The “ego” - which is not one with the central government of our nature! - is, indeed, only a conceptual synthesis - thus there are no actions prompted by “egoism”.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will To Power, Book II, 371
[i]I.
Introduction[/i]
Friedrich Nietzsche, above perhaps any philosopher in the history of modern thought, is most associated with unbridled and and unrestrained egoism, and with very little reason for it.
It is easy to see in his prophetic doctrine of the ‘Overman’ and in his constant attacks upon the altruistic ‘herd’ a call for a return to base animalistic brutality in the service of the self, and many interpreters who have looked at Nietzsche as a visionary sage with little or no intellectual content have felt satisfied in passing him over as a priest of the egoist religion. Unfortunately for this particular interpretation, Nietzsche’s own writings stand in stark contrast to any Hobbesian interpretation of man as a creature with a fundamentally ‘self-serving nature’ - or any innate nature at all, for that matter - and, indeed, question the very existence of a coherent ‘self’ altogether.
My purpose with this essay is simple: to examine Nietzsche’s philosophy of the Dionysian, to express the experience of elation that lies at the heart of Nietzsche’s thought, and to liberate him from the confines of petty individualism and bourgeois modes of thinking which see in him nothing more than a herald of cold, rationalistic thought.
[i]II.
Nietzsche contra Dionysus: The Ontological Aspects of the Will to Power[/i]
In the closing sentences of the final section of Twilight of the Idols, entitled What I Owe to the Ancients, Nietzsche identifies himself as the “last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus… the teacher of the eternal recurrence.”
What does it mean to be a disciple of Dionysus? Historically it was the Bacchoi, individuals (often women) who felt themselvs consumed with the spirit of Bacchus to the point of ego-obliteration, who were thus identified. These individuals would lie in wait along a roadside to leap out at the passing traveller and tear him asunder in an orgy of drunkenness and death. Might it also be so with Nietzsche? Are his works nothing more than a darkened road at night along which Nietzsche lurks to destroy the passing thinker?
One must comprehend Nietzsche’s enthusiasm before one can comprehend Nietzsche. The modern English ‘enthusiasm’ stems from the Greek enthousiasmos, which is literally possession of the individual by a deity or spirit. One who is enthusiastic for a cause, for instance, is quite literally possessed by that cause; his thoughts and actions are not of his own willing, but instead are determined by the necessities of attaining the greater goal. The self is ‘forgotten’ in the service of the whole, and this forgetfulness will later be shown to be integral to Nietzsche’s psychological and epistemological approach to aesthetics.
With enthusiasm comes intoxication, a state of dissolution. Nietzsche identifies two competing forms of intoxication in his writings. This antithesis is most clearly expressed in Twilight of the Idols, “Reconnaissance Raids of an Untimely Man”:
"What is the meaning of the conceptual opposition I introduced into aesthetics, between Apollonian and Dionysian, both conceived as types of intoxication? - Apollonian intoxication keeps the eye in particular aroused, so that it receives visionary power. The painter, the sculptor, the epic poet are visionaries par excellence. In the Dionysian state, on the other hand, the whole system of the emotions is aroused and intensified: so that it discharges its every means of expression at one stroke, at the same time forcing out the power to represent, reproduce, transfigure, transform, every kind of mime and play-acting. The essential thing remains the case of the metamorphosis, the inability not to react (- as with certain hysterics who also enter into any role at the slightest sign)."
So conceived, we can begin to grasp the fundamental opposition between two modes of emotional expression identified first by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. The Apollonian, plastic and stately in its immobile beauty, is an epiphemoneon of an individualistic mode of being. The Dionysian, on the other hand, is passionate, and all individual acts of cognition become buried under the landslide of this passion. The Inuits, for instance, in their pre-Christian rituals, would often don masks representational of various nature spirits and deities, and in doing so would feel their own identity submerged beneath the role adopted in ritual.
This dualistic conception of aesthetics is not very hard to grasp: it has, in some form or another, become predominate in Western European society. The contrast between the ‘rational’ plastic arts and ‘irrational’ music is so simple that a child could grasp it. More interesting is the underlying philosophical justification which Nietzsche puts forward for the contrast.
Nietzsche’s primary philosophic influence was the pessimism of German neo-Kantian Arthur Schopenhauer, and one must have a grasp of his philosophy to understand Nietzsche. Like Kant, Schopenhauer drew a distinction between the realm of the experential, the ‘sensed’ (called in Kantian philosophy the phenomenal, and by Schopenhauer the representational) and the noumenal, or the mental abstraction one creates in the mind when regarding an object. Kant held that the noumenal, the ‘thing-in-itself’, was unknowable, lacking any correlation on the phenomenal level. For Schopenhauer, however, one could easily come to understand the thing-in-itself by regarding the body, which he considered the “objectivity of the will.”
This Will Schopenhauer takes to be synonymous with the thing-in-itself. As Schopenhauer explains in Book II of his The World as Will and Idea:
"The concept will… is of all possible concepts the only which has its source not in the phenomenal, not in the mere perceptive ideation, but comes from within, and arises in the most immediate consciousness of each of us. In this each of us knows his own individuality, knows it according to its essential nature, knows it immediately, apart from all form, even that of subject and object: knows it and at the same time is this individuality, for here the knowing subject and the object become one and the same."
This, for Schopenhauer, fulfills Kant’s requirement that the thing-in-itself be known a priori - for Schopenhauer says that the Will is the first a priori, above all others, known immediately by the individual and without the mediation of the rational intellect.
The Will is by necessity monolithic and totalistic, existing as a sort of beating heart at the center of things.
"We know that plurality is conditioned by space and time, and is conceivable only in them; and in this context we call them the principium individuationis… (i)f, now, this thing-in-itself is the will… then, regarded as such and apart from its manifestation, it lies outside time and space, and is consequently one."
This oneness of the Will, a holistic interpretation of existence which takes all different objects (things which cannot exist in the same place and at the same time as other objects) as the effects of space and time acting at the phenomenal level upon the Will, necessarily denies plurality. And it is against this interpretation of the Will which Nietzsche assaults in section 692 of The Will to Power:
"Is “will to power” a kind of “will” or identical with the concept “will”? Is it the same thing as desiring? Or commanding[i]? Is it that “will” of which Schopenhauer said it was the “in-itself of things”?
My proposition is: that the will of psychology hitherto is an unjustified generalization, that this will[/i] does not exist at all, that instead of grasping the idea of the development of one definite will into many forms, one has eliminated the character of the will by subtracting from it its content, its “wither?” - this is in the highest degree the case with Schopenhauer: what he calls “will” is a mere empty word. It is even less a question of a “will to life”; for life is merely a special case of the will to power - it is quite arbitrary to assert that everything strives to enter into this form of the will to power."
Here we have an elucidaiton of the reasons behind Nietzsche’s break with the philosophy of Scohpenhauer. Unlike Schopenhauer, who distinguished between the real and the rational and held the Will to be monolithic and singular, Nietzsche draws no distinction between the sensed and the thought, and understood the Will (to Power) as a Will to Plurality.
Michael Haar explains further in his essay “Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language”:
[i]"The classical view of the will… turns it either into a metaphysical substance or, more commonly, into a faculty of the subject. Moreover, this view sees in the will the cause and source of our actions. Finally, it conceives the will as a unity, an identity.
In opposition to this classical conception, Nietzsche posits as the guiding theme of his own analyses of the will the astonishing affirmation that “there is no such thing as a will.” Why does he do this? First of all because the will as a conscious faculty is neither a unity nor a primary term. It is plurality itself, and it is derived… the will, by being posited as a center or a foundation, is taken falsely by metaphysics to establish a unique origin within reality as well as within the individual, for there is no center, and there is no foundation. There is no will: this means, as against Schopenhauer, there exists no unique and universal will constituting substantiality of the will. No will: the individual does not possess[/i] an identical and permanent will from which all his actions could flow."
Plurality and multiplicity are the essence of the Dionysian experience. To use a physical example, if we could observe our bodies from the inside, we would see that, far from being what appears to us normally as a solid whole, they are actually collections of organs and nerves and bones and copious amounts of blood. And if we could look yet closer - if we could grow microscopes in our eyes - we would see that these constituent parts of our bodies are in fact composed of countless cells connected together, cells which are in turn composed of the various components which make them what they are (mitochondria, celluar membranes, and so forth). And, further still, these are in turn made up of atoms united in mollecular bonds - and so on. And any effort to cast judgment over one of these parts means “judging, measuring, comparing, condemning the whole.” So it is with the self. The Will to Power is not the Will to (over)Power, it is the Will to Self-Overcome - to put on a new mask.
[i]III.
Nietzsche and Self[/i]
“Whatever is profound loves masks.”
Nietzsche, having established plurality as an innate function of Becoming (Becoming as the reality of the senses without a transcendental totality ‘above’ it) has also established enthousiasmos as an integral and natural component of reality. One here can sympathize with the plight of that Turin landlady who walked into Nietzsche’s bedchamber one night to see him dancing wildly, nakedly, with an African grotesque on his face. Such is how reality confronts us.
Giving his refutation of the a priori ‘I’ in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes that "(t)here are still some harmless self-scrutinizers who think that there are ‘immediate certanties’, as in for example, ‘I think’, or, in Schopenhauer’s superstition, ‘I will’ - as if perception could grasp its object purely and nakedly as the ‘thing in itself’ without any falsification on the part of the subject or of the object. But I shall repeat a hundred times over that the ‘immediate certainty’, like ‘absolute knowledge’ and the ‘thing in itself’, contains a contradictio in adjecto… Let the common people think that perception means knowing-to-the-end, the philosopher must say to himself, 'If I analyze the process expressed by the proposition “I think”, I get a series of audacious assertions that would be difficult if not impossible to prove; for example that I am the one who is thinking, that thinking is an activity and an effect on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that an “I” exists, and finally, that we by now understand clearly what is designated as thinking…'"
Here Nietzsche points out what he regards as the fatal flaw of all Western philosophers since Descartes: a willingness to posit that all the world may be unreal so long as the proverbial ‘brain in a vat’ has some substance to it. Why not ask the opposite - why not question if it might not be so that the world is really real, and it is the self, the perceptive and intuitive and rationalizing ‘I’, which is the illusion? As Nietzsche says elsewhere in the book, "anyone who takes this world with all its space, time, form, movement, to be falsely inferred, would at the very least have good reason to end by distrusting the thought process itself - for wouldn’t this thought process have made us the victims of the greatest hoax ever?" This does not at all mean that something roughly resembling the ‘I’ of philosophy does not exist. Rather, it is with this question that Nietzsche begins to probe the exact psychological character of the ‘I’.
It is necessary to understand Nietzsche’s motivation for asking such a question. The classical idea of volition and will establish a mens rea which can be invoked to condemn and sentence the individual, which is really to pass judgment on the whole (from which the individual cannot be extracted and refined - the character of the Dionysian worldview is a tendency to see the whole and only the whole; the Dionysian aesthete does not, for instance, regard art, as Schopenhauer wants it, outside the field of relations). Nietzsche’s greatest concern in philosophy is to maintain the ‘innocence of becoming’, to refrain from passing judgment, to say not ‘Yea’, less even ‘Nay’, but rather nothing at all - to reign in the reflexive instinct and to exert mastery over the self.
Let us imagine a conversation between Mr. Thomas Hobbes, whom Nietzsche has sometimes been claimed to share certain emotional dispositions with, and Nietzsche himself.
[i]"Pleasure or delight is the appearance or sense of good; and molestation or displeasure is the appearance and sense of evil. And consequently all appetite, desire and love is accompanied with some delight, more or less, and all hatred and aversion with more or less displeasure and offence.
"Hobbes, you represent a century-long degradation and devaluation of the concept ‘philosopher’. English psychologists think in a way that is[/i] essentially unhistorical; this can’t be doubted. We can see at once: this first deduction contains all the typical traits of idiosyncratic English psychologists - we have ‘usefulness’, ‘forgetting’, ‘routine’ and finally ‘error’, all as the basis of a respect for values of which the higher man has hitherto been proud, as though it were a sort of general privilege of mankind. The pathos of nobility and distance, as I said, the continuing and predominant feeling of complete and fundamental superiority of a higher ruling kind in relation to a lower kind, to those ‘below’ - that is the origin of the antithesis ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does."
Nietzsche, perhaps anticipating Freud’s notion of unpleasure, absolutely rejects the typical individualist argument that what is pleasurable is the good and what is harmful is the bad. There are many cases, Nietzsche would argue, where one engages in harmful and even self-destructive behaviour willingly and without drawing pleasure or any possible benefit from it. The martyr, for instance, who throws himself longingly upon the rack, derives ‘pleasure’ only from feeling haughtier than the unrepentant sinner - in this instance, the ‘good cause’ came first, and pleasurable feelings only after the fact. The pathos of distance and the feeling of control over fate are central to Nietzsche’s moral psychology.
Nietzsche’s method of arriving at this conclusion is in keeping with his refusal to draw a distinction between the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds. From section 36 of Beyond Good and Evil:
"Assuming that nothing real is ‘given’ to us apart from our world of desires or passions, assuming that we cannot ascend or descend to any ‘reality’ other than the reality of our instincts (for thinking is merely an interrelation of these instincts, one to the other), may we not be allowed to perform an experiment and ask whether this ‘given’ also provides a sufficient explanation for the so-called mechanistic (or ‘material’) world? I do not mean the material world as a delusion, as ‘appearance’ or ‘representation’ (in the Berkleian or Schopenhauerian sense), but rather as a world with the same level of reality that our emotion has - that is, as a more rudimentary form of the world of emotions, holding everything in a powerful unity, all the potential of the organic process to develop and differentiate (and spoil and weaken, too, of course), as a kind of instinctual life in which all the organic functions (self-regulation, adaptation, alimentation, elimination, metabolism) are synthetically linked to one another - as a pre-form of life?.. Assuming, finally, that we could explain our entire instinctual life as the development and differentiation of one basic form of the will (namely the will to power, as my tenet would have it); assuming that one could derive all organic functions from this will to power and also find in it the solution to the problem of procreation and alimentation (it is all one problem), then we would have won the right to designate all effective energy as: the will to power. The world as seen from the inside, the world defined and described by its 'intelligible character ’ - would be simply ‘will to power’ and that alone."
Nietzsche’s ontology therefore cannot be separated from his psychology. In both the ‘material’ and ‘emotional’ levels he posits the same fundamental drive behind all phenomenon: the Will to Power. And, again, this Will to Power is a principle of multiplicity. And so it is entirely consistent of Nietzsche to say, one section over from the quotation I gave at the start of this essay, that "(e)very drive, in as much as it is active, sacrifices force and other drives: finally it is checked; otherwise it would destroy everything through its excessiveness. Therefore: the “un-egoistic,” self-sacrificing, imprudent, is nothing special - it is common to all the drives - they do not consider the advantage of the whole ego (because they do not consider at all!), they act contrary to our advantage, against the ego: and often for the ego - innocent in both cases!"
Nietzsche here suggests that, rather than an all-encompassing ‘human nature’ which dominates the individual and acts always to its own advantage, that ‘human nature’ is in fact a plethora of drives, each with their own will to power. The picture he paints here is one of a man divided: each instinct has its own goal and outlet, and these often come at the expense of the other drives, and even often of the whole. It is for this reason that Nietzsche says [i]“(t)he “subject” is only a fiction: the ego of which one speaks when one censures egoism does not exist at all.”
IV.
Conclusion[/i]
In the course of this essay I have used Nietzsche, true to Dionysian form, to unmask and undermine the traditional concept of the ‘self’. Against the traditional conceptualization of the self as a willful, complete entity capable of rational and objective thought, I have instead made an argument for something monstrous: a willed self, a self without boundaries, a self which runs into other selves like water.
What purpose could this ever be used for? That’s the greatest question one can ask of philosophy. Such a conception of the self helps to explain the intellectual origins of psychoanalytic theory and is of great interest to the social theorist. Perhaps more urgent, however, is its radical repudiation of the ‘self’ of Locke. Nietzsche, in the right hands, is perhaps the most powerful tool the would-be radical has.