

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V. Schopenhauer and Hartmann: Will, Character, Instinct

of the organism" Nietzsche betrays an accord with the view that organisms are constituted and act with some sense of purpose, but the reason why Hartmann would be especially appealing to Nietzsche on the question of teleology is precisely because of his physiological basis of the purpose of instinct, though the actual mechanism must, according to Hartmann "remain for us eternally covered with the veil of the Unconscious." It is the "unconsciousness of the coming to be" of organisms which Nietzsche finds valuable and which he will pursue. Nietzsche goes a step beyond Schopenhauer and Kant in wishing to examine such questions as metaphysics and teleology from a much more strictly physical and natural science point of view. At the time Nietzsche writes "Origins" under Hartmann's influence, he has already worked through a complete skepticism of Schopenhauer's metaphysics and Kant's teleology, both based upon the strong impressions received from his reading of Lange's History of Materialism: Criticism of its Present Importance. Before I turn specifically to Nietzsche's criticism of metaphysics and questioning of teleology, it will be very helpful to examine the nature and extent of Lange's influence upon this questioning.

Chapter Six Lange's History of Materialism In a letter to Hermann Mushacke from November, 1866, Nietzsche writes: "The most important philosophical work, which has appeared in the last ten years is doubtless Lange's History of Materialism. ... Kant, Schopenhauer and this book of Lange's — I need no more." 1 Nietzsche first read Lange in 1866, a year after discovering Schopenhauer. In his book, Friedrich Nietzsche als Naturphilosoph, Mittasch writes: "It must have made a strong impression upon the young Nietzsche, that Schopenhauer's philosophy was to a high degree natural philosophy, which was based upon the natural sciences of the time. From this certain impulses must have grown." 2 And, similarly, Schlechta and Anders remark, "It was certainly of importance to Nietzsche that Schopenhauer made use of the broadest basis of thinking in the natural sciences of his time." 3 Nietzsche had, from his early years at Schulpforta shown an interest in the natural sciences, and this interest was broadened in his reading of Schopenhauer and greatly reinforced through his reading of Lange. It was this book of Lange's which offered the young Nietzsche some basic ideas, which he eventually transformed into critiques of Schopenhauer and Kant and into basic tenants of his philosophy. For example, upon reading Lange, Nietzsche begins to question metaphysics and its relationship to language and art, and to work out for himself, some of the issues of teleology, using Kant's Critique of Judgement as a basis. We have evidence of Nietzsche's thoughts on the specific importance of Lange's work in letters of the period. 4 1 2 3 4

Nietzsche, KSB 2: 184. Mittasch, FNN 16. Schlechta and Anders, VAP 52. Schlechta and Anders quote a passage from Richard Blunck's biography of Nietzsche which summarizes quite well the effect which Lange had on Nietzsche and his relationship to Schopenhauer's work. "What Nietzsche got from Lange's work, is far more than a simple orientation in the history of philosophy and 'traditional conceptualization', as Jaspers indicates. He found here also an untrammeled and honorable thinker, whose positivistic relativism spoke to many of Nietzsche's own instincts and whose untrammeled exposition brought him an abundance of stimulation and confirmations. ... Here he first came into contact with Darwinism, with the economical and political streams of the time, further stimulation for his studies of Democritus, who was an especial love of Lange's. Here he got probably for the first time a picture of Kant's work, which he then completed through the reading of the two volume book about Kant by Kuno Fischer. Here, he was also made

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In August, 1866 Nietzsche writes the following description of Lange's work in a letter to Carl v o n Gersdorff: Finally I shall also mention Schopenhauer, to whom I am attached with complete sympathy. What we have in him, has lately been made even more clear to me through another writing, which in its own right is admirable and very instructive: History of Materialism and Criticism of its Meaning for the Present by Fr. A. Lange, 1866. We have here a highly enlightened Kantian and natural scientist before us. His thesis is summarized in the following three sentences: 1) the world of the senses is a product of our organization. 2) our visible (bodily) organs are the same as all other parts of the world of appearance, only pictures of an unknown situation. 3) Our true organization remains equally unknown to us as do the actual things outside. We have only the product of both before us. That is, the true essence of things, the thing in itself, is not only unknown to us, but the concept of it itself is no more and no less than the last outgrowth of an opposition conditioned by our organization, of which we do not know, whether it has any bearing at all outside of our experience. As a result, Lange thinks the philosophers should be left alone as long as they edify us (dass sie uns hinfüro erbauen). Art is free, also in the area of concepts. ... You see yourself, even with this strong critical point of view our Schopenhauer remains ours, yes, he becomes even more for us. If philosophy is art, ... if philosophy is supposed to edify, then I know at least no philosopher, who edifies more than our Schopenhauer. 5 In February, 1868, two years later, Nietzsche is again recommending Lange to Carl v o n Gersdorff: At this time I must once again praise the accomplishment of a man of whom I wrote you earlier. If you have the desire to be instructed completely in the materialistic movement of our days, about the natural sciences with their Darwinian theories, their cosmic systems, their animated camera obscura, ... I know of nothing more excellent to recommend than "The History of

5

acquaintance with the english positivists, w h o during his o w n so called positivistic period would play a large role for him. It was not Ree, as it has often been said, w h o first introduced him to them, rather it was already Lange. In Lange he also found decided confirmation of one of his philosophical basic instincts: Lange posited a fundamental abrupt line of separation between knowledge arrived at through experience and given as scientific truth and all manner of metaphysics as poetic concepts and rejected every equivalence of thinking and being, in the manner of Plato and Hegel. This knowledge critical approach of Lange's strengthened an inner conviction already of the young Nietzsche, namely that, between the infinity o f life and its concrete reality on one side and the limitation of the understanding on the other side, an unbridgeable discrepancy consisted, that life and the world is in its essence alogical and that every attempt, to make it purely understandable and to master it, is of necessity withdrawn. The stance of the real as merely alogical and unreal he had already met with as a revelation in Schopenhauer. In the cooler atmosphere of Lange he found it n o w to be verified" (VAP 55 — 56, quoted from Friedrich Nietzsche: Kindheit und Jugend, München/Basel, 1953, 158). Nietzsche, KSB 2: 1 5 9 - 1 6 0 .

VI. Lange's History of

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Materialism" of F. A. Lange (Iserlohn 1866), a book which offers infinitely more than the title promises ... Considering the direction of your studies I know of nothing more worthy. 6 Thus, w h e n Nietzsche reads Lange, o n l y a year a f t e r b e c o m i n g

Schopen-

hauer's a v o w e d disciple, he is already p r o v i d e d w i t h the tools f o r a decisive a r g u m e n t against metaphysical presuppositions. W h e n S c h o p e n h a u e r argues that the will is s y n o n y m o u s w i t h the thing in itself, he asserts an impossibility, because, f o r Lange, ultimate reality is u n k n o w a b l e , and any idea o f its essence remains fettered in the bonds o f the p h e n o m e n a l w o r l d and conceptuality. A l s o , w i t h his i n t r o d u c t i o n to D a r w i n i s m and the t h e o r y o f

evolution,

Nietzsche is led to think it possible that w h a t appears in the w o r l d as p u r p o s e c o u l d be explained mechanically, as a consequence o f r a n d o m o r f o r t u i t o u s changes. A l l o f these elements, gained f r o m his reading o f L a n g e will b e c o m e m o r e apparent as they w o r k themselves i n t o his critique o f Schopenhauer's metaphysics and his questioning o f t e l e o l o g y in chapters 7 and 8. I will address f i v e m a j o r areas o f concern f o r Nietzsche, areas in w h i c h the reading o f Lange's b o o k b r o u g h t a b o u t significant gain o f k n o w l e d g e and c o n f i r m a t i o n o r revision o f ideas held previously. These areas are 1) that w e can n e v e r get b e y o n d the fact o f o u r organization; 2) that p h i l o s o p h y is art; 3) t h e importance o f Nietzsche's acquaintance w i t h atomistic and dynamic theories, and the latest research on f o r c e and matter, and Lange's perspective on these; 4) language and the subject/predicate relationship; and finally, 5) Lange's ideas on teleology in light o f D a r w i n i a n t h e o r y . 7

6 7

Ibid., KSB 2: 257. With very few exceptions, it is only in recent years that interest has centered around Lange's influence upon Nietzsche. The major studies are: George J. Stack, Lange and Nietzsche, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1983; two articles by Jörg Salaquarda, "Der Standpunkt des Ideals bei Lange und Nietzsche," Studi Tedeschi, XXII, 1, 1979, and "Nietzsche und Lange," Nietzsche Studien 7, 1978; and "Schopenhauer und F. A. Lange" in VAP 50 ff. Earlier works which touch upon Nietzsche's relationship to Lange's History of Materialism are: Vaihinger, Die Philosophie des Als Ob, Berlin, 1920; Del-Negro, Die Rolle der Fiktionen in der Erkenntnistheorie Friedrich Nietzsche's, München, 1923; E. Hocks, Das Verhältnis der Erkenntnis %ur Unendlichkeit der Welt bei Nietzsche. Eine Darstellung seiner Erkenntnislehre, Leipzig, 1914. Stack's book on Lange and Nietzsche is a very complete study of this relationship, covering every possible area of influence. While Stack's study served to enrich mine to some extent, my major criticism of his work is that, after taking stock of Lange's work and the specific areas of influence upon Nietzsche, Stack tends to jump to the mature philosophy, relating the initial reactions of the 22 year old Nietzsche to Lange's work with those of the Nietzsche of the middle and late 1880s. Although this is not always the case, for Stack does refer to Human All too Human, Daybreak, The Birth of Tragedy and other writings of the earlier years, these are by far in the minority. I feel that in making the jump from this earliest of influences upon Nietzsche to their applications in Nietzsche's mature philosophy, while certainly useful, Stack neglects to take stock of the evolution, transformations, and changes which bring Nietzsche from his initial acquaintance with Lange, to those later years. My study of Lange and his influence, on the contrary, focuses on its immediate effects upon Nietzsche's thinking

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of

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We are a Product of our Organisation That we can never get beyond the fact of our psychophysical organization because we rely on our senses, which are the product of that organization is, perhaps, the single most important idea with Nietzsche gets from Lange's book. As a result of this basic idea, everything we perceive consists of appearance or pictures of something unknown. Even our own organization remains unknown to us; we can never know our true nature or that of things outside of ourselves because we have only the product of our organization acting upon those things and not the things themselves.

Sensory Synthesis Our senses are a product of our organization. This became a catchword for Nietzsche after reading Lange's section on the physiology of the sense organs. Lange opens his discussion of the organs of sense with the following: While nervous physiology in general at each advance was exhibiting life more and more as a product of mechanical processes, the more exact study of the processes of sensations in their connection with the nature and mode of operation of the sense-organs leads immediately to show us how, with the same mechanical necessity with which everything else goes on, ideas are produced in us which owe their peculiar nature to our organization, although they are occasioned by the external world. On the greater or lesser significance of the consequences of these observations turns the whole question of the thing in itself and the phenomenal world. 8 Our senses are not only occasioned by an external stimulus and the fixed constitution of an organ, but by the constellation of the "collective accurrent

8

which take into account the early stages of that influence and its results, unclouded by Nietzsche's eventual philosophical work. The question of which editions of Lange's History of Materialism Nietzsche had access to is important to note. Nietzsche undoubtedly is using the first edition (1866) when he studies it in 1866 and again in 1868. A second expanded edition appeared in 1873. Stack believes Nietzsche had access to this second edition and bases his reading heavily upon this. Salaquarda proves that Nietzsche had in hand in his personal library the 1882 printing of the fourth edition of Lange's work, and seems to assume that Nietzsche did not see the second. Other than to indicate that Nietzsche maintained a prolonged interest in this work, whether or not he read the second or fourth editions is irrelevant to my discussion as only the first edition was available up until 1873. Where E. C.Thomas' translation of the second edition and the content of the first edition remain the same, I use his translation, otherwise I offer my own translations from the first edition. Friedrich Albert Lange, The History of Materialism, 3 Vols., Trans. Ernest Chester Thomas, London: Trübner and Co., Ludgate Hill, 1879. Geschichte des Materialismus, Iserlohn: Verlag von J. Baldeker, 1866. HM 3: 202, GDM 4 8 1 - 8 2 .

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sensations" ("sämmtlicher andrängenden Empfindungen"). That is, even our simplest sensations are infinitely compound products or syntheses of individual impressions. The sense-organs are "organs of abstraction" ("AbstractionsApparate"), which offer us some important effect of motion, an effect which does not even exist in the object itself. Lange writes: First, of all, we remark that the main principle of the sentient apparatus, especially of the eye and ear, consists in this, that from the chaos of vibrations and motions of every kind with which we must suppose the media that surround us to be filled, certain forms of a motion repeated in definite numerical relations are singled out, relatively strengthened, and thus made object of perception, while all other forms of motion pass by without making any impression whatever upon our sensibility. We must begin therefore by declaring not merely that colour, sound, etc., are phenomena of the subject, but also that the motions in the outer world which occasion them by no means play the part which they must have for us as a result of their effect upon the senses.9

Thus, fox Lange, the psychical image of perception which becomes conscious in the subject is due to this selection and synthesis of individual impressions. While adopting this explanation as a general possibility of considering how sensations provide images of the intuition, Lange is careful to point to the limitations of this point of view by remarking that any explanation of how such a synthesis is possible remains a riddle, and that the origin of such an idea as that of the unitary psychical image put together from the numerous individual stimuli is only an inadequate mode of conception with which we have to content ourselves. According to Lange such a synthesis is required in order to translate atomic changes into consciousness. Lange refers to Johannes Müller's 10 work with the physiology of sight from his passage on erect vision from The Handbook of Physiology (1840) to open a discussion of the production of images out of the sense of sight. Müller, in describing the phenomenon of inverted vision, offers a good example of how the impressions we receive of our sensations are automatically and imperceptibly adjusted to the specific nature of those impressions. In accordance with the laws of optics, the images are depicted on the retina in an inverted position as regards the objects. ... The question now arises whether we really see the images, as they are, inverted, or erect as in the object itself ... even if we do see objects inverted, the only proof we can possibly have of it is that afforded by the study of the laws of optics; and that if everything is seen inverted, the relative position of the objects of course remains unchanged.11

9 10 11

HM 3: 217, G D M 491. See Appendix B.3. Lange, HM 3: 207, GDM 4 8 5 - 8 6 .

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In other words, our sensations produce in us, according to the workings of those sensations, images of objects, which in reality, may be other than they are perceived. In addition, our sensations are organized in such a manner that they work together to provide a congruity of sensory input. For example, the discordance which arises between the sensations of inverted vision and the sensation of touch, which perceives everything in erect position, is due to the fact that even the image of our hand while used in touch is seen inverted. Lange draws two conclusions from these observations: first, there are external things, and there are represented things, and second, within the represented things the visual image of our body stands in precisely the same circumstances as all other images. From this he concludes that the question as to whether, through our organization, we project images of things outwards is resolved. All images produced through sensory experience must reside with the sensing apparatus. For why, asks Lange, should all other images lie inside the image of the body, since the objects in the outer world are grasped in our representation no differently than is our own body, which according to the illustration of the camera obscura is also outer world? "How now shall so mythical a phenomenon as the so-called projection contribute to make the external things represented appearing outside the equally merely represented head?" 12 Lange points out that Müller remains with the theory of projection of images, that the idea received in the act of vision is to be conceived as a forward projection of the whole field of the retina. Lange adds that Müller would never have relapsed into this point of view had he not been entangled in the notions of subject and object, and Lange quotes Müller: "the projection outwards of the objects of vision is nothing else than the discrimination of the objects of vision from the subject, the discrimination of the sensations from the sentient Ego." 1 3 Lange then turns to Ueberweg, 14 who he feels, has completely elucidated the relation of the image of the body to the other images of the outer world. Lange discusses Ueberweg's use of the camera obscura in illustrating his point. This is the camera obscura to which Nietzsche refers in his letter to Gersdorff. For this purpose Ueberweg employs an interesting illustration. The table of a camera obscura is, like Condillac's statue, endowed with life and consciousness; its pictures are its ideas. It can no more receive an image of itself upon its table than our eye can throw its own image on the retina. The camera might however, have projecting parts, additions in the nature 12 13 14

Ibid., HM 3: 208, GDM 4 8 6 - 8 7 . Ibid., HM 3: 209, GDM 487. See Appendix B.3.

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of members, which should paint themselves on the table and so become an idea. It may mirror other similar constructions; may compare, abstract, and so at length form an idea of itself. This idea will then take up some place on the table, where the projecting members are usually reflected, or from where these members seem to spring. With admirable clearness Ueberweg has shown that a projection outwards is quite out of the question, just because the images are outside the image, exactly as we must imagine to ourselves the objects setting up sensation as outside our objective body. 15

The consequence which Lange draws from Ueberweg's illustration is that all the space that we perceive is only just the "space of our consciousness." Nietzsche was already familiar with these ideas as a result of his reading of Schopenhauer; that vision is a synthesis of impressions, that the image thus created is only occasioned in the mind of the observer and is not projected outward. Schopenhauer is not trammeled by the notion of subject and object, for both are already representation: the "outside us" to which we refer objects on the occasion of the sensation resides only inside our head. Schopenhauer agrees with Lange that space is a function of the synthesizing process, as Kant first proposed. However, while Schopenhauer attributes the synthesizing process of the transformation of sensory stimulation to image to the cause and effect of the understanding, which itself is directed by the will, Lange, while deferring to offer a definitive explanation, suggests the possibility of mechanical and materialistic processes at work in the conversion of the multiplicity of atomic movements into sensory images. There is a further significant difference between Schopenhauer's and Lange's interpretation of the process of the creation of images from sensory synthesis. Schopenhauer suggests that although the object is seen inverted in the retina of the eye, when its cause is referred back to the object, the impression is corrected. This implies that there is a correspondence of cause and effect between objects and perception of them. Whereas Lange explains the same phenomenon by suggesting that our hand, in the process of touching the seen object appears to confirm its uprightness, but what is actually the case is that the hand itself is seen in the inverted position, which offers the perception of congruity between the two sensory experiences. Thus, although Schopenhauer and Lange agree that our images of objects are only the product of our organization, our consciousness, the operations and sources of these images are thought differently. These reflections upon the nature of vision as an example of sensory production, offered by Lange, reinforced and stimulated notions already gathered from Schopenhauer, and had a lasting effect on Nietzsche. Nietzsche begins to turn from a metaphysical and idealistic explanation of perception 15

Lange, HM 3: 209, GDM 487-88.

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towards one based more firmly in material and mechanistic foundations. Nietzsche continues to rely heavily upon the metaphor of images and projection of images. The discussion of exactly where the image resides, outside of the subject (projected) or strictly within the bounds of the activities of consciousness, will become important to our later discussion in chapter 11 where Nietzsche essentially redefines them in terms of what we might call an eternal atomism. Lange, as does Schopenhauer, next addresses the leap which bridges the gap between sensations synthesized into perception and abstract thinking. It is in the course of the following remarks that Lange makes the three points which so impress Nietzsche that he quotes them almost verbatim to Gersdorff in his letter of August 1866. If it can be verified that the abstraction which our sense apparatus creates through the elimination of the mass of effects, emphasizing only a few, creates a one-sided picture of the world according to our organization then it is reasonable to maintain that this must be the process in abstract thinking as well. Lange writes: It is quite indifferent whether the phenomena of the sense-world are referred to the idea or to the mechanism of the organs, if they are only shown to be products of our organization in the widest sense of the word. As soon as this is shown, not merely with regard to individual phenomena, but with adequate generality, there results the following series of conclusions: — 1. The sense-world is a product of our organization. 2. Our visible (bodily) organs are, like all other parts of the phenomenal world, only pictures of an unknown object. 3. The transcendental basis of our organization remains therefore just as unknown to us as the things which act upon it. We have always before us merely the product of both. 16

Now, as we have seen, Nietzsche had already found verification in Schopenhauer for the first two of these propositions and in Kant for the third. However, Schopenhauer paradoxically betrays his own insight by proposing that our true organization and things in themselves can be known as will. This is the point at which Nietzsche can no longer accept Schopenhauer's will as anything but a metaphysical creation, a work of art. His letter to Gersdorff is evidence of this: "If philosophy is a r t . . . if philosophy is supposed to edify then I know at least no philosopher who edifies more than our Schopenhauer."

16

Ibid., HM 3: 219, GDM 493.

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Unconscious Inferences In attempting to explain, in some manner, the transition from sensory stimulus to abstract thinking, Lange addresses the problem of the contradiction between an inference of the sense organs and inferences made through thought. The eye makes, as it were, a probable inference; an inference from experience, an imperfect induction. We say the eye makes this inference. The expression is intentionally not more definite because we intend briefly to denote by it only that whole group of arrangements and processes from the central organ to the retina, to which is attributed the activity of vision. We regard it as unreliable in point of method to separate in this case inference and sight from one another as two separate acts. We can only do this in abstraction. Unless we give an artificial interpretation to the actual phenomenon, in this case, seeing is itself an inferring and the inference perfects itself in the form of a visual idea, as in other cases it does so in the form of conceptions expressed in language. 17 Lange suggests that this contradiction between sensory inference and the inferences of thought can perhaps find an explanation in the "special difficulty of unconscious thinking" ("des unbewussten Denkens"). In pursuing this thought of an unconscious thinking operating in a manner similar to conscious inferences, Lange joins in the general discussions of the time concerning "unconscious inferences". Such noted people as Helmholtz, Wundt, and Zöllner, 18 were proposing the existence of unconscious inferences as an explanation of the transition from sense perception to abstract thought. In the first edition of History of Materialism Lange only mentions Helmholtz. When Helmholtz shows that the perceptions come about as if they were formed by inferences, then the two following principles may be applied: — 1. We have hitherto always found physical conditions for the peculiarities of perception, and therefore we must conjecture that the analogy with inferences also rests upon physical conditions. 2. If there are in the purely sensible sphere, where organic conditions must be assumed for all phenomena, processes which are essentially related with rational inferences, it then becomes much more probable that the latter also rest upon a physical mechanism. 19 Given these two principles, Lange speculates on their significance for materialism. "What could be more welcome than the proof that on occasion of the sense perceptions in our body there arise quite unconsciously processes which in their result entirely correspond with inferences?" 20 Lange speculates that 17 18 15 20

Ibid., HM 3: 221, GDM 494. See Appendix B.3. Lange, HM 3: 222, GDM 4 9 5 - 9 6 . Ibid.

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if the body can perform logical operations without consciousness which have been attributed only to consciousness, then there is nothing to prevent the attribution of consciousness as a property to the body. 2 1 This is a very significant discussion for Nietzsche, especially in light of his later reading on Hartmann, where he is again thrust into the controversy concerning the existence of sensory experience and unconscious thinking operating upon the basis of purely physiological mechanisms. In the introduction to Philosophy of the Unconscious, Hartmann discusses Herbart's ideas of "non-conscious presentations" ("bewusstlosen Vorstellungen") which "are in consciousness without our being aware of them," without our "observing them to be ours and referring them to the E g o . " Whether or not these unconscious presentations reach consciousness depends, according to Herbart, upon the intensity of vibrations excited in the brain. Hartmann then writes of Herbart's idea: "The question then is: (1) D o all degrees of intensity of cerebral vibrations give rise to ideation, or does ideation only commence when a certain degree of intensity is reached? and (2) Is a conscious mental state excited by cerebral vibrations of any intensity, or only by those of a certain strength?" 22 Hartmann then turns to Fechner, w h o has approached these questions in his work Psychopbysik. Fechner proposes a "threshold of stimulation" ("Reizschwelle") in the mind. Stimuli (γ) which remain below

21

22

It should be noted that Lange did not express any particular adherence to the idea of an unconscious, but that at least in this case it seems of probable use. It would be more accurate to say that Lange wanted, for the most part to take the position of a "hands o f f " policy with regard to the idea of an unconscious. Lange was skeptical of the unconscious because he felt there was no material evidence of its existence and thus, it remained along with many other possibilities merely a transcendental explanation. Discussing Hartmann directly in a later revised edition of The History of Materialism Lange writes: "A closer examination of the Philosophy of the Unconscious is no part of our plan. The way from the point where we leave it to false teleology through the interference of the 'unconscious' is obvious, and we have only to do with the foundations of the new metaphysical edifice. That in our view the value of metaphysical systems does not depend upon their demonstrative foundation, which rests entirely upon illusion, we have already sufficiently shown. If the Philosophy of the Unconscious should ever gain so much influence upon the art and literature of our time and thus become the expression of the predominant intellectual tendency, as was once the case with Schelling and Hegel, it would, despite its mischievous foundation, be legitimatized as a national philosophy of the first rank. The period which should be marked by it would be a period of intellectual decay; but even decay has its great philosophers, as Plotinos at the close of the Greek philosophy. In any case, however, it remains a remarkable fact that so soon after the campaign of our Materialists against the whole of philosophy, a system could find so much acceptance, which opposes itself more decidedly to the positive sciences than any of the earlier systems, and which in this respect repeats all the errors of Schelling and Hegel in a much coarser and more palpable shape" (HM 3: 79 — 80). Lange also criticizes Philosophy of the Unconscious for its unscientific method. "There can hardly be another modern book in which the scientific material swept together stands in such flagrant contrast to all the essential principles of scientific method" (HM 3: 80). Hartmann, PU 1: 3 6 - 3 7 , PUG 22.

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the threshold he considers to be "unconscious sensations or ideas" and those which break through the threshold become conscious. These negative y's n o w Fechner calls "unconscious sensations," with the full consciousness, however, o f having only employed a license o f speech, to signify that the sensation γ is the more removed from reality the further γ sinks below 0, i.e., that an ever greater increment of stimulation is required in order first to restore the zero value o f γ , and then to recall the latter to the limit o f reality. T h e negative sign before γ accordingly signifies here (as elsewhere often the imaginary) the insolubility o f the problem, from the g i v e n quantity of a stimulus to calculate a sensation. 2 3

In the edition which Nietzsche read, Hartmann only mentions Wundt's concept of "unconscious inferences" ("unbewusste Schlussfolgerungen") and Helmholtz's interest in them. 24 As I discussed in chapter 5, both Kant and Schopenhauer came close to positing the idea of an unconscious operation of thinking. In reading Lange, Nietzsche is very attracted to the idea that unconscious inferences arising as 23 24

Ibid., PU 1: 3 4 - 3 5 , PUG 2 0 - 2 1 . When Nietzsche reads Hartmann, Hartmann is, in referring to the controversy over unconscious inferences, using it as one basis for the substantiation of his theory of the unconscious in the natural sciences. In a later edition Hartmann considerably broadens his discussion of unconscious inferences by quoting from and discussing Wundt and Helmholtz in more detail. From Wundt's "Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung," Hartmann quotes: "If the first act of apprehension which yet belongs to the sphere of the unconscious life, is already a process of inference, the law of logical development is thereby shown to hold even for this unconscious life; it is proved that there is not merely a conscious, but also an unconscious thinking. We believe we have hereby completely proved that the assumption of unconscious logical processes is not merely competent to explain the results of the processes of perception, but that it in fact also correctly declares the real nature of these processes, although the processes themselves are not accessible to immediate observation" (PU 1: 39). As we saw above, it is primarily to Helmholtz that Lange points when proposing the possibility of unconscious inferences. Hartmann attempts to follow Helmholtz's distinction between unconscious and conscious inferences. He quotes Helmholtz: "We must diverge somewhat from the beaten track of psychological analysis, in order to satisfy ourselves, that we have here to do with the same sort of mental activity that is operative in inferences commonly so called." Then Hartmann adds: "He finds the difference to consist only in the external circumstance, that conscious conclusions are wrought only by means of words ..., whilst the unconscious inferences or inductions have only to do with sensations, images of memory, and intuitions. ... Helmholtz deserves especial praise for expressly pointing to the fact that conscious inferences, after the requisite material of representation has been fully supplied and elaborated, thrust themselves upon us precisely like unconscious inferences, "without any exertion on our part" (i.e., on the part of our own consciousness), with all the energy of an external natural force" (PU 1: 40). In addition, Hartmann mentions Zöllner who "also found himself driven to the assumption of unconscious inferences for an explanation of those pseudoscopic phenomena which defy a merely physiological explanation" (PU 1: 40—41). I take the time to describe Hartmann's discussion in his later edition to give the reader an indication of what Nietzsche finds with regard to "unconscious inferences" when he studies Helmholtz, Wundt, and Zöllner in 1872-74.

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a synthesis of sense impressions could be understood as purely physiological processes rather than as a result of Schopenhauer's transcendental will, Kant's a priori concepts, or as a result of an equally transcendental soul. Nietzsche follows Lange's discussion of Helmholtz' unconscious inferences and later becomes acquainted with Hartmann's discussion of Herbart and Fechner's speculations with regard to unconscious processes. During Winter 1872 through Summer 1874, as evidenced by the records of the Basel library, Nietzsche is again studying Helmholtz, Fechner, and Zöllner, 2 5 all of whom describe such unconscious inferences. O n e also finds the names of Helmholtz, Wundt, and Herbart on Nietzsche's list of reading for " O n Teleology." In 1872 Nietzsche is himself thinking about and writing about unconscious inferences. 26 What is significant to this point in my discussion is that quite to the contrary of what Schlechta and Anders assert in 1962, Nietzsche was very interested in what Zöllner had to say on the topic of unconscious inferences. Schlechta and Anders write: Nietzsche did not think Zöllner's theory of practical knowledge, which he developed following Helmholtz, applied. Nietzsche did not believe that man, on the basis of "unconscious keys" (Unbewusster Schlüsse) transformed the data of the sensations. For him the act of perception (Wahrnehmungsakt) is no unconscious act of thought. ... Nietzsche pursued this question so far, that on April 5,1873 he borrowed Helmholtz's book Handbook of Physiological Optics, in order to gain for himself an idea of this problem independent of Zöllner's numerous citations.27 Quite the contrary, I have indicated that beginning with his reading of Lange, Nietzsche had a lively interest in these questions, and was far f r o m being uninterested in the idea of an unconscious as his interest in Hartmann further demonstrates. By the time Nietzsche reads Helmholtz and Zöllner in 1873, he is quite thoroughly acquainted with these ideas, and is not only sympathetic to them but bases the theory of language which arises in " O n Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," notes for a course on "Rhetoric," and notes from 1872 upon a version of them. Nietzsche's idea that language is a metaphorical or tropological activity, an idea he adopts f r o m Gerber's Language as Art, cannot be understood apart from unconscious inferences: "It is not difficult to prove that what is called "rhetorical," as a means of conscious art, had been active as a means of unconscious art in language and its development." 2 8

25 26 27 28

See Schlechta and Anders, VAP 125, 128, 1 1 8 - 1 9 . See my pages 49, 160, and Nietzsche, Ρ 3 5 - 3 6 , 4 0 - 4 1 , 4 8 - 4 9 . Schlechta and Anders, VAP 125. Nietzsche, R 106, Mus A 5: 2 9 7 - 9 8 . See my chapter 14.

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Lange's Thoroughgoing Skepticism But let us return to Nietzsche's reading of Lange. After Lange has used the idea of an unconscious thinking which operates according to inferences from sense perceptions to attempt to ground not only unconscious operations, but conscious ones as well in the physiological mechanisms of the body, he turns skeptic once again, and collapses all that has been gained back into the stringent limitations of our organization. If there is in the body a physical mechanism which produces conclusions of the senses and understanding, then, asks Lange: what is the body, matter, the physical? He answers: "modern physiology, just as much as philosophy, must answer that they are all only our ideas; necessary ideas, ideas resulting according to natural laws, but still never the things in themselves." 29 With regard to matter Lange concludes that the same mechanism which produces all our sensations produces our idea of matter. Matter is also merely a product of our organization. Every physical organization which I observe is still only my idea, and cannot differ in its nature from what is mental. Concerning the body Lange writes of the eye and the images it forms that the eye with its arrangements, the optic nerve with the brain and all the structures which we may yet discover there as causes of thought, are only ideas. What, then, of the images in the brain which have been drawn together in perceptual synthesis through a process of unconscious inferences? Lange writes that our brain too is only an image: "we have only a relation between the rest of our ideas and the idea of the brain, but no fixed point beyond this subjective sphere."30 Our mind is "a whole representation of matter and its movements which is the result of an organization of purely intellectual dispositions to sensation."31 Lange's complete skepticism does not, however, end in a denigration of scientific endeavor. The search for a physical mechanism of sensation, as of thought, is not superfluous or inadmissible, however, what we find, like every other represented mechanism, must be itself only a "necessarily occurring picture of an unknown state of things." Lange's skepticism further leads him to assert that it is a necessary consequence of the limitations of our organization that we recognize a transcendental order of things. The senses give us effects of things. Whether these effects rest on things in themselves, or whether, since we can never know the things in themselves, they consist in mere relations which exhibit

29 30 31

Lange, HM 3: 223, G D M 496. Ibid., HM 3: 226, G D M 498. Ibid., HM 3: 228, G D M 4 9 9 - 5 0 0 .

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themselves in various minds as various kinds and stages of the sensible element cannot be ascertained. A correlative of Lange's insistence upon the limits of our perception of a world according to our organization is his idea, which made a strong impression on Nietzsche, that other creatures with different organizations must interpret worlds very different from ours. Lange writes: It is conceivable that there may be beings with spatial intuitions of more than three dimensions, although we cannot possibly represent anything of the kind to ourselves. It is superfluous to go on accumulating such possibilities; it is enough completely to establish that there are infinite numbers of them and that the validity of our intuition of space and time therefore for the thing-in-itself appears extremely doubtful. 3 2

This is a theme which Nietzsche picks up and develops first in connection with Lange's Darwinism and teleology in "On Teleology" and is a theme which Nietzsche eventually carries outside the strictly physical possibility of differences in organization into the psychic, indicating not only that creatures of different organization perceive different worlds, but that the constitution of person from person and even event from event within one person always remains a perspectival viewing of a world. We could even speculate that in the Anschauung notes, where Nietzsche will assert that in no moment are we the same person, that his perspectivism, in connection with the creation of worlds, is one wherein difference lies in time: in each moment a new world is created.

Philosophy is Art After Nietzsche's acquaintance with Lange's thoroughgoing skepticism, it is little wonder that he was so impressed with the second point which I wish to discuss, namely, the idea that there remains only the thought that "philosophy is art," that "art is free, also in the area of concepts." Lange's influence, here, goes a long way toward forming one of Nietzsche's most basic points of view, perhaps most well expressed in The Birth of Tragedy: "only as an aesthetic phenomenon is the world eternally justified." 33

Lange's Critique of Kant In order to follow the logic of Lange's assertion that philosophy is in the last resort the play of imagination or poetry, we need to look briefly at his 32 33

Ibid., HM 3: 2 2 7 - 2 8 , G D M 499. Nietzsche, G T 52, K S A 1: 47.

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criticisms of Kant. Lange criticizes Kant for 1) allowing an understanding free from all influence of the senses and the positing of pure intuition, which without any cooperation of thought, affords no knowledge at all, and 2) for asserting that thought without intuition still leaves the form of thought. However, Lange is most critical of Kant's principle whereby sensation cannot again regulate itself upon other sensations. Nietzsche would already have been familiar enough with the first two criticisms of Kant, through his reading of Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer and Lange are very critical of Kant's philosophy where it leaves off with a grounding in direct sensory experience, and we have seen that Nietzsche is in accord with this. Lange is especially critical of this devaluation of sensory experience in his third criticism of Kant and his principle that sensation cannot again regulate itself upon other sensations. Lange points to Kant's suggestion that the two strains of human knowledge, sensibility and intellect may stem from a common but unknown root. Lange claims that this suggestion on Kant's part has been substantiated, not through Herbartian psychology or Hegelian phenomenology of the spirit, but through certain experiments of the physiology of the sense organs which have proved beyond question that already in the apparently completely incommunicable sense impressions procedures cooperate, which through elimination or supplementation of certain logical middle terms remarkably resemble the inferences and false inferences of conscious thinking. Using Fechner, Lange frames the following argument against Kant's assertion. Among the scanty beginning of a future scientific psychology appears a principle which teaches us that — within ordinary limits — sensation increases with the logarithm of the corresponding stimulus; the formula χ — log. y, which Fechner has made the basis of his "Psychophysics", as the 'law of Weber'. It is not improbable that this law has its ground in consciousness itself, and not in those psycho-physical processes that lie between the external (physical) stimulus and the act of consciousness. We may therefore without violence ... distinguish between the quantum of sensation (γ) forcing itself upon consciousness and the quantum taken up by consciousness (χ). This being presupposed, the mathematical formulas to which we are led by exact inquiry express at bottom nothing else than that the quantum of sensation forcing its way every instant is the unity by which consciousness measures on each occasion the degree of the increase to be taken up. As sensation may very well measure itself by other sensation in point of intensity, so it may order itself in the representation of juxtaposition according to the already existing sensations. Numerous facts show that sensations do not group themselves according to a ready-made form, the idea of space, but, on the contrary, the idea of space is itself determined by our sensations.34 34

Lange, HM 2: 1 9 8 - 9 9 , G D M 2 5 1 - 5 2 .

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What Kant calls the a priori forms which shape our perception of sensuous data, Lange replaces with our psycho-physical organization. Our organization does consist in a series and synthesis of sensations regulating themselves upon other sensations, as I have adequately demonstrated in my foregoing discussion of sensory synthesis. The difference lies in the nature of a priori forms and human sensory organization. The former are non-sensuous forms which mold sensuous experience; the latter is sensuous experience acting on sensuous experience. Lange makes this distinction clear in another context, that of the idea of cause. For Kant, the idea of cause is a primary idea of the pure reason, and as such underlies our whole experience. For Lange, however, cause is rooted in our organization, and therefore, operates as the condition of all experience. Once again, Lange carries through a skepticism which Kant only carries to a point. Kant believed that we can only "think," and not "intuit" the intelligible world, but that what we think about it must possess "objective reality." For Lange, thinking can never constitute objective reality, thinking always and only results in appearance. Thus, when Lange asserts, as he does above, that it is a necessary consequence of our organization that we recognize a transcendental order of things, he does not mean that there is a transcendental "true" world because any such posited world must be conceived in terms of concepts or categories that we already apply to our phenomenal world of appearances. After his criticisms of Kant and his position that we are necessarily limited to the world of phenomena, Lange offers his thesis that philosophical theories belong to the realm of art or poetry. This does not mean that philosophy is an illegitimate activity, rather the opposite. It is an essential human need in its striving after an ideal realm. In the phenomenal world all hangs together as a result of cause and effect ... The will of man is completely subject to the law of nature. But this law of nature itself, with the whole chronology of events, is only a product of the alternating effects between our organization and real things whose true nature remains hidden from us. The nature of our reason leads us to posit, in addition to the world which we perceive with our senses, an imaginary (eingebildete) world. This imaginary world is, in so far as we conceive of it, a world of appearance, a phantasm.35

Lange discusses the place of poetry (Dichtung) or metaphysics in regard to both idealism and materialism. He suggests that the idealistic element in the progress of the natural sciences is a personal one, and that the materialistic element is an objective one. Lange writes that idealism is from the beginning 35

Ibid., GDM 275.

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metaphysical poetry. The circumstance that in general, a poetic, creative instinct lies in our being, whether in philosophy, art or religion, often runs in direct contradiction to the testimony of our senses and intellect. In spite of this, idealism can bring forth creations which the most noble, healthiest of men hold higher than mere knowledge. Lange makes the distinction that whereas materialism is a result of the proofs of the senses and the operations of the intellect and thus is objective and common to all humans, ideas, on the other hand, are "poetic births by individuals" which may be strong enough to command whole periods and peoples with their magic. The idealism, or "inner truth" of art and religion has nothing to do with scientific knowledge but only with the harmonious satisfaction of the mind. On the other hand, however, Lange emphasizes, in light of his thoroughgoing skepticism, the metaphysical aspects of materialism which are built upon the analogy of the world of experience. For example, the atoms of materialism are conceived of as little bodies. One cannot imagine them as small as they are, because it goes beyond every human experience. However, one represents them as if one sees and feels them. Our senses give us things, but no thing in itself. Thus, materialism "also reveals its poetic nature in its representations of the elements of the physical world. It poeticizes, however, in a naive way after the prompting of the senses." 36 Lange argues for the necessary connection between ideas and knowledge of the senses and of the intellect. Our ideas, our phantasms, are products of the same nature which brings forth our sensory perceptions and judgements. Lange sums these positions up in three propositions to which he claims only an artistic and moral response seems justified. The physical world is derived from our concepts: for that reason it is the most important and worthwhile object of our insight. Only a relative truth is accessible to us and this lies only in experience. The ideas give us no experience, but lead us in an imagined world; just in this lies their usefulness. We deceive ourselves when we want to broaden our knowledge through them; we enrich ourselves, if we make them the basis of our actions. The one absolute which humans have is their moral code, and from this stable point one can bring order into the uncertain world of ideas, as it has already been given to the world of intellect, through the arrangement of our mind. The first two propositions contain the enduring, the third the subjective and timely. Enduring is also the achievement that the ideal is no longer

36

Ibid., GDM 345.

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judged on the basis of presumed proofs, but upon its relationship to the moral goals of humanity.37

What Nietzsche found in both Kant and Schopenhauer is once again reinforced in Lange. Both founded their philosophies in the evidence of natural science. However, where Kant and Schopenhauer choose to pass by the more thorough examination of the limits of scientific knowledge, it is precisely this question which interests Lange and which, he claims, should interest all materialists and critical philosophers. The idea that the world of appearance can be affirmed from a moral perspective, is one which Nietzsche adopts from Lange. And, in Lange, Nietzsche finds a thoroughgoing skeptic, who, rather than succumbing to the result of pessimism, to which an investigation of reality in only its materialistic and mechanistic aspects could inevitably lead, offers a counter-measure, that of affirming the fictionality of that very reality, of finding in art and morality a way of positively acting with regard to a world so distant from us.

The Figurative Use of Language It is in Lange's insistence upon the fact of the limits of our psychophysical organization and its consequences for knowledge of the world that Nietzsche's insistence that language cannot adequately represent truth lies. We have only "pictures" of an unknown situation. Thus we cannot linguistically or conceptually express the nature of actuality. Stack summarizes very well what Nietzsche gains from Lange in this area: Throughout his history, Lange argues that consciousness is fundamentally based upon sensations or complexes of sensations. Sense impressions are transmitted to "nerve-centers" and are identified by a particular sound ( = word). In sensory experience language is used to designate the psychical import or subjective meaning of a sensory excitation. ... If we combine these observations with Lange's assumption that the primary function of language is to name particulars in a symbolic manner, that language should be understood in a nominalistic way and that linguistic signs have a naturalistic origin and a conventional meaning, we have virtually all of the ingredients that Nietzsche brought together in his unpublished essay, Über Wahrheit und Luge im aussermoralischen Sinne. Nietzsche creatively synthesizes Lange's scattered observations on sense-perception and linguistic signification in his creation of the notion of anthropomorphische Wahrheit and what amounts to a pragmatic account of 'knowledge'.38

37

38

Ibid., GDM 2 7 7 - 7 8 .

George Stack, Lange and Nietzsche, Monographien und Texte Walter de Gruyter, 1983. LNS 138.

Nietzsche Forschung, New York:

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What is important to this portion of my discussion, is Lange's assertion that language retains value only in its symbolic and figurative aspects, in its imaginability. Although language does not represent truth it is still a basic necessity in the preservation of the species and as such we are constrained to operate within its restraints. In his insistence that language and philosophy, even science, are ultimately useful imagery, poetic expression, which prompts toward the ideal, Lange opens the possibility of a figurative use of language which had a great influence upon Nietzsche. Nietzsche went on in the Birth of Tragedy and throughout his philosophical thought to put into action the dictum contained in the following statement from Lange: Let us accustom ourselves, then, to attribute a higher worth than hitherto to the principle o f the creative idea in itself, and apart from any correspondence with historical and scientific knowledge, but also without any falsification o f them; let us accustom ourselves to regard the world o f ideas, as figurative representation of the entire truth, as just as indispensable to all human progress as the knowledge of the understanding, by resolving the greater or less import o f every idea into ethical and aesthetic principles. 3 9

Force and Matter:

Mere

Abstractions

Lange writes that the atomic doctrine of his day is still what it was in the time of Democritus. 40 It still has not lost its metaphysical character; and already in antiquity it served as a scientific hypothesis for the explanation of the observed facts of nature. Lange attempts to demonstrate that the general notion of atoms is an image which it would be difficult, if not impossible, to dispense with. Physicists cannot free themselves from the idea of compound, apparently compact, bodies which our senses present to us. Everything appears to be an effect of forces, and it is matter which is called in to form a subject for these forces. Lange, places the necessity of the image of atoms as an explanation for change and movement, precisely in terms of their imaginability, in the "picturability" of the atomistic theories with their atoms, molecules and actions of attraction and repulsion, of action at a distance, etc.

39 40

Lange, HM 3: 346, G D M 545. For an excellent discussion of Nietzsche's ideas relating Lange's materialistic point of view with that of the ancients, particularly to Thales, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Democritus and the Pythagoreans, see VAP 63—99. Though this discussion falls into the chronological period 1872—1875 and thus does not directly touch the 1865 — 1870/71 period I am addressing, there is no doubt that Nietzsche was, after reading Lange, as early as 1867, beginning to make the connections which led to the work reviewed by Schlechta and Anders. Evidence of this is found in my discussion of Nietzsche's "On Teleology" (1867—68) in which Empedocles plays a strong role.

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The correlation which Lange attempts to set up is that words and metaphysics go together on one hand with idealism, and sensuous picturability and scientific theories go together with materialism on the other hand. Science will lose all pretension to truth if it transgresses the limits of picturability. Lange again turns to Helmholtz and then Ueberweg in order to give an account of the state of the matter and force controversies of his day, but also, in order to reintroduce and reinforce his assertion that scientific theories are no more than abstractions from our senses. Helmholtz writes, in his "Abhandlung über die Erhaltung der Kraft": It is obvious that the ideas of matter and force, as applied to nature, can never be separated. Pure matter would be indifferent to the rest of nature, because it could never determine any change in nature or in our senseorgans; pure force would be something that must be (dasein), and yet again not be, because we call the existent matter — (weil wir das daseiende Materie nennen). It is just as inaccurate to try and explain matter as something real, and force as a mere notion to which nothing real corresponds; both are rather abstractions from the real formed in exactly the same way. We can perceive matter only through its forces, never in itself. 4 ' Lange continues: To Helmholtz's phrase "because we call the existent matter," Ueberweg observed, "much more substance." In fact, the reason why we cannot suppose a pure force is only to be sought in the psychological necessity by which our observations appear to us under the category of substance. We perceive only forces, but we demand a permanent representative of these changing phenomena, a substance. The Materialists naively assume the unknown matter as the only substance; Helmholtz, on the other hand, is quite conscious that we have to do here merely with an assumption which is demanded by the nature of our thought, without being valid for absolute reality. 42 Lange is clearly building a case from his perspective mentioned above, that even in the natural sciences, in physics, the materials of research, the theories of explanation of effects upon our senses are abstractions, assumptions imagined as a consequence of our organization. Lange calls upon Du BoisReymond 43 who writes: Force (so far as it is conceived as the cause of motion) is nothing but a more recondite product of the irresistible tendency to personification which is impressed upon us; a rhetorical artifice, as it were, of our brain, which snatches at a figurative term, because it is destitute of any conception clear enough to be literally expressed. In the notion of force and matter we find recurring the same dualism which presents itself in the notions of God and 41 42 43

Lange, HM 2: 3 9 1 - 9 2 , GDM 3 7 9 - 8 0 . Ibid., HM 2: 393, GDM 380. See Appendix 3.B.

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World, of Soul and Body, the same want which once impelled men to people bush, fountain, rock, air, and sea with creatures of their imagination.44

Here we find that there are at bottom neither forces nor matter; both are rather abstractions from things, only regarded from different points of view. Lange finds Du Bois-Reymond's descriptions attractive, in their recognition that the basic structures of human thinking lead to personification, to the need to populate the world with such rhetorical artifices, figurative terms, as God and World, Soul and Body, Force and Matter.

Force-points Although Nietzsche absorbed and followed up on the atomistic theories which Lange introduces in the History of Materialism, one section which seemed to be of especial interest to him, evidenced by his concentrated study of Boscovich, Fechner, Spir, Helmholtz, and Zöllner in 1872—74,45 begins where Lange describes the shift in emphasis from an atomistic worldview to a dynamic one. The progress of the sciences during this period were tending toward putting force in the place of matter, a tendency which Lange considers not much more than a playing with language, a substitution of one word for another: The history of atomism shows us, how an inherited metaphysical concept is gradually transformed in accordance with the requisites of experience; how its metaphysical character is not lost for a moment, though perhaps drops more and more from memory. ... At the same moment in which atomism celebrated its greatest triumph one perceived that there was actually no more atomism, and that the contest between dynamic and atomic research reduced itself to a mere contest of words.46

The change came about in that the effects which were usually ascribed to the resilience of material particles were conceived to be due to repulsive forces acting from a point situated in space, but without extension. These points became the elementary constituents of matter. Fechner adopts a theory of "simple" atoms or force centers without extension. The dynamic view concentrates on the effects which such force centers produce. Büchner also asserts that "a force which does not express itself cannot exist."47 Redtenbacher claims that: "We recognize the existence of forces by the manifold effects which they produce, and especially through the feeling and consciousness of our 44 45 46 47

Lange, HM 2: 378, GDM 3 7 2 - 7 3 . See Stack, LNS 2 2 4 - 6 1 and Schlechta and Anders, VAP 1 1 8 - 5 4 . See Appendix 3.B. Lange, G D M 362. Ibid., HM 2: 378, GDM 372. See Appendix 3.B.

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own forces."48 There is also Helmholtz's theory that we obtain knowledge of natural entities only by means of their "effects." For Helmholtz effects are what is real while matter is that which we "hypostasize as the origin and bearer of forces." To these reflections upon force-centers in place of atoms, Lange concludes, it is all a matter of metaphysics: The extentionless force points can imitate all of the clever tricks of atoms. They can vibrate, can enter into different relationships of arrangement and everything else which the physicist might wish. As a result it is not a question of physics, but of metaphysics, whether one is satisfied with this abstract being or whether one would rather have the atoms in bunches. 49

Here, in Lange, therefore, with the idea of force-points or force-centers, Nietzsche obtains his first acquaintance with dynamic viewpoints and it is a first impression which is expanded upon consistently throughout his thinking and always I, maintain, within the parameters of Lange's overall reservations attributing to such theories transcendental and linguistic limitations. That is, although Nietzsche will use the dynamic idea of force-points, or wills to power, it is never with the idea that he is describing an actual state of affairs, but rather, that in a figurative sense, the dynamical point of view is aesthetically useful as a hypothetical explanation. In his work, Stack draws the obvious correlation between Nietzsche's first acquaintance with force-points in Lange, and his subsequent study of Boscovich with his eventual theory of the will to power. Although Lange does not connect this dynamic conception of a force-pointworld with the metaphysical views of Leibniz, Nietzsche learned, from his study of Boscovich's Philosophia Naturalis, that Boscovich's mathematical theory of the structure of nature was suggested to him by Leibniz's metaphysics of nature. The "material" points posited by Boscovich resemble Leibniz's monads in a number of ways. They are unextended entities that "express" themselves in such a way as to give rise to "well-founded phenomena" or "bodies". Although Boscovich avoids considering his forcepoints as substances, his idea of unextended, dynamic entities emanating "force" is very close to Leibniz's thought, especially when you consider his definition of the monad as un etre capable daction. The notion of an entity "capable of action" immediately suggests an entity with the potential for action. If we deny substantial being to such "entities", and if we emphasize the "appetition" (as Leibniz called it) of such entities, we are not far removed from hypothetical "wills to power". 5 0

Though this is not a new observation of the series of events from Nietzsche's reading of Lange in 1866 — 68 to his study of Boscovich in 1872 —74,51 and 48 45 50 51

Ibid., HM 2: 380, G D M 374. Ibid., G D M 366. Stack, LNS 230. See Schlechta and Anders, YAP 1 2 7 - 3 9 .

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on to the will to power, one finds large gaps untouched. It is my contention, that Nietzsche's reading in Hartmann, and what we will come to understand as Hartmann's unconscious "will acts," which Nietzsche adopts in his world view in Anschauung, represents an indispensable step along the way from Lange and dynamism to Nietzsche's intense study of Boscovich, Helmholtz and Zöllner a few years later. Stack points very briefly to a possible connection with Hartmann in Nietzsche's adding a volitional aspect to what he calls in Beyond Good and Evil "under wills" or "will souls": What Nietzsche does not make clear is that the supposed 'volitional' activity of each fundamental "underwill" is unconscious. Although he, like Lange, was very critical of Hartmann's popular Philosophie des Unbewussten, he seems to have adopted the notion that both in man and in other living beings there is a continuously operative unconscious tendency, drive or urge. The "urges" of men and animals have developed over a long period of time as conditions of existence; they are the after-effects of perspectival valuations that now function instinctively or unconsciously.52

My further work with Hartmann and Nietzsche's worldview in Anschauung will demonstrate to what an extent Stack's supposition, that to the idea of dynamic force points Nietzsche adds an unconscious volitional aspect gained from his reading of Hartmann, is verifiable.

Subject and Predicate The transition from subjective feelings occasioned by the effects of stimuli producing forces to conceptualization through unconscious linguistic psychological forms, is accomplished, according to Lange, through the grammatical forms of subject and predicate. Lange indicates that these grammatical forms arise as a basic fact of our organization. Our experience, which is determined by the organization of our thinking, leads us to distinguish individual marks in things, and to conceive in succession what is in nature inseparably fused and simultaneous, and to lay down this conception in propositions with subject and predicate. This is all before, and condition of, experience. These observations, along with Du Bois-Reymond's characterization of force and matter as abstractions from things, as rhetorical artifices and figurative language, thus, bring Lange to conclude that the basic categories of philosophy, substance or matter, and accident or motion, arise because of our inherent tendency to divide the world into subject and predicate, and that these are the basic categories of science as well. 52

Stack, LNS 2 4 6 - 4 7 .

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VI. Lange's History of Materialism What we here understood of the nature of a body we call the properties of matter, and the properties we resolve back into "forces". From this it results that the matter is invariably what we cannot or will not further resolve into forces. Our "tendency to personification", or, if we use Kant's phrase, what comes to the same thing, the category of substance, compels us always to concei ve one of these ideas as subject, the other as predicate. As we analyse the things step by step, the as yet unanalysed remainder always remains as matter, the true representative of the thing. To it therefore we ascribe the properties we have discovered. Thus the great truth, 'No matter without force, no force without matter,' reveals itself as a mere consequence of the principle, 'No subject without predicate, no predicate without subject ... 53

Thus, matter is the unknown element, force, the known. Force becomes a "property of matter," and thus a "thing" becomes known to us through its properties, that is, "a subject is determined by its predicates." However, Lange reminds us that the "thing" is only, in fact, a resting place demanded by our thought. We only know properties and their coming together around an unknown something. The assumption of this unknown something is a "figment of our mind" ("eine Dichtung unseres Gemüthes"), though one made necessary and imperative by our organization. Nietzsche had been witness to Schopenhauer's criticisms and thoughts on the nature and consequence of the subject-predicate relationship. He meets with these criticisms again here in Lange. That Nietzsche kept this idea with him is witnessed by the fact that he so enthusiastically embraces Hartmann's suggestion two years after his reading of Schopenhauer and Lange that the philosophical notions of subject and object are developed from grammatical notions lying preformed in human beings. Lange's suggestion that the distinction of subject and predicate rest in our organization is not far from Hartmann's assertion that they lie in our unconscious, ideas which, as we saw, Nietzsche incorporated into his fragment "On the Origins of Language." Recall, also, that Hartmann stressed that all progress in the development of language is the first condition of progress in the elaboration of conscious thought, not its consequence, and that when the human mind begins to philosophize, it finds a language ready made for it, "fitted out with all the wealth of forms and notions." Nietzsche, along with Lange and Hartmann, then, understands language to be rooted in primitive psychological forms and beliefs inherent in human organization and that among these forms the grammatical forms are one of the foremost. Stack, not having the link of Hartmann between Lange and Nietzsche's eventual ideas of language writes: "Nietzsche seems to agree with Lange that the consciousness and language of modern man are atavistic in 53

Lange, HM 2: 379-80, GDM 373-74.

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the sense that they continue to perpetrate ways of thinking and forms of belief that were dominant in relatively early stages of man's cultural, social and psychological development." 54 Thus, when Nietzsche declares in "On the Origins of Language" that "the deepest philosophical knowledge lies already prepared in language," he means it in a double sense, both grammatical and unconsciously instinctual. In reading Hartmann Nietzsche is enabled to come to closer grips with what Lange indicates are the primitive "psychological characteristics" of language formation. And in Hartmann and Schelling Nietzsche finds Lange's opinion once again, that myth and story proceed, along with language, out of these primitive forms. In chapter 9 we will find Nietzsche, following Hartmann, defending the position that language is not declining from some primitive perfection, but rather it is a continual process of bloom and decay. The cultural surface forms may come and go, but the underlying "philosophical worth" of language, its unconscious and atavistic side continues to function and grow. This, too, is essentially in agreement with Lange who sees no definite progress or decline in the evolution of human language and culture. For Nietzsche, there grows out of these reflections on force and matter and the subject predicate relationship, two major directions of thinking. First, Nietzsche's thinking takes a definite direction away from matter towards force and the dynamics of and relations between effects and reactions of force. Second, in language, Nietzsche moves away from a belief in the grammatical categories of subject and object as categories of substance toward an understanding of them as relational nominatives necessitated by the nature of human perception and thinking. After a study of Lange, Nietzsche is left with a moving world of effects and relations with no sure ground in substance or in a stable notion of the ego.

Natural Science, Darwin, and Teleology The natural sciences with their Darwinian theories and the consequences for teleology formed a significant area of thinking for Nietzsche in Lange's work, for it is directly from the prompting of Nietzsche's reading of Lange that he proposes to write a dissertation on teleology and the concept of the organism since Kant. Lange concentrates on Darwin's major idea of natural selection and the doctrine of the struggle of species for existence, and their significance for considerations of teleology:

54

Stack, L N S 190.

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VI. Lange's History of

Materialism

All teleology has its root in the view that the builder of the universe acts in such a way that man must, on the analogy of human reason, call his action purposeful. ... It can now, however, be no longer doubted that nature proceeds in a way which has no similarity with human purposefulness; nay, that her most essential means is such that, measured by the standard of human understanding, it can only be compared with the blindest chance. 55 It is precisely observations of this nature which lead Schopenhauer to posit the irrationality and blind striving of the will before Darwin's specific ideas were prevalent. However, much in the same manner as Schopenhauer involuntarily ascribes an order and harmony to the blind striving of the will, Lange feels compelled to couple the idea of natural selection and struggle for existence with the universal laws of nature. What we call chance in the development of species is naturally no chance in the sense of the general laws of nature, whose great machinery calls forth all those effects ... what we see is not possibility, but actuality. The isolated chance is only "possible" for us, it is for us "accidental" because it is ordered by the machinery of the laws of nature, which in our human comprehension has nothing to do with this special result of its meshings. In the great whole, however, we can recognize necessity. Among the countless the advantageous are present, because they are actually there and everything actual is called forth through the eternal laws of the universe. In fact it is not that every teleology is brushed aside, rather an insight into the objective nature of the expediency of the physical world is won. ... We see clearly that this expediency in the single case is not human, that as far as we have recognized the methods, it is not there through a higher wisdom, but through means which in their logical content definitely and clearly are the most lowly that we know. This evaluation is itself again grounded only in human nature and so the metaphysical, the religious conception of things, which in its poetry goes beyond these barriers, retains again and again a margin for action for the production of teleology, which must simply and definitely be rejected on the basis of the principles of natural science and critical natural philosophy. 56 As we shall see in Nietzsche's discussion of teleology in chapter 8, the idea of "Möglichkeit," of possible forms in connection with mechanically working laws of nature comes to play an important role in his thinking about teleology. 55 56

Lange, HM 3: 33, G D M 402. Ibid., G D M 404—05. In the second edition of Lange's History of Materialism he develops these ideas further and gives the coupling of natural selection and the struggle f o r existence with the universal laws of nature a name: the "law of development:" "The law of development, according to which organisms rise in a definite gradation, can be nothing else than the cooperation, conceived as a unity, of the universal laws of Nature in order to produce the phenomenon of development. ... The law of development gives the possible forms; natural selection f r o m their enormous multitude chooses the actual forms; but it can summon forth nothing that is not contained in the plan of organisms, and the mere principle of utilit; becomes impotent if a modification of the animal is required of it which is against the law of development" (HM 3: 5 5 - 5 8 , G D M 2: 2 5 6 - 6 7 ) .

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Nietzsche takes these ideas and expands upon them. Although Lange writes of the unity, of the universal laws of Nature, and although he recognizes that teleology presupposes the idea of unity, he maintains that ultimately unity is only the combination of our thoughts as a consequence of our organization. If we conceive all unity as relative, if we see in unity only the combination of our thought, we have indeed not embraced the inmost nature of things, but we have certainly made possible the consistency of the scientific view. ... In this way we escape the inmost ground of the contradiction, which lies in the assumption of absolute unities, which are nowhere given to us. 57

Again, the emphasis on the conceptual nature of unity will play a major role in Nietzsche's thinking about teleology. After his reading of Lange's ideas on Darwinism and teleology, Nietzsche would have arrived at the following possibilities, possibilities which he explores in his notes for his projected dissertation, "Concerning the Concept of the Organic since Kant": 1) the laws of nature produce the expediency of the natural world through a combination of chance and mechanism, that is, of the multitude of possible forms, actual forms are chosen; 2) there is no "architect" of this world; and 3) even if the world operates according to a teleological plan or order, it is not given to us to know it, because of the nature of our organization. These points, taken together with Lange's conclusions that all scientific or metaphysical knowledge is limited to our organization and by the structure of our language, and that as a consequence, it is necessary that we recognize a transcendental order of things, to which, however, we can never have access, provide a significant grounding for my further discussion of Nietzsche's teleology, criticisms of metaphysics, and the eventual worldview he constructs on their basis. 58 57 58

Ibid., HM 3: 37, GDM 406. At the end of his chapter "Darwin and Teleology" in the second edition of History of Materialism Lange devotes ten pages to a discussion of Hartmann's "false teleology" presented in The Philosophy of the Unconscious. But as Nietzsche did not have access to these comments in the first edition, I merely wish to make note of it here. The major areas of influence upon Nietzsche, through Lange's book History of Materialism, which I have chosen to highlight for the purposes of this study are not all of the ideas which Nietzsche found useful in Lange, as Stack's book demonstrates. Another influence came with the introduction, in Lange's book of Heinrich Czolbe (see pages GDM 312—321). The influence of Czolbe must have worked its power over Nietzsche all the more at the point at which, aided by Lange, Nietzsche came more and more to agree that all that we can know of the world is appearance and that the most effective orientation in such a world stems from an artistic and moral perspective. What Lange presented of Czolbe and his works Neuen Darstellung des Sensualismus (Netν Exposition of Sensationalism), 1855, and Über die Grenzen und den Ursprung der menschlichen Erkenntniss (The Borders and Origins of Human Knowledge), 1865, was mostly a critical exposition of his scientific conclusions concerning the nature of sensations. But he also presents a sympathetic rendering of Czolbe's moral position, a moral position which Nietzsche comes to champion after it has undergone his own transforming

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activity. Lange quotes Czolbe: "The So-called moral needs arising from dissatisfaction with our earthly life might just as properly be called immoral. It is indeed no proof of humility, but rather of arrogance and vanity, to improve upon the world we know by imagining a supersensuous world, and to wish to exalt man into a creature above nature by the addition of a supersensuous part. Yes, certainly, dissatisfaction with the world of phenomena — the deepest root of super-sensuous ideas — is not a moral reason at all, but rather a moral weakness" (HM 2: 290, G D M 317)! The basis of Czolbe's ethic lies in the priniciple, "Content thyself with the world that is given thee" (HM 2: 283, G D M 315)! Now, this principle, is of course, just the opposite of Schopenhauer's answer to the world as representation. His is a thoroughly pessimistic answer, renunciation and denial of the world as representation of the insatiable will. By this point in his thinking, Nietzsche is convinced that appearance is all we can know of the world, an idea which he maintains and strengthens in his mature philosophy, and, as such, appearance should be completely affirmed. In 1868 C. A. Bernoulli reports that Nietzsche was occupying himself with Czolbe. Bernoulli writes: "There Nietzsche found the idea offered, nonsensuous and unclear are one and the same; only from sensuous experience do presentable or observable concepts, judgements and conclusions come to be built, and every conclusion drawn from something unpresentable should be avoided" (FNN 17). We saw Lange saying this above, and, of course, this is the basic tenant of the Schopenhauerian philosophy. The real question for Nietzsche comes to be, not what the world is — it is appearance — but, rather, what do we do with that fact; become pessimists and world deniers or world affirmers. Lange, though not completely, seems to suggest that there is room for optimism, especially through an. Nietzsche includes both of Czolbe's books on the list of readings he intended to do in 186"/' 68 with regard to his " O n Teleology." For Stack's discussion of Czolbe see LNS 309 — 311.

Chapter Seven "On Schopenhauer" ]n October, 1867 Nietzsche writes to his friend Deussen: My dear friend, concerning the writing of an apology for Schopenhauer, to which you challenged me in your last letter, I can only communicate the fact, that I look this life free and courageously in the face, since my feet have found firm ground. "The waters of sorrow" to speak in metaphors, will not bring me from my path, because they do not reach my head. That is naturally only a completely individual apology. But that is how we stand. If someone wants to refute Schopenhauer with reasons, I whisper in his ear, "But my dear man, worldviews are not created through logic, nor destroyed. I feel at home in that atmosphere, you in yours. Let me have my own nose, just as I do not take yours." ... The best which we have, to feel one with a great spirit, to sympathetically go along the path of his ideas, to have found a home of thoughts, a retreat from sorrowful hours — we would not rob others of this, and we will not let it be taken from us. Be it an error or a lie — 1 A year later, Deussen has again, apparently suggested to Nietzsche that he write a critique of Schopenhauer. In October, 1868 Nietzsche writes to Deussen: Thus tying into the closing of your letter, I would like to settle also the suggestion that you think me capable of. Dear friend, "writing well" (when in other circumstances I deserve this praise: nego ac pernego) does really not justify writing a critique of the Schopenhauerian system: in addition, you can have no idea of the respect I have for this "Genius of the first rank," when you think me ... capable of overthrowing this giant: hopefully you understand by a critique of his system not only the bringing to light of some faulty places, unsuccessful proofs, tactical incompetencies: all of which certain overly audacious bold ones not at home in philosophy believe they have done (womit allerdings gewisse überverwegne Überwege und in Philosophie nicht heimische Hayme alles gethan zu haben glauben). One does not write a criticism of a worldview: rather one understands it or not, a third point of view is, for me, not understandable. Someone, who can not smell the scent of the rose, is really incapable of criticizing it: however, if he does smell it: a la bonheur! Then his desire to criticize it will leave.

1

Nietzsche, K S B 2: 2 2 8 - 2 9 .

96

VII. "On Schopenhauer" — We simply do not understand one another: allow me to remain silent about these things: something I remember, having already s u g g e s t e d to y o u once before. 2

Though Nietzsche means what he says in these two letters, that a worldview and its effects cannot be shaken with logical proofs based on rational knowledge, he has ironically, during the period between these two letters written just such a short criticism of Schopenhauer. What he has written in criticism of Schopenhauer is interesting to our study. But what is equally as interesting is that in spite of rational criticisms Nietzsche was and remained for a number of years after this time a devotee of Schopenhauer, even as he grew away from a complete adherence to his ideas. As we saw above, Nietzsche, after Lange, no longer believed that we can "know" anything, because we are confined to the realm of conscious intelligence arising from our organization, therefore, his refusal to throw Schopenhauer over on that basis is consistent. What Nietzsche gets from Schopenhauer, in addition to ideas is feeling, and he expresses this in metaphors of the senses, the nose; you either smell the rose or you do not. Schlechta, in "Der junge Nietzsche und Schopenhauer," writes of the fact that such a criticism should be written by Nietzsche during the period of his passionate devotion to Schopenhauer, that "the young Nietzsche already did not demand of philosophy a solution, rather a concentrated (verdichtete) representation of the world riddle, and emerged already out of a spiritual place in which his beloved master himself breathed." 3 Let us look at what Nietzsche has written in criticism of the Schopenhauerian metaphysics, a criticism which only serves to confirm and strengthen what we have come to understand as Nietzsche's position with regard to a theory of language, and an epistemology in general. The notes begin: "An attempt to explain the world by an accepted factor. The thing in itself becomes one of its possible forms. The attempt fails." 4 Nietzsche's criticism is founded upon two major objections. The first is a criticism of how Schopenhauer came to privilege and predicate the word will. The second objection Nietzsche offers is to Schopenhauer's having placed the "dark drive" ("dunkle Trieb"), the drive which is a drive of the representation mechanism (Vorstellungsapparat), which brings the thing in itself to representation, into the realm of the principiutn individuationis.

2 3

4

Ibid., K S B 2: 328. Karl Schlechta, "Der junge Nietzsche und Schopenhauer," Jahrbuch der schaft, Heidelberg, 1939. J N 298. Nietzsche, ZS 226. All references are to my translation in Appendix A.

Schopenhauer-Gesell-

Predication of the Will

97

Predication of the Will In order to look at Nietzsche's objection to Schopenhauer's having placed the will in the position of Kant's thing in itself, it is helpful to repeat the sentence which sums up the Schopenhauerian system for Nietzsche: "The groundless, unknowing will reveals itself, through a representation mechanism as world" ("Der grundlose erkenntnisslose Wille offenbart sich, unter einen Vorstellungsapparat gebracht, als Welt."). 5 Nietzsche claims of this sentence that if we subtract from it what Schopenhauer found in Kant, there remains the one word "will" along with its predicates. Nietzsche then asserts that this remainder can be attacked "very successfully from four sides." Nietzsche's first two attacks are not really attacks, rather stated opinions which he does not choose to defend. First, he claims that Schopenhauer, where it was necessary to go beyond Kant, did not, and simply labelled Kant's thing in itself as "only a hidden category" ("nur eine versteckte Kategorie"). 6 His second objection is that, while Schopenhauer must be admired for following along the "dangerous" Kantian path, that which he put in place of the x, the will, was only born of "poetic intuition" while the attempted logical proofs "cannot satisfy either Schopenhauer or us." This comment is not to be taken as a simple refutation as we have seen in his letters to Deussen above. One of the major ideas which Nietzsche gets from Lange, as we recall, is that all philosophical systems are only born of poetic intuition, they are art, though through their art they attempt to build something valuable. It is not only Schopenhauer's philosophy which Nietzsche claims no logical proof can refute, but philosophical discourse in general. Though, as Nietzsche admits, Schopenhauer's logical proofs of the will cannot satisfy, for Nietzsche at least, they need not. Nietzsche's third objection, is the only one which he really attempts to defend, and it certainly frames his deepest departure from the Schopenhauerian philosophy. "Thirdly, we are compelled to guard against the predicates which Schopenhauer ascribes to his will, which for something simply unthinkable, sound much too certain and all stem from the contradiction to the world of representation." 7 This is a problem which Kant does not have because between the thing in itself and the phenomenon or appearance, this opposition, never comes into question. We will return to this objection in some detail in a moment. Nietzsche's fourth objection is that the world cannot be subsumed so easily into the Schopenhauerian system. And with regard to

5 6 7

Ibid. According to Schlechta, J N 297, Nietzsche gets this f r o m Ueberweg and Lange. Nietzsche, ZS 228.

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VII. "On Schopenhauer"

this point, Nietzsche indicates the problem which we have already mentioned briefly above, that Schopenhauer did not satisfactorily address the question concerning the borders of individuation. Though Nietzsche sets out objections three and four as two separate ones, there is no doubt, that they constitute two aspects of one problem, as we see in the following image: A certain species o f that contradiction with which the Schopenhauerian system is perforated, will occupy us on occasion; a species of extremely important and hardly avoidable contradictions, which to a certain extent while still resting under their mother's heart, arm themselves and, scarcely born, do their first deed by killing her. They concern themselves collectively with the borders of individuation and have their π ρ ώ τ ο ν ψ(εϋδος) in the point considered under 3) a b o v e . 8

Remember that point three is concerned with guarding against the predicates which Schopenhauer adds to his will. Nietzsche then quotes the following passage from The World as Will and Representation·. The will as thing in itself is quite different f r o m its phenomenon, and is entirely free f r o m all the f o r m s of the phenomenon into which it first passes w h e n it appears, and which therefore concern only its objectivity, and are foreign to the will itself. Even the most universal f o r m o f all representation, that o f object f o r subject, does not concern it, still less the forms that are subordinate to this and collectively have their c o m m o n expression in the principle of sufficient reason. A s w e know, time and space belong to this principle, and consequently plurality as well, which exists and has become possible only through them. In this last respect I shall call time and space

the principium

individuationis

Nietzsche then quotes a second passage: "This thing in itself ..., which as such is never object, since all object is its mere appearance or phenomenon, and not it itself, is to be thought of objectively, then we must borrow its name and concept from an object, from something in some way objectively given, and therefore from one of its phenomena."10 Nietzsche's objection is based in surprise. What surprises is the dictatorial tone in which Schopenhauer asserts a number of negative characteristics of the thing in itself characteristics about which we have no sure knowledge. Though Schopenhauer himself sees the problem in this, as evidenced by the second quote above, he nevertheless asks that something, which can never be an object be thought of objectively. Thus, writes Nietzsche, he takes the ungraspable χ and covers it with "colorfui clothes." What Schopenhauer asks is that we take the predicates for the thing in itself. The concept "thing in itself" is removed, "because it should be so," 8 9 10

Ibid., ZS 229. Ibid., WWR 1: 112, SW 2: 134. Ibid., WWR 1: 110, SW 2: 1 3 1 - 3 2 .

Predication of the Will

99

and another is "secretly pressed into our hands." 11 Nietzsche brings to bear against Schopenhauer the very argument which Schopenhauer used against Kant's categorical judgement, that predicates aligned to a subject, i.e., in Schopenhauer's own case, the attributes of timelessness, unity, and causelessness to the will, are then projected onto the external world and are to be taken as really existing. And after his reading of Lange's criticisms of the subject predicate forms of our thinking, constituted as a result of our organization, Nietzsche demonstrates here that he cannot again, take the use of these grammatical forms as proof of the actuality of any philosophical system, but only as proof of the structure of our own organization. Nietzsche criticizes Schopenhauer's specific attempts to describe the sense of the predicates of the will as completely ungraspable and transcendent, and he offers as example the following Schopenhauerian sentence: "The unity of that will ... in which we have recognized the inner being of the phenomenal world, is a metaphysical unity. Consequently, knowledge of it is transcendent; that is to say, it does not rest on the functions of our intellect, and is therefore not to be really grasped with them." 12 But for Nietzsche, this is all empty rhetoric, the predicates of unity, eternity, and freedom, which are the three predicates Schopenhauer attributes to the will, are all indivisibly knotted together with our organization, so that it is completely doubtful whether they have any meaning outside of human spheres of knowledge. For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer's will cannot be taken as a transcendent force because it is defined in terms of appearance itself, appearance which is grounded in multiplicity, temporality and causality. Nietzsche remains strongly critical of the borders of representation and its expression in language and conceptuality. Nietzsche gets this linguistic argument against the notion of a thinkable transcendental world first from Lange. As Stack writes in Lange and Nietzsche: Human languages (for Lange and Nietzsche) have developed primarily for the sake of social relations and interactions, are shot through with anthropomorphisms and "personifications", and have evolved for the sake of the description and designation of objects and events encountered in experience. Language is designed, then, for the sake of practical needs in a phenomenal world of experience. The use of such language to refer to, or "picture", transcendental entities or a transcendental world does not overcome its close association with phenomenal actuality.13 Thus, Nietzsche's final judgement on Schopenhauer's predication of the will from the world of appearance is one based on language. He uses 11 12 13

Ibid., ZS 230. Ibid. Stack, LNS 66.

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VII. "On Schopenhauer"

Schopenhauer's own realization of the limits of consciousness within the bonds of language by using Schopenhauer's own quote against him. Schopenhauer is "fully correct" when he himself maintains against this operation in general, but apparently not in his own case, that "from outside one can never come to the essence of things: no matter how one searches one wins ony images and names."14

Principium Individuationis and Origin of the Intellect To address Nietzsche's second major objection to Schopenhauer's philosophy, let us repeat his sentence: "The dark drive brought about through a representation mechanism reveals itself as world. This drive is not included under the principium individuationis.",5 In exploring this difference in thinking between himself and Schopenhauer Nietzsche asks: how does the will appear? Where does the representation mechanism come from through which the will appears? The question which Nietzsche is really asking is: how has an intellect arisen? According to Schopenhauer the conscious ego and its knowledge belong to nature and presuppose the organism, and the existence of organisms presuppose the will. The growth of the development of the brain has come about by the ever increasing and more complicated need of the corresponding appearances of the will. Nietzsche points to Schopenhauer's idea that the will is always pressing to higher manifestations of objectification in the world of representation. The intellect is no different, according to Schopenhauer, having arisen from its first dawning feelings to its extreme clarity. Nietzsche then quotes the following passage from Parerga and Paralipomena·. All life on earth did not exist in any consciousness at all, either in their own because they had none or in the consciousness of another because no such 14

15

Nietzsche, ZS 230, WWR 1: 99, SW 2: 118. Here one thinks of Wittgenstein and his assertion that metaphysical problems and theories are not empirical but linguistic or grammatical, or as P. Hallie rephrases it: they are "rootless grammatical claims disguised as empirical ones." Wittgenstein writes: "The characteristic of a metaphysical question being that we express an unclarity about the grammar of words in the form of a scientific question." "Just how they are grammatical or linguistic, however, is something of which Wittgenstein had a number of — possibly conflicting — views. For example apart from his thinking of metaphysicians as uttering disguised nonsense ... — Wittgenstein represents the metaphysician as making linguistic mistakes; as misunderstanding; misinterpreting; or putting a false interpretation on words. This is perhaps because he is unclear about the grammar of certain words; or is "misled by a form of expression," or because his intelligence is bewitched by means of language. In short, this view of traditional philosophy or 'metaphysics' represents it as just false descriptive grammar put in the verbal dress of an empirical claim" (W. E. Kennick, "Philosophy as Grammar" in Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophy and Language, New York: Humanities Press, Inc., 1972, 1 4 7 - 1 5 0 ) . Ibid., ZS 226.

Principium

Individuationis

and Origin of the Intellect

101

consciousness existed ..., that is, they did not exist at all; but then what does their having existed signify? At bottom, it is merely hypothetical, namely, if a consciousness had existed in those primeval times, then such events would have appeared in it; thus far does the regressus of phenomena lead us. And so it lay in the very nature of the thing in itself to manifest itself in such events.16

From such a point of view Nietzsche finds a contradiction, that a world of appearance is placed before the world of appearance. That is, the intellect, or principium individuationis operates only within the realm of time, space, and causality. If there was no consciousness, individuality, etc., that means that the above description is, as Nietzsche charges, "already dissolved in words and images," and is, as Schopenhauer himself writes, and Nietzsche emphasizes, only "translations into the language of our observing intellect." While making the argument above for the engendering of intellect, Schopenhauer himself, finds the problems in his own argument. Despite this, he nevertheless maintains it. Let us follow his reasoning: At bottom, however, all those events that cosmogony and geology urge us to assume as having occurred long before the existence of any knowing creature are themselves only a translation into the language of our intuitively perceiving intellect from the essence-in-itself of things which to it is incomprehensible. For those events have never had an existerice-in-itself, any more than have present events. But with the aid of the principles a priori of all possible experience and following a few empirical data, the regressus leads back to them; it is itself, however, only the concatenation of a series of mere phenomena that have no absolute existence.17

Schopenhauer admits that it is impossible to empirically explain the existence of primordial matter and force and that here a metaphysical solution may be justified. "Here, then, metaphysics must appear which, in the will in our true nature, makes us acquainted with the kernel and core of all things. In this sense, Kant had also said 'that the primary sources of the effects of nature must obviously be dealt with entirely by metaphysics'." 18 Though Nietzsche does not cite this argument of Schopenhauer's in "On Schopenhauer," he must have been familiar with it. Schopenhauer is an astute critic, nevertheless, as Nietzsche does indicate, he absolves himself from the consequences of his criticisms and continues to take merely metaphysical propositions for attributes of the thing in itself. Thus we find that the really interesting question for Nietzsche, which arises out of his criticism of Schopenhauer, is the question after the emergence of the intellect. Nietzsche writes: Ibid., ZS 231. Schopenhauer, PP 140n, SW 6: 1 4 9 - 5 0 n . Schopenhauer, PP 140, SW 6: 149. ' 8 Ibid., PP 141, SW 6: 150. 16

17

102

VII. "On Schopenhauer"

The existence of the last step before the appearance of the intellect is certainly as hypothetical as that of earlier, that means it was not in existence because consciousness was not in existence. With the next step, consciousness is supposed to appear, that means out of a non-existing world the flower of knowledge is to suddenly and directly break forth. This is also to have happened in a sphere of timelessness and spacelessness, without the mediation of causality: what stems out of such an otherworldly world, however, must itself — after Schopenhauer's reasoning — be thing in itself. 19

Based upon this reasoning Nietzsche asserts that either the intellect must be understood as a new predicate eternally joined with the thing in itself; and we know Nietzsche cannot choose this possibility based on the foregoing critique of predication of the will, or there can be no intellect because at no time could an intellect have come into being. But the intellect exists, and Nietzsche reasons: it follows that it could not be a tool of the world of appearance, as Schopenhauer would have it, hut rather thing in i t s e l f , that is, will (my emphasis). The Schopenhauerian thing in itself should become simultaneously the principium individuationis and basis of necessitation: in other words: the present world. Schopenhauer wanted to find an equation for the x: and it revealed itself out of his calculation that it = x, that means that he did not find it. 20

This closes Nietzsche's criticism of Schopenhauer's predication of the thing in itself and his criticism of Schopenhauer's placing the seat of the representation mechanism in the conscious intellect, the principium individuationis. It is clear that in this short criticism of Schopenhauer, two primary ideas arise for Nietzsche. The thing in itself still stands as an x. And, the intellect, the representation mechanism, which brings forth the world of representation does not belong only to the principium individuationis, but also to the x. In "On Schopenhauer," Nietzsche remains with the question after the origin of intellect. Nietzsche indicates that Schopenhauer is wary of the question of the origin of intellect "although it is apparent that the intellect in the Schopenhauerian sense is already a principium individuationis and presupposes a world caught in the lams of causality (my emphasis). 21 And Nietzsche quotes what we will find to be a very significant passage from Schopenhauer, which will set his own path of thinking going upon the question of the origin of intellect out of his theory of language.

" Nietzsche, ZS 2 3 1 - 3 2 . Ibid., ZS 232. 21 Ibid. 20

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103

Now if in the objective comprehension of the intellect we go back as far as we can, we shall find that the necessity or need of knowledge in general arises from the plurality and separate existence of beings, from individuation. For let us imagine that there exists only a single being, then such a being needs no knowledge, because there would not then exist anything different from that being itself, — anything whose existence such a being would therefore have to take up into itself only indirectly through knowledge, in other words, nothing foreign that could be apprehended as object. On the other hand, with the plurality of beings, every individual finds itself in a state of isolation from all the rest, and from this arises the necessity for knowledge. The nervous system, by means of which the animal individual first of all becomes conscious of itself, is bounded by a skin; yet in the brain raised to intellect, it crosses this boundary by means of its form of knowledge, causality, and in this way perception arises for it as a consciousness of other things, as a picture or image of beings in space and time, which change in accordance with causality.22

Hec, Schopenhauer supposes that there could be a "separate existence of beirgs" and "individuation" before the individuation of the principium individwtionis and its presupposition of conscious intellect, to the effect that "otler things" exist in the forms of space and time as precondition for peneption by conscious intellect in the making of images of representation. Niezsche will take this idea, and with Lange and Hartmann's help, shape it intcthe worldview in Anschauung set out in chapter 11, a worldview which allows for both unity and plurality, both objective and subjective intellect, for a resolution of the problems of Schopenhauer's principium individuationis and the questions of space, time, and causality, which Nietzsche begins to qustion here. It is interesting to note that for each of his major objections to Schopenhauer's philosophy, predication of the will and borders of individuation, Niezsche points to the fact that Schopenhauer is himself aware of the problems he presents, but chooses to suspend them in his case. This must ha\e been interesting to Nietzsche for two reasons; first, as demonstration and reaffirmation of the critical mind of Schopenhauer, and secondly in support of his recently acquired standpoint that philosophy need not, indeed camot satisfy according to any logical truth, but rather as poetic inspiration. In lis article "Der Standpunkt des Ideals bei Lange und Nietzsche," concerting Nietzsche's letter to Gersdorff of August, 1866, Salaquarda writes: that he still holds fast to Schopenhauer with full sympathy, with that he demonstrates, that such sympathy appears at the very least no longer selfevident. The basis of the communication to Gersdorff concerning his reading of Lange is apparently that the author of The History of Materialism had

22

bid., W W R 2: 274, S W 3: 310.

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VII. "On Schopenhauer"

offered him a point of view which had allowed him to continue to hold fast to Schopenhauer, despite certain doubts.23 The standpoint offered to Nietzsche through Lange was, of course, that philosophy is ultimately poetry. However, such a point of view does not mean that Nietzsche remains uncritical of Schopenhauer, for he also gets from Lange a strong sense that philosophy has an obligation in its creation of worlds, to remain as close to the bounds of what an examination of the natural and physical sciences tell us about the world as possible, while creating an ideal which can enhance such knowledge.

23

Jörg Salaquarda, "Der Standpunkt des Ideals bei Lange und Nietzsche," Studi Tedeschi, X X I I , 1, 1979. SI 138.

Chapter Eight "On Teleology" or "Concerning the Concept of the Organic Since Kant" In 1867 — 68 Nietzsche drew up an outline and many pages of notes for what was to have been his doctoral dissertation.' In a letter to his friend Deussen in April —Mai 1868 Nietzsche writes: The realm of metaphysics, and with that the province of "absolute" truth, has unquestionably been placed in a row with poetry and religion. Whomever wants to know something is now satisfied with a conscious relativity of knowledge — as for example, all well known natural scientists. Metaphysics belongs in certain men in the area of a spiritual necessity (Gemütsbedürfnisse), is essentially edification: on the other hand it is art, namely that of poetry in concepts (Begriffsdichtung). It must be remembered that metaphysics, neither as religion nor as art, has anything to do with the so called "essence of truth or being". By the way, when at the end of this year, you receive my doctoral dissertation you will notice a few things which will explain this point of limits of knowledge. My theme is "the concept of the organic since Kant," half philosophical, half natural science. My drafts are almost ready ... 2 On May 3rd or 4th Nietzsche writes to his friend Erwin Rohde: For a long time I have had a philosophical project in mind ... (namely to write "Concerning the concept of the organic since Kant") and have collected enough material for it; on the whole, however, this theme cannot be realized as the conscious goal just mentioned [a dissertation topic] unless one goes about it no less carefully than a fly.3 That Lange provides the primary occasion for Nietzsche's idea of such an undertaking is not only evident from his letter to Deussen in the way which it reiterates Lange's basic propositions, but we have the evidence of Nietzsche's sister when she writes in her biography of Nietzsche:

1

2 3

Nietzsche's eventual dissertation was "De fontibus Laertii Diogenis" ("Concerning the Sources of Laertius Diogenes") (FNN 21). Nietzsche, KSB 2: 269. Ibid., KSB 2: 274.

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Existent ... is a draft of a work "Concerning Teleology since Kant," -with which my brother, during his convalescence in March and April (1866) occupied himself. He had probably derived the stimulus to this work from Friedrich Albert Lange's History of Materialism, which he read immediately upon its publication and which he studied once again in February 1868. 4

At the end of these notes, Nietzsche affixed a long list of reading which he considered necessary for the completion of the projected dissertation. The list is conspicuous in its heavy reading in the natural and physical sciences and in the fact that most on the names on it were names encountered to one degree or another in his reading of Lange's book. 3 In exploring the concept of the organic since Kant, these notes, of necessity, explore Nietzsche's own position with regard to teleology, a position which he slowly draws out against that offered primarily by Kant in The Critique of Judgement. Aside from Kant's work, Nietzsche's other sources primarily include Section 28, the last few pages of "Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy," and Schopenhauer's essay "On Teleology" in The World as Will and Representation·, as well as the last sections on teleology in Kuno Fischer's two volume work Immanuel Kant und Seine Lehre. A close look at these notes on teleology is essential to my further discussion, because they demonstrate how thoroughly Nietzsche's epistemology is based upon his theory of language. In them we find Nietzsche's continuing critique of metaphysics which uses as its primary tool his understanding of the limits of language and conceptuality. Nietzsche is equating teleological thinking with metaphysical thinking. In his letter to Deussen, Nietzsche himself emphasizes not really the organic, or teleology, but much more that he is exploring the "conscious relativity of knowledge" and the "point of the limits of knowledge." We will see to what extent Nietzsche takes over Lange's idea that whenever the limits of knowledge are approached, what remains over are words, expressions, and a world of relations, but never truth itself.

Kant's

Teleology

With regard to scientific enquiry Kant felt that the forms of nature conform to the forms of our cognitive thinking and that both should be knowable in general mechanistic terms. Thus, scientific search for causes of 4

Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, Das Leben Nietzsches, Leipzig: V e r l a g v o n C. G . N a u m a n n , 1895. L N 1: 2 6 9 .

5

Please r e f e r to m y translation in A p p e n d i x A . It seems reasonable to assume that Nietzsche l o o k e d at m o s t o f these at o n e time o r another, because s o m e o f t h e m , f o r example, S c h o p e n h a u e r , Czolbe, H e l m h o l t z , K a n t , and others w e k n o w that he did read and study closely.

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any natural occurrence, or attempts to measure nature quantitatively, are legitimate. However, Kant thought that the problem of living organisms is not ultimately explainable through mechanistic research. He does not allow that our knowledge of mechanism is not yet advanced enough, rather that it is completely ineffective in explaining organic phenomena because in any analysis of an organism, as opposed to inorganic objects, an insoluable residuum must always remain unexplained. Given this premis, Kant asserts that it is in our human nature to account for living organisms in terms of explanations from design. However, the theological explanation falls short because we have no evidence that a God exists, or that if one exists, his activity is purposive. Therefore, for Kant, neither teleology according to a theory of theological design nor of mechanism offer adequate methods of explaining organic life. If this is so, how are we to procede to an understanding of organisms? Kant suggests that the principle of teleology be used to offer a third possibility: "the conception of combinations and forms in nature that are determined by ends is at least one more principle for reducing its phenomena to rules in cases where the laws of its purely mechanical causality do not carry us sufficiently far." 6 Kant proposes a "natural teleology." He claims that the biologist can never discover scientifically for what human or divine purpose nature is organized as it is. Yet the scientist, of necessity, sees that every living organism possesses a "natural" purpose because the structure of its parts demonstrate a teleological value in the preservation of its life and of its species. The organism is "an organized natural product in which every part is reciprocally both means and end." 7 We are, by the structure of our cognitive processes, Kant suggests, able to conceive the possibility that ultimate reality, "the super-sensible substrate" of nature may contain an explanation of organic life which is neither mechanistic nor based on design, yet it may be either or both. Design in this case is not that of theology, rather the idea that there may be a natural "intelligence" which operates according to the rules of means and ends. From this basis Kant goes on to suggest his "objective" teleology which regards organisms as beings in which every part is throughout determined by every other part, which leads him, through the reflective judgement, to intuit final causes acting in nature as a product of an intelligence. For we are bringing forward a teleological ground where we endow a conception of an object — as if that conception were to be found in nature instead of in ourselves — ... and so regard nature as possessed of a capacity 6 7

Kant, CJ 4 - 5 . Ibid., 24.

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of its own for acting technically·, whereas if we did not ascribe such a mode of operation to nature its causality would have to be regarded as bliind mechanism.8 Although Kant comes to this view as necessary, based upon the Organization of our reason, Lange asserts, as we saw above, that although there does appear to be some purposiveness in nature, it is exactly that, only appearance. Even if there is in reality such purposiveness, we are not in a position to know it.

Nietzsche:

"On Teleology"

In discussing Nietzsche's notes "On Teleology" let us remember that a year later in "Origins" Nietzsche explicitly states, as I have already mentioned, that the "real problem of philosophy is the unending expediency of organisms and the unconsciousness in their coming to be." Here, in this sentence, we discover the "remarkable diversion" which Nietzsche makes on the Kantian antinomy. 9 The question of teleology for Kant and for Schopenhauer rests in a concern for the first part of this sentence, in understanding "the unending expediency of the organism" and then on to final causes or the will. However, for Nietzsche, as we will discover in what follows, the real object of research in this statement is not only "the unending expediency of the organism," rather he chooses to concentrate on the mechanisms of "the unconsciousness of its coming to be." The key word, is once again, the unconscious, and how our conscious knowledge grows out of and is related to it. One of the first thoughts in the notes we are considering is the following: "Why cannot there be a power which unconsciously creates the expedient, i.e., Nature: one thinks of the instinct of animals." 10 In addition to the above, the other most significant aspect of Nietzsche's consideration of teleology, from the point of view of this study, is that his whole argument against some of Kant's major teleological postulates rests upon a thorough and consistent consideration of the limits of conceptuality. Nietzsche correlates concept making with a conscious intellect, resting in concepts or taking them as givens is a "pure arbitrariness," a poetry in concepts. And the carrying further of conscious thinking based upon a particular concept leads one astray from other possibilities. "Teleology as expedience and the result of conscious intelligence pushes farther and farther.

8 5 10

Ibid., 5. See chapter 4, note 7. Nietzsche, ZT 239. Pages refer to my translation in Appendix A.

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One asks after the purpose of this isolated interference and stands in this before pure arbitrariness." 11 Thus, in teleological matters, Nietzsche suggests, when we talk of concepts, of ends and final causes, what we mean is that "a form is intentioned by a living and thinking being in which life wants to appear. In other words, we do not advance, through the final cause to the explanation of life, but only of the form." 1 2 Conscious intelligence, thus, determines the forms, that is concepts, in which we view the world. With regard to the organism, Kant's "itself organizing" is traced arbitrarily by Kant. This is very significant, for once Kant has intentioned the form of organisms as constituting means and ends in themselves, it is from this "arbitrary form" that he begins to build his case for ends of nature and eventually of final causes, which lead him to favor a natural teleology, arrived at through the reflective judgement. Nietzsche, working rather from natural science (naturgemäss), favors a mechanistic theory operating equally within ideas of expedience and inexpedience. However, as we will see, concepts of mechanisms are equally arbitrary in the final analysis, but perhaps less so than the Kantian concepts of expedience. Nietzsche quotes and comments upon Kant: "The expedience of things can always be valid only with respect to an intelligence, with whose intention the thing agrees." And further, "either our own or a foreign intelligence which lies at the basis of things themselves. In the last case, the intention which reveals itself in appearance is the existence of things." In other cases only our conception of the thing is judged purely as expedience. This last kind of expediency has to do with only the form, ("in the simple observation of the object imagination and intelligence are harmonized").13

When an intelligence is introduced, especially human intelligence, Nietzsche, following Lange and Lange's discussion of the limits of knowledge, makes it clear that what concerns us is always only a world of appearance, a conceptualized world of conscious forms and not the world as it may actually be. Nietzsche clearly sets up a dichotomy in these notes on teleology between conscious intelligence and the forms of conceptuality and an unconscious 11 12 13

Ibid., 241. Ibid., 249. Ibid., 242—43. Here, Nietzsche is using Kuno Fischer's interpretation of Kant. Fischer wrote significant critiques of Kant constructed after a thorough acquaintance and sympathetic understanding of Schopenhauer's work and Kantian criticisms. Thus, he would recommend himself especially to Nietzsche. Remember that Blunck in his biography of Nietzsche (see chapter 6, note 4) points to the fact that Nietzsche's acquaintance with Kant is begun with his reading of Lange's History of Materialism and completed by the reading of Fischer's criticism. Nietzsche's first introduction to Kant is, of course, Schopenhauer and both of these works on Kant fall into line to one degree or another with Schopenhauer's rendering of him.

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force at work in nature which it is legitimate to posit but to which we cann ot have access. In Nietzsche's outline of the projected work on the organic since Kaxit two sections are indicated. The first section appears to roughly consist in an analysis of primarily Kantian elements of teleological consideration and Nietzsche's replacing of certain points with those of his own. The second section represents his own thinking on the organic and its relationship to teleology. The most effective way of entering into Nietzsche's discussion of teleology is simply to take these headings as cues for organizing my discussion under major areas of concern which seem important to Nietzsche.

Concept of expedience (ability of existence) In taking up the first point in Nietzsche's outline, "concept of expedience," note that he qualifies the word expedience as the concept of expedience. Nietzsche quotes Kant twice from The Critique of Judgement on the primal role of concepts: "we have complete insight only into what we can make and accomplish according to our concepts." To this Nietzsche responds: "What is beyond our concepts is completely unknowable." 14 In order to overcome the fact that human beings stand before the unknown, they invent "concepts, which only gather together a sum of appearing characteristics, which however, do not get ahold of the thing." Nietzsche then emphasizes the provisional nature of conceptuality with regard to the basic elements of a teleological consideration by writing: "Therein belong force, matter, individual, law, organism, atom, final cause. These are not parts but only reflected judgements."15 The concept of expedience has been formed from the idea "ability of existence." Concept of expedience: only the ability of existence. However, Nietzsche emphasizes that this equation demonstrates no specific degree of reason in its claim: "What is wonderful for us is really organic living: and all means to maintain this we call expedient."16 In contradistinction to Kant's statement that "it is something different to consider the inner form of a thing as expedient and to regard the existence of these things as ends of nature," Nietzsche counters that if the concept expedience arises from the ability of life, there would be no contradiction between the inexpedient method of maintenance and reproduction of an organism and its expedience. For if 14 15 16

Ibid., 244, 246. Ibid., 247. Ibid., 241.

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something lives, no matter how it maintains itself, it must by definition be expedient. Therefore, Nietzsche maintains, we cannot say, as Kant does, that if it is expedient the existence of a thing is an end of nature. We find that Nietzsche has no quarrel with the concept of the expedience of organisms, however, he does not agree that expedience leads to ends of nature. Having arrived at the idea of physical ends, Kant applies a reflective judgement to suggest that it is indeed justified to consider the possibility that the expedience of organisms might lead to the idea of ends of nature. Here is how Kant states the matter in The Critique oj Judgement: "brought so far, this conception necessarily leads us to the idea of aggregate nature as a system following the rule of ends." Thus, the whole mechanism of nature is subordinated to the principles of reason in order to test "phenomenal nature" by the idea of final ends. Kant applies the subjective maxim: "everything in the world is good for something or other; nothing in it is in vain; we are entitled, nay incited, by the example that nature affords us in its organic products, to expect nothing from it and its laws but what is final when things are viewed as a whole." 17 Nietzsche finds fault with Kant's consideration of teleology based upon ends and final causes for two major reasons. First, he questions and criticizes the movement from "organized causes, which must be thought as effective toward ends —." Nietzsche writes that Kant made this claim after a bad analogy: that there is nothing similar to the relationship of expedience of the organism. However, according to Nietzsche, it is only necessary to prove a coordinated possibility, in order to remove the compelling in the Kantian representation. The coordinated possibility which Nietzsche offers and which frames his version of teleology in these notes is: "mechanism joined with causality." "Expedience arose as a special case of the possible: countless forms arise, that means, mechanical assembly: among these countless there could also be some capable of life.'" 8 With this criticism, Nietzsche is repeating basic lessons learned in Lange's work, that a mechanical explanation in the service of the laws of nature allows organisms to arise and maintain themselves. Without, however, the necessity of positing the concept of ends in nature. Nietzsche also criticizes Kant for taking only the example of the organism from which to generalize to ends of nature and then to final causes. "The concept of an end of nature used only with the organism." 19 Nietzsche offers three specific objections to Kant's movement from organisms to ends of Kant, CJ 28, K W 10: 4 9 1 - 9 2 . Nietzsche, ZT 243. " Ibid., 247. 17

18

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nature, and finally to final causes. "This reflection comes about in that one 1) does not consider the subjective in the concept of ends, 2) understands nature as a unity, 3) also credits it with a unity of means." 20 These three criticisms, return us to Nietzsche's criticism of conceptuality. The subjective in conceptuality lies first and foremost, in the idea which Nietzsche appropriates from Lange, that our conceptions are determined according to the particular organization of human perception. It is a part of our human organization to see, or to wish to see purposes operating in nature. Because of the arbitrary nature of conceptuality, in Kant's case, the positing of the organism as containing within itself both ends and means, a subjective perception and an arbitrary process, lead to what Nietzsche considers to be fundamentally a false teleology. Concerning the opposition between the conception of organisms and of nature as either unities or multiplicities, Nietzsche writes: "The concept of the whole is however our work. Here lies the source of the representation of ends. The concept of the whole does not lie in things, but in us." 21 Thus, "into these unities, made by us, we later transfer the idea of end." Nietzsche quotes Kant: "The representation of the whole thought as cause is the end!;" then adds: "However, the 'whole' is itself only a representation." 22 "We believe that the force which brings about organisms of a certain kind is a unitary one. Then the method of this force, how it creates and maintains the organisms is to be observed." 23 However, organism must be considered "as a product of our organization." 24 These criticisms are also echos of Lange's consideration of teleology in the last chapter. This criticism of the need in us to create unities and to reason from wholes extends to a criticism of Schopenhauer as well. In the notes on teleology Nietzsche quotes several statements from Schopenhauer and then offers criticism of them. "The expedience of the organic, the regularity of the inorganic are brought into nature through our understanding." This idea, expanded upon, gives the explanation of external expedience. The thing in itself must "show its unity in the agreement of all appearances." "All the parts of nature come to meet each other, because there is one will."

However, Nietzsche counters this with: "But the opposite to the whole theory arises in that terrible struggle of individuals (which likewise manifest themselves as an idea) and the species. The explanation presupposes an overarching 20 21 22 23 24

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

248. 244. 245. 244. 243.

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teleology: which does not exist." 25 Therefore, Nietzsche disagrees with the Kantian position that our discursive intellect can only grasp the parts, but that the parts are conditioned by the whole, or with the Schopenhauerian proposition of the unity and expedience of the will as opposed to the multiplicity of representation. Nietzsche gives equal weight to the opposite opinion that multiplicity is what exists in fact but that our organization compels us to a false conception of unity. "In the organism parts are not only conditioned by the whole but also the whole by the parts." 26 Nietzsche writes: "The understanding is discursive not intuitive," then quotes Fischer: "it can grasp the the whole only in its parts and put them together" In the organism, however, the "parts are conditioned by the whole." "Now the understanding tries to proceed from the whole, which is not given in the perception, but only in representation. The representation of the whole conditions the parts: "the representation of the whole as cause," that is, end." "When grasping the whole out of the parts, understanding proceeds mechanically, when grasping the given parts from the whole, it can only trace them back to the concept of the whole."27

To this Nietzsche adds: "Thus intuition is lacking." From Kant's point of view, the intuitive is not lacking. At one point in his notes, Nietzsche refers to a specific passage in Goethe which he notes as "very important," a passage in which Goethe is quoting Kant. The section is 77 in The Critique of Judgement. Here Kant writes: But now we are also able to form a notion of an understanding which, not being discursive like ours, but intuitive, moves from the synthetic universal or intuition of a whole as a whole, to the particular — that is to say, from the whole to the parts ... Here it is also quite unnecessary to prove that an intellectus archetypus like this is possible. It is sufficient to show that we are led to this idea of an intellectus archetypus by contrasting with it our discursive understanding that has need of images (intellectus ectypus) and noting the contingent character of a faculty of this form, and that this idea involves nothing self-contradictory.28

The significant distinction here is that Kant refers to "pure intuition," that is, he posits a pure concept of such an intellect able to comprehend the whole and from the concept (subjective intuition) of that whole, the idea of ends of nature is justified. This is not what Nietzsche seeks as intuitive. Nietzsche's idea is intuitive from nature, that which can be sensed without or before conceptuality. Kant posits an empirical intuition and Schopenhauer considers 25 20 27 28

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Kant,

239 - 40. 246. 245-46. CJ 6 3 - 6 5 , K W 10: 5 2 5 - 2 6 .

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his understanding to be direct knowledge of perception or intuitive understanding. What Nietzsche points out here is that both of these conceptions of intuition still presuppose the intellect, in Kant's case the a priori forms, in Schopenhauer's case, the concept of cause through application of the laws of time and space. From the point of view of nature Nietzsche writes: "It is first denied that the whole in organisms is something real, that is, the concept of unity is examined and then ascribed to the human organism. Therefrom, then we may not proceed." 2 9 This is just the operation Kant performs above in proposing the pure intuition. Nietzsche finds the concept of an intuitive understanding interesting, however, he would never suppose that it could be in any way as just described, because he is not willing to transgress the limits of conceptuality by a simple reversal, such as Kant himself admittedly does when he writes that such an intuitive understanding can be posited upon the basis of our discursive understanding. For Nietzsche, such a positing translates teleological consideration into the realm of the transcendent of metaphysics. The intuition which Nietzsche would like to bring to bear would be of another kind. It would be an unconscious intuition, one based in our organization, manifested perhaps through the actions of our instincts: Again, "why cannot there be a power which unconsciously creates the expedient, i.e., Nature: one thinks of the instinct of animals." Such an unconscious intuition would allow the possibility that unconscious operations condition not only life, but also our perceptions of those elements which we combine to arrive at the concept of life. " T h e strong necessity of cause and effect shuts out the goal in unconscious nature." 3 0 " T h e secret is only 'life' — whether this is also only an idea conditioned by our organization?" 3 1 The idea of unconscious intuition would operate as an area of new thinking where all is yet to be discovered. Therefore Nietzsche's major criticisms of Kant's moving from organisms to ends of nature; that it leaves the subjective of the concept of ends of nature aside, that it understands nature as a unity, and that it also credits nature with a unity of means, are disputed primarily from the point of view of the limitations of subjective consciousness and discursive conceptuality. The concept of ends is necessarily of a subjective nature, nature as a unity exists only as a concept (our knowing cannot confirm it), and, as a result, a unity of means in nature is equally as ineffective as a possibility with regard to teleology in nature.

29 30 31

Nietzsche, Z T 246. Ibid., 241. Ibid., 244.

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The alleged impossibility of explaining an organism mechanically (what does mechanically mean?) Nietzsche agrees with Fischer's idea of mechanism, and quotes him with respect to it: "What reason knows of nature through its concepts, is nothing other than the effect of moving force, that means mechanism." Fischer adds that "what cannot be known from a merely mechanical point of view, does not belong to natural science." 32 This also sounds like Lange. However, Nietzsche does not so quickly agree with Fischer when he goes on to echo Kant on the impossibility of mechanical explanations of organisms. "Mechanically to explain means to explain from external causes." "The specification (of nature) cannot be explained through external causes." "Nothing, however, without cause."

Nietzsche continues to quote Fischer: "Through the concept of mechanical lawfulness the architecture of the world can be explained, but no organism can be explained with it." "It is impossible to represent natural expedience as being inherent in matter." "Matter is only external appearance."33

To this Nietzsche responds: "this definition was introduced, in order afterwards to set the inner (causes) against it." 3 4 Nietzsche concludes: "Thus, inner causes, that means ends, that means, representations." 35 Again, Nietzsche points to the problem of taking the form, the word for the thing in itself. If according to Kant and Fischer mechanism is inadequate to explain organisms because it is an external explanation and cannot get at the "specification of nature," which, it is implied can only be gotten at internally, a chain of consequences follows: there must then be inner causes, which imply ends, which means to Nietzsche, all is dissolved into mere words, mere "representations." Nietzsche writes: "Because of our organization we only understand a mechanical origin of things." 36 He does not concur with Kant's idea that mechanism can explain the world but not organisms. Nietzsche entertains the idea that mechanism may be equally valid as a method for investigating both the inorganic and the organic. The question is, what "life" is, whether it is a simple ordering and forming principle ... or something completely different: against that it is admissible Ibid., Ibid. 34 Ibid., 35 Ibid., * Ibid., 32

242.

33

246. 242. 243.

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VIII. "On Teleology" that the same principle exists within organic nature in the relationship of organisms to one another as in inorganic nature. 37

This, however, is not mechanism as Kant understands it. Kant states that while it is possible that organisms originated in a purely mechanical manner, it is impossible for us to trace them back mechanically. To this Nietzsche asks: "Why not?" Nietzsche writes: "By mechanism Kant understands the world without final causes: the world of causality." 38 Kant allowed the possibility that organisms could have originated out of chance or inexpedience, what Nietzsche calls mechanism, but denied the possibility of knowing it. Nietzsche responds: "The method of nature is the same in organic and inorganic spheres. If then the possibility of mechanism is present, then the possibility of knowing should also be there." 39 Nietzsche's "Why not?" and the above quote are an echo of Lange, who although never pretending to say that mechanical explanations have been reached, is also never willing to deny that they may not be reacheable. Rather, Nietzsche points to Goethe's attempt at teleology: metamorphosis belongs to the explanations of the organic out of the effective cause. Every effective cause finally rests on something impenetrable, (that even proves, that it is the right human way) For that reason one does not ask after final causes in inorganic nature, because here forces and not individuals are evident, that is, because we can solve everything mechanically, we no longer believe in ends. 4 0

Nietzsche, following Lange, also considers individuals (organisms) to consist only of forces, thus, they too should be mechanically traceable. Thus, Nietzsche does not agree with Kant that no organisms can be explained mechanically, or if it may be possible that they can be so explained that it is impossible to trace them back mechanically. Nietzsche agrees with Lange, that essentially organic and inorganic can alike be explained mechanically, and that they proceed from a mechanically working process in agreement with the "universal laws of Nature." Lange's notion of universal laws of nature, discussed in chapter 6 is a collection, drawn from experience, of certain rules in natural phenomena, whose ultimate cause we do not yet know. Thus, mechanism offers the possible forms; natural selection chooses according to causes, the actual forms. But these actual forms can summon forth nothing that is not contained in the mechanical plan of organisms. Nietzsche understands mechanism, as does Lange, to be the most effective "working hypothesis" of natural science, a hypothesis which allows another 37 38 39 40

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

248. 245, 247. 251. 245.

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point of view to a humanly scheming "architect of the universe," to mystical teleology, or even to Kant's objective teleology, which is not incompatible with mechanistic laws, but which finds them lacking. Stack describes Nietzsche's relationship to mechanism effectively, and what he writes characterizes Nietzsche's stance with regard to mechanism even in these early notes on teleology. Nietzsche is not entirely opposed to a mechanistic theory of nature if it is entertained for methodological purposes, if it is understood as hypothetical, if it is given no ontological or metaphysical significance. What he likes about mechanism is its practical application, its avoidance of teleological interpretation, its lack of sentimentality about the world. Thus, die mechanistische Vorstellung is entirely acceptable als regulatives Princip der Methode.41

This qualification of the limits of even the mechanical explanation on Nietzsche's part will be discussed in more detail in a moment.

The recognized inexpedience in nature in contradiction to expedience The major departure from the Kantian idea of mechanism, is Nietzsche's idea that mechanism may also include the possibility of the origination of organisms out of "chance," "inexpedience." Nietzsche points to the fact that Kant tried to prove "that a necessity exists that we think our bodies as premeditated, that is, to think of it in terms of concepts of expedience." Nietzsche adds: "The necessity of which Kant speaks no longer exists in our time." 42 The "necessity of expedience" is one way to explain teleology to oneself. Nietzsche suggests that optimism and teleology go hand in hand because both are concerned with disputing that the inexpedient really is something inexpedient. Against teleology in general one has the weapon: proof of inexpedience. With that one only proves, that the highest reason has only worked sporadically, that there is also a terrain for lesser reasons. There is no uniform teleological world: but there is a creating intelligence.43

This is the point at which Nietzsche asks the question referred to above, as to why the expedience creating power has to be intelligent, why not rather, unconscious, given by nature, in the manner of instincts. "The acceptance of such an intelligence is made after human analogy." Against the two metaphysical solutions to which Nietzsche points which are used to explain expedience in the world, the "coarse anthropological" 41 42 43

Stack, LNS 2 3 3 - 3 4 . Nietzsche, ZT 238. Ibid., 239.

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which supposes an ideal humanity outside of the world, and the other which "flees into an intelligible world" in which the expedience of things is immanent, Nietzsche proposes a resolution from a purely human standpoint: "the Empedoclean, where expedience appears only as an instance among many inexpediencies." 44 Expedience is the exception Expedience is chance This reveals complete non-rationality.45

The idea that mechanism joined with chance causality offers the possible forms out of which actual forms arise is again from Lange. Although Lange only mentions Empedocles in this connection, Nietzsche was already familiar with these ideas in Empedocles. Schlechta and Anders write: Nietzsche points out that the familiar solution to the problem of expediency in nature: the Darwinian theory, has its precursor in Empedocles who discarded the mechanical explanation of movement and only allowed movement out of "instincts," out of "animation."

Then Schlechta and Anders quote Nietzsche: Empedocles was faced with the problem that. ... The ordered world has been able to arise out of those opposing instincts, devoid of all ends, without all νους: and here the magnificent idea suffices that among countless failed forms and impossibilities of life there arise also a few expedient forms capable of life: here the expedience of what arises is attributed to the existence of the expedient. ... Now we have a special version of this thought in the Darwinian theory.46

Thus, as Schlechta and Anders comment, Empedocles offered Nietzsche a possibility of explaining expedience in nature without recourse to an ordered, end oriented νους (intellect or mind), rather that what appears to us as expedient has only arisen through the chance encounter of individual instincts. We find here the basis for Nietzsche's attraction to Lange's joining of mechanism and causality out of Darwinian theory and for his own idea that the expedience creating power may lie in an unconscious power manifested in instinct. Nietzsche makes a new combination in attempting to wed the mechanical with the instincts. With regard to organisms, Nietzsche writes in explanation of this Empedoclean standpoint and Lange's version of it: A thing lives — thus its parts are expedient: the life of things is the purpose of the parts. But there are countless different ways to live, that means forms,

44 45 46

Ibid. Ibid. Schlechta and Anders, V A P 6 8 - 6 9 .

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that means parts. Expedience is no absolute, rather a very relative expedience: seen from other sides, often inexpedient.47 In the organic being the parts are expedient to its existence, that means it would not live, if the parts were inexpedient. With that nothing is decided about the single part. The part is a form of expedience: but it cannot be discerned, that it is the only possible form.48 Nietzsche emphasizes that the part is a form of expedience. In general teleology places the organic elsewhere than in the form. Then it says of the parts of the organism that they are not necessary, what is really the case is that the form of the organism is not necessary. "But outside of that form it is simply still life." Nietzsche then states his principle of expediency: "for life there are different forms, that means expediences. Life is possible under an astonishing number of forms. Each of these forms is expedient; and because countless forms exist, so there are also countless expedient forms." 4 9 This possible flowering and choosing between forms is what Nietzsche is thinking of when he emphasizes Schopenhauer's characterization of nature's work largely as frantic and wasteful, which shows nature to be as completely indifferent to expedient forms as it is to the inexpedient. Again, this was reinforced in Lange's discussion of Darwin. Thus, in place of Kant's "organized causes, which must be effective towards ends —," Nietzsche proposes the possibility of "mechanism joined with causality" 5 0 as an alternate possibility in the creation of organisms and as a basis from which to think about teleology. "The presupposition is that the living can arise out of the mechanical" in spite of Kant's denial. In truth one thing is certain, that we only know the mechanical. What is beyond our concepts, is completely unknowable. The origin of the organic is thus a hypothetical one: that we imagine a human understanding was present. Now the concept of the organic is also only human: one must point out the analogy: that which is capable of life arises from among a multitude of those possibilities incapable of life. With that we come closer to the solution of the organism. We see that much that is capable of life arises and is maintained, and we see the method. Supposed that the force which works to make life capable of existence, brings it to be, and maintains it is the same: this is very irrational. This is, however, the presupposition of teleology. 51 Let me point to an essential correlation Nietzsche is making here. Nietzsche equates mechanical knowing with conceptuality, these both remain in the 47 48 49 50 51

Nietzsche, ZT 2 5 0 - 5 1 . Ibid., 248. Ibid., 249. Ibid., 243. Ibid., 244.

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realm of representation or phenomena. "Is a thing, therefore, inexpedient because it has arisen mechanically? Kant says so: Why cannot chance bring about something expedient? He was right: expedience lies only in our idea." 52 Because Kant defines the mechanical as the application of cause and effect to matter, he sees methodical necessity, the opposite of chance. However, for Nietzsche, as we have seen, chance can occasion expedience, and the mechanism, which is all we can know, of the chance expedience should be able to be mechanically traced back. But once again, Nietzsche is careful to qualify this statement, for he ever remains in the realm of forms, of representation. From the standpoint of human nature: we only know mechanism we do not know the organism But even mechanism as well as organism do not belong to the thing in itself."

However, while championing a mechanical explanation of expedience, Nietzsche is careful to emphasize that he does not believe in a mechanism of blindly operating forces. Under the heading in his notes "A False Antithesis," he rejects the idea of a mechanism in the sense of blind forces acting without aim, thus effecting nothing expedient, a view in which there is "in general no pervading degree of intelligence" where "the existence of the organism shows only blindly working forces." Nietzsche rejects this "false antithesis" to the Kantian system of ends and final causes based upon four points, points which, we find, attempt to bridge the two poles: 1) 2) 3) 4)

Setting aside of expanded representations of teleology Limits of the concept. The expedient in nature Expedient same as able to exist Organisms as multiplicities and unities54

Either point of view, the Kantian or purely mechanistic, sets aside expanded representations of teleology, for example, the possibility that mechanism might be joined with causality. Again, Nietzsche emphasizes that in ideological considerations as elsewhere we are constrained by the limits of the concept. Expedience is ultimately only the "concept of expedience" which arises from the ability for existence. For Nietzsche organisms are multiplicities and unities, that is the whole not only conditions the parts, but also the parts condition the whole. All four of these arguments refute the idea that only blindly effective forces are at work.

52 53 54

Ibid., 251. Ibid., 243. Ibid., 245.

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Organism (the undetermined life concept/the undetermined individual concept) After his critique of the conceptual basis of teleological thinking, Nietzsche is careful to frame his alternatives to the Kantian position within this critique. What Nietzsche suggests here, is that to attempt a specific determination of the concepts, "life" and "individual," is impossible, but more, to show how, as they must remain concepts, they will always remain undetermined with regard to what "life" may be. About the concept of life Nietzsche writes: We grasp about a living thing nothing but forms. The eternally becoming is life; through the nature of our intellect we grasp forms: our intellect is too dull to recognize continuing change: what is knowable to it it calls form. "Life" is something completely dark for us, which we therefore cannot illuminate even with final causes. ... Form is all of "life" that appears visible on the surface. 55

Along with the thought that life is only knowable by us in the forms in which we perceive it and that life must remain unknowable in itself, Nietzsche is of the opinion that there is in reality no such thing as an individual, except as determined through forms. These unities which we call organisms, are however again multiplicities. There are in reality no individuals, rather, individuals and organisms are nothing but abstractions.56 A concept similar to the form is the concept individual. Organisms are called unities, goal centers. But unities only exist for our intellect. Each individual has an infinity of living individuals within itself. It is only a coarse perception, perhaps taken from the human body. All "forms" can be thrown out, but life! 57 The individual is an insufficient concept. What we see of life is form; how we see them, as individuals. What lies behind that is unknowable. 58

Here, Nietzsche is again following Lange and is emphasizing the limits of knowledge and conceptuality. Behind the concept unity, we can really only know multiplicity. Behind the concept individual, again, we can only know multiplicity. In creating unities out of our perceptions we bring together several properties into a conception of a whole, or of a unity. Words are forms, and all we can see of life, according to our organization, are forms. 55 56 57 58

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

249-50. 244. 249. 251.

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To suppose a direct connection between the forms and concepts of life and life itself leads to teleological thinking which no longer stops at the limits of knowledge, but runs over into a transcendent world.

Teleological reflection is examination of forms In the second section of Nietzsche's outline he attempts to bridge the two extremes, the teleology of Kant's final causes, and an interpretation of the world which is the result of blindly operating forces which effect nothing expedient. It is in this section that Nietzsche offers his own conception of teleology. This conception consists of three major points. First, teleological consideration is consideration of forms, concepts, intellect. "Final causes as well as mechanisms are human ways of perceiving." 59 The idea behind this is that any teleological system arises only out of representation, i.e. forms, and cannot say anything about what there may be besides, thing in itself or will. The concept of final causes is thus also merely form. The second point is what Nietzsche calls: life force (Lebenskraft). There is "life" and there are forms. Although at first it appears as if Nietzsche has replaced thing in itself or will with his own concept "life," this is actually not the case. He puts it in quotation marks to emphasize that it is a word, merely a concept. He says "life," but to ask the why or how of it is useless, because we must always ask these questions within the limits of the forms of life and not in terms of that "life itself." "Life," as Nietzsche means it here is "the sensation growing existence." "'Life' occurs with the sensations: we consider the sensations as condition for the 'organic'". The question after the organism is: wherefrom the humanly analogous in nature? Through lack of a selfconsciousness? "To live" is to exist consciously, that is, human like. We cannot conceive of "life," that is, sensate growing existence, other than as analogous to the human. Man recognizes things which both coincide with and differ from human analogy and asks after the explanation.60 Here Nietzsche makes his argument against final causes, against any attempt to answer the question "why?" does something live in the manner that it does, or how are organisms organized according to ends and expedience. The argument is that in every case we are only arguing from forms. Does one need final causes to explain that something lives? No, only to explain how it lives. Do we need final causes to explain the life of a thing? 59 60

Ibid., 246. Ibid., 2 5 1 - 5 2 .

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... When we say "the dog lives" and then ask "why does the dog live?" that does not belong here. Because here we have made "life" equal to "existence." The question "why is something" belongs in the external teleology and lies completely out of our area.61

Forms (individuals) belong to and are derived from human organization Nietzsche's third major point concerning teleological consideration of forms is that these forms arise purely as the result of our human organization, a thought with which we are by now thoroughly familiar after our discussion of Lange. In his discussion of Darwinism and questions of teleology Lange directly addresses the aristotelian conception of form and how it has come to mean matter or substance: The form makes the essence of the individual; if this be so, we may also designate it substance, even though by a natural necessity it proceeds from the properties of the matter. These properties, when clearly seen, are in their turn only forms combining themselves into higher forms. The form, too, is the true logical core of force, when we once clear this idea of the false byeidea of a compelling anthropomorphic violence. We only see form as we only feel force. If we regard the form of a thing, it is unity; if we disregard the form, it is multeity or matter ... 62

For Nietzsche and for Lange the jump which takes place between perceiving an individual out of multiplicity by means of a form and then its translation into substance arising out of the properties of matter, poses a problem. For Nietzsche these forms are only concepts which join together a sum of appearing characteristics, which, however cannot correspond directly to the thing. Therein belong such forms as force, matter, individual, law, organism, atom, final causes. Nietzsche writes: "Whatever is supposed to be the 'cause as idea of the effect,' cannot be 'life,' but only the form. That means the appearance of things is thought as preexisting and as real." 63 Nietzsche, in the use of his key term, form, is also taking a cue from Schopenhauer who writes in On the Will in Nature: The real essence of every animal form, is an act of the will outside representation, ... But when our cerebral perception comprehends that form, ... it has to present itself in conformity with the laws and forms of knowledge. ... The understanding, in thus apprehending these things, now perceives the original unity reestablishing itself out of a multiplicity which its own form of knowledge had first brought about, and involuntarily taking for 61 62 63

Ibid., 250. Lange, HM 3: 39, G D M 2: 251. Nietzsche, Z T 250.

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granted that its own way of perceiving this is the way in which this animal form comes into being, it is now struck with admiration for the profound wisdom with which those parts are arranged, those functions combined. This is the meaning of Kant's great doctrine, that Teleology is brought into Nature by our own understanding, which accordingly wonders at a miracle of its own creation. 64

In the last few pages of his notes on teleology Nietzsche emphasizes the complete dominion of the form. It is impossible to know life, but only the form of life. We are constrained by the nature of our organization only to understand forms. Final cause means: the idea of the whole is identified as cause, that means a form of appearance is called real and preexisting. The concept of the whole refers only to the form, not to "life." I. Not "a "life" is to be generated, therefore, forms must be searched for" II. rather "under the following form a "life" should appear." It is impossible to grasp the concept of life: therefore, it does not belong to "the idea of the whole." 6 5

Thus, the place of the problem of teleology is only to be found in human conceptualization of forms, in appearance. This will never lead to knowledge of a real possible end of nature though one may be suspected. From Lange and Nietzsche's perspective, even if such an end existed, an organization such as the human could never know it. Nietzsche essentially accuses Kant of rejecting a search for a solution to these problems. Kant believed that his forms of ends and final causes were "preexisting and real," he still wanted to say something about the world in itself. Nietzsche's overall critique of Kant is that of all people, he who understood the limits of the human intellect and its conceptuality with regard to its ability to know the thing in itself, is most at fault in failing to pursue the question of teleology farther and more stringently. Kant favors a critical approach to both the mechanical and teleological points of view, however, just as he does with regard to a pure understanding, to thinking devoid of sensory confirmation in The Critique of Pure Reason, in The Critique of Judgement, Kant brings in the deus ex machina of the reflective judgement and supports a natural teleology of ends and final causes in spite of the limitations of the discursive intellect. Though this may have merit for ethical or moral purposes, teleology must still, given the limits of our organization, remain for Nietzsche a purely aesthetic product. "Treasuring of teleology in its valuation for the human world of ideas. Teleology is like optimism an aesthetic product." 66 64 65 66

Schopenhauer, W N 279, S W 4: 5 6 - 5 7 . Nietzsche, Z T 251. Ibid., 241.

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Nietzsche remains steadfast at the doors of appearance, of forms. If he does favor the idea that there may be a purpose in unconscious nature, he is firm in his position, along with Lange, that it remains unknown to human consciousness. Nietzsche attempts, I maintain, to do what he claims is the most difficult: "to unite the teleological and unteleological worlds," 67 where expedience is one case among many inexpediencies, where mechanism is joined with causality. Where a place is left for the intuitive, where the "strong necessity in human intelligence of cause and effect which shuts out the goal in unconscious nature" is relaxed, but always in the consciousness of the limitation of the forms and concepts of our organization, where there could be in nature "a power which unconsciously creates the expedient." Here we have Nietzsche's point of view stemming first from Empedocles, but primarily from that of natural science. If we connect this "unconscious purpose creating power" with Nietzsche's last heading in his outline in "On Teleology," "Lifeforce — what do we find Nietzsche intending with this concept? And can we draw a connection between them?

Life force = Are we to read this uncompleted equation as a sign that Nietzsche had yet to work out an idea of just what this life force is, or is it ment to indicate that this is ultimately unknowable? I maintain that elements of both are intended. After his reading of Lange, Nietzsche is very occupied with ideas of the relations of force as we have seen. In the teleological notes, relying upon Fischer who supports Lange, Nietzsche writes: "Order and disorder are not to be found in nature" "We assign effects to chance, whose knotting together with causes we do not see" "Mechanism is the "effect of moving force". "The idea of effect (...) is the concept of the whole." In organisms "the active principle (...) the idea of intended effect".68 Nietzsche believes that behind the organic and inorganic effective forces are at work, but not, as we saw, blindly effective forces. He uses " = " because he has not answered the "why" of these effective forces, for as we saw above, the question "why" something is belongs in external teleology and lies completely out of our scope of knowledge. In Nietzsche's mature thinking this life force becomes the will to power. Let us recall that Stack very astutely links Nietzsche's acquaintance with Hartmann's unconscious with the voli67 68

Ibid., 240. Ibid., 241, 242, 244.

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tional aspect of the will to power. Thus, here with the concept of a "Lebenskraft" which can be drawn into connection with an "unconsciously yet expediently creating power," we have the beginning movement toward the concept of the will to power. Even in his fully developed concept of the will to power, Nietzsche does not significantly change any of the thoughts of the Lebenskraft which we see here in these early notes on teleology. For example, in 1885 Nietzsche writes: The victorious concept "force", by means of which our physicists have created G o d and the world, still needs to be completed: an inner will must be ascribed to it, which I designate as "will to power", i.e., as an insatiable desire to manifest power; or as the employment and exercise of power, as a creative drive, etc. Physicists cannot eradicate "action at a distance" from their principles; nor can they eradicate a repellent force (or an attracting one). There is nothing for it: one is obliged to understand all motion, all "appearances", all "laws", only as symptoms of an inner event and to employ man as an analogy to this end. In the case of an animal, it is possible to trace all its drives to the will to power; likewise all the functions of organic life to this one source. 65

It is important to emphasize, however, that it is the "concept" of the will to power, itself only an interpretation of forms. In his thinking about force and effects in these notes on teleology and in his reading of Lange, we understand that for Nietzsche force, matter, effect, still remain in the last analysis forms, only human concepts. Form is all, of "life" that appears visible on the surface. Reflection on final causes is also examination of forms. ... In other words: teleological reflection and examination of organisms are not identical, but teleological reflection and examination of forms. Ends and forms are identical in nature." 70

Nietzsche's mature concept of the will to power as described above still incorporates many of the ideas which he explores in "On Teleology" such ideas as: 1) physicists only create a world out of mechanistic form, i.e., force; 2) after the model of Lange's idea, that to mechanism an idealistic component must be added, Nietzsche proposes that an inner will or unconscious expedience "be ascribed to force"; 3) and because we cannot get beyond the picturability, the appearance of the effects of force, of action and reaction, or action at a distance, we can only take this inner event and ascribe anthropomorphic forms to it, never believing that they reveal a truth. Remember in "Origins" Nietzsche wrote that the real problem of philosophy is the unending expediency of organisms and the unconsciousness in their coming to be. Nietzsche's question in "On Teleology," which asks why 69 70

Nietzsche, W M 3 3 2 - 3 3 , K S A 11: 563. Nietzsche, Z T 250.

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there might not be a power which unconsciously creates the expedient, after the model of instinct, offers the beginning of an answer to this "problem." In this first framing of an answer to his own question Nietzsche already incorporates a sort of unconscious will which creates the expedient in the manner of instincts. He incorporates power (eine unbewusst das Zweckmass schaffende Macht). And he speaks not only of life but of the force of life (Lebenskraft), and effects of that force. How can we reconcile Nietzsche's criticisms of teleology with such a purpose creating power? In 1885 Nietzsche writes of the will to power that it "is without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself ..." 7 I Here Nietzsche has accomplished what he considers a goal in "On Teleology," he unites the teleological with the unteleological world. That is, from the necessarily anthromorphic world of forms or appearance the will to power wills, and wills toward a goal, that of more power. However, since we cannot ask the "why" of the will to power in actuality, it remains willess and goalless. It is an instance or event rather than a substance; it is the force behind all forms. As Lingis states it in his article "The Will to Power," "will to power can function neither as the reason that accounts for the order of essences, nor as the foundation that sustains them in being." 72 The will to power is the groundless chaos beneath all grounds, yet it is the will that always wills more power, that which enables multiplicity out of oneness, a goalless becoming and passing away out of which appearance springs.

71 72

Nietzsche, WM 550, KSA 11: 611. Alfonso Lingis, "The Will to Power," The New Nietzsche, Ed. D. B. Allison, New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1977. WP 38. Stack also attributes the genesis of will in will to power to Nietzsche's reading of Lange (LNS 289—301), as well as a first possibility of the idea that power is what drives forces. What Stack claims is certainly supportable, but once again he jumps almost directly from Lange to the mature concept of the will to power. There can be no doubt that Nietzsche first met with these constituents of the will to power in Lange, but I maintain they are gradually built upon over the ensuing years with Nietzsche's taking supporting aspects from many places. My study shows how heavily Nietzsche is indebted to Hartmann as one of these influences. His study of Boscovich, Zöllner, and Helmholtz in 1872—74, which Stack discusses very briefly, but which needs to be researched in much greater detail, is another. Ideally the slow progress of this idea, its additions, substitutions, transformations, its genealogy, still needs to be discovered in much more detail. One would need to go about it, in Nietzsche's words, "no less carefully than a fly."

Chapter Nine Nietzsche and Hartmann: Unconscious Nature of Language Thus, the groundwork of Nietzsche's own emerging theory of language is laid. First, he accepts the Kantian distinction between phenomena and the thing in itself in a most responsible way. After having read Lange's History of Materialism, and after having thought through, in matters teleological and metaphysical, the complete necessity that we can never get beyond our interpretations of things according to our organization, Nietzsche is firmly convinced that there is only appearance, and things in themselves must remain of no essential consequence to us as interpreting beings, excepting in their function of stimulating our world of appearance through the senses. Secondly, Nietsche adopts Schopenhauer's position that thinking which resides purely in the abstract concepts and understands a world according to them is a poor witness of representation, rather, an understanding of concepts as representations having their ground in perceptual representation provides a more accurate grounding for understanding human beings' experience in the world, although even perceptual representation is not completely congruent with the world which stimulates it. This adoption of the Schopenhauerian insistence on perceptual experience, which is reinforced in Lange, opens the door for Nietzsche's pursuit of more exact knowledge of perception as it relates to the production of language in the physical and natural sciences, and explains in some part why Lange had such a great influence upon him. Thirdly, Nietzsche finds in Kant and Schopenhauer hints of unconscious operations, which not only contribute to conscious operations, but may even ground them, though both Kant and Schopenhauer are not willing ultimately to go over to that point of view. Nietzsche comes to study the nature of such an unconscious perceptual working not in the Schopenhauerian will, which he comes to criticize as purely metaphysical, rather, in the natural sciences. Before his reading of Hartmann, although Nietzsche presupposes these aspects of both the Kantian and Schopenhauerian points of view, he also begins to diverge fundamentally from them, as we have seen, and to take an even more radical position away from the privileging of abstract thought than that advanced by Schopenhauer, by supposing that much perceptual knowledge of representation takes place outside of consciousness and reason. That it takes place in unconscious sensation, in a language of the

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senses which affect us, in instinctual activity, all of which, however, remain ungraspable by consciousness of either Schopenhauer's perceptual understanding or of Kant's abstract a priori knowledge. Nietzsche agrees with Schopenhauer's assertion that only perceptual knowledge offers significant understanding of sensory experience as far as it goes. But Nietzsche goes further, and calls this instinctive unconscious, in both its expedient and inexpedient aspects, one with the will, and, in contradistinction to Schopenhauer, part of the principium individuationis as well. Hartmann becomes important for Nietzsche because, he too, understands an unconscious instinctive operation as the necessary precondition for consciousness in humans. It is true that Hartmann also finds the unconscious to be a metaphysical principle similar to Schopenhauer's will, but his interest for Nietzsche lies in having indicated between the spheres of will and conceptual thinking another sphere, both metaphysical and scientific at the same time, that of the individual unconscious. If we look again at "On the Origins of Language," we find Nietzsche, not only stating that language is the product of unconscious instinct in the organization of human beings, but he emphasizes this point, by asserting that conscious thinking is actually detrimental to language. The development of conscious thinking is detrimental to language. Decline as a result of further development of culture. The formal part, in which precisely philosophical worth lies, suffers. One thinks of the French language: no more declensions, no neuter, no passive, all end syllables worn off, the root syllables unrecognizably undone. A higher cultural development is not able to protect the already established decline.1

Here, Nietzsche carries over only a part of a lengthy discussion, which Hartmann devotes to the question as to whether or not language improves with the progress of civilkation in his chapter "The Unconscious in the Origins of Language." Remember that Nietzsche does not understand instinct to have been active only in the origination of some perfect state of language as do Schopenhauer and Rousseau, rather, unconscious instinctual activity is continually at the basis of the development and use of language. Language is neither the conscious work of individuals, it is too complicated, nor of a majority, it is too unified, rather, it is a complete organism. 2 Language, which has become less differentiated through the forms of conscious thinking has still done so as a result of basically unconscious processes. Ultimately, Nietzsche views the production of language and the resulting world of representation as a product of the unending expediency of the organism 1 2

Nietzsche, US 222. Ibid.

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language and the unconsciousness of its c o m i n g to be. In this sense language must still be coming about and growing instinctively. What does Nietzsche mean, then, by writing that the " f o r m a l p a r t " of language "in which precisely philosophical worth lies" suffers through conscious thinking? Here, Nietzsche means "philosophical w o r t h " in the context of our discussion that "the deepest philosophical worth lies already prepared in language," that is, the forms and g r o w t h of language are determined atavistically, as the result of unconscious psychological characteristics, primarily grammatical in nature, arising out of the particular nature of human organization. Following Hartmann, Nietzsche divides language into two parts: conscious language, and the unconscious formal aspects of language. In answer to the question does language continue to improve with yet higher culture, Hartmann writes: not only must this question be answered in the negative, but its contrary must be affirmed. Certainly with progressive culture new objects make their appearance, consequently new conceptions and relations, therefore also new words. There results from this a material enrichment of language. This, however, does not contain anything philosophical ...The formal part of language, however, wherein consists its properly philosophical value, undergoes a process of decomposition and of levelling pari passu with the progress of civilization.3 After offering the example of changes in the French language, Nietzsche takes over in " O r i g i n s , " Hartmann continues:

which

language needs no higher development of culture for its formation, such development is rather injurious to it, in that it is never able to preserve from corruption that which the past has elaborated, not even when it devotes a conscious and careful effort to its preservation and improvement. The linguistic development is carried on not only on the large scale and as a whole, but also in detail with the calm necessity of a natural product, and the forms of language, even at the present day, go on growing, deriding all the efforts of consciousness, as if they were independent creations of which the conscious mind only serves as a medium of their proper life. Both this result and also the speculative depth and grandeur of language, as well as, in fine, its marvellous organic unity, which far exceeds, the unity of a methodical systematic construction, should preserve us from regarding language as a product of conscious acute reflection.4 The formal part, then, in which philosophical worth lies, consists in the large scale necessity of language which as an unconscious natural product goes on growing in its organic unity. Further, it seems o b v i o u s that, given the examples of changing grammatical forms, the formal part of language is 3 4

Hartmann, PU 1: 296, PUG 229. Ibid., PU 1: 297, P U G 2 3 0 - 3 1 .

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primarily the grammatical, for example, the forms of subject and object which we have discussed, which, according to Hartmann and Nietzsche, first allow philosophical thought and especially philosophical thought of the type and concerning the categories of reflection which are natural to human beings. Hartmann writes: the development of language is, in the main, so similar on all the different theatres of human culture, and with the most diverse national character, that the agreement of the fundamental forms and structure of the sentence in all stages of development is only explicable by a common instinct of humanity for forming language, by an all-pervading spirit which everywhere guides the development of language according to the same laws of bloom •and decay.5

Thus, while language is not the product of conscious reflection, conscious use of language can, to some extent cause decay in the formal part of language. Conscious language is fixing, economy, analogy, while the formal part is possibility. This leads us back to Lange's law of development wherein actualization of one form according to expediency obscures the many possible forms from which it arose. Schopenhauer's view of language also emphasizes that in the process of the conscious fixing of language in abstraction "much that is inessential and therefore merely confusing, in real things is omitted," but that this allows us to "operate with few but essential determinations conceived in the abstract." Schopenhauer, of course, is referring to the relationship of abstract thought to perceptual understanding. My point is that, for Nietzsche and Hartmann, the same process of fixing and abstraction for the uses of economy and expediency operate in conscious use of grammatical possibilities, therefore obscuring the wealth of possible unconscious forms. In conformity with this interpretation, Hartmann also expresses the idea that this unconscious formal part of language will continue to create forms completely independently of conscious effort and with relationship to which conscious language only serves as a sort of medium of expression. After stating in "Origins" the position that language is an instinctual product, and after Hartmann, that it is thus an organism whose fundamental development and decay operates independently of consciousness, Nietzsche goes on to reject all hypotheses concerning the origins of language which are based on conscious decision. Thus, all earlier naive viewpoints are rejected. With the Greeks, whether language is δέσει or φύσει: that is whether through arbitrary formation, through agreement and arrangement, or whether sounds are necessitated by conceptual content. But also later teachers used these catchwords: ...agreement as basis. First, a situation without language, with gestures and tonal cries. 5

Ibid., P U 1: 298, P U G 231.

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To that man attached conventional gestures and tonal cries. These means could have become perfected in a pantomime cry- and song-language. But that would have been a precarious beginning. Correct intonation: fine hearing may not have been everyone's thing. Then man came upon the idea of finding a new means of expression. With tongue and lips, man was able to produce a multitude of articulations. The advantage of the new language was felt and it was retained.6

Although Nietzsche rejects "agreement as basis" as a possible origin of language, it remains one of the fundamentals of the development of his language theory in the functioning of conscious language in general. It lies at the basis of his recognition that conscious use of language always presupposes agreement among a community of people and comes to the fore in his essays "The Pathos of Truth" (1872) and "Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" (1873). Nietzsche also rejects the idea that language arises as a result of the process of interjection as suggested by Herder. Interjection is simply another form of conscious origins of language. Nietzsche understands consciousness as "the wonderful pensive organism;" "such an ingenious thinking completely impossible with a merely animalistic sound-language." 7 Nietzsche writes of Herder: One hundred years ago the Berlin Academy posed a prize question "About the Origins of Language." In 1770 Herder's essay won the prize. Man was born to language. "The genesis of language is an inner urge, as is the urge of the embryo to birth when it is ripe." But he shared with his forerunners the view that language internalized itself out of outward sounds. Interjection as the mother of language: while it is really the negation of language. 8

In "On Language and Words," Schopenhauer takes over Herder's idea of interjection and makes it his own. With the origin of human speech, it is quite certain that interjections were the first things to express not concepts but, like the noises of animals, feelings or movements of the will. Their different forms appeared at once and from their variety there occurred the transition to substantives, verbs, personal pronouns, and so on. 9 Let us take a moment to survey Herder's idea of interjection, in order to see how essentially it differs from Nietzsche's ideas on the origin of language. Above all, for Herder, "Nature sounds." Nature gave the law to all: "Feel not for yourself alone. But rather: your feeling resound!" "These sighs (screams, inarticulate sounds), these sounds are language." 1 0 However, for 6 7 8 5 10

Nietzsche, U S 223. Ibid., U S 222. Ibid., U S 224. Schopenhauer, PP 565, S W 6: 599. Johann Gottfried Herder, "Essay on the Origin of Language," E O L 87 — 88.

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Herder, while instincts continue to direct the animals, man is a creature of reflection: man has powers of conception which are not confined to the construction of a honey cell or of a cobweb... If instinct must thus fall by the wayside in so far as it followed exclusively from the organization of these senses and the confines of conceptions and was not determined blindly, precisely on account of this man achieves greater light."

Herder proposes a sort of gradual coming to consciousness and reason away from instinct in a manner very similar to Schopenhauer's ideas of the coming about of intellect out of past lower grades of objectification of the will. If man was not to be an instinctual animal, he had to be — by virtue of the more freely working positive power of his soul — a creature of reflection...if reason is not a separate and singly acting power but an orientation of all powers and as such a thing peculiar to his species, then man must have it in the first state in which he is man...Why does thinking reasonably right away signify thinking with fully developed reason? 12

Thus, Herder proposes that even in his origins as animal the human being has "a potentiality of reason." From this state of reflection which is peculiar to them, Herder asserts that humans invented language. "Invention of language is therefore as natural to man as it is to him that he is man." 13 The first vocabulary was collected from the sounds of the world. The human soul takes these sounds and impresses an image upon them as a distinguishing mark. These sounding interjections came first. What was this first language of ours other than a collection of elements of poetry? Imitation it was of sounding, acting, stirring nature! Taken from the interjections of all beings and animated by the interjections of human emotion! The natural language of all beings fashioned by reason into sounds, into images of action, passion, and living impact! 14

Nietzsche finds it contradictory that Herder could assert, after these arguments that humans are born to language, that the genesis of language is an inner urge similar to the urge of the embryo to birth when it is ripe. If language is an inner urge, which of course, Nietzsche is assuming, how can it look to outward phenomena for its origins, to the interjection of sounds? The answer is that Herder confounds this inner urge with reflection and reason. They run side by side from the beginning. The inner urge, or instinct is left behind in the human being and it is essentially reason taking the materials of the objective world, which forms a conscious language. This is the opposite of " Ibid., EOL 12 Ibid., EOL 13 Ibid., EOL 14 Ibid., EOL

109. 112. 115. 135.

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w h a t Nietzsche, f o l l o w i n g H a r t m a n n ,

is asserting. F o r t h e m ,

reflection,

consciousness, reason, can o n l y c o m e a b o u t after the fact o f l a n g u a g e . In this sense i n t e r j e c t i o n is the n e g a t i o n o f language. T h e c o n t r a d i c t i o n lies in an a p p a r e n t c o n f u s i o n o f inner and outer, in the p r o b l e m o f c o n s i d e r i n g that s o u n d s are external t o us, w h i c h can t h e n b e internalized. H e r d e r still b e l i e v e d in t h i n g s o u t there, in subject and object, w h e r e a s N i e t z s c h e o n l y b e l i e v e s in r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s o f t h i n g s a r r i v e d at a c c o r d i n g to o u r o r g a n i z a t i o n .

Thus,

s o u n d s necessarily already arise i n t e r n a l l y and i n s t i n c t i v e l y . 1 5 In Nietzsche's later t h e o r y o f l a n g u a g e s o u n d — m u s i c — p r o v i d e s and coincides w i t h t h e d r i v e t o w a r d language,

first

in the u n c o n s c i o u s sense, a n d t h e n e v e n in

c o n s c i o u s l a n g u a g e , h o w e v e r , this is n o t a m a j o r e l e m e n t o f his t h i n k i n g a b o u t l a n g u a g e at this p o i n t . 1 6 It appears, then, thus far in o u r discussion, that f o r Nietzsche, a l o n g s i d e o f l a n g u a g e n o r m a l l y u n d e r s t o o d as a p r o d u c t o f consciousness, t h e r e exists a l a n g u a g e w h o s e n a t u r e is that o f an u n c o n s c i o u s o r g a n i c b e c o m i n g characterized as a p r o d u c t i o n o f the reality o f instinct. Instinct as o n e w i t h t h e i n n e r m o s t kernel o f being, as the m o s t p a r t i c u l a r a c h i e v e m e n t o f i n d i v i d u a l s o r o f a m a j o r i t y . O n l y in this sense, in t h e sense o f Nietzsche's c o n c e p t o f 13

16

In "Origins" Nietzsche specifically rejects four other hypotheses as to the origins of language: 1. that language grows out of the human power of spirit or as a direct gift of God; 2. that language grows out of the nature of things. This is refuted upon comparison of languages, and their arbitrary nature; 3. that it is a purely human phenomenon, that the choice of sounds depend on the nature of things. He points specifically to von de Brosses (1709 — 1777). However, Nietzsche adds that the application of words to things is far from the origin of language. The mistake is that "we have become accustomed to imagining that in the sounds something of the things lie." 4. Nietzsche's last disagreement with an idea concerning the origin of language is that language is a reflexive spirituality of man, made more than once by many wise men as Lord Monboddo asserted. In his book, Nietzsche, Wagner, and the Philosophy of Pessimism (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1982), Roger Hollingrake notes on pages 16, 211, and 270 that on November 14, 1869 Nietzsche and Wagner discussed the origins of language. This was the period in which Nietzsche was writing "On the Origins of Language." Hollingrake points to Herder's influence upon Wagner and the origins of language wherein he felt his art to "revert to a stage when language was almost entirely free from the didactic element and was still poetry, imagery, and feeling." This idea, will become central to Nietzsche's work with music and language. It appears as if it was just about this time and his new friendship with Wagner and Wagner's appreciation of Schopenhauer's musical aesthetics that Nietzsche begins to connect music and language, a connection which forms the basis of most of The Birth of Tragedy. I have intentionally left aside any references to music and language in this work, because the relationship of music and language in Nietzsche's theory of language is a whole study in itself and needs to be built upon my discussion of the beginnings of his theory of language. See especially "On Music and Words," (1871) ("Über Musik und Wort"), "The Dionysian Worldview," (1870) ("Die dionysische Weltanschauung"), and "Greek Musicdrama," (1870) ("Das griechische Musikdrama"). The relationship of music to language and language to music is a theme which continues throughout Nietzsche's thinking.

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135

an unconscious origin and continuing bloom and decay of language, does the deepest knowledge of philosophy lie already prepared in language. Nietzsche's view of language, as an organic production of the reality of the instincts, has as its fundamental essence that it exists independently of and before conceptuality in conscious language, which gives it conscious form and often a form detrimental to its unconscious formal aspects. Unconcious language offers the multiplicity of possible forms, conscious language actualizes a particular form at a given moment and in a given cultural setting. 17 These thoughts return us to the binarity set up on page one, that language first makes conscious thinking possible, but that something can be expedient without consciousness. Now we may add to this: there exists a separate language for this expedient unconsciousness which produces or enables consciousness and conceptuality. In a note written in 1872, Nietzsche writes that concepts are first arrived at through the identification of things which are not the same, thus following up on his indication in "Origins" that consciousness represents non-differentiation, and that conceptuality means the making similar of things which are different: "Then afterwards we behave as if the concept, e. g., the concept 'man,' were something factual, whereas it is surely only something which we have constructed through a process of

17

This distinction cannot but remind us of de Saussure's distinction of langue and parole. Langue is language minus parole. It is both a social institution and a system of values. Parole is the individual act of selection and actualization. Thus langue provides the possible forms and parole chooses the actual form. I maintain however that at this point in his theory of language Nietzsche is privileging something akin to the systematic nature of language where language consists of a certain number of elements "each one of which is at the same time the equivalent of a given quantity of things and a term of a larger function, in which are found, in a differential order, other correlative values..." (Barthes, Elements of Semiology, 14). This could be corresponded to the idea of sensory synthesis and unconscious inferences which are created unconsciously as a system of values in so far as our organization dictates what is of value to us. Later in his theory of language, Nietzsche will concentrate on the institutional aspects of language. A major difference between Nietzsche and this division of langue on de Saussure's part into language and parole appears to be, however, that Nietzsche understands his unconscious language, what we have contrasted to de Saussure's systematic aspect of langue, as separate from, though of course, fundamental to, the institutional aspect of langue and specific acts of speech (parole) which he classifies together over against the unconscious elements of language. It appears as if Nietzsche finds a sort of triple piramid at work. Unconscious forms of language Conscious institutional and social language Specific speech The understanding being that specific speech arises only out of the possibility of conscious and institutional language, but that the latter only arises out of the possibilities provided by the unconscious forms of language. In Saussurian theory langue and parole have a dialectical relationship wherein each is dependent upon the other. In Nietzsche's scheme above, conscious language and specific speech acts will come to function in a similar way. But it is the underlying forms of unconscious language which preserve and facilitate the basic forms and formation of language.

136

IX. Nietzsche and Hartmann: Unconscious Nature of Language

ignoring all individual features."18 As we saw above, this process of simplification and loss of differentiation in abstract thinking is something which Nietzsche gets from Schopenhauer and Lange, and this is the major reason that Schopenhauer insists that conceptuality be based in perceptual experience. However, as Nietzsche reads Lange, he begins to understand that actual perception of sensory experience operates along the same lines of simplification and non-differentiation, reducing the multiplicity of sensory experience to a synthesis of forms through unconscious inference. The obvious problem in Nietzsche's juxtapositioning in "Origins" of his statement and Kant's 19 is that whereas for Kant, language and conceptuality first allow humans and their world to be thought, and to be thought about, for Nietzsche the human being is already language. This radical idea is later confirmed in his short 1873 essay "Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" and remains central to Nietzsche's theory of language. "The drive toward the formation of metaphors (Metapherbildung) [the equating of the unequal] is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself." 20 Language is unconscious instinct in human beings. Instinct is one with the innermost kernel of a being. Language is the human being's most fundamental drive "as with bees — the anthill, etc." The a priori "concepts which are already to be found in human beings themselves" are not found in humans themselves but have been transferred, abstracted from the multiplicity of experience by means of language and then taken as something factual. Concepts are not found in human beings, rather the unsconscious workings of language, which then enable the forms of conceptuality, are found in the human being. Nietzsche's initial originality, then lies in making a leap outside of consciousness in positing the expedience of an unconscious language and its effects. That Nietzsche retains these basic ideas about the origin and progress of language for some time after his reading of Lange and Hartmann is evinced by a passage in Beyond Good and Evil in which he repeats the ideas we have just discussed and expands upon them. That individual philosophical concepts are not anything capricious or autonomously evolving, but grow up in connection and relationship with each other; that, however suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the history of thought, they nevertheless belong just as much to a system as all

18 19

20

Nietzsche, Ρ 51. Nietzsche: "the deepest philosophical knowledge lies already prepared in language." Kant: "a great perhaps the greatest portion of what our reason finds to do consists in the analysis of concepts which human beings already find in themselves." Nietzsche, W L 8 8 - 8 9 , K S A 1: 887.

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137

the members of the fauna of a continent — is betrayed in the end also by the fact that the most diverse philosophers keep filling in a definite fundamental scheme of possible philosophies. Under an invisible spell, they always revolve once more in the same orbit; however independent of each other they may feel themselves with their critical or systematic wills, something within them leads them, something impels them in a definite order, one after the other — to wit, the innate systematic structure and relationship of their concepts. Their thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a recognition, a remembering, a return and a homecoming to a remote, primordial, and inclusive household of the soul, out of which those concepts grew originally: philosophizing is to this extent a kind of atavism of the highest order. The strange family resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and German philosophizing is explained easily enough. Where there is affinity of languages, it cannot fail, owing to the common philosophy of grammar — I mean, owing to the unconscious domination and guidance by similar grammatical functions — that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems...the spell of certain grammatical functions is ultimately also the spell of physiological valuations and racial conditions.21

Stack makes the argument that Nietzsche's thinking about language in this passage goes beyond Lange's and Hartmann's notion of an inherent mode of thinking based upon psychological dispositions into a prefiguration of structuralism in that Nietzsche links languages, cultural forms of life and patterns of belief and behavior. 22 We have seen to what extent Nietzsche's reading of Hartmann contributes to this trend in his thinking about language. The relationship of Nietzsche's theory of language to structuralism is an area of study which is not addressed in the present work, whose purpose is to demonstrate the slow coming together of the ideas which Nietzsche later expresses so succinctly in "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" and in later writings such as this passage from Beyond Good and Evil. Thus, Nietzsche begins his investigations of language in "Origins" by offering a third alternative to those offered by Kant and Schopenhauer. Kant's a priori forms and Schopenhauer's understanding, which both operate in largely unconscious ways and could, on the surface compare with what I have designated as Nietzsche's unconscious language, yet differ in the essential respect that Schopenhauer and Kant still characterize these as conscious operations to be encompassed under the category of reason. Nietzsche clearly posits the possibility of two distinct languages: 1) a language which can be characterized as unconscious (or preconscious), a language which is a product of the instincts, of the innermost kernel of a being, and which consists in 21 22

Nietzsche, J G B 2 7 - 2 8 , K S A 5: 34. Stack, L N S 189.

138

IX. Nietzsche and Hartmann: Unconscious Nature of Language

operations of unconscious sensory synthesis and inference; and 2) the language of conscious thinking, which actually serves to impoverish language of the first type through its process of simplification and fixing. The difference is that for Nietzsche, language, as conceptuality, does not provide the only reliable means of determining objects, in Kant's sense; language does not, even in the more refined Schopenhauerian sense, belong purely to the abstracta, but with an essential and necessary grounding in the concreta. Rather, although Nietzsche is in agreement that human beings possess such a language of consciousness and reason, maintains also a language with operations completely outside of the systems of conscious reason, which prompts to language through instinctual unconscious stimuli. Nietzsche's thinking about such an unconscious language of the nerves and its translation into perception and ultimately into a conscious language of concept and word leads him to write a few years later in Daybreak 119: "all our so-called 'consciousness' is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown and perhaps unknowable, though felt, text." 23 Nietzsche will soon begin to explore not only what operations are at work in such a 'non-rational, preconscious language, but also what forms it could take. For a while he comes to study it in terms of music, rapture, and the Dionysian, a perspective which he never abandons, but refines throughout his thinking. 24 Nietzsche also attempts to describe in some detail how this unconscious instinctual grammar and its operations, the formal part of language, works. He claims in his notes of 1872—73 and his notes for a course on "Rhetoric" that the figural tropology of rhetoric functions not merely as an embellishment of conscious language, but that it offers a key to a possible model of the unconscious operations which have created and continually act to inform our conscious use of language. 25

23 24 25

Nietzsche, Μ 120, K S A 3: 113. See note 16 above. See my chapter 2, note 38 and my chapter 14.

Chapter Ten Hartmann's Worldview of the Unconscious During the Summer 1870, Nietzsche was drafting ideas for a projected work, some of which became part of The Birth of Tragedy, and some of which were never made use of in published work. A few months later, during the winter and spring of 1870/71, Nietzsche was again making notes for a work to be called "Tragedy and the Free Spirit." It is extremely interesting to follow Nietzsche during this time, as he both retains certain of the Schopenhauerian formulas, rewoks some of them completely, adding his own thinking, in large part adapted from Hartmann, as we shall see, in his search for an understanding of the human being's relationship to knowledge of the world and the part which language plays in that knowledge. The worldview in Anschauung which Nietzsche develops during this period is also heavily indebted to major elements in Lange's philosophy as we have discussed them. Lange offered Nietzsche the broad outlines and freedom of imagination for this worldview, while Hartmann offered some of the more specific forms enabling its growth. The impetus which Lange provides lies in his attempt to mediate between materialism and idealism. In the Anschauung notes Nietzsche is neither materialist nor idealist, but both. Hartmann comes in to aid Nietzsche in the creation of his worldview in Anschauung with the concept of the unconscious. Stack refers to a common theme which Lange reiterates throughout his book: That we again come upon a limit to materialism insofar as the subjective, experiential phenomena of sensations are, considered objectively "nerve processes" that do not indicate the nature of the subjective, qualitative states experienced. There is a relationship between physiological processes and the subjectiven Empfindungsvorganges even though this relation cannot be entirely explained materialistically and even though the subjective experiences or sensations have qualitative characteristics that cannot be reduced to observed or observable material or physical states.1 Hartmann's unconscious and the world it structures offers an answer to the questioning into such unknown non-conscious, yet physiological processes,

1

Stack, LNS 9 9 - 1 0 0 .

140

X . Hartmann's W o r l d v i e w of the Unconscious

which was taking place in Nietzsche's thinking as well as in the work of the natural and physical sciences of the day. Hartmann's philosophy of the unconscious becomes a model with which Nietzsche works in the creation of the Ur-Eine in the Anschauung notes, and which offers basic forms to what will become, later in his thinking, the will to power. In the notes of 1870/71 Nietzsche continues his concern with the instincts and their relationship to conscious and unconscious language and thinking. Because of his interest in the relationship between physiological processes and the "subjectiven Empfindungsvorganges," Nietzsche begins to explore the mechanisms which allow a language of the unconscious and its translation into a conscious language. He is also interested, as he was in "Origins," in the relationship of these languages to the will. Thus, in order to accurately assess Nietzsche's language theory at this point, it will be useful and necessary to place it in the context of his overall thinking as it begins to break further away from the work of Schopenhauer. In the formulation of his worldview in the 1870/71 Anschauung notes, Nietzsche finds solutions to some of his criticisms of Schopenhauer. Let us recall that one of Nietzsche's major criticisms in "On Schopenhauer" was that, for Schopenhauer, the intellect, having arisen out of the ever higher objectifications of the will, operates as the tool of the world of representation, the principium individuationis. The conclusions which Nietzsche drew, after following Schopenhauer's reasoning, concerning the place of intellect were, once again, the following: either the intellect must be seen as a new predicate of the thing in itself or there can be no intellect because there is no provision for its having arisen. However, since the intellect exists: "it follows that it could not be a tool of the world of appearance, as Schopenhauer would have it, but rather thing in itself, that is will." Nietzsche then makes the next logical step: if will and the intellect are one, then the thing in itself must be understood simultaneously as the principium individuationis and as the basis of necessitation, "in other words: the present world." We also saw Nietzsche suggesting that intellect arose out of multiplicity which placed the individual "in a situation of isolation from all else, and out of that arose the necessity of knowledge." These are Nietzsche's conclusions in 1867. In his 1870/71 notes Nietzsche writes: "The conscious intellect a weak thing, really only the tool of the will. But the intellect itself and the will are one."2 Nietzsche is still working on this problem, but it has been refined. There is the conscious intellect. However, it is weak when compared to the intellect itself which, we must surmise, is some sort of unconscious intellect.

2

Nietzsche, A N 271, K S A 7: 128.

X . Hartmann's Worldview of the Unconscious

141

And this unconscious intellect is one with the will. If we were, at this point, to go directly into Nietzsche's notes for an explanation of this statement, we would find it difficult to understand why Nietzsche has split the intellect into two parts in this manner: dividing the conscious intellect from an intellect in itself which is one with the will. Let us remember that in the Fall of 1869 Nietzsche writes Rohde that he reads Hartmann much, and that Nietzsche's fragment "Origins" written 1869/ 70 is, as I have shown, documentably influenced by Hartmann. The notes I am about to discuss are written during the summer, fall, and winter of 1870/ 71. It is my contention that the new worldview which Nietzsche develops in these notes is also heavily influenced by his reading of Hartmann. In the early part of 1870 Nietzsche is still reading Hartmann as witnessed by the following note from that time. Nietzsche quotes Hartmann, and then comments: "Only in so far as feelings can be translated into thoughts, are they communicable, if we disregard the always extremely scanty instinctive language of gesture; for only in so far as feelings and thoughts are capable of being translated can they be rendered into words." Really! Gesture and tone! Communicated pleasure is art. What does gestural language mean: it is language by means of commonly understood symbols, forms of reflexive movement. The eye understands immediately the situation which has produced the gestures. It is the same with the instinctive tones. The ear understands immediately. These tones are symbols.3

Not only is this note offered in evidence that Nietzsche is still reading Hartmann, but also to show to what extent language and instinct are at the basis of Nietzsche's interest, and that he is again finding food for thought in Hartmann for these interests. The thoughts expressed by Nietzsche in this note become central ideas in "Die dionysische Weltanschauung" ("The Dionysian Worldview"), written in 1870, an essay in which he separates out three specific languages: those of thoughts (and words), gestures, and tones, and relates them to the feelings of pleasure and displeasure, the languages of gesture and tone being emphasized as unconscious and instinctive languages. By reading Hartmann's chapter, "Das Unbewusste im Gefühle" ("The Unconscious in Feeling"), a majority of the ideas presented in "The Dionysian

3

Nietzsche, K S A 7: 65.

142

X . Hartmann's W o r l d v i e w of the Unconscious

Worldview" can be found, and once again, this essay of Nietzsche's can be understood in terms of Hartmann's use of key terms. 4 If we turn to a letter written in December of 1870 by Nietzsche to Gersdorff in which he speaks, among other things, of the growing Schopenhauer reception, we read: Really polemical articles are no longer needed. The fact that Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious — a book which in any case poses the problems in a Schopenhauerian sense — has already had a second printing, is itself a gain for the revolution to be conducted. G i v e me only a couple of years, then you will detect also in me a new influence upon the study of antiquity and bound with it hopefully also a new spirit in the scholarly and ethical education of our nation. 5

Here, we find Nietzsche championing Hartmann and aligning himself with him in the common cause of promoting fundamentally Schopenhauerian principles. The reference to Hartmann and the direct follow up of Nietzsche's intentions can only be read as significant. We will find that during the next couple of years Nietzsche is working on notes and sketches for The Birth of Tragedy which can be seen as at least a partial realization of these hopes along with sections of the Untimely Meditations. Hartmann's influence becomes evident in much of this work and Nietzsche's having sent a copy of The Birth of Tragedy to Hartmann appears to further confirm an indebtedness. 6 Thus, it is possible to document Nietzsche's reading of Hartmann during the same period of time as he is writing the Anschauung notes, which I am considering.

Unconscious

Will-Acts

I find it useful, therefore, to look at passages from Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious, which could have been significant for Nietzsche before proceeding to Nietzsche's own notes. The purpose in this is twofold. First, Hartmann's discussions help us understand Nietzsche's more elaborate scheme by providing a stage upon which to set it, and secondly, I will be able to sort out more easily what Nietzsche himself adds to the suggestions of

4

5 6

The preparation of an article tying Hartmann's influence to "The Dionysian W o r l d v i e w " and the three distinct languages Nietzsche posits there is in preparation. Nietzsche, K S B 3: 162. See Nietzsche's letters to Fritzsch, April 1 8 7 2 and to G e r s d o r f f , May 1 8 7 2 in K S B 3: 3 1 0 and 316.

Unconscious Will-Acts

143

Schopenhauer and Hartmann in the worldview which is developed in these notes. Hartmann writes: "Whoever has not felt the need and the difficulty of comprehending individuation from the point of view of monism may securely pass over the first half of this chapter; he would find no interest in it." 7 In a later edition, which Nietzsche could not have read, but which is useful for our discussion, Hartmann makes his position even clearer by adding: For him, on the other hand, w h o hitherto has kept aloof f r o m Monism precisely on account of this more or less distinctly conscious difficulty, and has put up with the pluralism o f the real phenomenal w o r l d as an ultimate, f o r him lies in this chapter, taken in conjunction with Chapter Seven, the center of gravity o f the present book. 8

In his chapter "Die All-Einheit des Unbewussten" ("The All-Oneness of the Unconscious"), Hartmann defines what he means by monism. It is to "apprehend the world as an indivisible Being, to feel ourselves part of this Being, but a part which, at the same time, indwells the whole, and penetrated by this contrast to indulge the religious feeling of the sublimity of this vast Being and the sense of the ego's participation therein." 9 Hartmann includes Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schopenhauer under monism, as well as most of the "original philosophical or religious systems of the first rank" and he calls monism "the tendency of all modern philosophies of the present epoch." Hartmann's philosophy of the unconscious attempts to reconcile monism and pluralistic individualism by giving each a sphere, metaphysical or physicalreal, of its own and then by joining them under the unitary idea of the unconscious. The question which Hartmann considers in the two chapters which he refers to as the "center of gravity" of his work is one which Nietzsche himself asks in the 1870/71 Anschauung notes, and which is the point upon which we saw him criticizing Schopenhauer: "How is appearance possible next to being?". 10 "How does engendering of multiplicity take place out of oneness?"11 That is, how does individuation arise out of the unity of the will? What Hartmann does with regard to this question: "Why is there individuation? How is it possible on monistic principles?" is in his own words, to replace the "one-sidedness of abstract idealism" with a "real plurality." He writes:

Hartmann, PU 2: 334, PUG 507. Ibid. 9 Ibid., PU 2: 234, PUG 456. 10 Nietzsche, AN 274, K S A 7: 2 0 3 - 0 4 . " See ZS section IV. 7

8

144

X. Hartmann's Worldview of the Unconscious

Stated in general terms the answer to these difficulties runs: "individuals are objectively posited phenomena; i. e., they are willed thoughts of the Unconscious or particular will-acts of the same; the unity of the essence remains unaffected by the plurality of individuals, which are only activities (or combinations of certain activities) of the one Essential Being." 12 Hartmann attempts to explain the activities of the one Essential Being according to atomistic and dynamic theories, primarily those of Herbart. Nietzsche, as we saw in my chapter on Lange's book, was exposed to the atomistic theories of his time, including Herbart, finding them very interesting and stimulating. We can surmise that he must have found Hartmann's explanations, following Herbart, of interest. And Nietzsche does, to some extent, adopt the atomistic viewpoint offered by Hartmann in his 1870/71 notes, as we shall see. Thus it is relevant to present Hartmann's argument in full. Here, according to the present state of the scientific hypotheses, only two different kinds of individuals, repulsive and attractive forces, are to be distinguished; within each of these groups there obtains perfect resemblance between individuals, with the sole exception of their place. Only because the atomic forces A and Β act differently on the same atoms are they different, and because the lines of action of A and the lines of action of Β have distinct foci, this difference is shortly expressed as A and Β occupy different places, whilst in strictness force occupies no place at all, but only its effects are locally discriminated. But if one imagined two equal atoms united in a mathematical point, they would not only cease to be distinguishable, but even to be different, for they would cease to be two forces, and would be one force with double strength. 13 From this atomistic and dynamic reasoning Hartmann offers the following answer to the question, how does multiplicity arise out of oneness: the unconscious has at the same time different will-acts, which are distinguished by their content so far as the space relations of their effects are differently represented. "But when the will realizes its content, these many will-acts enter into objective reality as so many force-individuals; they are the first primitive manifestation of Essential Being." 14 Hartmann then goes on to discuss the manner in which the will is able to realize or distinguish its content, or willacts. Since every effect of atomic force is represented by the Unconscious as different from every other atomic force, its realization is of course different 12 13 14

Hartmann, PU 2: 337, PUG 507. Ibid., PU 2: 337, PUG 5 0 7 - 0 8 . Ibid., PU 2: 3 3 7 - 3 8 , PUG 508.

Hartmann's Criticism of Schopenhauer's Principium

Individuationis

145

from that of every other atomic force, thus likewise single, without prejudice to the circumstance that it is in its nature indistinguishable; the intuitive imagination of the Unconscious distinguishes it, however, without thought in its space relations ...' 5

Thus, the way in which the Unconscious forms representations is through an unconscious operation. Let us follow Hartmann further: "The concept is a result of a process of separation or abstraction, but the Unconscious always apprehends the totality of its matter of representation without condescending to a separation of parts within the same."16 For Hartmann the unconscious apprehends the totality of its matter, and thus thinks intuitively, somewhat in the manner of the hypothesized intuitive thought, brought about through reflective judgement, which Kant proposed earlier in our discussion. Hartmann opposes to this intuitive thinking that of discursive thinking which separates and abstracts. The unconscious thinks concepts only so far as they are contained in intuition as integral and undifferentiated elements, consequently it cannot be surprising if among the intuitions of the Unconscious there are such from which, even for discursive thinking, no concepts can be abstracted; as i. e., the perception that the actions of the atomic force A must be so directed that their lines of direction should intersect in this point here, those of the atom Β in that point there. Consequently, in the case of atoms, the difference and singleness of the individuals is, in fact, reduced in the most direct manner to the difference and singleness of the ideas which form the content of the acts of will of which the individuals consist, in such wise that to each individual there corresponds a single act of will. 17

Hartmann's Criticism of Schopenhauer's Principium

Individuationis

The major move which Hartmann has made away from Schopenhauer is that he has divided the "One Essential Being," the Unconscious, into idea and will. The idea allows the origin of "the ideal difference and singleness of the atoms," thus creating matter. The will is the setting in motion, through opposition, of the will acts or activity of the Unconscious. Both the origins in the idea and the activity in the will of the Unconscious operate independently of individual consciousness of it. From this perspective, how does Hartmann specifically criticize Schopenhauer's principium individuationis? This criticism would have held high interest for Nietzsche who also finds a problem here. 15 16 17

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., PU 2: 338, PUG 5 0 8 - 0 9 .

146

X . Hartmann's Worldview of the Unconscious

If we dwell a moment more upon the atomic forces of matter, and inquire respecting the medium whereby individuation in this sphere becomes possible, respecting the so-called "principium individuationis," undoubtedly the combination of space and time can alone be so characterized; for we saw that the atomic forces A and B, equal in thought, are only distinguished by the different space relations of their effects, improperly and briefly expressed by their places and only omitted at the time to add to "their effects:" "at the same point of time." This addendum is, however, necessary, for completeness' sake, because indeed with the time the place of an atom may change. The phrase principium individuationis is not well chosen. It should be medium individuationis; for the authorship or origin of individuation, just as that of space and time, belong solely to the Unconscious, namely, the ideal difference and singleness of the atoms to the idea, their reality however to the will. 1 8

Thus Hartmann emphasizes that his characterizations of time and space and the production of individuation out of the Unconscious should not be mistaken as similar to Schopenhauer's notion of the principium individuationis. The fundamental difference is that for Schopenhauer space and time are only forms of "subjective cerebral perception" with which the transcendent reality of the will has nothing to do, and thus, all individuation is merely subjective appearance to which nothing real corresponds. Hartmann continues: According to my conception, on the other hand, space and time are just as much forms of outward reality as of the subjective cerebral perception; certainly not forms of the (metaphysical) transcendent Substantial Being, but only of its activity, so that individuation has not merely an apparent reality for consciousness, but a reality apart from all consciousness, without thereby curtailing plurality of substance. 19

We shall see, in Nietzsche's notes, that this is also his conception of time in counter-distinction to that of Schopenhauer's. Hartmann summarizes in three specific explanations his departure from Schopenhauer concerning the arising of individuation or multiplicity out of oneness. First, Hartmann suggests that if Schopenhauer had not leant as much on Kant, he would have come to the true view, whereas, instead, he persisted in the statement that "the whole diversity of the world only acquires existence through the first animal consciousness and in its perception."20 Ibid., PU 2: 339, P U G 509. " Ibid., P U 2: 340, P U G 510. 20 Ibid. It is interesting to note Hartmann's specific arguments against Schopenhauer's claim that "the whole diversity of the world only acquires existence through the first animal consciousness and in perceptions" which are given in a later edition of Philosophy of the Unconscious. They are interesting because they parallel Nietzsche's o w n criticisms of Schopenhauer's individuation offered in "On Schopenhauer." Hartmann writes: "Only thus much truth lies in this, that objective manifestation also, in order to be real, i. e., to emerge from the unconsciously ideal composure into external reality, needed an opposition between d i f f e r e n t acts of will; error creeps in only when the union of one of the affected will-acts with a 18

Hartmann's Criticism of Schopenhauer's Principium

Individuationis

147

Hartmann's second point of departure from Schopenhauer is that Schopenhauer knows no atoms at all, thus, "he cannot think anything by 'individuation of matter,' because he cannot say what individuals of mere inorganic matter are."21 This is so, Schopenhauer resorts to metaphysical qualities like character, direct knowledge of the will, objectification of ideas, etc., to get at the individual, though he does use data from the natural sciences to attempt to support them. Although there is no doubt that Nietzsche found Hartmann's atomistic explanations attractive, it is significant to remember that from Nietzsche's perspective, gleaned from Lange, although explanations of physical reality using atoms and force is useful, they too are ultimately only fictions. This will be a significant departure which Nietzsche makes from Hartmann. Hartmann believes in atoms and their effects while Nietzsche believes in them only as appearance, thus as artistic projections. Hartmann's third objection to Schopenhauer concerning the nature of individuation is allied with the second just discussed. "Schopenhauer naively regards organic individuals as just as much direct objectifications of the will as I the atomic forces, whilst, I, following physical science, suppose the same to arise by the composition of atomic individuals."22 What Hartmann means by this is that there is the material world of atomic forces working in space and time to produce matter. Once matter has arisen in the idea of the Unconscious, will enters to set the atomic forces into action. It is only at this point, that the inception and growth of organic individuals or principium

21 22

conscious subject is required as condition. If we eliminate this unwarranted requirement, the simple truth remains that the objective phenomenon which rests on the individuation of the one into the many, is also only possible in this plurality without self-contradiction. Moreover, there lies in Schopenhauer's assertion that the world of individuation comes into existence only with the first conscious subject perceiving it an incorrect assumption, as if the subjective appearance which the intellect spontaneously constructs out of the material processes in the objective appearance of its brain were the immediate and true appearance of the Essential Being, whilst it is, in fact, very unlike, nay, in many points perfectly heterogeneous to, the objective phenomenon (i. e., the sum of natural individuals as they are, independently of being perceived). Only the objective phenomenon is the true and direct manifestation of the Essential Being; the subjective phenomenon, however, is a subjectively coloured and distorted copy of the objective phenomenon. To gain an adequate thought-picture of the objective appearance by eliminating that which merely appertains to subjectivity, and by the scientific investigation of the objective causes of the particular given affection of the subject, is the endeavour and problem of Natural Science (Physics in the widest sense), whilst Metaphysics endeavors to cognize the Essential Being according to its attributes and its mode of revelation, which underlies the objective appearance (natural things). Thus, e. g., matter as subjective phenomenon is matter with its palpable sense-qualities; as objective phenomenon, a definitely extended complex of punctual atoms; an essence, which underlies this phenomenon, the Allone Unconscious with the attributes will and idea. The first is the sensuous, the second the physical, the third the metaphysical definition of matter" (PU 2: 341—42). Ibid., PU 2: 342, PUG 510. Ibid.

148

X. Hartmann's Worldview of the Unconscious

individuationis becomes possible. Hartmann agrees with Schopenhauer that they rise to higher orders, but only as a result of combinations of lower order matter (or combinations of atoms) — that is, "the lower order individuals turn out to be medium individuationis for the higher." 23 For Schopenhauer, on the other hand, space and time result in the direct manifestation or objectification of all grades of the principium individuationis. Here, again, we will see Nietzsche adopting a view of organic individuals sympathetic with Hartmann's. This view would have been of particular interest to Nietzsche on two counts, in light of his thinking in "On Teleology" and his acquaintance with Lange's Darwinism. First, it offers an unconscious coming to be of organisms. Second, it is in essential agreement with the actualization of certain forms out of the multiplicity of possible forms, with nothing being possible that was not already contained in previous forms. Thus, for Hartmann, all plurality belongs only to the phenomenon, not to the essence which posits the former, and this essence is the "One Absolute Individual, the single existence, which is All." The world is bare phenomenon, "not subjectively posited phenomenon as in Kant, Fichte, and Schopenhauer, but objectively posited phenomenon." 24

Philosophy of the Unconscious and Human

Consciousness

Hartmann posits matter (atomic idea forces), organic formation with its instinct (will-acts of the Unconscious), and consciousness (another group of will-acts of the Unconscious), as the three modes of action or modes of appearance of the Unconscious. Let us look further at how Hartmann describes the activities and characteristics of the Unconscious, as it operates in these various modes of appearance, noting especially the place of the ego or consciousness in the series of will-acts of the Unconscious: The world consists only of a sum of activities or will-acts of the Unconscious, and the ego consists of another sum of activities or will-acts of the Unconscious. Only so far as the former activities intersect the latter does the world become sensible to me; only so far as the latter intersect the former do I become sensible to myself. ... In the sphere of the mental representation of pure Idea, the ideally opposed peacefully exist side by side, ... when, however, a will seizes these ideal opposites and make them its content, then the willacts filled with opposite content enter into opposition; they pass into real conflict, in which they mutually resist and threaten to destroy one another.

23 24

Ibid., PU 2: 343 PUG 512. Ibid., PU 2: 240, PUG 461.

149

Philosophy of the Unconscious and Human Consciousness

... Only in this conflict, the mutually o f f e r e d resistance o f the individually parted will-acts o f the A l l - O n e , arises and consists that which w e call reality.25 W h e n L a n g e r e m a r k s that the natural sciences f i n d a s u r e g r o u n d o n l y in t h e relations o f t h i n g s to o n e a n o t h e r and n o t in specific p r e d i c a t i o n s o f m a t t e r a n d f o r c e , atoms, etc., he o b v i o u s l y p r o v i d e s the b a c k g r o u n d o f N i e t z s c h e ' s conception of a relations-world comprised of dynamic actions, reactions and i n t e r a c t i o n s . H o w e v e r , t h e v a l u e f o r N i e t z s c h e i n H a r t m a n n is t o see s u c h d y n a m i c s a n d r e l a t i o n s o f a c t i o n a n d r e a c t i o n at w o r k i n a p a r t i c u l a r w o r l d v i e w , a n d in c o n n e c t i o n w i t h w i l l - a c t s w h i c h b e c o m e c e n t r a l t o h i s w o r l d v i e w in

own

Anschauung.

H a r t m a n n elaborates f u r t h e r o n the relationship o f consciousness to the s t r u c t u r e o f his p h i l o s o p h y o f t h e u n c o n s c i o u s . O n l y w h e n one has come to see that consciousness does n o t belong t o the essence, but to the phenomenon, that thus the plurality o f consciousness is o n l y a plurality of the appearance of the One, only then will it be possible t o emancipate oneself f r o m the p o w e r o f the practical instinct, w h i c h a l w a y s cries "I, I," and to comprehend the essential unity o f all corporeal and spiritual phenomenal individuals . . . 2 6

25

Ibid., PU 2: 242, PUG 462. Here, I offer a diagram of the structure of Hartmann's worldview constructed upon the basis of his philosophy of the unconscious and this description. _

I < I

Unsconscious

Idea

=

peaceful co-existence of opposition (atoms/matter: essence or being)

World

=

will seizes ideas and creates a set of will-acts of the unconscious (objective phenomena: organic formation out of combinations of atoms)