(036) Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil”, One Paragraph at a Time
Tags: Evolutionary Psychology, Power, Nietzsche, Philosophy

I’ve struggled in all my attempts to read and comprehend Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil”. These blog posts are my attempt to better understand this material. I encourage any corrections or criticisms in the comments.

Chapter Two: The Free Spirit

36. Supposing that nothing else is “given” as real but our world of desires and passions, that we cannot sink or rise to any other “reality” but just that of our impulses — for thinking is only a relation of these impulses to one another: — are we not permitted to make the attempt and to ask the question whether this which is “given” does not SUFFICE, by means of our counterparts, for the understanding even of the so-called mechanical (or “material”) world?

If every description of the world were to be derived solely from our own instincts and all the underlying biological processes that we are not conscious of, would it be valid to use this instinctive description as a means of arriving at an accurate description of the so-called material world?

I do not mean as an illusion, a “semblance,” a “representation” (in the Berkeleyan and Schopenhauerian sense), but as possessing the same degree of reality as our emotions themselves — as a more primitive form of the world of emotions, in which everything still lies locked in a mighty unity, which afterwards branches off and develops itself in organic processes (naturally also, refines and debilitates) — as a kind of instinctive life in which all organic functions, including self-regulation, assimilation, nutrition, secretion, and change of matter, are still synthetically united with one another — as a PRIMARY FORM of life?

Science aims to construct an objective view of material reality detached from the emotional point of view of the observer. The phenomenological daily experience of a man does not include experiencing atoms or molecules or the heliocentric solar system as they are abstractions.

However, the primary form of life that human beings experience is based on emotions derived from primitive organic functions like nutrition, sexual desire, and shifting social environments. These experiences come together with natural human impulses and desires to create a more accurate description of what people are like.

— In the end, it is not only permitted to make this attempt, it is commanded by the conscience of LOGICAL METHOD. Not to assume several kinds of causality, so long as the attempt to get along with a single one has not been pushed to its furthest extent (to absurdity, if I may be allowed to say so): that is a morality of method which one may not repudiate nowadays — it follows “from its definition,” as mathematicians say.

If a single source of causality is posited without having been tested to its most extreme and absurd limits, it would be unsafe to anchor additional assumptions to that single source of causality. Therefore exploring this primary phenomenological experience is mandated by our conscience as logical thinkers precisely because the description of human emotions and instincts is part of the description of the full human experience.

The question is ultimately whether we really recognize the will as OPERATING, whether we believe in the causality of the will; if we do so — and fundamentally our belief IN THIS is just our belief in causality itself — we MUST make the attempt to posit hypothetically the causality of the will as the only causality.

We must ask the question of whether the will, which derives from our experience of the world through emotions and instincts, is actually operative and has an impact on causality (fundamentally we have to accept here that causality exists in the first place). Furthermore, we must ask the question of whether or not the will can be the only operating function of causality.

“Will” can naturally only operate on “will” — and not on “matter” (not on “nerves,” for instance): in short, the hypothesis must be hazarded, whether will does not operate on will wherever “effects” are recognized — and whether all mechanical action, inasmuch as a power operates therein, is not just the power of will, the effect of will.

We are asking the question of whether “will” can affect “matter”. If at bottom our experience of reality is derived from our biologically instantiated emotions and instincts, and the “effects” of the will are to be recognized, we must conclude that will can affect matter.

Granted, finally, that we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one fundamental form of will — namely, the Will to Power, as my thesis puts it; granted that all organic functions could be traced back to this Will to Power, and that the solution of the problem of generation and nutrition — it is one problem — could also be found therein: one would thus have acquired the right to define ALL active force unequivocally as WILL TO POWER. The world seen from within, the world defined and designated according to its “intelligible character” — it would simply be “Will to Power,” and nothing else.

Assuming we could provide an accurate description of the “primary” human experience of biologically instantiated instincts and emotions, which also accounts for the necessities of life such as sexual desire and nutrition, we would be able to define all this effective energy as a will. Nietzsche strongly suggests that his conception of the “will to power” is precisely and unequivocally that will which is being described.

The subject of human instincts and emotions, especially in light of what we’ve learned about human beings in the century since Nietzsche penned these words, it seems rather reductive to jam all of this unknown and unknowable material into Nietzsche’s singular conception of the “will to power”.

What do you think? Is Nietzsche being reductive here?

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