In his On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche expressed great skepticism about the moral psychology presupposed by the proponents of “slave morality,” the institution that we know as antiegoistic, universalist, and egalitarian morality simpliciter.1 He claimed to identify the foundational claim in such a moral psychology—belief in “the submerged changeling, the ‘subject’” (GM I:13)—and he then offered a historical and psychological narrative about the origin of the notion. His story purported to show why a certain type (“the weak,” the “slavish”) would try to justify its position relative to the stronger type by portraying the stronger’s “expression of strength” as evil, and the situation of the defeated slave (powerlessness, humility) as good. This, in turn, if it was to be an effective condemnation (rather than a mere report of the facts), had to go one step farther than characterizing those who end up by nature as such overpowering types, one step farther than just characterizing the weak type, those who happen in empirical fact to be meek, humble, sympathetic to the suffering of others, and so forth. The real genius of the slave rebellion, according to Nietzsche, lies in its going beyond a simple inversion of value types, and in the creation of a new way of thinking about human beings: the creation of a subject “behind” the actual deed, one who could have acted to express his strength (or virtu-ous weakness) or not, and who thus can be condemned and held individually and completely responsible for his voluntary oppression of others, even as the slave can be praised for his supposedly voluntary withdrawal from the struggle. Nietzsche’s psychological narrative points to a distinct motive that explains this ideological warfare and invention—his phrase is, “thanks to the counterfeit and self-deception of impotence”—and he draws a conclusion about the realization of this motive, such that the slave can act, “just as if the weakness of the weak—that is to say, their essence, their effects, their sole ineluctable, irremovable reality—were a voluntary achievement, willed, chosen, a deed, a meritorious act. This type of man, prompted by instinct for self-preservation and for self-affirmation, needs to believe in a neutral, independent ‘subject’” (GM I:13).
The experience of the two differing motivations cited in these two passages is obviously supposed to be linked. Nietzsche appears to assume that the experience of such impotence itself is, if confronted unadorned, unbearable in some way, threatens one’s very “self-preservation”; requires a “self-affirmation” if one is to continue to lead a life. Hence the “self-deceit,” the compensatory belief that one’s “impotence” is actually an achievement to be admired. In sum, this invention of a subject (or soul) independent of and “behind” its deeds is what “the sublime self-deception that interprets weakness as freedom, and their being thus-and-thus as a merit, makes possible” (GM I:13).
However, as in many other cases, Nietzsche is not content merely to ascribe these psychological motivations to the originators of some moral code. Even if the slaves had such a “need,” establishing that would not of itself establish the further claim that this slavishly motivated commitment is actually false, necessarily deceived. Nietzsche clearly realizes this, and certainly wants to establish that further point. He suggests how he intends to demonstrate that in a famous simile proposed in GM I:13, just before the passages cited above. The simile appears to assert an ambitious, sweeping metaphysical claim (despite Nietzsche’s frequent demurrals about the possibility of metaphysics). His main claim is stated right after he notes that there is nothing surprising or even objectionable in the fact that “little lambs” insist that the greatest evil is “bird of prey” behavior, and that the highest good is little lamb behavior. Nietzsche goes on, “To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength.... For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength, or not do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything” (GM I:13; see also BGE 17).
This denial of a subject behind the deed and responsible for it is so sweeping that it immediately raises a problem for Nietzsche. It is the same question that would arise for anyone attacking the commonsense psychological view that holds that a subject’s intention (normally understood as a desire for an end, accompanied by a belief about means or a subject’s deciding or “willing” to act for some purpose or end) must stand both “behind” and “before” some activity in order for the event to be distinguished as a doing (Thun) at all, as something done by someone. We must be able to appeal to such a subject’s “intending” for us to be able to distinguish, say, someone volunteering for a risky mission, as an ontological type, from steel rusting or water running downhill or a bird singing. (The identification of such a prior condition is, in Wittgenstein’s famous words, what would distinguish my arm going up from me raising my arm.) It is “behind” the deed in the sense that other observers see only the movements of bodies—say, someone stepping out from a line of men—and must infer some intending subject in order to understand and explain both what happened and why the action occurred. (If there “is just the deed,” we tend to think, stepping out of line is just body movement, metaphysically like the wind blowing over a lamp.) A subject’s intention is “before” the deed because that commonsense psychological explanation typically points to such a prior intention as the cause of the act; what best answers the question, “why did that occur.”
Now Nietzsche is often described as a “naturalist,” perhaps a psychological naturalist in his account of moral institutions. Nowadays, naturalism is understood as the position that holds that there are only material objects in space and time (perhaps just the entities and properties referred to by the most advanced modern sciences), and that all explanation is scientific explanation, essentially subsumption under a scientific law. However, even with such a general, vague definition, it is unlikely that Nietzsche accepts this sort of naturalism, especially the latter condition. In GM II:12, he rails against the “mechanistic senselessness” of modern science, and he contrasts what he here and elsewhere calls this democratic prejudice with “the theory that in all events a will to power is operating (GM II:12). But many people think he accepts at least the former condition, and that such acceptance may partly explain what is going on in the denial of any separate soul in GM I:13; that is, that Nietzsche mostly means to deny “free will.”
And Nietzsche’s descriptions of the strong and the weak in GM I:13 have indeed already expressed the antivoluruarist view that the strong can “do nothing else but” express their strength. He seems to treat the commonsense psychology just sketched as essentially and wholly derivative from the slave or ultimately Christian compensatory fantasy of self-determining subjects and a “could have done otherwise” sense of freedom. This all does make it tempting to regard him as indifferent to the distinction between ordinary natural events and actions, and as perfectly content to consider the “reactive force” most responsible for the slave rebellio—ressentiment—as one of the many natural forces in the (psychological) world that we will need to appeal to in order to account for various social and political appearances. All this by contrast with a separate subject which could act or not, depending on what it “decides.” We could interpret GM 1:13 as only denying the possibility of this metaphysically free or spontaneous, self-determining subject behind the deed and attribute to Nietzsche a broadly consistent naturalism. Nietzsche certainly believes that the free will picture is a fantasy (BGE 19, 21; TI “Errors” 7). And in GM I:13 he obviously thinks that the classic picture of a commanding will and the resultant action give us, paradoxically and unacceptably, two actions, not one (cf. Williams 1994, 243), and that it pushes the basic question of origin back yet again.
The trouble with proceeding very far in this direction is that Nietzsche does not seem interested in merely naturalizing all talk of motives, goals, intentions, and aversions; he denies that whole model of behavior. The passages just quoted do not appear to leave room for corporeal states causing various body movements, as if, for example, a subject’s socially habituated fear for his reputation (where fear is understood as some sort of corporeal brain-state or materially embodied disposition) were “behind” his stepping out of line and acting in a way he knew would count for others as volunteering. If that model were adopted, we would still be pointing to some determinate causal factor “behind” and “before” the deed. The perplexing lightning simile is unequivocal, though, and we would not be following its suggestion if we merely substituted a material substance (like the brain or brain states or corporeally embodied desire) for an immaterial soul. Moreover, such a naturalist account relies on the material continuity through time of some identical substance in order to attribute to it various manifestations and expressions as interconnected properties. If there were no substance or subject of any kind behind or underlying various different events, it is hard to see how we might individuate these expressions of force, and even if we could, how we might distinguish a universe of episodic, atomistic force-events from the world that Nietzsche himself refers to, a world with some clear substantial continuities: slaves, masters, institutions, priests, and so on. He nowhere seems inclined to treat such a world as arbitrarily grouped collections of force-events (grouped together by whom or what, on what basis?), as if there were either “becoming-master” events or “becoming subdued by” events, and so forth. We thus still need a credible interpretation of: “But there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything” (GM I:13). Materialist or naturalist bloody-mindedness is not going to help.
In order to understand what such an extreme claim could mean (“there is no lightning behind the flash and responsible for it,” “no subject behind the deed”; there is just the deed), we might turn to Nietzsche’s own psychological explanations of the slave revolt, and what appears to be his own general theory about the psychological origins of normative distinctions. One would certainly expect consistency between his own account and GM I:13. In some places, there is certainly language consistent with the antiagent language of GM I:13, but at the same time and more frequently, language immediately in tension with it. In GM I:10, Nietzsche appears to attribute explanatory power to forces themselves, as if causally efficacious force-events: “The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values” (GM I:10). It is odd to say that resentment itself could become creative and could do something, and not that a subject, motivated by such resentment, acted, but perhaps Nietzsche is deliberately looking ahead to his own denial of any causal agent. Nietzsche also speaks of “the noble mode of valuation” as if it were an independent explicans (although both these expressions still seem to “sub-stantialize” force and a dispositional mode and to distinguish them from the manifestations they cause). And in his most important statement in On the Genealogy of Morals of what appears to be his will to power “doctrine,” Nietzsche seems to be trying to deliberately avoid any commitment to an agent-cum-intention causing-the-deed model. “[A]ll events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ are necessarily obscured or even obliterated.... But purposes and utilities are only signs that a will to power has become master of something less powerful and imposed upon it the character of a function” (GM II:12). And likewise: in the Second Essay, he talks freely of such things as a “struggle between power cotnplexes” (GM II:11).
On the other hand, Nietzsche would seem to be right in GM I:13 about the inevitably substantializing tendencies of language itself, even throughout his own account. Immediately after his claim using ressentiment as the subject of a sentence, he cannot himself resist parsing this as “the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge” (GM 1:10, my emphasis). This reintroduction of the substantive bearer of the property, “natures,” who express ressentiment, rather than any claim about ressentiment-events occurring, is also more consistent with the overall psychological manner of explaining morality. It is hard enough to imagine appealing to something like forces without substrates in which they inhere, of which they are properties, but the core idea of Nietzsche’s account is a picture of a social struggle, lasting over some time, among human beings, not forces, which results in a situation of relative stability, a successful subduing and a being subdued, wherein, finally, the reaction of the subdued finds another outlet of response than a direct counterforce. This last is caused by an apparently unbearable feeling, impotence, responsible then for a reaction motivated by an attempt to revalue such impotence. So, as he must, Nietzsche refers both to “the noble mode of valuation” as explicans and directly to “the noble man” as someone with motives, intentions, a self-understanding, a certain relation to the slavish, and so forth. I say that Nietzsche “must” so refer because, as several others have pointed out (Rüdiger Bittner with regard to Nietzsche, Bittner 2001, 34–46; Axel Honneth with regard to Foucault, Honneth 1991), there cannot just “be” subduing and subdued events. Someone must be subdued and be held in subjection, be prevented from doing what he might otherwise do, by the activities of someone else who is not so restricted, or by some internalization of such originally external constraint (cf. Nietzsche’s account of “internalization” [Verinnerlichung] in GM II:16). (Otherwise, we don’t have a becoming-master, just an episodic, quantitative more or less.) Even the “will to power” passages cannot end by pointing to a mere “becoming-master” event. If such a striving is successful, what we are left with is a Master, not the residue of an event, and thereby correspondingly a slave.2
Finally, throughout On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche treats his own explanation of the slave revolt in morality as something not acknowledged by, something that would be actively disputed by, the proponents of such a revolt, and for such an account to make sense, there must be such proponents, now quite complex proponents it turns out. That is, while he might invoke the language of psychological naturalism, the language of instincts, to account for this moralizing reaction, he also notes that this instinctual force is not “for itself” what it is “in itself,” to adopt a non-Nietzschean form of expression. It is not just experienced as a desire pushing for satisfaction. The “moral reaction” is not experienced by such a subject as what it really is, even though the reaction could not be satisfying unless also “experienced,” somehow, as some sort of revenge.3 Morality is a “counterfeit” and “self-deceit,” and its effectiveness as a weapon against the Master would disappear if it were correctly understood by its proponents as a psychological ploy or strategy in the search for an indirect route to power over one’s oppressors.
But then, it would seem, it cannot be that “the deed is all there is (das Thun ist Alles).” Nietzsche himself, it would appear, is only able to account for the deed being what it is (a reactive, revenge-inspired rebellion, motivated by the frustrations of impotence) by appeal to the standard psychological language of a subject’s “true intentions,” the struggle to realize that intention, the conflict with other subjects that this produces, and, as we have just seen, he must also be able to refer even to the possibility of a self-deceived commitment to an intention, acting for the sake of an end one consciously and sincerely would disavow. Nietzsche’s claim is that the deed in question is not a discovery, or even the attempt at a discovery, of the true nature of good and evil, but a revolt, because it is motivated by a vengeful reaction. But if there were “only the deed, not a doer,” the question—what deed?—would, it appears, be unanswerable, or at least it could not be answered in the “divided subject” way Nietzsche appears committed to. Indeed, in pursuing that question, we are not only back with a “subject” and a subject’s intentions behind the deed, but involved in a hunt for true, genuine intentions, lying “back there” somewhere, but hidden and unacknowledged, even though causally effective.
And finally the whole direction of Nietzsche’s narrative seems to depend on what GM I:13 denies. Since the revolt is something the slaves did, is a deed, and not something that happened to them, or merely “grew” in them, it is something that can be undone, that, in the right situation, can be countered by a new “legislation of values,” once the “crisis of Christian honesty” occurs. (Oddly, this alternative deed, or “revaluation” seems to be an idea that Nietzsche both accuses the slave of fabricating in order to focus absolute blame on the master, and a possibility Nietzsche himself seems to want to preserve, the possibility of an eventual “self-overcoming.”) And all of this requires not only subjects of deeds, but even possibilities inhering yet unrealized in such subjects. Again, the denial of a causally autonomous soul, the free will, and freely undertaken commitments does not get us very far in understanding Nietzsche’s own enterprise in a way that is consistent with GM I:13. And so we need to think again about what “the deed is all there is” might amount to.
Now it may be that Nietzsche is such an unsystematic thinker that at some point in any philosophical reconstruction, one will simply have to pick and choose, follow one of the paths Nietzsche opened up and ignore another, inconsistent path that he also pointed to.4 But if we reject the substantializing of the will to power, or any substantializing, the social account that results from its application would look like so many heterogeneous episodes of conflicting and discontinuous fields of contingent forces and it would resemble not at all the typology that Nietzsche so clearly relies on. Accordingly, Rüdiger Bittner has encouraged us to discard the “will to power” explanation as a dead end, one ultimately wedded to a “creationist” and projective theory of value and concentrate on what Bittner thinks is closer to Nietzsche’s interest: an adequate account of life and living beings, and therewith the instability and provisionality of any substance claim. To understand the domain of “life,” we have to rid ourselves of substance presumptions and concentrate on subject-less “activity” itself. (Bittner also wants us to take GM I:13 as the heart of Nietzsche’s project, and abandon completely the language of subjects’ “creating value.”)
But, as we have seen, if we accept GM I:13 at face value, and insist that there is no doer behind the deed, we have to give up much more than the metaphysics of the will to power, and its assumptions about exclusively created value. We will make it very difficult to understand the whole of Nietzsche’s own attack on the moral psychology of Christian morality, since he appears to rely on a traditional understanding of act descriptions (that the act is individuated as an act mainly by reference to the agent’s intentions), and he invokes a complex picture of unconscious motives, operative and motivating, but inaccessible as such to the agents involved. Without Nietzsche’s own, prima facie inconsistent Doer-Deed language, the question of what is supposedly happening in the slave revolt, which in his account clearly relies on notions of subjection to the will of others, resentment, and even “madness” (GM II:22), will be difficult to understand. Values cannot be said to simply “grow” organically, given some sort of context. For one thing, as Nietzsche famously remarked, we must make ourselves into creatures capable of keeping promises, and this requires many “centuries” of commitment, perseverance, and so the unmistakable exercise of subjectivity. It seems a question-begging evasion to gloss all such appeals as really about “what happens to us,” what madness befalls us, in situations of subjection. There would be little reason to take Nietzsche seriously if he were out to make what Bernard Williams has called the “uninviting” claim that “we never really do anything, that no events are actions” (Williams 1994, 241).
We might do better, I want to suggest, to appreciate first that the surface meaning of the claims made in GM I:13 remains quite elusive. As GM II:12 pointed out, the notion of an “activity” functions as a “fundamental concept” in what Nietzsche himself claims, and he insists in that passage on a contrast between such an activity and the “mechanistic senselessness” of the ordinary modern scientific world view. We thus need to return to GM I:13 and appreciate that Nietzsche is not denying that there is a subject of the deed; he is just asserting that it is not separate, distinct from the activity itself; it is “in” the deed. He is not denying that strength “expresses itself” in acts of strength. He is in fact asserting just that, that there is such an expression, and so appears to be relying on a notion of expression, rather than intentional causality to understand how the does is in the deed. (“To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength” is the expression he uses. He does not say, “there are just strength-events.”) That—the appeal to expression—is quite an important clue. He is not denying, in other words, that there is a genuine deed, and that it must be distinguishable from any mere event. He maintains that distinction. He has only introduced the category of deed or activity so quickly and metaphorically that it is difficult to flesh out what he means. (Put in terms of his image, in other words, the “flash” (Leucbte) is not just an electrical discharge in the air. A certain sort of meteorological event is “expressed,” and so a phenomenally identical “flash” might not be lightning, but could be artificially produced. It would be a phenomenally identical event, but not lightning.)
In order to understand this claim about a doer “in” the deed, I want to suggest a comparison with another philosopher that will seem at first glance quite inappropriate. Assume for a moment that there is a brotherhood of modern anti-Cartesians, philosophers united in their opposition to metaphysical dualism, to a picture of mind shut up in itself and its own ideas and so in an unsolvable skeptical dilemma about the real world, and opposed as well to the notion of autonomous, identifiable subjects, whose intentions and finally “acts of willing” best identify and explain distinct sorts of events in the world, actions. There is a range in such a group, including Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and Heidegger, but surely a charter member is also Hegel. And in his Jena Phänomenologie, Hegel formulated this issue of how to “find” the agent “in” the deed in a way that suggests something of what Nietzsche may have been thinking. Consider: “The true being of a man is rather his deed; in this the individual is actual, and it is the deed that does away with both aspects of what is [merely] ‘meant’ [intended] to be: in the one aspect where what is ‘meant’ has the form of a corporeal passive being, the individuality, in the deed, exhibits itself rather as the negative essence, which only is in so far as it supercedes mere being.... It [the deed] is this, and its being is not merely a sign, but the fact itself. It is this and the individual human being is what the deed is ... even if he deceives himself on the point, and, turning away from the action into himself, fancies that in this inner self he is something else than what he is in the deed” (Hegel 1979, 178–79; Engl. 194). And even more clearly, in §404: “Whatever it is that the individual does, and whatever happens to him, that he has done himself, and he is that himself. He can have only the consciousness of the simple transference of himself from the night of possibility into the daylight of the present, from the abstract in-itself into the significance of actual being, and can have only the certainty that what happens to him in the latter is nothing else but what lay dormant in the former.... The individual, therefore, knowing that in his actual world he can find nothing else but its unity with himself, or only the certainty of himself in the truth of that world, can experience only joy in himself” (ibid., 220; Engl. 242).
Modern Hegel scholarship owes a great debt to Charles Taylor for having focused so much of our attention on this “expressivist” notion of action, as opposed to an intentionalist or causal account, and it is quite relevant here for understanding how Nietzsche could appear to deny any standard picture of agency and of normal volitional responsibility, and yet still speak of actions, and of the expression of a subject in a deed, indeed wholly in the deed.5 The main similarity turns on what might be called a nonseparability thesis about intention and action, and a corresponding nonisolatability claim about a subject’s intention (that the determinate meaning of such an intention cannot be made out if isolated from a much larger complex of social and historical factors).
According to the first or nonseparability thesis, intention-formation and articulation are always temporally fluid, altering and being transformed “on the go,” as it were, as events in a project unfold. I may start out engaged in a project, understanding my intention as X, and, over time, come to understand that this was not really what I intended; it must have been Y, or later perhaps Z. And there is no way to confirm the certainty of one’s “real” purpose except in the deed actually performed. My subjective construal at any time before or during the deed has no privileged authority. The deed alone can “show” one who one is. This means that the act description cannot be separated from this mutable intention, since as the intention comes into a kind of focus, what it is I take myself to be doing can also alter. This is partly what Nietzsche has in mind, I think, when he objects to the way other genealogists search for the origin of punishment by looking for a fixed purpose that subjects struggle to realize with various means. “[A]nd the entire history of a ‘thing,’ an organ, a custom can in this way be a continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations and adaptations whose causes do not even have to be related to each other, but, on the contrary, in some cases succeed and alternate with one another in a purely chance fashion” (GM II:12). This is why, in the next section, Nietzsche writes that “only that which has no history is definable” and that we must appreciate “how accidental the ‘meaning’ of punishment is” (GM II:13).
Likewise there is a common “nonisolatability” thesis between Hegel and Nietzsche: attending only to a specific intention as both accounting for why the act occurred and what is actually undertaken, distorts what is necessary for a full explanation of an action. In the first place, the conditions under which one would regard an intention as justifying an action (or not, or connectable at all with it) have to be part of the picture too, and this shifts our attention to the person’s character and then to his life-history and even to a community as a whole or to a tradition. We have to have all that in view before the adoption of a specific intention can itself make sense. Indeed this assumption is already on view from the start in Nietzsche’s genealogy, since he treats the unequal distribution of social power as an essential element in understanding “what the slavish type was attempting.” The psychology that Nietzsche announces as “the queen of the sciences” is also a social and historical psychology.
And while, on the standard model, the criterion for success of an action amounts to whether the originally held purpose was in fact achieved, on this different model “success” is much more complicated. I must also be able to “see myself” in the deed, see it as an expression of me (in a sense not restricted to my singular intention), but also such that what I understand is being attempted and realized is what others understand also. I haven’t performed the action, haven’t volunteered for the mission, say, if nothing I do is so understood by others as such an act.
Now Hegel and Nietzsche are going to part company radically very soon in this exposition, but it is important to have in view this way of understanding action as “mine” without our needing to say that some prior “I” caused it by deciding it should happen. On this model, as Hegel notes, we should understand successful action as a continuous and temporally extended, an everywhere mutable translation or expression of inner into outer, but not as an isolated and separated determinate inner struggling for expression in imperfect material. Our “original” intentions are just provisional starting points, formulated with incomplete knowledge of circumstances and consequences. We have to understand the end and the reason for pursuing it as both constantly transformed, such that what I end up with, what I actually did, counts fully as my intention realized or expressed.
Thus, if I start out to write a poem, I might find that it does not go as I expected, and think that this is because the material resists my execution, my inner poem, and so what I get is a “poorly expressed poem.” This is a very misleading picture on this account, as misleading as “the commanding will” of BGE 19. The poem is a perfect expression of what your intention turned out to be. To ask for a better poem is to ask for another one, for the formation and execution of another intention. If the poem failed; everything has failed. It (the expression of what has turned out to be the intended poem) just turned out to be a bad poem; not a bad expression of a good poem. As Nietzsche keeps insisting, our egos are wedded to the latter account; but the former correctly expresses what happened.
Now, philosophically, a great deal more needs to be said before this understanding of “the doer in the deed” could be defended. The anti-Cartesian and broadly anti-Christian account asks for something quite unusual. These passages in Hegel and Nietzsche seem to be asking us to relocate our attention when trying to understand an action, render a deed intelligible, from attention to a prior event or mental state (the formation of and commitment to an intention, whether a maxim, or desire-plus-belief, and the like) to “what lies deeper in the deed itself” and is expressed in it. (Where “deeper” does not mean already there, hidden in the depths, but not yet fully formed and revealed.) Rather, the interpretive task focuses on a continuing expression or translation of the subject into the actuality of the deed, and conversely our translation back into “who the person is.” As Hegel put it in his clearest expression of this anti-intentionalist position: “Ethica) self-consciousness now learns from its deed the developed nature of what it actually did” (Hegel 1979, 255; Engl. 283).
This can all sound counterintuitive because it seems obvious that the final deed may not express the agent simply because some contingency intervened and prevented the full realization (thus reinstituting a “separation” between the subject in itself and the deed that actually resulted, shaped as it so often is by external circumstances and events). Or we easily accept that if someone did something unknowingly and innocently, he cannot be said to be properly “in” the deed, even though the deed came about because of him and no one else, as when someone genuinely does not know that he is revealing a secret, and does so, but “guiltlessly,” we want to say.
The issues are quite complicated and cannot be pursued here. The central question is: should not Nietzsche be aware that, by eliminating as nonsensical the idea that appears to be a necessary condition for a deed being a deed—a subject’s individual causal responsibility for the deed occurring—he has eliminated any way of properly understanding the notion of responsibility, or that he has eliminated even a place for criticism of an agent. If the strong is not at all free to be weak, is not free to express that strength in any way other than by “a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs,” in what “responsibility sense” is the agent in the deed if not “causally”? A plant’s life-cyde or nature might be said to be “expressed” in its various stages, but, as we have seen, Nietzsche rejects such a reductionist reading, he shows no indication of wanting to eliminate his “fundamental concept,” activity.
Now it is true that sometimes Nietzsche seems content with a kind of typological determinism. People just belong to some type or other (whether biological or socially formed) and some just are weak, base, vengeful, and ugly; others are strong, noble, generous, and beautiful (cf. BGE 265). There is no way to justify these distinctions; that is the (“Socratic”) trick the former group tries to play on the latter. The whole point is that you have to be a member of the latter group to appreciate the distinction. But on the one hand, Nietzsche’s own evaluations are not so tied to this fixed typology. About the weak he also says: “Human history would be altogether too stupid a thing without the spirit that the impotent have introduced into it” (GM I:7). Likewise, he certainly seems to be criticizing the nobility by contrast when he says: “[I]t was on the soil of this essentially dangerous form of human existence, the priestly form, that man first became an interesting animal, that only here did the human soul in a higher sense acquire depth and become evil—and these are the two basic respects in which man has hitherto been superior to other beasts” (GM 1:6). Such passages suggest a radical flexibility and indeterminateness in the normative value of such distinctions, an unpredictability in what they “turn out” to mean, as if Nietzsche thinks that such oppositions look one way in one context and another in another context. That raises the question of how this variation works, how this interpretive struggle is to be understood and what its relation might be to the psychological struggle.
Nietzsche has a great many things to say about this hermeneutical warfare, but we should note that his remarks confirm attributing the “nonisolatability” thesis to him, as noted above, and the second “success” condition for actions, as understood on this alternate model. Not only is the determinate meaning of a subject’s intention not a matter of inner perception and sincerity, but a function in some way of a certain social context, but also “what is going on” in such a context is itself constantly contested among the participants. As he put it in a famous passage, “all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ are necessarily obscured or even obliterated” (GM II:12).
He makes the same sort of point about the variability and contestability of the various understandings of punishment (GM II:14) and notes that even the noble man needs the appropriate enemies if his actions are to have the meaning he sees expressed in them (GM 1:10). In such cases, “the subject” is not absent; he is “out there” in his deeds, but the deeds are “out there” too, multiply interpretable by others (and that means, in Nietzsche’s understanding, in multiple ways can be “appropriated” by others). These interpretations are themselves already expressions of various types that cannot be isolated from historical time and from the contestations of their own age. They are not existential “projections,” motivated by some sort of self-interest or self-aggrandizement (cf. Geuss 1999, 16). And we have already good reason to be cautious of interpreters who think that there must be something appealed to, underlying Nietzsche’s account, as a kind of criterion: “life,” and/or “the will to power,” to cite the most frequent candidates. If life must also turn against itself to be life, and if we don’t know what really counts as having established power, or even what power is, we have only returned again to a social struggle about the meaning of deeds. In other words, if the most important deed is the legislation of values, what actually is legislated cannot be fixed by the noble man’s strength of resolve alone, or guaranteed by his “pathos of distance.” There is a difference between “actually” legislating values, that is, succeeding in doing so, and, on the other hand, engaging in a fantasy of self and value creation.
It is at this point that the similarities between Nietzsche and Hegel end. In a sense one can read Nietzsche’s infrequent, published references to the “will to power” as attempts to dramatize the simple claim that there is no best, appropriate, finally reconciling resolution to these sorts of conflicts. “There is” only the conflict, at once potentially tragic and ennobling, and potentially dispiriting, a source of nihilistic despair. Hegel of course claims that such conflicts have an inherent “logic,” that a developmental story can be told, say, in the Phenomenology, from the conflict between Antigone and Creon, to the partial overcoming of morality in “Forgiveness,” and that the heart of that story is the ever more successful realization of freedom as a kind of rational agency. There is no corresponding logic or teleology in Nietzsche; just the opposite.
I want to conclude by returning to the intuitive difficulties created by GM I:13, especially about responsibility. We should note, that is, Nietzsche’s own response to the responsibility question—how, on his picture of how an agent is wholly in the deed, not separate from it—such reactions as regret, sorrow about what one did, and the like, might be understood.
Not surprisingly (given their similarities on so many issues) Nietzsche turns to Spinoza to make his point, and his remarks in GM II:15 are perfectly consistent with, and I think, confirm the position attributed to him above. He muses that Spinoza might have “one afternoon” asked himself, given that there is no “free will” or separate subject underlying the deed in Spinoza’s own system, what could remain in that system of the morsus conscientiae, the sting of conscience. This is the very intuitive or commonsense question we have posed above. Nietzsche first appeals to Spinoza by making his own attempt at a “becoming master” as a “new interpretation” of Spinoza, invoking essentially Nietzschean language (especially the concept of “innocence”), and announcing: “The world for Spinoza had returned to that state of innocence in which it had lain before the invention of the bad conscience” (GM II:15). But then he notes that Spinoza reinvented this morsus conscientiae in the Ethics. “‘The opposite of gaudium,’ he finally said to himself—‘A sadness accompanied by the recollection of a past event that flouted all of our expectations.’ Eth. III, propos. XVII, schol. I.II Mischief-makers overtaken by punishments have for thousands of years felt in respect of their transgressions just as Spinoza did: ‘here something has unexpectedly gone wrong,’ not: ‘I ought not to have done that’” (GM II:15). So, disappointment that I was not who I thought I was, sadness at what was expressed “in” the deed, replaces guilt, or the sort of guilt that depends on the claim that I could have done otherwise. Indeed, it is a kind of regret that depends on my not really having had the option to do otherwise; or at least that counterfactual option, on this view, is like considering the possibility that I might not have been me, a fanciful and largely irrelevant speculation, a mere thought experiment.
None of this settles the many other questions raised by Nietzsche’s position: What are the conditions necessary for rightly identifying what it was that I did? What role do the judgments of others properly play in that assessment? Deeds, even understood as expressions, rather than caused results, conflict, express incompatible if also provisional and changing, purposes. How do we, as nonparticipants, understand and even evaluate such conflicts? Are not our interpretations the expressions of current contestations, and if so what would count as success, as prevailing now? How much of “who I am” can be said to be expressed in the deed? How might I distinguish important “discoveries” about myself that I had not known and would have denied, from trivial or irrelevant revelations? If whatever it is that is expressed in such deeds is not a stable core or substantial self, neither as an individual soul nor as a substantial type, what could form the basis of the temporal story that would link these manifestations and transformations?
These are difficult questions, but, I have tried to show, they are the right sort of questions raised by Nietzsche’s remarks in GM I:13, and they are very different from questions about metaphysical forces, naturalized psychologies, instinct theories, or existential, groundless choices, leaps into the abyss. Whether Nietzsche has good answers to such important questions is another story.
Bittner, R. 1994. “Ressentiment,” in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, ed. R. Schacht, University of California Press, 127–38.
Bittner, R. 2001. “Masters without Substance,” in Nietzsche’s Postmoralism: Essays on Nietzsche’s Prelude to Philosophy’s Future, ed. R. Schacht, Cambridge University Press, 34–46.
Geuss, R. 1999. Morality, Culture and History: Essays on German Philosophy, Cambridge University Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1979. Phenomenolog of Spirit, transl. A. V. Miller, Oxford University Press. German text: Phänomenologie des Gesites, Bd. 2, Hauptwerke in sechs Bänden, Hamburg 1999.
Honneth, A. 1991. The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory, transi. by Kenneth Baynes, MIT Press.
Taylor, C. 1975. Hegel. Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, C. 1985. Human Agency and Language. Philosophical Papers. Vol. 1. Cambridge University Press.
Williams, B. 1994. “Nietzsche’s Minimalist Moral Psychology,” in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, ed. R. Schacht, University of California Press, 237–47.
Nietzsche does not treat “morality” as univocal and certainly not as a phenomenon with a single necessary essence. But it is clear that he has a standard form of nineteenth-century Christian morality often in his sights. For a summary of its characteristics, see Geuss 1999, 171. For my citations of Nietzsche’s writings, I have used Kaufinann’s translations of BGE, GS, and Z; Kaufmann and Hollingdale’s GM; and Hollingdale’s translations of TI and A.
There are of course, several other genealogical origins of morality sketched in On the Genealogy of Morals: suffering itself seems to require a compensatory mechanism; there is the feeling of guilt traced back to debt; the “Verinuerlichung” of aggression, turning it toward oneself, and so forth. But all of these raise the same problem, the compatibility of their psychological accounts with GM I:13.
Bittner claims in “Ressentiment,” that this makes no sense; that there can be no such thing as self-deception (1994, 127–38). That’s one way to solve the problem.
Cf. also Bernard Williams’s remark, “With Nietzsche... the resistance to the continuation of philosophy by ordinary means is built into the text, which is booby-trapped, not only against recovering theory from it, but in many cases, against any systematic exegesis that assimilates it to theory” (1994, 238).
Cf. “Aims of a New Epoch” in Taylor 1975, 3–50; “What is Human Agency” and “Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind,” in Taylor 1985, 15–44, 77–96.