Commentary on Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human

Art by Ilya Repin -- "What Freedom"

“Truth as Circe. Error has turned animals into men; might truth be capable of turning man into an animal again?” (519)

 

I. Bad Habits in Drawing Conclusions

           
The Key

            Rather than dive into a chapter-by-chapter exegesis of everything said in the book, I’ve decided to look at some of the common threads that are woven throughout, with an occasional in-depth examination of one topic or another. We’ll begin with what I consider to be the key to the entire book, which Nietzsche helpfully gives in the first chapter: human beings, especially philosophers, have bad habits in drawing conclusions.

            “The most common false conclusions of men are these: a thing exists, therefore it is legitimate. Here one is concluding functionality from viability and legitimacy from functionality. Furthermore, if an opinion makes us glad, it must be true; if its effect is good, it in itself must be good and true. Here one is attributing to the effect the predicate ‘gladdening’, ‘good’, in the sense of the useful, and providing the cause with the same predicate ‘good’, but now in the sense of the logical and valid. The reversal of the proposition is: if a thing cannot prevail and maintain itself, it must be wrong; if an opinion tortures and agitates, it must be false.” (30)

            The first chapter, “Of First and Last Things”, sets the stage for Nietzsche’s criticism of the western intellectual tradition. The basis of this criticism is that western philosophers have been approaching the world metaphysically – assuming from the outset that what is valuable to us has a “miraculous origin, directly out of the heart and essence of the ‘thing in itself’”, and denigrating what we despise as an ‘opposite’ of what is true, valuable or sacred: false, evil or profane. Nietzsche traces this problem to our bad habits in drawing conclusions, which he says arose because our ability to reason logically *evolved*: “the mole’s eyes of [lower organisms] at first see everything as identical… then… the various stimuli of pleasure and unpleasure become more noticeable, different substances are gradually distinguished…” (18)
            Accordingly, Nietzsche says that the “first stage of logic is judgment, whose essence consists… in belief. All belief is based on the *feeling of pleasure or pain* in relation to the feeling subject.” Thus, when Nietzsche characterizes one of our bad habits as “it exists, therefore it is legitimate”, he means that we feel the immediate reality of an existent feeling, and this impels us to vest this feeling with some sort of meaning, value or relation to underlying truth. Because religious, moral and aesthetic sensibilities “make [mankind] so deeply happy or unhappy, he deceives himself, and shows the same pride as astrology, which thinks the heavens revolve around the fate of man.” (4)
            By way of another example, Nietzsche calls the history of moral feelings, “the history of an error, an error called ‘responsibility’, which in turn rests on an error called ‘freedom of the will’. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, concluded as follows: because certain actions produce *displeasure* (‘sense of guilt’), a responsibility must exist… From the fact of man’s displeasure, Schopenhauer thinks he can prove that man somehow must have had a freedom…” (39) He puts a fine point on this problem towards the end of the book: “There is no pre-established harmony between the furthering of truth and the good of mankind.” (517)

            “Because for thousands of years we have been looking at the world with moral, aesthetic and religious claims, with blind inclination, passion, or fear, and have indulged ourselves fully with the bad habits of illogical thought, this world has gradually *become* so strangely colorful, frightful, profound, soulful; it has acquired color, but we have been the painters: the human intellect allowed appearance to appear, and projected its mistaken conceptions onto the things.” (16)

            While our errors in judgment had humble (and necessary) origins, they’ve now been habituated, and even inculcated by culture to such a degree that they color everything we believe. Nietzsche’s response to these metaphysical viewpoints is his project in HH: the creation of a “historical philosophy” – which is to say, a view of the world as evolving, rather than a fixed quantity or the product of an eternal creator. Nietzsche desires to do away with rigid categorizations such as ‘opposites’, and instead employs a “chemistry of concepts and feelings”, where beliefs and character traits are seen as admixtures of things ‘good and bad’.
            The implications of this project are that all human beliefs are, as the title of the book suggests, ‘human, all too human’: Nietzsche locates their origin in the psyche. Furthermore, since the psyche is not a fixed quantity – an immortal soul or substantial ego – it is, by all reason, a possession of the physiology, which is itself an evolving structure acted upon by the dynamism of its environment. To Nietzsche, we are “clever animals [who] invented knowledge” (Truth and the Lie in the Nonmoral Sense), but we have drawn erroneous conclusions about the nature of that knowledge: “All judgments about the value of life have developed illogically and therefore unfairly… Man cannot experience a drive to or away from something without the feeling that he is desiring what is beneficial and avoiding what is harmful… We are from the start illogical and therefore unfair beings, and this we can know: it is one of the greatest and most insoluable disharmonies of existence.” (32) Metaphysics therefore cannot be the result of dispassionate, truth-seeking beings; it is based on the erroneous desire to make the world a product of what is human, rather than what is human a product of the world, and to use man’s conceptions of fixed categories to color reality. “Man is the rule, nature without rule: in this tenet lies the basic conviction that governs primitive, religiously productive cultures.” (111)
            He contrasts the metaphysical philosophy of previous thinkers with a philosophy rooted in science, which typifies his attitude during this period. “Out of concern for happiness,” he writes, “man tied off the veins of scientific investigation.” (7) This is not a call for a positivistic or mechanistic view of mankind – rather, it is a call to follow rational inquiry wherever it may lead, whether pleasurable or not. This also doesn’t mean that Nietzsche believes we can be free of our errors or valuable untruths (one of his more complicated stances, which wouldn’t be fully explored until BGE), writing that “whoever thinks more deeply knows that he is always wrong, whatever his acts and judgments,”  (518) and pointing out that “we see all things by means of our human head, and cannot chop it off, though it remains to wonder what would be left of the world if indeed it had been cut off.” (9)

Application

            Now, we shall apply this ‘key’: of beliefs as primarily influenced by what is felt to be pleasurable or displeasurable by human beings.
            In the fourth chapter, “Signs of Higher and Lower Culture”, Nietzsche addresses questions of education – which he sees not so much as a process of giving knowledge, but as a process of enculturation and discipline, the path to ‘higher culture’, so to speak. Nietzsche states that he hopes for education and the pursuit of reason to eventually free man of his ‘bad habits’. “The greatest progress men have made lies in their learning to *draw correct conclusions*. That is by no means so natural a thing as Schopenhauer assumes… rather it is learned late and still has not come to prevail.” (271) Given his explanations of how human logic came about by evolution, however, he sees the pursuit of knowledge as intimately linked with pleasure-seeking, like all things human: “Why is knowledge… linked to pleasure? First and foremost, because by it we gain awareness of our power… Second, because, as we gain knowledge, we surpass older ideas and their representatives, become victors… Third, because any new knowledge, however small, makes us feel superior to *everyone* and unique in understanding this matter correctly.” (252)
            It should be noted that Nietzsche’s conception of ‘will to power’ had not yet been crystalized – but while he tends to consider pleasure and pain the main driving principles behind human life, here he rather explicitly links pleasure to the feeling of power, perhaps prefiguring his later ideas. Furthermore, here as elsewhere, it is also explicit that ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’ should not be reduced to mere physiological sensations or easily-quantifiable utilitarian ‘units’ that can be said to be the same for all men at all times – considering the values one holds or of one’s current place and time to be eternal and unchanging is “the congenital defect of all philosophers” (2) and counter to the project of historical philosophy.

            Thus, we find pleasure and pain in all sorts of areas, such as morality: “How much pleasure we get from morality! Just think what a river of agreeable tears has flowed at tales of noble, generous actions.” (91) He finds pleasure at the root of “the social instinct”, writing that “From his relationship to other man, man gains a new kind of pleasure… Perhaps some of these feelings have come to him from the animals… Pleasurable feelings based on human relations generally makes man better; shared joy, pleasure taken together, heightens this feeling…” (98). Rejecting the moral systems that elevate honesty as a good in and of itself, or as a good divinely-commanded, Nietzsche writes: “Why do men usually tell the truth in daily life?... it is because, first, it is more convenient: for lies demand imagination, dissembling, and memory… Then, it is because it is advantageous in ordinary circumstances to say directly: I want this, I did that, and so on…” (54) All of these things about morality which are convenient or advantageous (pleasurable) become solidified by habit:

            “An important type of pleasure, and thus an important source of morality, grows out of habit. One does habitual things more easily, skillfully, gladly; one feels a pleasure at them, knowing from experience that the habit has stood the test and is useful. A morality one can live with has been proved salutary, effective, in contrast to all the as yet unproven new experiments. Accordingly, custom is the union of the pleasant and the useful; in addition, it requires no thought.” (97)

            When it comes to religion, Nietzsche writes that there is many to whom it is of advantage to be religious – either because it is in keeping with their temperament and prejudices, or simply because of social pressures. (115) We continue the bad habit in drawing conclusions, especially in religion: “An agreeable opinion is accepted as true: this is the proof by pleasure (or, as the church says, the proof by strength), that all religions are so proud of, whereas they ought to be ashamed. If the belief did not make us happy, it would not be believed: how little must it then be worth!” (120) In a passage that perhaps prefigures another Nietzschean idea – the “Death of God” – Nietzsche predicts that the belief in Christianity is doomed to fade away because of its justification through pleasure: “Christanity came into existence in order to lighten the heart; but now it had to burden the heart first, in order to be able to lighten it afterward. Consequently it will perish.” (119)
            Further, in examination of society and its institutions – such as the church – Nietzsche once again identifies our ‘bad habits in making conclusions’, writing, in section called ‘Reason or unreason deduced from the consequences’:

            “All states and social arrangements – class, marriage, education, law – acquire strength and permanence solely because of the faith of bound spirits in them; they exist, then, in the absence of reasons…Christianity, which was very innocent in its intellectual ideas… demanded faith and nothing but faith, and passionately rejected the desire for reasons; it pointed to the successful result of faith: ‘You’ll soon discover the advantage of faith’, it suggested, ‘you’ll be blessed because of it.’ The state, in fact, does the same thing, and each father raises his son in the same way: ‘Just take this to be true,’ he says, ‘you’ll discover how good it feels.’ But this means that the truth of an opinion should be proved by its personal benefit; the usefulness of a teaching should guarantee its intellectual certainty and substantiation. This is as if the defendant were to say in court: ‘My defender is telling the whole truth, for just see what happens as a result of his plea: I am acquitted.’” (227)

            Further writing on social interactions, relationships and friendships, Nietzsche sees this driving force (pleasure v/s displeasure) behind our assessments of other people, writing, “After a conversation with someone, one is best disposed towards his partner in conversation if he had the opportunity to display to him his own wit and amiability in its full splendor.” (369) Generally, when we criticize others, it is to take pleasure in our powers of judgment: “We praise or find fault, depending on which of the two provides more opportunities for our powers of judgment to shine.” (86) Nietzsche argues that pure malice does exist, but thinks it to be relatively rare (“most men are much too concerned with themselves”, 85), and sees most apparently malicious actions as driven by our desire for pleasure in ourselves: “We attack not only to hurt a person, to conquer him, but also, perhaps, simply to become aware of our own strength.” (317, and another prefiguration of will to power). For most people, however (especially in ‘dull society’), “it is largely a matter of habit whether one decides for or against the other person: both make sense” (334).

Vanity

            This dovetails into what Nietzsche considers to be one of the perennial sources of pleasure of mankind in society: vanity. He sees the origin of vanity in what is pleasurable habit, once again: “We care about the good opinion of others first because it is profitable, and then because we want to give others joy (children want to give joy to their parents, pupils to their teachers, men of good will to all other men). Only when someone holds the good opinion of others to be important without regard to his interests or wish to give joy, do we speak of vanity.” Of course, this is another error – distilling the ‘opposite’ vice of vanity from the virtuous desire to give joy. While we find in pleasure/advantage the origins of vanity, it is once again *habit* that has reified it and given it permanence: “the individual wants to confirm the opinion he has of himself through the opinion of others and strengthen it in his own eyes; but the mighty habituation to authority (which is as old as man) also leads many to base their own belief in themselves on authority, to accept it only from the hand of others.” (89)
            Pleasing others – that habit which originates through humanity’s ‘social instinct’ – when transformed into a means of acquiring social capital, leads man to pursue that which is useful to the community at large. “Men seldom endure a profession if they do not believe or persuade themselves that it is basically more important than all others.” (492) However, this social capital eventually becomes, through the power of culture, a pleasure or advantage unto itself. “People who prefer to be noticed, and thereby displease, desire the same thing as those who do not want to be noticed, and want only to please…by means of a step that seems to be distancing them from their goal. Because they want to have influence and power, they display their superiority, even if it is felt as disagreeable: for they know that the man who has finally gained power pleases in almost everything he does and says.” (595)
            In keeping with Nietzsche’s rejection of moral dualism, and his giving all appropriate dues to humanity’s errors, he says that vanity enriches mankind (“How poor the human spirit would be without vanity!”, 79) This is because vanity has been contrasted with ‘selfless action’, which does not exist. Vanity itself, although is dependent on the community’s feelings, still circles back to the feelings of the subject: “The vain man wants not only to stand out; but also to feel outstanding… Not the opinion of others, but his opinion of their opinion is what he cares about.” (545) Nietzsche takes an extreme view here: “Never has a man done anything that was only for others, and without any personal motivation.” (133) In a section called ‘Vanity and ambition as educators’, he writes:

            “So long as a man has not yet become the instrument of the universal human good, ambition may torment him; but if he has achieved that goal, if of necessity he is working like a machine for the good of all, then vanity may enter; it will humanize him in small matters, make him more sociable, tolerable, considerate, once ambition has completed the rough work (of making him useful).” (593)

            Nevertheless, numerous examples of our bad habits in making conclusions are laid at the feet of vanity. “He who has boldly prophesied the weather three times and has been successful, believes a bit, at the bottom of his heart, in his own prophetic gift. We do not dispute what is magical or irrational when it flatters our self-esteem.” (574) While he draws many conclusions about our pleasure-seeking as behind our social interactions, he later identifies these tendencies specifically with vanity, in relating why men hold to their opinions: “One man adheres to an opinion because he prides himself on having come upon it by himself; another because he has learned it with effort, and is proud of having grasped it: thus both out of vanity.” (527) Thus, our confusion of truth with what is advantageous binds our self-identification to our convictions: we believe about ourselves is what is pleasurable to believe.

Convictions

            To sum up what has been said so far, we have a theory of human reasoning that sees our conclusions as backwards (reasoning from the effect to the cause) because it is driven by pleasure-seeking. “Unconsciously we seek out principles and dogmas that are in keeping with our temperament.” (608) Through the habits of enculturation, these bad conclusions are reified and come to color the world; human society reinforces them through carrots and sticks (which are both consciously engineered and instinctive) that give pleasure and unpleasure. “The first opinion that occurs to us when we are suddenly asked about a matter is usually not our own,” he  writes, “but only the customary one appropriate to our caste, position or parentage…” (571) Thus, the opinions which succeed and give pleasure are not those which merely give pleasure to one individual, but which are approved by the society. This gives man means of acquiring pleasure through all sorts of new means, and man becomes a vain animal. Nietzsche then identifies laziness as the reason for convictions – which is to say, that by continuing in our habits and failing to apply a historical philosophy to our beliefs, they harden and become immovable.  “Out of passions grow opinions; mental sloth lets these rigidify into convictions.” (637)
            While Nietzsche gives both favorable and unfavorable assessments of vanity, he has an overall negative view of convictions in HH. The final chapter opens with two aphorisms that put his feelings on the matter rather bluntly, “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.” (483) and “We criticize a thinker more sharply when he proposes a tenet that is disagreeable to us; and yet it would be more reasonable to do this when we find his tenet agreeable.” This is especially true of the common people, who do not have time to think and examine: “The man who has a lot to do usually keeps his general views and opinions almost unchanged; as does each person who works in the service of an idea. He will never test the idea itself any more; he no longer has time for that. Indeed, it is contrary to his interest even to think it possible to discuss it.” (511) Thus, in his criticism of convictions, Nietzsche wears the influence of French Enlightenment thinkers on his sleeve, suggesting that a historical philosopher would have to actively fight their own bad habits in drawing conclusions, rise above the lot of the laborers and the lower cultures, and follow a true line of rational inquiry instead.

            “Conviction is the belief that in some point of knowledge one possesses absolute truth. Such a belief presumes, then, that absolute truths exist; likewise that the perfect methods for arriving at them have been found; finally, that every man who has convictions makes use of these perfect methods. All three assertions prove at one that the man of convictions if not the man of scientific thinking… The countless people who sacrificed themselves for convictions thought they were doing it for absolute truth. All of them were wrong: probably no man has ever sacrificed himself for truth; at least, the dogmatic expression of his belief will have been unscientific or half-scientific. But actually one wanted to be right because he thought he had to be right. To let his belief be torn from him meant perhaps to put his eternal happiness in question…. It is not the struggle of opinions that has made history so violent, but rather the struggle of belief in opinions, that is, the struggle of convictions. If only all those people who thought so highly of their conviction, who sacrifices all sorts of things to it and spared neither their honor, body nor life in its service, had devoted but half of their strength to investigating by what right they clung to this or that conviction, how they had arrived at it, then how peaceable the history of mankind would appear! How much more would be known!...” (630)

            I’ve quoted this long section because it reveals a Nietzsche from the beginning of his middle period who was not as keen to fetishize war or violence (although admittedly elsewhere in the text he says that war is necessary, and has aspects in its favor and against it). While Nietzsche definitely still esteems errors, here he seems to long for a world where mankind can get over his mental sloth and free himself from convictions – which would actually increase human knowledge, in contrast to the work of metaphysical philosophers. People don’t do this, however, because “usually we prefer to surrender unconditionally to a conviction held by people of authority (fathers, friends, teachers, princes) and we have a kind of troubled conscience if we do not do so.” (631)
            Since education is the route to ‘higher culture’, and a means of disciplining the mind, Nietzsche sees clinging to convictions as a sign of ‘backward cultures’: “If one has not passed through various convictions, but remains caught in the net of his first belief, he is in all events, because of just this unchangeability… harsh, injudicious, unteachable, without gentleness, eternally suspect, a person lacking scruples, who reaches for any means to enforce his opinion…” (632) Thus, convictions are not morally judged by Nietzsche – and it is not exactly the holding of a conviction that is the fault, but its rigidity: the fact that one remains in it perpetually. ‘Passing through’ multiple convictions is part of the process of self-discipline.

Esteeming Humble Truths

            An interesting thread that is begun in HH, and which is woven throughout Nietzsche’s work, is his esteeming of ‘small’, ‘dull’ or ‘humble’ truths. “Men clearly overestimate everything large and obtrusive,” he writes. “This comes from their conscious or unconscious insight that it is very useful if someone throws all his strength into one area… extreme natures attract notice much too much, but a lesser culture is also necessary to let itself be captivated by them.” (260) While those who first begin their education are excited by grand theories, knowledge which is novel, interesting or all-encompassing, Nietzsche believes this is merely a trait of a poorly-developed intellect, again because of pleasure. As an example, he says that “He who speaks a bit of a foreign language has more delight in it than he who speaks it well; pleasure goes along with superficial knowledge.” (554) And elsewhere: “The champions of truth are hardest to find, not when it is dangerous to tell it, but rather when it is boring.” (506)
            In contrast, he writes at the beginning of the work that “It is a sign of higher culture to esteem more highly the little, humble truths, those discovered by a strict method, rather than the gladdening and dazzling errors that originate in metaphysical and artistic ages and men… truths that are hard won, certain, enduring, and therefore still of consequence for all further knowledge are the higher; to keep to them is manly, and shows bravery, simplicity and restraint.” (3) In a section called ‘The scientific spirit is powerful the part, not in the whole’, he writes that the smallest fields of science are treated objectively, but the “great sciences” – and philosophy is at “the top of the whole scientific pyramid” – “have so much high-flying metaphysics and so much wariness of the seemingly insignificant explanations of physics… Until now, there has been no philosopher in whose hands philosophy has not become an apology for knowledge… everyone is an optimist, by thinking that knowledge must be accorded the highest usefulness.” (6)
            This is perhaps why he writes favorably about the underestimated value of Gymnasium education (the equivalent of primary school or grammar school). Again, the real value is not “those things which the pupil assimilates only with reluctance, to shake off as soon as he can,” but rather the skills which the pupils learn – the personal and intellectual development they undergo. “If pupils only listen, their intellect will be automatically preformed to a scientific way of thinking.” (266)
            In the final section of the book, Nietzsche writes of the “freedom of reason” that comes with being unshackled from convictions. One turns away from overarching world-explanations, or eternalizing their beliefs onto all mankind – since man and the world are both *evolving*, and not even evolving towards any kind of “final goal”. He calls a person who becomes intellectually freed in this way, ‘the wanderer’, and describes him: “he does want to observe, and keeps his eyes open for everything that actually occurs in the world; therefore he must not attach his heart too firmly to any individual thing; there must be something wandering within him, which takes its joy in change and transitoriness.” Here, as always, it is a question of temperament: an intellectually free person takes joy in uncertainty, as by an instinct. These are the true philosophers and free spirits that Nietzsche would romanticize throughout his work.

II. The Myth of Free Will

The Fable of Intelligible Freedom

            In Nietzsche’s view, our moral ideas rest upon the doctrine of free will. One cannot justify holding someone morally responsible for an action unless that action was freely chosen – meaning that he could have done otherwise, if he so chose. If he could not have done otherwise, then, logically, there is no way that the person in question could be morally responsible. While some determinists and compatibilists have attempted to incorporate ideas like moral obligations into their worldview, Nietzsche might ask whether this is another bad habit in drawing conclusions: reasoning from the effect to the cause. We find morality useful for so many reasons, even indispensible, and thus we cannot bear to part with it.            
            On the contrary, in aphorism 39, entitled, ‘The fable of intelligible freedom’, Nietzsche argues against free will as an intelligible concept:

            “The history of those feelings, by virtue of which we consider a person responsible, the so-called moral feelings, is divided into the following main phases. At first we call particular acts good or evil without any consideration of their motives, but simply on the basis of their beneficial or harmful consequences.”

            Nietzsche traces the origin of morality to the pleasure or displeasure felt as a consequence of human actions: this is where we first begin to moralize. The earliest expressions of morality are based on irrational feelings. In later writings he’d call this a ‘premoral’ phase of mankind. Nietzsche assesses that whether one acted out of their own volition or not does not matter much to the justice of the most primitive cultures: what matters is whether one causes harm, and that is all.

            “Soon, however, we forget the origin of these terms and imagine that the quality ‘good’ or ‘evil’ is inherent in the actions themselves, without consideration of their consequences; this is the same error language makes when calling the stone itself hard, the tree itself green – that is, we take the effect to be the cause. Then we assign goodness or evil to the motives, and regard the acts themselves as morally ambiguous. We go even further and cease to give to the particular motive the predicate good or evil, but give it rather to the whole nature of a man; the motive grows out of him as a plant grows out of the earth. So we make man responsible in turn for the effects of his actions, then for his actions, then his motives and finally his nature.” (Ibid)

            All three main branches of ethics are now present in this accounting of morality: first consequentialism (consequences), then deontological morality (intentions), then virtue ethics (nature or character). In my opinion, this order is also how Nietzsche would rank them in terms of how closely they approximate ‘higher culture’, or ‘lower culture’ – with the virtue ethics of the Greeks representing the highest cultural achievement in moral understanding so far, and utilitarianism relegated to the childishness of the masses.

            “Ultimately we discover that his nature cannot be responsible either, in that it is itself an inevitable consequence, an outgrowth of the elements, and influences of past and present things; that is, man cannot be made responsible for anything, neither for his nature, nor his motives, nor his actions, nor the effects of his actions. And thus we come to understand that the history of moral feelings is the history of an error, an error called ‘responsibility’, which in turn rests on an error called ‘freedom of the will’.” (Ibid)

            A person’s nature cannot be separated from nature itself: there is no ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. People are natural phenomena; one is an outgrowth of forces they had nothing to do with. Thus, we can’t lay praise or blame with someone because of his or her temperament or character, which he did not author.

            “Schopenhauer, on the other hand, concluded as follows: because certain actions produce displeasure (‘sense of guilt’), a responsibility must exist. For there would be no reason for this displeasure if not only all human actions occurred out of necessity (as they actually do, according to this philosopher’s insight), but if man himself also acquired his entire nature out of the same necessity (which Schopenhauer denies). From the fact of man’s displeasure, Schopenhauer thinks he can prove that man somehow must have had a freedom, a freedom which did not determine his actions but rather determined his nature: freedom, that is, to be this way or the other, not to act this way or the other…. Man becomes that which he wants to be; his volition precedes his existence. In this case, we are concluding falsely that we can deduce the justification, the rational admissibility of this displeasure, from the fact that it exists; and from this false deduction Schopenhauer arrives at his fantastic conclusion of so-called intelligible freedom.” (Ibid)

            Schopenhauer was engaged in a project of moralism. He found the key to man’s salvation in human action (‘negation of the will’) – and still wants to hold on to the idea that man’s will is free. The will must be able to choose to negate itself. Otherwise, this makes Schopenhauer’s idea of the salvific intellect rather suspect. If the will, armed with the intellect, still cannot do other than what is in its nature by negating itself, then the whole project falls apart. Thus he makes the claim that man is responsible for his nature, and therefore that volition precedes essence, which Nietzsche calls ‘fantastic’. (As for why Schopenhauer believed this, I think I detect the influence of the ‘Law of Karma’ on S’s thought here). As N argues, Schopenhauer’s own claims about the necessity of all events and actions undermines any attempt to suggest mankind is free.           

            “But displeasure after the deed need not be rational at all: in fact, it certainly is not rational, for it rests on the erroneous assumption that the deed did not have to follow necessarily. Thus, because he thinks he is free (but not because he is free) man feels remorse and pangs of conscience. Furthermore, this displeasure is a habit that can be given up… Tied to the development of custom and culture, it is a very changeable thing, and present perhaps only within a relatively short period of world history. No one is responsible for his deeds, no one for his nature; to judge is to be unjust. This is also true when the individual judges himself. This tenet is as bright as sunlight, and yet everyone prefers to walk back into the shadow of untruth – for fear of the consequences.” (Ibid)

            This is a call to apply a historical philosophy to doctrines of morality and free will – N. accuses our observations of being based on a recent breed of mankind that may have been quite different from mankind in the past. How we judge a person today is certainly different from how we judge the actions of other animals, and the way we judge may change in the future as man continues to evolve. The fact that we feel pangs of bad conscience after certain actions is, to N., evidence of nothing further than the fact that we’ve been enculturated (habituated) to feel pangs of conscience. Even though N. thinks it is obvious (“bright as sunshine”) that the will is not free, we cling to this falsehood out of fear. This is once again the principle, in action: that our philosophic errors are caused by reasoning from the consequence to the origin, from the effect to the cause: because of the feared consequences, we continue to hold that the will is free.         Nietzsche elaborates on how such an illusion can be sustained in a later passage:
           
            “…people do not want to admit that all those things which men have defended with the sacrifice of their lives and happiness in earlier centuries were nothing but errors. Perhaps one calls them levels of truth. Basically, however, one thinks that if someone honestly believed in something and had fought for his belief and died it would be too unfair if he had actually been inspired by a mere error. Such an occurrence seems to contradict eternal justice. Therefore, the hearts of sensitive men always decree in opposition to their heads that there must be a necessary connection between moral actions and intellectual insights. Unfortunately, it is otherwise, for there is no eternal justice.” (53)

            I’m personally reminded of the late, great Christopher Hitchens’ coinage: “We must believe in free will, because we have no choice,” – one of the worst claims I’ve ever heard from one of the best minds. Or, Jordan Peterson’s common appeal to the fact that all of our western traditions of law are based on free will, therefore it would be unwise to do away with it. I personally find these claims from free will libertarians exceedingly suspect, in that they (openly!) argue that we should accept intuition in lieu of rational inquiry. But I digress…

Motivated, Not Evil

            To summarize the claims of the above passage, morality, like all things human, originated from the drives to gain pleasure and avoid displeasure, and was subsequently shaped by these drives. These same drives now fool us into continuing to indulge in morality – after all, having been shaped as a human tool for pleasure-seeking, morality gives us great pleasure, and it is to be expected that we would not want to give it up. Unfortunately, however, as we trace back the negative consequences of an evil act to the act itself, the intentions, and finally the character of the person who committed the act, ‘free will’ always eludes us. It is Nietzsche’s hope that the next stage in human moral development will lead us to finally realize that ‘free will’ eludes us because it is a fabrication, and discard it – but since the furthering of our pleasure and the furthering of truth are here in opposition, it is more likely that this will not be the case. He writes in 107:

            “Man’s complete lack of responsibility, for his behavior and for his nature, is the bitterest drop of knowledge man must swallow, if he had been in the habit of seeing responsibility and duty as humanity’s claim to nobility. All his judgments, distinctions, dislikes have thereby become worthless and wrong: the deepest feeling he had offered a victim or a hero was misdirected; he may no longer praise, no longer blame, for it is nonsensical to praise and blame nature and necessity…. He can admire… strength, beauty, abundance, but he may not find any earned merit in them: chemical processes, and the clash of elements… these have no more earned merit than do those inner struggles and crises in which a man is torn back and forth by various motives until he finally decides for the most powerful….”

            As for why Nietzsche rejects free will, it must be understood that this is a rejection derived primarily from a skeptical attitude. Nietzsche’s argument boils down to this: first, we cannot find free will anywhere in the decision-making process; second, we cannot account for such a thing logically. The free will hypothesis posits something acausal – as if human motivations and thoughts occurred independently, as a causa sui. He writes, “…even to-day we think that all our feelings and doings are, at bottom, acts of the free will; when the sentient individual contemplates himself he deems every feeling, every change, a something isolated, disconnected, that is to say, unqualified by any thing; it comes suddenly to the surface, independent of anything that went before or came after.”
            This should be unsurprising: only now, as a conscious, thinking animal, can mankind begin to understand his sensations as natural phenomena. “We are hungry, but originally we do not know that the organism must be nourished: on the contrary that feeling seems to manifest itself without reason or purpose; it stands out by itself and seems quite independent.” (18) “The first sign that an animal has become human is that his behavior is no longer directed to his momentary comfort, but rather to his enduring comfort,” Nietzsche writes, “that is, when man becomes useful, expedient: then for the first time the rule of reason bursts forth.” (94) To Nietzsche, our ‘good’ and ‘bad’ actions do not signify a free choice to commit ‘good’ or ‘evil’ – rather, ‘bad’ actions represent a failure of reason. Reason emerged, just as morality emerged, as a means of gaining pleasure/avoiding unpleasure.

            “Good actions are sublimated evil actions; evil actions are good actions become coarse and stupid. The individual’s only demand, for self-enjoyment (along with the fear of losing it), is satisfied in all circumstances: man may act as he can, that is, as he must, whether in deeds of vanity, revenge, pleasure, usefulness, malice, cunning, or in deeds of sacrifice, pity, knowledge. His powers of judgment determine where a man will let this demand for self-enjoyment take him.” (107)

            The progress of society has been to further develop man’s powers of judgment, so that he can direct his work to enduring pleasures, rather than momentary. In a passage called ‘The super-animal’, N. writes, “The beast in us wants to be lied to; morality is a white lie, to keep it from tearing us apart. Without the errors inherent in the postulates of morality, man would have remained an animal. But as it is he has taken himself to be something higher and has imposed stricter laws upon himself.” (40) Because of the social demands placed on mankind by these ‘stricter laws’, and the shared consequences to the community of the actions of those within it, morality is enforced by the social mores: “A still higher state is reached when man acts according to the principle of honor, by means of which he finds his place in society, submitting to commonly held feelings; that raises him high above the phase in which he is guided only by personal usefulness.” (94)   
            We may notice that the ability to make a ‘free choice’ has still not been found anywhere – while we have found the reasons why man might believe he has free will (usefulness), we have not found any rational basis for the concept in reality. What we have instead are men which have come to associate certain actions or ways of being as “good” or “bad” in accordance at all times with the pleasure or displeasure they produce – as regards the individual only (on the base level of morality), then as regards the community (at higher levels of development). The pangs of conscience and sense of guilt – which Schopenhauer took to be evidence of free will – is just a result of these social forces on the psyche.
            It is because of this that Nietzsche says, “One will seldom go wrong to attribute extreme actions to vanity, moderate ones to habit, and petty ones to fear.” (74) Humankind’s actions are conditioned; they are influenced by a play of forces within and without. The only question as to how a person will act concerns which drive is most powerful in him.
            Nietzsche invokes Socrates and Plato, in a rare example where he does not merely praise them for their greatness, but goes on to say that they are both actually right about something: “Man always acts for the good; that is, in a way that seems to him good (useful) according to the degree of his intellect, the prevailing measure of his rationality.” (102) Failing to find the evidence that there is a ‘free choice’ anywhere in man’s powers of decision-making, Nietzsche sees man as not dissimilar to the other animals. “We don’t accuse nature of immortality when it sends us a thunderstorm…” he writes. “Why do we call the injurious man immoral? Because in the first case we assume necessity, and in the second a voluntarily governing free will. But this distinction is in error.” (102)
            Because of the power of the society (or the state, for that matter) in respect to the individual, we have an inconsistent standard in evaluating what is immoral. We cannot defer to the principle that doing intentional harm is bad, Nietzsche says, because “we intentionally kill the criminal and do him harm, to protect ourselves and society…. All morality allows the intentional infliction of harm… when it is a matter of self-preservation!” The state will execute criminals as a matter of preserving the community, but the criminal was only practicing his own form of self-preservation. Nietzsche thinks that the same governing principle applies, over the animals, natural disasters like thunderstorms, and the criminal; the principle of self-preservation can “explain all evil acts which men practice against other men; man wants to get pleasure or resist unpleasure; in some sense it is always a matter of self-preservation.” (102)
            “If we accept self-defense as moral,” as we do in the case of the state defending itself against the criminal, “then we must also accept nearly all expressions of so-called immoral egoism; we inflict harm, rob or kill, to preserve or protect ourselves, to prevent personal disaster; where cunning and dissimulation are the correct means of self-preservation, we lie. To do injury intentionally, when it is a matter of our existence or security… is conceded to be moral…” (104) Nietzsche almost explicitly makes his pleasure principle here an analogue for the role of will to power in his later philosophy by associating it with life itself: he rejects that any action can be undertaken without the aim toward pleasure in it. Even apparent acts of pure malice are still for the pleasure of the actor. “No life without pleasure; the struggle for pleasure is the struggle for life. Whether the individual fights this battle in ways such that men call him good or such that they call him evil in determined by the measure and make-up of his intellect.” (Ibid)        
            While man’s nature and nurture have both been addressed, Nietzsche also draws attention to the random experiences people have which can give rise to all sorts of different moral characters. “Whether or not our passions reach the point of red heat and guide our whole life depends on whether or not we have been exposed to certain shocking sights or impressions – for example a father falsely executed, killed or tortured; an unfaithful wife; a cruel ambush by an enemy. No one knows how far circumstances, pity, or indignation may drive him…” And it is not just the random experiences which may affect man in unforeseen ways, but in the experiences which are repeated, and which act on people in ways that affect their outlook on the world and their emotional life. “Miserable, mean experiences make one miserable; it is usually not the quality of the experiences but rather the quantity that determines the lower and higher man, in good and evil.” (72)      
            One qualitative difference between humankind and the animals is that, with consciousness, man can reflect on past choices, and feel pangs of guilt over them. The doctrine of free will is therefore yet another belief derived from our pleasure-seeking (or pain avoiding) impulses, and reinforced by habit. Admittedly, this furthered mankind (by providing them with morality, as a means of disciplining the mind) but is nowhere close to the truth. And , for Nietzsche, it has outlived its usefulness. He writes in section 99:

            “All ‘evil’ actions are motivated by the drive for preservation, or, more exactly, by the individual’s intention to gain pleasure and avoid unpleasure; thus they are motivated, but they are not evil. ‘Giving pain in and of itself’ does not exist, except in the brain of philosophers, nor does ‘giving pleasure in and of itself’ (pity, in the Schopenhauerian sense). In conditions preceding organized states, we kill any being, be it ape or man, that wants to take a fruit off a tree before we do… Those evil actions which outrage us most today are based on the error that the man who harms us has free will, that is, that he had the choice not to do this bad thing to us. This belief in his choice arouses hatred, thirst for revenge, spite, the whole deterioration of our imagination; whereas we get much less angry at an animal because we consider it irresponsible. To do harm not out of a drive for preservation, but for requital – that is the result of an erroneous judgment, and is therefore likewise innocent… Force precedes morality; indeed, for a time morality itself is force, to which others acquiesce to avoid unpleasure. Later it becomes custom, and still later free obedience, and finally almost instinct: then it is coupled to pleasure, like all habitual and natural things, and is now called virtue.”

Absolute Necessity

            Nietzsche so far has attacked free will from a negative position – one of skepticism. He has located all the reasons for our moral feelings in drives which are far more consistent with the rest of the natural world than the doctrine of free will. But, in one of the more famous passages of HH, Nietzsche attacks free will with a positive argument – the absolute necessity of all events:

            “At the waterfall. When we see a waterfall, we think we see freedom of will and choice in the innumerable turnings, windings, breakings of the waves; but everything is necessary; each movement can be calculated mathematically. Thus it is with human actions; if one were omniscient, one would be able to calculate each individual action in advance, each step in the progress of knowledge, each error, each act of malice. To be sure the acting man is caught in his illusion of volition; if the wheel of the world were to stand still for a moment and an omniscient, calculating mind were there to take advantage of this interruption, he would be able to tell into the farthest future of each being and describe every rut that wheel will roll upon. The acting man's delusion about himself, his assumption that free will exists, is also part of the calculable mechanism.” (106)

            Given Nietzsche’s language here, he could almost be accused of a mechanistic understanding of the world – and to be sure, this is not the later Nietzsche (of BGE, for example) who says that “we should not reify cause and effect”. That being said, ‘causality’ as such is not the primary focus of Nietzsche’s argument here: we might, more appropriately, utilize the term ‘necessity’. Everything that happens need not be reduced to a deterministic play of causes and effects, in Nietzsche’s view. He does hold that every single event is necessary, in that everything acts in accord with its own nature. Its affect on the external world is a necessary reflection/manifestation of that nature.
            When we study chemistry, geology, or physics, we take every happening as absolutely necessary – for example, it is necessary that an object with mass will attract other objects with mass (through gravity). Mechanistic science sees gravity as a “law” reigning over the physical world; Nietzsche might argue that gravity is the property of the thing with mass (its nature). Biology, too, is a science that reveals a totally necessary world – and Nietzsche’s argument is simply that we should include man among all the other biological phenomena that we study, and which we take to necessarily behave in a certain way. That man’s psyche is so complex obscures this fact – but this is not evidence of free will, but of our incomplete knowledge. “Everything is necessity: this is the new knowledge, and this knowledge itself is necessity. Everything is innocence: and knowledge is the way to insight into this innocence.” (107)      
            When Nietzsche preaches this doctrine of irresponsibility, he is willing to follow through with this, and let everyone off the hook; even people he has a low opinion of. “We must think of men who are cruel today as stages of earlier cultures…” he writes, comparing such people to merely one more rock formation in the mountain range of humanity. “They are backward men whose brains… have not yet developed much delicacy or versatility. But they themselves are as little responsible as a piece of granite for being granite.” (43) Nietzsche was certainly no progressive when it came to being ‘understanding’ of criminality (and perhaps hardened in this view later, as he criticized the sympathizing with criminals in BGE) he nevertheless writes that “Our crime against criminals is that we treat them like scoundrels.” (66)
            Nietzsche is even willing to apply this position to individual figures that he despises, and raises the example of Calvin burning Dr. Servet. He points out that “his was a consistent act, flowing out of his convictions”. Much of our discomfort with the men and events of past ages is part of the congenital defect of all philosophers, which causes them to see everything from the perspective of the moral values of their own time and place. “When we consider earlier periods, we must be careful not to fall into unjust abuse. The injustice of slavery, the cruelty of subjugating persons and peoples, cannot be measured by our standards. For the instinct of justice was not so widely developed then.” (101)
            Nietzsche does seem to contradict himself when he writes “One can promise actions, but not feelings, for the latter are involuntary.” (58) – after all, he has argued that man is not responsible for his feelings or his actions. But N. is not writing about responsibility here, but rather about what is voluntary. If we take a charitable reading, then he says that one’s actions are voluntary, he means that the will, if directed towards a certain course of action, can then affect those actions – this is not because the will is ‘free’, but because it is potent. Feelings, on the other hand are the irrational drives behind the will – and everyone knows that he cannot will away a feeling no matter how badly he tries – if anything, the feeling is the thing acting on the will, not the other way around. (Schopenhauer: “A man wills what he wills, but cannot choose what he wills.”) If only Nietzsche had taken this aphorism a step further… and reasoned that a person’s feelings can change enough in the future, such that they may feel that they do not care to honor their promises! Feelings dictate actions, so one can’t even really promise action.  
            This may of course raise the specter once more of the consequences of Nietzsche’s arguments here: does this total irresponsibility not lead to a society bereft of morality and justice?; is this a vision of a society that does not put a stop to any criminality? Not necessarily – although, it must be said that there will be some consequences in the way we understand the process of criminal justice in the postmoral viewpoint.

Justice

            “How is it that every execution offends us more than a murder?” Nietzsche asks, then answers: “It is the coldness of the judges, the painful preparations, the understanding that a man is here being used as a means to deter others. For guilt is not being punished, even if there were guilt; guilt lies in the educators, the parents, the environment, in us, not in the murderer – I am talking about the motivating circumstances.” (70)
            Nevertheless, Nietzsche writes “There is a justice according to which we take a man’s life…” (88) – and as he says in aphorism 70 and elsewhere, we may still have need for reward and punishment as a means of preserving the communal good of society. Whether this fact is conscious or not, the real utility in punishment is in deterrence, the prevention of future criminality: “The wise man punishes not because men have acted badly, but so they will not act badly” (105). This is the recognition that the community’s self-defense (or, the securing of the community’s pleasure and avoidance of its displeasure) is more valuable than the individual’s self-defense. However, Nietzsche criticizes the moralizing that we have done by ‘making the criminal a scoundrel’, and thinking him ‘evil’. Much of this is simply our own taking pleasure in revenge: “Every virtue has its privileges, one being to deliver its own little bundle of wood to the funeral pyre of a condemned man.” (67)
            In Nietzsche’s accounting of justice, more broadly, he does not see it as necessarily moral, and has already dismissed the concept of ‘eternal justice’ near the beginning of chapter two. “Justice,” he writes, “originates among approximately equal powers, as Thucydides (in the horrifying conversation between the Athenian and Melian envoys) rightly understood. When there is no clearly recognizable supreme power and a battle would lead to fruitless and mutual injury, one begins to think of reaching an understanding…” Justice, like every moral concept, originates from the pleasure-seeking principle; just as the society/community has its own arrangement with the individual to secure its pleasure, so do oppositional forces come to an arrangement to avoid unpleasure. “[T]he initial character of justice is barter… justice is requital and exchange on the assumption of relatively equal positions of strength.” (92)
            In a section called the ‘Rights of the weaker’, Nietzsche accounts for why stronger parties have indulged in arrangements with weaker ones. “If one party, a city under siege for example, submits under certain conditions to a greater power, its reciprocal condition is that this first party can destroy itself, burn the city, and thus make the power suffer a great loss… Rights exist between slaves and masters to the same extent, exactly insofar as possession of his slave is profitable and important to the master.” (93) This kind of relationship – which creates ‘rights’ for the weaker party, though still on the underlying basis of force – is similar to the subject’s rights even under a tutelary government, as in the case of the secessio plebis in ancient Rome. The ability of the people to cause havoc is what secures them from state abuses, not because they possess ‘natural rights’.
            The theories of justice and/or rights of preceding figures such as Locke, Paine, Rousseau, Kant, etc., had introduced notions of each man getting ‘his due’ – which is to say, what is deserved or owed to him. These notions are intimately bound up with morality and free will since they determine that certain actions in a person’s past (or even their innate nature) can mean they are ‘deserving’ of pleasure or displeasure. This type of justice is dismissed by Nietzsche:

            “The man who has fully understood the theory of complete irresponsibility can no longer include the so-called justice that punishes and rewards within the concept of justice, if that consists in giving each his due. For the man who is punished does not deserve the punishment: he is only being used as the means to frighten others away from certain future actions; likewise, the man who is rewarded does not deserve this reward; he could not act other than he did… Neither punishment nor reward are due to anyone as his; they are given to him because it is useful…” (105)

            We may say that here again, though the will to power is not fully formulated, it is prefigured: all roads lead back to the use of force for Nietzsche. In the Nietzschean view, to give a criminal due process, for example, is undertaken only to make sure force is exercised on the correct party, not the deserving party. Nietzsche would never agree to calls for anything like ‘social justice’, since the masses do not know how to sacrifice, renounce momentary pleasures, and do not possess a keen intellect. When the rights of the many are honored, it is in proportion to the strength of the many – but this isn’t a good thing, because the collective drives of the many are not something noble, in N’s view. The common people tend to be shortsighted, and therefore undermine the strength and usefulness of the society, which is supposed to ensure enduring pleasure (life). True ‘justice’ can only occur between people who are disciplined and possess a refined intellect: the aristocrats.

            “Noble (if not exactly very insightful) representatives of the ruling class may well vow to treat people as equals, and grant them equal rights. To that extent, a socialistic way of thought, based on justice, is possible; but, as we said, only within the ruling class, which in this case practices justice by its sacrifices and renunciations. On the other hand, to demand equality of rights, as do the socialists of the subjugated caste, never results from justice but rather covetousness. If one shows the beast bloody pieces of meat close by, and then draws them away again until it finally roars, do you think this roar means justice?” (451)

            The term “justice” is therefore multifaceted in reality, but multiple ideas are confounded under a single label, which confuses the issue. The reason for this confusion is, once again, free will: while true justice in all of Nietzsche’s formulations are variations on bartering between parties of rival strength, the moralistic concept of justice depends on deserving, and hence on free will. This is no less true of eternal justice, which Nietzsche has already rejected (it is dependent on metaphysical ‘afterworlds’, after all). Eternal justice is the most powerful iteration of the free will doctrine’s affect on the human psyche.

            “The keenest thorn in the sentiment of sin is dulled when it is perceived that one's acts have contravened human tradition, human rules and human laws without having thereby endangered the “eternal salvation of the soul” and its relations with deity. If finally men attain to the conviction of the absolute necessity of all acts and of their utter irresponsibility and then absorb it into their flesh and blood, every relic of conscience pangs will disappear.” (133)

Freedom from Free Will

            Nietzsche says in the first chapter that we have a “will to free will” – and at this point it should be obvious what this will consists of: the pleasure of morality, which justifies everything individuals do, as well as the acts of church and state. However, there is another, higher kind of “justification” that Nietzsche yearns for: the emancipation from morality, which justifies every man eo ipso and puts an end to the concepts of sinfulness and responsibility. It is paradoxical to some extent that what Nietzsche is offering is freedom from free will.
            As Nietzsche routinely stresses, even the belief in free will was itself necessary. It has only been the infancy and deficiency of our intellect that has prevented us from reaching the next step: complete irresponsibility. Good actions are merely the refined versions of evil actions, after we have tempered them with reason, with the consideration for enduring well-being, with consideration for community well-being, and so on. All of these developments represent, to Nietzsche, not the invention of ‘free choice’, or the advent of a greater ‘freedom of the will’, but merely higher and higher knowledge. Now, with the knowledge that there is no God passing judgments on mankind, and that man was merely another animal that happened to acquire knowledge, we can regard man as we do other natural phenomena.        
            This is, of course, a Herculean task, since it requires that we can get over taking pleasure in our own virtue, in vanity, in revenge. It also rejects the self-recriminations of the pious and the ascetics – which is their own form of taking pleasure in morality. In short, Nietzsche argues, the embrace of man’s total irresponsibility is to apply “Christly forgiveness” to mankind, and apply absolute modesty to ourselves – getting rid of ‘praise’ and ‘blame’ entirely:
            True modesty (that is, the knowledge that we are not our own creations) does exist, and it well suits the great mind, because he particularly can comprehend the thought of his complete lack of responsibility (even for whatever good he creates). (588).

III. Artist As Alchemist

Artists, Saints and Philosophers

            To Nietzsche, human beings are not essentially different from the rest of the animals. However, he makes three exceptions to this rule: the artist, saint, and philosopher. These three are prototypes for rising above mankind: “…we must be lifted up—and who are they that will uplift us? The sincere men who have cast out the beast: the philosophers, artists and saints. Nature— quæ nunquam facit saltum— has made her one leap in creating them; a leap of joy, as she feels herself for the first time at her goal…” (Schopenhauer as Educator, IV) This role – the transcendent figure who is above the rest of mankind – would later be filled by the Ubermensch in Nietzsche’s mature philosophy. The key difference, however, is that Nietzsche considers the Ubermensch to be something beyond the human, whereas the language he opts for in his Untimely Meditations suggests that the artist, the saint and the philosopher are the only truly human beings among humankind. The rest are more similar to the animals than they are to these three extraordinary types.
            Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations immediately preceded HH; in this third essay of the four, Nietzsche argued that the entire worth of nature is only found in man’s representations or reflections of it. He quotes Goethe: “I have often said, and will often repeat – the causa finalis of natural and human activity is dramatic poetry. Otherwise the stuff is of no use at all.” This is the function of both the artist and the philosopher. The artist shows us a way forward, beyond the lot of the animals, because he represents the contents of the psyche: man’s concepts and feelings. The philosopher is a similar transcendence, since the philosopher focuses their energies on developing the powers of reason and the intellect. Both these types have risen above solely following their base instincts, and therefore open the way to self-reflection. “Nature needs the artist, as she needs the philosopher, for a metaphysical end, the explanation of herself… and so may reach self-consciousness.” (Ibid)
            During this period, the saint is regarded with less scorn than Nietzsche’s attitude as expressed in his later works (see Genealogy of Morals & especially the Anti-Christ) wherein the saint is concluded to be a ‘dead-end’, a failure, or an aberration, insofar as he has poisoned himself, and indeed much of mankind, against life and passion. In HH, while the saint is criticized (not least of all for promoting a false, religious metaphysics) Nietzsche also expressed admiration for the priestly type, on account of his discipline and project of self-mastery. “Nature needs the saint. In him the ego has melted away, and the suffering of his life is, practically, no longer felt as individual, but as the spring of the deepest sympathy and intimacy with all living creatures: he sees the wonderful transformation scene that the comedy of ‘becoming’ never reaches, the attainment…” (UM III.5) Furthermore, Nietzsche asserts (in the work following HH, and in fact throughout his career) that the ascetic priest is the most powerful type of human that has arisen in the species so far: “Indeed, happiness – taken as the most alive feeing of power – has perhaps nowhere on earth been greater than in the souls of superstitious ascetics.” (Daybreak II.113)

            The philosopher also occupies a complicated position in Nietzsche’s worldview: on the one hand, all philosophers have “become… apologist[s] for knowledge”, have been led astray by abstractions, and have falsely believed that human beings can possess the truth. But if anything, Nietzsche’s criticism of philosophers in general during this period is that they simply have not taken rational inquiry far enough: which would lead them to discard absolute truths in favor of probabilities, discard moral and metaphysical truths in favor of psychology, and so on. Nietzsche argues that, instead of metaphysical philosophy, which has allowed us to paint our human, all too human prejudices and desires onto the canvas of the world, a historical philosophy is needed. Rather than taking what mankind feels and values at a certain time or place as eternal, a historical philosophy sees mankind as evolving. Nietzsche uses the term “philosophical science” as the next iteration of philosophy, and ‘science’ here means uncompromising application of skepticism to every matter.

A Chemistry of Concepts and Feelings

            What these three extraordinary types have in common is that they have all developed a new power never before seen in nature: power in the realm of the psyche. The power that is possessed by the artist, philosopher and the saint is the power to represent, reflect, manipulate, re-direct, transmute, distill, magnify (etc.) the concepts and feelings of the inner, psychic life. While the saint does this through asceticism, the artist through aesthetics, and the philosopher through reason, they all gain an understanding and eventually a power over the moods, beliefs and inner states of other beings. Nietzsche necessarily includes himself among these types (which is arguably not the case with the Ubermensch) since he is a philosopher. But his approach of ‘philosophical science’ rejects past attempts at understanding the human psyche, with the use of templates provided by metaphysics or morality (such as ‘opposites’).
            We ought to evaluate human beings and their actions, Nietzsche says, through a ‘chemistry of concepts and feelings’:

            “All we need, something which can be given us only now, with the various sciences at their present level of achievement, is a chemistry of moral, religious, ascetic ideas and feelings, a chemistry of all those impulses that we ourselves experience in the great and small interactions of culture and society, indeed even in solitude. What if this chemistry might end with the conclusion that, even here, the most glorious colors are extracted from base, even despised substances?” (HH 1)

            What we have so far, therefore, is a portrait of the artist, saint and philosopher as three different types who have tried their hand as chemists of the human psyche. This isn’t to say that they understood this. A true historical philosopher that really understood this chemistry hadn’t come along until Nietzsche, making these earlier iterations more like alchemists or proto-scientists. This new innovation in Nietzsche’s philosophical science will allow the philosopher to acquire greater power – and thus reason and the intellect will acquire greater power. At this stage in his career, Nietzsche thinks this would all be to the good.
            Despite his admiration for the saint, Nietzsche can see that there is as much about the saint that is harmful or detrimental to life as there are advantages to the type. Because of our bad habits in making conclusions and the longstanding affect of religious metaphysics on human thought, the power of the saint has corrupted and weakened European man. Nietzsche is willing to say, along with Voltaire, “Believe me, my friend, error has its merits too” – the saint was an error with great merit, but who must now be overcome.

            It might be guessed that, because he is a philosopher, Nietzsche thinks that the philosopher should now reign as the supreme type, but his views are more nuanced:

            “In spiritual economy, transitional spheres of thought are indeed necessary occasionally, for the transition from religion to scientific contemplation is a violent, dangerous leap, something inadvisable… But in the end, one ought to understand that the needs which religion has satisfied, which philosophy is now to satisfy, are not unchangeable: these needs themselves can be weakened and rooted out. Think, for example, of Christian anguish, the sighing about inner depravity, concern about salvation – all of these ideas originate only from errors of reason and deserve not satisfaction, but annihilation. A philosophy can be useful either by satisfying those needs or by eliminating them; for they are acquired needs, temporally limited, based on assumptions that contradict those of science. It is preferable to use art for this transition, for easing a heart overburdened with feelings; those ideas are entertained much less by art than by a metaphysical philosophy. Beginning with art, one can more easily move on to a truly liberating philosophical science.” (27)

            Nietzsche seems to privilege the philosopher (or even ‘the scientific man’), as ultimately preferable and an even higher stage of culture: ‘culture’, to N., is elevated to the extent that man can temper with reason and education that which is base, bestial or lower. However, he views the artist as a necessary transitional form. Philosophy can re-order the inner life of someone, but only if he is dedicated to reason and willing to follow it wherever it may lead. Not only are such people few in number, but dealing with those violent passions is something even the philosophical man cannot escape – this ‘chemistry’ cannot be undertaken as a ‘disinterested observer’. “As historical philosophy explains it, there exists, strictly considered, neither a selfless act nor a completely disinterested observation…” (1)
            The artist, therefore, who dives into his passions and, in turn, stirs passions in others, must be the one to perform this transmutation when it comes to the domain of the passions. As Nietzsche says about one of the greatest artists: “Shakespeare reflected a great deal on passions, and by temperament probably had very easy access to many of them (dramatists in general are rather wicked people).” (176) Nietzsche rejects the Aristotelian notion that negative emotions could be ‘discharged’ through tragedy: he argues that art has the opposite effect, of reifying and strengthening those passions which it represents: “...in the long run, a drive is actually strengthened by gratifying it, despite periodic alleviations… Plato might be right, after all, when he claims that tragedy makes us on the whole more anxious and sentimental. The tragic poet himself, would, of necessity, acquire a gloomy, fearful worldview and a weak, susceptible, lachrymose soul…” (212) Art is not something inconsequential, but actually very powerful in determining the psychic fate of the individual – and of society.
            That art should take on the psychic sphere previously afforded to religion is not necessarily a prescriptive statement from Nietzsche either, since he seems to believe that it is already happening: “Art raises its head where religions decline. It takes over a number of feelings and moods produced by religion, clasps them to its heart, and then becomes itself deeper, more soulful, so that it is able to communicate exaltation and enthusiasm…” (150) Nietzsche is careful to point out that the specific feelings conjured up by religion are not immutable, but nevertheless, the many generations of religious indoctrination have given it a powerful energy: “The wealth of religious feeling, swollen to a river, breaks out again and again, and seeks to conquer new realms: but growing enlightenment has shaken the dogmas of religion and generated a mistrust of it; therefore feeling, forced out of the religious sphere by enlightenment, throws itself into art…” Nietzsche’s personal opinion that art is optimal for transitioning from religion is of course of no consequence in respect to the actual direction of religious feeling, which also throws itself “in certain instances into political life, too, indeed even directly into science.” (Ibid)
            Not least because he denigrates the saint, this is why Nietzsche holds the irreligious artists to have been among the best artists – they can freely play with the concepts and feelings formed by religion without being overwhelmed by them. He writes, in a section entitled, ‘Irreligiosity of artists’: “Homer is so at home among his gods, and takes such delight in them as a poet that surely must have been deeply irreligious… in more recent times [this same irreligiosity] has distinguished the great artists of the Renaissance, as well as Shakespeare and Goethe.” (125) We might be hard-pressed to name three artists for whom Nietzsche has higher regard. Thus, while all artists are among the extraordinary ‘truly human’ human beings, it is the irreligious artist who represents Nietzsche’s hope for a vanguard to a higher type of culture.
            Nietzsche’s desire for art to undertake the task of absorbing religious feeling has sense to it, within the framework of a chemistry of concepts and feelings, since a rigorous, scientific temperament does not satisfy the emotional needs which religion has nurtured. While perhaps a few mentally-disciplined types could manage to ‘root out’ religious feeling through cold-hearted skepticism, Nietzsche thinks this is rare: “However much one thinks he has lost the habit of religion, he has not lost it to the degree that he would not enjoy encountering religious feelings and moods without any conceptual content as, for example, in music.” (131) The same old habits – of following our strongest feelings when assessing reality, instead of our reason – can be kindled through art just as they were kindled through religion. The metaphysical need – like a vast, flowing river – has to be re-directed rather than dammed up, for it is simply too powerful for that. “We can understand how strong the metaphysical need is… from the way, even in a free spirit who has rid himself of everything metaphysical, the highest effects of art easily produce a reverberation of a long-silenced, or even broken metaphysical string.” (153)
            For the purposes of advancing culture, “A person must have one or the other: either a disposition which is easygoing by nature, or else a disposition eased by art and knowledge.” (486) The man of knowledge can help guide people who are naturally of scientific temperament to higher culture: he can deal with the religious concepts. But the artist can transmute religious feelings while the philosopher cannot, because he owns the domain of un-reason: moods, emotional states, etc. The artist can entertain, ennoble or even re-direct the irrational and intense emotions that are satisfied by religious worship. The symbolism, deep-seated memories and doctrinal beliefs that are found in religion can be affected, even indirectly, by art. “All intense moods bring with them a resonance of related feelings and moods; they seem to stir up memory. Something us remembers and becomes aware of similar states and their origin… In this sense, one speaks of moral feelings, religious feelings, as if they were all unities; in truth they are rivers with a hundred sources and tributaries.” (14) Through this chemistry of concepts and feelings, these sources and tributaries can be discovered and eventually re-directed.
            This role for the artist as the extraordinary type which will prepare the way for the scientific man is explained in detail in HH 222, which begins with the maxim of all historical philosophers:

            “…[T]he artist can give his image validity only for a time, because man as a whole has evolved and is changeable, and not even an individual is fixed or enduring… [W]hat place remains for art, then, after this knowledge? Above all, for thousands of years, it has taught us to see every form of life with interest and joy, and to develop our sensibility so that we finally call out, ‘However it may be, life is good.’ This teaching of art – to have joy in existence and to regard human life as a part of nature, without being moved too violently, as something that developed through laws – this teaching has taken root in us… We could give art up, but in doing so we would not forfeit what it has taught us to do. Similarly, we have given up religion, but not the emotional intensification and exaltation it led to. As plastic art and music are the standard for the wealth of feeling really earned and won through religion, so the intense and manifold joy in life, which art implants in us, would still demand satisfaction were art to disappear. The scientific man is a further development of the artistic man.” (222)

            Thus, we have a similar claim as when Nietzsche suggests that in some distant age “the whole of religion will appear as an exercise and prelude” (TGS 300); art may also be a mere exercise and prelude. The most important role of art, as Nietzsche lays it out here, is virtually the same as he argues in Birth of Tragedy: that art has the power to take even the most terrible revelations and torturous inner states and transmute them into what is beautiful and worthwhile. “[The Greeks] do not deceive themselves, but they deliberately play over life with lies…. They knew that only through art could even misery become a pleasure.” (HH 154) Art places the most violent passions into an arena governed by human laws, and prevents them from becoming overwhelming. In these respects, it takes over a similar function to the religions. The question as to how the artist accomplishes this miracle strikes at the heart of why the artist, to Nietzsche, is both uniquely able to transmute old religious feelings, and also why the philosopher cannot do so.

Art Deceives

            The philosopher is interested in using reason to get to the truth, but the artist is a deceiver. In HH, the lion’s share of observations that Nietzsche makes about art have to do with the artist’s ability to deceive. When it comes to poetry, for example: “Metre lays a gauze over reality; it occasions some artificiality of speech and impurity of thinking; through the shadow that it throws over thought, it sometimes conceals, sometimes emphasizes.” (151) Art is, almost by definition, only created when one infuses his representations of the world with his own emotional and intellectual prejudices.
            By focusing on some truths and excluding others, by interpreting, by giving half-truths, the artist thereby lies to us. “When it comes to recognizing truths, the artist has a weaker morality than the thinker; on no account does he want his brilliant, profound interpretations of life to be taken from him…” (146) Nietzsche believes that even the most whole-hearted attempts at honestly representing the world, through drama for instance, have still been deceptions, with the only added element being that the dramatist deceives himself by thinking he can be such a disinterested observer.

            “When someone says that the dramatist (and the artist in general) creates real characters, this is a beautiful illusion and exaggeration, in whose existence and dissemination art celebrates one of its unintentional, almost superfluous triumphs. In fact, we don’t understand much about real, living people, and generalize very superficially when we attribute to them this character or that; the poet is reflecting this, our very incomplete view of man, when he turns into people… those sketches which are just as superficial as our knowledge of people. There is much deception in these characters created by artists; they are by no means examples of nature incarnate, but rather, like painted people, rather too thin; they cannot stand up to close examination… That the painter and sculptor express at all the ‘idea’ of man is nothing but a vain fantasy and a deception of the senses…. Art proceeds from man’s natural ignorance about his interior (in body and character): it is not for physicists and philosophers.” (160)

            Whereas clarity of thought might be a goal of the philosopher or scientist, the artist actually has an interest in being somewhat unclear. Consider: “The misfortune of clear and acute writers it that one takes them for shallow…” (181) and also: “Most thinkers write badly because they tell us not only their thoughts but also the thinking of their thoughts.” (188) The artist benefits from vagueness, incompleteness, and mystery: this gives the illusion of depth, and lets his audience fill that depth with their own wealth of inner feeling. “As figures in relief sometimes strike the imagination so powerfully because they seem to be on the point of stepping out of the wall,” Nietzsche writers, “so the relief-like, incomplete representation of a thought, or of a whole philosophy, is sometimes more effective than its exhaustive realization. More is left to the effort of the viewer…” (178) By hiding the truth with obliqueness or an enticing mystery, the artist introduces “an irrational element that simulates a sea for the listener’s imagination, and, like a fog, hides its opposite shore.” (199)
            This includes the artist’s presentation of himself to the rest of the world, and especially to his audience: the artist is advantaged by any degree of mystery or incomplete understanding of the artistic process, for a number of reasons. “To be sure, if [the artist’s] goal is to have the greatest possible effect, then vagueness about themselves, and an added gift of a semimadness have always helped a lot…” (164) Key to this illusion about the artist is the notion of his ‘intuition’, his ‘gift’, or the inexplicable source of their inspiration. Part of why religious feelings are so powerful is because they are taken to be uncaused by anything from nature, but rather as the intuition of something supernatural and unconditioned.
            The strongest feelings are felt to be independent (“when the sentient individual contemplates himself he deems every feeling, every change, as something isolated, disconnected, that is to say, unqualified by any thing; it comes suddenly to the surface”, 18), and people desire that any art that stirs up a strong emotional resonance be similarly ‘miraculous’ and beyond explanation. But this is another deception: “When productive energy has been damned up for a while,” Nietzsche says, “…there is finally a sudden outpouring… as if a miracle were taking place. This constitutes the well-known illusion which all artists… have somewhat too great an interest in preserving.” (156)
            “When something is perfect,” he writes, “we tend to neglect to ask about its evolution, delighting rather in what is present, as if it has risen from the ground by magic…” We want these feelings – which feel so profound – to actually be profound. The artist knows this, and knows that this is his way of using power (as a chemist of the psyche). Thus, the artist does not only lie in the body of his work, but is prone to lie about himself. “The artist knows that his work has its full effect only when it arouses belief in an improvisation, in a wondrous instantaneousness of origin; and so he encourages this illusion… [to] dispose the soul of the viewer or listener to believe in the sudden emergence of perfection. As is self-evident, the science of art must oppose this illusion most firmly…” (145)
            As we can see from this passage, Nietzsche’s hopes for the two extraordinary types he approves of – the artist and the philosopher – seem to converge when he speaks about the future of artistic education (‘the science of art’). Nietzsche wants to do away with the notion of talent as a fixed, inexplicable quantity: “Speak not of gifts, or innate talents!” (163) Nietzsche points out how our awe at the artistic genius is only a further development on our tendency to mystify the artistic process; but in his view, however, art is, like every other discipline, something which can be taught:

            “Because we think well of ourselves, but in no way expect we could ever make the sketch to a painting by Raphael or a scene like one in a play by Shakespeare, we convince ourselves that the ability to do so is quite excessively wonderful…. If we have a religious sensibility, a grace from above…. But those insinuations of our vanity aside, the activity of the genius seems in no way fundamentally different from the activity of a mechanical inventor, a scholar of astronomy or history, a master tactician. All those activities are explained when one imagines men whose thinking is active in one particular direction… From where, then, the belief that there is genius in only in the artist, orator, or philosopher? That they only have ‘intuition’?.... everything that is complete and perfect is admired; everything evolving is underestimated.” (162)

            Through the Gymnasium education – especially in the training in the Latin style – the youth were previously “prepared for art in general in the only possible right way: through practice.” (203) Nietzsche sees an essential place for artistic education in school, but finds that the German styles of poetry and writing are “barbarism”, and looks back to the ancient world for better examples of artistic mastery. Yet again, the Romans and Greeks are held up as examples. Even the greatness of past saintly types can be located not in “intuition” but in their breadth of knowledge and skill for interpretation (that is, what is artistic about them): “It is no different with oracular priests: it is always the degree of knowledge, imagination, ambition, morality in the head and heart of the interpreters that has made so much out of them.” (126) Thus we may note yet again that what is greatest about the three extraordinary types is what is shared in common amongst them: the learned skill (not innate talent) for chemistry of feeling.
            Another reason why art is better situated to mediate those forces within mankind which are ‘between’ religion and philosophy is because it is, by its nature ‘backward-looking’: “Art incidentally performs the task of preserving, even touching up extinct, faded ideas… Because art has this general benefit, one must excuse the artist himself if he does not stand in the front ranks of the enlightenment, of mankind’s progressive maturation…” (147)
            It should be stated at this point that the artist is a figure who, in N’s view could be used to transition mankind from religious concepts & feelings to philosophical ones; but, part of why this is the case is precisely because the artist has previously done quite the opposite. Since strong religious feelings have always flowed into strong aesthetic feelings, the artist can easily stir longings for past ages. “Poets…” Nietzsche writes, “help the present acquire new colors by making a light shine in from the past. To be able to do this, they themselves must in some respects be creatures facing backwards, so that they can be used as bridges to quite distant times and ideas, to religions and cultures dying out or dead.” (148)
            Since the truly scientific-philosopher points the way forward to pure knowledge, he will naturally regard art as sharing more of a kinship with religion, since they are both rooted on error and deception: “Error has made man so deep, delicate, inventive as to bring forth such blossoms as religions and arts. Pure knowledge would have been incapable of it.” (29) Thus, the artist is needed as a transitional sphere to the philosophical man because he still deals in errors, and is therefore the one who can transfigure the saint’s errors: there is the potential to pave the way for honesty out of lies. That said, there are passages where Nietzsche seems almost cynical about the project, owing to the irrational and deceptive character of the artist: “Not without deep sorrow do we admit to ourselves that artists of all times, at their most inspired, have transported to a heavenly transfiguration precisely those ideas that we now know to be false: artists glorify mankind’s religious and philosophical errors…” He predicts that, as we eventually dispense with such errors (perhaps even with the help of the artist!), one day, art will fade from the human imagination: “There will someday be a moving legend that such an art, such an artistic faith, once existed.” (220)

The Death of Art

            In a passage called ‘The desensualization of higher art.’, Nietzsche writes:

            “Because the artistic development of modern music has forced the intellect to undergo an extraordinary training, our ears have become increasingly intellectual…. All our senses have I fact become somewhat dulled because we always enquire after the reason, what ‘it means’ and no longer what ‘it is’…. What is the consequence of all this? The more the eye and ear are capable of thought, the more they reach the boundary line where they become asensual. Joy is transferred to the brain; the sense organs themselves become dull and weak. More and more, the symbolic replaces that which exists – and so, as surely as on any other path, we arrive along this one at barbarism.” (217)

            In his own day, Nietzsche noted a “twofold trend in musical development”: Nietzsche contrasts one group, whom we might call the ‘upper class’, with “higher, more delicate pretensions, ever more attuned to ‘what it means’” with “the vast majority, which each year is becoming ever more incapable of understanding meaning” and therefore “learning to reach with increasing pleasure for that which is intrinsically ugly and repulsive, that is, the basely sensual.” (Ibid) This seems to suggest that the ‘end of art’ is that it is eventually split in twain by the centrifugal forces within it: on the one hand it deals in deception, irrationality and the passions, and on the other, it tames these elements of the human psyche, makes them symbolic, makes passions obey laws, and can even deprive these forces of the metaphysical power they once possessed. The people of ‘lower culture’ will naturally be attracted to the former, and the ‘higher culture’ will naturally be attracted to the latter. The higher culture will, of course, be vastly outnumbered by the lower culture – one possible meaning of the aphorism: “We belong to a time in which culture is in danger of being destroyed by the means of culture.” (520)
            In section 221, Nietzsche elaborates on the problems facing art, specifically poetry. As artistic tastes progressed and poetic verse became increasingly liberated from the various constraints and limitations the academy (and high culture in general) historically imposed, Nietzsche saw an eventual degeneration in the works. “Voltaire was the last of the great dramatists to restrict with Greek moderation his polymorphic soul, equal to even the greatest tragic tempests,” he writes. Then, further down, he claims that Voltaire was “the last great writer to have… a Greek artistic conscience… the highest freedom of spirit and a positively unrevolutionary frame of mind. – Since then, the modern spirit has come to rule in all areas, with its unrest, its hatred and moderation and limitation, at first unleashed by the fever of revolution…”
            Nietzsche is not ungrateful to this liberalization of poetry, writing that “through this unshackling we enjoy for a time a poetry of all peoples, blooming wildly, strangely beautiful, and gigantically irregular, from the folk song right up to the ‘great barbarian’, Shakespeare.” But this will have a cataclysmic downside, as “we have thrown off the shackles of Franco-Hellenic art… but we have gotten used to finding all shackles, all limitation unreasonable” In the final assessment, “Art moves towards its dissolution.” Nietzsche quotes Lord Byron, a poet for whom he has a great deal of praise: “As to poetry, in general, the more I think about it, the more I am firm in the conviction that we are all on the wrong path, each and every one. We are all following a revolutionary system that is inherently false.”
            These dire prophecies concerning the future of the art world may be taken as they will be the modern reader. Nietzsche might well have been disgusted by the artistic developments of our own time – his fears have arguably come true. As for whether Nietzsche’s hopes came true, it is a tough argument to claim that art really has been used for the purpose of advancing mankind to become more philosophical/scientific. Could it still be possible that Nietzsche’s hopes be fulfilled? The ‘science of art’ is the means by which the artist serves as the bridge to higher types of human beings. The past techniques of transmuting concepts and feelings are like alchemy. If we develop this ‘science of art’, these techniques may yet bring forth what Nietzsche says we need, at the very beginning of HH, to advance our understanding of humankind: an evolution from alchemy to chemistry.
            Since the artist is a man with one foot in science (in his technique, his discipline) and the other in religion (irrationality, feelings), he therefore is likely to appear backward-facing to the purely scientific man and possibly irreligious or dangerous by the religious man. But this position, betwixt the two, makes him an ideal transitional form for Nietzsche, as mediator between man’s metaphysical childishness and scientific maturity. The tragic flaw of the artist, then, is that his ‘betweenness’ leaves him liable to flee into pure childishness and mendacity. Nietzsche would probably claim that this is what has happened.
            Thus we may say that what Nietzsche fears most about the ‘dissolution’ of art is that artists may lose exactly what he considers to be the route to ‘higher culture’: discipline, technique, limitation. As he wrote in the last section of HH: “When a man tries earnestly to liberate his intellect, his passions and desires secretly hope to benefit from it also.” (542) The liberation of art from any constraint is not a good development for Nietzsche – for it is not art in and of itself, nor even the passions art stirs and manipulates, but the ‘science of art’ that is valuable. The destruction of this science and letting loose of the passions is yet another road to barbarism.