Irrational Man: An Analysis (Part 3, Chapter 8: Nietzsche)

In the last post on this series on William Barrett’s Irrational Man, we began exploring Part 3: The Existentialists, beginning with chapter 7 on Kierkegaard.  In this post, we’ll be taking a look at Nietzsche’s philosophy in more detail.

Ch. 8 – Nietzsche

Nietzsche shared many of the same concerns as Kierkegaard, given the new challenges of modernity brought about by the Enlightenment; but each of these great thinkers approached this new chapter of our history from perspectives that were in many ways, diametrically opposed.  Kierkegaard had a grand goal of sharing with others what he thought it meant to be a Christian, and he tried to revive Christianity within a society that he found to be increasingly secularized.  He also saw that of the Christianity that did exist, it was largely organized and depersonalized, and he felt the need to stress the importance of a much more personal form of the religion.  Nietzsche on the other hand, an atheist, rejected Christianity and stressed the importance of re-establishing our values given the fact that modernity was now living in a godless world, albeit a culturally Christianized world, but one that was now without a Christ.

Despite their differences, both philosophers felt that discovering the true meaning of our lives was paramount to living an authentic life, and this new quest for meaning was largely related to the fact that our view of ourselves had changed significantly:

“By the middle of the nineteenth century, as we have seen, the problem of man had begun to dawn on certain minds in a new and more radical form: Man, it was seen, is a stranger to himself and must discover, or rediscover, who he is and what his meaning is.”

Nietzsche also understood and vividly illustrated the crucial differences between mankind and the rest of nature, most especially our self-awareness:

“It was Nietzsche who showed in its fullest sense how thoroughly problematical is the nature of man: he can never be understood as an animal species within the zoological order of nature, because he has broken free of nature and has thereby posed the question of his own meaning-and with it the meaning of nature as well-as his destiny.”

And for Nietzsche, the meaning one was to find for their life included first abandoning what he saw as an oppressive and disempowering Christian morality, which he saw as severely inhibiting our potential as human beings.  He was much more sympathetic to Greek culture and morality, and even though (perhaps ironically) Christianity itself was derived from a syncretism between Judaism and Greek Hellenism, it’s moral and psychologically relevant differences were too substantial to avoid Nietzsche’s criticism.  He thought that a return to a more archaic form of Greek culture and mentality was the solution we needed to restore or at least re-validate our instincts:

“Dionysus reborn, Nietzsche thought, might become a savior-god for the whole race, which seemed everywhere to show symptoms of fatigue and decline.”

Nietzsche learned about the god Dionysus while he was studying Greek tragedy, and he gravitated toward the Dionysian symbolism, for it contained a kind of reconciliation between high culture and our primal instincts.  Dionysus was after all the patron god of the Greek tragic festivals and so was associated with beautiful works of art; but he was also the god of wine and ritual madness, bringing people together through the grape harvest and the joy of intoxication.  As Barrett describes it:

“This god thus united miraculously in himself the height of culture with the depth of instinct, bringing together the warring opposites that divided Nietzsche himself.”

It was this window into the hidden portions of our psyche that Nietzsche tried to look through and which became an integral basis for much of his philosophy.  But the chaotic nature of our species combined with our immense power to manipulate the environment also concerned him greatly; and he thought that the way modernity was repressing many of our instincts needed to be circumvented, lest we continue to build up this tension in our unconscious only to release itself in an explosive eruption of violence:

“It is no mere matter of psychological curiosity but a question of life and death for man in our time to place himself again in contact with the archaic life of his unconscious.  Without such contact he may become the Titan who slays himself.  Man, this most dangerous of the animals, as Nietzsche called him, now holds in his hands the dangerous power of blowing himself and his planet to bits; and it is not yet even clear that this problematic and complex being is really sane.”

Indeed our species has been removed from our natural evolutionary habitat; and we’ve built our modern lives around socio-cultural and technological constructs that have, in many ways at least, inhibited the open channel between our unconscious and conscious mind.  One could even say that the prefrontal cortex region of our brain, important as it is for conscious planning and decision making, has been effectively high-jacked by human culture (memetic selection) and now it’s constantly running on overtime, over-suppressing the emotional centers of the brain (such as the limbic system).

While we’ve come to realize that emotional suppression is sometimes necessary in order to function well as a cooperative social species that depends on complex long-term social relationships, we also need to maintain a healthy dose of emotional expression as well.  If we can’t release this more primal form of “psychological energy” (for lack of a better term), then it shouldn’t be surprising to see it eventually manifest into some kind of destructive behavior.

We ought not forget that we’re just like other animals in terms of our brain being best adapted to a specific balance of behaviors and cognitive functions; and if this balance is disrupted through hyperactive or hypoactive use of one region or another, doesn’t it stand to reason that we may wind up with either an impairment in brain function or less healthy behavior?  If we’re not making a sufficient use of our emotional capacities, shouldn’t we expect them to diminish or atrophy in some way or other?  And if some neurological version of the competitive exclusion principle exists, then this would further reinforce the idea that our suppression of emotion by other capacities may cause those other capacities to become permanently dominant.  We can only imagine the kinds of consequences that ensue when this psychological impairment falls upon a species with our level of power.

1.  Ecce Homo

“In the end one experiences only oneself,” Nietzsche observes in his Zarathustra, and elsewhere he remarks, in the same vein, that all the systems of the philosophers are just so many forms of personal confession, if we but had eyes to see it.”

Here Nietzsche is expressing one of his central ideas, by pointing out the fact that we can’t separate ourselves from our thoughts, and therefore the ideas put forward by any philosopher are really betraying some set of values they hold whether unconsciously or explicitly, and they also betray one’s individual perspective; an unavoidable perspective stemming from our subjective experience which colors our interpretation of those experiences.  Perspectivism, or the view that reality and our ideas about what’s true and what we value can be mapped onto many different possible conceptual schemes, was a big part of Nietzsche’s overall philosophy, and it was interwoven into his ideas on meaning, epistemology, and ontology.

As enlightening as Nietzsche was in giving us a much needed glimpse into some of the important psychological forces that give our lives the shape they have (for better or worse), his written works show little if any psychoanalytical insight applied to himself, in terms of the darker and less pleasant side of his own psyche.

“Nietzsche’s systematic shielding of himself from the other side is relevant to his explanation of the death of God: Man killed God, he says, because he could not bear to have anyone looking at his ugliest side.”

But even if he didn’t turn his psychoanalytical eye inward toward his own unconscious, he was still very effective in shining a light on the collective unconscious of humanity as a whole.  It’s not enough that we marvel over the better angels of our nature, even though it’s important to acknowledge and understand our capacities and our potential for bettering ourselves and the world we live in; we also have to acknowledge our flaws and shortcomings and while we may try to overcome these weaknesses in one way or another, some of them are simply a part of our nature and we should accept them as such even if we may not like them.

One of the prevailing theories stemming from Western Rationalism (mentioned earlier in Barrett’s book) was that human beings were inherently perfect and rational, and it was within the realm of possibility to realize that potential; but this kind of wishful thinking was relying on a fundamental denial of an essential part of the kind of animal we really are.  And Nietzsche did a good job of putting this fact out in the limelight, and explaining how we couldn’t truly realize our potential until we came to terms with this fairly ugly side of ourselves.

Barrett distinguishes between the attitudes stemming from various forms of atheism, including that of Nietzsche’s:

“The urbane atheism of Bertrand Russell, for example, presupposes the existence of believers against whom he can score points in an argument and get off some of his best quips.  The atheism of Sartre is a more somber affair, and indeed borrows some of its color from Nietzsche: Sartre relentlessly works out the atheistic conclusion that in a universe without God man is absurd, unjustified, and without reason, as Being itself is.”

In fact Nietzsche was more concerned with the atheists that hadn’t yet accepted the full ramifications of a Godless world, rather than believers themselves.  He felt that those who believed in God still had a more coherent belief system given many of their moral values and the meaning they attached to their lives, since they were largely derived from their religious beliefs (even if the religious beliefs were unwarranted or harmful).  Those that were atheists, many of them at least, hadn’t yet taken the time to build a new foundation for their previously held values and the meaning in their lives; and if they couldn’t rebuild this foundation then they’d have to change those values and what they find to be meaningful to reflect that shift in foundation.

Overall, Nietzsche even changes the game a little in terms of how the conception of God was to be understood in philosophy:

“If God is taken as a metaphysical object whose existence has to be proved, then the position held by scientifically minded philosophers like Russell must inevitably be valid: the existence of such an object can never be empirically proved.  Therefore, God must be a superstition held by primitive and childish minds.  But both these alternative views are abstract, whereas the reality of God is concrete, a thoroughly autonomous presence that takes hold of men but of which, of course, some men are more conscious than others.  Nietzsche’s atheism reveals the true meaning of God-and does so, we might add, more effectively than a good many official forms of theism.”

Even though God may not actually exist as a conscious being, the idea of God and the feelings associated with what one labels as an experience of God, is as real as any other idea or experience and so it should still be taken seriously even in a world where no gods exist.  As an atheist myself (formerly a born-again Protestant Christian), I’ve come to appreciate the real breadth of possible meaning attached to the term “God”.  Even though the God or gods described in various forms of theism do not track onto objective reality as was pointed out by Russell, this doesn’t negate the subjective reality underlying theism.  People ascribe the label “God” to a set of certain feelings and forces that they feel are controlling their lives, their values, and their overall vision of the world.  Nietzsche had his own vision of the world as well, and so one could label this as his “god”, despite the confusion that this may cause when discussing God on metaphysical terms.

2. What Happens In “Zarathustra”; Nietzsche as Moralist

One of the greatest benefits of producing art is our ability to tap into multiple perspectives that we might otherwise never explore.  And by doing this, we stand a better chance of creating a window into our own unconscious:

“[Thus Spoke Zarathustra] was Nietzsche’s poetic work and because of this he could allow the unconscious to take over in it, to break through the restraints imposed elsewhere by the philosophic intellect. [in poetry] One loses all perception of what is imagery and simile-that is to say, the symbol itself supersedes thought, because it is richer in meaning.”

By avoiding the common philosophical trap of submitting oneself to a preconceived structure and template for processing information, poetry and other works of art can inspire new ideas and novel perspectives through the use of metaphor and allegory, emotion, and the seemingly infinite powers of our own imagination.  Not only is this true for the artist herself, but also for the spectator who stands in a unique position to interpret what they see and to make sense of it the best they can.  And in the rarest of cases, one may be able to experience something in a work of art that fundamentally changes themselves in the process.  Either way, by presenting someone with an unusual and ambiguous stimulus that they are left to interpret, they can hope to gain at least some access into their unconscious and to inspire an expression of their creativity.

In his Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche was focusing on how human beings could ever hope to regain a feeling of completeness; for modernity had fractured the individual and placed too much emphasis on collective specialization:

“For man, says Schiller, the problem is one of forming individuals.  Modern life has departmentalized, specialized, and thereby fragmented the being of man.  We now face the problem of putting the fragments together into a whole.  In the course of his exposition, Schiller even referred back, as did Nietzsche, to the example of the Greeks, who produced real individuals and not mere learned abstract men like those of the modern age.”

A part of this reassembly process would necessarily involve reincorporating what Nietzsche thought of as the various attributes of our human nature, which many of us are in denial of (to go back to the point raised earlier in this post).  For Nietzsche, this meant taking on some characteristics that may seem inherently immoral:

“Man must incorporate his devil or, as he put it, man must become better and more evil; the tree that would grow taller must send its roots down deeper.”

Nietzsche seems to be saying that if there are aspects of our psychology that are normal albeit seemingly dark or evil, then we ought to structure our moral values along the same lines rather than in opposition to these more primal parts of our psyche:

“(Nietzsche) The whole of traditional morality, he believed, had no grasp of psychological reality and was therefore dangerously one-sided and false.”

And there is some truth to this though I wouldn’t go as far as Nietzsche does, as I believe that there are many basic and cross-cultural moral prescriptions that do in fact take many of our psychological needs into account.  Most cultures have some place for various virtues such as compassion, honesty, generosity, forgiveness, commitment, integrity, and many others; and these virtues have been shown within the fields of moral psychology and sociology to help us flourish and lead psychologically fulfilling lives.  We evolved as a social species that operates within some degree of a dominance hierarchy, and sure enough our psychological traits are what we’d expect given our evolutionary history.

However, it’s also true that we ought to avoid slipping into some form of a naturalistic fallacy; for we don’t want to simply assume that all the behaviors that were more common prior to modernity let alone prior to civilization were beneficial to us and our psychology.  For example, raping and stealing were far more common per capita prior to humans establishing some kind of civil state or society.  And a number of other behaviors that we’ve discovered to be good or bad for our physical or psychological health have been the result of a long process of trial and error, cultural evolution, and the cultural transmission of newfound ideas from one generation to the next.  In any case, we don’t want to assume that just because something has been a tradition or even a common instinctual behavior for many thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years, that it is therefore a moral behavior.  Quite the contrary; instead we need to look closely at which behaviors lead to more fulfilling lives and overall maximal satisfaction and then aim to maximize those behaviors over those that detract from this goal.

Nietzsche did raise a good point however, and one that’s supported by modern moral psychology; namely, the fact that what we think we want or need isn’t always in agreement with our actual wants and needs, once we dive below the surface.  Psychology has been an indispensable tool in discovering many of our unconscious desires and the best moral theories are going to be those that take both our conscious and unconscious motivations and traits into account.  Only then can we have a moral theory that is truly going to be sufficiently motivating to follow in the long term as well as most beneficial to us psychologically.  If one is basing their moral theory on wishful thinking rather than facts about their psychology, then they aren’t likely to develop a viable moral theory.  Nietzsche realized this and promoted it in his writings, and this was an important contribution as it bridged human psychology with a number of important topics in philosophy:

“On this point Nietzsche has a perfectly sober and straightforward case against all those idealists, from Plato onward, who have set universal ideas over and above the individual’s psychological needs.  Morality itself is blind to the tangle of its own psychological motives, as Nietzsche showed in one of his most powerful book, The Genealogy of Morals, which traces the source of morality back to the drives of power and resentment.”

I’m sure that drives of power and resentment have played some role in certain moral prescriptions and moral systems, but I doubt that this is likely to be true generally speaking; and even in cases where a moral prescription or system arose out of one of these unconscious drives, such as resentment, this doesn’t negate it’s validity nor demonstrate whether or not it’s warranted or psychologically beneficial.  The source of morality isn’t as important as whether or not the moral system itself works, though the sources of morality can be both psychologically relevant and revealing.

Our ego certainly has a lot to do with our moral behavior and whether or not we choose to face our inner demons:

“Precisely what is hardest for us to take is the devil as the personification of the pettiest, paltriest, meanest part of our personality…the one that most cruelly deflates ones egotism.”

If one is able to accept both the brighter and darker sides of themselves, they’ll also be more likely to willingly accept Nietzsche’s idea of the Eternal Return:

“The idea of the Eternal Return thus expresses, as Unamuno has pointed out, Nietzsche’s own aspirations toward eternal and immortal life…For Nietzsche the idea of the Eternal Return becomes the supreme test of courage: If Nietzsche the man must return to life again and again, with the same burden of ill health and suffering, would it not require the greatest affirmation and love of life to say Yes to this absolutely hopeless prospect?”

Although I wouldn’t expect most people to embrace this idea, because it goes against our teleological intuitions of time and causation leading to some final state or goal, it does provide a valuable means of establishing whether or not someone is really able to accept this life for what it is with all of its absurdities, pains and pleasures.  If someone willingly accepts the idea, then by extension they likely accept themselves, their lives, and the rest of human history (and even the history of life on this planet, no less).  This doesn’t mean that by accepting the idea of the Eternal Return, that people have to put every action, event, or behavior on equal footing, for example, by condoning slavery or the death of millions as a result of countless wars, just because these events are to be repeated for eternity.  But one is still accepting that all of these events were necessary in some sense; that they couldn’t have been any other way, and this acceptance should translate to one’s attitude toward life reflecting this by some kind of overarching contentment.

I think that the more common reaction to this kind of idea is slipping into some kind of nihilism, where a person no longer cares about anything, and no longer finds any meaning or purpose in their lives.  And this reaction is perfectly understandable given our teleological intuitions; most people don’t or wouldn’t want to invest time and effort into some goal if they knew that the goal would never be accomplished or knew that it would eventually be undone.  But, oddly enough, even if the Eternal Return isn’t an actual fact of our universe, we still run into the same basic situation within our own lifetimes whereby we know that there are a number of goals that will never be achieved because of our own inevitable death.

There’s also the fact that even if we did achieve a number of goals, once we die, we can no longer reap any benefits from them.  There may be other people that can benefit from our own past accomplishments, but eventually they will die as well.  Eventually all life in the universe will expire, and this is bound to happen long before the inevitable heat death of the universe transpires; and once it happens, there won’t be anybody experiencing anything at all let alone reaping the benefits of a goal from someone’s distant past.  Once this is taken into account, Nietzsche’s idea doesn’t sound all that bad, does it?  If we knew that there would always be time and some amount of conscious experience for eternity, then there will always be some form of immortality for consciousness; and if it’s eternally recurring, then we end up becoming immortal in some sense.

Perhaps the idea of the Eternal Return (or Recurrence), even though this idea began many hundreds if not a few thousand years before Nietzsche, was motivated by Nietzsche’s own fear of death.  Even though he thought of the idea as horrifying and paralyzing (not least because of all the undesirable parts of our own personal existence), since he didn’t believe in a traditional afterlife, maybe the fear of death motivated him to adopt such an idea, even though he also saw it as a physically plausible consequence of probability and the laws of physics.  But either way, beyond it being far more plausible an idea compared to that of an eternal paradise after death, it’s also a very different idea; not only because one’s memory or identity isn’t preserved such that one actually experiences immortality when the “temporal loop” defining their lifetime starts all over again (i.e. the “movie” of one’s life is just played over and over again, unbeknownst to the person in the movie), but this idea is also different because it involves accepting the world the way it is for all eternity rather than an idea revolving around the way they wish it was.  The Eternal Return fully engages with the existentialist reality of human life with all its absurdities, contingencies, and the rest.

3. Power and Nihilism

Nietzsche, like Kierkegaard before him, was considered to be an unsystematic thinker by many, though Barrett points out that this view is mistaken when it comes to Nietzsche; a common view resulting from the form his writings took which were largely aphoristic.  Nietzsche himself even said that he was viewing science and philosophy through the eyes of art, but nevertheless his work eventually revealed a systematic structure:

“As thinking gradually took over the whole person, and everything else in his life being starved out, it was inevitable that this thought should tend to close itself off in a system.”

This systematization of his philosophy was revealed in the notes he was making for The Will to Power, a work he never finished but one that was more or less assembled and published posthumously by his sister Elisabeth.  The systematization was centered on the idea that a will to power was the underlying force that ultimately guided our behavior, striving to achieve the highest possible position in life as opposed to being fundamentally driven by some biological imperative to survive.  But it’s worth pointing out here that Nietzsche didn’t seem to be merely talking about a driving force behind human behavior, but rather he seemed to be referencing an even more fundamental driving force that was in some sense driving all of reality; and this more inclusive view would be analogous to Schopenhauer’s will to live.

It’s interesting to consider this perspective from the lens of biology, where if we try and reconcile this with a Darwinian account of evolution in which survival is key, we could surmise that a will to power is but a mechanism for survival.  If we grant Nietzsche’s position and the position of the various anti-Darwinian thinkers that influenced him, that is, that a will to survive or survival more generally is somehow secondary to a will to power, then we run into a problem: if survival is a secondary drive or goal, then we’d expect survival to be less important than power; but without survival you can’t have power and thus it makes far more evolutionary sense that a will to survive is more basic than a will to power.

However, I am willing to grant that as soon as organisms began evolving brains along with the rest of their nervous system, the will to power (or something analogous to it) became increasingly important; and by the time humans came on the scene with their highly complex brains, the will to power may have become manifest in our neurological drive to better predict our environment over time.  I wrote about this idea in a previous post where I had explored Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, where I explained what I saw as a correlation between Nietzsche’s will to power and the idea of the brain as a predictive processor:

“…I’d like to build on it a little and suggest that both expressions of a will to power can be seen as complementary strategies to fulfill one’s desire for maximal autonomy, but with the added caveat that this autonomy serves to fulfill a desire for maximal causal power by harnessing as much control over our experience and understanding of the world as possible.  On the one hand, we can try and change the world in certain ways to fulfill this desire (including through the domination of other wills to power), or we can try and change ourselves and our view of the world (up to and including changing our desires if we find them to be misdirecting us away from our greatest goal).  We may even change our desires such that they are compatible with an external force attempting to dominate us, thus rendering the external domination powerless (or at least less powerful than it was), and then we could conceivably regain a form of power over our experience and understanding of the world.

I’ve argued elsewhere that I think that our view of the world as well as our actions and desires can be properly described as predictions of various causal relations (this is based on my personal view of knowledge combined with a Predictive Processing account of brain function).  Reconciling this train of thought with Nietzsche’s basic idea of a will to power, I think we could…equate maximal autonomy with maximal predictive success (including the predictions pertaining to our desires). Looking at autonomy and a will to power in this way, we can see that one is more likely to make successful predictions about the actions of another if they subjugate the other’s will to power by their own.  And one can also increase the success of their predictions by changing them in the right ways, including increasing their complexity to better match the causal structure of the world, and by changing our desires and actions as well.”

On the other hand, if we treat the brain’s predictive activity as a kind of mechanistic description of how the brain works rather than a type of drive per se, and if we treat our underlying drives as something that merely falls under this umbrella of description, then we might want to consider whether or not any of the drives that are typically posited in psychological theory (such as power, sex, or a will to live) are actually more basic than any other or typically dominant over the others.  Barrett suggests an alternative, saying that we ought to look at these elements more holistically:

“What if the human psyche cannot be carved up into compartments and one compartment wedged in under another as being more basic?  What if such dichotomizing really overlooks the organic unity of the human psyche, which is such that a single impulse can be just as much an impulse toward love on the one hand as it is toward power on the other?”

I agree with Barrett at least in the sense that these drives seem to be operating together much of the time, and when they aren’t in unison, they often seem to be operating on the same level at least.  Another way to put this could be to say that as a social species, we’ve evolved a number of different modular behavioral strategies that are typically best suited for particular social circumstances, though some circumstances may be such that multiple strategies will work and thus multiple strategies may be used simultaneously without working against each other.

But I also think that our conscious attention plays a role as well where the primary drive(s) used to produce the subsequent behavior may be affected by thinking about certain things or in a certain way, such as how much you love someone, what you think you can gain from them, etc.  And this would mean that the various underlying drives for our behavior are individually selected or prioritized based on one’s current experiences and where their attention is directed at any particular moment.  It may still be the case that some drives are typically dominant over others, such as a will to power, even if certain circumstances can lead to another drive temporarily taking over, however short-lived that may be.

The will to power, even if it’s not primary, would still help to explain some of the enormous advancements we’ve made in our scientific and technological progress, while also explaining (at least to some degree) the apparent disparity between our standard of living and overall physio-psychological health on the one hand, and our immense power to manipulate the environment on the other:

“Technology in the twentieth century has taken such enormous strides beyond that of the nineteenth that it now bulks larger as an instrument of naked power than as an instrument for human well-being.”

We could fully grasp Barrett’s point here by thinking about the opening scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where “The Dawn of Man” was essentially made manifest with the discovery of tools, specifically weapons.  Once this seemingly insignificant discovery was made, it completely changed the game for our species.  While it gave us a new means of defending ourselves and an ability to hunt other animals, thus providing us with the requisite surplus of protein and calories needed for brain development and enhanced intelligence, it also catalyzed an arms race.  And with the advent of human civilization, our historical trajectory around the globe became largely dominated by our differential means of destruction; whoever had the biggest stick, the largest army, the best projectiles, and ultimately the most concentrated form of energy, would likely win the battle, forever changing the fate of the parties involved.

Indeed war has been such a core part of human history, so it’s no wonder Nietzsche stumbled upon such an idea; and even if he hadn’t, someone else likely would have even if they wouldn’t have done so with the same level of creativity and intellectual rigor.  If our history has been so colored with war, which is a physical instantiation of a will to power in order to dominate another group, then we should expect many to see it as a fundamental part of who we are.  Personally, I don’t think we’re fundamentally war-driven creatures but rather that war results from our ability to engage in it combined with a perceived lack of and desire for resources, freedom, and stability in our lives; but many of these goods, freedom in particular, imply a particular level of power over oneself and their environment, so even a fight for freedom is in one way or another a kind of will to power as well.

And what are we to make of our quest for power in terms of the big picture?  Theoretically, there is an upper limit to the amount of power any individual or group can possibly attain, and if one gets to a point where they are seeking power for power’s sake, and using their newly acquired power to harness even more power, then what will happen when we eventually hit that ceiling?  If our values become centered around power, and we lose any anchor we once had to provide meaning for our lives, then it seems we would be on a direct path toward nihilism:

“For Nietzsche, the problem of nihilism arose out of the discovery that “God is dead.” “God” here means the historical God of the Christian faith.  But in a wider philosophical sense it means also the whole realm of supersensible reality-Platonic Ideas, the Absolute, or what not-that philosophy has traditionally posited beyond the sensible realm, and in which it has located man’s highest values.  Now that this other, higher, eternal realm is gone, Nietzsche declared, man’s highest values lose their value…The only value Nietzsche can set up to take the place of these highest values that have lost their value for contemporary man is: Power.”

As Barrett explains, Nietzsche seemed to think that power was the only thing that could replace the eternal realm that we valued so much; but of course this does nothing to alleviate the problem of nihilism in the long term since the infinite void still awaits those at the end of the finite road to maximal power.

“If this moment in Western history is but the fateful outcome of the fundamental ways of thought that lie at the very basis of our civilization-and particularly of that way of thought that sunders man from nature, sees nature as a realm of objects to be mastered and conquered, and can therefore end only with the exaltation of the will to power-then we have to find out how this one-sided and ultimately nihilistic emphasis upon the power over things may be corrected.”

I think the answer to this problem lies in a combination of strategies, but with the overarching goal of maximizing life fulfillment.  We need to reprogram our general attitude toward power such that it is truly instrumental rather than perceived as intrinsically valuable; and this means that our basic goal becomes accumulating power such that we can maximize our personal satisfaction and life fulfillment, and nothing more.  Among other things, the power we acquire should be centered around a power over ourselves and our own psychology; finding ways of living and thinking which are likely to include the fostering of a more respectful relationship with the nature that created us in the first place.

And now that we’re knee deep in the Information Age, we will be able to harness the potential of genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and artificial reality; and within these avenues of research we will be able to change our own biology such that we can quickly adapt our psychology to the ever-changing cultural environment of the modern world, and we’ll be able to free up our time to create any world we want.  We just need to keep the ultimate goal in mind, fulfillment and contentment, and direct our increasing power towards this goal in particular instead of merely chipping away at it in the background as some secondary priority.  If we don’t prioritize it, then we may simply perpetuate and amplify the meaningless sources of distraction in our lives, eventually getting lost in the chaos, and forgetting about our ultimate potential and the imperatives needed to realize it.

I’ll be posting a link here to part 9 of this post-series, exploring Heidegger’s philosophy, once it has been completed.

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Irrational Man: An Analysis (Part 3, Chapter 7: Kierkegaard)

Part III – The Existentialists

In the last post in this series on William Barrett’s Irrational Man, we examined how existentialism was influenced by a number of poets and novelists including several of the Romantics and the two most famous Russian authors, namely Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.  In this post, we’ll be entering part 3 of Barrett’s book, and taking a look at Kierkegaard specifically.

Chapter 7 – Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard is often considered to be the first existentialist philosopher and so naturally Barrett begins his exploration of individual existentialists here.  Kierkegaard was a brilliant man with a broad range of interests; he was a poet as well as a philosopher, exploring theology and religion (Christianity in particular), morality and ethics, and various aspects of human psychology.  The fact that he was also a devout Christian can be seen throughout his writings, where he attempted to delineate his own philosophy of religion with a focus on the concepts of faith, doubt, and also his disdain for any organized forms of religion.  Perhaps the most influential core of his work is the focus on individuality, subjectivity, and the lifelong search to truly know oneself.  In many ways, Kierkegaard paved the way for modern existentialism, and he did so with a kind of poetic brilliance that made clever use of both irony and metaphor.

Barrett describes Kierkegaard’s arrival in human history as the onset of an ironic form of intelligence intent on undermining itself:

“Kierkegaard does not disparage intelligence; quite the contrary, he speaks of it with respect and even reverence.  But nonetheless, at a certain moment in history this intelligence had to be opposed, and opposed with all the resources and powers of a man of brilliant intelligence.”

Kierkegaard did in fact value science as a methodology and as an enterprise, and he also saw the importance of objective knowledge; but he strongly believed that the most important kind of knowledge or truth was that which was derived from subjectivity; from the individual and their own concrete existence, through their feelings, their freedom of choice, and their understanding of who they are and who they want to become as an individual.  Since he was also a man of faith, this meant that he had to work harder than most to manage his own intellect in order to prevent it from enveloping the religious sphere of his life.  He felt that he had to suppress the intellect at least enough to maintain his own faith, for he couldn’t imagine a life without it:

“His intellectual power, he knew, was also his cross.  Without faith, which the intelligence can never supply, he would have died inside his mind, a sickly and paralyzed Hamlet.”

Kierkegaard saw faith as of the utmost importance to our particular period in history as well, since Western civilization had effectively become disconnected from Christianity, unbeknownst to the majority of those living in Kierkegaard’s time:

“The central fact for the nineteenth century, as Kierkegaard (and after him Nietzsche, from a diametrically opposite point of view) saw it, was that this civilization that had once been Christian was so no longer.  It had been a civilization that revolved around the figure of Christ, and was now, in Nietzsche’s image, like a planet detaching itself from its sun; and of this the civilization was not yet aware.”

Indeed, in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, we hear of a madman roaming around one morning who makes such a pronouncement to a group of non-believers in a marketplace:

” ‘Where is God gone?’ he called out.  ‘I mean to tell you!  We have killed him, – you and I!  We are all his murderers…What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun?…God is dead!  God remains dead!  And we have killed him!  How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers?…’  Here the madman was silent and looked again at his hearers; they also were silent and looked at him in surprise.  At last he threw his lantern on the ground, so that it broke in pieces and was extinguished.  ‘I come too early,’ he then said ‘I am not yet at the right time.  This prodigious event is still on its way, and is traveling, – it has not yet reached men’s ears.’ “

Although Nietzsche will be looked at in more detail in part 8 of this post-series, it’s worth briefly mentioning what he was pointing out with this essay.  Nietzsche was highlighting the fact that at this point in our history after the Enlightenment, we had made a number of scientific discoveries about our world and our place in it, and this had made the concept of God somewhat superfluous.  As a result of the drastic rise in secularization, the proportion of people that didn’t believe in God rose substantially; and because Christianity no longer had the theistic foundation it relied upon, all of the moral systems, traditions, and the ultimate meaning in one’s life derived from Christianity had to be re-established if not abandoned altogether.

But many people, including a number of atheists, didn’t fully appreciate this fact and simply took for granted much of the cultural constructs that arose from Christianity.  Nietzsche had a feeling that most people weren’t intellectually fit for the task of re-grounding their values and finding meaning in a Godless world, and so he feared that nihilism would begin to dominate Western civilization.  Kierkegaard had similar fears, but as a man who refused to shake his own belief in God and in Christianity, he felt that it was his imperative to try and revive the Christian faith that he saw was in severe decline.

1.  The Man Himself

“The ultimate source of Kierkegaard’s power over us today lies neither in his own intelligence nor in his battle against the imperialism of intelligence-to use the formula with which we began-but in the religious and human passion of the man himself, from which the intelligence takes fire and acquires all its meaning.”

Aside from the fact that Kierkegaard’s own intelligence was primarily shaped and directed by his passion for love and for God, I tend to believe that intelligence is in some sense always subservient to the aims of one’s desires.  And if desires themselves are derivative of, or at least intimately connected to, feeling and passion, then a person’s intelligence is going to be heavily guided by subjectivity; not only in terms of the basic drives that attempt to lead us to a feeling of homeostasis but also in terms of the psychological contentment resulting from that which gives our lives meaning and purpose.

For Kierkegaard, the only way to truly discover what the meaning for one’s own life is, or to truly know oneself, is to endure the painful burden of choice eventually leading to the elimination of a number of possibilities and to the creation of a number of actualities.  One must make certain significant choices in their life such that, once those choices are made, they cannot be unmade; and every time this is done, one is increasingly committing oneself to being (or to becoming) a very specific self.  And Kierkegaard thought that renewing one’s choices daily in the sense of freely maintaining a commitment to them for the rest of one’s life (rather than simply forgetting that those choices were made and moving on to the next one) was the only way to give those choices any meaning, let alone any prolonged meaning.  Barrett mentions the relation of choice, possibility, and reality as it was experienced by Kierkegaard:

“The man who has chosen irrevocably, whose choice has once and for all sundered him from a certain possibility for himself and his life, is thereby thrown back on the reality of that self in all its mortality and finitude.  He is no longer a spectator of himself as a mere possibility; he is that self in its reality.”

As can be seen with Kierkegaard’s own life, some of these choices (such as breaking off his engagement with Regine Olsen) can be hard to live with, but the pain and suffering experienced in our lives is still ours; it is still a part of who we are as an individual and further affirms the reality of our choices, often adding an inner depth to our lives that we may otherwise never attain.

“The cosmic rationalism of Hegel would have told him his loss was not a real loss but only the appearance of loss, but this would have been an abominable insult to his suffering.”

I have to agree with Kierkegaard here that the felt experience one has is as real as anything ever could be.  To say otherwise, that is, to negate the reality of this or that felt experience is to deny the reality of any felt experience whatsoever; for they all precipitate from the same subjective currency of our own individual consciousness.  We can certainly distinguish between subjective reality and objective reality, for example, by evaluating which aspects of our experience can and cannot be verified through a third-party or through some kind of external instrumentation and measurement.  But this distinction only helps us in terms of fine-tuning our ability to make successful predictions about our world by better understanding its causal structure; it does not help us determine what is real and what is not real in the broadest sense of the term.  Reality is quite simply what we experience; nothing more and nothing less.

2. Socrates and Hegel; Existence and Reason

Barrett gives us an apt comparison between Kierkegaard and Socrates:

“As the ancient Socrates played the gadfly for his fellow Athenians stinging them into awareness of their own ignorance, so Kierkegaard would find his task, he told himself, in raising difficulties for the easy conscience of an age that was smug in the conviction of its own material progress and intellectual enlightenment.”

And both philosophers certainly made a lasting impact with their use of the Socratic method; Socrates having first promoted this method of teaching and argumentation, and Kierkegaard making heavy use of it in his first published work Either/Or, and in other works.

“He could teach only by example, and what Kierkegaard learned from the example of Socrates became fundamental for his own thinking: namely, that existence and a theory about existence are not one and the same, any more than a printed menu is as effective a form of nourishment as an actual meal.  More than that: the possession of a theory about existence may intoxicate the possessor to such a degree that he forgets the need of existence altogether.”

And this problem, of not being able to see the forest for the trees, plagues many people that are simply distracted by the details that are uncovered when they’re simply trying to better understand the world.  But living a life of contentment and deeply understanding life in general are two very different things and you can’t invest more in one without retracting time and effort from the other.  Having said that, there’s still some degree of overlap between these two goals; contentment isn’t likely to be maximally realized without some degree of in-depth understanding of the life you’re living and the experiences you’ve had.  As Socrates famously put it: “the unexamined life is not worth living.”  You just don’t want to sacrifice too many of the experiences just to formulate a theory about them.

How does reason, rationality, and thought relate to any theories that address what is actually real?  Well, the belief in a rational cosmos, such as that held by Hegel, can severely restrict one’s ontology when it comes to the concept of existence itself:

“When Hegel says, “The Real is rational, and the rational is real,” we might at first think that only a German idealist with his head in the clouds, forgetful of our earthly existence, could so far forget all the discords, gaps, and imperfections in our ordinary experience.  But the belief in a completely rational cosmos lies behind the Western philosophic tradition; at the very dawn of this tradition Parmenides stated it in his famous verse, “It is the same thing that can be thought and that can be.”  What cannot be thought, Parmenides held, cannot be real.  If existence cannot be thought, but only lived, then reason has no other recourse than to leave existence out of its picture of reality.”

I think what Parmenides said would have been more accurate (if not correct) had he rephrased it just a little differently: “It is the same thing that can be thought consciously experienced and that can be.”  Rephrasing it as such allows for a much more inclusive conception of what is considered real, since anything that is within the possibility of conscious experience is given an equal claim to being real in some way or another; which means that all the irrational thoughts or feelings, the gaps and lack of coherency in some of our experiences, are all taken into account as a part of reality. What else could we mean by saying that existence must be lived, other than the fact that existence must be consciously experienced?  If we mean to include the actions we take in the world, and thus the bodily behavior we enact, this is still included in our conscious experience and in the experiences of other conscious agents.  So once the entire experience of every conscious agent is taken into account, what else could there possibly be aside from this that we can truly say is necessary in order for existence to be lived?

It may be that existence and conscious experience are not identical, even if they’re always coincident with one another; but this is in part contingent on whether or not all matter and energy in the universe is conscious or not.  If consciousness is actually universal, then perhaps existence and some kind of experientiality or other (whether primitive or highly complex) are in fact identical with one another.  And if not, then it is still the existence of those entities which are conscious that should dominate our consideration since that is the only kind of existence that can actually be lived at all.

If we reduce our window of consideration from all conscious experience down to merely the subset of reason or rationality within that experience, then of course there’s going to be a problem with structuring theories about the world within such a limitation; for anything that doesn’t fit within its purview simply disappears:

“As the French scientist and philosopher Emile Meyerson says, reason has only one means of accounting for what does not come from itself, and that is to reduce it to nothingness…The process is still going on today, in somewhat more subtle fashion, under the names of science and Positivism, and without invoking the blessing of Hegel at all.”

Although, in order to be charitable to science, we ought to consider the upsurge of interest and development in the scientific fields of psychology and cognitive science in the decades following the writing of Barrett’s book; for consciousness and the many aspects of our psyche and our experience have taken on a much more important role in terms of what we are valuing in science and the kinds of phenomena we’re trying so hard to understand better.  If psychology and the cognitive and neurosciences include the entire goings-on of our brain and overall subjective experience, and if all the information that is processed therein is trying to be accounted for, then science should no longer be considered cut-off from, or exclusive to, that which lies outside of reason, rationality, or logic.

We mustn’t confuse or conflate reason with science even if science includes the use of reason, for science can investigate the unreasonable; it can provide us with ways of making more and more successful predictions about the causal structure of our experience even as they relate to emotions, intuition, and altered or transcendent states of consciousness like those stemming from meditation, religious experiences or psycho-pharmacological substances.  And scientific fields like moral and positive psychology are also better informing us of what kinds of lifestyles, behaviors, character traits and virtues lead to maximal flourishing and to the most fulfilling lives.  So one could even say that science has been serving as a kind of bridge between reason and existence; between rationality and the other aspects of our psyche that make life worth living.

Going back to the relation between reason and existence, Barrett mentions the conceptual closure of the former to the latter as argued by Kant:

“Kant declared, in effect, that existence can never be conceived by reason-though the conclusions he drew from this fact were very different from Kierkegaard’s.  “Being”, says Kant, “is evidently not a real predicate, or concept of something that can be added to the concept of a thing.”  That is, if I think of a thing, and then think of that thing as existing, my second concept does not add any determinate characteristic to the first…So far as thinking is concerned, there is no definite note or characteristic by which, in a concept, I can represent existence as such.”

And yet, we somehow manage to be able to distinguish between the world of imaginary objects and that of non-imaginary objects (at least most of the time); and we do this using the same physical means of perception in our brain.  I think it’s true to say that both imaginary and non-imaginary objects exist in some sense; for both exist physically as representations in our brains such that we can know them at all, even if they differ in terms of whether the representations are likely to be shared by others (i.e. how they map onto what we might call our external reality).

If I conceive of an apple sitting on a table in front of me, and then I conceive of an apple sitting on a table in front of me that you would also agree is in fact sitting on the table in front of me, then I’ve distinguished conceptually between an imaginary apple and one that exists in our external reality.  And since I can’t ever be certain whether or not I’m hallucinating that there’s an actual apple on the table in front of me (or any other aspect of my experienced existence), I must accept that the common thread of existence, in terms of what it really means for something to exist or not, is entirely grounded on its relation to (my own) conscious experience.  It is entirely grounded on our individual perception; on the way our own brains make predictions about the causes of our sensory input and so forth.

“If existence cannot be represented in a concept, he says (Kierkegaard), it is not because it is too general, remote, and tenuous a thing to be conceived of but rather because it is too dense, concrete, and rich.  I am; and this fact that I exist is so compelling and enveloping a reality that it cannot be reproduced thinly in any of my mental concepts, though it is clearly the life-and-death fact without which all my concepts would be void.”

I actually think Kierkegaard was closer to the mark than Kant was, for he claimed that it was not so much that reason reduces existence to nothingness, but rather that existence is so tangible, rich and complex that reason can’t fully encompass it.  This makes sense insofar as reason operates through the principle of reduction, abstraction, and the dissecting of a holistic experience into parts that relate to one another in a certain way in order to make sense of that experience.  If the holistic experience is needed to fully appreciate existence, then reason alone isn’t going to be up to the task.  But reason also seems to unify our experiences, and if this unification presupposes existence in order to make sense of that experience then we can’t fully appreciate existence without reason either.

3. Aesthetic, Ethical, Religious

Kierkegaard lays out three primary stages of living in his philosophy: namely, the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious.  While there are different ways to interpret this “stage theory”, the most common interpretation treats these stages like a set of concentric circles or spheres where the aesthetic is in the very center, the ethical contains the aesthetic, and the religious subsumes both the ethical and the aesthetic.  Thus, for Kierkegaard, the religious is the most important stage that, in effect, supersedes the others; even though the religious doesn’t eliminate the other spheres, since a religious person is still capable of being ethical or having aesthetic enjoyment, and since an ethical person is still capable of aesthetic enjoyment, etc.

In a previous post where I analyzed Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, I summarized these three stages as follows:

“…The aesthetic life is that of sensuous or felt experience, infinite potentiality through imagination, hiddenness or privacy, and an overarching egotism focused on the individual.  The ethical life supersedes or transcends this aesthetic way of life by relating one to “the universal”, that is, to the common good of all people, to social contracts, and to the betterment of others over oneself.  The ethical life, according to Kierkegaard, also consists of public disclosure or transparency.  Finally, the religious life supersedes the ethical (and thus also supersedes the aesthetic) but shares some characteristics of both the aesthetic and the ethical.

The religious, like the aesthetic, operates on the level of the individual, but with the added component of the individual having a direct relation to God.  And just like the ethical, the religious appeals to a conception of good and evil behavior, but God is the arbiter in this way of life rather than human beings or their nature.  Thus the sphere of ethics that Abraham might normally commit himself to in other cases is thought to be superseded by the religious sphere, the sphere of faith.  Within this sphere of faith, Abraham assumes that anything that God commands is Abraham’s absolute duty to uphold, and he also has faith that this will lead to the best ends…”

While the aesthete generally tends to live life in search of pleasure, always trying to flee away from boredom in an ever-increasing fit of desperation to continue finding moments of pleasure despite the futility of such an unsustainable goal, Kierkegaard also claims that the aesthete includes the intellectual who tries to stand outside of life; detached from it and only viewing it as a spectator rather than a participant, and categorizing each experience as either interesting or boring, and nothing more.  And it is this speculative detachment from life, which was an underpinning of Western thought, that Kierkegaard objected to; an objection that would be maintained within the rest of existential philosophy that was soon to come.

If the aesthetic is unsustainable or if someone (such as Kierkegaard) has given up such a life of pleasure, then all that remains is the other spheres of life.  For Kierkegaard, the ethical life, at least on its own, seemed to be insufficient for making up what was lost in the aesthetic:

“For a really passionate temperament that has renounced the life of pleasure, the consolations of the ethical are a warmed-over substitute at best.  Why burden ourselves with conscience and responsibility when we are going to die, and that will be the end of it?  Kierkegaard would have approved of the feeling behind Nietzsche’s saying, ‘God is dead, everything is permitted.’ ” 

One conclusion we might arrive at, after considering Kierkegaard’s attitude toward the ethical life, is that he may have made a mistake when he renounced the life of pleasure entirely.  Another conclusion we might make is that Kierkegaard’s conception of the ethical is incomplete or misguided.  If he honestly asks, in the hypothetical absence of God or any option for a religious life, why we ought to burden ourselves with conscience and responsibility, this seems to betray a fundamental flaw in his moral and ethical reasoning.  Likewise for Nietzsche, and Dostoyevsky for that matter, where they both echoed similar sentiments: “If God does not exist, then everything is permissible.”

As I’ve argued elsewhere (here, and here), the best form any moral theory can take (such that it’s also sufficiently motivating to follow) is going to be centered around the individual, and it will be grounded on the hypothetical imperative that maximizes their personal satisfaction and life fulfillment.  If some behaviors serve toward best achieving this goal and other behaviors detract from it, as a result of our human psychology, sociology, and thus as a result of the finite range of conditions that we thrive within as human beings, then regardless of whether a God exists or not, everything is most certainly not permitted.  Nietzsche was right however when he claimed that the “death of God” (so to speak) would require a means of re-establishing a ground for our morals and values, but this doesn’t mean that all possible grounds for doing so have an equal claim to being true nor will they all be equally efficacious in achieving one’s primary moral objective.

Part of the problem with Kierkegaard’s moral theorizing is his adoption of Kant’s universal maxim for ethical duty: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”  The problem is that this maxim or “categorical imperative” (the way it’s generally interpreted at least) doesn’t take individual psychological and circumstantial idiosyncrasies into account.  One can certainly insert these idiosyncrasies into Kant’s formulation, but that’s not how Kant intended it to be used nor how Kierkegaard interpreted it.  And yet, Kierkegaard seems to smuggle in such exceptions anyway, by having incorporated it into his conception of the religious way of life:

“An ethical rule, he says, expresses itself as a universal: all men under such-and-such circumstances ought to do such and such.  But the religious personality may be called upon to do something that goes against the universal norm.”

And if something goes against a universal norm, and one feels that they ought to do it anyway (above all else), then they are implicitly denying that a complete theory of ethics involves exclusive universality (a categorical imperative); rather, it must require taking some kind of individual exceptions into account.  Kierkegaard seems to be prioritizing the individual in all of his philosophy, and yet he didn’t think that a theory of ethics could plausibly account for such prioritization.

“The validity of this break with the ethical is guaranteed, if it ever is, by only one principle, which is central to Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy as well as to his Christian faith-the principle, namely, that the individual is higher than the universal. (This means also that the individual is always of higher value than the collective).”

I completely agree with Kierkegaard that the individual is always of higher value than the collective; and this can be shown by any utilitarian moral theory that forgets to take into account the psychological state of those individual actors and moral agents carrying out some plan to maximize happiness or utility for the greatest number of people.  If the imperative comes down to my having to do something such that I can no longer live with myself afterward, then the moral theory has failed miserably.  Instead, I should feel that I did the right thing in any moral dilemma (when thinking clearly and while maximally informed of the facts), even when every available option is less than optimal.  We have to be able to live with our own actions, and ultimately with the kind of person that those actions have made us become.  The concrete self that we alone have conscious access to takes on a priority over any abstract conception of other selves or any kind of universality that references only a part of our being.

“Where then as an abstract rule it commands something that goes against my deepest self (but it has to be my deepest self, and herein the fear and trembling of the choice reside), then I feel compelled out of conscience-a religious conscience superior to the ethical-to transcend that rule.  I am compelled to make an exception because I myself am an exception; that is, a concrete being whose existence can never be completely subsumed under any universal or even system of universals.”

Although I agree with Kierkegaard here for the most part, in terms of our giving the utmost importance to the individual self, I don’t think that a religious conscience is something one can distinguish from their conscience generally; rather, it would just be one’s conscience, albeit one altered by a set of religious beliefs, which may end up changing how one’s conscience operates but doesn’t change the fact that it is still their conscience nevertheless.

For example, if two people differ with respect to their belief in souls, where one has a religious belief that a fertilized egg has a soul and the other person only believes that people with a capacity for consciousness or a personality have souls (or have no soul at all), then that difference in belief may affect their conscience differently if both parties were to, for example, donate a fertilized egg to a group of stem-cell researchers.  The former may feel guilty afterward (knowing that the egg they believe to be inhabited by a soul may be destroyed), whereas the latter may feel really good about themselves for aiding important life-saving medical research.  This is why one can only make a proper moral assessment when they are taking seriously what is truly factual about the world (what is supported by evidence) and what is a cherished religious or otherwise supernatural belief.  If one’s conscience is primarily operating on true evidenced facts about the world (along with their intuition), then their conscience and what some may call their religious conscience should be referring to the exact same thing.

Despite the fact that viable moral theories should be centered around the individual rather than the collective, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try and come up with sets of universal moral rules that ought to be followed most of the time.  For example, a rule like “don’t steal from others” is a good rule to follow most of the time, and if everyone in a society strives to obey such a rule, that society will be better off overall as a result; but if my child is starving and nobody is willing to help in any way, then my only option may be to steal a loaf of bread in order to prevent the greater moral crime of letting a child starve.

This example should highlight a fundamental oversight regarding Kant’s categorical imperative as well: you can build in any number of exceptions within a universal law to make it account for personal circumstances and even psychological idiosyncrasies, thus eliminating the kind of universality that Kant sought to maintain.  For example, if I willed it to be a universal law that “you shouldn’t take your own life,” I could make this better by adding an exception to it so that the law becomes “you shouldn’t take your own life unless it is to save the life of another,” or even more individually tailored to “you shouldn’t take your own life unless not doing so will cause you to suffer immensely or inhibit your overall life satisfaction and life fulfillment.”  If someone has a unique life history or psychological predisposition whereby taking their own life is the only option available to them lest they suffer needlessly, then they ought to take their own life regardless of whatever categorical imperative they are striving to uphold.

There is however still an important reason for adopting Kant’s universal maxim (at least generally speaking): the fact that universal laws like the Golden Rule provide people with an easy heuristic to quickly ascertain the likely moral status of any particular action or behavior.  If we try and tailor in all sorts of idiosyncratic exceptions (with respect to yourself as well as others), it makes the rules much more complicated and harder to remember; instead, one should use the universal rules most of the time and only when they see a legitimate reason to question it, should they consider if an exception should be made.

Another important point regarding ethical behavior or moral dilemmas is the factor of uncertainty in our knowledge of a situation:

“But even the most ordinary people are required from time to time to make decisions crucial for their own lives, and in such crises they know something of the “suspension of the ethical” of which Kierkegaard writes.  For the choice in such human situations is almost never between a good and an evil, where both are plainly as such and the choice therefore made in all the certitude of reason; rather it is between rival goods, where one is bound to do some evil either way, and where the ultimate outcome and even-of most of all-our own motives are unclear to us.  The terror of confronting oneself in such a situation is so great that most people panic and try to take cover under any universal rule that will apply, if only it will save them from the task of choosing themselves.”

And rather than making these tough decisions themselves, a lot of people would prefer for others to tell them what’s right and wrong behavior such as getting these answers from a religion, from one’s parents, from a community, etc.; but this negates the intimate consideration of the individual where each of these difficult choices made will lead them down a particular path in their life and shape who they become as a person.  The same fear drives a lot of people away from critical thinking, where many would prefer to have people tell them what’s true and false and not have to think about these things for themselves, and so they gravitate towards institutions that say they “have all the answers” (even if many that fear critical thinking wouldn’t explicitly say that this is the case, since it is primarily a manifestation of the unconscious).  Kierkegaard highly valued these difficult moments of choice and thought they were fundamental to being a true self living an authentic life.

But despite the fact that universal ethical rules are convenient and fairly effective to use in most cases, they are still far from perfect and so one will find themselves in a situation where they simply don’t know which rule to use or what to do, and one will just have to make a decision that they think will be the most easy to live with:

“Life seems to have intended it this way, for no moral blueprint has ever been drawn up that covers all the situations for us beforehand so that we can be absolutely certain under which rule the situation comes.  Such is the concreteness of existence that a situation may come under several rules at once, forcing us to choose outside any rule, and from inside ourselves…Most people, of course, do not want to recognize that in certain crises they are being brought face to face with the religious center of their existence.”

Now I wouldn’t call this the religious center of one’s existence but rather the moral center of one’s existence; it is simply the fact that we’re trying to distinguish between universal moral prescriptions (which Kierkegaard labels as “the ethical”) and those that are non-universal or dynamic (which Kierkegaard labels as “the religious”).  In any case, one can call this whatever they wish, as long as they understand the distinction that’s being made here which is still an important one worth making.  And along with acknowledging this distinction between universal and individual moral consideration, it’s also important that one engages with the world in a way where our individual emotional “palette” is faced head on rather than denied or suppressed by society or its universal conventions.

Barrett mentions how the denial of our true emotions (brought about by modernity) has inhibited our connection to the transcendent, or at least, inhibited our appreciation or respect for the causal forces that we find to be greater than ourselves:

“Modern man is farther from the truth of his own emotions than the primitive.  When we banish the shudder of fear, the rising of the hair of the flesh in dread, or the shiver of awe, we shall have lost the emotion of the holy altogether.”

But beyond acknowledging our emotions, Kierkegaard has something to say about how we choose to cope with them, most especially that of anxiety and despair:

“We are all in despair, consciously or unconsciously, according to Kierkegaard, and every means we have of coping with this despair, short of religion, is either unsuccessful or demoniacal.”

And here is another place where I have to part ways with Kierkegaard despite his brilliance in examining the human condition and the many complicated aspects of our psychology; for relying on religion (or more specifically, relying on religious belief) to cope with despair is but another distraction from the truth of our own existence.  It is an inauthentic way of living life since one is avoiding the way the world really is.  I think it’s far more effective and authentic for people to work on changing their attitude toward life and the circumstances they find themselves in without sacrificing a reliable epistemology in the process.  We need to provide ourselves with avenues for emotional expression, work to increase our mindfulness and positivity, and constantly strive to become better versions of ourselves by finding things we’re passionate about and by living a philosophically examined life.  This doesn’t mean that we have to rid ourselves of the rituals, fellowship, and meditative benefits that religion offer; but rather that we should merely dispense with the supernatural component and the dogma and irrationality that’s typically attached to and promoted by religion.

4. Subjective and Objective Truth

Kierkegaard ties his conception of the religious life to the meaning of truth itself, and he distinguishes this mode of living with the concept of religious belief.  While one can assimilate a number of religious beliefs just as one can do with non-religious beliefs, for Kierkegaard, religion itself is something else entirely:

“If the religious level of existence is understood as a stage upon life’s way, then quite clearly the truth that religion is concerned with is not at all the same as the objective truth of a creed or belief.  Religion is not a system of intellectual propositions to which the believer assents because he knows it to be true, as a system of geometry is true; existentially, for the individual himself, religion means in the end simply to be religious.  In order to make clear what it means to be religious, Kierkegaard has to reopen the whole question of the meaning of truth.”

And his distinction between objective and subjective truth is paramount to understanding this difference.  One could say perhaps that by subjective truth he is referring to a truth that must be embodied and have an intimate relation to the individual:

“But the truth of religion is not at all like (objective truth): it is a truth that must penetrate my own personal existence, or it is nothing; and I must struggle to renew it in my life every day…Strictly speaking, subjective truth is not a truth that I have, but a truth that I am.”

The struggle for renewal goes back to Kierkegaard’s conception of how the meaning a person finds in their life is in part dependent on some kind of personal commitment; it relies on making certain choices that one remakes day after day, keeping these personal choices in focus so as to not lose sight of the path we’re carving out for ourselves.  And so it seems that he views subjective truth as intimately connected to the meaning we give our lives, and to the kind of person that we are now.

Perhaps another way we can look at this conception, especially as it differs from objective truth, is to examine the relation between language, logic, and conscious reasoning on the one hand, and intuition, emotion, and the unconscious mind on the other.  Objective truth is generally communicable, it makes explicit predictions about the causal structure of reality, and it involves a way of unifying our experiences into some coherent ensemble; but subjective truth involves felt experience, emotional attachment, and a more automated sense of familiarity and relation between ourselves and the world.  And both of these facets are important for our ability to navigate the world effectively while also feeling that we’re psychologically whole or complete.

5. The Attack Upon Christendom

Kierkegaard points out an important shift in modern society that Barrett mentioned early on in this book; the move toward mass society, which has effectively eaten away at our individuality:

“The chief movement of modernity, Kierkegaard holds, is a drift toward mass society, which means the death of the individual as life becomes ever more collectivized and externalized.  The social thinking of the present age is determined, he says, by what might be called the Law of Large Numbers: it does not matter what quality each individual has, so long as we have enough individuals to add up to a large number-that is, to a crowd or mass.”

And false metrics of success like economic growth and population growth have definitely detracted from the quality each of our lives is capable of achieving.  And because of our inclinations as a social species, we are (perhaps unconsciously) drawn towards the potential survival benefits brought about by joining progressively larger and larger groups.  In terms of industrialization, we’ve been using technology to primarily allow us to support more people on the globe and to increase the output of each individual worker (to benefit the wealthiest) rather than substantially reducing the number of hours worked per week or eliminating poverty outright.  This has got to be the biggest failure of the industrial revolution and of capitalism (when not regulated properly), and one that’s so often taken for granted.

Because of the greed that’s consumed the moral compass of those at the top of our sociopolitical hierarchy, our lives have been funneled into a military-industrial complex that will only surrender our servitude when the rich eventually stop asking for more and more of the fruits of our labor.  And by the push of marketing and social pressure, we’re tricked into wanting to maintain society the way it is; to continue to buy more consumable garbage that we don’t really need and to be complacent with such a lifestyle.  The massive externalization of our psyche has led to a kind of, as Barrett put it earlier, spiritual poverty.  And Kierkegaard was well aware of this psychological degradation brought on by modernity’s unchecked collectivization.

Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche also saw a problem with how modernity had effectively killed God; though Kierkegaard and Nietzsche differed in their attitudes toward organized religion, Christianity in particular:

“The Grand Inquisitor, the Pope of Popes, relieves men of the burden of being Christian, but at the same time leaves them the peace of believing they are Christians…Nietzsche, the passionate and religious atheist, insisted on the necessity of a religious institution, the Church, to keep the sheep in peace, thus putting himself at the opposite extreme from Kierkegaard; Dostoevski in his story of the Grand Inquisitor may be said to embrace dialectically the two extremes of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.  The truth lies in the eternal tension between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor.  Without Christ the institution of religion is empty and evil, but without the institution as a means of mitigating it the agony in the desert of selfhood is not viable for most men.”

Modernity had helped produce organized religion, thus diminishing the personal, individualistic dimension of spirituality which Kierkegaard saw as indispensable; but modernity also facilitated the “death of God” making even organized religion increasingly difficult to adhere to since the underlying theistic foundation was destroyed for many.  Nietzsche realized the benefits of organized religion since so many people are unable to think critically for themselves, are unable to find an effective moral framework that isn’t grounded on religion, and are unable to find meaning or stability in their lives that isn’t grounded on belief in God or in some religion or other.  In short, most people aren’t able to deal with the burdens realized within existentialism.

Due to the fact that much of European culture and so many of its institutions had been built around Christianity, this made the religion much more collectivized and less personal, but it also made Christianity more vulnerable to being uprooted by new ideas that were given power from the very same collective.  Thus, it was the mass externalization of religion that made religion that much more accessible to the externalization of reason, as exemplified by scientific progress and technology.  Reason and religion could no longer co-exist in the same way they once had because the externalization drastically reduced our ability to compartmentalize the two.  And this made it that much harder to try and reestablish a more personal form of Christianity, as Kierkegaard had been longing for.

Reason also led us to the realization of our own finitude, and once this view was taken more seriously, it created yet another hurdle for the masses to maintain their religiosity; for once death is seen as inevitable, and immortality accepted as an impossibility, one of the most important uses for God becomes null and void:

“The question of death is thus central to the whole of religious thought, is that to which everything else in the religious striving is an accessory: ‘If there is no immortality, what use is God?’ “

The fear of death is a powerful motivator for adopting any number of beliefs that might help to manage the cognitive dissonance that results from it, and so the desire for eternal happiness makes death that much more frightening.  But once death is truly accepted, then many of the other beliefs that were meant to provide comfort or consolation are no longer necessary or meaningful.  For Kierkegaard, he didn’t think we could cope with the despair of an inevitable death without a religion that promised some way to overcome it and to transcend our life and existence in this world, and he thought Christianity was the best religion to accomplish this goal.

It is on this point in particular, how he fails to properly deal with death, that I find Kierkegaard to lack an important strength as an existentialist; as it seems that in order to live an authentic life, a person must accept death, that is, they must accept the finitude of our individual human existence.  As Heidegger would later go on to say, buried deep within the idea of death as the possibility of impossibility is a basis for affirming one’s own life, through the acceptance of our mortality and the uncertainty that surrounds it.

Click here for the next post in this series, part 8 on Nietzsche’s philosophy.

The Experientiality of Matter

If there’s one thing that Nietzsche advocated for, it was to eliminate dogmatism and absolutism from one’s thinking.  And although I generally agree with him here, I do think that there is one exception to this rule.  One thing that we can be absolutely certain of is our own conscious experience.  Nietzsche actually had something to say about this (in Beyond Good and Evil, which I explored in a previous post), where he responds to Descartes’ famous adage “cogito ergo sum” (the very adage associated with my blog!), and he basically says that Descartes’ conclusion (“I think therefore I am”) shows a lack of reflection concerning the meaning of “I think”.  He wonders how he (and by extension, Descartes) could possibly know for sure that he was doing the thinking rather than the thought doing the thinking, and he even considers the possibility that what is generally described as thinking may actually be something more like willing or feeling or something else entirely.

Despite Nietzsche’s criticism against Descartes in terms of what thought is exactly or who or what actually does the thinking, we still can’t deny that there is thought.  Perhaps if we replace “I think therefore I am” with something more like “I am conscious, therefore (my) conscious experience exists”, then we can retain some core of Descartes’ insight while throwing out the ambiguities or uncertainties associated with how exactly one interprets that conscious experience.

So I’m in agreement with Nietzsche in the sense that we can’t be certain of any particular interpretation of our conscious experience, including whether or not there is an ego or a self (which Nietzsche actually describes as a childish superstition similar to the idea of a soul), nor can we make any certain inferences about the world’s causal relations stemming from that conscious experience.  Regardless of these limitations, we can still be sure that conscious experience exists, even if it can’t be ascribed to an “I” or a “self” or any particular identity (let alone a persistent identity).

Once we’re cognizant of this certainty, and if we’re able to crawl out of the well of solipsism and eventually build up a theory about reality (for pragmatic reasons at the very least), then we must remain aware of the priority of consciousness in any resultant theory we construct about reality, with regard to its structure or any of its other properties.  Personally, I believe that some form of naturalistic physicalism (a realistic physicalism) is the best candidate for an ontological theory that is the most parsimonious and explanatory for all that we experience in our reality.  However, most people that make the move to adopt some brand of physicalism seem to throw the baby out with the bathwater (so to speak), whereby consciousness gets eliminated by assuming it’s an illusion or that it’s not physical (therefore having no room for it in a physicalist theory, aside from its neurophysiological attributes).

Although I used to feel differently about consciousness (and it’s relationship to physicalism), where I thought it was plausible for it to be some kind of an illusion, upon further reflection I’ve come to realize that this was a rather ridiculous position to hold.  Consciousness can’t be an illusion in the proper sense of the word, because the experience of consciousness is real.  Even if I’m hallucinating where my perceptions don’t directly correspond with the actual incoming sensory information transduced through my body’s sensory receptors, then we can only say that the perceptions are illusory insofar as they don’t directly map onto that incoming sensory information.  But I still can’t say that having these experiences is itself an illusion.  And this is because consciousness is self-evident and experiential in that it constitutes whatever is experienced no matter what that experience consists of.

As for my thoughts on physicalism, I came to realize that positing consciousness as an intrinsic property of at least some kinds of physical material (analogous to a property like mass) allows us to avoid having to call consciousness non-physical.  If it is simply an experiential property of matter, that doesn’t negate its being a physical property of that matter.  It may be that we can’t access this property in such a way as to evaluate it with external instrumentation, like we can for all the other properties of matter that we know of such as mass, charge, spin, or what-have-you, but that doesn’t mean an experiential property should be off limits for any physicalist theory.  It’s just that most physicalists assume that everything can or has to be reducible to the externally accessible properties that our instrumentation can measure.  And this suggests that they’ve simply assumed that the physical can only include externally accessible properties of matter, rather than both internally and externally accessible properties of matter.

Now it’s easy to see why science might push philosophy in this direction because its methodology is largely grounded on third-party verification and a form of objectivity involving the ability to accurately quantify everything about a phenomenon with little or no regard for introspection or subjectivity.  And I think that this has caused many a philosopher to paint themselves into a corner by assuming that any ontological theory underlying the totality of our reality must be constrained in the same way that the physical sciences are.  To see why this is an unwarranted assumption, let’s consider a “black box” that can only be evaluated by a certain method externally.  It would be fallacious to conclude that just because we are unable to access the inside of the box, that the box must therefore be empty inside or that there can’t be anything substantially different inside the box compared to what is outside the box.

We can analogize this limitation of studying consciousness with our ability to study black holes within the field of astrophysics, where we’ve come to realize that accessing any information about their interior (aside from how much mass there is) is impossible to do from the outside.  And if we managed to access this information (if there is any) from the inside by leaping past its outer event horizon, it would be impossible for us to escape and share any of that information.  The best we can do is to learn what we can from the outside behavior of the black hole in terms of its interaction with surrounding matter and light and infer something about the inside, like how much matter it contains (e.g. we can infer the mass of a black hole from its outer surface area).  And we can learn a little bit more by considering what is needed to create or destroy a black hole, thus creating or destroying any interior qualities that may or may not exist.

A black hole can only form from certain configurations of matter, particularly aggregates that are above a certain mass and density.  And it can only be destroyed by starving it to death, by depriving it of any new matter, where it will slowly die by evaporating entirely into Hawking radiation, thus destroying anything that was on the inside in the process.  So we can infer that any internal qualities it does have, however inaccessible they may be, can be brought into and out of existence with certain physical processes.

Similarly, we can infer some things about consciousness by observing one’s external behavior including inferring some conditions that can create, modify, or destroy that type of consciousness, but we are unable to know what it’s like to be on the inside of that system once it exists.  We’re only able to know about the inside of our own conscious system, where we are in some sense inside our own black hole with nobody else able to access this perspective.  And I think it is easy enough to imagine that certain configurations of matter simply have an intrinsic, externally inaccessible experiential property, just as certain configurations of matter lead to the creation of a black hole with its own externally inaccessible and qualitatively unknown internal properties.  Despite the fact that we can’t access the black hole’s interior with a strictly external method, to determine its internal properties, this doesn’t mean we should assume that whatever properties may exist inside it are therefore fundamentally non-physical.  Just as we wouldn’t consider alternate dimensions (such as those predicted in M-theory/String-Theory) that we can’t physically access to be non-physical.  Perhaps one or more of these inaccessible dimensions (if they exist) is what accounts for an intrinsic experiential property within matter (though this is entirely speculative and need not be true for the previous points to hold, but it’s an interesting thought nevertheless).

Here’s a relevant quote from the philosopher Galen Strawson, where he outlines what physicalism actually entails:

Real physicalists must accept that at least some ultimates are intrinsically experience-involving. They must at least embrace micropsychism. Given that everything concrete is physical, and that everything physical is constituted out of physical ultimates, and that experience is part of concrete reality, it seems the only reasonable position, more than just an ‘inference to the best explanation’… Micropsychism is not yet panpsychism, for as things stand realistic physicalists can conjecture that only some types of ultimates are intrinsically experiential. But they must allow that panpsychism may be true, and the big step has already been taken with micropsychism, the admission that at least some ultimates must be experiential. ‘And were the inmost essence of things laid open to us’ I think that the idea that some but not all physical ultimates are experiential would look like the idea that some but not all physical ultimates are spatio-temporal (on the assumption that spacetime is indeed a fundamental feature of reality). I would bet a lot against there being such radical heterogeneity at the very bottom of things. In fact (to disagree with my earlier self) it is hard to see why this view would not count as a form of dualism… So now I can say that physicalism, i.e. real physicalism, entails panexperientialism or panpsychism. All physical stuff is energy, in one form or another, and all energy, I trow, is an experience-involving phenomenon. This sounded crazy to me for a long time, but I am quite used to it, now that I know that there is no alternative short of ‘substance dualism’… Real physicalism, realistic physicalism, entails panpsychism, and whatever problems are raised by this fact are problems a real physicalist must face.

— Galen Strawson, Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?

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While I don’t believe that all matter has a mind per se, because a mind is generally conceived as being a complex information processing structure, I think it is likely that all matter has an experiential quality of some kind, even if most instantiations of it are entirely unrecognizable as what we’d generally consider to be “consciousness” or “mentality”.  I believe that the intuitive gap here is born from the fact that the only minds we are confident exist are those instantiated by a brain, which has the ability to make an incredibly large number of experiential discriminations between various causal relations, thus giving it a capacity that is incredibly complex and not observed anywhere else in nature.  On the other hand, a particle of matter on its own would be hypothesized to have the capacity to make only one or two of these kinds of discriminations, making it unintelligent and thus incapable of brain-like activity.  Once a person accepts that an experiential quality can come in varying degrees from say one experiential “bit” to billions or trillions of “bits” (or more), then we can plausibly see how matter could give rise to systems that have a vast range in their causal power, from rocks that don’t appear to do much at all, to living organisms that have the ability to store countless representations of causal relations (memory) allowing them to behave in increasingly complex ways.  And perhaps best of all, this approach solves the mind-body problem by eliminating the mystery of how fundamentally non-experiential stuff could possibly give rise to experientiality and consciousness.

Looking Beyond Good & Evil

Nietzche’s Beyond Good and Evil serves as a thorough overview of his philosophy and is definitely one of his better works (although I think Thus Spoke Zarathustra is much more fun to read).  It’s definitely worth reading (if you haven’t already) to put a fresh perspective on many widely held philosophical assumptions that are often taken for granted.  While I’m not interested in all of the claims he makes (and he makes many, in nearly 300 aphorisms spread over nine chapters), there are at least several ideas that I think are worth analyzing.

One theme presented throughout the book is Nietzsche’s disdain for classical conceptions of truth and any form of absolutism or dogmatism.  With regard to truth or his study on the nature of truth (what we could call his alethiology), he subscribes to a view that he coined as perspectivism.  For Nietzsche, there are no such things as absolute truths but rather there are only different perspectives about reality and our understanding of it.  So he insists that we shouldn’t get stuck in the mud of dogmatism, and should instead try to view what is or isn’t true with an open mind and from as many points of view as possible.

Nietzsche’s view here is in part fueled by his belief that the universe is in a state of constant change, as well as his belief in the fixity of language.  Since the universe is in a state of constant change, language generally fails to capture this dynamic essence.  And since philosophy is inherently connected to the use of language, false inferences and dogmatic conclusions will often manifest from it.  Wittgenstein belonged to a similar school of thought (likely building off of Nietzsche’s contributions) where he claimed that most of the problems in philosophy had to do with the limitations of language, and therefore, that those philosophical problems could only be solved (if at all) through an in-depth evaluation of the properties of language and how they relate to its use.

This school of thought certainly has merit given the facts of language having more of a fixed syntactic structure yet also having a dynamic or probabilistic semantic structure.  We need language to communicate our thoughts to one another, and so this requires some kind of consistency or stability in its syntactic structure.  But the meaning behind the words we use is something that is established through use, through context, and ultimately through associations between probabilistic conceptual structures and relatively stable or fixed visual and audible symbols (written or spoken words).  Since the semantic structure of language has fuzzy boundaries, and yet is attached to relatively fixed words and grammar, it produces the illusion of a reality that is essentially unchanging.  And this results in the kinds of philosophical problems and dogmatic thinking that Nietzsche warns us of.

It’s hard to disagree with Nietzsche’s view that dogmatism is to be avoided at all costs, and that absolute truths are generally specious at best (let alone dangerous), and philosophy owes a lot to Nietzsche for pointing out the need to reject this kind of thinking.  Nietzsche’s rejection of absolutism and dogmatism is made especially clear in his views on the common conceptions of God and morality.  He points out how these concepts have changed a lot over the centuries (where, for example, the meaning of good has undergone a complete reversal throughout its history), and this is despite the fact that throughout that time, the proponents of those particular views of God or morality believe that these concepts have never changed and will never change.

Nietzsche believes that all change is ultimately driven by a will to power, where this will is a sort of instinct for autonomy, and which also consists of a desire to impose one’s will onto others.  So the meaning of these concepts (such as God or morality) and countless others have only changed because they’ve been re-appropriated by different or conflicting wills to power.  As such, he thinks that the meaning and interpretation of a concept illustrate the attributes of the particular will making use of those concepts, rather than some absolute truth about reality.  I think this idea makes a lot of sense if we regard the will to power as not only encompassing the desires belonging to any individual (most especially their desire for autonomy), but also the inferences they’ve made about reality, it’s apparent causal relations, etc., which provide the content for those desires.  So any will to power is effectively colored by the world view held by the individual, and this world view or set of inferred causal relations includes one’s inferences pertaining to language and any meaning ascribed to the words and concepts that one uses.

Even more interesting to me is the distinction Nietzsche makes between what he calls an unrefined use or version of the will to power and one that is refined.  The unrefined form of a will to power takes the desire for autonomy and directs it outward (perhaps more instinctually) in order to dominate the will of others.  The refined version on the other hand takes this desire for autonomy and directs it inward toward oneself, manifesting itself as a kind of cruelty which causes a person to constantly struggle to make themselves stronger, more independent, and to provide them with a deeper character and perhaps even a deeper understanding of themselves and their view of the world.  Both manifestations of the will to power seem to try and simply maximize one’s power over as much as possible, but the latter refined version is believed by Nietzsche to be superior and ultimately a more effective form of power.

We can better illustrate this view by considering a person who tries to dominate others to gain power in part because they lack the ability to gain power over their own autonomy, and then compare this to a person who gains control over their own desires and autonomy and therefore doesn’t need to compensate for any inadequacy by dominating others.  A person who feels a need to dominate others is in effect dependent on those subordinates (and dependence implies a certain lack of power), but a person who increases their power over themselves gains more independence and thus a form of freedom that is otherwise not possible.

I like this internal/external distinction that Nietzsche makes, but I’d like to build on it a little and suggest that both expressions of a will to power can be seen as complementary strategies to fulfill one’s desire for maximal autonomy, but with the added caveat that this autonomy serves to fulfill a desire for maximal causal power by harnessing as much control over our experience and understanding of the world as possible.  On the one hand, we can try and change the world in certain ways to fulfill this desire (including through the domination of other wills to power), or we can try and change ourselves and our view of the world (up to and including changing our desires if we find them to be misdirecting us away from our greatest goal).  We may even change our desires such that they are compatible with an external force attempting to dominate us, thus rendering the external domination powerless (or at least less powerful than it was), and then we could conceivably regain a form of power over our experience and understanding of the world.

I’ve argued elsewhere that I think that our view of the world as well as our actions and desires can be properly described as predictions of various causal relations (this is based on my personal view of knowledge combined with a Predictive Processing account of brain function).  Reconciling this train of thought with Nietzsche’s basic idea of a will to power, I think we could say that our will to power depends on our predictions of the world and its many apparent causal relations.  We could equate maximal autonomy with maximal predictive success (including the predictions pertaining to our desires). Looking at autonomy and a will to power in this way, we can see that one is more likely to make successful predictions about the actions of another if they subjugate the other’s will to power by their own.  And one can also increase the success of their predictions by changing them in the right ways, including increasing their complexity to better match the causal structure of the world, and by changing our desires and actions as well.

Another thing to consider about a desire for autonomy is that it is better formulated if it includes whatever is required for its own sustainability.  Dominating other wills to power will often serve to promote a sustainable autonomy for the dominator because then those other wills aren’t as likely to become dominators themselves and reverse the direction of dominance, and this preserves the autonomy of the dominating will to power.  This shows how this particular external expression of a will to power could be naturally selected for (under certain circumstances at least) which Nietzsche himself even argued (though in an anti-Darwinian form since genes are not the unit of selection here, but rather behaviors).  This type of behavioral selection would explain it’s prevalence in the animal kingdom including in a number of primate species aside from human beings.  I do think however that we’ve found many ways of overcoming the need or impulse to dominate and it has a lot to do with having adopted social contract theory, since in my view it provides a way of maximizing the average will to power for all parties involved.

Coming back to Nietzsche’s take on language, truth, and dogmatism, we can also see that an increasingly potent will to power is more easily achievable if it is able to formulate and test new tentative predictions about the world, rather than being locked in to some set of predictions (which is dogmatism at it’s core).  Being able to adapt one’s predictions is equivalent to considering and adopting a new point of view, a capability which Nietzsche described as inherent in any free spirit.  It also amounts to being able to more easily free ourselves from the shackles of language, just as Nietzsche advocated for, since new points of view affect the meaning that we ascribe to words and concepts.  I would add to this, the fact that new points of view can also increase our chances of making more successful predictions that constitute our understanding of the world (and ourselves), because we can test them against our previous world view and see if this leads to more or less error, better parsimony, and so on.

Nietzsche’s hope was that one day all philosophy would be flexible enough to overcome its dogmatic prejudices, its claims of absolute truths, including those revolving around morality and concepts like good and evil.  He sees these concepts as nothing more than superficial expressions of one particular will to power or another, and thus he wants philosophy to eventually move itself beyond good and evil.  Personally, I am a proponent of an egoistic goal theory of morality, which grounds all morality on what maximizes the satisfaction and life fulfillment of the individual (which includes cultivating virtues such as compassion, honesty, and reasonableness), and so I believe that good and evil, when properly defined, are more than simply superficial expressions.

But I agree with Nietzsche in part, because I think these concepts have been poorly defined and misused such that they appear to have no inherent meaning.  And I also agree with Nietzsche in that I reject moral absolutism and its associated dogma (as found in religion most especially), because I believe morality to be dynamic in various ways, contingent on the specific situations we find ourselves in and the ever-changing idiosyncrasies of our human psychology.  Human beings often find themselves in completely novel situations and cultural evolution is making this happen more and more frequently.  And our species is also changing because of biological evolution as well.  So even though I agree that moral facts exist (with an objective foundation), and that a subset of these facts are likely to be universal due to the overlap between our biology and psychology, I do not believe that any of these moral facts are absolute because there are far too many dynamic variables for an absolute morality to work even in principle.  Nietzsche was definitely on the right track here.

Putting this all together, I’d like to think that our will to power has an underlying impetus, namely a drive for maximal satisfaction and life fulfillment.  If this is true then our drive for maximal autonomy and control over our experience and understanding of the world serves to fulfill what we believe will maximize this overall satisfaction and fulfillment.  However, when people are irrational, dogmatic, and/or are not well-informed on the relevant facts (and this happens a lot!), this is more likely to lead to an unrefined will to power that is less conducive to achieving that goal, where dominating the wills of others and any number of other immoral behaviors overtakes the character of the individual.  Our best chance of finding a fulfilling path in life (while remaining intellectually honest) is going to require an open mind, a willingness to criticize our own beliefs and assumptions, and a concerted effort to try and overcome our own limitations.  Nietzsche’s philosophy (much of it at least) serves as a powerful reminder of this admirable goal.