Materialism and the Human Animal
For the last 2,500 years, Western civilization has been engaged in an intellectual exercise to lift human beings out of the animal kingdom. Central to this undertaking is the view that human beings, because they have a “consciousness,” are qualitatively different than the other species that inhabit the planet. Their bodies are repositories of this consciousness, the way a bottle is the vessel for the liquid it carries. Consciousness and matter are different, with consciousness as the repository of reason, morality, and knowledge.
Plato not only exemplifies this attitude in the doctrine of the forms but emphasizes the significance of reason as the tool for the undoing of our animal nature. Reason is the source of control over our irrational instincts. The extent of reason’s control over the impulsive side of the human character represents the measure of our growth as a species. Only when this is achieved is one truly the master of the self and able to transcend the materiality of existence. Then one can understand the true foundation for stable and unchanging truths in the world.
The rise of Christianity offered another method for the employment of fixed and static truths. God descends into the world either directly or through prophets and reveals the ideals and practices that are part of His will in the world. God’s intention is to save mankind through the delivery of an unchanging set of rules and practices that are the path to human salvation.
In the modern period, Immanuel Kant moderates this position. He suggests that human beings do not have direct access to the transcendent realm but can reason its existence. Further, because of the contrast between thought and sensation, and the fact that human beings possess both faculties, it is suggested that there is something transcendent within the mind/body dualism that is our ontological makeup. This transcendent arena, the noumenal, presents a domain of possibilities, as it is the domain of both reason and freedom. “Free will” can thus be saved from the clutches of pure empiricism. Reason can ascend to discover what is true and universal within the transcendent realm. Our social and political aspirations can then then be constructed in a way to conform to the truth acquired through reason.
However, suppose we move in another direction. Suppose we think deeply about what the model of human evolution outlined by Darwin really means. What do all the constructions of moral codes, teleologies of history, and natural law look like from the perspective of a species that evolved like all others? What if it is not possible to leave our animal natures behind? What if we are just another form of animal that evolves like all others? If that is the case, our philosophic and social history has been little more than a trail of lies.
This is precisely the position of Friedrich Nietzsche. In Nietzsche’s view, he is peeling off the mask that has been used to cover the character of human existence. Central to Nietzsche’s exploration is evolutionary biology. Nietzsche repeatedly invokes Darwin, and even when Nietzsche offers criticism of Darwin, it is still Darwin’s biology that influences Nietzsche’s thought. To Nietzsche we are now in a new age. All that has been carried from the past much be rethought and regrounded, if it can be, within a new intellectual paradigm.
Although Nietzsche criticizes Darwin in numerous places, he accepts Darwin’s basic premise that human beings evolved on the earth. Evolution is embedded in our organic existence.
The astral arrangement in which we live is an exception; this arrangement, and the relatively long durability which is determined by it, has again made possible the exception of exceptions, the formation of organic life.[1]
To adjust itself to its environment, organic life adapts and changes. The human organism has developed a capacity for knowledge. However, to Nietzsche that capacity is sorely limited.
Once upon a time, in some out of the wary corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing . . . One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature.[2]
To Nietzsche there is no separation of mind and body. The brain evolved as a part of the body that assisted in the preservation of the species.
In order for a particular species to maintain itself and increase its power, its conception of reality must comprehend enough of the calculable and constant for it to base a scheme of behavior on it. The utility of preservation—not some abstract-theoretical need not to be deceived—stands as the motive behind the development of the organs of knowledge—they develop in such a way that their observations suffice for our preservation.[3]
As a result, Nietzsche concludes that the understanding of the world created by our body’s thinking organ cannot capture what is universal or transcendental because we are historically bound creatures. When Nietzsche speaks of “truth,” he is referring to that which is fixed and eternal. But to Nietzsche, truth is an illusion we have created for ourselves. There is no “truth” in the human experience.
The senses provide us with impressions of the external environment. However, the senses only provide the raw material for concepts. They do not teach us the truth of a thing.[4] They provide the basis for our interpretations of the world. Everything we become aware of is only an interpretation.[5]
Our thoughts do not capture essences, entertain revelations supplied by a deity, or ascend to universal moral knowledge. We create knowledge that serves our needs. This means that our intellectual capacity is limited to “interpretation.”[6]
There exists neither “spirit,” nor reason, nor thinking, nor consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth: all are fictions that are of no use. There is no question of “subject and object,” but of a particular species of animal that can prosper only through a certain relative rightness; above all, regularity of its perceptions (so that it can accumulate experience) . . .[7]
Therefore, truth eludes us. Our minds are not capable of such power. Truth cannot be found or discovered. Our knowledge is always human-centric, a reflection of our needs coupled with our limited capacities.[8]
Nietzsche’s point is that as biological creatures we have a need to adjust our material activities to the realities of the world. In the process, we create an understanding of that world which we code into narratives. These narratives are not reality, but are illusions that we identify as truths, or universals, when we are, in fact, incapable of such constructions.
What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: In short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions . . .[9]
These illusions have their origins in necessity. We have to adjust ourselves to the external world as part of the mechanism of survival.[10] But our illusions are aesthetic judgments, not an uncovering of the secrets found in the universe. This is the case even for physics, which Nietzsche identifies as an interpretive enterprise as well.[11] Put another way, we are creatures that must interpret our reality to survive. We do not uncover truth.
We need knowledge, but we need to keep in mind that it is always “human knowledge,” not knowledge per se. Knowledge construction, therefore, is always an anthropomorphic enterprise. “At bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis of the world into man.”[12] This is carried out through the construction of concepts and their repetition in language.[13]
Even the relationship of a nerve stimulus to the generated image is not a necessary one. But when the same image has been generated millions of time and has been handed down for many generations and finally appears on the same occasion every time for all mankind, then it acquires at last the same meaning for men it would if it were the sole necessary image and if the relationship of the original nerve stimulus to the generated image were a strictly causal one. In the same manner, an eternally repeated dream would certainly be felt and judged to be reality.[14]
Our understanding of the world is a product of what is repeated as truth within the culture. It is a matter of what “circulates.” There is no correspondence between what is presented as “object” and our interpretation of it. There are no a priori truths.[15] There are no facts. There are only interpretations.[16]
The critique of Western epistemology constitutes a major part of Nietzsche’s materialist perspective. Since the beginning of civilization human beings have been constructing an evolving narrative of who they are, their essential characteristics, and an illusory understanding of the universal character of the moral codes that have directed their behavior. None of this is possible in the wake of Nietzsche’s critique.
The method Nietzsche employs is genealogy. Gilles Deleuze calls genealogy Nietzsche’s method to study the origin of values.[17] However, the genealogical method can be used to uncover much more than the origin of values. It is Nietzsche’s method to uncover the origins of what human beings believe about themselves, the world, and their social and political practices. In general, it is a materialist methodology employed to uncover the material origins of what people think and how they behave. The major work that displays this methodological approach is The Genealogy of Morals.
In The Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche is asking a simple question: How did human beings come to believe in certain moral prescriptions? Such a question always has a corollary. It must also address what human beings have to believe about themselves in order to make those moral prescriptions rational? What Nietzsche is trying to convey is that the pronouncement of what people believe is not enough for a full understanding of the power and dimensions of those beliefs. There needs to be an entire substratum of assumptions, constructions, and illusions in order to make the belief rational in the eyes of the actors.
The genealogical method attempts to do this by performing two tasks: giving an empirically based hypothesis about the material origin of a belief or practice, and drawing the connections between that belief or practice to a larger set of ideas about human subjectivity and the nature of social reality. All this must be accomplished without reference to a transcendent subject, fixed canonical norms, and stable universal values. This is a tall order, and while Nietzsche may stray over the materialist line at times with regard to his own conclusions about subjectivity, the methodological strategy remains clear.
If an utterance does not capture truth, it is a reflection of cultural conditioning, subjective interests, or both. Therefore, the exploration of moral positions cannot be separated from the rules of language. Further, since the medium of language is always mediated within the context of social forces present in the society, these utterances must also be considered political acts.
Nietzsche focuses on the control of language as a manifestation of political power. In ancient times, this meant that values were a reflection of the nobility.[18] However, a transvaluation of values occurred as Christianity spread among the multitudes of the poor and the powerless. They were “seduced” by a belief system that placed them at the center of the moral universe. Their numbers gave them political power and their ideas political direction. They invented democracy and democratic values as a manifestation of that power.
Therefore, it was not the truth of Christianity that was its appeal, but timeliness of its message to a Roman society in which poverty and depravity had run its course. The transformation from Roman polytheism to Christianity was a political manifestation of class distinctions. Christianity appealed to a growing number of poor. It both explained their plight and promised them salvation. As the number of believers increased so did their power to transform the culture. Aristocratic ideals were replaced with what Nietzsche refers to as a slave mentality. The inferior dragged society down to its level. Guilt, blame, fear, and the will to smallness are the hallmarks of this culture.
One can quibble with some of the sweeping generalities, provocative pronouncements, and the conspiratorial nature of some of the claims of the Genealogy. However, to focus on such things would be to miss the point. Nietzsche is seeking to provide a methodology for the generation of knowledge about the origins of beliefs and practices that does not require the construction of a subject prior to the analysis. He claims that moral conscience has its origin, not in truth, but in objective experience of history along with the likes and dislikes of those with power.[19] This means that Western philosophy has been a fruitless enterprise.
In all “science of morals” so far one thing was lacking, strange as it may sound: the problem of morality itself; what was lacking was any suspicion that there was something problematic here. What the philosophers called “a rational foundation for morality” and tried to supply was, seen in the right light, merely a scholarly variation of the common faith in the prevalent morality; a new means of expression of this faith; and thus just another fact within a particular morality; indeed, in the last analysis a kind of denial that this morality might ever be considered problematic . . .[20]
It is hard not to imagine Nietzsche having Kant in mind when he wrote this. To Nietzsche, subjectivity reflects its context. Organic life adjusts itself to its conditions. Human beings adjust their beliefs to the conditions presented by necessity.
Genealogy begins with the practice or belief and asks, “What does one have to believe about oneself in order to make this rational?” Therefore, even as the constructions of the self are illusory, they can still be analyzed for their content and for their material origins. In this way, we can study the human experience through studying the residue of culture. Morality is a symptom to be read.[21] The real question is what do moralities tell us about their creators.[22] The truth of what a human being is remains illusory. Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s method seeks to show the process of how we invent those illusions. It also seeks to maintain a materialist character in the process.
This perspective is at the core of the genealogical method. Genealogy begins with the assumption that human beings do not create truths, but utilities. Morality must be read as one of those utilities. Therefore, the question can never be, “what is the content of human morality?” The question is instead, “what is the utility of this or that moral code?” Who is speaking? Whose interest is being served? Morality never tells us about universal truth. It tells us about the character and needs of its creators.[23]
Nietzsche has stripped the human being naked and asked: What remains? The challenge is to provide an explanation that fits into the parameters of his epistemological understanding of what is possible. That means that the explanation must be consistent with: the anthropomorphic character of knowledge, the inability to fix and define human nature and subjectivity (while allowing for open evolutionary development), a recognition of necessity as the origin of ethics and morality, and a generally relativizing understanding of reality. This is a tall order.
Genealogy is a materialist methodology to study all the beliefs and practices in which human beings are engaged. This covers not just the formation of human’s moral beliefs, but would also include the beliefs that animate their social and political institutions. Sovereignty, patriotism, capitalism, rational administration, and a host of other beliefs and practices can be analyzed using this method. It is a method that asks, “what are the conditions that gave rise to such beliefs?” It will be of particular interest to Michel Foucault.
To this point, the focus of this chapter has largely been directed toward the limitations Nietzsche places on our ability to know. But Nietzsche is also trying to direct his readers to an understanding of the instincts that he says are present in the human being, lying under the surface. Animal life is directed by drives and instincts.
Is it possible for Nietzsche to retain his materialist credentials and to provide more in terms of an understanding of his views on human activity? What motivates human beings to action? Is it only survival? What is left after the genealogical method has stripped away our illusions?
The subject is an invention.[24] As such, the notion of subjectivity cannot serve as the foundation for an understanding of human beings. Therefore, Nietzsche looks to human behavior and the motivations to behavior as the telltale signs as to the nature of human beings. Behavior is the measure of the human story. “ . . . [T]here is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.”[25]
Subjectivity is a construction that has a double purpose. It is an addendum to the array of human actions that allows for the action to appear rational within the frame of human activity and for the action to be judged as appropriate or moral against the constructed standard. This duel function gives the construction of subjectivity a powerful role in the social structures. Punishment then takes on a dual character as well. It has the function of enforcing compliance with expected norms and functions to reinforce the dominant narrative on subjectivity through the imposition of its content.
Such a disciplinary scheme would not be possible without the invention of free will, in either Christian or Kantian varieties. To Nietzsche, free will was invented by the rulers and priests in order to allow punishment.[26] It has no standing as truth, something even Kant admitted, but its transmission over the centuries has been an essential tool to the ruling elites. Each can be made accountable, because each is an independent moral agent. In this way, the construction of subjectivity can be maintained.
So the notion of will as a transcendentally free, creative, or moral force in human beings is rejected by Nietzsche. Such traits are never assigned to other creatures in the animal kingdom. We do not consider snails or jellyfish to possess will. Why is it assigned to human beings?
We no longer derive man from “the spirit” or “the deity”; we have placed him back among the animals. We consider him the strongest animal because he is the most cunning . . . On the other hand, we oppose the vanity that would raise its head again here too—as if man had been the great hidden purpose of the evolution of the animals. Man is by no means the crown of creation; every living being stands beside him on the same level of perfection.[27]
As animals, human beings have drives, passions, and psychological states that motivate them to action, but of which they are scarcely aware. It would be false to assume that instincts drive the rest of the animal kingdom, but such forces are not found within the human being.
The discussion of these drives and instincts by Nietzsche is complex and nuanced. It is significant for both what he says about the will, and what he rejects within the history of ideas. The summation of all these drives Nietzsche terms “the will to power.”
Suppose, finally, we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one basic form of the will—namely, the will to power, as my proposition has it; suppose all organic functions could be traced back to this will to power and one could also find in it the solution of the problem of procreation and nourishment—it is one problem—then one would have gained the right to determine all efficient force univocally as—will to power.[28]
Life is the will to power.[29] It involves all organic functions.[30] But the will to power is not representative of one human instinct but a term used to summarize a multiplicity of instincts and drives. It is the drive to self-preservation, the drive to knowledge, to procreation, to creativity, and a host of other motivations to action. It is not, as Nietzsche makes clear, the will to control others.[31]
Therefore, the self is defined as a complex of competing drives. What manifests as behavior is the effective outcome of that struggle. Nietzsche claims that it is a mistake to assume that the intellect has sorted and analyzed the possible states and chosen an outcome. That would place the intellect in opposition and control of instincts. What we consider the “intellect” is actually an invention to mask the operation of instincts. The effect is always a result of the “behavior of the instincts toward one another.”[32]
So what is will in this scheme? Nietzsche uses the term often. He clearly rejects the idea of free will.[33] Our drives and desires are not even the result of individual wills, but psychological motivations that are part of human instincts. The individuality that is often attributed to Nietzsche is manifested in the fact that individuals have differing levels of will through which they express those instincts. Superior individuals express their instincts as creativity and do so more effectively than inferiors.
Here a question that needs to be asked regarding the impact of this position on Nietzsche’s materialist credentials. Does the characterization of life as the “will to power” constitute a hard ontological positon that would undermine Nietzsche’s status as a materialist? Such a case could be argued.
However, Nietzsche makes no grand statements about consciousness that are tied to such claims. In fact, he considers human consciousness to be quite underdeveloped.[34] Taken as a general statement about the animated nature of life coupled with the character of our biological motives to action, the will to power is not a grand ontological statement, but a characterization of what it means to be alive. Life grows, expands, consumes, and creates as part of its materiality in the world. This is part of our material being in the world.
Nietzsche proposes a naturalistic morality that is dominated by the instincts of life.[35] Natural morality embraces the will to power in all its forms. The will to power is an event or activity in which life seeks to extend its force.[36]
My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement (“union”) with those of them that are sufficiently related to it; thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on . . .[37]
One can read this as an expression of life, as it seeks to expand its reach as an expression of itself as life. Or one can read this as a statement about the nature of social and political life. Social and political institutions emerge in the compromise of human life seeking to extend itself in a condition in which others are doing the same. Political balance, of sorts, becomes the outcome. Both interpretations are, in the end, reflections of the same process. Both serve the will to power.
But Nietzsche’s discussion of morality is not simply a critique of the foundations of the old morality nor a genealogical discussion of its origins. Evolutionary biology suggests that a new order of moral is not only desirable, but also necessary. In Zarathustra a new morality is heralded with the coming of the übermensch. However, this will need to be put in context.
Nietzsche believes that the old religion is being overwhelmed and undermined by science. Religion cannot hold up to the epistemological critique that results from science’s demands for empirical referents within scientific syntax. For this reason, Zarathustra comes down from the mountain and pronounces the death of God. The death of God is obviously not an empirical statement, but a statement regarding the material force of the concept God as a motivation or justification for human action. As a foundational principle supporting morals, God’s death means the moral pillars that supported the Christian morality, and the pseudo-Christian morality of Kant, collapse.
It is for this reason Nietzsche spoke of a coming age of nihilism, an age where the old order had died but a new order of morality had not yet emerged.[38] “I write for a species of man that does not yet exist . . . ”[39] A transvaluation of values as significant as the one brought about by the Christian order is now necessary. However, it has to be based on the characteristic of the human being as an animal in the world, a being that is shaped by the order of evolutionary biology.
The old morality attacked passion. Such morality is anti-life.[40] It sought to assign guilt and blame. Each is responsible. All owe a debt.[41] Such a view looks to the past. We must consider the future not the past.[42] We need to train people for heights, not mediocrity.[43]
That means a new foundation for moral claims must be created. “If the morality of ‘thou shalt not lie’ is rejected, the ‘sense for truth’ will have to legitimize itself before another tribunal: as a means of the preservation of man, as the will to power.”[44] The “scientific outlook” can assist in our understanding of the behavior that is consistent with our survival and growth.[45] Morality can be created for its biological utility rather than its employment of ancient texts.[46]
We need a morality that is constructed after we have been placed back among the animals. It must recognize that there are no “moral facts.”[47] There are only moral utilities for a species that seeks to survive and grow within its environment. “What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself.”[48]
One final point is worth noting. Nietzsche never viewed the lack of transcendent knowledge and morality a cause for despair. Rather, human beings should celebrate, finally acknowledging that they have the power to shape the future. “The problem I thus pose is not what shall succeed mankind in the sequence of living beings (man is an end), but what type of man shall be bred, shall be willed, for being higher in value, worthier of life, more certain of a future.”[49] As biological creatures the world can be in our hands and the future shaped by that condition.
Our understanding of the world is an entirely human creation. Yet it is not the product of a single individual or generation. We carry the camel’s burden from one generation to the next. The medium of that process is language.
The “word” is a nerve stimuli.[50] When the organism has a sensation it creates a word for that sensation. From the collection of words, concepts are built.[51] Concepts designate cases where there are similar characteristics.[52] But Nietzsche is concerned for what is missing in this formulation. When a concept is created it dulls the differences among the discrete events that make up its domain. The uniqueness of each case is lost to the general. We become conditioned to think in terms of similarities rather than differences.
We think in the form that language provides for us.[53] Every effect must have a cause. Every event must have a rational explanation. We cannot think outside the parameters set by the rules of language.[54] Our language creates the illusion that our impressions have stability and the harmony of their commonality is greater than the discord of their difference.
However, our language is metaphorical. It does not capture the truth of the Kantian thing-in-itself. It conveys a story. Our understanding of the world is an aesthetic phenomenon.[55] The construction of subjectivity is part of that story. So is the construction of culture.
Culture, as the collection of beliefs and practices, gives meaning to the vast number of people in society. It is central to the functioning of what Nietzsche calls the “herd.” The “herd” is Nietzsche’s term for the masses of people who are weak in will and intellect. They constitute the majority of humans and they construct the social order for safety and security. Morality has largely been constructed to protect the herd, as the majority exercises its power to create the conditions for its own defense.[56] Such forces shape the political landscape.
Morality and religion are the vehicles by which control and domination can be exercised over the members of the social order. This is carried out through social conditioning and constant repetition. Thus, the human being can be shaped by social forces over time, as they manifest themselves “in the form of legislation, religions, and customs.”[57]
But there is another mechanism that is operating at a cultural level that conveys the need for the state and its corresponding social institutions. With the death of God, where do the masses seek comfort and safety? Nietzsche rejects the argument of Enlightenment humanism that proposes that people are relatively equal in the ability to will, create, and reason. Enlightenment humanism is the moral code of the herd as it has seized control of the political institutions through the process of democratic practice.
In addressing the power of language and culture, and its transformation in the modern period, Nietzsche provides a materialist explanation for the rise of the modern institutional order, specifically the nation-state. In a speech delivered by Zarathustra in Book I, Nietzsche conveys a genealogical understanding of the modern state. Contrary to liberalism, which identifies the rise of the modern state as the result of human reason applied to the problem of social interactions, Nietzsche suggests a macro-level theory of the psychological conditions that give rise to the state.
Nietzsche has no affection for the state. Nietzsche argues that rule by the herd constitutes a degeneration of culture, but that is not the only reason for his feelings about the state. The state is “the coldest of all cold monsters.”[58] Patriotism is described as “fatherlandishness,” irrational “soil addiction.”[59] It is “insanity.”[60] Nationalism is a swindle perpetrated by politicians.[61] It is a “fiction,” something that has been constructed.[62]
How did the conditions that allowed for the rise of the state come about? A clue to Nietzsche’s position comes in the speech, “Of the New Idol.” With the death of God, many had lost their way. Religion had given people purpose and grounded their morality. The state emerges as “the new idol” and gives them something new to believe in. “‘There is nothing greater on earth than I, the regulating finger of God’—thus the monster bellows.”[63] Even for those who rejected religion, the state now provides them a new home.[64] The fervor that was once exclusively the domain of religious dedication now is transferred to the state. The state tells them who to love or hate, what is true and what is false.
Therefore, the liberal tradition’s account of the rise of the nation-state conveys a misreading of its origins. It also misreads the sequence between the origins of the state and the construction of citizens. There is no sequence of DNA that conveys national identity. Citizens are created, constructed out of the sentiments and interests of the ruling elites. In the democratic age, that means the masses, the herd.
Human beings are shaped by the totality of forces present in the culture. The beliefs and attitudes found among the masses translate into a system of laws, customs, and ritualized behavior. This is precisely how the “slave morality” of Christianity has spread its ideals of guilt, blame, and impotence through the totality of Western culture. It has defined those values as synonymous with civilization.[65]
Nietzsche is telling us that beliefs and values, as well as the physical environment, have material force in history. Human beings are embedded within a social context that conditions their behavior. He rejects the ideas of transcendent thought and free will, which have been treated in the history of philosophy and religion as the sources of freedom, creativity, and conscience. What remains is a view of human beings as historical creatures possessing drives and instincts which they mask with terms like the “categorical imperative,” “natural law,” and “rationality.”
But the force of history and culture does not have a center. It is filled with lies and deceit, but it is less a conspiracy than a long chain of illusions that are increasingly at odds with science, evolutionary theory, and a natural understanding of human beings. To Nietzsche, such an outcome is to be expected in a society of unequals.[66] Democracy produces politics of the lowest common denominator. It does not produce a society that ascends.
This is why Nietzsche came to believe that we were heading into a new dark age. The masses have constructed a web of lies in order to make the present appear rational. When the lies all collapse, the masses will have nothing to hold on to. With God and the state revealed as elaborate hoaxes, the purposelessness of existence becomes an overpowering force upon a mass that lacks the ability to create its own meaning in the world. Zarathustra’s task is to both tear off the mask of successive illusions and to prepare human beings to take control over their own destinies.
In epistemological terms, Nietzsche appears as a very consistent materialist. He rejects the idea of transcendent truths, not only in the moral realm, but also with regard to our understanding of social phenomena and science. All is an interpretation. All is anthropomorphic. The value of our understanding is in its utility, not in its correspondence with something that is fixed and universal. Nietzsche is, in many ways, setting the stage for some of the materialist discourse on truth that will come after him. Such a position represents an epistemological relativism that emerges with Feyerabend, the poststructuralists, and Althusser in the twentieth century.
Nietzsche’s materialist credentials are also supported by the rejection of historical teleologies and his rejection of “purpose” as part of the human discourse. This is what Michel Foucault calls “positive nihilism,” and it denies all such claims as social inventions generated out of vanity and pride. Further, we need to read those characterizations as symptoms of decadence and decay. Only a society that has separated itself off from the biological nature of existence could invent such fictions.
Therefore, from a Nietzschean perspective, there must be material forces that direct the character and direction of social change. Our language schemes empower different modes of existence. The world is filled with a variety of social modes, gods, and narratives on subjectivity. What selects among them is not their truth or their consistencies with some historical dynamic. The movement from one mode of existence to another is manifested by the differing amounts of power among competing groups in the larger arena of social forces.
It is not possible to pronounce the right way in history. Understanding, critique, and analysis do not have an objective standing. There is no neutral ground on which to stand to make objective analysis. Such a position is echoed by Jacques Derrida in the middle of the twentieth century. There is only the completion among competing narratives of social existence the force each generates for itself.
Some narratives may be better than others. Some may better serve our survival, growth, and development. Some may give us greater latitude for our creativity. Scientific culture is superior to medievalism. But that does mean that our direction as a culture cannot be altered. The Enlightenment belief that reason will generate infinite progress within the future of humanity is relegated to faith rather than fact. There is no guarantee that force of religious culture cannot once again emerge and set the pattern for social and political life. It depends on the relative strength of each mode of existence within the political landscape. To Nietzsche, the reality is that every mode of existence will define reason in a way that makes its activities appear as rational to itself. All our anthropomorphisms feed upon themselves in the end.
Genealogical analysis reveals the material influence of beliefs and ideas. Nietzsche’s point is that it is not truth but power that drives the direction of social change. It is not our correctness that dictates history, but the array of forces that emerges from the material conditions of social existence. Thus, it is possible for a group like the working class, the bourgeoisie, or religious groups to manifest historical and social changes. However, this does not represent any sort of fixed, eternal definition of justice, but is simply the manifestation of the group’s ability to manifest a level of power at a given stage in history. This is the point Nietzsche is trying to make in the Genealogy of Morals. Each group will generate its own narrative on what constitutes justice and it will become part of its discourse on subjectivity.
This construction would include a description of the dynamics of historical change that chart the direction of history in a way consistent with the dominant group’s rise to power. As new groups and interests become dominant, they will alter the narratives on morality, social institutions, and even the purpose of life itself. They will make their ascendance appear rational, as a kind of natural teleological development within social evolution. The content of these changes are, in a sense, epiphenomenal. They are the surface residue of the movement of forces within the material conditions of existence.
Thus, in addition to Nietzsche’s ethical and epistemological relativism, there is also a deep level of social and cultural relativism. The point is not that all modes of existence are “good.” It’s that all modes of existence have the possibility to rise, given the right conditions, and that each has the mechanism to justify itself through the construction of its rationalizing narrative. To Nietzsche, only a genealogical analysis can reveal the relativistic nature of such claims.
Today it is the force of the scientific method that has emerged as the centerpiece of the narrative on truth. Such was not always the case.
It is not the victory of science that distinguishes our nineteenth century, but the victory of the scientific method over science . . . All the methods, all the presuppositions of our contemporary science were for millennia regarded with the profoundest contempt; on their account one was excluded from the society of respectable people—one was considered as an “enemy of God,” as a reviler of the highest ideal, as “possessed.”[67]
Science is providing us with information on how to adjust nature to our needs. It is a method, a means to the tasks that human beings put before it. It is not a mode of existence, but a means to empower one. “Science—the transformation of nature into concepts for the purpose of mastering nature—belongs under the rubric ‘means.’”[68]
But science is not only providing interpretations of the regularity of the world and its inanimate elements. It is also providing a foundation for a new understanding of human beings. The inductive logic employed by Darwin is not only placing human beings back among the animals. It is also providing the basis for an evolutionary understanding of human ontology. Darwin gives a scientific foundation of the notion of “becoming.”
But to Nietzsche, even science must be put in its place. Science provides only a “relative rightness” about the world. Its knowledge is human-centric. It represents a structure for generating knowledge that is relative to human beings. The thing-in-itself remains allusive.
Even though Nietzsche rejects both Hegelianism and dialectics, he accepts the notion that history and culture are dynamic. Shifting the discourse from “being” to “becoming” is very important in Nietzsche’s general framework.
The belief that the world as it ought to be is, reality exists, is a belief of the unproductive who do not desire to create a new world as it ought to be. They posit it as already available, they seek ways and means to reach it. “Will to truth”—as the impotence of the will to create.[69]
Such an approach is for a lazy person, “a kind weary of life.”[70]
I seek a conception of the world that takes this fact [becoming] into account. Becoming must be explained without recourse to final intentions; becoming must appear justified at every moment . . . Becoming does not aim at a final state, does not flow into “being” . . . Becoming is an equivalent value every moment; the sum of its values always remains the same; in other words, it has no value at all, for anything against which to measure it, and in relation to which the word “value” would have meaning is lacking.[71]
Nietzsche’s commitment is clear: “becoming” must be considered without a teleological endpoint or goal; “becoming” without a means to assign value to its character; life as transformation. It is hard to imagine such a position without evolutionary biology.
But this raises an interesting question. To what degree does a firm commitment to indeterminism, chance, relativism, and an opposition to “being” constitute such a firm ontological position that it undermines the materialist character of Nietzsche agenda. Or, on the other hand, is this to be understood as the only ontological position that can stand within a materialist framework. In the final analysis, this may be a distinction without a difference, one of those philosophic quandaries that result from the structure of classical philosophic discourse that must give way.
“Becoming” puts everything in flux. Science is only interpretive. Evolution implies constant adaptation and change. The thing-in-itself is revealed as the illusion, the allusive “being” under the reality of “becoming.” In such an environment there is no possibility to identify “being,” and hence, no possibility to create fixed and stable structures as either concepts or the institutional order.
Nietzsche asserts a kind of meta-ontological position, one that denies the possibility of generating fixed ontological content. There is only change and beings that are affected by all the conditions that give rise to it. These beings possess drives and instincts identified as the “will to power,” a term given to the force of adaptation and change that is part of our becoming. It is primordial being outside the repression and sublimation of the rationality project in the Western world.
Even the notion of the “will to power” does not characterize “being” but seeks to explain processes. To say that life is defined by the will to power is a characterization not of being but of the activity that defines what it means to have “life.” But this is not vitalism. Nietzsche asserts no notions of life force that has existence outside the organism. What we call consciousness, or mind, is simply that mechanism by which the body adjusts to the understanding of its materiality both as needs and as the finitude of existence.
In typical sardonic fashion, Nietzsche mocks the futility of all our apollonian constructions. “Man has gradually become a visionary animal, who has to fulfil one more condition of existence than the other animals; man must from time to time believe that he knows why he exists; his species cannot flourish without periodically confiding in life! Without the belief in reason in life!”[72]
It is life as a “role of the dice.” There is no grand purpose, only beings trying to get along, relying on some interpretive understanding of themselves, others, and their surroundings as a necessary means of survival. Everything else is illusion.
From Plato to Kant, human beings have implicitly been told that they must repress their instincts to build civilization. Anticipating Freud, Nietzsche fears the results of such repression. Instincts and passion are part of our nature.
Does this constitute a hard ontological position? Perhaps more than is consistent with the parameters of strict materialism. However, it should be noted that in many respects Nietzsche is actually trying to describe “life” rather than “being.” It would also be hard to deny the influence of German romanticism on his sentiments.
Nietzsche will set the stage for much of the philosophic discourse in the twentieth century. He both critiques and absorbs elements in the Western tradition, engaging Kant, Schopenhauer, Spinoza, Plato, and others. He takes the skeptical elements in Kant and develops them into an epistemological doctrine. To Nietzsche, Kant’s genius was to show the limitations of science and logic.[73] Nietzsche also challenges the assumptions of the Kantian ethical system. It was always Nietzsche’s position that we must take the world as it is given to us, rather than create an illusion of how we would like it to be. To enact a known falsehood is to set course on the road to nihilism.
He rejects the dialectic methods of Hegel and Marx, denying that their deterministic and teleological elements can provide useful information to the study of human history. They have a subjective, wishful character about them. In the case of Hegel, human beings appear as a kind of epiphenomenon, an afterthought for a reified notion of the transcendent. In the case of Marx and socialism, it represents neither truth nor history, but the desires of the most stupid form of herd animal. Socialism has also not given up on the idea of good and evil, something essential to a Nietzschean analysis of society.[74] It has simply recast the villains.
Weber’s relationship with Nietzsche is more complex. Weber lived a generation after Nietzsche and had familiarity with Nietzsche’s writings. Nietzsche had gained notoriety by the end of the nineteenth century and Weber had read his work. Nietzsche is mentioned numerous times, particularly in Weber’s later essays. Weber refers to the Genealogy as a “brilliant essay.”[75] He references Nietzsche’s concept of the “last men,” echoing the claim that it is naïve to believe that science can answer the questions of human happiness or how we should live.[76]
Yet, despite the admiration, Weber could not be considered a Nietzschean. Weber’s distinction of facts and values is too artificial, too Kantian, for it to be compatible with Nietzsche’s framework. Weber does not relativize and anthropomorphize the Western “rationality project” the way Nietzsche does. To Weber, science still has an objective character about it that the other avenues of inquiry should emulate. That is not what Nietzsche has in mind.
Where there is some “meeting of the minds” is on the subjective character of values. Weber, like Nietzsche, rejects the idea that science can provide human beings with values. Further, they both reject the idea that values can be the result of some transcendent process of reason. In this sense, they both are moving the study of human society in a more materialistic direction.
Regarding empiricism, Nietzsche’s criticisms are not dissimilar to those of Marx. Empiricism is too “mechanical.”[77] It does not deal with the question of life. Instead it treats human activity as the movement of atoms and molecules. Such explanations cannot address the complexity of social growth and evolution.
Everyone since Nietzsche has to come to terms with his position, one way or the other. A large measure of its appeal is its materialistic character. He manages to combine Darwin’s evolutionary theory with a presentation of what he believes Darwin means for our understanding of philosophy, society, and politics. Evolutionary biology means that we cannot treat human nature as static and fixed. It means that science, as well as society, must be understood as an interpretive means for human survival. All our institutional creations must be comprehended in relation to their material origins and the material conditions that maintain their functions. Such breadth makes this a powerful method for generating a materialist understanding of our relationship to the experience and maintenance of life.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Joyful Wisdom,” in Nietzsche Selections. Ed. by Richard Schacht (New York: Scribner/Macmillan), 107.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in Nietzsche Selection, 45.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Random House, 1967), 267.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 280.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 263.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 264.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 266.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 298.
Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies,” 49.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 266.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (New York: Vintage, 1966), 21.
Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies,” 50.
Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies,” 51-52.
Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies,” 51.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 459.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 267.
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 2.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecco Homo (New York: Vintage, 1967), 29-31.
Nietzsche, “Joyful Wisdom,” 116-117.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 98.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols,” in Nietzsche Selections, 315.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 99.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 99.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 267.
Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 45.
Nietzsche, “Joyful Wisdom,” 314, and “The Antichrist.” in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 598.
Nietzsche, “The Antichrist,” 580.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 48.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 148.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 48.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 407.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage, 1974), 261.
Nietzsche, “The Antichrist,” 580, also Beyond Good and Evil, 28.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 262.
Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols,” 311.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 340.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 340.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 3.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 503.
Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols,” 310.
Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 62.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 519.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 501.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 272.
Nietzsche, “The Antichrist,” 579.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 315.
Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols,” 315.
Nietzsche, “The Antichrist,” 570.
Nietzsche, “The Antichrist,” 570.
Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies,” 47.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 275.
Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies,” 48.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 283.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 283.
Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies,” 51.
Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 46.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 93.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1971), 75.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 174
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 196.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 49.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 188.
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 76.
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 76.
Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 42-43.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 397.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 261.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 328.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 317.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 317.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 377 – 378.
Nietzsche, “Joyful Wisdom,” 103.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), 111.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 19.
Max Weber, “The Social Psychology of World Religions,” in From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press: 1946), 270.
Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber, 143.
Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 24.