Much recent Nietzsche scholarship has been concerned with Nietzsche’s moral psychology. What is Nietzsche’s theory of human nature? Are we capable of autonomous action? What is it to value, and how does value figure in motivation and action? Over the past decade, Paul Katsafanas’ answers to these questions have quickly become necessary reading. In The Nietzschean Self, Katsafanas draws on and supplements previous work in order to offer a comprehensive articulation of his account of a Nietzsche who values practical freedom and believes that human beings can attain it, understands the self as constituted by drives but also by self-conscious reflective thought, and, ultimately, offers a picture of the practical lives of human beings that improves upon those offered by Kant, Hume, or Aristotle.
Ten chapters deal systemically and progressively with central elements of Nietzsche’s moral psychology. Consciousness is, in Nietzsche’s words, superficial and falsifying, but not in such a way as to reduce it to the status of an epiphenomenon divorced from the effective causes of our actions. With Kant, Nietzsche understands human beings as constructing experience through concepts, through consciousness, but, contra Kant, the concepts in play at any one time are revisable and contested products of human culture and practice that can and do change over time. The human being is constituted by drives, and drives are dispositions that induce affective orientations, psychic forces which colour perception in such a way as to enable their gratification. We value those things towards which our drives have a positive affective orientation of which we do not disapprove. Although human beings are in an important sense constituted by drives, drives do not go all the way down. Our drives form part of a vortex of forces that interact in order to produce action, and conscious, reflective thought forms part of this vortex. Thus, human beings can will, but the will is not separate from or sovereign over sensibility, as for Kant, but forms one part of the messy muddle of human motivation. Selfhood is an honorific, an achievement. To be a self is to be unified, and Katsafanas argues for an account according to which the unity Nietzsche praises obtains not among drives but, following Friedrich Schiller, between the rational and sensible parts of the self. Exceptional individuals, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Ludwig van Beethoven, are those who bear a certain relation to their culture; they change history by changing a culture’s sense of what matters. So, greatness is not solitary. Finally, freedom is self-determination, which requires that one determine for oneself what is of value in life, a project that requires careful and consistent work towards self-understanding.
Katsafanas has written a very good book. Nietzsche scholars interested in these questions should read it, but it is not without certain organizational and thematic tensions. The fact that the book draws heavily on previously published articles is the source of both the book’s strengths and weaknesses. Within each chapter, Katsafanas moves deliberately and slowly through complex issues, relating his analysis back to the literature and responding to published criticisms of his previously published views. At its best, this sort of careful analysis moves conversations forward productively, and Katsafanas no doubt does that in several chapters here, especially in his response to Brian Leiter’s epiphenomenalism, John Richardson’s account of drives and valuation, and Maudemarie Clark’s work on the self. In places, however, the central thread of the book is lost, and it’s unclear how the arguments within and between chapters are to constitute a larger whole. Katsafanas does well to relate more technical discussions to broader themes in Nietzsche’s thought, such as his mobilization of Nietzsche’s account of bad conscience in Katsafanas’ discussion of the falsifying effect of consciousness, but such productive exposition is rare. Cursory introductory and concluding chapters relate Nietzsche’s theses to wider debates in moral psychology and the history of philosophy, but these concerns are noticeably absent from the heart of the book.
Schopenhauer looms very large, as he should in any discussion of Nietzsche, but the use to which he is put is sometimes unsatisfying. It is difficult for any reader of Nietzsche to impress upon his scattered remarks the imprint of a system; since Katsafanas means to do just that, he too often appeals to Schopenhauer, on, say, the nature of drives, to fill in the blanks of Nietzsche’s thinking, without establishing that Nietzsche was in fact influenced by Schopenhauer on this specific point or to this specific extent.
In his discussions of willing and freedom, Katsafanas returns often to Nietzsche’s figure of the sovereign individual who, unlike his weak-willed contemporaries, can rightfully claim the capacity to promise. Katsafanas mentions but does not seriously engage debates concerning Nietzsche’s ultimate view of the sovereign individual, a figure argued by some to be parodic. Such a view, if true, would be problematic for Katsafanas’ interpretation.
The heart of the book is a picture of Nietzschean moral psychology that avoids the false dichotomies of his predecessors. Inclinations are not burdensome to a rational creature, nor is reason a slave of the passions; instead, reason and sensibility are inextricably intertwined in a complex and shifting vortex of forces. We are not absolutely free, nor absolutely determined, but we are more and less autonomous, more and less able to shift the prevailing vortex of forces that constitutes us. We achieve freedom not by casting off the shackles of society in search of a pre-social self, nor by identifying our freedom with the progress of our culture and its institutions; instead, freedom is a negotiation between our rootedness and our individuality. The picture Katsafanas offers is compelling, well articulated, and well defended. The book adds to our understanding of several timely debates, and thus should be read by anyone interested in Nietzsche’s moral psychology.
