3 Times:
I think that to understand Nietzsche and other philosophers one has to understand the influences that inform his ideas. “Will to power” is for example an evolution of Schopenhauer’s “Will”, another metaphysical construct, believe it or not. Schopenhauer, of course, was eventually “overcome” by Nietzsche, but like new temples which are built on top of older pagan shrines, he used the thought of Schopenhauer as a fundation for his philosophy.
Schopenhauer’s idea of determinism was basically like Nietzsche’s, an attempt to have his cake and eat it too. He says:
“Because everything in nature is at once appearance and thing in itself…it is consequently suceptible to a twofold explanation, a physical and a metaphysical. The physical explanation is always in termsa of cause and the metaphysical in terms of will.”(Thing Itself and Appearance)
Schopenhauer wrote in the midst of materialism as a world view. Materialism was a treath not only to religion but also to philosophy as it used to be. Schopenhauer, I see, as adefender of the philosophical narrative, that is, Schopenhauer’s insistence is that metaphysics is not obsolete and the physical not enough to explain the being of Nature. Nietzsche may attack this defense of metaphysics but has to engage metaphysics very often. A lot of times, like in Daybreak and Human All Too Human, he basically has to destroy the very possibility of being taken seriously, at the start of his books. The first few aphorism, if accepted, should lead to the reader closing the book. He is mining, going underground, just as Schopenhauer, going beyond the surface, appearance, the physical, to bring us the metaphysical. Nietzsche already admits that this must be a presupposition and he does not intend to prove the physical reality of his findings. You are free to accept the presupposition, the metaphysics, or reject it as beyond our reach to actually know.
Same essay from Schopenhauer:
“Strictly speaking, therefore, the degree and tendency of a man’s intelligence and the constitution of his moral character could perhaps be traced back to purely physical causes,”
This is the view that Materialism has taken and which he believes is not enough. He doesn’t deny determinism, but is trying to reconcille, or absorb this materialist determinism into his philosophy.
“Metaphysically, on the other hand, the same man would have to be explained as the apparitional form of his own, utterly free and primal will, which has created for itself the intellect appropiate to it; so that all his actions, however necessarly they may be the result of his character in conflict with the motivations acting on him at any given time, and however necessarly these again may arise as a consequence of his corporeity, are nonetheless to be attributed wholly to him.”
Though we are determined, the determinism is not from outside of us, but within. We do as we do because of causes, yes, but these causes are not impersonal. At one point the trace for causes reaches the will and this will, though a determinant, is wholly ourselves. At that point, it is no longer who your parents were, what was the air temperature that day, or what you had to eat, but simply what is the character of your will, or your individual presentation of the will, the thing in itself. We are all affected by physical causes, our biology for example, but as twin studies have shown the materialist cannot have the last word because a person can be biologically the same and still retain the possibility or “freedom” to be her own woman. She is not determined completely by her genes, nor by her enviroment. Education is another determinant but again one which cannot tell us the entire story, because we cannot produce doctors at will…a problem that even the greeks experienced.
And so, Schopenhauer proposes that like a finger-print, each person is unique. That we are determined, but determined by our individuality, which is an expression of the Thing in itself. Sounds too much like the ol’ “soul”? True. And this might have been one of the reasons why Nietzsche eventually disavowed him. In the final analysis Schopenhauer was not denying determinism, but that there is a physical and a metaphysical determinism, and that you could not predict, for example, the future actions of an individual without full knowledge of the physical causes and the metaphysical will.