Below, we review the antecedents of voluntarism, the main works, and basic concepts of Nietzsche’s philosophy that have become so influential in the 20th century.
Voluntarism
To understand Nietzsche’s philosophy, we must go back to the sources of the philosophy of the will. The first source of voluntarism is found in Augustine, who presented the concept of the will in a much more dynamic way than the Greek philosophers. Augustine is usually referred to as the philosopher of love. However, Augustine’s idea of love is identical to the concept of the will. He calls love what the later voluntarists called will, because the process by which essence actualizes itself in existence he conceives as the work of God, and as such, it is love.[1] His work, De Trinitate (On the Trinity), while seeking to defend the unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit against the heretical teachings of his days, also explores the nature of divine love. The famous Augustinian triad: the Father who loves (amans), the Son whom he loves (quod amatur), and the Holy Spirit who is love (amor), describes the inner life of God. It is love by which essence actualizes itself in existence. This proposition becomes the source of voluntarism.
It was in the 13th century when voluntarism appeared as a concrete philosophy of the will. What Duns Scotus and William of Ockham the prominent representatives of voluntarism advocate, that divine regularities depend on God’s will rather than God’s rationality (Scotus), and that divine regularities do not depend on any rational necessity (Ockham), all remain incomprehensible if the divine will is not understood as a transition from essence to existence. The thesis of voluntarism is the following: There is a definite will by which essence actualizes itself in existence. The alternative to this is that there is a definite rationality by which the essence actualizes itself in existence. This, of course, is Hegel’s thesis when he asserts that history is the dialectical self-realization of spirit. This dialectical self-realization will unite the real and the rational, that is, reality will become more and more rational. While Hegel’s system seeks hegemony in the intellectual space, his contemporary, Schelling returns to voluntarism and realizes the process of self-realization as voluntaristic. This is the question of what principle realises the world. For Schelling, being itself is will.
However, to review the concept of will according to Nietzsche’s teacher Schopenhauer, who took it from Schelling, it is essential to clarify it. If we understand the will as a psychic function, as we have understood it since 20th-century psychology, then voluntarism makes no sense. If we understand it as a psychic function, then the will is united with the consciousness, as it is the characteristic of the human conscious will. In this case, the thesis that will is the transition from essence to existence, as conscious will does not make sense, since most beings – such as crystals – do not have consciousness. Will, before it becomes conscious, is drive. This is Schelling’s philosophy of will, which turns out to be his philosophy of nature. According to Schelling, nature is the self-realisation of the will.
The first 19th-century exponent of voluntarism was Schopenhauer, who took the concept of the will from Schelling. Schopenhauer’s major work is The World as Will and Representation, a work that is partly epistemological and partly ontological. It is through the two concepts of will and representation in the title that reality is understood. From an epistemological point of view: the world we perceive is representation (Vorstellung). This epistemological orientation is of course entirely Kantian, distinguishing the world as it appears (phenomena) from the world (noumena). From an ontological point of view, and this is the one that is relevant for our subject: the essence of the world is will (Wille). For Schopenhauer, will as striving is realized in nature, and in human nature as well. According to Schopenhauer, this striving causes suffering both to the subject and to the objects around him, who are the subjects of their own world, because this striving never reaches its goal, nor can it, since it has no real, ultimate goal. Existence is striving. Striving is suffering. Existence is suffering. When the subject’s strive is united with its object, it is satisfied, but in the depths of all satisfaction, there is an even deeper dissatisfaction, which ultimately leads to disgust (Lebensüberdruss). Striving is insatiable (Unersättlich).[2] The subject, to free itself from its eternal dissatisfaction, wants to free itself from itself. From this Freud would derive the concept of the death drive in the 20th century.[3]
At this point, it is understandable why Schopenhauer is also associated with pessimistic philosophy. Schopenhauer united voluntarism and pessimism, but this unification is not necessary – as can be seen in Nietzsche. Since existence is will and will is suffering, suffering can be eliminated by eliminating will. At this point, Western civilisation reaches a crucial turning point. Schopenhauer discovered Buddhism, and in it the will of non-will, when the subject, to find peace, wills to will no more. He agreed that happiness is the renunciation of desires, as Buddhists put it, “the conquest of the self in the form of a formless self”, as Zen Buddhists put it, or the return to the Brahman principle, as Hindus put it.[4]
Nietzsche
The above-described context is essential to understand the basic concepts of Nietzsche’s major works. Literature tends to group Nietzsche’s ideas around the following five concepts: will-to-power, resentment, death of God, overman (Übermensch), and eternal recurrence. His major works are The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Human, All Too Human (1878), The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), Ecce Homo (1888), The Antichrist (1888).
Nietzsche adopts from Schopenhauer, and Schelling, the concept of the will, but he does not discuss it in relation to transition from essence to existence, but the relation to life. Life is will. Life is the process in which the will actualizes itself. Nietzsche later changes the concept of the will to life (Wille zur Leben) into the concept of the will to power (Wille zur Macht), but power here does not mean the will to an object or an institution of power, but the will to the power of being itself. The ontological conception behind this is that what exists has the power to be against the possibility of non-being. The will to power is thus the will to the power of being, but it is true that the power of being can be correlated with power in the social sense, that is, with objects or institutions of power. In his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy, he does not even use the concept of will itself but expresses the concept of will to life in a metaphor.
Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy is a dramatic-theoretical work through which he presents a critique of the 19th-century zeitgeist and the concept of the will to live, however in metaphorical language. In the first fifteen chapters, Nietzsche demonstrates through an analysis of ancient Greek dramas that the power of Greek tragedies lies in their ability to unite the conflict between two opposing forces. These two opposing forces are the Apollonian and the Dionysian, as Nietzsche calls them.[5] The Apollonian represents logos, the Dionysian chaos and passion. The Greek dramas owe their tragic artistic power to these opposing forces and the way in which they unite them since the same forces are united in human existence. The Greek dramas depict the profound conflict of human existence. In the following ten chapters, Nietzsche criticizes the modern age for having eliminated the union of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the Apollonian, the logical quality, has triumphed, which will cause problems, since the Dionysian passion that exists in man cannot be suspended. The conflict between the two interpretations of the world is clear: the world is the self-realisation of a specific ratio (Hegel) or the self-realisation of a specific voluntas (Schopenhauer). The Dionysian is the will to live.[6]
His first major work of the 1880s, after he had resigned his professorship, was The Gay Science (1882). Although Nietzsche uses Schopenhauer’s notion of the will in metaphorical language in The Birth of the Tragedy, but he does it with criticism.[7] He does not adopt the pessimism of Schopenhauer, who closely associated the will with suffering. According to Nietzsche, the will does not equal suffering. The will causes suffering when the balance between the Dionysian and the Apollonian is disrupted. The Gay Science, which is a collection of fragments, is already entitled The Gay Science, indicating that Nietzsche considers the will to live to be a positive concept since life is actualizing itself by will.[8]
However, there is also a negative element in the will to power. The power of the subject is power over specific objects, who are at the same time subjects of their own world. The actualisation of power, in its distorted form, can create an oppressor-oppressed relationship. Oppression, in the oppressed, breeds resentment, from which the oppressed, in order to free himself, either actualizes his power by confronting the oppressor, or, deluding himself, devalues his own values in order to rationally justify not actualizing his power by confronting the oppressor. [9] The devaluation of the values, in which the oppressor is involved, eventually leads to the transvaluation of the values, new values, we could say new ideas, such as freedom, equality, justice, etc., towards which the oppressed, even in confrontation with the oppressor, can actualize his power.
When Nietzsche writes in Gay Science that “God is dead” (Gott ist tot), he is writing about a revaluation of values that can lead to nihilism for a temporary period. The phrase “God is dead” does not mean the event of the death of God, but that, just as the rise of the natural sciences has made the concept of God as a supernatural being impossible, and belief in God impossible, so the previously divine, i.e. eternal, values have disappeared. There is nothing to define man ultimately. According to Nietzsche, this is partly like when the sun goes down and darkness falls on the earth, because since the beginning of Christianity, the idea of God has been the basis of the Western value system, and if the idea of God dies, the whole value system may die with it. Where there is no ultimate value, there is an absolute value crisis. The tragedies of the 20th century, both Nazism and socialism, could not have happened if God had not died. At the same time, Nietzsche argues, it is also partly an opportunity and an opportunity for the rise of new ideas. The idealistic man is the one who actualizes his freedom, if necessary, in opposition to his oppressors. The idealistic man, as he puts: the Übermensch, is the one who actualizes his will to power.[10]
Nietzsche became a critic of Christian morality, and particularly the Christian concept of love and humility because he believed that love and humility were ideas by which the Christian masses could be kept under oppression. With the “death of God”, he believed, these ideals also died.
Marx, later, bases his concept of class struggle on this and on the concept of Hegelianism. However, there is an important difference between Nietzsche and Marx. According to Nietzsche, ideas are ultimately born out of the bitterness of the oppressed “class”, whereas according to Marx, ideas are created by the oppressing class to keep the oppressed in oppression. Just as the idea of “life after death”, according to Marx, is created by the oppressing class, in collaboration with the Church, to keep the oppressed in exploitation, devaluing the value of life to only a “life before death”.
Nietzsche’s final, and particularly complex concept is eternal recurrence, the first source of which is found in Stoicism.[11] It is the idea that every moment that happens has already happened and will happen an infinite number of times. The moment is eternal, not in the Kierkegaardian sense that the eternal invades the moment, but in the sense that there is an eternal significance to a particular moment and to the self-actualization of the self that has or has not happened in a particular moment. The aim of this almost mythical idea is for the subject to realize: if he had to repeat his life forever and ever, as he lives it, would he take it with joy or with bitterness? If he would take it with bitterness, he is not actualizing his will to power: his will to life.
Bibliography
Burnham, Douglas: Nietzsche Dictionary, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
Freud, Sigmund: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. C.J.M. Hubback, London, International Psycho-Analytical Press, 1922.
Freud, Sigmund: Jenseits des Lustprinzips, Leipzig, Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1920.
Mary Troxell: „Arthur Schopenhauer” in Fieser, James, and Dowden, Bradley, eds: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Martin, TN, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, n.d. Accessed August 28, 2024.
Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Birth of Tragedy, trans. William A. Haussmann, Edinburgh, T.N. Foulis, 1909.
Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Gay Science, trans. Thomas Common, New York, Macmillan, 1910.
Tillich, Paul: A History of Christian Thought, From its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism, ed. Carl E. Braaten, New York, NY, Simon & Schuster, 1967.
References
- Paul Tillich: A History of Christian Thought, From its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism, ed. Carl E. Braaten, New York, NY, Simon & Schuster, 1967, 489. ↑
- Mary Troxell: „Arthur Schopenhauer” in Fieser, James, and Dowden, Bradley, eds: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Martin, TN, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, n.d. Accessed August 28, 2024. ↑
- Tillich: A History of Christian Thought, 488-493.I am aware that the Hungarian translation, as well as the English, uses the term instinct as death instinct, but Tillich rightly points out that there is no such thing as death instinct, because there is no instinct that is directed towards death. Instinct is by definition directed towards life. Death, as described by Schopenhauer, can be directed only by the drive.
Tillich: A History of Christian Thought, 488.
Sigmund Freud: Jenseits des Lustprinzips, Leipzig, Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1920. Sigmund Freud: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. C.J.M. Hubback, London, International Psycho-Analytical Press, 1922. - Tillich: A History of Christian Thought, 492-493. ↑
- Friedrich Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy, trans. William A. Haussmann, Edinburgh, T.N. Foulis, 1909, 21. ↑
- „The affirmation of life, even in its most unfamiliar and severe problems, the will to life, enjoying its own exhaustibility in the sacrifice of its highest types, – that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I divined as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet.” in Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Birth of Tragedy, trans. William A. Haussmann, Edinburgh, T.N. Foulis, 1909, 193. ↑
- Douglas Burnham: Nietzsche Dictionary, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, 342. ↑
- Friedrich Nietzsche: The Gay Science, trans. Thomas Common, New York, Macmillan, 1910. ↑
- Burnham: Nietzsche Dictionary, 281. ↑
- It is important to note that it was during Nietzsche’s lifetime that Darwin’s theory of evolution emerged, which Nietzsche adopted without criticism since there is no compelling argument against the evolution of species. In addition, the spirit of the entire period was determined by Hegel’s system, in which nature, and in it the dialectical development of human nature, the unification of the real and the rational, is present. Nietzsche does not consider human evolution to be closed; in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra, proclaiming the new man, describes a man stronger in body. ↑
- Tillich: A History of Christian Thought, 500. ↑