3.3.2—
Nietzsche's Critique of "Ego-Substance"

A critique of the notion of mental- or subject-substance is found throughout Nietzsche's later work. Though, like many of Nietzsche's

[26] For Leiter ("Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, " 343), this is "[t]he primary text in [Nietzsche's] mature work in which he does offer a sustained discussion of [perspectives and perspectivism] in an epistemological context," while, for Clark (Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 128), this passage is "the only statement of Nietzsche's perspectivism in [the mature works]."

[27] Leiter ("Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, " 343) notes that "Nietzsche uses the language of 'interpretation' freely throughout the material published during his lifetime [while] discussions of 'perspectivism' and 'perspectives' are far less frequent." Yet Leiter proceeds to discuss perspectivism without reference to the notion of interpretation.

major ideas, it is never developed at length, this critique appears in much the same form in Beyond Good and Evil, the Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, and the later Nachlaß (see, e.g., BGE 12, 16, 17, 19, 34, 54; GM I:13; TI "Reason" 5, "Errors" 3; WP 229, 370, 477, 481–92, 531, 545–53, 631–32). Not surprisingly, the critique of ego-substance is a result of Nietzsche naturalism, which is both antimetaphysical (against the posit of any otherworldly entity or explanatory principle) and holistic (against every absolute foundation or origin). Thus, Nietzsche considers theological the belief that there is some "being" or subject-substratum "behind doing, effecting, becoming" (GM I:13). To assume such a being is to posit an otherworldly entity that initiates or produces the happenings, effects, and appearances that constitute the natural world while remaining outside that world, unchanged by its contingencies and exigencies (see TI "Reason" 5, "Errors" 3; WP 487). The notion of ego-substance is also a form of the "myth of the given," what Nietzsche calls the myth of "immediate certainties," those simple, atomic unities that are supposed to serve as the absolute foundation of all being and knowing.^[28] Nietzsche's naturalism rejects the idea that there is any entity that is not essentially dependent upon other entities for its genesis and continued existence and the idea that there is any fundamental, obvious "fact" that need not justify itself by relation to other "facts." For, according to Nietzsche, there are "facts" only against the background of a particular interpretation, and the only entities that exist are natural, that is, essentially relational and contingent, entities (see WP 481; BGE 34; and GM I:13). Thus, in rejecting the foundational presuppositions of "materialistic atomism," Nietzsche also rejects what he calls "soul atomism [ . . . ], the belief which regards the soul as something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon " (BGE 12). Such an idea, he claims, is not only super-natural but also fails to account satisfactorily for important features of human psychology, which reveals the human subject to be an amalgamation of competing impulses and drives rather than an atomic unity.^[29]

As Nietzsche himself acknowledges, this critique of mental substance

[28] See BGE 16, 17, 19, 34. Other "immediate certainties" repudiated by Nietzsche are God, the thing in itself, substance, and cause.

[29] True to his naturalism, Nietzsche regards psychology as "the queen of the sciences," "the path to the fundamental problems" (BGE 23), against the Kantian view that claims this role for epistemology and metaphysics.

stems from the critique of that notion by Hume and Kant.^[30] Following Hume, Kant argues that, because the subject or self is not discoverable among the contents of experience, some other justification must be sought for its postulation. Nietzsche takes up this line of thought in Beyond Good and Evil §54. For Nietzsche, as for Hume and Kant, we only ever experience discrete impressions, actions, and effects but never the "subject" that is supposed to have those impressions or initiate those actions and effects.^[31] Yet whereas Kant came to regard the notion of the self as a formal requirement of reason and to posit the antinaturalistic notions of noumenal self and noumenal causality, Nietzsche comes to regard the self as merely a grammatical habit that supports a moral fiction. For the radically empiricist Nietzsche—who maintains neither Kant's distinctions between intuition, understanding, and reason nor Kant's conviction that practical reason must be taken for granted and its postulates deduced—we have justification only for belief in actions, effects, doings, becomings, and appearances; and it is only a "seduction of language" that leads us to posit a "'being' behind doing, effecting, becoming; 'the doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything" (GM I:13).^[32] Furthermore, this linguistic habit serves the Christian, moral purpose of making some isolable thing (i.e., a specific subject) responsible and accountable for these actions and deeds. The separation of doer from deed, the subsequent removal of this doer from the conditioned and contingent world of effects and happenings, and, finally, the ascription of a "free will" to this subject serve to isolate some being as responsible for every eventuality and to claim that this being was free to do otherwise.^[33]

Of course Nietzsche also criticizes determinism, the notion of an "unfree will" (BGE 21). But this is not the place to delve into what

[30] On Kant, see BGE 54. Hume is certainly the precursor to Nietzsche's critique of metaphysical conceptions of causality and the self, a fact that Nietzsche seems briefly to acknowledge in WP 550. For more comparison between Hume's and Nietzsche's critiques of the self, see Davey, "Nietzsche and Hume on Self and Identity." For a comparison between Nietzsche's and Kant's critiques of the self, see Schacht, Nietzscbe, 138–40.

[31] For Kant on the phenomenality of "inner sense," see Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1929), 87–88, 165–69; for Nietzsche on the "phenomenality of the inner world," see WP 477, 479.

[32] For more on our metaphysical seduction by the subject-predicate form, see BGE 16, 17, 19, 34, 54; TI "Reason" 5; WP 482, 484.

[33] See BGE 21, 219; GM I:13; TI "Reason" 5, "Morality" 6, "Errors" 3, 7–8. According to Nietzsche, human decisions and actions should not be viewed as the result of a detached "free will" possessed by every human being. Rather, they are to be seen as the results of a struggle among competing instincts, drives and desires. On this, see A 14.

would need to be a lengthy discussion of Nietzsche's philosophy of mind and moral theory. I simply want to indicate that a critique of the notion of a pre-given subject-substratum is basic to Nietzsche's naturalism. The point is that to assume the existence of a "free will" behind every action is to assert that the source of the contingent and the conditional is something given and unconditioned, in short, something unworldly. According to Nietzsche, this scenario "deprives becoming of its innocence"—and it is the primary goal of Nietzsche's naturalism to restore the "innocence of becoming."^[34]