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Julius Bahnsen’s Influence on Nietzsche’s Wills-Theory
Julius Bahnsen’s Influence on Nietzsche’s Wills-Theory A NTH ONY K. J ENSEN
ABSTRACT: This
article traces the development of Nietzsche’s early adoption and later rejection of Schopenhauer’s theory of Will. I argue that Nietzsche’s break with Schopenhauer was coextensive with his acceptance of explanatory naturalism about both external and internal activities. I argue further that a major source for four of his specific arguments against the Schopenhauerian primacy of the one Will was the little-known neo-Schopenhauerian thinker Julius Bahnsen. Using Bahnsen, Nietzsche argues (1) that there is no empirical evidence of a transcendent Will; (2) that explanations of behavior do not require a transcendent Will; (3) that what explains behavior is not a “thing” at all, but a fluid dynamic of strivings; and (4) that these strivings are “guided” even absent a distinct guiding principle. K EYWORDS:
Julius Bahnsen, Will, Schopenhauer, self-knowledge, agency
N
ietzsche’s break from Schopenhauer is usually regarded as coextensive with his movement toward ontological naturalism, the view that all there is is limited by the scope of what is naturally observable. Moral norms like good and evil are accordingly ruled out as “things,” but naturalized as human, alltoo-human constructions, just as much as are God and the soul, just as much as would Schopenhauer’s non–naturally observable one world Will. While I think that basic picture is correct, I also think that scholars have regarded the problem with insufficient attention to the historical context of that transition, especially when it comes to naturalistic explanations of choice and agency. The move away from a Schopenhauerian explanatory framework as to how a person selects his or her courses of action involves a naturalistic view of agency that runs directly through the “neo-Schopenhauerian” school. 1 A relatively little-known group of thinkers, especially in Anglophone circles, Julius Frauenstädt, Eugen Dühring, Eduard von Hartmann, Philipp Mainländer, and Julius Bahnsen, each carried Schopenhauer’s work in fascinating directions, each of whom Nietzsche knew intimately and engaged with philosophically. Nietzsche’s attitude toward each of these figures is critical to varying degrees and especially in the cases of Hartmann and Dühring is quite hostile. But as is often the case with Nietzsche, the hostility he shows an author often masks a deeper influence. Nietzsche’s rejection of
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Schopenhauer’s transcendent Will and postulation of naturalistic power-drives to explain norm-motivated behavior was, I will show, highly indebted specifically to Julius Bahnsen’s Zum Verhaltniss zwischen Wille und Motiv (1870). Bahnsen’s work, I contend, is a crucial intermediary between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche when it comes to explaining the manner by which the competition of power-drives within an agent leads to the expression of certain behaviors. To begin, let us dispense with a common sense view of norm selection, in other words, the view everyone involved in this article—Schopenhauer, the neo-Schopenhauerians, and Nietzsche—is arguing against. This view holds that there is an “I” that stands apart from the electrical-chemical operations in the physical brain. And it holds that this “I” is presented with a decision among representational norms whose intellectual content competes in terms of their respective commendability. The “I” enacts that norm once it decides which course of action was the preferable one. Now, the belief in a freely-willed deliberative “I” that listens attentively to competing arguments and chooses one on the basis of an allegedly rational decision, to each of these philosophers, is deeply flawed. Not only does this commonsense view of agency rely upon a supranaturalistic attribution of a thing known as an “I,” its explanatory power rests on the belief in the supra-naturalistic connection between ideational content and physical activities. Thus, the view being argued against by Schopenhauer, the neo-Schopenhauerians, and Nietzsche is both ontologically supra-naturalistic and explanatorily supra-naturalistic. Schopenhauer’s dual-aspect theory was to have revealed the mind-body problem as a philosophical misunderstanding, specifically, as an attempt to misapply the category of causation to a supposed interaction between a phenomenal body whose conceptualization is inextricable from the principle of sufficient reason and the Will, which for Schopenhauer transcends conceptualization entirely. The elections of norms are the means to satisfy the Will’s striving for life. That striving is individuated into particular motives by means of the Will’s objectification into diverse satisfactions. Although all organisms seek what satisfies the Will, within rational organisms, the objectification of the Will into a specifically intellectual principle allows it to demand a much more complicated range of satisfactions –ideational as well as bodily satisfactions— as it becomes increasingly individuated into a multiplicity of intellectual motives. However, for Schopenhauer, which norms are elected as guides for action is not the effect or result of the Will electing those norms. Although motives are ultimately derivative from the one Will to Life, they are not ontologically derivative in the sense of being the effect of the Will, but in the sense of being another means to observe and thus another way to explain why an individual acts. Because for Schopenhauer the Will and embodied motives are not two separate entities and because there is thus no causal relation that can be predicated between them,
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the familiar problem of how the Will causes the embodied motives to seek certain actions is not solved, exactly, but avoided. Holding the dual-aspect theory means that there is one substance, but two perspectives by which two explanations of an action can be constructed: one noumenal as the ultimate explanation of everything, and one phenomenal that regards the particular explanation of this particular, spatiotemporally specific, behavior. Both are correct, from two divergent perspectives. The first correct explanation would posit one world Will, the noumenal thing-in-itself, as the ultimate essence of everything including the activities of all and any organic beings. That explanation is not a product of the understanding per se. The apprehension of the one world Will rests upon the mystically felt connection of the Will as simultaneously the essence of the self and of all things. The second, phenomenal explanation proceeds from the discursive understanding, running through the cognitive forms of space, time, and causality to present the experience of the self, as everything else, as a tem poral series of individuated sensations. Thus, while Schopenhauer collapses the Will-Body ontology into a single, pan-enthetic thing, he maintains a dualist epistemology insofar as there remains for any explanation of action both a phenomenal-experientiable ground and a transcendent-mystical ground. The former is the domain in which the natural sciences operate, the latter the arena in which artists, saints, and genius philosophers, no doubt like Schopenhauer himself, each operates. Different “neo-Schopenhauerians” came to terms with Schopenhauer’s supra-naturalistic Will in different ways. Eugen Dühring recast Schopenhauer’s pessimism—the view that the world Will is best characterized by a ceaseless and unsatisfiable striving—in a more fatalistic and indeed political fashion.2 For Eduard von Hartmann, Schopenhauer’s ahistoricity needed to be remedied by a synthesis with Hegel’s historical phenomenology, such that the Schopenhauerian unconscious Will would do for history what the ruling Idea did for Hegel. 3 For Philipp Mainländer, Schopenhauer’s transcendent unified Will was collapsed into an immanent multiplicity of individuated wills.4 Julius Bahnsen, closer to Mainländer than any of the others, sought a way to transform Schopenhauer’s transcendent explanation into a naturalistic one that explains sufficiently why agents behave as they do. To that end, he aimed to demonstrate that (1) there is no evidence of a transcendent Will; (2) explanations of behavior do not require a transcendent Will; (3) that what explains behavior is not a “thing” at all, but a fluid dynamic of strivings; and (4) that these strivings are “guided” even absent a distinct guiding principle. With these four steps Bahnsen sought to naturalize Schopenhauer’s dual-aspect theory of explanation. My argument in what follows is that not only did Nietzsche know Bahnsen’s four arguments, he incorporated them into his own effort to naturalize Schopenhauer for the sake of explaining agency.
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Bahnsen and Nietzsche Since Julius Bahnsen is mostly unknown, and not just by specialists of Nietzsche, it is helpful to introduce him in the context of his relationship to Nietzsche. 5 First off, there are a number of curious points of biographical contact between the pair. Bahnsen wrote an autobiography whose hyperbolic self-loathing stands as an antipode to Nietzsche’s hyperbolic self-praise in Ecce homo. The title of Bahnsen’s autobiography, Wie ich wurde, was ich ward (ed. 1905), is a mirror image of Nietzsche’s subtitle, Wie man wird, was man ist .6 Like Nietzsche, Bahnsen was trained in philology, at the same university, in fact, that would become Erwin Rohde’s home: Kiel. Like Nietzsche, too, a long, happy professorship was not in the cards. Bahnsen eked out a lonely existence in Pomerania, and was lucky just to have fairly steady employment as a gymnasium teacher. For Bahnsen the reason was not poor health, but a combination of his militant defense of Schopenhauer and his personality’s vacillation between manic hostility and lugubrious depression. 7 With respect to the latter, even the careful reader must take pains to avoid a too-easy psychologizing, as many still do with Nietzsche, between Bahnsen’s personal melancholy and his philosophical engagement with pessimism.8 Bahnsen visited Schopenhauer twice during the 1850s. As it was for Mainländer and Frauenstädt, and one might well add Wagner, the encounter with Schopenhauer was remarkably transformative. Bahnsen left feeling more like an apostle than a philosophical colleague: “from then on I regarded and honored him as my master.”9 Like Nietzsche, his initial reading of Schopenhauer produced great enthusiasm, but also, later, a sort of retrospective embarrassment at having been carried away into the ether of mystical speculation. Toward the end of his life, Bahnsen “felt he had to say that it was not only inappropriate, but factually incorrect, to consider myself just a mere disciple of Schopenhauer. One could well call me his student, but not a mere apostle, even when I was younger; but it’d be more congenial still [to call me] a Fortführer und Vollender.”10 Bahnsen proved to be much more than a “continuer” and “completer”; indeed, as we are about to see, some of his positions move in different and indeed in contrary directions to his former master. Bahnsen and Nietzsche had a loose but documented acquaintanceship – philosophically and personally—for more than eleven years. In 1867, Nietzsche enthusiastically refers Bahnsen’s Beiträge zur Charakterologie (1867) to his friend Gersdorff, on account of its “viel Liebe zum ‘Meister,’” and “wirklich viel gute Gedanken und Beobachtungen [. . .]” (Nietzsche to Carl von Gersdorff, November 24, 1867, and December 1, 1867, no. 554; KSB 2, 239).11 One year later, Nietzsche tells Gersdorff that they should have a get together of all “unsre philosophischen Freunde” (Nietzsche to Carl von Gersdorff, February 16, 1868, no. 562; KSB 2, 258). Bahnsen is named alongside Dühring and Frauenstädt as
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people they simply must invite. The most interesting letter comes on February 22, 1878, precisely during Nietzsche’s last months at Basel and the start of his composition of Human, All Too Human ( KGB II 6/2, 803–5). Bahnsen wrote to Nietzsche to express his enthusiastic agreement with Nietzsche’s works to date, specifically Birth of Tragedy, and the first two Untimely Meditations, on each of which he claims to have been lecturing. (If Bahnsen is being honest here, I believe this makes him the earliest professional lecturer on Nietzsche’s thought—nearly a decade before the more noted Georg Brandes.) He commends Nietzsche’s emphasis on two underappreciated aspects of their common master: Schopenhauer’s view of health and his resistance to statist “culture.” Bahnsen, however, found the Wagnerian overtones hard to stomach and found Nietzsche’s appropriation of the dual-aspect theory for the dual forces whose intermingling allegedly produces Greek tragedy to be both a stretch of Ancient history and a misappropriation of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics. Apart from those critiques, which are sound enough, the letter was uncommonly congenial for Bahnsen, who even offers to form a “Waffenbruederschaft” on the ninetieth birthday of Schopenhauer in the spirit of their “gemeinsamen Strebens”—a phrase that, given their mutual thoughts about “Streben” or “striving,” was probably at least partly tongue-in-cheek. Nietzsche never answered Bahnsen. His sister Elizabeth wrote to Bahnsen instead on September 3, 1878: My poor brother, Professor Dr. Nietzsche, was so troubled by headaches and eye problems this winter that all writing and reading was forbidden to him. He regrets for that reason continually that he could not answer your kind and endearing letter. He hopes very much, however, to soon be able to have a personal meeting with you. [. . .] My brother belongs among the most serious and joyful readers of your Charakterologie, but because of his suffering he is prevented from becoming better acquainted in the area of contemporary German philosophy than he would wish. . . .12 Bahnsen died in 1881 (with the self-chosen epitaph: “Vita mea irritus labor” 13) and thus did not live to see Nietzsche’s mature writing and whatever new directions it may have taken. But considering Nietzsche never wrote to Bahnsen in the three years between Bahnsen’s letter and his death, it is unlikely that he remained nearly so enthusiastic about Bahnsen as Elizabeth suggests. Nietzsche rarely speaks well of any of the neo-Schopenhauerians after the 1880s, and his vitriol against the life-denying pessimists generally would have precluded any friendship with Bahnsen personally. On the other hand, a waning enthusiasm for Bahnsen personally does not mean Nietzsche was indifferent to his thought. After all, Nietzsche bought or borrowed Bahnsen’s works faithfully soon after they were published: the two volumes of his Charakterologie in November, 1867, Bahnsen’s Zur Philosophie der Geschichte in 1872, and his posthumous Der Widerspruch im Wissen und Wesen der Welt in 1882, at a time when, of course,
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any strong allegiance to Schopenhauerianism would have already been purged. 14 It is better to say that Nietzsche’s attitude toward the neo-Schopenhauerians, and Bahnsen especially, is highly ambivalent, something reflected in a lengthy reference in the Gay Science: But let me ask you: should we perhaps consider that old clap-trap Bahnsen a credit to the Germans, seeing how decadently he lived his whole life in a Realdialektik of misery and his “personal bad luck”? Perhaps precisely this is German? (I herewith recommend his writings for the purpose for which I have used them myself: as an anti-pessimistic diet, especially with respect to their elegantiae psychologicae; I think they should be effective even for the most constipated bowels and minds.) [. . .] Neither Bahnsen nor Mainländer, not to mention Eduard von Hartmann, gives us any clear evidence regarding the question whether Schopenhauer’s pessimism, his horrified look into a de-deified world that had become blind, mad, and questionable, his honest horror, was not merely an exceptional case among the Germans but a German event. (GS 357)
Bahnsen’s On the Relation between Will and Motive Bahnsen’s most elegant and focused formulation of a naturalized theory of choice and agency comes in his short pamphlet Zum Verhältniss zwischen Wille und Motiv (1870).15 Here, Bahnsen begins his account by attacking the neoSchopenhauerian direction taken by Eduard von Hartmann, Nietzsche’s own mid-1870s foe.16 A largely unsuccessful attempt to syncretize Schopenhauer’s metaphysical Will with Hegel’s philosophy of history, Hartmann’s system holds that a singular metaphysical Unconscious guides the several unconsciousnesses of individual human rational agents to accomplish what ends the metaphysical Unconscious seeks. The ends sought by the one world Unconscious in fact obviate the individual’s need to will by himself or herself, since what it wills is irresistible by individual human conscious wills. Accordingly, all traces of individual character are accidents and all clashes of will—interpersonally and intrapersonally—are mere surfaces that are to be “aufgehoben” along the path of the Metaphysical Unconscious’ march through history. 17 Not only is history a night in which all cows are black, those cows trudge single file off a cliff into the abyss of “Willenslosigkeit.” Hartmann is obviously the furthest thing from a naturalist, as he thinks that the source of all norm-selections is ultimately transcendent. Any explanation that involves the immanent, individuated motives of a spatiotemporally specific action are regarded as a mere illusion masking the one true world-mover, the metaphysical unconscious which transcends the limits of natural explanation by definition.
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Bahnsen’s arguments against Hartmann do not here concern his pessimism or historiography,18 but the coherence of his account of a transcendent will, or in Hartmann’s terms, the “metaphysische Unbewusstsein.” There are three distinct arguments Bahnsen employs against Hartmann’s metaphysics. 1. Argument from Experience: We are only warranted to explain phenomena that can be observed within normal spatiotemporal experience. Via introspection, which Bahnsen, in contrast to Schopenhauer, considers just such an experience, we never actually feel a single-minded striving, and certainly no thing called “Will”; but we do feel a push toward certain ends and a pull away from others. Thus all we are warranted to posit to explain behaviors are pushes and pulls.19 2. Argument from Simplicity: Descriptive typological psychology (Charakterologie) and contemporary cognitive science both demonstrate that no two types of character respond to stimuli in identical ways.20 If we hold a single common metaphysical Will for all types of character, it becomes unnecessarily difficult to explain how an incredibly diverse system of responses arose to those similar stimuli. It is simpler to suppose that instead of one common Will, a person’s character is unique insofar as they have a unique expression of pushes and pulls to those similar stimuli.21 3. Argument from Definition: Will is allegedly the thing that posits and effectuates motives. But because Will is unconscious and because motives require representations about the desirability or undesirability of which ends are sought, we are left with the nonsense of positing something unconscious that somehow holds representations. 22 Out of his critique of Hartmann, Bahnsen develops his positive view of the connections between will and motive. Empirically, our awareness of the push-pull of our wills, if considered more reflectively, will usually yield a complex and multifaceted dynamic of motivations. A single unitary cause of those motivations is not felt (following Hume); but neither is it logically necessary (contrary to Kant), nor will it even prove useful for explaining the connection between consciousness and bodily motion. It would be truer to experience to label what we actually do experience in self-reflection as a dynamic of multifaceted activities—and leave it at that. Since the alleged connection between a hypothetical Will and activities is unexperientiable, a naturalistic explanation that in no way sacrifices explanatory scope would involve treating the activities we do experience—that dynamic of willing—as the only justifiable explanatory factors. Rather than hypostatize a transcendent motivator to select particular motives, one might simply individuate those strivings by the “that” for which they strive.23 With words Nietzsche
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seems to have cribbed quite closely, Bahnsen writes: “Wie es ein Missbrauch der Sprache ist, hinter ihr die Gedanken zu verstecken, so des Handelns, wenn sich [. . .] ‘der Wille hinter der That verbirgt’—Beides geht ‘wider die Natur’” [“Just as it is a misappropriation for language to hide thoughts behind it, so it is with doings when one . . . ‘conceals will behind the deed’—both are ‘contrary to nature’”].24 Compare Nietzsche’s phrasing at GM I:13: “nur unter der Verführung der Sprache [. . .], welche alles Wirken als bedingt durch ein Wirkendes, durch ein ‘Subjekt’ versteht und missversteht, kann es anders erscheinen” [“Only under the seduction of language . . . , which understands and misunderstands all acts as conditioned by an acting-thing, by a ‘subject,’ can it appear otherwise”]. It is, Bahnsen thinks, a misappropriation of linguistic custom for ontology to claim there must be a subject for every verb, a doer behind every deed. And when the doing is done, no fixed effect or product can be adduced either: there can only be, in Bahnsen’s words, a “Wirken ohne ein Gewirktes” [“doing without a deed”]. 25 And even the nominalized form ‘wills’ is misleading (if convenient); better would it be if we could talk in terms of “das Erregende” [“the stimulating”], “ein Hervorbringendes” [“a bringing forth”], or “Producirendes” [“producing”]. 26 Note the participial form of each term. What we experience are doings, not things. And if all we experience are doings of various sorts, the leap immediately to a doer is unwarranted without first considering the possibility that the multifaceted doings are sufficient to explain all that can be observed to occur. In place of Schopenhauer’s explanatory motive-act dualism, which would require an explanation of their interaction and an account of the “aims” of the motive, Bahnsen thinks that the strivings themselves are, in their very character, motivational. Accordingly, the action of a person cannot be considered a decision by a deciding thing, but an expression of the outcome of the dynamic agonism among those motives themselves without any mediating party. 27 This agonism between drives Bahnsen labels, in intentional juxtaposition with Hegel, individualistische Realdialektik .28 His theory counters Hegel in two ways: first, rather than competing ideas or modes of thinking, for Bahnsen the elements of the dynamic are themselves Real , natural, immanent entities. These strivings, or as he sometimes calls them, “Henaden,” operate more like force-points than mini-ontological substances, always active and always inherently directional.29 Second, in place of Hegel’s Aufhebung , the competition of those natural entities remains forever unresolved in perpetual “Dialektik.” But lacking the synthetic moment, the “Henaden” remain engaged in a constant war of all against all. Everything natural is therefore best characterized by unresolvable contrariety, from the directing forces of subjectivity to the forces of both animate and inanimate material nature.30 And thus human behavior, just as rife with inner contrariety, hesitation, and contradiction, is ontologically consistent with the whole of nature. Accordingly, a naturalistic explanation of agency suffices as
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a complete explanation insofar as there is no transcendent ground available for possible appeal.31 On the whole, Bahnsen’s argument against Eduard von Hartmann works to undermine a much larger target, namely, Schopenhauer’s hypostatization of a transcendent principle to explain human action. Given Bahnsen’s naturalist ontology and his naturalistic theory of explanation, what is normally termed a “decision” cannot be the result of a deliberative “I” that freely selects norms as a conscious, intellectual representation. He excises representational motives along with their alleged author, the “I” or the “Mind” or the one unified singular “Will,” all as a foray into the metaphysical that is neither warranted nor necessary. In the enactment of norms no deliberation is required and therefore the teleology of things is prohibited. 32 Gone too is the possibility of either freedom or determinism, since both presume there is decision maker or actor independent of the actions: free will presumes the agent can control those actions, whereas determinism presumes the agent cannot. A decision is nothing more and nothing less than the expressed outcome of the dynamic competition among the various willings-for-something. If one willing carries more force over its contrary, if it possesses what Bahnsen names a “größere Entschiedenheit,” the organism whose willing it is expresses that action. Bahnsen’s individual wills simply express what it is their nature to express without question of whether they could, would, or should have done otherwise. When an agent claims retrospectively that their behavior was “norm-driven,” when that means the intentional selection of an end whose preferability is housed in conscious representation, it is not that they explain according to one aspect of a dual-aspect theory, per Schopenhauer, but that they are appealing to something which does not and never did exist. Such a claim, Bahnsen thinks, is an unnecessary, inexpedient, and useless explanation for what he thinks his individuated-willings theory can explain naturalistically. Explanatory naturalism is sufficient, more expedient, and more useful.
Nietzsche’s Adoption of Bahnsen Imputing influences on Nietzsche carries two difficulties that few other philosophers bear. First, he is notoriously circumspect and occasionally dishonest about what he read. Even in what should have been the clearest expression of his opinion of the neo-Schopenhauerian philosophers— Gay Science 99: “On the Followers of Schopenhauer”—he never mentions by name the genuine philosophical followers of Schopenhauer—Frauenstädt, Dühring, Hartmann, Mainländer, or Bahnsen, though he knew each of their work intimately—opting instead to wage yet another diatribe against the Wagnerians. Second, Nietzsche rarely “shows his work” in terms of arguments whose lineage can be fruitfully
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compared or contrasted with the arguments of other authors who held similar conclusions. More often than we would like, his bombastic conclusions are so rhetorically stylized that it becomes especially difficult to distinguish what is a Nietzschean rephrasing of an argument and what is genuinely a Nietzschean argument. In the present case we have unquestionable evidence that Nietzsche read Bahnsen often and over the course of his life, that he endorsed him enthusiastically at the same time he was developing his own theory of willing, and, what is more, the extremely close phrasing in regarding motive-act dualism as a misap plication of language. To prove conclusively that Nietzsche did adopt Bahnsen’s particular formulation of will-pluralism as a means of solving Schopenhauer’s dual-aspect theory is not possible without further biographical evidence than we possess. But to suggest Bahnsen’s will theory, as I believe no one has ever done, as a major influence on the formation of Nietzsche’s own views, I want now to revisit the steps of that movement, provide evidence that Nietzsche did utilize arguments with similar terminology and intent, and offer those as evidence for the conclusion that Bahnsen was a crucial intermediary between Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s theories of will. Remember the four key points in Bahnsen’s correction of the Schopenhauerian/ Hartmannian interpretation of a single ontological Will: 1. there is no empirical evidence of a transcendent Will; 2. explanations of behavior do not require a transcendent Will; 3. that what explains behavior is not a “thing” at all, but a fluid dynamic of strivings; and 4. that these strivings are “guided” even absent a distinct guiding principle. First, it is well known that Nietzsche rejects the view of a single rational mind that controls behavior, a view that had been dominant from Plato through the Enlightenment. (See among many other passages KSA 13:11[113].) There is ample evidence, too, that Nietzsche also rejected a single unified transcendent Will, too. Beyond Good and Evil 19 spells this out well enough. Willing appears to Nietzsche, in a passage of declared opposition to Schopenhauer’s Ur-Eine, “above all something complicated , something that is a unity only in word,” a plurality of feelings toward which and away from which we are moved. The reasons Nietzsche offers in rejecting the single Will are very similar to Bahnsen: our direct introspective experience never grants us a glimpse at anything more than the spatiotemporally individuated willing states. There are still harmless self-observers who believe in the existence of “immediate certainties” such as “I think” or the “I will” that was Schopenhauer’s superstition: just as if knowledge had been given an object here to seize, stark naked, as a “thing-in-itself,” and no falsification
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took place from either the side of the subject or the side of the object. But I will say this a hundred times: “immediate certainty,” like “absolute knowledge” and the “thing in itself” contains a contradictio in adjecto. ( BGE 16; see also GS 127) The phrasing of the passage directs the reader to the question of the possibility of knowledge and the Kantian thing-in-itself. While certainly important, it distracts from the original target, namely, our presumed immediate certainty of things like the “I” as a single, unified thing. What we really sense of our internal self are individuated willing-states. Necessarily so, since those individuated states are experienced through the only possible ways human beings can experience—in Nietzsche’s idiom: “perspectives”—that constitute both feeling and thinking generally. Those perspectives render the great effluvia of sensuous and reflective experience into manageable units according to both psychophysiological needs and socially accepted conventions. But insofar as those perspectives operate for the sake of the organism’s further empowerment, they render the effluvia oversimplified and superficial. Nietzsche’s denial that we perceive outside of perspectives thereby renders impossible that what we perceive in any allegedly direct experience is an experience of a single, unindividuated, nonspatial, nontemporal Will in-itself, the very thing that Schopenhauer touted was not only the genuine character of both self and world, but also the object of immediate, if mystical, apprehension. This, however, is not to say that the notion of a Will should be discarded entirely. The notion of Will should instead be considered a “Unifying Conception of Psychology” a “meaningful clarification,”—but “is it the ‘Will’ of which Schopenhauer spoke, would it be the ‘essence of things’?: my proposition is this: that the Will of all previous psychology is an unjustified generalization, that this will does not exist ” ( KSA 13:14[121]). That is, because we only experience self-feelings as a sort of “social structure composed of many ‘souls’” ( BGE 19) that perpetually conflict with and strive to overcome one another, we are not entitled to say there is a single Will that stands underneath those strivings. As he emphasizes in the Genealogy of Morals “Aber es giebt kein solches Substrat; es giebt kein ‘Sein’ hinter dem Thun, Wirken, Werden; ‘der Thäter’ ist zum Thun bloss hinzugedichtet” [“But there is no such substrate; there is no ‘being’ behind the doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is poetically attached to the deed”] (GM I:13; KSA 5, p. 279). Nietzsche claims this repeatedly. “There aren’t any ‘will’s’; that is only a simplified conception constructed by reason” ( KSA 10:24[34]). And again, “‘Will’: that is what our feeling imparts as a result of a process—thus it is already a consequence [Wirkung ], and not the beginning and the cause” ( KSA 10:7[25]). And yet again, “‘Willing,’ as it is understood, means as little as ‘thinking’: it is a pure fiction” ( KSA 13:11[114]). Will, therefore, cannot possibly be considered the substrate of the world of appearances or of the self. It is not simply a redirection of the Schopenhauerian
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Will to Life, but a symbolic designation to stand for the common character of a variegated number of what can be observed, namely, individuated strivings. 33 The second argument concerns the necessity of a single principle named Will to explain agency and behaviors. Nietzsche agrees with Bahnsen that there is no such necessity. “The ‘inner world’ is full of phantoms. . .: the will is one of them. The will no longer moves anything, hence does not explain anything either—it merely accompanies events; it can also be absent” (TI “Errors” 3). As with the first argument by Bahnsen, Nietzsche uses not only the general conclusion, but also the three supporting arguments Bahnsen utilized with respect to this second point. That is, Nietzsche rejects that a transcendent entity is required to explain actions on the grounds that it is not (2a) necessary, or (2b) expedient, or even (2c) useful. With respect to necessity (2a), Nietzsche writes: “The assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary [nicht nothwendig]; perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general? A kind of aristocracy of ‘cells’ in which dominion resides?” ( KSA 11:40[42]). Just as Bahnsen thought the base-experience we could have were sufficient for explaining the pushes and pulls we encounter in acts of willing, so Nietzsche thinks that it is unnecessary to posit some one thing behind them. The argument, at least here, does not require Nietzsche to either reject the one Will altogether (though he will elsewhere), nor even to posit something suitable in its place. Like Bahnsen, all Nietzsche has to do here is point out that choice and agency could well be explained without reference to a single thing. And indeed, he does: “Finally: why could ‘a purpose’ not be an epiphenomenon in the series of changes in the activating forces that bring about the purposive action—a pale image sketched in consciousness beforehand that serves to orient us concerning events, even as a symptom of events, not as their cause?—But with this we have criticized the will itself : is it not an illusion to take for a cause that which rises to consciousness as a will-act?” ( KSA 12:12[1]). With respect to expediency (2b), consider again GM I:13: “Basically, the common people double a deed; when they see lightning, they make a doing-a-deed out of it: they posit the same event, first as cause and then as its effect. Scientists do no better when they say ‘force moves, force, causes,’ and such like [. . .].” Nietzsche here echoes Bahnsen’s claim that the reflexive attitude which posits a doer behind a deed is actually a roundabout sort of fiction. Notice that the fictional character of the assertion is not the problem—scientists do no better with their explanatory devices, though not because they claim something false. The problem is not an untrue assertion, but an inexpedient one. And Nietzsche goes further than Bahnsen into the psychological grounds why such inexpedient doubling becomes normalized. “The reason the subject (or, as we more colloquially say, the soul ) has been, until now, the best doctrine on earth, is perhaps because it facilitated that sublime self-deception whereby the majority of the dying, the weak and the oppressed of every kind could construe weakness itself as freedom, and their
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particular mode of existence as an accomplishment ” (GM I:13). So despite the needless double-locution of speaking of causes for effects, we humans typically speak that way, not for any epistemological reason, so much as for the sake of being able to praise or blame someone for some doings. Nietzsche’s entire notion of the “innocence of becoming,” and consequently a great deal of his affirmative moral thinking, hinges on his claim here that the separation of agent and doing is inexpedient. Finally, with respect to the usefulness (2c) of a Will for explaining actions, Nietzsche writes, “There exists neither ‘spirit,’ nor reason, nor thinking, nor consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth: all are fictions that are of no use” ( KSA 13:14[22], pp. 301–2). Many illusions are useful for Nietzsche. In fact, some of the illusions human beings have created are more necessary for our survival than a perfect correspondential truth, were it possible, even could be. Elsewhere he considers the supposition of a self to be quite useful and indeed, as we saw, he himself endorses the “will to power” as a very useful designation to express the common character of various will-acts: “a determinate name for this reality [the reality ‘inside’ the person] would be: ‘will to power’” ( KSA 11:40[53]). Here, however, why he thinks such a designation is not useful has to do with the wider context, mentioned above, about the moral consequences such a supposition of agency provokes, an argument far outside the scope of Bahnsen’s own vision. Rather than the inconvenience of explanation, here the target is the usefulness of relying on transcendent principles, “will” among them, for a culture’s more general health. Better would it be, Nietzsche thinks, to give up such delusions of both speculative philosophy and theology, and in their place affirm the natural life given to us. Naturalistic hypotheses of the kind Nietzsche envisions are thus said to have a usefulness more conducive to the well-being of individuals and cultures than does the reliance upon supra-naturalistic explanations which rely upon souls, Wills, and the like. Therefore here as well, Nietzsche not only has a similar point as Bahnsen. The three key arguments Bahnsen uses to support that point—that a transcendent Will is unnecessary, inexpedient, and not useful—are clearly repeated by Nietzsche. Moving to the third point, remember that Bahnsen mused about renaming his Wills “die Erregenden” since the participial form better characterizes the activity of the subrational drives. Nietzsche more often than not uses nouns like drives, instincts, impulses, affects, and many others to typify the character of the inner world. However, he did so with the similar proviso that nominalizing these forms is a linguistic convenience only and cannot be taken as a referential description of some alleged substantial entities. “A quantum of force is just such a quantum of drive, will, action, in fact it is nothing but this driv ing , willing , and acting , and only the seduction of language (and the fundamental errors or reason petrified within it), which construes and misconstrues all actions as conditional upon an agency, a ‘subject,’ can make it appear otherwise” (GM I:13,
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my emphasis). The result of perspectivalizing introspection as well as outward experience is that the stream of experience is individuated into spatiotemporally discrete things that are supposed to stand in causal relationships with one another.34 Although we cannot suspend that normal mode of judgment to see the flow of becoming as it genuinely is, we can at least maintain an awareness of how our perspectives affect our experience. A more conscientious manner of referring to the flow of becoming, and thereby “better” at least than imbuing the forces with substantiality, would be to refer to them participially, as Nietzsche at least sometimes does. Fourth, and finally, in place of Schopenhauer’s Will as the transcendent aspect of the body’s phenomenal activities, Nietzsche and Bahnsen posit an agonistic dynamic and Realdialektik of variegated strivings respectively as sufficient to explain deliberative agency. In a note of 1885, Nietzsche writes, “ Meine Hypothese: das Subjekt als Vielheit” ( KSA 11:40[42]). Those multiplicities to which he refers are those same internal “strivings” of which Bahnsen spoke. The strivings are all that is present in both ourselves (4a) and in organic nature (4b). As to the former (4a), “We ourselves are, indeed, nothing but that which at every moment we sense of this continued flowing [Fortströmen]” ( AOM 223; KSA 2, p. 477). The image of “flowing” here intimates the directedness of the internal factors involved in behavior. But at the same time, it suggests that our willing needs as little direction as the water in a river requires someone to push it along, precisely as Bahnsen had outlined above. As to the latter (4b), “Life would be defined as an enduring form of processes of force expressions, in which the different contenders grow unequally” ( KSA 11:36[22]). The precise details of Nietzsche’s agonistic force-ontology have been discussed often and well in the literature.35 The main point for our purpose is that from Nietzsche’s naturalized vision of ontology, the explanation of agency follows from this directly. Any explanation of agency cannot depend upon a metaphysical notion of Will or any other supra-naturalistic principle for that matter. And investigation as to why someone did what they did must restrict its analysis to the naturalistically experientiable power-drives involved. Therefore, for Nietzsche, as for Bahnsen, it is not a question of Will, but “a question of a struggle between two elements of unequal power: a new arrangement of forces is achieved according to the measure of power of each of them. [. . .] [T]he essential thing is that the factions in conflict emerge with different quanta of power” ( KSA 13:14[195]).
Conclusion Given these four strains of argument against the hypothesis of a will to explain behaviors, I suggest again that Nietzsche drew from Julius Bahnsen the same four key moves away from the transcendent side of Schopenhauer’s dual-aspect
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theory and toward a naturalistic theory meant to explain decisive actions. To be sure there are many differences in their general philosophies. Bahnsen’s pessimism is exhaustive, whereas Nietzsche strives to affirm life. Bahnsen is a hard fatalist, whereas Nietzsche rightly views both freedom and determinism as equal misunderstandings of the logical entailments of a naturalistic wills-theory. Bahnsen sees the world and the self as a never-ending battle among self-contradictory drives, whereas Nietzsche finds drives competitive and agonistic, but not necessarily contradictory. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Bahnsen has nothing like the historical dimension so essential in Nietzsche’s moral theory, nothing like his insights about the movements of culture and morality. But the transition away from Schopenhauer’s dual-aspect mode of explanation toward both a naturalized ontology as well as a naturalized explanatory strategy of agency is a key part of both Bahnsen’s and Nietzsche’s thought, and one, moreover, that Nietzsche seems to have appropriated at least in part from Bahnsen. Finally, the view Nietzsche inherited from Bahnsen should invite us to reconsider what Nietzsche meant by philosophical naturalism. By naturalism, Nietzsche simply cannot mean a reduction to a materialist view of nature. Such had been done already by Moleschott, Büchner, and Czolbe; and it was little more than ridiculed by any of the authors whom Nietzsche liked to read.36 Nor can it mean an explanatory reductivism in the sense of limiting one’s explanations to the proceduralism of contemporary natural science. No philosopher in the nineteenth century, including the positivists, ever held such a view, even if for no better reason than that there simply was no single scientific methodology that philosophy even in principle could have attempted to emulate.37 What Bahnsen saw himself as doing, and what, for that matter Helmholtz, Lange, Spir, the neo-Kantians, and Mach all saw themselves as doing, was walking the line between Schelling’s idealistic Naturphilosophie and Büchner’s materialism. Schopenhauer took an important step in trying to naturalize agency by means of an ontological identity between the natural world and a transcendent Will. But when it came to behavior, he required a dual-aspect explanation. Bahnsen and Nietzsche both, as I have shown, repeal the Schopenhauerian pan-enthetic Will by positing “Henaden” or wills-to-power as sufficient fictions to explain the diversity not only of human actions but of all organic matter. A naturalized vision of agency means, then, the rejection of experience-transcending principles as either necessary or expedient or useful for explaining why humans do what they do. When it comes to explaining behavior, “[t]o posit a belief as the cause of a mechanistic motion is to believe in miracles [Wunder-Glaube]” ( KSA 10:24[21]). On the other hand, we cannot imagine that our designations of experience identify what experiences are really had due to the perspectival character of thinking about those experiences. The best to which we can “get down” is an awareness of the perspectival character—the abbreviated, simplified, and generalized character—of our internal experiences, which are then
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made available for explanations of agency. “Assuming that our world of desires and passions is the only thing ‘given’ as real, that we cannot get down or up to any ‘reality’ except the reality of our drives (since thinking is merely a relation between these drives) [. . .] ( BGE 36).” Naturalism, as Nietzsche understands it, is therefore not simply or even principally a matter of either a materialist ontology or proceduralist scientism, but an awareness that any designations of experience, inner experience as well as outer experience, are bound by the natural perspectival limitations of what can be claimed.38 Providence College
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NOTES 1. The term “neo-Schopenhauerian” is, to my knowledge, a neologism. The superb efforts of Winfried H. Müller-Seyfahrt have proven that this was a recognizable group whose thought bears sufficient enough commonalities to loosely be t ermed a school. Among her recent editions of a few of their works, see her highly informative collection Politik und Gesellschaft im Umkreis Arthur Schopenhauers, ed. Winfried H. Müller-Seyfahrt and Thomas Koßler (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2008). Alas, hers has been a voice that deserves a better audience. All translations from this and all other authors are my own. 2. The most comprehensive expression is Eugen Dühring, Der Wert des Lebens: Eine philosophische Betrachtung (Breslau: Eduard Trewendt, 1865). A helpful account of Nietzsche’s relation to pessimism in the context of Dühring is Tobias Dahlkvist , Nietzsche and the Philosophy of Pessimism: A Study of Nietzsche’s Relation to the Pessimistic Tradition: Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Leopardi (Uppsala: Uppsala Studies in the History of Ideas, 2007). 3. Such is the aim of Hartmann’s then wildly popular Philosophie des Unbewussten (Berlin: Carl Duncker Verlag, 1869). For Hartmann’s relation to Schopenhauer and to Nietzsche, see my “The Rogue of All Rogues: Nietzsche’s Presentation of Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophie des Unbewussten and Hartmann’s Response to Nietzsche,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 32 (2006): 41–61. 4. Philipp Mainländer, Die Philosophie der Erlösung (Berlin: Theodor Hofmann, 1876). 5. While there is not much scholarship on the relationship between Nietzsche and Bahnsen, a commendable study is Rüdiger Grimm, “Embracing Two Horses: Tragedy, Humor, and Inwardness; or, Nietzsche, Vischer, and Julius Bahnsen,” Nietzsche-Studien 18 (1989): 203–20. As the title makes clear, however, Grimm’s focus is quite far from my own. 6. Julius Bahnsen, Wie ich wurde, was ich ward , ed. Rudolf Louis (Leipzig: J.A. Barth, 1931). Although the text of Bahnsen’s autobiography was written in his hand, it was compiled and published posthumously. The title, however, cannot be considered the major influence for Nietzsche’s own subtitle. The famous phrase “become who you are,” from which Nietzsche’s subtitle “how one becomes what one is” is derived, ultimately comes from Nietzsche’s earliest reading of Pindar’s second Pythian Ode, as well as an early note of encouragement from his teacher Friedrich Ritschl. 7. His subsection “Exil und preussische Dienst” offers ample detail of Bahnsen’s character. See his Wie ich wurde, was ich ward , 49–67. 8. Indeed Harry Slochower suggests the two are inextricable: “Ideas possessed personal values for him. However, the passion with which he fought for his persuasions involved him in
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constant controversies, carried on in a brilliant, yet extremely polemical manner. Everywhere he takes the position of a fighter, now assailing with fast rapier-thrusts, now defending with passionate counter-attacks, always disputatious. [. . .] His heated and militant tone has irritated many critics and has doubtless been a strong factor contributing toward the inadequate consideration that his system has received.” Harry Slochower, “Julius Bahnsen: Philosopher of Heroic Despair, 1830–1881,” Philosophical Review 41.4 (1932): 368–84, 368. 9. Bahnsen, Wie ich wurde, was ich ward , 45. 10. Bahnsen, Wie ich wurde, was ich ward , 49. 11. Julius Bahnsen, Beiträge zur Charakterologie mit besonderer Berücksichtigung pädagogischer Fragen, 2 vols. (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1867). 12. Preserved in Richard Frank Krummel, Nietzsche und der deutsche Geist , 3 vols. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter Press, 1998), 1:45–46. 13. Cited in Slochower, “Julius Bahnsen,” 373. 14. For Nietzsche’s reading of Bahnsen, see Thomas H. Brobjer, Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context: an Intellectual Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 48. 15. Julius Bahnsen, Zum Verhaltniss zwischen Wille und Motiv: Eine metaphysische Voruntersuchung zur Charakterologie (Stolp und Lauenburg im Breisgau: Eschenhagen Verlag, 1870). 16. Bahnsen’s relationship with Hartmann is ambivalent, and like many of his personal encounters, rather vehemently so. On the one hand, Bahnsen criticizes Hartmann in print as derisively as Nietzsche ever does. On the other, Bahnsen worked as an editorial assistant for Hartmann in 1872 and even named his third child Arthur Eduard Hartmann Bahnsen. 17. Bahnsen, Wie ich wurde, was ich ward , 12–13. 18. Both are addressed, however, in Bahnsen’s Zur Philosophie der Geschichte: Eine kritische Besprechung des Hegel-Hartmannschen Evolutionismus aus Schopenhauerschen Principien (Berlin: Carl Duncker, 1872). Nietzsche borrowed this work from the Basel University library in 1872, and its central theses appear prominently in his own On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, which was composed in 1873. 19. Bahnsen, Zum Verhaltniss zwischen Wille und Motiv, 9. 20. Johannes Müller famously proved this with his doctrine of specific nerve energies in his Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen (1833), which Nietzsche and Bahnsen both knew well. That Bahnsen’s own Charakterologie could really prove the same using descriptive typology is rather doubtful. 21. Bahnsen, Zum Verhaltniss zwischen Wille und Motiv, 18. 22. Bahnsen, Zum Verhaltniss zwischen Wille und Motiv, 28–29. 23. Bahnsen, Zum Verhaltniss zwischen Wille und Motiv, 29. 24. Bahnsen, Zum Verhaltniss zwischen Wille und Motiv. 25. Bahnsen, Zum Verhaltniss zwischen Wille und Motiv, 41. 26. Bahnsen, Zum Verhaltniss zwischen Wille und Motiv, 40. 27. Bahnsen, Zum Verhaltniss zwischen Wille und Motiv, 39. 28. Bahnsen, Wie ich wurde, was ich ward , 49. 29. Bahnsen, Beiträge zur Charakterologie, 2:102–3f. 30. Bahnsen, Beiträge zur Charakterologie, 2:452–53. Bahnsen stands in relationship to a number of Nietzsche’s other influences on this point, especially Jean-Marie Guyau’s Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction (1885), Maximilian Drossbach’s Ueber die scheinbaren und wirklichen Ursachen des Geschehens (1884), and Wilhelm Roux’s Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus (1881). Of them, it is worth noting, Bahnsen is the only distinctively Schopenhauerian. 31. Bahnsen’s confidence here is misplaced. A naturalistic explanation would be complete were there nothing beyond it that could possibly be appealed to as an explanation. This, however,
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does not mean that Bahnsen’s own naturalistic explanation would be the only possible naturalistic explanation available. 32. Bahnsen, Zum Verhaltniss zwischen Wille und Motiv, 28. 33. I argue for this claim more thoroughly in my “Nietzsche and Schopenhauer: ‘For Me What Mattered Was the Human Being,’” in Nietzsche and the Philosophers, ed. Mark Conard (forthcoming). 34. For a similar formulation, see Steven D. Hales and Rex Welshon, Nietzsche’s Perspectivism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 142: “Consciousness is, as Nietzsche remarks, a kind of ‘language’ [. . .], a mediated and symbolic simplification and interpretative construction on the psychological event that it models, itself already an interpretation.” On this point, see also Patrick Wotling, “What Language Do Drives Speak?,” in Nietzsche on Instinct and Language, ed. Constâncio/Branco (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), 74–78. 35. Among many, see Hubert Treiber, “Zur Genealogie einer ‘science positive de la morale en Allemagne’: Die Geburt der ‘r(é)ealistischen Moralwissenschaft’ aus der Idee einer monistischen Naturkonzeption,” Nietzsche-Studien 22 (1993): 165–221. For an account of the variety of influences on Nietzsche’s naturalistic ontology, see Robin Small, Nietzsche in Context (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); Peter Poellner, Nietzsche and Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and esp. Christa Davis Acampora, Contesting Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 36. As one example, consider what F.A. Lange once wrote about Czolbe. “[I]t must be seen that Czolbe’s satisfaction-theory is built upon sand, and therefore, in the long run, can no more attain its end than the popular dogmatism which, on the contrary, will not give up a beginning and an end of things—the Creation and the Day of Judgment.” F.A. Lange, History of Materialism: Criticism of Its Present Importance, 3 vols., trans. E.C. Thomas (1866; repr., London: Trübner & Co., 1881). 37. For Nietzsche’s knowledge of the varieties of naturalism in its historical context, see above all Christian J. Emden, Nietzsche’s Naturalism: Philosophy and the Life Sciences in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 38. A fuller account of Nietzsche’s perspectivism of inner experience cannot be elucidated here. See my “Was heisst Denken? Orientierung und Perspektive,” Nietzscheforschung 22 (2015): 29–42; and “Helmholtz, Lange and the Unconscious Symbols of the Self,” in Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity, ed. João Constancio (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2015), 196–218.
