Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy by Robert Pippin | Notes & Summary
Introductory Remarks
Nietzsche himself invites us to read him in a Straussian way where the most important truths are unspoken.
Nietzsche and Wittgenstein were both trying to say what it would mean for philosophy to end as both were trying to end philosophical theory. But Nietzsche’s texts go beyond Wittgenstein’s in that they are booby trapped, meaning they are designed so you can’t pull a philosophical theory out of it purposefully.
To make sense of his philosophy we are going to bucket what nietzsche is doing under the label “psychology”.
This book investigates four key Nietzschean figurative claims:
truth could be a woman
science could be gay
God could die
No lightning without flash
And these images carry enormous weight for two of the central concerns of Nietzsche: self-deceit and self-overcoming.
Psychology as "the Queen of the Sciences"
This chapter is to make sense of two of Nietzsche’s statements.
Psychology as Queen
What is psychology?
Moral psychology: what actually happens when we express (state, feel, act on) an evaluative/normative claim.
Nietzsche’s claim is going to be there is no general moral psychology. Views of the soul and its capacities vary in different historical eras.
His enterprise is critical and deflationary: morality works in ways quite different from how moral agents would describe how it works.
Why is psychology (not metaphysics) the foundational discipline?
One idea is that will to power is a metaphysics. He’s imbuing the universe with a “psychological” drive. But this isn’t right because Nietzsche is going to say that philosophers (like Schopenhauer) take the mere figurative sayings of moralists and generalize them way too far. They reify things like “will to power”.
What Nietzsche has in mind are the French moralists Pascal, Rochefoucauld, and Montaigne. Montaigne especially was able to have a sober, realpolitik view of the world while maintaining a cheerfulness who was thoroughly at home in the world.
Nietzsche is going to write substantive works with deep insights without appealing to deeper currents of human nature. What Nietzsche is after is how people, like Montaigne, can sustain pursuits in the world. That’s not something that can be brought about by systematic philosophy or revelation.
Truth as Woman, Philosopher as Lover
The relationship between philosopher and eros
Love is not merely naturalistic we are evaluating someone
… but its not deliberate normative evaluation its a lot more intimate
They are both conditions of a flourishing life
Philosophical soul is close to the tyrannical soul, able to subjugate other desires to a master one
According to Plato philosophy is the highest expression of eros
Diorama’s ladder needs an explanation for why people progress from lower to higher: the reason is our love is only satisfied when we arrive at things that are more fixed and eternal.
For Nietzsche this is why Platonists (ascetics in general) are clumsy lovers. They show the love of a teenager: demanding eternal commitment. But the way they do this is by abandoning everything that is meaningful that one could possibly love: fleeting bodies.
Like love, philosophy (establishment of values) can fail. Nietzsche called this failure nihilism.
But he believes we must give an attempt even if it has no guarantee of success.
He wants to show what ideals are available to us now, how we came here, what could have been. This sets up a gay science.
What is a Gay Science
This chapter is to describe what Nietzsche is aiming for with a Gay Science (and what he isn’t aiming for).
Relationship with french moralists:
Nietzsche wanted to accomplish what Montaigne accomplished: be brutally honest about the natural world, about what really happens but still maintain that optimism.
Nietzsche wanted to go beyond the French moralists. They didn’t poke deeper at philosophical foundations, Nietzsche claims that those foundations aren’t there.
The Erotic view of human commitments:
It’s not just about naturalistic forces (contra Leiter) that push us to make commitments, we are making real evaluations too.
There are thin commitments like observing the rules of chess but these are grounded by deep commitments like the love of chess itself. Deep commitments are primordial in that they are pre-reason and we don’t have reasons for giving them.
Historicism:
Nietzsche, unlike the French moralists believe that every philosophy needs to be historical, written for a particular epoch.
This is why his books are not essays or pensees but they are about bringing a new age (Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, Daybreak, etc.)
Influences of where Nietzsche might have found “Gay Science”
Emerson uses “gay science” to find a philosophy that can affirm life and treat the world as sacred.
Carlyle contrasted gay science with the dismal science of economics that reduces everything to cold laws. It’s not the results of these sciences that depress us its the views.
Troubadours used gay science. It is the knowledge of erotics.
Intellectual Conscience:
Our particular epoch is marked by intellectual conscience which I take to be a need for things to be justified by reason.
The issue is that we can’t naively believe in commitments anymore.
We desire knowledge too much.
It’s less clear what we really desire (e.g. grand theory of everything) is possible or will fulfill us. But that is what makes philosophy erotic. Irrational pursuit. Even Kant setting the limitation of knowledge did not decrease our attraction to it.
Embodied knowledge:
What we need is an embodied knowledge.
We don’t have a culture, we know many things about culture but we aren’t a culture.
The dualism required of a gay science. Whatever this science ends up becoming it is in a deep tension with itself
Aeschylus’ plays have both Apollonian and Dionysian.
Untimely meditation is about history for life but it is constrained by “justice” lest it become an ideology.
Nietzsche talks about a lightheartedness and seriousness
What do we know about this gay science
It needs to address the intellectual conscience that is to say, it can’t just revert back into a naive belief.
So this can’t be an embellishment of the truth.
It needs to be a poetry of some form, it can’t be philosophical/scientific such that it fails to motivate us (notice the tension with the previous point).
Don’t confuse disenchantment for wisdom.
Therefore, it needs to give up this very language of an inside and an outside. It can’t embellish scientific language. It needs to have one language that both can satisfy our intellectual conscience but can also do so in a form that can motivate us. In Nietzsche’s own words:
“To sustain the intellectual conscience constitutive of a philosophical life, but now without what had been traditionally understood as philosophy, the exposure of the reality behind, hidden beneath, the appearances.”
Notice, this is what Montaigne accomplished. Being real without losing affirmation of the world.
What’s so attractive about this is that this navigates between two extremes. One extreme is that of naivety. (Blind techno-optimists)The other is of being black-pilled and incapacitated. (It’s all a scam) The error of the first is delusion the error of the second is to mistake disenchantment for wisdom.
Modernity as a Psychological Problem
This chapter further develops the issue of nihilism, particularly as a loss of tension/sincerity/desire, and what is needed to resolve it.
Death of God
Nietzsche does not endorse Zarathustra who proclaims that God is dead and we have killed him. He attributes this to a form of sentimentalism of christians. Nietzsche does not feel the same guilt that Zarathustra does. Zarathustra is melancholic and thinks we need God.
Nietzsche is also critiquing the atheistic villagers who dismiss Zarathustra who are smug and boorish. He calls these atheists “pale atheists” because they lack vitality and seem sick.
To celebrate it or to lament it are both wrong reactions for Nietzsche.
The Problem of Nihilism/Man as tension
What nihilism is isn’t the lack of strong desires, it’s the lack of second-order ability to affirm and throw ourselves fully into those strong desires.
The problem of nihilism isn’t intellect, it’s not knowledge, but it’s about desire.
Nihilism is an erotic problem, it’s a bow that can’t shoot beyond the human anymore. (There are ways of shooting beyond the human that is bad, ie. Christianity)
Question: what would Nietzsche say about technology/transhumanism? That seems to be a way of shooting the bow beyond the human without leaving this world right?
The problem of desire is a problem of tension. The metaphor of the bow is helpful here because the more the two parts of the bow are in tension the greater the energy.
It’s not just about naturalistic impulses, it’s not just about different physiological tensions and forces battling within you. It’s about not being satisfied with who you are. Self-consciousness is tension for Nietzsche.
Humans are odd in that what human nature is, is a rebellion from the merely natural. Rousseau, Marx, Hegel (recognition), Kant’s unsocial sociability, Freud’s self-division — all of this is about how we are not just naturalistic creatures.
For Nietzsche, what the sovereign individual is, is about the fragile achievement of individuality.
This tension is also related to the problem of suffering.
What makes suffering bad is not having meaning around it.
The christian remedy for suffering worked with two caveats 1. Recently it stopped working (science its patricidal son) 2. The cost was too great.
Eros, imagery, Nietzsche’s failure
He takes the metaphor of morality as the picture very seriously.
He’s going to ask not what the picture hides but what it reveals. He’s not going to look “behind the picture” in the Genealogy for example trying to come up with a theory of action but rather try to examine the picture very closely and see what it confesses.
Nihilism is so difficult to cure. Because desire is something internal.
He thinks his mission isn’t to really provide a philosophical account of the world but rather paint images that inspire Eros.
Interesting that the civilizational grounding currents are more often fiction than non-fiction.
Nietzsche ultimately fails at making his philosophy (whose presence today is felt negatively rather than positively) or himself as a good role model.
The Deed is Everything
This chapter is about RP’s expressivist reading of Nietzsche’s rejection of free will.
Against freedom
The slaves genius is not just in flipping the referent of good and bad but flipping it and then adding the idea of freedom and thus making it good and evil. Making everyone blame worthy.
What Nietzsche is not
Metaphysician
Eternal recurrence, will to power are not metaphysical claims about the world they are not psychological readings (contra Leiter) they are images designed to invoke something in us. They are literary figures.
Naturalist (Contra Leiter)
Nietzsche clearly still wants to preserve the language of action.
He clearly posits things like the unconscious like resentment.
Clearly you don’t want to say that human action is in the same category as leaf blowing in the wind.
He says that psychology is the fundamental path to solving key issues.
It’s not going to help make sense of the image that lightning is the flash. Because in the naturalist view there are still motives (natural not psychological) that account
Existenitalist
He is not about encouraging us to have the strength of will to create a new form of life. Because he is too interested in the social/historical contingencies. He is interested in creating a new culture not about individualistic willing meaning (it is about heroic individuals who create value, but those values are significant not just for them but because they bring about a new age).
The Expressivist Reading
There is a doer. But the doer is “in” the deed.
This solves the riddle/image of the lightning as flash. Because it collapses the action into the doer.
There is a group of modern anti-cartesians (Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein) who think that an intention is not an intention without it being realized. Only once it becomes realized is it an intention and even more importantly, the process is reflective. So you update your intention/your self-view.
If I write a bad poem, the standard reading is that I intended a good poem but expressed it poorly. The expressivist reading is that you infected intended a bad poem.
When we observe an action, Nietzsche doesn’t locate it in a prior intention, but as saying something about what the doer is.
Intentions need to be viewed in their social/historical contexts. So a slave intending compassion is different than a master intending compassion.
There are many ways that we can interpret an intention and all of them can be legitimate in their own ways.
In this model we don’t feel guilt or regret for doing a wrong action. We feel sadness that we weren’t the person we thought we were.
The Psychological Problem of Self-Deception
This chapter is to detail what self-deception means for Nietzsche.
Examples of Self-Deception
Consciousness is a lie.
Christian religion is deceitful. The slaves aren’t doing it for the reasons they suggested.
Many interpreters treat the will to power as the unconscious driving that is REALLY motivating everything (but that would make Nietzsche hold a metaphysical view).
The Problematic
What does it mean for drives to be hidden? How do we hide them?
Even more puzzling because Nietzsche, in certain passages, doesn’t think it’s fully unconscious (they are somewhat aware of this) but its not a full awareness.
The issue with certain readings is to think that you can take something hidden out from its covers and for the thing not to lose its mystique. e.g. you can’t translate literature into philosophy without substantial “loss”.
How could the slave be comforted by a fake tale they themselves created? How could the fox gain any comfort in believing the grapes were sour when they really weren’t?
Two interpretations of Freud
One interpretation is that YOU have drives that are unavailable to your conscious mind. His innovation, in this view, is to recast symptoms as motivators.
Second interpretation is that what is going on is not ME it’s happening to me.
Nietzsche is much closer to the first Freud.
Pippin’s solution
All of these are issues on the intentionalist model of action (we have certain intentions that we actualize) but they aren’t problems in the expressivist model of action (where intentions are at best provisional, but really they aren’t full intentions, without being actualized).
In this reading, Nietzsche isn’t denying the free will but he is saying that the world has so many causal streams what portion of it that you actually choose is always going to be psychologically biased. Maybe he’s saying something even stronger that to think/to turn into language is to be biased.
In this mode, self-deceit is not as simple as lying because self-knowledge is always provisional. What makes it self-deceit isn’t that your actions don’t match your ex-ante intentions (there are no such things) what makes it self-deceit is your stated intentions do not match your real intentions as seen through successive actions. Ie. All the institutions of hate that Christianity actually created and not the resentment they feel in the moment is the real reason.
Nietzsche’s positive ideal then isn’t about admitting who one is its not one should be TRUE to one’s nature it’s about BECOMING who one is. It’s about becoming and actuality.
How to Overcome Oneself: On the Nietzschean Ideal
This chapter is to argue that self-overcoming is the 1. Nietzschean ideal 2. Solution to nihilism for our time 3. What genuine freedom means for Nietzsche 4. What will to power is for Nietzsche
He’s not interested in resolving the question of freedom as much as dissolving it. He dissolves it by always asking why someone wants to believe in what appears to be a scientific or metaphysical belief.
Nietzsche doesn’t care about freedom in most forms except what he labels as “self-overcoming”.
Strength of freedom is measured by resistance it can overcome.
Available to individuals as well as groups.
It is an intellectual/erotic attitude that people can’t just will themselves into.
Question: how does Nietzsche’s philosophy aim to engender such a “shift”?
What it is not:
Authenticity of being what one is.
Hierarchical unity of all one’s life and desires.
What it is:
A dissatisfaction of the self that leads us to negate certain part of the self in pursuit of a positive ideal.
It is a tension of both 1. Ability to have whole-hearted commitment 2. Willingness to abandon such a commitment.
This is such a crucial point which is behind Nietzsche’s critique of the herd and how it seeks comfort. These seem to be in tension but they really imply each other, to whole-heartedly strive for an ideal means being willing to abandon current commitments.
One way is if we have nothing to commit to, the other way is if we don’t want to give things up.
Will to power
Pippin interprets will to power and freedom as this state of constant self-overcoming.
Will to power is interesting because what counts as “power” is up to interpretation. Masters gain power over the slaves but they “yield” life in order to pursue power. So masters have will to power in the worldly sense but are losing will to power in the sense of preserving life. Will to power then requires knowing when to claim something and when to yield (this exact tension of affirmation and negation).
True will to power is to be somewhat indifferent to power, it must be re-interpreted as self-overcoming.
Ubermensch
The overman is a man who is constantly self-overcoming. That is Nietzsche’s solution for nihilism. The point is not about establishing a new ideal a new religion but to encourage constant self-overcoming.
Question: Kierkegaard’s critique of the aesthetic life and “crop-rotation” in Either/Or.
Freedom
Freedom is wholehearted identification with possibility of abandonment. It’s certainly not ironic detachment but it’s also not passionate identification.
Question: what’s wrong with Goethe’s Werther? Doesn’t this resolve the issue of nihilism or does Nietzsche simply think it is not available to us anymore?
Concluding Remarks
Concluding comments on relationship to Hegel and Montaigne.
Hegel
Hegel felt that the 19th century (Prussian) world was sufficiently psychologically satisfying.
But just as European society was turning for the better many of its best minds rose up in protest.
Hegel was (judging from history) wrong on the ability for such a state to satisfy us. Nietzsche is responding to why such a world wasn’t satisfying 1. It is deceitful and hides its own brutality 2. It is boring and will lead to erotic failure.
Montaigne
Montaigne never bothered with a deeper philosophical theory. Nietzsche wanted to show that such a theory was not there. The downside to this is that his theory needed to have a systematicity emblematic of philosophical theories.
One reading of why Montaigne was able to achieve cheerfulness was because he didn’t live in the 19th century. But the other reading is that Nietzsche still clung to transcendence (judging things from perspective of eternal recurrence, the “over” man).