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common presumptions about subjectivity and the self, using the notion of drives to
stimulate the critical engagement he is calling for. Next, we examine how Nietzsche
maintains a commitment to the notion of self-cultivation in Dawn, even despite his
skeptical remarks on subjectivity and the self. In light of this, we consider how
Nietzsche’s undermining of such presumptions leads him to make an important
distinction between the subjectivity of an agent shaped by customary morality, and
that of a free-spirited ethical agent.4 Our account includes attention to some sources
of Nietzsche’s thinking on subjectivity and the self in Dawn, in order to reinforce the
point that Nietzsche’s remarks on subjectivity and the self are made fundamentally
for critical-ethical purposes: Nietzsche’s promotion of the conditions for ongoing
development and self-cultivation of free-spirited ethical agency requires exposure
of the presumptions that support customary moral agency.
One of the key presumptions that Nietzsche claims we need to abandon is belief
in the immortality of the soul (D 501).5 Understanding souls as mortal, he thinks,
provides substantial advantages for the passion of knowledge and hence for our
experimental pursuit of understanding: from a mortal perspective, “everything is
less important” (D 501). Employing mortality as a framework for knowledge means
that we can afford to make mistakes, and to treat what we are doing as provisional,
instead of choking down half-formed ideas as if they were truths, which Nietzsche
suggests is what we currently tend to do (D 501). Thinking of the soul purely in
mortal terms means that humans are no longer playing a zero-sum game in which
they either choose well while alive and enjoy a glorious afterlife, or choose poorly
while alive and endure an eternity of agony and torment. Nietzsche’s claim in
Dawn 501 is prefaced by a detailed story that he provides concerning the effect of
Christian morality on subjectivity and individual subjects, which we discussed in
greater depth in Chapter 3. Briefly to reiterate two key points. First, Nietzsche contends that doctrines of pure spirituality teach us to “despise, ignore, or torment the
body” and to “torment and despise oneself” on account of all our drives (D 39).
Second, he suggests that Christianity powerfully affects subject development: as he
puts it, Christianity has “chiseled out” fine human social figures, and the “powerful
beauty and refinement of the princes of the church” and indeed their “pride in
obedience” operate as marks of, and demonstrations of the truth of, the church to
the people (D 60). The mechanism by which the chiseling out and “complete spiritualization” of subjects occurs operates according to what Nietzsche calls the ebb
and flow of two kinds of happiness: “the feeling of power and the feeling of surrender” (D 60). As Nietzsche points out in a later aphorism, one effect of this on
our understanding of ourselves and of our bodies is ignorance: it means that “we
know so little” of the “whole contingent nature of the machine” (D 86). Another
effect of complete spiritualization is the placing of a tremendous interpretative
burden onto Christians; Nietzsche provides the figure of Pascal as an example: “Oh
what an unfortunate interpreter! How he has to twist and torture his system! How
he has to twist and torture himself so as to stay in the right!” (D 86). A Christian
Nietzsche on Subjectivity
such as Pascal, according to Nietzsche, must perform profoundly awkward intellectual contortions in order to maintain a spiritualized understanding of bodily
functions — by which Nietzsche specifies anything that “stems from the stomach,
entrails, heartbeat, nerves, gall, semen” — as moral and religious phenomena
(D 86). Nietzsche points out that these contortions are inimical to self-understanding,
as well as to our flourishing.
According to Nietzsche, a second fundamental presumption about the self
involves the relationship between drives and intellect. In Dawn 109, Nietzsche
provides an inquiry into the “ultimate motive” of self-mastery and moderation, in
which he identifies and isolates six different methods for combating the intensity
or vehemence of a drive. The six methods are:
i) Avoiding opportunities for the drive’s gratification and causing it to weaken
and even wither away through long periods of abstinence.
ii) Imposing on oneself a tightly regulated regimen of gratification in which the
drive is subsumed under some rule and enclosed within its ebb and flow
within fixed time periods — here one gains intervals during which the drive
no longer intrudes.
iii) One can give oneself over to wild, uncontrolled gratification of the drive so as
to become satiated with it and through this “cultivated disgust” gain control
over it.
iv) Through in intellectual ploy in which one yokes the gratification tightly to an
extremely distressing idea — such as shame, wounded pride, or dire consequences — where, and after some practice, the idea of gratification will come
itself to be experienced as distressing.
v) One can seek to dislocate one’s energy resources by imposing some difficult
and strenuous task on oneself or by deliberately subjecting oneself to new
stimulants and pleasures, thus directing thoughts and energy into other
channels.
vi) Through general debilitation and exhaustion, which is an extreme measure
requiring the debilitation of the one’s whole physical and spiritual
constitution.
Having identified these six methods, Nietzsche points out that when we combat
the vehemence drive in one of these ways, our wanting to do so is not something
within our control, as we often presume:
On the contrary, in this whole process our intellect is manifestly only the
blind tool of another drive that is the rival of the one tormenting us with its
vehemence: be it the drive for quietude, fear of shame and other evil consequences, or love. Whereas “we” believe ourselves to be complaining about
the vehemence of a drive, it is, at bottom, one drive that is complaining about
another (D 109)
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This claim, and the argument in Dawn 109 overall, commits Nietzsche to the view
in this text that the self is a battleground of different drives, and that the intellect
is not the only important facet of being a subject, as spiritualization has prompted
us to imagine.
A third and related presumption that compounds our misunderstanding of the
subject is language, and the prejudices on which language is based.6 These reinforce the mistaken simple view that the intellect is the seat of the self, and that the
self is unified. Nietzsche draws attention to the problem of language as misleading when he complains that “words get in our way” because “perpetually petrified” words pose impediments to “every act of knowledge” instead of providing us
with the means to developing solutions (D 47). In Dawn 115, Nietzsche expands
on this complaint by noting that words exist only for superlative degrees of processes and drives. As he claims, when words are not available to us, we tend not to
engage any longer in precise observation: “[w]rath, hate, love, compassion, joy,
pain,” and so on are all names for extreme states, while the milder middle degrees,
as well as the lower ones that are constantly in play, “elude us” (D 115). Hence, for
Nietzsche, language reinforces the presumption that subjects are good readers or
interpreters of themselves and that subjects have access to anything remotely
resembling transparent self-knowledge:
We are none of us what we appear to be solely in those states for which we
have consciousness and words — and hence praise and censure; we misconstrue ourselves according to these cruder outbursts, which are the only
ones we register; we draw a conclusion from material in which the exceptions outweigh the rule, we misread ourselves in this seemingly clearest
block print of the Self (D 115)
The particular irony here is that our opinions and valuations of ourselves bring us
through the mistaken route that becomes our so-called “ego” [Ich], and collaborate
“in the formation of our character and destiny [Schicksal]” (D 115).7 Yet we should
not overlook how Nietzsche also points out that, “it is precisely they [words] that
weave the web of our character and our destiny” (D 115). He later reinforces this
same point when he notes that we express our thoughts in those words that “lie
ready to hand,” and suggests further that, “we have at every moment only that very
thought for which we have ready to hand the words that are roughly capable of
expressing it” (D 257).8 As we will see later on, a complex problem is raised by this
concerning Nietzsche’s tackling of presumptions about the effect of language on
our knowledge of the self. We will return to this problem later in this chapter.
A fourth presumption concerns self-knowledge. Nietzsche argues that from earliest times to the present day, the most difficult thing for human beings to comprehend
has been their ignorance of themselves (D 116). The oldest kind of realism, he says,
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is the kind of moral and metaphysical realism we encounter in Schopenhauer, which
holds that each one of us is a competent and perfectly moral judge that exhibits an
exact knowledge of good and evil. While we think we know how human action
comes about in every case, Nietzsche points out that this is an age-old delusion,
based on the inherited prejudice that “God sees into the heart,” or that the doer can
adequately reflect upon their deeds and thereby know them clearly:
“I know what I want, what I’ve done, I’m free and take responsibility for
it, I hold others responsible, I can call by name all ethical possibilities and
all inner motives that exist in the face of an action; no matter how you
might act — in whatever situation I’ll understand myself and you all!”
That’s how everyone used to think, that’s how everyone more or less still
thinks today. (D 116)
Holding that the proper or correct action needs to follow on from knowledge of
what is appropriate is a deep-seated prejudice of ours. Nietzsche encourages his
readers to consider that the “terrifying truth” is that whatever we can know about
a deed never suffices to guarantee its being carried out, and that there is an enormous chasm separating knowledge from specific actions. According to Nietzsche,
it has taken centuries for humankind to learn that external things are not what
they appear to be, and we still have much to learn with regard to the domain of
“inner things” or the “inner world”: “[m]oral actions are, in truth, ‘something
other’ than moral truths … and all actions are essentially unknown” (D 116)
Physiology is an important factor in Nietzsche’s assessment of the presumptions we have about the self. We already saw that Nietzsche claims that spiritualization obscures the significance of the body by teaching us to “despise, ignore, or
torment” it (D 39). In an aphorism entitled “In prison,” Nietzsche extends this
point, noting how it might seem disappointing to us that human sensation and
perception are constituted by specific and limited horizons, meaning that we are
bound and finite in what we can do and know (D 117). What may seem to be the
prison of the body sets a limit on our perceptual experiences of the world:
It is according to these horizons, within which our senses enclose each of
us as if behind prison walls, that we now measure the world, we call this
thing near and that distant, this thing large and that small, this thing hard
and that soft: this measuring we call perception — and all of it, each and
every bit, are errors through and through! (D 117)
Each of our senses, Nietzsche claims, enclose us “as if behind prison
walls” — hence, we measure the world according to the limits of the senses, and
we call this measuring “perception” (D 117). Added to this, Nietzsche thinks that
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habituation forms a key part of how the experience of perception reinforces the
presumption that there is a unified “knower” of a set of clearly and directly knowable facts about things in the world as well as ourselves:
The habits of our senses have woven us into perception’s wile and guile: it,
in turn, is the foundation for all our judgements and forms of “knowledge” — there is no escape whatsoever, no underused or underhanded way
into the real world! We hang within our web, we spiders, and no matter
what we capture in it, we can capture nothing whatsoever other than what
allows itself to be captured precisely in our web (D 117)
Nietzsche further considers that the effect of perception on knowing is so significant that while, on the one hand, if we had different eyes, ones more sensitive to
proximity, humans would appear monstrously tall or even immeasurable to us; on
the other hand, organs could be imagined on a scale whereby entire solar systems
would be perceived as contracted and constricted as if a single cell (D 117). Sensory
perception, then, poses a particular kind of constraint on human animals.9
Nietzsche extends this insight on the constraints of perception in Dawn 117
by examining the example of a neighbor (D 118). He asks what we comprehend
of the neighbor other than their boundaries, which, as he points out, the neighbor inscribes themselves and impresses on us. The answer is that, according to
Nietzsche, the only thing we understand about the neighbor is the “alteration
in us of which he is the cause” (D 118). This is because our knowledge of the
neighbor “resembles a formed hollow space … we mold him into a satellite of
our own system” (D 118). What this example shows us is that our knowledge of
the other, like our knowledge of ourselves, is far more limited and uncertain
that we tend to assume. When he suggests that we inhabit a world of phantoms,
“[i]nverted, topsy-turvy, empty world, dreamed full and upright nonetheless,”
what Nietzsche is showing is not that knowledge is impossible but that the passion of knowledge has been curtailed by the belief that knowledge derived
from the body or from perception is problematic because it is transient and
incomplete (D 118).
In Dawn 119, one of the longest aphorisms of Dawn, and one of the sections
best known as an example of Nietzsche’s skepticism about the unified subject,
Nietzsche further explores the drives and notes that no matter how much we
struggle for self-knowledge, nothing is more incomplete to us than the image of
the totality of our drives. We cannot call our cruder drives by name; their number
and strength, their play and counter play, and most of all what Nietzsche calls the
laws of their “alimentation” remain completely unknown to us:
This alimentation thus becomes the work of chance: our daily experiences
toss willy-nilly to this drive or that drive some prey or other which it seizes
greedily, but the whole coming and going of these events exists completely
Nietzsche on Subjectivity
apart from any meaningful connection to the alimentary needs of the sum
drives: so that the result will always be two-fold: the starving and stunting
of some drives and the overstuffing of others (D 119)
Our perceptions and experiences, then, are types of nourishment; the problem is
that there is lack of understanding on our part of this. Nietzsche appeals to the
image of the polyp in providing a detailed analysis of how our self-knowledge is
unproblematically incomplete, owing to our necessarily partial knowledge of the
drives that constitute subjectivity:
With every moment of our lives some of the polyp-arms [Polypenarme] of
our being grow and others dry up, depending on the nourishment that the
moment does or does not supply. As stated earlier, all our experiences are,
in this sense, types of nourishment [der Nahrung] — seeds sown, however,
with a blind hand devoid of any knowledge as to who hungers and who
already has abundance (D 119)
George J. Stack and Brian Domino have both suggested that the work of Julien
Offray De La Mettrie informs Nietzsche’s use of the polyp in this aphorism.10 In
Man–Machine, La Mettrie’s discussion of Tremblay’s auto-regenerative polyp
appears first in a discussion of health, which La Mettrie suggests is required for
unbelief as well as for inquiry that grows out of unbelief. The polyp as an autoregenerating organism is used as an example of how causality, if understood as a
part of nature, need depend neither on chance nor on God, and how natural causality can thus be separated out from these two mistaken factors in our efforts to
explain phenomena.11 The polyp is also used in a broader sense, as an illustration of
how coming to know the “weight of the Universe,” as La Mettrie puts it, “will not
affect” a true atheist negatively, rather than this weight of knowledge “crushing”
the atheist as some might expect.12 The polyp next appears as part of a comment by
La Mettrie on the existence of the soul, in which La Mettrie criticizes the view that
the soul “is generally spread throughout the body” and attributes this view (which,
as he notes, the polyp might seem to support, but in fact does not) to unwise use of
“obscure and meaningless” language.13 Thus Nietzsche’s use of La Mettrian polyp
imagery reinforces the connection we have shown that Nietzsche draws between
presumptions about the self and the possibility of knowledge based on language,
and presumptions that are based on ignorance (willful or not) of biology.
What emerges when we become aware of the workings of these presumptions
and willing to question them is a better sense of the extent to which human animals are contingent:
as a consequence of this contingent alimentation of the parts, the whole,
the fully-grown polyp turns out to be a creature no less contingent
[Zufälliges] than its maturation (D 119)
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In light of Nietzsche’s consistent emphasis on the importance of transience or
contingency, notice that any “gardener” we might be tempted to read into this
aphorism as the owner of the “hand” Nietzsche mentions is also, like us, “blind”
and “devoid of knowledge” about the needs that organisms have with regard to
their nourishment. Nietzsche notes that this theater of cruelty of chance and
experience that constitutes the self would be more transparent to us if all of the
drives wanted to take matters as seriously as does the drive for hunger (D 119).
In the next part of Dawn 119, Nietzsche develops an insight onto our dreams
and how they serve to compensate the drives for a contingent absence of nourishment during the day. One dream may be full of tenderness and tears, another on
a different day playful and high-spirited, while other ones may be adventurous or
full of melancholy. It is through invention in dreams — make-believe — that we
discharge our drives and facilitate their free play. According to Nietzsche here,
dreams are free and arbitrary interpretations of our nerve impulses during sleep,
as well as of movements of blood and intestines, of the pressure of an arm or of
the bedclothes, of the sounds from a bell tower, and so on. Given that this “text,”
as Nietzsche calls it, remains pretty much the same from evening to evening, he
wonders why it elicits different commentary. His answer is that the “make-
believing faculty” of reason [die dichtende Vernunft] is imagining divergent causes
for the same nerve impulse, in accordance with the fact that different drives seek
to gratify themselves. One day a particular drive is at “high tide,” while on another
day a different drive is resurgent. As Nietzsche points out, in contrast to dreaming,
our waking lives do not enjoy the same “freedom of interpretation,” since it is less
poetic and unbridled. Nevertheless, this should not serve to deceive us: when we
are in a waking state our drives “do nothing but interpret nerve impulses” and
“ascribe ‘causes’ to them” in accordance with the needs of our drives (D 119).
Hence, Nietzsche contends that there is no “essential” difference between waking
and dreaming states; this suggests the possibility that consciousness may be
nothing more than a “fantastical commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable,
yet felt text” (D 119).14
Nietzsche concludes this aphorism by suggesting that to experience is to make
believe or invent; however, we should not simply assume that we are the authors
or agents of our own experiences, since we are subject to the play of drives
(D 119). This point is underlined by the witticism contained in the next, short
aphorism:
To reassure the sceptic. — “I have no idea what I’m doing! I have no idea
what I should do!” You are right, but make no mistake about it: you are
being done! moment by every moment! Humanity has, through all ages,
confused the active and the passive, it is its everlasting grammatical
blunder (D 120)
Nietzsche on Subjectivity
Nietzsche questions the deep-seated assumption that we are self-willed agents
and with sufficient causally effective free will to control our own destiny; giving
examples such as saying we want the sun to rise after it has risen, or that we want
a wheel to roll when we cannot stop it from rolling, or that a person thrown down
in a wrestling match claims they want to lie there, he notes that, while we laugh
at such things, we are not acting differently when we use the construction “I want”
(D 124). Hence, he thinks that if we pay proper attention to a phrase such as
“I want,” it shows up another presumption on our part: that there is indeed always
a causal connection between willing and action, as we tend to believe.15
Nietzsche explains that the presumptuous desire to be entirely our own author
has its psychological roots in a basically narcissistic desire to experience oneself as
all-powerful.16 He draws on the myth of Oedipus to make this point:
You wish to take responsibility for everything! Only not for your dreams!
What miserable frailty, what poverty in the courage of your convictions!
Nothing is more your own than your dreams! Nothing more your work!
Content, form, duration, actor, spectator — in these comedies you yourselves are everything! And this is just the place in yourselves you shun and
are ashamed of, and even Oedipus, the wise Oedipus, knew how to derive
consolation from the idea that we cannot do anything about what it is we
dream! I conclude from this: that the vast majority of human beings must
be aware that they have abhorrent dreams. Were it otherwise: how greatly
this nocturnal poeticizing would have been plundered to bolster human
arrogance! — Do I have to add that wise Oedipus was right, that we really
aren’t responsible for our dreams, but no more for our waking hours either,
and that the doctrine of free will has as its mother and father human pride
and the human feeling of power? (D 128)
As Michael Ure has noted, Nietzsche is exposing the tragicomedy of existence that
results from human pride and the need for the feeling of power [Machtgefühl]. In
Dawn 128, Nietzsche conceives the dreamer on the model of the figure of Oedipus
with the dream itself as analogous to a tragicomic work of art. According to Ure,
Nietzsche’s remark is designed to reveal to the comedy of the Oedipal dreamer: in
dreams, we disavow what is most our own, and in the case of Oedipus this is the
dream of becoming his own father and enjoying the body of his mother. Of course,
the twist Nietzsche adds to this story is that one is also not responsible for one’s
waking state. The critical bite of the moral comes from Nietzsche’s attempt to
expose the hubris involved in seeking to attribute to ourselves the power of autogenesis, “conceiving of ourselves as both mother and father to ourselves, so to
speak, we engage in a comic, childish self-inflation designed to satisfy our
Machtgefühl.”17 Here, the self imagines itself to be completely self-sufficient, free
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of fate, and conducting the dream of self-authorship. The dangers of leading such
an existence are manifold and include what Ure calls a series of “intersubjective
pathologies,” such as melancholia and revenge. We see in this two important features of Nietzsche’s understanding of the self at this time: (i) the psychological
claim that the fantasy of auto-genesis is in fact symptomatic of a desire for narcissistic plenitude; and (ii) the idea that careful self-cultivation is the only therapeutic response that can work against the pathological affects borne of narcissistic
loss.18 Ure rightly notes that for Nietzsche the failure to treat the loss, and to
cultivate one’s drives and affects, is what generates a range of pathological
phenomena and through which the ego or I consoles and compensates for its
losses. Moreover:
How one bears narcissistic loss … has profound implications for the dynamics
and possibilities of social intercourse, and he identifies self-cultivation as
a therapy that tempers these pathological excesses. He sees self-cultivation as a
means of overcoming the pathological forms of intersubjectivity in which
the self engages with others exclusively for the sake of alleviating itself of
painful affects and narcissistic loss.19
Ure is also incisive in suggesting that Nietzsche does not conceive self-cultivation
as some narrowly private and individualistic project but rather as a means of
reworking and modulating the affects that shape the relationship of the self to its
others.20
While Nietzsche unpacks a set of presumptions about subjectivity and the self
in Dawn, he does seem to hold on to the view that humans can cultivate themselves. This raises a fundamental problem for the consistency of Nietzsche’s thinking about the self in this text. If we take Nietzsche’s engagement with presumptions
about the self and about agency seriously, then it is not only unclear how we
might explain how drives and intellect engage with one another in a subjectively
productive way, or how such an interaction could be in any meaningful sense
understood as self-guiding. Moreover, this problem is particularly pressing as it
calls into question how Nietzsche’s arguments concerning a need for change in
epistemological and ethical matters make sense. If he really did accept his critique
of presumptions as the end of the story he wishes to tell us about the self in Dawn,
then, plausibly, his account would make even less sense; a positive account of the
subject is needed to ground Nietzsche’s thinking.
Let us discuss Nietzsche’s thinking on cultivation in Dawn in greater detail, as a
means of developing a response to these concerns. Cultivation has already been
widely recognized as fundamentally important to Nietzsche’s middle writings,
including Dawn. Many of Nietzsche’s letters in the period during which he was
composing the text discuss the value of health-promoting activities such as
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gardening.21 Nietzsche’s original plan for a title was The Ploughshare: Thoughts on
the Prejudices of Morality, and as Duncan Large has pointed out, even as late as
July–August of 1882 Nietzsche was still considering production of a two-volume
edition of free-spirit writings collected under the title The Ploughshare: A Tool for
Liberating the Spirit.22 Nietzsche’s discussion of cultivation in Dawn makes extensive use of the example of gardens and gardening. He engages in an analysis of
human beings as if they were gardens, and considers better and worse approaches
to the cultivation of these gardens, including self-cultivation.23 We note that four
aphorisms are especially relevant to this dimension of the text.
The first aphorism deals with a “contemporary moral fashion” in which the
principle that “moral actions are actions generated by sympathy for others” is
commonly accepted (D 174).24 Nietzsche’s objection to sympathy-based morality
is about the negative and unhealthy effects of sympathy-based moral behavior: it
tends to “grate off” the rough edges of humanity, to such an extent that “heralds
of sympathetic affects” are, Nietzsche complains, “well on the way to turning
humanity into sand” — “[t]iny, soft, round, endless grains of sand!” (D 174).25
Given this, Nietzsche asks whether a person:
is more useful to another by immediately and constantly leaping to his side
and helping him — which can, in any case, only transpire very superficially, provided the help doesn’t turn into a tyrannical encroachment and
transformation — or by fashioning out of oneself something the other will
behold with pleasure, a lovely, peaceful, self-enclosed garden, for instance,
with high walls to protect against the dangers and dust of the roadway, but
with a hospitable gate as well (D 174)
We know from Nietzsche’s discussion of the neighbor impressing their boundaries on us that we perceive others through their effects on us (D 118). The negative
effect of sympathy-based morality hence involves that a self problematically
excludes or encroaches upon others, even in expressing sympathetic affects such
as compassion to others.26 Nietzsche imagines an alternative ethics that is based
on (aesthetically pleasing) self-fashioning or self-cultivation, in which such
encroachment or exclusion is absent. While the aphorism presents us with a
choice to make between morality based on sympathetic affect on the one hand,
and an ethic of self-cultivation on the other, notice that Nietzsche doesn’t tell us
the answer to his utility question in Dawn 174 directly. He indicates that the
effects of sympathy-based moral behavior — superficial help at best, and tyrannical encroachment at worst — make such behavior questionable, so the peaceful
garden-self alternative sounds attractive by comparison. Yet he leaves us to reflect
on the merits of self-cultivation for ourselves; in so doing, our choosing to help
others is by no means prohibited.
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Nietzsche next uses the metaphor of a garden to introduce how dissimulation
[Verstellung] has been involved in sympathy-based moral behavior:
Dissimulation as duty. — For the most part, goodness [die Güte] has been
developed by extended dissimulation [lange Verstellung] that sought to
appear as goodness: wherever great power has taken hold one has recognized
the necessity of precisely this type of dissimulation — it exudes certainty and
confidence and increases hundredfold the sum of real physical power
[physischen Macht]. The lie is, if not the mother, then the wet nurse of goodness. Honesty [Ehrlichkeit] too has, for the most part, been reared to maturity
on the requirement that one seem honest and upright: within the hereditary
aristocracies. The long-standing practice of dissimulation turns into, at last,
nature: in the end dissimulation cancels itself out, and organs and instincts
are the hardly anticipated fruits in the garden of hypocrisy (D 248)
In this hypocritical garden, cultivation of social behaviors that increase power is
based on a pretense of honesty. But eventually, the organs and instincts for a “natural”
honesty emerge. As Nietzsche puts it, what begins as dissimulation turns into
“nature [Natur]”: what we initially pretend to be (being honest) is ultimately what
we may become. The garden of Dawn 248 really is that of humans. Organs and
instincts — including those for virtuous behavior — are open to cultivation and
development, like plants.
This leads on to a third aphorism in which Nietzsche also likens humans to
gardens, and which involves a more specific analogy between gardening and
thinking.27 Nietzsche describes how conclusions will spring forth even without
cultivating the “earth” of the thinker:
Gardener and garden. — Out of damp dreary days, solitude, and loveless
words directed at us, conclusions spring up like mushrooms: one morning
they are there, we know not where they came from, and stare at us, peevish
and grey. Woe to the thinker [Denker] who is not the gardener but only the
earth for the plants [Gewächse] that grow in him! (D 382)28
Nietzsche explicitly identifies thinking as a form of plant-like development, and
warns against what happens if a thinker does not engage in cultivation: conclusions sprout regardless of whether the thinker wants them to or not. His fungal
imagery recalls the imagery of the repulsive apostate of the free spirit, who has
given up on free spiritedness and become “a ‘believer’” (D 56). He describes the
apostate as repellent and diseased, because the apostate’s dishonesty represents
something “fungal, edematous, overgrown, festering” (D 56). The conclusions that
mushroom in Dawn 382 result from an overly extreme renunciation of the world,
Nietzsche on Subjectivity
which as Nietzsche warns elsewhere, leads to an “infertile” and “melancholic”
solitude (D 440). Thinking is already a direct part of life and the world and is
connected with the affects; our difficulty, Nietzsche thinks, lies with learning to
appreciate these points.
In the fourth garden aphorism, Dawn 560, Nietzsche connects his remarks on
drives in earlier parts of Dawn (e.g. D 119, 132, 331, 422, 553) with the issue of
freedom. He makes a claim about what we are free to do, which bears heavily
upon how we might understand cultivation:
What we are free to do. — One can handle one’s drives like a gardener [Man
kann wie ein Gärtner mit seinen Trieben schalten] and, though few know
it, cultivate the seeds [die Keime] of one’s anger, pity, musing, vanity as
fruitfully and advantageously as beautiful fruit on espaliers [wie ein
schönes Obst an Spalieren]; one can do so with a gardener’s good or bad
taste and, as it were, in the French or English or Dutch or Chinese style;
one can also let nature have her sway and only attend to a little decoration
and cleaning up here and there; finally, one can, without giving them any
thought whatsoever, let the plants, in keeping with the natural advantages
and disadvantages of their habitat, grow up and fight it out amongst themselves — indeed, one can take pleasure in such wildness, and want to enjoy
just this pleasure, even if one has one’s difficulties with it. We are free to do
all this: but how many actually know they are free to do this? Don’t most
people believe in themselves as completed, fully grown facts? Haven’t great
philosophers, with their doctrine of immutability of character, pressed
their seal of approval on this presumption [Vorurtheil]? (D 560)29
Nietzsche thinks we are free to engage in cultivating drives, and he suggests that
the drives we are to cultivate are our own drives. He is also clear that knowing
about our freedom to cultivate really does matter significantly to our being able to
exercise drive cultivation freedom. The characterization of these drives as different “seeds [Keime]” in this aphorism helps to clarify that Nietzsche is thinking of
subjectivity and freedom as developmental rather than as fixed, abstract concepts.30 Nietzsche’s disabling and eliding of a causally effective “gardener” whose
hand is alluded to in Dawn 119 captures a problem of “self”-cultivation: it seems
initially unlikely that we could talk meaningfully about cultivating ourselves, or
even talk in a weaker sense about cultivation of de-individuated drives, especially
if our self-knowledge is as limited as Nietzsche suggests is the case.
It is important to note that self-cultivation is not incommensurate with the natural world: Nietzsche notes that we can take pleasure in different approaches towards
cultivation of seed-drives — for example, we might pleasurably adopt a particular
style of gardening such as the French or English or Dutch of Chinese style, we
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might engage in more minimal garden maintenance, or we might simply let the
plants [die Pflanzen] run wild, growing or withering depending on the local conditions that obtain (D 560).31 These cultivation options also fit with the individualism
that Nietzsche suggests we must nurture in order to counter customary morality
and its explicitly de-individualizing effects (D 493). For instance, discussing consumption of one’s own philosophical fruit, Nietzsche says that in the past he had
denigrated the fruit growing on his own tree, but now realizes he would be a fool not
to consider consuming this fruit (D 493). Indeed, an organism meeting the conditions
for minimally sufficient health and strength to undergo the process of becoming a
more autonomous subject might very plausibly start to find their own “most delicious” fruit nourishing and start to benefit from this nourishment (D 493).32
Nietzsche’s call to nurture individualism here does not fit with his remarks on drives
in Dawn 119 or Dawn 109, unless we treat him as envisaging more than one form of
subjectivity (heteronomous and autonomous) in Dawn. Thinking of what Sachs
terms “autonomous” subjectivity as distinctively developmental also helps us to see
one way in which free-spirited ethical agents might continually develop toward the
possibility of a new or “great health” that, as Nietzsche will go on to point out in The
Gay Science, “does not merely have but acquires continually” (GS 382).
Having examined how these four garden aphorisms provide evidence of
Nietzsche’s commitment to the possibility of self-cultivation in Dawn, we can bolster this possibility even further by returning to consider the key aphorisms in
which Nietzsche unpacks of our presumptions about the self. Nietzsche’s remarks
on language, drives, and perception do not exclude a role for a self that is capable
of meaningful intellectual engagement, action, and responsibility. First, because
of the constraints they impose, perceptual experiences still remain utterly fundamental to the subject: while the constraint is experienced as problematic by an
unfree spirit, it may be understood more positively from the perspective of a subject who has begun to become free. Nietzsche explicitly acknowledges that limits
are not merely constraints, but are also conditions of possibility (D 117). This possibility is supported by a claim earlier in the text, where Nietzsche points out that
it is an error to identify the means to knowledge as ends or goals in themselves
(D 43). Instead, he suggests that, while estranging ourselves from sensory
perception and pushing ourselves to abstraction used to be experienced as
“exaltation,” these are today things of which “we can no longer get the full feel”
(D 43). Instead, the exaltation at abstraction might now be replaced by multiple
forces that “must now come together in the thinker” (D 43). Instead of reveling in
“the palest images of words and things” or playing with “invisible, inaudible,
intangible beings felt, from out of the depths of disdain for the physically palpable,
misleading and evil earth” we might now “no longer be misled!” (D 43).
Nietzsche does not suggest that we have a choice about the sensory perceptions
we experience. As he acknowledges, we call something near and another thing
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distant, or “this thing hard and that thing soft” by virtue of our specific location in
the world and the functioning of our organs in that location (D 117). However, we
do have some choice about how we understand and value sensory perception as a
part of our pursuit of knowing. As Nietzsche points out, with the understanding
that we “need” no longer “be misled” by “abstractions” comes a new feeling:
“with that one leaped, as if upward” (D 43). This is an advance in understanding
and at the same time an advance in the passion of knowledge. Recall that Nietzsche
encourages us to keep the possibility of a “freedom of feeling” in mind as part of
his affirmation of a passion for knowledge (D 207). This opens up a contrast
between two feelings about knowing, only one of which is commensurate with
Nietzsche’s project in Dawn. On the one hand, we may entertain a belief that the
imperative to “[k]now oneself” involves our finally having absolute knowledge of
all things, on the basis that “things are merely the boundaries of the human
being” (D 48). On the other hand, however, Nietzsche explains a fundamental
feeling that we can contrast with knowing oneself in such an absolute sense in the
next aphorism, where he identifies it as a feeling of “permanent transitoriness”
that is valuable because it avoids sentimental understanding of humans as either
descended from the divine (a mistaken view that Darwin has challenged) or as
progressing toward the divine, as if “some little species” living “on some little
planet” could be excepted from their mortal status (D 49).
Given these points, in addition to Nietzsche’s discussion of cultivating the self
through his garden aphorisms, it remains unclear how we are to understand the
coherence of Nietzsche’s account of the self in Dawn. Three previous scholarly
assessments are of particular relevance in determining whether or not a clear and
consistent account of the self is indeed available in this text. In a detailed account of
subjectivity and freedom, Carl B. Sachs has framed the problem of subjectivity as it
appears in this text by asking how a multiplicity of drives and affects could constitute a unified feeling and thinking subject.33 Christa Acampora has also raised the
same issue, focusing on Nietzsche’s free spirit writings in addition to Dawn: she
claims that (i) as drive nourishment is unknowable and the work of chance, therefore (ii) drive-orchestration would be the work of whichever drive happens to be
dominant, not of a unified self.34 Beyond the specific context of Dawn, Paul
Katsafanas has argued that Nietzschean unity of self is “unity between drives and
other parts of the individual,” which parts he identifies as reason and sensibility.35
Katsafanas contends that on his account, Nietzschean unity merely requires that
agents have conscious thoughts, engage in episodes of deliberation and choice, and
possess drives and affects; conscious thoughts and the capacity for choice are pervasively and inescapably influenced by drives, yet are distinct from drives.36
Examining the problem of subjectivity in the specific context of the text of
Dawn, Sachs contends that previous accounts have failed to appreciate that in
indicating drives as the components of selves, we are never merely a bundle of
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drives and affects: we are interpreted and interpreting drives and affects.37 Here,
note that in the important aphorism Dawn 119, Nietzsche explicitly does appeal to
the concept of interpretation, and that examination of the aphorism in the original German also supports this: Nietzsche claims that we have greater “freedom of
interpretation [Freiheit der Interpretation]” in dreams than in a waking state, and
that when we are in a waking state, our drives “do nothing but interpret nerve
impulses [die Nervenreize interpretiren]” (D 119). Sachs suggests that we can
resolve the apparent inconsistency between talk of drives and talk of a self by differentiating between two forms of subjectivity operating in Dawn. The first of
these is heteronomous subjectivity, where the subject is organized through procedures and techniques external to it such as authority and tradition, and the second
of these is autonomous subjectivity, which refers to a self as a continual work in
progress.38 Sachs suggests that the question of the consistency of Nietzsche’s
account of subjectivity is therefore really a question about how problematically
heteronomous subjects can engage in becoming autonomous; his response is that
developing autonomy would require free spirits, which in Dawn Nietzsche anticipates as an emergent possibility, to engage in overcoming morality and pursuing
an ethics of self-fashioning.39 Hence according to Sachs, appeal to the notion of
self-cultivation in Dawn does not conflict with understanding drives as constituting selves, providing that we see drives and selves as both interpreting and
interpreted.
Acampora is more skeptical than Sachs about self-cultivation as a solution to
the subjectivity problem in Dawn, because she thinks that it is unclear that
Nietzsche provides us with a sufficiently robust account of unification for responsible self-cultivation, and because she doubts that Nietzsche presents a normative
ideal for full personhood with which we can be satisfied.40 Instead, she favors an
account of free spirits as freeing themselves from addictive attachments, including from any overwhelming sense of themselves as detached, to loosen the soul
for attachments that have developmental value.41 As she notes, this process is
experimental and risky for free spirits.42 Acampora is surely right to hold that
experimentation plays an important role in free spirit subjectivity, that Nietzsche’s
talk of the self can seem incoherent, and that free spirits work to free themselves
from addictive attachments. Yet these points do not preclude that Nietzsche can
meaningfully speak of self-cultivation, if we treat free spirits as heteronomous
subjects that have the capacity to develop greater autonomy, and if we treat drives
and selves as already always interpreting and interpreted. As we saw, the notion of
interpretation is explicitly Nietzsche’s own term in Dawn 119. It is not that there
is a self behind the self that we interpret, or a drive behind the drive that we interpret, which would raise the specter of a “two world” metaphysics that would trouble the distinction between heteronomous and autonomous selves that Sachs
develops, but rather that what Nietzsche means by interpretation in this aphorism
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already involves the deep connection between word and thing, physiology and
experience, that the current dispassionate approach to knowing downplays.
Moreover, in speaking of selves both as drive-based and as self-cultivating,
Nietzsche is speaking from within the wider framework of his campaign against
morality in Dawn. It is not that Nietzsche sets out to make a theory of self, but
rather that his remarks on the self are a necessary component of his wider ethical
project. The apparent conflict between unified self and self as a mere composite of
drives is perhaps most evident within Dawn 560, where Nietzsche emphasizes that
we have freedom to cultivate drives, and specifically our drives.43 These seeddrives, to which Nietzsche attends as a means of cultivation, include emotions
such as anger, pity, and vanity, and they also include musing or thought
[Nachgrübeln] (D 560).44 Notice that Nietzsche makes it explicit that the significant
barrier to our freedom as self-cultivators is “presumption [Vorurtheil].” The subtitle of Dawn reinforces the connection between Nietzsche’s critical engagement
with morality of custom, his re-imagination of the ethical, and his thinking here on
presumption as a barrier to cultivation of drives: “thoughts on the presumptions of
morality [Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurtheile].” He claims that one particularly insidious presumption is the mistaken belief that our characters are complete,
fully grown, and immutable “facts” (D 560). As with Dawn 119, this claim initially
seems to undermine Nietzsche’s claim for self-cultivation. However, Nietzsche further suggests that mistaken belief in character fixity has been further reinforced by
the work of presumptuous, so-called “great,” philosophers, and that the presumption is problematic specifically because it prevents people from coming to know that
they have the freedom to cultivate their drives. If we believe our characters are
fixed, then we remain unaware of certain needs, of problems that may be blighting
our lives, or even, if we do appreciate these things, that there is any real possibility
of pursuing meaningful change and development.
Attending to the reason why Nietzsche thinks not knowing is a problem is helpful in resolving the apparent confusion between Nietzsche’s remarks on the self in
Dawn. Dawn 560 is not the first instance in the text where Nietzsche discusses not
knowing as a problem for the self. In Dawn 83, discussing what seem to be two
competing explanations for humanity (natural and supernatural), he writes:
Poor humanity! — One drop of blood too much or two little in the brain can
make our life unspeakably miserable and hard, such that we suffer more
from this one drop of blood than Prometheus from his vulture. But the most
horrible thing of all is not even knowing that this drop of blood is the cause.
“The devil!” Or “sin!” instead.45
Nietzsche is making two important claims here: (i) physiological diversity provides a natural explanation for diverse responses to experience (in contrast to the
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supernatural/customary morality explanations Nietzsche argues against in Dawn);
and (ii) our not knowing is not a problem because of our being unaware — it is a
problem because not knowing reinforces supernatural/customary morality explanations that limit human development and flourishing. Again, Nietzsche does
not provide an account of drives and self-knowledge in the absence of an agenda;
his consistent concern is with tackling the negative impact on human flourishing
of presumptions about morality. This needs to be included in explanations of his
remarks on the self with regard to this text. If we now apply this insight to
Nietzsche’s claim on self-cultivation in Dawn 560, notice that instead of treating
subjects as victims of chance or some supernatural entity, we can consider subjects
to be products of natural causality.46 On this basis, we can separate out two components of Nietzsche’s position more clearly: his account of drives as a multiplicity of
which our self-knowledge is always incomplete, as described in his complains
about presumptions concerning the self and self-knowledge in Dawn 119, and selfdriven cultivation of drives, as discussed in Dawn 560. This illustrates a process of
cultivating healthier humans than customary morality typically allows, in contrast
to affirming the existence of a unified, fixed, self that exists independently of
nature and time and that could not thus be a candidate for cultivation.
As mentioned earlier, Nietzsche mentions six specific methods of cultivating
drives: (i) avoiding drive-gratification opportunities; (ii) planting regularity into
the drive; (iii) generating supersatiation and disgust; (iv) using an association of
an agonizing thought; (v) redirecting one’s energy resources to a distracting end;
and (vi) general exhaustion (D 109). These methods may be applied to conscious
thought and to feeling directly, in the manner of the gardener that Nietzsche imagines in Dawn 560. Yet they may also involve only the minimal gardener from
Dawn 119, who cultivates blindly and unknowingly — a minimal gardener we
could call “experiences.” Drives are natural, but may be cultivated in the same way
that, for instance as Nietzsche discusses, apple trees may be cultivated on espaliers. Apple trees grow and produce apples regardless of whether or not there is
anyone tending to them, but if we want to cultivate more fruitful, healthier, apple
trees, then it may help to create what may seem like more challenging conditions
but that actually result in better growth, namely, pruning each tree and tying it to
a frame to control its growth and to promote greater fruit yield (D 560).
The available scholarship has tended to take the view that Nietzsche is presenting us with a hard choice to make between ways of understanding the Nietzschean
self (both in Dawn and in other texts): either as a “self”-less composite of drives or
self as a unity of consciousness that is not reducible entirely to drives and other
components such as affects. Instead of perpetuating the story of an incommensurable choice between multiplicity of subjectivities and unity of self, we think it
may be more fruitful to follow the suggestion we have been developing in this
discussion: namely, to attend to how, in Dawn, both such senses of the self are
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present.47 This opens up the possibility that, in the case of Dawn, it is necessary, as
well as coherent, for Nietzsche to speak of cultivating drives through nourishment and experience of thought and feeling, while also acknowledging that selves
are worked on — “done” — without each self necessarily always being directly
aware of this, or necessarily needing to be in control of it (D 120).
In these respects our account of Nietzsche’s view of the self in Dawn is commensurate with Paul Katsafanas’s differentiation in Nietzsche’s thinking on mind
between conscious states as states that have “conceptually articulated content” and
unconscious states as states that have “nonconceptually articulated content,” and
with his claim that conscious states falsify by rendering unconscious states only
partially, and thus generating our partial perceptions of and interactions with the
world.48 Moreover, our view fits with Nietzsche’s view of the self in his wider free
spirit writings, such as Human, All Too Human, and The Gay Science. This point is
supported by a recent account developed by Christine Daigle, who argues that in
The Gay Science 354 Nietzsche locates thinking and willing, as well as drives and
affects, in the unconscious; according to Daigle, this entails that we must be careful
not to take the functioning of a Nietzschean self as too neatly divided between the
conscious and the unconscious, or to think of a Nietzschean self as a fixed entity.49
Instead, she suggests that we should think of the Nietzschean self as continually
becoming; just as the phenomenal realm becomes, she argues, so too does the self,
which Nietzsche had already acknowledged in Human, All Too Human: “this
painting — that which we humans call life and experience — has gradually become,
is indeed still fully in course of becoming” (HH 16).50 From what Daigle refers to as
the “twofold bidirectional process of constitution” the Nietzschean subject emerges
as an ambiguous multiplicity that is constantly fluctuating, a composite of its
experiences, which Nietzsche himself makes clear in his example of the “polyparms of our being,” which he sees as nourished positively and negatively through
experiences “with every moment of our lives” (D 119).51 According to Daigle, one
characteristic of a free spirit is understanding that one is such a self.52
In a reading of Dawn, Gianni Vattimo has claimed that Nietzsche’s critique of
morality is not conducted, “in the name of the free and responsible subject, for such a
subject is likewise a product of neurosis, a thing formed in illness.”53 Vattimo contends
that because there is an “inextricable connection” between internal or internalized
conscience, including the “individual in revolt,” and social morality, the appeal to freedom in Nietzsche cannot be made in the name of “the sovereignty of the individual.”54
While he rightly notes that Nietzsche unmasks morality as a set of principles that are
not intended for the utility or the good of the individual on whom they are imposed
but for the preservation of society, even to the detriment of individuals, we suggest he
wrongly infers from this that Nietzsche’s aim is not to defend the individual against
the claims of the group. The reason, he argues, is not because, metaphysically speaking, it is necessary to prefer the claims of determinism over the belief in freedom — a
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position that we would suggest it is more plausible to claim Nietzsche upholds in
volume one of Human, all too Human than in Dawn — “but simply because there is
no subject of such actions. Not: the subject is not free, but simply: the subject is not.”55
Based on the available evidence in Dawn, as we have discussed here, it is difficult to
make sense of Vattimo’s view. And, while as Lanier Anderson points out, in Dawn
Nietzsche holds the subject or self to be an assemblage of materially and historically
conditioned drives and affects, this does not prevent Nietzsche from outlining an aspiration — a new dawn, in effect — in which those selves with the capacity to do so may
cultivate themselves, and potentially become more self-determining.56
For the purposes of Nietzsche’s project in Dawn, it is not necessary to claim that
an autonomous self exists. It is enough to claim that the psychophysical conditions of will, drives, affects, bodies, and environment, along with Nietzsche’s
questioning of presumptions about self, will, and causality, are sufficient for possible autonomous selves to emerge from out of heteronomous ones.57 Plausibly,
then, the account of the self that Nietzsche presents in Dawn can count as an
emerging product of the conditions of natural or material subjectivity, and explicitly as subjects that are constantly in flux.58 Before Nietzsche commences his free
spirit writings, the subject is conceivable as only heteronomous, or unfree: cultivated by authority and tradition and cultivating themselves as heteronomous
through thoughts and feelings derived from that tradition (though not necessarily
always knowing that they do such work). With the free spirit writings, as
Nietzsche’s remarks in Dawn indicate, it becomes conceivable that free-spirited
subjects may acquire knowledge and use of self-cultivatory power, and may thus
begin to develop as autonomous subjects. Such Nietzschean subjects ground the
campaign against morality and the associated critical engagement with a possible
new enlightenment that Nietzsche develops in Dawn, and make possible the alternative approach to the ethical, and to matters such as our attitude toward dying,
that he explores in this text. The topic of death will be examined in chapter 8. Now
we wish to further illuminate Nietzsche’s campaign against morality in Dawn,
linking it up with the theme of self-care and his concerns about fanaticism.
Notes
1 Recently e.g. Tom Stern has claimed that even though Nietzsche’s remarks on
drives might seem to add up to a view that differentiates between “drive and
instinct as biological, quasi-rational, and perhaps, on Darwinian grounds, inherited
through generations of natural selection; ‘inclinations’ as more general dispositions
or tastes, not necessarily tied to biological needs; and ‘affects’ as brief, forceful inner
stirrings,” this view is impossible for two reasons: (i) drive-based explanations of
nonconscious behavior cannot be used to explain the behavior of conscious beings
fully; and (ii) “the texts do not, as a whole, support the division” between biological
Nietzsche on Subjectivity
drives and instincts, general dispositions that may move beyond biology, and inner
feeling. We agree that claims made about the texts as a collective whole are difficult
to sustain. See Tom Stern. 2015. “Against Nietzsche’s ‘Theory’ of the Drives.”
Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1(01): 121–40, 125–26.
2 In addition to Stern, see e.g. Carl B. Sachs. 2008. “Nietzsche’s Daybreak: Toward a
Naturalized Theory of Autonomy.” Epoché 13/1(Fall): 81–100; Paul Katsafanas 2011.
“The Concept of Unified Agency in Nietzsche, Plato, and Schiller.” Journal of the
History of Philosophy 49(1): 87–113; Keith Ansell-Pearson. 2011. “Beyond
Compassion: On Nietzsche’s Moral Therapy in Dawn.” Continental Philosophy
Review 44(2): 179–204; Paul Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2011); Katrina Mitcheson, Nietzsche, Truth and Transformation
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Christa Davis Acampora. 2014 “Senses of
Freedom of the Free Spirit.” Pli: Warwick Journal of Philosophy 25: 13–33; Rebecca
Bamford, “Health and Self-cultivation in Dawn,” in Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Philosophy,
ed. Rebecca Bamford (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), 85–109.
See also Mark Alfano, Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2017), in which Alfano argues that for Nietzsche, drives “differ
from preferences and desires in being associated primarily with the processes of
agency rather than with teleologically specified states of affairs” (5). Earlier versions
of parts of this chapter appear in portions of Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion,”
and Bamford, “Health and Self-cultivation in Dawn.”
3 Robert Guay has argued that Nietzsche’s remarks on subjectivity throughout his
writings do not amount to a denial of a unified subject, and that Nietzsche “not
only attributed a fundamental role to subjectivity in the explanation of belief and
action, but even considered all events to be ultimately explicable by reference to
subjectivity.” Guay’s account does refer to Dawn 43 and Dawn 124, but a detailed
analysis of subjectivity in Dawn is beyond the scope of his essay, which attends to
multiple texts by Nietzsche; we see our analysis as building on Guay’s discussion
of these two aphorisms. See Robert Guay. 2006. “The ‘I’s Have It: Nietzsche on
Subjectivity,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 49(3): 218–41.
4 Guay, “The ‘I’s Have It”; Sachs, “Nietzsche’s Daybreak”; Katsafanas, “The Concept
of Unified Agency in Nietzsche, Plato, and Schiller”; Acampora, “Senses of
Freedom of the Free Spirit.”
5 Sachs points this out in “Nietzsche’s Daybreak,” 81–100.
6 In On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense, Nietzsche discusses the development
of language in the context of the dissimulation of the intellect, which he claims
operates as a means of self-preservation. He makes a similar claim about
dissimulation here, and some of the language of nerve stimuli is also carried over
from On Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral Sense to Dawn. However, and importantly
for how we understand the concept of interpretation in Dawn, the idiom of
“construction” that Nietzsche employs in On Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral Sense
is replaced by the idiom of “cultivation” in Dawn.
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7 In The Gay Science, Nietzsche will prescribe as a method of becoming the
“purification of our opinions and valuations,” which is to be carried out in terms
of a “new limit” we place on ourselves (GS 335).
8 Katsafanas draws attention to this aphorism as Nietzsche’s initial exploration of
the view that conscious thinking occurs in words, in The Nietzschean Self: Moral
Psychology, Agency, and the Unconscious (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2016), 25.
9 Here it is worth noting the similarity of Nietzsche’s point in this aphorism to
Spinoza’s thinking on the limitation that perception places on human
understanding of the world. Spinoza discusses this using his well-known
example of the worm in the blood in a letter to Henry Oldenburg, in which
Spinoza is primarily concerned with explaining the coherence of the parts of
Nature and how this coherence may be known. In the letter, Spinoza likens
humans to “a tiny worm living in the blood,” which is “capable of distinguishing
by sight the particles of the blood — lymph, etc. — and of intelligently observing
how each particle, on colliding with another, either rebounds or communicates
some degree of its motion, and so forth.” As Spinoza points out, even while the
worm may make intelligent observations of particle motion — just as humans
may make intelligent observations of the interactions of things in the
world — such a worm “would be living in the blood as we are living in our part
of the universe, and it would regard each individual particle as a whole, not a
part, and it would have no idea as to how all the parts are modified by the overall
nature of the blood and compelled to mutual adaptation as the overall nature of
the blood requires, so as to agree with one another in a definite relation.” See
Baruch Spinoza, Letter to Henry Oldenburg of November 20, 1665, in Modern
Philosophy: An Anthology of Primary Sources, ed. Roger Ariew and Eric Watkins
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 126–28.
10 Brian Domino, “Polyp Man,” in A Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal Beyond
Docile and Brutal, ed. Christa Davis Acampora and Ralph R. Acampora
(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 43. On Friedrich Albert Lange and
Nietzsche, see also George J. Stack, Lange and Nietzsche (Berlin and New York:
de Gruyter, 1983), 138–40. As both Domino and Stack discuss, Lange provided
extensive discussion of La Mettrie’s materialist philosophy — along with
Abraham Tremblay’s famous and influential discovery of the self-regenerating
polyp — in his History of Materialism, which Nietzsche read, upon which he
commented favourably, and which is directly mentioned in D 119. Today,
biologists refer to Tremblay’s “polyp,” discovered in 1741, as a “hydra.”
Tremblay’s experiments were considered important, because they seemed to
provide evidence opposing preformation and supporting epigenesis, the theory
that life acquires form through some active organizing process unique to living
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things. On the history of the hydra, see Ted Everson, The Gene: A Historical
Perspective (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007), 23–24.
11 Julien Offray De La Mettrie, “Machine Man,” in Machine Man and Other
Writings, ed. Ann Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 24.
12 La Mettrie, “Machine Man,” 24. La Mettrie’s ambiguous image of the (non)
crushing weight of atheism is strongly reminiscent of Nietzsche’s thought
experiment concerning our experience of the “greatest” weight, namely the
thought of eternal recurrence (GS 341).
13 La Mettrie, “Machine Man,” 32.
14 For a contemporary account of dreams that supports some (though not all) of
Nietzsche’s insights concerning dreams, see Colin McGinn, Mindsight: Image,
Dream, Meaning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). McGinn claims
that one crucial difference between the dream state and the waking state is that in
the former dreams are “modally exhaustive” or blind: “In waking c onsciousness
I can be perceiving one thing and imagining something else: there is the perceived
world and the imagined world. I ‘live’ in both worlds, the actual and the possible …
But in the dream there is only the dream world and no envisaged alternative to it;
so I feel condemned to that world, since I can picture no other.” McGinn
Mindsight, 80. For a discussion of dreams in D 119, see also Katsafanas, The
Nietzschean Self, 95.
15 See Katsafanas, The Nietzschean Self, 138.
16 Michael Ure, Nietzsche’s Therapy: Self-Cultivation in the Middle Works (Lanham:
Lexington Books, 2008), 46.
17 Ure, Nietzsche’s Therapy, 46.
18 On these points see Ure, Nietzsche’s Therapy, 47.
19 Ure, Nietzsche’s Therapy, 47.
20 Ure advances this interpretation partly as a response to the overly literary model
of the self and self-becoming in Alexander Nehamas’s influential reading in
Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).
21 For example, writing to his mother, Franziska Nietzsche on July 21, 1879,
Nietzsche speculates on gardening as a helpful activity as part of his interest in
pursuing a more simple and natural, and hence healthier, way of living. See
Rebecca Bamford, “Daybreak,” in A Companion to the Works of Friedrich
Nietzsche, ed. Paul Bishop (Rochester: Boydell & Brewer [Camden House], 2012),
139–57.
22 Duncan Large, “Nietzsche’s Helmbrecht. 1997. or How to Philosophize with a
Ploughshare.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 13: 3–22. Reprinted in Studia
Nietzscheana (2014): http://www.nietzschesource.org/SN/d-large-2014.
23 Paul Franco describes Nietzsche’s conception of the self as “aesthetic” and as
“horticultural” and discusses how this aesthetic self is presented in Dawn
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through the garden metaphor in D 560. See Paul Franco, Nietzsche’s
Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 77, 81–82.
24 Ure, Nietzsche’s Therapy, 202–03.
25 Ansell-Pearson elsewhere claims that Nietzsche is promoting an ethic of
self-fashioning in this aphorism, in response to concern about “market-driven
atomization and de-individuation” as well as to the tyranny of a morality of
sympathetic affect, Ansell-Pearson “Beyond Compassion,” 188–90.
26 Abbey shows that Nietzsche’s critical engagement with pity is not absolute but
nuanced, making allowances for differences of individual type and context in
assessing whether or not pity is defensible or appropriate ethical behaviour. See
Abbey, Nietzsche’s Middle Period, 71.
27 Bamford discusses the significance of this analogy in D 382 for Nietzsche’s
overall project in Dawn in greater depth in her essay “Daybreak.”
28 Translation modified.
29 Translation modified from “shoots” to “seeds.” Smith renders “die Keime” as
“shoots” in his translation, which obscures the Stoic imagery here. Bamford thanks
Stefan Heßbrüggen for pointing out this Stoic influence upon Dawn 560 to her.
Graham Parkes has pointed out that seed imagery also occurs in Plato, e.g. in the
Timaeus, and provides a detailed analysis connecting this aspect of Plato’s work to
Nietzsche’s thinking on ethics and psychology in Graham Parkes, Composing the
Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology (London: University of Chicago Press,
1994), 186–93. See also Bamford, “Health and Self-cultivation in Dawn.”
30 In “Health and Self-cultivation in Dawn,” Bamford discusses two Stoic influences
at work in Nietzsche’s use of the seed metaphor; following work by Maryanne
Cline Horowitz, these may be summarized as follows: (i) Diogenes Laertius’
conception of “Nature as a force moving of itself” whereby nature gives rise to
offspring produced and organized through Nature’s own seminal principles
[spermatikoi logoi]; (ii) widespread Stoic use of the metaphor of seeds to account
for knowledge and of virtue as developmental, for example by Seneca in his
Epistles. See Horowitz. 1974. “The Stoic Synthesis of the Idea of Natural Law in
Man: Four Themes.” Journal of the History of Ideas 35(1): 3–16. In an essay that
focuses on BGE 12, Lanier Anderson has made a similar claim that the
Nietzschean self is a task or achievement. See Anderson, “What is a Nietzschean
Self?” in Nietzsche, Naturalism and Normativity, ed. Christopher Janaway and
Simon Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 202–35, 208. On the
aesthetic self as a horticultural self, see also Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment,
77, 81–82. And on Nietzsche’s artful naturalism and its relevance to Nietzsche’s
account of the self, see Christa Davis Acampora, Contesting Nietzsche (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
31 In a note from 1881, Nietzsche expresses his admiration of the Chinese for
cultivating trees that bear roses on one side and pears on the other — an exotic
Nietzsche on Subjectivity
fruit that is the result of selective breeding indeed! (KSA 9 11 [276]) This theme
continues in the later notes, such as one from 1887 where Nietzsche demands that
individuals be allowed to freely work on themselves as artist-tyrants. He adds an
important qualification: “Not merely a master-race, whose task would be limited
to governing, but a race or people with its own sphere of life, with an excess of
strength for beauty, bravery, culture (Cultur), manners to the highest peak of the
spirit; an affirming race that may grant itself every great luxury … a hothouse for
strange and exquisite plants” (KSA 12, 9 [153]; WP 898). The concept for this
non-average type of human being is “the superhuman” (KSA 12, 10 [17]; WP 866).
32 On minimal conditions see Mitcheson, Nietzsche, Truth and Transformation, 152.
33 Sachs, “Nietzsche’s Daybreak,” 85.
34 Acampora, “Senses of Freedom of the Free Spirit,” 27–32. See also Acampora,
Contesting Nietzsche.
35 Katsafanas, “The Concept of Unified Agency,” 103. While his account is helpful,
Katsafanas’ paper incorporates more substantial analysis from Nietzsche’s later
writings; a detailed analysis of Dawn is beyond the scope of his project.
36 Katsafanas, “The Concept of Unified Agency,” 113.
37 Sachs, “Nietzsche’s Daybreak,” 85.
38 Sachs, “Nietzsche’s Daybreak,” 94–95.
39 Sachs, “Nietzsche’s Daybreak,” 94–95. Mitcheson also points out that what is
needed is fairly minimal: according to her, only latent health and strength are
required to undertake the move from fettered to free (heteronomous to
autonomous) spirit. See Mitcheson, Nietzsche, Truth and Transformation, 152.
40 Acampora, “Senses of Freedom of the Free Spirit,” 29. See also Peter Poellner,
“Nietzschean Freedom,” in Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, ed. Ken Gemes
and Simon May (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 154.
41 Acampora, “Senses of Freedom of the Free Spirit,” 27–32.
42 Acampora, “Senses of Freedom of the Free Spirit,” 27–32.
43 On material conditions, see Sachs, “Nietzsche’s Daybreak,” 82. As Parkes
discusses, the cultivation options discussed in D 560 are a form of sublimation of
drives. See Parkes, Composing the Soul, 169. See also Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond
Compassion”, 196.
44 We do not claim here that Nietzsche differentiates between emotion and thought
wholesale.
45 George Stack has pointed out that, while discussing how temperament rests on a
physiological basis that determines human character in Man-Machine, Julien
Offray de La Mettrie observes something very close to this claim concerning the
physiological basis for cognitive diversity: “A mere nothing, a tiny fibre, some
trifling thing that the most subtle anatomy cannot discover, would have made
two idiots out of Erasmus and Fontanelle” (Stack, Lange and Nietzsche, 140);
La Mettrie, “Machine Man”, 10.
165
166
Nietzsche’s Dawn
46 Natural causality is termed “material conditions of subjectivity” by Sachs in
“Nietzsche’s Daybreak,” 93.
47 Contrast e.g. Stern, “Against Nietzsche’s ‘Theory’ of the Drives,” with the
account provided by Guay, “The ‘I’s Have It.”
48 Paul Katsafanas. 2005. “Nietzsche’s Theory of Mind: Consciousness and
Conceptualization.” European Journal of Philosophy 13(1): 1–31, 24.
49 Christine Daigle, “The Ethical Ideal of the Free Spirit in Human, All Too
Human,” in Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Philosophy, ed. Rebecca Bamford (London:
Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), 33–48. It is important to note that, in
his paper “Nietzsche’s Theory of Mind,” Katsafanas acknowledges this and calls
for more attention to be given to the relationship between conscious and
unconscious states, a call to which Daigle’s essay responds.
50 Daigle, “The Ethical Ideal of the Free Spirit,” 37. On the concept of the
Nietzschean self understood in light of Deleuze as compound becoming, see
Alan D. Schrift, “Rethinking the Subject: or, How One Becomes-Other Than
What One is,” in Nietzsche’s Postmoralism, ed. Richard Schacht (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Christa Davis Acampora, “Naturalism
and Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology,” in A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith
Ansell-Pearson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 314–33.
51 Daigle, “The Ethical Ideal of the Free Spirit,” 37–38, 43.
52 Daigle, “The Ethical Ideal of the Free Spirit,” 38, 43.
53 Gianni Vattimo, Dialogue with Nietzsche, trans. William McCuaig (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2006), 164. This work by Vattimo was originally
published in Italian in 1979.
54 Vattimo, Dialogue with Nietzsche, 162–63.
55 Vattimo, Dialogue with Nietzsche, 161.
56 See Lanier Anderson, “What is a Nietzschean Self?” in Nietzsche, Naturalism and
Normativity, ed. Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012), 202–35.
57 On the distinction between heteronomous and autonomous selves, see Sachs,
“Nietzsche’s Daybreak.”
58 Sachs, “Nietzsche’s Daybreak,” 93. It has been argued that the Nietzschean self
should best be conceived of as a task or achievement in R. Lainer Anderson,
“What is a Nietzschean Self?” in Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity, ed.
Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009), 202–35. Daigle’s account in her essay “The Ethical Ideal of the Free Spirit”
helpfully explains what that achievement might, in the context of the free spirit
writings, consistently involve. On subject multiplicity as a pre-requisite for
change, see Mitcheson, Nietzsche, Truth, and Transformation, 135.