[Bups-dis] In response to Ryan Dawson's essay 'Self-overcoming and free will in Nietzsche'

[Paul Hubbard]

I was quite intrigued to read Ryan Dawson's submission to the March 2006 
edition of the BUPS journal entitled: 'Self-overcoming and free will in 
Nietzsche'.  I meant to post something on the subject at least a month 
ago, but I was rather over-laden with work (as I expect we all were!).  
Anyhow, I wanted to ask Ryan (or anyone else who's interested, for that 
matter) how far he believes Nietzsche's definition of the Self (as found 
in the Zarathustra passage: 'On the Despisers of the Body') can taken?  
In his essay, Ryan attempts to 'blend' two approaches to questions 
regarding the status of 'free will' in Nietzsche's philosophy.  In 
short, the conclusion he reaches (if I have understood Ryan correctly) 
is that there is a distinction between the 'Self' and the 'Soul' in 
Nietzsche's writings.  Now the Self is to be identified with the Body, 
and the Body is to be interpreted, first, as being confined by 
antecedent biological constraints and, second, as a series of internal 
drives that seek some form of external expression.  Such an outlet for 
expression is found in the Soul, which is a creation of the Body.  The 
Body 'creates' the Soul out of past actions, whose effects conflict with 
one another, and thus require satisfactory resolution.  The creation of 
the Soul, then, gives the Body expression in the form of an external, 
public, self; which in turn also provides a sense of stability of 
character (in terms of individual traits, discovered through the 
performance of actions and the resolution of conflicts created by them).

For me, the problem with such an interpretation (although it attempts to 
find some satisfactory 'middle-ground' between two inadequate 
approaches) is that it does not seem to go far enough.  At the end of 
the essay we are left with, despite Ryan's claims to the contrary, a 
'doer behind the deed' (ie the Body/Self as the genuine cause of our 
actions, as opposed to the 'popular fiction' of the ego).  This could, 
of course, just be a problem with language.  The Body/Self is not an 
'actor', as traditionally defined, but it is a /cause/ surely?  Now I 
have always taken Nietzsche to be trying to get his readers to challenge 
traditional notions of cause and effect, and thus how we interpret 
reality itself.  And when we look at how language treats instances of 
cause and effect it often seems to do so in terms of either activity or 
passivity.  Although in English (unfortunately I can't comment on other 
languages) we might make use of the continuous tense to give a sense of 
something in the process of occurring, this doesn't resolve the original 
problem.  In order to think about a world of pure becoming, we must 
surely confront the way our language divides the world up into causes 
and effects?  The conclusion of Ryan's essay does not go far enough 
insofar as it leaves us with an intentional 'agent', the Body/Self, as 
the cause behind our actions; thus we are not really being asked to 
challenge some fundamental notions about the nature of the world nor our 
place in it.  In order to do that we would have to look at some of 
Nietzsche's ideas concerning will to power and eternal recurrence, but I 
am not yet ready to go into that here (for now, at least).  First, I'd 
like to know what other people think about this problem, or even if they 
will agree that there is one.