DOES WILL MATTER?

The title is a light-hearted allusion to Schopenhauer’s magnum opus, and not an attempt to question Wille an-Sich. The whole purpose of my comment is to address the ‘serious’ business of philosophy in a kind of jocular manner, which it well deserves.

Nietzsche’s incursion into the land of Affects raises some terrific questions, like in the following one-liner from the passage below: ‘I am free, ‘he’ must obey.’ It is so naturally fitting into the general context of my discussion of society, that its omission from the Twilight section would have been inexcusable. I have therefore made an allusion to it a part of my Slaves Of Freedom entry there. This entry here, I repeat, follows a different course.

“Philosophers are used to speak of the Will as if it were the best-known thing in the world. Schopenhauer has given us to understand that the will alone is known to us, absolutely and completely. He only did what philosophers do: he adopted a popular prejudice and exaggerated it. However, ‘willing’ seems to me to be something complicated. So, let us be more cautious and say that in willing there is a plurality of sensations. Just as they are to be recognized as ingredients of the will, so should thinking also: in every act of the will there is a ruling thought. Third, the will is not only a complex of sensation and thinking, but it is above all an Affect, and, specifically, the Affect of the command. “Freedom of the Will” is, essentially, the Affect of superiority: I am free, ‘he’ must obey. A man who wills commands something within himself which renders obedience, or that, he believes, renders obedience. A philosopher should claim the right to include willing as such within the sphere of morals, morals being understood as the doctrine of the relations of supremacy, under which the phenomenon of life comes to be.” (From Nietzsche’s Jenseits 19).

This passage raises several intriguing questions at once. First and foremost, Nietzsche is right, criticizing Schopenhauer for his claim of our full knowledge of our Will. His understanding of the Will compares to the Kantian Ding an-Sich, our body being the external manifestation of the Will, which is, of course, that Ding an-Sich. Now, his claim that the will alone is known to us suggests that the rays of the sun know the sun, or, to put it in Platonic terms, especially considering that Schopenhauer confesses to his indebtedness to Plato, a shadow has the knowledge of its origin, the idea!

By the same token, I agree with Nietzsche that the phenomenon of willing is much more complicated than what Schopenhauer wants us to believe, including not only rational elements, but also irrational elements, and a host of varied psychological nuances, which make it practically impossible to produce an adequate definition of willing, let alone understand it. (Actually, had we been able to come up with such a definition at all, we would have moved much closer to the understanding of it than where we are even now!) But still, I do not see how Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the Will should rest on a “popular prejudice.” Rousseau and Kant had indeed moved philosophy toward the eventual acceptance of Schopenhauer’s theory, yet saying that “he adopted a popular prejudice” needs some additional explanation on Nietzsche’s part, and either he neglects to provide one, or, if he does, it eludes me completely…

While I thus agree with Nietzsche that Schopenhauer’s insistence on our knowledge of the will is logically flawed, this is just another general philosophical theory that, no matter how good it is, is fated to bite the dust. However, this does not take anything away from Schopenhauer as a philosopher of genius, and I am satisfied that Nietzsche recognizes this fact, calls Schopenhauer his precursor, and puts a deservedly high value on his accomplishments.

But let us now change the subject from the focus on Schopenhauer to some general points.

If Nietzsche is right that this is really what all philosophers do: adopt a popular prejudice and exaggerate it, does this mean that they are not the pioneers of human thought, as one would expect them to be, but merely followers of popular opinions? Was Schopenhauer, then, an appropriator and not the discoverer of the will? Somehow, I think that Nietzsche is rather unkind, and what he says with a straight face may not be exactly the case and ought to be taken with a large grain of salt.

Come to think of it, all great philosophers merit the recognition of posterity by posing the right questions, but hardly any by answering them. The right question is above all a brand new angle of vision, something new about a thing that can be ages old, but has never been seen like he sees it. Nietzsche’s word popular means that several people before him had been involved in this consideration, and, finally, the word prejudice means an “opinion,” that is, not the thing itself, which, as I say, can be very old, but an angle, a viewpoint, a vision of the thing. Now comes the big question: what does the word exaggerate mean? Can it possibly suggest a new approach, which to me seems a little bit of a stretch, or putting an old approach under a magnifying glass, in order to come up with a blown up image? This is not such a trite matter as to be easily dismissed. The technicality of enlarging a picture cannot be passed off as an innovation, and the conclusion here has to be that all philosophers are just a bunch of phonies… Somehow I do not think that this is what Nietzsche had in mind… And now comes the much bigger question. Is the greatness of a philosopher not in the magnum opus of his life, the object of his pride, that very same general theory, that I have already ventured to debunk in principle? Does his value, on the contrary, rest in those little tiny things, sparkling like diamonds among the large chunks of wasted ore that he labors all his life to shovel?…

I can hear Nietzsche laughing back at me from his Jenseits. “You have just put your finger on it, my friend, when you mentioned the diamonds. These little things are there to be admired, not dissected. My gems are all perfect, and trying to cut them devalues their worth.”

In other words, Nietzsche is probably a little facetious here, a flighty comment, enjoy it, and let us move on from there! But I still keep wondering about Schopenhauer and his Will, about Kant and his Achtung, about Hegel and his State, moving steadily up the spiral staircase to the tower’s pinnacle, where God lives…

And now on the question of Affect which my German dictionary translates as “passionate feeling” but it can also be understood as a stimulus. Apparently, Spinoza uses the Latin word affectus to signify precisely the same thing. Is Nietzsche here making use of Kant’s meaning of the word “will” as dominance of one man’s will over the will of another?

On the other hand I am rather perplexed by the following unusual definition of morals: “A philosopher must claim the right to include willing as such within the sphere of morals, morals understood as the doctrine of the relations of supremacy under which the phenomenon of life comes to be.” It is clear, of course, that free will determines morality, and here it is that Achtung comes in, with a perfect fit. But does the introduction of the supremacy affect, to overwhelm the definition of morals, mean that Nietzsche tries to make the same point, which he is making in his concept of Will to Power?

…Probably!