Chapter 1. Introduction: to live free

My starting point is a desire for life. I want to live free, and I want to live joyfully.

What is anarchy? An idea that helps guide this desire. Anarchy means: no rulers. No domination. No one is a master and no one is a slave.

But we live in a world of domination. The overwhelming force of the state, the all-pervading power of the market, the ever-present oppressions of species, gender, race, class, religion, down to the petty hierarchies and degradations of our everyday lives and personal relationships, the social norms of status, submission, isolation dug deep into our bodies. In totality: a system of shit.

So how can I possibly live free in this world? If freedom means utopia, a world with no more domination, then it’s a hopeless quest. By now we know that no god, no great revolution, is going to appear and take us to the promised land.

Instead, living freely can only mean living fighting. It means seizing what moments and cracks of freedom I can. It means attacking and uprooting as much as I can the forces of domination around and within me.

And again: I want to live joyfully. I have had enough of sadness, fear, and despair.

Does it sound like there’s a contradiction here? Growing up in this thing called liberal democracy, they tried to teach me that struggle is bitter. At best, conflict is something nasty you have to face up to sometimes, while dreaming of a world of perpetual peace.

This way of thinking can’t work for us now, if it ever did. There is no end in sight, no new world to come. There is only this world, with its pain and cruelty and loneliness. And also: its delights, all its sensations, encounters, friendships, loves, discoveries, tenderness, wildness, beauty, and possibilities.

This is the key idea of Nietzsche’s philosophy: affirm life, say yes to life, here and now. Don’t try to hide from struggle in fantasy worlds and imaginary futures. Embrace life’s conflict, and yes you can live freely and joyfully.

Of course, it’s not easy. It involves danger, and also hard work. We face enemies in the world around us, institutions and individuals that set out to oppress and exploit us. And we also face forces within ourselves that work to keep us passive, conformist, confused, anxious, sad, self-destructive, weak.

To fight these forces effectively, we need to make ourselves stronger, both as individuals and as groups of comrades, friends and allies. And one part of this is striving to better understand ourselves and the social worlds we are part of. Ideas are tools – or weapons. But many of the ideas we learn in contemporary capitalist society are blunt or broken, or actively hold us back. We need new ways of thinking, and developing these can involve exploring the work of past thinkers – not as sacred masters but as ‘arsenals to be looted’.

One source of idea-weapons, which I at least have found very helpful, is Nietzsche. I am writing this book to explain some of these Nietzschean ideas, as I understand them, both to clarify my own thinking and to share them with others.

Outline of this book

I have divided this book into two parts. Part one looks at key ideas from Nietzsche’s approach to psychology, i.e., to the workings of the human mind or ‘psyche’. It looks at questions like: what are human beings? How do we develop and become what we are? What psychological ties bind us to the norms and habits of the conformist ‘herd’? How can we become ‘free spirits’?

The second part moves from the psyche to the social world. It looks at some Nietzschean ideas about how human beings interact, fight, dominate, love, form alliances and groups, and in doing so create, destroy and transform social institutions and systems. It tries to understand some of the mechanics, if you like, of power, and so how we can develop different kinds of projects for fighting against domination.

I try not to get too bogged down in scholarly detail. I take ideas from Nietzsche and from other people too, mix them together, reshape and develop them. But to do this it has helped me to try and understand in some more depth what Nietzsche was thinking and the context of his own work. The first part of the book works quite closely with Nietzsche’s own texts; the second part takes these ideas, adds in some more from other writers, and runs away with them. The endnotes include some more scholarly observations about my particular take on Nietzsche, and some reading suggestions for those who want to explore his texts further.

In the Appendix, I look a bit at the historical interaction between Nietzsche and the anarchists: what Nietzsche knew and thought about the anarchism of his time, and how anarchists picked up his ideas. This is just an introductory sketch: to give any decent account of the interactions between Nietzschean ideas and anarchist thought and practice over the last 120 years would be a big project of its own.

The rest of this introductory chapter gives a quick overview of the main ideas of this book: if you don’t want to read the whole thing, this should at least give you a snapshot.

Psychology for free spirits

Scratch a political ideal and you can uncover a view of human nature. In medieval Europe, thinkers of the Catholic Church justified the feudal system with stories about how human beings are born to play fixed roles in a God-given hierarchy. In the “modern” era, as capitalism gathered steam, philosophers developed new pictures of human nature alongside new institutions. The greats of modern philosophy from Hobbes to Locke to Hume, Machiavelli to Rousseau to Kant, down to 19th century Utilitarians or Hegelians, rooted their political claims in theories about the basic structures of human perception, motivation and action, in the process inventing the new science of psychology.

Many of the stories these enlightenment philosophers told are now deeply embedded in the “common sense” of capitalist culture. One is the idea that humans are “economic agents”, citizen-consumers who spend our lives pursuing comfort, wealth, or profit – our “self-interest”. Even more basic is the idea that we are “rational subjects” at all, individuals who can, or at least should, make decisions by consciously calculating from a range of options, and can be held responsible for those choices – in a courtroom if necessary. A few hundred years ago these were wild and strange ideas. It’s not that they are completely unchallenged today, but they have spread far in our everyday thinking, and play dominant roles in economics, law, politics, psychiatry, education and other disciplines.

Revolutionary movements against capitalism have also used these “enlightenment” views of psychology, developing them in their own ways. For example, Marxist strands of socialism took on the same ideas of economic self-interest, and also the idea that work or productive labour is fundamental to our being. While nineteenth century anarchist thought often relied heavily on a view close to that famously linked to Rousseau, the philosopher of the French Revolution: humans share an underlying peace-loving and cooperative nature that only needs to be set free from the artificial corruption of state domination.

Nietzsche’s psychological investigations attack many of these conventional myths. He says: if we look closely and honestly at how we are, we see that we are very far from being coherent rational subjects dedicated to the pursuit of peace, happiness and economic accumulation.

Chapter 2 introduces the main lines of Nietzsche’s radically different view. The most general picture of a human being is not an individual but a “dividual”: that is, a complex mind-body with multiple motivations, which may pull us in very different directions in different contexts. Nietzsche sometimes uses the name ‘drive’ (Trieb, in German) for the myriad patterns of valuing, desiring and acting that move us. These patterns are often unconscious and deeply embodied – Nietzsche attacks the enlightenment “mind / body distinction”, seeing everything as body, as ‘physiology’.

We could sum up Nietzsche’s psycho-physiology by saying: it is one of radical difference. The values and desires that ‘drive’ us are not universal, they can vary widely across individuals and cultures. Indeed, they can be very different even “within” the same individual. And they can be very different across time: our psychologies have been shaped through our lives; and they are never fixed for good, but are always mutable, open to change.

This doesn’t mean that human psyches are pure random chaos. Maybe the key point is: our mind-bodies are not given by timeless universals, but shaped by contingent processes. I.e., they have been formed, in certain ways, by particular conjunctions of events – and they could have been different.

For example, capitalist societies may well have succeeded, to some extent, in creating individuals who are obsessively driven to accumulate profits or consumer goods. But this is not because human beings are “naturally” so: it took particular historical processes involving war, colonisation, starvation, torture, policing, schooling, advertising, and more to make us this way.

Thus Nietzschean psychology is largely about uncovering the processes that have shaped us into what we are – and so understanding how we can become different. Chapter 3 starts by looking at some basic processes that shape psyches. Nietzsche thinks that our values, desires and practices are largely ‘adopted’ from others in the social worlds around us. This adoption is largely unconscious. There is a deep human tendency to unconscious imitation – “mimesis” – that starts in infancy but stays with us all our lives. Then, after imitating or otherwise picking up social patterns, we ‘incorporate’ them, make them into ‘our own nature’ through repetition, habituation, performance. This chapter also brings in some ideas from recent research in developmental psychology, which back up a lot of Nietzsche’s early insights.

These processes underlie what Nietzsche calls the ‘herd instinct’: a strong human tendency to cling together in conformist groups. This is the subject of Chapter 4. ‘As long as there have been humans, there have also been human herds (clans, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches)’ (BGE199). And there are other forces at work here: patterns of fear, shame, punishment, and also comfort. So, although we have the potential for radical difference, there are strong tendencies that can shape us into uniform animals tied to the norms of the social groups around us.

But we can be individuals: relatively coherent beings who can start to reflect on themselves, and shape and re-make themselves, setting their own projects. As we see in Chapter 5, a key Nietzschean point is that an individual is not born but made: we have to become individuals. And, however paradoxical it may seem, becoming an individual is not something we can do all alone, it also involves social processes.

Chapter 6 looks at a disease that Nietzsche thinks has infected human psyches over generations: the pathology of ressentiment and slave morality. The state, and systematic domination in general, traumatises us, twisting our values and desires into patterns that weaken and torment us even more. Slavish valuing takes changing forms over history. Nietzsche particularly analyses the religious submission of Christianity, and also its inheritance in democratic, socialist, and indeed anarchist practices today.

In Chapter 7, we come to Nietzsche’s ideal of the ‘free spirit’: an individual who starts to break away from the rigid herd life of the norm and to challenge the sick patterns of slave morality, and so begins to create new ways of living. But, as with all Nietzsche’s characters, this is not a simple hero figure, the free spirit is a complex image. How is it possible to become free, flexible, open for new possibilities and experiments, but at the same time strong and stable enough not to lose oneself and be destroyed?

Ontology for Social War

The second part of this book moves from the individual to the social. If we take up the Nietzschean idea of a free-spirited individual as a starting point for our life projects, what does this mean for how we live with others? Chapter 8 sets out some questions about different kinds of social encounters: relations of affinity and alliance; relations with strangers; and relations with enemies. How do we form groups that are not conformist herds? How do we fight, without becoming cruel or cold? How do we care, without becoming priests or charity workers? How do we spread anarchic desires, without becoming advertisers or missionaries?

To start to answer these questions, first we need some better idea-weapons for thinking about social worlds. Ontology (from the Greek Ontos, “being”) is the study of what is, of what kinds of beings make up the world. Just as with psychology, if we don’t examine our ideas about social ontology, we risk getting stuck in dominant models.

For example, common theories of the social and natural world in capitalist culture often embed an implicit social ontology something like this: the world is made up of two basic kinds of beings, on the one hand, human individuals; on the other, mere things, whether living or inanimate. Human individuals are “subjects” who make free decisions. Non-human things are “objects” to be produced, owned, hoarded, exchanged, destroyed. Human subjects are all different, but also all alike, because they share the same basic nature, the same basic structures of rationality, and the same needs and “interests”. These shared reasons and interests lead them to come together and form enduring social institutions. These basic ontological structures can be found not just in liberal theory – e.g., the presumptions of orthodox economics – but also in some Marxist and other “radical” versions.

Chapter 9 is the longest chapter in this book. It sketches some main lines of a Nietzschean social ontology; later chapters fill in more detail. The ideas here don’t come just from Nietzsche, but also plunder more recent thinkers including “post-structuralists” such as Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault – all of them following Nietzschean paths – and others from quite different traditions.

A Nietzschean social ontology flows from the core points of Nietzschean psycho-physiology: mind-bodies are diverse, multiple, and mutable. Now the focus is on what happens when these bodies meet: their conflicts and alliances, the groups and institutions and other relationships they form, the wars they fight, and how these transform them anew.

I start by thinking of these encounters as taking place within ‘three ecologies’, psychic, social, and material. All of these are complex and largely unpredictable worlds (or, ways of viewing the world) made up of many different bodies. As bodies meet, they form new assemblages, contingent relationships and structures that can be more or less permanent or fleeting, while old structures are dis-assembled. These assemblages may be enmities, loose alliances or close affinities, hierarchies and states of domination, groups held together by shared forms of life, cultures and practices of identity. Bodies, themselves assemblages, are transformed by their encounters: spurred to create new values, catching each others’ desires and other patterns, forming projects, increasing and decreasing in their power to pursue them.

Chapter 10 zooms in on one crucial aspect of these encounters: they are relations of power. Here I use some ideas from Foucault. Power, in the broadest sense, means the ability of any being to cause – or to resist or block – changes in the world. Social power, more specifically, is the ability to affect changes by shaping other bodies’ possibilities of action. Power is not evil, but can be involved in every kind of social encounter: e.g., finding a comrade, making a friend, forming an alliance, can increase our power; so can escaping a relation of dependency or captivity or exploitation. Domination means fixing an unequal relationship of power, crystallising it into a hierarchy – where some are masters and some are slaves. Domination does not have to involve force or coercion, and – unlike Marxist “radical” theories – we do not have to understand it as contravening human beings’ supposed “real interests”.

Chapter 11 analyses capitalism as a culture of domination. Certain individuals and groups pursue forms of life – shared complexes of values, desires, and practices – that lead them to dominate others; while others are trained to submit and obey. Of course, as humans are complex assemblages, often both dominating and submissive patterns will exist in the same body simultaneously. Capitalist culture has built up around particular practices or technologies of domination. These can include techniques of invasion and conquest, e.g., traumatic colonial and gender violence or economic “shock therapy”; techniques of contagion, from nationalist race panics to modern advertising; and techniques of control such as aid, disaster management, education, and more. Although these have developed in particular forms, they are not far from the classic patterns of domination traced by Nietzsche’s stories of the masters, slaves and priests in the Genealogy.

Chapter 12 applies Nietzschean thinking to the old question of ‘voluntary servitude’. In Nietzschean terms, the ‘logic of submission’ (as Wolfi Landstreicher calls it) means incorporating values, desires and practices that support states of domination – until they even become ‘one’s own nature’. Human beings have strong tendencies to incorporate even submissive values – but we can also resist them, and hold onto and strengthen our own values and identities. This chapter also brings in ideas from the feminist psychiatrist of trauma Judith Herman, and from James Scott, a political scientist who has studied the ‘arts of resistance’ to domination amongst peasants and slaves.

The last three chapters turn these Nietzschean ideas to questions I find pressing for the ways I want to live and fight now.

Chapter 13 asks: how can we form different kinds of collectives that break with the power of the norms, that are ‘packs’ of free spirits and fighters, rather than ‘herds’ of fearful conformists? I think of a pack as a group of friends and comrades brought together both by shared projects, and by love and delight.

Chapter 14 asks: how we can spread rebellious and anarchic projects and desires more widely – but without creating new patterns of domination and conformity? I affirm my values – not because they are “true” or “right”, but because I love them. I make propaganda to spread my ideas through seduction, incitement and contagion. The anarchic propaganda I like aims to attract more comrades and allies: but also to provoke and encourage others to break with the logic of submission and become active as individuals, developing their own initiatives which may even conflict with mine.

Chapter 15 is about the anarchist idea of living a projectual life (the term comes from anarchists including Alfredo Bonanno and Wolfi Landstreicher). The point is: stop complaining resentfully about the world as it is, stop casting ourselves as victims, go from ‘reactive’ to ‘active’ and grasp hold of our lives, living joyfully and freely while fighting to and beyond the limits of our powers. The projects I want to make will involve both individual self-transformation and collective insurrectionary struggle.

A note on references

There are a lot of quotes from Nietzsche in this book. I have used the referencing system now followed by most specialist books about Nietzsche. In brackets after each quote you will see an abbreviation (see list below) followed by a number. Nietzsche wrote mostly in short numbered sections or “aphorisms”, and the numbers refer to these rather than to pages. This is helpful, because then it doesn’t matter which translation or edition you have in your hands. All of Nietzsche’s works, letters and unpublished notes in the original German are available freely online, and searchable, at Nietzschesource.org. There are numerous English translations available online, but some are much better than others, and often the ones that are easiest to find online aren’t so good. The translations I like most are listed in the bibliography at the end, many of them by Walter Kaufmann. They can all be downloaded if you look around a bit.

For other authors I follow a standard academic system: they are listed in the bibliography by author name and year of publication. Except for Foucault, who also gets quoted enough to have his own abbreviations (see list in the bibliography).

Published books by Nietzsche:

A. The Antichrist

AOM. Assorted Opinions and Maxims. (Or: Human, All Too Human volume 2 Part 1)

BGE. Beyond Good and Evil

BT. The Birth of Tragedy

CW. The Case of Wagner

D. Dawn

EH. Ecce Homo

GM. On the Genealogy of Morals (NB: references give essay number 1 to 3, then section number)

GS. The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. 1974.

HH. Human, All Too Human

TI. The Twilight of the Idols

WS. The Wanderer and his Shadow (Or: Human, All Too Human volume 2 Part 2)

Z. Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Published after Nietzsche’s death:

WP. The Will to Power (NB: this book is in fact a compilation of unpublished notes edited under the guidance of Nietzsche’s nazi-loving sister)

KSA. Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden. (“Official” collection in German of all Nietzsche’s work, including notebooks and scraps of paper found lying in his room etc., references give volume and page number).

KSB. Sämtliche Briefe. Kritische Studienausgabe in 8 Bänden. (“Official” collection in German of Nietzsche’s letters, references give volume and page number.)

Part 1: Psychology for Free Spirits

Chapter 2. Bodies of drives

Nietzschean psychology attacks many orthodox ideas about what human beings are, ideas that have become deeply embedded in the common sense of capitalist culture. It attacks the core enlightenment idea that we are by nature rational subjects. More basically still, it attacks the very idea of any fixed human nature.

Nietzschean psychology says: we are bodies, not detached minds. And we have multiple, diverse and often conflicting, values and desires, which are continually open to change. To the limited extent that we are rational or responsible individuals, this is because we have been made this way by specific processes of education and training. Even as some of these ideas have been absorbed by theories such as Freud’s, Nietzsche’s psychology is still a radical challenge. It opens up ways of thinking that can be powerful for projects of anarchy.

Nietzsche developed his psychological approach in three books that make up what is sometimes called his middle or Free Spirit period: Human, All Too Human (1878–80), Dawn (1881) and The Gay Science (1882). In these works Nietzsche broke away from the influence of his early mentors: the romantic composer and right-wing ideologue Richard Wagner, and the great philosopher of pessimism Arthur Schopenhauer. He rejected romanticism, grand conceptions of art and artistic genius, and enlightenment ideals of humanity as the pinnacle of evolution.

He declares his new critical attitude in the opening passages of Human, All Too Human (HH1-3), calling for a rejection of ‘metaphysical philosophy’. Instead, he says here, we need a new kind of ‘historical philosophy’ which recognises that there are no ‘eternal facts’ about human nature, as all ‘moral, religious and aesthetic conceptions and sensations’ have developed through historical processes. To understand how our values and instincts have been formed, we have to look hard at our everyday lives, engaging in psychological ‘close observation’. This is far from easy: it requires a painful honesty and modesty to give up ‘errors, which blind us and make us happy’, and be prepared to recognise that it may be that ‘the most glorious colours are derived from base, indeed from despised materials’.

Nietzsche’s experiments in close observation lead him to a new conception of human psychology. Here are some of its main ideas, which I will look at one by one in this chapter:

Skepticism. We know much less than we usually think about the largely unconscious processes that shape our lives.

Embodiment. We are bodies, not disembodied minds: we need to undo the prejudices of centuries of religion and philosophy and stop despising the body.

Always valuing. All life and activity, even perception and unconscious activity, involves value judgements.

Multiplicity and diversity. We are not, in general, unified or coherent individuals: there are many different, and often conflicting, patterns of valuing and desiring at work in our bodies (which Nietzsche often calls ‘drives’).

Mutability, or continual becoming. These patterns are mutable – continually open to change: our values and desires have been shaped by particular processes through our life histories ... and they can still change some more.

(i) Skepticism: our ignorance

Why do we perceive, think, feel, and act in the ways that we do? For example: why did I obey that policeman’s order? Because I consciously decided that it was right to do so? Or were there other forces – desires, habits, fears, instincts, whims, whatever they may be – at work in me?

Was I aware of all these forces and processes? Can I become aware of them now, looking back, by reflecting on what I was thinking and feeling? Or are at least some of the processes that move me deeply unconscious, altogether out of reach of introspection?

Nietzsche is highly skeptical about psychological self-understanding. ‘No matter how hard a person struggles for self-knowledge, nothing can be more incomplete than the image of all the drives taken together that constitute his being.’ (D119). We are taught to think that ‘one knows, knows just exactly in every instance how human action comes about’ (D116); but this is just an ‘age-old delusion’ that we cling on to rather than face the ‘terrifying truth’ that ‘all actions are essentially unknown’ (ibid).

Why is it so hard to understand ourselves? The problems go deep. Some are built into the foundations of language. For example, take a basic subject-verb-object sentence like this: ‘I love you’. Grammatical structures like this help train us to see the world as made up of stable and unified ‘things’. There is one active subject ‘I’; another stable passive object of desire, ‘you’; and one identifiable action or feeling, ‘love’. This common sense way of thinking in terms of subjects and objects is very useful in navigating many aspects of everyday life. But it can cause problems in thinking deeper about psychological processes: it supports the illusion that I am a unified being with one lasting set of values, desires and needs, rather than a complex body with many constantly transforming, and often conflicting, motivations.

Consciousness, and our faith in it, is another problem. We cling on to the comforting idea that we are aware of what is going on “inside” us. But only a small part of our psychological life will ever ‘enter our consciousness’ (GS354). Rather, ‘by far the greatest part of our spirit’s activity remains unconscious and unfelt’ (GS333); ‘the thinking that rises to consciousness is only the smallest part of all this – the most superficial and worst part’ (GS354). Many psychological processes are altogether unconscious: e.g., muscular and nervous reflexes, like when you catch a ball or shrink from a blow, or the deep processes that shape our perceptions of the world. Others we may be aware of, but in non-reflective ways that we can hardly describe in words: e.g., many emotions, passions, feelings. And when we do have conscious awareness of thoughts, reasons, motives, decisions, etc., this awareness may be vague or confused, or downright misleading.

For example, consider the paradigm case of conscious agency: you take time to think hard about a problem, and so arrive at a deliberate decision to act in a certain way. But even then, says Nietzsche, although this decision may well play a role in shaping your action, it is really only ‘one motive’ that works alongside a range of other factors. Just as important may be:

‘the way we customarily expend our energy, or a slight provocation from a person whom we fear or honour or love, or indolence [...] or the excitation of our imagination brought on by whatever trivial occurrence comes our way at the decisive moment; completely incalculable somatic factors [...] the surge of some distress or other [...]’ (D129).

In short: even the most deliberate action is the result of a ‘clash of motives’ featuring many ‘motives that we in part do not recognise at all and in part recognise only very dimly’ (ibid).

On top of all that, conventional theories in philosophy and psychology only make things worse by encouraging these ‘errors’. The enlightenment tradition running through philosophers like Descartes and Kant reinforces the idea of the human being as a unified and self-conscious “transcendental subject”. For Nietzsche, this is also connected to Christian ‘slave morality’ (see Chapter 6): if individuals are coherent self-conscious actors then they can be held responsible, blamed, and expected to feel guilty for their actions.

To sum up, in general we are much less aware of the psychological processes at work in us than we are usually led to believe, both by the “folk psychology” built into everyday language and common sense, and by high theory.

None of this means that we should just give up trying to understand our psyches. We can develop better pictures of the psychological processes that shape our lives. But this involves, first of all, starting to let go of comfortable myths. We shouldn’t think of ourselves as self-knowing subjects, but rather as ‘experimenters’ who have to look with new eyes at even the most familiar aspects of our everyday lives – the ‘nearest things’ (WS5-6, WS16).

Careful self-observation isn’t an easy task: ‘How many people know how to observe something? Of the few who do, how many observe themselves?’ (GS335). To take it on you need the ‘virtue of modesty’ (HH2), and a rigorous honesty or ‘integrity’ (in German, ‘Redlichkeit’, GS335). And conscious introspection certainly isn’t enough. Nietzsche’s own psychological observation also involved paying careful attention to ‘physiological’ conditions of diet, climate, etc.; and the study of history, including the everyday histories of how our feelings, actions, and other patterns change over time.

But however carefully we investigate and experiment, our evaluations and actions are still shaped by ‘physiological process[es] we know nothing of’ (D119). Although the sciences of the brain have developed beyond recognition since Nietzsche’s time, this point still holds. Ultimately, it means that even the best understanding of psychology is ‘all a matter of talking in images’ (D119). We can identify patterns and tendencies, and try to find better images, less misleading ways of describing them, concepts that will help us understand and take control of our lives. But all of the images we use for describing psychological life – including Nietzsche’s favourite images of ‘drives’ – remain makeshift and imperfect tools, which have their powers but also their limits.

(ii) Materialism: we are bodies

Nietzsche’s philosophy is materialist, and anti-dualist. That is, he attacks traditional oppositions of mind vs. body, psychological vs. physical.

Take these three kinds or levels of psychological processes: on the one hand, reflective conscious processes of thinking, reasoning, deliberation; on the other, unconscious “automatic” or “reflex” processes of muscles and nerves; and somewhere in between, processes involving emotions that you deeply “feel” in the body. For Nietzsche, all three kinds of processes are psychological and, at the same time, also, bodily or ‘physiological’. To emphasise this unity, he sometimes talks not about psychology but about ‘psycho-physiology’ (BGE23).

Mind/body dualism is another of the strongest myths of orthodox philosophy and psychology. It is deeply connected to religious notions of spirit and afterworld, and to humanist ideas that human beings occupy a privileged position distinct from other life-forms. Philosophy and religion traditionally teaches us to ‘despise’ and look down on our bodies, to see ourselves as intellectual or spiritual beings distinct from flesh and matter. Nietzsche aims to attack this myth: bodies are not ‘things’ that we own, containers that we occupy; we are bodies – ‘body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body’ (Z: On The Despisers of the Body).

(iii) Drive patterns

Nietzsche’s central psychological image or concept is the drive (Trieb, in German). Nietzsche uses the idea of drive to understand some crucial recurring patterns in the psycho-physiological life of humans. He mentions many examples throughout his work. For example, there are very common drives to eat, sleep, have sex, etc. But there are also drives to philosophise, drives to knowledge and self-knowledge, aggressive drives, dominating drives and submissive drives, drives to benevolence or to feeling morally superior to others, drives to climb mountains, and many more. Again, some of these might seem more refined, mental, psychological, human, and others more instinctive, embodied, basic, physiological, animal: but for Nietzsche, this distinction is usually a problem.

Most basically, a drive is a particular kind of pattern of psycho-physiological activity. Drives are patterns of motivation and action, of how our bodies are led to move in particular ways – e.g., to climb mountains or philosophise. But at the same time, drives are also patterns of significance, of how we interpret and value the world around us. It is a key insight of Nietzsche’s psychology that these two elements – acting, and meaning-giving – go inseparably together. ‘[A]ll actions may be traced back to evaluations’ (D104). ‘[A] drive without some kind of knowing evaluation of the worth of its objective, does not exist in man’ (HH32).

Nietzsche most detailed discussion of his theory of drives is in section 119 of Dawn. Here he develops this example: you are walking in a marketplace, and you hear someone laughing at you. And then:

‘... depending on whether this or that drive happens to be surging in us at the moment, the event will assume for us this or that meaning – and depending on the type of person we are, it will be a completely different event. One person takes it like a drop of rain, another shakes it off like an insect, one tries to pick a fight, another checks his clothes to see if there’s a reason to laugh ..’ (D119).

In each case, first of all, you interpret a situation – laughter in the marketplace – in a particular way. Here are three features of this meaning-giving aspect of drives:

First, some particular events, objects, aspects, e.g., the laughter, are identified, they stand out and draw your attention, whereas others may go unnoticed.

Second, the things that are identified are at the same time given a meaning – e.g., the laughter is interpreted as a threat, a joke, etc.

Third, when something is identified and given a meaning, this also involves giving it a value. That is, it is identified positively or negatively, in some sense. There may be numerous ways of valuing something – for example, as good or bad, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly, tasty or bland, or in some other way. But the interpretation is never entirely “neutral”, always evaluative in some way.

At the same time as a drive gives meaning and value to a situation, this also creates a tendency or disposition, to action. To use a more obvious, if heavily loaded, term: a desire. If you interpret the laughter as hostile, and value it negatively as a threat or danger, then this calls for a certain kind of response: e.g., a fight, or a flight. If you interpret it as a harmless joke, or as completely irrelevant, then this will lead to a quite different pattern of action. Certainly, not all desires are realised. But it is a key idea of Nietzsche’s psychology that evaluations do generally lead to some kind of response or action – even if not in the most direct or obvious way.

Here maybe we need to pause and ask: just what do we mean by an ‘action’? Nietzsche’s idea of action is broad. For example, he thinks that at least some thoughts are also actions: e.g., ‘your deciding, for instance, that [something] is right, is also an action’, as is an ensuing deliberative inference “therefore it must be done”’ (GS335). I will employ a somewhat crude distinction between “external” and “internal” actions. By external actions I mean movements of a body that impinge on the world beyond, and so may immediately affect other bodies: for example, when in On The Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche tells us that ‘noble’ natures can respond to attacks with ‘the true reaction, that of deeds’ (GM1:10). By contrast, an internal action is one that is enacted only within an ‘inner world’ (GM2:16) and does not directly impinge on others. Internal actions can include thoughts, dreams, fantasies, etc.

This point comes to play a central role in Nietzsche’s psychology. It begins in D119, where he suggests that dreams may be a way of ‘compensating’ for drives that fail to be ‘nourished’ with action in waking life – an idea that was to be massively influential on Freud. Later, this basic idea that drive patterns can be redirected from external to internal activity will be one of the key themes of the Genealogy – the theory of ‘internalisation’, which leads to the development of diseased ‘slave morality’ (see Chapter 6). In this story, the enslaved are unable to express their ‘aggressive instincts’ openly against the oppression of the masters – but these desires don’t just disappear. Instead, they play out in an ‘inner world’ of revenge fantasies and ‘ressentiment’.

To sum up, then, a drive is a pattern of meaning-giving, valuing, desiring, and acting. That is, it involves (a) giving meaning to the world around you; (b) which includes valuing things positively or negatively; and so (c) forming desires or tendencies to action; which will (d) indeed lead you to act in some way, even if not in the most obvious or immediate ways.

(iv) Perspectivism: everything is valuing

There is a lot more that could be said about Nietzsche’s ideas of drives, but I am just going to zoom in on a few points. The first is the idea of ‘valuing’. This is central not only to Nietzsche’s psychology but to all his philosophical thought: he will come to describe his overall life project as the ‘revaluation of all values’.

Nietzsche’s idea of value is radically different from the philosophical mainstream, in at least two important ways. First, there are no such things for Nietzsche as “intrinsic” values belonging to things “in themselves”, and certainly not as universal or timeless values. A thing – an object, an action, an event, an idea, money, human labour, a moral code, laughter in the marketplace, or whatever – has no meaning or value ‘in its own right’. If it has a value, this is because it has been given it ‘as a gift’ (GS301) by someone who values.

That is: there will always be (a) a particular valuer who ‘gives’ (b) a value to something in (c) a particular act of valuation. And a thing can be given many different meanings and values, be valued in many different ways, by different valuers at different times. I might take the laughter in the marketplace as a threat, but you take it as a joke. Or maybe first I take it as a threat but then later, looking back, see it as a joke.

We can sum up some of this by saying: an evaluation is always made from a particular viewpoint, a perspective. ‘From each of our basic drives there is a different perspectival assessment of all events and experiences’ (KSA 12.1[ 58 ] [1885]). This is what is often called Nietzsche’s “perspectivism” (or “perspectivalism”), and is of central importance in his philosophy.

For example, in the Genealogy, Nietzsche argues against conventional stories about how moral codes and political systems have developed. Liberal thinkers project (or retro-ject) their own valuing perspectives, shaped by Christian slave morality, back in time, assuming that human beings have always shared their own needs, desires, and views of good and evil: ‘One has taken the value of these values as given, as factual, as beyond all question; one has hitherto never doubted or hesitated in the slightest degree in supposing “the good man” to be of greater value than the “evil man” [...]’ (GM:P6).

Nietzsche, in contrast, argues that we cannot understand the history of moral or political systems until we see that different individuals, groups, and cultures have very different ‘modes of valuation’, which are often in conflict, and have been transforming throughout historical time. ‘[H]ow differently men’s instincts have grown, and might yet grow, depending on different moral climates’ (GS7).

Nietzsche’s second radical point about valuing is that it is everywhere. Philosophers traditionally understand values in terms of reasons and conscious, deliberative judgments. But Nietzsche thinks that conscious judgment is a rare, and not the most important, form of valuation. Values are also embedded in our feelings, emotions, ‘instincts’, gut reactions, in a range of forms of judgment that may be more or less conscious, more or less cold or passionate. And we also value even at the very moment of perceiving something – perception is not just a matter of receiving neutral information or “sense data” from the world for later processing, but always comes already loaded with meaning and positive or negative judgments.

To give some obvious examples: when I perceive or notice the colour of someone’s skin, or the shape of a body gendered as male or female, these perceptions are already heavy with value judgments. Nietzsche sees this as true generally for all sensory experience: ‘All experiences are moral experiences, even in the realm of sense perception’ (GS114); ‘all sense perceptions are wholly permeated with value judgments’. (WP505). This idea is now well established in at least some strands of philosophy and psychology – for example, as developed in the 20th century ‘phenomenological’ tradition by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s influential philosophy of perception, or in recent “embodied” or “enactive” forms of cognitive science.

But Nietzsche goes even deeper: he also thinks that we value even in purely unconscious or ‘automatic’ bodily processes – there are not just judgements of the mind or judgements of the eyes, but even ‘judgments of the muscles’ (WP314; see also WP388). When I flinch from an attack, or jerk my hand away from fire, or unconsciously lean towards someone I like, these are also acts of valuing. Finally, given that valuing does not need language, consciousness, or other ‘higher’ psychological structures, Nietzsche at least sometimes sees it everywhere in all ‘organic being’ (KSA11.26[ 72 ] [1884]): ‘“Higher” and “lower”, the selecting of the more important, more useful, more pressing arises already in the lowest organisms. “Alive”: that means already valuing ...’ (KSA11.25[ 433 ] [1884).

Although this last idea is still a radical one for mainstream philosophy, some biologists and ecologists have developed similar thoughts in the 20th and 21st centuries. The early 20th century biologist Jakob von Uexküll elaborated a ‘theory of meaning’ in which all animal life creates meaning by identifying the features of its environment that are relevant to its specific needs and activities – its ‘Umwelt’, or local and perspectival world of significance.

More recently, Francisco Varela (1991) argued in the 1990s that even single-celled organisms are ‘sense-making’ as they interact and manoeuvre in environments – a view that has become influential for new ideas in biology and cognitive sciences. Certainly, there are differences between the valuing practices of different organisms, and complex multi-cellular organisms such as human bodies have intricate perceptual and cognitive systems involving multiple layers of processes. But ultimately, on this view, when philosophers and priests discourse on good and evil they are just engaged in more complex and bizarre forms of the same tendency of all life-forms to value and give meaning to the worlds around them, from dogs salivating over food to sunflowers turning to the sun.

To sum up: there are no values in ‘nature’ without valuers; but nature is full of valuers.

(v) Dividualism: we are many

So, a drive is a pattern of how a body interprets, values, desires, and acts in the world. The next crucial point is that any ‘individual’ body has many different drive patterns.

First of all, different patterns may shape a body’s valuing and acting at different times, or in different contexts. For example, the same person may value and act very differently at work, in front of the boss or with workmates, at home, on a night out with a gang of friends, alone with a lover, surrounded by strong comrades, in isolation, in a familiar or strange environment, ill and tired or healthy and well-rested, sober or under the influence of different drugs, etc.

In different environments, different contexts, at different moments in my life, I may not only act very differently, but also the world may appear very differently, have very different meanings and values. To go back to Nietzsche’s marketplace discussion, we interpret and respond to the same event very differently depending on what ‘drive is surging in us at that moment’ (D119). In turn, what drive pattern is active at a given moment is certainly not random, but strongly affected by the chemicals in my bloodstream, by the physical and social worlds around me, by my personal history and development.

But there is a second, still deeper, level of Nietzsche’s picture of the multiple body. It’s not just that we value and act differently at different times, but also multiple patterns of valuing and acting are at work in the same body simultaneously. In general, actions result from a ‘clash of motives’ (D129) in which a number of different valuing patterns and tendencies are at work, often competing, at the same time. And, as discussed above, many of these may be more or less deeply unconscious, motive forces that we ‘in part do not recognise at all and in part recognise only very dimly’ (D129).

Nietzsche tends to see conflict everywhere, and he sees it within as well as between bodies. He often sees a body as a playground or battlefield of ‘rival’ drives each trying to become a psycho-physiological ‘tyrant’. If we practice close observation, he thinks, we start to see that cases of inner turmoil, split personalities, mixed motives, hypocrisy, are much more common than we like to admit.

And yet the play of drive patterns within a body is not always conflictual: different values and desires can not only clash but also work together and support each other. For example, in his analysis of supposed ‘compassion’, Nietzsche thinks that a range of so-called ‘altruistic’ and ‘egoistic’ motives may all be involved together when I act to help, or perhaps to pity, another. The general point is that ‘we never do something of this sort from one motive’ (D133) – multiple thoughts, impulses, drives are at work simultaneously, some more openly than others.

So, both over time and even simultaneously, Nietzsche thinks that it is a rare achievement for a human body to be a coherent individual, with one unique and consistent set of values, desires, motives and patterns of action. More often, to use a more recent neologism, human beings are more like “dividuals” than “individuals”. That is, if we get past the conventional myths and observe closely, we can see multiple patterns of valuing and acting that may sometimes contradict, other times support, each other. In an unpublished note from 1883 Nietzsche writes: ‘As cell stands beside cell physiologically, so drive beside drive. The most general picture of our being is an association of drives, with ongoing alliances and rivalries with one another.’ (KSA 10.7[ 94 ] [1883]).

To sum up this point, Nietzsche uses the image of a ‘social structure’. He writes: ‘our body is only a social structure composed of many souls’ (BGE19); or, we can think of the ‘soul as a social structure of the drives and emotions’ (BGE12). A social structure is a grouping composed of many different elements. And it can be “organised” in many different ways. For example, individual parts in the structure may be relatively separate and diverse. Or perhaps they come together to coordinate their action through affinity and shared desires. Or perhaps they are “ordered”, tyrannized, disciplined, governed, trained and made to conform.

In political philosophy, there is a strong tradition of understanding social structures by analogy with the individual organism. There is also another line, going back to Greek philosophy, of seeing individuals by analogy with societies. Nietzsche picks up and radicalizes this second position. A key point, for him, is that social structures have to be made, organized in particular ways, through particular historical processes – for example, processes of ordering, or dis-ordering. The same applies to “individuals”: we need to study the “social” processes through which bodies can be trained, ordered, made into more or less coherent “subjects”.

(vi) Mutability: everything can change

Perhaps the best known theory of drives is Freud’s. Although Freud was strongly influenced by Nietzsche, his psychology moves in a different direction. For Freud, a drive is a constant and universal force – all humans everywhere, and throughout their lives, are shaped by the same basic motivational patterns, ultimately the ‘Libido’ drive for life and self-preservation, and (in Freud’s later work) also the negative ‘death drive’. These basic drives take different forms and action paths in different stages of our lives, and are manifested in distinct ways in different cultures. But ultimately the basic forces always remain the same.

Nietzschean psychology is not like this. Our patterns of valuing and acting are not only multiple and diverse, but also constantly open to change in unexpected and unpredictable ways.

Simplifying a lot, we can think about two dimensions of change of drive patterns. First, drives change over the long term, in historical time, and across bodies, evolving with groups, institutions, social conflicts, cultures – and indeed, over the very long term, with the evolution of biological species.

A lot of Nietzsche’s work is about these long-term transformations of patterns of valuing and acting shared in social groups. For example, in the Genealogy, he argues that modern European value systems and practices have largely developed out of Christian moral patterns, which themselves had dramatically reshaped and transformed patterns common in ancient and prehistoric times. So, this is an account of how common patterns of valuing and acting have transformed across several thousand years of European social history. There is plenty to debate about the details of Nietzsche’s historical stories, but the key psychological idea stands out: even the deepest human values are not fixed, but are transforming through history, sometimes gradually, other times rapidly, dramatically and traumatically, alongside political and social conflicts and shifts.

But these historical shifts in common patterns of valuing and acting are really just a zoomed-out view of changes taking place at the level of individual bodies, and during our lifetimes. E.g., to say that a new form of ‘slave morality’ spreads through a conquered population is to say that the same kind of psycho-physiological shifts are taking place in the bodies of many people undergoing shared conditions of captivity, and influencing each others’ ways of reacting to this domination.

Many of the strongest and fastest changes in our psychological patterns take place in childhood. As Nietzsche puts it, as children we ‘adopt’ many of our basic values, desires, and ways of acting (D104), absorbing them from the social models and worlds around us as we grow. But change certainly doesn’t stop there. Throughout our lives we remain open to ‘adopting’ – absorbing, imitating, learning, etc. – new patterns from others. Our existing patterns are also constantly subject to change as we meet new environments. We can also – although Nietzsche thinks this is rare – become self-transforming individuals who deliberately set out to reshape the drives within us, to revolutionise the ‘social structures’ that are our bodies.

Just how our drive patterns change – what are the processes of their development – is one of the biggest, and most interesting and important, questions for Nietzsche’s psychological approach. I will dive into it in more depth in the next few chapters.

For now, one key point to emphasise is that patterns and their transformations are contingent. That is: a particular drive pattern didn’t have to develop in just the way it did, it could have been otherwise. This is how Nietzsche puts it in a famous and central passage of the Genealogy:

‘the entire history of a “thing”, an organ, a custom can in this way be a continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations and adaptations whose causes do not even have to be related to one another but, on the contrary, in some cases succeed and alternate with one another in a purely chance fashion’ (GM2:12)

For example, it wasn’t ordained by fate that particular sets of values and practices would coalesce and eventually develop into male domination, state society, racialised colonialism, nineteenth century Christian morality, consumer capitalism, and other complex social forms (See Chapter 6). It might not have happened, or happened very differently – and then we might have developed and inherited very different patterns of valuing and acting, and been very different kinds of human beings. The paths that values and practices take as they are transformed and transmitted are very often unpredictable: they depend on a vast and complex range of factors, local conditions, accidents.

In this respect Nietzsche’s thinking is very different to liberal political philosophy, which typically sees state society as a natural and inevitable development for all human beings. It is also very different from most Marxist thought, which similarly sees historical change as driven in predictable directions by a few basic factors of economic production and common human nature. These differences have big implications for thinking about how to transform ourselves and the worlds around us.

Chapter 3. Incorporation

Why do we have the values we do? Where do our desires come from? What forces shaped them, and how can they be changed?

A lot of Nietzsche’s thinking on this point can be summed up in this one sentence from Dawn: ‘All actions may be traced back to evaluations, all evaluations are either one’s own or adopted – the latter more often by far.’ (D104). At least some of our ways of valuing and acting can be ‘our own’. But before we can understand what that means, first we need to look at how, most of the time, we follow patterns that we have ‘adopted’ – picked up, copied, learnt, absorbed – from others, in childhood and throughout our lives.

There is a word Nietzsche uses that can be powerful in this context – ‘incorporation’ (Einverleibung). In both English and in German, it has a double meaning. On the one hand, to incorporate something is to absorb or ingest it, to take something from the outside world into your body, as when you swallow some food. At the same time, incorporation also means to make something bodily, transform it into flesh: you don’t just swallow the food then shit it straight out again, but at least some of it becomes part of the cellular structure of your body, part of you.

Nietzsche introduces the term ‘incorporation’ in The Gay Science. It refers to a process whereby an initially superficial intellectual judgement becomes ‘incorporated or made instinctive’ (GS11). He argues that ‘erroneous articles of faith’ (GS110) – for example, ‘that our will is free; ‘that what is good for me is also good in itself’ – have become deeply incorporated into common human ways of understanding and perceiving the world. Elsewhere in that book, Nietzsche similarly writes about how a name or label attributed to a thing ‘gradually grows to be a part of the thing and turns into its very body’ (GS58); and how species ‘translate’ moralities ‘into their own flesh and blood’ (GS134). But so far in human evolution, Nietzsche thinks, ‘we have incorporated only our errors’ (GS11). He asks: can we also learn how to incorporate ‘knowledge’, or maybe new free-spirited ideas?

Although Nietzsche doesn’t yet use the word ‘incorporation’ in Dawn, it provides a good summary of many of his discussions there. First we ‘adopt’ the values of other people around us, then over time ‘we grow so accustomed to this pretence that it ends up being our nature’ (D104). For example, moral ‘goodness’ usually starts out as a hypocritical performance: ‘extended dissimulation that sought to appear as goodness’ (D248). But eventually the ‘long-standing practice of dissimulation turns into, at last, nature: in the end dissimulation cancels itself out, and organs and instincts are the hardly anticipated fruits in the garden of hypocrisy.’ (ibid). In all cases, a pattern starts out as a superficial performance; but over time it becomes ‘natural’, ‘instinctive’, dug deeply into the body’s unconscious and automatic responses.

Although Nietzsche likes to emphasise the incorporation of hypocrisies, errors and lies, we can see the same kind of patterns at work more generally. Think of learning a new dance, a new game or sport, perhaps a new language. At first, the new moves and sounds and ideas are completely ‘external’ to you. They seem strange, alien, unfamiliar, awkward, pretentious or unreal. You have to copy them from others, or work them out with difficulty, and make a conscious effort to remember. But with time, practice and repetition, the same moves can become unconscious and ‘natural’.

Following the idea of incorporation has big ramifications for how we think about our ‘natures’ and our power to transform ourselves. But first, I want to look at some of Nietzsche’s ideas about just how it happens. To do this we can break the process down into two stages: first, we take in patterns from the world outside, from others; then, with time and repetition, they become part of our bodies.

Mimesis

There can be a range of ways that we initially ‘adopt’ patterns of interpreting, valuing, desiring, acting, etc., from others. In general, we can call these processes of transmission: patterns are spread from one body to another.

Although Nietzsche never develops a systematic theory of such transmission, through his work he tends to think about three main kinds. First, there are conscious processes of learning or education involving language and other symbolic systems, and perhaps tools such as books or computers. Second, there are unconscious and automatic processes involving imitation of other people’s gestures, movements, sounds, etc. Third, Nietzsche thinks that we also adopt or ‘inherit’ some patterns biologically or ‘in the blood’ – or through what nowadays we would call genetic (and epigenetic) inheritance.

The route that Nietzsche pays most attention to, and which I will concentrate on here, is unconscious imitation. As in other aspects of his psychology, Nietzsche emphasises the overlooked power and importance of unconscious processes, and holds that conscious ‘education’ is weaker and less important than conventionally believed. In later work, particularly Beyond Good and Evil, he will increasingly work with eugenicist ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘breeding’ (BGE213 and BGE264 are two particularly brutal examples); but these ideas play little role in the free spirit period of psychological close observation.

Nietzsche thinks that human beings have a strong and ‘almost automatic’ (D142) tendency to imitate each other, and in doing so to absorb each others’ emotional states and evaluations. This is the main way we start to adopt moral and other valuing stances: ‘children perceive in their parents strong sympathies and antipathies toward certain actions and, as born apes, imitate these inclinations and disinclinations’ (D34). Although unconscious imitation is particularly strong in infants, it stays with us throughout our lives:

‘Older than language is the mimicking of gestures, which takes place involuntarily and is even now, when the language of gesture is universally restrained and control of the muscles has been achieved, so strong that we cannot see a mobile face without an innervation of our own face’ (HH216).

He describes this process in detail in D142:

we ‘produce the feeling in ourselves according to the effects it exerts and displays on the other person, in that we reproduce with our body (or at least we approach a faint similarity in the play of muscle and in innervation) the expression of his eyes, his voice, his gait, his bearing (or even their reflection in word, painting, and music). Then there arises in us a similar feeling, as a result of an age-old association between movement and sensation, which have been thoroughly conditioned to move back and forth from one to another. We have come a long way in developing this skill for understanding other people’s feelings, and in the presence of another person we are, almost automatically, always employing it [...]

I will also use the term mimesis to label this tendency of unconscious imitation. Nietzsche does not use this word himself, but it has a long history in philosophy – going back to Plato, who used it in writing of the dangers of theatre, where audiences are caught up and moved by the “unreal” passions evoked by actors. In recent philosophy, René Girard uses this term to talk about unconscious imitation and the spread of ‘mimetic desires’; it is also used in a similar way by some contemporary neuroscientists and psychologists.

At some points, Nietzsche is not far off Plato in identifying mimesis as a dangerous form of contagion. The problem is that, even as adults, we find it very hard to resist unconsciously absorbing patterns from our social worlds:

‘inclination and aversion [are] so contagious, that one can scarcely live in the proximity of a person of strong feelings, without being filled like a barrel with his For and Against [...] [W]e gradually accustom ourselves to the way of feeling of our environment, and because sympathetic agreement and accommodation is so pleasant we soon bear all the marks and party colours of this environment.’ (HH371).

This is one of the main reasons why Nietzsche thinks that those who want to be ‘free spirits’ must (in various ways) separate and isolate themselves from the ‘herd’.

Research from recent psychology

To sum up, Nietzsche thinks that imitation is innate, automatic, largely unconscious, and central to the formation of our values. In these points his discussions of mimesis anticipate much recent research in cognitive and developmental psychology.

The idea that mimesis is an ‘automatic’ tendency present in humans from birth is supported by the pioneering work of psychologists Meltzoff and Moore (1985), who studied newborn babies of even a few hours old mimicking movements of tongue and lips. Further evidence comes from studies of the ‘delayed imitation paradigm’ featuring infants of a few months old (Meltzoff and Moore 1999; Bauer et al. 2000; Nelson 2007:94). Here the psychologist shows a child, usually with a number of repetitions, a series of three- or four-step action sequences, e.g., moving some toys in a particular order. Some weeks or months later, the baby is brought back and given the same toys to play with. Nine month old children tend to repeat some part of a sequence they were shown a month ago. And children who were 20 months old at the start of the experiment can still repeat a sequence two years later. It seems unlikely that any conscious recall is involved here: these do seem to be cases of ‘implicit memory’, of unconsciously imitated patterns becoming incorporated over time.

There is also considerable psychological research on unconscious imitation in adults; for example, ‘chameleon effects’, where people’s views and movements unconsciously shift depending on how others act in groups around them; or ‘priming’ and ‘perceptual induction’, where people can be prompted to act or think in particular ways through unconscious cues. These effects are widespread in ‘low level’ micro-actions – e.g., ‘imitative interference paradigms’, where performance of simple gestures is affected by how you are ‘primed’ by previous observations of others’ actions (Wolfgang Prinz 2005). And also in more complex attitudes to the world, e.g., in experiments conducted by Ap Djisterkhuis and colleagues ‘youthful participants who are subliminally primed with words associated with the elderly, such as “gray”, “bingo” or “sentimental”, subsequently walk more slowly, perform worse on memory tasks, and express more conservative attitudes than age-matched participants’ (Hurley and Chater 2005: volume 1, 36). These kinds of processes are, of course, part of the toolkit of modern advertising.

The neuroscience of imitation is also a growth scientific area, following the discovery, in experiments on captive chimpanzees, of so-called ‘mirror neurons’, brain connections that ‘fire’ both when the prisoner moves in a certain way, and when she sees another prisoner moving in a similar way. This area of research is controversial not only ethically but scientifically, with many debates about its interpretation.

Performativity

Incorporation means not just that you temporarily pick up other people’s patterns, but that they become part of your own ‘nature’.

Nietzsche studies this second step in numerous observations through Human, All Too Human and Dawn. One extended discussion is section HH51, entitled ‘how appearance becomes being’. Here again he thinks about a hypocritical performance: ‘the hypocrite who always plays one and the same role finally ceases to be a hypocrite; for example, priests, who as young men are usually conscious or unconscious hypocrites, finally become natural and then really are priests without any affectation [...]’ Similarly, in D325, he mentions ‘advice given to Wesley by Böhler, his spiritual mentor’ to ‘preach belief until you have it’. These religious examples recall probably the most famous philosophical discussion of this theme, by Blaise Pascal (1670), who advocated repeated prayer as the way for unbelievers to gain faith. Although in HH51 Nietzsche is clear that the process applies quite generally:

‘If someone obstinately and for a long time wants to appear something it is in the end hard for him to be anything else. The profession of almost every man, even that of the artist, begins with hypocrisy, with an imitation from without, with a copying of what is most effective.’

From all of these stories, we can pick out a few basic points:

First, the action or attitude to be incorporation is enacted, put into practice.

Second, this enactment is repeated, perhaps numerous times, and perhaps over a long period of time.

And third, at least in many of Nietzsche’s examples, what happens is not just an enactment but what we can call a performance: that is, a social enactment, for an audience (or, maybe at least, for oneself as a kind of internalised audience) of a socially recognised role or pattern – e.g., a ‘profession’, or a socially valued state like ‘goodness’ or ‘benevolence’.

According to Nietzsche’s stories, it doesn’t matter much whether, initially, the performance is genuine or ‘real’, or only a show or appearance, ‘hypocritical’ or ‘dissimulatory’. It doesn’t matter what the actor’s intentions or conscious beliefs are, or her reasons for putting on the performance. If she repeats it enough, for long enough, it will become real.

Why should this be? Nietzsche doesn’t give an explicit answer himself, but we can see how this fits with core aspects of his psychology. Recall a few key points from the last chapter.

Multiple drive patterns of valuing, desiring and acting can be active in a body simultaneously. They may conflict with each other, in a ‘clash of motives’ (D129).

In this case, we have two patterns in focus. On the one hand, a pattern of conscious valuing, what the performer inwardly tells herself she “really” believes. On the other, the ‘hypocritical’ pattern she is performing, physically enacting. She may tell herself this is only a show. But putting on a physical performance, and especially it is to be convincing, is more than just a sequence of empty movements; it may also stimulate, even if unconsciously, accompanying patterns of valuing and desiring.

The values we are consciously aware of are often not the strongest ones working in us. Unconscious, but embodied and enacted, values and desires are often more powerful. Deeds are stronger than words.

In this case, the “real” pattern is maintained only in conscious thought; but the ‘hypocritical’ pattern is physically enacted.

But perhaps the most important idea here is this: Nietzsche thinks that drive patterns are, in general, ‘nourished’ (D119) or strengthened by repeated activity. Drive patterns that are enacted will tend to get stronger, whereas if a drive isn’t ‘stimulated’ for months it ‘withers up like a plant without rain’ (ibid). This basic nutrition principle is also key to Nietzsche’s discussion in Dawn of how to achieve ‘self-mastery’ by ‘combating the intensity of a drive’ (D109). The first and simplest method is: ‘avoid opportunities for gratification of the drive and through longer and ever longer periods of abstinence cause it to weaken and wither away’ (ibid). Furthermore, although it is possible to keep suppressed or hidden patterns alive in an ‘inner world’ of conscious thought and fantasy (what in the last chapter I called internal action), in general the nutrition principle seems to work stronger when enactment is external and expressively physical.

Finally, the ‘hypocritical’ pattern gets further reinforcement from social approval. I will look more at this point in the next chapter on ‘herd instinct’.

We can sum up the core idea like this: repeatedly performing a pattern of valuing and acting can dig it right into your ‘nature’. The effect is likely to be stronger where the performance is actively physical, and particularly if it is reinforced by social approval. On the other hand, your conscious judgements about your performance – what you tell yourself you “really believe” – by themselves don’t make all that much difference.

Memory, repetition and scripts

Why should this happen? Here, perhaps, is one part of an answer: there is something deep in the structure of human memory that makes it so. Unconsciously copying and repeating patterns of action is a very basic and early way that humans develop. This is how, in infancy, human psyches begin to be formed, how we start to become what we are. And these basic processes of imitating, learning, remembering, and becoming don’t disappear, they continue to work in us as adults.

Again, recent research in psychology backs up these ideas. Until the 1980s, most psychologists believed that infants (children under 1 year old) had no long term memory stretching over months. Research using games like the ‘delayed imitation paradigm’ discussed above showed this to be wrong. Small children do remember, just not in the way that psychology and philosophy has traditionally thought about memory. The conventional paradigm of memory is consciously recalling a specific object or event, perhaps like a witness in a courtroom: e.g., I can remember and state your name, or what I was doing at 8pm last Thursday night.

Yet early human memory is not about specific objects, but about recurring patterns or sequences – as developmental psychologist Katherine Nelson puts it, ‘action programs’, ‘the dynamics of events’ (2007:90). And it is not conscious recall (“ah yes, I remember that”) but implicit memory – that is, a pattern recurs when stimulated, perhaps unconsciously, in a particular context. For example, a child implicitly starts playing again with toys in the same remembered sequence, or my body implicitly starts to tremble again when I hear a dog barking or smell the first spring jasmine.

For developmental psychologists like Katherine Nelson, the concept of a script (or ‘event schema’) can be very useful in thinking about early memory and development. A script is a recurring sequence of actions that bodies learn, remember, and then repeat themselves in particular contexts. In the ‘delayed imitation’ games, children copy and repeat basic scripts for playing with toys. Nelson and colleagues watched small children learning ‘repertoires’ of scripts for daily activities – e.g., scripts for bedtime, dinnertime, going out, playing different games, etc. E.g., ‘first you wash your hands, then you sit down, then you eat’, etc. Like mini-dramas, scripts may contain a number of different roles: ‘mummy does this, baby does this’, etc. As children learn scripts, they are also learning sets of beliefs and expectations about what people will or should do in a context. And they are also learning patterns of valuing and desiring – ‘bedtime’ and ‘dinnertime’ scripts, etc., tell us not just what to do in a particular moment or context, but also what to want.

The strong evidence from developmental psychology is that infants and small children tend to copy and incorporate repeated script patterns. We can see here a basis for Nietzsche’s idea of drives being ‘nourished’: the more small children observe a pattern being repeated by others around them, the more likely they are to pick it up and repeat it themselves; but patterns that are not repeated over ‘relatively short periods of time’ (Nelson ibid:89) are usually forgotten. As well as interactions with adults, children also repeat and incorporate scripts in play, alone or with others. One important role of early play is the rehearsal and exploration of scripts, including different roles and variations. In Nietzschean terms: a bit like the ‘hypocrite’ learning to be a priest, children ‘nourish’ and so strengthen patterns of valuing, desiring, and acting through performative play.

It is probably impossible, and unnecessary, to separate out “nature” and “nurture” and say to just what extent early processes of imitation, memory, etc., are due to “innate” dispositions of newborn human brains (which have already been developing for nine months in the womb). We could also look, for example, at the roles played by cultural traditions of parenting. In any case, the basic idea that small children learn by imitating and incorporating scripts seems to hold in many settings. On the other hand, the kinds of scripts that children pick up in different social worlds may be very different indeed.

In general, we can think of any recurring and relatively stable pattern of action or interaction as a script. Individuals can have scripts all of their own: e.g., I have my own personal habitual or ritual-like scripts for writing. A social script, though, is a script that is shared, understood and followed by a group of people. This doesn’t mean they all play the same roles: for example, ‘mummy’ and ‘baby’ share a dinnertime script which they both remember and follow, but their scripted parts are quite different. Or men and women, masters and slaves, bosses and workers, teachers and students, etc., may follow scripts in which, again, they are assigned very different social roles.

From early childhood on we see, copy, learn, repeat, incorporate, spread, and help reproduce many such social scripts. This is one important underlying part of what Nietzsche sometimes calls the ‘herd instinct’ – which I will look at in detail in the next chapter. As we imitate and repeat the scripts of the ‘herds’ around us, we incorporate common patterns of valuing and desiring shared by fellow herd members. Or, to use more recent psychological language, we can think of this in terms of ‘repertoires’ of scripts. A herd-like group shares an overlapping ‘social repertoire’ of common scripts. Growing up as a member of this group involves learning and incorporating these social scripts into your own personal repertoire.

And one of the most basic things we need to learn in this process is how to identify, categorise and value other members of our herd or in-group, so that we know just who to imitate. Nietzsche writes that we learn this basic form of prejudice:

‘as children and rarely ever learn to change our view again; most often we are, throughout our lives, dupes of the way we learned in childhood to judge our neighbours (their intellect, station, morality, exemplarity or reproachability) and to deem it necessary to pay homage to their evaluations’ (D104).

Although script-learning is particularly strong in early childhood, it doesn’t stop there. Again, these same basic psychological processes continue to work in us as adults, even if we are unconscious of them. Conscious structures involving language and reasoning, what developmental psychologists call ‘higher’ psychological processes, are built on top of these basic unconscious patterns, but never fully replace them. To paraphrase Nietzsche: ‘Consciousness is the last and latest development’ of the developing human body ‘and hence also what is most unfinished and least strong’ (GS11).

However, we can also make use of consciousness to understand better the deep and early processes that have shaped and continue to shape us. And then, Nietzsche thinks, we can learn ways to intervene, to resist, redirect, and use them for new goals. We can, at least partly, break the power of ‘herd instinct’, and become self-shaping ‘free spirits’.

Chapter 4. The herd and the norms

‘As long as there have been humans, there have also been human herds (clans, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches)’ (BGE199). Herds may take many forms and names, but always they are groups bound together by conformity, obedience, fear and shame. Becoming a ‘free spirit’, standing against the herd and its norms, is difficult and dangerous, those who stand out are liable to be attacked, punished, shunned. But also, becoming a free spirit means struggling to overcome powerful forces of conformity that have been deeply incorporated in our own bodies. These internal forces are what Nietzsche sometimes calls ‘herd instinct’.

Uncovering morality

Looking at the herd instinct brings us to one of the key themes running through Nietzsche’s philosophy, his investigation and critique of morality. At one point, Nietzsche says simply that ‘morality is herd instinct in the individual’ (GS116).

To start with, we can see that morality involves a way of valuing. When someone takes a moral stance, they evaluate, they judge. The objects of judgment may be people, actions, ideas, feelings, or whatever. But (as discussed in Chapter 2) for Nietzsche all life continually involves valuing – we are valuing the world in some way whenever we desire, feel, think, taste, sense, move, act. And not all life is moral. Morality is a particular, perhaps particularly human, kind of valuing, with special characteristics of its own.

Here is a basic starting point for thinking about moral – or more broadly, to use a more recent philosophical term, “normative” – valuing: morality judges things not just as “good” or “bad”, but as “right” or “wrong”. In particular, morality tells us that some actions, some ways of behaving, are right – are what we should do, we ought to do. Other things are wrong, should not be done.

A second crucial point, in Nietzsche’s analysis, is that moral valuation comes with particular kinds of feeling, of affect. Often, it feels like a commanding voice – the ‘conscience’ (GS117, BGE199). When we are under the sway of morality – when moral drives are strong in our bodies – we feel as if guided, pushed, or ‘stung’ (GS117) by the voice of conscience that tells us: do this, don’t do that. If we do wrong, or if we question the pull of conscience, we may feel bad, anxious, guilty, ashamed.

Nietzsche thinks that some very different forms of morality have developed over human history: ‘every people speaks its own language of good and evil: its neighbours do not understand it’ (Z: I On The New Idol). For example, one of the key themes of On The Genealogy of Morals is the gulf between contrasting ‘noble’ and ‘slave’ moralities. These different moral perspectives not only evaluate the world in very different ways, but also overlay different affects: for example, Christian slave morality brings in bitter doses of guilt and resentment. But one thing all moralities have in common is that they are ways of valuing that are collective, social, shared by herds or tribes. And they also all share some basic and deep psychological patterns, including the ‘sting’ of conscience. Nietzsche’s investigation of morality thus starts with its most basic and ‘ancient’ form, which he calls the ‘morality of custom’. He analyses this deep foundation layer of moral psychology in the first part of Dawn, and continues to refer back to and build on this analysis in his later books including the Genealogy.

Morality of custom

In a morality of custom, ‘morality is nothing other (therefore no more!) than obedience to customs, of whatever kind they may be’ (D9). Customs are simply ‘the traditional ways of behaving and evaluating’ of a particular tribe (ibid). Perhaps some customs arose for a ‘reason’, but others may be completely arbitrary: just ‘fundamentally superfluous stipulations’ (D15) – such as supposedly ‘among the Kamshadales forbidding the scraping of snow from the shoes with a knife’ (ibid).

In a morality of custom, people obey the customs of the tribe simply ‘because tradition commands it’. ‘What is tradition? A higher authority that one obeys, not because it commands what is useful to us, but because it commands.’ (D9). In fact, according to Nietzsche, obeying a custom because it is useful, or for any other reason of one’s own, may itself be immoral: it is necessary not just to obey but to obey unthinkingly, without question. Nietzsche, critically following Immanuel Kant – probably the most influential of all enlightenment moral philosophers – thinks of morality in terms of a ‘categorical imperative’, an unconditional command: ‘“though shalt unconditionally do this, unconditionally do that”, in short, “thou shalt”’ (BGE199).

The key affect of this deep morality, according to Nietzsche, is not any kind of sympathy or altruism, or even guilt or shame – it is fear. We hear the commanding voice of tradition, embodied in the conscience, and obey fearfully.

‘What differentiates this feeling with regard to tradition from the feeling of fear in general? It is the fear of a higher intellect that commands through tradition, fear in the face of an inexplicable, indeterminate power, of something beyond the personal – there is superstition in this fear.’ (D9).

The place of fear in Nietzsche’s account of morality is linked to his view of prehistory as a time where weak and trembling early humans live in ‘perpetual fear and precaution’ (D18). There are three main sources of prehistoric fear. Firstly, fear of very real and present dangers – wild animals, harsh environments, enemy tribes, etc. Secondly, superstitious fear of unknown forces: according to Nietzsche, prehistoric humans believed that failure to observe customs will bring down unexplained disaster on the community as a whole (D9). Thirdly, there is the more mundane fear of being punished by other group members if you break the customs.

We don’t have to follow all of Nietzsche’s speculations about ancient humanity. The importance of his analysis is how it challenges still powerful presumptions about morality. Against standard moral theories from Christian orthodoxy to liberal utilitarianism, he argues that moral rules do not have to serve any kind of reason, purpose or utility. We tend to unconsciously inherit, adopt, and incorporate moral rules of the herds we are brought up in. We largely obey them automatically, unthinkingly. But if we do start to question them, we may feel the force of a very basic moral affect: a command that carries fear, a sense of ‘an inexplicable, indeterminate power’ (ibid).

We don’t need to think of this ‘conscience’ as an innate human inheritance. It may stem from processes of education that begin in early childhood, and continue through our lives as we are again and again subjected to disapproval, sanction, punishment for non-conformity. We are trained to fear and obey the laws of the tribe. Nietzsche himself looks at this training process in the Genealogy, where he argues that violent and traumatic punishment is the key mechanism for shaping human beings through ‘an increase in fear, a heightening of prudence, mastery of the desires’ that ‘tames men’ (GM2:15).

Norms

To take Nietzsche’s analysis further, it can be helpful to bring in some more modern terminology. Nietzsche’s ‘customs’ are norms. A norm is a pattern of valuing, desiring, acting that is common, expected – normal – within a particular social group. And a norm carries the weight of “normativity”: i.e, members of the group feel, however consciously or unconsciously, that following the norm is right, and deviating from it is wrong. And, in many cases, groups will reinforce the power of their norms with sanctions – punishments, from bad looks or bad-mouthing to violent attacks – as well as possible rewards of status, approval, etc., for those who conform.

In the last chapter, I introduced the idea of a social script: a more or less regular pattern of interaction in which people take on given roles, and so act (and value, desire, feel, believe, and more ...) in socially expected ways, according to their role. We looked at how, from early childhood, humans see, copy, learn, repeat, incorporate, spread, and help reproduce or transform many such social scripts.

Now, scripts, and the roles and actions they define, can be, and very often are, norms. We expect someone to play a particular role, and act in a certain way. I expect you to act like a woman, like a worker, like a boss, like a servant, like a member of my sub-cultural club. It is normal for you to do so. Not to do so is abnormal, deviant, dangerous, frightening, shocking, shameful, wrong.

Strands of herd instinct

But, however deep it goes, fear is just one motivating force involved in herd morality. Although Nietzsche talks about the ‘herd instinct’, singular, his analysis actually has multiple strands: numerous different motivations and patterns work together to bind us to the herd, to hold us to the norms. We can try and summarise some important ones here.

First, in the last chapter we looked at the power of mimesis, unconscious imitation. From infancy, and throughout our lives, human beings have a strong tendency to ‘almost automatically’ copy and adopt the actions – and values, desires, feelings, beliefs – of others around us. Mimesis itself is a strong force in creating and holding together herds. Mimesis spreads and digs ‘normal’ patterns and scripts into the bodies of children and new group members. And, as adults, people who live together and interact continue to unconsciously imitate and reinforce the same patterns and scripts.

Second, normal patterns and scripts are then further reinforced by the ‘sting’ of conscience, the ‘feeling with regard to tradition’ – my own deeply incorporated fear of doing wrong.

Third, of course, norms are maintained not only by my own individual conscience, but by the others, as they continue to reward or punish me. A sanction may be a bad look, a sigh of disapproval, or a violent assault. The herd instinct is also the instinct or drive to enforce the norms on others: to punish, shame, scorn, or simply distance oneself from deviants, abnormals, and outsiders.

But also, fourth, norms are not only maintained by punishment and trauma, but also by more positive means. To be in a herd is comfortable, safe, and carries its pleasures. Those who uphold the norms are acclaimed, respected, admired, desired, praised, recognised, bathed in the glow of collective good conscience. So another strand of herd instinct: the desire to be accepted, esteemed, judged as worthy members, feel comfortable and righteous.

Fifth, people may also decide consciously to cleave to the norms. Perhaps because they rationalise, justify, believe that the norms are right. Perhaps because they believe that following the norms is in their self-interest, helps them realise their individual projects, flourish, avoid suffering. But it should be emphasised that, in Nietzsche’s thinking, these more conscious processes are generally rather less important that we usually tend to think: unconscious fears, desires, habits, affects are the main drivers of conformity and identity; conscious reasoning very often provides just a superficial ex post hoc justification of our embodied forms of life.

The herd

A herd, we can say, is a group that is held together by shared norms. Members of the group are led to follow these norms by all of the strands of herd instinct noted above, and more. These strands tie them together in following a set of normative scripts – a herd form of life.

We should keep in mind that the idea of a herd is an “ideal type”: i.e., an extreme or pure case that probably no group completely lives up to in reality. Some human groups are more herd-like, some less. Probably no group is only held together by norms, by herd instinct. Many kinds of motivations lead humans to form and maintain groups: individual projects and self-interests, ties of love and affinity, and more. But perhaps, on the other hand, every human group is at least to some degree a herd. The power of norms, of herd instinct, is deep and strong.

Herds can be found everywhere. Although, arguably, big groups have particularly strong herd tendencies, there can also be small herds, even herds of two or three. Again: ‘As long as there have been humans, there have also been human herds (clans, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches)’ (BGE199).

Rebels and anarchists also form herds. For instance, one good place to find study herd behaviour is in a meeting or assembly. In a meeting, I may find myself imitating everything from the postures to the ideas of the others. I may identify and abide by local norms and customs, or at least, if I become aware of it, feel a strong impulsion to do so. I may find myself, also, identifying esteemed members, alpha males, charismatic models of righteousness – and outsiders, abnormals, scapegoats, antisocial individuals who threaten the peace of the norms. I may feel the desire to be accepted, liked, listened to, desired, respected. I may find myself participating in factions, in-groups and out-groups. I may find myself turning on opponents and outsiders, perhaps with a ferocity I can justify by the urgent need to prove a crucial point.

Or perhaps, on the other hand, I deliberately court controversy, revel in an outsider status, enjoying being different and superior to the others – could this, too, be an inverted form of herd instinct?

Chapter 5. Becoming an individual

We are not born individuals. Individuals are made – and only ever incompletely.

The most general picture of a human being, in Nietzsche’s thought, is not an individual but a dividual: a body of drives, of many diverse patterns, habits, structures of valuing, desiring, acting, thinking, feeling, becoming.

These multiple forces may pull in different directions, so that a human is a divided, perhaps chaotic, flux of struggles, inconsistencies, contradictions, tensions, adventures, hesitations. Or a body may become ordered into a more stable kind of being with predictable routines, fixed habits, driving instincts – and, perhaps, lasting aspirations, long term commitments, life projects.

Nietzsche uses the term ‘individual’ in different ways throughout his writing. Sometimes he denies that individuals exist at all. More often, he wants to reserve the term for human bodies of a particular kind: we are not all individuals, or at least not all of the time, but individuality is something to aspire to. One of his most powerful contribution to these questions is his idea of the ‘sovereign individual’, which he discusses in the Genealogy (GM2:1–3).

The sovereign individual

A ‘sovereign individual’ is, first of all, a body that has become relatively ordered and coherent, that is not just pulled in lots of contradictory directions. But it’s also more than this: as Nietzsche puts it, the ‘sovereign individual’ is someone who has acquired ‘the right to make promises’ (GM2:2). Or more generally: the power to become self-directing, to commit to projects and follow them through. And, crucially, this is also the foundation of a further power: the power to transform yourself, to make yourself into something new.

How do we become sovereign individuals? According to Nietzsche, it is not easy, and involves difficult and painful processes of training or education. Here we get to a thought that can seem paradoxical, or at least needs some working through. A sovereign individual is a being who has developed some kind of sovereignty, self-determination, and so becomes able to actively work on herself. But we can’t become such an individual all by ourselves: in fact we are shaped, perhaps even forced, into individuality by social forces.

The right to make promises

The second essay of the Genealogy opens like this:

‘To breed an animal with the right to make promises – is this not the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man?’ (GM2:1)

First of all, Nietzsche says, such an animal needs to develop a special kind of memory and desire:

‘an active desire not to rid oneself, a desire for the continuance of something desired once, a real memory of the will: so that between the original “I will”, “I shall do this”, and the actual discharge of the will, its act, a world of strange new things, circumstances, even acts of will may be interposed without breaking this long chain of will. But how many things this presupposes!

Think here of two moments, or two actions:

First, I say ‘I am going to do this thing’.

Maybe I say it aloud to other people: ‘I’m going to be there with you tomorrow’. Maybe I say it silently to myself. Maybe it’s an action I intend to do tomorrow, or in ten years, or right now. In any case, making this statement is itself an action: remember, in Nietzsche’s anti-dualist ‘psycho-physiology’ a silent thought is a movement of the body, just as much as a whisper or a shout or a vigorous deed (‘your deciding, for instance, that [something] is right, is also an action’ (GS335); see discussion in Chapter 2).

Then, later, I do the thing.

These two actions, two moments, are separated by a span of time, even if it’s only a split second. In Nietzsche’s psychological picture, a human body is a dividual body of many different, often conflicting, and often changing, ‘drive’ patterns of valuing, desiring and acting. Even in the same moment, different drives may be pulling a body in different directions. And across two different moments, quite different drives may be in play.

For example, at one moment I may really “mean it” when I say that I will stop smoking tomorrow, I will stand and fight, I will love you forever, I will definitely be on time next time, etc. But at another future moment, the forces that shape my activity may be very different: not only the “internal” alignment of values, desires, beliefs, ideas “within” me; but also the interplay of my body and the world around me – e.g., whether a friend presses me to have a drink with them, whether there’s a bus strike or someone betrays me to the cops, whether I’m captivated by a scent of perfume that brings up powerful memories.

So it’s certainly not the case that people always do what they say they’re going to do – even if they really feel they will at the time they make statements of intent. But sometimes people do. And some people do so more than others. What makes it happen?

Back to Nietzsche:

‘But how many things this presupposes! To ordain the future in this way, man must first have learned to distinguish necessary events from chance ones, to think causally, to see and anticipate distant eventualities as if they belonged to the present, to decide with certainty what is the goal and what the means to it, and in general be able to calculate and compute. Man himself must first of all become calculable, regular, necessary, even in his own image of himself [...]’

To break this down a bit, there are two important factors here. First, a human being that can make commitments needs to become ‘regular’ and consistent: that is, the same drives, the same sets of values and desires, continue to shape and direct her across time. But also, to make a commitment involves a form of awareness, of self-consciousness: it’s not just that I am consistent over time, but that I know myself to be so; not just that I am calculable, but that I am able to calculate about myself, and about how I interact with the world around me.

Ordering processes

The Genealogy‘s next section picks up the first of these two points. Nietzsche writes:

‘The task of breeding an animal with the right to make promises evidently embraces and presupposes as a preparatory task that one first makes men to a certain degree necessary, uniform, like among like, regular, and consequently calculable.’ (GM2:2).

And then Nietzsche tells us how this works: it is the job of ‘morality of custom’, of the herd and its norms:

‘the labour performed by man upon himself during the greater part of the existence of the human race, his entire prehistoric labour, finds in this its meaning, its great justification, notwithstanding the severity, tyranny, stupidity, and idiocy involved in it: with the aid of the morality of custom and the social straitjacket, man was actually made calculable’ (ibid).

We have already looked at the morality of custom, and the associated idea of herd instinct, in the last chapter. To recap, there are actually a number of ‘herd instinct’ processes through which human beings are ordered – shaped, trained, educated, and so made ‘regular’ – within social groups.

First, the ordering of mimesis: from infancy, and through our lives, we ‘almost automatically’ copy and adopt the actions – and values, desires, feelings, beliefs – of others around us.

Second, normal patterns and scripts are then further reinforced by the ‘sting’ of conscience, the ‘feeling with regard to tradition’, my own deeply incorporated fear of doing wrong.

Third, norms are maintained by punishment sanctions, including violence and shame, applied by other members of the herd.

Fourth, they are also reinforced more positively by rewards, including the pleasurable glow of conformity, acceptance, and status.

Fifth, people may also learn to rationalise, consci