Abstract
In this chapter, I explain that for Nietzsche, affective nihilism (as a drive-based, psychophysiological disorder) is a problem of weakened agency. Otherwise put, affective nihilists are weak agents, though Nietzsche offers different version of this will-weakness: either the intensity of one’s will is diminished due to the weakened activity of one’s drives, or the efficacy and endurance of one’s will drops off as one’s will is fragmented into a chaotic cluster of contradictory drives.
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Creasy, Kaitlyn. 2019. “Making Knowledge the Most Powerful Affect: Overcoming Affective Nihilism.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 50 (2): 210–232.
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Importantly, however, describing affective nihilism as a problem of weakened agency that can be explained as a psychophysiological disorder does not tell the whole story of affective nihilism and its significance for Nietzsche. Indeed, as mentioned in the previous chapter, it is critical for Nietzsche that affective nihilism as a disorder can be caused by the internalization of life-denying norms or beliefs: norms and beliefs inherited from one’s culture or society.
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This view is also shared by Gemes (2009, p. 42).
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For more on this, see Huddleston (2019b, pp. 86–87).
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Katsafanas (2016) argues that agential unity does not result when “one drive predominates and coordinates the other drives” (2016, p. 175). Instead, he believes that “an agent is unified—or, equivalently, the agent is active in the production of her action—when she approves of her action, and further knowledge of the action’s etiology would not undermine the approval” (ibid., p. 195). This is because Katsafanas, unlike other scholars (Gemes 2009; Richardson 2009), understands unity to involve a “relation between [one’s] drives and [one’s] conscious thoughts” (ibid., p. 165). Such unity is required for one to be a genuine agent. On Katsafanas’ view, however, it seems that the last man may very well count as a unified agent, one who genuinely acts as opposed to one who merely manifests behaviors in virtue of his drives. After all, the last man experiences an unreflective, easy contentedness with the ends he pursues—that is to say, he seems to approve of his ends and actions—and his noncommittal, detached attitude makes it unlikely that discovering the etiology of his actions (what seems to be a desire for undisturbed, simple comfort) would trouble him at all. In fact, that “sunny and impartial hospitality with which he accepts everything that comes his way, his type of unscrupulous benevolence” (BGE 207) seems to ensure that he would remain cheerful and unmoved even in the face of such a discovery. Yet Nietzsche characterizes the last man’s will as lacking unity. According to Nietzsche, the last man’s soul undergoes “ever greater deterioration and disintegration” (KSA 11:25[9]; he has “no goal, no conclusion and sunrise […] nothing tough, powerful, self-reliant that wants to be master” (BGE 207). (Note here that I read Nietzsche’s descriptions of the last man, the theoretical man, and the objective man as descriptions of the same type of individual.) Thus, I resist Katsafanas’s claim that Nietzschean unity involves a relation between conscious thought and drives (rather than a relation among one’s drives and affects). In addition, it seems clear that Nietzsche would not characterize the last man as an agent. Indeed, the last man’s behaviors and pursuits are framed as mere “pastimes” (Z P:5); according to Nietzsche, such a man “change[s], [he does] not become” (KSA 13:14[157]). Thus, the particular kind of self-approbation described by Katsafanas—one that would persist in the face of discoveries about the origins of one’s actions—is not a sufficient condition for agency in Nietzsche. Still, I do think that Nietzsche believes a kind of self-approbatory attitude similar to the one Katsafanas describes here will be an important characteristic of one who has overcome affective nihilism: this will be the attitude that “redeem[s] what is past…. transform[ing] every ‘It was’ into ‘Thus I willed it’” (Z II:20). I discuss this at more length in the eighth chapter.
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Socrates’ development of “a hypertrophy of the logical faculty” as a response to his spirit’s anarchy is no indication that he has unified his will in the way Nietzsche recommends; indeed, in Socrates’ case, reason plays the role of “counter-tyrant” (TI, “Socrates,” 9) to the drives, which Socrates already experiences as tyrannical. One whose will is unified in the proper way will achieve mastery over their drives in the form of their dominant drive or set of drives; the dominant drives do not become a “tyrant” in Nietzsche’s healthy individual. For more on this distinction between tyranny and mastery, see Reginster (2003) and Katsafanas (2016).
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Further support for this point can be found in a note from the Nachlass in which Nietzsche characterizes “objectivity as the disintegration of the will [Willens-Disgregation]” (KSA 13:14[83]).
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It is worth noting that the connection between mechanical activity and the herd instinct appears in both Zarathustra and the Genealogy.
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Although a robust account of Nietzschean nihilism must include affective nihilism, it is not the case that every Nietzschean nihilist suffers from affective nihilism. Indeed, one can judge this-worldly existence negatively or believe in the worthlessness of existence without suffering from affective nihilism.
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Importantly, though it is a necessary condition of overcoming affective nihilism that one’s will is strengthened and one is able to accomplish those goals one sets for oneself, this is not sufficient for overcoming nihilism (Anderson 2013, p. 164). This is something I discuss at greater length in the next two chapters.
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Creasy, K. (2020). Affective Nihilists, Weak Agents. In: The Problem of Affective Nihilism in Nietzsche. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37133-3_6
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