1

ON UNITY OF THE SELF IN NIETZSCHE

Jordan Adshead

Spring 2014

2

In this essay I am going to consider the question of the self, the drives, and of unity in

Nietzsche’s writings. I defend an interpretation of Nietzsche’s view which holds that unity is

the predominance of one drive or drives over all others, an interpretation which we will call

the predominance thesis. To this end I will engage with recent arguments against the

predominance thesis put forward by Paul Katsafanas. I will begin in section I with a brief

consideration of the drives in order to situate the unified self within Nietzsche’s wider drive

psychology. In section II I present evidence in favour of the predominance thesis before

going on to consider Katsafanas’ textual objections in section III. Section IV will consider

Katsafanas’ philosophical objection leading us to consider how far we might go in

attributing acts to an agent in light of the findings of the predominance thesis.

I

So what is the self for Nietzsche? In order to get a foothold on this question we should

briefly consider an account of the self which Nietzsche explicitly rejects:

From now on, my dear philosophers, let us be wary of the dangerous old conceptual fable

which posited a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject”… (GM III.12)

While innumerable iterations of this same notion have appeared throughout the Western

philosophical tradition and beyond, we will briefly consider the Kantian account (as one of

Nietzsche’s favoured antagonists). Kant’s claim, broadly speaking, is that one cannot be

identified with their “empirical consciousness”, that inner states must be attributable to a pure

subject which transcends their empirical consciousness. Inner states are mutable and flux

whereas the transcendental subject must be immutable and invariant in order to sustain its

identity throughout a succession of such states. This idea of a self as distinct from its

3

conscious acts feeds into a conception of agency wherein the subject enjoys a measure of

distance from its impulses. As Christine Korsgaard puts it:

[W]hen you deliberate, it is as if there were something over and above all of your desires,

something which is you, and which chooses which desire to act on.1

But the self, for Nietzsche, is not something which stands over the world from a lofty

transcendental vantage but rather stands immersed within it. To “suspend the feelings

altogether”, he writes, amounts to the “castration of the intellect” (GM III.12). Ken Gemes is

keen to point out, however, that Nietzsche’s critiques are not simply outright eliminations of

these cherished notions but often rather attempts to ask again what is meant by soul, spirit,

free will, etc.2 Nietzsche writes:

Let [“soul atomism”] be allowed to designate that belief which regards the soul as being

something indestructible, eternal, indivisible […] this belief ought to be ejected from science!

Between ourselves, it is not at all necessary by that same act to get rid of ‘the soul’ itself […]

the road to new forms and refinements of the soul-hypothesis stands open: and such

conceptions as ‘mortal soul’, and ‘soul as multiplicity of the subject’ and ‘soul as social

structure of the drives and emotions’ want henceforth to possess civic rights in science. (BGE

12)

This idea of the soul as social structure is an instructive metaphor and one through which

we can approach the problem of the unity of self. The idea of an initially plural self factors

into another notion central to Nietzsche’s mature thought: the will to power. The notion of

1 Korsgaard, C. “The Sources of Normativity” Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 100

2 Gemes, K. “Nietzsche on Free Will, Autonomy, and the Sovereign Individual”, in “Nietzsche on Freedom and

Autonomy”, Eds. Gemes & May, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 44-46 (henceforth “NFAS”)

4

the drives, present throughout Nietzsche’s work (indeed right down to his philological

studies3), is tied to this notion of willing:

He who wills adds in this way the sensations of pleasure of the successful executive agents,

the serviceable ‘under-wills’ or ‘under-souls’ – for our body is only a social structure

composed of many souls […] what happens here is what happens in every well-constructed

and happy commonwealth: the ruling class identifies itself with the successes of the

commonwealth. (BGE 19)

The illusion of an atomistic soul is, then, the result of the dominant drives identifying with

the whole work which the ‘under-wills’ carry out under their command. When we

experience a clash of drives we fall prey to the idea that “we” as transcendent arbiter are

overseeing the conflict, assessing the relative virtues of each drive in the way Korsgaard

imagines. Nietzsche arguess that our intellect, weighing in on the conflict, is only the “blind

tool of another drive” - that the experience of combating a drive is actually just one drive

“complaining about another” (D 109). The intellect, of course, cannot bring any of its own

force to bear on the conflict because, despite our imagining it as “essentially opposed to the

instincts”, it is “actually nothing but a certain behaviour of the instincts towards one another” (GS

333, see also BGE 36). In a note from 1885 Nietzsche considers that consciousness, while

experienced superficially as a unity distinct from the manifold of impulses, is actually the

result of the “interaction and struggle” of a “multiplicity of subjects”:

The assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary; perhaps it is just as permissible

to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought

and consciousness in general. (WP 490, my emphasis)

3 Parkes, G. “Composing the Soul”, University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 274 (henceforth “CS”)

5

Nietzsche presents us with a commonwealth composed of souls which are conceived as

active drives or wills, breaking entirely with the theory of a unitary soul whose ideal is

disinterested contemplation. Proponents of the “pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing

subject” tend to hold that being in the grip of an impulse distorts one’s view. While

Nietzsche certainly accepts that drives can oppose knowledge4 he also denies that there is

any knowledge, any seeing at all without drives. Indeed, disinterested contemplation, as an

“eye from nowhere”, could not have the “active power of interpretation which turns seeing

into seeing something” (GM III.12, my emphasis). An eye which “sees from nowhere”,

Nietzsche writes, “is impossible to imagine”. But what exactly is this active power of

interpretation?

In so far as the word ‘knowledge’ has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable

otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings. - ‘Perspectivism.’

It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a

kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to

accept as a norm. (WP 481)

So the drives themselves are the locus of evaluative power, their evaluations entrenched in

our thinking and perceiving. But what of this question of unity of the self when Nietzsche

has stressed this subject-multiplicity so much? Many commentators in fact take Nietzsche to

be a “prophet of disunity”, as denying the possibility of any unitary self whatsoever.5 In the

4 See e.g. KSA 9:11[141], cited in Parkes, G. “Composing the Soul”, University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 305

(henceforth “CS”) 5 Gemes, K. “Postmodernism’s Use and Abuse of Nietzsche”, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,

Vol. 62, No. 2, 2001, p. 339 (henceforth “PUA”)

6

next section we will look deeper into how Nietzschean unity stands with respect to the

manifold self.

II

The version of the predominance thesis which I hope to defend can be summarised in four

broad claims which we will now spend some time with: (1) the self is constituted by a

plurality of drives, (2) unity of self is a condition wherein one drive (or group of drives)

dominates all others, (3) consciousness is a mode of the interaction between drives, (4) unity

is a precondition of genuine agency.

In Composing the Soul, Graham Parkes notes that, despite Nietzsche’s emphasis on the

multiplicity of drives in the soul, he nonetheless also stresses the importance of disciplining

those drives and imposing order upon them.6 Nietzsche speaks disparagingly of a “feeble

vacillation back and forth between different drives” (HH 278) and in passages like D 272,

BGE 200, and BGE 208 we see him diagnosing corruption resulting from:

inheritance of a diversified descent, that is to say contrary and often not merely contrary

drives and values which struggle with one another and rarely leave one another in peace –

such a man of late cultures and broken lights will, on average, be a rather weak man… (BGE

200)

Having too many drives which interfere with one another can exhaust a person, leading

Nietzsche to declare that:

6 Parkes, G. “CS”, p. 280

7

that which becomes most profoundly sick and degenerates in such hybrids is the will… (BGE

208)

Owing to our subject-multiplicity we often find that first this evaluation then that comes to

the fore in a fruitless shifting back and forth between weaker drives, none of which can

develop any momentum. Nietzsche writes that “a dance is not a languid reeling back and

forth between drives” but rather requires “strength and suppleness” (HH 278). The

predominance thesis, then, holds that unity in an agent emerges when a drive or drives come

to dominate all other drives, putting an end to this “fruitless back and forth”. Nietzsche

writes:

The multitude and disgregation of impulses and the lack of any systematic order among [the

drives] result in a ‘weak will’; their co-ordination under a single predominant impulse results

in a ‘strong will’: in the first case it is the oscillation and the lack of gravity; in the latter, the

precision and clarity of direction. (WP 46)

We see that lack of systematic order among impulses results in a weak will, whereas a

predominant drive offers one “precision and clarity of direction”. As an illustrative example

of unity we might consider the ascetic philosopher from essay three of the Genealogy. The

meaning of the ascetic ideal for the philosopher is to properly cultivate the soil where

knowledge grows and so to turn away from other drives which may squander the nervous

energy required. Nietzsche, for instance, remarks that the philosopher “loathes marriage” as

an “obstacle and disaster on the path to the optimum” (GM III.7) and that the “domineering

passion” of these philosophers may also have had to “bridle an unrestrained and irritable

pride or a wilful sensuality” (GM III.8). Significantly, this is not out of “hatred of the senses”

but the “will of their domineering instinct (GM III.8). This domineering drive suspends any

8

other drives which would deprive it of its “clarity of direction”, at least “in times of

pregnancy”.

Nietzsche seems to think of predominance as a necessary condition of the great person. In

Essay II of the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche insists that the history of morality up to now

has been preparing for the advent of a sovereign individual who has the right to make

promises - one who has their own “independent, enduring will” (GM II.2, my emphasis).

Elsewhere Nietzsche speaks of how for the Germans the “the strength to will, and to will

one thing for a long time” was stronger (BGE 208). In the same passage he speaks of a

coming age of “grand politics” which can set its goals “thousands of years ahead”.

Similarly in The Gay Science we see Nietzsche talking of this protracted will with respect to

science, insisting that a study of moral matters will take several generations, “centuries of

experimentation”, to complete (GS 7). Though he certainly has his reservations about

whether science’s “cyclopic buildings” are possible at all, nevertheless we see a sense in all

of this that truly great tasks demand extended efforts which cannot permit of interruption

from competing drives. For the great man must have a “long logic in all his activity” and

“the ability to extend his will across great stretches of his life” (WP 962). The domineering

drive has to be powerful enough to defend “against accidents, even ‘against fate’” (GM II.2).

A disunified soul, however, would not be able to accomplish the things which, e.g. the

ascetic philosopher accomplishes. As a result of lacking the strength to placate intervening

drives, one’s existence would be a series of short-lived projects wherein the only persistent

activities one might pursue are when we are forced to do something. As Ken Gemes puts it:

9

Consider [Nietzsche’s] account of herd man; he is a mere collection of ever fluctuating,

competing drives, with different drives dominating at different times. Such an animal cannot

take on genuine commitments to the future, for such a being has no genuine continuity over

time.7

Interestingly, however, Gemes holds that one must be unified in order to have a character at

all, which implies that one must be unified in order for actions to be able to be attributable to

that character.

To have a character is to have a stable, unified, and integrated hierarchy of drives […] Modern

man, who is at the mercy of a menagerie of competing forces, internal and external, has no

such character.8

The distinction between genuine action and mere behaviour is here construed as the

difference between being the locus of various disorganised forces and being “the effective

agent behind a doing”.9 Though being the effective agent “behind” a doing cannot be the

same thing as being a conscious I which stands distinct from the drives and co-ordinates

their operation from afar.10 The sense of selfhood bound to this kind of agency develops out

of a predominant drive:

The I is not the attitude of one being to several (drives, thoughts, etc.) but the ego is a plurality of

person-like forces, of which now this one now that one stands in the foreground and regards the

others […] as the drives are in conflict, the feeling of the I is always strongest where the preponderance

7 Gemes, K. “PUA”, p. 343

8 Gemes, K. “NFAS”, p. 38 (my emphasis)

9 Ibid. p. 34 (note: to be “behind” a doing in this sense simply means to be responsible for it)

10 Ibid. p. 48

10

is […] Instinctively we make the predominant quantity momentarily into the whole ego and place

all weaker drives perspectivally farther away… (KSA 9:6[70]; 1180)11

Unity demands that our “thoughts, desires, and actions are not haphazard but are instead

connected to one another”12 by means of the organising drive. Only then can we describe the

operations of our psyche as manifesting a “self” - though a self which, unlike the atomistic

soul, is more of an effect than a cause. Being a genuine agent, then, means having a character -

something which, owing to our initial condition as a disorganised nexus of forces, we must

first achieve.

It is clear from Nietzsche’s writings that the emergence of a predominant drive occurs prior

to the event of conscious deliberation. The great person’s devotion to an idea or a cause

grips them “inevitably, fatefully, involuntarily, as a river bursting its banks is involuntary” -

the culmination of historic/physiological forces finally being discharged (TI IX.44).

Elsewhere Nietzsche affirms the notion that development of the drives is a chance affair:

This alimentation thus becomes the work of chance: our daily experiences toss willy-nilly to

this drive or that drive some prey that it seizes greedily, but the whole coming and going of

these events exists completely apart from any meaningful connection to the alimentary needs

of the sum drives (D 119).

This lack of conscious choice is reminiscent of the image of mounting “lack of gravity” in

WP 46, evoking the idea that this will is not something we stand over and control but rather

something which grounds us and pulls us inexorably in one direction. Nietzsche writes:

11

Cited in Parkes, G. “CS”, p. 292 and p. 447 (my emphasis) 12

Nehamas, A. “Nietzsche: Life as Literature”, Harvard University Press, 1985, p. 7 (cited in Gemes, K. “PUA”)

11

“I have no idea what I’m doing! I have no idea what I should do!” You’re right, but make no

mistake about it: you are being done! moment by every moment! Humanity has, through all

ages, confused the active and the passive, it is the everlasting grammatical blunder. (D 120)

Unity of self, then, is something which happens to us, like all strivings of will, and which

therefore takes a bit of fortuity and the right circumstances to bring about. Even if we choose,

as Nietzsche did, to move to places more conducive to creativity, to judge a place more

“conducive” is still an evaluation and the work of a drive.

The predominance thesis, then, can be construed as an account of the conditions necessary

for genuine action. A disunified self would be fragmentary and disorganised, unable to

participate in something like “grand politics” or the establishment of science’s “cyclopic

buildings” without being steered off course by intervening drives. A unified self is a self

with a purpose, or as Parkes puts it, a “task”, which is constituted by a strong drive. As we

saw in D 109, one comes to identify with the “winning drive” (it defines ones character13)

which squares with the tendency we have for understanding ourselves and others in terms

of the drives which win out in us, perhaps leading us to live a life as “an artist” or maybe

even “a soldier”.

We have considered the Nietzschean self as a subject-multiplicity and have explored the

possibility of unifying this multiplicity under the governance of a predominant drive or

drives. With this interpretation on the table we will next go on to consider Katsafanas’

arguments against the interpretation I have outlined, beginning first with some textual

concerns before moving on to the philosophical argument.

13

Gemes, K. “NFAS”, p. 48

12

III

Katsafanas wants first to deal with passages like WP 46 cited above which offer the strongest

evidence in favour of the predominance thesis. He proceeds by stressing another element of

Nietzsche’s attitude toward the drives: his praise of inconsistency and conflict amongst

them.14 Katsafanas cites the following passage (from 1884):

In contrast to the animals, man has cultivated an abundance of contrary drives and impulses

within himself: thanks to this synthesis, he is master of the earth […] The highest man would

have the greatest multiplicity of drives, in the relatively greatest strength that can be endured.

Indeed, where the plant “man” shows himself strongest one finds instincts that conflict

powerfully (e.g. in Shakespeare) but are controlled. (WP 966)

In this passage Nietzsche appears not to be praising the dominance of drives over other

drives, but rather explicitly encouraging multiplicity and even conflict among the drives

(albeit controlled conflict). But are these remarks actually in conflict with the predominance

thesis? Taken at face value, we would want to say yes – however this would be to ignore a

nuance of Nietzsche’s attitude towards encouraging multiplicity and even conflict among

drives. In the passage Katsafanas cites, there is a middle section left unquoted which may

provide a clue:

Moralities are the expression of locally limited orders of rank in his multifarious world of

drives, so man should not perish through their contradictions. Thus a drive as master, its

opposite weakened, refined, as the impulse that provides the stimulus for the activity of the

chief drive. (WP 966)

14

Katsafanas, P. “The Concept of Unified Agency in Nietzsche, Plato, and Schiller”, in Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 49, No. 1 , 2011, p. 97 (henceforth “CUA”)

13

The idea then, it seems, is that conflict amongst the drives is not beneficial “in itself” but is

rather intended to provide some sort of stimulation for the chief drive itself. But what kind of

stimulation? To help us out here, recall one of the passages on “diversified descent” cited

above where we see Nietzsche claiming that internal conflict among drives makes certain

types weary:

The man of an era of dissolution […] contains within him the inheritance of a diversified

descent, that is to say contrary and not merely contradictory drives and values […] his

fundamental desire is that the war he is should come to an end (BGE 200).

As we saw above, Nietzsche feels that these origins can run one down because the various

drives expend the energy of the organism in their conflict with one another (D 272).

Nietzsche’s praise of inconsistent drives seems strange in this light. The conflicted person

becomes exhausted by their inner conflict and simply wishes for it to cease - their happiness

in keeping with the happiness of a “sedative”.

If, however, the contrariety and war in such a nature should act as one more stimulus and

enticement to life – and if, on the other hand, in addition to powerful and irreconcilable

drives, there has also been inherited and cultivated a proper mastery and subtlety in

conducting a war against oneself, that is to say self-control […] then there arise those

marvellously incomprehensible and unfathomable men […] pre-destined for victory. (BGE

200)

Here we see that a curious feature of Nietzsche’s view is that multiple origins does not

necessarily lead to a weakened physiological, and therefore cultural, profile. In fact this

14

conflict can actually serve as the stimulus and strengthening power of one who has

practiced self-control and self-mastery, which as we discovered in D 109, can only be the

mastery of another drive. In a telling remark at the end of the passage, Nietzsche states that

both the weak person craving sedation and the strong who thrive on conflict grow out of the

same condition: conflicting drives. The reason for Nietzsche’s ambiguity on the value of

conflicting drives, then, is that they can be damaging to the physiologically weak but can

actually forge any stronger, more domineering drives.

IV

We should now consider Katsafanas’ philosophical argument against interpreting unity as

the predominance of a drive or drives over all others. The argument turns on the idea of

genuine agency and claims that we do not want to consider someone who is, for example,

dominated by an urge to drink alcohol as manifesting “agential control” when they give in

to the urge. Katsafanas uses this example to argue that the predominance thesis makes a

mistaken assumption, namely that the dominant part has some special claim to being

representative of the self. Rather, he suggests, we tend to locate the agent in the inclinations

against the powerful impulse to drink.15 We often say “they overcame their demons” just as

when someone is in the grip of such a passion we might say “they are not themselves”.

Katsafanas is troubled by the notion that if “the deliberating agent’s thoughts and actions

are guided, sometimes decisively, by her drives, can the actions that issue from her

genuinely be regarded as her doings?”16 He remarks that “it seems perverse to claim that

15

Katsafanas, P. “CUA”, p. 98 16

Katsafanas, P. “Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology”, (available at: http://brianleiternietzsche.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/katsafanas-on-nietzsches-philosophical.html), p. 40 (henceforth “NPP”)

15

when such an alcoholic succumbs to his addiction he is manifesting agential control”.17

Indeed, we tend to see an alcoholic as the victim of a drive to intoxication but do not see, for

example, a mountain climber as the victim of a drive to conquer (or whatever it happens to

be). The alcoholic themselves may see their impulses as an alien force impinging upon them

and making them do something they don’t want to do. We say they “give in” to the urge –

the “they” being the agent who reflectively judges alcohol to be harmful. How might we

deal with this objection?

Alva Noë makes an interesting and often overlooked point about addiction and like

behaviours: they are meaningful in the context of the addict’s life. Noë situates addictive

behaviour amidst:

the pattern of needs, options, values, preferences and pressures that structure the person's

ongoing life in a community with others.18

That one is not merely under assault by blind and impersonal forces and that these actions

rather make sense in the context of an addict’s life is something we could imagine Nietzsche

considering. After all, his talk of drives is laden with personal metaphor, even leading some

commentators to consider the drives to be agents in their own right.19 Without entering too

deeply into what precisely Nietzsche means to imply with this agential language, it is

enough to say that the drives are not simply portrayed as blind, mechanistic processes (even

if we are in the dark over what the drives are striving for, or why). Nietzsche’s remarks on

the “English psychologists” forewarn us against interpreting the “directing force of human

development” as “passive, automatic, reflex-like” (GM I.1). He writes elsewhere: 17

Katsafanas, P. “CUA”, p. 99 18

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/09/16/140528777/addiction-a-disorder-of-choice 19

See e.g., Katsafanas, P. “NPP”, pp. 4-7 for a helpful discussion of the “homuncular reading” and its proponents.

16

The causa sui is the best self-contradiction hitherto imagined […] the desire for ‘freedom of the

will’ in that metaphysical superlative sense […] the desire to bear the whole and sole

responsibilities for one’s actions and to absolve God, world, ancestors, chance, society from

responsibility from them is nothing more than the desire to be precisely that causa sui […] I would

ask whoever [banishes this conception of free will] also banish […] ‘unfree will’. ‘Unfree will’ is a

myth: in real life it is only a question of strong and weak wills… (BGE 21, my emphasis).

Nietzsche chastises both proponents of the “metaphysical superlative” account of free will,

seeking to be their own causa sui, and the proponents of the “unfree will”, who Nietzsche

pens as hoping to be absolved of the burden of responsibility. The idea of an “unfree will”

echoes the interpretation of man as “passive, automatic, reflex-like” which beckons

Nietzsche ire in GM I.1. It is not, then, that one has “metaphysical freedom”, that we are not

determined by participation in necessity, but nor is it that we are merely clockwork

mechanisms behaving passively. The only story is the story of strong and weak wills, their

evaluations, and their struggles.

While we saw that Nietzsche insists we are “being done”, that we confuse “the active and

passive”, nonetheless he is also keen to stress the active power of interpretation which drives

bring to bear (GM III.12). The drive or drives which constitute a given person’s addiction

tend to “neutralize the value of everything else”20, rendering things one once cherished, or

things one otherwise might have cherished, as uninteresting or simply not valuable:

Owing to the contrasts other states of consciousness present and to the wasteful squandering

of their nervous energy, people who live for sublime and enraptured moments are usually

20

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/09/16/140528777/addiction-a-disorder-of-choice

17

wretched and disconsolate; they view those moments [of intoxication] as their true self and

the misery and despair as the effect of everything “outside the self”; thus, the thought of their

environment, their age, their entire world fills them with vengeful emotions.” (D 50)

While not only referring to people who literally crave intoxication through drugs21, these

remarks contribute nicely towards painting a more personal picture of addiction. Nietzsche

writes that a wasteful squandering of energy precedes the destitute condition of chasing

intoxication. One whose nervous energy is routinely squandered should tend to feel

lethargic and will accordingly seek comfort, tranquillity, and exhibit an unwillingness to

take on bold tasks. Nietzsche describes this character-type as “world weary”, and insists that

any other ends - be they moral, artistic, religious – are for them merely an impediment to

intoxication. This drive to intoxication subordinates all others, evaluating everything else

negatively as possibilities which merely stand in the way of one’s only access to “sublime

and enraptured moments”.

One thing Nietzsche does stress is that things have multiple meanings which are prone to

change over time (see e.g., GM II.13 for punishment and all of GM III on ascetic ideals) and

addiction is no exception to this. What it means to be addicted to something is related

intimately to the personal circumstances of that agent. Characterising the alcoholic’s craving

as a mere “drive to drink” gives the impression that impersonal forces are at work. Bearing

in mind Nietzsche’s remarks about the drive to intoxication we might be better off

describing it, e.g. as a will to sublime feelings in one who has a hard time experiencing them

without alcohol, or the perhaps an attempt to nullify one’s recurring anxieties. However we

make sense of it, it is important is to distinguish the ruling passion from a blind mechanical

21

D 188 seems to allow the feeling inspired by a charming leader of some kind to qualify as intoxication in this broad sense.

18

force and to situate the drive in the context of the agent’s life. An alcoholic may be

struggling with their family situation, career, or perhaps dealing with a personal trauma.

When we step aside from the interpretation of addiction which sees it as akin to an

impersonal impulse, it seems far less perverse to accept the conclusion that giving in to those

cravings is an act attributable to the agent. Rather than seeing the addict as a hapless victim

of a wayward drive, it may indeed turn out to be more illuminating if we pay attention to

why an addict behaves like they do. From this perspective we might indeed come to

understand the alcoholic’s giving in to their impulse to drink as the action most reflective of

their character, by virtue of its being the predominant response to one’s circumstances. For

better or worse, the drives which come to dominate a person also become characteristic of

them, representing their life circumstances and how they cope with them.

V

We have considered textual evidence in favour of interpreting Nietzsche as intending by

“unity” a predominance of one drive or drives over others. We have explored notions of

genuine agency and mere behaviour common to contemporary discussions in the

philosophy of action and have considered what the predominance thesis suggests about

how Nietzsche’s drive psychology stands with respect to the distinction. To this end we also

considered Paul Katsafanas’ textual and philosophical objections, concluding that

Katsafanas’ philosophical argument characterises the phenomenon of addiction in ways that

are improper to the personal character of the phenomenon itself and which, on my

understanding, Nietzsche would not accept.

19

Bibliography

Gemes, K. “Nietzsche on Free Will, Autonomy, and the Sovereign Individual”, in “Nietzsche on

Freedom and Autonomy”, Eds. Gemes & May, Oxford University Press, 2009

Gemes, K. “Postmodernism’s Use and Abuse of Nietzsche”, in Philosophy and Phenomenological

Research, Vol. 62, No. 2, 2001

Katsafanas, P. “Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology”, (available at:

http://brianleiternietzsche.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/katsafanas-on-nietzsches-

philosophical.html)

Katsafanas, P. “The Concept of Unified Agency in Nietzsche, Plato, and Schiller”, in Journal of the

History of Philosophy, Vol. 49, No. 1 , 2011

Korsgaard, C. “The Sources of Normativity” Cambridge University Press, 1996

Nehamas, A. “Nietzsche: Life as Literature”, Harvard University Press, 1985

Nietzsche, F. “Beyond Good and Evil”, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, 2003

Nietzsche, F. “Dawn”, trans. Brittain Smith, Stanford University Press, 2011

Nietzsche, F. “Ecce Homo”, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, 2004

Nietzsche, F. “Human, All Too Human”, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, 1988

Nietzsche, F. “On the Genealogy of Morals”, trans. Douglas Smith, Oxford University Press, 2008

Nietzsche, F. “The Gay Science”, trans. Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books, 1974

Nietzsche, F. “The Will to Power”, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, Vintage Books,

1968

20

Nietzsche, F. “Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ”, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books,

2003

Noë, A. “Addiction: A Disorder of Choice?”

(http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/09/16/140528777/addiction-a-disorder-of-choice)

Parkes, G. “Composing the Soul”, University of Chicago Press, 1994