Simply Nietzsche, page 7
One should try to turn oneself into some art object, giving a formal unity to everything that constitutes oneself. But if this really is one thing that is “needful,” how does it square with what we said about amor fati? That doctrine invited us to affirm everything about our life. Superficially, giving style to one’s character seems to be motivated by a desire to change something about one’s self, which seems at odds with affirming everything about one’s life. One way to resolve this tension is to see the notion of “giving style to one’s character” not as a matter of changing anything that constitutes yourself, but instead giving it an artistic interpretation of all the facts, be they good or bad, which jointly constitute one’s self. Nothing about you changes, except a shift in the attitudes one has toward those facts. This, in turn, will tell us a little more about what it is to “affirm” one’s life. One can offer a pleasing interpretation of one’s self and its interconnecting parts.
But a little reflection shows that this reconciliation of amorfati with giving style to one’s character doesn’t really work. One thing to note is when Nietzsche asked us to “affirm” things by wishing for their eternal recurrence, he prompted us to affirm not only facts about ourselves but every trivial fact, including “this spider and this moonlight between the trees” (GS 341). It is difficult to see how these facts can fit into an “artistic interpretation” of one’s self. Second, in the passages about eternal recurrence, amorfati, and affirmation, the implication is that what we affirm involves fully recognizing that what one affirms is indeed something ugly, awful, or undesirable. It is facing up to the terrible truth and yet still affirming it. But in “giving style” to one’s character, Nietzsche suggested that what we cannot remove, we must somehow conceal or at least make beautiful.
There is a further problem with the idea of giving style to one’s character, a problem similar to the one I picked up on when discussing amor fati. The injunction to “give style to one’s character” seems an injunction to do something. We should try to change, or at least artistically reinterpret, our character. But as I noted about amor fati, Nietzsche thought of us as “pieces of fate.” Recall that for him, a person is nothing but a collection of different, interacting, drives. No agent or self stands above, and is in control of, drives; instead, there are competing drives, with some drives overcoming others. Just as I asked regarding affirmation, how could “I” be said to “do” anything called “affirming, in what sense could “I do” anything to give style to my character?
The beginnings of an answer are given a little later in a section entitled “Long live physics!” (GS 335). Its title might seem initially puzzling since this passage starts with a question about self-knowledge, a topic that seems a million miles away from physics. We think we have self-knowledge in the sense that we think we know directly what we are thinking, what we are intending to do, what we want, etc. We can just “tell” all that through our own consciousness. But this is, at best, a surface. Any judgments or intentions have “a prehistory in your drives, inclinations, aversions, experiences,” none of which needs to be knowable through consciousness. What guides us in thought and action is not consciousness but “opinions, valuations, and tables”—drives—“most powerful levers in the machinery of our actions,” which remain “unknowable” and “impenetrable.” This claim prompted two thoughts for Nietzsche. First is that we should leave such “chatter” behind and not take our consciousness to reveal what causes us to act. Second, we should limit “ourselves to the purification of our opinions and value judgments and to the creation of tables of what is good that are new and all our own.” Further, we want “to become who we are—human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves!” This brings us back to the territory of “giving style to one’s character,” and in a way that seems to exacerbate the problem at hand: how one could do anything to give style to one’s character when one is a “piece of fate.” Here Nietzsche talked about human beings creating themselves, which seems an impossible feat. Surely, creation is not only something we do, hence raising the piece of fate problem, but we need to exist already to create “ourselves.” To compound that puzzle, Nietzsche posited that we must “become who we are.” If we “are” already, what sense is there to “becoming” what we already are?
I will postpone the discussion of “self-creation” and “becoming what one is” until a later chapter, focusing right now on the pieces of fate puzzle. Finally, in the section entitled “Long live physics!” Nietzsche got to physics. To achieve the goal of creation, we must “become … discovers of everything lawful and necessary in the world: we must become physicists … hitherto all valuations and ideals have been built of ignorance of physics or in contradiction to it.” This suggests that changing ourselves—creating new values and giving style to our character—is not something we do directly. We do so by learning about ourselves as natural objects placed in an environment, subject to natural laws and causes; changes in ourselves—in our drives—must be affected in physical ways. Nietzsche often talked of physiology and diet as determining a person’s values and behavior, and so changes in the person are physical. Given that consciousness doesn’t reveal the drives to us, then to “survey all [one’s] strengths and weaknesses” involves trying to figure out what one’s drives are by considering one’s history and environment rather than one’s conscious thoughts. Still, one might say: “although I don’t ‘give style’ to my character directly, but only doing so by trying to affect my most unconscious drives by changing the environment in which I am placed, am I still not doing something.” The “pieces of fate” problem still seems to be there, as does the puzzling claims about “creating one’s self” and “becoming what you are.” The matter runs rather deep, and, as we shall see in later chapters, Nietzsche’s radical view of ourselves runs just as deep.
Nietzsche’s Bible
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
In a letter to Paul Deussen from November 1888, Nietzsche wrote that Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Z) would be “the foremost book of the millennia, the bible of the future.” No doubt Z is his most famous work, one, as I mentioned, which was distributed among German soldiers during World War I. Nietzsche referred to Z frequently in his subsequent writings, and devoted a lengthy discussion of it in Ecce Homo. The work was influential in countless ways. It inspired, for example, Richard Strauss’s tone poem, Also Sprach Zarathustra, a piece of music now more associated with Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey than it is with Nietzsche. Similarly, Gustav Mahler found musical inspiration in the work. It also fascinated Carl Gustav Jung, influencing his school of psychoanalysis. Paradoxically, Z influenced both the Nazi and the Zionist movement. It is sometimes described as “philosophical novel,” not a bad description, but one that doesn’t quite capture the florid nature of the prose, or the fact that much of it is a collection of speeches, sometimes shrill enough to test one’s tolerance; it always ends with the triplet “Thus spoke Zarathustra” or, occasionally, musical mode—songs which also end with “Thus sang Zarathustra.” It is replete with animal imagery, with different creatures standing as symbols for various aspects of human character traits. It is quite unlike any of Nietzsche’s other works, and certainly, nothing like it exists in the canon of Western philosophy. Nietzsche himself variously conceived of it—not only as his “bible,” but also as a “symphony” or as “poetry.” The invocation of Zarathustra as its principal character, whose name derives from the Persian prophet of Zoroastrianism, obviously reinforces the religious connotations of the work.
Though Z is his most famous work, its centrality to philosophically-minded readers of Nietzsche has diminished. Certainly, when serious Nietzsche scholarship was in its infancy in the English-speaking world, Zarathustra commanded the most attention. Walter Kauffman, a Princeton scholar to whom English-speaking scholarship owes a great debt, edited an influential collection of Nietzsche’s works entitled The Portable Nietzsche, a volume that contained snippets from some of the philosopher’s works and complete translations of only four of his books, one of which was Thus Spoke Zarathustra (the others being Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist and Nietzsche Contra Wagner). It is exceedingly unlikely that a collection commissioned from a philosophically-minded editor these days would have this distribution of texts. At the very least, the Genealogy, perhaps Nietzsche’s greatest work, would have to be included in its entirety, together with much more material from Beyond Good and Evil, The Gay Science, and Daybreak than Kaufmann provided. These works, though far from being dull and academic (in the bad sense of the word “academic”), contain far more subtle and nuanced presentations of Nietzsche’s thought than the melodrama of Zarathustra. Z certainly engages and excites readers (and, one must add, also puts some readers off), but its success obscures his other works from which, philosophically speaking, there is more to be learned.
It was also written at a time of personal crisis for Nietzsche. The Lou Salomé affair completely devastated him. He felt Paul Reé had betrayed him, and drafted an abusive letter to him, as well as one to Reé’s brother Georg, lambasting both Paul and Lou. Nietzsche’s sister was herself sending abusive letters or, rather, one long letter to Reé’s mother attacking both Paul and Lou. Now, according to Nietzsche’s most recent and authoritative biographer, Julian Young, Nietzsche’s volatile feelings towards Lou were also mixed with a suspicion of his sister’s own motives. He began to think she was stoking his volatile feelings but only to get him to express Elisabeth’s own resentment, rather than Nietzsche’s ideal of love. But the whole affair and the intensity of his feelings for Lou and/or his suspicion of his sister left a mark on the views of women Nietzsche expressed in Z. Prior to the Salomé affair, Nietzsche’s remarks on women had, for that period in history, been rather liberal. In Part I of Z, there is a section entitled “On little women, Old and Young,” in which Nietzsche expressed some very different, and rather less palatable, thoughts about women. Zarathustra, for example, declares that women see men only as a means to children. Even the sweetest woman is bitter. The happiest man is one who wills; the happiest woman is one who obeys his will. Women are all so superficial; they are just shallow creatures of appearance. Most notoriously, the text contains the line, “You go to women? Don’t forget the whip!” This line is often discussed in conjunction with a famous photograph of Nietzsche, Reé, and Salomé taken in 1882, which depicts Nietzsche and Reé in the place of horses on a cart, and Salomé inside the cart holding a whip. But since Salomé is holding the whip, it is very difficult to see what is the connection between the line in Z and the photograph. There is a consensus that the photograph is an allusion to Wagner’s character Frika, who is represented in a carriage holding a whip while her husband is where the horse should be. None of this takes the sting out of what is said in Z about going to women with a whip. Nor does the fact that it is the old woman who says it to Zarathustra, rather than the other way around. It is difficult not to see such remarks as anything other than Nietzsche’s bitterness at Lou and Elisabeth.
More on Zarathustra
Thus Spoke Zarathustra comprises a prologue and four parts. The first two parts were published in 1883, and the third in 1884. Part 4 was completed the next year, but only 45 copies were printed for private circulation, an inauspicious end to the writing of what would be his most famous work. I mentioned in the previous chapter that in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche stated that the “basic idea” of Zarathustra is “the thought of the eternal return.” We shall come to that, but there is another connection to The Gay Science. If the madman of The Gay Science is Nietzsche, so too is the character of Zarathustra. This is to say that Zarathustra is Nietzsche and the madman. Zarathustra descends from his solitude in the mountains, the same way Nietzsche came down to the marketplace from his room in Sils Maria. On the way, he encounters a saint, and Zarathustra is surprised to learn that the saint has yet to hear of the death of God. Like the madman, Zarathustra proclaims the death of God in the marketplace, but this time instead of his single lantern, Zarathustra claims a different source of illumination or meaning—the Übermensch. This is a term that used to be translated as “superman,” but I will stick to the now commonly accepted “Overman” “I teach you the Overman,” Zarathustra declares. But what is the “Overman?”
The first clue lies in the fact that when Zarathustra mentions the Overman, he also states that “man is something that should be overcome.” The Overman is something that corrects some flaw or deficiency in human beings as they are now. What concerned the madman of The Gay Science was that the death of God leads inexorably to the loss of an overall meaning for, or interpretation of, human existence. The Overman is supposed to embody a new meaning for human existence. In an attempt to see what content that might have, let us work back from what Nietzsche took to be the flaw or deficiency in human nature that the Overman is supposed to overcome. This deficiency is exemplified by a figure Zarathustra refers to as “the last man,” who is supposed to be the inevitable outcome of humanity without meaning, and who is “the most despicable figure.” The last man is the inventor of “happiness,” meaning a certain docile contentment and freedom from suffering. But this “happiness” is an aimless state of existence. “What is a star?” asks the last man. “What is creation? What is longing?” Without a guiding sense of purpose or meaning, humanity is reduced to the level of a herd of docile animals, avoiding discomfort. So, somehow, the Overman is supposed to offer an alternative interpretation of human existence. But how? It is not that the Overman preaches a substantial overarching meaning for human nature, as Christianity does. It is rather that the Overman is one that possesses an aim or goal which shapes and directs their lives, and that involves, necessarily, discontentment with circumstances and life. “I love,” Zarathustra says, “the great despisers because they are great reverers and arrows of longing.” It is not that there is a single meaning for every human being, but rather that there is something about human nature which means that humanity must have some aim or goal, and also must be discontented to be motivated to pursue it.
To understand what that might mean, we need to see what, in Nietzsche’s view, made such a human being possible. In Part II of Z, in the section entitled “Of Self-Overcoming,” Nietzsche introduced one of his most infamous doctrines, namely that of the “will to power.” Human nature can be overcome, and so there can be overmen because human nature embodies this “will to power.” To understand the Overman, then, we need to understand the will to power. Unfortunately, Nietzsche’s treatment of the most famous doctrine in his most famous work is much too brief and metaphorical, and this is one of the many reasons Z is not philosophically rich. Zarathustra purports to offer us his insight into “life and the nature of all that lives,” and that insight is the claim that all life consists in relations of “obeying” and “commanding.” There is no basic “will to life,” but where there is life, there is will to power. Zarathustra claims that this “secret life,” i.e., the claim that behind all life are the relations of obeying and commanding, spoke to him. It said, “Behold! I am that which must always overcome itself.” What are we to make of all this?
Recall that in Chapter 2, I introduced the notion of a “drive” briefly, and I said that Nietzsche’s use of “drive,” which he discussed in his unpublished notes, was inspired by the biology and psychology of his day. Taking “life” to be a biological category, Nietzsche’s references to life can be understood as references to the drives that are the building blocks of living creatures, including human beings. Humans are compositions of drives, and drives are causal tendencies grounded in physiology. Drives are said to “aim” at things, and “value” things, but such language needn’t be taken to mean that drives are conscious agents or human-like creatures. Instead, we can think of them as causal tendencies favored by natural selection. So, for example, one can say that trees grow tall because they want to reach the light as shorthand for a particular causal tendency that natural selection has favored, and which contributes to the flourishing of trees. Drives are causal tendencies which we may, therefore, speak of as “aiming” for things. But there is a further feature of Nietzsche’s discussion of drives in his notebooks, which is directly relevant to our concerns. All drives exhibit the “will to power,” he posited, adding that “every drive is a kind of lust for domination,” involving “[a]ppropriation and incorporation, [which] is above all a willing to overwhelm, a forming, shaping and reshaping until the overwhelmed has gone completely over into the power of the attacker.” Drives “command” and “obey” each other. Now, words “lust,” “command,” “obey,” and, above all, “will,” seem to reopen the worry that drives are nothing but tiny agents or people. But, again, this worry can be dispelled. We can understand that drive has a “lust for domination” in the sense that it is a causal tendency to produce its effect to a maximal degree, and will meet causal resistance from other drives. Since there is a conflict in the causal tendencies, there will be a “struggle” among drives. Think, for example, of weeds in a garden. They are compositions of drives, and the growth exhibits not merely the production of healthy plants, but also ones that sap all resources from, and smother, all other plants. The biological thesis prevalent when Nietzsche was writing, held that survival is not merely the result of adaption of the organism to its environment, but also the outcome of the strength of the causal dispositions placed in that environment. Weeds, for instance, “overcome” other plants. Inspired by this particular biological view, Nietzsche regarded all our drives to be tendencies to maximize their effects; that means that there will be causal resistances which those drives “seek to overcome.” The “will to power” is not separate from the drives but a fact about the nature of all drives.
But a little reflection shows that this reconciliation of amorfati with giving style to one’s character doesn’t really work. One thing to note is when Nietzsche asked us to “affirm” things by wishing for their eternal recurrence, he prompted us to affirm not only facts about ourselves but every trivial fact, including “this spider and this moonlight between the trees” (GS 341). It is difficult to see how these facts can fit into an “artistic interpretation” of one’s self. Second, in the passages about eternal recurrence, amorfati, and affirmation, the implication is that what we affirm involves fully recognizing that what one affirms is indeed something ugly, awful, or undesirable. It is facing up to the terrible truth and yet still affirming it. But in “giving style” to one’s character, Nietzsche suggested that what we cannot remove, we must somehow conceal or at least make beautiful.
There is a further problem with the idea of giving style to one’s character, a problem similar to the one I picked up on when discussing amor fati. The injunction to “give style to one’s character” seems an injunction to do something. We should try to change, or at least artistically reinterpret, our character. But as I noted about amor fati, Nietzsche thought of us as “pieces of fate.” Recall that for him, a person is nothing but a collection of different, interacting, drives. No agent or self stands above, and is in control of, drives; instead, there are competing drives, with some drives overcoming others. Just as I asked regarding affirmation, how could “I” be said to “do” anything called “affirming, in what sense could “I do” anything to give style to my character?
The beginnings of an answer are given a little later in a section entitled “Long live physics!” (GS 335). Its title might seem initially puzzling since this passage starts with a question about self-knowledge, a topic that seems a million miles away from physics. We think we have self-knowledge in the sense that we think we know directly what we are thinking, what we are intending to do, what we want, etc. We can just “tell” all that through our own consciousness. But this is, at best, a surface. Any judgments or intentions have “a prehistory in your drives, inclinations, aversions, experiences,” none of which needs to be knowable through consciousness. What guides us in thought and action is not consciousness but “opinions, valuations, and tables”—drives—“most powerful levers in the machinery of our actions,” which remain “unknowable” and “impenetrable.” This claim prompted two thoughts for Nietzsche. First is that we should leave such “chatter” behind and not take our consciousness to reveal what causes us to act. Second, we should limit “ourselves to the purification of our opinions and value judgments and to the creation of tables of what is good that are new and all our own.” Further, we want “to become who we are—human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves!” This brings us back to the territory of “giving style to one’s character,” and in a way that seems to exacerbate the problem at hand: how one could do anything to give style to one’s character when one is a “piece of fate.” Here Nietzsche talked about human beings creating themselves, which seems an impossible feat. Surely, creation is not only something we do, hence raising the piece of fate problem, but we need to exist already to create “ourselves.” To compound that puzzle, Nietzsche posited that we must “become who we are.” If we “are” already, what sense is there to “becoming” what we already are?
I will postpone the discussion of “self-creation” and “becoming what one is” until a later chapter, focusing right now on the pieces of fate puzzle. Finally, in the section entitled “Long live physics!” Nietzsche got to physics. To achieve the goal of creation, we must “become … discovers of everything lawful and necessary in the world: we must become physicists … hitherto all valuations and ideals have been built of ignorance of physics or in contradiction to it.” This suggests that changing ourselves—creating new values and giving style to our character—is not something we do directly. We do so by learning about ourselves as natural objects placed in an environment, subject to natural laws and causes; changes in ourselves—in our drives—must be affected in physical ways. Nietzsche often talked of physiology and diet as determining a person’s values and behavior, and so changes in the person are physical. Given that consciousness doesn’t reveal the drives to us, then to “survey all [one’s] strengths and weaknesses” involves trying to figure out what one’s drives are by considering one’s history and environment rather than one’s conscious thoughts. Still, one might say: “although I don’t ‘give style’ to my character directly, but only doing so by trying to affect my most unconscious drives by changing the environment in which I am placed, am I still not doing something.” The “pieces of fate” problem still seems to be there, as does the puzzling claims about “creating one’s self” and “becoming what you are.” The matter runs rather deep, and, as we shall see in later chapters, Nietzsche’s radical view of ourselves runs just as deep.
Nietzsche’s Bible
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
In a letter to Paul Deussen from November 1888, Nietzsche wrote that Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Z) would be “the foremost book of the millennia, the bible of the future.” No doubt Z is his most famous work, one, as I mentioned, which was distributed among German soldiers during World War I. Nietzsche referred to Z frequently in his subsequent writings, and devoted a lengthy discussion of it in Ecce Homo. The work was influential in countless ways. It inspired, for example, Richard Strauss’s tone poem, Also Sprach Zarathustra, a piece of music now more associated with Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey than it is with Nietzsche. Similarly, Gustav Mahler found musical inspiration in the work. It also fascinated Carl Gustav Jung, influencing his school of psychoanalysis. Paradoxically, Z influenced both the Nazi and the Zionist movement. It is sometimes described as “philosophical novel,” not a bad description, but one that doesn’t quite capture the florid nature of the prose, or the fact that much of it is a collection of speeches, sometimes shrill enough to test one’s tolerance; it always ends with the triplet “Thus spoke Zarathustra” or, occasionally, musical mode—songs which also end with “Thus sang Zarathustra.” It is replete with animal imagery, with different creatures standing as symbols for various aspects of human character traits. It is quite unlike any of Nietzsche’s other works, and certainly, nothing like it exists in the canon of Western philosophy. Nietzsche himself variously conceived of it—not only as his “bible,” but also as a “symphony” or as “poetry.” The invocation of Zarathustra as its principal character, whose name derives from the Persian prophet of Zoroastrianism, obviously reinforces the religious connotations of the work.
Though Z is his most famous work, its centrality to philosophically-minded readers of Nietzsche has diminished. Certainly, when serious Nietzsche scholarship was in its infancy in the English-speaking world, Zarathustra commanded the most attention. Walter Kauffman, a Princeton scholar to whom English-speaking scholarship owes a great debt, edited an influential collection of Nietzsche’s works entitled The Portable Nietzsche, a volume that contained snippets from some of the philosopher’s works and complete translations of only four of his books, one of which was Thus Spoke Zarathustra (the others being Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist and Nietzsche Contra Wagner). It is exceedingly unlikely that a collection commissioned from a philosophically-minded editor these days would have this distribution of texts. At the very least, the Genealogy, perhaps Nietzsche’s greatest work, would have to be included in its entirety, together with much more material from Beyond Good and Evil, The Gay Science, and Daybreak than Kaufmann provided. These works, though far from being dull and academic (in the bad sense of the word “academic”), contain far more subtle and nuanced presentations of Nietzsche’s thought than the melodrama of Zarathustra. Z certainly engages and excites readers (and, one must add, also puts some readers off), but its success obscures his other works from which, philosophically speaking, there is more to be learned.
It was also written at a time of personal crisis for Nietzsche. The Lou Salomé affair completely devastated him. He felt Paul Reé had betrayed him, and drafted an abusive letter to him, as well as one to Reé’s brother Georg, lambasting both Paul and Lou. Nietzsche’s sister was herself sending abusive letters or, rather, one long letter to Reé’s mother attacking both Paul and Lou. Now, according to Nietzsche’s most recent and authoritative biographer, Julian Young, Nietzsche’s volatile feelings towards Lou were also mixed with a suspicion of his sister’s own motives. He began to think she was stoking his volatile feelings but only to get him to express Elisabeth’s own resentment, rather than Nietzsche’s ideal of love. But the whole affair and the intensity of his feelings for Lou and/or his suspicion of his sister left a mark on the views of women Nietzsche expressed in Z. Prior to the Salomé affair, Nietzsche’s remarks on women had, for that period in history, been rather liberal. In Part I of Z, there is a section entitled “On little women, Old and Young,” in which Nietzsche expressed some very different, and rather less palatable, thoughts about women. Zarathustra, for example, declares that women see men only as a means to children. Even the sweetest woman is bitter. The happiest man is one who wills; the happiest woman is one who obeys his will. Women are all so superficial; they are just shallow creatures of appearance. Most notoriously, the text contains the line, “You go to women? Don’t forget the whip!” This line is often discussed in conjunction with a famous photograph of Nietzsche, Reé, and Salomé taken in 1882, which depicts Nietzsche and Reé in the place of horses on a cart, and Salomé inside the cart holding a whip. But since Salomé is holding the whip, it is very difficult to see what is the connection between the line in Z and the photograph. There is a consensus that the photograph is an allusion to Wagner’s character Frika, who is represented in a carriage holding a whip while her husband is where the horse should be. None of this takes the sting out of what is said in Z about going to women with a whip. Nor does the fact that it is the old woman who says it to Zarathustra, rather than the other way around. It is difficult not to see such remarks as anything other than Nietzsche’s bitterness at Lou and Elisabeth.
More on Zarathustra
Thus Spoke Zarathustra comprises a prologue and four parts. The first two parts were published in 1883, and the third in 1884. Part 4 was completed the next year, but only 45 copies were printed for private circulation, an inauspicious end to the writing of what would be his most famous work. I mentioned in the previous chapter that in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche stated that the “basic idea” of Zarathustra is “the thought of the eternal return.” We shall come to that, but there is another connection to The Gay Science. If the madman of The Gay Science is Nietzsche, so too is the character of Zarathustra. This is to say that Zarathustra is Nietzsche and the madman. Zarathustra descends from his solitude in the mountains, the same way Nietzsche came down to the marketplace from his room in Sils Maria. On the way, he encounters a saint, and Zarathustra is surprised to learn that the saint has yet to hear of the death of God. Like the madman, Zarathustra proclaims the death of God in the marketplace, but this time instead of his single lantern, Zarathustra claims a different source of illumination or meaning—the Übermensch. This is a term that used to be translated as “superman,” but I will stick to the now commonly accepted “Overman” “I teach you the Overman,” Zarathustra declares. But what is the “Overman?”
The first clue lies in the fact that when Zarathustra mentions the Overman, he also states that “man is something that should be overcome.” The Overman is something that corrects some flaw or deficiency in human beings as they are now. What concerned the madman of The Gay Science was that the death of God leads inexorably to the loss of an overall meaning for, or interpretation of, human existence. The Overman is supposed to embody a new meaning for human existence. In an attempt to see what content that might have, let us work back from what Nietzsche took to be the flaw or deficiency in human nature that the Overman is supposed to overcome. This deficiency is exemplified by a figure Zarathustra refers to as “the last man,” who is supposed to be the inevitable outcome of humanity without meaning, and who is “the most despicable figure.” The last man is the inventor of “happiness,” meaning a certain docile contentment and freedom from suffering. But this “happiness” is an aimless state of existence. “What is a star?” asks the last man. “What is creation? What is longing?” Without a guiding sense of purpose or meaning, humanity is reduced to the level of a herd of docile animals, avoiding discomfort. So, somehow, the Overman is supposed to offer an alternative interpretation of human existence. But how? It is not that the Overman preaches a substantial overarching meaning for human nature, as Christianity does. It is rather that the Overman is one that possesses an aim or goal which shapes and directs their lives, and that involves, necessarily, discontentment with circumstances and life. “I love,” Zarathustra says, “the great despisers because they are great reverers and arrows of longing.” It is not that there is a single meaning for every human being, but rather that there is something about human nature which means that humanity must have some aim or goal, and also must be discontented to be motivated to pursue it.
To understand what that might mean, we need to see what, in Nietzsche’s view, made such a human being possible. In Part II of Z, in the section entitled “Of Self-Overcoming,” Nietzsche introduced one of his most infamous doctrines, namely that of the “will to power.” Human nature can be overcome, and so there can be overmen because human nature embodies this “will to power.” To understand the Overman, then, we need to understand the will to power. Unfortunately, Nietzsche’s treatment of the most famous doctrine in his most famous work is much too brief and metaphorical, and this is one of the many reasons Z is not philosophically rich. Zarathustra purports to offer us his insight into “life and the nature of all that lives,” and that insight is the claim that all life consists in relations of “obeying” and “commanding.” There is no basic “will to life,” but where there is life, there is will to power. Zarathustra claims that this “secret life,” i.e., the claim that behind all life are the relations of obeying and commanding, spoke to him. It said, “Behold! I am that which must always overcome itself.” What are we to make of all this?
Recall that in Chapter 2, I introduced the notion of a “drive” briefly, and I said that Nietzsche’s use of “drive,” which he discussed in his unpublished notes, was inspired by the biology and psychology of his day. Taking “life” to be a biological category, Nietzsche’s references to life can be understood as references to the drives that are the building blocks of living creatures, including human beings. Humans are compositions of drives, and drives are causal tendencies grounded in physiology. Drives are said to “aim” at things, and “value” things, but such language needn’t be taken to mean that drives are conscious agents or human-like creatures. Instead, we can think of them as causal tendencies favored by natural selection. So, for example, one can say that trees grow tall because they want to reach the light as shorthand for a particular causal tendency that natural selection has favored, and which contributes to the flourishing of trees. Drives are causal tendencies which we may, therefore, speak of as “aiming” for things. But there is a further feature of Nietzsche’s discussion of drives in his notebooks, which is directly relevant to our concerns. All drives exhibit the “will to power,” he posited, adding that “every drive is a kind of lust for domination,” involving “[a]ppropriation and incorporation, [which] is above all a willing to overwhelm, a forming, shaping and reshaping until the overwhelmed has gone completely over into the power of the attacker.” Drives “command” and “obey” each other. Now, words “lust,” “command,” “obey,” and, above all, “will,” seem to reopen the worry that drives are nothing but tiny agents or people. But, again, this worry can be dispelled. We can understand that drive has a “lust for domination” in the sense that it is a causal tendency to produce its effect to a maximal degree, and will meet causal resistance from other drives. Since there is a conflict in the causal tendencies, there will be a “struggle” among drives. Think, for example, of weeds in a garden. They are compositions of drives, and the growth exhibits not merely the production of healthy plants, but also ones that sap all resources from, and smother, all other plants. The biological thesis prevalent when Nietzsche was writing, held that survival is not merely the result of adaption of the organism to its environment, but also the outcome of the strength of the causal dispositions placed in that environment. Weeds, for instance, “overcome” other plants. Inspired by this particular biological view, Nietzsche regarded all our drives to be tendencies to maximize their effects; that means that there will be causal resistances which those drives “seek to overcome.” The “will to power” is not separate from the drives but a fact about the nature of all drives.
