The Life of the Mind (38 page)

 

Nietzsche's philosophy, centered on the Will to Power, seems at first glance to constitute the climax of the Will's ascendancy in theoretical reflection. I think that this interpretation of Nietzsche is a misunderstanding caused partly by the rather unfortunate circumstances surrounding the first uncritical editions of his posthumously published writings. We owe to Nietzsche a number of decisive insights into the nature of the willing facility and the willing ego, to which we shall return later, but most of the passages about the Will in his work testify to an outspoken hostility toward the "theory of 'freedom of the Will,' a hundred times refuted, [which] owes its permanence" precisely to its being "refutable": "Somebody always comes along who feels strong enough to refute it once more."
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Nietzsche's own final refutation is contained in his "thought of Eternal Return," the "basic concept of the
Zarathustra,
" which expresses "the highest possible formula of affirmation."
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As such, it stands historically in the series of "theodicies," those strange justifications of God or of Being which, ever since the seventeenth century, philosophers felt were needed to reconcile man's mind to the world in which he was to spend his life. The "thought of Eternal Return" implies an unconditional denial of the modem rectilinear time concept and its progressing course; it is nothing less than an explicit reversion to the cyclical time concept of antiquity. What makes it modem is the pathetic tone in which it is expressed, indicating the amount of willful intensity needed by modem man to regain the simple admiring and affirming wonder,
thaumazein,
which once, for Plato, was the beginning of philosophy. Modem philosophy, on the contrary, had originated in the Cartesian and Leibnizian doubt that Being—"Why is there something and not, rather, nothing?"—could be justified at all. Nietzsche speaks of Eternal Recurrence in the tone of a religious convert, and it
was
a conversion that brought him to it, though not a religious one. With this thought he tried to convert himself to the ancient concept of Being and deny the entire philosophical creed of the modem age, which he was the first to diagnose as the "Age of Suspicion." Ascribing his thought to an "inspiration," he does not doubt that "one must go back thousands of years to find somebody who would have the right to tell [him], 'this is also my experience.' "
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Although in the early decades of our century Nietzsche was read and misread by almost everybody in the European intellectual community, his influence on philosophy properly speaking was minimal; to this day, there are no Nietzscheans in the sense that there are still Kantians and Hegelians. His first recognition as a philosopher came with the very influential rebellion of thinkers against academic philosophy that, unhappily, goes under the name of "existentialism." No serious study of Nietzsche's thought existed before Jaspers' and Heidegger's books about him;
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yet that does not mean that either Jaspers or Heidegger can be understood as a belated founder of a Nietzsche school. More important in the present context, neither Jaspers nor Heidegger in his own philosophy put the Will at the center of the human faculties.

For Jaspers, human freedom is guaranteed by our not having
the
truth; truth compels, and man can be free only because he does not know the answer to the ultimate questions: "I must will because I do
not
know. The Being which is inaccessible to knowledge can be revealed only to my volition. Not-knowing is the root of having to will."
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Heidegger in his early work had shared the modern age's emphasis on the future as the decisive temporal entity—"the future is the primary phenomenon of an original and authentic temporality"—and had introduced
Sorge
(a German word that appeared for the first time as a philosophical term in
Being and Time
and that means "a caring for," as well as "worry about the future") as the key existential fact of human existence. Ten years later he broke with the whole modern age's philosophy (in the second volume of his book about Nietzsche), precisely because he had discovered to what an extent the age itself, and not just its theoretical products, was based on the domination of the Will. He concluded his later philosophy with the seemingly paradoxical proposition of "willing not-to-will."
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To be sure, in his early philosophy Heidegger did not share the modem age's belief in Progress, and his proposition "to will not-to-will" has nothing in common with Nietzsche's overcoming of the Will by restricting it to willing that whatever happens shall happen again and again. But Heidegger's famous
Kehre,
the turning-about of his late philosophy, nevertheless somewhat resembles Nietzsche's conversion; in the first place, it
was
a kind of conversion, and secondly, it had the identical consequence of leading him back to the earliest Greek thinkers. It is as though at the very end, the thinkers of the modem age escaped into a "land of thought" (Kant)
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where their own specifically modem preoccupations—with the future, with the Will as the mental organ for it, and with freedom as a problem—had been non-existent, where, in other words, there was no notion of a mental faculty that might correspond to freedom as the faculty of thinking corresponded to truth.

The purpose of these preliminary remarks is to facilitate our approach to the complexities of the willing ego, and in our methodological concern we can hardly afford to overlook the simple fact that every philosophy of the Will is the product of the thinking rather than the willing ego. Though of course it is always the same mind that thinks and wills, we have seen that it cannot be taken for granted that the thinking ego's evaluation of the other mental activities will remain unbiased; and to find thinkers with widely different general philosophies raising identical arguments against the Will is bound to arouse our mistrust. I shall briefly outline the main objections as we find them in post-medieval philosophy before I enter into a discussion of Hegel's position.

There is, first, the ever-recurring disbelief in the very existence of the faculty. The Will is suspected of being a mere illusion, a phantasm of consciousness, a kind of delusion inherent in consciousness' very structure. "A wooden top," in Hobbes's words, "...lashed by the boys ... sometimes spinning, sometimes hitting men on the shin, if it were sensible of its own motion, would think it proceeded from its own will, unless it felt what lashed it."
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And Spinoza thought along the same lines: a stone set in motion by some external force "would believe itself to be completely free and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish," provided that it was "conscious of its own endeavor" and "capable of thinking."
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In other words, "men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined." Thus men are subjectively free, objectively necessitated. Spinoza's correspondents raise the obvious objection: "If this were granted, all wickedness would be excusable," which disturbs Spinoza not in the least. He answers: "Wicked men are not less to be feared, and not less harmful, when they are wicked from necessity."
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Hobbes and Spinoza admit the existence of the Will as a subjectively felt faculty and deny only its freedom: "I acknowledge this liberty, that I can do if I will; but to say I can will if I will, I take to be an absurd speech." For "Liberty or Freedom, signifieth properly the absence of ... external impediments of motion.... But when the impediment of motion is in the constitution of the thing itself, we use not to say: it wants the liberty, but the power to move; as when a stone lieth still or a man is fastened to his bed by sickness." These reflections are entirely in accordance with the Greek position on the matter. What is no longer in line with classical philosophy is Hobbes's conclusion that "Liberty and necessity are consistent: as in the water, that hath not only liberty, but a necessity of descending by the channel; so likewise in the actions which men voluntarily do: which because they proceed from their will, proceed from liberty; and yet, because every act of man's will ... proceedeth from some cause and that from another cause, in a continual chain ... proceed from necessity. So that to him that could see the connection of those causes, the necessity of all men's voluntary actions would appear manifest."
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With both Hobbes and Spinoza the negation of the Will is firmly grounded in their respective philosophies. But we find virtually the same argument in Schopenhauer, whose general philosophy was very nearly the opposite and for whom consciousness or subjectivity was the very essence of Being: like Hobbes, he does not deny Will but denies that Will is free: there is an illusory feeling of freedom when I experience volition; when I deliberate about what to do next, and, rejecting a number of possibilities, finally come to some definite decision, it is "with just as free a will ... as if water spoke to itself: 'I can make high waves ... I can rush down hill ... I can plunge down foaming and gushing ... I can rise freely as a stream of water into the air (...in the fountain)...but I am doing none of these things now, and am voluntarily remaining quiet and clear water in the reflecting pond."
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This kind of argument is best summed up by John Stuart Mill in the passage already quoted: "Our
internal
consciousness tells us that we have a power, which the whole outward experience of the human race tells us that we never use" (italics added).
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What is so striking in these objections raised against the very existence of the faculty is, first of all, that they are invariably raised in terms of the modern notion of consciousness—a notion just as unknown to ancient philosophy as the notion of the Will. Hie Greek
synesis—
that I can share knowledge with myself (
syniēmi
) about things to which no one else can testify—is the predecessor more of conscience than of consciousness,
⁴⁵
as is seen when Plato mentions how the memory of the bloody deed haunts the homicide.
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Next, the same objections could easily be raised, but hardly ever were, against the existence of the faculty of thought. To be sure, Hobbes's reckoning with consequences, if that is to be understood as thinking, is not open to such suspicions, but this power of figuring and calculating ahead coincides, rather, with the willing ego's deliberations about means to an end or with the capacity used in solving riddles and mathematical problems. (Some such equation, clearly, is behind Ryle's refutation of "the doctrine that there exists a Faculty ... of the 'Will' and, accordingly, that there occur processes, or operations, corresponding to what it describes as 'volitions.'" In Ryle's own words: "No one ever says such things as that ... he performed five quick and easy volitions and two slow and difficult volitions between midday and lunch-time."
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It cannot be seriously maintained that enduring thought-products, such as Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason
or Hegel's
Phenomenology of Mind,
could ever be understood in these terms.) The only philosophers I know of who dared doubt the existence of the faculty of thought were Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. The latter in his early thought-experiments held that the thinking ego (what he called the "
vorstellendes Subjekt,
" deriving his terminology from Schopenhauer) could "in the last resort be mere superstition," probably an "empty delusion, but the willing subject exists." In justification of his thesis Wittgenstein reiterates the arguments commonly raised in the seventeenth century against Spinoza's denial of the Will, to wit, "If the Will did not exist, neither would there be ... the bearer of ethics."
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As for Nietzsche, it must be said that he had his doubts about both willing and thinking.

The disturbing fact that even the so-called voluntarists among the philosophers, those entirely convinced, like Hobbes, of the
power
of the will, could so easily glide to doubting its very existence may be somewhat clarified by examining the second of our ever-recurring difficulties. What aroused the philosophers' distrust was precisely the inevitable connection with Freedom—to repeat, the notion of an unfree will is a contradiction in terms: "If I must necessarily will, why need I speak of will at all?...Our will would not be will unless it were in our power. Because it is in our power it is free."
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To quote Descartes, whom one may count among the voluntarists: "No one, when he considers himself alone, fails to experience the fact that to will and to be free are the same thing."
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As I have said more than once, the touchstone of a free act—from the decision to get out of bed in the morning or take a walk in the afternoon to the highest resolutions by which we bind ourselves for the future—is always that we know that we could also have left undone what we actually did. Willing, it appears, is characterized by an infinitely greater freedom than thinking, and—again to repeat—this undeniable fact has never been felt to be an unmixed blessing. Thus we hear from Descartes: "I am conscious of a will so extended as to be subject to no limits....It is free will alone ... which I find to be so great in me that I can conceive no other idea to be more great; it is ... this will that causes me to know that ... I bear the image and similitude of God," and he immediately adds that this experience "consists solely in the fact that ... we act in such a way that we are not in the least conscious that any outside force constrains us [in] the power of choosing to do a thing or choosing not to do it."
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In so saying, he leaves the door wide open on the one hand to the doubts of his successors and on the other to the attempts of his contemporaries "to make [God's] pre-ordinances harmonize with the freedom of our will."
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Descartes himself, unwilling to become "involved in the great difficulties [that would ensue] if we undertook to reconcile God's foresight and omnipotence with human freedom," explicitly appeals to the beneficial limitations of "our thought [which] is finite" and therefore subject to certain rules, for instance, the axiom of non-contradiction, and the compelling "necessities" of self-evident truth.
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