Reading Nietzsche

Themes · Knowledge and the Body

Body, Physiology, Naturalism

Cluster Knowledge and the Body Writing period 1878–1888 First encounter 6 readings

"Body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body." The sentence is easy to quote and hard to hold, because "body" is doing at least five different jobs across the corpus and they do not all support each other.

The naturalism is real. Nietzsche thinks the concepts that have organized European philosophy — the soul, the unified ego, free will, the responsible subject — describe nothing, and that the work of philosophy now includes explaining why they seemed to. He is attentive to the physiological literature of his century, he treats health and illness as philosophically relevant rather than as biographical noise, and in the late books "physiological" becomes his standard word for the level at which a judgment is to be explained.

But the word "body" in Nietzsche is not the body of a physiology textbook. It names an organism understood as a plurality of drives in some arrangement with each other, with consciousness as a late and partial instrument attached to it. That is a philosophical proposal, not a scientific finding, and Nietzsche's own confidence about it runs well ahead of anything the nineteenth century could establish. Taking it seriously means being able to say which of his claims is empirical, which is conceptual, and which is a way of redescribing something already believed.

The risk on this page is specific, and it is the reason for its structure. Once "the body" is available as an explanation, it can be used to explain anything: a moral judgment, a metaphysical system, a preference in music, an entire culture. At that point it has stopped being an argument and become a vocabulary. The section below separates the jobs the word is doing, so that a reader can tell when a passage is making a claim and when it is applying a label.

Essential first encounter

Six assignments, read in order and in chronological sequence. The route begins with the drives rather than with the famous sentence, because the claim about the body only does philosophical work once there is an account of what the body is supposed to consist of. The late physiological vocabulary comes last, where its dependence on the earlier arguments is visible.

  1. Core · 1881

    Daybreak §119

    Experience as the surface of something not observed

    Kennedy: Experience and Invention. The free edition is The Dawn of Day.

    Question: Nietzsche says our waking life is as invented as our dreams. What exactly is supposed to be doing the inventing?

    Why it belongs: The most important middle-period section on this theme and the right place to start. Nietzsche proposes that the drives are nourished by whatever the day happens to supply, that no one knows their own drives as such, and that what we call experience is an interpretation laid over a play of impulses we do not observe — so that even our moral self-assessments are a kind of invention. It puts the theme on a footing that is psychological before it is physiological, and it introduces the plurality the later "body" is supposed to name. It is also careful in a way the late work often is not: Nietzsche presents the account as a conjecture about something inaccessible, which is the honest form of the claim.

    Read alongside: Daybreak §560; The psychology of morality.

    Online edition: §119 (trans. J. M. Kennedy) · Preferred edition.

  2. Core · 1883

    Thus Spoke Zarathustra Part I, "On the Despisers of the Body"

    Body am I entirely

    Common: The Despisers of the Body. Common renders the key sentence "Body am I entirely, and nothing more; and soul is only the name of something in the body."

    Question: The speech replaces one unity with another. What kind of unity is the body supposed to be, and how does it differ from the soul it replaces?

    Why it belongs: The dramatic statement, and the source of nearly every quotation on this subject. Zarathustra addresses those who despise the body, tells them that the body is a great reason and the spirit a small one, calls the body a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a herdsman, and describes the self behind the "I" as something that dwells in the body and is the body. Read it carefully and quickly twice: the rhetoric moves fast, and the substantive claim — that the organizing work attributed to a conscious self is done by something the conscious self does not see — is easy to lose in it. Note also what it does not do. It asserts the reversal without arguing for it, and the argument has to come from the sections on either side of it in this route.

    Read alongside: Zarathustra I, "On Enjoying and Suffering the Passions"; Critique of metaphysics.

    Online edition: Part I, "The Despisers of the Body" (trans. Thomas Common) · Preferred edition.

  3. Core · 1886

    Beyond Good and Evil §§13, 17, 19

    Taking the willing subject apart

    Part I, "On the Prejudices of Philosophers." Section numbers run continuously across the book's nine parts.

    Question: §19 breaks willing into sensations, a thought and an affect of command. Which of those three is doing the work the word "will" was supposed to do?

    Why it belongs: The argued version of what Zarathustra declaims. §13 says that a living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength and that self-preservation is only one consequence of that. §17 argues that a thought comes when it wishes and not when "I" wish, so that the "I" in "I think" is an interpretation of the process rather than an observation of it. §19 is the central one: willing is analysed into sensations of the state one leaves and the state one moves toward, a ruling thought, and above all an affect of command — and Nietzsche adds that we are at once the one commanding and the one obeying, which is why the success of the command gets mistaken for a simple act of will. Read §19 slowly. It is the closest thing in the published work to an account of what a body is on this theme, and it is where the concept of the drives becomes a claim about agency.

    Read alongside: Beyond Good and Evil §12; Will to power.

    Online edition: Part I (trans. Helen Zimmern; use Find for the section numbers) · Preferred edition.

  4. Development · Book V (1887)

    The Gay Science §382

    A health that has to be given up to be had

    Kaufmann: The great health. The free edition is titled The Joyful Wisdom.

    Question: "Health" here is not the absence of illness. What is it the name of, and is the usage doing argumentative work or rhetorical work?

    Why it belongs: The section describes a health that one does not merely have but must keep acquiring because one keeps giving it up, and connects it to an ideal of a spirit that plays naively with everything that has counted as holy and good. It matters on this page because it is where the physiological vocabulary stops being descriptive and becomes evaluative: health names a capacity to sustain experiments and to recover from them, not a bodily state a physician could confirm. That shift is worth marking, because most of the late uses of "healthy" and "sick" inherit it, and a reader who takes them as medical claims will be misreading them — while a reader who takes them as purely metaphorical will miss that Nietzsche thought they were continuous with the medical sense.

    Read alongside: Ecce Homo, "Why I Am So Wise" §§1–2; Wagner and decadence.

    Online edition: §382 (trans. Thomas Common) · Preferred edition.

  5. Core · 1888

    Twilight of the Idols "The Four Great Errors"; "'Reason' in Philosophy" §1

    Inner causes reconsidered, and the senses defended

    Ludovici: "The Four Great Errors" and "'Reason' in Philosophy." Section numbers restart in each chapter.

    Question: If the inner world of motives contains no causes, what happens to introspective reports about why one did something?

    Why it belongs: "The Four Great Errors" is where the naturalism turns into a method. Nietzsche argues that we took our concept of cause from an inner experience of willing that does not contain causes, that we then supply imaginary causes after the fact for states whose real sources are physiological, and that the sense of free will is one such construction. The point for this theme is not the denial of freedom but the model of self-knowledge it replaces: the conscious report is an interpretation of a condition, not a record of it. "'Reason' in Philosophy" §1 supplies the complementary charge — that philosophers hate becoming and prefer a mummified world — which is the reason the body has been the standing casualty of the tradition.

    Read alongside: Twilight, "'Reason' in Philosophy" §§2–3; Critique of metaphysics.

    Online edition: "The Four Great Errors" (trans. Anthony M. Ludovici; for "'Reason' in Philosophy" use the contents) · Preferred edition.

  6. Complication · 1888

    Ecce Homo "Why I Am So Wise" §§1–2; "Why I Am So Clever" §1, §10

    The doctrine applied to its author

    Free edition (trans. Anthony M. Ludovici). Written in 1888 and first published in 1908.

    Question: Nietzsche treats nutrition and climate as philosophical questions. Is that the doctrine being demonstrated, or the doctrine being tested?

    Why it belongs: The chapters where the naturalism is carried out in the first person: illness and recovery described as the conditions under which certain perspectives became available, and the practical questions of diet, place and daily rhythm treated with complete seriousness as matters philosophy has neglected. It is genuinely illuminating about what the doctrine is supposed to mean in practice, and it is the place where its weakness is most exposed — the claims about what his own physiology explains are unfalsifiable, and they are made by someone with an obvious interest in them. Read it as the doctrine's most vivid application and its least independent evidence, and keep The Gay Science §382 in view as the more careful version of the same thought.

    Read alongside: The Gay Science §382; Amor fati.

    Online edition: "Why I Am So Wise" (trans. Anthony M. Ludovici; for "Why I Am So Clever" use the contents) · Preferred edition.

Five things "the body" is doing

The word does at least five different jobs, and they have different standards of evidence. Separating them is the single most useful discipline on this theme, because the slogan "body am I entirely" makes them look like one claim.

1. Physiology — a claim about explanation
That certain judgments, moods and philosophical positions are to be explained by the state of the organism that produced them. This is an empirical claim and it can be wrong. In the late work it is asserted far more often than it is supported, and Nietzsche's own examples — Wagner, Socrates, Saint Paul — are diagnoses at a distance of centuries. Twilight, "The Four Great Errors" and the late polemics.
2. Drives — a claim about composition
That what acts in a person is a plurality of impulses in some arrangement, rather than a single agent. This is a conceptual proposal about how to describe a person, and most of Nietzsche's distinctive psychology depends on it. Daybreak §119, Beyond Good and Evil §12 and §19.
3. Affects — a claim about access
That feelings and inclinations are not noise interfering with judgment but the means by which anything is registered as mattering at all. This is why Genealogy III §12 can say that more affects mean a more complete concept, and it is the point where this theme and perspectivism stop being separable.
4. Embodiment — a claim about the self
That there is no thinking thing standing behind or above the organism, so that the "I" is an interpretation rather than an observer. This is the anti-Cartesian claim, and it is argued for — in Beyond Good and Evil §§16–17 — rather than merely announced. Zarathustra I, "On the Despisers of the Body."
5. Interpretation — a claim about what conscious reports are
That what reaches consciousness has already been simplified, generalized and translated, so that introspection delivers an interpretation and not a record. The Gay Science §354, Daybreak §119. This is the claim that makes the other four hard to check, including by Nietzsche.

The five do not entail one another. A reader could accept that the self is not a Cartesian ego (4) while doubting that a particular philosopher's argument is explained by his digestion (1). The drives (2) can be accepted as a description without the physiological reductions (1) following. And claim (5) sits awkwardly with claim (1), since a doctrine that makes conscious reports unreliable also makes it difficult to say how the physiological diagnosis was arrived at. That tension is not resolved in the published work, and this page does not resolve it either. What it does is mark which claim is being made where, so that a passage can be assessed on the right terms.

Fuller route: tests and complications

Five investigations, one for each use of the term. Each assignment opens its full explanation and reading links in the work survey below.

1. The drives, and what they are supposed to be

Start with the composition claim, because the rest of the theme leans on it. Ask in each case whether the drives are being observed, inferred, or posited.

  1. Daybreak — §119
    The unobserved play of impulses beneath what we call experience.
  2. Daybreak — §38
    The same drive wearing different moral costumes as the evaluation changes.
  3. Beyond Good and Evil — §12
    The soul kept as a topic and abandoned as an atom: soul as a social structure of drives and affects.
  4. Daybreak — §560
    Cultivating drives like a gardener — and the question of who is supposed to be doing the gardening.

2. The self that was supposed to be doing it

The anti-Cartesian argument, which is the best-supported part of the theme.

  1. Beyond Good and Evil — §§17, 19
    A thought that comes when it wishes; willing analysed into commanding and obeying.
  2. Thus Spoke Zarathustra — I, "On the Despisers of the Body"
    The self that is the body, and the "I" as its instrument.
  3. On the Genealogy of Morals — Essay I §13
    The doer added to the deed by grammar, and what that removes.
  4. Human, All Too Human — §39
    The middle-period dismantling of intelligible freedom, and its cost.

3. What consciousness is for

The interpretation claim. Follow the proposal that awareness is a late instrument shaped by a social requirement.

  1. The Gay Science — §354
    Consciousness developed under the pressure of the need to communicate.
  2. Human, All Too Human — §11
    Language taken for knowledge of the world, and the reification of words.
  3. Twilight of the Idols — "The Four Great Errors"
    Imaginary causes supplied after the fact for states with other sources.
  4. Beyond Good and Evil — §230
    Knowing described as an appetite to incorporate and simplify, not a mirror.

4. Affects as access rather than interference

The claim that makes this theme inseparable from the account of knowledge. Test whether it can be held without collapsing into either sentimentalism or relativism.

  1. Thus Spoke Zarathustra — I, "On Enjoying and Suffering the Passions"
    Passions renamed as virtues, and the danger in the renaming.
  2. The Gay Science — §290
    Giving style to one's character: the constructive use of the drives.
  3. Twilight of the Idols — "Morality as Anti-Nature"
    Moralities that attack the passions at the root, read as an inability to discipline them.
  4. Beyond Good and Evil — §6
    Philosophy as the involuntary memoir of the philosopher who wrote it.

5. Physiological explanation, and where it overreaches

The most exposed claim on the page. Read the strongest applications and ask what would count against them.

  1. On the Genealogy of Morals — Essay III §§6–10
    The philosopher's asceticism read as working conditions rather than conviction.
  2. On the Genealogy of Morals — Essay III §§17–19
    The priest's remedies described as physiological interventions under a spiritual description.
  3. Twilight of the Idols — "Skirmishes" §§47–49
    Beauty, decline and the affirmative type given bodily descriptions.
  4. Ecce Homo — "Why I Am So Wise" §6
    The diagnostic instrument claimed as a sense of smell, with no way of checking it.

Keep these distinctions in view

The body as substrate and the body as plurality
The first move refuses the soul/body pair. The second, and more important, refuses the assumption that the body is one thing: it is described as a structure of drives in a relation of command and obedience. Readings that replace the soul with a simple organism have taken the first step and stopped.
Physiology as science and physiology as vocabulary
Nietzsche read the physiological literature of his time and used its terms. In the late polemics "physiological" often marks the level at which he thinks a judgment should be explained rather than reporting anything established. Both uses are present, sometimes in the same paragraph, and telling them apart is most of the work.
Health as condition and health as evaluation
The Gay Science §382 makes the great health a capacity that is repeatedly lost and reacquired. Once that is in place, "healthy" and "sick" in the late work are doing evaluative work with a medical surface. That does not make them empty, but it does mean they cannot be cashed out by any actual diagnosis.
Drives and instincts
Nietzsche uses Trieb, Instinkt and Affekt with less system than a reader might hope, and translators differ. Do not build an interpretation on a distinction between them that the German does not sustain; do notice when a passage needs the drives to be many and when it needs them to be organized.
Explaining a belief and refuting it
A physiological account of why someone holds a view is not an argument against the view. Nietzsche knows this — Human, All Too Human §1 and Daybreak §103 are explicit about the difference — and the late polemics regularly proceed as if he did not.
The body against metaphysics, and the body as metaphysics
The critique of substance applies to the body too. If unities are suspect, an organism described as "a great reason" needs to say why it is not another posited unity. Beyond Good and Evil §19 is the closest thing to an answer, and the critique of metaphysics page carries the objection.
Naturalism and reduction
Nietzsche's naturalism is a demand that explanations stay within the world rather than a claim that everything is really chemistry. The Gay Science §373 calls a merely mechanical reading of the world one of the stupidest possible interpretations, which is a useful check on any account of this theme that makes him a materialist of that kind.

Explore by work

Twenty-six assignments across eight works, including the six starting readings. Core identifies the first encounter; development adds a mechanism or setting; complication tests an apparent answer; extension follows a related question. The survey follows publication chronology, and The Gay Science Book V is marked as the 1887 addition.

Human, All Too Human3 reading assignments

The 1878 book is where the naturalism becomes a programme. The register is analytic and the conclusions are stated with more hesitation than the late work allows. Preferred edition: Hollingdale.

Back to the work list · Return to the fuller route

Daybreak4 reading assignments

The laboratory of the drives, and the book that does most for this theme without using its late vocabulary. Preferred translation: Hollingdale; the free edition is The Dawn of Day, translated by J. M. Kennedy.

Back to the work list · Return to the fuller route

The Gay Science3 reading assignments

Book IV (1882) supplies the constructive image of shaping a character; Book V (1887) supplies the account of consciousness and the great health. The year is marked on each entry.

Back to the work list · Return to the fuller route

Thus Spoke Zarathustra3 reading assignments

The dramatic statement and its immediate sequel. The two Part I speeches are printed consecutively and should be read that way; the Part III chapter shows what the doctrine costs the body that has to absorb it.

Back to the work list · Return to the fuller route

Beyond Good and Evil4 reading assignments

The published book that argues for what the others assert. Part I contains the dismantling of the willing subject; Part VII contains the account of knowing as an appetite. Section numbers run continuously from 1 to 296.

Back to the work list · Return to the fuller route

On the Genealogy of Morals3 reading assignments

The Genealogy makes the body the site of historical formation, and the third essay contains the most sustained physiological reading in the published work. The free edition numbers the Preface and each essay separately.

Back to the work list · Return to the fuller route

Twilight of the Idols4 reading assignments

The 1888 compressions, and the place where the physiological vocabulary is thickest. Section numbers restart in each chapter and several chapter titles differ in the free edition.

Back to the work list · Return to the fuller route

Ecce Homo2 reading assignments

The doctrine applied to its author. Written in 1888, published in 1908, and the least independent evidence on the page. The free edition titles the later chapters "Why I Write Such Excellent Books" and "Why I Am a Fatality."

Back to the work list · Return to the fuller route

The Will to Power: notebook readings

Four numbered entries, offered as a short appendix rather than as a route. There is late notebook material on the drives and the affects, but on this theme it is thinner than the published work and mostly restates it: Beyond Good and Evil §§12 and 19, Daybreak §119 and The Gay Science §354 are the substantial texts, and the notes add emphasis rather than argument. The four below are included because each one states something the books leave implicit.

Beginning from the body4 assignments · 4 entries

Two entries on the method and two on the difficulty the published work leaves open — what holds a plurality of drives together.

  • Notebook reading · Book III

    The Will to Power §492

    Beginning from the body

    Question: What does starting from the body offer that starting from consciousness does not?

    Why it belongs: The entry proposes the body and physiology as the methodological starting point, on the grounds that they present a richer and more clearly observable phenomenon than consciousness. It is the most explicit statement of this theme's programme anywhere, and it is unpublished — which is itself informative, since the published books argue for particular claims about the body without ever announcing the method this baldly. The physiological confidence runs well ahead of what Nietzsche could have established.

    Read alongside: The Gay Science §354; Perspectivism.

  • Notebook reading · Book III

    The Will to Power §490

    The subject as a plurality

    Question: If the subject is a society of many subjects, what makes it one society rather than several?

    Why it belongs: The entry tests a plurality of interacting subjects in place of an assumed single one, with an analogy to cells that cooperate and compete. It extends the composition claim to the knower, which is where Beyond Good and Evil §§16–17 were already pointing, and it states plainly what those sections imply. The cell analogy is an exploratory hypothesis and not an established account of agency.

    Read alongside: Beyond Good and Evil §12; Self-overcoming.

  • Notebook reading · Book III

    The Will to Power §668

    Commanding does not guarantee execution

    Question: If a command can fail inside a person, what does that tell you about the relation between the parts?

    Why it belongs: The entry observes that willing something is not the same as its happening, and treats the gap as evidence about how the parts of a person stand to each other. It is the counterweight to any reading of the drives as a tidy hierarchy, and it makes the difficulty in Daybreak §560 and The Gay Science §290 explicit: the gardener can want and not get.

    Read alongside: Daybreak §560; Beyond Good and Evil §19.

  • Notebook reading · Book IV

    The Will to Power §966

    An order of rank within the person

    Question: Strength is described as the organization of opposed drives rather than their absence. What would show that an organization had been achieved?

    Why it belongs: The entry treats a person's strength as consisting in holding conflicting drives together in an order rather than in having few of them. It supplies the notebooks' answer to the question the published work leaves open — what a well-arranged plurality would look like — and it is also where the theme's political vocabulary and its psychological vocabulary meet, since "order of rank" is being used for both. That overlap is worth noticing rather than assuming; the master and slave morality page treats the social sense.

    Read alongside: The Gay Science §290; Self-overcoming.

Back to the notebook guide · Compare the published works

For the original notebook arrangement and manuscript references rather than the compilation's editorial numbering, consult Nietzsche Source's critical edition. This theme is a case where a longer notebook route would have made the page longer without making it better: the published arguments are stronger than the notes, and a reader is better served by Beyond Good and Evil Part I than by any number of fragments.

Related extensions: what might follow?

Choose these after the central questions, according to the direction your reading takes. They return to assignments already explained in the survey.

Connections

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