Alexandros Pagidas

Nietzsche on Force and Matter

by Alexandros Pagidas

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Abbreviations I will use these standard abbreviations for Nietzsche’s works: BGE Beyond Good and Evil (1886) GM On The Genealogy of Morals (1887) GS The Gay Science (1882) HH Human All-too-Human (1878,1879,1880)1TI The Twilight of the Idols (1888) TL Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense(1873) A The Anti-Christ (1888) WP The Will to Power D Daybreak (1881) UM Untimely Meditations (1873) Z Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883,1884,1885) LN Writings From the Late Notebooks Also: PN The Portable Nietzsche The specific translations I use appear in detail in the bibliography.

When citing from these works, I will cite not pages but sections (unless

otherwise noted) and chapters (if they affect the numbering of the sections).

These are Nietzsche’s own sections which are identical regardless of

publisher. This makes finding the reference easier if you’re using different

editions. When I use fragments from the Nachlass that do not exist in the

English version of the Will to Power, I will use the critical edition of

Nietzsche’s works in German edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari:

KSA Kritische Studienausgabe The following abbreviations are for secondary sources on Nietzsche: NOM Nietzsche On Morality

1 This contains volumes that were added in different years. The same goes for Z

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BSPS Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche, Knowledge, and Critical Theory, vol. 203 BSPS Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche,vol. 204 NPN Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology JN A History of Western Philosophy: 20th Century Three dots in brackets […] means that I have excluded one or more words

from the section cited, while anything in brackets [ ] is my addition.

Acknowledgements

I thank Professor Jonathan Dancy for his help, encouragement and

understanding.

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Nietzsche on Force and Matter

Introduction Not “to know” but to schematise—to impose upon chaos as much regularity and form as our practical needs require.2

Martin Heidegger in his Nietzsche pondered what Nietzsche might mean by

such an assertion. In an example3 he asks us to imagine a room with a

blackboard filled with Greek letters. Some people would not be able to

recognize that these are Greek letters, but even then, they would not be

confronted by “chaos”. They would be able to perceive them as something

visible, as some letters written on a blackboard that they cannot read. Surely

this perceiving and asserting would be related to the blackboard and the

qualities it possesses not to a chaos. But for Heidegger this already presumes

something has been decided: This blackboard – “what does that mean?” he

asks. To talk about letters on a blackboard we must have already cognised

this thing as blackboard, and not only that, but “must already have

ascertained what we encounter as a “thing” as such, and not, say, a fleeting

occurrence.”4 The point is that when we encounter blackboards, chairs, etc.

we think of them already within the schematism of things in general5 and

what mainly interests us is what and how those things are. We are

2 WP, 515 3 Found p.77-8 in Heidegger’s Nietzsche (1961), vol.3, ed. D.F. Krell, New York: Harper Collins, 1991. 4 Ibid., p.78 5 Obviously this is a Kantian point against classical empiricism; we never experience “raw” experience directly and unmediated from the “world”. Contemporary versions of it are exemplified in critiques like W. Sellar’s critique of the “myth of the given” in his famous 1956 essay “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”. We’ll later see Nietzsche’s treatment of this Kantian point.

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continually confronted with hard, coloured, rough, odorous, extended,

movable things, a manifold of what is given. However, the question arises:

Is what is given what gives itself? Is it not also already something taken, already taken up by the words, black, gray, hard, rough, extended, flat? Must we not also take back this invasion by what we encounter through the words in which we have taken hold of what was encountered, in order to possess what is purely encountered, to let it be encountered? What is encountered – can anything be said about it at all?6

We could view this passage as a brief summary of Western philosophy up to

Kant. The first question is the classic problem between appearance and

reality: “Are things as they appear to be?” The second question deals with

the influence or “distortion” of certain “subjective” (in the example’s case,

language) factors through which things are encountered. The third question

presents the classic aspiration among philosophers, to try to eliminate all

those “subjective” factors, in order to possess what is “purely” encountered:

the “thing”, the world – as it is in itself. The last question leaves us with the

Kantian predicament: can anything be said about the “thing”, the world, as it

is in itself?

We will partly address the above issues along the way. However, that which

will be of primary importance for our purposes is that which Heidegger

mentioned in the first paragraphs and which I tacitly assumed along the

way: I have spoken of whether things are as they appear to be, whether

certain subjective factors distort the things we encounter, and whether we

should eliminate those subjective factors in order to possess things as they

are in themselves, which all presume that I must already have ascertained

6 Ibid. (italics in the original)

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that I’m confronted with a world of “things” and what is important is what

and how those things are. However, as Richard Schacht reminds us:

It is quite common for philosophers to regard ‘thing’ as a term so general and noncommittal that it may be used to refer to whatever there is, with the consequence that the existence of ‘things’ would seem to follow directly from the very minimal claim that the world does in fact exist. They may readily grant that at the outset of reflection the nature of what there is must be considered an open question; but it is very easy for this question to be turned into that of the nature of whatever things there are –and this restatement of the question is by no means entirely innocuous. Indeed, it is Nietzsche’s contention that this in fact is a highly prejudicial way of orienting philosophical inquiry, which sets it on a most unfortunate course even while in a sense rendering it more manageable. It may facilitate thought as well as action to treat our environing world as though it were composed of a multiplicity of discrete entities (with various distinctive and common properties); but this is by no means merely to paraphrase the notion of ‘that of which the world consists’ in more precise but equally noncommittal terms.7 We shall examine why we view the world through the schematism of

things8 within the broader questions mentioned above. However, I should

remind the reader, that we’d primarily be interested in the ontological status

of “things”. We should, as Schacht reminds us:

Distinguish between a “thing” as an ontological category, which may or may not be a coherent notion and of which there may or may not exist actual instances; and ‘thing’ understood very prosaically, as a catch-all term appropriately applicable to all of the various items of ordinary experience designated by commonplace nouns (‘tree,’ ‘rock,’ ‘house,’ etc.), and subsuming whatever it is that they are conventionally used to specify. It is by no means Nietzsche’s intention to deny that there is anything in the world of our experience to which they refer; and if a ‘thing’ is taken simply to be any such item of our life-world, he could be quite prepared to allow that there clearly are such ‘things’ – a great many of them, of many different kinds.9

Thus, in what follows I will firstly present some of Nietzsche’s background,

and most important, his naturalism, since his first point of departure is a

“naturalization” of the Kantian categories. I will then explicate how

Nietzsche views cognition in light of his “naturalization” of Kant, 7 R. Schacht, Nietzsche, p.143, London: Routledge, 1983. 8 I am purposely avoiding the term “substance” even though it is obviously related. However, “substance” has had a variety of different meanings during the history of philosophy and which may cause unwanted confusion. I therefore mostly prefer the more neutral term “thing” because it has lay connotations, is a term that Nietzsche repeatedly uses, and because it sometimes has hues of meaning that “substance” does not capture. 9 Schacht, Nietzsche, p.141 (already cited).

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examining his ideas on the intellect, perception and consciousness. As you

will later find out, his ideas on these areas affect his explanation as to why

we view the world through the schematism of things, and also recast the

main questions in the history of philosophy up to Kant. I will then focus on

language, how it relates to consciousness and how the “metaphysics of

language” form the main reason for why we view the world within the

schematism of things. I will then show how Nietzsche destroyed the notion

of a “thing” – of matter, atoms and the like – and replaced it with his notion

of force. I will explicate these ideas within a comparison with philosophies

of process mainly by Whitehead, though I will touch very briefly Bergson

and Mach. Finally, I will show Nietzsche’s relevance after the linguistic turn

and how Nietzsche’s rejection of the “things-in-themselves” puts him close

to philosophers like Quine, Goodman, Sellars and Rorty.

1. Nietzsche’s Naturalism and Intellectual Background A. Background and the Death of God. To translate man back into nature; to become master over the many vain and overly enthusiastic interpretations and connotations that have so far been scrawled and painted over that eternal basic text of homo natura; to see to it that man henceforth stands before man as even today, hardened in the discipline of science, he stands before the rest of nature, with intrepid Oedipus eyes and sealed Odysseus ears, deaf to the siren songs of old metaphysical bird catchers who have been piping at him all too long, "you are more, you are higher, you are of a different origin!" − that may be a strange and insane task, but it is a task – who would deny that?10

10 BGE, 230

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The above section in BGE is just an example of many11. The idea of

“translating man back to nature” has been a recurring theme in Nietzsche’s

writings, even if one looks back as far as 1872:

When one speaks of humanity, the idea is fundamental that this is something which separates and distinguishes man from nature. In reality, however, there is no such separation: “natural” qualities and those called truly “human” are inseparably grown together. Man, in his highest and noblest capacities, is wholly nature.12

Or as late as 1888: “We no longer trace the origin of man in the ‘spirit’, in

the ‘divinity’, we have placed him back among the animals.”13 In

Nietzsche’s intellectual context, the idea that man was no different from the

rest of the animals had already gained in popularity:

The researches and discoveries of modern times can no longer allow us to doubt that man, with all he has and possesses, be it mental or corporeal, is a natural product like all other organic beings […] Hence not merely what he is, but also what he does, wills, feels, and thinks, depends upon the same natural necessity as the whole structure of the world.14

The quote is by German materialist Ludwig Büchner (1824-1899) whose

book Force and Matter (1855) was a best seller that went through 12

editions in 17 years and was translated in 17 foreign languages15. The era

that Nietzsche grew up was dominated by the ideas of thinkers like Lange16

(1828-1875), Feuerbach (1804-1872), and Helmholtz (1821-1894) – not to

mention Schopenhauer (1788-1860), who was finally getting the recognition

he deserved, and the evolutionary ideas put forward by Darwin’s On the

Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871).

11 More examples will be given later. 12 PN, from “Homer’s Contest”, p.32 13 A, 14 14 As quoted in B. Leiter’s Nietzsche on Morality, p.7, London: Routledge, 2002. 15 NOM, p.65 16 A figure greatly admired by Nietzsche who thought of Lange’s book The History of Materialism as “the most significant philosophical work to have appeared in recent decades” (as quoted in NOM, p.65)

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By the middle of the nineteenth century German Idealism was in decline, in

contrast to German Materialism. Although Kant17 and Schopenhauer18

significantly influenced Nietzsche, he was equally influenced by Lange19

and the general climate of his era, which constantly undermined distinctions

that set human beings apart from Nature. According to Hollingdale “the

most profound difference between Nietzsche’s mature philosophy and

Schopenhauer’s is that Nietzsche’s is not metaphysical but materialistic, and

his will to power an induction from observed data not a metaphysical

postulate like Schopenhauer’s will to live”20. Although Lange, like

Schopenhauer, was a follower of Kant, the decisive difference was that for

Lange

Ultimate reality is not only unknowable, as Kant maintained, but the very idea of it is a consequence of the way we think, that is, the concept of the thing-in-itself is part of the phenomenal world…[Even Schopenhauer’s] will is nothing but one more idea. Because even the idea of ultimate reality must belong to the plane of appearance, nothing meaningful can be said about it, and philosophers must concern themselves only with the material world – the world of phenomena, the only world we know.21 The influence of Lange prevailed and Nietzsche viewed the distinction

between phenomena and noumena, the idea of a transcendental subject that

“is not part of the world but a perspective upon it”22, and Schopenhauer’s

17 For Kant’s influence on Nietzsche see R. K. Hill, Nietzsche’s Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of his Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. 18 For Schopenhauer’s influence on Nietzsche see C. Janaway (ed.), Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. 19 For Lange’s influence on Nietzsche see G. Stack, Lange and Nietzsche, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1983. 20 Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy, p. 69, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 21 Ibid. 22 (my italics) R. Scruton, Kant, p. 56, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. For a more sophisticated presentation of the transcendental subject see S. Gardner, Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason, p.134-150, London: Routledge, 1999.

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“will” with increasing suspicion, creating the need for a re-interpretation

under a naturalistic framework with no metaphysical baggage.

The “death of God” announced in The Gay Science23, apart from it being

interpreted as having to do with the loss of meaning, value and the

predicament of modern culture24, also has another meaning more pertinent

to this dissertation: For Nietzsche with the “death of God” “all that ever has

been or ever could be subsumed in the name ‘God’, including all God-

substitutes, other worlds, ultimate realities, things-in-themselves, noumenal

planes and wills to live– the entire ‘metaphysical need’ of man and all its

products”25 are to be rejected. The “death of God” does not only lead to “a

devaluation of the highest values”26 but also to “a devaluation of all super-

or extra-natural posits and explanatory principles.”27 In fact, this is the first

meaning that the “death of God” has. One can realize this because just after

proclaiming for the first time “the death of God” (GS 108), Nietzsche asks

in the next section (GS 109):

“When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin

to “naturalize” humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly

23 Its first appearance in Nietzsche (it also appears before Nietzsche, see Ericvon der Luft, “Sources of Nietzsche’s ‘God is Dead!’”, Journal of the History of Ideas 65, 2 p.263-276, April-June 1984) is in GS, 108. However, it also appears in GS, 125 and 343 – not to mention seven passages in Z (in PN pages 124, 191, 202, 294, 371-79, 398 and 426) 24 Examples are Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, p.96-118 Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974; Heidegger, ‘The Word of Nietzsche: “God Is Dead”’, p.53-112 in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt, New York: Harper & Row 1977; Hollingdale, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy, p.138-147, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; and Higgins, Comic Relief, p.95-122, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 25 Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy, p.70. 26 WP, 2 27 C. Cox, Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation, p.71, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

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redeemed nature?” This section is complemented with a note written one

year before the publication of The Gay Science, where Nietzsche writes:

“My task: the dehumanisation of nature and then the naturalization of

humanity after it has attained the pure concept of “nature”. Human beings

and philosophers have in the past projected the human into nature – let us

dehumanise nature.”28

So Nietzsche’s task is to “redeem nature” not only from theological

interpretations, but also from moral and aesthetic anthropomorphisms29.

B. What Kind of a Naturalist was Nietzsche?

In his book Nietzsche on Morality Brian Leiter makes certain distinctions

within the naturalist camp. There are what he calls “Methodological

Naturalists” which “construct philosophical theories that are continuous

with the sciences either in virtue of their dependence upon the actual results

of scientific method in different domains or in virtue of their employment

and emulation of distinctively scientific ways of looking at and explaining

things”30And there are also those he calls “Substantive Naturalists” which

hold “either the (ontological) view that the only things that exist are natural

(or perhaps simply physical31) things; or the (semantic) view that a suitable

28 As quoted by R.S. Cohen, in the Preface, p.xx of BSPS vol.203. 29 See also the whole of GS 109. 30 NOM, p.5 31 Leiter warns us (ibid., p.6) that Nietzsche would not be sympathetic with the contemporary Substantive Naturalist view that only properties picked out by the laws of the physical sciences are real (known as physicalism).

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philosophical analysis of any concept must show it to be amenable to

empirical enquiry”32.

Leiter classifies Nietzsche as “fundamentally methodological”33, although

he also shares with other philosophers like Hume certain features of

Substantive-Naturalism like the opposition to supernaturalism in ontology

and explanation. He is placed among Hume, Freud and Marx, as a

philosopher who tries to put forward a general theory of human nature.34

Evidence in support of Nietzsche as a methodological naturalist can be

found both in the sense of emulating scientific methods: “It is not the victory

of science that distinguishes our nineteenth century, but the victory of

scientific method over science”35, or “On the whole, scientific methods are

at least as important as any other result of research. For it is on the insight

into method that the scientific spirit depends; and if these methods were to

be lost, all the results of science could not prevent a renewed supremacy of

superstition and nonsense”36 and in the sense of using and being acquainted

with the actual results of scientific research of his day.

There are three sources of evidence for the latter claim. The first is the list of

books he took out on loan from his University library in Basel37. Some of

these are: H. Kopp’s History of Chemistry (1844), T. Fechner on the 32 Ibid., p.5 33 Ibid., p.6 34 Ibid., p.5-6 35 WP, 466, see also WP, 469: “the most valuable insights are methods”. 36 HH, 635 (as translated in NPN, p.15) 37 You can find the whole list in Luca Crescenzi, “Verzeichnis der von Nietzsche aus der Universitätsbibliothek in Basel entliehenen Bücher (1869-79),” Nietzsche-Studien 23 (1994): 388-442. (I am indebted to the Nietzsche Channel (http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/) for this source.)

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doctrine of atoms38, and R. Boscovich’s Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis

(1763) which turned out to be a significant influence on Nietzsche as recent

scholars have indicated39. The second source is the books found in his

library40; some examples are A. Spir’s Thought and Reality41 (1873), J.C.F.

Zöllner’s On The Nature of Comets42 (1872), J. G. Vogt’s Force: A Realist-

Monistic Worldview43(1878) and E. Mach’s Contributions to the Analysis of

the Sensations (1886) 44.

Nietzsche’s critical engagement with science and the scientific theories of

his contemporaries has been “for far too long […] too much informed by an

ignorance of the theoretical contexts he was working in. His ideas have been

decontextualised and over-determined as part of some general history of

metaphysics”45. Fortunately, (and this is the third source of evidence) there

have been some recent attempts to remedy this ignorance46. These attempts

38 Ueber die Physikalische und Philosophische Atomenlehre, 1864 39 For example, G. Whitlock, “Roger J. Boscovich and Friedrich Nietzsche a Re-Examination” p.187-202, in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science (BSPS), eds. B. Babich & R.S. Cohen, vol. 204, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999; and K. Ansell-Pearson, “Nietzsche’s Brave New World of Force” in Pli, The Warwick Journal of Philosophy p. 6-35, Volume 9: Parallel Processes: Philosophy and Science, 2000. 40 There is an incomplete list of Nietzsche’s library in http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/library.htm 41 Denken und Wirklichkeit. Versuch einer Erneuerung der kritischen Philosophie. 42 Über die Natur der Kometen. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Theorie der Erkenntniss. In NPN, p.404 (footnote #183) Moles writes that “Nietzsche wrote approvingly of this book in his letters, claiming that it provides much more that its title promises.” This is because this book has a “historical signicance [in] that it introduces a cosmology embodying a Riemannian conception of space” (ibid., p.281). According to Nietzsche’s sister (not a reliable source of information, but on the specific point not implausible; see ibid., footnote #181 p.404) Nietzsche had read Riemann. However, Moles is justified in claiming (ibid., p.281) that Nietzsche probably got acquainted with Riemannian ideas through Zöllner’s book. 43 Die Kraft: eiene real monistische Weltanschauung 44 Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen. 45 K. Ansell-Pearson, “Nietzsche’s Brave New World of Force”, p.8 (source already cited). Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche has something to do with this, as Nietzsche is placed in the honorific place of the “last metaphysician”. 46 There were even attempts in the 1950’s like A. Mittasch’s, Nietzsche als Naturphilosoph, Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1952 and Joan Stambaugh The Problem of Time in Nietzsche, Lewisburg: Associated

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show that Nietzsche had a “more than casual or dilettante’s association with

science”47. In fact, certain Nietzschean ideas regarding space, time, and non-

extended atoms as centres of force, are quite original and anticipate

developments in physics48.

Nietzsche’s relationship with scientific writings of his day in physiology,

psychology, biology, chemistry and physics, is just more evidence of his

naturalistic credentials, and his thought should not be viewed in isolation

from that context.

C. Nietzsche’s “Naturalization” of the Kantian Categories

“What do philosophers lack? (a) an historical sense”49

Before Darwin, many thought that species were immutable; in the history of

philosophy many thought that change was problematic, unreal, and what

ultimately existed, had to have immutable characteristics. With Parmenides,

“being” is timeless and perfect – change is an illusion. Plato thought that

concepts (even ones like justice) reside in the world of Forms, that they are

eternal and changeless. Kant thought that the Understanding imposed fixed

categories (e.g. substance, causality) on the world.

This is what prompts Nietzsche to write in The Twilight of The Idols:

You ask me which of the philosophers’ traits are really idiosyncrasies?

University Press, 1987. For recent studies see A. Moles’s NPN; B. Babich, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science, New York: State University of New York Press, 1994; and for a big variety of contributors and approaches see the BSPS volumes 203 & 204, eds. B. Babich & R.S. Cohen, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999. 47 B. Babich, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science, p.65 48 For this and exciting connections between Nietzsche, Kant, Leibniz, Riemann, and Relativity Theory see chapters 7 and 8 in NPN. 49 WP, 408. See also, HH, vol.1 “Of first and last things”, sections 1 and 2.

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For example, their lack of historical sense, their hatred of the very idea of becoming, their Egypticism. They think that they show respect for a subject when they de-historicize it, sub specie aeterni [Spinoza] – when they turn it into a mummy. All that philosophers have handled for thousands of years have been concept mummies; nothing real escaped their grasp alive. When these honourable idolaters of concepts worship something, they kill it and stuff it; they threaten the life of everything they worship. Death, change, old age, as well as procreation and growth, are to their minds objections – even refutations. Whatever has being does not become; whatever becomes does not have being [Parmenides]. Now they all believe, desperately even, in what has being. But since they never grasp it, they seek for reasons why it is kept from them. “There must be mere appearance, there must be some deception which prevents us from perceiving that which has being: where is the deceiver?” “We have found him,” they cry ecstatically; “it is the senses! These senses, which are so immoral in other ways too, deceive us concerning the true world.”50

Whatever philosophers couldn’t find with the senses (be it equality51,

causation, substance), they blamed the senses (Plato, Descartes) and either

relocated it in some metaphysical realm (the world of “Being”, Forms,

noumenal/transcendental realities) or attributed it to some “error”52 or

“determination” (to use Hume’s53 word) of our mind.

Nietzsche on the other hand, although he rejects metaphysical realms,

believes that simply to declare that the mind is such as to be “determin’d by

custom”54 though certainly more plausible, is not enough to explain

causality55; nor, in the case of substance, does he believe that positing

certain immutable category of the understanding is enough to explain why

we tend to view the world as composed of things and believe in “substance”.

50 “‘Reason’ in Philosophy”, section 1. 51 See Plato’s Phaedo, and his argument from Imperfection. 52 See K. Popper’s interesting essay “On the Sources of Knowledge and Ignorance” (in Conjectures and Refutations, p.3-30, 5th edition, London: Routledge, 1995) on the “conspiracy theory of error” that runs throughout the history of philosophy. 53 D. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature Book I, section 14, p.105, eds. Norton & Norton, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 54 Ibid. 55 See my essay entitled An Attempt at a Genealogy of Cause and Effect, (its in one of the links in http://www.geocities.com/gcecrops) to view a Nietzschean account of causality. See also the articles by A. Rehberg and P. Poellner in BSPS 204; Chapter 6 in A. Moles’s Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology, New York: Peter Lang, 1990; R. Schacht, Nietzsche, p. 169-186 London: Routledge, 1983.

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The fact that the distinction between human/animal had been repeatedly

undermined in Nietzsche’s time, allowed him to “Darwinize” Kant. Thus

against Kant he claims that “man has become […] the faculty of cognition

has become”56 while some philosophers “would have it that the whole world

is spun out of this faculty of cognition”57. With humans “back with the

animals”, the theory of evolution prevailing and the fixity of species gone,

the fixity of “categories” should follow, and be viewed through an

evolutionary framework. Humans have not only evolved, but are evolving,

so to choose a point in our cognitive evolution that supplies us with a certain

picture of the world, and then claim that this is how the world is becomes

simply arbitrary. Nietzsche uses a metaphor that depicts past philosophers

viewing the world, life and experience as if they are “before a painting that

has been unrolled once and for all and unchangeably depicts the same

scene”58. They think that their job is to correctly interpret it, so as to draw a

conclusion about its ultimate nature. What they miss in doing this is that this

painting is not fixed, but rather changes with each interpretation and as

humans and their cognitive abilities evolve.

The evolutionary picture of the Kantian categories maintains that the

categories were traits that emerged in our evolutionary history that turned

out to be beneficial and were subsequently kept and strengthened over time:

Origin of knowledge.− Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helped to preserve the species: those who hit 56 HH, vol.1, “Of First and Last Things”, section 2. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., section 16.

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upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny. Such erroneous articles of faith, which were continually inherited, until they became almost part of the basic endowment of the species, include the following: that there are enduring things; that there are equal things; that there are things, substances; bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be.59 The intellect preserved what was useful – not what “accurately represented

reality”. That realization made Nietzsche even more sceptical of the status

of our “truths”, as exemplified in the famous remark: “Life no argument −

We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live − by positing

bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content;

without these articles of faith nobody now could endure life. But that does

not prove them. Life is no argument. The conditions of life might include

error.”60

The synthetic a priori judgements are not some categories imposed by some

fixed otherworldly “transcendental subject” but rather “articles of faith”

preserved during the course of the biological evolution of our intellect

because of their usefulness in arranging a world in which we can live.

On the same theme in a section of particular interest for our purposes,

Nietzsche remarks specifically on the category of substance; how it might

have originated and how it is related to the way we reason:

Origin of the logical.− How did logic come into existence in man's head? Certainly out of illogic, whose realm originally must have been immense. Innumerable beings who made inferences in a way different from ours perished; for all that, their ways might have been truer. Those, for example, who did not know how to find often enough what is "equal" as regards both nourishment and hostile animals—those, in other words, who subsumed things too slowly and cautiously—were favoured with a lesser probability of survival than those who guessed immediately upon encountering similar instances that they must be equal. The

59 GS, 110 60 GS, 121

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dominant tendency, however, to treat as equal what is merely similar—an illogical tendency, for nothing is really equal—is what first created any basis for logic. In order that the concept of substance could originate— which is indispensable for logic although in the strictest sense nothing real corresponds to it— it was likewise necessary that for a long time one did not see nor perceive the changes in things. The beings that did not see so precisely had an advantage over those that saw everything "in flux." At bottom, every high degree of caution in making inferences and every sceptical tendency constitute a great danger for life. No living beings would have survived if the opposite tendency –to affirm rather than suspend judgement, to err and make up things rather than wait, to assent rather than negate, to pass judgement rather than be just –had not been bred to the point where it became extraordinarily strong.61 Let us now turn to how Nietzsche viewed cognition on the light of his

“Darwinization” of Kant.

2. Cognition

A. The Nature of Knowing after Darwin – Evolutionary Epistemology.

For Nietzsche knowing “is to be regarded in a strict and narrow

anthropocentric and biological sense”62 viewing it within an evolutionary

framework where “the utility of preservation […] stands as the motive

behind the development of the organs of knowledge – they develop in such a

way that their observation suffice for our preservation”63. However, one

should note an important difference between Darwin and Nietzsche. For

Nietzsche “Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of

self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being”64. Since “the

wish to preserve oneself is the symptom of a condition of distress, of a

limitation of the really fundamental instinct of life which aims at the

expansion of power and, wishing for that, frequently risks and even

61 GS, 111 62 WP, 480 63 Ibid. 64 BGE, 13

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sacrifices self-preservation.”65. Against Darwin he claims that “in nature it

is not conditions of distress that are dominant but overflow and squandering,

even to the point of absurdity [66]. The struggle for existence is only an

exception, a temporary restriction of the will to life.”67 Nietzsche does not

deny that such a struggle occurs: “It does occur, but as the exception”68.

What he denies is that self-preservation is the “primum mobile”69; in another

section in WP he gives the example of the protoplasm that takes “into itself

absurdly more than would be required to preserve it”70 and thereby does not

“preserve itself” but “fall apart”. He concludes that self-preservation “is

only one of the indirect and most frequent results”71 of the will to power and

believes it to be a superfluous teleological principle that “method, which

must be essentially economy of principles”72, demands we get rid of. He

also accuses Darwin of mistaking “Malthus [73] for nature”74 and insists that

“where there is a struggle it is a struggle for power”75 and “growth and

expansion […] – in accordance with the will to power which is the will of

life.”76

65 GS, 349. Apart from the sections I will cite later, this theme is found also in: TL, 2; Z, “On Self-Overcoming”; BGE, 262; GM, Second Essay, 11 (the last paragraph). Browse also book 3, part 2: “Will to Power in Nature” in WP. 66 Insects and bacteria are good examples. 67 GS, 349. 68 TI, ‘Expeditions of an Untimely Man’ section 14 69 Primary motive WP, 652. 70 WP, 651 71 BGE, 13 72 Ibid. 73 Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) author of the influential Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) which argued that food production increased in a much slower rate than population growth therefore leading to mass starvation. 74 TI, ‘Expeditions of an Untimely Man’ section 14 75 Ibid. 76 GS, 349, connects with BGE, 13: “life itself is will to power”.

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Thus, in line with this difference he has with Darwin, he proposes

“Knowledge works as a tool of power.”77 And that “In order for a particular

species to maintain itself and increase its power, […] a species grasps a

certain amount of reality in order to become master of it, in order to press it

into service.”78

B. Piaget, Nietzsche, Analogical Extrapolation.

“Thinking” in primitive conditions ( pre-organic) is the crystallization of forms, as in the case of crystal. – In our thought, the essential feature is fitting new material into old schemas (= Procrustes’ bed), making equal what is new.79 In an earlier paper of mine80 I made use of what I recognized to be a trait of

intelligence that I thought had been fundamental in our intellectual

evolution. To understand this trait it is necessary that we acquaint ourselves

with a section by Nietzsche entitled ‘The origin of our concept of

“knowledge”’. There he notes that when most people talk about knowledge

they want

Nothing more than this: Something strange is to be reduced to something familiar. And we philosophers − have we really meant more than this when we have spoken of knowledge? What is familiar means what we are used to so that we no longer marvel at it, our everyday, some rule in which we are stuck, anything at all in which we feel at home. Look, isn’t our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover under everything strange, unusual, and questionable something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who attain knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security?81

A section that should supplement this idea is found in TI: “to trace

something unknown back to something known is alleviating, soothing,

77 WP, 480 78 Ibid. 79 WP, 499 80 See my essay An Attempt at a Genealogy of Cause and Effect, http://www.geocities.com/gcecrops 81 GS, book five, section 355.

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gratifying and gives moreover a feeling of power”82. Thus in an interplay

between the instinct of fear and the will to power we have this strong

tendency to familiarize “strange” things in order to restore our sense of

security and expand our power.

An example of this tendency would be to take a familiar method that

“explains” a phenomenon or “solves” a problem and extrapolate it to a

different (strange, unusual or urgent) phenomenon or problem with the hope

of solving or explaining it – thus mastering the situation and increasing

one’s power. I call this tendency analogical extrapolation83. Analogical

extrapolations are very common in human history and happen everywhere

including philosophy.

The Euclidian method was adopted by Spinoza and Hobbes to deal with

metaphysical, epistemological, ethical and political problems even though it

started as a method in geometry. This process is something that comes so

naturally to us84, that we hardly notice it. The “method” doesn’t have to be

something as grand as Euclidian geometry. It could be something as trivial

as “if you press a button, something happens”. What is crucial to note

however, is that analogical extrapolation is constantly applied back and forth

82 TI, “The Four Great Errors”, section 5. 83 When I initially introduced this idea, I had called it “methodological extrapolation”; however, I believe Professor G. Strawson’s suggestion to change it to “analogical” besides being more elegant, better captures its function. 84 “Plato was the first to set up the theory that to know the real consists in finding its Idea, that is to say in forcing it into a pre-existing frame already at our disposal – as if we implicitly possessed universal knowledge […] this belief is natural to the human intellect, always engaged as it is in determining under what former heading it shall catalogue any new object; and it may be said, that in a certain sense, we are all born Platonists.” By H. Bergson in Creative Evolution (1907), p.48-9, New York: Dover Publications, 1998.

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during man’s practical and intellectual evolution. Surprisingly, I learned that

in the history of science, this process of reducing everything strange into

something familiar, was actually a methodological rule for explanation

advocated by no other than Robert Boyle: “to explicate a phenomenon [is]

to deduce it from something else in nature more known to us than the thing

to be explained by it”85. In a relevant section in WP Nietzsche writes: “The

development of science resolves the “familiar” more and more into the

unfamiliar: – it desires, however, the reverse, and proceeds from the instinct

to trace the unfamiliar back to the familiar.”86 For example, the familiar

ideas of impact and pressure (classical mechanics) had to be complemented

with “unfamiliar” qualities like gravity. Later, with Maxwell and Faraday,

more “unfamiliar” ideas had to be introduced: electromagnetic fields.

Needless to say, that the sciences increase our power over nature87.

The fruitful connection I wish to make is between analogical extrapolation,

Nietzsche and Jean Piaget’s (1896-1980) ideas on cognitive development.

As the opening quote states, Nietzsche believes that what is essential in our

thought is “fitting new material into old schemas”, an idea essentially like

that of analogical extrapolation, and not at all unlike with certain ideas of

Piaget.

85 As quoted by P. Poellner, Nietzsche and Metaphysics, p.38-39, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. We shall discuss later how the idea of a world of stable unchanging substances (e.g. atoms) was possibly derived from the familiar idea of the subject as what is stable regardless of its diverse experiences. 86 WP, 608 87 See WP, 610

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Piaget’s ‘genetic epistemology’ was derived from his acute observations of

the cognitive development of children. By generalizing from his

observations, he proposed three very general mechanisms of development.

He called the first assimilation. In this stage:

The child adapted and interpreted information from the world to fit his existing schemas. The manifestations of assimilation ran from a newborn who generalized his sucking reflex from a nipple to a rattle, to a preschool child who used blocks as dolls in her pretend play, to a school-age child in a conservation task who simply misreported counter-evidence to his claims about the water.88 In accommodation, the second stage,

The opposite effect took place: the child was forced to adapt his schemas to fit new information from the world. Again these effects could vary from an infant who had to change his style of sucking to accommodate the unyielding rattle, to a preschool child who imitated her mother’s phone conversation in an initially uncomprehending way, to a child in a conservation task who at least temporarily admitted that the same water was in both glasses.89 Finally, the last stage was called equilibration, which Really represented a kind of balance between assimilation and accommodation. When the child’s representations and the evidence from the world matched, the process of accommodation and assimilation would end and the child could at least temporarily settle on a particular kind of representation. Piaget saw cognitive development as a highly dynamic process, constantly balancing representations that had already been constructed with new input from the outside world.90 To claim that Nietzsche anticipated some of Piaget’s ideas and results would

not be an exaggeration. In fact, not only did he anticipate ideas and results,

but even the very same metaphor Piaget91 used to illustrate the mechanism

of development. The biological example “of an animal literally assimilating

88 A. Gopnik, “Jean Piaget”, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, London: Routledge, 1998. (my emphasis) 89 Ibid. The experiment was showing children two glasses with different shape yet containing the same volume of water. Initially, most children could not see that the shape did not affect the volume. 90 Ibid. 91 There is a new feature in http://www.amazon.com (of course, not all their books have this feature enabled) that allows you to search any single word in a book you want (free of charge), even indexes and contents. I put the word “Nietzsche” and searched the following books: The Moral Judgement of the Child; The Psychology of the Child; Language and Thought of the Child; The Psychology of Intelligence; Six Psychological Studies; The Construction of Reality in the Child. I couldn’t find a single reference to Nietzsche – it is therefore plausible that Piaget didn’t read or use Nietzsche.

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part of its environment by eating it, and literally accommodating the food by

physically changing its body as a result”92 can readily be found in Nietzsche

in several places in WP:

All thought, judgment, perception, considered as comparison, has as its precondition a "positing of equality," and earlier still a "making equal." The process of making equal is the same as the process of incorporation of appropriated material in the amoeba.93 And On the origin of logic. The fundamental inclination to posit as equal, to see things as equal, is modified, held in check, by consideration of usefulness and harmfulness, by considerations of success: it adapts itself to a milder degree in which it can be satisfied without at the same time denying and endangering life. This whole process corresponds exactly to that external, mechanical process (which is its symbol) by which protoplasm makes what it appropriates equal to itself and fits it into its own forms and files.94

This process also symbolizes analogical extrapolation. We try to explain

things by appealing to familiar schemas. We do it in science as much as we

do it in everyday life. The function of metaphor in everyday discourse is no

different case – people engage in metaphorical discourse when they want to

express something the confines of their existing vocabulary cannot express.

It is the same with language learning in children. It has been observed that

children rapidly generalize what words they’ve already learned to new

things, trying to subsume everything they encounter within already existing

vocabulary95.

However, going back to Heidegger’s example in the introduction, as

conscious subjects we are neither spectators (nor active participants) of a

“chaos” of sensations suddenly becoming intelligible into blackboards, 92 Ibid. 93 WP, 501 94 WP, 510 95 A. Musgrave, Common Sense, Science and Scepticism, p.70-71, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

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letters or chairs. In the great majority of cases, the steps of the process

through which something “chaotic” becomes intelligible largely lie outside

consciousness. To understand the philosophical implications of this

observation and its relation to our interests in this dissertation, it is necessary

we turn to Nietzsche’s account of the intellect and its relation to

consciousness and perception.

C. Intellect, Perception, Consciousness.

Living in an era when knowledge about the anatomy and physiology of the

human body had significantly increased, Nietzsche was aware of the

tremendous complexity of the human body, and all the processes that are

carried out every second. Despite the complexity and number of these

bodily processes “by far the greater number”96 of them had “nothing

whatever to do with consciousness; nor with sensation”97 even in “the

direction or protection and care in respect of the co-ordination of the bodily

functions”98. For example, think of the immune system in action; or when

you accidentally touch a hot stove, you immediately remove your hand by

reflex without undergoing any conscious decision. Nietzsche’s own example

is when one stumbles, one doesn’t wait “for the fact to ring the bell of

consciousness and for instructions how to act to be telegraphed back”99.

From such examples Nietzsche also makes the observation that we do not

96 WP, 676 97 Ibid. 98 WP, 524 99 WP, 699

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react to pain, since in the latter examples the action comes noticeably earlier

than the feeling of pain100.

From observing these bodily processes “we perceive that a purposiveness

rules over the smallest events […] planning, selectivity, co-ordination,

reparation, etc.”101 Nietzsche does not doubt “that a higher court rules over

these things […] a kind of directing committee”102 ultimately a “more

comprehensive intellect”103 which has “the conscious ego itself only as a

tool in [its] service”104. He even ponders the question

Whether all conscious willing, all conscious purposes, all evaluations are not perhaps only means through which something essentially different from what appears in consciousness is to be achieved. We think: it is a question of our pleasure and displeasure – but pleasure and displeasure could be means through which we have to achieve something that lies outside our consciousness.105 Whereas in the past “conscious thought was considered thought itself”106

Nietzsche thinks a large part of our intellectual activity occurs beneath

consciousness, anticipating Freud who, incidentally, stopped reading

Nietzsche in fear that he had anticipated too many of his own ideas107 and in

agreement with Poincaré who was inclined to posit a “subliminal self”

which pre-selected which ideas will break into the domain of

consciousness108.

100 Ibid. This whole section is devoted to this issue. 101 Ibid. 102 WP, 524 103 WP, 676 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid. 106 GS, 333 107 NOM, p.2 108 R. M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, p. 240 New York: Bantam Books, 1974.

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It is this unconscious intellect that is responsible for “making equal what is

new”109 and which plans, selects and organizes which perceptions and

thoughts break into the domain of consciousness. Thus Nietzsche writes

“everything that enters consciousness as “unity” is already tremendously

complex”110 and the mistake of modern philosophy (e.g. Descartes) was to

treat the inner world as if it wasn’t phenomenal111. In contrast Nietzsche

maintains “the phenomenality of the inner world too”112 where

“Everything of which we become conscious is arranged, simplified, schematized, interpreted through and through − the actual process of inner “perception,” the causal connection between thoughts, feelings, desires, between subject and object, are absolutely hidden from us − and are perhaps purely imaginary”113. In such a picture “Sense-perception happens without our awareness:

whatever we become conscious”114 is already the result of “assimilation and

equalization in regard to all the past in us; they do not follow directly upon

the “impression” –”115 hinting of the role of our evolutionary past in

perception and against classical empiricism.

Moreover, our perceptions are species specific; we are aware only of those

perceptions the “becoming-conscious of which was useful and essential to

us and to the entire organic process—therefore not all perceptions in general

(e.g., not the electric)”116. The sharpness of our perceptions determine

difference and sameness; thus “the coarser organ sees much apparent

109 WP, 499 110 WP, 489 111 WP, 475 112 WP, 477 113 Ibid. 114 LN, n.34, section 30. 115 WP, 500 116 WP, 505

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equality”117 seeing something as one thing whereas with a microscope for

instance, you could be seeing two or more distinguishable “things”.

The species we belong and the senses we have, do not only determine the

schemes under which things appear to us in space, but also affect the

temporal aspects of experience, our “tempo at which observation and

comparison are possible”118. Nietzsche, in accordance with his naturalism,

grounds these thoughts on temporality on a lecture he attended by the

scientist Karl Ernst von Bär119 who claimed that the rates of sensation and of

voluntary movements, thus of conscious life, appear among various animals

to be approximately proportional to their pulse rates120. Different animals

have different pulse rates and hence different rates of sensations. If our rate

of sensations were slower we would “consider the grass and flowers to be

something just as absolute and persistent as we now consider the

mountains”121; if it were faster “a mushroom would suddenly sprout up like

a fountain […] day and night would alternate like light and shadows in but a

moment”122. Our biological make-up largely determines the way we carve

the world. Our divisions into “processes” and “things” are not necessary; if

we had a different make-up some “processes” would look like “things” 117 WP, 511 118 WP, 568 119 German-Russian (1792-1876) embryologist who held a professorship at the University of Königsberg from 1817 to 1834, considered a founder of embryology and comparative embryology. From footnote #35 in p.60 of G. Whitlock’s translation of Nietzsche’s Pre-PlatonicPhilosophers (lectures given in the University of Basel from 1872 to 1876; distinct from the other lectures on Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks), Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001. 120 Ibid (Pre-Platonic Philosophers), p.60. 121 Ibid., p.61 122 Ibid. The same idea is found in Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, book 2, ch.XXIII, §12. (p.302-3 in P.H. Nidditch’s unabridged edition of the Essay, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975)

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while some “things” would look like “processes”. This is why it makes little

sense for Nietzsche to talk of “absolute persistence”.

What is left for consciousness to do in such a picture? Since it is absent in

most of our processes and in most animals around us, why is it there?

3. Language

A. Language and the Emergence of Consciousness

Nietzsche sounds contemporary when he asks:

On the “genius of the species.”— The problem of consciousness (more precisely, of becoming conscious of something) confronts us only when we begin to comprehend how we could dispense with it; and now physiology and the history of animals place us at the beginning of such comprehension (it took them two centuries to catch up with Leibniz’s [123] suspicion which soared ahead). For we could think, feel, will, and remember, and we could also "act" in every sense of that word, and yet none of all this would have to "enter our consciousness" (as one says metaphorically). The whole of life would be possible without, as it were, seeing itself in a mirror. Even now, for that matter, by far the greatest portion of our life actually takes place without this mirror effect; and this is true even of our thinking, feeling, and willing life, however offensive this may sound to older philosophers. For what purpose, then, any consciousness at all when it is in the main superfluous?124 Which is reminiscent of David Chalmers’s “Hard Problem of

Consciousness”125. Many aspects of our conscious experiences (the

integration of information by a cognitive system; the reportability of mental

states; the ability of a system to access its own internal states; the focus of

attention; the deliberate control of behaviour; the difference between

wakefulness and sleep) “are suited to reductive physicalist explanation

precisely because they are “functionally defined”, and thus can be

123 GS, 357: “Leibniz’s incomparable insight that has been vindicated not only against Descartes but against everybody who had philosophized before him –that consciousness is merely an accidens [accidental property] of experience and not its necessary and essential attribute; that, in other words, what we call consciousness constitutes only one state of our spiritual and psychic world (perhaps a pathological state) and not by any means the whole of it.” 124 GS, 354 125 D. Chalmers, Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness in Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol. 2 no. 3, 1995, p. 200-219.

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straightforwardly accounted for in terms of physical mechanisms capable of

performing these functions”126. This vindicates Nietzsche’s earlier

hypothesis that appealing to consciousness in order to explain certain

cognitive phenomena could in the future become redundant127. However, the

“hard” problem that remains is:

Even after we have explicated cognitive functions in terms of physical mechanisms, we still have the following question: “Why are these functions accompanied by experience?”[…] To put it vividly, if we could write a big book, which listed all the various complex functions involved in human/animal behaviour, and explicated them in terms of physical mechanisms, such a book would not explain why such creatures have conscious experience. Indeed it would not even have to make reference to consciousness. Such a book would contain only blueprints for complex automata.128 It would be anachronistic to try to see Nietzsche as trying to solve the

“hard” problem of consciousness. However, the hypothesis he puts forward

as an answer to his question in GS 354, may shed some light as to why

consciousness emerged and why it is not superfluous:

[I]t seems to me as if the subtlety and strength of consciousness always were proportionate to a man's (or animal's) capacity for communication, and as if this capacity in turn were proportionate to the need for communication. But this last point is not to be understood as if the individual human being who happens to be a master in communicating and making understandable his needs must also be most dependent on others in his needs. But it does seem to me as if it were that way when we consider whole races and chains of generations: Where need and distress have forced men for a long time to communicate and to understand each other quickly and subtly, the ultimate result is an excess of this strength and art of communication—as it were, a capacity that has gradually been accumulated129 It is interesting that most (if not all) of the non-human animals that we

would be willing to credit with some form of self-consciousness (primates,

126 P. Goff, The Even Harder Problem of Consciousness, p.2, presented at the Graduate Seminars, at the University of Reading, Spring Term, 2003. For Goff the problem is even harder because he does not think that any of the solutions proposed by Chalmers can account for why conscious experiences and functional states are so perfectly matched. As he says in page 6: “once we have logically and metaphysically separated consciousness and functioning, it becomes very difficult to explain why in every single case they interact so harmoniously.” 127 See start of WP, 676 128 P. Goff, The Even Harder Problem of Consciousness, p.3 129 GS, 354

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dolphins, whales) possess a capacity for communication and live in groups

with complex social structures. Nietzsche goes on to stress the importance

of the social nature of language and consciousness:

Supposing that this observation is correct, I may now proceed to the surmise that consciousness has developed only under the pressure of the need for communication; that from the start it was needed and useful only between human beings (particularly between those who commanded and those who obeyed); and that it also developed only in proportion to the degree of this utility. Consciousness is really only a net of communication between human beings; it is only as such that it had to develop; a solitary human being who lived like a beast of prey would not have needed it. That our actions, thoughts, feelings, and movements enter our own consciousness—at least a part of them—that is the result of a "must" that for a terribly long time lorded it over man. As the most endangered animal, he needed help and protection, he needed his peers, he had to learn to express his distress and to make himself understood; and for all of this he needed "consciousness" first of all, he needed to "know" himself; what distressed him, he needed to "know" how he felt, he needed to "know" what he thought. For, to say it once more; Man, like every living being, thinks continually without knowing it; the thinking that rises to consciousness is only the smallest part of all this—the most superficial and worst part—for only this conscious thinking takes the form of words, which is to say signs of communication, and this fact uncovers the origin of consciousness.130 The fact that conscious thinking takes the form of words is for Nietzsche the

indication that “the development of language and the development of

consciousness (not of reason but merely of the way reason enters

consciousness[131]) go hand in hand.”132

To turn to an empirical example regarding the connection between

consciousness and language, we should examine the case of Helen Keller133,

who at the age of two due to a disease became blind, deaf and after a while

mute. Through the efforts of her teacher Anne M. Sullivan she was able to

130 Ibid. 131 For the importance of this parenthetical note, see Schacht’s Nietzsche, p.287-290 132 GS, 354 133 1880-1968, American, born in Alabama. After acquiring language through the efforts of her teacher, Anne M. Sullivan, she went on to graduate from Radcliffe College. She published numerous books and articles in order to improve the conditions for the handicapped in the U.S. (from H. Keller’s autobiography, The Story of My Life (1903), p.iii, New York: Dover Publications, 1996)

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learn a tactile-based language. Here is how she describes her acquisition of

language:

Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects or acts by a certain blind natural impetus…I had a power of association…After repeatedly smelling rain and feeling the discomfort of wetness, I acted like those about me. I ran to shut the window. But that was not thought in any sense. It was the same kind of association that makes animals take shelter from the rain. When I learned the meaning of ‘I’ and ‘me’ and found that I was something, I began to think. Then consciousness first existed for me.134 There is much to be learned from this moving passage. The example of

Keller shows that acquiring a language doesn’t simply help us describe the

world – it puts us in it. Without a language we cannot “know” our desires,

we cannot “think” in “any sense”; we can’t see ourselves as causal agents.

However, there was something Keller could do without language: she could

make causal connections. Which means that she could group phenomena

into categories (rain, wetness = discomfort) and discern causal relationships

between them. It is this dependence of consciousness to language that

prompts Nietzsche to write that

The human being inventing signs is at the same time the human being who becomes ever more keenly conscious of himself. It was only as a social animal that man acquired self-consciousness − which he is still in the process of doing, more and more. […] Consciousness does not really belong to man's individual existence but rather to his social or herd nature; […] it has developed subtlety only insofar as this is required by social or herd utility. Consequently, given the best will in the world to understand ourselves as individually as possible, "to know ourselves," each of us will always succeed in becoming conscious only of what is not individual but "average." Our thoughts themselves are continually governed by the character of consciousness − by the "genius of the species" that commands it − and translated back into the perspective of the herd. […] This is the essence of phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand them: Owing to the nature of animal consciousness, the world of which we can become conscious is only a surface and sign-world, a world that is made common and meaner; whatever becomes conscious becomes by the same token shallow, thin, relatively stupid, general, sign, herd signal; all becoming conscious

134 As quoted in A. Musgrave, Common Sense, Science and Scepticism, p.67, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

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involves a great and thorough corruption, falsification, reduction to superficialities, and generalization.135

Now that we are better acquainted with Nietzsche’s thoughts on the

intellect, perception and the relations between consciousness and language

we have the necessary background to look at the metaphysics of language,

but before we do so, we’ll take a brief but close look on the origins of

language.

B. A Closer Look at the Origins of Language

Nietzsche belongs in a group of philosophers that see language as a social

practice (Wittgenstein, Dummett, McDowell, Burge), and this is reflected in

the way he thinks languages originated.

The origins of language according to A. Moles’s interpretation of

Nietzsche136, rests on certain innocuous assumptions as to the social

evolution of pre-historical times137. Nietzsche assumes that in primitive

times human beings originally lived in relatively small isolated groups. As

the populations increased, the contacts between them were more frequent

and essentially warlike. Small scale warfare between groups for territories

and resources broke out. As a consequence of this the groups decreased but

those that dominated became larger and stronger. The large numbers of

individuals within the group increased the magnitude of the warfare and

135 GS, 354 136 NPN, chapter 2. 137 Ibid., p. 46

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necessitated efficient ways to communicate more precise information within

each group138; this led to the development of languages.

I should remind the reader that this story is stitched together from various

sections scattered throughout his works, and I don’t believe it should be

taken very literally; neither do I think the outcome of the stitching process is

justified fully by the sections used by Moles139 (which I checked), but I felt I

had to include it for scholarly purposes and in order to make a point.

Nietzsche’s general critical project is not necessarily affected if his account

is historically inaccurate; language could as well have originated in another

scenario: over time the number of individuals in the groups that human

populations lived in increased in number. More numbers meant greater need

for food. We have evidence that such groups hunted in teams since this

made it easier for them to kill large prey or even drive whole herds over

cliffs with the assistance of fire. However, such practices required careful

co-ordination and hence necessitated communication between the hunters.

Gestures were important because they were silent means of communicating

thus useful when planning an ambush; while sounds were equally important

138 Ibid. 139 As an example, I invite the reader to read the beginning of p.42 in NPN until you reach endnote #2. Now this endnote in p. 343 cites BGE 257 as justifying what was written in the preceding sentences which were: “As the tempo, violence and subtlety of warlike encroachments grew greater, faster and more efficient ways of communicating more precise information within each group had to be developed. It was this, Nietzsche thinks, that led to the development of languages, and accounts for their growing ever more sophisticated.” However, BGE 257 has nothing to do with language – neither the word nor anything related to language is mentioned – the section deals with the origins of aristocratic societies and how they are related to the enhancement of man; in it, Nietzsche talks about “warlike encroachments” but he doesn’t link it to the origin of languages at all. It can’t be used to justify what Moles wants it to justify. However, he does cite an additional section in the Musarion edition (which I couldn’t find access to) of Nietzsche’s works for that specific point, which might do the job.

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since with a sound you can transmit a message from quite a distance without

the receiver facing you or you facing the receiver.

However, it doesn’t really matter which scenario proves more accurate for

Nietzsche’s critical project and here’s why: Two points are necessary for his

critique: 1) Languages originated from and within pragmatic, practical

circumstances 2) The rules of grammar we’ve inherited from natural

languages were preserved and passed on due to their practical function and

use rather than their philosophical merits. In order for Nietzsche’s position

to be critically affected, it would require a convincing theory about the

origin of languages that would not lend support to these points – a rather

difficult thing to achieve.

Filling in the rest of the story, Nietzsche believed that in order for part of

our actions, thoughts, feelings, and movements to enter our own

consciousness a “must” should have lorded over man for a terribly long

time140. This “must” could have ensued by the practical necessities of living

in ever-larger groups, which made communication indispensable. Common

needs pursued together in a common way of life over time increased the

efficiency of communication. Eventually certain conventions for objects,

commands, events, became standard. The functions of these conventions

might be similar in different groups (depending on the form of life of the

group employing them) though there is a certain arbitrariness in these

conventions as is demonstrated by the diversity of languages. 140 GS, 354

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C. Psychology and the Metaphysics of Language

Grammar, in establishing usage, makes legitimate and false divisions. For example, it divides verbs into transitive and intransitive. A man who really knows how to speak, however, often has to make a transitive verb intransitive so as to photograph what he feels instead of seeing it darkly, like the common lot of human animals. If I wish to say that I exist, I'll say, “I am.” If I wish to say I exist as a separate entity, I'll say, “I am myself.” But if I wish to say that I exist as an entity that addresses and acts on itself, exercising the divine function of self-creation, then must I not convert the verb to be into a transitive? And so, triumphantly and anti-grammatically supreme, I'll speak of “amming myself.” And in so doing I'll have stated a philosophy in two tiny words. Isn't this infinitely more preferable to saying nothing in forty sentences? What more can we demand from philosophy and diction?141 It was Nietzsche’s contention, before Wittgenstein, that grammar not only

bars certain possibilities of thinking, but may also mislead us into making

philosophical errors or metaphysical commitments. As it was with Piaget, so

it is with Wittgenstein142; he also shares a pertinent metaphor with

Nietzsche: “An entire mythology is stored within our language,”143 writes

Wittgenstein, “A philosophical mythology lies concealed in language,”144

writes Nietzsche. There is a common philosophical “mythology” between

philosophies of the Indo-European languages (anyone who is familiar with

Indian philosophies can readily see striking parallels between Indian and

Western metaphysics). Regardless of their diversity it seems that they “keep

filling in a definite fundamental scheme of possible philosophies. Under an

141 F. Pessoa, The Book of Disquietude, section 80, trans. R. Zenith, New York: The Sheep Meadow Press, 1996. 142 We know Wittgenstein had read Nietzsche. See p. 759 in G. Hallett's A Companion to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1977. Unfortunately, Hallet doesn’t say which of Nietzsche’s works Wittgenstein read, though he lists him under his “favourites”. 143 L. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, p.133, in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (edited by James C. Klagge, and Alfred Nordmann), Hackett, 1993. 144 HH, section 13, vol.2 part 2:“The Wanderer and his Shadow”.

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invisible spell, they always revolve once more in the same orbit”145 What

explains this peculiarity? For Nietzsche146 this

Strange family resemblances of all Indian, Greek, and German philosophising are 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; just as the way seems barred against certain other possibilities of world-interpretation.147

He even ponders later in the same section whether philosophers in the Ural-

Altaic languages, where the concept of the subject is least developed, might

travel different philosophical paths148.

Nietzsche thought that “owing to the unconscious domination and guidance

by similar grammatical functions” we are led to commit certain

philosophical errors. Nietzsche’s genealogical method is an attempt to

“reveal the source of error, otherwise hearing the truth won’t do any good”

but he doesn’t simply state these errors since “To convince someone of the

truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error

to truth.”149 In the first chapters, we have been building the background of

this path, or rather, the nature of the one who walks it (since who walks the

path determines how he shall walk it or if he’s able to walk at all) from now

on we shall try to walk it.

145 BGE, 20 146 Let me remind the reader that Nietzsche was a professional philologist – appointed to a full professor in Basel University only when he was only 24. 147 Ibid. 148 In the works of E. Shapir (1884-1939) and B. Whorf (1897-1941) one finds the relevant thesis that different linguistic communities carve the world differently. This point is also raised in p.154 in F. Waismann’s The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy (1965), 2nd edition, ed. R. Harré, London: Macmillan, 1997. 149 L. Wittgenstein, p.119 in Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, in Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (edited by James C. Klagge, and Alfred Nordmann), Hackett, 1993.

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It is at the juncture of a naïve phenomenology of our psychological

processes and language that we locate the main reason we tend to view the

world “through the schematism of “things””150. In TI Nietzsche claims that

“Language belongs in its origin on the age of the most rudimentary forms of

psychology: we find ourselves in the midst of a rude fetishism when we call

to mind the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language”151. The

most important presupposition is that “We believed ourselves to be causal

agents in the act of willing; we at least thought we were there catching

causality in the act.”152. In virtue of this psychological belief and the

essence of language to express relationships153, the grammatical distinction

between the deed and the doer was born.

This distinction by separating “what is being done from what is doing it […]

tends to transform the latter into a substantial entity”154. Nietzsche’s

favourite example155 is when we say “lightning flashes”. This makes the

flashing as if it is an activity of the lightning “But flashing is not separable

from lightning: lightning is the flashing”156. We just interpret events “in

accordance with the conclusion: ‘every change must have an author’”157

150 WP, 479 151 TI, ‘ “Reason” in Philosophy’, section 5. 152 TI, ‘The Four Great Errors’, section 3 (emphasis in the original). I have talked elsewhere on why it is wrong to see our will as cause (see my paper An Attempt at A Genealogy of Cause and Effect, http://www.geocities.com/gcecrops) , and will not discuss it here. 153 WP, 625. 154 NPN, p.53 155 Found in WP, 531 and GM, First Essay, section 13. 156 A. Danto in the chapter entitled: “Nietzsche”, p. 395, A Critical History of Western Philosophy, ed. D.J. O’Connor, The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964. 157 WP, 531

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Alexandros Pagidas

which has been petrified in the “unshakeable belief in the trinity of subject-

verb-predicate”158.

Alistair Moles is right to stress that Nietzsche does not necessarily speak of

the flash as perception. For if he did, our language could be right to

distinguish between the lightning (the discharge itself) as the cause of

perception and the flash as the phenomenal result of the discharge.159 What

Moles suggests is that Nietzsche is thinking of the flash as activity, and “the

tendency to reify this activity by predicating it of a substantial entity (The

subject of the verb “flashes”)”160. The general idea is that through language

“the conception of a non-active thing is imposed on the event”161 and the

world of activity is turned into the world of things162; the noun is given

higher value than the verb – nouns predicate verbs, not the other way

around163. Moreover, our language through the use of adjectives also

distinguishes between the “thing” and its qualities. Thus colours, textures

etc. are separated from the thing itself, and joined with other things in

generalized unities (e.g. “green”), giving adjectives a lower value than

nouns, since one can speak without adjectives yet one cannot speak without

nouns164. As the opening quote mentioned, our language also divides verbs

into transitive and intransitive, thus on top of the substantial entity it creates

158 M. Haar, Nietzsche and Metaphysics (1993), p.74, trans. M. Gendre, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. 159 NPN, p.53 160 Ibid. 161 Ibid. 162 See WP, 531. 163 Ibid. 164 Ibid.

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by the deed/doer distinction, it can also reify a “deed”. Like when you say “I

am cold” and strip the duration from the sensation. Thus, language

encourages the world (and metaphysics) of “being” rather than the world of

becoming.

The substantial entity that results from our belief in the will as cause and its

grammatical equivalent, has had different names in the history of

philosophy: ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, ‘mind’, ‘ego’, ‘subject’. The substantiality of the

ego is aided by memory, which leads us to think that behind the multiplicity

of change something remains the same; in memory “lies the chief temptation

to assume a “soul,” which, outside time, reproduces, recognizes, etc.”165

It is at this point that we should remind ourselves of what we discussed

about the nature of knowing and analogical extrapolation. For unlike Piaget

who “underestimated the importance of social interaction and language in

cognitive development”166 for Nietzsche language was essential in the

development of cognition and consciousness, Keller’s case illustrating our

point. For Nietzsche the ‘subject’ and the grammatical distinction of the

‘doer and the deed’ serves as the quintessential cognitive schema. That was

the “familiar idea” with which new phenomena were to be understood.

Through analogically extrapolating the concept of the subject we created the

concept of “substance”: “The concept of substance is a consequence of the

165 WP, 502 166 A. Gopnik, “Jean Piaget” (source cited)

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concept of the subject: not the reverse!”167 Or again in another section: “It is

only after the model of the subject that we have invented the reality of

things and projected them into the medley of sensations.”168 Since the

“subject” was the category upon which future interpretations were based;

characteristics thought to belong to the subject (unity, identity, duration,

substance, causal powers, being) even though they come from naïve

observations of subjectivity, got transferred to objects. A phenomenon also

observed also by Whorf:

When speakers attempt to interpret an experience in terms of a category available in their language they automatically involve the other meanings implicit in that particular category (analogy) and in the overall configuration of categories in which it is embedded. And speakers regard these other meanings as being intrinsic to the original experience rather than a product of linguistic analogy. Thus, language does not so much blind speakers to some obvious reality, but rather it suggests associations which are not necessarily entailed by experience.169 According to Nietzsche, one of these associations which was suggested to

all further experiences was that of intention:

I notice something and seek a reason for it; this means originally: I seek an intention in it, and above all someone who has intentions, a subject, a doer: every event a deed—formerly one saw intentions in all events, this is our oldest habit.170 The reason “the question “why?” is always a question after the causa

finalis171, after the “what for?””172 is because “man believed for immense

periods of time, only in persons (and not substances, forces, things and so

forth)”173 an observatio