Nietzsche's Five Contributions to the Discovery of the Mind by Walter Kaufmann

[ An exposition by Stanley Corngold]

First and foremost is Nietzsche’s skepticism about the reliability of ‘consciousness.’ It is a contribution so complex . . .[with] such far-flung implications that one might despair of putting the point briefly if he himself had not stated it once parenthetically in a mere four words ‘consciousness is a surface.’ In any different contexts he showed how the role of consciousness in our psychic life had been widely and vastly overestimated [D2 54].

In this connection, Nietzsche emerges as a great theorist of repression, as Freud himself noted in The Psychopathology of Everyday , citing Nietzsche’s aphorism from Beyond Good and Evil (2:68): ‘I have done that’ says my memory. ‘I could not have done that,’ says my pride and remains inexorable. Finally, my memory yields’ [D2 55].

Among the most memorable and productive of Nietzsche’s formulations we read:

“Our moral judgments and evaluation, too, are only images and fantasies about a physiological process that is unknown to us . . . All of our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt text” [D2 56].

Nietzsche’s rich reflection on the element of fiction that all men and women insert into ordinary experience inspires a good summation from Kaufman, en bon pedagogue: “Finally, there is Nietzsche’s suggestion that our experiences consist largely, if not entirely, of what we lay into them.” These supplements are provoked by our bodily life. Nietzsche  “suggests that our moral judgments and evaluations are rationalizations of unconscious physiological processes. I take it that this means that we are not indignant because an action outrages our moral sense but that the indignation is primary and the moral judgment a rationalization”[D2 57].

Kaufmann certainly rewards us in elaborating Nietzsche’s originality as a theorist of repression. “Resistance”, he writes, “this key concept of psychoanalysis – is actually encountered in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (section 23): a proper physio-psychology has to contend with the unconscious resistance in the heart of the investigator . . . .” [D2 64-65]. As for the distinction between the factitious ego and the deep Self, which consists of the ego’s resistance to ideas, we have only to quote, with Kaufman, Zarathustra’s great, plangent cry: “Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage- whose name is self . . .Always the self listens and seeks; it compares, overpowers, conquers and destroys. It controls, and it is in control of the ego to.. . . What, indeed, does man know of himself! Can he even perceive himself completely”[D2 69].

 

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“Nietzsche’s second major contribution to the discovery of the mind was his theory of the will to power,’ a concept to which “he  himself gave a central place in his books, beginning with Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ [D270]- though contrary claims which can’t be ignored have been made e.g. by Brian Leiter. Nevertheless, on the strength of even its occasional mentions, it has since proved tremendously interesting. Heidegger, for one, singles out the doctrine of the will to power as Nietzsche’s leading idea, supporting his view of Nietzsche as  the last great metaphysician of the West. Kaufmann vigorously denies that the concept of will to power has a metaphysical status for Nietzsche – for Kaufmann this is out of the question, as implying a two worlds view of appearance and ulterior reality, of phenomena and Ding-an-sich, which Nietzsche abhors.

How does Nietzsche profile the will to power? It stands behind his audacious argument in the preface to the second edition of The Birth of Tragedy on behalf of ‘deception’, such “as semblance, delusion, error, interpretation, contrivance, art” as futherers of life. Kaufmann celebrates Nietzsche’s understanding of the will to life, again in opposition to Spinoza and Darwin: in Nietzsche’s words:

“The wish to preserve oneself is the symptom of a condition of distress, of a limitation of the really fundamental instinct of life which aims at the expansion of power and, wishing for that, frequently risks and even sacrifices self preservation [!] .  .   In nature it is not conditions of distress that are dominant but overflow and squandering  .  .  . the struggle for existence is only an exception, a temporary restriction of the will to live. The great and small struggle always revolves around superiority, around grown and expansion, around power – in accordance with the will to power, which is the will to life (from The Gay Science)” [D2 80-81].

 Kaufmann elaborates the concept  of will to power , for example, the wrong idea of thinking that Nietzsche “associated power exclusively or even primarily with military or political power . . . To his mind, one-up-manship, aggressiveness, jingoism, militarism, racism, conformity, resignation to a drab life, and the desire for Nirvana were all expressions of weakness [D2 91-92]. The crux of Kaufmann’s argument is found in one of Nietzsche’s late jottings, which Kaufmann terms the ‘classical formulation’ of the will to power: “ I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows to turn to its advantage” [D2 105].  The conceptual force of the drive is its demoralizing “the shamefully moralized way of speaking which has gradually made all modern judgments of men and things slimy” [D2 101-2].

Readers of Nietzsche might object to the probity of this claim on recalling that Nietzsche also has no hesitation in flinging about charges of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’, but Kaufmann has an answer:

‘When a way of life fascinates us but at the same time elicits strongly negative emotions, this shows that we have a strong desire to live like this ourselves but feel even more strongly that we must not do this. Whether we are fully aware of this or not, we give ourselves moral credit for not indulging in such behavior, and we resent those who do not deny themselves as we do. Nietzsche’s highly emotional attacks on ‘the weak’ are a case in point” [D2102].

 

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Nietzsche’s third important contribution to the discovery of the mind is his analysis of ressentiment. This concept is a lever with which he – and now others- can operate analytically on entire world views as they are shown to inform religions, philosophies, and other belief systems.

Nietzsche locates the origins of ‘slave morality’ in repressed rage at the power of a ruling class or human type, a revaluation producing, for one thing, the table of Christian values. Resentment of vitality inspires the value-creating ‘priest to conceive ‘meekness’ as a virtue; resentment of ostentation as ‘poverty of the heart’; resentment of sexual power as ascetic self-denial; and so forth. There can be no greater tribute to the animating presence of repressed resentment in Christian values than the voluptuous delight that believers will experience from their vantage point in heaven while witnessing the eternal tortures of the damned – nonbelievers by choice or by the unlucky fate of having been born too early or elsewhere. Kaufmann cites another ‘classical’ formulation from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: “The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures who are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with imaginary revenge” [D2 12]. But there are ways to get around revenge when you think you have been harmed: you can master that harm, grow from it, and ‘prove” this way, as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says, “that [your enemy] . . .did you some good.” Kaufmann is surely aware that this sublimation is easier said than done. Yet the value of this wisdom is unassailable, for “there is no nobler way to overcome resentment and transmute self-pity into a .pervasive sense of gratitude” [D2 122].  Kaufmann associates this transmutation of self-pity with a willingness to absorb criticism and respect for alternatives. “The essence of critical thinking is the consideration of objections and alternatives, while dogmatism ignores both.”

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We have arrived at the fourth of Nietzsche’s major contributions to discovering the mind. This is his pioneering of psychohistory. ”I am trying to show how a psychological understanding of the principal figures . . .help us to understand their philosophies better.” It’s a matter of having some grasp of the mind or mentality of one’s subject.” The interpreter ‘must develop a feeling for what this human being meant of thought”; add to this, “an understanding of a person’s individual style that can only come from prolonged immersion in the works and documents” add to this, finally, a readiness to practice a ‘critical rethinking of the writer’s ideas.” Nietzsche practiced psychohistory in his brilliant analysis of Paul and Jesus and, in its beginnings, Luther. These portraits  are less models to imitate than cogent suggestions for emulation.

Kaufman’s intent is to heed the patient in the text, again and again that invisible but felt author, whose sensibility exceeds any range of ’nuances’ one might find in a work read merely as a weave of words. We have arrived at the clearest understanding of the principle behind Kaufman’s “humanism”: it is the claim that the human being is a richer object of study than any of his works, the value of which is measure in turn by the degree of felt presence of the man. Kaufman’s postulate stands boldly formulated: “The anti-psychological bias of so many scholastics in the humanities is ultimately anti humanistic [FH 71]. It is a war of extreme banners swung by readers who, on he one hand, listen to the author’s wildly beating,(mostly) broken heart; and on the other hand, detect various textual sites of ‘disjunctive ensemble operations.’ More than anyone before them Nietzsche and Freud called attention to the human being who finds expression in a text’ [FH 71].

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The last  of Nietzsche’s contributions to the discovery of the mind is his philosophy of masks [D2 137].  In opposing the ordinary idea that masks are markers of insincerity, Nietzsche (and Kaufmann) bring high praise to this device: it makes for irony, subtlety, and appropriate reserve. Still, “thhe question remains how intellectual integrity and honesty .  .  . can be reconciled with his philosophy of masks” [D2 149]. The answer is not crystal clearer, and Nietzsche’s remarks are rather cryptic, as form fits function. We read, from the speaker’s position of strength, ‘Whatever is profound loves masks”; here there is no suggestion of a compromise in depth. And we also read in the same passage, rather from the position of one who has been harried, how a mask grows around “every profound spirit . . . owing to the constantly false, namely shallow, interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives” [D2 156]. He can no longer  bare his thought if it is only to invite mean thrusts. In any case, we mask the world: “Without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live – that renouncing false judgments would be renouncing life” (D2 152]. How then, could the temptation not arise to think that a personal fiction  might be necessary for survival?

Reference:

[D2] : Discovering the Mind, vol. 2,  Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Buber; Brunswick, NJ, Transaction, 1992
[FH] : The Future of the Humanities. New York: Reader’s Digest Press, 1977