Who Is in Control?
Daybreak — Essential Reading Path · Reading 5 of 10
Read: Book II, §109 in full, stopping before §110.
Allow: About 55–70 minutes, including the passages, this guide, rereading, and a short written response.
Preferred translation: R. J. Hollingdale, edited by Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter. Free alternative: §109 (J. M. Kennedy, The Dawn of Day).
Use the aphorism numbers in either translation; page numbers and English headings vary. If highlighting fails, locate the numbered heading and read to the stated stopping point. Kennedy’s introduction and footnotes are the translator’s commentary, distinct from Nietzsche’s text. The explanations and everyday examples below are this guide’s commentary.
Before you read
Imagine someone resisting the urge to interrupt a friend. They describe the moment as reason taking control. But why did they want to hold back? Perhaps they value listening, fear seeming rude, want the friendship to last, or take pride in their composure.
Any of those concerns could make restraint possible. Identifying one would not show that no restraint occurred. It would change the explanation: the victory involved something the person cared about, not simply an intellect issuing orders without a motive.
This example is ours. It introduces the turn at the end of §109, where Nietzsche asks what motivates the struggle we call self-control. He reaches that question through a surprisingly detailed account of six ways in which the force of an impulse might be reduced.
Reading 4 questioned the completeness of our self-descriptions. Here we examine a particularly attractive description: the person who commands their impulses through reason. Read the entire aphorism, including the ending.
The main question: When one impulse is brought under control, what gives the effort to control it its direction and force?
Three things to notice
- Six different operations. Avoiding an occasion, imposing a rhythm, provoking disgust, linking satisfaction to pain, redirecting powers, and weakening the whole person work differently. Keep them distinct.
- Achievement and cost. An impulse can become weaker because a capacity has developed or because the person’s general powers have been damaged. A similar outcome can conceal very different processes.
- The final motive. After surveying the methods, Nietzsche asks why the impulse is being opposed. Look for the role assigned to a rival drive and to intellect.
A way to read the passage
A classification that ends by questioning its agent
The opening identifies six ways to combat an impulse’s excessive force. Nietzsche is examining how the conflict proceeds before asking who, or what, directs it. Read this as an explanatory classification, including troubling examples, rather than a program to put into practice. §109, the six methods and their final motive
Nietzsche distinguishes the operation that makes each method work. This map keeps his sequence visible:
| Method | What changes in Nietzsche’s account? |
|---|---|
| 1. Avoiding occasions | Opportunities for satisfaction diminish, and the impulse is expected to weaken. |
| 2. Imposing a regular order | Satisfaction is restricted to fixed times, creating intervals of relative quiet. |
| 3. Producing satiety and disgust | Excessive satisfaction is expected to generate aversion; Nietzsche stresses its destructive danger. |
| 4. Associating satisfaction with pain | A painful thought becomes attached to the anticipated gratification. |
| 5. Redirecting powers | Another activity or competing drive absorbs powers claimed by the dominant impulse. |
| 6. Weakening the whole person | General depletion reduces the targeted impulse along with other capacities. |
The last row prevents us from equating a weaker impulse with a stronger self. Success by a narrow measure could constitute a broader failure.
The first two methods: opportunities and intervals
The first method changes the occasions on which an impulse can obtain satisfaction. Nietzsche expects prolonged lack of satisfaction to weaken it. The explanation turns on the relation between an impulse and the opportunities that sustain it.
The second method organizes satisfaction into a strict rhythm. Its immediate aim is an interval in which the impulse no longer presses constantly. Nietzsche says that this arrangement might eventually lead into the first method, but it begins differently: satisfaction remains available under a temporal order.
As an ordinary illustration, imagine one person leaving a room where an argument repeatedly resumes and another arranging a particular time for discussing the disagreement. The first changes exposure to the occasion; the second organizes an interval. These are our examples of the distinction, not evidence that either arrangement always changes the underlying impulse.
Both methods make circumstances part of self-control. Changing the setting or its rhythm can change how the contest arises.
The third method: a victory that can destroy its agent
The third method moves in the opposite direction: Nietzsche describes excessive gratification intended to produce disgust with the impulse. Instead of denying it satisfaction, the person expects satisfaction to turn into aversion.
Nietzsche immediately emphasizes the danger through the image of a rider destroying both horse and rider. He says the disastrous outcome is frequent. That qualification belongs to his account, not merely to a modern objection added from outside it.
The distinction from the first two methods is precise: here restraint is supposed to emerge from disgust generated by excess. The example shows why a catalog of ways to weaken an impulse cannot serve as practical endorsement of each way. The destruction of the person would not become successful self-command simply because the particular craving had ceased to dominate.
The fourth method: altering what satisfaction promises
The fourth method works through association. A thought of gratification becomes so closely connected with something painful that anticipating the gratification calls up the pain as well. Nietzsche’s examples include religious punishment, social contempt, distress caused to loved ones, and wounded pride.
Unlike the third method, the aversion need not arise from exhausting the enjoyment itself. Something else changes its anticipated significance. A pleasure now promises disgrace, guilt, or the humiliation of feeling ruled by a craving.
Take an invented ordinary example: someone enjoys showing off their knowledge but begins to associate doing so with a respected friend’s disappointment. The thought of displaying knowledge may become less attractive. That illustrates the proposed association without proving that the friend’s judgment is justified or the resulting restraint beneficial.
Nietzsche’s discussion of pride is especially important. The person may delight in subduing a passion because being its dependent feels intolerable. The sense of command can itself become a satisfaction. What appears to be reason overcoming appetite might involve one desire obtaining pleasure through the defeat of another.
Some examples in the passage concern severe distress. Their explanatory role is to show how anticipated pain can influence an impulse. They do not establish that shame, fear, or punitive associations are good ways of caring for a person.
The fifth method: a competing use for one’s powers
The fifth method shifts activity elsewhere. Nietzsche describes demanding work, a new attraction, or deliberate encouragement of other impulses. Their common feature is that powers otherwise claimed by the dominant craving find another use.
He includes a collective version: several other passions receive opportunities that prevent one from taking everything. The imagery of a tyrant and rivals makes control look like a redistribution within the person. A coalition of tendencies can limit a dominant member without requiring the complete disappearance of wanting.
For a modest illustration, imagine someone preoccupied with winning a minor disagreement becoming absorbed in planning a shared celebration. Cooperation and anticipation may occupy attention previously claimed by competitiveness. This is our illustration of redirected activity; it is not a general claim that distraction resolves a conflict.
This method differs from attaching pain to the original satisfaction. The original attraction may remain, while other activities gain a stronger place. Nietzsche’s language about limited powers is part of his explanatory picture; the aphorism does not establish a precise measure of how those powers are distributed.
The sixth method: weakening everything
The final method lowers the force of an impulse by weakening the entire bodily and mental organization. Nietzsche’s ascetic example makes the cost explicit: the targeted sensuality diminishes together with vitality, and reason may be damaged too.
He has moved from changing particular occasions or relationships among tendencies to impairing the person more generally. The impulse loses force because much else has lost force. The difference matters whenever an apparent victory is assessed only by the disappearance of an unwanted urge.
These destructive examples expose limits of the category Nietzsche is constructing. A method can explain a reduction without providing a reasonable model of self-control. Effectiveness in one restricted respect cannot settle whether the result deserves to be wanted.
The ending: why does anyone want control?
After reviewing the six methods, Nietzsche makes his strongest claim. The will to oppose a craving, the selected method, and its success are themselves beyond our power. Intellect operates as an instrument of another, rival drive. His examples include the wish for rest, fear of disgrace or other consequences, and love.
The ending reaches further than saying that motives occasionally influence reasoning. Nietzsche denies that the decision to control a drive originates in an independent commander standing outside this contest. What speaks as the person’s complaint against an impulse expresses another force within the person.
To understand the point, ask what makes the impulse’s dominance objectionable. An urge to continue talking becomes a problem because rest, another person’s needs, or a desire to be considerate presses against it. Without a competing concern, why would its force be experienced as something requiring resistance?
This does not establish that every conflict has exactly two neatly separable participants. The fifth method already permits several tendencies to combine. The relevant change is from picturing an isolated reason confronting desire to examining the configuration of motives that brings reasoning into the struggle.
Nietzsche calls intellect a blind instrument because it serves the contest without necessarily understanding the motive directing its service. It may devise effective means while misunderstanding whose purposes, within the person, those means advance. Skill in managing a craving does not automatically give accurate knowledge of why managing it matters.
Explaining control does not erase what happened
Return to the person who listened instead of interrupting. If concern for the friendship directed their restraint, the listening still occurred. Recognizing a motive would give us a more detailed explanation of the restraint, not evidence that it was imaginary.
There remains a stronger question about agency. Nietzsche’s denial of command over the will to resist challenges a picture of completely independent choice. It does not by itself resolve every question about planning, learning, responding to reasons, or the difference between effective and ineffective regulation. These are activities whose place in his account needs explanation.
Reading 1’s distinction survives. A moral reason might sincerely participate while resting on error. Investigating a motive and examining whether its judgment is defensible remain different tasks.
A difficulty to keep in view
Has Nietzsche explained the place of reasoning, or assigned it too narrow a role?
Recognizing that reasoning needs a motive is one thing. Establishing that it is always merely an instrument of a rival drive is another. Deliberation can uncover a misunderstanding, make an overlooked consequence visible, or alter what a person wants. An adequate account must explain those changes as well as reasoning’s dependence on existing concerns.
Nietzsche could describe the changes as developments within the competition of drives. But the description would still need to show how considering reasons makes a difference. Repeating that some drive won does not explain every feature of the process that produced the outcome.
The six methods also require scrutiny as a classification. Nietzsche claims that these are the essentially different possibilities, yet this short passage does not establish their completeness or supply evidence for their effectiveness in every case. His warnings about destructive methods make the difference between a possible mechanism and a defensible practice especially clear.
Finally, there is no guarantee that the victorious motive deserves our allegiance. Fear of disgrace may restrain cruelty or prevent necessary dissent. Pride can support discipline or make ordinary dependence humiliating. The fact that a drive wins explains an outcome; deciding whether to welcome that outcome requires further judgment.
Check your understanding
Try answering before opening each suggested response.
How do Nietzsche’s first two methods differ?
The first reduces opportunities for satisfaction and expects the impulse to weaken through deprivation of those opportunities. The second permits satisfaction within a strict rhythm, creating intervals of quiet. Nietzsche suggests that the second may lead to the first, but they begin with different arrangements.
What separates the third and fourth methods?
The third seeks disgust through excessive gratification and carries a danger Nietzsche explicitly stresses. The fourth links anticipated satisfaction to a painful thought, such as disgrace or wounded pride. Aversion has different proposed sources in the two accounts.
Why should the fifth and sixth methods not be grouped together?
The fifth redirects powers into other activities or competing drives. The sixth weakens the whole bodily and mental organization, reducing the targeted impulse along with other capacities. General depletion can produce a narrower victory at the cost of the person’s wider powers.
What does the final claim about intellect change?
Nietzsche treats intellect as serving a rival drive, such as love, the wish for rest, or fear of consequences. The will to control an impulse is itself motivated and, he claims, beyond our command. Control becomes a conflict within the person that also directs the use of reasoning.
Does this account show that self-control never happens?
No. An impulse can be regulated and conduct can change. Nietzsche disputes an explanation of that change through an independent commander outside the drives. Whether his account adequately explains deliberation and agency remains a further question; calling the outcome illusory would skip it.
What should I write in my notes?
Choose an ordinary instance of restraint, real or invented: letting someone finish speaking, leaving an argument, or completing an agreed task. Write 180–250 words:
- Describe what changed in the person’s conduct and what impulse was being limited.
- Identify one of Nietzsche’s six mechanisms that helps explain the change. Use the classification analytically; do not attempt a method as an experiment.
- Suggest a competing concern that could have motivated restraint. Distinguish evidence for this suggestion from a plausible guess.
- Explain what reasoning contributed. Did it merely find a means, or might it have changed the person’s understanding of what mattered?
- Give a reason to welcome or question the outcome, separately from explaining how it occurred.
A strong response makes self-control more intelligible while leaving its value and the adequacy of Nietzsche’s explanation open to assessment.
Continue the reading
Reading 6: Is Compassion Always Good? →
The next session reads §§133–134. We turn to a feeling whose goodness is often treated as evident and examine its motives, effects, and standing as a guide to action.
Carry this question forward: If a feeling can direct action without giving a complete account of its own motive, what must we examine before treating compassion as sufficient reason to act? Explaining a feeling and deciding what it justifies remain connected but distinct tasks.