indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an
atomon: this belief ought to be expelled from science!
Between ourselves, it is not at all necessary to get rid of
‘the soul’ thereby, and thus renounce one of the oldest and
most venerated hypotheses—as happens frequently to the
clumsiness of naturalists, who can hardly touch on the soul
without immediately losing it. But the way is open for
new acceptations and refinements of the soul-hypothesis;
and such conceptions as ‘mortal soul,’ and ‘soul of
subjective multiplicity,’ and ‘soul as social structure of the
instincts and passions,’ want henceforth to have legitimate
rights in science. In that the NEW psychologist is about to
put an end to the superstitions which have hitherto
flourished with almost tropical luxuriance around the idea
of the soul, he is really, as it were, thrusting himself into a
new desert and a new distrust—it is possible that the older
psychologists had a merrier and more comfortable time of
it; eventually, however, he finds that precisely thereby he
is also condemned to INVENT—and, who knows?
perhaps to DISCOVER the new.
13. Psychologists should bethink themselves before
putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the
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cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks
above all to DISCHARGE its strength—life itself is WILL
TO POWER; self-preservation is only one of the indirect
and most frequent RESULTS thereof. In short, here, as
everywhere else, let us beware of SUPERFLUOUS
teleological principles!—one of which is the instinct of
self- preservation (we owe it to Spinoza’s inconsistency). It
is thus, in effect, that method ordains, which must be
essentially economy of principles.
14. It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that
natural philosophy is only a world-exposition and world-
arrangement (according to us, if I may say so!) and NOT a
world-explanation; but in so far as it is based on belief in
the senses, it is regarded as more, and for a long time to
come must be regarded as more—namely, as an
explanation. It has eyes and fingers of its own, it has ocular
evidence and palpableness of its own: this operates
fascinatingly, persuasively, and CONVINCINGLY upon
an age with fundamentally plebeian tastes—in fact, it
follows instinctively the canon of truth of eternal popular
sensualism. What is clear, what is ‘explained’? Only that
which can be seen and felt—one must pursue every
problem thus far. Obversely, however, the charm of the
Platonic mode of thought, which was an
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ARISTOCRATIC mode, consisted precisely in
RESISTANCE to obvious sense-evidence—perhaps
among men who enjoyed even stronger and more
fastidious senses than our contemporaries, but who knew
how to find a higher triumph in remaining masters of
them: and this by means of pale, cold, grey conceptional
networks which they threw over the motley whirl of the
senses—the mob of the senses, as Plato said. In this
overcoming of the world, and interpreting of the world in
the manner of Plato, there was an ENJOYMENT
different from that which the physicists of today offer us—
and likewise the Darwinists and anti-teleologists among
the physiological workers, with their principle of the
‘smallest possible effort,’ and the greatest possible blunder.
‘Where there is nothing more to see or to grasp, there is
also nothing more for men to do’—that is certainly an
imperative different from the Platonic one, but it may
notwithstanding be the right imperative for a hardy,
laborious race of machinists and bridge- builders of the
future, who have nothing but ROUGH work to perform.
15. To study physiology with a clear conscience, one
must insist on the fact that the sense-organs are not
phenomena in the sense of the idealistic philosophy; as
such they certainly could not be causes! Sensualism,
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therefore, at least as regulative hypothesis, if not as
heuristic principle. What? And others say even that the
external world is the work of our organs? But then our
body, as a part of this external world, would be the work
of our organs! But then our organs themselves would be
the work of our organs! It seems to me that this is a
complete REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM, if the
conception CAUSA SUI is something fundamentally
absurd. Consequently, the external world is NOT the
work of our organs—?
16. There are still harmless self-observers who believe
that there are ‘immediate certainties"; for instance, ‘I
think,’ or as the superstition of Schopenhauer puts it, ‘I
will"; as though cognition here got hold of its object
purely and simply as ‘the thing in itself,’ without any
falsification taking place either on the part of the subject or
the object. I would repeat it, however, a hundred times,
that ‘immediate certainty,’ as well as ‘absolute knowledge’
and the ‘thing in itself,’ involve a CONTRADICTIO IN
ADJECTO; we really ought to free ourselves from the
misleading significance of words! The people on their part
may think that cognition is knowing all about things, but
the philosopher must say to himself: ‘When I analyze the
process that is expressed in the sentence, ‘I think,’ I find a
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whole series of daring assertions, the argumentative proof
of which would be difficult, perhaps impossible: for
instance, that it is I who think, that there must necessarily
be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and
operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a
cause, that there is an ‘ego,’ and finally, that it is already
determined what is to be designated by thinking—that I
KNOW what thinking is. For if I had not already decided
within myself what it is, by what standard could I
determine whether that which is just happening is not
perhaps ‘willing’ or ‘feeling’? In short, the assertion ‘I
think,’ assumes that I COMPARE my state at the present
moment with other states of myself which I know, in
order to determine what it is; on account of this
retrospective connection with further ‘knowledge,’ it has,
at any rate, no immediate certainty for me.’—In place of
the ‘immediate certainty’ in which the people may believe
in the special case, the philosopher thus finds a series of
metaphysical questions presented to him, veritable
conscience questions of the intellect, to wit: ‘Whence did
I get the notion of ‘thinking’? Why do I believe in cause
and effect? What gives me the right to speak of an ‘ego,’
and even of an ‘ego’ as cause, and finally of an ‘ego’ as
cause of thought?’ He who ventures to answer these
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metaphysical questions at once by an appeal to a sort of
INTUITIVE perception, like the person who says, ‘I
think, and know that this, at least, is true, actual, and
certain’—will encounter a smile and two notes of
interrogation in a philosopher nowadays. ‘Sir,’ the
philosopher will perhaps give him to understand, ‘it is
improbable that you are not mistaken, but why should it
be the truth?’
17. With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall
never tire of emphasizing a small, terse fact, which is
unwillingly recognized by these credulous minds—
namely, that a thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not
when ‘I’ wish; so that it is a PERVERSION of the facts of
the case to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the
predicate ‘think.’ ONE thinks; but that this ‘one’ is
precisely the famous old ‘ego,’ is, to put it mildly, only a
supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an ‘immediate
certainty.’ After all, one has even gone too far with this
‘one thinks’—even the ‘one’ contains an
INTERPRETATION of the process, and does not
belong to the process itself. One infers here according to
the usual grammatical formula—‘To think is an activity;
every activity requires an agency that is active;
consequently’ … It was pretty much on the same lines that
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the older atomism sought, besides the operating ‘power,’
the material particle wherein it resides and out of which it
operates—the atom. More rigorous minds, however,
learnt at last to get along without this ‘earth-residuum,’
and perhaps some day we shall accustom ourselves, even
from the logician’s point of view, to get along without the
little ‘one’ (to which the worthy old ‘ego’ has refined
itself).
18. It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it
is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more
subtle minds. It seems that the hundred-times-refuted
theory of the ‘free will’ owes its persistence to this charm
alone; some one is always appearing who feels himself
strong enough to refute it.
19. Philosophers are accustomed to speak of the will as
though it were the best-known thing in the world;
indeed, Schopenhauer has given us to understand that the
will alone is really known to us, absolutely and completely
known, without deduction or addition. But it again and
again seems to me that in this case Schopenhauer also only
did what philosophers are in the habit of doing-he seems
to have adopted a POPULAR PREJUDICE and
exaggerated it. Willing-seems to me to be above all
something COMPLICATED, something that is a unity
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only in name—and it is precisely in a name that popular
prejudice lurks, which has got the mastery over the
inadequate precautions of philosophers in all ages. So let us
for once be more cautious, let us be ‘unphilosophical": let
us say that in all willing there is firstly a plurality of
sensations, namely, the sensation of the condition ‘AWAY
FROM WHICH we go,’ the sensation of the condition
‘TOWARDS WHICH we go,’ the sensation of this
‘FROM’ and ‘TOWARDS’ itself, and then besides, an
accompanying muscular sensation, which, even without
our putting in motion ‘arms and legs,’ commences its
action by force of habit, directly we ‘will’ anything.
Therefore, just as sensations (and indeed many kinds of
sensations) are to be recognized as ingredients of the will,
so, in the second place, thinking is also to be recognized;
in every act of the will there is a ruling thought;—and let
us not imagine it possible to sever this thought from the
‘willing,’ as if the will would then remain over! In the
third place, the will is not only a complex of sensation and
thinking, but it is above all an EMOTION, and in fact the
emotion of the command. That which is termed ‘freedom
of the will’ is essentially the emotion of supremacy in
respect to him who must obey: ‘I am free, ‘he’ must
obey’—this consciousness is inherent in every will; and
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equally so the straining of the attention, the straight look
which fixes itself exclusively on one thing, the
unconditional judgment that ‘this and nothing else is
necessary now,’ the inward certainty that obedience will
be rendered—and whatever else pertains to the position of
the commander. A man who WILLS commands
something within himself which renders obedience, or
which he believes renders obedience. But now let us
notice what is the strangest thing about the will,—this
affair so extremely complex, for which the people have
only one name. Inasmuch as in the given circumstances
we are at the same time the commanding AND the
obeying parties, and as the obeying party we know the
sensations of constraint, impulsion, pressure, resistance,
and motion, which usually commence immediately after
the act of will; inasmuch as, on the other hand, we are
accustomed to disregard this duality, and to deceive
ourselves about it by means of the synthetic term ‘I": a
whole series of erroneous conclusions, and consequently
of false judgments about the will itself, has become
attached to the act of willing—to such a degree that he
who wills believes firmly that willing SUFFICES for
action. Since in the majority of cases there has only been
exercise of will when the effect of the command—
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consequently obedience, and therefore action—was to be
EXPECTED, the APPEARANCE has translated itself
into the sentiment, as if there were a NECESSITY OF
EFFECT; in a word, he who wills believes with a fair
amount of certainty that will and action are somehow one;
he ascribes the success, the carrying out of the willing, to
the will itself, and thereby enjoys an increase of the
sensation of power which accompanies all success.
‘Freedom of Will’—that is the expression for the complex
state of delight of the person exercising volition, who
commands and at the same time identifies himself with the
executor of the order— who, as such, enjoys also the
triumph over obstacles, but thinks within himself that it
was really his own will that overcame them. In this way
the person exercising volition adds the feelings of delight
of his successful executive instruments, the useful
‘underwills’ or under-souls—indeed, our body is but a
social structure composed of many souls—to his feelings of
delight as commander. L’EFFET C’EST MOI. what
happens here is what happens in every well-constructed
and happy commonwealth, namely, that the governing
class identifies itself with the successes of the
commonwealth. In all willing it is absolutely a question of
commanding and obeying, on the basis, as already said, of
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a social structure composed of many ‘souls’, on which
account a philosopher should claim the right to include
willing- as-such within the sphere of morals—regarded as
the doctrine of the relations of supremacy under which the
phenomenon of ‘life’ manifests itself.
20. That the separate philosophical ideas are not
