Relación Costo-Beneficio

Nietzsche's investigation of the drives starts with a radical admission of ignorance. His most complete presentation of his drive theory, in Dawn section D119, opens with this line: ‘No matter how hard a person struggles for self-knowledge, nothing can be more incomplete than the image of all the drives taken together that

constitute his being.’ This section follows closely on a run of passages (D115- D118) exposing fundamental errors in our common sense understanding of perception, thought and action. Subsequent sections, such as D129, develop further implications of our lack of self-knowledge.

I will just touch lightly on Nietzsche's reasons for this view. D115 claims that ‘language and the prejudices upon which language is based hinder in many

ways our understanding of inner processes and drives’. We do not have words for most of our inner experience, and language is a coarse net that catches only ‘superlative degrees’ or ‘extreme states’. Nietzsche will extend this analysis in

TheGay Science, notably GS354 which understands reflective consciousness as that part of our psychic world that we can grasp in communicable, linguistic, and so highly limited terms. A further problem is ‘the age-old delusion that one knows, knows just exactly in every instance how human action comes about’ (D116). We maintain a dubious belief in a unitary volitional ‘subject’ as the root cause of action rather than face the ‘terrifying truth’ that ‘all actions are essentially unknown’ (ibid).2

Very summarily, we can identify a number of levels of ‘erroneous’ categorisation. Most superficially, there are some gross psychological fallacies, such as the belief in transcendental subjects, which can be recognised and undone. But these are rooted in linguistic structures that inescapably shape all conscious thought.3 _{And then, to make things worse, Nietzsche also thinks that we are prone}

to some ‘primary errors’ (HH18) that lie well beneath reflective consciousness. The crudeness of linguistic categorisation is then only an acute case of a more general problem of atomism (BGE12), the inevitable but ‘arbitrary division and

2 Nietzsche's scepticism about common sense notions of will and agency is supported by recent research in psychology and neuroscience, such as that presented by Daniel M. Wegner in his

The Illusion of Conscious Will (2002). Although Wegner doesn't cite Nietzsche, some of his conclusions are strikingly similar. E.g.: ‘The unique human convenience of conscious thoughts that preview our actions gives us the privilege of feeling we wilfully cause what we do. In fact, however, unconscious and inscrutable mechanisms create both conscious thought about action and the action, and also produce the sense of will we experience by perceiving the thought as cause of the action.” (ibid:98). Brian Leiter (2009:122-4) discusses some of Wegner's findings in relation to Nietzsche.

3 I will look further at Nietzsche's account of language and consciousness in Chapter 3, and at his critique of the subject in Chapter 4. As Nietzsche develops these ideas in later texts, notably GM, he further brings out their interconnection: for example, in GM1:13 our customary conception of the ‘subject’ is also embedded into language.

See also Mattia Riccardi (forthcoming b) for a further discussion of what he describes as ‘inner opacity’ in Nietzsche, and of the particular role played here by language.

dismemberment’ (GS112) of the flux of becoming by human understanding, which is embedded even into basic structures of perception.4

Given all this, we are faced with a situation where ‘our moral judgements and evaluations are … mere images and fantasies stemming from a physiological process we know nothing of’ (D119). I want to make three notes on this statement. First, in fact there is no reason why it should apply only to moral judgements and evaluations.5 _{Second, Nietzsche's identification of the underlying unconscious}

processes behind our evaluations as physiological fits with his strong and repeated insistence on the embodiment of the psychic throughout Dawn and other books, spelt out perhaps most famously in Z ‘On The Despisers of the Body’. In Beyond Good and Evil he uses the adjective ‘psycho-physiological’ (BGE23) to

emphasise an anti-dualistic and materialist approach.6 _{In line with this, through} this thesis I write of drives as acting within, and composing, bodies.

Third, if our judgements and evaluations are just ‘images and fantasies’, is this not equally true of the psychological judgements Nietzsche is now making

4 In HH18 Nietzsche claims that ‘it is from the period of the lower organisms that man has inherited the belief that there are identical things’ and that ‘belief in the freedom of will is a primary error committed by everything organic’. Our linguistically shaped folk psychology, and still later scientific understanding of causation, are recent particularly human developments of this ancient ‘organic’ necessary erring. These ideas are developed through the first book of HH, and again in GS103-115.

5 Dawn is subtitled ‘Thoughts on the Presumptions of Morality’. With this focus, Nietzsche is at pains to emphasise that his analysis of valuing takes in moral valuing. But his basic

observations and arguments are about valuing per se. I look further at the meaning of ‘value’ in Nietzsche in the next section.

6 In his emphasis on the primacy of ‘physiology’ Nietzsche is strongly influenced by strands of 19th century German ‘materialism’, including those he encountered through intense reading of Friedrich Lange's 1866 History of Materialism. This materialism is a strong theme in Dawn, and remains constant throughout Nietzsche's work in the middle and later periods. To note just a few examples: in GS39 he connects differences in powerful individuals' ‘tastes and feelings’ to ‘lifestyle, nutrition or digestion, perhaps a deficit or excess of inorganic salts in their blood or brain; in brief, in their physis.’ In the third essay of the Genealogy he treats ressentiment as a physiological condition (GM3:15). In Twilight of the Idols he understands ‘sympathy’ as an expression of ‘physiological overexcitability’ (TI IX:37). In Ecce Homo he studies in detail the physiological factors behind his own philosophical career, addressing questions of ‘place’, ‘climate’ and ‘nutrition’ (EH ‘Why I am so clever’ 2).

about drives? Nietzsche readily admits this point: as he develops his detailed account of drives in D119, he interjects that it is all just ‘a matter of speaking in images’ (ibid). He had written in an unpublished note some years earlier: ‘In general the word drive is only a convenience and will be used everywhere that regular effects [regelmässige Wirkungen] in organisms are still not reducible to their chemical and mechanical laws.’ (KSA 8.23[9] [1876–1877]), and this remains fundamentally his view in Dawn. Drives are images, fantasies,

‘conventional fictions’7 _{that we can use to describe our psychological states and}

patterns, whilst we remain radically ignorant about the actual ‘physiological processes’ or ‘laws’ that produce them.8

My starting point, then, is that we should not read Nietzsche's drive theory as an attempt to identify any “true” causal nature behind psychic life. However, to carry over some terms from a related Nietzschean discussion of causal

understanding in science: although we cannot reach ‘beyond the image or behind it’ to give actual ‘explanations’, what we can do is make it so that ‘our

descriptions are better’ (GS112).

In what sense ‘better’? Specifically, Nietzsche maintains that drive imagery is better than the images – of subjects, wills, reasons, agents, etc. – employed by traditional psychology, in both its “folk” and philosophical forms. And it is better for the guiding projects that Nietzsche pursues in Dawn and the other books of the ‘free spirit period’. These include, as we will see, the

‘therapeutic’ project of understanding our own recurring psycho-physiological

7 To carry over a term that Nietzsche applies in BGE21 in a different context, there referring to ascriptions of causes.

8 It might be asked: is this truth of psycho-physiology only currently unknown, given the state of 19th – or 21st – century science, or is it in principle unknowable? This is a fascinating

patterns in order to effectively pursue projects of self-cultivation; and the

connected project, which will develop into the genealogy of morals, of exposing the ‘presumptions of morality’ (the sub-title of Dawn). Similarly, my own interest in pursuing Nietzsche's images of drives is that I think they may give us more powerful tools than traditional psychological constructs for understanding psycho- political dynamics of social change.

On what basis can we judge the efficacy of drive imagery? The basic method that Nietzsche employs in the ‘free spirit’ texts is that of close ‘psychological observation’ (HH35-8), in which he largely sees the French

moralistes as his models. He sets out to pay attention to ‘the closest things’ (WS5- 6, WS16), to embark on an honest and meticulous study of everyday psycho- physiological life, which means not only introspective phenomenology of perceiving, desiring, feeling, valuing, acting and interacting, but also recording and analysing conditions of diet, climate, etc., and always with a regard for history.9 _{The claim is that through such fieldwork we can identify some basic}

patterns of how we – or the processes working through our bodies – perceive, interpret and value the world, and how these evaluative interpretations shape our

9 Nietzsche first calls for a turn to close ‘psychological observation’ in Human, All Too Human, notably in the sequence HH35-8. Some points to note here are that:(i) psychological

observation is a difficult and time-consuming, ‘modest labour’ requiring ‘perseverance in labour that does not weary of heaping stone upon stone, brick upon brick’ (HH37) – a theme he continues to develop throughout this period, for example in the preface of Dawn; (ii)

psychological observation is ‘necessary’ (HH38) for the project of what in HH Nietzsche calls the ‘history of moral sensations’ – and which will evolve into the genealogy of morals; (iii) Nietzsche associates this approach with the French moralistes: in HH35 he cites La

Rochefoucauld, whom he follows through HH in uncovering hidden egoistic impulses behind moral masks; Montaigne and Pascal are also regularly referenced throughout the free spirit trilogy. On Nietzsche and the moralistes see Pippin (2009). Nietzsche expands on this message with the call to turn to ‘the closest things’ in the Wanderer and His Shadow (WS5, WS6, WS16), which ties psychological observation to concern for physiology and everyday matters of diet and climate – a point Nietzsche develops right through to the detailed physiological self-analysis of Ecce Homo. But we should also remember in this context Nietzsche's warning in AOM223: ‘direct self-observation is not nearly sufficient for us to know ourselves: we require history, for the past continues to flow within us in a hundred waves [...]’. Genealogy and psycho-physiology are companion methods.

desires and move our bodies to action. If we have the patience and honesty to stick at it – the integrity or ‘Redlichkeit’ that Nietzsche praises in passages such as GS335 – then we can get past customary psychological errors to construct new images that provide more productive and powerful handles on psycho-

physiological patterns.

Before delving into the imagery of drives, one final note. Terminological consistency is not one of Nietzsche's values. In Dawn and other works he uses terms including ‘drive’ (Trieb), ‘instinct’ (Instinkt), ‘desire’ (Begierde), ‘affect’ (Affekt), ‘will’ (Wille), ‘impulse’ (Antrieb) and more in interchangeable or overlapping ways. In giving all the spotlight to ‘drive’ I am overlaying, and for not the only time in this thesis, a consistency of my own on Nietzsche. As I proceed it will be important to pay attention to some of the nuances of Nietzsche's language; but also, and I think more so, to look for patterns that he describes in various ways.