Uppsala University Department of Philosophy
Nietzsche, epiphenomenalism and causal relationships
between self-‐affirmation and the internal constitution of the
drives
Ludwig Törnros Bachelor thesis AT-‐181. Introduction
Nietzsche has often been interpreted as an epiphenomenalist about conciousness. Brian Leiter has in recent times put one of the most notable interpretations of this kind forward. In this paper I will be looking at two causal relationships between two of Nietzsche’s ideals and the relationships’
compatibility with Brian Leiter’s epiphenomenal interpretation of Nietzsche. The ideals are the self-‐affirmative ideal and the ideal internal conditions. The self-‐ affirmative ideal will be presented as an individual having a genuine conscious affirmative attitude towards oneself and one’s life, and the ideal internal conditions as an ideal state that an individual’s set of drives can be in. The first causal relationship between the two ideals is that the ideal internal conditions cause the self-‐affirmative attitude. I will call this causal relationship Connection 1 and it will be shown to be a plausible notion on Brian Leiter’s epiphenomenal interpretation of Nietzsche.
Connection 1: The ideal internal conditions cause the self-‐ affirmative attitude.
The main concern of this paper will be another causal relationship that Christopher Janaway has put forward in his article “Nietzsche on Morality, Drives, and Human Greatness”, as a notion that he interprets Nietzsche as holding. It is that the self-‐affirmative attitude causes the internal conditions to become more ideal. I will call this causal relationship Connection 2.
Connection 2: The self-‐affirmative attitude causes the internal conditions to become more ideal.
Janaway claims in his article that Connection 2 is compatible with
epiphenomenal interpretations of Nietzsche and he mentions Brian Leiter specifically in connection to this claim (Janaway 2012, p. 199, footnote 23). He does not discuss this claim in much detail nor does he give any detailed
compatibility between Janaway’s proposed causal relationship and Leiter’s epiphenomenal interpretation of Nietzsche as well as evaluate if Connection 2 is a plausible notion. I will in addition to this also expand a small effort towards discussing how we should understand the scope of Janaway’s claim that
Connection 2 is compatible with epiphenomenal interpretations of Nietzsche in general.
In section two I will present the two ideals. Janaway’s proposed causal relationship is dependent upon certain definitions of the two ideals. The
definition of the ideal internal conditions is rather uncontroversial, but what the self-‐affirmative ideal consists in is a much-‐debated issue. I will not question whether Janaway’s definitions are right or wrong, but instead evaluate his proposed causal relationship and its compatibility with Leiter’s epiphenomenal interpretation of Nietzsche with the assumption that he is right. Janaway’s definition of the self-‐affirmative ideal as a conscious attitude is why his claim that Connection 2 is compatible with epiphenomenalism is puzzling, because epiphenomenalism about consciousness does typically accord no or a
significantly limited causal role to conscious mental states.
Janaway does not seem to claim that his proposed causal relationship only is compatible with Leiter’s epiphenomenal interpretation of Nietzsche, but epiphenomenal interpretations of Nietzsche in general. He is however unclear about the scope of this claim. In section three I will make a distinction between strong and weak epiphenomenalism and show that Connection 2 only possibly can be compatible with epiphenomenal interpretations of Nietzsche that is of the weaker kind. The distinguishing feature is that conscious mental states can play a causal role in a causal chain towards action on weak epiphenomenalism, which they cannot on strong epiphenomenalism, there conscious mental states are only an end of the line of a causal chain towards action. Janaway’s claim that
Connection 2 is compatible with epiphenomenal interpretations of Nietzsche in general should therefore probably not include strong epiphenomenal
interpretations. Brian Leiter’s epiphenomenal interpretation will be shown to be of the weaker kind, and from this point forward in the paper I will focus
In section four I will present Brian Leiter’s epiphenomenal interpretation of Nietzsche, involving Leiter’s conception of agency as well as his fatalistic interpretation of Nietzsche, and explain why Connection 1 is a plausible notion on this interpretation.
In section five I will present Janaway’s argumentation for Connection 2 being possible in principle and evaluate its compatibility with Leiter’s epiphenomenal interpretation of Nietzsche. Janaway will argue that evaluative attitudes in general can have an altering effect upon the drives according to Nietzsche. I will conclude that Janaway’s argumentation is compatible with Leiter’s
epiphenomenal interpretation’s conception of agency but presumably not with Leiter’s further fatalistic interpretation of Nietzsche.
To show that Connection 2 is possible in principle is however not enough for a sufficient argumentation for Connection 2, because we need reason to believe that the self-‐affirmative attitude, according to Nietzsche, can have the particular effect of making the internal conditions more ideal, not just that it can have some effect. This is what I will be discussing in section six. It might be that Janaway assumes that because the self-‐affirmative attitude is an ideal of Nietzsche’s that it must therefore have the effect of making the internal conditions more ideal if it can have an effect upon the drives. But this assumption is not obvious, which I will show, and Janaway needs some form of argument supporting his claim that the self-‐affirmative attitude in fact can have the effect upon the drives that makes the internal conditions more ideal. The problem is that Janaway is highly unclear on this point, he does not present any detailed and clear argument, but I will in the end of section six present an argument in favor of Janaway’s position. It is unclear whether this argument presents a view that Janaway holds. I will discuss why this is unclear. I will also argue that this argument is not strong on its own and is in need of support from Nietzsche’s literature.
2. The self-‐affirmative ideal and the ideal internal conditions
Especially in the later of his productive years Nietzsche idealizes an ability to love or say “Yes” to life (Janaway, p. 183). We find his life’s formula in Ecce Homo: ”amor fati: not wanting anything to be different, not forwards, not backwards, not for all eternity. Not just enduring what is necessary, still less concealing it—all idealism is hypocrisy in the face of what is necessary—but
loving it...”(EH, ’Why I am so clever’, 10)1. In Beyond Good and Evil he writes “the ideal of the most high-‐spirited, vital, world-‐affirming individual, who has learned not just to accept and go along with what was and is, but who wants it again and again just as it was and is through all eternity” (BGE, 56). In The Gay Science we find his thought of the eternal recurrence. There a demon is supposed to find us at our most lonely and vulnerable and say:
“’This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence -‐ even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!'” (GS, 341).
A person is self-‐affirmative according to Nietzsche if she would “long for nothing
more fervently” (GS, 341) than this being the case.
1 When I refer to Nietzsche’s works in this paper I will be using abbreviations of the work title, followed by Arabic numerals for section numbers. When works are divided into volumes, parts, or chapters, Roman numerals or abbreviations of chapter titles precede section numbers, so that (GM, I, 1) for example refers to section one, essay one, in the Genealogy of Morals, or (TI, “Reason”, 1) refers to section one, “’Reason’ in Philosophy”, in Twilight of the Idols. See the
Janaway conceives of the self-‐affirmative ideal as a conscious self-‐affirmative attitude2 (Janaway 2012, p. 184). A conscious self-‐affirmative attitude can be conceived of in wide manner of ways and we need to differentiate what we can call genuine self-‐affirmation or a genuine self-‐affirmative attitude from self-‐ affirmation in this broader sense of the word. The self-‐affirmative ideal can for example not simply be the verbal or conceptual act of saying or thinking “Yes, in fact I do love my life”. Because this could be a lie or the person saying this might not have a sufficient understanding of what his or her life contains. To make this distinction between genuine and non-‐genuine self-‐affirmation clear we can turn to the thought of the eternal recurrence recounted above. Nietzsche is here pointing out the fact that our lives contain hardship, suffering, boredom, triviality etc. He claims that we will have to live this life of ours over and over again in eternity, and by asking us whether we can still love it he turns the passage into a thought experiment. He wants us to think about our hardship, suffering etc. and imagine what it would be like to live our life over and over again, and how we react to this prospect shows whether we are self-‐affirmative or not. A genuine self-‐affirmative attitude requires a proper understanding and knowledge of the hardship, suffering etc. that one’s life contains, and is not an attitude of acceptance or reconciliation, it is a love of one’s life.
When discussing the thought experiment of the eternal recurrence Nietzsche describes only two possible reactions to it, either fervent joy or despair, but according to Janaway an individual can presumably land anywhere within this spectrum (Janaway 2012, p. 183-‐4). His reasoning is that it seems implausible that there are only two possible reactions to the prospect of one’s life eternal recurrence. The fact that there are many possible reactions to the prospect of one’s life’s eternal recurrence does, according to Janaway, suggest that the self-‐ affirmative ideal admits of degrees (Janaway 2012, p. 184). So that an individual
2 Whether the self-‐affirmative ideal can be a conscious mental state on an
can be self-‐affirmative to a certain lesser degree, for instance because while loving the rest of her life she cannot love or even accept a certain experience that was particularly painful, but when she manages to deal with this painful
experience, slowly coming to terms with it, she can become more and more self-‐ affirmative. On this view the ideal is to become as much self-‐affirmative as possible.
The genuine self-‐affirmation is in part a form of loving or wanting of that which goes against one’s will, which can seem problematic. Hardship, suffering etc. are experiences undergone with a negative first-‐order attitude and the genuine self-‐affirmation requires one to love or say “Yes” to these things. We should conceive of the self-‐affirmative attitude as a second-‐order attitude. A person that is genuinely self-‐affirmative is not a person without negative first-‐ order experiences, who lives a blissful life; it is a person who can manage to love these experiences with a second-‐order attitude of genuine self-‐affirmation. So it is the attaining of this second-‐order attitude that is ideal not that which is affirmed. It is not the assessing of oneself and one’s life on the amount of good they include but rather the ability to love oneself and one’s life despite the boredom, suffering, disappointment, triviality etc. The question Nietzsche is asking is that even if life includes these things, can you still love yourself and your life, can you still be self-‐affirmative (Janaway 2012, p. 185-‐6)?
Nietzsche’s second ideal, the ideal internal conditions, has to do with the structure of an individual’s drives. A drive can minimally be described as a rigid and unconscious disposition towards a certain kind of behaviour, the sex drive being a common example. The structure of the drives is built up of four
conditions, the amount of drives, their individual strengths, the strife between them as well as the unifying force holding them together. Nietzsche’s ideal internal conditions are that the drives are many, individually strong, in much strife with each other as well as constituting a kind of unity. Nietzsche writes:
driving powerfully against one another (e.g. Shakespeare), but bound together.” (KSA 11, 289).
It is not enough to have one, or a few powerful drives. The footballer whose only wish since she was a toddler was to play professional football and who
continually only aimed and dreamed of this goal does not satisfy Nietzsche’s ideal internal conditions. The same goes for scholars, performance artists or whatever, if their inner life has similar features. According to Nietzsche you need to have a plenitude of strong drives, and you need to tolerate their conflicts with each other and at the same time have a sort of unifying force keeping them united. When I in this paper refer to a certain state of a structure of the drives I am referring to a certain way an individual’s set of drives are in accordance with these conditions. A weak structure is a state of low satisfaction of Nietzsche’s ideal internal conditions, and a strong structure is reversely a state of high satisfaction.
So now we have a working understanding of the self-‐affirmative ideal as a genuine conscious second-‐order attitude of love towards oneself and one’s life that admits of degrees, as well as an understanding of the ideal internal
conditions. To be clear I want to point out the fact that certain theories about the self-‐affirmative ideal defines it in terms of the ideal internal conditions. This is not the case in this paper as we can see from how I have presented the two ideals, and this presentation mirrors Janaway’s views on the subject.
3. Strong and weak epiphenomenalism
In this section I will expand a small effort towards understanding the scope of Janaway’s claim that Connection 2 is compatible with epiphenomenal
exclusively on Connection 2’s compatibility with Leiter’s epiphenomenal interpretation of Nietzsche and its plausibility.
Strong epiphenomenalism commits to conscious mental states playing no causal role whatsoever. This means that they are simply and only an end of a causal chain. A popular parable is the humming of a machine, it is caused by and accompanies the workings of the machine and is wholly causally inefficacious and superfluous of that machine’s system. That conscious mental states are only an end of a causal chain means that they cannot start a causal chain towards action or be a link in it. This makes conscious mental states a superfluous by-‐ product in the causal development of the world as well as the smaller causal scheme that shapes individuals’ lives. Imagine a possible world where everything is the same but humans do not have consciousness; the causal development except for the disappearance of the end stations of our conscious mental states would be identical to the actual world – this shows a complete redundancy of conscious mental states. We can now see that if we are committed to Nietzsche being a strong epiphenomenalist that we would have to reject Janaway’s proposed Connection 2. Because the complete causal inefficaciousness of conscious mental states makes it impossible for any conscious mental state to be anything else than redundant to what an individual is, does and turns out to be. If conscious mental states can have no causal effect on anything they cannot cause an individual to become more ideal.
Nietzsche scholars, among them Leiter, have however tended towards a different interpretation of Nietzsche’s epiphenomenalism, which we will call weak epiphenomenalism. This allows for conscious mental states to play a causal role in a causal chain towards action as long as this role is played in virtue of the
natural facts, facts about a person’s set of drives and physical constitution,
sometimes together with environmental factors (Leiter 2005, p. 91-‐2). This means simply that weak epiphenomenalism regards conscious mental states as a necessary link in some of the causal explanations for why we do what we do, have certain beliefs and feelings, our lives turn out one way rather than another etc. Conscious mental states lack autonomy on both strong and weak
by facts outside the realm of consciousness even on weak epiphenomenalism. What this means will be explained in the next section.
4. Leiter and Connection 1
A plausible conclusion on Leiter’s epiphenomenal interpretation of Nietzsche3 is that there is a causal relationship between the two ideals where the ideal
internal conditions cause the self-‐affirmative attitude – Connection 1. I will first present and explain Leiter’s epiphenomenal interpretation of Nietzsche and in the end of this section explain why Connection 1 is a plausible notion on this interpretation.
In order to explain what Leiter’s epiphenomenal interpretation of Nietzsche entails I suggest that we start with what it means for conciousness. It means that conscious mental states lack causal autonomy and that consciousness lacks agency. One way of understanding how an individual’s actions, beliefs, personality etc. develop is that there is an autonomous self with a will that
chooses to do certain actions, believe certain things and strive towards becoming certain things. Through conscious hard work, self-‐disciplining, wanting to be a certain way etc. individuals are understood as “creating” themselves, as having the ability to be what they wish or think they ought to be. This understanding is according to Leiter’s epiphenomenal interpretation of Nietzsche incorrect. There is no radically free or completely undetermined “creating” in this sense of
oneself because consciousness is determined and can be explained by the natural facts underpinning one’s character, sometimes together with environmental factors. When we try to change our behaviour, strive towards one goal rather than some other satisfaction, avoid something pleasurable that we have a belief is harmful to us, and so on, Nietzsche’s causal story is: “at bottom it is one drive
which is complaining about the other” (D, 109). What happens below the surface
of consciousness is what actually causes our actions, beliefs, attitudes etc. Self-‐
disciplining, wanting to be a certain way, evaluative attitudes such as the self-‐ affirmation this paper concerns are due to the natural facts underpinning one’s character and personality traits.
Nietzsche holds, according to Leiter, that there are certain natural facts about a person, facts about a person’s set of drives and physical constitution that are
causally primary (Leiter 2005, p. 81-‐2). This means that these facts determine an
individual’s personality traits and character. An individual acts in certain ways, believe and feel etc. certain things because he or she has certain personality traits and a certain character. The causal primacy of the natural facts is that they determine the personality traits and character of an individual and therefore also determines how the individual will react to certain environments, their actions, beliefs, attitudes etc. I will call this Leiter’s epiphenomenal interpretation’s conception of agency and I will in section five show that it is compatible with Janaway’s proposed Connection 2.
Because the natural facts about an individual determines his or her character and personality traits, and there is no radically free or undetermined “creating” of oneself, this means that there are only two causal factors that determines the life-‐trajectory of an individual. The natural facts about him or her and the environmental factors that he or she encounters. Leiter claims that this means that the natural facts about an individual at the outset of his or her life will
narrowly determine the life-‐trajectory of that individual. This is why Leiter refers
to Nietzsche as a kind of fatalist (Leiter 2005, p. 82). What is meant by “narrowly” is unclear. Leiter writes that it means that the natural facts
say that the natural facts about an individual at the outset of his or her life narrowly determine that individual’s life-‐trajectory, and that Nietzsche is a fatalist, because the reactions by the individual to the possible environmental factors he or she might encounter are already determined by the natural facts about him or her at the outset of his or her life.
I will in section five show that Janaway’s proposed causal relationship involve claims about the drives that seem to be incompatible with Leiter’s fatalistic interpretation of Nietzsche. Because on Janaway’s interpretation the natural facts are open to significant change, partly due to the environmental factors the individual encounters. If the natural facts can change, partly due to
environmental factors, then the claim that the natural facts can at the outset of an individual’s life narrowly determine the possible life-‐trajectories open to the individual seems implausible. It depends on how you define “narrow” of course, but I will make a reasonable case that Janaway’s proposal involves claims that make the possible life-‐trajectories open to an individual too numeral to be able to speak of a significant circumscription by the natural facts about an individual at the outset of his or her life.
Returning to the topic of Connection 1 being a plausible notion on Leiter’s epiphenomenal interpretation of Nietzsche. We can now see that it is. On Leiter’s interpretation it is the natural facts about an individual, sometimes together with environmental factors, that causes his or her evaluative attitudes. So if we have one ideal that specifies an ideal way these natural facts can be in, namely a
strong structure of the drives, then a plausible conclusion is that this determines, or causes, an individual to also have Nietzsche’s idealized attitude of self-‐
affirmation. Janaway is sympathetic to this causal relationship, but he claims that it does not show the whole picture (Janaway 2012, p. 192). He has therefore in his article “Nietzsche on Morality, Drives, and Human Greatness” suggested another causal relationship. He claims that the self-‐affirmative attitude, according to Nietzsche, can cause the structure of the drives to move towards satisfying Nietzsche’s ideal internal conditions, and that this is true even on an epiphenomenal interpretation of Nietzsche (Janaway 2012, p. 198-‐9), this is the causal relationship I am referring to as Connection 2.
Janaway’s argumentation for his proposed causal relationship Connection 2 being possible in principle relies on interpretive evidence from Nietzsche’s literature, and therefore I think it best for clarity’s sake to follow the same line of argument as him. Janaway argues that the causal story of Connection 2, where the self-‐affirmative attitude causes the structure of the drives to strengthen, is possible in principle by arguing that moral evaluative attitudes, according to Nietzsche, can cause the structure of the drives to weaken and that evaluative attitudes in general can have an effect upon the drives. This argumentation is what I will be evaluating in this section, I will not question any interpretive evidence but instead evaluate whether it is compatible with Leiter’s
epiphenomenal interpretation of Nietzsche or not. I will conclude that Janaway’s argumentation for Connection 2 being possible in principle is compatible with Leiter’s epiphenomenal interpretation’s conception of agency, but presumably not with Leiter’s fatalistic interpretation.
To show that Connection 2 is possible in principle is not the same as showing that the self-‐affirmative attitude in fact does have a strengthening effect upon the drives’ structure. It is unclear, as I said in the introduction, whether Janaway presents any argument in favour of his claim that the self-‐affirmative attitude in fact can strengthen the drives’ structure. He might just be assuming that because the self-‐affirmative attitude is an ideal of Nietzsche’s that it will therefore
necessarily have the effect of strengthening the structure of the drives if it can have an effect upon the drives. I will in the next section show that this is not an obvious and self-‐evident conclusion and that Janaway needs to argue in favor of his position. I will put forward such an argument, which it is unclear whether Janaway holds or not, and conclude that it is not strong.
Even if we had reason to believe that the self-‐affirmative attitude’s effect upon the drives is in fact a strengthening of their structure, I will argue in section seven that Janaway would still have some explanation to do. This is due to
Janaway’s claim that individuals with weakly structured drives can come to have their drives’ structure strengthened by a self-‐affirmative attitude.
Connection 2 being possible in principle and evaluate its compatibility with Leiter’s epiphenomenal interpretation of Nietzsche.
The direction of the causal story that we saw when I presented Leiter’s epiphenomenal interpretation of Nietzsche in section four is that the drives causes conscious and self-‐conscious attitudes. I will start by explaining what this means regarding a weak structure of the drives and morality. Morality, says Janaway, is by minimal characterization a collection of values with which the person adopts certain evaluative attitudes, among them certain beliefs and affects:
“for instance the belief that stronger human beings ought in general not to harm others, the belief that human beings are essentially free to act in certain ways, the feeling that it is blameworthy and in some cases shocking if someone rejects compassion in favour of self-‐interest, the feeling of guilt over our tendencies to self-‐assertion, the outrage felt over an act of cruelty, judgements as to why such outrage is justified, and so on.” (Janaway 2012, p. 196).
Nietzsche’s explanation for a person’s adherence to morality and the consequent adoption of moral evaluative attitudes is that “Moralities are the expression…of orders of rank among these drives: so that the human being does not perish from their contradiction” (KSA 11, 289). That we have these beliefs, feel these feelings and make these justifications are according to Nietzsche symptomatic of the way certain drives are or have been structured (Janaway 2012, p. 196). In other words, a certain state of the structure of the drives, of low satisfaction of the ideal internal conditions, causes the individual to adhere to moral values and to adopt moral evaluative attitudes. This causal story can be exemplified with a sketch of Nietzsche’s story of the slave revolt from the Genealogy. There the slaves had a drive towards retaliation against their oppressing masters but at the same time they had a drive towards self-‐protection. The drive to self-‐protection repressed the drive towards retaliation until the slaves invented the
weakness, enabling them to call their masters evil and themselves good (Janaway 2012, p. 196). Through this conceptual scheme the drive towards retaliation found a substitute discharge. The inner conflict and the slaves’ low tolerance of this conflict caused the conceptual scheme and their moral attitudes so that the inner conflict could be resolved, and the fact that the slaves only have an imaginary retaliation against their oppressing masters demonstrates how their drive to retaliation has become weak. In other words, the slaves’ weak structure of the drives caused them to invent morality and to adopt moral evaluative attitudes.
Janaway claims that this causal story according to Nietzsche can run the other way around as well (Janaway 2012, p. 196). So that moral evaluative attitudes can cause the structure of the drives to move away from satisfying Nietzsche’s ideal internal conditions. His reason for thinking this is a quote from the
Genealogy: “Precisely here I saw the great danger to humanity... I understood the ever more widely spreading morality of compassion...as the most uncanny
symptom of our now uncanny European culture” (GMP, 5). Therefore we need to look upon “morality as consequence, as symptom, as mask, as Tartuffery, as sickness, as misunderstanding; but also morality as cause, as medicine, as
inhibitor, as poison” (GMP, 6). Janaway’s explanation for how this causal story is supposed to work is that an individual’s experiences can cause significant
alterations to the structure of the drives and that evaluative attitudes constitute a significant part of an individual’s experiences (Janaway 2012, p. 197).
That our evaluative attitudes are a significant part of our experiences seems plausible. Unlike for example a cat or an octopus we have the capability of forming such attitudes, and they will therefore be a part of our collective experiences of the happenings in our lives.
Janaway’s reasons for thinking that our experiences can cause significant alterations to the structure of the drives come from his interpretation of
Nietzsche. The understanding is that all of an individual’s experiences constitute possible nourishment for the drives. To understand what this means we turn to passage 119 in Daybreak:
“Every moment of our lives sees some of the polyp-‐arms of our being grow and others of them wither, all according to the nutriment which the moment does or does not bear with it. Our experiences are, as already said, all in this sense means of nourishment” (D, 119).
When using the word “polyp-‐arms” Nietzsche is making a metaphor for the drives “grabbing” nourishment and growing stronger. In the same passage we find:
“To express it more clearly: suppose a drive finds itself at the point at which it desires gratification -‐ or exercise of its strength, or discharge of its strength, or the saturation of an emptiness-‐ these are all metaphors-‐: it then regards every event of the day with a view to seeing how it can employ it for the attainment of its goal; whether a man is moving, or resting or angry or reading or speaking or fighting or rejoicing, the drive will in its thirst as it were taste every condition into which the man may enter, and as a rule will discover nothing for itself there and will have to wait and go on thirsting: in a little while it will grow faint, and after a couple of days or months of non-‐
gratification it will wither away like a plant without rain.” (D, 119).
Janaway is claiming that all our experiences according to Nietzsche constitute possible nourishment for the drives. Whatever the moment may contain – moving, resting, anger, reading etc. – the drives will try to make it into
nourishment for themselves so that they can grow stronger. This means that an individual’s drives are responsive to the individual’s experiences, some may grow stronger due to repeated experiences of a certain nature while others may grow weaker, and when the experiences change other drives may find
go hungry. What this entails, says Janaway, is that an individual’s drives are not “immutable givens of human nature, even of an individual’s nature” (Janaway 2012, p. 189). He claims that drives can weaken and even die out by lack of nourishment and that drives can strengthen and even come into existence by receiving a satisfactory amount of nourishment. He commits himself to an even stronger claim as well, that the relationships between the drives, namely their strife and their unity, are also open to change by this responsiveness to
experiences (Janaway, p 189) presumably as a consequence of the drives
growing weaker/stronger and dying out/coming into existence. This entails that all of Nietzsche’s specified internal conditions of the structure of the drives can in an individual change due to the responsiveness of the drives to the
individual’s experiences. The ideal internal conditions do then, as we saw concerning the self-‐affirmative ideal, admit of degrees. The amount of drives, their individual strengths, their strife as well as their unity is open to change due to the drives’ responsiveness to the individual’s experiences. So an individual can satisfy Nietzsche’s ideal internal conditions to a certain lesser degree but might, if his or her drives are given the right kind of nourishment, come to satisfy the ideal to higher degree at a later point in time, and vice versa.
The question is whether this theory of the drives’ responsiveness to an individual’s experiences is compatible with Leiter’s epiphenomenal
interpretation of Nietzsche. This question has two parts. Firstly, is the causal story of experiences causing alterations to the drives compatible with Leiter’s epiphenomenal interpretation of Nietzsche? I suggest that it is. The causal story is this, our natural facts do together with environmental factors cause us to do certain actions, to believe or feel certain things and so forth, and these actions, beliefs and feelings etc. will in turn have an effect upon the drives. This means that the natural facts are still causally primary because they still determine the individual’s personality traits and character, and therefore also, together with environmental factors, what he or she does, thinks etc. What is added to this causal story is only that these actions, beliefs, attitudes etc. can play a further causal role in causing alterations to the drives, which is compatible with Leiter’s epiphenomenal interpretation of Nietzsche since it is a kind of weak
Secondly, is the fact that an individual’s natural facts can change during a lifetime compatible with Leiter’s epiphenomenal interpretation of Nietzsche? It seems like it is in one sense but in another not. Even if we posit that an
individual’s set of drives might change significantly, which Janaway’s claim that an individual’s drives are not “immutable givens of human nature, even of an individual’s nature” (Janaway 2012, p. 189) seems to suggest, this does not change Leiter’s epiphenomenal interpretation’s conception of agency. The individual’s personality traits and character will still be determined by the
natural facts about that individual, even if those facts themselves can change, and the responses of that individual to certain environmental factors in differing circumstances will therefore also be determined by the natural facts, as well as their actions, beliefs etc. The worry is that if the natural facts can change then the natural facts’ determination of an individual’s possible life-‐trajectories will widen, and by this I mean that the possible life-‐trajectories open to the individual will significantly increase. The epiphenomenal interpretation of Nietzsche put forward by Brian Leiter, interprets Nietzsche as a kind of fatalist, which means that a person’s life proceeds along a fixed trajectory, that is fixed by the natural facts about him or her (Leiter 2005, p. 81). To hold this view seems incompatible with Janaway’s theory about the drives’ responsiveness to our experiences. Because the fatalistic view seems to presuppose that the natural facts cannot change like this, or not change like this to any significant degree, because if the drives can change like this, or change like this to a significant degree, then the possible trajectories will be too numerous to possibly hold as narrowly
different situation to react to, but will also play a causal role in determining the natural facts, and therefore also the personality traits and character, of that individual all through his or her lifetime, that another layer of possibility has been added, that will significantly increase the possible life-‐trajectories open to the individual.
One could say, as I have hinted at, that if it can be shown that the drives cannot change significantly during an individual’s lifetime then it can still be said that the natural facts at the outset of the individual’s life narrowly determine its possible trajectories. But I will leave the question of this possibility unanswered, it depends on how you define “narrow” (Leiter is as I said in section four vague on this definition) because the more important thing is that the causal story of the drives’ responsiveness to our experiences is compatible with the conception of agency given on Leiter’s epiphenomenal interpretation of Nietzsche.
This section has been about Janaway’s argumentation for Connection 2 being possible in principle. I have concluded that Connection 2 being possible in principle – by evaluative attitudes being able to effect the drives by constituting nourishment for them – is compatible with Leiter’s epiphenomenal
interpretation’s conception of agency but presumably not Leiter’s fatalistic interpretation. Connection 2 being possible in principle is, I have said earlier, not enough for us to have reason to believe that the self-‐affirmative attitude in fact can have a strengthening effect upon the structure of the drives. And we will now in the next section turn to discuss the question of whether the self-‐affirmative attitude actually can or cannot be causally linked to a strengthening effect upon the structure of the drives and the question whether Janaway does put any argument forward in support of this being so.
What we have seen so far is that Janaway’s argumentation that evaluative attitudes can cause alterations to the structure of the drives can be made
compatible with Leiter’s epiphenomenal interpretation’s conception of agency. At the moment we only have reason to believe however that the self-‐affirmative attitude can have an effect upon the structure of the drives, not that it has any particular effect. Janaway is highly unclear on this point, because he does not put forward any detailed or clear argument in support of his claim that the self-‐ affirmative attitude does in fact have a strengthening effect upon the structure of the drives. It is even unclear if he discusses this topic at all. It might be that he just assumes that the self-‐affirmative attitude must make the drives’ structure more ideal, if it can have an effect upon them, because the attitude is an ideal of Nietzsche’s, and that he thinks this an too obvious point to even mention. I will soon show that this assumption is not obvious and self-‐evident, and that Janaway needs to argue for his position here. But it might also be so that Janaway is
putting forward an argument in favor of his position, but this is highly unclear. The argument in favor of Janaway’s position that I will present in the end of this section is drawn from a discussion by Janaway (Janaway 2012, p. 198), and in this discussion Janaway does not state this argument directly, which one thinks that he ought to do, seeing as such an argument is crucial to his argumentation, and Janaway’s discussion seem to concern another topic then the one of where the self-‐affirmative attitude gets its strengthening force from, sometimes it even seems like he has already assumed that is has a strengthening effect. These considerations seem to indicate that Janaway is in fact not putting forward this argument, but on the principle of charity and because this argument is so readily available to him, I conclude that the matter is unclear whether he holds this argument or not. I will in any case conclude that this argument is not strong on its own and is need of support from Nietzsche’s literature.
way the Modern mensch (a term I have avoided in this paper, it is a designation of the psychological make-‐up existing after the slave revolt and Christianity) can evaluate themselves and their life (Gemes forthcoming, p. 25). His reason for thinking this is that all value judgments, according to him, where a person takes a step back and tries to pass judgment on life in its totality, which plausibly is being done on Janaway’s interpretation of the self-‐affirmative ideal, is always pathological in Nietzsche’s view. One this view it seems plausible to suggest that the self-‐affirmative attitude is the evaluative attitude that can have the least possible weakening effect upon the structure of the drives, if it can have an effect. So Janaway’s assumption is not obvious and his claim that the self-‐affirmative attitude can cause the structure of the drives to strengthen needs to be
supported by further argumentation. It is not enough to simply claim that the self-‐affirmative attitude must have this strengthening effect because it is an ideal of Nietzsche’s, because Nietzsche’s use of the notion ideal is complex, which Gemes’ view demonstrates.
It can be argued that the first of these causal stories, Connection 1, can be regarded as the self-‐affirmative attitude’s genesis. What is meant by “genesis”? The easiest way to explain this is to yet again evoke the example of morality. The genesis of moral values is the slave revolt. This was so to speak how these values originated in the world. Because of the oppression by their masters and the slaves’ weakly structured drives they invented morality to be able to retaliate. What is meant by genesis is this invention, or creation, that first brings certain values into the world. What one could argue is that the same is the case with the self-‐affirmative attitude, that its genesis is a strong structure of the drives. That Connection 1 is how this valuation was created and so to speak entered the world. So the genesis of moral evaluative attitudes and the self-‐affirmative attitude are certain states of the structure of the drives. And Janaway seems to think that these attitudes can come to be adopted by individuals whose
structures of their drives are not in these states (or not in these states to a sufficient degree) presumably through a conceptual understanding of them, through cultural conditioning and possibly other environmental factors. Returning to the effect of the self-‐affirmative attitude upon the drives, the argument is that because an attitude has its genesis in a certain state of the structure of the drives, then it will have an effect upon the drives, by constituting nourishment for them, that causes the drives to become more like that state, e.g. weaker or stronger. So in the case of morality, it causes the structure of the drives to weaken, given certain natural facts, because its genesis is a weak structure of the drives, and vice versa in the case of self-‐affirmation.
This argument has some intuitive appeal. It seems intuitive that an evaluation will be a certain environment for the drives, certain nourishment for them, which causes them to move towards a certain state because that evaluation was originally caused by that particular state. But this argument is rather speculative on its own and is in need of support from Nietzsche’s own literature. Because of its intuitive appeal I do however think that it might be a good beginning of an argument in favor of Janaway’s position.
