After the first six sections of part 1 of Beyond Good and Evil there are about 18 pages
left in this part, On the Prejudices of Philosophers.
In this video I will comment on selections from these remaining sections.
In section 9 Nietzsche attacks the Stoics and specifically their doctrine of natural law.
“Live according to nature” is the Stoic motto, but Nietzsche observes nature is not
orderly but wasteful and cruel.
Despite their claim to wish to conform to nature, he says, the Stoics really want something else.
What they want is to impose their ideal or their morality on nature.
They cannot recognize anymore that this is what they do, however; they're in a deluded state.
And this is this case with other philosophies: they try to create or recreate the world in
their own image.
And so Nietzsche writes: “Philosophy is the tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual
will to power.”
So here Nietzsche is reducing philosophy itself to an acting out of the will to power, over
and over again in the history of thought.
In section 13 Nietzsche critiques the idea that self-preservation is the fundamental
life principle that explains organic activity.
He notes that living beings do not in fact seek to preserve their lives: this is not
the most fundamental biological drive.
Life, Nietzsche says, seeks to dominate, to overwhelm, to discharge its strength into
the environment around it, on to beings around it.
Life itself is will to power.
This is a fundamental doctrine of Nietzsche's.
Self-preservation, he says then, is only a side effect of this much more fundamental
will to power drive.
I think Nietzsche gives us here his critique of Darwinian ways of thinking.
Self-preservation and reproduction of the species are secondary to this more fundamental
physiological/psychological drive which is the will to power.
In section 14 Nietzsche attacks physics and prejudices associated with it.
Physics, he says, is an interpretation of the world, not an explanation of the world.
Sense evidence counts strongly in favor of physics, but this is an appeal to the fundamentally
plebeian tastes of the present age.
Nietzsche contrasts these with the Platonic system, which he calls a noble way of thinking
which involved resisting the obvious evidence of the senses.
Platonic philosophers, Nietzsche notes, found a kind of higher mastery in overcoming the
obvious evidence of the senses.
And of course there is some irony here in Nietzsche praising Plato in order to deride
modern physics, believers in modern physics.
But he concludes this section by noting that perhaps this kind of crude physics, belief
in physics, is the right sort of philosophy for a tough industrious trace of machinists
with rough work to do, here obviously referring to the Americans.
Keep in mind Nietzsche is writing this in the 1880s.
In Section 17 Nietzsche attacks the superstitions of logicians.
He notes that thought comes to us when it wishes, not when I wish.
So in the statement “I think,” we would be wrong to regard the ego as a condition
for the activity or event of thinking.
Nietzsche says thinking happens, but it is a pure supposition or prejudice to add “I”
as the agent of this action.
He calls it a grammatical habit of supplying an agent for every event or activity.
So he is criticizing here easy assumptions about the ego and the self, and he's also
criticizing the immediate certainty of the Cartesians and the rationalists.
He's criticizing the idea that we can have mental events about which we cannot possibly
be wrong because of their clarity and distinctness and metaphysical certainty.
In section 20 Nietzsche describes philosophy as an atavism, that is, a leftover relic of
a previous stage.
Philosophical concepts, he notes, form parts of an interconnected system, and they obey
an unseen imperative.
Something within leads them, something impels them in a definite order, he writes.
Philosophy, he says, is a kind of return to the deep recesses of the soul, an atavism
of the highest order, perhaps we should say an atavism in the realm of the spirit, in
the realm of the intellect.
And so he uses this to explain the resemblance of the Indian, Greek, and German philosophies
and philosophizing, based upon their linguistic affinity.
He gives a physiological and racial origin of ideas, and he explicitly contrasts this
with the Lockean blank slate idea.
In section 21 Nietzsche argues against a causa sui, a self-caused event.
He's arguing here against free will, the idea that the will can be free, without any prior determinant.
Free will, he says, is a superstition and a contradiction.
Walter Kaufmann notes in a footnote that Nietzsche here is attacking a position which is very
similar to the position that Jean-Paul Sartre will articulate more than 50 years later.
“The desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself and
to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society, involves nothing less than to
be precisely this causa sui and with more than Munchausen's audacity to pull oneself
up into existence by the hair out of the swamps of nothingness.”
So what we have here, I think, is Nietzsche disagreeing with the position that Sartre
will eventually articulate about the radical freedom and responsibility of the self.
He's going to want to pin the self down to its physiological and spiritual origins and components.
Cause and effect, he writes in this section, are useful fictions only.
In real life, he says, it is only a matter of strong and weak wills.
In section 22 Nietzsche criticizes the idea of laws of nature.
He says physicists enjoy speaking of nature conforming to law but this, he thinks, is
a projection of and support for modern democratic egalitarianism.
The scientist as much as says: all parts of nature, all particles of matter of whatever
character, obey the same inexorable impersonal laws.
This, says Nietzsche, is an interpretation, not a text.
Another interpretation, Nietzsche's interpretation, is that nature instead is the relentless struggle
of strength against strength.
Nature is the combat arena of will to power.
And Nietzsche is comfortable with his interpretation being recognized only as an interpretation.
He says at the end of the section: “so much the better!”
His point here I think being that there is no single interpretation that is the correct
true interpretation.
The laws of nature that the physicists describe are just as much an interpretation as his
will to power interpretation.
In section 23, the final section of this part, Nietzsche describes psychology as the new
master science of the human race.
No philosopher, he says, has yet understood psychology, physiology, and the will to power
as Nietzsche does.
This involves recognizing that hatred, envy, covetousness, and the lust to rule, to dominate,
are essential conditions of life.
Recognizing this fact can produce a kind of seasickness of the spirit, a kind of vertigo,
which is almost overwhelming.
But Nietzsche says.
“All right, let us clench our teeth, let us open our eyes and keep our hand on the helm.
We sail right over morality by daring to make our voyage there.”
So he is concluding this section by blasting through the prejudices of the philosophers
into this new world that he is imagining, articulating this new reign of psychology,
which opens up, he thinks, the most profound world of insight yet made available to man.
And he announces at the end of this part that psychology will now be the queen of the sciences.
This brings us to the end of section 23 and the end of part 1 of Beyond Good and Evil.
We will turn to part 2 next. Thanks for watching today; goodbye.
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