Verhexung

This was the last week of my course, and the topic was the “affirmation of life” and how we can better understand what Nietzsche means by “affirmation” and by “life” on the basis of his drive psychology.  

Unlike prior weeks, this week was a bit more discussion oriented, especially since my own views on the matter have been very unsettled.  The assigned passages are meant to lay out a puzzle: on the one hand, Nietzsche urges us to affirm life, while on the other hand, Nietzsche claims that value judgments for or against life cannot be true.  

Are such value judgments not true because these value judgments are necessarily false or because they are neither true nor false?  In either case, by affirming life, is Nietzsche making a value judgment and going against his own words or is he doing something else?

Reading and comments for week 12: http://bit.ly/ICngPp

Having spent the last ten weeks looking at the unconscious and at its effects on conscious mental life, this week we will turn to consciousness to isolate what exactly its role is according to Nietzsche.  

In this regard, Nietzsche seems to associate consciousness, in the sense of “self-awareness” of mental states, with the need to communicate, a need which arises from our organization into societies.  This need to communicate supposedly requires that we can operate with generalities: words, ideas, concepts.  Most of the difficult passages under discussion are from The Gay Science.

Reading and comments for week 11: http://bit.ly/HTUf0c

This week’s reading begins by looking at Nietzsche’s notion of the weak and the strong will (BGE 21).  These two seem to be differentiated by their capacity for self-control, and while the former lacks the focusing power of a master drive, the latter maintains self-control through a central, master drive.  

However, the strong will (along with its capacity for self-control and its master drive) can be attributed to two kinds of soul: the tyrannical soul of an ascetic and the mastered soul of an artist.  Both kinds of soul are possessed of a strong will, but Nietzsche distinguishes between the two of them on the basis of their relation between the master drive and the subservient drives.  In tyranny, the master drive asphyxiates the lesser drives.  In mastery, the master drive sublimates the lesser drives.

Thus, we will investigate this week how Nietzsche’s psychology can potentially explain the degrees and varieties of self-control that a person can have.

Reading and comments for week 10: http://bit.ly/IKhMPf

This week’s reading looks at three things: Nietzsche’s analysis of the will, the model of effective agency that Nietzsche criticizes, and three models of effective agency that interpreters have offered as Nietzsche’s own.  The first of these latter models is Leiter’s epiphenomenal model, the second is Leiter’s secondary cause model and its variant by Katsafanas, and the third is my own teleological model.  We will look at passages that support each of the models and discuss both the textual and philosophical plausibility of each of them for ascribing them to Nietzsche.

Reading and comments for week 9: http://bit.ly/HNQVE5

Background reading:
(i) Brian Leiter, “Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will”.
(ii) Harry Frankfurt, “The Problem of Action”.

This week’s reading looks at Nietzsche’s claim that even our most detached capacity, reflective deliberation, is incapable of avoiding the powerful influence of our drives.  We begin with some passages by Kant, Nagel, and Korsgaard that argue for the impartiality of reflection and how it could be used to give us objective reasons for action.  Following this are various passages from Nietzsche that discuss (i) the influence of the drives on our reflective thought and describe (ii) our inescapability from the influence of our drives.

Reading and comments for week 8: http://bit.ly/y0PY5G

This week’s reading revisits the topic of how our drives can influence our perception, thoughts, and beliefs.  In the second week, we discussed how certain mental phenomena are symptoms of our drives.  This week we go into further detail to understand Nietzsche’s various claims that describe drives as “coating” our experience of the world with value and meaning.

Reading and comments for week 7: http://bit.ly/AbcU9s 

This week we will be looking at two ways of conceiving of the self as a relation among the parts of the soul.  As a foil, we will start out by examining a Kantian account of the self, an account which provides a transcendental argument to posit a self over and above our inclinations.  Nietzsche, however, takes a different approach, an approach more like that of the Ancients.  Nietzsche conceives of the self as a relation of authority among the drives.

After my extended commentary, the reading begins by looking at some relevant passages from Gregory Moore’s monograph, Nietzsche, Biology, Metaphor, and then moves on to examine a handful of passages from Nietzsche’s writings (including some relevant fragments of passages that were assigned in prior weeks).

Reading and comments for week 6: http://bit.ly/A4glUB

Discussion of Nietzsche’s theory of the soul (part of his drive psychology) will continue into next week.  For this week, we will be looking at how Nietzsche contrasts his “soul as a society constructed out of drives and affects” with Christian and cartesian conceptions of the soul as conscious, rational, and indivisible/atomistic (BGE 12; see GS 11).  We will also be looking at the soul’s development and how it acquires greater depth and complexity.  The main mechanism that Nietzsche seems to believe is at play in the advanced development of the soul is bad conscience: which is the turning inward of psychic energies against the agent that possesses them.  This week’s reading will be prefaced with my introductory comments but will largely consist in reading and discussing various difficult passages from Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality.

Reading and comments for week 5: http://bit.ly/ycOGl5

The next topic on Nietzsche’s drive theory is that of the structure of the will to power.  The will to power, central to Nietzsche’s understanding of the drives and central to his psychology, is a concept whose definition has remained elusive.  Through a mixture of reading some passages from Nietzsche and some selections from Reginster’s work on Nietzsche, we will survey various interpretations of the will to power.  Ultimately, we will need to make sense of how the will to power is both a self-standing drive and a second-order desire, and how it is that it aims at encountering and overcoming resistances.

Reading and comments for week 4: http://bit.ly/zKwODN

This week and in the next two weeks we will be looking at Nietzsche’s drive theory.  The topic for this week is specifically the basic structure of a drive.  Drives seem to lie at the hylomorphic intermediary between the psyche (or soul) and the body.  By looking at drives in isolation we will see that they have a basic structure of generating affects that dispose us in certain ways, have aims that we are inclined to pursue and have various corresponding objects that can satisfy these aims, have a recurring need to be satisfied, and finally, they operate according to pain, pleasure, and the feeling of power.

Reading and comments for week 3: http://bit.ly/wzh3qF 

I’ve also finalized the class schedule: http://bit.ly/wkVcEy

This week we will look at Nietzsche’s method for unveiling the drives operative in our soul/psyche.  This week’s reading draws an analogy between Nietzsche and Freud to cast light on Nietzsche’s method for studying the symptoms that disclose the nature of the drives.  

Reading and comments for week 2: http://bit.ly/AnI2Yc

Again, here is the syllabus that was discussed in the first week of class along with a pdf of an introductory passage that we read aloud.

Syllabus: http://bit.ly/wX2xf8 

Reading and comments for week 1: http://bit.ly/ybTiW3

(Accompanying each week’s pdf of the reading are some preliminary comments.)

This coming Friday will be the first week of a two unit decal course that I will be offering at Berkeley.  UC Berkeley has a program called “decal” in which students, under the guidance of an advisor, are able to offer a one to two unit course that other students can enroll and take.  I’ve previously offered a course on Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols (you can view the page for it here) with R. Jay Wallace as the advisor.  This semester, the course will be titled, “Nietzsche’s Psychology” (the advisor is Hans Sluga), and it will look at Nietzsche’s psychological aphorisms and their philosophical implications.

Website: http://nietzschegrid.org/decal/psychology/

Syllabus: http://nietzschegrid.org/decal/psychology/nietzschepsychology.pdf