The Fundamentality of Psychology and Its Union with History in Nietzsche's Work

In this essay, I will address Nietzsche’s claim by considering two of his primary texts, Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals: First Essay. I will begin by reconstructing the claim from Beyond Good and Evil, which expresses why Nietzsche believes psychology is fundamental to our problems, but is also our way of out of the problem in order to serve life. Developing this reconstruction, I will discuss how Nietzsche’s argument within Genealogy of Morals: First Essay advances into a union between psychology and history. In the latter part of my essay, I will assess his claim in relation to both texts by expressing positive ideas of his new innovative method he presents, but also a concern that his idea of psychology of resentment within his Priest character could be problematic to get his claim off the ground in the first place. Finally, I will conclude that my position for Nietzsche’s claim is undecided, but not unconvinced.

To unpack Nietzsche’s rather bold claim, I think we should address what psychology is in this context for Nietzsche, depending whether it is old or now. Psychology treats why people do things, the reasons for actions, the explainers of behaviour. It does more than simply describe, which is what we have seen in quantitative sciences. Moreover, psychology treats these explainers ‘in the abstract’, which means not in particular cases, but in types. When analysing many, if not all of Nietzsche’s works, one can identify a psychological orientation to his aims. For Nietzsche, psychology is a frame for our understanding, passions and drives. They are an essential part of our individual stories. What serves life for Nietzsche stems from a psychological soil. Nietzsche wants to propose a new psychological approach that offers a variety of ways of categorizing the originality of his various psychological observations. This will open up many different points of entry into basic questions about what his goal of new psychology is trying to achieve.

Nietzsche’s claim that psychology is the fundamental road to our problems can be found in Beyond Good and Evil section 23, where Nietzsche tells us psychology has remained anchored to moral prejudices and so it has not ventured into any depths, hence why he believes there to be a problem. Nietzsche’s wants to demonstrate a new goal with a new psychology that is committed to an unprecedented naturalism that seeks to ‘translate humanity back into nature’. Dissimilar, to other clumsy forms of naturalism, he also maintains that his particular transformation project is original because it attempts to remain joyful in its new orientation toward science. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche discuss psychology to be ‘the queen of sciences’ as he understands it to replace philosophy especially metaphysics.

Nietzsche is referring to a new sort of fundamental doctrine, ‘the will to power’. All of nature, especially organic nature and most especially human psychological nature is understood as the expression of a simple drive to dominate and exert power as much as possible and not be subject to any other will or drive. This appears to be amount to a psychologizing of being itself a psychological drive. Furthermore, all psychology so far lies within the power of moral prejudices. These prejudices have penetrated into the spiritual world, which is the coldest and free of suppositions. This consequently has been inhibiting and harmful. Additionally in section 23, Nietzsche tells us ‘a genuine physio-psychology has to struggle with unconscious resistances in the heart of the investigator; it has the heart against it’. Even a theory of the mutual dependence of the good and evil impulse causes an immortality and aversion to the conscience that is hearty. Nietzsche describes it as ‘a theory of the derivation of all good impulses from wicked ones’.

Nietzsche states that if someone was to declare that hatred and lust as life conditioning emotions, which is fundamental to life, it must be heightened further if life is to be heightened further. One would be suffering from a judgement of ‘sea sicknesses’ and this a dangerous form of knowledge for Nietzsche, one to steer clear from. On the contrary, Nietzsche wants to stress to his readers that we need to cross this danger to overcome. If one is brave to enter these seas then he tells us to ‘keep our eyes open’ and ‘a firm hand on the helm’ suggesting one needs an awareness of our surroundings.

He continues further to say we will sail straight over morality and by doing this we flatten it. It warns that we crush the remainder of our morality by venturing a greater voyage. A deeper world of insight is to be revealed to what Nietzsche calls ‘the daring travellers’ and the psychologist brings a sacrifice. Nietzsche is suggesting in this instance that he is the psychologist. However, we are not sacrificing the intellect. On the contrary, Nietzsche says we are entitled to demand in return that psychology should be recognised as the ‘queen of sciences to serve and prepare which the road of other sciences exist’. These other sciences may lead us astray.

In his later work The Genealogy of Morals, his argument that psychology is the fundamental path to our problems is developed here, but shows a similar if not stronger emphasis on morality. On the contrary, Nietzsche does not call his genealogy a genealogy, nor does he give the same argument explicitly of problems of psychology. Nietzsche’s First Essay focuses towards a union between psychology and history. Nietzsche claims that all our judgements are embedded in our drives. After we see the death of God emerge in the Gay Science where effectively the foundation of all our knowledge has collapsed, Nietzsche’s task going forward is to implant a new nature to reactivate the psychological human soil. By inspiring a re-orientation, he aims to bring to surface our conscience, which activates passions and questions our value system. Nietzsche is aware of course that his task his far from simple, but this is part of his point. To re-evaluate ones value system is not easy, as we are turning everything we know on its head and bringing pain to the surface. Psychology being the fundamental road to our problems is a journey to seize for Nietzsche. This journey will cause anger and annoyance, but as Nietzsche explains ‘we stand in a need of a critique of moral values, the value of these values itself should first be called into question’. If one acknowledges their values as a problem then for Nietzsche the psychologist has succeeded.

Nietzsche wants to stress to his reader that even though he does not claim he is doing a genealogy, he is placing himself and his values under scrutiny like that of others. The problem at hand is worrying for everyone including Nietzsche. Nietzsche also needs to overcome himself. One has to understand the present orientation of their personal psychological drives, then to dislodge them and finally, to inspire a new orientation, which is Nietzsche task as the psychologist. Nietzsche makes this emphasis on an individual connection to the problem where he quotes ‘ whoever learns to ask questions here, will undergo the same experience as I- that of a huge new prospect opening up, every kind of mistrust, suspicion, fear leaps forward’. ‘It was here I saw the beginning of the end, the stagnation… the will turning against life’. Nietzsche has made evident use of the word problem within the Genealogy and Beyond Good and Evil. In section five of the first essay, he places the problem with him ‘with respect to our problem- which might with good reason be described as reticent’. This problem needs to be made apparent for Nietzsche to move towards a reorientation of values. In Section Five, he introduces a character of the ‘Priest’, which is intended to represent a knotted origin within our psychological drives. The Priest stands as a socio-political opposition to the Romans and more importantly, a psychological category. The psychological category recognises the Priest as powerless and brooding. The Priest initiated the slave revolt within morality. However, due to his powerlessness he cannot act so he conducts a psychological warfare. The psychological process involves the inward turning of our drives, where a reflection takes place.

Looking at Nietzsche’s story, the priest stood in a jealous opposition to the aristocratic class, where the priests grew deeply resentful towards their roman oppressors and this led the priests to exact a spiritual revenge upon their oppressors by inverting their system of values. This means that the resentment felt by one group towards another drove the former to invert the values of the latter. This psychological importance of resentment Nietzsche places on the priest is something I will assess later. Assessing Nietzsche’s claim, he does provide us with an original and dynamic new social psychology that diagnoses philosophical systems and historical periods, in terms of their sickness or health and introduces a highly speculative new psycho historical method called genealogy to account for the tangled histories of our changing conceptions of human nature and value. Nietzsche provides us with a loosely organized but distinctive brand of depth psychology that emphasizes the role that unconscious states and hidden drives play in his explanations of human behaviour.

He intends to help his readers work through the basic defence mechanisms and prejudices of modern life in order to set the stage for their possible conversion to a new affirmative orientation towards life. Nietzsche claims that psychology will be freed from moral prejudices when it is understood as morphology and the doctrine of the development of will to power. Although, considering the soul as something of a social structure entails considering them drives according to the will of power, as drives competing for power. All the assertions are understood not according to their correspondence with the truth, but according to what seeks to gain power by making that claim. If we understand the soul as a competition amongst drives for power then not only the moral agent but also the all-knowing subject will require a radical interpretation.

If as Nietzsche suggests the will to power is a principle of the psyche, all knowing will be determined by the will to power and there can be no objection as to why these aims are not true. The question will now be what seeks the will to power. By Nietzsche declaring that psychology will be the fundamental cause of our problems, it will demonstrate a great significance of the will to power having a psychological meaning. His claims about the world spirit will have this primarily psychological meaning. Establishing the psychology is fundamental, Nietzsche’s aim to evaluate claims according to their psychological effects over objective truth about the world. Understood in this way, the will to power in no way constitutes a fundamental metaphysical claim, rather it, provides an invitation to reinstate a metaphysics of opposites. Having established that the measure for evaluating a judgment is a question of what is life promoting and not its truthfulness, the new psychology has the task of demonstrating how it might be possible to make judgments without recourse to independent standards of truth. The value of any claim will be found in the sorts of life it produces; the fundamental grounds will not be metaphysical or epistemological, but ethical and psychological.

Now that I have addressed his claim in Beyond Good and Evil, I will now consider more closely how we can assess this claim in his first Genealogy. For Nietzsche, the new science of psychology needs a new basic theory of its entities. It needs to be informed, above all, by the recognition of what values really are, and the role these play in explaining, and giving meaning to us. Nietzsche thinks of his Genealogy of Morality as doing psychology in this favoured new way, as he says in Ecce Homo ‘A psychologist’s three crucial preparatory works for a revaluation of all values. This book contains the first psychology of the priest’

In Nietzsche’s argument for declaring the psychology is the fundamental road to our problems, he places a large importance of will. Nietzsche declares a specific proposal of the will in accordance with our psychology, ‘the character of a will to power’. Nietzsche possesses this deeper aim within psychology I mentioned earlier, that other particulars that are perhaps only for the sake of power, which we sees in Beyond, Good and Evil ‘To understand psychology as morphology and evolution-doctrine of the will to power, as I do – nobody has yet come close to doing this even in thought’. This will to power is incorporated into human values.

We may consider that Nietzsche’s psychological method studies will in a perspectival way that addresses qualities. One has a first personal experience about what something is like or how it feels. This is essential to these wills. Hence, to do psychology correctly is to grasp these qualities. Psychology experiences how a kind of action is achieved with a particular kind of will. Nietzsche’s method involves occupying perspectives, and experiencing their involvements in one another. For example, we can consider the famous diagnosis in Nietzsche’s first that addresses Christian morality as rooted in resentment, depends on Nietzsche’s assurance in his own ability to occupy feelingly the Christian positions, and to identify the influence in it of that reactive attitude. Nietzsche conveys a psychological insight to us only insofar as we occupy these stances ourselves. For he studies these wills and values not in their role in his own life, but ‘in the abstract’, as part of the shared passionate tools everyone takes on in the culture. This way the new psychology vitally occupies perspectives involves a kind of ‘subjectivity’ at odds with the ‘objectivity’ called for by ‘science so far’. It precludes the mathematical determination of explainers as quantities.

On the other hand, Nietzsche claim in Beyond Good and Evil spreads further than a will to power, there is a key importance of history. Chaudhri identifies a troubled union between history and psychology of resentment in his Priestly caste. Nietzsche’s genealogical story is intended as large scale, it a reorientation and change affecting the evaluative system of an entire class, society or culture. However, Nietzsche’s primary psychological affect of resentment could appear individualistic. It may be apparent how it appeals to particular feelings of resentment towards someone explain the way in which that person has acted or behaved or conducted himself through a psychological episode of his life. However, it may be difficult to see how appeals to the psychology of resentment could give a compelling account of the way in which an entire class or group has effected some historical change or brought about some particular state of affairs. It is not clear how the feeling of resentment can be shared and deployed to bring about the change in question where one needs to overcome ‘oneself’.

Therefore, this brings into question whether his claim that psychology is the road to our fundamental problems even gets off the ground. The question becomes harder to answer when we consider resentment unlike other affects such as anger, it is unlikely to be recognised as an agent as a motive for his action of behaviour and therefore is likely to operate unconsciously. This psychological motive is hidden and operates outside of our awareness. The element of Nietzsche’s account that needs to be unconscious, namely for formation of operation and resentment raises his own problem within his Genealogy, rather than a psychological process it may be considered more of a social phenomenon. Nietzsche is trying to explain a form of collective reason, the shared consciousness of morality and there is a problem about the role played in his explanation.

Resentment may been the psychological motive that drove the priests to invent their value good and evil value system, but it need not have been the primary psychological motive that drove society to adopt and embrace that value system. Although I am not disputing that Nietzsche has identified psychology as a problem, what I am highlighting is the historical changes and re-orientation we are meant to go through even though they may be gradual are supposed to be long lasting. Yet, the kind of psychology Nietzsche deploys to explain such historical changes may be considered individualistic. It is difficult to determine how psychology of individuals can be used to explain historical changes affecting entire societies and cultures.

The running together of large scale historical stories and individualistic psychologies seems to be one of the peculiarities of Nietzsche’s genealogy, and we need to be sure we have a good account of how the two could work together before we try to incorporate Nietzsche’s genealogical method in our contemporary ethical inquiries. This is one way in which Nietzsche’s psychology and history might stand in a rather precarious relationship with one another: the psychology, by virtue of being “individualistic, ” does not seem up to the task of explaining historical change at the level of entire societies and cultures. Nietzsche’s history and psychology might be standing in each other’s way to give us an explanation. Therefore, it places us with a doubt that psychology might not be the road to fundamental problems.

To conclude, Nietzsche has provided us with a positive and innovative idea even though on the surface the claim psychology is the fundamental road our problems could be conceived quite negatively, Nietzsche has identified how his kind of psychology that involves a reorientation of values we already knew, which seems bold move to make. Nevertheless, his arguments are promising where he states that we need to overcome ourselves by going on this different voyage and venture into depths to achieve it, even though there is danger in this. On the contrary, his bold claims of resentment within Genealogy of Morals appears hard to see how this drive could apply to an entire group. Therefore, I must conclude that Nietzsche’s claim that psychology is the fundamental road to our problems is a phenomenon I remained undecided, but not unconvinced.