Reading Nietzsche

Themes · Knowledge and the Body

The Psychology of Morality and the Affects

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

If we do not reliably know why we act, what happens to a morality built on judging intentions?

Nietzsche's work here is not primarily a moral position but a method of reading moral phenomena: treating a judgment, a feeling of obligation, or a sense of guilt as something with causes that the person holding it does not have access to. Daybreak states the difficulty at its starkest — however far self-knowledge goes, nothing is more incomplete than a person's picture of the drives that constitute him, and experience mostly supplies nourishment to drives already at work rather than information about them.

From that starting point several claims follow, and they are worth keeping apart. One is about the self: what we call the will is a relation among many drives rather than a single faculty issuing commands. A second is about motive: the reason a person gives for an act is itself a phenomenon to be explained, not evidence about what produced the act. A third is about specific moral formations: ressentiment, bad conscience, the ascetic ideal — mechanisms by which a feeling that cannot discharge outward is turned somewhere else and given a meaning.

None of this is a moral theory, and Nietzsche's claim that psychology should again become the path to the fundamental problems is a claim about method rather than a result. The material also ranges from careful description to confident speculation, and the difference is frequently invisible in the prose. Where a passage is proposing a mechanism rather than reporting one, this guide says so.

Essential first encounter

Six short assignments, read in order. Ressentiment and bad conscience are given separate steps because they are separate mechanisms in separate essays, and the site keeps that distinction rather than merging them into a single reading on the Genealogy.

  1. Core

    Daybreak §119

    We do not know the drives we are made of

    Kennedy: Experience and Invention.

    Question: If experience mostly feeds the drives rather than informing us about them, what is introspection actually reporting?

    Why it belongs: The foundational section for the whole theme. Nietzsche argues that however far self-knowledge reaches, the catalogue of a person's drives remains incomplete; that the drives are nourished by the day's chance events rather than revealed by them; and that even a dream is the interpretation of a bodily stimulus invented after the fact. Every later claim on this page depends on this one. Note that the argument is itself a hypothesis about a process we cannot observe, which is a difficulty Nietzsche acknowledges here more readily than in the late books.

    Read alongside: Daybreak §§129–130; Beyond Good and Evil §19.

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

  2. Core

    Daybreak §§32, 38

    What a moral judgment does to an impulse

    Kennedy: The Brake; Impulses Transformed by Moral Judgments.

    Question: If blame changes the impulse rather than only restraining it, what is a moral judgment doing?

    Why it belongs: §38 states the mechanism directly: the same impulse, under the pressure of the blame custom attaches to it, develops into a different and painful affect — so that moral judgment is not a brake applied to a fixed drive but something that alters what the drive becomes. §32 approaches the same point from the other side, through the shock of discovering that moral suffering rested on an error. Together they show morality operating causally rather than only evaluatively, which is the claim the Genealogy will develop into a history.

    Read alongside: Genealogy II §§16–18; Daybreak §215.

    Online edition: §§32, 38 (trans. J. M. Kennedy) · Preferred edition.

  3. Core

    Beyond Good and Evil §§19, 23

    The will as many wills, and psychology as the way in

    Question: §19 says willing involves commanding and obeying at once. Who, on that account, is the one who wills?

    Why it belongs: §19 takes apart the apparently simple act of willing into a plurality of sensations, a thought, and above all an affect of command, and argues that the feeling of freedom in willing comes from identifying with the commanding part while the obeying parts do the work. §23 then proposes that psychology be recognized as the queen of the sciences and the path to the fundamental problems, and concedes that pursuing it means sailing against inherited moral prejudice. Two short sections that supply the theme's model of the self and its statement of method.

    Read alongside: Daybreak §119; Beyond Good and Evil §§13, 17.

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

  4. Core

    On the Genealogy of Morals Essay I, §§10–13

    Ressentiment, and the doer invented behind the deed

    Question: §13 says the strong are not free to be weak. If that is right, what work is the language of choice doing in moral judgment?

    Why it belongs: The first of the two mechanisms. §10 defines ressentiment as a valuation that begins by saying no to an outside and only then invents its own yes; §§11–12 track what that does to the concept of the enemy; §13, the lambs and the birds of prey, argues that grammar tempts us to posit a neutral subject behind an activity who could have acted otherwise, and that this fiction is what makes the weak able to credit themselves with their weakness as an achievement. Keep this distinct from bad conscience: it is a different mechanism, in a different essay, with a different object.

    Read alongside: Master and slave morality; Genealogy I §14.

    Online edition: Essay I §§10–13 (trans. Horace B. Samuel; the Preface and each essay are numbered separately) · Preferred edition.

  5. Core

    On the Genealogy of Morals Essay II, §§16–18

    Bad conscience as instinct turned inward

    Question: Nietzsche calls bad conscience an illness, and also the source of everything interesting in human beings. How can both be true?

    Why it belongs: The second mechanism, and the more original one. §16 describes the enclosure of human beings within society and peace, so that instincts which could no longer discharge outward turned against their bearer; §17 denies that this was a gradual adaptation; §18 identifies the same force at work in the artist's delight in form, so that self-cruelty becomes the condition of self-making. This is the site's protected distinction in action: bad conscience is not the slave revolt, and reading the two essays as one argument loses what is most interesting in the second. The historical account of a conquering race imposing a form is asserted rather than evidenced, and belongs with the weaker material.

    Read alongside: Genealogy II §22; Suffering and cruelty.

    Online edition: Essay II §§16–18 (trans. Horace B. Samuel) · Preferred edition.

  6. Core

    Twilight of the Idols The Four Great Errors §§1–8

    The machinery of moral judgment taken apart

    Question: If the will is not a cause, what is left of praise, blame and responsibility — and does Nietzsche want anything left?

    Why it belongs: The compressed late summary: the confusion of cause and consequence, false causality, imaginary causes, and the error of free will. Nietzsche argues that we invent causes after the fact to make experience familiar, and that the doctrine of the will was devised for the purpose of finding people guilty and punishing them. Read last, it shows the psychology being turned into a weapon; the claim that the will was invented in order to punish is a genealogical assertion, not a demonstrated history.

    Read alongside: Human, All Too Human §39; Genealogy as method.

    Online edition: The Four Great Errors (trans. Anthony M. Ludovici; section numbers restart in each chapter) · Preferred edition.

Fuller route: tests and complications

Continue with these five investigations after the first encounter. Each assignment below opens its explanation and reading links in the work survey. Read the assignments within a group in order; the question above them explains what the comparison is meant to test.

1. Can a motive be known?

The theme's hardest problem, and the one on which everything else rests. Ask in each case what evidence a claim about hidden motives could rest on.

  1. Daybreak — §119
    The incompleteness of any catalogue of one's own drives.
  2. Daybreak — §§129–130
    The supposed combat of motives, and the two kingdoms of purpose and chance.
  3. The Gay Science — §335
    Moral self-knowledge treated as typically self-flattering.
  4. The Gay Science — §333
    Knowing described as the outcome of a struggle among impulses.

2. What kind of thing is doing the willing?

If the will is many wills, the grammar of agency needs replacing. Test how far Nietzsche gets, and what he leaves standing.

  1. Beyond Good and Evil — §19
    Commanding and obeying inside a single act.
  2. Beyond Good and Evil — §§13, 17
    A living thing discharging strength; a thought that comes when it wishes.
  3. Thus Spoke Zarathustra — I, On the Despisers of the Body
    The self behind the "I", in dramatic form.
  4. The Gay Science — §354
    Consciousness as a late and social instrument.

3. The two mechanisms, kept apart

Ressentiment and bad conscience are routinely merged. Read them against each other and state the difference precisely.

  1. On the Genealogy of Morals — Essay I §§10–13
    Valuation that begins with a no to an outside.
  2. On the Genealogy of Morals — Essay I §14
    The workshop where ideals are manufactured.
  3. On the Genealogy of Morals — Essay II §§16–18
    Instinct turned inward when it cannot discharge outward.
  4. On the Genealogy of Morals — Essay II §22
    Guilt raised to a maximum, and the relief that deepens it.

4. The affects as evidence rather than noise

Nietzsche does not treat feeling as an obstacle to judgment. Follow the cases where an affect is read as a source of information.

  1. Thus Spoke Zarathustra — II, On the Tarantulas
    The preachers of equality, and the revenge inside a demand for justice.
  2. Thus Spoke Zarathustra — I, On the Pale Criminal
    An act and the image of it that the doer cannot bear.
  3. Daybreak — §215
    Sacrifice examined as something other than selflessness.
  4. On the Genealogy of Morals — Essay III §§15–18
    The priest redirecting a suffering he cannot cure.

5. Where the psychology becomes polemic

The late books turn the method on named targets. Ask what is gained in force and what is given up in care.

  1. Twilight of the Idols — The Problem of Socrates
    A philosopher diagnosed rather than answered.
  2. Twilight of the Idols — Morality as Anti-Nature
    Hostility to the passions read as a symptom.
  3. The Antichrist — §15
    A whole moral vocabulary classified as imaginary.
  4. Ecce Homo — Why I Am So Wise §6
    Freedom from ressentiment claimed, in the first person.

Keep these distinctions in view

Ressentiment and ordinary resentment
Ressentiment names a valuation that originates in a no to an outside and only afterwards produces its own affirmations. It is not anger at injury, not objection to harm, and not any complaint made by someone weaker. Collapsing it into ordinary resentment turns the analysis into an insult.
Bad conscience and the slave revolt
Two mechanisms, two essays, two objects. The slave revolt is a reversal of valuations directed outward at an enemy; bad conscience is instinct turned against its bearer when external discharge is blocked. They interact in Essay II §22, but they are not the same process and neither reduces to the other.
Explaining a belief and refuting it
An account of why someone holds a moral view leaves the question of whether the view is correct entirely open. Nietzsche sometimes observes this and sometimes does not; where a passage slides from the first to the second, the slide should be marked.
Description and endorsement
Reading an affect as a symptom is not approval of what produced it or of what it produces. Nietzsche describes cruelty, revenge and self-torment with great attention; attention is not advocacy, and the passages where he does advocate are identifiable as such.
Psychological claim and historical claim
The mechanism of bad conscience is a psychological proposal. The story of a conquering race that imposed a state on a formless population is a historical one. The second is far weaker than the first and is not needed to state the first.
Drives, affects, and instincts
The vocabulary is not stabilized across the corpus, and the translations vary further. Do not assume that Trieb, Affekt and Instinkt mark a settled taxonomy; check what each passage is actually distinguishing.
Aphorism and argument
Beyond Good and Evil Part IV is a sequence of epigrams, not a chapter of moral psychology. Some of its aphorisms bear on this theme; many concern art, women, friendship, scholarship or style, and several are jokes. Its role in the book is to train a way of reading rather than to advance a doctrine, and quarrying it for psychological theses without that context produces a Nietzsche who never wrote a qualification.
What Nietzsche anticipated and what he authorized
The resemblances to later depth psychology are real and are discussed below. They do not make Nietzsche a proto-psychoanalyst, and later theories cannot be used to fill gaps in his arguments.

The afterlife

Freud said that he had avoided reading Nietzsche, and gave as a reason that he expected to find in him too much of what psychoanalysis would later claim. The judgment is not unreasonable. The unconscious as a domain of motives not transparent to the conscious self, self-deception as a feature of ordinary self-presentation, the turning inward of an impulse that cannot discharge outward — all of this is in Nietzsche before it is in Freud. Adler and Jung, both closer readers of him than Freud, are in places working out what he made available.

Two cautions. The resemblance is one of theme and not of theory: Nietzsche has no clinical practice, no account of infantile development, no technique, and no interest in cure. And the direction of explanation should not be reversed — later psychology cannot be used to supply what a Nietzschean argument leaves unsupported, and a claim of his does not gain evidential weight because something like it was later given a different apparatus. The resemblance is a fact about intellectual history, and it is interesting; it is not a corroboration.

Explore by work

Thirty assignments across nine works, including the six starting readings. Core identifies that first encounter; development adds a mechanism or setting; complication tests an apparent answer; extension follows a related question. The survey follows publication chronology, and marks The Gay Science Book V and the 1886 prefaces as later additions.

Human, All Too Human3 reading assignments

The 1878 book establishes the basic operation: separating an act from the moral evaluation attached to it, and treating the evaluation as the thing to be explained. The Second Division, "The History of the Moral Sentiments," is where most of this work is done.

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Daybreak6 reading assignments

The 1881 book is the theme's centre of gravity. Nowhere else does Nietzsche work so patiently on the opacity of motive, and nowhere else is he so explicit that his own accounts are conjectures.

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The Gay Science3 reading assignments

Book III supplies the treatment of knowing as an affair of the drives; Book V, added in 1887, supplies the account of consciousness. The survey marks which sections belong to the later addition.

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Thus Spoke Zarathustra3 reading assignments

The book dramatizes the psychology rather than arguing it, and the dramatization sometimes gets further than the analysis does. The free Common edition numbers chapters I–LXXX continuously and uses different titles; match by part and chapter title.

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Beyond Good and Evil4 reading assignments

Part I supplies the model of the will and the claim for psychology; Part V, "Natural History of Morals" (§§186–203), supplies the comparative programme. Part IV, "Epigrams and Interludes," runs §§63–185 and is a different kind of writing altogether; see the note in its entry below. The free Zimmern edition has no per-section anchors, so links open the relevant part and you should use Find; Zimmern's part titles differ from Kaufmann's in Parts III, IV and VIII.

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On the Genealogy of Morals5 reading assignments

The 1887 book contains the theme's two central mechanisms, in separate essays and with separate arguments. The Preface and each essay are numbered separately in every edition, and Nietzsche's closing Note follows Essay I §17. For a complete reading of all three essays in order, use the twelve-lesson course.

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Twilight of the Idols4 reading assignments

The 1888 book compresses the psychology and turns it on named targets. Section numbers restart in each chapter and Ludovici's chapter titles differ from Kaufmann's; see the edition guidance.

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The Antichrist and Ecce Homo2 reading assignments

Both from 1888. Ecce Homo was published posthumously and is retrospective throughout. The free Mencken Antichrist omits portions of §§29, 35 and 38 and the separate Law Against Christianity; see the edition guidance.

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Notebook material

Two entries are given here, identified individually rather than as a range. No short starting route is offered: the compilation's psychological material is scattered across books assembled by its editors around other organizing questions, and a seven-entry sequence would impose a shape the notes do not have. Readers wanting a fuller notebook route should use the one on perspectivism for the epistemology and the one on master and slave morality for moral authority and rank.

For the original notebook arrangement and manuscript references rather than the compilation's editorial numbering, consult Nietzsche Source's critical edition.

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

← PerspectivismBody, physiology, naturalism →