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Introspection No. 1

Another notebook drawing from this past January, which was done in pencil and ink.  

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Nietzsche on Life and the Art of Living [Scarborough]

The beautiful coastal village of Scarborough, England is host to the Friedrich Nietzsche Society’s annual conference.  I will be presenting a paper on the feeling of power and its correspondence to actual self-control, assessing the tenability of the account by seeing how it can fit with cases from the psychology literature on mental illness.

Dates: September 18-20, 2015 Location: University of Hull, Scarborough Campus, England Program: https://fns.org.uk/node/342

Conference looks to be fantastic with a great many Nietzsche scholars from all around and at different stages in their careers presenting papers on various topics.  Check out the program for further details.

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Moral Consideration for AI

A paper I’ve coauthored with Eric Schwitzgebel, titled “A Defense of the Rights of Artificial Intelligences”, is now up on his blog for comments!  Final draft due on September 15th.

http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2015/09/a-defense-of-rights-of-artificial.html

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Drawing of skull with alcohol based ink

Here’s a recent study of a skull I did using alcohol based inks (signed with middle name).  

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Maude’s Seminar: Nietzsche on Morality

This Spring quarter, Maudemarie Clark will be teaching the following graduate seminar:

The seminar will study the development of Nietzsche’s thinking about morality: what morality is and what Nietzsche’s problem with it is, from Human, All-Too-Human (HA) to his Genealogy (GM).  We will begin with “Schopenhauer as Educator,” however, because in that early essay, we find Nietzsche himself committed to the morality he would later reject.  We will then move on to such topics as 1) the crude psychological egoism and moral nihilism of HA, 2) the ethical egoism and initial attempt to naturalize morality of Daybreak (D), 3) D’s denial of the will and the ego, and perhaps 4) what I can only call the Darwinian-inspired descriptive utilitarianism of Gay Science.  The main concern will be to figure out how Nietzsche got from these early positions to the much more sophisticated one we find in BGE and GM.  That is, looking at what he might’ve found unsatisfactory in his early positions and how his later view improved upon them.

This looks to be a great seminar, one that’ll explore how Nietzsche got to his final views on morality.

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Maude publishes collected papers

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Korsgaard on Constitutivism and Animals [Riverside]

Chris Korsgaard will be giving a colloquium and a workshop this coming week.  The colloquium is titled “How to Be an Aristotelian Kantian Constitutivist”:

Date: 3:30-5:30pm, March 4th, 2015 Location: INTS 1113

The workshop is on “Fellow Creatures: On the Moral and Legal Standing of Animals”:

Date: 1:00-3:00pm, March 5th, 2015 Location: HMNSS 1605B

In preparation for the workshop, the Korsgaard reading group at Riverside has worked through her manuscript as well as several of her papers on animals.  Also check out her recent Philosophy Bites on the moral status of animals.

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Unfinished study of despondency

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Leiter on Naturalism and Metaethics [Riverside]

Brian Leiter will be giving a colloquium and a workshop this coming week.  The colloquium is titled "Normativity for Naturalists":

Date: 3-5pm, February 11th, 2015 Location: INTS 1113

The workshop is on "Nietzsche's Metaethics":

Date: 11-1pm, February 12th, 2015 Location: HMNSS 1605B

In preparation for the workshop, we are to read "Nietzsche's metaethics: Against the privilege readings" followed by "Moral skepticism and moral disagreement in Nietzsche" followed finally Huddleston's "Nietzsche's Meta-axiology: Against the sceptical readings", which is a paper that, in part, responds to Leiter's two papers.

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Bernd Magnus Lecture [Riverside]

Fred Neuhouser will be giving this year's Bernd Magnus Lecture, which is titled, "Nietzsche on Spiritual Illness and Supramoral Autonomy".

Date: 3-5pm, January 28th, 2015 Location: INTS 1113, University of California, Riverside

Here is his abstract:

In this talk I examine Nietzsche's conception of spiritual illness, especially as exhibited in various forms of the bad conscience, and I ask what positive potential Nietzsche finds in it.  I discuss four features of spiritual illness: the measureless drive to make oneself suffer, self-opacity, life denial, and a self-undermining dynamic in which life exhausts the sources of its own vitality.  I offer some suggestions as to how these features of spiritual illness might also be preconditions of great spiritual health, including what Nietzsche calls the autonomy of the "supramoral" individual.  I take all of these topics to be relevant to the question, 'To what extent is the Genealogy of Morals a theodicy?'

I look forward to what looks like an interesting talk.  From the title, it seems the talk will share similar themes with one of his recently published papers, "Nietzsche on Spiritual Illness and Its Promise".

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Nietzsche's Soul: 6.1-2

I’d like to summarize sections 1 and 2 of the sixth chapter of Clark/Dudrick’s The Soul of Nietzsche’s BGE, and discuss some concerns about their theory of drives as politically ordered.

A bit of background: the magnificent tension of the spirit involves the tension between the will to truth and the will to value. As Clark defines it, “The will to truth is the will to represent reality in terms of what is actually there” (Clark ‘Princeton paper’ p. 4). She remarks that in her book with Dudrick, by contrast, the will to value is described as “a will to represent reality in terms of what the philosopher takes to be valuable” but that “it would be better to characterize this second will as a will to represent reality in ways that lend support to one’s values” (ibid.).

6.1 — BGE 6 and 9: Will to Power and Will to Value

In section 1, Clark/Dudrick argue for the claim that the will to value just is the will to power, however, both of these operating at different levels. The will to value represents operation at the level of the person or the macrolevel; the will to power represents operation at the level of the drives or the microlevel. As mentioned, the will to value is described in one’s “representing reality in ways that lend support to one’s values” (C/D ‘Princeton paper’ p. 4), but the will to power is described in a drive’s struggle to rule among the other drives. The task is figuring out how these two are one and the same will.

A bit of background: from my rudimentary understanding (correct me if I’m wrong), the Stoics believed in a kind of determinism. According to them, most people were determined by their passions or by social influences (and if they were determined by these they were slaves, no matter their social status), but to attain genuine freedom (freedom as a sort of perfectionism), one would have to be determined according to reason. This seems reminiscent of Kant who remarks that everything operates according to laws, and that we should act according to laws of freedom if we hope to be free. However, the Stoics believed that we should listen to reason because reason would reveal to us the ends of nature. They had a conception of nature in which what are the ends of nature are the ends that are best for us humans. This is why Nietzsche remarks, against the Stoics, how in fact the ends of nature aren’t our ends, but instead that nature is “wasteful without measure, indifferent without measure, without purpose and consideration, without mercy and justice” (BGE 9). Instead, what Nietzsche claims the Stoics are doing, is projecting a conception of nature that really isn’t the case but one that fits with their values. Against the Stoic conception, Nietzsche describes nature as cruel and indifferent and lacking ends.

What is going on in Beyond Good and Evil aphorism 9 is what motivates this two-level reading of this one will, a will that can be described as a will to power: drives struggling to rule over each other, and as a will to value: the person representing reality in a way that vindicates that person’s values.

In the aphorism, Nietzsche writes that “philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to ‘world creation’” (BGE 9). Here we see Nietzsche bring in his notion of the will to power to describe what the Stoic is doing, but when he talks about the will to power’s operation he describes it in terms of the Stoic’s projecting their values “onto nature, onto nature itself; you [Stoics] demand that it be nature ‘according to the Stoa’ and want to make all existence conform only to your own image of existence” (BGE 9). The problem is that although the Stoics are described as expressing the will to power, all they are seen as doing is projecting a conception of nature that vindicates their values (which is the will to value).

To find a solution we would have to see how these two wills are one and the same. To understand the will to power as the will to value, we would have to see how drives give rise to values: we would have to see how the struggle for authority among drives gives rise to a person holding certain values and conceiving of the world in terms that vindicate those values.

Take a look at the example C/D use to describe the operation of the will to power:

If two drives come into conflict, we can imagine each drive trying to keep the organism focused on the features of reality that support its goals, at least while it is active. In this way it aims at power over the other drives, power to prevent them from getting what they want, which is to monopolize the person’s cognitive capacities in the service of their own ends. Now, this is also what happens in the case of philosophy, with the difference that the drive gains control not simply of the cognitive capacities but also of the drive to knowledge. (C/D 2012: 146)

I take it that the drive to knowledge is or is behind the will to truth,1 and so the idea is that the drives appropriate the truth drive in service of their own ends, to make the person represent the world in a manner that vindicates the ends of those drives. If a drive’s ends are understood as a person’s values, then we can see why representing the world in a matter that vindicates the ends of drives (in their will to power over the truth drive, i.e., in their struggle to appropriate the truth drive) is compatible with the macrolevel phenomena of a person representing the world in a manner that vindicates their values. However, this solution is too simple: the ends of drives cannot simply be equated to a person’s values. We need to work out how (at the microlevel) the ends of drives give rise to (at the macrolevel) a person’s values, and C/D begin to work this out in the next section (and is further tackled in the later parts of chapter 7).

6.2 — BGE 6: Two Interpretations

In this section, C/D turn to BGE 6. In that aphorism, Nietzsche claims that who a philosopher is is constituted by the “order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand in relation to each other” (BGE 6). We might be tempted to understand the “order of rank” among drives as a causal order, but C/D argue that Nietzsche’s language here as well as at the end of BGE 19 suggest that this is a political order, that is, a normative organization of drives according to which drives are recognized as having authority by other drives.

However, such a reading of drives forming a political order brings in two questions: (1) what plausible capacities must a drive have to recognize another drive as a legitimate ruler? and (2) could such a political ordering instead be naturalized?

Problem 1 — Capacities required for a Political order

C/D define drives as “dispositions to action, picked out in terms of their goals” (C/D 2012: 148). However, because drives must have capacities required for entering into a political order, the C/D view has been characterized as a homuncular view of drives. Over and above simply being dispositions with certain aims, drives are homunculi, mini-agents, able to enter into political relations.

Because drives are said to enter into political relations, we can ask: what sorts of capacities must drives have to enter into political relations? and does it make sense to attribute such capacities to drives?

At the very least, it seems drives must be capable of being conscious of each other in order to recognize which drives are in legitimate authority, in order to command and obey. (This is the objection Katsafanas raises in “Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology” 2013.) He doesn’t think that it makes sense to attribute the requisite consciousness, which is usually attributed to whole agents, to parts of agents.

In their paper presented at the Boston Workshop in Late Modern Philosophy, C/D responded as follows: “Our answer to these objections is to say that commanding and obeying […] can go on without the one engaging in them being conscious of that fact” (C/D forthcoming: 429-30). They give as an example the social behavior of animals that organize into dominance hierarchies and which goes on without having self-consciousness.

However, I think there is another way we could respond to the problem raised by Katsafanas without needing to deny that drives can avail themselves of the capacity for consciousness. Perhaps the reason why drives appear to have such capacities is that drives can interact with each other through capacities such as consciousness and rationality. We might then say that, by virtue of these capacities, drives take on activities within conscious mental life and the space of reasons.

Such a reading seems supported by claims made by both Katsafanas and C/D.

On the one hand, Katsafanas explicitly claims that drives can be seen as having certain capacities by virtue of being part of an organism with such capacities:

[W]e can deny that drives, considered in isolation, can reason, evaluate, and interpret, while maintaining that embodied drives – drives considered as part of a whole organism – can reason, evaluate, and interpret. (Katsafanas 2013: 744)

On the other hand, C/D claim that drives can appropriate the organism’s cognitive capacities in the service of their own ends:

If two drives come into conflict, we can imagine each drive trying to […] monopolize the person’s cognitive capacities in the service of their own ends. (C/D 2012: 146)

If we put these two claims together, I don’t think it would be untenable to suggest that drives are capable of entering into political relations because they have the capacities required to do so (without denying that they require consciousness, as C/D deny). Drives would have the required capacities by virtue of the organism having those capacities and the drives being able to avail themselves of them.

I think such a reading actually fits quite well with Nietzsche’s account, in GM II, of how we get from the causal animal soul to the normative human soul. He prefaces his account by talking about how, in their prehistory, humans must have felt awkward when they first began to develop the capacity for consciousness (which I take to mean self-consciousness). He then goes into explaining how human drives turned against each other through their forced socialization. I lack the space to argue for it fully (I’d like to develop this account at later time), but I want to suggest that Nietzsche introduces self-consciousness precisely because it is a capacity that the organism requires for drives to be able to come into conflict with each other, and this is the conflict that (Nietzsche explains) gives rise to the political ordering of the soul.

Problem 2 — Possibility of Naturalizing the Political order

For the second problem, let’s turn to Riccardi’s NDPR review of their book, in which he succinctly describes the problem:

According to [Clark and Dudrick’s account of Nietzsche’s theory of the soul], the “political” order of the drives constituting the soul cannot just correspond to their “causal” order, for it is not merely “an order of strength” (189). Now, it is right to stress that the will to power underlying the formation of such a political order is not equivalent to brute strength. This is reflected by Nietzsche’s using the German term Macht, which is germane to the political sphere, rather than Kraft. However, this doesn’t show that the power relations between the drives cannot be captured in causal terms. For one thing, it certainly seems wrong to assume that brute strength is the only option available here. It is possible to conceive such relations as realized by sophisticated psychological mechanisms and still treat them as causal. If this is so, why not think of the “political” order as constituted by, or resulting from, the way in which the drives (causally) interact? Moreover, it is not clear in which sense the power relations between the drives might be captured in terms of reasons, as the authors claim. They argue that Nietzsche’s command-obedience talk implies that the lower-ranked drives “recognize the authority” of the higher-ranked drives (193). But how are we to make sense of it? Clark and Dudrick compare the order of the drives to the “‘dominance hierarchies’” which structure the social life of primates (199). This might be an insightful way of seeing it, but it doesn’t help us to see how the transactions between the drives happen within something that might be called a “space of reasons”. (Riccardi 2012: NDPR on C/D’s monograph)

Riccardi recognizes Nietzsche’s suggestive claims that favor reading the drives as politically ordered, but he doesn’t think this necessarily favors the normative reading because he thinks that drive relations explained causally can still account for a political ordering.

Now, I think that there needs to be a motive behind the political ordering, a motive that upholds the political order. I would think that cases of weakness of will involve a recalcitrant drive not gaining dominance within the political order (or else the drive would come to constitute the self in the moment of weakness of will). Instead, I’d like to think that the person suffers weakness of will because the drive usurps the whole political order. This might seem obscure because it involves a causal force usurping a normative structure, but on what grounds can they interact? The only way (I can think of) for a drive operating according to brute strength to usurp the political order would be for that drive to come into conflict with the causal mechanism that upholds that political order.2 That way the conflict is strictly causal.

I agree with Velleman in his paper, “What Happens When Someone Acts?”, that there must be a motive behind agency, driving practical reason itself (and I think that this motive might be conscience for Nietzsche). Now, just because this motive is part of the causal world, doesn’t mean that the structure this motive upholds can’t be a normative structure. This would be an especially appealing position if we need a normative structure/political order for drives to form a self that can then come into conflict with drives that are trying to usurp this normative structure. A drive that tries to usurp the self, e.g., in a moment of weakness of will, would come into conflict with the very motive that holds up the normative structure (the recalcitrant drive wouldn’t come into conflict with the political order, just with the drive upholding the political order). When someone is overcome by an alien drive (a drive that they don’t identify with), we wouldn’t say that their self is replaced by the vehement drive but rather that they have given into behavior that satisfies the vehement drive that they don’t identify with.

Although I’m curious to hear C/D’s own account of the relation of the truth drive to the will to truth. ↩

It is another question how this causal mechanism upholds a political structure, but I don’t think it will be problematic in the same way (if it happens to be problematic). ↩

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Stanford Publishes BGE/GM Volume

Translation by Adrian Del Caro; this seems like a fantastic new volume from the Stanford University Press complete works of Nietzsche.  

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Nietzsche, Value, and Self-Constitution Conference [Oxford]

An amazing looking conference is coming up next month.  The conference features abstracts of the recent books by Katsafanas and by Clark/Dudrick and papers that engage ideas in the texts presented by a really fantastic list of Nietzsche scholars.  Also impressive is the list of scholars chairing the talks.

Date: May 17-18, 2014 Location: St. Peter's College, Oxford, England Program: here

At the conference, Berry who has previously written widely on Nietzsche and ancient skepticism will be talking on agency, Riccardi who has written on Nietzsche's epiphenomenalism will be tackling "the space of values" (I don't know what the talk is on but the title is reminiscent of the space of reasons, and I'd imagine it intersects with the Clark/Dudrick discussion of it), Leiter will be engaging what I take to be the Clark/Dudrick distinction between an exoteric and esoteric reading of Nietzsche, Huddleston who worked on a dissertation at Princeton under Nehamas on Nietzsche and culture will be presenting on what I assume is Katsafanas's Nietzsche inspired constitutivism, Katsafanas himself will be discussing Nietzsche's conception of freedom, and Clark/Dudrick will also be presenting a paper whose title is yet to be determined.  

I wish I could attend this conference.  I'd encourage anyone out there to make their way to this mecca of Nietzsche scholarship.

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Four Questions About Drives

Some issues that I was thinking to discuss for the presentation:

1. What sorts of activities are drives involved in? This would be a good way to start the presentation, as it would show how important and pervasive Nietzsche thinks the influence of drives is on us.  For example, drives affect our (i) perception, they affect our (ii) emotions, they influence our (iii) values, they lead us to (iii) philosophize on their behalf, etc.

2. What is the structure of a drive? This could be led in with the question, (i) how do we discriminate among drives?  This could then bring up the aim/object distinction.  Drives could be distinguished on the basis of their general aims, yet Nietzsche still tells us that, because they are unconscious, drives admit of a certain obscurity. Also, in discussing the structure of a drive, I want to mention (ii) how drives show up in our behavior and psychology. The effect of drives show up as symptoms in the person that can be studied and traced back to the underlying drives behind the symptoms. Like Freud uses interpretation to get down to the drives (manifest content, latent content, drive wish), Nietzsche also uses an interpretive method to reveal the psychology at work in the philosopher (metaphysical beliefs, values, drive hierarchy). These can each then be thought about in reverse to wonder how our psychology worked to produce that manifest content and those metaphysical beliefs (including religious beliefs).

3. How do drives relate to each other? This looks at the (i) causal versus (ii) political models of drive interrelations.  Here is where the strictly dispositional versus homuncular readings come to the fore.  In discussing the homuncular reading, I wanted to address the sort of capacities conceiving drives as homunculi requires drives to have, how having such capacities may present some problems, and how the homuncular reading could be reenvisioned to avoid those problems (perhaps by saying not that drives must be minimally conscious to recognize authority, but that drives can be involved in a political structure by virtue of being part of a person with self-reflective capacities and a disposition that makes them care about values.  A person’s self-reflection can then be understood as an instrument that can be appropriated by drives).

4. How do drives relate to the self? Here I’d be curious to look at the different ways drives can constitute the self and the problem of not being able to account for akrasia faced by the strictly dispositional reading.  If drives are dispositions, organizing according to brute causal force, then how is one to account for cases of either strength of will and weakness of will, as according to a dispositional reading a person’s will would merely be the strongest drive at some time (which goes against our intuitions of a person identifying with some desire that comes in conflict with a stronger desire in cases of akrasia). I want to mention how drives constitute the self in Clark’s account and how Katsafanas adds consciousness as a means for establishing agential unity.

I was thinking that those four questions could potentially guide the presentation.  I plan to spend the most time on the third question as that works closest with the material in the debate between the strictly dispositional (Katsafanas/Richardson) and the homuncular (Clark/Dudrick) reading of drives.

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Recent Nietzsche Scholarship

I wanted to mention some recent and new secondary literature that may be of interest.  

First, Katsafanas's recently published Agency and the Foundations of Ethics, has a review by Alex Silk in NDPR.  

The Journal of Nietzsche Studies is now publishing selected papers from the North American Nietzsche Society annual meeting.  The recent JNS issue has also published some really interesting papers from a symposium on Clark and Dudrick's The Soul of Nietzsche's BGE.  

Finally, the collection by Janaway and Roberston Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity has reviews you should check out by both Leiter and Katsafanas.

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Prelude to Nietzsche on Drives

Maudemarie Clark asked me to present in two weeks on the secondary literature on Nietzsche on drives for her seminar this quarter.  I'm planning on looking at the Katsafanas/Richardson (dispositional) versus Clark/Dudrick (homuncular) accounts of drives.  Any suggestions for what to further look at would be much appreciated.  I'll also update with my presentation once I've gotten it organized.

I plan on starting my research by revisiting the paper Clark/Dudrick gave at the first Boston Workshop in Late Modern Philosophy, in which they respond to Katsafanas's account in his paper, "Nietzsche's Philosophical Psychology".  I also want to revisit Katsafanas's review of their book in the recent issue of the Journal of Nietzsche Studies.  

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Olive Tree Sketch

A sketch of mine contrasting the organic with the geometric.