8 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Random House, 1968).
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materialism, as Spinoza had before him. Stil , Nietzsche does not
believe that Spinoza has gone far enough to overcome the idealist
scorn for the body, though he has gone further than most thinkers.
In section 372 of the Gay Science, Nietzsche critical y cal s “even Spinoza” an idealist, afflicted with a vampirism that sucks everything dry of the “blood” of the senses – leaving us the clattering bones
of mere words, like Spinoza’s “amor intellectualis dei.” This is
noteworthy because Nietzsche ultimately views every philosopher since Socrates as an idealist of some sort, so that “even Spinoza”
should be read as a qualifier that almost elevates Spinoza above the
whole history of philosophy and brings him nearest to Nietzsche’s
own overcoming of the tradition.
Nietzsche’s views on selfhood and self-preservation are
remarkably similar to those of Spinoza in every way. Even though
Spinoza conceives of beings as finite modes of a single substance,
he does believe that these modes enjoy a relative independence on
account of possessing an individual essence or conatus. Reflecting on Descartes’ demonstration with the molten wax (intended to show
that only the properties of size, shape and motion are definitively
real), Spinoza notes that many beings do not behave in the same
manner as the wax. Instead, they resist damage; they seem to strive to persist in their own being and can even restore themselves if injured.
This suggests that an individual essence defines a given being, such
that if it were removed that being would no longer be itself.9 Given
that every bodily process also has a mental aspect, this endeavor of
self-preservation is what we conceive of as will ( voluntas). When we become self-conscious of the ‘appetites’ of our conatus, we experience willful ‘desire’ ( cupiditas).10
Nevertheless, though our ‘individual
essence’ strives for its own preservation through various desires, this endeavor itself is not something that we can wil , rather our apparent will is itself a function of it. For those phenomena which, when
considered under the attribute of thought, we call the decisions of
the mind and acts of the wil , are the very same phenomena that, if
9 Spinoza,
Ethics 3:6; 2: Definition 2.
10 Ibid., 3:9.
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considered under the attribute of extension, would be seen as the
biological appetites of bodily processes governed by the physical
laws of motion and rest.11
According to Spinoza, in so far as we do not have an adequate
idea of these causes we are governed by unconscious forces.
Furthermore, the self-as-agent is an il usion brought about by
the mind’s ideas of its ideas, which in turn are bodily processes
conceived intellectual y.12 Thus, while our emotions seem to be
outwardly focused on certain objects or persons, they are actual y
confused conceptions of affectations of the body at the hands of
uncontrol able external causes that are caused by other causes, in an
untraceable recession ad infinitum.13
It is widely believed that Nietzsche is the supreme philosopher of
a social-Darwinist will to self-preservation. Instead, the truth is that like Spinoza, though Nietzsche thought that beings are characterized
by self-preservation, he paradoxical y recognized that the same
beings lack an agency to preserve, or by means of which they might
seek self-preservation, so that self-preservation is only a function of a greater will of life acting through beings. In section 490 of The Will to Power, Nietzsche views “the subject as [a] multiplicity”, wherein
“the important main activity is unconscious and… consciousness
is the effect of forces whose essence, ways and modalities are not
peculiar to it.” Nietzsche, like Spinoza, believes that the ultimate
causes of this greater will of life are not discernable to the beings
In section 13 of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche is arguing
against the Darwinist claim that self-preservation is “the cardinal
instinct of an organic being.” He praises Spinoza and says that ‘we’
owe him not to make this mistake because Spinoza realized the
apparently inconsistent truth that beings seek ‘self-preservation’
(paradoxical y) not for their own sake, but to serve a greater will
to power of “life itself.” Self-preservation is only a result of this.
11 Ibid., 3:2, Scholium.
12 Ibid., 2:21.
13 Ibid., 3:Appendix; 2:48.
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Oddly enough, in section 349 of the Gay Science, Nietzsche criticizes Spinoza and the Darwinists for holding self-preservation as a prime
principle. He claims that they made the mistake of abstracting their
own downtrodden struggle for mere existence under conditions
of distress and imposing it on a world truly characterized by the
squandering and overabundance of the will to power, i.e. the will to
superiority and dominance (not mere ‘survival’). He goes so far as to
call the will to self-preservation a “Spinozistic dogma.”
The Gay Science was written in two installments. Parts one
through four were written before Beyond Good and Evil, while part five was written immediately after it. The critical comments in section 349 were thus written after Nietzsche’s commending of Spinoza for
understanding self-preservation more clearly than Darwinists. Since
the words of praise in section 13 of Beyond Good and Evil show a more subtle understanding of Spinoza as well as deeper thinking in
general, the latter charge in the Gay Science must be viewed not only as polemical, but as a knowing distortion of Spinoza’s doctrine so
as to make it fit a certain stereotype or caricature. It is a commonly employed tactic in Nietzsche’s writings to take people and turn them
into symbols of an idea, often to dramatize some polemic.
Nietzsche’s views on agency and causality are substantial y
similar to those of Spinoza. In section 5 of chapter 3 in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche writes that the grammatical discourse of language, which defines thought, erroneously:
...sees everywhere deed and doer...believes in will as cause in
general...believes in the ‘ego’, in the ego as being, in the ego as
substance, and... projects its belief in the ego-substance on to all things – only thus does it create the concept ‘thing’...Being is everywhere thought in, foisted on, as cause; it is only from the conception ‘ego’ that there follows, derivatively, the concept
‘being’...At the beginning stands the great fateful error that the
will is something which produces an effect – that will is a faculty...
Today we know it is merely a word.14
14 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols & the Anti-Christ (New York: Penguin 152
jason reza jorjani
In section 3 of chapter 6, Nietzsche adds: “the will no longer moves
anything, consequently no longer explains anything – it merely
accompanies events, it can also be absent.” In sections 633-634 of the Will to Power, Nietzsche writes:
“Two successive states, the one ‘cause’, the other ‘effect’: this is
false. The first has nothing to effe
ct, the second has been effected by nothing.”
It might come as a surprise to those who know Nietzsche as the
philosopher of ‘wil ’ to power that Nietzsche, like Spinoza, is an
ardent fatalist and views “free wil ” as a fiction.
Even though Spinoza proposes three stages of knowledge, so as
to make it appear that there is a spectrum of degrees in the adequacy
of ideas, underlying this theory is a simpler and more fundamental
conception of knowledge. Imaginative and scientific knowledge
both conceive of things “in relation to a certain time and place”,
while intuitive knowledge conceives of things “as contained in God,
and following from the necessity of the divine nature.”15 From the
perspective sub specie durationis (“under the aspect of time”), we identify ourselves with the apparently free and autonomous will
of our individual conatus. However, when we transcend to the
perspective sub specie aeternitatis (“under the aspect of eternity”), by the use of our reason, we understand that free will is an il usion
following from our inability to trace the causes of all our actions
back to the dictates of divine Necessity.16 In fact, all of our endeavors are no more contingent than the movements of a stone rolling down
a hil , which stone, ignorantly absorbed in itself, might believe itself to be freely pursuing its desire. Contingency and possibilities are not real qualities of the world but defects of our intellect.17
Books, 1990).
15 Spinoza,
Ethics 5:29, Scholium.
16 Ibid., 2:35, Scholium.
17 Ibid., 1:33, Scholium.
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Nietzsche’s great doctrine is that of “will to power”. Yet in section
8 of chapter 6 of Twilight of the Idols, which Nietzsche himself frames with the title “what alone can our teaching be”, he does not use the
misleading words “will to power” at al . Instead, he states that in the absence of causality and substance:
“No one is accountable for existing at al , or for being constituted as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in
which he lives. The fatality of his nature cannot be disentangled
from the fatality of all that which has been and will be…”
In respect to Necessity and free wil , Nietzsche disagrees with
Spinoza only on the relationship between ‘God’ and Fate. In
entry 18 of Notebook 36 (June-July 1885), Nietzsche claims that
Spinoza’s desire for infinite creative novelty from his “Deus sive
Natura”, betrays the persistence of a traditional religious sentiment
and is hypocritical in light of Spinoza’s own claim to affirm the
purposelessness of existence. Spinoza insisted on infinite novelty
because he did not want to equate “Deus sive Natura” with fate, as Nietzsche seems to do at times. However, two years later in section 15
of Essay II in On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche praises Spinoza for having “wrathful y defended the honor of his ‘free’ God against
those blasphemers who asserted that God effected things sub ratione boni.” Nietzsche says that this freed God from fate and restored the innocence of the world as it was before the rise of bad conscience.
These apparently contradictory passages can be reconciled in
the following way. Though he often props himself up as the greatest
enemy of God or as the proclaimer of the “death of God”, Nietzsche
does sometimes describe his own vision of a divinity in positive
terms. In section 16 of the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche, like Spinoza, equates God with the incomprehensible and terrible power of “the
eternal y creative primordial mother” that is Nature. In section 797
of the Will to Power, he affirmatively refers to Heraclitus’ vision of God as the eternal child playing games of chance:
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“Play, the useless – as the ideal of him who is overfull of strength,
as ‘childlike’. The ‘childlikeness’ of God: pais paizon [a child playing].”
In section 381 of the Gay Science, as elsewhere, he evokes the image of God as the ‘Lord of the Dance’, and of the philosopher as a master
of dance:
“I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish
more to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his
art, and final y also his only piety, his ‘service to God.’”
When we view these passages in the light of Nietzsche’s comments
on the nature of fate, we are left with the sense that Nietzsche’s God is not equal to fate, nor is his divinity free from fate. Metaphorical y, it could be said that Nietzsche’s fate is not mechanistic, it is a dance, or a game of chance – which remains engrossing as a game despite
having only a certain vast but limited number of possible outcomes.
It is unclear how different Spinoza’s view of the relationship
between God and Fate real y is from that of Nietzsche. After al ,
though Spinoza views God as free from fate, he also views God’s
instantiation of fate as not bound by the requirement of having a
sufficient reason. Though Spinoza’s entire moral doctrine is based
on seeking knowledge of reasons, Spinoza, like Nietzsche following
after him, views the foundation of the world as without reason,
irrational, insane. Of course, Spinoza would not have admitted the latter so bluntly. It is on account of this hypocritical failure to realize just how radical y his own thinking has departed from tradition, that
Nietzsche finds fault with Spinoza while at the same time echoing
Spinoza’s revolutionary thoughts in a purified form.
According to Spinoza, ironical y, it is the il usion of free will
born of the imagination that renders us most passive and powerless
in respect to our fate and prevents us from claiming it as our own.
‘Free wil ’ is responsible for a reactive type of morality. A person
who comprehends and reaffirms Necessity is freed from the negative
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passions of hatred, contempt, envy, vengeance, pity, humility and
weakness in respect to others.18 Nietzsche wholeheartedly agrees.
In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche argues that the weak
mass of humanity needs something more than life in order to be able to bear the suffering of its existence. However, it has turned out that “the characteristics which have been assigned to the ‘real being’
of things are the characteristics of non-being, of nothingness – the
‘real world’ has been constructed out of the contradiction to the
actual world...”19 Thus the will to truth that has undergone so many
transformations throughout the course of history, must ultimately
reveal itself as “a will to nothingness, an aversion to life” – an attitude towards life, towards a “riddle of existence” to which we are fated. In a passage from chapter 20 of book 2 of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “On Redemption”, Nietzsche writes:
All ‘it was’ is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident – until the
creative will says to it, ‘But thus I willed it.’ Until the creative will says to it, ‘But thus I will it, thus shall I will it.’
But has the will yet spoken thus? And when will that happen?
Has the will been unharnessed yet from his own fol y? Has the
will yet become his own redeemer and joy-bringer? Has he
unlearned the spirit of revenge and all gnashing of teeth? And
who taught
him reconciliation with time and something higher
than reconciliation? For that will which is will to power must will something higher than any reconciliation; but how shall this be brought about? Who could teach him also to will backwards? 20
Certainly, an effective “wil ” as we traditional y conceive of it, or a will that could at once command and actualize its desire amidst the
world of men by virtue of its power, could not do the same to what has already passed in time. We can only have an attitude towards the 18 Ibid., 5:50,53.
19 Nietzsche,
Twilight of the Idols, 3:6.
20 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (New York: The Modern Library, 1995).
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past, how it has brought us to our present and burdens our future. To
nonetheless wish to go back and change the past is to be dominated
by the “spirit of revenge”, revenge against time, against one’s fate. If one believes that there remains the consolation that, burned by the
past, one can at least seize the present furiously in one’s claws and
mold it with meticulous precision then one is “harnessed” by the
“fol y” of belief in the effective wil , which does not exist.
The future is as fated as the past and this is just what defines
the nature of fate. According to Nietzsche, if any final state of the
world could come to be in the future, it would have to be infinite
and eternal and thus be manifest in the present as well as in the past.
Since we experience finitude and time this cannot be so. Yet if the
world is open in its ceaseless becoming and closed in its finitude, then there are a finite number of possible states of affairs. Thus every moment of every life is bound to repeat itself over again in another
life after an ever-withdrawing ‘end of the world’. Nietzsche cal s this most burdensome thought “the Eternal Recurrence of the Same”. It
would appear that in light of this eternal recurrence the only choice
one has is to express ‘good wil ’ or ‘aversion’ towards one’s fated life.
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra tel s us that the “wil ” of will to power is an attitude towards the fated past, present and future which says “...thus I wil ed it...thus I will it, thus shall I will it.”
In entry 6 of Notebook 5 (summer 1886 – autumn 1887),
Nietzsche is contemplating the eternal recurrence of the same as if