Encyclopedia of Philosophy: NIETZSCHE AS PSYCHOLOGIST

Nietzsche often called himself a ‘psychologist’ rather than a ‘philosopher’. What he meant has little to do with any science of behaviour modelling itself on the physical sciences. In the first section of Human, All Too Human, he uses the metaphor of ‘sublimation’, taken from physical chemistry, to express the transformation of lower into higher impulses. (Borrowed by Freud, this expression has become common.) Moral and religious sentiments do not have a higher origin, or give access to any realm of values; their difference from lower impulses is one of degree, not of kind. Crucial to this picture is a rejection of the unity of personality. The self is, in fact, a plurality of forces — Nietzsche says ‘personlike’ forces, whose relation to one another is a sort of political structure. A healthy and strong personality is one which has a well organized structure amongst its drives and impulses. Despite his talk of the ‘will to power’, Nietzsche regards the will in its usual sense as a fiction. When we analyse the typical ‘act of will’ we find a mixture of various elements: sensations of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ states, of the movement, of the thinking, and above all of the ‘affect of superiority’ associated with an inner commanding. This last is close to synonymous with the will to power. But where that concept comes to the fore is in biology, where it allows Nietzsche to oppose Darwinism, or at least what he takes to be the Darwinist emphasis on the will to live: ‘The physiologists should take heed before they assume self-preservation as the cardinal drive of an organic being. Above all, a living being wants to discharge its energy: life as such is will to power. Self-preservation is only one of its indirect and most frequent consequences’ (Beyond Good and Evil, section 13).