![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Nietzsche offers us an account of how different drives interact with one another; it is rich but also appears to risk the homunculus fallacy. Competing attempts to deflect this charge on his behalf share an implicit consensus about the ‘epistemic ends’ of the account: they assume Nietzsche is trying to provide true explanations of psychological phenomena. I argue against this consensus. I claim that Nietzsche's characterisations of drive interaction are to be taken as fictive and are not intended to have explanatory value. They nevertheless facilitate genuine epistemic achievement. Drawing on Catherine Elgin's account of the epistemic role of idealised models in science, I argue that Nietzsche's account of drive interaction is a ‘model of the mind’ that, despite relying on falsehoods, can exemplify features of our psychology that aid us in making novel predictions. We then see that Nietzsche neatly sidesteps the homunculus fallacy; we can further understand more fully what Nietzsche hopes his drive psychology will teach us. We can now resolve, for example, outstanding interpretative puzzles about the relationship between psychic integration and Nietzsche’s distinctive notion of spiritual health.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 I use the following abbreviations for Nietzsche’s texts: Daybreak – D; The Gay Science – GS; Beyond Good and Evil – BGE; Twilight of the Idols – TI; The Antichrist – A; Ecce Home – EH; Unpublished Fragments – NF [Year]. All translations of the published works are from the ‘Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy’ editions; the translations of the unpublished fragments are from the Stanford University Press editions of Nietzsche’s complete works. I use the following abbreviations for Schopenhauer’s texts: The World as Will and Representation, Volume I – WWR I; The World as Will and Representation, Volume II – WWR II. I use the E.F.J. Payne translation for these two texts.
2 See also Drayson (Citation2012) for further discussion of these two components of the homunculus fallacy.
3 See also Riccardi (Citation2021, 49). For further elaboration on what makes an explanation distinctively subpersonal, see Drayson (Citation2012).
4 Anderson (Citation2005) offers one notable development of this strategy.
5 I thank Christopher Fowles for the suggestion that I use this passage to clarify TI Skirmishes 7.
6 Nietzsche, to be clear, considers his account of the drives to be ‘psychology’ as he understands it: BGE 12 and TI Skirmishes 38 are examples of cases where he indicates this.
7 I suspect that Nietzsche’s use of idealisation extends beyond his claims about drive interaction to some of his more speculative claims about individual drives. Consider an interpretative puzzle raised by Stern (Citation2015): Nietzsche’s claim that our ability to identify and name the drives is inevitably extremely limited (D 119) seems in tension with his various highly specific characterisations of specific drives in his psychological analyses (consider, for instance, his discussion of the prominence of the ‘histrionic instinct’ in diplomats in GS 361). This puzzle could be overcome if we took these latter claims to be fictive; I suspect they may well be, but I do not have the space to fully develop this case here.
8 I am indebted to Brian Leiter for various comments and suggestions which helped me clarify my views on the explanation assumption, and in particular for pushing me to draw out the importance of prediction as an alternative epistemic end.
9 See Salmon (Citation1989, 3–4) and Potochnik (Citation2015) for further discussion. Note that, while prediction may have pragmatic value, it is nevertheless a distinctively epistemic aim: a good prediction is one that is right.
10 For a detailed overview of the issues facing the thesis that predictions and explanations are symmetrical, see Salmon (Citation1989, Ch. 2).
11 Little is said about whether Nietzsche values prediction too, to the extent the goals come apart.
12 Interestingly, this backdrop is also highlighted by Salmon (Citation1989, 4–5) in his classic history of the development of views of explanation in the 20th century: he notes that in a ‘philosophical context dominated by post-Kantian and post-Hegelian German idealism’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many philosophers ‘argued there could be no genuine explanation of any fact of nature that did not involve an extra-empirical appeal … Many scientific philosophers (as well as philosophical scientists) reacted to this attitude by denying that science is in any way concerned with explanation’.
13 Stoll highlights a second strand to morphological or descriptive knowledge for Schopenhauer: it doesn’t just seek to predict but has a further ontological upshot in helping us ‘determine[] which forces make up the material world and the priority relations between them’ (Citation2018, 536). It is not clear to me that Nietzsche took up this second strand; while Stoll suggests he does, his primary evidence looks to come from unpublished notes and letters (534). But even if Nietzsche does accept this second more robust aim of description, it would not be sufficient for genuine explanation on the demanding conception of explanation in play.
14 Compare also GS 335, where Nietzsche suggests knowledge of the regularities of nature is an important aid in the project of self-creation: ‘we must become the best students and discoverers of everything lawful and necessary in the world: we must become physicists in order to be creators’.
15 Elgin often refers to this broad group of cognitive ends as contributing to what she terms, following Kvanvig (Citation2003), ‘objectual understanding’: objectual understanding is the understanding of a topic or subject matter. She is at pains to distinguish objectual understanding from ‘understanding why’, however; she thus accommodates a view on which understanding might be measured by predictive success rather than the ability to offer true explanations. Someone might demonstrate an (objectual) understanding of the New York subway system by showing an ability to correctly predict the best route to take at different times of day and in different weather conditions; they may, despite this predictive ability, be unable to explain their know how – they might not be able to explain why their proffered routes are the best ones to take, even if they in fact are so (Elgin, Citation2017, Ch. 3).
16 This claim is certainly still itself philosophically controversial; for one account on which metaphors can in some sense be true, see Hills (Citation1997). I will, for the sake of argument, concede that such a notion is viable here.
17 See Weisberg’s account of the fidelity criteria by which we evaluate models (2013, Ch. 3) for further discussion on why we should separate our evaluation of a model’s predictive power from its ability to accurately represent its target’s causal structure.
18 We see here, recalling Elgin’s account, how the value of felicitously false models depends centrally on how they enable a given practitioner to make the best use of the rest of their knowledge base.
19 See section 5.2 for further discussion.
20 Riccardi (Citation2021), for instance, focuses heavily on how a causal dispositional account can be provided for talk of drives ‘commanding and obeying’.
21 Whether Nietzsche’s model is in fact a good one, and actually has predictive power, is not a question that I will attempt to answer here.
22 Note the near identical terms used to characterise Socrates (TI Socrates 4).
23 What this balance is will vary from person to person, based on the strengths and natures of their various drives: ‘health … of course could look in one person like the opposite of health in another’ (GS 120). The suggestion is not that everyone needs to behave exactly as Caesar did if they want to be healthy.
24 This paper benefited greatly from the comments of audience members at the London Nietzsche Seminar and the 2023 International Society for Nietzsche Studies workshop in Atlanta. I am grateful for detailed written comments from Ian Dunkle, Joseph Alfon, Daniel Davis and Brian Leiter which prompted substantial revisions of the piece. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Andrew Huddleston for encouraging me to pursue this project, and for having the patience to offer extensive guidance on its numerous iterations.