The Life of the Mind (58 page)

 

No doubt the personified concept had its root in verifiable experience, but the pseudo-kingdom of disembodied spirits working behind men's backs was built out of homesickness for another world, in which man's spirit could feel at home.

This, then, is my justification for having omitted from our considerations that body of thought, German Idealism, in which sheer speculation in the realm of metaphysics perhaps reached its climax together with its end. I did not want to cross the "rainbow-bridge of concepts," perhaps because I am not homesick enough, in any event because I do not believe in a world, be it a past world or a future world, in which man's mind, equipped for withdrawing from the world of appearances, could or should ever be comfortably at home. Moreover, at least in the cases of Nietzsche and Heidegger, it was precisely a confrontation with the Will as a human faculty and not as an ontological category that prompted them first to repudiate the faculty and
then
turn about to put their confidence in this ghostly home of personified concepts which so obviously was "built" and decorated by the thinking, as opposed to the willing, ego.

In my discussion of the Will I have repeatedly mentioned two altogether different ways of understanding the faculty: as a faculty of
choice
between objects or goals, the
liberum arbitrium,
which acts as arbiter between given ends and deliberates freely about means to reach them; and, on the other hand, as our "faculty for beginning spontaneously a series in time" (Kant)
¹⁷
or Augustine's "
initium ut esset homo creatus est
" man's capacity for beginning because he himself is a beginning. With the modern age's concept of Progress and its inherent shift from understanding the future as that which approaches us to that which we determine by the Will's projects, the instigating power of the Will was bound to come to the foreground. And so indeed it did, as far as we can tell from the common opinion of the time.

On the other hand, nothing is more characteristic of the beginnings of what we now call "existentialism" than the absence of any such optimistic overtones. According to Nietzsche, only "lack of historical sense," a lack that for him is "the original error of all philosophers,"
¹⁸
can explain that optimism: "Let us not be deceived! Time marches forward; we'd like to believe that everything that is in it also marches forward—that the development is one that moves forward." And as to Progress' correlate, the idea of mankind: "'Mankind' does not advance; it does not even exist."
¹⁹

In other words, though the universal suspicion at the beginning of the modern age had been powerfully neutralized, held in check, first by the very notion of Progress and then by its seeming embodiment and apogee in the French Revolution, this had proved to be only a delaying action, whose force eventually exhausted itself. If one wants to look on this development historically, one can only say that Nietzsche's thought-experiments—"such an experimental philosophy as I live anticipates experimentally even the possibilities of the most fundamental nihilism"
²⁰
—at last completed what had begun with Descartes and Pascal in the seventeenth century.

Men, forever tempted to lift the veil of the future—with the aid of computers or horoscopes or the intestines of sacrificial animals—have a worse record to show in these "sciences" than in almost any other scientific endeavor. Still, if it were a matter of honest competition between futurologists in respect to our own time, the prize might well go to John Donne, a poet without any scientific ambitions, who in 1611 wrote in immediate reaction to what he knew was going on in the sciences (which for a long time would still be operating under the name of "natural philosophy"). He did not have to wait for Descartes, or Pascal, to draw all the conclusions from what he perceived.

 

And new Philosophy calls all in doubt,
The Element of fire is quite put out;
The Sun is lost and th'earth, and no mans wit
Can well direct him where to looke for it....
'Tis all in pieces, all cohaerence gone;
All just supply, and all Relation:
Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot....

 

And he ends with lamentations that needed roughly three hundred years to be heard again: "when thou knowst this, Thou knowst how ugly a monster ... how wan a Ghost ... how drie a Cinder this world is."
²¹

It is against this historical background that we shall have to consider the last two thinkers still close enough to the West's philosophical heritage to recognize in the Will one of the mind's important faculties. We start with Nietzsche and remember that he never wrote any book with the title "Will to Power," that the collection of fragments, notes, and aphorisms bearing this title was published posthumously, selected from a chaos of unconnected and often contradictory sayings. Each one of them is what all Nietzsche's mature writings actually are, namely, a thought-experiment, a literary genre surprisingly rare in our recorded history. The most obvious analogy is Pascal's
Pensées
, which share with Nietzsche's
Will to Power
a haphazardness of arrangement that has led later editors to try to rearrange them, with the rather annoying result that the reader has a good deal of trouble identifying and dating them.

We shall consider first a number of simple descriptive statements without metaphysical or general philosophical connotations. Most of them will sound rather familiar, but it will be better not to jump to the conclusion that we may be confronted here with bookish influences. To draw such inferences is especially tempting in the case of Heidegger because of his profound knowledge of medieval philosophy, on the one hand, and his insistence on the primacy of the future tense in
Being and Time
(which I have already spoken of), on the other. It is all the more noteworthy that in his discussion of the Will, which chiefly takes the form of an interpretation of Nietzsche, he nowhere mentions Augustine's discoveries in the
Confessions.
Hence what will sound familiar in the following is best ascribed to the peculiar characteristics of the willing faculty; even Schopenhauer's influence on the young Nietzsche we may disregard without great scruples. Nietzsche knew that "Schopenhauer spoke of the 'will'; but nothing is more characteristic of his philosophy than the absence of all genuine willing,"
²²
and he saw correctly that the reason for this lay in a "basic misunderstanding of the
will
(as if craving, instinct, drive were the
essence
of the will)" whereas "the will is precisely that which treats cravings as their master and appoints to them their way and measure."
²³

For "to will is not the same as to desire, to strive for, to want: from all these it is distinguished through the element of Command.... That something is commanded, this is inherent in willing."
²⁴
Heidegger comments: "No characteristic phrase occurs more frequently in Nietzsche than ... to will is to command; inherent in Will is the commanding thought."
²⁵
It is no less characteristic that this commanding thought is directed only very rarely toward dominating others: command and obedience both occur in the mind—in a fashion strangely similar to Augustine's conception, of which Nietzsche certainly knew nothing.

He explains at some length in
Beyond Good and Evil:

 

Somebody who wills gives orders to something
in
him that obeys.... The strangest aspect of this multiple phenomenon we call 'Will' is that we have but one word for it, and especially only one word for the fact that
we are in every given case at the same time those who issue the orders and those who obey them;
insofar as we obey, we experience the feelings of coercion, urging, pressing, resisting, which usually begin to manifest themselves immediately after the act of willing; insofar however ... as we are in command ... we experience a sensation of pleasure, and this all the more strongly as we are used to overcoming the dichotomy through the notion of the I, the Ego, and this in such a way that we take the obedience in ourselves for granted and therefore identify willing and performing, willing and acting [italics added].

 

This willing operation existing only in our minds overcomes the mental duality of the two-in-one that has become a battle between one who commands and one who is supposed to obey by identifying the "I" as a whole with the commanding part and anticipating that the other, the resisting part, will obey and do as it is told. "What is called 'freedom of the will' is essentially a passionate superiority toward a someone who must obey. 'I am free; "he" must obey'—the consciousness of this is the very willing."
²⁶

We would not expect Nietzsche to believe in divine grace as the healing power for the Will's duality. What
is
unexpected in the above description is that he detected in the "consciousness" of the struggle a kind of trick of the "I" that enables it to escape die conflict by identifying itself with the commanding part and to overlook, as it were, the unpleasant, paralyzing sentiments of being coerced and hence always on the point of resisting. Nietzsche often denounces this feeling of superiority as an illusion, albeit a wholesome one. In other passages, he accounts for the "strangeness" of the whole phenomenon by calling it an "oscillation [of the will] between yes and no," but he sticks to the feeling of the "I" 's superiority by identifying the oscillation with a kind of swinging from pleasure to pain. The pleasure, different in this as in other respects from Scotus'
delectatio,
is clearly the anticipated joy of the I-can inherent in the willing act itself, independent of performance, of the triumphal feeling we all know when we perform well, regardless of praise or audience. In Nietzsche, the point is that he numbers the negative slave-feelings of being coerced and of resisting or resenting among the necessary obstacles without which the Will would not even know its own power. Only by surmounting an inner resistance does the Will become aware of its genesis: it did not spring up to obtain power; power is its very source. Again in
Beyond Good and Evil:
"'Freedom of the will' is the word for that manifold pleasurable condition of the wilier
who is in command and at the same time
considers himself as one with the executor of the command—as such enjoying the triumph over the resistance, but possessed of the judgment that it is his will itself that is overcoming the resistance. In this fashion the wilier adds the pleasurable feelings of executing ... to his pleasurable feeling as Commander."
²⁷

This description, which takes the two-in-one of the Will, the resisting "I" and the triumphant "I," to be the source of the Will's power, owes its plausibility to the unexpected introduction of the pain-pleasure principle into the discussion: "to posit pleasure and displeasure as cardinal facts."
²⁸
Just as the mere absence of pain can never cause pleasure, so the Will, if it did not have to overcome resistance, could never achieve power. Here, unwittingly following the ancient hedonist philosophies rather than the contemporary pleasure-pain calculus, Nietzsche relies in his description on the experience of
release
from pain—not on the mere absence of pain or the mere presence of pleasure. The intensity of the sensation of release is only matched by the intensity of the sensation of pain and is always greater than any pleasure unrelated to pain. The pleasure of drinking the most exquisite wine cannot be compared in intensity with the pleasure felt by a desperately thirsty mail who obtains his first drink of water. In this sense there is a clear distinction between joy, independent of and unrelated to needs and desires, and pleasure, the sensuous lust of a creature whose body is alive to the extent that it is in need of something it does not have.

Joy, it seems, can only be experienced if one is wholly free of pain and desire; that is, it stands outside the pain-pleasure calculus, which Nietzsche despised because of its inbred utilitarianism. Joy—what Nietzsche called the Dionysian principle—comes from
abundance,
and it is true that all joy is a kind of luxury; it overcomes us, and we can indulge in it only after the needs of life have been satisfied. But this is not to deny the sensuous element in joy as well; abundance is still
life's
abundance, and the Dionysian principle in its sensuous lust turns to destruction precisely because abundance can afford destruction. In this respect is not the Will in the closest possible affinity with the life-principle, which constantly produces and destroys? Hence Nietzsche defines the Dionysian as "temporary identification with the principle of life (including the voluptuousness of the martyr)," as "Joy in the destruction ... and at the sight of its progressive ruin ... Joy in what is coming and lies in the future, which triumphs over existing things, however good."
²⁹

The Nietzschean shift from the I-will to the anticipated I-can, which negates the Paulinian I-will-and-I-cannof and thereby all Christian ethics, is based on an unqualified Yes to Life, that is, on an elevation of Life as experienced outside all mental activities to the rank of supreme value by which everything else is to be evaluated. This is possible and plausible because there is indeed an I-can inherent in every I-will, as we saw in our discussion of Duns Scotus: "
Voluntas est potentia quia ipsa alquid potest
" ("The Will is a power because it
can
achieve something").
³⁰
The Nietzschean Will, however, is not limited by its own inherent I-can; for instance, it can will eternity, and Nietzsche looks forward to a future that will produce the "superman," that is, a new human species strong enough to live in the thought of an "eternal recurrence." "We produced the weightiest thought—
now let us produce the being
to whom it will be easy and blessed! . . . To celebrate the future, not the past. To sing [
dichten
] the myth of the future."
³¹