Lyceum's Ink

ISSUE No. 2

• Nietzsche and the Unconscious
• The Re-evaluation of Our Values: A Nietzschean Approach to Philosophical Counseling

ISSUE No. 1

• Adult Education as Philosophical Practice
• Socrates in America or the Art of Transcendental Conversation

Nietzsche and the Unconscious

So in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!
Herman Melville: Moby Dick

We are none of us that which we appear to be from the states for which alone we have consciousness and words...we misread ourselves in this apparently most clear script of our selves. And yet this opinion of ourselves...the so-called "I," continues to collaborate on our character and fate.
Friedrich Nietzsche: Daybreak

Sigmund Freud considered the ideas of the wandering, iterant, sometimes mad philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) as "too rich" for him and declared that he had renounced the study of philosophy because its abstractness was unpleasant to him.¹ Yet he wrote in The History of Psychoanalysis:

In later years I have denied myself the very great pleasure of reading the works of Nietzsche, with the deliberate object of not being hampered in working out the impressions received in psychoanalysis by any sort of anticipatory ideas. I had therefore to be prepared-and I am so, gladly-to forgo all the claims to a priority in the instances in which laborious psychoanalytic investigation can merely confirm the truths which the philosopher recognized by intuition. ²

We may smile at the term, "laborious psychoanalytic investigation," seeing it as Freud's valiant but doomed attempt at creating a scientific credibility for the insights gleaned from the methods of psychoanalysis. He needed to distance himself from Nietzsche because he was aware of the striking sre curtailed by the restraining forms of human culture into which one is born. "All instincts," Nietzsche wrote in The Genealogy of Morals, "which do not find a vent without turn inwards - this is what I mean by the growing 'internalization' of man: consequently we have the first growth in man of what subsequently was called soul."³ The instincts of the free and wild human animal became turned backwards "against man himself." This was the origin of bad conscience, about which we will have more to say later. Nietzsche's words are too eloquent to paraphrase:

It was man who, lacking external enemies and obstacles, and imprisoned as he was in the oppressive narrowness and monotony of custom, in his own impatience lacerated, persecuted, gnawed, frightened, and ill-treated himself; it was this animal in the hands of the tamer which beat itself against the bars of its cage, it was this being who, pinning and yearning for that desert home of which it had been deprived, was compelled to create out of its own self an adventure, a torture-chamber, a hazardous and perilous desert; it was this fool, this homesick and desperate prisoner, who invented the 'bad conscience.'⁴

This is the disease that Nietzsche felt has infected all of mankind, causing self-inflicted suffering and torture. However, it is a malady of which Nietzsche thought could be cured. He saw the cure as one that could be undertaken by a very few who separate themselves from the herd and are able to tolerate an arduous and hazardous journey to self-overcoming. We will now look at the details of this diagnosis and its treatment.

Section I: The Drives.

Nietzsche first mentioned the drives in "On Moods," by saying, "How often the will sleeps and only the drives and inclinations are awake!"⁵ As a sort of twist on Plato's Republic, he pictured the psyche as a political realm where various factions vie for power. The statement he made about Wagner in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth can perhaps be applied to the genius in all of us:

Each of his drives strove into the immeasurable, and each of his talents - from joy in its own existence - wanted to tear itself away from the others to attain its own satisfaction; the greater their abundance, the greater was the tumult and the greater their hostility when they cross one another.⁷

Talent, for Nietzsche, was vampirelike in that it sought to suck the energies from the other drives and endangered the individual with becoming possessed by only one tyrannical drive. This is very similar to Jung's notion of archetypal possession, when the ego becomes inflated with the power of the archetype and loses its own grounding. Nietzsche conceived of an entire host of drives, all struggling to dominate an individual. Each drive demands actions appropriate to its particular satisfaction. These drives include the scientific drive, the mythological drive, the political drive, the art drive, the drive for knowledge and even the seasonal spring drive. In his early writing Nietzsche disagreed with Schopenhauer that the drives could not be known directly but only through their representations. In the beginning he maintained that the entire Triebleben, drive-life, the play of affect, sensations and acts of will, could be known by us. But, by the time of Daybreak (1880) he saw that the drives largely function unconsciously. He writes in that work, "nothing can be more incomplete than one's image of the totality of drives that constitute one's being.⁸

One of the more interesting drives, the Dionysian, was articulated in Nietzsche's first work, The Birth of Tragedy (1871). This drive seeks to nullify the principium individuationis by breaking down the personal boundaries between the self and the world and between individuals. The drive seeks a sort of particiaption mystique of merged identity with one’s surroundings and the group. C.G. Jung would later explore this drive as part of the collective archetypal inheritance. Nietzsche's multiple and polyphonic drives resemble more the archetypal theories of Jung and James Hillman than the dual drive theory of Freud.

Graham Parkes, in his excellent book on Nietzsche's psychology, Composing the Soul, describes how Nietzsche imagined the passions as animals within the soul, animate "beings" that must be feed, nurtured and eventually domesticated and trained.⁹ Nietzsche fought the late nineteenth century Christian European tendency to distrust and squelch the instinctual life of human beings in the name of higher culture, seeing the need to coordinate and work with the drives. He did not wish to silence them nor to take away their power, but he did recognize that unbridled instincts do not serve the development of the individual. According to Parkes, he advocated a sort of training program for the wild beasts of the psyche so that they could be coordinated under a loyalty to a higher self.¹⁰ He wrote in The Wanderer and His Shadow:

All our drives must first become more anxious and mistrustful, then gradually acquire more reason and honesty, becoming more clear-sighted and thereby increasingly losing the grounds for mistrust of each other. In this way, greater, more fundamental joyfulness can arise.¹¹

A very important aspect of Nietzsche is his emphasis on joy on attaining a coordination of the drives and in self-overcoming. He strongly rejected an attitude of Christian asceticism in handling the drives and, though he saw that self-overcoming is likely to involve suffering and hard work, it is not to be a mortification of the body or a mutilation of the instincts. He described this coordination more like a dance.

There arises the danger of a feeble vacillation back and forth between different drives. A metaphor may help to suggest how this difficulty might be resolved: one must remember that the dance is not the same as a languid reeling back and forth between different drives. High culture will resemble a daring dance: which is why one needs a great deal of suppleness and strength.¹²

The dance is an apt metaphor because it can allow for instinctual expression and joy within a form and a discipline. It can be further seen as an art form and can thus enrich and further higher culture.

Post-modernists often present Nietzsche as advocating a radical decentralizing of the self, reading him as challenging the notion of the necessity of unity in personal identity. In aphorism 105 of Daybreak, Nietzsche took up the question of the substantiality of the ego versus the Schein-Ego, the seeming-ego, created through an assortment of others' thoughts and opinions. Most people, he wrote,

do nothing for their ego but only for the phantom of their ego that has been formed in the heads of those around them and communicated back to them - a result of which everybody lives in a midst of impersonal, semipersonal opinions and arbitrary and, as it were, poetical evaluations, each one always in the head of the other, and that head in turn in other heads: a wonderful world of phantasms, that yet manages to appear so sober!¹³

We presume that our ego is in control of our lives and that we are rationally combating and controlling our drives in each moment. But Nietzsche challenges this by asserting that our so-called ego control is just the result of another drive.

That one wants to combat the violence of a drive at all is not within our power, neither the choice of method nor whether that method will succeed. Rather, in this whole process our intellect is clearly just the blind tool of another drive that is a rival of the one that is torturing us by its violence: whether it be the drive for peace and quiet , of fear of disgrace and other evil consequences, or love. So while "we" think we are complaining about the violence of a drive, it is basically one drive that is complaining about another.¹⁴

It would be safe to say that Nietzsche believed we never can have the experience of being outside of our drives, that the drives are the very constitutive elements of what we experience as the "I." Most drive activity functions well below the threshold of consciousness, giving the illusion, for the most part, of a stable personal identity with consistent goals and values. During times of stress, however, when the ego-drive loses some of its control, we become aware of the diversity of our inner aspects in various symptoms and projections.

Nietzsche revealed a sort of presumption of consciousness when he writes "that all our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt text."¹⁵ Nietzsche was no doubt referring to Kant's declaration that the self, as numenal, cannot be known as it is in itself, but can only be known from the phenomena of its manifestations. These effects of the self are mistakenly assumed to be elements of its inherent nature, when they are more likely to be passing moods, thoughts, sensations and attitudes that do not adhere to anything substantial. "The ego is a plurality of person-like forces, of which now this one not that one stands in the foreground as the ego and regards the others as a subject regards an influential and determining external world."¹⁶ Nietzsche conceived of the ego not as an island of rational reality testing that defends itself against the unconscious drives, but as itself constituted of the vary drives that make up the unconscious. We are at one time identified and convinced by one drive and at another time by quite another drive. We subsume these drives under the general category of the "I" but they are, in fact, free of any ontological identity with whom we truly are. When one drive is in ascendance, the others are viewed as antagonistic and "not-me" and therefore are projected out on others or defended against. But in another moment that alienated drive might be the new identity of the "I" and the former identification is thrust out and seen as other. The effects of this model of the psyche can create an ontological insecurity, undermining any presumptions to grounding in a substantial self-identity. On the positive side, however, through resisting the tendency to look at the drives as being in opposition to the ego, one can liberate intense creative energy by exploring new aspects of drives as they expand and assist the ego in the art of living.

Nietzsche maintained that our conscious life is a product of deep-level fantasy determined by the current drive that is calling the shots. For example, when we are in the heroic drive, the world and ourselves become wrapped up in projects of challenges and battles. When the erotic drive dominates, the world and ourselves coordinate to build scenes of yearning and passionate release. Our drives act upon our perceptions of the world, causing us to selectively and artistically attend to those aspects in accord with the drive energy of that particular moment. Our beliefs and attitudes about ourselves and others become determined as drive-derivatives. This is the basis for Nietzsche's famous perspectivism - the replacement of an absolute standard for truth and values with a recognition of the inescapable subjective viewpoint of all value statements and metaphysical claims. Nietzsche declares that to experience is to fabricate.¹⁷ But this fabrication is not ego-driven, but rather the result of the drives or instincts speaking through us. It is only in the false presumptions of the ego that "we" are the authors of these fabrications.

We are buds on a single tree - what we do we know about what we can become of us from the interests of the tree!...Stop feeling oneself as the fantastic ego! Learn gradually to jettison the supposed individual! Discover the errors of the ego! Realize that egoism is an error...Get beyond "me" and "you"! Experience cosmically...What is needed is practice in seeing with other eyes: practice in seeing apart from human relations, and thus seeing objectively! To cure this enormous delusion of human beings. ¹⁸

We are touching here on what I think will lead us directly into the nature of the Ubermensch and what Nietzsche meant by the need for mankind to surpass and overcome what it is to be human. With the concepts of the Ubermensch and the Eternal Return, Nietzsche distinguished himself from the camp of existential humanists in which we often find him, and finds more compatibility with the transpersonal psychologists. We will explore this distinction further in our conclusions.

So we can begin to understand the nature of Nietzsche’s conceptualization of the unconscious as the repository for all human drives that may be aroused and awakened in the daily life of the individual. These drives are multiply determined by biological and archaic forces, so that the history of mankind can be read through their expression.¹⁹ Some drives may never be expressed, since there may not be opportunities or triggers in the external life of the individual. Or the current identified ego (remember, also drive-based) may judge the nature of an unconscious pressing drive to be unacceptable to it and therefore will repress it. The energy from this drive, according to Nietzsche, will be turned against the individual, creating a vice-like torture of forced asceticism. All drives, in their claims to an absolute perspective, are errors. But, if no drive claims exclusive rights to an ego-identity then other drives can establish a sort of check and balance dynamic that prevents any tyranny among the drives and establishes a sort of inner harmony. As he wrote in his essay, On Truth: "The more individuals one has in oneself, the greater the prospect will be of one’s discovering a truth - then the struggle is within him."²⁰ And later in the essay he described his advise to us as, "denying ourselves as individuals, looking into the world through as many eyes as possible, living in drives and activities in order to make ourselves eyes for that, giving oneself over to life from time to time so that one can later rest one’s eyes on it, entertaining the drives as the foundation of all knowledge."²¹ This sounds like a sort of abandonment to the instincts but actually the condition is one of discipline and order as we will see in section III. Parkes describes this condition as holding ourselves between and among the drives, while understanding ourselves as the play of drives themselves.²²

For Nietzsche, rational thinking was a sort of law court where different drive claimants are brought before intentionality and testify to their relevancy in any particular situation of one’s life. The verdict then allowed the winning drive claimant to interpret and color the situation to its own advantage. The fairer the hearing of the multiple claimants, the healthier the individual. In his stress upon the ultimate drive origin of human rationality, Nietzsche went so far as to undermine the presumption that the mind thinks its own thoughts:

A thought comes when "it" wants and not when "I" will it...It thinks: but that this "it" is precisely the famous old "I" is, to put it mildly, merely an assumption, an assertion, and above all not any kind of "immediate certainty."²³

Nietzsche indeed brought the death of man, not just the death of God.

Section II: The Sickness

Could consciousness itself be a symptom of this sickness which is man? Nietzsche seemed to think so. Consciousness for Nietzsche, as for Freud, is the region of the ego affected by the external world. Consciousness is always consciousness of a relation of an inferior to a superior. It is an ego in relation to a self. The lesser has the consciousness of a part of the superior which is not conscious. In Hegelian language the slave has consciousness while the master does not. Consciousness, therefore is reactive to the influences of the superior force. This is very important for Nietzsche. Consciousness can only become aware of the effects of the superior force and can not itself be a creative force. Gilles Delueze examined Nietzsche's conception of reactivity in Nietzsche and Philosophy. He noted that the aim of Nietzsche's philosophical therapeutics is to find a way to shift the basically reactive condition of human consciousness to a more active and creative condition. Deleuze writes,

The real problem is the discovery of active forces without which the reactions themselves would not be forces. What makes a body superior to all reactions, particularly that reaction of the ego that is called consciousness, is the activity of necessarily unconscious forces.²⁴

Nietzsche said the only true science is that of activity and the science of activity is necessarily a science of the unconscious.

Nietzsche explained why consciousness can not be trusted as a means towards a Wissenschaftslehre, a science of knowledge, in the eleventh aphorism of Joyful Wisdom:

Consciousness is the last and the latest development of the organic, and consequently also the most unfinished and least powerful of these developments. Innumerable mistakes originate out of consciousness...If the conserving bond of the instincts were not very much more powerful, it would not generally serve as a regulator: by perverse judging and dreaming with open eyes, by superficiality and credulity, in short, just by consciousness, mankind would necessarily have broken down...hitherto our errors alone have been embodied in us , and all our consciousness is relative to errors!²⁵

This "dreaming with open eyes" refers to Nietzsche's contention that we are constantly projecting our phantasies out onto the world even in full and clear consciousness. He recognized that these phantasies are fabrications and do not lead to foundational truths necessary for science. Also in this passage, Nietzsche recognized that our well-being is more dependent on the "conserving bond of the instincts" than on consciousness. Indeed, consciousness alone would lead humankind quickly into destruction. The birth of consciousness was brought about through the separation of human beings from the free expression of their instinctual lives. The intervening factor is culture. Because of culture, Nietzsche wrote in The Antichrist, "man is the most unsuccessful animal, the sickliest, the one most dangerously strayed from its instincts."²⁶ With the repression of the instincts mankind loses its vital and natural connection to life and replaces it with the poor and ineffective substitute of the various illusions of culture, "the greatest and most disasterous maladies, of which humanity has not to this day been cured."²⁷ In quite striking opposition to Hegel, Nietzsche did not see that the victory of Spirit through ever expanding cultural forms will herald a golden age for human beings. Rather,

"Spirit" is to us precisely a symptom of a relative imperfection of the organism, as an attempting, fumbling, blundering, as a toiling in which an unnecessarily large amount of nervous energy is expended - we deny that anything can be made perfect so long as it is still made conscious.²⁸

Obviously Nietzsche's therapeutics were not going to promote the conscious appropriation and processing of unconscious material as in Freud and Jung, His was a much more radical approach; that of respecting and feeding the unconscious instincts without translating them into conscious forms.

In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche extended the active/reactive intrapsychic model of consciousness into the social world. He distinguished between the reactive, or slave morality, based on negation and ressentiment versus the master morality of the noble affirmation of power. Nietzsche traced the source of western morality to the attitudes of conquered people to their superiors. The will of the subjugated people becomes restrained by the conquerors. This will becomes reactive, in that it must react to the positive assertion of the superior group. Ressentiment is defined by Staten as,

the reactive exercise of will, the will that would rather will nothingness than not will, the will of a subject who is powerless to do anything against that which makes him or her suffer and who therefore must "compensate" with an "imaginary vengence," a vengence in the depths of his inferiority, by redefining helpless passivity as a free exercise of the will.²⁹

The conquerers in the assertion of their personal will are seen as evil while the victims, suppressing their will are viewed as good. This absolute reversal of the natural feeling of goodness in the expression of the will causes great harm to the psyche of the individual.

All instincts that do not discharge themselves toward the outside turn inward - this is what I call the internalization of the human being: thus it was that the human being first developed what later came to be called the "soul." This entire inner world, originally as thin as if it were streched between two membranes, extended and expanded and acquired depth, breadth, and height in proportion as outward discharge was inhibited.³⁰

Nietzsche attributed the entire internalization of consciousness to this primal repression of the instincts. He called this the intellectualization of the instincts and sees it as the basis for the forms of culture and religion. The "soul" is an artifact of this repression and internalization process. It appears from this that Nietzsche would abhor any psychology that attempted to fathom the inner core of a person. Soul is merely the result of repressed drives. This is why he could say of the Greeks:

Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial - out of profundity.³¹

It is an interesting twist that this "father of depth psychology " is here advocating our remaining at the surface amid the appearances and not digging for soul. There does seem to be a paradox here between the Nietzsche that claimed that we are hidden to ouselves and the Nietzsche that was content with appearances. Perhaps we can resolve this further along in our investigation.

Ressentiment, with its reversal of values and its thirst for revenge was characterized by Nietzsche in the figure of the Jewish Priest who makes a virture of a necessity. The impotence of the subjugated people is praised as the high value (humility and peacefulness) while the strong are condemned and on whose head the vengeance of the Lord is to follow. According to Nietzsche, "Priests are the most evil enemies to have, because they are the most impotent. It is their impotence which makes their hate so violent and sinister, so cerebral and poisonous. The greatest haters in history - but also the most intellegent haters - have been priests."³² A transition occurs as the human animal forces more and more of it's instinctual energies underground, maintaining an outward aspect of cooperative geniality, while inwardly turning the more violent drives towards the oppressor, the individual himself. Nietzsche noted that the change in inner dynamics is reflected in the emergence of the Christian priest, who no longer calls out for vengeance against an external enemy, but places the source and responsibility for suffering within the individual himself. Now redemption can only come through suffering, so the priest inflicts the wound (of original sin) only to be in control of the only cure (renunciation of the ego and submission to the Church). This interiorization of guilt reduces the human animal to pure reactivity so that the active and creative life-forces wither away, or worse, continue to exert a destructive and torturous influence on the individual. Nietzsche considered this to be the condition of the overwhelming majority in Western Europe in the late nineteenth century.

Out of this condition developed the ascetic ideal. Nietzsche was both repulsed and drawn to the ascetic character. He found the renunciation of the instincts in the ascetic priest to be a perversion of the life force, but at the same time, he recognized that it was through a form of ascetism, that the human animal can rise above the "human, all too human," and rise to the status of the Ubermensch. Staten articulates the distinction in the ascetism of the priest and that of a figure like Zarathustra when he writes, "Against a will turned toward the past, raging against its fixity, avenging itself by making others suffer, Nietzsche describes 'a will turned toward the future, a will that makes itself suffer in order constantly to remake itself.'"³³ The key here is that the will takes on suffering in order to transform itself. But why must the will suffer? Because it is full of errors and delusions.

We now return to Nietzsche’s assessment that life is generally made up of the projections of our own fabrication. Life is utterly appearance, without any substance underneath. "We hide ourselves in life, in its appearance, its falsity, its superficiality, in its radiant deception."³⁴ Nietzsche used the metaphor, vita femina, 'life is a woman', to describe both its allusiveness and its fertility. Blondel explains Nietzsche’s choice of metaphor as follows:

This ontology speaks of being as a woman who has no being, as appearance and disguise, as the illusion and mystery of a woman who has no nature, who is pure spectacle - a woman who, "when she gives herself, gives herself as spectacle...Appearance and appearing are the only reality of the vita femina...The notion of a truth beyond appearance, underneath or behind the veil, is rendered null and void. It is certainly true that life deceives us with her ambiguous apparitions; but she deceives us not because she conceals an essence or a reality beneath appearance, but because she has no essence and would only make us think that she does. Her "essence" is to appear.³⁵

We need to set aside Nietzsche’s attitude toward women in examining the sense of this metaphor. He was trying to emphasize that life holds out a promise in its appearances, not a promise as to a goal but rather towards a possiblity. This brings out the second aspect of the metaphor. Though bad conscience is a sickness, it is like a morning sickness, in that it signals a pregnancy. Nietzsche said that it is the womb of all ideal and imaginative phenomena.³⁶ This pregnancy fortells of the creative opportunity when, liberating oneself from the conditioning of the bad conscience, one can move ahead into new ways of living. In realizing that all reality is a fabrication then one can do as Goethe advised and truly "create oneself."

Of course this move toward self-creation runs on the very precarious edge of the abyss of nihilism. In recognition that there are no grounds to values and metaphysical and relgious claims, one risks falling into the deep depression of finding no value or purpose in life, so that everything is drained of meaning and significance. This was a real threat to Nietsche in his life, as it was for Dostoevski and other existentialists. How do we live in a world that we see as built upon the values imposed by motives of power and control that have no true basis. Life shows itself to be an arena of manipulation and seduction, full of untruths and errors, some devised intentionally to control and suppress, others unconsciously accepted by the herd and affirmed as real. Nihilism is seen by many contemporary thinkers as the major malady of this last century.³⁷ Sass describes that nihilism can be experienced in two ways:

as a vertiginous sense of power inherent in seeing reality as but a figment of one's own, all powerful self; or as a despairing recognition of the ultimate meaninglessness and absurdity of the human world, a succumbing to what Nietzsche called "the great blood-sucker, the spider skepticism."³⁸

Sass explains in Madness and Modernity that Nietzsche, early on in his first work, The Birth of Tragedy, recognized that the means by which we can accept and embrace this world devoid of its inherent values and meaning is through acknowledging the Dionysian drive within us. Dionysius is the Greek God of wine, inebriation and madness, and most importantly the dissolution of personal boundaries in the experience of the ever-flowing changable state of existence in which nothing remains the same and there is no firm ground that remains constant. This condition is described well by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit: "The True is thus the Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk; yet because each member collapses as soon as he drops out, the revel is just as much transparent and simple repose."³⁹ Through the god, Dionysius, the ancient Greeks recognized the ultimate importance of submitting to the multiplicity of manifestions of life through the drives and letting go of the need to control or contain them. But the Greeks also paired the god Dionysius with Apollo, the god of order and balance, and thus acknowledged that a balance of power must abide in the psyche between the powers of dissolution and abandon and the poweres of form and structure. Our next section will explore how Nietzsche conceived of this balance as a type of cure for the sickness of modern humanity.

Section III: The Cure

Nietzsche did see a way through the "death of God" and the transvaluation of all values. Once individuals are able to separate themselves from all prior metaphysics and moral ideas, they are capable of establishing a set of values and purposes that reflect their own unique being. But this process involves crossing the abyss of nihilism, in which everything is destroyed and there is no firm ground underneath one's feet. The experience of Nihilism can either be experienced with despair or with elation depending upon whether the individual can see it as an opportunity for personal creation. Since no "self" is inherently within the person to be discovered and then submitted to, the individual must build up a self ex nihilo. This section will explore how one is to do this in a Nietzschean fashion utilizing the various drive energies of the unconscious.

As shown earlier, Nietzsche maintained that there is a multitude of unconscious drives within us. These cannot be reduced to the sexual or aggressive and also do not necessarily work against the fashioning process of the self. In fact, Nietzsche maintained that it is important to harvest the passion and energies from the various drives in order to feel the vitality and creative forces in life. This is why he condemned the Christian religion for curtailing the life energies. However, a life that is tossed from drive to drive in a haphazard manner is not an elevated life, but one in which the person is at the mercy of their instincts. He or she is nothing more than an animal. And, though Nietzsche was quick to recognize that we are in most ways closely akin to the animal kingdom and therefore should not push away these animal instincts, he also envisions the human being as capable of surpassing the merely animal. This is not done, however, through, controling the instincts through reason. Nietzsche criticized Socrates for over-intellectualizing life by believing the highest form of life was attained through thinking alone, that his diamon merely restricted him from acting rather than affirming authentic action itself. Nietzsche saw the necessity and advantage of the struggle between the instincts for domination in the individual. He wanted to keep the opponents strong and observes, along with Heraclitus that "strife is the mother of all things." It is through this vigor, if the individual can tolerate it, that truly novel solutions arise. This can give birth to genius, as he showed through the examples of Goethe and Wagner.

The question, then, is how does one live with the multiplicity of drives, each seeking its own sole domination of the psyche? Watler Kaufman, in his classic work, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, suggests how Nietzsche envisioned the governance, but not suppression, of the instinctual life. He notes that Nietzsche is one of the first thinkers to employ the word sublimieren, sublimation, in his work and that he anticipates Freud by over twenty years in the employment of this term to describe a means of utilizing instinctual energies without repressing them. In The Will to Power, Nietzsche used the term sublimation to describe the how the sexual impulse could be channeled into creative spiritual activity, instead of being fulfilled directly. He maintained that all self-mastery involved the transformation of the baser instincts into their more moderate and creative expressions in art, literature, governance, and other forms of civilization. In a very similiar fashion as Freud, Nietzsche believed that through sublimation the energy of the drive need not be repressed or lost but can find meanful and satisfying expression through productive means. This preservation of the drives is made clear in what Kaufman writes:

Nietzsche believed that a man without impulses could not do the good or create the beautiful any more than a castrated man could beget children. A man with strong impulses might be evil because he had not yet learned to sublimate his impulses, but if he should ever acquire self-control, he might acheive greatness.

This is why Nietzsche is often misinterpreted as praising the "blond beast" or the Borgia. Those who criticize do not understand it is not the cruelty that he praises but rather the preservation of instinctual energies that can be utilized for creative, live-affirming projects.

Humans cannot be very creative in chaos. If there is no guiding principle to organize the panoply of drives, then humankind is tossed from one fleeting instinct to another without ever being able to fully harness the instinctual forces for systematic ends. In Nietzsche’s efforts to transvaluate all moral systems and in his attack on Christianity he deconstructed external systems of vices and virtues which have long organized human efforts at self improvement and abolishment of the baser drives. His challenge, then, was to find a means by which the multitude of drives could be preserved and yet governed. He found this through the will to power. Nietzsche maintained that all drives, even fully respecting their unique characteristics, are exemplars of one basic meta-drive, the will to power. The will to power is a universal principle that states that everything that is organized even for a moment wills to increase its power in confrontation with its surroundings. Pleasure and pain are epiphenomena in this striving for increased power. In the concept of the will to power, Nietzsche took Spinoza's understanding of conatus, as the effort by which everything endeavors to persevere in its own being, and extends it to include a dimension of striving beyond itself. Heidegger picks up on this striving beyond mere existence in his two volume study of Nietzsche when he wrote, "Only a more powerful heightening can counter the tendency to sink back; simply holding onto the position already attained will not do, becuase the inevitable consequence is ultimately exhaustion...To will is to want to become stronger.⁴⁰

This will to power is the unifying principle to which Nietzsche appealed in his efforts at presenting a non-repressive structure under which the drives can be organized.

Supposing, finally, that we were to succeed in explaining our entire drive-life as the development and ramification of one basic form of will - namely, of will to power...supposing one could find in this the solution to the problem of procreation and nourishment - it is one problem - one would then have the right to determine all effective force univocally as: will to power. The world seen from within, the world determined and defined in its "intelligible character" - would be precisely "will to power" and nothing besides.⁴¹

Nietzsche endorsed a type of monism in his more metaphysical moments, in seeing all things as expression of the will to power. He did not think that the reduction of all drives to this basic principle was in any way threatened their uniqueness but rather it preserved their essential dynamic. Some might argue that this flight into metaphysical reductionism is inconsistent with his overall trajectory, but let us, for the moment, entertain this notion and see if it solves the problem of the chaos of the conflicting drives. Indeed, Nietzsche saw that it is very healthy to have strong, conflicting drives battling for dominance within the psyche. Though this might produce suffering in the individual, it will make the person strong and creative and perhaps capable of producing original work.

Nietzsche maintained that the way to honor the uniqueness of each instinct without reducing it to another is to affirm the will to power of all instincts and allow them to develop momentary order out of the struggle. At any particular time one instinct might find expression while another is reacting to it. Nietzsche seemed to give no credit to a guiding "reality principle" as in Freud, where the instincts are modified through an understanding of the demands of external reality. In fact, Nietzsche disdained the socializing and refining forces of civilization viewing them as manifestations of the errors of the dominant European Christian culture. This is one reason why his hero, Zarathustra, drew back away from society and sought his truth alone. Nietzsche endorsed no Freudian compromise formation with civilization. He described a compromise formutation, but it was between the personal instincts themselves. Srong instincts are like the best of oliarchical administrations, where, the assertion of each individual instinct modifies and shapes the ultimate expression into a creative and novel response that will not overwhelm the person or lead to disaster.

The question is, with the diminishment of the ego and consciousness as the guiding and regulatory mechanism, can one trust that the struggle among the instincts alone will enable individuals to negotiate their lives in productive ways? Isn't giving over control to the instincts a form of regression and even psychosis? Haven't we won the conscious control of our lives over many years of evolution; how could it possibly be progressive to return to an unconscious state of merely living the instinctual? This is not how Nietsche imagined human development. He did not advocate a going back to the animal state but saw "man" as a bridge between the animal and the super-human, the Ubermensch. "Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman - a rope over an abyss."⁴²

Who is the Ubermensch? Kaufmann writes that the Ubermensch is the symbol of "the repudiation of any conformity to a single norn: [the] antithesis to mediocrity and stagnation."⁴³ Man, according to Nietzsche, must be overcome. In our self-overcoming we approach the Ubermensch, but the Ubermensch is always on the horizon. He represents the anticipated yet seemingly impossible condition of overcoming what we are, the fabrication of our selves out of the deceptions of our culture. This is why we cannot trust our ego or our consciousness because these are merely the result of civilizing and erroneous forces. We must appeal to an unconscious part of ourselves that can organize the drives in a project of self-fashioning, an ever-changing process of the expression of the one will to power that unites them. As Sass writes,

The Nietzschean hero would be a person who could hold all these rival perspectives in mind while still managing to act - a person who, while somehow remaining aware of the underlying flux in all its uncategorizable immediacy, as well as of the arbitrariness of all schemata or perspectives, could nevertheless, through froce of will, draw from himself a firm horizon in which to live.⁴⁴

As opposed to a will turned towards the past , raging against its fixity, resenting others and avenging itself by making others suffer, Nietzsche endorsed a will turned toward the future, a will that makes itself suffer in orger constantly to remake itself. This task off self-transcendence means that the self must free itself from the remnants and lies of cultural conditioning and say "no" to the values and metaphysics that one has assumed unreflectively, in order to say "yes" to the self and the cosmos. The image of the Ubermensch is a symbol of the capacity possible within us to move from a reactive and resentful state of powerlessness to a condition of self-creation and affirmation of life. Life in its multi-faceted and ever-changing reality stripped of cultural and religious overlays. Nietsche uses the image of Ariadne as the analog to this condition. She is able to release herself from the longing for the abandoning lover and arch-representative of the conventional "heroic" life, Theseus, in order to embrace Dionysus, the arch-representation of flux and change and organic growth. Socrates, in obeying the command of restraint of his quasi-divine daimon, epitomized for Nietzsche the prevailing use of reason and the life of the mind as a purely inhibitory agent, Dionysus, on the other hand, is characterized by fusion, spontaneity and the liberation of desire.

The fullest manifestation of the affirmation of life is in Nietzsche’s admonishment toward amor fati, love of one’s fate, "that one wants nothing to be different - not forward, not backward, not in all eternity."⁴⁵ This is the condition by which we can understand what Nietzsche means by his principle of the eternal return. I interpret this doctrine most usefully as a sort of moral imperative, such as, " I will seek to live my life and accept and embrace all that has happened to me and all that will happen to me, as if it were to reoccur, over and over, for ever." If I could do so, then I could truly say "yes" to my life and live solely from active and not reactive forces. As he writes in The Gay Science,

My doctrine teaches: live in such a way that you must desire to live again, this is your duty - you will live again in any case! He for whom striving procures the highest feeling, let him strive; he for whom repose procures the highest feeling, let him rest; he for whom belonging, following, and obeying procures the highest feeling, let him obey. Provided that he becomes aware of what procures the highest feeling, and that he shrinks back from nothing. Eternity depends upon it!⁴⁶

The key here is the highest feeling of completely being the author of one's life. The recognition that all is necessary, not in a fatalistc way, but in total affirmation of past, present and future.

In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche articulated the goal of this form of therapy: "You have it in your power to merge everything you have lived through - attempts, false starts, errors, delusions, passions, your love and your hope - into your goal, with nothing left over."⁴⁷ In this way individuals will not play victims and use their perceived powerlessness in the face of forces outside of themselves as excuses for resentment and inaction, rather all of one's life will be embraced as necessary in fulfulling one's special destiny. Fate and destiny imply a lack of free will and indeed in a number of passages, Nietzsche seemed to echo the following deterministic position:

To be sure, the acting man is caught in his illusion of volition; if the wheel of the world were to stand still for a moment and an omniscient, calculating mind were there to take advantage of the interuption, he would be able to tell into the farthest future of each being and describe every rut that wheel will foll upon. The acting man's delusion about himself, his assumption that free will exists, is part of the calculable mechanism.⁴⁸

Nietzsche struggled with the same paradox as Spinoza in that both men deny freewill, yet describe and defend an optimal way of being in the world. Both philosophers recognize that true freedom can be attained through acknowledging that one's life could be no different than it has been (freedom from guilt, resentment and regret) and that the future will be composed entirely of the elements of the past in a way that must unfold out of necessity (freedom from fear, rumination and anticipation). In truly adopting this attitude, individuals can transcend and overcome their worries and regrets and live in the indeterminate space of the present moment. This would be the final goal of Nietzschean therapy: not to promote and enhance determinate consciousness, but to allow for the guidance of the entirety of one's life - one's drives and failures and aspirations - which is much bigger than mere consciousness. This would create an opening for the possiblity of the Ubermensch to arise as a new creation, not based on the conditioning of the past. Zarathustra claimed that that the Ubermensch was only a possibility on the distant horizon of human kind but I think Nietzsche might agree that we all have a bit of this ubermensch within us and it is waiting in its cave to emerge when the time is ripe.


References

Ackerman, John. Nietzsche: A Frenzied Look. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990.
Blondel, Eric. "Nietzsche: Life as Metaphor" in Allison, David B., ed. The New Nietzsche. Allison, New York: Dell, 1977.
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. London: Oxford University Press, 1973.
Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Tomlinson, Hugh, trans. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.
Freud, Sigmund. Interpretation of Dreams. Strachey, James, trans. New York: Avon, 1965.
Hannah, Barbara. Jung: His life and work. New York: Putnam and Sons, 1976.
Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Miller, A.V., trans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche. Krell, David, trans. San Francisco: Harper, 1991.
Jones, Ernest. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. New York: Basic Books, 1953.
Jung, C. G. Two Essays in Analytic Psychology. Hull, R., trans. New York: Meridian, 1956.
Psychological Types. Baynes, H.G., trans. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974.
Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. New York: Vintage, 1968.
Klein, D.B. The Unconscious: Invention or Discovery? Santa Monica: Goodyear, 1977.
Klossowski, Pierre. Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. Smith, Daniel, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Levin, David Michael. "Psychopathology in the Epoch of Nihilism" in Levin, David Michael, ed. Pathologies of the Modern Self. New York: New York University Press, 1987.
Lowith, Karl. From Hegel to Nietzsche. Green, David, trans. New York: Anchor, 1967.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Hollingdale, R., trans. London: Penguin, 1976
__________________The Birth of Tragedy. Golffing, F., trans. New York: Anchor, 1956.
__________________The Genealogy of Morals. Golffing, F., trans. New York: Anchor, 1956.
__________________Human, all too Human. Faber, M. and Lehmann, S., trans. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.
__________________Joyful Wisdom. Common, T., trans. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1975.
__________________Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Cowan, M., trans. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1962.
__________________Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Hollingdale, R., trans. London: Penguin, 1971.
__________________Unfashionable Observations. Gray, R., trans. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1995.
Parkes, Graham. Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche's Psychology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Roazen, Paul. Freud and his Followers. New York: New American Library, 1974.
Robinson, Daniel. An intellectual History of Psychology. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986.
Sass, Louis. Madness and Modernism. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
Simmel, Georg. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Loiskandl, H., trans. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
Staten, Henry. Nietzsche's Voice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Yalom, Irvin. When Nietzsche Wept. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

Notes

1. # Jones, E. p. 154.
2. # Freud, S. The History of Psychoanalysis, p. 56.
3. # Bloom, H. (1966) The Anxiety of Influence, p. 89.
4. # Genealogy of Morals, p. 176.
5. # Ibid.
6. # On Moods
7. # Wagner in Bayreuth, p. 3.
8. # Daybreak, p. 119
9. # Parkes, G. Composing the Soul, p. 283.
10. # Ibid. p. 278.
11. # Wanderer and His Shadow, p. 6.
12. # Human, All Too Human, p. 270.
13. # Daybreak, p. 105.
14. # Ibid.
15. # Daybreak, p. 119.
16. # Kritische Studienausgabe, p. 70.
17. # On Truth and Lie in the Extramoral sense, p. 82.
18. # Kritische Studienausgabe, p. 11.
19. # "I have discovered for myself that ancient humanity and animality, indeed the entire primal age and past of all sentient being continues in me...You still carry around valuations of things originating in the passions and loves of former centuries. In every feeling, in every sense impression there is a piece of [this] ancient love," The Joyful Science, p. 54.
20. # Ibid., p. 119.
21. # Ibid. p. 141.
22. # Parkes. op. cit. p. 305.
23. # Beyond Good and Evil, p. 17.
24. # Deleuze. Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 40-41.
25. # Joyful Wisdom, p. 47.
26. # The Antichrist, p. 14.
27. # Ibid.
28. # Ibid.
29. # Staten, H. Nietzsche's Voice, p. 41.
30. # Genealogy of Morals, p. 16.
31. # Nietzsche Contra Wagner, Epilogue, p.2.
32. # Genealogy of Morals, p. 167
33. # Staten. op. cit. p. 50.
34. # Ecce Homo, 78.
35. # Blondel, E. Nietzsche: Life as Metaphor, p. 156-7.
36. # Genealogy of Morals, 19.
37. # see Sass (1982) and Levin (1987).
38. # Sass, p. 31.
39. # Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, . 27.
40. # Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. I, p. 60.
41. # Beyond Good and Evil, p. 36.
42. # Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p.3.
43. # Kaufmann, p. 309.
44. # Sass, p. 153.
45. # Ecce Homo, sec. II:10.
46. # The Gay Science, sec. 126.
47. # Human, All Too Human, sec. 292.
48. # Ibid, sec. 106.

The Re-evaluation of Our Values: A Nietzschean Approach to Philosophical Counseling

David O'Donaghue, Psy.D.

It is quite common in personal counseling situations for clients to question standards of perfection, both in the realm of accomplishment and morality, by which they judge themselves. These standards can be re-evaluated as being too lax, leading to indolence and unproductiveness, or too severe leading to low self-esteem, depression and stress. If clients can listen to the inner voice of judgment and conscience with some critical distance and can determine whether its dictates are realistic and attainable, they are in a better position to change the content of the inner imperatives to be more adaptive to their current situation. Since this is pretty standard fare among psychotherapists, the question arises: Is there a special contribution philosophical counseling can make to this process of reviewing one's ethical standards? Friedrich Nietzsche who "traverse(s) the range of human values and value-feelings and look(s) with sundry eyes and consciences" at all values, can provide us with one example of a philosopher embarking on this therapeutic task. He writes, as a philosopher, in the Genealogy of Morals:

We need a critique of all moral values; the intrinsic worth of these values must, first of all, be called into question. To this end we need to know the conditions from which those values have sprung and how they were developed and changed: morality as consequence, symptom, mask, sickness, misunderstanding; but also, morality as cause, remedy, stimulant, inhibition and poison.

In this paper, I propose to translate Nietzsche's general critique of nineteenth century European morality into a method of working with clients who are willing to submit their personal, taken-for-granted values to a serious critique within the counseling context. I will use many passages from Nietzsche's evocative prose and pair them with the necessary therapeutic considerations to be relevant to philosophical counseling. The rigor and challenge of this form of counseling might not be appropriate in psychological therapy, and so may best be applied among those practicing philosophy in counseling.

Nietzsche asserted that the common morality preached in the Christianized European world affirmed the weakness, mediocrity, and ineffectiveness of a "herd mentality" which sacrificed genius and creativity for the sake of maintaining and protecting the general, low-level conformity of the majority of the human population. He was no lover of democracy and saw social levelers as representing a backward tendency in an overall evolutionary process that strives to create a stronger, more vital human species. Nietzsche takes the task of morality to be the improvement, not of the entire human race or even individuals per se, but of certain human characteristics which will bring forth a superior culture, not by appealing to the slow gropings of the masses, but in building a set of noble leaders, thinkers, and artists who will change society more quickly through the assertion of their will to power. We can see how this would appeal to the National Socialists and indeed, through the machinations and creative editing of Nietzsche’s writings by his sister, Frau Foster-Nietzsche, efforts were made to make Nietzsche the representative philosopher of the Reich. Though Walter Kauffmann and others have taken great pains in showing that Nietzsche was himself very critical of German nationalism and not particularly anti-Semitic, I think we should still ask about the overall political ramifications of Nietzsche’s theory, which I will address towards the end of my paper.

On the personal counseling level, Nietzsche’s criticism of the "levelers" can be taken as the efforts we make to quell our own uniqueness in the interests of the herd, whether the herd is particularly well-informed and progressive or not. Chances are, the leveling of our own capabilities in the interests of conformity to Das Man, or the they that doesn’t really exist, as Heidegger puts it, works negative in two directions: First it truncates our own self-expression and actualization and secondly it may abort important (though unpopular) contributions we may be able to make to the herd. Nietzsche’s ethic is noble as opposed to democratic. It is oriented toward strengthening the assertion of our personal will, rather than tempering the will to be more modest, selfless or yielding. For these traits Nietzsche blamed the ascetic ideal of Christianity. Like Freud, after him, Nietzsche saw that when instincts are not directly expressed outwardly they are turned against the self, as he expresses in an aphorism in Beyond Good And Evil: "Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself." Unlike Freud, he did not see the suppression of instincts as a sacrifice we need to make in order to live in a civilized world.

Nietzsche claimed that the only way to understand the nature of morality was to answer the following question, "Under what conditions did man construct the value judgments good and evil?" Let us briefly trace the development of morality as he saw it. Nietzsche imagines in his myth of origins that human kind roamed the earth freely expressing their dominance over other animals and others of their species. That certain noble values developed that were characteristic of the success in this process of domination and expression of the will to power. These were the values that were aspired to by everyone to varying degrees of success. This version of "natural man" is not too far off from Hobbes constant warfare among competing assertions of domination. But whereas, Hobbes saw this as a nightmare from which the hierarchical control of a strong monarchy could rescue us. Nietzsche saw this as an advantageous condition that promoted the best qualities of the species while weeding out the weaker traits. (We will leave alone here the fact that Nietzsche himself was a sickly individual and that he probably depended on certain peaceful conditions to write that would not have been possible in a constant battle of the survival of the fittest.) Morality went astray, according to Nietzsche, with the development of the priests, who were powerful intellectually but not physically. The manner in which this class of individuals could assert its will to power was to invert the table of values so that the weak were morally superior to the strong and the downtrodden blessed above those in power. He specifically saw the resentment of the Jews with the loss of their kingdom, first to the Babylonians and then to the Romans, as inculcating this ethic of resentment. Since they were inferior politically to their conquerors, the Jews needed to develop a means of being morally superior to them. They did this through what Nietzsche called a "slave morality" that encouraged meekness and docility and love of one’s enemy, which Nietzsche saw as the vilest from of hatred:

Priests are the most evil enemies to have...because they are the most impotent. It is their impotence which makes their hatred so violent and sinister, so cerebral and poisonous. The greatest haters in history - but also the most intelligent haters - have been priests.

Nietzsche has a very ambivalent relationship with the priest cast, the Jews, as he saw them. He both saw them as responsible for subverting morality into inculcating the opposite set of values than those that would improve the human species, and he found that "human history would be a dull and stupid thing without the intelligence furnished by its impotence." He also sees the morality of Christianity as just a smooth continuation of this priestly tradition and there is much to question as to his doing justice to either the advent of Christianity or how he presents the Jewish mentality. But I take this as a myth of origin and would put aside questions of historical accuracy and view it as a working fiction (like the Oedipal complex) and see if it bears fruit in human advancement and liberation.

So, if we turn again to the clinical situation, how can we translate Nietzsche’s story into useful guidelines for counseling? Nietzsche believed that we are beset by a multitude of drives that vie for power and expression within the psyche. Unlike Freud, who limited the basic drives to two: the sexual and the aggressive, and more like Jung, who had a conception of a constellation of numerous drives in the psyche, Nietzsche conceived of an entire host of drives: the scientific drive, the mythological drive, the art drive, the drive for knowledge, even the seasonal Spring drive, all clamoring for attention and satisfaction. This is parallel to the metaphor of the battle for the domination of strong individuals in Nietzsche’s vision of the primal state. He describes the battle among the drives intrapsychically in the following description of Wagner:

Each of his drives strove into the immeasurable, and each of his talents - from joy in its own existence - wanted to tear itself away from the others to attain its own satisfaction; the greater their abundance, the greater was the tumult and the greater their hostility when they cross each other.

Nietzsche would claim that the competition between drives strengthens the individual and again, unlike Freud, he did not accept that these drives needed to be sublimated in the interests of consistency and social adaptation. He claimed that, though the truly gifted individual will struggle with a variety of strong drives within and therefore be prone to much suffering, he or she will be able to produce from this rich array of conflicting drives great work. Nietzsche seems to suggest that conflicting drives actually add to the creative fire and do not distract from it or lead to mutual annihilation. If one can give room to the drives and allow them to find their own equilibrium, one can have access to one’s particular genius and thereby rise above the dull standards of the herd. The battle is primarily an inner one, and those that see Nietzsche as advocating control and domination over others, I believe, misunderstand him. Perhaps a better metaphor than battle of the instincts is the dance. He writes in Human, All Too Human, "...dancing is not the same thing as staggering wearily back and forth between different impulses. High culture will resemble a daring dance, requiring much strength and flexibility."

The metaphor of the "slave mentality" could represent the a condition in which clients blame and resent others for the particular situation they find themselves. Nietzsche has a vision of the goal of this kind of counseling to enable clients to "love their fate," amor fati. When one can truly embrace one’s situation and not blame others or oneself for it, but truly embrace it as both necessary and willed, then one has the experience of the eternal return which means that one could will to live this moment over and over for all eternity. To live in this state would be true enlightenment and something few of us could sustain for very long. Perhaps a good statement of the goal of this form of philosophical counseling would be the shift from a reactionary condition of externalized blame and resentment toward an active condition in which one can fully embrace the multiplicity of one’s inner drives and completely accept one’s facticity, one’s fate.

The interiorization of mankind that was brought about by the blockage to outward instinctual expression is the source of what Nietzsche conceived of as the soul. The interior life serves the function of discharging instinctual energies but also splits the forces of the personality into multiple competing forces. Though Nietzsche believed in giving full reign to these forces he ultimately did see the need for the nobler, more assertive and courageous characteristics to come to the fore and dominate in the external choices and actions taken by an individual. This is what Nietzsche referred to as "self-overcoming:" the process by which one can overcome the baser instincts to rise even above the merely human in aspiring to the ubermensch, or the being which even transcends the present normal human condition. Nietzsche thought that the ubermensch was an ideal of a race of superior humans that, at this point, can only be aspired to. It is this small group of superior human beings that human evolution must depend and not on the evolution of the species in general. That is why Nietzsche is often accused of being an elitist, a label, I think he would be proud of. The counseling parallel here might be the idea of a superior part of the self that is beyond the ego and can function as an ego ideal or guide in the aspirations of personal growth. We must be careful, however, to not ascribe any metaphysical or spiritual qualities to this higher self, if we are to stay true to Nietzsche's conceptualization of the ubermensch. The ubermensch acts from his own creative impulses beyond considerations of good and evil.

This autonomous, more than moral individual (the terms autonomous and moral are mutually exclusive) has developed his own, independent, long-range will, which dares to make promises: he has the proud and vigorous consciousness of what he has achieved, a sense of power and freedom, of absolute accomplishment.

Clients in philosophical counseling goes through the process of evaluating the genealogy of their morals by taking a hard look at the source and function of the voice of conscience within them. Freud did much the same thing when he determined that much of standard morality is based on the unconscious internalization of parental messages in order, in an infantile condition, to preserve the parents love. These massages get objectified in moral percepts and their source gets buried in the part of the unconscious Freud called the superego. He would also try to help patients become liberated from the rigid demands and standards of these internalized messages by bringing early memories, particularly of parental chastisement, out in analysis, so that it no longer plays an unconscious punitive role in the current life of the patient. Nietzsche did this on a societal scale by seeing that certain configurations in culture have brought about the internalizations of self-attack. It seems appropriate that the philosophical counselor can both look for the source of clients' values in parental messages and in taken-for-granted societal forms. Both deconstructions can aid in the clients' liberation from their unreflected values.

It may seem for a time in the counseling process that clients will feel a deep sense of nihilism, that is, a feeling that all standards and values are meaningless. Nietzsche recognized this as a grave danger in his therapeutics. He calls this the death of God, but nihilism need not be only restricted to religious nonbelief but can also refer to the exposing of the history of morals as a story of the justification of the strong against the weak (as in the case of the Sophist Protagoras and Foucault) or in Nietzsche’s particular case, the weak (i.e., the priest cast) against the strong. A person can easily experience a sort of free-fall into despair and depression when the foundations of one's values are undermined. How can one continue to live in a world that one sees as built upon the values imposed by motives of power and control. Life itself shows itself to be an arena of manipulation and seduction, full of untruths and errors, some devised intentionally to control and suppress, other unconsciously accepted by the herd and accepted as universal. Nihilism has been seen by many contemporary thinkers as the major malady of this last century.

Louis Sass, in his excellent book critiquing contemporary life, Madness and Modernism, described that nihilism can be experienced in two ways:

as a vertiginous sense of power inherent in seeing reality as but a figment of one’s own, all powerful self: or as a despairing recognition of the ultimate meaninglessness and absurdity of the human world, a succumbing to what Nietzsche called "the great bloodsucker, the spider skepticism.

In his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche sought a means by which we can accept and embrace the world, devoid of its inherent values and meaning, by appealing to the Dionysian drive within us. Dionysu is the Greek God of wine, inebriation and madness, and most importantly the dissolution of personal boundaries in the experience of the ever-flowing changeable state of existence in which nothing remains the same and there is no firm ground that remains constant. This condition is well described by Hegel in The Phenomenology of Spirit: "The true is thus the Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk; yet because each member collapses as soon as he drops out, the revel is just as much transparent and simple repose." Through the god Dionysus the ancient Greeks recognized the ultimate importance of submitting to the multiplicity of manifestations of life through the drives and letting go of the need to control or contain them. But, as Nietzsche pointed out, the Greeks also paired Dionysus with Apollo, the god of order and balance, and thus acknowledged that the psyche must harmonize the forces of dissolution with the forces of form and order.

The wisdom in this, from the counseling point of view, is that sometimes our client’s need to let go of control and rigid maintenance of their organized lives in order to let transformative energies work on them. Sometimes clients’ ethical systems are a cage that too tightly binds their potentials. Nietzsche was a firm believer that in order to truly express our independence and individualized selves we need to let go of the moral legacy of parents, church and state in order to determine our own set of values that relate to our personal existences, so that we, in Kantian terms, become our own law givers. We do not appeal to some universal maxim for our categorical imperative, but we, nevertheless, live according strictly to the law that we give ourselves, which enables us to be live up to our full potential. This is the noble ethics; a high standard we struggle to live up to, even if it is self imposed. That is why Nietzsche stressed that rising to the ubermensch was a personal battle within the individual with the higher, more vital and accomplishing drives dominating the lower more passive and reactive drives. To be active and self-creative is the goal in Nietzschian therapy, by overcoming resentment and blaming and reactivity to external forces. If we cannot trust that the standard of meaning lies above us, so that we need only submit passively to it, then we must create the standard ourselves and live according to our self-created values and purposes. As Sartre said, we must tolerate our freedom.

I have tried to present what I might imagine a Nietzschian form of philosophical counseling to be. I think there are myriads of options of philosophers throughout the ages that can be adapted to counseling work. I think there are some serious considerations to address with this form of counseling and I would like to bring those up in the form of a few questions that I hope we can discuss further during our question and answer period.

1. Nietzsche’s approach is highly individualized and seems to disdain considerations of collective values. Is this a responsible position to take in our contemporary world where it is becoming quite evident that our very survival will depend on the restraining of personal self-aggrandizement and mutual cooperation. Is there a way to recognize Nietzsche’s continued relevance and importance in light of the need for local and global cooperation? Given the current situation, why are more books written about Nietzsche at this time than ever before?

2. Do you think it is possible to really acknowledge and express all our drives in some fashion that will not lead us into a chaotic, primitive, less productive state? Isn’t Freud ultimately correct in saying that some repression of primal drives is necessary in order for meaningful and productive work to be accomplished? How would you conceive of living out all your drives in a creative fashion that would lead to genius? Is Nietzsche hedging and contradicting himself when he claims that we must overcome ourselves in order to rise to our higher humanity. This, it seems to me, entails the suppressing of lower instincts in favor of higher one’s and isn’t this just like what psychoanalysis and the church and the state claim we must do as well?

3. Nietzsche was not value free himself, nor did he ever claim to be. He wished for one set of values (the strong, manly, courageous, warlike, aggressive, and creative) to replace the European Christian values of his time (mildness, compassion, non-violence, docileness, nonassertiveness). His perspectivalism recognized that all values are determined by cultural circumstance, his included. I would maintain that Europe or anywhere else for that matter was not functioning on the Christian values that he so maligned, but does his appeal to an earlier, more violent and brutal state of morality of the strong asserting themselves among equals and virtually ignoring the claims of the weak, have any appeal at all today? If we were to take this perspective solely intrapsychically we would support and encourage our strong assertive drives to come to the fore over own reactive, passive and resentful drives. Can this be a way to glean the wisdom from Nietzsche without necessary looking at how the world would be if Nietzsche’s will to power was played out in an unrestrained manner.

4. Is there a danger in running headlong into a critique of our client’s system of values? Why? What would one need to do to allay the difficulties in this bold approach? Do the aspirations of the field of philosophical counseling as opposed to psychological counseling mitigate these concerns? Do we still have some responsibility to the general well-being of our clients, no matter what form of counseling we embark upon?

After having shared my concerns and critique of Nietzsche’s approach via these questions I would like to conclude with a kinder and gentler version of Nietzsche. Friedrich Nietzsche was a very complex individual. He struggled with his own illness, loneliness and sense of isolation and, if we were to psychoanalyze him a bit, we might say that all his talk of the strong, manly, violent assertiveness in his writing is the way that he compensated and denied the reality of his own condition. Be that as it may, we still read him and, judging from the books and articles published about him, he is more popular today, than ever before. So, he must carry some relevant and important wisdom for us in our contemporary world. I’d like to suggest that this centers around the simple admonishment to us to rise up against the forces of oppression, whether those be internal or external, and have the courage to express and produce from that place which is most authentic within us. As he writes in Unfashionable Observations:

Each of us bears within himself a productive uniqueness as the kernel of his being, and when he becomes conscious of this uniqueness, a strange aura - this aura of the unusual - surrounds him....What have you up to now truly loved, what attracted your soul, what dominated it whilesimultaneously making it happy? Place this series of revered objects before you, and perhaps their nature and their sequence will reveal to you a law, the fundamental law of your authentic self. compare these objects, observe how one completes, expands, surpasses, transfigures the others, how they form a stepladder on which until now you have climbed up to yourself; for your true being does not lie deeply within you, but rather immeasurably high above you, or at least above what you commonly take to be your ego...No one can build for you the bridge upon which you alone must cross the stream of life, no one but you alone. To be sure, there are countless paths and bridges and demigods, that want to carry you through the stream, but only at the price of your self; you would pawn and lose your self. There is one single path in this world on which no one but you can travel. Where does it lead? Do not ask, just take it.

References

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Parkes, Graham. Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche's Psychology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
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