Nietzsche: Soul as Subjective Multiplicity

Nietzsche: Soul as Subjective Multiplicity Much of Nietzsche’s thought in Beyond Good and Evil celebrates the complexity of existence and criticises reductionist and simplified thinking. In BGE 12, Nietzsche attacks "soul atomism," the Christian understanding of the soul as an immortal, unified entity, and proposes alternative descriptions which could potentially challenge the old paradigm. For example, instead of a singular, whole entity, the soul might be seen as a "subjective multiplicity." He denies the concrete accuracy of the unified soul by attributing as its origin an “atomistic need” or a “metaphysical need;” that one understands their self as an atomistic soul because they need to understand it that way. The inherent paradox between the key terms of Nietzsche's proposed soul-concept requires detailed attention: how can a multiplicity be subjective? If a solid subjectivity can emerge among a multiplicity, what does this mean in practice for consciousness and free will? I will examine these questions in the light of contemporary Nietzsche scholars’ recent comparisons of Nietzschean selfhood with Plato’s and Schopenhauer’s theories, as well as within the context of Beyond Good and Evil. The possibility of a multiplicitous soul has made multiple appearances in the history of philosophy, for example in Kant’s faculties of the mind and Plato’s three-way division of the soul, but Nietzsche invites the philosophers of the future not to formulate a new simplistic categorisation of the concept of self, but simply to challenge all simplified notions of the self and the religious understandings of the soul, and to open an uncertainty that may lead to “invention [and] perhaps to discovery” (BGE 12). It may be significant to consider why Nietzsche conceptualises his alternative constructions of the nature of selfhood in the terms of an old religious concept and uses the word “soul” as opposed to “self” or some other secular term. Dudley (2002:233) suggests that "the thoughts and values that language enshrines are made rather than found, through both the genealogical exposition of prevailing conceptual structures and the extraordinary use of ordinary language." It is more powerful to challenge Christian soul-atomism by redefining the word "soul" as opposed to abandoning the word altogether, as this simply using a different word for the new definition would allow the old, Christian concept of the soul to persist. The multiplicity could be seen as consisting of drives and affects, as Nietzsche (BGE 12) himself suggests in the same section; they could be read as Plato’s parts of the soul; or as Sartre does later on, different consciousnesses. Cannon (1991:35) remarks on Sartre's denial of the unconscious in Freudian psychoanalysis, but emphasises that Sartre "does not equate consciousness with the will [nor] deny the power of emotional, imaginative and sexual consciousness as well as a rational consciousness." These would allow for maintaining the idea of existential freedom, despite the lack of unity between the parts of the soul or self, but also explain why one subject is capable of many contradictory decisions and observations. Similarly to Nietzsche’s drives, consciousnesses with their own aims refer to the multiplicity of options and decisions that the external world offers, and reconcile the seeming contradictions between the various choices that one person might make. The Christian concept of the soul is almost reductionist in its atomism, and does not permit understanding of expansive potential and possibilities for various aims and purposes of the conscious subject. Another possible way of conceiving of the soul Nietzsche suggests here is a "social structure of drives and affects" (BGE 12) which indicates a higher degree of independence for the components than the simple suggestion of multiplicity does. The questions of self, agency and consciousness become complicated and multidimensional when the discussion moves away from the simple atomistic view. Dividing the understanding of selfhood into components, invites the question of the nature of these components: are they standalone or simply aspects of a unified whole; are they separate parts from among which an experience of subjectivity emerges? Could it be possible that each component has its autonomy, even its own awareness, and the subject experiences as their own selfhood the awareness of the component that is dominant at any given time? The phrase “social structure” could potentially suggest any of these. The passage in question is preceded by a discussion of the Kantian faculties of the mind (BGE 11) where Nietzsche criticises the conception of the mind as composed of faculties as too easy an explanation. ""By virtue of a faculty" […] is that—an answer? An explanation? Or is it not merely a repetition of the question?" Nietzsche asks. Kant’s three faculties of the mind, Sensibility, Understanding and Imagination (Brook 2013), explain functions of the brain rather than parts of the soul or the self. All that is achieved by the division of the mind into faculties is a compartmentalising of certain activities of the mind, but the essence of the self or of personhood is not examined further. In BGE 11, Nietzsche suggests to "replace the Kantian question, "How are synthetic judgements a priori possible?"” by another question, "Why is belief in such judgements necessary?" The atomistic need that Nietzsche examines in the following aphorism is probably one of those beliefs in an a priori judgement. In this context, another aspect to proposing this alternative view of the soul is to question why there has previously been a need to believe in soul atomism. Along with this goes the question of why it is so important to imagine it otherwise. Simmel (1991:15) writes, "The soul's disposition to reflect its own multiplicity in the richness of meanings transcending greatly the simple meaning of things has been brought by philosophy from a sheer occurrence to a principle and an inner necessity." The subject's experience of life, and the experiences one is conscious of, are many-sided and multiple; therefore perhaps a need arises to understand the subject likewise. Robinson (1999:23) quotes from Nietzsche’s notebooks a statement that the self is “merely a formulation of our grammatical habit, which posits a doer for what is done.” However, in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche seems particularly concerned with not only challenging the traditional view of the self as an atomic soul, but proposing an alternative way of understanding the soul. In any case, even if appointing a doer for the deed is true only on the level of language, it is how the self is experienced and thus deserves consideration. Proposing a theory of a multiplicity in the place of assuming the existence of a continuous and whole self seems like a compromise between the possibility of the nonexistence of a soul or a self as an ontological reality, and the inevitable fact that people experience themselves as selves. Clark and Dudrick (2012:163-5) explore at length the passage from Beyond Good and Evil with the alternative soul visions, and compare Nietzsche's soul-definitions with Plato's theories, interpreting BGE 12 as referring to the theory of the soul presented in The Republic. The suggestion of a multiplicitous soul may be an extension of Plato’s similar theory, but Nietzsche aims to challenge existing understandings of the self further. "Any word," for the things that comprise the multiplicity of the soul in Plato's view, writes Pappas (1995:82), "would be imprecise here. Of course the soul cannot have parts in the way that a piece of land or a stretch of time does." The impossibility of such divisibility illustrates specifically the paradigmatic soul-atomism that Nietzsche (BGE 12) declares war against. Why could the soul not have parts, even fairly distinct and standalone ones? Following Nietzsche's challenging of the soul-atomism, the components that make the self can be thought of more freely and, potentially, more literally. Plato imagined the soul as consisting of “reason, spirit and appetite,” of which appetite is comparable to Nietzsche’s drives (Clark and Dudrick 2012:165). These are, just like Kant’s faculties, mere compartmentalisations of psychical activities. What Nietzsche is suggesting is something much more open, complex and fluid, a system which escapes neat categories and exhaustive explanations of the surface functions of the mind. He is more interested in what might be going on beneath the surface, and how that which makes the person who they are works on the microlevel. These are essential concerns when moving away from Christianity in whose belief system the self is something given by a higher power. "The basis of all philosophy is the fact that things overflow any single determination: a manifold thing is also uniform, a simple thing is complex, the earthly is divine, the spiritual is material, the material is spiritual, the still is in motion, and whatever is moving is simultaneously at rest," writes Simmel (1991:15). If the subject’s conscious experience of the world was straightforward, philosophy would not be needed; if the nature of personhood and the structure of the self seemed to simply correspond to that experience, psychology would not be needed. Neither is the case, and Nietzsche’s proposition for a new understanding of the self aims to bridge both these gaps in understanding persons and their relations to the world. The impossibility of neat categorisation of experience is also present in Plato's question: "is there any one of these many fair-and-honorable things that will not sometimes appear ugly and base? And of the just things, that will not seem unjust?" (The Republic, 479a). The need for a multifarious self reflects the way consciousness is consciousness of something, and when the qualities of the observed world one is conscious of appear contradictory, this might logically require a contradictory nature of the conscious subject itself. Simmel (1991:181) suggests something similar to this multiplicity of experience of the world with regard to the distance between the experiences of the extreme pessimism expressed by Schopenhauer (who was a major influencer of Nietzsche’s philosophy) and Nietzschean will to power and loving one's fate. Optimism and pessimism "are not theoretical knowledge but the expressions of fundamental states of the soul. They cannot be reconciled in a "higher unity," because there is no identity between them." The multiplicity of the soul can, however, allow for these contradictory experiences to coexist in the world. An atomistic need belongs to the same worldview as searching for the truth, but in Nietzsche’s challenging of the old paradigms, the possibility becomes evident that there may be no one truth, or one true way of experiencing the world or the value of life, but that one self may have a multitude of experiences in its multiplicitous nature. "By sensing the reverberations of spiritual existence in the distance opened up by these opposites, the soul grows [...] It finally embraces both the desperation and jubilation of life as the poles of its own expansion," Simmel (1991:181) concludes. A self that consists of conflicting aims and drives can comprehend seemingly contrasting experiences of the world without needing to consider one more true than another. Nietzsche imagines the drives as being in competition with each other; that “every drive wants to be master” (BGE 6). According to Gemes (2009:47), “on Nietzsche’s ideal weaker drives are not suppressed or shackled. Rather, they are to be harnessed to allow their expression in service to a higher aim.” In this case, the experience of subjective selfhood could be imagines as culminating in the awareness of the master-drive towards whose aim the other drives are working. An example of a drive Nietzsche gives in BGE 6 is “the drive to knowledge.” It is an interesting suggestion that a personality might be built out of striving for a variety of objects in the external world, and the process by which for example the drive to knowledge would be successful in this struggle, the other drives would strive for the acquisition of knowledge as well. Those other drives, their internal structure and the process of their struggle would individualise the subject and make their selfhood, and drive for knowledge, unique. "According to Nietzsche, what Schopenhauer calls a “conflict of motives” is in fact a conflict of unconscious drives and affects, whose surface has become conscious," writes Constâncio (2011:35), and that "a conscious thought may be the tool of a drive that is competing with another drive." This view neglects the primacy of a thinking consciousness as an agent of free will, and undoes the Cartesian presumption of thinking as that which determines selfhood. Pappas (1995:83) writes, “Like Freud, Plato sees inner conflict as both the most intrinsically important fact about human existence, and the phenomenon that most reveals the structure of the personality.” To translate this into Nietzsche’s terminology, the drives’ struggle for mastery over each other is where the subjectivity of the multiplicity emerges. For the successful master drive to determine the subject’s experience of selfhood is inadequate; the process of its struggle against the other drives is what constitutes the nuances of the self. In addition, if the main aim of the master drive is for the other drives to serve itself, this adds further complexity to the question of selfhood. To this Katsafanas (2014:10) adds, “a full explanation of a person’s behavior is going to include not just drives, but environmental and physiological factors, as well as experiences and memories.” This is closer to a holistic view of the subject not as a singular self but an existence that involves the person’s body, thoughts, relations with others, and environment. The subject’s surroundings become part of the self in an existentialist sense, and the drives and the environment could form a reciprocal relationship in which the drives impact the person’s behaviour and their relation to the external world, which in turn impacts the formation of the person’s drives and their internal activity. “In an age of disintegration that mixes races indiscriminately, human beings have in their bodies the heritage of multiple origins, that is, opposite […] drives and value standards that fight each other,” Nietzsche (BGE 200) claims. While the immediate influence of other people on our drives and affects concurs with the shaping of the self by the environment, the idea that drives could be hereditary is more surprising in the wider context of Nietzsche’s discussion of selfhood. This statement of Nietzsche’s also suggests that the drives and psyches of people from different cultural backgrounds significantly differ from each other. This may be nothing but a sign of cultural prejudice, or possibly an acknowledgement of the extent to which the external world, including other people, shapes the individual self. Nietzsche discusses the problem of free will in BGE 21, asserting that the idea that the will is free is a desire more than anything else; people think their subjective consciousness asserts will and decisions because they want to believe so, not because this explanation corresponds to their experience of life or any account of reality that could be supported by evidence. According to Tubert (2015:412), “nothing [Nietzsche] says in [BGE 21] seems to imply that he thinks that all of our actions are determined; his emphasis is rather that we cannot ignore the materials that partially constitute who we are.” Indeed, a multiplicity constituting the self does not logically imply lack of subjectivity altogether. A possibility still remains of the soul-components having individual autonomy, which would essentially remove none of the agency of a unified autonomy of the self since the subject would experience the autonomy of the component of their self as their own agency. It is also possible that the components of the self come together in something of a unity that is experienced as the agency of the whole self, and while this agency is limited by the interaction and competition of the components, the subjective self has control within these limits. Perhaps being aware of these materials, and the fact of being composed of them, is the only thing that can increase the conscious subject agency, even if full freedom of will can never be achieved. If the subjective human soul, mind or consciousness is composed of multiple drives, can each drive have consciousness on its own? The possibility of so-called “homuncular drives” is discussed by Clark and Dudrick (2012), and disputed by Katsafanas (2014). The possibility of each drive being conscious is a tempting one, as it would allow preserving a more traditional view of agency; it would remove the question of how a multiplicity becomes conscious and where agency comes from, since those would already exist. “This is hardly informative,” writes Katsafanas (2014:5); “Rather than explaining agency and selfhood, it simply shifts the problematic terms about, from the level of persons to the level of drives.” What Nietzsche means by drives and affects, Poellner (1995:174) writes, is that "they connote physiological affections rather than the conscious episodes which desires and intentions have traditionally been constructed as." These, of course, could not be individually conscious. From a Sartrean point of view it might be possible to conceive of the multifarious self to consist of parts that are individually conscious and the consciousness of the dominant part equals the consciousness of the subject at any given time; the same might be the case for a master-drive. However, as Katsafanas (2014:6) points out, competition or even hierarchy between the drives does not require consciousness, and thinking consciousness is certainly no prerequisite for a hierarchical social structure. Considering Nietzsche’s motivation to challenge soul atomism, it may be inconsequential to debate the specific level of autonomy each component of the soul has; the main argument is that there are components in the first place as opposed to a unified whole. The more interesting question is, if the soul components are not individually conscious, where do they come together as the subjectivity which the person experiences as their self? Nietzsche aims to explain this in Ecce Homo, quoted by Gemes (2009:47) “To become what one is, one must not have the slightest notion of what one is. . . .The whole surface of consciousness—consciousness is a surface—must be kept clear of all great imperatives.” This passage might provide a potential answer to the question of where the ultimate subjectivity of the multiplicitous self occurs. It is a surface of the soul-components; a unifying awareness of the struggle and activity taking place among multiple drives. “The whole of life, which is made other than the sum total of its singularities, becomes the factual unity we sense as the substance of the singular,” (Simmel 1991:31) words the same sentiment. In examining questions of selfhood, terms such as consciousness and subjectivity present themselves in various meanings, but are certainly not interchangeable in Nietzschean context. Nietzsche, his predecessors and contemporary scholars have so radically challenged the paradigm of selfhood that the distinctions between terms referring to conscious or mental activity need to be interpreted and have their definitions revised regularly to avoid confusion. It is not always clear, throughout Beyond Good and Evil, if Nietzsche uses the word “soul” earnestly to mean the essence of the self, or ironically to challenge former views of the immortal, atomistic soul. Since his assertions in BGE 12, however, it can be fairly safe to read his use of “soul” as having a different meaning from the thinking subject or consciousness. “Thinking,” “consciousness” and “awareness” seem to refer to secondary activities executed by, or taking place within, the multiplicitous soul, which together with the aforementioned activities constitutes what the subject conventionally experiences as their selfhood. Clark and Dudrick (2012:161) conclude that "although […] Nietzsche denies the need for any psychic entity that does the thinking, he seems to concede that there is a grammatical subject that does the thinking, namely, the person who is identical with the body.” The existence of the multiplicity of components within one person’s physical body is probably the only certain way of establishing a concrete unity between them, if a unified consciousness is lacking. Nietzsche (BGE 16-17) analyses in detail the common phrase “I think” which he finds problematic due to its implication of a subjective “I” which supposedly takes the deliberate action of thinking. Here Nietzsche implies that the activity of thinking, or the existence of thoughts, does not require an active subject behind it. The subjectivity of this self that is composed of multiple parts could, then, be nothing more than an illusion caused by the soul-components residing, and forming a consciousness on the surface, within the same physical body; unified only by the desire to have free will and the desire to be a unified whole—a drive of its own? Simmel (1991:25) writes of Schopenhauer's view of the soul, "The creative totality of the soul is not exhausted in [a single act of will], though it obviously desires such completion. Thus we experience ourselves always as more than we are." This also illustrates the need for a Nietzschean theory of multiplicity: the numerous drives cannot all reach completion in the given reality. But if we experience ourselves as more than we are, where does the atomistic need come from? Two words stand out from Nietzsche’s description of the atomistic soul: “indestructible” and “eternal” (BGE 12). A self that is a product of the physical brain, and tied to the external environment and relations with other consciousnesses, is also bound to the temporality of the material world. The fact that the subjectivity is conscious, even if this is only an illusion created amongst autonomous drives within the psyche, inevitably leads to the desire of a consciousness to persist in the world as it cannot imagine not being conscious. Being conscious leads to a wish to be eternal. Perhaps people also experience themselves as multiplicitous because the world their consciousness is conscious of is so complex, but precisely because of this complexity, wish their selves to be simpler. This atomistic need, then, would be a denial of the world: a fiction whose purpose is to simplify the relationship of the self and the outside world, but resulting in turning away from the world as it is. In BGE 192, Nietzsche describes a similar phenomenon suggesting how “little do we see a tree exactly and completely [since] it is so very much easier for us simply to improvise some approximation of a tree.” His discussion of this behaviour suggests an unconscious instinct by which a person simplifies their experience of the world rather than a conscious desire to do so, but this is equally illustrative of the atomistic need as is soul atomism. Perceiving the self as a simple, whole, immortal soul indeed simplifies one’s relation to the world and may not be a harmful position to hold from the perspective of the individual; but it certainly is a denial of the empirical world, and thus Nietzsche rightly calls it a “belief” which should be “expelled from science” (BGE 12). A subjective multiplicity can be understood as a structure of drives, soul-components, different consciousnesses or parts of the psyche, optimism and pessimism as the opposite poles of a human experience, or the complex and polymorphic heritages that a person carries in their body. The interactions of these components constitute of the self and create what is experienced as a personality. The immortal soul is an understanding resulting from a need to simplify the self’s relation to a complex and absurd external reality. A whole, continuous or even subjective self may not be a factually existent on a microlevel, but if this is how people experience their selves, it is useless for philosophy or any other science to dispute that experience. The subjectivity of the multifarious self may be nothing but an illusion reflected off the surface of the interplay of the soul’s components, or exist only grammatically, but it is still existent on the levels of experience and of language, and therefore deserves a philosophical theory to account for its existence. To conceptualise a self or a soul in the first place may be necessary for humans to understand their own being; conceptualising this self as a multiplicity helps account for the complexity of existence. While not deserving of a paradigmatic status in science, soul atomism and a simplified understanding of the self are vital for the subject’s ability to comprehend their existence in a complex and absurd external reality. 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