Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung

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Monographien und Texte
zur Nietzsche-Forschung

Herausgegeben von

Ernst Behler
Wolfgang Müller-Lauter · Heinz Wenzel

Band 19

1988

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

The Beginnings of Nietzsche's
Theory of Language

by

Claudia Crawford

1988

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

 Anschriften der Herausgeber:
Prof. Dr. Ernst Behler
Comparative Literature GN-42
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington 98195, U.S.A.
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Müller-Lauter
Klopstockstraße 27, D-1000 Berlin 37
Prof. Dr. Heinz Wenzel
Harnackstraße 16, D-1000 Berlin 33

Redaktion:

Johannes Neininger
Ithweg 5, D-1000 Berlin 37

Deutsche Bibliothek Cataloguing in Publication Data

Crawford, Claudia:
The beginnings of Nietzsche's theory of language / by Claudia
Crawford. - Berlin ; New York : de Gruyter, 1988
(Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung ; Bd. 19)
ISBN 3-11-011336-8
NE: G T

Copyright 1988 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin 30

Printed in Germany
Alle Rechte des Nachdrucks, einschließlich des Rechtes der Herstellung von Photokopien und
Mikrofilmen, vorbehalten.
Satz und Druck: Arthur Collignon GmbH, Berlin 30
Bindearbeiten: Lüderitz & Bauer, Berlin 61
 Language is the most quotidian thing of all: it needs a philosopher to
occupy himself with it. Those who find language interesting in itself and
others who recognize in it nothing but the medium of interesting thoughts.
Nietzsche, Notes for "Homer and Classical Philology"

Language did not return into the field of thought directly and in its own
right until the end of the nineteenth century. We might have said until the
twentieth century had not Nietzsche, the philologist, been the first to connect
the philosophical task with a radical reflection upon language.
And now, in this philosophical-philological space opened up for us by
Nietzsche, language wells up in an enigmatic multiplicity that must be
mastered. ... It is quite possible that all those questions now confronting our
curiosity (What is language? What is a sign? What is unspoken in the world,
in our gestures, in the whole enigmatic heraldry of our behaviour, our
dreams, our sicknesses — does all that speak, and if so in what language and
in obedience to what grammar? Is everything significant, and, if not, what
is, and for whom, and in accordance with what rules? What relation is there
between language and being, and is it really to being that language is always
addressed — at least, language that speaks truly? What, then, is this language
that says nothing, is never silent, and is called 'literature'?) — it is quite
possible that all these questions are presented today (as) ... replies to the
questions imposed upon philosophy by Nietzsche.
Foucault, The Order of Things
 Acknowledgements

Acknowledgement is gratefully made to Walter de Gruyter & Co. for

permission to translate and reproduce the sections of Nietzsche's notes from
volume 7 of the Colli-Montinari edition of Nietzsche's Werke, Berlin, 1967 ff.,
and to C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung for permission to translate and
reproduce "Vom Ursprung der Sprache," "Zur Teleologie," "Zu Schopen-
hauer," and the untitled notes from July, 1863, all published in volume Werke
3 of the Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, München, 1933 — 42.
Acknowledgement is also gratefully made to Professor Ernst Behler,
Chair of Comparative Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle and
Editor of Nietzsche Studien for his continued interest in and encouragement
of this project. Monika Stumpf deserves my gratitude for her careful review
of my translations. Acknowledgement is made to the Department of Com-
parative Literature, University of Minnesota, for financial assistance and to
my home Department of Humanities and Program in Comparative Studies
in Discourse and Society, University of Minnesota, for their support in time
and materials.
Finally, to my husband Larry, a special thanks for his invaluable assistance
and unflagging support throughout the preparation of this work.
 Preface

This work initially grew out of a desire to write a comprehensive study

dealing with Nietzsche's theory of language. Nietzsche's theory of language
is an especially pertinent area of research for Nietzsche scholars, philosophers,
and critics today. In the past three decades many works have been published
about Nietzsche, almost all of which acknowledge the importance of his
work with language in one of its dimensions or another. It seemed important,
therefore, to trace and explore the genealogy of Nietzsche's theory of language
from its beginnings through his mature philosophical works. My research
revealed, however, that there are several specific phases in the evolution of
Nietzsche's theory of language, each of which merits a study in itself.
Nietzsche's view of language as a product twice removed from reality, or
his "non-correspondence" theory of language, is a much quoted and inter-
preted idea. In his early unpublished essay, "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral
Sense," Nietzsche writes that the physical world initiates a nerve stimulus in
the human animal. This nerve stimulus is transferred into an image, and the
image in turn is imitated in a sound. This rhetorical or metaphorical process
ends by giving us words with which to form concepts. In addition, Nietzsche
emphasizes that language only becomes possible within a community of
speakers who agree upon commonly held conceptions and meanings of words,
creating a system of language relevant to that community.
Now the problem with taking this essay as a point of departure for
understanding Nietzsche's theory of language is that it encapsulates ideas
with which he had been working for years. It summarizes in a few sentences
some very basic ideas which can be traced in detail in following the influences
of Schopenhauer, Lange, and Hartmann upon the beginnings of Nietzsche's
theory of language. It has recently been suggested that Nietzsche's essay "On
Truth and Lies" as well as his notes for a course on "Rhetoric" take over
the major ideas of Gustav Gerber's Die Sprache als Kunst {Language as Art),
and thus, that Gerber stands as the most significant source for Nietzsche's
early theory of language. 1 However, my research demonstrates that "On
Truth and Lies" is a further genealogical development of ideas which
Nietzsche had already formed upon the basis of the influences of Kant,

1 See my chapter 14.

χ Preface

Schopenhauer, Lange, and Hartmann as they came into contact with Gerber's
rhetorical model of language. Gerber offered Nietzsche a new metaphor, that
of rhetoric, for a body of ideas concerning language which Nietzsche already
had in place by 1871.
For Nietzsche, the origins and ongoing process of language do not reside
in community, rather, community only becomes possible with the conscious
use of language. And conscious use of language itself only becomes possible
as a result of purely unconscious instinctual activities of individual human
beings. This idea, of the unconscious and instinctual origination of language,
which Nietzsche's beginning theory of language demonstrates, finds a place
in "On Truth and Lies" in two rather enigmatic sentences: "the artistic
transference of a nerve stimulus into images is the mother, if not grandmother
of every single concept;"2 and the metaphors which humans agree to use
according to fixed conventions and through forgetting their origin in meta-
phor, originally consist of "a mass of images which streamed from the primal
faculty of human imagination." 3 There is first, a continual physiological
unconscious origination of language through instinct, and then, conscious-
ness, community, the pathos of truth, and science, grow out of these origins
as secondary, weakened processes. According to Nietzsche's beginning theory
of language, conscious language provides only an image of an image, a
symbol of a symbol, and after Gerber, the metaphor of a metaphor. The
individual has a unique unconscious and artistic language of his or her own
in images, an idea Nietzsche also expresses in "On Truth and Lies:" "each
perceptual metaphor is individual and without equals and is therefore able
to elude classification."4 However, when once translated into sounds and the
conscious language of the community, it loses its uniqueness and becomes
merely conventional, becomes herd language. Nietzsche expresses this contrast
between the language of the individual and that of the community repeatedly
throughout his work, for example, in Zarathustra, "On Enjoying and Suffering
the Passions" or The Gay Science, aphorism 354. Conscious language poses a
very definite limit, while in its unconscious artistic aspects, language exists
as a most provoking possibility.
As a result, in his beginning theory of language, Nietzsche comes to
emphasize the artistic nature of the unconscious metaphorical production of
language. In describing the intuitive being, as opposed to the rational being
in "On Truth and Lies," Nietzsche reiterates his earlier insight, gained from

2 Nietzsche, WL 85, K S A 1: 882. Please refer to the Key to Abbreviations for Nietzsche's
works. Where appropriate, quotes are followed by reference to English translation and
original German.
3 Ibid., WL 86, K S A 1: 883.
4 Ibid., WL 84, K S A 1: 882.
 Preface XI

Hartmann, that it might be desirable to make some conscious use of the

artistic nature of unconscious language.
The intuitive being would be guided by means of intuitions rather than by
concepts. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them
he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard-of
combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the
old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impres-
sion of the powerful present intuition (my emphasis). 5

This passage characterizes the artistic, socially subversive, and transformative

possibilities of language which Nietzsche's worldview in Anschauung6 first
offers, where these very unconscious creative possibilities become an end in
themselves. This period, in which Nietzsche thinks about language in terms
of rhetoric, has yielded many rich articles for the Nietzsche literature. How-
ever, it fits into the overall development of Nietzsche's early theory of
language more as a mid-point rather than as its beginning.
Another very significant area of Nietzsche's theory of language which
needs to be taken into consideration involves the relation of music to
language. Nietzsche begins to write about this relation in 1870 — 71 and it
remains a constant in his thinking up and through the Case of Wagner. In
1870 music becomes a paradigm against which to measure language, its
limitations and possibilities. Nietzsche pursues the distinctions between var-
ious unconscious and conscious languages in essays like "The Dionysian
Worldview," "Greek Musicdrama," and his fragment on "Music and Words."
Music symbolizes the essence of things and represents world harmony. The
gesture of the lips, and other gestures, symbolize the appearance of being of
human beings. Gesture language, which is completely instinctual and without
consciousness, Nietzsche equates with music dynamics. The language of
words consists in the merging of the gesture of the lips and tone. Nietzsche
considers the language of thoughts and concepts, which he equates with
rhythm, to be unconscious feeling transferred into conscious representations.
Concepts are a holding in memory of the symbol of the accompanying
gestures after the tone has faded away. Because words and the symbolism of
human gestures "are measured by the eternal significance of music," it is
music which brings to words their force. It is significant to note that the
scheme which Nietzsche builds with regard to music and language retains
the same structure as his worldview in Anschauung and represents a modifi-
cation of that scheme. Music corresponds with the Ur-Eine, while unconscious
gestures connected to feeling correspond to the first image of the will-acts

5 Ibid., WL 90, KSA 1: 888-89.

6 Nietzsche's worldview in Anschauung is offered for the first time in the present work.
XII Preface

of the Ur-Eine, which humans perceive as tone. Words, then, correspond to

human representation, and remain a mere image of this first image. In the
worldview in Anschauung human representing can never know the Ur-Eine
directly although human beings are one with it in their essence as appearance
of its will-acts. In exactly the same way:
Music can create images out of itself, which will always however be but
schemata, instances as it were of her intrinsic general contents. But how
should the image, the representation, create music out of itself! 7

The privileging of music as the most adequate form of expression of the will
remains with Nietzsche throughout his thinking. In Zaratbustra singing is
lauded over speaking. In his "Attempt at a Self Criticism," Nietzsche calls
his own writing a "contrapuntal vocal art and seduction of the ear." 8 In The
Case of Wagner Nietzsche writes: "one becomes more of a philosopher the
more one becomes a musician." But "Wagner was not a musician by instinct,"
rather he "increased music's capacity for language," while Nietzsche attempts
to increase language's capacity for music. Wagner required the gesture,
literature to persuade the world to take his music seriously. Music was a
mere means to him, "But no musician would think that way." Nietzsche
demands that "music should not become an art of lying." 9 In The Case of
Wagner, Nietzsche turns the tables of The Birth of Tragedy against Wagner,
rather than for him, and precisely upon the question of the relation of music
and words. The ranking in order of priority of effective communication of
languages remains constant for Nietzsche: music first, then gesture, and
finally the word and conceptuality. Thus, there is another whole study, or a
related one, to be found in an examination of how Nietzsche emphasizes not
just the language of lips and tongue, but also of facial and bodily gesture,
dance, song, performance, imitation, flight, and laughter. 10 This merging of
all the human symbolic possibilities or languages, Nietzsche brings together
in the Dionysian dithyramb, which permeates the communications of Zara-
thustra, and which is tied so strongly to the last period of Nietzsche's work
in Ecce Homo and the "Dionysus Dithyrambs" where he styles himself "the
disciple of Dionysus and the inventor of the dithyramb." 11
With On the Genealogy of Morals yet another specific phase in Nietzsche's
thinking about language takes form. Language finds its place in the context
of force, in the play of active and reactive forces and the concept of the will

7 Nietzsche, MW 33, K S A 7: 362.

8 Nietzsche, G T 25, K S A 1: 21.
9 Nietzsche, DFW 158, 172, 177, 180, K S A 6: 14, 30, 3 5 - 3 6 , 39.
10 For a beginning study along these lines, see Graham Parkes, "The Dance from Mouth to
Hand," forthcoming in The Postmodern Nietzsche, Ed. Clayton Koelb.
11 Nietzsche, EH 306, K S A 6: 345.
 Preface XIII

to power. Still drawing upon its earlier formulations, Nietzsche now under-
stands language as a force among forces. Language exerts its quanta of energy
and is simultaneously acted upon by other forces. Thus, Nietzsche's thinking
about language turns from an interest in its origins and manner of unconscious
production to a concern with the effects of language change upon humans
and cultures. In this context Nietzsche's method of genealogy, as it relates to
his theory of language, assumes a pivotal role. In his genealogical analysis of
how the slave morality "got its word (and its words) in,'" 2 Nietzsche is
interested in tracing meaning changes within human interpretation of events
as translations of those events into linguistic forms, as well as the reverse:
how linguistic forms and values transform or shape human cultures. Words,
when examined from a historical and genealogical point of view, are seen
not simply as descriptors of events, but as the very shapers of those events.13
In the works of his last year another phase in Nietzsche's understanding
of language is intensified and provides the material for a specific study.
Language retains its effectiveness as force and play of forces, but now
Nietzsche begins to lay more stress on the power which each individual
instance of language production exerts as an instance of value and action.
Although this had been integral to his genealogical analysis of ressentiment
from a historical perspective, Nietzsche now emphasizes the creator of un-
known futures for human beings as one who consciously wields the power
of language. Language becomes a dynamic instance of interpretation and
valuing, not in a critical sense of a subject who interprets values and then
speaks or writes about those interpretations, but in a creative sense where
the speaking or writing itself is the new value force embodied. Nietzsche's
critique of grammar, yet another fundamental area of his theory of language
which needs to be traced from its first formulations in the beginnings of his
theory of language and throughout his thinking, rests on this distinction
between language as the reportage of a "subject" and language as actually
creating being. In 1885 Nietzsche writes:
What sets me apart most fundamentally from the metaphysicians, is that: I
do not agree with them that it is the "I" which thinks: further I take the
"I" itself as a pure construction of thinking, along the same order as
"material," "thing," "substance," "individual," "goal," "number:" only as

12 Nietzsche, G M 26, K S A 5: 260.

13 Nietzsche poses a question in his note to the First Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals·. "What
light does lingustics, and especially the study of etymology, throw on the history of the
evolution of moral. concepts?" For ä beginning consideration of this question from a
perspective which merges de Saussure's ideas on etymology • and linguistic value with
Nietzsche's linguistic genealogy, see my article, "What Light does Linguistics, and Especially
the Study of Etymology, Throw on the History of the Evolution of Moral Concepts" in
The Paradigm Exchange II, Center for Humanistic Studies, University of Minnesota, 1987.
XIV Preface

regulative fiction, with whose help a kind o f constancy, that means some-
thing " k n o w a b l e " is put into a world of becoming, is poeticised (hineingedich-
tet) into it. The belief in grammar, in the linguistic subject, object, in verbs,
has subjugated the metaphysicians up until now: I teach foreswearing o f
this belief. 1 4

Nietzsche's theory and practice of language in his last year changes us,
moves us, not through its informational or referential nature, its logical
arguments, its conceptual wanderings, but by the effectiveness of its meta-
phorical force. Language no longer names things, rather Nietzsche's language
creates things. Because there is no "thing in itself," no truth, to which a
word is referred for verification, the word itself stands as the thing. Its power
engraves, as Nietzsche expresses it in Twilight of the Idols, "sign upon sign on
bronze tablets with the sureness of a destiny." Language, becomes action
which makes a difference. Each act of language has the potential for rein-
forcing or changing the existing value moment, both within the system of
language itself, and at the same time, in the broader cultural or moral systems
of a people which depend on it.
By this time, Nietzsche has contradicted his earlier belief, based upon
Lange's "standpoint of the ideal" that metaphysical worlds may and should
be created, not as proffering truth about the world, but more in the sense of
comforting artistic visions; this is the "metaphysical comfort" of The Birth of
Tragedy. However, in his "Attempt at a Self Criticism," written fourteen years
later, Nietzsche offers his new perspective that when we use language to will
a world, it is always this world that we create. We ought to learn to use the
art of language for /to-worldly comfort and "dispatch all metaphysical
comforts to the devil — metaphysics in front.'" 5 From the beginnings of his
thinking about language, Nietzsche believed that its formal aspects, its
unconscious forms and physiological processes (in his later formulations, the
will to power) condition any conscious use of conceptuality and abstraction.
As a result, as his theory of language evolves, Nietzsche comes more and
more to emphasize that if human beings could develop the capacity of
exploiting the unconscious forms of language as creative possibilities, and
translate them in terms of a conscious willing into force and action, it would be
in this essential transforming quality of language, that any hope of transval-
uation of values could find its arena of action. Nietzsche's own practice of
language in his last year, his value actions, leads him, as Charles Altieri
expresses it, not to idealize the will to power as a concept, but to perform

14KSA 11: 526.

15Nietzsche, G T 26, KSA 1: 22.
" Charles Altieri, "Ecce Homo: Narcissism, Power, Pathos, and the Status of Autobiographical
Representations," Boundary 2, Vols. IX, No. 3 and X, No. 1, Spring/Fall 1981.
 Preface XV

In an effort to persuade through performance, Nietzsche critiques several

instances of philosophical and cultural discourse in which language has exerted
its force upon the formation of Western civilization. Throughout his mature
work, though in no one text and in no systematic manner, Nietzsche develops
a genealogy of five worlds which the Western philosophical tradition has so
far interpreted and acted for itself by means of language: the actual, apparent,
real, true, and other worlds. In Twilight of the Idols and his "History of an
Error," 1 7 Nietzsche describes these worlds as effective instances of linguistic
force and emphasizes each as a conceptual phase in an ongoing process of
transformation. Each conceptual phase constitutes a creation, by means of
words, which has prepared the very perception of life of Western culture and
the quality of lives lived in it. Nietzsche then indulges in the freedom of
destroying these worlds, of "breaking their words," and in the liberty of
creating a new one. By staging a wor(l)d drama in which he replaces the old
words with his own, in the most forceful and psychological of styles, by
replacing the old worlds with his Dionysian world, Nietzsche desires to create
a new phase in world transformation which will result in the actualization of
lives of a higher quality. In Zarathustra, in "On Old and New Tablets,"
Nietzsche had already referred to the destroying and creating power of words
when he links the breaking of the old tablets, the old laws, with the breaking
of words: "Such words were once called holy ... where have there been such
better robbers and killers in this world than in such holy words? ... Break,
break this word of the softhearted and half-and-half." 18 In Ecce Homo, Altieri
suggests, that Nietzsche heightens the stakes of his personal conflict with
history. His autobiography is not offered as a history or an alternative to
history, but stands as one of the most forceful tests of historicity itself.
I would like to propose one last area of Nietzsche's theory of language
which merits a study in itself. It would explore the relationship of Nietzsche's
practice of language as transgression of language forms: the language of
madness or impropriety, the language of seduction and excess; his refusal of
decorum. I contend that this aspect of Nietzsche's practice of language
consitutes a phase in his relationship with language which is consciously
understood and exploited. Here, Nietzsche's "style" would have to be reex-
amined. Nietzsche's style cannot be adequately understood as merely excep-
tionally persuasive, or as constituting a labyrinth from which no redeeming
thread need be desired, rather, Nietzsche redefines style altogether. In Ecce
Homo Nietzsche makes a crucial distinction between "good style in itself,"

17
Nietzsche, G D 485, KSA 6: 8 0 - 8 1 .
18
Nietzsche, Ζ 314, 324, KSA 4: 253, 265. This reference comes from Michael Ryan, "The
Act," Glyph, No. 2, 1977.
XVI Preface

which is on a par with "idealism," the "good in itself," the "thing in itself,"
and his own art of style.
Good is any style that really communicates an inward state, that makes no
mistake about the signs, the tempo of the signs, the gestures — ... the art
of gestures. 19

Nietzsche's "great" style communicates an inward state, "an inward tension

of pathos," and not a knowledge. It communicates unique, individual states,
but not in the sense of a "subject" telling about itself as "object." The
communication uses all the possibilities of symbolic language, unconscious
music, and the tempo of that music, and the art of unconscious gestures
translated into the signs of a conscious language. To be mistaken about signs
would be to use them without tempo, without the art of gestures, to use
them merely as concepts. Nietzsche equates the number of his stylistic
possibilities with the number of inward states at his disposal: "considering
that the multiplicity of inward states is exceptionally large in my case, I have
many stylistic possibilities."20 Each inner state has its own style. It is not the
style which is constant, that is, "good in itself," "thing in itself," which
unifies a host of states. It is rather, that the inward state, in each instance,
enacts, performs, communicates the signs, tempo and gestures of its moment
of being. In his style, the Dionysian dithyramb, Nietzsche carries to the
ultimate point his idea that language is largely an unconscious creative will
to power, that it is action, value, that it can, not only poetically, but actually,
prepare a stage for its own silence and the beginning of our transvaluing
action. The excess, the overfullness, and unheard combinations of metaphors
of the intuitive being, referred to above in "On Truth and Lies," with which
to break the old conceptual barriers, simply become pathos, gesture, and music
in Nietzsche.
This work, The Beginnings of Nietzsche's Theory of Language, seems a sober,
if not pedantic introduction to Nietzsche's theory of language, as it takes its
first forms from the influences of Eduard von Hartmann, Schopenhauer,
Lange, Gerber, and others. Still, it is essential to give close attention to these
beginning sources, because although Nietzsche modified and carried to their
ultimate conclusions his work with language in the areas just outlined, the
basic relationship of language to epistemology, the understanding of language
as at once, a limit and a possibility of the greatest kind are prepared at this
early point out of these influences.

19 Nietzsche, EH 265, K S A 6: 304.

20 Ibid.
 Preface XVII

To Nietzsche, then, whose language, and the multifarious art of that

language, provides a source of continuing delight, riddle enough and more
for any searcher and researcher.

Minneapolis, Minnesota Claudia Crawford

September, 1987
 Table of Contents

Acknowledgements VII
Preface IX
Key to Abbreviations XXIII
Introduction 1
Theory and Method 2
The Beginnings of Nietzsche's Theory of Language: 1863—1873 11
The Texts 14
I. Eduard von Hartmann and the Unconscious 17
II. Schopenhauer 22
Language and Representation 23
Schopenhauer's Departure from Kant 30
The Subject-Predicate Relationship 31
Nietzsche's Transformations of Schopenhauer's Language
Theory 33
III. Kant 37
IV. Nietzsche: "The deepest philosophical knowledge lies already
prepared in language." 41
Grammar 41
Instinct 42
V. Schopenhauer and Hartmann: Will, Character, Instinct . . . . 51
Schopenhauer's Will 51
Schopenhauer's "Unconscious" Will 53
Hartmann's Criticism of Schopenhauer's Will 56
Schopenhauer and Hartmann: Instinct and Character . . . . 58
Nietzsche: Instinct and Character 61
VI. Lange's: History of Materialism 67
We are a Product of our Organization 70
Sensory Synthesis 70
Unconscious Inferences 75
Lange's Thoroughgoing Skepticism 79
XX Table of Contents

Philosophy is Art 80
Lange's Critique of Kant 80
The Figurative Use of Language 84
Force and Matter: Mere Abstractions 85
Force-points 87
Subject and Predicate 89
Natural Science, Darwin, and Teleology 91
VII. "On Schopenhauer" 95
Predication of the Will 97
Principium individuationis and Origin of the Intellect 100

VIII. "On Teleology" or "Concerning the Concept of the Organic

Since Kant" 105
Kant's Teleology 106
Nietzsche: "On Teleology" 108
Concept of expedience (ability of existence) 110
The alleged impossibility of explaining an organism me-
chanically (what does mechanically mean?) 115
The recognized inexpedience in nature in contradiction to
expedience 117
Organism (the undetermined life concept/the undetermined
individual concept) 121
Teleological reflection is examination of forms 122
Forms (individuals) belong to and are derived from human
organization 123
Life force = 125

IX. Nietzsche and Hartmann: Unconscious Nature of Language . 128

X. Hartmann's Worldview of the Unconscious 139

Unconscious Will-Acts 142
Hartmann's Criticism of Schopenhauer's principium individua-
tionis 145
Philosophy of the Unconscious and Human Consciousness 148
Interlude 151
XI. Nietzsche's Worldview in Anschauung 158
The Term Anschauung 158
The Ur-Eine and Anschauung 162
Space, Time, Causality 164
Conscious Intellect and Anschauung 166
Language and Anschauung 168
 Table of Contents XXI

Will and Action 170

Loss of Identity 171
Teleology and Goal of Anschauung 172
Figure 1: Anschauung and Language 178
XII. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer 179
Space, Time, Causality 179
Identity of the Knowing Subject 181
Will: Unitary or Multiple 182
Will and Action 183
Language 184
Teleology of the Will 188
XIII. Reconciliation of Materialism and Idealism 193
Language: Instinkt, Wahn, Kunst! 197
XIV. Nietzsche's Notes for a Course on "Rhetoric" and "On Truth
and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" 199
Gerber's Language as Art 202
Language as Unconscious Art 206
Genesis of Language 208
All Words are from the Beginning Tropes 211
The Impossibility of Language to Describe the Essence of
Things 216
Nietzsche's working methods 219
Appendix A: 221
Notes on Translation 221
1. "On the Origins of Language" 222
2. "On Schopenhauer" 226
3. "On Teleology" 238
4. "Anschauung Notes" 267
5. "Untitled Notes" 291
Appendix B: 295
1. Genealogical nodes 295
2. Chronology 298
3. Index of scientific and philosophical names 298
Index of Subjects 306
Index of Names 312
 Key to Abbreviations

Nietzsche's Works Used

KSA Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe. Ed. Giorgio Colli und Maz-
zino Montinari. Berlin und München: Walter de Gruyter und dtv,
1980.
KSB Sämtliche Briefe. Kritische Studienausgabe. Ed. Giorgio Colli und Maz-
zino Montinari, Berlin und München: Walter de Gruyter und dtv,
1986.
MusA Gesammelte Werke. Musarionausgabe. München: Musarion Verlag,
1920-1929.
BA Werke und Briefe. Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe. München: C. H.
Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1933—1942. Indicated in text as
BAW for Werke.
GA Grossoktavausgabe of Nietzsche's Werke. Leipzig: C. G. Naumann
Verlag, 1 9 0 1 - 1 3 .

Nietzsche's Works Used in English Translation

"Untitled Notes" (1863) "Untitled Notes" UN

"Zu Schopenhauer" (1867/68) "On Schopenhauer" ZS
"Zur Teleologie" (1867/68) "On Teleology" ZT
"Vom Ursprung der Sprache" (1869/ "On the Origins of Lan- US
70) guage"
"Die dionysische Weltanschauung" "The Dionysian World- DW
(1870) view"
" Anschauung Notes" (1870/71) "Anschauung Notes" AN
"Über Musik und Wörter" (1871) "On Music and Words" MW
Die Geburt der Tragödie (1872) The Birth of Tragedy GT
"Notes-Summer 1872 —Beginning "The Philosopher" Ρ
1873"
"Über Wahrheit und Lüge im ausser- "On Truth and Lies in a WL
moralischen Sinne" (1873) Nonmoral Sense"
XXIV Key to Abbreviations

"Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der "On the Uses and Disad- HL
Historie für das Leben" (1874) vantages of History for
Life"
"Rhetorik" (1872?-74) "Course on Rhetoric" R
Menschliches, Allzumenschliches II Human, All-too-Human MA 2
(1880) Part II
Morgenröte (1881) Daybreak Μ
Also sprach Zarathustra (1883-85) Thus Spoke Zarathustra Ζ
Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882, Part The Gay Science FW
V, 1886)
Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886) Beyond Good and Evil JGB
Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887) The Genealogy of Morals GM
Der Fall Wagner (1888) The Case of Wagner DFW
Göthen-Dämmerung (1889) Twilight of the Idols GD
Ecce Homo (1908) Ecce Homo EH
Die Nachlass-Kompilation, Der Wille Will to Power WM
Zur Macht (1930)

I use my translations of: UN, ZS, ZT, US, AN, and DW.
I use Walter Kaufmann's translations of: GT and DFW (Vintage Books,
1967), FW (Vintage Books, 1974), JGB (Vintage Books, 1966), GM and EH
(Vintage Books, 1967), and Ζ and GD (Portable Nietzsche, Penguin Books,
1954).
I use Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale's translation of: WM
(Vintage Books, 1968).
I use R. J. Hollingdale's translations of: HL (Cambridge Univ. Press,
1983), Μ (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), and MA 2 (Cambridge Univ. Press,
1986).
I use Daniel Breazeale's translation of: WL and Ρ (Philosophy and Truth:
Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's, Humanities Press,
1979).
I use Carole Blair's translation of: R (Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 16,
No. 2, 1983).
I use the Oscar Levy translation of: MW (The Complete Works of Friedrich
Nietzsche, Vol. 1, Gordon Press, 1974).
 Introduction

Nietzsche's writings evince a complex, constantly modified and devel-

oping view of language. His view of language is concerned with the possible
origins and qualities of language, with the interrelationships of power of
effect between language and human consciousness and knowledge of the
world. It is also very much concerned with the limitations of language.
Although what I have chosen to call a theory of language can be abstracted
from Nietzsche's writings, it would be inaccurate to assert that Nietzsche
himself organized his thoughts about language in any systematic manner as
an independent aspect of his overall philosophizing. Nietzsche does not single
out and give specific form and priority to his theory of language, except at
what appear to be sporadic intervals in his thinking. 1 It is the purpose of
this work to demonstrate that, although on the surface this appears to be the
case, Nietzsche carried with him, from his earliest writings, a passionate
interest in language and its workings and a fundamental realization of the
significance of certain advantages and disadvantages of language. In discuss-
ing Nietzsche's theory of language throughout this work, I inevitably si-
multaneously discuss his ontology and theory of knowledge. Nietzsche's
theory of language is inseparable from his thinking about human knowledge
of the world and the creation of a practical philosophy for living in it. When

1 Works dealing with language specifically are "On the Origins of Language" ("Vom Ursprung
der Sprache," 1869-70), "Music and Words" ("Über Musik und Wörter," 1871), "On Truth
and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" ("Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne,"
1873), and notes for a course on "Rhetoric" ("Rhetorik," 1874). Many references to language
also appear in the unpublished notes of the period during which these essays are written.
The next clear cut work with language comes in the Genealogy of Morals fourteen years later,
which is ultimately an exercise in Nietzsche's theory of language. Twilight of the Idols and
The Antichrist, again, return to theoretical statements about language, some of which repeat
views developed in the early years. Ecce homo, stands as an example of Nietzsche's theory of
language in practice. (See my article: "Ecce Homo: Problem of the Ί am'". Enclitic, 4 : 1 ,
1980.) All other references to language specifically, from the period of Human All Too Human
up until The Genealogy of Morals, including the Nachlass, while often extremely significant to
the overall theory, are scattered. One can generally say that Nietzsche was most overtly
concerned with language at the beginning of his thinking and again in the last year or so
of his thinking. However, the period in between, of approximately ten years, demonstrates
Nietzsche's continuing evaluations of language. See, for example, Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
"On Poets" and "The Song of Melancholy" or Beyond Good and Evil, especially the Preface
and "On the Prejudices of Philosophers."
2 Introduction

taken together as a changing, but coherent perspective, his beginning theory

of language can be seen to provide a rich grounding element for his later
philosophical and artistic enterprise.

Theory and Method

At the outset two questions present themselves in this undertaking: How

is theory used; and, why language? I wrote that Nietzsche held a constantly
modified and developing view of language, rather than, for example, a system
of language, a conception of language. To have used such terms as system
or conception would be to deny at the outset the insights which my following
of Nietzsche's work with language yields. Theory is used primarily in its
original Greek and Latin sense as "a looking at," a mental viewing or
contemplation. Theory, here, is not to be understood as "a systematic state-
ment based upon strongly verified underlying principles," or as "a mental
plan of a way to do something," two of the primary dictionary definitions.
Both of these definitions of theory imply that one has a plan, idea, some
principles, into which the field of study is to be subsumed. Theory in the
sense "of looking at" simply looks to see what is seen and then a formulation
of apparent relationships of certain observed phenomena — in this case, the
texts of Nietzsche, — which has been verified to some degree, results/Viewing
is a transformation, a transfiguration, and not a prefiguration of that which
is to be looked at. To a large extent theory as it is intended here, means
speculation, even in some instances, plain old guesswork.
The method used in this work does not assume that it is possible or
desirable to recreate the "truth" of the moment in which Nietzsche himself
wrote a text, to suggest with some claim to authority that this and only this
was what he thought when he wrote it. Rather, this work is, in the sense of
Foucault's archaeology, a rewriting, that is, Nietzsche's texts, "as a preserved
form of exteriority, are subjected to a regulated transformation. It is not a
return to the innermost secret of the origin; it is the systematic description
of a discourse-object." 2 I have attempted a "regulated transformation" of
Nietzsche's texts on language in the sense which Foucault defines regularity.
Archaeological description is concerned with those discursive practices to
which the facts of succession must be referred if one is not to establish them
in an unsystematic and naive way, that is, in terms of merit. At the level in
which they are, the originality/banality opposition is therefore not relevant:

2 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans.
A. M. Sheridan Smith, New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1972. A 1 3 9 - 4 0 .
 Theory and Method 3

between an initial formulation and the sentence, which, years, centuries

later, repeats it more or less exactly, it establishes no hierarchy of value; it
makes no radical difference. It tries only to establish the regularity of
statements ... it designates, for every verbal performance ... the set of
conditions in which the enunciative function operates, and which guarantees
and defines its existence. ... Thus, archaeology seeks to uncover the regu-
larity of a discursive practice. A practice that is in operation ... 3

This work in regulated transformation, in theory as "a looking at" is

pursued in all rigor and attention to detail. The attempt will be to bridge a
gap which Bernd Magnus points to in his article "Nietzsche Today: A View
from America." On one side, he writes: "to read Nietzsche as offering theories
of knowledge, or morals or ontology — or in this case, language — is itself
the product of a tacit conception of philosophy as an enterprise which
confronts a reasonably fixed set of issues within timeless constraints," in
other words, within the tradition of logic and analysis which characterizes
Western philosophy. Magnus continues: "to give up this picture is essential
to understanding Nietzsche's deconstruction of 'philosophy'." 4 On the other
side, Magnus characterizes what he understands as a deconstructionist ap-
proach to Nietzsche which operates devoid of analysis or argument. These
readings "must either stare at his texts in mute silence or use them to see
whether they inspire us to say anything interesting, to reduce them to mere
means in a free-association game, as has been done by some Derridians." 5
Theory, in the sense used in this work, falls somewhere in between these
two characterizations. Although traditional philosophy and strictly held log-
ical analysis is assuredly under attack by Nietzsche, and not only Nietzsche,
still for a long time to come, any deconstruction of it is constrained to
operate to a large, perhaps lessening, extent within it. Derrida said that, and
Magnus also recognizes this constraint. Nietzsche's texts are a paradigmal
instance of an attempt to both remain within traditional philosophy, insofar
as it is necessary, and yet to offer practices of exploding it. However, theory
in the sense of "to look at," especially with regard to Nietzsche's theory of
language, is also, in some ways, compatible with the idea of "staring at

3 Ibid., A 144 - 45.

4 Bernd Magnus, "Nietzsche Today: A View from America," in International Studies in Philosophy,
Binghamton: State University of New York, XVβ, 1983. NT 102.
5 Ibid. By selecting these remarks from Magnus' article, I do not want to create a false opinion
of his relationship to the deconstructionist perspective. Magnus advocates the useful inter-
action and, when effective, merging of the three major research perspectives which he points
to in this article: analytical, deconstructionist, and reconstructionist. I merely wish to point
to the fact that Magnus has apparently divided deconstructionist interpretation into two
categories: salvagable und unsalvagable. The staring at Nietzsche's texts in mute silence and
using Nietzsche's texts as a means to free-association and game clearly belonging to the
latter.
4 Introduction

Nietzsche's texts in mute silence." For to add language to looking, in itself

already transformation, is for Nietzsche, to transform once again the shape
of what is seen. To use Nietzsche's texts "to see whether they inspire us to
say anything interesting, to reduce them to mere means in a free-association
game," once again, is not only not far from the Nietzschean enterprise, but
central to it. Assuredly Nietzsche wants us to say what we have to say; we
cannot do otherwise. 6 Nietzsche's ultimate aim may have been to seduce us
in all manner of ways to do just that. And certainly the Freudian, and most
especially the Nietzschean perspectives should not allow us to scoff at either
the idea of free association or game and the logics, assuredly of a different
sort, which are attached to them.
I would like to take a middle road. Theory, in this work, does attempt
to get beyond the truth-oriented texts and methods of traditional philosophy,
but from a perspective at least twice removed. I go to Nietzsche's texts in
an attempt to see him looking at the problem of language. But this is always,
as Nietzsche's perspectivism reminds us, my looking at his looking, and in
this sense, his text will assuredly produce in me something of my own. It is
not exactly a free association or a game because a logic is applied and an
attempt is made to take my looking as "seriously" as possible. I take the
stance of the genealogist, who is primarily a documentarian. The project, in
Nietzsche's words, "is to traverse the enormous distant, and so well hidden
land as it actually existed, has actually been lived ... as though with new
eyes." 7
On the surface the job of the genealogist is not to act as an original
voice, a creator and shaper, rather it is to decipher a hieroglyphics, to practice
an art of exegesis, exegesis in Nietzsche's sense of it as rumination. Rumination
is a slow, repetitive, grey activity. Thus, in discovering Nietzsche's beginning
theory of language I work with documents in an effort to see Nietzsche
seeing, and to make his seeing available to others. Yet inevitably something of
those elements of game and free-association will have their effect. Again,
Foucault's words may come to offer an addendum to what I am attempting
to say about the orientation of my method in this work. He characterizes the
"truth analysts" in the following way.
By analysing the truth of propositions and the relations that unite them,
one can define a field of logical noncontradiction: one will then discover a

6 Nietzsche makes this clear in many places. See, for example "On the Prejudices of Philoso-
phers" in Beyond Good and Evil, 6, where Nietzsche attributes the productions of philosophers
more to the prompting of the instincts, to drives other than "the knowledge drive," and
more as "personal confessions of their authors and a kind of involuntary and unconscious
memoir," than to the production of objective conscious thinking.
7 Nietzsche, GM 21, KSA 5: 254.
 Theory and Method 5

systematicity; one will rise from the visible body of sentences to that pure,
ideal architecture that the ambiguities of grammar, and the overloading of
words with meanings have probably concealed as much as expressed.

Foucault then suggests an alternative:

But one can adopt the contrary course, and, by following the thread of
analogies and symbols, rediscover a thematic that is more imaginary than
discursive, more affective than rational, and less close to the concept than
to desire; its force animates the most opposed figures, but only to melt them
at once into a slowly transformable unity; what one then discovers is a
plastic continuity, the movement of a meaning that is embodied in various
representations, images, and metaphors. 8

In taking a "middle road," I not only intend to bring together such approaches
to reading Nietzsche as the analytical, though non-truth oriented, or the
approach of free association and play, but also to emphasize the dynamics of
exegesis at work not only in my own method, but especially in Nietzsche's
practice of reading and writing. The middle road is intended to be just that,
travelling in the middle of texts, the texts of Nietzsche, and the texts which
contributed to their genesis. The "event" of reading a text, or any other act
of exegesis, according to Nietzsche, is our essential act. Exegesis "occurs
when a group of phenomena are selected and united by an interpreting being." 9
Jaspers quotes Nietzsche: "Perhaps it is scarcely possible ... to read a text as
text, without permitting any interpretation to commingle with it." 10 Perhaps
it is even true that "all our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic
commentary on an unknown and possibly unknowable but felt text. ... After
all, what are our experiences? Much more that which we read into them than
what they contain!"11
Thus, the word theory as it is used here, in the sense of a regulated
transformation, implies a process of "looking at" in the sense of exegesis, in
its sense as rumination, and again in its sense as an interpreting activity, both
rigorous and fantastical at the same time.
How do I propose to trace the single thread of Nietzsche's theory of
language in a manner which bridges the gaps mentioned, which attempts to
be as "faithful" as possible to Nietzsche's optics of language, while retaining
a critical distance? By bringing to my aid Nietzsche's own method of pursuing
such circuitous pathways, one already mentioned above — the method of
genealogy. By contrasting and blending the genealogical and critical aspects

8 Foucault, A 1 4 9 - 5 0 .
9 Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche, trans. Charles Wallraff and Frederick Schmitz, Chicago: Henry
Regnery, Co., 1965. JN 288.
10 Ibid., JN 289.
11 Ibid., JN 290.
6 Introduction

of my study. Genealogical study concerns "the effective formation of dis-

course, whether within the limits of control, or outside of them," in other
words, genealogical analysis follows the formation of discourse, at once
scattered, discontinuous and regular. Criticism "analyses the process of rare-
faction, consolidation and unification in discourse.'" 2
The genealogical method does not lend itself to a neat breaking up of
Nietzsche's thinking into major periods, and the placing of them under
structuring labels. This approach is a vestige of historical simplification. To
some extent, aside from the prejudice of historical thinking, this has been a
result of the state and availability of Nietzsche's texts themselves. Now,
however, with the publication of the new Colli-Montinari Critical Edition of
Nietzsche's works, as Breazeale says: "One of the most fertile fields of
Nietzsche research is opened up. This concerns the evolution and development
of Nietzsche's thought, as well as the influences upon and sources of the
same." 13
In retracing the genealogy of Nietzsche's theory of language, I follow
the evolution of an area of thought as it develops out of specific influences
and transformations of those influences. However, I wish to emphasize that
evolution or development in my genealogical method, as opposed to a strictly
historical development of "logical" sequence and structuring labels, is applied
in Nietzsche's sense of it where:
The "evolution" of a thing, a custom, an organ is by no means its progressus
toward a goal, even less a logical progressus by the shortest route and with
the smallest expenditure of force — but a succession of more or less
profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subduing, plus
the resistances they encounter, the attempts at transformation for the purpose
of defense and reaction, and the results of successful counteractions. The
form is fluid, but the "meaning" is even more so.14

It seems reasonable to agree that the more of Nietzsche's "text" which is

made available to us in its chronological completeness, the more able we are
to assess the strands of his thinking. Rather than neat breaks in his thinking,
the painstaking work of genealogical analysis reveals a winding, circuitous
path, a forward and backwards movement, with however, enough consist-
encies, common terms, and reformulations of terms to allow an effective
direction to emerge. In a genealogical sense,
the entire history of a "thing", an organ, a custom can in this way be a
continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations and adaptations whose

12 Foucault, A 233.
13 Daniel Breazeale, "We Alexandrians," in International Studies in Philosophy, Binghamton: State
University of New York, XV/2, 1983. WA 50.
14 Nietzsche, GM 7 7 - 7 8 , KSA 5: 3 1 4 - 1 5 .
 Theory and Method 7

causes d o not even have to be related to one another but, on the contrary,
in some cases succeed and alternate with one another in a purely chance
fashion. 1 5

Nietzsche's theory of language consists of a transforming and recombining

of elements, experimentation, creation of forms and sloughing off of forms.
Nietzsche often grows a new skin over which the old simultaneously begins
to loosen, die, and fall off. Sometimes Nietzsche clings to the old skin long
after it has lost value for him. Often it will seem as if I have gone out of the
way of the thread of language which we are following, but only to find the
thread again in more significance.
In offering a genealogical exegesis of Nietzsche's beginning texts on
language this work is also largely concerned with the texts of others and the
manner in which these texts come to be integrated into Nietzsche's own text
on language. Nietzsche was undoubtedly a valuable and unique thinker, but
he was also very much a product of his times. I attempt to discover under
what conditions Nietzsche devised his beginning theory of language and
what value it possessed for him. It is in the small and painstaking work with
the texts of others, that Nietzsche begins, through the process of rarefaction,
consolidation, and unification, to form what is finally "his own." The ge-
nealogical method attempts to pull together the scattered, regular and dis-
continuous elements which result in the effective formation of Nietzsche's
beginning discourse on language. I am putting into practice Nietzsche's
method of tracing "conceptual transformations" ("Begriffs- Verwandlungen")
and phases in such conceptual transformations.16 Therefore, in treating influ-
ences upon Nietzsche's beginning theory of language, the coincidence and
interchange of texts is played out in some detail. To the genealogical exegete
this offers the coincidence and juxtapositioning of documents upon which
the practice of rumination can be applied. It is part of my purpose to allow
a play of interactions between texts to arise in the reader, in conjunction with
or independent of my interpretations. Certainly no attempt will succeed in
following Nietzsche's thinking about language and the influences upon this
thinking as completely and variously as it in all probability occurred. I
indicate some of the influences which helped to form Nietzsche's beginning
theory of language, but it can also be said with certainty that there must
have been others as well.
What the reader will confront, then, is in the nature of a nodal procedure
of genealogical method. An attempt is made to provide a general on-going
background, upon which moments in Nietzsche's thinking about language,

15 Ibid., GM 77, K S A 5: 314.

16 Ibid., GM 27, KSA 5: 261 and GM 29, KSA 5: 263.
8 Introduction

in the context of influences upon that thinking, are enlarged upon, opened
up, and played out in detail, in order to suggest certain, but far from all,
relations moving between nodes. I will focus primarily on ideas surrounding
and relating to the role of language in major influences upon Nietzsche as
they seem important to him. The manner in which this is done is the following:
what I present of Schopenhauer, Kant, Hartmann, Gerber, and other sources
of influence should be read as telescoped versions of their thinking seen from
the perspective of what we eventually come to understand as Nietzsche's
theory of language. To put it simply, I take Nietzsche's view of language,
from his discourse at a later time, primarily his 1873 unpublished essay "Über
Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne" ("On Truth and Lies in a
Nonmoral Sense"), and then look back at Schopenhauer, for example, to see
what fits it, which ideas could have served to influence it. What is revealed
is a sort of echo in advance, which allows us to trace a probable path of
genealogical development. Of course, proceeding in this manner puts us in
a position of advantage which Nietzsche himself did not have, that of knowing
at the beginning approximately where his theory of language was heading.
However, this in no way detracts from the effectiveness of the genealogical
method, in fact, such a genealogical method presupposes it.
To give the reader an indication of the nodal procedure of my analysis,
I mention the progress of just two such nodes, of which at least twelve are
offered. A brief description of each genealogical node is given in Appendix
B.l. The procedure of nodes results in a cumulative effect, so that, what may
appear as arbitrary and unnecessary detail at the beginning of the work comes
to be used and reused throughout the work; detail, which, by the end, proves
itself important to the overall economy of the genealogical method.
The first nodal example, revolving around the progression in Nietzsche's
thinking with regard to language, is the node of relations which pertains to
the sensory perception of sight, its translation into images, and projection of
images. When, in discussing Schopenhauer's theory of language, the reader
finds a long passage on the sense of sight, a first piece in the overall node
arises, which surfaces again in Lange's discussion of sight as an example of
sensory synthesis and the question of projection of images. The node again
surfaces in the discussion of images of representation as opposed to things
in themselves, or Schopenhauer's will, or Hartmann's unconscious. Eventually
Nietzsche develops his worldview in Anschauung which, in one of its aspects,
is nothing less than a whole theoretics of viewing, images, and projection of
images. The theoretics of language as arising out of a metaphorical imaging
process is then discussed in light of "On Truth and Lies" and the influence
of Gustav Gerber's Language as Art.
 Theory and Method 9

A second example of the genealogical nodal procedure centers around

Nietzsche's interest in and criticism of the basic grammatical forms of subject
and predicate. Nietzsche works with this node of thought again and again,
each time under a new influence and in a new context. He first meets with
the problem in Schopenhauer and Schopenhauer's criticism of Kant. Again,
in Hartmann and Lange. So ingrained does the subject predicate node become
for Nietzsche, that he eventually turns it into use as a major weapon of
criticism against Schopenhauer. Finally, in the worldview in Anschauung,
Nietzsche's cumulative thought about the subject predicate relationship comes
to ground his first stated non-identity of the subject and the purely represen-
tational nature of any predicates attached to such a non-identity. The subject
predicate relationship is also at the basis of Nietzsche's view that appearance
is all there is and that artistic or rhetorical language is the only effective, but
not true, means of expressing it.
It is important to note that these nodes with which Nietzsche is working
in his beginning theory of language do not end with his worldview in
Anschauung or his essay "On Truth and Lies." They continue to be reformed
and worked with, in some cases, throughout his philosophical thinking. In
my use of the genealogical nodal method a roughly chronological order is
preserved. However, chronology is not strictly maintained in the interests of
providing a synchronic aspect to the study. A chronology of the period
studied is provided in Appendix B.2. An overall logical order of thought is
maintained, but does not always prevail. The genealogical nodal method used
is almost the technique of pointillism in which, when one backs up and takes
the totality of points into view, each of which is uniquely necessary, something
of a whole picture presents itself.
Now to address my second question: Why language? First, because
language has become one of the central and most widely developed objects
of thought in the twentieth century. Language has become a study in itself,
along with the recognition of its structuring effects on all fields of endeavor.
In 1869 Eduard von Hartmann wrote, and Nietzsche read, in his Philosophie
des Unbewussten (Philosophy of the Unconscious)·.
Still to this day there is no philosophy of language, for what goes by that name
is altogether fragmentary, and what is usually offered as such are pretentious
appeals to human instinct, which afford no explanation at all ... yet philos-
ophy, the farther it has progressed, has ever more clearly perceived that the
understanding of one's own thinking is the first task, and that this is
admirably furthered by raising the spiritual treasures which are buried in
the language of the discoverer.17

17 Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious, 3 vols., trans. William Chatterton
Coupland, London: Trübner and Co., 1884. In all cases reference to the English translation
is followed by reference to the German Philosophie des Unbewussten, Berlin, 1869. PU 1: 295,
PUG 2 2 8 - 2 9 .
10 Introduction

Since then philosophies of language have become abundant and respectable,

if not necessary as precondition to philosophy in general, to understanding
of human forms of interaction through communication and institutions. The
study of language and discourse has brought about reevaluations of such
ordering principles as history, mythology, psychology, and philosophy. The
effects of research in such areas as linguistics, semantics, and semiotics are
restructuring most others, literary criticism, psychology, education, social
patterning and communications interaction. Language has been turned upon
itself from a critical aspect. Such staples of Western thought as subject and
object, logic, truth, and knowledge, are being reexamined from a new
perspective of language which finds that language is not static, that meanings
change, that unconscious drives and motivations contribute to the formation
of and use of language often over and above that of rational thinking.
Secondly, it is my aim to find Nietzsche's place within this series of events
in which language has, as Foucault writes, "returned into the field of thought
directly and in its own right." I am very much in sympathy with Foucault
who gives Nietzsche credit for "opening up" the space wherein language has
now become so central, in calling Nietzsche "the first to connect the philo-
sophical task with a radical reflection upon language." 1 8 However, a note of
criticism is needed here. It is surprising that Foucault, who, as we saw above,
champions the nonrelevance of originality or priority of the authors of texts,
but chooses to study, rather, the regularity of discourse-objects, should after
all give Nietzsche priority here. It appears to be true that Nietzsche deserves
much of this credit, however, my study demonstrates that Nietzsche's theory
of language is itself largely the product of a "regulated transformation" of
the texts of others.
Much has been written in the last fifteen years or so about Nietzsche's
unique relation to language, 19 usually in connection with what is currently

18Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. R. D. Laing, New York: Random House, 1973.
OT 305.
" See, for example: Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Phtlospher, New York: Macmillan Co., 1965;
Paul de Man, "Rhetoric of Tropes" and "Rhetoric of Persuasion," Allegories of Reading, New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1979; Jacques Derrida, Eperons, Paris: Flammarion, 1976;
Ruediger H. Grimm, Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1977; Sarah
Kofmann, Nietzsche et la metaphor, Paris: Payot, 1972; Philippe, Lacoue-Labarthe, "Le detour"
and "La fable," Le sujet de la philosophic, Paris: Aubier—Flammarion, 1979; Alexander
Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, London: Harvard University Press, 1985; Bernard
Pautrat, Versions du soleil: Figures et systeme de Nietzsche, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971; Jean-
Michel Rey, L!enjeu des signes, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971; J. P. Stern, A Study of Nietzsche,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979; Tracy Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the
Politics of Transfiguration, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975; Richard Schacht,
Nietzsche, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983; and Gerold Ungeheuer, "Nietzsche über
Sprache und Sprechen, Über Wahrheit und Traum," Nietzsche Studien, 12, 1983.
 The Beginnings of Nietzsche's Theory of Language: 1863 — 1873 11

called his "theory of knowledge." Such articles and books have dealt with
various aspects of Nietzsche's thinking about language: his ideas on rhetoric
and language, genealogy (as a tracing of the formation of ideas and cultures
upon the basis of linguistic transformations), the disassociation of language
as a system of signs which does not correspond to a reality outside of itself,
and language as dealing always and only with a fiction of the world. If
Nietzsche's ideas about language are having an effect on our thinking today,
or at least run concurrently with that thinking, then this work constitutes an
attempt to follow the genesis and beginning development of those ideas.

The Beginnings of Nietzsche's Theory of Language: 1863— 1873

The early years in Nietzsche's thinking, Hollingdale writes, "will seem a

dull one unless you look beneath the surface." 20 In 1962 Karl Schlechta and
Anni Anders published a book about this period entitled Friedrich Nietzsche:
Von den verborgenen Anfängen seines Philosophierens (Friedrich Nietzsche: The
Hidden Beginnings of his Philosophising). Aside from the obvious lack of access
to many of Nietzsche's texts of this period until quite recently, which led
Schlechta and Anders to characterize this period as "hidden," there exists in
the texts themselves evidence that to talk of a surface and a beneath, of
something hidden is a very appropriate description. Again, Hollingdale writes:
"Ostensibly Nietzsche was playing a secondary role in his own life: he was a
'follower' of Schopenhauer and Wagner; under the surface, however, there
was an intense conflict going on between these dominating influences and
all those influences which resisted such domination."21 Nietzsche, himself,
characterizes this period in his second Preface to Human All Too Human II,
written in 1886, as a time when it was necessary to hold what was closest to
him secret.
When, in the third Untimely Meditation, I went on to give expression to my
reverence for my first and only educator, the great Arthur Schopenhauer. ...
[I] already 'believed in nothing anymore,' as the people put it, not even in
Schopenhauer: just at that time I produced an essay I have refrained from
publishing (ein geheim gehaltenes Schriftstück) "On Truth and Lies in a Non-
moral Sense." ... Even my festive victory address in honour of Richard
Wagner on the occasion of his celebration of victory at Beyreuth in 1876
... a work wearing the strongest appearance of being 'up to the minute', was
in its background an act of homage and gratitude to a piece of my own
past ... and in fact a liberation, a farewell.22

20 R. J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. HN 51.

21 Ibid.
22 Nietzsche, MA 2: 2, KSA 2: 370.
12 Introduction

Why was Nietzsche in the position of leading an essentially double life at

this time? That of the young, idealistic, yet critical professor of philology
who made a stir with The Untimely Meditations and The Birth of Tragedy, with
that of, as he calls himself, a skeptic and critic, one who "did not believe in
a blessed thing," one who "hid away" those thoughts closest to him?
Part of the answer to this question, is simply that Nietzsche was doing
so much simultaneously. Many of his pursuits at the time were contradictory.
And it appears as if he could not or did not wish to give up a part of them
to concentrate on but a few. To follow the results of this straining of capacities
and influences is fascinating. Nietzsche was a disciple of Schopenhauer, yet
a subterranean critic of Schopenhauer. He became professor of philology at
the early age of 24, and was soon writing notes very critical of philology.
His real avocation, even at this time, was philosophy. The outline and many
pages of notes for a dissertation in philosophy were written in 1867 — 68 with
the title "Über den Begriff des Organischen seit Kant" ("Concerning the
Concept of the Organic Since Kant"). Although Nietzsche eventually used
his prize winning essay "De fontibus Laertee Diogenis" ("Concerning the
Sources of Laertius Diogenes") as his dissertation, this other philosophical
excursion into teleological questions was apparently a serious contender as a
dissertation topic in his mind. He was a social and cultural critic of modern
Germany as his Untimely Meditations were to show. Thus, he lived in two
worlds, that of ancient Greece and of modern Germany. He was also early
drawn to the study of the natural and physical sciences. The most influential
early reading was F. A. Lange's Geschichte des Materialismus (History of Mate-
rialism ), which Nietzsche praised highly and to which he returned again and
again. And, of course, Nietzsche was a "Wagnerian," but also a secret critic
of Wagner. These competing facts and tendencies in the young professor
Nietzsche resulted in work of the most interesting kind. Because he could
not give up his love of the Greeks, of philosophy, of music, or of the natural
sciences, he attempted, during these early years, to combine them in a grand
plan which Schlechta and Anders point to and describe in some detail using
plans and notes of Nietzsche's from the years 1872 and 1873. In this plan:

The exemplary meaning of the Pre-Platonic philosophers, the anthropo-

morphic transferences, "Truth and Illusion," necessity of illusion, the rela-
tionship of philosophy and science, the relationship of philosophy and culture
(art); all of these themes have their place. Through the inclusion of modern
philosophy (Kant and Schopenhauer) the whole receives its topical impor-
tance.23

21 Karl Schlechta and Anni Anders, Friedrich Nietzsche: Von den verborgenen Anfängen seines
Philosophierens, Stuttgart: Bad Cannstatt, 1962. VAP 85 — 86.
 The Beginnings of Nietzsche's Theory of Language: 1863 — 1873 13

N i e t z s c h e ' s planned title for this c o m p r e h e n s i v e w o r k w a s " D i e P h i l o s o p h e n

des tragischen Zeitalters" ( " T h e P h i l o s o p h e r s o f the Tragic A g e " ) . 2 4 In the
S u m m e r o f 1872 N i e t z s c h e writes, o f these plans, that they s h o u l d "deal w i t h
The Birth of Tragedy f r o m another side." A n d , that it s h o u l d "receive its
c o n f i r m a t i o n f r o m the p h i l o s o p h y o f its contemporaries." 2 5 N i e t z s c h e ' s plans
for such an ambitious u n d e r t a k i n g were never realized, but the n o t e s and
essays w h i c h c o m e as a result o f this possibility constitute a w h o l e stream o f
t h i n k i n g , a Gegenstück, a geheimgehaltenes set o f texts w h i c h N i e t z s c h e did not
c h o o s e to publish. T h e thread o f l a n g u a g e can be f o l l o w e d profitably t h r o u g h -
o u t as a perspective f r o m w h i c h to draw these c o m p e t i n g interests together. 2 6
In his "Attempt at a Self Criticism" o f The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche
w r o t e o f this early period:
H o w I regret now that in those days I still lacked the courage (or immod-
esty?) to permit myself in every way an individual language of my own for
such individual views and hazards — and that instead I tried laboriously to
express by means of Schopenhauerian and Kantian formulas strange and
new valuations which were basically at odds with Kant's and Schopenhauer's
spirit and taste!27

M y genealogical analysis o f N i e t z s c h e ' s b e g i n n i n g theory o f l a n g u a g e offers

a basis for and direction t o the p e r i o d o f N i e t z s c h e ' s early t h i n k i n g to w h i c h
h e refers above. It is c h a l l e n g i n g t o separate N i e t z s c h e ' s t h i n k i n g f r o m that
o f his influences, to separate o n e concern o f his o w n f r o m another —
s o m e t h i n g w h i c h , as he admits a b o v e , he c o u l d h i m s e l f n o t d o adequately
f o r a time. T h e result o f this p r o c e s s will be t o demonstrate, that t o an extent,
w h i c h N i e t z s c h e h i m s e l f w a s apparently unaware at the time, he did h a v e a
l a n g u a g e o f his o w n , d e s p i t e the truth o f his claim that he o f t e n clothed it

24
The notes which Nietzsche gathered under the planned title "Die Philosophen des tragischen
Zeitalters" (which can be found in KSA 1: 800—872), translated into English by Marianne
Cowan in 1962 with the title Philosophy in (he Tragic Age of the Creeks, Chicago: Henry
Regnery Co., 1962, represents only a part of the overall plan which Nietzsche had in mind.
For a discussion of the details of the larger plan, see especially pages 77—99 of VAP.
25
Schlechta and Anders, VAP 7 9 - 8 0 .
26
Nietzsche's thinking about language during this early period, the natural and physical sciences,
the modern philosophers, etc. was often being thought with reference to the Greeks and his
philological and philosophical studies of them. No attempt is made in this work to connect
Nietzsche's early theory of language, as I find it, with the Greeks, except where necessary.
Nevertheless, this does not detract significantly from what I have to offer because my
research indicates that the theory of language originates in his modern influences and may
at most have been confirmed or prefigured, here or there, in the ancients. It is also clear
that Nietzsche's readings in modern philosophy, and the natural and physical sciences were
often used as a basis from which to evaluate, and reevaluate, his thinking about philological
matters. Were someone with the expertise in Greek philology to attempt such research into
Nietzsche's philological work, it is certainly possible that another dimension could be added
to what I offer with regard to Nietzsche's beginning theory of language.
27
Nietzsche, GT 24, KSA 1:19.
14 Introduction

in the terminology of others, and not only that he had a language of his
own, but also a very definite theory about language. My genealogical nodal
method will open up for the reader Nietzsche's statement that he "tried
laboriously to express by means of Schopenhauerian and Kantian formulas
strange and new valuations which were basically at odds with Kant's and
Schopenhauer's spirit and taste." It will open up this statement by showing
where Nietzsche does exactly what he claims, while providing a close look
at the developing "new valuations" which do operate in a circle of thought
whose direction diverges fundamentally from that of Schopenhauer and Kant.
And my study reveals that these new valuations were strongly in place before
the publication of The Birth of Tragedy. Part of Nietzsche's failure to permit
himself a language of his own in The Birth of Tragedy was his new allegiance
to Wagner, which in his mind entailed a continuing allegiance to Schopen-
hauer, one which, was for the most part already overcome. It is precisely
because underneath, in his "secret" self that Nietzsche develops a theory of
language and resulting worldview, that after 1876, he is strong enough to
choose to let go of Schopenhauer, Wagner, and those aspects of philology of
which he was highly critical.

The Texts

In this work I translate and interpret several texts written by Nietzsche

between 1863 and 1870/71 with the intention of retracing his development
of a beginning theory of language. I take the most central of these texts, a
fragment written in 1869/70 entitled "Vom Ursprung der Sprache" ("On the
Origins of Language"), and offer a thorough exegesis of it. While "Origins"
is the major text interpreted throughout and returned to again and again, I
examine the various veins of thought represented by the other texts inter-
preted which feed into my reading of this text. These consist of Nietzsche's
own texts and the texts of major influences contributing significantly to my
exegesis.
I go back to Nietzsche's reading of Schopenhauer beginning in 1865 and
to his gleaning of an understanding of Kant. Nietzsche's relationship to
Schopenhauer, especially his criticism of and the specific elements of his slow
and considered breaking away from the influence of Schopenhauer's thinking,
which took place under the surface of his continually avowed discipleship, is
presented in detail.
The importance of the influence of Eduard von Hartmann, is indicated
in conjunction with my examination of Kant and Schopenhauer. I introduce,
in great detail, the progress of this influence and demonstrate to what an
 The Texts 15

extent Nietzsche's thinking begins with a full appreciation of Hartmann's

unconscious.
After having based Nietzsche's first forms of language theory in Scho-
penhauer, Kant, and Hartmann, I examine the great influence which Lange's
book Geschichte des Materialismus (History of Materialism) had upon Nietzsche's
perception of Kant and Schopenhauer, and how it prepared some of the
ground for his further interest in Hartmann, and in the natural and physical
sciences. My research integrates into its basic framework specific discussions
of the importance of the natural and physical sciences to the evolution of
Nietzsche's thinking about language.
Prompted by his reading of Lange, in 1867/68, Nietzsche writes two texts
in the form of notes. The first of these texts is a criticism of Schopenhauer
entitled "Zu Schopenhauer" ("On Schopenhauer"). During the same period,
Nietzsche also penned a copious set of notes for a planned dissertation topic
to have been entitled "Über den Begriff des Organischen seit Kant" ("Con-
cerning the Concept of the Organic Since Kant"), which is found in
Nietzsche's notes under the heading "Zur Teleologie" ("On Teleology"). 28
A thorough examination of these two texts, taken in conjunction with Lange's
and Hartmann's influences, as they relate to "On the Origins of Language"
allow a rich understanding of the complex of thought material working its
effects in the young Nietzsche's thinking with regard to language and
introduces a new dimension to understanding Lange's influence on Nietzsche.
In 1870/71, during the period when Nietzsche is beginning sketches for
The Birth of Tragedy, he again, writes two sets of notes of interest to my
study, notes, most of which were not included in that work. In these notes,
which I have drawn together upon the basis of their similar ideational content,
and to which I have given the title " Anschauung Notes," I maintain, Nietzsche
fashioned his own first significant philosophic worldview, one which grows
directly out of all I will have discussed up to that point. 29 It is a worldview
which Nietzsche had already sketched out very briefly in some notes from
1863, long before his reading of Schopenhauer, Kant, Hartmann, and Lange,
influences which to a large extent, offered Nietzsche the tools to work his
early intuitions into a considered worldview. 30 The gathering together and
interpretation into a worldview of the "Anschauung Notes" presents a model

28 "Zur Teleologie," "Zu Schopenhauer," and "Vom Ursprung der Sprache," are not included
either in the Karl Schlechta, nor in the new Colli—Montinari Studienausgabe of Nietzsche's
works. I have used the BAW 3 version of "Zu Schopenhauer," 352—361, and "Zur
Teleologie," 371 — 394, and the MusA 5 version of "Vom Ursprung der Sprache," 467—470.
29 These notes are reproduced in K S A 7. Additional notes, which I could not find in the K S A
Edition, I have taken from the MusA 3 Edition, 336—37.
30 These 1863 notes can be found in BAW 2: 2 5 5 - 2 5 7 .
16 Introduction

which allows the unifying elements of diverse activities in the early years of
Nietzsche's thinking to be discovered. It creates a context for the further
elaboration of Nietzsche's thinking about language and music and especially
for a very fruitful reinterpretation of The Birth of Tragedy. The worldview in
Anschauung is compared with specific elements of Schopenhauer's thinking
and yields a thorough and interesting contrast between Nietzsche's own ideas
as they reflect his breaking away from Schopenhauer before the publication
of The Birth of Tragedy. This comparison with Schopenhauer also demonstrates
how early in his thinking Nietzsche is anticipating the major elements of his
mature philosophy.
Nietzsche's beginning theory of language, as developed out of the analysis
of these texts and influences, is then summarized in light of Nietzsche's notes
for a course on "Rhetoric" and his unpublished essay "On Truth and Lies"
and the influence of Gustav Gerber's Language as Art?x My discussion reveals
that, although Nietzsche adopts Gerber's tropological framework as a work-
ing hypothesis for longstanding questions of his own, the major assumptions
of Gerber's theory of language had already been worked out independently
by Nietzsche before he reads Gerber in the fall of 1872.

31 Gerber's influence upon Nietzsche's notes for a course on "Rhetoric" and "On Truth and
Lies" has only recently been established. See my chapter 14.
 Chapter One
Eduard von Hartmann and the Unconscious

In Nietzsche's short fragment entitled "On the Origins of Language,"

written in 1869/70, the text reads: "Every conscious thinking first possible
with the help of language," and "something expedient can be without
consciousness."1 These two statements, when taken together, form the fun-
damental basis of Nietzsche's theorking about language. Since, as Nietzsche
holds, language first makes human conscious thinking possible, he agrees
with Schelling, whom he quotes in this context:
Since without language there could be nothing philosophical, and in general
no human consciousness is thinkable, the foundation of language cannot lie
in consciousness. Yet, the deeper we look into it, the more surely it is
discovered, that its depth far exceeds that of the most conscious productions.
It is with language as it is with organic beings; we think we see them come
blindly into existence and at the same time, cannot deny the unfathomable
intentionality of their formation even in the smallest detail. 2

At the head of his fragment on the origins of language, Nietzsche writes and
underlines the follwing: "Language is neither the conscious work of individuals nor
of a majority."1'
If language does not find its origins in consciousness, one can certainly
assert, following Nietzsche, that language represents the method of its func-
tioning, the condition upon which consciousness rests. Human consciousness
is what it is at any given point in time and space owing to the particular
shape of language which structures it. However, Nietzsche emphasizes re-
peatedly in his early writings about language that consciousness and its
structuring method — language — no matter how intricately developed,

' "On the Origins of Language" (" Vom Ursprung der Sprache") was used by Nietzsche as the
introduction to a course on Latin grammar taught in 1869/70, first published in the appendix
of Volume II of the Philologica by Kröner (GA XIX: 385—387). In the case of my translations
of Nietzsche's works, reference is made to the page number of the full translation provided
in Appendix A. The German text follows each translation in Appendix A. Nietzsche, US 222
and 224.
2 Ibid., 224. Quoted by Nietzsche from Hartmann, PUG 227. Hartmann takes the quote from

Schilling's "Philosophie der Mythologie," Sämmtliche Werks, Erster Band, Stuttgart:

J. G. Cotta'scher Verlag, 1856, PM 52.
1 Ibid., 222.
18 I. Eduard von Hartmann and the Unconscious

remain inadequate for an accurate perception and expression of the world,

in fact, that it may function as a detriment to its realization.
In November 1868 Eduard von Hartmann's book Philosophy of the Uncon-
scious, with the subtitle "Speculative results according to the inductive method
of physical science," was published. In a letter to Gersdorff of August 4,
1869, Nietzsche writes: "An important book for you is 'Hartmann's Philos-
ophy of the Unconscious,' in spite of the dishonesty of the author." 4 On
November 5, 1869 Erwin Rohde writes to Nietzsche:
Have you read E. v. Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious? He plunders
Schopenhauer while at the same time insulting him: posits the will, as if he
had birthed it himself, with two blind eyes, an unconscious intellect, through
which the whole becomes a kind of mole. Long terrible deserts of scholastic
emptiness run through the book; however, if one can eventually conquer
one's annoyance with the insolence against Schopenhauer, one reads much
with interest. The so called method of physical science used in the book is
stupid.5

Nietzsche, was, of course, already reading Hartmann's book and had rec-
ommended it to Gersdorff with the same qualifications of "dishonesty of the
author." He replied to Rohde on November 11: "About Hartmann, I join
with you in opinion and expression. However, I read him much, because he
has the most beautiful knowledge and off and on knows how to strongly
harmonize with the old Nornen-song of accursed existence." 6 Nietzsche is
clearly taken with the book in spite of its disservice to his declared mentor,
Schopenhauer.
Why make much of Nietzsche's reading of Hartmann, and why here at
the beginning of my discussion of his theory of language? Because the majority
of ideas which Nietzsche promotes in his fragment "On the Origins of
Language" come directly from Hartmann's chapter "Das Unbewusste in der
Entstehung der Sprache" ("The Unconscious in the Origins of Language"). One
could further counter: why make much of this? A fragment of writing
influenced by a current reading is not an unusual thing. True; however, my
study of Nietzsche's beginning theory of language will demonstrate that
Hartmann not only provided some interesting ideas on the origin of language
for the young Nietzsche, but that he filled a major gap in Nietzsche's thinking
about language, one which had been opened up, but not satisfactorily filled,
through his readings in Kant and Schopenhauer. Not only does Hartmann
fill this gap, but he offers, what must have been for Nietzsche convincing,

4 Nietzsche, KSB 3: 36.

5 Alwin Mittasch, Friedrich Nietzsche als Naturphilosoph, Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1952.
FNN 3 0 8 - 0 9 .
6 Nietzsche, KSB 3: 73.
 I. Eduard von Hartmann and the Unconscious 19

explanations as to why and where Schopenhauer and Kant fail to close it.
We will find, in what follows, that Hartmann's influence, coming as it did,
at a time to build upon Kant and Schopenhauer, and in ways already
preshadowed by Nietzsche's own thinking about and criticism of these
philosophers, becomes a major influence for him. In his book, Nietzsche als
Natur philo soph, Mittasch writes: "How far, Nietzsche's idea of the unconscious
was influenced by Schelling, Schopenhauer, Carus, and E. v. Hartmann, can
remain undiscussed." 7 I will make significant inroads in opening up this
question for discussion.
Hartmann opens his chapter "The Unconscious in the Origins of Lan-
guage" with the quote from Schelling which Nietzsche uses in his fragment,
and which I quoted above. Hartmann writes, in view of this prompting from
Schelling, that "all conscious human thought is only possible by the help of
language." The position which Hartmann states very clearly, and which
Nietzsche makes his own is that:
Without language, or with a merely animal vocal language devoid of
grammatical forms, a thinking so acute that the marvellously profound
organism of universally identical fundamental forms could emerge as its
conscious product, is, therefore, quite inexplicable. Rather, all progress in
the development of language will be the first condition of progress in the
elaboration of conscious thought, not its consequence ... 8
Nietzsche converts this thought into the following: "Every conscious thinking
first possible with the help of language. Such an ingenious thinking com-
pletely impossible with a merely animalistic sound-language; the wonderful
pensive organism." 9 To the question, then, what form of action of the human
mind has produced language? Hartmann answers: unconscious instinct. 10 The

7 Mittasch, FNN 331.

8 Hartmann, PU 1: 298, PUG 231. Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious first appeared in
November 1868. It underwent nine editions between 1869 and 1882. It is the English
translation by Coupland of the ninth edition which I use in this work. Between the first and
ninth editions Hartmann revised and expanded his work several times. While the English
translation includes these alterations, I am convinced that Nietzsche's study of Hartmann
between 1869 and 1871 was conducted on the basis of the first or second (1869) edition
based on the dates of the letters quoted above in which he discusses Hartmann. In this
study, then, where Nietzsche is directly concerned, I remain only with what is contained in
these editions. Where it seems relevant to the discussion, 1 append, in notes, references to
the expanded material available in the English translation of the ninth edition. In some cases
material included in the first two editions is not contained in the English translation. In
those cases I offer my own translation.
9 Nietzsche, US 222.
10 In a later edition of the Philosophy of the Unconscious, Hartmann answers his question: What
form of action of the human mind has produced language? even more specifically: "What
other answer is conceivable to this than that of the unconscious spiritual activity, which with
intuitive correctness acts here in natural instincts, there in intellectual instincts; here in the
individual, there in the cooperative instincts; and everywhere alike, everywhere with infallibile
clairvoyant accuracy answers to the greatness of the need" (PU 1: 300)?
20 I. Eduard von Hartmann and the Unconscious

proposition: an unconscious origination of language as the condition for

conscious operations, is, at the time Nietzsche reads Hartmann, somewhat of
a revolutionary idea. The idea of an unconscious foundation of all human
activity, including that of language and rational thought, was a new and
rather unprecedented perspective. Until approximately the first half of the
nineteenth century and the blossoming of Romanticism, human beings viewed
themselves as rational beings capable of translating their thinking will into
actions effective in a more or less predictable world. Certainly, Schopenhauer
shook these foundations for Nietzsche, with his idea of the irrational will. It
was, to a large extent, precisely the revolutionary nature of Schopenhauer's
thinking that Nietzsche found so appealing. However, even Schopenhauer
stopped short of declaring an unconscious in Hartmann's sense.
In the introduction to The Philosophy of the Unconscious Hartmann traces
the origins of the idea of the unconscious first to Leibniz. He then follows
a trail from Hume to Kant, Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, and then to Schopen-
hauer. The trail broadens into the physical sciences of his time with Herbart
and Fechner, and into the natural sciences with Carus, Wundt, and Helm-
holtz. 11 Each of these contributions to the theory of an unconscious, with
the exception of Carus, who Hartmann credits with a presentation of the idea
of the unconscious in its pure form, are, according to him, more or less
fragmentary and often peripheral to a definite statement of its existence and
effects on human development such as he himself first offers in unified form
in his book. Throughout the ensuing study I will return to the various
contexts in which Nietzsche confronts Hartmann's theory of the unconscious,
not only in its philosophical distinctions, but also as it relates to Nietzsche's
acquaintance with the theories of the physical and natural sciences and the
extent to which both influence his thinking about language. 12

" One of my major objectives is to demonstrate to what an extent Nietzsche's theory of

language depends on his great interest in and reading of the physical and natural sciences.
To my knowledge the only major works to deal with this aspect of Nietzsche's thinking are
Alwin Mittasch, Friedrich Nietzsche als Naturphilosoph, Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1952,
and G. J. Stack, Lange and Nietzsche, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1983. Mittasch's compendium of
Nietzsche's work in the natural and physical sciences is outstanding, however, it should
ideally be seen as a foundation for further extensive research in this area of Nietzsche studies.
See also VAP (1962), which offers valuable information on these aspects of Nietzsche's
thinking. To one extent or another, Nietzsche was familiar with the ideas of each of the men
Hartmann mentions here. Appendix B.3 offers an introduction to each of the names in the
physical and natural sciences mentioned in my work. This is done for two reasons: 1) to
demonstrate the breadth of Nietzsche's interest, and, 2) because these names come into my
discussion again, at a later point.
12
See Appendix B.3 on Hartmann. Nietzsche's relationship to Hartmann is interesting. There
is evidence that Nietzsche often wrote of Hartmann in very unflattering light. If I continue,
for example, the quote from Nietzsche's letter to Erwin Rohde of November 11, 1869 (KS13
3: 73) we find, after Nietzsche's praise of Hartmann, the following: "He is a very fragile
 I. Eduard von Hartmann and the Unconscious 21

and stiff man — with a little spite it seems to me, and here and there also small-minded and
ungrateful. And this is for me a footing in ethics and the ethical judgement of men and
animals." However, as Mittasch wisely notes, Nietzsche uses sharp, but with that all too
sharp words in his ambiguous references to Hartmann. "Already in the Basel years Nietzsche
spoke of 'Schopenhauer's imitator Hartmann (who is really his enemy)' (GA X: 217, [KSA
7: 811]). 'Hartmann and Heine are unconscious ironists; scoundrels against themselves' (GA
X: 283, [KSA 7: 659]). However, 'Hartmann has spirit (Geist)' (GA X: 304, [KSA 7: 740])!"
(FNN 39).
Later (1884) Nietzsche writes a few notes which specifically refer to Hartmann: "What a
poor fate Schopenhauer had. His injustices found their exaggerators (Diihring and Richard
Wagner), his fundamental view of pessimism a Berliner involuntary belittler (Eduard von
Hartmann)" (KSA 11: 161). "Poor Schopenhauer! Eduard von Hartmann cut off the legs
that he walked on, and Richard Wagner also cut off his head" (KSA 11: 153)! "I was in
error at that time: I thought Eduard von Hartmann was a fine, superior head and wag (feiner
überlegener Kopf und Spassvogel), who made fun of the pessimistic dilemma of the age; I found
the discovery of his. "Unconscious" so mischievous, so clever, it appears to me a real
mousetrap for the gloomy and dumb ones (of philosophical dilettantism, as it spreads more
and more over Germany). Now one is determined to assure me that he meant it in earnest:
and one almost forces me to believe it; — should he, however, therefore, cease to be cheering
for me? Should I have to stop laughing when this Arria again and again urges its Paetus,
not to be fearful of the Dolche, I mean of the Hartmannian pessimism? Paete, it calls tenderly,
non doletX Paete, this pessimism does not hurt! Paete, Eduard does not bite! Eduard is full of
consideration, agreeable, human friendly, blue, even friendly to the state, even prussian-blue
— in short Eduard is a maid for all tasks and his pessimism leaves nothing to be desired"
(KSA 11: 532—33)! "There are still many more cheerful things on earth, than the Pessimists
admit: for example, Eduard von Hartmann himself. The Laokoon group, comprised of three
clowns and just as many umbrellas, cheers me not as much as this Eduard 'wrestling' with
his problems" (KSA 11: 232).
It seems clear that Nietzsche had something of an ambiguous relationship to Hartmann's
writings. He is consistent in asserting that Hartmann did not pursue pessimism in the full
sense of the word (i.e., as did Schopenhauer), while at the same time offering a completely
pessimistic point of view. This contradictory stance seems to have been arrived at in that
Nietzsche felt Hartmann was playing at pessimism, while offering the view that pessimism
does not or should not hurt. The whole dynamics, which we find at work in Nietzsche's
references to Hartmann, naming him as unconscious ironist, joker, as perpetrating a sort of
mischievous joke upon his "fellow" pessimists is not primarily derogatory, rather the opposite.
One detects a definite tone of appreciation and admiration for such a source of "cheerfulness."
And Nietzsche makes this perfectly clear in section 9 of "On the Uses and Disadvantages of
History for Life," 1873, to which I turn in Chapter 10.
It is probable that Hartmann's influence did not stop with the period I am reviewing,
although that influence was most likely never as marked as in this early period. Nietzsche
contained in his library two other of Hartmann's major works, the second of which was
very heavily commented upon by Nietzsche in its margins. The two works were: Das
Unbewusste vom Standpunkt der Physiologie und Descenden^theorie, Berlin, 1872, and Phänomenologie
des sittlichen Bewusstseins, Berlin, 1874. (See Oehler, Max. Nietzsche's Bibliothek. Vierzehnte
Jahresausgabe der Gesellschaft der Freunde des Nietzsche-Archivs. Wiesbaden: Lessing-
druckerei, 1942.)
It is also significant that Nietzsche sent a copy of The Birth of Tragedy to Hartmann. See
KSB 3: 310 and 316. It is part of my work to demonstrate to what an extent that book owes
its birth to Nietzsche's work with Hartmann's ideas.
 Chapter Two
Schopenhauer

Nietzsche's theory of language takes its first forms from a working with
and working against the Kantian and Schopenhauerian philosophies, and in
particular from Kant's thing in itself as seen through the filter of Schopen-
hauerian criticism. Kant's revolutionary distinction of the phenomenon from
the thing in itself, based on the proof that between things and us there always
stands the intellect and that on this account they may not be known according
to what they may be in themselves, provides the foundation stone of Scho-
penhauer's philosophy, and subsequently of Nietzsche's early thinking about
language and epistemology.
In "On the Origins of Language" Nietzsche writes: "The deepest philo-
sophical knowledge lies already prepared in language." ("Die tiefsten philo-
sophischen Erkenntnisse liegen schon vorbereitet in der Sprache.") Then he
quotes Kant and at the same time makes reference to a specific discussion in
Schopenhauer's "Kritik der Kantischen Philosophie" ("Criticism of the Kan-
tian Philosophy"): "Kant says: 'a great, perhaps the greatest portion of what
our reason finds to do consists in the analysis of concepts which human
beings already find in themselves'." (" 'Ein grosser Theil, vielleicht der grösste
Theil von dem Geschäfte der Vernunft besteht in Zergliederungen der Be-
griffe, die er (der Mensch) schon in sich vorfindet.'") And then, referring to
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche adds: "One thinks of subject and object, the idea
of judgement is abstracted from grammatical sentences. Out of subject and
predicate come the categories of substance and accident." ("Man denke an
Subjekt und Objekt; der Begriff des Urtheils ist vom grammatischen Satze
abstrahirt. Aus Subjekt und Prädikat wurden die Kategorien von Substanz
und Accidenz.") 1 My discussion will break into Nietzsche's juxtapositioning

1 Nietzsche, US 222. The quote from Kant can be found in The Critique of Pure Reason,
Introduction, Section 3. That this is the Kantian sentence quoted by Nietzsche is corraborated
by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy in their article "Friedrich Nietzsche:
Rhetorique et langage," Poetique, No. 5, 1971. In this article the authors translate into French
and annotate early writings by Nietzsche concerned with rhetoric and language. However,
in the course of my research I have found that Nietzsche does not take the quote directly
from Kant, but rather word for word from Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious and in
so doing repeats Hartmann's misquote of Kant's actual sentence which will be discussed in
chapter 3. Nietzsche himself, provides the Schopenhauerian reference which can be found
in Schopenhauer, WWR h 458, SW 2: 543.
 Language and Representation 23

of these three statements in order to make them the opportunity of briefly

schematizing Schopenhauer's philosophy, from the perspective of the part
language plays in it, while examining its aspects as a reaction against and
departure from Kantian philosophy.
To approach Nietzsche's theory of language from this perspective is
necessary and interesting for several reasons: 1) Nietzsche's theory of lan-
guage, as already mentioned, forms itself to a large extent in agreement with
and through a critique of these philosophies; 2) it provides a specific ground
upon which to clearly delineate Nietzsche's breaking away from Schopen-
hauer, something which still remains to be analyzed in detail and with specific
attention to particular terminology in their theories of language and the roles
they play in their respective epistemologies; 3) it will provide the ground
upon which Nietzsche is able to take such an interest in the natural and
physical sciences, and outline a background of thinking which makes Hart-
mann such an attractive possibility; and 4) it will allow me to demonstrate
how early in his thinking Nietzsche anticipates the major formulations of his
later thinking about language and philosophy in general, and how they are
in their earliest formation not only reactions to Schopenhauer, but also to a
significant degree, reactions to specific Kantian principles.
It is the basic conception of the mind shared by Spinoza and the Empi-
ricists which Kant and subsequently Schopenhauer inherit. The mind is seen
as an entity, immaterial or material, which receives representations of things
in the world, reasons about the perceived representations, and translates
thought about these representations into actions of the body willed by the
mind. Kant and Schopenhauer draw this basic model more into the physical
and empirical sciences, however, the major divisions of the mind, of impres-
sions or images, to reasonable thought, and willed action remain, for the
most part, unchanged. It is with this basic model, with its Kantian and
Schopenhauerian modifications, that we will see Nietzsche working. Scho-
penhauer's philosophy provides a meeting place in which empiricism takes a
role alongside the line of thinking which leads to philosophical idealism. It
is this conjunction of idealism and empiricism around which Nietzsche is
continually fighting his agon during his early years of thinking.

Language and Representation

The most distinguishing element of Schopenhauer's philosophy, which

draws its fundamental inspiration from Kant and the thing in itself, is that it
starts neither from object nor from subject, but from representation, which
contains and presupposes both.
24 II. Schopenhauer

T h e perceived world in space and time, proclaiming itself as nothing but

causality, is perfectly real, and is absolutely what it appears to be; it appears
wholly and without reserve as representation, hanging together according
to the law of causality. This is its empirical reality ... the whole world of
objects is and remains representation, and is for this reason wholly and
forever conditioned by the subject (and his understanding); in other words,
it has transcendental ideality. 2

The subject, or the principium individuationis, has two ways of knowing,

knowledge of perception (or intuitive knowledge) and knowledge abstracted
from perception, that is, rational knowledge. What might exist outside of the
principium individuations, the thing in itself, can never be known (though, later
in my discussion we will find that Schopenhauer does claim to have identified
the essence of the thing in itself under the name of the will). Within
representation, the subject can only know his perceptions, and what he
conceptualizes and thinks about those perceptions, as objects. Thus, repre-
sentation means more precisely — object for the subject. However, the subject
itself is also, necessarily, only object for its knowing consciousness.
Representation of perception is arrived at through the understanding,
which takes the sensation as a datum and applies the law of causality (space
and time), allowing the sensation to be perceived as an effect, thus situating
the object as cause. "All perception is not only of the senses, but of the intellect;
in other words, pure knowledge through the understanding of cause and effect."3 Not
experience first then understanding of cause and effect, but cause and effect
as the conditions for experience. Rational knowledge, which is abstract
consciousness, is the fixing in concepts of reason what has already become
known according to perception. Schopenhauer calls this fixing of concepts
"representations of representations:"
Reflection is necessarily the copy or repetition of the originally presented
world of perception, though a copy of quite a special kind in a completely
heterogeneous material. Concepts, therefore, can quite appropriately be
called representations of representations (Vorstellungen von Vorstellungen). ...
the abstract representation has its whole nature simply and solely in its
relation to another representation. 4

Although the representation of a representation may have its relation to a

concept or abstract representation before it, this cannot, according to Scho-
penhauer, continue ad infinitum, the series of abstractions must end in the last

2 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2 Vols., trans. E. F. J. Payne, New
York: Dover Publications Inc., 1969. Each reference is followed by reference to the German:
Arthur Schopenhauer Sämtliche Werke, Herausgegeben von Julius Frauenstädt, Leipzig: F. A.
Brockhaus, 1891. W W R 1: 15, SW 2: 17.
3 Ibid., W W R 1: 13, SW 2: 15.
4 Ibid., W W R 1: 4 0 - 4 1 , SW 2: 4 8 - 4 9 .
 Language and Representation 25

analysis with a concept which has its basis in knowledge of perception. For
Schopenhauer, the whole world of reflection rests on the world of perception
as its precondition.
Schopenhauer defines those concepts which are not related directly to
knowledge of perception, but only through one or several other concepts as
abstracta, and those which have a direct grounding in knowledge of perception
as concreta. With his examples of abstracta, such as "relation," "virtue,"
"investigation," "beginning," and of concreta, "man," "stone," "horse," Scho-
penhauer demonstrates that by concepts, or rational knowledge he means
conscious thinking made possible through language. In this context Scho-
penhauer makes an important qualification about the "reflex" of language:
"although abstract rational knowledge is the reflex of the representation from
perception, and is founded thereon, it is by no means so congruent with it
that it could everywhere take its place; on the contrary, it never corresponds
wholly to this representation."5 Schopenhauer emphasizes that even concepts
denoted as concreta are to be considered as such in only a figurative sense
"for even these too are always abstracta, and in no way representations of
perception."6 It is clear, that for Schopenhauer, a concept is a representation
of a second order nature as far as consciousness is concerned: it is abstracted
from perception which already presupposes conscious operations of the
intellect. Thus, for Schopenhauer, "the concept of consciousness coincides
with that of representation in general of whatever kind it may be." 7 However,
perception and language are never exactly congruent with that of which they
are representations. Both these conscious operations remain inadequate to
the thing in itself, which exists as a universal lying outside the world of
representation and the basic functions of the principium individuationis — time,
space, and causality.
In Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde (The Fourfold
Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason) Schopenhauer describes the process
of the formation of conceptions out of objects of representation. The first
objects of representation are intuitive, complete, and empirical representa-
tions.
They are intuitive as opposed to mere thoughts, ... they are complete, in that
... they not only contain the formal, but also the material part of phenomena,
and they are empirical, partly as proceeding, not from mere connection of
thoughts, but from an excitation of feeling in our sensitive organism, as
their origin, to which they constantly refer for evidence as to their reality.8

5 Ibid., WWR 1: 58, SW 2: 6 9 - 7 0 .

6 Ibid., WWR 1: 41, SW 2: 4 8 - 4 9 .
7 Ibid., WWR 1: 51, SW 2: 60.
8 Arthur Schopenhauer, The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, trans. Mme. Karl
Hillebrand, London: George Bell and Sons, 1891. FR 31, SW 1: 28.
26 II. Schopenhauer

The faculty of abstraction, however, reduces these complete intuitive repre-

sentations into their component parts "in order to think each of these parts
separately as different qualities of, or relations between, things." In this
process the perceptions necessarily forfeit their perceptibility. "Although each
quality thus isolated (abstracted) can quite well be thought by itself, it does
not at all follow that it can be perceived by itself." 9 In chapter 6 of Die Welt
als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation), Part Two,
Schopenhauer reiterates: "abstraction is a throwing off of useless luggage for
the purpose of handling more easily the knowledge to be compared and
manoeuvred in all directions." Thus, "much that is inessential and therefore
merely confusing, in real things is omitted, and we operate with few but
essential determinations conceived in the abstract." 10 To conceive, then, is to
think less than we perceive.
Concepts would, according to Schopenhauer, "entirely escape our con-
sciousness, and be of no avail to it for the thinking processes ... were they
not fixed and retained in our senses by arbitrary signs." 11 These signs are
words. According to Schopenhauer words are necessary to concepts, and
language to the processes of reason, because our consciousness has time as
its form and because concepts have arisen through abstraction and are thus
universal rather than particular in character. It is the property of concepts to
have an objective existence that does not belong to any time series.
Therefore, to enter the immediate present of an individual consciousness,
and consequently to be capable of insertion into a time-series, they must be
to a certain extent brought down again to the nature of particular things,
individualized, and thus linked to a representadon of the senses; this is the
word.12
Only by this means is the arbitrary reproduction, recollection, and preser-
vation of concepts possible and only by this means are the operations possible
which are to be undertaken with concepts, judging, inferring, comparing,
limiting, and so on. Thus, for Schopenhauer, the reduction of the knowledge
of perception to abstract conceptions "is the fundamental business of reason,
and can only take place by means of language." 1 3 In maintaining this necessity
of language, of word and speech as the means of abstract thinking Schopen-
hauer is careful to point to its limitations.
But just as every means, every machine, at the same time burdens and
obstructs, so does language, since it forces the infinitely shaded, mobile,

9 Ibid., FR 1 1 5 - 1 6 , SW 1: 98.
10 Schopenhauer, W W R 2: 64, SW 3: 68.
" Schopenhauer, FR 116, SW 1: 99.
12 Schopenhauer, W W R 2: 66, SW 3: 70.
13 Schopenhauer, FR 116, SW 1: 100.
 Language and Representation 27

and modifiable idea into certain rigid, permanent forms, and by fixing the
idea it at the same time fetters it.14

Schopenhauer distinguishes two types of what we might call image

thought. Thinking "in a wider sense" corresponds to perceptual knowledge
and is composed of "all inner activity of the mind in general, (and which)
necessitates either words or pictures of the imagination: without one or the
other of these it has nothing to hold by." 1 5 By what mechanism does
perceptual knowledge produce representations? Through a physiological oc-
currence in an animal's brain, whose result is the consciousness of a picture
or image (Bewusstsein eines Bildes). In discussing the creation of images of
objects from the senses Schopenhauer offers examples of images arising from
the senses of hearing, touch, smell and taste, which appear to be the result
of a cause and effect sequence. However, Schopenhauer finds that images
created from the sense of sight are unique in that apprehension of an object
appears to be direct. However, this is an illusion, and in describing the nature
of this illusion, Schopenhauer offers a key passage in the mechanisms of
perceptual thinking arising from the sense of sight. I quote at length, because
the operations of sight and the making of pictures or images will become
central to Nietzsche's thinking about language as we proceed, and it is very
probable that some of his ideas stem from the reading of Schopenhauerian
passages such as the following.

In the case of seeing the transition from the effect to the cause occurs quite
unconsciously (gan% unbewusst) and thus the illusion arises that this kind of
perception is perfectly direct and consists only in the sensation of sense
without the operation of the understanding — this fact is due partly to the
great perfection of the organ, and partly to the exclusively rectilinear action
of light. In virtue of this action, the impression itself leads to the place of
the cause, and as the eye has the capacity of experiencing most delicately
and at a glance all the nuances of light, shade, colour, and outline, as well
as the data by which the understanding estimates distance, the operating of
the understanding, in the case of impressions on this sense, takes place with
a rapidity and certainty that no more allow it to enter consciousness than
they allow spelling to do so in the case of reading. In this way, therefore,
the illusion arises that the sensation itself gives us the objects directly.
Nevertheless, it is precisely in vision that the operation of the understanding
(des VerstandesJ, which consists in knowing the cause from the effect, is
most significant. By virtue of this operation, what is doubly felt with two
eyes is singly perceived; by means of it, the impression arrives on the retina
upside down, in consequence of the crossing of the rays in the pupil; and
when its cause is pursued back in the same direction, the impression is

14 Schopenhauer, W W R 2: 66, SW 3: 71.

15 Schopenhauer, FR 121, SW 1: 103.
28 II. Schopenhauer

corrected, or, as it is expressed, we see things upright, although their image

in the eye is inverted and reversed.16
With this we have a very good idea of what Schopenhauer means by a picture
or image of perception, and the role of cause and effect in its production.
However, Schopenhauer goes on to qualify this process of picturing or
imaging: "Obviously the relation of such a picture to something entirely
different from the animal in whose brain it exists can only be a very indirect
one.'" 7 It is important to emphasize here, and it will become significant for
my further discussion, that this picture or image thinking, even when it
proceeds from sensation itself all takes place, for Schopenhauer, "inside our
head." From the point of view of Schopenhauer's subjective idealism, the
"outside us" to which we refer objects on the occasion of the sensation of
sight described above, itself resides inside our head. In other words, although
we can experience the determination of a thing "outside" directly, we do not
have within us the representation of the perceived thing lying outside us
which is different from our perception of it. "Therefore, these things that we
perceive directly in such a manner and not some mere image or copy of
them, are themselves also only our representations, and as such exist only in
our head." 18
Schopenhauer describes a second type of image thinking "in a narrower
sense" which corresponds to abstract reflection by means of words. He makes
a direct analogy between "the directness and unconsciousness with which in
perception we make the transition from the sensation to its cause," and the creation
of abstract representations or thinking.
When we read or listen, we receive mere words, but from these we pass
over to the concepts denoted by them so immediately, that it is as if we
received the concepts immediately·, for we are in no way conscious of the
transition to them ... Only when we pass from abstract concepts to pictures
of the imagination do we become aware of the transposition.19
This second type of picture thinking arises only after abstract conceptuali-
zation has taken place, and thus, Schopenhauer calls such pictures or images
of the imagination a "representative of a conception" (Repräsentant eines
Begriffs).
Even when used to represent a conception, a picture of the imagination
(phantasm) ought to be distinguished from a conception. We use phantasms
as representatives of conceptions when we try to grasp the intuitive representation
itself that has given rise to the conception and to make it tally with that

16 Schopenhauer, W W R 2: 2 3 - 2 4 , SW 3: 28.
17 Ibid., W W R 2: 1 9 1 - 9 2 , SW 3: 214.
18 Ibid., W W R 2: 22, SW 3: 26.
19 Ibid., W W R 2: 23, SW 3: 27.
 Language and Representation 29

conception, which is in all cases impossible; for ... we are always conscious
that they are not adequate to the conceptions they represent, and that they
are full of arbitrary determinations. 20
Because of the nature of the formation of abstractions, according to Scho-
penhauer, through reduction, similarity, fixing, etc., they are ultimately in-
adequate to what is represented, and thus carry with them some dangers.
"All mere rational talk thus renders the result of given conceptions clearer,
but does not, strictly speaking, bring anything new to light." 2 1 Again,
Schopenhauer emphasizes the founding nature of perceptual intuition of the
senses, which can bring new knowledge about, and the arbitrary nature of
abstract conceptualization, which while useful, dispenses to a great extent
with perceptibility.
Perception is not only the source of all knowledge, but is itself knowledge
'par excellence'; it alone is the unconditionally true genuine knowledge,
fully worthy of the name. For it alone imparts insight proper; it alone is
actually assimilated by man, passes into his inner nature and can quite
justifiably be called his, whereas the concepts merely cling to him.22

Thus, Schopenhauer's scheme of language proceeds roughly in the following

manner: a sensation produces an image in perception, which is an intuitive,
complete, and empirical representation. This image is subjected to the proc-
esses of abstraction. It is cut up and fixed in a concept through the application
of a word. Concepts are used for purely logical reasoning, or are used as an
activity of the faculty of judgment which "acts as the mediator between
intuitive and abstract knowledge, or between the understanding and rea-
son." 2 3 The attempt to "tally" a conception with the "intuitive representation
itself' which gave rise to it, by "picturing" a representative of the conception,
is a fundamental operation of conscious conceptuality. This type of image or
picture of the imagination does not come from sensuous impressions and as
a result can never tally with the intuitive representation which originally gave
rise to the conception. Just as images created from sensation are not adequate
to what is perceived, images arising from abstract conceptualization are
equally as inadequate to what is conceived.

20 Schopenhauer, FR 120, SW 1: 102.

21 Ibid., FR 123, SW 1: 105.
22 Schopenhauer, WWR 2: 77, SW 3: 83.
25 Schopenhauer, FR 1 2 1 - 2 2 , SW 1: 103.
30 II. Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer's Departure from Kant

With the Statement: "The true kernel of all knowledge is that reflection
which works with the help of intuitive representations; for it goes back to
the fountainhead, to the basis of all conceptions," 24 Schopenhauer touches
upon the fundamental separation of his own philosophy from that of Kant's.
The more we depart from a grounding in perceptual knowledge and ascend
in abstract thought, the more we deduct, the less therefore remains to be
thought. "The highest, i.e., the most general conceptions, are the emptiest
and poorest, and at last become mere husks, such as, for instance, being,
essence, thing, becoming, etc." 25 For Schopenhauer, philosophical systems
which consist of such very general conceptions without grounding themselves
in the knowledge of perception, "are little more than mere juggling with
words. For since all abstraction consists in thinking away, the further we
push it the less we have left over." 26
Schopenhauer considers Kant's discovery of the a priori nature of time
and space to have been a "lucky find" based on objective apprehension and
the highest human thought. However, although Kant expressly states in The
Critique of Pure Reason that "all thought must, directly or indirectly, go back
to intuitions, i.e., to our sensibility," he went on to find pure concepts as
presupposition in our faculty of knowledge which parallel the a priori
categories of time and space on the perceptual leval.
He imagined that empirical, actual thinking would be possible first of all
through a pure thinking a priori, which would have no objects at all in
itself, but would have to take them from perception. ... Thus a pure
understanding corresponded symmetrically to a pure sensibility.21
Schopenhauer considers that a boundary has been overleapt which leads to
the precarious position wherein the abstracta come to predominate as cate-
gories of understanding the world. Kant does say that abstract thinking does
"very frequently, though not always" go back to our perceiving in order to
convince ourselves that our abstract thinking has not taken us too far from
our ground of perception. This referring back of concept to perception, is
that already discussed above as the process of using the second type of
"picture of imagination" which attempts to grasp the intuitive representation

24 Ibid., FR 122, SW 1: 103.

25 Ibid., FR 116, SW 1: 99.
26 Schopenhauer, WWR 2: 64, SW 3: 69. Many of the passages from The Fourfold Root of the
Principle of Sufficient Reason were brought to my attention in an article by Morris S. Engel,
"Schopenhauer's Impact on Wittgenstein," Schopenhauer: His Philosophical Achievement, Ed.
Michael Fox, New Jersey: Barnes and Nobel Books, 1980.
27 Ibid., WWR 1: 449, SW 2: 532.
 The Subject-Predicate Relationship 31

which has given rise to the conception. Kant calls a fleeting phantasm of this
kind a scheme:
such a schema stands midway between our abstract thinking of empirically
acquired concepts and our clear perception occurring through the senses,
so also do there exist a priori similar schemata of the pure concepts of the
understanding between the faculty of perception of pure sensibility and the
faculty of thinking a priori of the pure understanding.28

Now this is the point at which Schopenhauer balks. Kant, in assuming

schemata of the pure concepts a priori of the understanding, which are
analogous to the empirical schemata, overlooks the original purpose of such
schemata. Empirical thinking rests upon the material content of empirical
perception and can refer back to that material content to assure ourselves
that our thinking still has real content. However, with Kant's concepts a
priori, which have no content at all, as they have not sprung from perception,
but which first receive a content from within, "have as yet nothing on which
they could look back." 29 Schopenhauer's differences with Kant can be
summed up clearly. Whereas Kant starts from indirect, reflected knowledge,
Schopenhauer starts from direct and intuitive knowledge. For Kant philos-
ophy is a science of concepts, whereas for Schopenhauer, philosophy is a
science in concepts drawn from knowledge of perception. Kant minimizes
the world of perception and sticks to the forms of abstract thinking, a
procedure which is "founded on the assumption that reflection is the ectype
of all perception, and that everything essential to perception must therefore
be expressed in reflection." 30

The Subject-Predicate Relationship

To offer a concrete example of Schopenhauer's objection to Kant upon

this score, let me refer back to my opening quote from Nietzsche's "On the
Origins of Language" and his juxtapositioning of Schopenhauer and Kant.
To reiterate, Kant says: "a great, perhaps the greatest portion of what our
reason finds to do consists in the analysis of concepts which human beings
already find in themselves." And then, referring to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche
adds: "One thinks of subject and object, the idea of judgement is abstracted
from grammatical sentences. Out of subject and predicate come the categories
of substance and accident." Nietzsche's reference, here, to Schopenhauer

28 Ibid., W W R 1: 450, SW 2: 533.

29 Ibid., W W R 1: 450, SW 2: 534.
30 Ibid., W W R 1: 453, SW 2: 537.
32 II. Schopenhauer

gives no hint of the point of conflict with Kant which it contains — though
the page to which Nietzsche gives reference in his footnote contains the
essence of the conflict.
The reference is to Schopenhauer's criticism of Kant's categorical judge-
ment in his "Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy," where Schopenhauer
maintains that the mistake Kant makes, a mistake which is commonly made,
when the grounding nature of perceptual knowledge is left aside, is one of
confusing the place of the abstract conceptions of subject and predicate with
those of the external categories of substance and accident; a confusion which
allows the projection of abstract knowledge onto the external world, as a
precondition for the understanding of causality in knowledge of perception.
The mistake of confusing subject and predicate with substance and accident
comes about because the plurality of different immediate kinds of knowledge
in perception are all abstracted through the combination of the two concepts
of subject and predicate:
For example, the judgements: "Water boils"; "The sine measures the angle";
"the will decides"; "employment distracts"; "distinction is difficult", express
through the same logical form the most varied kinds of relations. From this
we obtain once more the sanction, however wrong the beginning, to place
ourselves at the standpoint of abstract knowledge, in order to analyae direct,
intuitive knowledge. ... Now after this knowledge, like much that is quite
different from it (e.g., the subordination of highly abstract concepts), has
been expressed in the abstract through subject and predicate, these mere
relations of concepts have been transferred back to knowledge of perception,
and it has been supposed that the subject and predicate of the judgement
must have a special correlative of their own in perception, namely substance
and accident.31

This is the obverse of Schopenhauer's view that cause and effect themselves
condition experience. Not experience first then understanding of cause and
effect, but cause and effect as the conditions for experience. Schopenhauer
asserts that the subject and predicate should be kept in the abstracta where
they alone have significance.
In order to attempt an explanation of how subject and predicate relate to
abstract conceptualization, Schopenhauer develops a theory of conceptual
extension wherein conceptual spheres overlap each other in varying ways.
Because concepts are abstract representations and thus not completely definite
representations, as are representations of perception, they have a range, an
extension, or a sphere in which they operate. The sphere of any concept
converges in part with the sphere of related concepts and vice versa, although
if they are really different concepts each contains something the other does

31 Ibid., W W R 1: 458, S W 2: 543.

 Nietzsche's Transformations of Schopenhauer's Language Theory 33

not. "In this relation every subject stands to its predicate. To recognize this
relation means to judge.32 What needs to be emphasized is that Schopenhauer's
relation of subject to predicate, or concept spheres to one another, remains
strictly within the realm of the abstracta and have arisen only upon the basis
of direct perceptual knowledge. Schopenhauer's objection to Kant's category
of categorical judgement is that Kant seems to leave aside the "ground [direct
perceptual knowledge] of the connection of concept spheres [the relationship
of subject to predicate] which gives truth to the judgement ... (and) can be
of a very varied nature." 33 Rather, Kant takes the abstract categories of
subject and predicate as fundamental concepts with which to, then, perceive
substance and accident. Kant, says Schopenhauer, by making this mistake,
by supposing that the abstract relation expressed in subject and predicate
characterizes the human relation with representation of an object and is thus
used as a model for projection of substance and accident, makes, what he
calls a "monstrous assertion" ("monströse Behauptung"): "that perception with-
out concept is absolutely empty, but that concept without perception is still
something!"34 For Schopenhauer thought is mere abstraction from perception
which cannot furnish new knowledge, cannot establish objects which did not
exist previously: the "material of our thinking is none other than our percep-
tions themselves, and not something which perception does not contain, and
which would be added only through thought." 35

Nietzsche's Transformations of Schopenhauer's Language Theory

It is significant to notice that Nietzsche, in "Origins," redirects Schopen-

hauer's conception of subject and predicate as abstract ideas used to illustrate
the relationship of operations between spheres of concepts, and takes them,
rather, in their purely grammatical sense. "One thinks of subject and object,
the idea of judgement is abstracted from grammatical sentences." This is not
what Schopenhauer says, as we have seen. He is speaking of the subject and
predicate of the judgement, not of the subject and predicate of sentences,
though one might at first glance take this meaning, as he gives examples of
subject predicate sentences, which, however, he himself calls judgements.
Schopenhauer is not talking about the formation of sentences here, he is
talking about judgements which arise as a result of the application of the

32 Ibid., W W R 1: 42, SW 2: 50. For a more detailed discussion of Schopenhauer's ideas about
concept spheres see W W R 1, Section 9, and W W R 2, chapter 10.
33 Ibid., W W R 1: 458, SW 2: 543.
34 Ibid., W W R 1: 474, SW 2: 562.
35 Ibid., W W R 1: 475, SW 2: 5 6 3 - 6 4 .
34 II. Schopenhauer

relationship of subject to predicate, a relationship which determines the

connection between possible concept spheres. He uses the idea of subject and
predicate to illustrate that some concept spheres will have connections with
others which have something in common while other concept spheres will
have nothing in common and cannot stand in a relationship of subject to
predicate.
That Nietzsche replaces Schopenhauer's abstract notion of subject and
predicate in concept spheres with a concern for the purely grammatical effects
of subject and predicate as they relate to philosophical thinking in general is
immediately understood if we refer to Eduard von Hartmann's chapter "The
Unconscious in the Origin of Language" in his Philosophy of the Unconscious.
This is the source (along with Lange, as we shall see) of Nietzsche's having
juxtaposed these ideas in the first place. There, Hartmann writes:
Let us consider first the philosophical value of the grammatical forms and
the formation of concepts. In every more developed language we find the
distinction of subject and predicate, of subject and object, of substantive,
verb, and adjective, and the same conditions for the construction of sen-
tences. In the less developed languages these fundamental forms are at least
distinguished by their position in the sentence. Whoever is acquainted with
the history of philosophy will know how much it owes to these grammatical
forms alone. The notion of the judgement is unquestionably abstracted from
the grammatical sentence by the omission of the verbal form. The categories
of substance and accident are derived in the same way from subject and
predicate; ... The philosophical notions of subject and object, which in
strictness were wanting to the consciousness of antiquity but today openly
govern speculation, have been developed from grammatical notions in which
they lay involved unconsciously preformed ... 36

Schopenhauer's reflections on language never lead him to question the nature

of grammar in itself. His assumption is that subject and predicate, having
been determined in a grammatical sense common to all, can now serve as a
model for the possible abstract relations between concept spheres. Nietzsche
is not satisfied with accepting language as a given not to be studied in itself
as a subject of speculation. Thus his interest in what Hartmann proposes. It
is here, in Hartmann, that Nietzsche finds his idea, expressed in "Origins,"
that judgements are abstracted from the forms of the grammatical sentence
and that the categories of substance and accident are derived from subject
and predicate.
Hartmann proposes something which Schopenhauer does not: namely
that grammatical forms govern speculation because they lie unconsciously
preformed in the human mind and as such must offer a set of predetermined

36 Hartmann, PU 1: 2 9 3 - 9 4 , PUG 2 2 7 - 2 8 .
 Nietzsche's Transformations of Schopenhauer's Language Theory 35

forms and notions to the philosophical mind. Nietzsche's sentence, "The

deepest philosophical knowledge lies already prepared in language," which
immediately precedes his lines from Kant and Schopenhauer, can be under-
stood more completely in light of Hartmann's words above. It implies an
examination of language which proceeds from language itself. Schopenhauer's
concern is not with language per se, rather he is interested in finding the
place which language plays in the larger context of our coming to rational
knowledge out of perception. The first fact for Schopenhauer is the principle
of sufficient reason. For Nietzsche, on the other hand, the first fact is language
itself, and what proceeds from it is conditioned by the very first fact of
language. This is in sympathy with Hartmann's view that the philosophy of
his time neglected what lies nearest to it, namely language, and that while
there was no philosophy of language per se, yet "philosophy, the farther it
has progressed, has ever more clearly perceived that the understanding of
one's own thinking is the first task." 37 Nietzsche takes this suggestion very
much to heart and it most likely fell in accord with thoughts already forming
themselves in his thinking. Later in his theory of language (1872—74)
Nietzsche's thoroughgoing criticism of grammar and its determining influence
in philosophical thinking comes very much to the fore. He ultimately takes
grammar back to the basic forms of sense perception itself. 38 For now, it is
enough to point to the distinctions being made here, in the conjoining of
Hartmann's suggestion and the examples of Schopenhauer with regard to
Kant. It is from this starting point that, to quote Lacoue-Labarthe, Nietzsche's
project will raise a "constant accusation of the ontological, metaphysical
responsibility of language and of grammar." 39
This rather detailed summary of Schopenhauer's views on language and
its relationship to perception as it comes to be formed both with and against
Kant's philosophizing has been followed in such detail, because it provides,
along with Hartmann's influence, the basis of much of Nietzsche's own
theorizing about language. Nietzsche will apply some of these ideas more
distinctly and in some cases with a very different emphasis in mind. The
major ideas, which Nietzsche retains from Schopenhauer's writings on lan-
guage are the following: 1) the division of representation from the thing in

37 Ibid., PU 1: 295, PUG 2 2 8 - 2 9 .

38 See Breazeale's translation of Nietzsche's notes from 1872 — 75 and Nietzsche's notes for a
course on "Rhetoric" (1874). In a forthcoming article, "Nietzsche's Physiology of Ideological
Criticism," in The Postmodern Nietzsche, Ed. Clayton Koelb, I have discussed Nietzsche's idea
of unconscious physiological perception. In that article, I maintain that for Nietzsche, the
forms of conscious language, including its grammatical categories, are constituted as an
imitation of a specific model of completely unconscious operations of perceptual tropology.
39 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, "Le detour" in Le sujetde la philosophic, Paris: Aubier—Flammarion,
1979. D 2.
36 II. Schopenhauer

itself; 2) the idea that an image is the result of a physiological abstraction

from the senses, i.e., perceptual knowledge; 3) the idea, however, that even
perceptual knowledge does not correspond to the actual object of represen-
tation; 4) a distrust of abstraction and agreement with the necessity of
grounding in the empirical; 5) the idea that words are arbitrary and second
order representations; 6) therefore, that abstract thought is inadequate to
express the world and can never have to do with truth; 7) and the prompting
of Schopenhauer's criticism of subject and predicate as abstractions allowing
the positing of substance and accident, which, when taken in conjunction
with Hartmann's suggestions about the unconscious role of grammar in
philosophical thinking, leads to his own criticisms of grammar.
These gains which Nietzsche wins from Schopenhauer for his beginning
theory of language must, however, be seen against the background of Scho-
penhauer's subjective idealism wherein the things that we perceive directly,
the "outside of us" to which we refer objects on the occasion of perception
itself resides inside our head. Therefore things can only be in space and
outside of us in so far as we represent them. For Schopenhauer, the concept
of consciousness coincides with that of representation in general whether
perceptual or abstracted from perception. Representations are the consequence
of the conditions of the principium individuationis which arises only as a result
of the laws of space and time in causality. Although Nietzsche incorporates
the items of language theory gained from Schopenhauer into his theory of
language, he will not apply them in the context of a subjective idealism, but
from a point of view which takes into consideration materialistic and scientific
knowledge, along with a receptivity to the unconscious, pre-intellectual
aspects of language, perspectives which eventually lead him to a strong
criticism of Schopenhauer's basic premise of the nature of individuation.
 Chapter Three
Kant

Let us turn again to the juxtapositioning of quotes from Nietzsche's

"Origins." We find, interestingly enough, that Nietzsche has not only swerved
away from Schopenhauer's meaning with regard to subject and predicate in
favor of a purely grammatical concern, prompted by Hartmann, but that the
Kantian quote is taken verbatim from Hartmann as well. Nietzsche writes:
"The deepest philosophical knowledge lies already prepared in language."
Then he quotes Kant: "A great, perhaps the greatest portion of what our
reason finds to do consists in the analysis of concepts which human beings
already find in themselves." ("Ein grosser Theil, vielleicht der grösste Theil
von dem Geschäfte der Vernunft besteht in Zergliederungen der Begriffe,
die er [der Mensch] schon in sich vorfindet.") Except for the addition of the
word "man" in brackets, Nietzsche quotes Hartmann exactly. But in so doing,
Nietzsche repeats an inaccurate rendering of Kant's actual sentence which is
to be found in Section 3 of the Introduction to The Critique of Pure Reason.
In actuality, Kant's statement reads: "A great, perhaps the greatest portion
of what our reason finds to do consists in the analysis of our concepts of
objects." ("Ein grosser Teil, und vielleicht der grösste, von dem Geschäfte
unserer Vernunft besteht in Zergliederungen der Begriffe, die wir schon von
Gegenständen haben.") 1 How Hartmann intends the permutation of Kant's
quote is explained in part by his next sentences:
It [reason] finds the cases of declension in the substantive, adjective, pro-
noun, the voices, tenses, and moods of the verb, and the immeasurable
wealth of ready-made notions of object and relation. All the categories,
which for the most part represent the most important relations, the funda-
mental notions of all thought, as being, becoming, thinking, feeling, desiring,
motion, force, activity, etc., lie before it ready-made material, and it requires
thousands of years only to find its whereabouts in this wealth of unconscious
speculation.2
Hartmann can transpose "concepts of objects" into "concepts which it already
finds in itself' because he believes that the concept of object is only possible

1 Immanuel Kant, Werke in Zwölf Bänden, Heraugegeben von Wilhelm Weischedel, Wiesbaden:
Insel Verlag, 1956. KW 3: 51.
2 Hartmann, PU 1: 294-95, PUG 228.
38 III. Kant

upon the precondition of the already unconscious forms of language itself.

This is a notion not entirely unjustified with reference to the Kantian context.
Though there is no evidence that Nietzsche did so, let us turn to Kant
for a moment to find what he means by "concept of an object." In Section
1 of the first part of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant tells us very clearly.
W h a t e v e r the process and the means may be by which k n o w l e d g e reaches,
its objects, there is one that reaches them directly, and f o r m s the ultimate
material of all thought, viz. intuition. This is possible only w h e n the object
is given, and the object can be given only (to human beings at least) through
a certain affection of the mind. This faculty o f receiving representations
according to the manner in which w e are affected by objects, is called
sensibility. Objects therefore are given to us through our sensibility. Sensi-
bility alone supplies us with intuitions. These intuitions become thought
through the understanding, and hence arise conceptions. 3

The process which Kant describes as relevant, to human beings at least, is

one which leads from object to concept through the means of sensibility and
intuition which arise, however, only through a certain affection of the mind.
Kant divides the phenomenon, the undefined object of empirical intuition,
into two terms: matter, which corresponds to sensation, and form, that which
causes matter to be perceived as arranged in a certain way. Matter is given a
posteriori, but the form of matter, Kant writes, "must be ready for it in the
mind a priori and must therefore be capable of being considered as separate
from all sensations." Kant's reason for reaching this conclusion is that "it is
clear that it cannot be sensation again through which sensations are arranged
and placed in certain forms." 4 The affection of the mind, then, provides the
a priori forms, which do not refer to direct sensibility. Thus, Kant makes a
distinction between empirical intuition of the senses and pure intuition "which
a priori, and even without a real object of the senses or of sensation, exists
in the mind as a mere form of sensibility." 5 Concepts of objects, for Kant,
can proceed without a real object of the senses, as a result of the a priori
forms of the mind. Hartmann is implying that Kant's a priori forms can be
understood as proceeding out of the unconscious ready-made forms of
grammar which lie in human beings and which provide the predetermined
directions of conscious speculation.
If we, now, look at the context from which Hartmann draws the Kantian
quote, we find Kant alluding to the basically unconscious nature of the
formation of reason and its concepts. Kant writes:

3 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Trans. F. Max Müller, New York: Doubleday and
Company, Inc., 1966. PR 321, K W 3: 69.
4 Ibid., PR 2 1 - 2 2 , K W 3: 6 9 - 7 0 .
5 Ibid., PR 22, K W 3: 70.
 III. Kant 39

The reason why during the time of building we feel free from all anxiety
and suspicion and believe in the apparent solidity of our foundation is this:
— A great, perhaps the greatest portion of what our reason finds to do
consists in the analysis of our concepts of objects. This gives us a great deal
of knowledge which, though it consists in no more than in simplifications
and explanations of what is comprehended in our concepts (though in a
confused manner), is yet considered as equal, at least in form, to new
knowledge. It only separates and arranges our concepts, it does not enlarge
them in matter and contents. As by this process we gain a kind of real
knowledge a priori, which progresses safely and usefully, it happens that our
reason, without being aware of it, appropriates under that pretence propo-
sitions of a totally different character, adding to given concepts new and
strange ones a priori, without knowing whence they come, nay without even
thinking of such a question. 6

The main point is that, for Kant, "the business of reason" allows us to "gain
a kind of real knowledge a priori without knowing where it comes from." In
this passage Kant admits the tentative and basically incomprehensible nature
of the formation of such concepts of reason, but does not deny their validity.
Again, this is the point at which Schopenhauer is not satisfied to follow
Kant, he insists upon the necessity of having a specific grounding for such
abstract reasoning in direct perceptual knowledge of the understanding.
Hartmann, on the other hand, finds this passage useful in his pursuit of the
unconscious. When Kant writes, that we do not know where the a priori
concepts come from, nor even think to ask such a question, Hartmann jumps
in to supply an answer.
Hartmann opens his Philosophy of the Unconscious with a quote from Kant's
Anthropology, Section 5: "Of the ideas which we have without being conscious
of them," "To have ideas, and yet not be conscious of them, — there seems
to be a contradiction in that; for how can we know that we have them, if
we are not conscious of them?"7 Kant answers his question by writing that
we may become indirectly aware of such unconscious ideas. It is these words
of Kant's which Hartmann claims as a starting point for his investigation
into the unconscious. Hartmann quotes another passage from Kant's
thropology·.

Innumerable are the sensations and perceptions whereof we are not con-
scious, although we must undoubtedly conclude that we have them, obscure
ideas as they may be called (to be found in animals as well as in man). The
clear ideas, indeed, are but an infinitely small fraction of these same exposed
to consciousness. That only a few spots on the great chart of our minds are

6 Ibid., PR 6 - 7 , K W 3: 5 1 - 5 2 .
7 Hartmann, PU 1: 1, PUG 1.
40 III. Kant

illuminated may well fill us w i t h amazement in contemplating this nature

of ours.8

Nietzsche, along with Schopenhauer, rejects, for the most part, Kant's
pure concepts of the understanding in favor of empirical conception based
on perception of the senses. However, as I already indicated, Nietzsche is
questioning on a more fundamental level than is Schopenhauer, and although
Schopenhauer is critical of the category of pure intuition as we have seen,
he too mystifies the idea of direct sensory impressions as much as does Kant
with the conscious category of the understanding and causality. Both philos-
ophers are unwilling, in the last analysis, to dispense with some form of
conscious effects in the translation of sensation to concepts of reason.
Drawing from both Kant and Schopenhauer, Nietzsche begins to form
some basic questions about perception and its relationship to language, which
we might suppose run something like the following. Why must consciousness,
whether in the form of pure intuition or of perceptual understanding be
shoved in to obscure the basic fact of sensory experience? What is direct
sensory experience? Is there an unconscious language which has enough
structure of its own unique kind to qualify it as a language, a language
different from, and which operates as a precondition for language which
abstracts from perceptions to form rational knowledge? We see, then, the
gap which opens up for Nietzsche in his reading of Schopenhauer and Kant,
and we can understand why his reading of Hartmann, approximately a year
later, came as the possibility of helping to offer new avenues of thinking with
regard to these and similar questions. The unconscious, something hinted at
by both Kant and Schopenhauer, yet ultimately rejected in their spheres of
reasoning, was offered by Hartmann as the necessary something, in the main
unknown, it is true, but of which it may at least be affirmed, that besides the
negative attribute "being unconscious," it possesses also the essentially positive
attributes "unconscious willing and unconscious representing". 9

8 Ibid., PU 1: 20, PUG 1 5 - 1 6 .

9 Ibid., PU 1: 4, PUG 3.
 Chapter Four
Nietzsche: "The deepest philosophical knowledge lies already
prepared in language."

Let us turn attention, now, to Niet2sche's own statement: "The deepest

philosophical knowledge lies already prepared in language." We can read this
statement from two perspectives.

Grammar

Because language and its grammatical forms first allow the fixing of
concepts and the conceiving of philosophical knowledge in the most funda-
mental sense, any such philosophical knowledge will inevitably come up
against the limits of its production. That Nietzsche means this in the most
literal sense is witnessed by his turning of Schopenhauer's abstract categories
of subject and predicate, upon Hartmann's prompting, into the purely gram-
matical subject and predicate. The thought that purely grammatical categories
determine the form of philosophical knowledge is a reversal of Rousseau's
thought, which up until that time can be taken as representative of the usual
view of language. In his "Essay on the Origin of Language," an essay with
which Nietzsche was acquainted, Rousseau writes: " T h e study of philosophy
and the progress of reason, while having perfected grammar, deprive language
of its vital, passionate quality which made it so singable." 1 The important
distinction is that for Nietzsche, along with Hartmann, it is rather, the
perfecting of grammar in a purely linguistic sense which has allowed the
study of philosophy and the progress of reason as we understand it. This is
a thought which Wittgenstein, another worker with language, expressed in
many forms, a thought which is not uncommon today: "Philosophical prob-
lems are, of course, not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by
looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to

1 Jean Jacques Rousseau, "Essay on the Origin of Language," On the Origin of Language, Two
Essays by Jean Jacques Rousseau andJohann Gottfried Herder, Trans. John H. Moran and Alexander
Gode, New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1966. EOL 68.
42 IV. Nietzsche: "The deepest philosophical knowledge

make us recognize those workings." 2 Both Kant and Schopenhauer, along

with Rousseau, are not unaware of this linguistic limitation of philosophical
knowledge, however, they do not choose to make it a major direction in
their thinking. Nietzsche does, as demonstrated by my discussion of his
beginning theory of language in this work, and in notes and lectures from
1872 through 1875 where he continues to devote specific attention to the
formation of grammar and its philosophical and social consequences. This
critical reflection on grammar becomes for his later philosophy a self evident
precondition for thinking. As an example, I offer a famous line from Twilight
of the Idols·. " 'Reason' in language: oh what an old deceptive female she is! I
am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar." 3

Instinct

The second way of reading Nietzsche's statement will be procured by

repeating it and in adding to it. The deepest philosophical knowledge lies
already prepared in language, as a product of instinct. What Nietzsche is
doing, in sympathy with Hartmann, when he quotes Kant, "a great, perhaps
the greatest portion of what our reason finds to do consists in the analysis
of concepts which human beings already find in themselves," is to use Kant
as a supporting authority for an equation different from Kant's: the deepest
philosophical knowledge does not lie in our concepts of objects, as Kant
would have it, but in language, and language is determined according to our
human organization. That is, the forms of language lie as ready made material
in the unconscious organization of human beings. Whether looked at from
the point of view of empirical intuition or pure intuition, there is no doubt
that Kant finds that the analysis of concepts as the business of reason lies
already prepared in humans, whether in the direct sensory experience of
empirical intuition or in the "certain affection of the mind" which is pure
intuition, and which yields the a priori forms. However, Nietzsche is looking
for an answer to his questions about language from a different point of view,
from a point of view which takes into consideration Hartmann's theory of
an unconscious. What Nietzsche means by equating language with human
organization is that "Language is a product of instinct, as with bees — the
anthill, etc." 4 Thus, the deepest knowledge of philosophy lies already prepared
in language before the possibility of conceptuality or reason, and actually

2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, New York: Macmillan, 1953. PI 47.

3 Nietzsche, G D 483, K S A 6: 78.
4 Nietzsche, US 222.
 Instinct 43

determines the eventual shape of these. With this, Nietzsche pronounces his
own opinion on the origins of language and begins his long attempt at a
theory of language which examines the questions left unexamined or only
partially examined by Kant and Schopenhauer.
In "Origins" Nietzsche has occasion to quote Kant once again. He writes
that after Kant a right understanding of the origins of language first becomes
possible. The right knowledge comes about first with Kant, who in the
Critique of Judgement "recognizes teleology in Nature as something actual, but
on the other hand, emphasizes the wonderful antinomy that something
expedient can be without consciousness." Nietzsche's next sentence reads:
"This the reality of instinct." 5 What Nietzsche finds important here is that
"something can be expedient without consciousness" and that this something,
with regard to language, is for him "the reality of instinct." That Nietzsche
is using Kant's meaning of the antinomy presented in the Critique ofJudgement
for his own ends, is, of course, evident. According to Kant, we find in nature
that the organic body is a material whose parts are joined together through
expedience, and up to a certain point this expedience can be explained by
purely mechanical laws. However, not everything can be explained this way
and thus the reflective judgement must "think a causality distinct from
mechanism." Kant's statements in the antinomy are: "All production of
material things is possible on mere mechanical laws," and "Some production
of such things is not possible on mere mechanical laws." Kant continues:
For if I say: I must estimate the possibility of all events in material nature,
and, consequently, also all forms considered as its products, on mere me-
chanical laws, I do not thereby assert that they are solely possible in this way,
that is, to the exclusion of every other kind of causality.6
Of course, the other way Kant chooses is to follow the "principle of final
causes." Nietzsche chooses another alternative with regard to organisms; he
chooses to say that that which cannot be determined by reason is thus a
product of unconscious processes, in this case, the reality of instinct. In his
notes "On Teleology" to which I will turn in detail in chapter 8, Nietzsche
writes, long before his acquaintance with Hartmann: "Why cannot there be
a power which unconsciously creates the expedient, i.e., nature: one thinks
of the instinct of animals." 7

5 Ibid., US 224.
6 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, Trans. F. Max Müller, New York: Doubleday and
Company, Inc., 1966. CJ 3 7 - 3 8 , K W 10: 501.
7 Nietzsche, ZT 239. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, in their translation of "On the Origins of
Language," also note that Nietzsche is recasting Kant's antinomy for his own purposes. "It
is at least necessary to note here, that in introducing 'instinct' as a solution of a sort, to the
Kantian antinomy, Nietzsche is completely unfaithful to Kant, and operates a remarkable
44 IV. Nietzsche: "The deepest philosophical knowledge ..."

It is true, Nietzsche would have come across the idea that the origin of
language lies in instinct in many places, in Schopenhauer, Rousseau, and
Schelling, for example. In a short fragment, "On Language and Words,"
Schopenhauer writes of the origin of language that "the most plausible thing
seems to me the assumption that man invented language instinctively" because
there is in man an "instinct by virtue whereof he produces, without reflection
and conscious intention, the instrument that is absolutely necessary for the
use of his faculty of reason and the organ thereof." 8 Although Schopenhauer
finds the origins of language in instinct, it is a very primitive stage, which
only finds its justification in the dropping of such primitive stages towards
the progress of reason.
In his "Essay on the Origin of Language" Rousseau opens with the
thought that when the need for communication by signs arose, because the
only means of communication arises from the senses, it was a language of
sensate signs which was invented. However, the "inventors of language did
not proceed rationally in this way; rather their instinct suggested the conse-
quence to them." 9 However, Rousseau too, only allows instinct at the
primitive stage of language. Rousseau, along with Schopenhauer, assumes
that the origin of language in instinct gave way to the language of grammar
and reason. In both Schopenhauer and Rousseau's cases, this is ultimately a
positive progress, though both thinkers rue the loss of the first "perfect"
forms of language; Rousseau, its "singability," Schopenhauer, its "character-
istic completeness and perfection." Nietzsche, while giving lip service to this
idea, begins to break away from any notion of a once perfect language, which
is steadily deteriorating, and supposes that unconscious, instinctual workings
not only provide an origin, but also the paradigm of the operation of language
at all times.
The third source which might have prompted Nietzsche's ideas that the
deepest philosophical knowledge lies already prepared in language and that
the origin of language lies in the reality of instinct can be found in passages
surrounding the quote which both Nietzsche and Hartmann take from
Schelling, which I offered at the beginning of this work. Again, I do not

diversion of the idea of finality without consciousness," that is, the ends of nature may be
unconscious ones. ("II faut au moins noter ici qu'en introduisant Tinstinct' comme solution,
enquelque sorte, de l'antinomie kantienne, Nietzsche est tout ä fait infidele ä Kant, et opere
un detournement remarquable de l'idee de finalite, sans conscience" (RL 138).) Lacoue-Labarthe
and Nancy did not have the information that Nietzsche is restating an idea which he already
noted in 1867/68 in his notes "Zur Teleologie," a thought which is reinforced by his reading
of Hartmann.
8 Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. 2, Trans. E. F. J. Payne, Oxford: Cla-
redon Press, 1974. PP 2: 566, SW 6: 625.
9 Rousseau, EOL 5.
 Instinct 45

know specifically if Nietzsche looked at the context from which Hartmann

drew the quote, or whether he simply took it from Hartmann's text without
further reflection. However, if he had, here is what he would have found:
Is poetry already to be recognized in the simple material formation of
language? ... how many treasures of poetry lie hidden in language, which
the poet does not put in it, which he only so to speak draws out of it. ...
In mythology a philosophy could not have worked, which first needed to
find its form in poetry, rather this philosophy was itself and essentially
poetry; and also the other way: the poetry, which created the forms of
mythology, did not stand in the service of a philosophy different from itself,
rather it itself was essentially also knowledge producing activity. ... My-
thology is then really not only a natural thing, rather it is an organic
production. Poetry and philosophy, each in itself, is for us a principle of
free intentional invention, but because they are bound to each other, they
can really have no independent effect. ... Mythology is therefore a product
of a free activity that is here un-free; as the organic is a birth of free and
necessary origin and, as far as the word invention still applies, is an
unintentional-intentional instinctive invention {einer unabsichtlich-absichtlichen
instinktartigen Erfindung).10

By this Schelling means that the organic invention of language, whether

poetry, philosophy, or myth, in so far as the word invention can be applied
to them, acquire their deepest dispositions and most material characteristics
not merely from the work of chance, but more essentially, as instinctual
invention. Hartmann and Nietzsche, as we shall see, also hold the forms and
progress of language to be an organic process as Schelling suggests. As an
ardent student of Schelling, it cannot be doubted that Hartmann had these
passages in mind. What is most attractive to Hartmann in this passage is the
unintentional intentional instinctive invention of language. In the same way
that instinct operates in the production of animals, or the language of feature,
gesture and sound of primitive man, "precisely in the same way must also
human verbal language be a conception of genius, a work of the instinct of
multitudes . . . " n Again, taking his cue from Schelling Hartmann expands on
this idea:
For the labour of an individual, the foundation is much too complicated and
rich. Language is a work of the masses — the people. For the conscious labour
of many, however, it is too indivisible an organism. Only the instinct of masses,
as exhibited in the life of the hive and the ant-hill, can have created it. 12
In "Origins," Nietzsche takes over these ideas from Hartmann and ap-
pends a precise definition of what instinct is and is not in the creation of
language.

10 Schelling, PM 5 2 - 5 3 .
11 Hartmann, PU 1: 299, P U G 2 3 1 - 3 2 .
12 Ibid., PU 1: 2 9 7 - 9 8 , P U G 231.
46 IV. Nietzsche: "The deepest philosophical knowledge

For the work of an individual it is too complicated, for the masses much
too unified, a complete organism. It remains only to consider language as
a product of instinct, as with bees — the anthill, etc. Instinct is not however
the result of conscious reflection, not merely the consequence of bodily
organization, not the result of a mechanism, which lies in the brain, not the
effect of a mechanism coming to the spirit from outside, which is foreign
to it, but the most particular achievement of individuals or of the masses,
springing from character. Instinct is one with the innermost kernel of a
being. 13

Without the knowledge of Nietzsche's source here, one would be hard pressed
to come to terms with these qualifications of the definition of instinct.
However, turning to Hartmann alleviates this problem.
At the beginning of his chapter "Das Unbewusste im Instinkt" ("The
Unconscious in Instinct"), Hartmann offers his definition of instinct: "Instinct
is purposive action without consciousness of the purpose. " u In an attempt to explain
instinctive actions in light of his definition Hartmann offers three possibilities:
1) they may be a consequence of corporeal organization, 2) the result of a
cerebral or mental mechanism contrived by nature, or 3) the result of
unconscious mental activity.
To refute the position that the purposive action of instinct is a consequence
of bodily organization, Hartmann offers two arguments supported by many
examples of the habits of organisms taken from natural science. First, that
"instincts are quite different with similar bodily structures," and second, "the same
instincts appear with different organisations,"15 Bodily organization may be a
factor, but not, in Hartmann's sense of it, the consistent explanation.
What Hartmann has in mind "as a cerebral or mental mechanism implanted
by nature" is that instinctive action could be executed without individual (if
also unconscious) mental activity and without an idea of its purpose: "the
end being conceived once for all by nature or a providence, which had so
contrived the psychical organization that only a mechanical use of the means
remained to the individual." 16 Hartmann, in refuting the two explanations of
instinct above, is careful not to fall into the position of proposing that a
psychical and not a physical organization is the cause of instinct. It is, rather,
both. It is not purely a physical phenomenon because instinct always needs
a motive to spur it into action. It cannot spring mechanically into action of
its own volition.
Each instinct waits upon a motive; which, according to our view, signifies
the occurrence of appropriate external circumstances making possible the

13 Nietzsche, US 2 2 2 - 2 3 . Compare Hartmann, P U G 79.

14 Hartmann, PU 1: 79, P U G 54.
15 Ibid., PU 1: 7 9 - 8 0 , P U G 5 4 - 5 5 .
16 Ibid., PU 1: 8 2 - 8 3 , P U G 57.
 Instinct 47

attainment of the end by those means which instinct wills; not till then is
instinct functional as actual will, with action at its heels; before the motive
is present, instinct remains latent, as it were, and is not functional. 17

Hartmann concludes that the "causal connection between the sensuous

presentation which serves as a motive and the will to act instinctively" can
only be either "a (non-conscious) mechanical conduction and conversion of
vibrations of the presented motive into the vibrations of the willed action in
the brain or an unconscious mental mechanism.18
If ... an unconscious mental mechanism, be assumed, the process cannot
well be conceived under any other form than that which holds good of
mind in general, thinking and willing. Between the conscious motive and
the will to the instinctive action a causal connection has to be imagined by
means of unconscious ideation and volition, and I know not how this
connection can be more simply conceived than by represented and willed
purpose.19

Based upon this Hartmann modifies his first definition of instinct as "pur-
posive action without consciousness of the purpose" to "instinct is conscious
willing of the means to an unconsciously willed end." 20
Now, what the end may be for an individual or species which triggers
purposive action of instinct is determined by what Hartmann calls the
individual's inmost nature and character. As opposed to the idea that indi-
vidual instinct is subservient to and must conform to a mind standing outside
the individual like providence, "the end of the instinct is in each single case
unconsciously willed and imagined by the individual and the choice of means
suitable to each special case unconsciously made." 21 Hartmann elaborates
upon his assertion that instinct is the individual's own activity, springing from
his inmost nature and character, from the "inmost core of every being," and
emphasizes the translation into conscious activity:
Frequently the knowledge of the purpose of the unconscious cognition is
not at all ascertainable by sense-perception. Then the characteristic attribute

17 Ibid., P U 1: 83, P U G 57.

18 Ibid., P U 1: 87, P U G 61.
" Ibid., PU 1: 88, P U G 6 1 .
20 Ibid., PU 1: 88, P U G 62.

21 Ibid., P U 1: 1 1 3 , P U G 79 — 80. In a later edition Hartmann expands on what he means by

the individual's inmost nature and character. "The sum of individual modes of reaction on
all possible kinds of motives is called the individual character, and this character is essentially
dependent on a constitution of brain and body in lesser degree acquired by the individual
by habit, in greater part inherited" (PU 1: 89). Here, it is very clear that Hartmann's idea
of individual character, which stems from bodily habit and inheritance, that is f r o m phys-
iological factors, is far removed f r o m Schopenhauer's conception of the intelligible character
which originates in the will and its unalterable representation in empirical character, a
distinction which I will pursue in chapter 5.
48 IV. Nietzsche: "The deepest philosophical knowledge

of the Unconscious is shown in the clairvoyant intuition, of which there is

an echo in consciousness as presentiment, either feeble and evanescent, or,
as in the case of man in particular, more or less distinct; whilst the instinctive
action itself, the adoption of the means to the unconscious end, is always
vividly realized in consciousness, because otherwise correct execution would
be impossible. 22

Hartmann is careful to defend his position that instinct arises from an

unconscious mental mechanism against the misinterpretation that he asserts
a wide gulf to exist between consciousness and his unconscious mental
mechanism in practice. Hartmann sees unconscious and conscious activity as
being combined in different proportions "so that through their intermixtures
in different degree there occurs a gradual transition from pure instinct to
pure conscious reflection."23 In the chapter to which Hartmann refers, "Das
Unbewusste im Denken" ("The Unconscious in Thought"), he argues that
unconscious processes are necessary if a transition from sense perception to
abstract thought is to take place. Hartmann ascribes intuitive thinking to
unconscious and discursive thinking to conscious processes.
In all this we cannot doubt that in intuition the same logical links are
present in the Unconscious, only what follows serially in conscious logic is
compressed into a point of time. That only the last term comes into con-
sciousness is due to the circumstance that it alone possesses interest for us;
but that all the others are present in the Unconscious may be perceived, if
the intuition be intentionally repeated in such a way that only the one before
the last, then the term before that, etc., emerges into consciousness. The
relation between the two kinds is then to be conceived as follows: The
intuitive leaps the space to be traversed at a bound; the discursive takes
several steps; the space measured is in both cases precisely the same, but
the time required for the purpose is different. Each putting of the foot to
the ground forms a point of rest, a station, consisting of cerebral vibrations
which produce a conscious idea and for that purpose need time (a quarter
— two seconds). The leaping or stepping itself, on the other hand, is in
both cases something momentary, timeless, because empirically falling into
the Unconscious; the process proper is thus always unconscious, the difference
is only whether, between the conscious stations for halting, greater or lesser
tracts be traversed. 24

The distinction of an unconscious process which operates in a stepwise

fashion with only the last step emerging into consciousness is a process which
Nietzsche finds attractive. By the time Nietzsche reads Hartmann in 1868 he
has already met with the idea of "unconscious inferences" as a possible
explanation of the transition from sensory perception to abstract thinking in

22
Ibid., PU 1: 1 1 3 - 1 4 , PUG 80.
23
Ibid., PU 1: 9 2 - 9 3 , PUG 64.
24
Ibid., PU 1: 3 1 6 - 1 7 , PUG 2 4 6 - 4 7 .
 Instinct 49

his reading of Lange's History of Materialism, and thus his receptivity to

Hartmann's unconscious already had a footing in his thinking. In 1872
Nietzsche writes: "Unconscious inferences (are) no doubt a process of passing
from image to image. The image which is last attained then operates as a
stimulus and motive." 2 5 After playing out Hartmann's definitions of instinct
in some detail it is now possible to understand what Nietzsche means by his
use of instinct in "Origins." Instinct is an unconscious purposive process in
each individual which uses conscious willing to gain its end. Or, to repeat
Hartmann's definitions: instinct is "purposive action without consciousness
of the purpose," it is "conscious willing of the means to an unconsciously
willed end." Here Nietzsche chooses to accept the idea of an unconscious
mental mechanism which is understood by means of unconscious ideation
and volition. And, in connection with Nietzsche's description above of the
operation of unconscious inferences, which is so strikingly similar to Hart-
mann's description of unconscious intuition, Nietzsche adds: "Instincts like-
wise appear to be a variety of picture thinking, which finally becomes a
stimulus and motive." 2 6 Nietzsche agrees with Hartmann's argument that
such unconscious processes are necessary if a transition from sense perception
to abstract thought is to take place. It is also significant to note Hartmann's
characterization of unconscious processes as being compressed into a point
in time (ZeitpunktJ, as being timeless, while conscious thinking must take its
steps in time. This idea, in combination with atomistic and dynamic theories
which Nietzsche finds in both Hartmann and Lange, finds a place in
Nietzsche's worldview in Anschauung.
Thus, while Schopenhauer and Kant point to the existence of ideas of
which we are unconscious, they do not refer to these ideas as intuitive, but
rather, more as a form of thinking which we are unable to grasp without
conscious apprehension and thought. Hartmann, however, offers a definition
of intuition which depends upon the unconscious in which he claims "the same
logical links are present" as are found in discursive thinking.
In reading Hartmann, Nietzsche comes to visualize a completely uncon-
scious process of thinking which has a certain logic or inferential quality of
its own and which functions as a basis for conscious discursive activity. It is
a process which consists of an "interblending of the discursive and intuitive
methods" of the unconscious and conscious aspects of mental activity. A
process which arises out of the reality of instinct and the limits of human
organization.

25
Nietzsche, Ρ 41.
26
Ibid.
50 IV. Nietzsche: "The deepest philosophical knowledge

That Nietzsche was much influenced by Hartmann's insistence upon

unconscious instinct at work in the production of language, is not only
evident in "Origins," but evidence of this influence is found in other notes
written during the same period, for example, notes for his talk "Homer and
Classical Philology" delivered as his acceptance speech for the position of
professor of philology at Basel.
But as soon as we try to understand these superior men (of antiquity) and
their thoughts, solely as symptoms of spiritual currents, as continuing
instincts, we touch nature directly. It is the same when we continue to the
origin of language.
It is not the power of the single genius which history shows above all,
much more the dark power of terrible instincts, unconscious willing.
Elements of natural science.
1) the tendency to the naked truth
2) exact method, statistics
3) exposition of instinctual life (Triebleben), laws, etc.
4) origin of language, Darwinism 2 7
Philology ... is ... natural science, in the degree to which it tries to sound
out the most p r o f o u n d instinct in man, the instinct of language ... 2 8
Everything that has not yet lost its effective force is worth living: (leaving
out of consideration the apparently historical, i.e., languages which appar-
ently belong to the products of nature). 2 9

In these notes Nietzsche is linking instincts and the unconscious with lan-
guage. And, in addition to the suggestion that the origin of language could
be looked at from the perspective of Darwinism, Nietzsche suggests that
language can most profitably be studied from the point of view of the natural
sciences: "Recognition by natural science of the nature of language."30

27
Nietzsche, BAW 5: 195.
28
Ibid., BAW 5: 272.
29
Ibid., BAW 5: 188.
30
Ibid., BAW 5: 268.
 Chapter Five
Schopenhauer and Hartmann: Will, Character, Instinct

In "Origins" Nietzsche rewrites Hartmann's ideas about the relationship

between instinct and character in the following manner: "instinct is the most
particular achievement of individuals or of the masses springing from char-
acter," and "instinct is one with the innermost kernel of a being." 1 Although
we saw in our discussion of Hartmann's chapter "The Unconscious in the
Origins of Language," that Nietzsche is using the terms "innermost kernel
of being," "character," and "instinct," in the way in which Hartmann defines
them, both Hartmann and Nietzsche are heavily indebted to Schopenhauer's
definitions of them as they relate to his overall metaphysical principle of the
will.

Schopenhauer's Will

Until this point in my discussion, I have confined my description of

Schopenhauer's philosophy to representation. However, Schopenhauer was
not satisfied with knowing that we have representations and that they are
such and such according to the principle of sufficient reason. If the world
were nothing more than representation, it would be a meaningless dream.
Schopenhauer identifies the will as synonymous with Kant's thing in itself,
and as such:
it is by its whole nature completely and fundamentally different from the
representation and so the forms and laws of the representation must be
wholly foreign to it. ... Here we already see that we can never get at the
inner nature of things from without. However much we investigate, we obtain
nothing but images and names. ... Yet this is the path that all philosophers
before me have followed.2

This includes, of course, Kant, who in Schopenhauer's reading of him, was

satisfied to stop at this limitation.

1
Nietzsche, US 223.
2
Schopenhauer, WWR 1: 99, SW 2: 118.
52 V. Schopenhauer and Hartmann: Will, Character, Instinct

How does Schopenhauer get at the inner nature of things from inside the
subject of knowing? The answer is given in the form of the word "will" and
in an operation. The subject of knowing experiences his body in two entirely
different ways. First, there is an experience of the subject which is not the
immediate knowledge of perception, but is already a representation. Second,
there is an experience which is one and the same with the body of the subject.
This immediate knowledge of the body Schopenhauer denotes as will.
The act of will and the action of the body are not two different states
objectively known, connected by the bond of causality; they do not stand
in the relation of cause and effect, but are one and the same thing, though
given in two entirely different ways, first quite directly, and then in percep-
tion for the understanding. The action of the body is nothing but the act
of will objectified, i.e., translated into perception. ... Only in reflection are
willing and acting different, in reality they are one. 3
The operation which Schopenhauer then applies to the word will makes of
it the all pervasive foundation upon which the world of representation and
intellect rests. "Hitherto," writes Schopenhauer, "the concept of will has been
subsumed under the concept of force·, I on the other hand, do exactly the
reverse, and intend every force in nature to be conceived as will." Schopen-
hauer's argument procedes in the following manner. At the root of the
concept force lies knowledge of the world of representation or phenomenon
through knowledge of perception. On the other hand the concept of will is
the only concept that does not have its origin in phenomenon or represen-
tation of perception. Rather the concept of will comes from within:
And proceeds from the most immediate consciousness of everyone. In this
consciousness each one knows and at the same time is himself his own
individuality according to its nature immediately, without any form, even
the form of subject and object, for here knower and known coincide.
Therefore, if we refer the concept of force to that of will, we have in fact
referred something more unknown to something infinitely better known,
indeed to the one thing really known to us immediately and completely;
and we have very greatly extended our knowledge. If, on the other hand,
we subsume the concept of will under that o f f o r c e , as has been done hitherto,
we renounce the only immediate knowledge of the inner nature of the world
that we have, since we let it disappear in a concept abstracted from the
phenomenon, with which therefore we can never pass beyond the phenom-
enon. 4

3 Ibid., W W R 1: 1 0 0 - 1 0 2 , S W 2: 1 1 9 - 2 0 .
4 Ibid., W W R 1: 1 1 1 - 1 1 2 , S W 2: 133. That this operation on Schopenhauer's part made an
impression upon Nietzsche is made clear in his "On Schopenhauer," where this and sur-
rounding passages are specifically cited. It seems reasonable to surmise, that this reversal of
the roles of force and will, making of the will the basic impelling force, served as the first
possibility of what was later to become the will to power.
 Schopenhauer's "Unconscious" Will 53

Thus, the will becomes the basic impelling and producing force of nature.
Its nature is always the expression of the will to life. All knowledge is foreign
to the will. The intellect, mind, knowledge, are brought forth by the will
and remain in a secondary position with regard to it. The will is an original
unity, an absolute, blind force upon which rests the multiplicity of represen-
tation as objedifications of its striving. Schopenhauer's reversal of force and
will is a radical departure from an entire tradition, which rested on the idea
that will receives content and direction from the mind or spirit, which really
meant, humans or a god have control over fate. Schopenhauer relegates the
intellect — except for its aiding of the will to higher stages of objectification
— to a mere tool and mouthpiece of the will, placing human beings in a
fundamentally powerless position at the mercy of the will.

Schopenhauer's "Unconscious" Will

However, let us note that with all of this Schopenhauer has not left the
realm of consciousness. We read that the will "proceeds from the most
immediate consciousness of everyone. In this consciousness each one knows and
at the same time is himself its own individuality according to its nature
immediately, without any form ... for here knower and known coincide" (my
emphasis). This conception of consciousness, as an immediate consciousness
without form, is unusual for Schopenhauer as we have read him up to this
point. Nevertheless, he is saying that consciousness, with regard to the will,
can know without forms. It is true we are in two worlds with Schopenhauer,
the world of representation and the world of the will, but to equate these
respectively with consciousness and unconsciousness is to oversimplify. It is
more accurate to say that there is the non-conscious irrationality of the will,
which, however, is not without order and harmony. And that there are
actually two types of consciousness for human beings, abstract consciousness
drawn from representation and an immediate consciousness without forms
deriving from direct knowledge of the will. There is confusion on these
points in reading Schopenhauer because he uses the word unbewusst generally
to mean unconscious, but by this usually means operations are occurring in
the world, organisms, in us, of which we simply are not conscious or which
are non-conscious for us because the will is, as stated above, "by its whole
nature completely and fundamentally different from the representation and
so the forms and laws of the representation must be wholly foreign to it."
Let, us look, by way of contrast, at two isolated quotes from Schopenhauer,
where he does approach the possibility of an unconscious thinking:
54 V. Schopenhauer and Hartmann: Will, Character, Instinct

The whole process of our thinking and resolving seldom lies on the surface,
that is to say, seldom consists in a concatenation of clearly conceived
judgments; although we aspire to this, in order to be able to give an account
of it to ourselves and others. But usually the rumination of material from
outside, by which it is cast into ideas, takes place in the obscure depths of
the mind. This rumination goes on almost as unconsciously (beinahe so
unbewusst) as the conversion of nourishment into the humors and substance
of the body. Hence it is that we are often unable to give any account of the
origin of our deepest thoughts; they are the offspring of our mysterious
inner being. Judgments, sudden flashes of thoughts, resolves, rise from
those depths unexpectedly and to our own astonishment. Consciousness is
the mere surface of our mind, and of this, as of the globe, we do not know
the interior, but only the crust.5

And again, in chapter 3 of Parerga and Paralipomena, "Ideas Concerning the

Intellect," Schopenhauer writes:
We might almost imagine (Fast möchte man glauben) that half of all our
thinking occurred unconsciously. ... In fact our best, most terse, and most
profound thoughts suddenly occur in consciousness like an inspiration and
often at once in the form of a striking or significant sentence. But they are
obviously the results of a long and unconscious meditation and of countless
apercus that often lie in the distant past and are individually forgotten. ...
One might almost venture to put forward (Beinahe möchte man es wagen) the
physiological hypothesis that conscious thought takes place on the surface
of the brain and unconscious in the innermost recesses of its medullary
substance.6

Let us note, however, the tentative way Schopenhauer offers his suggestion
of such an unconscious rumination. "This rumination goes on almost as
unconsciously as the conversion of nourishment into the humors and sub-
stance of the body." "One might almost venture to put forward the physio-
logical hypothesis that conscious thought takes place on the surface." "We
might almost imagine that half of all our thinking occurred unconsciously"
(my emphasis). Thus, when one experiences the will immediately, it is with
consciousness, but consciousness without forms. And, in both of the quotes
above where Schopenhauer describes most of our thought as an almost
unconscious activity, what he means, I maintain, is that it appears unconscious
to us, but in reality it is the non-conscious striving of the will working in
us.
But in the last instance, or in the secret of our inner being, what puts into
activity the association of ideas itself ... is the will. ... Now just as here the
laws of the connection of ideas exist only on the basis of the will, so in the

5 Ibid., W W R 2: 1 3 5 - 3 6 , S W 3: 1 4 8 - 4 9 .
6 Schopenhauer, PP 5 5 - 5 6 , S W 6: 5 8 - 5 9 .
 Schopenhauer's "Unconscious" Will 55

real world the causal nexus of bodies really exists only on the basis of the
will manifesting itself in the phenomena of this world. 7

Therefore, even in these passages concerning an unconscious thinking, Scho-

penhauer chooses, to remain at the division between consciousness and the
will. What one can almost call an unconscious is really the will working in
us to bring forth our conscious thoughts. To admit the existence of something
like the unconscious in human intellect itself would be to place the reasoning
abilities of human beings on a footing with the non-conscious operations of
organic nature as a whole, and Schopenhauer was not ready to equate the
operations of organic nature with those of conscious thought, not even in
its "unconscious" operations. This would disturb the hierarchy of the coming
to be of ever higher grades of objectification of the will into phenomena,
and would have constituted a major contradiction in his thinking.
In addition, we find that Schopenhauer's irrational, non-conscious will
and its blind striving, is, in the last analysis, not as formless as it sounds. Its
striving is harmonious in its antagonism, ordered in its conflict and pur-
poseful. One could almost ascribe a teleological orientation to it.
Therefore the instinct of animals generally gives us the best explanation for
the remaining teleology of nature. For just as an instinct is an action,
resembling one according to a concept of purpose, yet entirely without such
concept, so are all formation and growth in nature like that which is
according to a concept of purpose, and yet entirely without this. In outer
as well as in inner teleology of nature, what we must think of as means and
end is everywhere only the phenomenon of the unity of the one will so far in
agreement with itself, which has broken up into space and time for our mode
of cognition. ... That harmony goes only so far as to render possible the
continuance of the world and its beings, which without it would long since
have perished. Therefore it extends only to the continuance of the species
and of the general conditions of life, but not to that of individuals.8

True, Schopenhauer never argues a teleological position from design, nor

from his new perspective of the irrational will, did he ever allow the possibility
that the harmonious aspects of the workings of the will could proceed from
processes analogous to human intellect. However, we see above that though
the will is non-rational, operating without the forms of consciousness com-
mon to human intellect, nevertheless, its overall direction of order and
harmony proceeds from the principle of "the continuance of the world and
its beings." Although on one level the will appears to be operating blindly,
in the struggle for life of the individuals, nevertheless, it is careful to preserve
the species, to preserve the continuance of the world and its beings, and

7 Schopenhauer, W W R 2: 136, SW 3: 149.

8 Ibid., W W R 1: 161, SW 2: 192.
56 V. Schopenhauer and Hartmann: Will, Character, Instinct

toward an end, that of ever higher forms of objectification of the will through
the ideas, 9 and eventually to the denial of the will by intellect.
Thus, we find, upon closer inspection, that though Schopenhauer main-
tains a strict division between human intellect and the will, this division
cannot be simply stated as conscious versus the unconscious. Schopenhauer
relaxes theses boundaries to a point by suggesting a type of human con-
sciousness without forms in addition to the abstract consciousness which
operates according to the forms of representation. On the other hand, his
will is formless, with, however, an overall operation of order and harmony
with an end in view. To admit an unconscious in the human intellect per se
would be to destroy these stretched, but carefully held boundaries. Nowhere
does Schopenhauer admit of an unconscious thinking as a part of or condition
upon which human consciousness itself rests.

Hartmann's Criticism of Schopenhauer's Will

Hartmann disputes the claim that the will can be directly known. His
arguments not only attempt to refute Schopenhauer's suggestion, but give
evidence why, for him, the will must be unconscious.
If, now, the man thinks to apprehend the will directly in consciousness in
three ways (1) from its cause, the motive; (2) from its accompanying and
succeeding feelings; and (3) from its effect, the act; and all the time (4) has
the content or object of the will as representation actually in consciousness,
— it is no wonder that the illusion of being immediately conscious of the
will itself is very tenacious and firmly fixed by long habit, so that it allows
the scientific view of the eternal unconsciousness of the will itself only with
difficulty to make way and to obtain a firm footing in the mind. But let
any one only once carefully test himself with several instances, and my
assertion will be found confirmed. If any one at first believes himself
conscious of the will itself, he soon observes, on closer examination, that
he is only conscious of the conceptual representation "I will", and at the same
time of the idea which forms the content of the will; and if he pursues the
investigation, he finds that the ideal presentation "I will" has always simul-
taneously arisen in one of the stated three ways or in several, and nothing
more is found in consciousness, even after the most searching examination. 10

9 Schopenhauer defines his use of Idea in the following passages: "Now I say that these grades
of the objectification of the will are nothing but Plato's Ideas. I mention this here for the moment,
so that in future I can use the word Idea in this sense. Therefore with me the word is always
to be understood in its genuine and original meaning, given it by Plato" (WWR 1: 129, SW
2: 154). "By Idea I understand every definite and fixed grade of the mill's objectification in so
far as it is thing in itself and is therefore foreign to plurality" (WWR 1: 130, SW 2: 154).
10 Hartmann, PU 2: 101, PUG 3 5 9 - 6 0 .
 Hartmann's Criticism of Schopenhauer's Will 57

Hartmann further makes the distinction that Schopenhauer recognized only

the will as metaphysical principle, while Idea was for him a product of the
brain in a materialistic sense. As a result, with regard to Schopenhauer "one
can only speak of an unconscious will, but not of unconscious idea." According
to Hartmann, Schopenhauer remains stuck in a subjective idealism, whereas
he on the other hand, espouses an objective idealism. Because of this, writes
Hartmann, Schopenhauer altogether fails to perceive that the unconscious
will of nature presupposes an unconscious Idea as goal, content, or object of
itself, without which it would be empty, indefinite, and objectless.11 Hartmann
points to the fact that in Schopenhauer's observations on instinct, sexual
love, life of the species, etc., the unconscious will is described as if it were
bound up with unconscious representation, without Schopenhauer knowing
or admitting it. Hartmann further indicates that because for Schopenhauer,
every consciousness is consciousness of an object with more or less clearly
conscious reference to the correlative notion of subject, a consciousness in which
this opposition is lacking would be inconceivable. But for Hartmann an
unconscious cognition without this consciousness of an object is possible and
Hartmann writes that Schopenhauer very nearly approached it in his descrip-
tion of the intuitive idea.12

11 Ibid., PUG 18.

12 In a later edition Hartmann expands greatly on these distinctions and argues very much
along the same lines as I have done in the preceeding section for Schopenhauer's not having
embraced the idea of the unconscious. He even quotes the same passages. Hartmann suggests
that although Schopenhauer failed to recognize it, his will is "the sole metaphysical principle
and is, therefore, of course, an unconscious will." Hartmann then continues: "Thought, on the
other hand, which with him is only the phenomenon of a metaphysical principle, and
therefore, as thought, not itself metaphysical, can, even where it is unconscious, never be
comparable with the unconscious Idea of Schelling, which I myself place by the side of
unconscious Will, as metaphysical principle of equal value. But, also, apart from this distinction
of the metaphysical and phenomenal, the 'unconscious rumination', of which Schopenhauer
speaks in two passages, which are in perfect accord [Here, Hartmann gives the two passages
I quoted above.], and which he assigns to the interior of the brain, refers indeed only to the
obscure and confused ideas of Leibnitz and Kant — ideas which are too weakly illuminated
by the light of consciousness to stand out clearly, which are thus merely below the threshold
of distinct consciousness, and are differentiated from the clearly conscious ideas only in degree
(not essentially). Schopenhauer thus gets no nearer the true conception of the absolutely
unconscious idea in these two apercus (which for the rest have had no influence on his
philosophy) than in another place, where he speaks of the separate consciousness of subor-
dinate nerve-centers in the organism. An opening for the true, absolutely unconscious idea
is certainly afforded by the system of Schopenhauer, but only at the point where it becomes
faithless to itself and self-contradictory, when the Idea, which is originally only another kind
of intuition of the cerebral intellect, becomes a metaphysical entity, preceding and condi-
tioning real individuation. ... Schopenhauer himself, however, shows no apprehension of
this so that, for example, it does not occur to him to bring forward the Idea to explain the
adaptation of means to ends in Nature, which rather in genuine idealistic fashion he regards
as a merely subjective appearance, arising through the disruption of the One Reality into
58 V. Schopenhauer and Hartmann: Will, Character, Instinct

We now begin to understand Rohde's letter to Nietzsche, quoted above,

in which he accuses Hartmann of plundering Schopenhauer and of proceeding
as if he himself had birthed the will "with two blind eyes, an unconscious
intellect." Hartmann essentially takes over Schopenhauer's system, but makes
two significant alterations. 1) In place of Schopenhauer's will which manifests
itself as representation through the different grades of objectification of the
ideas, Hartmann posits the metaphysical order of the Unconscious which
unites the unconscious will and the unconscious ideas. 2) While, for Scho-
penhauer, representation is the subjective knowledge of the will's striving,
for Hartmann, the unfolding of the idea of the unconscious through willing
is reality. It is the objective phenomenal-real order of nature, which is the
physiological unconscious, which provides an unconscious ground for the
total consciousness of an organism. Conscious thought first allows a knowl-
edge of the unconscious, which exists completely independently of it. The
subjective-ideal order of consciousness first becomes possible through conflict
with this unconscious ground and is the bond by which knowledge of the
transcendent but phenomenal-real order occurs. These distinctions become
crucial for Nietzsche as we will see in chapter 11.

Schopenhauer and Hartmann: Instinct and Character

With these general differences in mind, let us now compare Schopen-

hauer's ideas of instinct and character and their relation to will, with Hart-
mann's, and then attempt to find where Nietzsche is placing himself with
regard to them. As I indicated briefly above, Schopenhauer subsumes instinct
into a network of harmonious activities of the will. The will of animals and
thus human beings as well, is set in motion in two different ways: either by
motivation, which is triggered by an external occasion, or by instinct, which
exists as an internal impulse.
M o r e closely considered however, the contrast between the t w o is not so
sharp; in fact, ultimately it runs back to a difference o f degree. The motive
also acts only on the assumption of an inner impulse, that is to say, o f a
definite disposition o r quality o f the will, called its character. The motive in
each case gives this only a decided direction; individualizes it for the concrete
case. In just the same way, although instinct is a decided impulse of the
will, it does not act entirely f r o m within, like a spring, but it too waits f o r

the co-existence and succession of Space and Time, whereby essential unity is revealed in
the form of a teleological relation essentially non-existent, so that it would be to turn things
upside down to seek Reason in the purposive activity of Nature" (PU 1: 29 — 30).
 Schopenhauer and Hartmann: Instinct and Character 59

an external circumstance necessarily required for this action, and that cir-
cumstance determines the moment of the instinct's manifestation.13
An example of motivation triggering instinct, which Schopenhauer offers, is
that the season of the year acts as the external motivation, which allows the
manifestation of instinct in the migratory bird. For Schopenhauer the differ-
ence between instinct and character lies in that instinct is to be understood
as character set in motion only by a "quite specially determined motive," which
always brings forth exactly the same kind of action.
However, before motivation is possible, and it is only motivation which
sets instinct into motion, character is assumed. "Character, as possessed by
every animal species and every human individual ... is a permanent and
unalterable quality of will." Character is the inner impulse of the will in its
"definite (on going) disposition or quality," in its individual idea or objecti-
fication which is different in each individual. This character determines what
will act as motivation for it which sets instinct into motion as "a decided
impulse of the will."
Yet this quality can be set in motion by very different motives, and adapts
itself to them. For this reason the action resulting from it can, according to
its material quality, turn out very different, yet it will always bear the stamp
of the same character. It will therefore express and reveal this character;
consequently, for the knowledge of this, the material quality of the action
in which the character appears is essentially a matter of indifference. Ac-
cordingly, we might declare instinct to be an excessively one sided and strictly
determined character.14

Why "excessively one sided"? Because of lack, of intellect. Schopenhauer

continues:
It follows from this statement that to be determined by motivation presupposes
certain width of the sphere of knowledge and consequently a more perfectly
developed intellect. It is therefore peculiar to the higher animals, and quite
specially to man. On the other hand, to be determined by instinct demands
only as much intellect as is necessary to apprehend the one quite specially
determined motive that alone and exclusively becomes the occasion for the
instinct's manifestation. For this reason, it occurs in the case of an extremely
limited sphere of knowledge, and therefore, as a rule and in the highest
degree, only in the case of animals of the inferior classes, particularly
insects.15

In higher animals, the intellect — consciousness — moves away from the

setting in motion of the will through instinct and develops the capacity to

13 Schopenhauer, W W R 2: 342, SW 3: 3 9 0 - 9 1 .
14 Ibid., W W R 2: 343, SW 3: 3 9 1 - 9 2 .
15 Ibid.
60 V. Schopenhauer and Hartmann: Will, Character, Instinct

set the will in motion through motivation. Motivation is tied to knowledge

and a more perfectly developed intellect.
Schopenhauer distinguishes two types of character corresponding to will
and representation. First is intelligible character, which I have been describing
above. It is a term which Schopenhauer gets from Kant. He defines intelligible
character as "an extra temporal, and so indivisible and unalterable act of
will." While the intelligible character belongs to the will, the "individual
phenomena, illuminated by knowledge, in persons and animals, is determined
by motives to which the character in each case regularly and necessarily
always reacts in the same way." Schopenhauer calls this empirical character.
The character of each individual man, in so far as it is thoroughly individual
and not entirely included in that of the species, can be regarded as a special
Idea, corresponding to a particular act of objectification of the will. This
act itself would then be his intelligible character, and his empirical character
would be its phenomenon. The empirical character is entirely determined
by the intelligible that is groundless, that is to say, will as thing in itself,
not subject to the principle of sufficient reason (the form of the phenome-
non). The empirical character must in the course of a lifetime furnish a copy
of the intelligible character, and cannot turn out differently from what is
demanded by the latter's inner nature. 1 6

Thus, empirical character is tied to the manifestation of instincts in its various

degrees according to amount of knowledge, according to the degrees of
objectifications of the will. Man, with most intellect, acts according to
motivation over instinct, and to many types of motivation, whereas the insect,
as Schopenhauer's example of empirical character with least knowledge, acts
with instinct according to a single motivation.
Now we are in a position to compare Schopenhauer's use of the terms
"instinct," "character," and "will," with Hartmann's use of these terms. For
Schopenhauer, the intelligible character is an unalterable and "definite dis-
position or quality of the will." An external circumstance, the motive, sets
in motion a specific instinctual act. The instinctual act expresses and reveals
the intelligible character in empirical form. For Schopenhauer, the instinct is
a necessary but relatively weak link in the process. It is an "impulse of the
will" whose only purpose is the manifestation of character for the purposes
of the will's striving for ever higher levels of objectification.
Hartmann, however, places the willing of a purpose not with the uncon-
scious idea, which is similar to Schopenhauer's will, but rather with the
principle of the unconscious of individual character. Instinct is the result of
this unconscious purposeful activity. And as we recall, from my discussion
of Hartmann's definitions of instinct in chapter 4, the end of this purposeful

16 Ibid., WWR 1: 158, SW 2: 1 8 8 - 8 9 .

 Nietzsche: Instinct and Character 61

activity does not come from something outside the individual but the end of
the instinct is in each single case unconsciously willed and imagined by the
individual, and the choice of means suitable to each special case consciously
made. As we saw above, Schopenhauer wrote that "the material quality of
the action in which the character appears is essentially a matter of indiffer-
ence." For Hartmann, the unconscious instinctive action is crucial, as it
produces a "conscious willing of a means to an unconscious end." It is
purposeful activity willing a means to an end which arises from the uncon-
scious of each individual "springing from his inmost nature and character."
Here is a big difference. Schopenhauer's instinct is tied to the metaphysics
of the will, whereas Hartmann's idea of character and individual unconscious
volition proceeds from the history of the organism, from the phenomenal-
real order of nature.

Nietzsche: Instinct and Character

Hartmann owes much, of course, to the Schopenhauerian characterization

of these terms, however, as we have seen, he reorganizes them creating the
physiological order of unconscious individual ideation and volition in instinct
resulting in conscious willing of a means to an unconscious end through
instinctive action. At the time Nietzsche reads Hartmann, he is very familiar
with Schopenhauer's use of these terms. However, at least in his attempts at
arriving at a theory of the origin of language, Nietzsche is much more in
sympathy with Hartmann's point of view in which instinct plays such a
strong role.
The point at which Nietzsche appears to draw away from Schopenhauer
is in the distinction of empirical character. Schopenhauer wants intellect to
draw toward motivation and away from instinct. This assumes that con-
sciousness can will away instinct. Nietzsche finds instinct to be much more
demanding; it is not so easily brushed aside and continues to manifest itself
even with conscious knowledge and higher awareness of motivation. "Even
knowledge of the instincts does not undo their effects." 17 It is true that
Nietzsche's equation of the production of language out of instinct as syn-
onymous with the instinctual production of bees and ants comes from
Hartmann and even from Schopenhauer, yet for Schopenhauer, these are
instincts of the lowest forms of objectification. Instinct is an impulse of the
will which remains secondary to character. Nietzsche departs from Schopen-
hauer here and adopts a point of view with regard to the instincts which

17 Nietzsche, K S A 7: 98.
62 V. Schopenhauer and Hartmann: Will, Character, Instinct

falls in line with Hartmann's assertion that it is instinct which is the continual
purposive action in all organic life. Nietzsche gives instinct the primary role.
Let us review all of what Nietzsche writes of character and instinct during
the period in question. In "Origins" as we recall he writes: "Instinct is the
most particular achievement of individuals or of the masses, springing from
character. Instinct is one with the innermost kernel of a being." In notes
written in winter and spring 1870/71 he writes further:

Character appears to be, then, a representation poured over our instinct life,
under which all manifestations of that instinctual life come to light. This
representation is appearance and the other one truth: one the eternal,
appearance the transient. The will the universal, the representation the
differentiating. Character is a typical representation of the Ur-Eine, which
we on the other hand, only come to know as multiplicity of externalizations.
Here we see how the representation is capable of differentiating between
manifestations of the will: how all character is an inner representation. This
inner representation is apparently not identical with our conscious thinking
about ourselves. 18

Character is an inner representation through which our instinctual life is

expressed. While character is a representation, instinct is one with the inner-
most kernel of a being. This life of the instincts revealed through character
is not identical with our conscious thinking. When Nietzsche writes about
instinct and character in "Origins" he is clearly adopting Hartmann's defi-
nitions as opposed to Schopenhauer's.
During the same period of 1870/71 Nietzsche begins to transform these
terms into specific elements of a larger worldview of his own.

The Ur-representation, which makes up the character, is also the mother of

all moral phenomena. And that occasional Auflebung of character (in artistic
pleasure, improvisation) is a transformation of the moral character.
Rigid constancy of the representation of the Ur-Eine, which however as
appearance must carry out a process. The intelligible character completely
fixed: only the representations are free and changeable? How we act, how
we think — all process and necessary. 19
The individual, the intelligible character is only a representation of the Ur-Eine.
Character is no reality, but only a representation: it is pulled into the realm
of becoming and has therefore a surface, the empirical man. 20

And, one last, but significant passage:

18Nietzsche, A N 276 - 77, MusA 3: 3 3 6 - 3 7 .

" Nietzsche, A N 277, K S A 7: 213.
20 Nietzsche, A N 2 7 2 - 7 3 , K S A 7: 201.
 Nietzsche: Instinct and Character 63

There is alone the one will: man is a representation born in each moment.
What is firmness of character? An activity of the viewing will, as much as
the potential of a character for education.21

In chapter 11, we will find Nietzsche creating his worldview in Anschauung,

heavily influenced by Hartmann, in which there is what he calls the Ur-Eine.
The Ur-Eine is simultaneously being and will. The Ur-Eine in its aspect as
will projects representations to create what Nietzsche calls appearance. It is
to these already existent phenomenal-real representations that humans come
with consciousness to interpret a world. Intelligible character for Nietzsche
must be a split entity: there is the intelligible character of that aspect of the
Ur-Eine which is being, and there is the intelligible character which belongs
to the activity of the will which leads to appearance. Humans in their aspect
as unconscious instinct are part of this world of appearance; this constitutes
their truer nature, their "intelligible character." As opposed to Schopenhauer's
idea of empirical character which can only reflect in representation the fixed
and unalterable intelligible character of the will, for Nietzsche, consciousness
differentiates the represented outside of this intelligible character by gathering
many expressions of it into the "empirical character." Thus, it is unconscious
instinct which determines not only the intelligible character of appearance,
but also consciousness of it. "We guard ourselves against instinct, as some-
thing animalistic. In this act itself an instinct is at work." 2 2 I will discuss in
much more detail in chapters 10 and 11 how Nietzsche comes to posit a
phenomenal-real world under the influence of Hartmann. For my present
discussion it is relevant to look at Hartmann's specific criticisms of Schopen-
hauer's intelligible character:

Schopenhauer, who assumes the establishment of character by a resolution

taken once for all out of time, can hardly stand the test of criticisms derived
from his own principles.
Schopenhauer himself wishes to be an absolute monist; if, then, the will of
the world is in its essence one; if further, the character likewise, according
to his own assertion, is nothing but the peculiarity of the individual will,
the individuality of character can manifestly only be conceived as possible in
an individualised activity of the universal will, but not as directly based on
the essential nature of the universal will, since this always remains universal.
How, however, the activity of the will which produces character is to be
thought as extra-temporal, of that I can form no idea. I can only imagine a
being, but not its activity, as out of time, since activity at once supposes
time, unless one also assumes as possible an activity in zero-time, in which
case it is in the moment also again extinguished. The character, however, that
is to live through the life-period of the individual manifestly requires also

21 Ibid., AN 275, K S A 7: 208.

22 Ibid., K S A 7: 201.
64 V. Schopenhauer and Hartmann: Will, Character, Instinct

an activity of the universal will, which lasts just as long. Otherwise expressed,
the doctrine of the intelligible individual character is a contradiction to the
monistic principle, a contradiction also to the transcendent ideality of space
and time. For in the intelligible the principium individuationis is wanting,
consequently also plurality and individuality, consequently also the many
individual characters. The individual character /ire-supposes the individual,
or rather individuals, thus plurality, individuality; in short, the world of
appearances: like this, it only becomes possible through time, through the
temporal activity of the Universal Intelligible Being. 23

For Schopenhauer, instinct is an impulse of the will, which upon the prompt-
ing of motivation, causes actions to form the empirical character, which only
mirrors the unalterable intelligible character of will. Whereas, for Nietzsche
and Hartmann, instinct is that which prompts the differentiation of the
intelligible character as individual will from the unconscious idea or the Ur-
Eine as Being, and consciousness as that which allows the differentiation of
empirical character from the merely represented intelligible character. Whereas
Schopenhauer contends that empirical character can only repeat the form of
intelligible character, Nietzsche, along with Hartmann, believes that the
intelligible character is an activity which allows for the potential education or
change of empirical character. Instinct becomes the basic element because a
physiological real world of phenomenality is presupposed as basis of reaction,
rather than that of a transcendental will. It is also significant that, for
Nietzsche, instinct (the innermost kernel of being) and character (as inner
representation) are not identical with our conscious thinking about ourselves,
thus placing his definitions in the realm of Hartmann's unconscious.
Many of these differences in the ways in which Nietzsche and Schopen-
hauer use the terms "character" and "instinct" can be detected without
knowing of Hartmann's influence, however with knowledge of it, we are in
a strong position to understand Nietzsche's emphasis on the role of instinct
in human activity and in the production of language. We are in a much better
position to understand why Nietzsche suggests that the study of the origin
of language should proceed from the natural sciences and why he speaks of
language as "a complete organism." The "organism" of language is a product
of instinct. That Nietzsche has Hartmann's unconscious very much in mind
is evinced by the sentence which immediately follows his definition of instinct
in "Origins". "This is the real problem of philosophy, the unending expe-
diency of organisms and the unconsciousness in their coming to be."24
The adoption of Hartmann's distinctions with regard to these terms is
particularly significant for two major reasons. First, Nietzsche is, at this time,

23 Hartmann, PU 2: 3 4 5 - 4 6 , P U G 513.
24 Nietzsche, US 223.
 Nietzsche: Instinct and Character 65

wrestling with the question of metaphysics. Although both Schopenhauer

and Kant develop their philosophies to a great extent from the evidence of
physical and natural science, their projects are ultimately metaphysical.
Nietzsche is, by the time he reads Hartmann, wary of metaphysics. Nietzsche,
as we shall see, is skeptical of how the physical and natural sciences have
been applied by Schopenhauer and Kant. His preference for Hartmann's
"inductive method of the physical sciences," through which observation he
champions a strong instinct acting as a result of unconscious idea and will,
is interesting to Nietzsche in its adherence to a physiologically-real state of
affairs, even though the exact methods of such a state of affairs are not yet
fathomable. With this, I do not mean to suggest that Hartmann's philosophy
of the unconscious is not metaphysical, however, in opposition to Schopen-
hauer and Kant, Hartmann divides his philosophy into parts according to
the possible definitions of matter: one definition concerns the metaphysics of
the unconscious will and idea, another the definition of purely physiological
phenomenon, and the third concerns the purely sensuous definition of matter.
The second problem Nietzsche is wrestling with is the question of
teleology. If language is an organism, toward what purpose is it, along with
all organisms striving? For Schopenhauer the will is ultimately blind and
irrational, yet there appears to be an order and harmony to its striving in
organisms at least at the level of species, something from which Kant, too,
derives his natural teleology. However, whereas Kant derives his natural
teleology from the organization of human intellect, Schopenhauer derives his
teleology not from the human intellect, but from the striving of the will. In
Über den Willen in der Natur (The Will in Nature) Schopenhauer writes:
the universal fitness for their ends, the obviously intentional design in all
the parts of the organism of the lower animals without exception, proclaim
too distinctly for it ever to have been seriously questioned, that here no
forces of Nature acting by chance and without plan have been at work, but
a will. 25

Schopenhauer does not deny a teleological viewpoint as long as it is under-

stood that it operates upon the aim of the will and is in no sense of human
intellectual origin.
Hartmann, in much the same sense, espouses the apparent purpose at
work in the coming to be of organisms. "One of the most important
manifestations of the Unconscious is instinct, and the conception of instinct
rests on that of purpose."26 In his statement about "the unending expediency

25 Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Will in Nature, Trans. Mme. Karl Hillebrand, London: George
Bell and Sons, 1891. WN 255, SW 4: 37.
26 Hartmann, PU 1: 43, PUG 24.
66 V. Schopenhauer and Hartmann: Will, Character, Instinct

of the organism" Nietzsche betrays an accord with the view that organisms
are constituted and act with some sense of purpose, but the reason why
Hartmann would be especially appealing to Nietzsche on the question of
teleology is precisely because of his physiological basis of the purpose of
instinct, though the actual mechanism must, according to Hartmann "remain
for us eternally covered with the veil of the Unconscious." It is the "uncon-
sciousness of the coming to be" of organisms which Nietzsche finds valuable
and which he will pursue.
Nietzsche goes a step beyond Schopenhauer and Kant in wishing to
examine such questions as metaphysics and teleology from a much more
strictly physical and natural science point of view. At the time Nietzsche
writes "Origins" under Hartmann's influence, he has already worked through
a complete skepticism of Schopenhauer's metaphysics and Kant's teleology,
both based upon the strong impressions received from his reading of Lange's
History of Materialism: Criticism of its Present Importance. Before I turn specif-
ically to Nietzsche's criticism of metaphysics and questioning of teleology, it
will be very helpful to examine the nature and extent of Lange's influence
upon this questioning.
 Chapter Six
Lange's History of Materialism

In a letter to Hermann Mushacke from November, 1866, Nietzsche writes:

"The most important philosophical work, which has appeared in the last ten
years is doubtless Lange's History of Materialism. ... Kant, Schopenhauer
and this book of Lange's — I need no more." 1 Nietzsche first read Lange in
1866, a year after discovering Schopenhauer. In his book, Friedrich Nietzsche
als Naturphilosoph, Mittasch writes: "It must have made a strong impression
upon the young Nietzsche, that Schopenhauer's philosophy was to a high
degree natural philosophy, which was based upon the natural sciences of the
time. From this certain impulses must have grown." 2 And, similarly, Schlechta
and Anders remark, "It was certainly of importance to Nietzsche that Scho-
penhauer made use of the broadest basis of thinking in the natural sciences
of his time." 3 Nietzsche had, from his early years at Schulpforta shown an
interest in the natural sciences, and this interest was broadened in his reading
of Schopenhauer and greatly reinforced through his reading of Lange. It was
this book of Lange's which offered the young Nietzsche some basic ideas,
which he eventually transformed into critiques of Schopenhauer and Kant
and into basic tenants of his philosophy. For example, upon reading Lange,
Nietzsche begins to question metaphysics and its relationship to language
and art, and to work out for himself, some of the issues of teleology, using
Kant's Critique of Judgement as a basis. We have evidence of Nietzsche's
thoughts on the specific importance of Lange's work in letters of the period. 4

1 Nietzsche, KSB 2: 184.

2 Mittasch, FNN 16.
3 Schlechta and Anders, VAP 52.
4 Schlechta and Anders quote a passage from Richard Blunck's biography of Nietzsche which
summarizes quite well the effect which Lange had on Nietzsche and his relationship to
Schopenhauer's work. "What Nietzsche got from Lange's work, is far more than a simple
orientation in the history of philosophy and 'traditional conceptualization', as Jaspers
indicates. He found here also an untrammeled and honorable thinker, whose positivistic
relativism spoke to many of Nietzsche's own instincts and whose untrammeled exposition
brought him an abundance of stimulation and confirmations. ... Here he first came into
contact with Darwinism, with the economical and political streams of the time, further
stimulation for his studies of Democritus, who was an especial love of Lange's. Here he got
probably for the first time a picture of Kant's work, which he then completed through the
reading of the two volume book about Kant by Kuno Fischer. Here, he was also made
68 VI. Lange's History of Materialism

In August, 1866 Nietzsche writes the following description of Lange's work

in a letter to Carl v o n Gersdorff:
Finally I shall also mention Schopenhauer, to whom I am attached with
complete sympathy. What we have in him, has lately been made even more
clear to me through another writing, which in its own right is admirable
and very instructive: History of Materialism and Criticism of its Meaning
for the Present by Fr. A. Lange, 1866. We have here a highly enlightened
Kantian and natural scientist before us. His thesis is summarized in the
following three sentences:
1) the world of the senses is a product of our organization.
2) our visible (bodily) organs are the same as all other parts of the world
of appearance, only pictures of an unknown situation.
3) Our true organization remains equally unknown to us as do the actual
things outside. We have only the product of both before us.
That is, the true essence of things, the thing in itself, is not only unknown
to us, but the concept of it itself is no more and no less than the last
outgrowth of an opposition conditioned by our organization, of which we
do not know, whether it has any bearing at all outside of our experience.
As a result, Lange thinks the philosophers should be left alone as long as
they edify us (dass sie uns hinfüro erbauen). Art is free, also in the area of
concepts. ... You see yourself, even with this strong critical point of view
our Schopenhauer remains ours, yes, he becomes even more for us. If
philosophy is art, ... if philosophy is supposed to edify, then I know at least
no philosopher, who edifies more than our Schopenhauer. 5

In February, 1868, two years later, Nietzsche is again recommending Lange

to Carl v o n Gersdorff:
At this time I must once again praise the accomplishment of a man of whom
I wrote you earlier. If you have the desire to be instructed completely in
the materialistic movement of our days, about the natural sciences with their
Darwinian theories, their cosmic systems, their animated camera obscura,
... I know of nothing more excellent to recommend than "The History of

acquaintance with the english positivists, w h o during his o w n so called positivistic period
would play a large role for him. It was not Ree, as it has often been said, w h o first introduced
him to them, rather it was already Lange. In Lange he also found decided confirmation of
one of his philosophical basic instincts: Lange posited a fundamental abrupt line of separation
between knowledge arrived at through experience and given as scientific truth and all manner
of metaphysics as poetic concepts and rejected every equivalence of thinking and being, in
the manner of Plato and Hegel. This knowledge critical approach of Lange's strengthened
an inner conviction already of the young Nietzsche, namely that, between the infinity o f life
and its concrete reality on one side and the limitation of the understanding on the other
side, an unbridgeable discrepancy consisted, that life and the world is in its essence alogical
and that every attempt, to make it purely understandable and to master it, is of necessity
withdrawn. The stance of the real as merely alogical and unreal he had already met with as
a revelation in Schopenhauer. In the cooler atmosphere of Lange he found it n o w to be
verified" (VAP 55 — 56, quoted from Friedrich Nietzsche: Kindheit und Jugend, München/Basel,
1953, 158).
5
Nietzsche, KSB 2: 1 5 9 - 1 6 0 .
 VI. Lange's History of Materialism 69

Materialism" of F. A. Lange (Iserlohn 1866), a book which offers infinitely

more than the title promises ... Considering the direction of your studies I
know of nothing more worthy. 6

Thus, w h e n Nietzsche reads Lange, o n l y a year a f t e r b e c o m i n g Schopen-

hauer's a v o w e d disciple, he is already p r o v i d e d w i t h the tools f o r a decisive
a r g u m e n t against metaphysical presuppositions. W h e n S c h o p e n h a u e r argues
that the will is s y n o n y m o u s w i t h the thing in itself, he asserts an impossibility,
because, f o r Lange, ultimate reality is u n k n o w a b l e , and any idea o f its essence
remains fettered in the bonds o f the p h e n o m e n a l w o r l d and conceptuality.
A l s o , w i t h his i n t r o d u c t i o n to D a r w i n i s m and the t h e o r y o f evolution,
Nietzsche is led to think it possible that w h a t appears in the w o r l d as p u r p o s e
c o u l d be explained mechanically, as a consequence o f r a n d o m o r f o r t u i t o u s
changes. A l l o f these elements, gained f r o m his reading o f L a n g e will b e c o m e
m o r e apparent as they w o r k themselves i n t o his critique o f Schopenhauer's
metaphysics and his questioning o f t e l e o l o g y in chapters 7 and 8.
I will address f i v e m a j o r areas o f concern f o r Nietzsche, areas in w h i c h
the reading o f Lange's b o o k b r o u g h t a b o u t significant gain o f k n o w l e d g e
and c o n f i r m a t i o n o r revision o f ideas held previously. These areas are 1) that
w e can n e v e r get b e y o n d the fact o f o u r organization; 2) that p h i l o s o p h y is
art; 3) t h e importance o f Nietzsche's acquaintance w i t h atomistic and dynamic
theories, and the latest research on f o r c e and matter, and Lange's perspective
on these; 4) language and the subject/predicate relationship; and finally, 5)
Lange's ideas on teleology in light o f D a r w i n i a n t h e o r y . 7

6 Ibid., KSB 2: 257.

7 With very few exceptions, it is only in recent years that interest has centered around Lange's
influence upon Nietzsche. The major studies are: George J. Stack, Lange and Nietzsche, New
York: Walter de Gruyter, 1983; two articles by Jörg Salaquarda, "Der Standpunkt des Ideals
bei Lange und Nietzsche," Studi Tedeschi, XXII, 1, 1979, and "Nietzsche und Lange," Nietzsche
Studien 7, 1978; and "Schopenhauer und F. A. Lange" in VAP 50 ff. Earlier works which
touch upon Nietzsche's relationship to Lange's History of Materialism are: Vaihinger, Die
Philosophie des Als Ob, Berlin, 1920; Del-Negro, Die Rolle der Fiktionen in der Erkenntnistheorie
Friedrich Nietzsche's, München, 1923; E. Hocks, Das Verhältnis der Erkenntnis %ur Unendlichkeit
der Welt bei Nietzsche. Eine Darstellung seiner Erkenntnislehre, Leipzig, 1914.
Stack's book on Lange and Nietzsche is a very complete study of this relationship, covering
every possible area of influence. While Stack's study served to enrich mine to some extent,
my major criticism of his work is that, after taking stock of Lange's work and the specific
areas of influence upon Nietzsche, Stack tends to jump to the mature philosophy, relating
the initial reactions of the 22 year old Nietzsche to Lange's work with those of the Nietzsche
of the middle and late 1880s. Although this is not always the case, for Stack does refer to
Human All too Human, Daybreak, The Birth of Tragedy and other writings of the earlier years,
these are by far in the minority. I feel that in making the jump from this earliest of influences
upon Nietzsche to their applications in Nietzsche's mature philosophy, while certainly useful,
Stack neglects to take stock of the evolution, transformations, and changes which bring
Nietzsche from his initial acquaintance with Lange, to those later years. My study of Lange
and his influence, on the contrary, focuses on its immediate effects upon Nietzsche's thinking
70 VI. Lange's History of Materialism

We are a Product of our Organisation

That we can never get beyond the fact of our psychophysical organization
because we rely on our senses, which are the product of that organization is,
perhaps, the single most important idea with Nietzsche gets from Lange's
book. As a result of this basic idea, everything we perceive consists of
appearance or pictures of something unknown. Even our own organization
remains unknown to us; we can never know our true nature or that of things
outside of ourselves because we have only the product of our organization
acting upon those things and not the things themselves.

Sensory Synthesis

Our senses are a product of our organization. This became a catchword

for Nietzsche after reading Lange's section on the physiology of the sense
organs. Lange opens his discussion of the organs of sense with the following:
While nervous physiology in general at each advance was exhibiting life
more and more as a product of mechanical processes, the more exact study
of the processes of sensations in their connection with the nature and mode
of operation of the sense-organs leads immediately to show us how, with
the same mechanical necessity with which everything else goes on, ideas are
produced in us which owe their peculiar nature to our organization, although
they are occasioned by the external world. On the greater or lesser signifi-
cance of the consequences of these observations turns the whole question
of the thing in itself and the phenomenal world. 8

Our senses are not only occasioned by an external stimulus and the fixed
constitution of an organ, but by the constellation of the "collective accurrent

which take into account the early stages of that influence and its results, unclouded by
Nietzsche's eventual philosophical work.
The question of which editions of Lange's History of Materialism Nietzsche had access to is
important to note. Nietzsche undoubtedly is using the first edition (1866) when he studies
it in 1866 and again in 1868. A second expanded edition appeared in 1873. Stack believes
Nietzsche had access to this second edition and bases his reading heavily upon this. Salaquarda
proves that Nietzsche had in hand in his personal library the 1882 printing of the fourth
edition of Lange's work, and seems to assume that Nietzsche did not see the second. Other
than to indicate that Nietzsche maintained a prolonged interest in this work, whether or not
he read the second or fourth editions is irrelevant to my discussion as only the first edition
was available up until 1873. Where E. C.Thomas' translation of the second edition and the
content of the first edition remain the same, I use his translation, otherwise I offer my own
translations from the first edition.
8 Friedrich Albert Lange, The History of Materialism, 3 Vols., Trans. Ernest Chester Thomas,
London: Trübner and Co., Ludgate Hill, 1879. Geschichte des Materialismus, Iserlohn: Verlag
von J. Baldeker, 1866. HM 3: 202, GDM 4 8 1 - 8 2 .
 We are a Product of our Organization 71

sensations" ("sämmtlicher andrängenden Empfindungen"). That is, even our sim-

plest sensations are infinitely compound products or syntheses of individual
impressions. The sense-organs are "organs of abstraction" ("Abstractions-
Apparate"), which offer us some important effect of motion, an effect which
does not even exist in the object itself. Lange writes:
First, of all, we remark that the main principle of the sentient apparatus,
especially of the eye and ear, consists in this, that from the chaos of vibrations
and motions of every kind with which we must suppose the media that
surround us to be filled, certain forms of a motion repeated in definite
numerical relations are singled out, relatively strengthened, and thus made
object of perception, while all other forms of motion pass by without
making any impression whatever upon our sensibility. We must begin
therefore by declaring not merely that colour, sound, etc., are phenomena
of the subject, but also that the motions in the outer world which occasion
them by no means play the part which they must have for us as a result of
their effect upon the senses.9

Thus, fox Lange, the psychical image of perception which becomes conscious
in the subject is due to this selection and synthesis of individual impressions.
While adopting this explanation as a general possibility of considering how
sensations provide images of the intuition, Lange is careful to point to the
limitations of this point of view by remarking that any explanation of how
such a synthesis is possible remains a riddle, and that the origin of such an
idea as that of the unitary psychical image put together from the numerous
individual stimuli is only an inadequate mode of conception with which we
have to content ourselves. According to Lange such a synthesis is required
in order to translate atomic changes into consciousness.
Lange refers to Johannes Müller's 10 work with the physiology of sight
from his passage on erect vision from The Handbook of Physiology (1840) to
open a discussion of the production of images out of the sense of sight.
Müller, in describing the phenomenon of inverted vision, offers a good
example of how the impressions we receive of our sensations are automatically
and imperceptibly adjusted to the specific nature of those impressions.
In accordance with the laws of optics, the images are depicted on the retina
in an inverted position as regards the objects. ... The question now arises
whether we really see the images, as they are, inverted, or erect as in the
object itself ... even if we do see objects inverted, the only proof we can
possibly have of it is that afforded by the study of the laws of optics; and
that if everything is seen inverted, the relative position of the objects of
course remains unchanged.11

9 HM 3: 217, G D M 491.
10 See Appendix B.3.
11 Lange, HM 3: 207, GDM 4 8 5 - 8 6 .
72 VI. Lange's History of Materialism

In other words, our sensations produce in us, according to the workings of

those sensations, images of objects, which in reality, may be other than they
are perceived. In addition, our sensations are organized in such a manner
that they work together to provide a congruity of sensory input. For example,
the discordance which arises between the sensations of inverted vision and
the sensation of touch, which perceives everything in erect position, is due
to the fact that even the image of our hand while used in touch is seen
inverted.
Lange draws two conclusions from these observations: first, there are
external things, and there are represented things, and second, within the
represented things the visual image of our body stands in precisely the same
circumstances as all other images. From this he concludes that the question
as to whether, through our organization, we project images of things outwards
is resolved. All images produced through sensory experience must reside with
the sensing apparatus. For why, asks Lange, should all other images lie inside
the image of the body, since the objects in the outer world are grasped in
our representation no differently than is our own body, which according to
the illustration of the camera obscura is also outer world? "How now shall
so mythical a phenomenon as the so-called projection contribute to make the
external things represented appearing outside the equally merely represented
head?" 12 Lange points out that Müller remains with the theory of projection
of images, that the idea received in the act of vision is to be conceived as a
forward projection of the whole field of the retina. Lange adds that Müller
would never have relapsed into this point of view had he not been entangled
in the notions of subject and object, and Lange quotes Müller: "the projection
outwards of the objects of vision is nothing else than the discrimination of
the objects of vision from the subject, the discrimination of the sensations
from the sentient Ego." 1 3
Lange then turns to Ueberweg, 14 who he feels, has completely elucidated
the relation of the image of the body to the other images of the outer world.
Lange discusses Ueberweg's use of the camera obscura in illustrating his
point. This is the camera obscura to which Nietzsche refers in his letter to
Gersdorff.
For this purpose Ueberweg employs an interesting illustration. The table of
a camera obscura is, like Condillac's statue, endowed with life and con-
sciousness; its pictures are its ideas. It can no more receive an image of
itself upon its table than our eye can throw its own image on the retina.
The camera might however, have projecting parts, additions in the nature

12 Ibid., HM 3: 208, GDM 4 8 6 - 8 7 .

13 Ibid., HM 3: 209, GDM 487.
14 See Appendix B.3.
 We are a Product of our Organization 73

of members, which should paint themselves on the table and so become an

idea. It may mirror other similar constructions; may compare, abstract, and
so at length form an idea of itself. This idea will then take up some place
on the table, where the projecting members are usually reflected, or from
where these members seem to spring. With admirable clearness Ueberweg
has shown that a projection outwards is quite out of the question, just
because the images are outside the image, exactly as we must imagine to
ourselves the objects setting up sensation as outside our objective body. 15

The consequence which Lange draws from Ueberweg's illustration is that all
the space that we perceive is only just the "space of our consciousness."
Nietzsche was already familiar with these ideas as a result of his reading
of Schopenhauer; that vision is a synthesis of impressions, that the image
thus created is only occasioned in the mind of the observer and is not
projected outward. Schopenhauer is not trammeled by the notion of subject
and object, for both are already representation: the "outside us" to which we
refer objects on the occasion of the sensation resides only inside our head.
Schopenhauer agrees with Lange that space is a function of the synthesizing
process, as Kant first proposed. However, while Schopenhauer attributes the
synthesizing process of the transformation of sensory stimulation to image
to the cause and effect of the understanding, which itself is directed by the
will, Lange, while deferring to offer a definitive explanation, suggests the
possibility of mechanical and materialistic processes at work in the conversion
of the multiplicity of atomic movements into sensory images.
There is a further significant difference between Schopenhauer's and
Lange's interpretation of the process of the creation of images from sensory
synthesis. Schopenhauer suggests that although the object is seen inverted in
the retina of the eye, when its cause is referred back to the object, the
impression is corrected. This implies that there is a correspondence of cause
and effect between objects and perception of them. Whereas Lange explains
the same phenomenon by suggesting that our hand, in the process of touching
the seen object appears to confirm its uprightness, but what is actually the
case is that the hand itself is seen in the inverted position, which offers the
perception of congruity between the two sensory experiences. Thus, although
Schopenhauer and Lange agree that our images of objects are only the
product of our organization, our consciousness, the operations and sources
of these images are thought differently.
These reflections upon the nature of vision as an example of sensory
production, offered by Lange, reinforced and stimulated notions already
gathered from Schopenhauer, and had a lasting effect on Nietzsche. Nietzsche
begins to turn from a metaphysical and idealistic explanation of perception

15 Lange, HM 3: 209, GDM 487-88.

74 VI. Lange's History of Materialism

towards one based more firmly in material and mechanistic foundations.

Nietzsche continues to rely heavily upon the metaphor of images and pro-
jection of images. The discussion of exactly where the image resides, outside
of the subject (projected) or strictly within the bounds of the activities of
consciousness, will become important to our later discussion in chapter 11
where Nietzsche essentially redefines them in terms of what we might call
an eternal atomism.
Lange, as does Schopenhauer, next addresses the leap which bridges the
gap between sensations synthesized into perception and abstract thinking. It
is in the course of the following remarks that Lange makes the three points
which so impress Nietzsche that he quotes them almost verbatim to Gersdorff
in his letter of August 1866. If it can be verified that the abstraction which
our sense apparatus creates through the elimination of the mass of effects,
emphasizing only a few, creates a one-sided picture of the world according
to our organization then it is reasonable to maintain that this must be the
process in abstract thinking as well. Lange writes:
It is quite indifferent whether the phenomena of the sense-world are referred
to the idea or to the mechanism of the organs, if they are only shown to be
products of our organization in the widest sense of the word. As soon as
this is shown, not merely with regard to individual phenomena, but with
adequate generality, there results the following series of conclusions: —
1. The sense-world is a product of our organization.
2. Our visible (bodily) organs are, like all other parts of the phenomenal
world, only pictures of an unknown object.
3. The transcendental basis of our organization remains therefore just as
unknown to us as the things which act upon it. We have always before us
merely the product of both. 16

Now, as we have seen, Nietzsche had already found verification in Schopen-

hauer for the first two of these propositions and in Kant for the third.
However, Schopenhauer paradoxically betrays his own insight by proposing
that our true organization and things in themselves can be known as will.
This is the point at which Nietzsche can no longer accept Schopenhauer's
will as anything but a metaphysical creation, a work of art. His letter to
Gersdorff is evidence of this: "If philosophy is a r t . . . if philosophy is supposed
to edify then I know at least no philosopher who edifies more than our
Schopenhauer."

16 Ibid., HM 3: 219, GDM 493.

 We are a Product of our Organization 75

Unconscious Inferences

In attempting to explain, in some manner, the transition from sensory

stimulus to abstract thinking, Lange addresses the problem of the contradic-
tion between an inference of the sense organs and inferences made through
thought.
The eye makes, as it were, a probable inference; an inference from experience,
an imperfect induction. We say the eye makes this inference. The expression is
intentionally not more definite because we intend briefly to denote by it
only that whole group of arrangements and processes from the central organ
to the retina, to which is attributed the activity of vision. We regard it as
unreliable in point of method to separate in this case inference and sight
from one another as two separate acts. We can only do this in abstraction.
Unless we give an artificial interpretation to the actual phenomenon, in this
case, seeing is itself an inferring and the inference perfects itself in the form of a
visual idea, as in other cases it does so in the form of conceptions expressed
in language. 17
Lange suggests that this contradiction between sensory inference and the
inferences of thought can perhaps find an explanation in the "special difficulty
of unconscious thinking" ("des unbewussten Denkens"). In pursuing this
thought of an unconscious thinking operating in a manner similar to conscious
inferences, Lange joins in the general discussions of the time concerning
"unconscious inferences". Such noted people as Helmholtz, Wundt, and
Zöllner, 18 were proposing the existence of unconscious inferences as an
explanation of the transition from sense perception to abstract thought. In
the first edition of History of Materialism Lange only mentions Helmholtz.
When Helmholtz shows that the perceptions come about as if they were
formed by inferences, then the two following principles may be applied: —
1. We have hitherto always found physical conditions for the peculiarities
of perception, and therefore we must conjecture that the analogy with
inferences also rests upon physical conditions.
2. If there are in the purely sensible sphere, where organic conditions must
be assumed for all phenomena, processes which are essentially related with
rational inferences, it then becomes much more probable that the latter also
rest upon a physical mechanism. 19
Given these two principles, Lange speculates on their significance for mate-
rialism. "What could be more welcome than the proof that on occasion of
the sense perceptions in our body there arise quite unconsciously processes which
in their result entirely correspond with inferences?" 20 Lange speculates that

17 Ibid., HM 3: 221, GDM 494.

18 See Appendix B.3.
15 Lange, HM 3: 222, GDM 4 9 5 - 9 6 .
20 Ibid.
76 VI. Lange's History of Materialism

if the body can perform logical operations without consciousness which have
been attributed only to consciousness, then there is nothing to prevent the
attribution of consciousness as a property to the body. 2 1 This is a very
significant discussion for Nietzsche, especially in light of his later reading on
Hartmann, where he is again thrust into the controversy concerning the
existence of sensory experience and unconscious thinking operating upon the
basis of purely physiological mechanisms.
In the introduction to Philosophy of the Unconscious, Hartmann discusses
Herbart's ideas of "non-conscious presentations" ("bewusstlosen Vorstellungen")
which "are in consciousness without our being aware of them," without our
"observing them to be ours and referring them to the E g o . " Whether or not
these unconscious presentations reach consciousness depends, according to
Herbart, upon the intensity of vibrations excited in the brain. Hartmann then
writes of Herbart's idea: "The question then is: (1) D o all degrees of intensity
of cerebral vibrations give rise to ideation, or does ideation only commence
when a certain degree of intensity is reached? and (2) Is a conscious mental
state excited by cerebral vibrations of any intensity, or only by those of a
certain strength?" 22 Hartmann then turns to Fechner, w h o has approached
these questions in his work Psychopbysik. Fechner proposes a "threshold of
stimulation" ("Reizschwelle") in the mind. Stimuli (γ) which remain below

21
It should be noted that Lange did not express any particular adherence to the idea of an
unconscious, but that at least in this case it seems of probable use. It would be more accurate
to say that Lange wanted, for the most part to take the position of a "hands o f f " policy
with regard to the idea of an unconscious. Lange was skeptical of the unconscious because
he felt there was no material evidence of its existence and thus, it remained along with many
other possibilities merely a transcendental explanation. Discussing Hartmann directly in a
later revised edition of The History of Materialism Lange writes: "A closer examination of the
Philosophy of the Unconscious is no part of our plan. The way from the point where we leave
it to false teleology through the interference of the 'unconscious' is obvious, and we have
only to do with the foundations of the new metaphysical edifice. That in our view the value
of metaphysical systems does not depend upon their demonstrative foundation, which rests
entirely upon illusion, we have already sufficiently shown. If the Philosophy of the Unconscious
should ever gain so much influence upon the art and literature of our time and thus become
the expression of the predominant intellectual tendency, as was once the case with Schelling
and Hegel, it would, despite its mischievous foundation, be legitimatized as a national
philosophy of the first rank. The period which should be marked by it would be a period
of intellectual decay; but even decay has its great philosophers, as Plotinos at the close of
the Greek philosophy. In any case, however, it remains a remarkable fact that so soon after
the campaign of our Materialists against the whole of philosophy, a system could find so
much acceptance, which opposes itself more decidedly to the positive sciences than any of
the earlier systems, and which in this respect repeats all the errors of Schelling and Hegel
in a much coarser and more palpable shape" (HM 3: 79 — 80). Lange also criticizes Philosophy
of the Unconscious for its unscientific method. "There can hardly be another modern book in
which the scientific material swept together stands in such flagrant contrast to all the essential
principles of scientific method" (HM 3: 80).
22
Hartmann, PU 1: 3 6 - 3 7 , PUG 22.
 We are a Product of our Organization 77

the threshold he considers to be "unconscious sensations or ideas" and those

which break through the threshold become conscious.
These negative y's n o w Fechner calls "unconscious sensations," with the full
consciousness, however, o f having only employed a license o f speech, to
signify that the sensation γ is the more removed from reality the further γ
sinks below 0, i.e., that an ever greater increment of stimulation is required in
order first to restore the zero value o f γ , and then to recall the latter to the
limit o f reality. T h e negative sign before γ accordingly signifies here (as
elsewhere often the imaginary) the insolubility o f the problem, from the
g i v e n quantity of a stimulus to calculate a sensation. 2 3

In the edition which Nietzsche read, Hartmann only mentions Wundt's

concept of "unconscious inferences" ("unbewusste Schlussfolgerungen") and
Helmholtz's interest in them. 24
As I discussed in chapter 5, both Kant and Schopenhauer came close to
positing the idea of an unconscious operation of thinking. In reading Lange,
Nietzsche is very attracted to the idea that unconscious inferences arising as

23
Ibid., PU 1: 3 4 - 3 5 , PUG 2 0 - 2 1 .
24
When Nietzsche reads Hartmann, Hartmann is, in referring to the controversy over uncon-
scious inferences, using it as one basis for the substantiation of his theory of the unconscious
in the natural sciences. In a later edition Hartmann considerably broadens his discussion of
unconscious inferences by quoting from and discussing Wundt and Helmholtz in more detail.
From Wundt's "Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung," Hartmann quotes: "If the
first act of apprehension which yet belongs to the sphere of the unconscious life, is already
a process of inference, the law of logical development is thereby shown to hold even for
this unconscious life; it is proved that there is not merely a conscious, but also an unconscious
thinking. We believe we have hereby completely proved that the assumption of unconscious
logical processes is not merely competent to explain the results of the processes of perception,
but that it in fact also correctly declares the real nature of these processes, although the processes
themselves are not accessible to immediate observation" (PU 1: 39).
As we saw above, it is primarily to Helmholtz that Lange points when proposing the
possibility of unconscious inferences. Hartmann attempts to follow Helmholtz's distinction
between unconscious and conscious inferences. He quotes Helmholtz: "We must diverge
somewhat from the beaten track of psychological analysis, in order to satisfy ourselves, that
we have here to do with the same sort of mental activity that is operative in inferences
commonly so called." Then Hartmann adds: "He finds the difference to consist only in the
external circumstance, that conscious conclusions are wrought only by means of words ...,
whilst the unconscious inferences or inductions have only to do with sensations, images of
memory, and intuitions. ... Helmholtz deserves especial praise for expressly pointing to the
fact that conscious inferences, after the requisite material of representation has been fully
supplied and elaborated, thrust themselves upon us precisely like unconscious inferences,
"without any exertion on our part" (i.e., on the part of our own consciousness), with all the
energy of an external natural force" (PU 1: 40).
In addition, Hartmann mentions Zöllner who "also found himself driven to the assumption
of unconscious inferences for an explanation of those pseudoscopic phenomena which defy
a merely physiological explanation" (PU 1: 40—41). I take the time to describe Hartmann's
discussion in his later edition to give the reader an indication of what Nietzsche finds with
regard to "unconscious inferences" when he studies Helmholtz, Wundt, and Zöllner in
1872-74.
78 VI. Lange's History of Materialism

a synthesis of sense impressions could be understood as purely physiological

processes rather than as a result of Schopenhauer's transcendental will, Kant's
a priori concepts, or as a result of an equally transcendental soul. Nietzsche
follows Lange's discussion of Helmholtz' unconscious inferences and later
becomes acquainted with Hartmann's discussion of Herbart and Fechner's
speculations with regard to unconscious processes.
During Winter 1872 through Summer 1874, as evidenced by the records
of the Basel library, Nietzsche is again studying Helmholtz, Fechner, and
Zöllner, 2 5 all of whom describe such unconscious inferences. O n e also finds
the names of Helmholtz, Wundt, and Herbart on Nietzsche's list of reading
for " O n Teleology." In 1872 Nietzsche is himself thinking about and writing
about unconscious inferences. 26
What is significant to this point in my discussion is that quite to the
contrary of what Schlechta and Anders assert in 1962, Nietzsche was very
interested in what Zöllner had to say on the topic of unconscious inferences.
Schlechta and Anders write:

Nietzsche did not think Zöllner's theory of practical knowledge, which he

developed following Helmholtz, applied. Nietzsche did not believe that man,
on the basis of "unconscious keys" (Unbewusster Schlüsse) transformed the
data of the sensations. For him the act of perception (Wahrnehmungsakt) is
no unconscious act of thought. ... Nietzsche pursued this question so far,
that on April 5,1873 he borrowed Helmholtz's book Handbook of Physiological
Optics, in order to gain for himself an idea of this problem independent of
Zöllner's numerous citations.27

Quite the contrary, I have indicated that beginning with his reading of Lange,
Nietzsche had a lively interest in these questions, and was far f r o m being
uninterested in the idea of an unconscious as his interest in Hartmann further
demonstrates. By the time Nietzsche reads Helmholtz and Zöllner in 1873,
he is quite thoroughly acquainted with these ideas, and is not only sympathetic
to them but bases the theory of language which arises in " O n Truth and Lies
in a Nonmoral Sense," notes for a course on "Rhetoric," and notes from
1872 upon a version of them. Nietzsche's idea that language is a metaphorical
or tropological activity, an idea he adopts f r o m Gerber's Language as Art,
cannot be understood apart from unconscious inferences: "It is not difficult
to prove that what is called "rhetorical," as a means of conscious art, had
been active as a means of unconscious art in language and its development." 2 8

25
See Schlechta and Anders, VAP 125, 128, 1 1 8 - 1 9 .
26
See my pages 49, 160, and Nietzsche, Ρ 3 5 - 3 6 , 4 0 - 4 1 , 4 8 - 4 9 .
27
Schlechta and Anders, VAP 125.
28
Nietzsche, R 106, Mus A 5: 2 9 7 - 9 8 . See my chapter 14.
 We are a Product of our Organization 79

Lange's Thoroughgoing Skepticism

But let us return to Nietzsche's reading of Lange. After Lange has used
the idea of an unconscious thinking which operates according to inferences
from sense perceptions to attempt to ground not only unconscious operations,
but conscious ones as well in the physiological mechanisms of the body, he
turns skeptic once again, and collapses all that has been gained back into the
stringent limitations of our organization. If there is in the body a physical
mechanism which produces conclusions of the senses and understanding,
then, asks Lange: what is the body, matter, the physical? He answers: "modern
physiology, just as much as philosophy, must answer that they are all only
our ideas; necessary ideas, ideas resulting according to natural laws, but still
never the things in themselves." 29 With regard to matter Lange concludes
that the same mechanism which produces all our sensations produces our
idea of matter. Matter is also merely a product of our organization. Every
physical organization which I observe is still only my idea, and cannot differ
in its nature from what is mental. Concerning the body Lange writes of the
eye and the images it forms that the eye with its arrangements, the optic
nerve with the brain and all the structures which we may yet discover there
as causes of thought, are only ideas. What, then, of the images in the brain
which have been drawn together in perceptual synthesis through a process
of unconscious inferences? Lange writes that our brain too is only an image:
"we have only a relation between the rest of our ideas and the idea of the
brain, but no fixed point beyond this subjective sphere."30 Our mind is "a
whole representation of matter and its movements which is the result of an
organization of purely intellectual dispositions to sensation."31 Lange's com-
plete skepticism does not, however, end in a denigration of scientific endeavor.
The search for a physical mechanism of sensation, as of thought, is not
superfluous or inadmissible, however, what we find, like every other repre-
sented mechanism, must be itself only a "necessarily occurring picture of an
unknown state of things."
Lange's skepticism further leads him to assert that it is a necessary
consequence of the limitations of our organization that we recognize a
transcendental order of things. The senses give us effects of things. Whether
these effects rest on things in themselves, or whether, since we can never
know the things in themselves, they consist in mere relations which exhibit

29 Lange, HM 3: 223, G D M 496.

30 Ibid., HM 3: 226, G D M 498.
31 Ibid., HM 3: 228, G D M 4 9 9 - 5 0 0 .
80 VI. Lange's History of Materialism

themselves in various minds as various kinds and stages of the sensible

element cannot be ascertained.
A correlative of Lange's insistence upon the limits of our perception of
a world according to our organization is his idea, which made a strong
impression on Nietzsche, that other creatures with different organizations
must interpret worlds very different from ours. Lange writes:
It is conceivable that there may be beings with spatial intuitions of more
than three dimensions, although we cannot possibly represent anything of
the kind to ourselves. It is superfluous to go on accumulating such possi-
bilities; it is enough completely to establish that there are infinite numbers
of them and that the validity of our intuition of space and time therefore
for the thing-in-itself appears extremely doubtful. 3 2

This is a theme which Nietzsche picks up and develops first in connection

with Lange's Darwinism and teleology in "On Teleology" and is a theme
which Nietzsche eventually carries outside the strictly physical possibility of
differences in organization into the psychic, indicating not only that creatures
of different organization perceive different worlds, but that the constitution
of person from person and even event from event within one person always
remains a perspectival viewing of a world. We could even speculate that in
the Anschauung notes, where Nietzsche will assert that in no moment are we
the same person, that his perspectivism, in connection with the creation of
worlds, is one wherein difference lies in time: in each moment a new world
is created.

Philosophy is Art

After Nietzsche's acquaintance with Lange's thoroughgoing skepticism,

it is little wonder that he was so impressed with the second point which I
wish to discuss, namely, the idea that there remains only the thought that
"philosophy is art," that "art is free, also in the area of concepts." Lange's
influence, here, goes a long way toward forming one of Nietzsche's most
basic points of view, perhaps most well expressed in The Birth of Tragedy:
"only as an aesthetic phenomenon is the world eternally justified." 33

Lange's Critique of Kant

In order to follow the logic of Lange's assertion that philosophy is in the

last resort the play of imagination or poetry, we need to look briefly at his

32 Ibid., HM 3: 2 2 7 - 2 8 , G D M 499.
33 Nietzsche, G T 52, K S A 1: 47.
 Philosophy is A r t 81

criticisms of Kant. Lange criticizes Kant for 1) allowing an understanding

free from all influence of the senses and the positing of pure intuition, which
without any cooperation of thought, affords no knowledge at all, and 2) for
asserting that thought without intuition still leaves the form of thought.
However, Lange is most critical of Kant's principle whereby sensation cannot
again regulate itself upon other sensations. Nietzsche would already have
been familiar enough with the first two criticisms of Kant, through his
reading of Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer and Lange are very critical of Kant's
philosophy where it leaves off with a grounding in direct sensory experience,
and we have seen that Nietzsche is in accord with this.
Lange is especially critical of this devaluation of sensory experience in his
third criticism of Kant and his principle that sensation cannot again regulate
itself upon other sensations. Lange points to Kant's suggestion that the two
strains of human knowledge, sensibility and intellect may stem from a
common but unknown root. Lange claims that this suggestion on Kant's
part has been substantiated, not through Herbartian psychology or Hegelian
phenomenology of the spirit, but through certain experiments of the physi-
ology of the sense organs which have proved beyond question that already
in the apparently completely incommunicable sense impressions procedures
cooperate, which through elimination or supplementation of certain logical
middle terms remarkably resemble the inferences and false inferences of
conscious thinking. Using Fechner, Lange frames the following argument
against Kant's assertion.
Among the scanty beginning of a future scientific psychology appears a
principle which teaches us that — within ordinary limits — sensation
increases with the logarithm of the corresponding stimulus; the formula χ
— log. y, which Fechner has made the basis of his "Psychophysics", as the
'law of Weber'. It is not improbable that this law has its ground in
consciousness itself, and not in those psycho-physical processes that lie
between the external (physical) stimulus and the act of consciousness. We
may therefore without violence ... distinguish between the quantum of
sensation (γ) forcing itself upon consciousness and the quantum taken up
by consciousness (χ). This being presupposed, the mathematical formulas
to which we are led by exact inquiry express at bottom nothing else than
that the quantum of sensation forcing its way every instant is the unity by
which consciousness measures on each occasion the degree of the increase
to be taken up. As sensation may very well measure itself by other sensation
in point of intensity, so it may order itself in the representation of juxta-
position according to the already existing sensations. Numerous facts show
that sensations do not group themselves according to a ready-made form,
the idea of space, but, on the contrary, the idea of space is itself determined
by our sensations.34

34 Lange, HM 2: 1 9 8 - 9 9 , G D M 2 5 1 - 5 2 .
82 VI. Lange's History of Materialism

What Kant calls the a priori forms which shape our perception of sensuous
data, Lange replaces with our psycho-physical organization. Our organization
does consist in a series and synthesis of sensations regulating themselves upon
other sensations, as I have adequately demonstrated in my foregoing discus-
sion of sensory synthesis. The difference lies in the nature of a priori forms
and human sensory organization. The former are non-sensuous forms which
mold sensuous experience; the latter is sensuous experience acting on sensuous
experience. Lange makes this distinction clear in another context, that of the
idea of cause. For Kant, the idea of cause is a primary idea of the pure reason,
and as such underlies our whole experience. For Lange, however, cause is
rooted in our organization, and therefore, operates as the condition of all
experience.
Once again, Lange carries through a skepticism which Kant only carries
to a point. Kant believed that we can only "think," and not "intuit" the
intelligible world, but that what we think about it must possess "objective
reality." For Lange, thinking can never constitute objective reality, thinking
always and only results in appearance. Thus, when Lange asserts, as he does
above, that it is a necessary consequence of our organization that we recognize
a transcendental order of things, he does not mean that there is a transcen-
dental "true" world because any such posited world must be conceived in
terms of concepts or categories that we already apply to our phenomenal
world of appearances.
After his criticisms of Kant and his position that we are necessarily limited
to the world of phenomena, Lange offers his thesis that philosophical theories
belong to the realm of art or poetry. This does not mean that philosophy is
an illegitimate activity, rather the opposite. It is an essential human need in
its striving after an ideal realm.
In the phenomenal world all hangs together as a result of cause and effect
... The will of man is completely subject to the law of nature. But this law
of nature itself, with the whole chronology of events, is only a product of
the alternating effects between our organization and real things whose true
nature remains hidden from us. The nature of our reason leads us to posit,
in addition to the world which we perceive with our senses, an imaginary
(eingebildete) world. This imaginary world is, in so far as we conceive of it,
a world of appearance, a phantasm.35

Lange discusses the place of poetry (Dichtung) or metaphysics in regard to

both idealism and materialism. He suggests that the idealistic element in the
progress of the natural sciences is a personal one, and that the materialistic
element is an objective one. Lange writes that idealism is from the beginning

35 Ibid., GDM 275.

 Philosophy is Art 83

metaphysical poetry. The circumstance that in general, a poetic, creative

instinct lies in our being, whether in philosophy, art or religion, often runs
in direct contradiction to the testimony of our senses and intellect. In spite
of this, idealism can bring forth creations which the most noble, healthiest
of men hold higher than mere knowledge. Lange makes the distinction that
whereas materialism is a result of the proofs of the senses and the operations
of the intellect and thus is objective and common to all humans, ideas, on
the other hand, are "poetic births by individuals" which may be strong
enough to command whole periods and peoples with their magic. The
idealism, or "inner truth" of art and religion has nothing to do with scientific
knowledge but only with the harmonious satisfaction of the mind.
On the other hand, however, Lange emphasizes, in light of his thorough-
going skepticism, the metaphysical aspects of materialism which are built
upon the analogy of the world of experience. For example, the atoms of
materialism are conceived of as little bodies. One cannot imagine them as
small as they are, because it goes beyond every human experience. However,
one represents them as if one sees and feels them. Our senses give us things,
but no thing in itself. Thus, materialism "also reveals its poetic nature in its
representations of the elements of the physical world. It poeticizes, however,
in a naive way after the prompting of the senses." 36 Lange argues for the
necessary connection between ideas and knowledge of the senses and of the
intellect. Our ideas, our phantasms, are products of the same nature which
brings forth our sensory perceptions and judgements. Lange sums these
positions up in three propositions to which he claims only an artistic and
moral response seems justified.

The physical world is derived from our concepts: for that reason it is the
most important and worthwhile object of our insight. Only a relative truth
is accessible to us and this lies only in experience.
The ideas give us no experience, but lead us in an imagined world; just in
this lies their usefulness. We deceive ourselves when we want to broaden
our knowledge through them; we enrich ourselves, if we make them the
basis of our actions.
The one absolute which humans have is their moral code, and from this
stable point one can bring order into the uncertain world of ideas, as it has
already been given to the world of intellect, through the arrangement of
our mind.
The first two propositions contain the enduring, the third the subjective
and timely. Enduring is also the achievement that the ideal is no longer

36 Ibid., GDM 345.

84 VI. Lange's History of Materialism

judged on the basis of presumed proofs, but upon its relationship to the
moral goals of humanity.37

What Nietzsche found in both Kant and Schopenhauer is once again

reinforced in Lange. Both founded their philosophies in the evidence of
natural science. However, where Kant and Schopenhauer choose to pass by
the more thorough examination of the limits of scientific knowledge, it is
precisely this question which interests Lange and which, he claims, should
interest all materialists and critical philosophers. The idea that the world of
appearance can be affirmed from a moral perspective, is one which Nietzsche
adopts from Lange. And, in Lange, Nietzsche finds a thoroughgoing skeptic,
who, rather than succumbing to the result of pessimism, to which an inves-
tigation of reality in only its materialistic and mechanistic aspects could
inevitably lead, offers a counter-measure, that of affirming the fictionality of
that very reality, of finding in art and morality a way of positively acting
with regard to a world so distant from us.

The Figurative Use of Language

It is in Lange's insistence upon the fact of the limits of our psycho-

physical organization and its consequences for knowledge of the world that
Nietzsche's insistence that language cannot adequately represent truth lies.
We have only "pictures" of an unknown situation. Thus we cannot linguist-
ically or conceptually express the nature of actuality. Stack summarizes very
well what Nietzsche gains from Lange in this area:
Throughout his history, Lange argues that consciousness is fundamentally
based upon sensations or complexes of sensations. Sense impressions are
transmitted to "nerve-centers" and are identified by a particular sound ( =
word). In sensory experience language is used to designate the psychical
import or subjective meaning of a sensory excitation. ... If we combine
these observations with Lange's assumption that the primary function of
language is to name particulars in a symbolic manner, that language should
be understood in a nominalistic way and that linguistic signs have a natu-
ralistic origin and a conventional meaning, we have virtually all of the
ingredients that Nietzsche brought together in his unpublished essay, Über
Wahrheit und Luge im aussermoralischen Sinne. Nietzsche creatively synthesizes
Lange's scattered observations on sense-perception and linguistic significa-
tion in his creation of the notion of anthropomorphische Wahrheit and what
amounts to a pragmatic account of 'knowledge'.38

37 Ibid., GDM 2 7 7 - 7 8 .
38 George Stack, Lange and Nietzsche, Monographien und Texte Nietzsche Forschung, New York:
Walter de Gruyter, 1983. LNS 138.
 Force and Matter: Mere Abstractions 85

What is important to this portion of my discussion, is Lange's assertion that

language retains value only in its symbolic and figurative aspects, in its
imaginability. Although language does not represent truth it is still a basic
necessity in the preservation of the species and as such we are constrained to
operate within its restraints. In his insistence that language and philosophy,
even science, are ultimately useful imagery, poetic expression, which prompts
toward the ideal, Lange opens the possibility of a figurative use of language
which had a great influence upon Nietzsche. Nietzsche went on in the Birth
of Tragedy and throughout his philosophical thought to put into action the
dictum contained in the following statement from Lange:
Let us accustom ourselves, then, to attribute a higher worth than hitherto
to the principle o f the creative idea in itself, and apart from any correspond-
ence with historical and scientific knowledge, but also without any falsifi-
cation o f them; let us accustom ourselves to regard the world o f ideas, as
figurative representation of the entire truth, as just as indispensable to all
human progress as the knowledge of the understanding, by resolving the
greater or less import o f every idea into ethical and aesthetic principles. 3 9

Force and Matter: Mere Abstractions

Lange writes that the atomic doctrine of his day is still what it was in
the time of Democritus. 40 It still has not lost its metaphysical character; and
already in antiquity it served as a scientific hypothesis for the explanation of
the observed facts of nature. Lange attempts to demonstrate that the general
notion of atoms is an image which it would be difficult, if not impossible,
to dispense with. Physicists cannot free themselves from the idea of com-
pound, apparently compact, bodies which our senses present to us. Everything
appears to be an effect of forces, and it is matter which is called in to form
a subject for these forces. Lange, places the necessity of the image of atoms
as an explanation for change and movement, precisely in terms of their
imaginability, in the "picturability" of the atomistic theories with their atoms,
molecules and actions of attraction and repulsion, of action at a distance, etc.

39 Lange, HM 3: 346, G D M 545.

40 For an excellent discussion of Nietzsche's ideas relating Lange's materialistic point of view
with that of the ancients, particularly to Thales, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Democritus and
the Pythagoreans, see VAP 63—99. Though this discussion falls into the chronological period
1872—1875 and thus does not directly touch the 1865 — 1870/71 period I am addressing,
there is no doubt that Nietzsche was, after reading Lange, as early as 1867, beginning to
make the connections which led to the work reviewed by Schlechta and Anders. Evidence
of this is found in my discussion of Nietzsche's "On Teleology" (1867—68) in which
Empedocles plays a strong role.
86 VI. Lange's History of Materialism

The correlation which Lange attempts to set up is that words and metaphysics
go together on one hand with idealism, and sensuous picturability and
scientific theories go together with materialism on the other hand. Science
will lose all pretension to truth if it transgresses the limits of picturability.
Lange again turns to Helmholtz and then Ueberweg in order to give an
account of the state of the matter and force controversies of his day, but
also, in order to reintroduce and reinforce his assertion that scientific theories
are no more than abstractions from our senses. Helmholtz writes, in his
"Abhandlung über die Erhaltung der Kraft":
It is obvious that the ideas of matter and force, as applied to nature, can
never be separated. Pure matter would be indifferent to the rest of nature,
because it could never determine any change in nature or in our sense-
organs; pure force would be something that must be (dasein), and yet again
not be, because we call the existent matter — (weil wir das daseiende Materie
nennen). It is just as inaccurate to try and explain matter as something real,
and force as a mere notion to which nothing real corresponds; both are
rather abstractions from the real formed in exactly the same way. We can
perceive matter only through its forces, never in itself. 4 '
Lange continues: To Helmholtz's phrase "because we call the existent matter,"
Ueberweg observed, "much more substance."
In fact, the reason why we cannot suppose a pure force is only to be sought
in the psychological necessity by which our observations appear to us under
the category of substance. We perceive only forces, but we demand a
permanent representative of these changing phenomena, a substance. The
Materialists naively assume the unknown matter as the only substance;
Helmholtz, on the other hand, is quite conscious that we have to do here
merely with an assumption which is demanded by the nature of our thought,
without being valid for absolute reality. 42

Lange is clearly building a case from his perspective mentioned above, that
even in the natural sciences, in physics, the materials of research, the theories
of explanation of effects upon our senses are abstractions, assumptions
imagined as a consequence of our organization. Lange calls upon Du Bois-
Reymond 43 who writes:
Force (so far as it is conceived as the cause of motion) is nothing but a
more recondite product of the irresistible tendency to personification which
is impressed upon us; a rhetorical artifice, as it were, of our brain, which
snatches at a figurative term, because it is destitute of any conception clear
enough to be literally expressed. In the notion of force and matter we find
recurring the same dualism which presents itself in the notions of God and

41 Lange, HM 2: 3 9 1 - 9 2 , GDM 3 7 9 - 8 0 .
42 Ibid., HM 2: 393, GDM 380.
43 See Appendix 3.B.
 Force and Matter: Mere Abstractions 87

World, of Soul and Body, the same want which once impelled men to people
bush, fountain, rock, air, and sea with creatures of their imagination.44

Here we find that there are at bottom neither forces nor matter; both are
rather abstractions from things, only regarded from different points of view.
Lange finds Du Bois-Reymond's descriptions attractive, in their recognition
that the basic structures of human thinking lead to personification, to the
need to populate the world with such rhetorical artifices, figurative terms, as
God and World, Soul and Body, Force and Matter.

Force-points

Although Nietzsche absorbed and followed up on the atomistic theories

which Lange introduces in the History of Materialism, one section which
seemed to be of especial interest to him, evidenced by his concentrated study
of Boscovich, Fechner, Spir, Helmholtz, and Zöllner in 1872—74,45 begins
where Lange describes the shift in emphasis from an atomistic worldview to
a dynamic one. The progress of the sciences during this period were tending
toward putting force in the place of matter, a tendency which Lange considers
not much more than a playing with language, a substitution of one word for
another:
The history of atomism shows us, how an inherited metaphysical concept
is gradually transformed in accordance with the requisites of experience;
how its metaphysical character is not lost for a moment, though perhaps
drops more and more from memory. ... At the same moment in which
atomism celebrated its greatest triumph one perceived that there was actually
no more atomism, and that the contest between dynamic and atomic research
reduced itself to a mere contest of words.46

The change came about in that the effects which were usually ascribed to the
resilience of material particles were conceived to be due to repulsive forces
acting from a point situated in space, but without extension. These points
became the elementary constituents of matter. Fechner adopts a theory of
"simple" atoms or force centers without extension. The dynamic view con-
centrates on the effects which such force centers produce. Büchner also asserts
that "a force which does not express itself cannot exist."47 Redtenbacher claims
that: "We recognize the existence of forces by the manifold effects which
they produce, and especially through the feeling and consciousness of our

44 Lange, HM 2: 378, GDM 3 7 2 - 7 3 .

45 See Stack, LNS 2 2 4 - 6 1 and Schlechta and Anders, VAP 1 1 8 - 5 4 . See Appendix 3.B.
46 Lange, G D M 362.
47 Ibid., HM 2: 378, GDM 372. See Appendix 3.B.
88 VI. Lange's History of Materialism

own forces."48 There is also Helmholtz's theory that we obtain knowledge

of natural entities only by means of their "effects." For Helmholtz effects are
what is real while matter is that which we "hypostasize as the origin and
bearer of forces." To these reflections upon force-centers in place of atoms,
Lange concludes, it is all a matter of metaphysics:
The extentionless force points can imitate all of the clever tricks of atoms.
They can vibrate, can enter into different relationships of arrangement and
everything else which the physicist might wish. As a result it is not a
question of physics, but of metaphysics, whether one is satisfied with this
abstract being or whether one would rather have the atoms in bunches. 49

Here, in Lange, therefore, with the idea of force-points or force-centers,

Nietzsche obtains his first acquaintance with dynamic viewpoints and it is a
first impression which is expanded upon consistently throughout his thinking
and always I, maintain, within the parameters of Lange's overall reservations
attributing to such theories transcendental and linguistic limitations. That is,
although Nietzsche will use the dynamic idea of force-points, or wills to
power, it is never with the idea that he is describing an actual state of affairs,
but rather, that in a figurative sense, the dynamical point of view is aesthet-
ically useful as a hypothetical explanation. In his work, Stack draws the
obvious correlation between Nietzsche's first acquaintance with force-points
in Lange, and his subsequent study of Boscovich with his eventual theory of
the will to power.
Although Lange does not connect this dynamic conception of a force-point-
world with the metaphysical views of Leibniz, Nietzsche learned, from his
study of Boscovich's Philosophia Naturalis, that Boscovich's mathematical
theory of the structure of nature was suggested to him by Leibniz's meta-
physics of nature. The "material" points posited by Boscovich resemble
Leibniz's monads in a number of ways. They are unextended entities that
"express" themselves in such a way as to give rise to "well-founded phe-
nomena" or "bodies". Although Boscovich avoids considering his force-
points as substances, his idea of unextended, dynamic entities emanating
"force" is very close to Leibniz's thought, especially when you consider his
definition of the monad as un etre capable daction. The notion of an entity
"capable of action" immediately suggests an entity with the potential for
action. If we deny substantial being to such "entities", and if we emphasize
the "appetition" (as Leibniz called it) of such entities, we are not far removed
from hypothetical "wills to power". 5 0

Though this is not a new observation of the series of events from Nietzsche's
reading of Lange in 1866 — 68 to his study of Boscovich in 1872 —74,51 and

48
Ibid., HM 2: 380, G D M 374.
45
Ibid., G D M 366.
50
Stack, LNS 230.
51
See Schlechta and Anders, YAP 1 2 7 - 3 9 .
 Force and Matter: Mere Abstractions 89

on to the will to power, one finds large gaps untouched. It is my contention,

that Nietzsche's reading in Hartmann, and what we will come to understand
as Hartmann's unconscious "will acts," which Nietzsche adopts in his world
view in Anschauung, represents an indispensable step along the way from
Lange and dynamism to Nietzsche's intense study of Boscovich, Helmholtz
and Zöllner a few years later. Stack points very briefly to a possible connection
with Hartmann in Nietzsche's adding a volitional aspect to what he calls in
Beyond Good and Evil "under wills" or "will souls":
What Nietzsche does not make clear is that the supposed 'volitional' activity
of each fundamental "underwill" is unconscious. Although he, like Lange,
was very critical of Hartmann's popular Philosophie des Unbewussten, he seems
to have adopted the notion that both in man and in other living beings
there is a continuously operative unconscious tendency, drive or urge. The
"urges" of men and animals have developed over a long period of time as
conditions of existence; they are the after-effects of perspectival valuations
that now function instinctively or unconsciously.52
My further work with Hartmann and Nietzsche's worldview in Anschauung
will demonstrate to what an extent Stack's supposition, that to the idea of
dynamic force points Nietzsche adds an unconscious volitional aspect gained
from his reading of Hartmann, is verifiable.

Subject and Predicate

The transition from subjective feelings occasioned by the effects of stimuli

producing forces to conceptualization through unconscious linguistic psy-
chological forms, is accomplished, according to Lange, through the gram-
matical forms of subject and predicate. Lange indicates that these grammatical
forms arise as a basic fact of our organization. Our experience, which is
determined by the organization of our thinking, leads us to distinguish
individual marks in things, and to conceive in succession what is in nature
inseparably fused and simultaneous, and to lay down this conception in
propositions with subject and predicate. This is all before, and condition of,
experience.
These observations, along with Du Bois-Reymond's characterization of
force and matter as abstractions from things, as rhetorical artifices and
figurative language, thus, bring Lange to conclude that the basic categories
of philosophy, substance or matter, and accident or motion, arise because of
our inherent tendency to divide the world into subject and predicate, and
that these are the basic categories of science as well.

52 Stack, LNS 2 4 6 - 4 7 .
90 VI. Lange's History of Materialism

What we here understood of the nature of a body we call the properties of

matter, and the properties we resolve back into "forces". From this it results
that the matter is invariably what we cannot or will not further resolve into forces.
Our "tendency to personification", or, if we use Kant's phrase, what comes
to the same thing, the category of substance, compels us always to concei ve
one of these ideas as subject, the other as predicate. As we analyse the things
step by step, the as yet unanalysed remainder always remains as matter, the
true representative of the thing. To it therefore we ascribe the properties
we have discovered. Thus the great truth, 'No matter without force, no
force without matter,' reveals itself as a mere consequence of the principle,
'No subject without predicate, no predicate without subject ... 53

Thus, matter is the unknown element, force, the known. Force becomes a
"property of matter," and thus a "thing" becomes known to us through its
properties, that is, "a subject is determined by its predicates." However,
Lange reminds us that the "thing" is only, in fact, a resting place demanded
by our thought. We only know properties and their coming together around
an unknown something. The assumption of this unknown something is a
"figment of our mind" ("eine Dichtung unseres Gemüthes"), though one made
necessary and imperative by our organization.
Nietzsche had been witness to Schopenhauer's criticisms and thoughts
on the nature and consequence of the subject-predicate relationship. He meets
with these criticisms again here in Lange. That Nietzsche kept this idea with
him is witnessed by the fact that he so enthusiastically embraces Hartmann's
suggestion two years after his reading of Schopenhauer and Lange that the
philosophical notions of subject and object are developed from grammatical
notions lying preformed in human beings. Lange's suggestion that the dis-
tinction of subject and predicate rest in our organization is not far from
Hartmann's assertion that they lie in our unconscious, ideas which, as we
saw, Nietzsche incorporated into his fragment "On the Origins of Language."
Recall, also, that Hartmann stressed that all progress in the development of
language is the first condition of progress in the elaboration of conscious
thought, not its consequence, and that when the human mind begins to
philosophize, it finds a language ready made for it, "fitted out with all the
wealth of forms and notions."
Nietzsche, along with Lange and Hartmann, then, understands language
to be rooted in primitive psychological forms and beliefs inherent in human
organization and that among these forms the grammatical forms are one of
the foremost. Stack, not having the link of Hartmann between Lange and
Nietzsche's eventual ideas of language writes: "Nietzsche seems to agree with
Lange that the consciousness and language of modern man are atavistic in

53 Lange, HM 2: 379-80, GDM 373-74.

 Natural Science, Darwin, and Teleology 91

the sense that they continue to perpetrate ways of thinking and forms of
belief that were dominant in relatively early stages of man's cultural, social
and psychological development." 54
Thus, when Nietzsche declares in "On the Origins of Language" that
"the deepest philosophical knowledge lies already prepared in language," he
means it in a double sense, both grammatical and unconsciously instinctual.
In reading Hartmann Nietzsche is enabled to come to closer grips with what
Lange indicates are the primitive "psychological characteristics" of language
formation. And in Hartmann and Schelling Nietzsche finds Lange's opinion
once again, that myth and story proceed, along with language, out of these
primitive forms. In chapter 9 we will find Nietzsche, following Hartmann,
defending the position that language is not declining from some primitive
perfection, but rather it is a continual process of bloom and decay. The
cultural surface forms may come and go, but the underlying "philosophical
worth" of language, its unconscious and atavistic side continues to function
and grow. This, too, is essentially in agreement with Lange who sees no
definite progress or decline in the evolution of human language and culture.
For Nietzsche, there grows out of these reflections on force and matter
and the subject predicate relationship, two major directions of thinking. First,
Nietzsche's thinking takes a definite direction away from matter towards
force and the dynamics of and relations between effects and reactions of
force. Second, in language, Nietzsche moves away from a belief in the
grammatical categories of subject and object as categories of substance toward
an understanding of them as relational nominatives necessitated by the nature
of human perception and thinking. After a study of Lange, Nietzsche is left
with a moving world of effects and relations with no sure ground in substance
or in a stable notion of the ego.

Natural Science, Darwin, and Teleology

The natural sciences with their Darwinian theories and the consequences
for teleology formed a significant area of thinking for Nietzsche in Lange's
work, for it is directly from the prompting of Nietzsche's reading of Lange
that he proposes to write a dissertation on teleology and the concept of the
organism since Kant. Lange concentrates on Darwin's major idea of natural
selection and the doctrine of the struggle of species for existence, and their
significance for considerations of teleology:

54
Stack, L N S 190.
92 VI. Lange's History of Materialism

All teleology has its root in the view that the builder of the universe acts
in such a way that man must, on the analogy of human reason, call his
action purposeful. ... It can now, however, be no longer doubted that nature
proceeds in a way which has no similarity with human purposefulness; nay,
that her most essential means is such that, measured by the standard of
human understanding, it can only be compared with the blindest chance. 55

It is precisely observations of this nature which lead Schopenhauer to posit

the irrationality and blind striving of the will before Darwin's specific ideas
were prevalent. However, much in the same manner as Schopenhauer invol-
untarily ascribes an order and harmony to the blind striving of the will,
Lange feels compelled to couple the idea of natural selection and struggle
for existence with the universal laws of nature.
What we call chance in the development of species is naturally no chance
in the sense of the general laws of nature, whose great machinery calls forth
all those effects ... what we see is not possibility, but actuality. The isolated
chance is only "possible" for us, it is for us "accidental" because it is ordered
by the machinery of the laws of nature, which in our human comprehension
has nothing to do with this special result of its meshings. In the great whole,
however, we can recognize necessity. Among the countless the advantageous
are present, because they are actually there and everything actual is called forth
through the eternal laws of the universe. In fact it is not that every teleology
is brushed aside, rather an insight into the objective nature of the expediency
of the physical world is won. ... We see clearly that this expediency in the
single case is not human, that as far as we have recognized the methods, it
is not there through a higher wisdom, but through means which in their
logical content definitely and clearly are the most lowly that we know. This
evaluation is itself again grounded only in human nature and so the meta-
physical, the religious conception of things, which in its poetry goes beyond
these barriers, retains again and again a margin for action for the production
of teleology, which must simply and definitely be rejected on the basis of
the principles of natural science and critical natural philosophy. 56

As we shall see in Nietzsche's discussion of teleology in chapter 8, the idea

of "Möglichkeit," of possible forms in connection with mechanically working
laws of nature comes to play an important role in his thinking about teleology.

55 Lange, HM 3: 33, G D M 402.

56 Ibid., G D M 404—05. In the second edition of Lange's History of Materialism he develops
these ideas further and gives the coupling of natural selection and the struggle f o r existence
with the universal laws of nature a name: the "law of development:" "The law of development,
according to which organisms rise in a definite gradation, can be nothing else than the co-
operation, conceived as a unity, of the universal laws of Nature in order to produce the
phenomenon of development. ... The law of development gives the possible forms; natural
selection f r o m their enormous multitude chooses the actual forms; but it can summon forth
nothing that is not contained in the plan of organisms, and the mere principle of utilit;
becomes impotent if a modification of the animal is required of it which is against the law
of development" (HM 3: 5 5 - 5 8 , G D M 2: 2 5 6 - 6 7 ) .
 Natural Science, Darwin, and Teleology 93

Nietzsche takes these ideas and expands upon them. Although Lange writes
of the unity, of the universal laws of Nature, and although he recognizes that
teleology presupposes the idea of unity, he maintains that ultimately unity is
only the combination of our thoughts as a consequence of our organization.
If we conceive all unity as relative, if we see in unity only the combination
of our thought, we have indeed not embraced the inmost nature of things,
but we have certainly made possible the consistency of the scientific view.
... In this way we escape the inmost ground of the contradiction, which lies
in the assumption of absolute unities, which are nowhere given to us. 57

Again, the emphasis on the conceptual nature of unity will play a major role
in Nietzsche's thinking about teleology.
After his reading of Lange's ideas on Darwinism and teleology, Nietzsche
would have arrived at the following possibilities, possibilities which he
explores in his notes for his projected dissertation, "Concerning the Concept
of the Organic since Kant": 1) the laws of nature produce the expediency of
the natural world through a combination of chance and mechanism, that is,
of the multitude of possible forms, actual forms are chosen; 2) there is no
"architect" of this world; and 3) even if the world operates according to a
teleological plan or order, it is not given to us to know it, because of the
nature of our organization. These points, taken together with Lange's con-
clusions that all scientific or metaphysical knowledge is limited to our
organization and by the structure of our language, and that as a consequence,
it is necessary that we recognize a transcendental order of things, to which,
however, we can never have access, provide a significant grounding for my
further discussion of Nietzsche's teleology, criticisms of metaphysics, and the
eventual worldview he constructs on their basis. 58

57 Ibid., HM 3: 37, GDM 406.

58 At the end of his chapter "Darwin and Teleology" in the second edition of History of
Materialism Lange devotes ten pages to a discussion of Hartmann's "false teleology" presented
in The Philosophy of the Unconscious. But as Nietzsche did not have access to these comments
in the first edition, I merely wish to make note of it here.
The major areas of influence upon Nietzsche, through Lange's book History of Materialism,
which I have chosen to highlight for the purposes of this study are not all of the ideas which
Nietzsche found useful in Lange, as Stack's book demonstrates. Another influence came
with the introduction, in Lange's book of Heinrich Czolbe (see pages GDM 312—321). The
influence of Czolbe must have worked its power over Nietzsche all the more at the point at
which, aided by Lange, Nietzsche came more and more to agree that all that we can know
of the world is appearance and that the most effective orientation in such a world stems
from an artistic and moral perspective. What Lange presented of Czolbe and his works Neuen
Darstellung des Sensualismus (Netν Exposition of Sensationalism), 1855, and Über die Grenzen und
den Ursprung der menschlichen Erkenntniss (The Borders and Origins of Human Knowledge), 1865,
was mostly a critical exposition of his scientific conclusions concerning the nature of
sensations. But he also presents a sympathetic rendering of Czolbe's moral position, a moral
position which Nietzsche comes to champion after it has undergone his own transforming
94 VI. Lange's History of Materialism

activity. Lange quotes Czolbe: "The So-called moral needs arising from dissatisfaction with
our earthly life might just as properly be called immoral. It is indeed no proof of humility,
but rather of arrogance and vanity, to improve upon the world we know by imagining a
supersensuous world, and to wish to exalt man into a creature above nature by the addition
of a supersensuous part. Yes, certainly, dissatisfaction with the world of phenomena — the
deepest root of super-sensuous ideas — is not a moral reason at all, but rather a moral
weakness" (HM 2: 290, G D M 317)!
The basis of Czolbe's ethic lies in the priniciple, "Content thyself with the world that is
given thee" (HM 2: 283, G D M 315)! Now, this principle, is of course, just the opposite of
Schopenhauer's answer to the world as representation. His is a thoroughly pessimistic answer,
renunciation and denial of the world as representation of the insatiable will. By this point
in his thinking, Nietzsche is convinced that appearance is all we can know of the world, an
idea which he maintains and strengthens in his mature philosophy, and, as such, appearance
should be completely affirmed. In 1868 C. A. Bernoulli reports that Nietzsche was occupying
himself with Czolbe. Bernoulli writes: "There Nietzsche found the idea offered, nonsensuous
and unclear are one and the same; only from sensuous experience do presentable or observable
concepts, judgements and conclusions come to be built, and every conclusion drawn from
something unpresentable should be avoided" (FNN 17). We saw Lange saying this above,
and, of course, this is the basic tenant of the Schopenhauerian philosophy. The real question
for Nietzsche comes to be, not what the world is — it is appearance — but, rather, what do
we do with that fact; become pessimists and world deniers or world affirmers. Lange, though
not completely, seems to suggest that there is room for optimism, especially through an.
Nietzsche includes both of Czolbe's books on the list of readings he intended to do in 186"/'
68 with regard to his " O n Teleology." For Stack's discussion of Czolbe see LNS 309 — 311.
 Chapter Seven
"On Schopenhauer"

]n October, 1867 Nietzsche writes to his friend Deussen:

My dear friend, concerning the writing of an apology for Schopenhauer, to
which you challenged me in your last letter, I can only communicate the
fact, that I look this life free and courageously in the face, since my feet
have found firm ground. "The waters of sorrow" to speak in metaphors,
will not bring me from my path, because they do not reach my head.
That is naturally only a completely individual apology. But that is how we
stand. If someone wants to refute Schopenhauer with reasons, I whisper in
his ear, "But my dear man, worldviews are not created through logic, nor
destroyed. I feel at home in that atmosphere, you in yours. Let me have my
own nose, just as I do not take yours." ... The best which we have, to feel
one with a great spirit, to sympathetically go along the path of his ideas, to
have found a home of thoughts, a retreat from sorrowful hours — we would
not rob others of this, and we will not let it be taken from us. Be it an
error or a lie — 1

A year later, Deussen has again, apparently suggested to Nietzsche that he

write a critique of Schopenhauer. In October, 1868 Nietzsche writes to
Deussen:
Thus tying into the closing of your letter, I would like to settle also the
suggestion that you think me capable of. Dear friend, "writing well" (when
in other circumstances I deserve this praise: nego ac pernego) does really not
justify writing a critique of the Schopenhauerian system: in addition, you
can have no idea of the respect I have for this "Genius of the first rank,"
when you think me ... capable of overthrowing this giant: hopefully you
understand by a critique of his system not only the bringing to light of
some faulty places, unsuccessful proofs, tactical incompetencies: all of which
certain overly audacious bold ones not at home in philosophy believe they
have done (womit allerdings gewisse überverwegne Überwege und in Phi-
losophie nicht heimische Hayme alles gethan zu haben glauben). One does
not write a criticism of a worldview: rather one understands it or not, a
third point of view is, for me, not understandable. Someone, who can not
smell the scent of the rose, is really incapable of criticizing it: however, if
he does smell it: a la bonheur! Then his desire to criticize it will leave.

1 Nietzsche, K S B 2: 2 2 8 - 2 9 .
96 VII. "On Schopenhauer"

— We simply do not understand one another: allow me to remain silent

about these things: something I remember, having already s u g g e s t e d to y o u
once before. 2

Though Nietzsche means what he says in these two letters, that a worldview
and its effects cannot be shaken with logical proofs based on rational knowl-
edge, he has ironically, during the period between these two letters written
just such a short criticism of Schopenhauer. What he has written in criticism
of Schopenhauer is interesting to our study. But what is equally as interesting
is that in spite of rational criticisms Nietzsche was and remained for a number
of years after this time a devotee of Schopenhauer, even as he grew away
from a complete adherence to his ideas. As we saw above, Nietzsche, after
Lange, no longer believed that we can "know" anything, because we are
confined to the realm of conscious intelligence arising from our organization,
therefore, his refusal to throw Schopenhauer over on that basis is consistent.
What Nietzsche gets from Schopenhauer, in addition to ideas is feeling, and
he expresses this in metaphors of the senses, the nose; you either smell the
rose or you do not. Schlechta, in "Der junge Nietzsche und Schopenhauer,"
writes of the fact that such a criticism should be written by Nietzsche during
the period of his passionate devotion to Schopenhauer, that "the young
Nietzsche already did not demand of philosophy a solution, rather a concen-
trated (verdichtete) representation of the world riddle, and emerged already
out of a spiritual place in which his beloved master himself breathed." 3
Let us look at what Nietzsche has written in criticism of the Schopen-
hauerian metaphysics, a criticism which only serves to confirm and strengthen
what we have come to understand as Nietzsche's position with regard to a
theory of language, and an epistemology in general. The notes begin: "An
attempt to explain the world by an accepted factor. The thing in itself becomes
one of its possible forms. The attempt fails." 4 Nietzsche's criticism is founded
upon two major objections. The first is a criticism of how Schopenhauer
came to privilege and predicate the word will. The second objection Nietzsche
offers is to Schopenhauer's having placed the "dark drive" ("dunkle Trieb"),
the drive which is a drive of the representation mechanism (Vorstellungsap-
parat), which brings the thing in itself to representation, into the realm of
the principiutn individuationis.

2 Ibid., K S B 2: 328.
3 Karl Schlechta, "Der junge Nietzsche und Schopenhauer," Jahrbuch der Schopenhauer-Gesell-
schaft, Heidelberg, 1939. J N 298.
4 Nietzsche, ZS 226. All references are to my translation in Appendix A.
 Predication of the Will 97

Predication of the Will

In order to look at Nietzsche's objection to Schopenhauer's having placed

the will in the position of Kant's thing in itself, it is helpful to repeat the
sentence which sums up the Schopenhauerian system for Nietzsche: "The
groundless, unknowing will reveals itself, through a representation mecha-
nism as world" ("Der grundlose erkenntnisslose Wille offenbart sich, unter
einen Vorstellungsapparat gebracht, als Welt."). 5 Nietzsche claims of this
sentence that if we subtract from it what Schopenhauer found in Kant, there
remains the one word "will" along with its predicates. Nietzsche then asserts
that this remainder can be attacked "very successfully from four sides."
Nietzsche's first two attacks are not really attacks, rather stated opinions
which he does not choose to defend. First, he claims that Schopenhauer,
where it was necessary to go beyond Kant, did not, and simply labelled
Kant's thing in itself as "only a hidden category" ("nur eine versteckte
Kategorie"). 6 His second objection is that, while Schopenhauer must be
admired for following along the "dangerous" Kantian path, that which he
put in place of the x, the will, was only born of "poetic intuition" while the
attempted logical proofs "cannot satisfy either Schopenhauer or us." This
comment is not to be taken as a simple refutation as we have seen in his
letters to Deussen above. One of the major ideas which Nietzsche gets from
Lange, as we recall, is that all philosophical systems are only born of poetic
intuition, they are art, though through their art they attempt to build
something valuable. It is not only Schopenhauer's philosophy which
Nietzsche claims no logical proof can refute, but philosophical discourse in
general. Though, as Nietzsche admits, Schopenhauer's logical proofs of the
will cannot satisfy, for Nietzsche at least, they need not.
Nietzsche's third objection, is the only one which he really attempts to
defend, and it certainly frames his deepest departure from the Schopenhauer-
ian philosophy. "Thirdly, we are compelled to guard against the predicates
which Schopenhauer ascribes to his will, which for something simply un-
thinkable, sound much too certain and all stem from the contradiction to the
world of representation." 7 This is a problem which Kant does not have
because between the thing in itself and the phenomenon or appearance, this
opposition, never comes into question. We will return to this objection in
some detail in a moment. Nietzsche's fourth objection is that the world cannot
be subsumed so easily into the Schopenhauerian system. And with regard to

5 Ibid.
6 According to Schlechta, J N 297, Nietzsche gets this f r o m Ueberweg and Lange.
7 Nietzsche, ZS 228.
98 VII. "On Schopenhauer"

this point, Nietzsche indicates the problem which we have already mentioned
briefly above, that Schopenhauer did not satisfactorily address the question
concerning the borders of individuation.
Though Nietzsche sets out objections three and four as two separate ones,
there is no doubt, that they constitute two aspects of one problem, as we see
in the following image:
A certain species o f that contradiction with which the Schopenhauerian
system is perforated, will occupy us on occasion; a species of extremely
important and hardly avoidable contradictions, which to a certain extent
while still resting under their mother's heart, arm themselves and, scarcely
born, do their first deed by killing her. They concern themselves collectively
with the borders of individuation and have their π ρ ώ τ ο ν ψ(εϋδος) in the
point considered under 3) a b o v e . 8

Remember that point three is concerned with guarding against the predicates
which Schopenhauer adds to his will. Nietzsche then quotes the following
passage from The World as Will and Representation·.
The will as thing in itself is quite different f r o m its phenomenon, and is
entirely free f r o m all the f o r m s of the phenomenon into which it first passes
w h e n it appears, and which therefore concern only its objectivity, and are
foreign to the will itself. Even the most universal f o r m o f all representation,
that o f object f o r subject, does not concern it, still less the forms that are
subordinate to this and collectively have their c o m m o n expression in the
principle of sufficient reason. A s w e know, time and space belong to this
principle, and consequently plurality as well, which exists and has become
possible only through them. In this last respect I shall call time and space
the principium individuationis
Nietzsche then quotes a second passage: "This thing in itself ..., which as
such is never object, since all object is its mere appearance or phenomenon,
and not it itself, is to be thought of objectively, then we must borrow its name and
concept from an object, from something in some way objectively given, and
therefore from one of its phenomena."10 Nietzsche's objection is based in
surprise. What surprises is the dictatorial tone in which Schopenhauer asserts
a number of negative characteristics of the thing in itself characteristics about
which we have no sure knowledge. Though Schopenhauer himself sees the
problem in this, as evidenced by the second quote above, he nevertheless
asks that something, which can never be an object be thought of objectively.
Thus, writes Nietzsche, he takes the ungraspable χ and covers it with "colorfui
clothes." What Schopenhauer asks is that we take the predicates for the thing
in itself. The concept "thing in itself" is removed, "because it should be so,"

8 Ibid., ZS 229.
9 Ibid., WWR 1: 112, SW 2: 134.
10 Ibid., WWR 1: 110, SW 2: 1 3 1 - 3 2 .
 Predication of the Will 99

and another is "secretly pressed into our hands." 11 Nietzsche brings to bear
against Schopenhauer the very argument which Schopenhauer used against
Kant's categorical judgement, that predicates aligned to a subject, i.e., in
Schopenhauer's own case, the attributes of timelessness, unity, and causeless-
ness to the will, are then projected onto the external world and are to be
taken as really existing. And after his reading of Lange's criticisms of the
subject predicate forms of our thinking, constituted as a result of our
organization, Nietzsche demonstrates here that he cannot again, take the use
of these grammatical forms as proof of the actuality of any philosophical
system, but only as proof of the structure of our own organization.
Nietzsche criticizes Schopenhauer's specific attempts to describe the sense
of the predicates of the will as completely ungraspable and transcendent, and
he offers as example the following Schopenhauerian sentence: "The unity of
that will ... in which we have recognized the inner being of the phenomenal
world, is a metaphysical unity. Consequently, knowledge of it is transcendent;
that is to say, it does not rest on the functions of our intellect, and is therefore
not to be really grasped with them." 12 But for Nietzsche, this is all empty
rhetoric, the predicates of unity, eternity, and freedom, which are the three
predicates Schopenhauer attributes to the will, are all indivisibly knotted
together with our organization, so that it is completely doubtful whether
they have any meaning outside of human spheres of knowledge. For
Nietzsche, Schopenhauer's will cannot be taken as a transcendent force
because it is defined in terms of appearance itself, appearance which is
grounded in multiplicity, temporality and causality. Nietzsche remains
strongly critical of the borders of representation and its expression in language
and conceptuality. Nietzsche gets this linguistic argument against the notion
of a thinkable transcendental world first from Lange. As Stack writes in
Lange and Nietzsche:
Human languages (for Lange and Nietzsche) have developed primarily for
the sake of social relations and interactions, are shot through with anthro-
pomorphisms and "personifications", and have evolved for the sake of the
description and designation of objects and events encountered in experience.
Language is designed, then, for the sake of practical needs in a phenomenal
world of experience. The use of such language to refer to, or "picture",
transcendental entities or a transcendental world does not overcome its close
association with phenomenal actuality.13
Thus, Nietzsche's final judgement on Schopenhauer's predication of the
will from the world of appearance is one based on language. He uses

11 Ibid., ZS 230.
12 Ibid.
13 Stack, LNS 66.
100 VII. "On Schopenhauer"

Schopenhauer's own realization of the limits of consciousness within the

bonds of language by using Schopenhauer's own quote against him. Scho-
penhauer is "fully correct" when he himself maintains against this operation
in general, but apparently not in his own case, that "from outside one can
never come to the essence of things: no matter how one searches one wins
ony images and names."14

Principium Individuationis and Origin of the Intellect

To address Nietzsche's second major objection to Schopenhauer's philos-

ophy, let us repeat his sentence: "The dark drive brought about through a
representation mechanism reveals itself as world. This drive is not included
under the principium individuationis.",5 In exploring this difference in thinking
between himself and Schopenhauer Nietzsche asks: how does the will appear?
Where does the representation mechanism come from through which the will
appears? The question which Nietzsche is really asking is: how has an intellect
arisen? According to Schopenhauer the conscious ego and its knowledge
belong to nature and presuppose the organism, and the existence of organisms
presuppose the will. The growth of the development of the brain has come
about by the ever increasing and more complicated need of the corresponding
appearances of the will. Nietzsche points to Schopenhauer's idea that the will
is always pressing to higher manifestations of objectification in the world of
representation. The intellect is no different, according to Schopenhauer,
having arisen from its first dawning feelings to its extreme clarity. Nietzsche
then quotes the following passage from Parerga and Paralipomena·.
All life on earth did not exist in any consciousness at all, either in their own
because they had none or in the consciousness of another because no such

14 Nietzsche, ZS 230, WWR 1: 99, SW 2: 118. Here one thinks of Wittgenstein and his assertion
that metaphysical problems and theories are not empirical but linguistic or grammatical, or
as P. Hallie rephrases it: they are "rootless grammatical claims disguised as empirical ones."
Wittgenstein writes: "The characteristic of a metaphysical question being that we express an
unclarity about the grammar of words in the form of a scientific question." "Just how they
are grammatical or linguistic, however, is something of which Wittgenstein had a number
of — possibly conflicting — views. For example apart from his thinking of metaphysicians
as uttering disguised nonsense ... — Wittgenstein represents the metaphysician as making
linguistic mistakes; as misunderstanding; misinterpreting; or putting a false interpretation
on words. This is perhaps because he is unclear about the grammar of certain words; or is
"misled by a form of expression," or because his intelligence is bewitched by means of
language. In short, this view of traditional philosophy or 'metaphysics' represents it as just
false descriptive grammar put in the verbal dress of an empirical claim" (W. E. Kennick,
"Philosophy as Grammar" in Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophy and Language, New York: Hu-
manities Press, Inc., 1972, 1 4 7 - 1 5 0 ) .
15 Ibid., ZS 226.
 Principium Individuationis and Origin of the Intellect 101

consciousness existed ..., that is, they did not exist at all; but then what
does their having existed signify? At bottom, it is merely hypothetical, namely,
if a consciousness had existed in those primeval times, then such events
would have appeared in it; thus far does the regressus of phenomena lead
us. And so it lay in the very nature of the thing in itself to manifest itself
in such events.16

From such a point of view Nietzsche finds a contradiction, that a world of

appearance is placed before the world of appearance. That is, the intellect,
or principium individuationis operates only within the realm of time, space, and
causality. If there was no consciousness, individuality, etc., that means that
the above description is, as Nietzsche charges, "already dissolved in words
and images," and is, as Schopenhauer himself writes, and Nietzsche empha-
sizes, only "translations into the language of our observing intellect."
While making the argument above for the engendering of intellect,
Schopenhauer himself, finds the problems in his own argument. Despite this,
he nevertheless maintains it. Let us follow his reasoning:
At bottom, however, all those events that cosmogony and geology urge us
to assume as having occurred long before the existence of any knowing
creature are themselves only a translation into the language of our intuitively
perceiving intellect from the essence-in-itself of things which to it is incom-
prehensible. For those events have never had an existerice-in-itself, any more
than have present events. But with the aid of the principles a priori of all
possible experience and following a few empirical data, the regressus leads
back to them; it is itself, however, only the concatenation of a series of mere
phenomena that have no absolute existence.17

Schopenhauer admits that it is impossible to empirically explain the existence

of primordial matter and force and that here a metaphysical solution may be
justified. "Here, then, metaphysics must appear which, in the will in our true
nature, makes us acquainted with the kernel and core of all things. In this
sense, Kant had also said 'that the primary sources of the effects of nature
must obviously be dealt with entirely by metaphysics'." 18 Though Nietzsche
does not cite this argument of Schopenhauer's in "On Schopenhauer," he
must have been familiar with it. Schopenhauer is an astute critic, nevertheless,
as Nietzsche does indicate, he absolves himself from the consequences of his
criticisms and continues to take merely metaphysical propositions for attri-
butes of the thing in itself.
Thus we find that the really interesting question for Nietzsche, which
arises out of his criticism of Schopenhauer, is the question after the emergence
of the intellect. Nietzsche writes:

16 Ibid., ZS 231. Schopenhauer, PP 140n, SW 6: 1 4 9 - 5 0 n .

17 Schopenhauer, PP 140, SW 6: 149.
' 8 Ibid., PP 141, SW 6: 150.
102 VII. "On Schopenhauer"

The existence of the last step before the appearance of the intellect is
certainly as hypothetical as that of earlier, that means it was not in existence
because consciousness was not in existence. With the next step, consciousness
is supposed to appear, that means out of a non-existing world the flower of
knowledge is to suddenly and directly break forth. This is also to have
happened in a sphere of timelessness and spacelessness, without the mediation
of causality: what stems out of such an otherworldly world, however, must
itself — after Schopenhauer's reasoning — be thing in itself. 19

Based upon this reasoning Nietzsche asserts that either the intellect must be
understood as a new predicate eternally joined with the thing in itself; and
we know Nietzsche cannot choose this possibility based on the foregoing
critique of predication of the will, or there can be no intellect because at no
time could an intellect have come into being. But the intellect exists, and
Nietzsche reasons:
it follows that it could not be a tool of the world of appearance, as Schopenhauer
would have it, hut rather thing in i t s e l f , that is, will (my emphasis).
The Schopenhauerian thing in itself should become simultaneously the
principium individuationis and basis of necessitation: in other words: the present
world.
Schopenhauer wanted to find an equation for the x: and it revealed itself
out of his calculation that it = x, that means that he did not find it. 20

This closes Nietzsche's criticism of Schopenhauer's predication of the

thing in itself and his criticism of Schopenhauer's placing the seat of the
representation mechanism in the conscious intellect, the principium individua-
tionis. It is clear that in this short criticism of Schopenhauer, two primary
ideas arise for Nietzsche. The thing in itself still stands as an x. And, the
intellect, the representation mechanism, which brings forth the world of
representation does not belong only to the principium individuationis, but also
to the x.
In "On Schopenhauer," Nietzsche remains with the question after the
origin of intellect. Nietzsche indicates that Schopenhauer is wary of the
question of the origin of intellect "although it is apparent that the intellect
in the Schopenhauerian sense is already a principium individuationis and presup-
poses a world caught in the lams of causality (my emphasis). 21 And Nietzsche
quotes what we will find to be a very significant passage from Schopenhauer,
which will set his own path of thinking going upon the question of the
origin of intellect out of his theory of language.

" Nietzsche, ZS 2 3 1 - 3 2 .
20 Ibid., ZS 232.
21 Ibid.
 Principium Individuationis and Origin of the Intellect 103

Now if in the objective comprehension of the intellect we go back as far as

we can, we shall find that the necessity or need of knowledge in general arises
from the plurality and separate existence of beings, from individuation. For
let us imagine that there exists only a single being, then such a being needs
no knowledge, because there would not then exist anything different from
that being itself, — anything whose existence such a being would therefore
have to take up into itself only indirectly through knowledge, in other
words, nothing foreign that could be apprehended as object. On the other
hand, with the plurality of beings, every individual finds itself in a state of
isolation from all the rest, and from this arises the necessity for knowledge.
The nervous system, by means of which the animal individual first of all
becomes conscious of itself, is bounded by a skin; yet in the brain raised to
intellect, it crosses this boundary by means of its form of knowledge,
causality, and in this way perception arises for it as a consciousness of other
things, as a picture or image of beings in space and time, which change in
accordance with causality.22

Hec, Schopenhauer supposes that there could be a "separate existence of

beirgs" and "individuation" before the individuation of the principium indi-
vidwtionis and its presupposition of conscious intellect, to the effect that
"otler things" exist in the forms of space and time as precondition for
peneption by conscious intellect in the making of images of representation.
Niezsche will take this idea, and with Lange and Hartmann's help, shape it
intcthe worldview in Anschauung set out in chapter 11, a worldview which
allows for both unity and plurality, both objective and subjective intellect,
for a resolution of the problems of Schopenhauer's principium individuationis
and the questions of space, time, and causality, which Nietzsche begins to
qustion here.
It is interesting to note that for each of his major objections to Schopen-
hauer's philosophy, predication of the will and borders of individuation,
Niezsche points to the fact that Schopenhauer is himself aware of the
problems he presents, but chooses to suspend them in his case. This must
ha\e been interesting to Nietzsche for two reasons; first, as demonstration
and reaffirmation of the critical mind of Schopenhauer, and secondly in
support of his recently acquired standpoint that philosophy need not, indeed
camot satisfy according to any logical truth, but rather as poetic inspiration.
In lis article "Der Standpunkt des Ideals bei Lange und Nietzsche," con-
certing Nietzsche's letter to Gersdorff of August, 1866, Salaquarda writes:
that he still holds fast to Schopenhauer with full sympathy, with that he
demonstrates, that such sympathy appears at the very least no longer self-
evident. The basis of the communication to Gersdorff concerning his reading
of Lange is apparently that the author of The History of Materialism had

22 bid., W W R 2: 274, S W 3: 310.

104 VII. "On Schopenhauer"

offered him a point of view which had allowed him to continue to hold fast
to Schopenhauer, despite certain doubts.23
The standpoint offered to Nietzsche through Lange was, of course, that
philosophy is ultimately poetry. However, such a point of view does not
mean that Nietzsche remains uncritical of Schopenhauer, for he also gets
from Lange a strong sense that philosophy has an obligation in its creation
of worlds, to remain as close to the bounds of what an examination of the
natural and physical sciences tell us about the world as possible, while creating
an ideal which can enhance such knowledge.

23
Jörg Salaquarda, "Der Standpunkt des Ideals bei Lange und Nietzsche," Studi Tedeschi, X X I I ,
1, 1979. SI 138.
 Chapter Eight
"On Teleology" or "Concerning the Concept of the Organic
Since Kant"

In 1867 — 68 Nietzsche drew up an outline and many pages of notes for

what was to have been his doctoral dissertation.' In a letter to his friend
Deussen in April —Mai 1868 Nietzsche writes:

The realm of metaphysics, and with that the province of "absolute" truth,
has unquestionably been placed in a row with poetry and religion. Whomever
wants to know something is now satisfied with a conscious relativity of
knowledge — as for example, all well known natural scientists. Metaphysics
belongs in certain men in the area of a spiritual necessity (Gemütsbedürfnisse),
is essentially edification: on the other hand it is art, namely that of poetry
in concepts (Begriffsdichtung). It must be remembered that metaphysics,
neither as religion nor as art, has anything to do with the so called "essence
of truth or being". By the way, when at the end of this year, you receive
my doctoral dissertation you will notice a few things which will explain this
point of limits of knowledge. My theme is "the concept of the organic since
Kant," half philosophical, half natural science. My drafts are almost
ready ... 2

On May 3rd or 4th Nietzsche writes to his friend Erwin Rohde:

For a long time I have had a philosophical project in mind ... (namely to
write "Concerning the concept of the organic since Kant") and have collected
enough material for it; on the whole, however, this theme cannot be realized
as the conscious goal just mentioned [a dissertation topic] unless one goes
about it no less carefully than a fly.3

That Lange provides the primary occasion for Nietzsche's idea of such
an undertaking is not only evident from his letter to Deussen in the way
which it reiterates Lange's basic propositions, but we have the evidence of
Nietzsche's sister when she writes in her biography of Nietzsche:

1 Nietzsche's eventual dissertation was "De fontibus Laertii Diogenis" ("Concerning the
Sources of Laertius Diogenes") (FNN 21).
2 Nietzsche, KSB 2: 269.
3 Ibid., KSB 2: 274.
106 VIII. "On Teleology"

Existent ... is a draft of a work "Concerning Teleology since Kant," -with

which my brother, during his convalescence in March and April (1866)
occupied himself. He had probably derived the stimulus to this work from
Friedrich Albert Lange's History of Materialism, which he read immediately
upon its publication and which he studied once again in February 1868. 4

At the end of these notes, Nietzsche affixed a long list of reading which he
considered necessary for the completion of the projected dissertation. The
list is conspicuous in its heavy reading in the natural and physical sciences
and in the fact that most on the names on it were names encountered to one
degree or another in his reading of Lange's book. 3
In exploring the concept of the organic since Kant, these notes, of
necessity, explore Nietzsche's own position with regard to teleology, a posi-
tion which he slowly draws out against that offered primarily by Kant in The
Critique of Judgement. Aside from Kant's work, Nietzsche's other sources
primarily include Section 28, the last few pages of "Criticism of the Kantian
Philosophy," and Schopenhauer's essay "On Teleology" in The World as Will
and Representation·, as well as the last sections on teleology in Kuno Fischer's
two volume work Immanuel Kant und Seine Lehre.
A close look at these notes on teleology is essential to my further
discussion, because they demonstrate how thoroughly Nietzsche's epistemol-
ogy is based upon his theory of language. In them we find Nietzsche's
continuing critique of metaphysics which uses as its primary tool his under-
standing of the limits of language and conceptuality. Nietzsche is equating
teleological thinking with metaphysical thinking. In his letter to Deussen,
Nietzsche himself emphasizes not really the organic, or teleology, but much
more that he is exploring the "conscious relativity of knowledge" and the
"point of the limits of knowledge." We will see to what extent Nietzsche
takes over Lange's idea that whenever the limits of knowledge are approached,
what remains over are words, expressions, and a world of relations, but never
truth itself.

Kant's Teleology

With regard to scientific enquiry Kant felt that the forms of nature
conform to the forms of our cognitive thinking and that both should be
knowable in general mechanistic terms. Thus, scientific search for causes of

4 Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, Das Leben Nietzsches, Leipzig: V e r l a g v o n C. G . N a u m a n n , 1895.

L N 1: 2 6 9 .
5 Please r e f e r to m y translation in A p p e n d i x A . It seems reasonable to assume that Nietzsche
l o o k e d at m o s t o f these at o n e time o r another, because s o m e o f t h e m , f o r example,
S c h o p e n h a u e r , Czolbe, H e l m h o l t z , K a n t , and others w e k n o w that he did read and study
closely.
 Kant's Teleology 107

any natural occurrence, or attempts to measure nature quantitatively, are

legitimate. However, Kant thought that the problem of living organisms is
not ultimately explainable through mechanistic research. He does not allow
that our knowledge of mechanism is not yet advanced enough, rather that it
is completely ineffective in explaining organic phenomena because in any
analysis of an organism, as opposed to inorganic objects, an insoluable
residuum must always remain unexplained.
Given this premis, Kant asserts that it is in our human nature to account
for living organisms in terms of explanations from design. However, the
theological explanation falls short because we have no evidence that a God
exists, or that if one exists, his activity is purposive. Therefore, for Kant,
neither teleology according to a theory of theological design nor of mechanism
offer adequate methods of explaining organic life.
If this is so, how are we to procede to an understanding of organisms?
Kant suggests that the principle of teleology be used to offer a third possi-
bility: "the conception of combinations and forms in nature that are deter-
mined by ends is at least one more principle for reducing its phenomena to
rules in cases where the laws of its purely mechanical causality do not carry
us sufficiently far." 6 Kant proposes a "natural teleology." He claims that the
biologist can never discover scientifically for what human or divine purpose
nature is organized as it is. Yet the scientist, of necessity, sees that every
living organism possesses a "natural" purpose because the structure of its
parts demonstrate a teleological value in the preservation of its life and of its
species. The organism is "an organized natural product in which every part
is reciprocally both means and end." 7 We are, by the structure of our cognitive
processes, Kant suggests, able to conceive the possibility that ultimate reality,
"the super-sensible substrate" of nature may contain an explanation of organic
life which is neither mechanistic nor based on design, yet it may be either or
both. Design in this case is not that of theology, rather the idea that there
may be a natural "intelligence" which operates according to the rules of
means and ends.
From this basis Kant goes on to suggest his "objective" teleology which
regards organisms as beings in which every part is throughout determined
by every other part, which leads him, through the reflective judgement, to
intuit final causes acting in nature as a product of an intelligence.
For we are bringing forward a teleological ground where we endow a
conception of an object — as if that conception were to be found in nature
instead of in ourselves — ... and so regard nature as possessed of a capacity

6 Kant, CJ 4 - 5 .
7 Ibid., 24.
108 VIII. "On Teleology"

of its own for acting technically·, whereas if we did not ascribe such a mode
of operation to nature its causality would have to be regarded as bliind
mechanism.8
Although Kant comes to this view as necessary, based upon the Organi-
zation of our reason, Lange asserts, as we saw above, that although there
does appear to be some purposiveness in nature, it is exactly that, only
appearance. Even if there is in reality such purposiveness, we are not in a
position to know it.

Nietzsche: "On Teleology"

In discussing Nietzsche's notes "On Teleology" let us remember that a

year later in "Origins" Nietzsche explicitly states, as I have already mentioned,
that the "real problem of philosophy is the unending expediency of organisms
and the unconsciousness in their coming to be." Here, in this sentence, we
discover the "remarkable diversion" which Nietzsche makes on the Kantian
antinomy. 9 The question of teleology for Kant and for Schopenhauer rests
in a concern for the first part of this sentence, in understanding "the unending
expediency of the organism" and then on to final causes or the will. However,
for Nietzsche, as we will discover in what follows, the real object of research
in this statement is not only "the unending expediency of the organism," rather
he chooses to concentrate on the mechanisms of "the unconsciousness of its
coming to be." The key word, is once again, the unconscious, and how our
conscious knowledge grows out of and is related to it. One of the first
thoughts in the notes we are considering is the following: "Why cannot there
be a power which unconsciously creates the expedient, i.e., Nature: one thinks
of the instinct of animals." 10
In addition to the above, the other most significant aspect of Nietzsche's
consideration of teleology, from the point of view of this study, is that his
whole argument against some of Kant's major teleological postulates rests
upon a thorough and consistent consideration of the limits of conceptuality.
Nietzsche correlates concept making with a conscious intellect, resting in
concepts or taking them as givens is a "pure arbitrariness," a poetry in
concepts. And the carrying further of conscious thinking based upon a
particular concept leads one astray from other possibilities. "Teleology as
expedience and the result of conscious intelligence pushes farther and farther.

8 Ibid., 5.
5 See chapter 4, note 7.
10 Nietzsche, ZT 239. Pages refer to my translation in Appendix A.
 Nietzsche: "On Teleology" 109

One asks after the purpose of this isolated interference and stands in this
before pure arbitrariness." 11 Thus, in teleological matters, Nietzsche suggests,
when we talk of concepts, of ends and final causes, what we mean is that "a
form is intentioned by a living and thinking being in which life wants to
appear. In other words, we do not advance, through the final cause to the
explanation of life, but only of the form." 1 2 Conscious intelligence, thus,
determines the forms, that is concepts, in which we view the world. With
regard to the organism, Kant's "itself organizing" is traced arbitrarily by
Kant. This is very significant, for once Kant has intentioned the form of
organisms as constituting means and ends in themselves, it is from this
"arbitrary form" that he begins to build his case for ends of nature and
eventually of final causes, which lead him to favor a natural teleology, arrived
at through the reflective judgement.
Nietzsche, working rather from natural science (naturgemäss), favors a
mechanistic theory operating equally within ideas of expedience and inexpe-
dience. However, as we will see, concepts of mechanisms are equally arbitrary
in the final analysis, but perhaps less so than the Kantian concepts of
expedience. Nietzsche quotes and comments upon Kant:
"The expedience of things can always be valid only with respect to an
intelligence, with whose intention the thing agrees." And further, "either
our own or a foreign intelligence which lies at the basis of things themselves.
In the last case, the intention which reveals itself in appearance is the existence
of things." In other cases only our conception of the thing is judged purely
as expedience. This last kind of expediency has to do with only the form,
("in the simple observation of the object imagination and intelligence are
harmonized").13

When an intelligence is introduced, especially human intelligence, Nietzsche,

following Lange and Lange's discussion of the limits of knowledge, makes
it clear that what concerns us is always only a world of appearance, a
conceptualized world of conscious forms and not the world as it may actually
be. Nietzsche clearly sets up a dichotomy in these notes on teleology between
conscious intelligence and the forms of conceptuality and an unconscious

11 Ibid., 241.
12 Ibid., 249.
13 Ibid., 242—43. Here, Nietzsche is using Kuno Fischer's interpretation of Kant. Fischer wrote
significant critiques of Kant constructed after a thorough acquaintance and sympathetic
understanding of Schopenhauer's work and Kantian criticisms. Thus, he would recommend
himself especially to Nietzsche. Remember that Blunck in his biography of Nietzsche (see
chapter 6, note 4) points to the fact that Nietzsche's acquaintance with Kant is begun with
his reading of Lange's History of Materialism and completed by the reading of Fischer's
criticism. Nietzsche's first introduction to Kant is, of course, Schopenhauer and both of
these works on Kant fall into line to one degree or another with Schopenhauer's rendering
of him.
110 VIII. "On Teleology"

force at work in nature which it is legitimate to posit but to which we cann ot

have access.
In Nietzsche's outline of the projected work on the organic since Kaxit
two sections are indicated. The first section appears to roughly consist in an
analysis of primarily Kantian elements of teleological consideration and
Nietzsche's replacing of certain points with those of his own. The second
section represents his own thinking on the organic and its relationship to
teleology. The most effective way of entering into Nietzsche's discussion of
teleology is simply to take these headings as cues for organizing my discussion
under major areas of concern which seem important to Nietzsche.

Concept of expedience (ability of existence)

In taking up the first point in Nietzsche's outline, "concept of expedience,"

note that he qualifies the word expedience as the concept of expedience.
Nietzsche quotes Kant twice from The Critique of Judgement on the primal
role of concepts: "we have complete insight only into what we can make and
accomplish according to our concepts." To this Nietzsche responds: "What
is beyond our concepts is completely unknowable." 14 In order to overcome
the fact that human beings stand before the unknown, they invent "concepts,
which only gather together a sum of appearing characteristics, which however,
do not get ahold of the thing." Nietzsche then emphasizes the provisional
nature of conceptuality with regard to the basic elements of a teleological
consideration by writing: "Therein belong force, matter, individual, law,
organism, atom, final cause. These are not parts but only reflected judge-
ments."15
The concept of expedience has been formed from the idea "ability of
existence." Concept of expedience: only the ability of existence. However,
Nietzsche emphasizes that this equation demonstrates no specific degree of
reason in its claim: "What is wonderful for us is really organic living: and
all means to maintain this we call expedient."16 In contradistinction to Kant's
statement that "it is something different to consider the inner form of a thing
as expedient and to regard the existence of these things as ends of nature,"
Nietzsche counters that if the concept expedience arises from the ability of
life, there would be no contradiction between the inexpedient method of
maintenance and reproduction of an organism and its expedience. For if

14 Ibid., 244, 246.

15 Ibid., 247.
16 Ibid., 241.
 Nietzsche: "On Teleology" 111

something lives, no matter how it maintains itself, it must by definition be

expedient. Therefore, Nietzsche maintains, we cannot say, as Kant does, that
if it is expedient the existence of a thing is an end of nature.
We find that Nietzsche has no quarrel with the concept of the expedience
of organisms, however, he does not agree that expedience leads to ends of
nature. Having arrived at the idea of physical ends, Kant applies a reflective
judgement to suggest that it is indeed justified to consider the possibility that
the expedience of organisms might lead to the idea of ends of nature. Here
is how Kant states the matter in The Critique oj Judgement: "brought so far,
this conception necessarily leads us to the idea of aggregate nature as a system
following the rule of ends." Thus, the whole mechanism of nature is subor-
dinated to the principles of reason in order to test "phenomenal nature" by
the idea of final ends. Kant applies the subjective maxim: "everything in the
world is good for something or other; nothing in it is in vain; we are entitled,
nay incited, by the example that nature affords us in its organic products, to
expect nothing from it and its laws but what is final when things are viewed
as a whole." 17
Nietzsche finds fault with Kant's consideration of teleology based upon
ends and final causes for two major reasons. First, he questions and criticizes
the movement from "organized causes, which must be thought as effective
toward ends —." Nietzsche writes that Kant made this claim after a bad
analogy: that there is nothing similar to the relationship of expedience of the
organism. However, according to Nietzsche, it is only necessary to prove a
coordinated possibility, in order to remove the compelling in the Kantian
representation. The coordinated possibility which Nietzsche offers and which
frames his version of teleology in these notes is: "mechanism joined with
causality." "Expedience arose as a special case of the possible: countless forms
arise, that means, mechanical assembly: among these countless there could
also be some capable of life.'" 8 With this criticism, Nietzsche is repeating
basic lessons learned in Lange's work, that a mechanical explanation in the
service of the laws of nature allows organisms to arise and maintain them-
selves. Without, however, the necessity of positing the concept of ends in
nature.
Nietzsche also criticizes Kant for taking only the example of the organism
from which to generalize to ends of nature and then to final causes. "The
concept of an end of nature used only with the organism." 19 Nietzsche offers
three specific objections to Kant's movement from organisms to ends of

17Kant, CJ 28, K W 10: 4 9 1 - 9 2 .

18Nietzsche, ZT 243.
" Ibid., 247.
112 VIII. "On Teleology"

nature, and finally to final causes. "This reflection comes about in that one
1) does not consider the subjective in the concept of ends, 2) understands
nature as a unity, 3) also credits it with a unity of means." 20 These three
criticisms, return us to Nietzsche's criticism of conceptuality.
The subjective in conceptuality lies first and foremost, in the idea which
Nietzsche appropriates from Lange, that our conceptions are determined
according to the particular organization of human perception. It is a part of
our human organization to see, or to wish to see purposes operating in
nature. Because of the arbitrary nature of conceptuality, in Kant's case, the
positing of the organism as containing within itself both ends and means, a
subjective perception and an arbitrary process, lead to what Nietzsche con-
siders to be fundamentally a false teleology.
Concerning the opposition between the conception of organisms and of
nature as either unities or multiplicities, Nietzsche writes: "The concept of
the whole is however our work. Here lies the source of the representation
of ends. The concept of the whole does not lie in things, but in us." 21 Thus,
"into these unities, made by us, we later transfer the idea of end." Nietzsche
quotes Kant: "The representation of the whole thought as cause is the end!;"
then adds: "However, the 'whole' is itself only a representation." 22 "We
believe that the force which brings about organisms of a certain kind is a
unitary one. Then the method of this force, how it creates and maintains the
organisms is to be observed." 23 However, organism must be considered "as
a product of our organization." 24 These criticisms are also echos of Lange's
consideration of teleology in the last chapter.
This criticism of the need in us to create unities and to reason from
wholes extends to a criticism of Schopenhauer as well. In the notes on
teleology Nietzsche quotes several statements from Schopenhauer and then
offers criticism of them.
"The expedience of the organic, the regularity of the inorganic are brought
into nature through our understanding." This idea, expanded upon, gives
the explanation of external expedience. The thing in itself must "show its
unity in the agreement of all appearances." "All the parts of nature come to
meet each other, because there is one will."

However, Nietzsche counters this with: "But the opposite to the whole theory
arises in that terrible struggle of individuals (which likewise manifest them-
selves as an idea) and the species. The explanation presupposes an overarching

20 Ibid., 248.
21 Ibid., 244.
22 Ibid., 245.
23 Ibid., 244.
24 Ibid., 243.
 Nietzsche: "On Teleology" 113

teleology: which does not exist." 25 Therefore, Nietzsche disagrees with the
Kantian position that our discursive intellect can only grasp the parts, but
that the parts are conditioned by the whole, or with the Schopenhauerian
proposition of the unity and expedience of the will as opposed to the
multiplicity of representation. Nietzsche gives equal weight to the opposite
opinion that multiplicity is what exists in fact but that our organization
compels us to a false conception of unity. "In the organism parts are not
only conditioned by the whole but also the whole by the parts." 26 Nietzsche
writes: "The understanding is discursive not intuitive," then quotes Fischer:
"it can grasp the the whole only in its parts and put them together"
In the organism, however, the "parts are conditioned by the whole." "Now
the understanding tries to proceed from the whole, which is not given in
the perception, but only in representation. The representation of the whole
conditions the parts: "the representation of the whole as cause," that is,
end."
"When grasping the whole out of the parts, understanding proceeds me-
chanically, when grasping the given parts from the whole, it can only trace
them back to the concept of the whole."27

To this Nietzsche adds: "Thus intuition is lacking." From Kant's point of

view, the intuitive is not lacking. At one point in his notes, Nietzsche refers
to a specific passage in Goethe which he notes as "very important," a passage
in which Goethe is quoting Kant. The section is 77 in The Critique of Judgement.
Here Kant writes:
But now we are also able to form a notion of an understanding which, not
being discursive like ours, but intuitive, moves from the synthetic universal
or intuition of a whole as a whole, to the particular — that is to say, from
the whole to the parts ... Here it is also quite unnecessary to prove that an
intellectus archetypus like this is possible. It is sufficient to show that we are
led to this idea of an intellectus archetypus by contrasting with it our discursive
understanding that has need of images (intellectus ectypus) and noting the
contingent character of a faculty of this form, and that this idea involves
nothing self-contradictory.28

The significant distinction here is that Kant refers to "pure intuition," that
is, he posits a pure concept of such an intellect able to comprehend the whole
and from the concept (subjective intuition) of that whole, the idea of ends
of nature is justified. This is not what Nietzsche seeks as intuitive. Nietzsche's
idea is intuitive from nature, that which can be sensed without or before
conceptuality. Kant posits an empirical intuition and Schopenhauer considers

25 Ibid., 239 - 40.

20 Ibid., 246.
27 Ibid., 245-46.
28 Kant, CJ 6 3 - 6 5 , K W 10: 5 2 5 - 2 6 .
114 VIII. " O n Teleology"

his understanding to be direct knowledge of perception or intuitive under-

standing. What Nietzsche points out here is that both of these conceptions
of intuition still presuppose the intellect, in Kant's case the a priori forms,
in Schopenhauer's case, the concept of cause through application of the laws
of time and space. From the point of view of nature Nietzsche writes: "It is
first denied that the whole in organisms is something real, that is, the concept
of unity is examined and then ascribed to the human organism. Therefrom,
then we may not proceed." 2 9 This is just the operation Kant performs above
in proposing the pure intuition. Nietzsche finds the concept of an intuitive
understanding interesting, however, he would never suppose that it could be
in any way as just described, because he is not willing to transgress the limits
of conceptuality by a simple reversal, such as Kant himself admittedly does
when he writes that such an intuitive understanding can be posited upon the
basis of our discursive understanding. For Nietzsche, such a positing translates
teleological consideration into the realm of the transcendent of metaphysics.
The intuition which Nietzsche would like to bring to bear would be of
another kind. It would be an unconscious intuition, one based in our
organization, manifested perhaps through the actions of our instincts: Again,
"why cannot there be a power which unconsciously creates the expedient,
i.e., Nature: one thinks of the instinct of animals." Such an unconscious
intuition would allow the possibility that unconscious operations condition
not only life, but also our perceptions of those elements which we combine
to arrive at the concept of life. " T h e strong necessity of cause and effect
shuts out the goal in unconscious nature." 3 0 " T h e secret is only 'life' —
whether this is also only an idea conditioned by our organization?" 3 1 The
idea of unconscious intuition would operate as an area of new thinking where
all is yet to be discovered.

Therefore Nietzsche's major criticisms of Kant's moving from organisms

to ends of nature; that it leaves the subjective of the concept of ends of
nature aside, that it understands nature as a unity, and that it also credits
nature with a unity of means, are disputed primarily from the point of view
of the limitations of subjective consciousness and discursive conceptuality.
The concept of ends is necessarily of a subjective nature, nature as a unity
exists only as a concept (our knowing cannot confirm it), and, as a result, a
unity of means in nature is equally as ineffective as a possibility with regard
to teleology in nature.

29 Nietzsche, Z T 246.
30 Ibid., 241.
31 Ibid., 244.
 Nietzsche: "On Teleology" 115

The alleged impossibility of explaining an organism mechanically

(what does mechanically mean?)

Nietzsche agrees with Fischer's idea of mechanism, and quotes him with
respect to it: "What reason knows of nature through its concepts, is nothing
other than the effect of moving force, that means mechanism." Fischer adds
that "what cannot be known from a merely mechanical point of view, does
not belong to natural science." 32 This also sounds like Lange. However,
Nietzsche does not so quickly agree with Fischer when he goes on to echo
Kant on the impossibility of mechanical explanations of organisms.
"Mechanically to explain means to explain from external causes." "The
specification (of nature) cannot be explained through external causes."
"Nothing, however, without cause."

Nietzsche continues to quote Fischer:

"Through the concept of mechanical lawfulness the architecture of the world
can be explained, but no organism can be explained with it." "It is impossible
to represent natural expedience as being inherent in matter." "Matter is only
external appearance."33

To this Nietzsche responds: "this definition was introduced, in order after-

wards to set the inner (causes) against it." 3 4 Nietzsche concludes: "Thus,
inner causes, that means ends, that means, representations." 35 Again,
Nietzsche points to the problem of taking the form, the word for the thing
in itself. If according to Kant and Fischer mechanism is inadequate to explain
organisms because it is an external explanation and cannot get at the "spec-
ification of nature," which, it is implied can only be gotten at internally, a
chain of consequences follows: there must then be inner causes, which imply
ends, which means to Nietzsche, all is dissolved into mere words, mere
"representations."
Nietzsche writes: "Because of our organization we only understand a
mechanical origin of things." 36 He does not concur with Kant's idea that
mechanism can explain the world but not organisms. Nietzsche entertains the
idea that mechanism may be equally valid as a method for investigating both
the inorganic and the organic.
The question is, what "life" is, whether it is a simple ordering and forming
principle ... or something completely different: against that it is admissible

32 Ibid., 242.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., 246.
35 Ibid., 242.
* Ibid., 243.
116 VIII. "On Teleology"

that the same principle exists within organic nature in the relationship of
organisms to one another as in inorganic nature. 37

This, however, is not mechanism as Kant understands it. Kant states that
while it is possible that organisms originated in a purely mechanical manner,
it is impossible for us to trace them back mechanically. To this Nietzsche
asks: "Why not?" Nietzsche writes: "By mechanism Kant understands the
world without final causes: the world of causality." 38 Kant allowed the
possibility that organisms could have originated out of chance or inexpedi-
ence, what Nietzsche calls mechanism, but denied the possibility of knowing
it. Nietzsche responds: "The method of nature is the same in organic and
inorganic spheres. If then the possibility of mechanism is present, then the
possibility of knowing should also be there." 39 Nietzsche's "Why not?" and
the above quote are an echo of Lange, who although never pretending to
say that mechanical explanations have been reached, is also never willing to
deny that they may not be reacheable. Rather, Nietzsche points to Goethe's
attempt at teleology:
metamorphosis belongs to the explanations of the organic out of the effective
cause. Every effective cause finally rests on something impenetrable, (that
even proves, that it is the right human way)
For that reason one does not ask after final causes in inorganic nature,
because here forces and not individuals are evident, that is, because we can
solve everything mechanically, we no longer believe in ends. 4 0

Nietzsche, following Lange, also considers individuals (organisms) to consist

only of forces, thus, they too should be mechanically traceable.
Thus, Nietzsche does not agree with Kant that no organisms can be
explained mechanically, or if it may be possible that they can be so explained
that it is impossible to trace them back mechanically. Nietzsche agrees with
Lange, that essentially organic and inorganic can alike be explained mechan-
ically, and that they proceed from a mechanically working process in agree-
ment with the "universal laws of Nature." Lange's notion of universal laws
of nature, discussed in chapter 6 is a collection, drawn from experience, of
certain rules in natural phenomena, whose ultimate cause we do not yet
know. Thus, mechanism offers the possible forms; natural selection chooses
according to causes, the actual forms. But these actual forms can summon
forth nothing that is not contained in the mechanical plan of organisms.
Nietzsche understands mechanism, as does Lange, to be the most effective
"working hypothesis" of natural science, a hypothesis which allows another

37
Ibid., 248.
38
Ibid., 245, 247.
39
Ibid., 251.
40
Ibid., 245.
 Nietzsche: "On Teleology" 117

point of view to a humanly scheming "architect of the universe," to mystical

teleology, or even to Kant's objective teleology, which is not incompatible
with mechanistic laws, but which finds them lacking. Stack describes
Nietzsche's relationship to mechanism effectively, and what he writes char-
acterizes Nietzsche's stance with regard to mechanism even in these early
notes on teleology.
Nietzsche is not entirely opposed to a mechanistic theory of nature if it is
entertained for methodological purposes, if it is understood as hypothetical,
if it is given no ontological or metaphysical significance. What he likes
about mechanism is its practical application, its avoidance of teleological
interpretation, its lack of sentimentality about the world. Thus, die mechani-
stische Vorstellung is entirely acceptable als regulatives Princip der Methode.41

This qualification of the limits of even the mechanical explanation on

Nietzsche's part will be discussed in more detail in a moment.

The recognized inexpedience in nature in contradiction to expedience

The major departure from the Kantian idea of mechanism, is Nietzsche's

idea that mechanism may also include the possibility of the origination of
organisms out of "chance," "inexpedience." Nietzsche points to the fact that
Kant tried to prove "that a necessity exists that we think our bodies as
premeditated, that is, to think of it in terms of concepts of expedience."
Nietzsche adds: "The necessity of which Kant speaks no longer exists in our
time." 42 The "necessity of expedience" is one way to explain teleology to
oneself. Nietzsche suggests that optimism and teleology go hand in hand
because both are concerned with disputing that the inexpedient really is
something inexpedient.
Against teleology in general one has the weapon: proof of inexpedience.
With that one only proves, that the highest reason has only worked sporad-
ically, that there is also a terrain for lesser reasons. There is no uniform
teleological world: but there is a creating intelligence.43
This is the point at which Nietzsche asks the question referred to above, as
to why the expedience creating power has to be intelligent, why not rather,
unconscious, given by nature, in the manner of instincts. "The acceptance of
such an intelligence is made after human analogy."
Against the two metaphysical solutions to which Nietzsche points which
are used to explain expedience in the world, the "coarse anthropological"

41 Stack, LNS 2 3 3 - 3 4 .
42 Nietzsche, ZT 238.
43 Ibid., 239.
118 VIII. "On Teleology"

which supposes an ideal humanity outside of the world, and the other which
"flees into an intelligible world" in which the expedience of things is im-
manent, Nietzsche proposes a resolution from a purely human standpoint:
"the Empedoclean, where expedience appears only as an instance among
many inexpediencies." 44
Expedience is the exception
Expedience is chance
This reveals complete non-rationality.45

The idea that mechanism joined with chance causality offers the possible
forms out of which actual forms arise is again from Lange. Although Lange
only mentions Empedocles in this connection, Nietzsche was already familiar
with these ideas in Empedocles. Schlechta and Anders write:
Nietzsche points out that the familiar solution to the problem of expediency
in nature: the Darwinian theory, has its precursor in Empedocles who
discarded the mechanical explanation of movement and only allowed move-
ment out of "instincts," out of "animation."

Then Schlechta and Anders quote Nietzsche:

Empedocles was faced with the problem that. ... The ordered world has
been able to arise out of those opposing instincts, devoid of all ends, without
all νους: and here the magnificent idea suffices that among countless failed
forms and impossibilities of life there arise also a few expedient forms
capable of life: here the expedience of what arises is attributed to the existence
of the expedient. ... Now we have a special version of this thought in the
Darwinian theory.46

Thus, as Schlechta and Anders comment, Empedocles offered Nietzsche a

possibility of explaining expedience in nature without recourse to an ordered,
end oriented νους (intellect or mind), rather that what appears to us as expedient
has only arisen through the chance encounter of individual instincts. We find
here the basis for Nietzsche's attraction to Lange's joining of mechanism and
causality out of Darwinian theory and for his own idea that the expedience
creating power may lie in an unconscious power manifested in instinct.
Nietzsche makes a new combination in attempting to wed the mechanical
with the instincts. With regard to organisms, Nietzsche writes in explanation
of this Empedoclean standpoint and Lange's version of it:
A thing lives — thus its parts are expedient: the life of things is the purpose
of the parts. But there are countless different ways to live, that means forms,

44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.
46 Schlechta and Anders, V A P 6 8 - 6 9 .
 Nietzsche: "On Teleology" 119

that means parts. Expedience is no absolute, rather a very relative expedience:

seen from other sides, often inexpedient.47
In the organic being the parts are expedient to its existence, that means it
would not live, if the parts were inexpedient. With that nothing is decided
about the single part. The part is a form of expedience: but it cannot be
discerned, that it is the only possible form.48
Nietzsche emphasizes that the part is a form of expedience. In general
teleology places the organic elsewhere than in the form. Then it says of the
parts of the organism that they are not necessary, what is really the case is
that the form of the organism is not necessary. "But outside of that form it
is simply still life." Nietzsche then states his principle of expediency: "for life
there are different forms, that means expediences. Life is possible under an
astonishing number of forms. Each of these forms is expedient; and because
countless forms exist, so there are also countless expedient forms." 4 9 This
possible flowering and choosing between forms is what Nietzsche is thinking
of when he emphasizes Schopenhauer's characterization of nature's work
largely as frantic and wasteful, which shows nature to be as completely
indifferent to expedient forms as it is to the inexpedient. Again, this was
reinforced in Lange's discussion of Darwin.
Thus, in place of Kant's "organized causes, which must be effective
towards ends —," Nietzsche proposes the possibility of "mechanism joined
with causality" 5 0 as an alternate possibility in the creation of organisms and
as a basis from which to think about teleology. "The presupposition is that
the living can arise out of the mechanical" in spite of Kant's denial.
In truth one thing is certain, that we only know the mechanical. What is
beyond our concepts, is completely unknowable. The origin of the organic
is thus a hypothetical one: that we imagine a human understanding was
present. Now the concept of the organic is also only human: one must point
out the analogy: that which is capable of life arises from among a multitude
of those possibilities incapable of life. With that we come closer to the
solution of the organism. We see that much that is capable of life arises and
is maintained, and we see the method. Supposed that the force which works
to make life capable of existence, brings it to be, and maintains it is the
same: this is very irrational. This is, however, the presupposition of teleol-
ogy. 51

Let me point to an essential correlation Nietzsche is making here. Nietzsche

equates mechanical knowing with conceptuality, these both remain in the

47 Nietzsche, ZT 2 5 0 - 5 1 .
48 Ibid., 248.
49 Ibid., 249.
50 Ibid., 243.
51 Ibid., 244.
120 VIII. "On Teleology"

realm of representation or phenomena. "Is a thing, therefore, inexpedient

because it has arisen mechanically? Kant says so: Why cannot chance bring
about something expedient? He was right: expedience lies only in our idea." 52
Because Kant defines the mechanical as the application of cause and effect to
matter, he sees methodical necessity, the opposite of chance. However, for
Nietzsche, as we have seen, chance can occasion expedience, and the mech-
anism, which is all we can know, of the chance expedience should be able to
be mechanically traced back. But once again, Nietzsche is careful to qualify
this statement, for he ever remains in the realm of forms, of representation.
From the standpoint of human nature:
we only know mechanism
we do not know the organism
But even mechanism as well as organism do not belong to the thing in
itself."

However, while championing a mechanical explanation of expedience,

Nietzsche is careful to emphasize that he does not believe in a mechanism of
blindly operating forces. Under the heading in his notes "A False Antithesis,"
he rejects the idea of a mechanism in the sense of blind forces acting without
aim, thus effecting nothing expedient, a view in which there is "in general
no pervading degree of intelligence" where "the existence of the organism
shows only blindly working forces." Nietzsche rejects this "false antithesis"
to the Kantian system of ends and final causes based upon four points, points
which, we find, attempt to bridge the two poles:
1) Setting aside of expanded representations of teleology
2) Limits of the concept. The expedient in nature
3) Expedient same as able to exist
4) Organisms as multiplicities and unities54

Either point of view, the Kantian or purely mechanistic, sets aside expanded
representations of teleology, for example, the possibility that mechanism
might be joined with causality. Again, Nietzsche emphasizes that in ideolog-
ical considerations as elsewhere we are constrained by the limits of the
concept. Expedience is ultimately only the "concept of expedience" which
arises from the ability for existence. For Nietzsche organisms are multiplicities
and unities, that is the whole not only conditions the parts, but also the parts
condition the whole. All four of these arguments refute the idea that only
blindly effective forces are at work.

52 Ibid., 251.
53 Ibid., 243.
54 Ibid., 245.
 Nietzsche: "On Teleology" 121

Organism (the undetermined life concept/the undetermined

individual concept)

After his critique of the conceptual basis of teleological thinking,

Nietzsche is careful to frame his alternatives to the Kantian position within
this critique. What Nietzsche suggests here, is that to attempt a specific
determination of the concepts, "life" and "individual," is impossible, but
more, to show how, as they must remain concepts, they will always remain
undetermined with regard to what "life" may be. About the concept of life
Nietzsche writes:
We grasp about a living thing nothing but forms. The eternally becoming
is life; through the nature of our intellect we grasp forms: our intellect is
too dull to recognize continuing change: what is knowable to it it calls
form.
"Life" is something completely dark for us, which we therefore cannot
illuminate even with final causes. ... Form is all of "life" that appears visible
on the surface. 55

Along with the thought that life is only knowable by us in the forms in
which we perceive it and that life must remain unknowable in itself, Nietzsche
is of the opinion that there is in reality no such thing as an individual, except
as determined through forms.
These unities which we call organisms, are however again multiplicities.
There are in reality no individuals, rather, individuals and organisms are
nothing but abstractions.56
A concept similar to the form is the concept individual. Organisms are
called unities, goal centers. But unities only exist for our intellect. Each
individual has an infinity of living individuals within itself. It is only a
coarse perception, perhaps taken from the human body. All "forms" can be
thrown out, but life! 57
The individual is an insufficient concept. What we see of life is form; how
we see them, as individuals. What lies behind that is unknowable. 58

Here, Nietzsche is again following Lange and is emphasizing the limits of

knowledge and conceptuality. Behind the concept unity, we can really only
know multiplicity. Behind the concept individual, again, we can only know
multiplicity. In creating unities out of our perceptions we bring together
several properties into a conception of a whole, or of a unity. Words are
forms, and all we can see of life, according to our organization, are forms.

55 Ibid., 249-50.
56 Ibid., 244.
57 Ibid., 249.
58 Ibid., 251.
122 VIII. "On Teleology"

To suppose a direct connection between the forms and concepts of life and
life itself leads to teleological thinking which no longer stops at the limits of
knowledge, but runs over into a transcendent world.

Teleological reflection is examination of forms

In the second section of Nietzsche's outline he attempts to bridge the

two extremes, the teleology of Kant's final causes, and an interpretation of
the world which is the result of blindly operating forces which effect nothing
expedient. It is in this section that Nietzsche offers his own conception of
teleology. This conception consists of three major points. First, teleological
consideration is consideration of forms, concepts, intellect. "Final causes as
well as mechanisms are human ways of perceiving." 59 The idea behind this
is that any teleological system arises only out of representation, i.e. forms,
and cannot say anything about what there may be besides, thing in itself or
will. The concept of final causes is thus also merely form.
The second point is what Nietzsche calls: life force (Lebenskraft). There
is "life" and there are forms. Although at first it appears as if Nietzsche has
replaced thing in itself or will with his own concept "life," this is actually
not the case. He puts it in quotation marks to emphasize that it is a word,
merely a concept. He says "life," but to ask the why or how of it is useless,
because we must always ask these questions within the limits of the forms
of life and not in terms of that "life itself." "Life," as Nietzsche means it here
is "the sensation growing existence." "'Life' occurs with the sensations: we
consider the sensations as condition for the 'organic'".
The question after the organism is: wherefrom the humanly analogous in
nature? Through lack of a selfconsciousness? "To live" is to exist consciously,
that is, human like.
We cannot conceive of "life," that is, sensate growing existence, other than
as analogous to the human. Man recognizes things which both coincide
with and differ from human analogy and asks after the explanation.60
Here Nietzsche makes his argument against final causes, against any attempt
to answer the question "why?" does something live in the manner that it
does, or how are organisms organized according to ends and expedience.
The argument is that in every case we are only arguing from forms.
Does one need final causes to explain that something lives? No, only to
explain how it lives. Do we need final causes to explain the life of a thing?

59 Ibid., 246.
60 Ibid., 2 5 1 - 5 2 .
 Nietzsche: "On Teleology" 123

... When we say "the dog lives" and then ask "why does the dog live?"
that does not belong here. Because here we have made "life" equal to
"existence." The question "why is something" belongs in the external
teleology and lies completely out of our area.61

Forms (individuals) belong to and are derived from human organization

Nietzsche's third major point concerning teleological consideration of

forms is that these forms arise purely as the result of our human organization,
a thought with which we are by now thoroughly familiar after our discussion
of Lange. In his discussion of Darwinism and questions of teleology Lange
directly addresses the aristotelian conception of form and how it has come
to mean matter or substance:
The form makes the essence of the individual; if this be so, we may also
designate it substance, even though by a natural necessity it proceeds from
the properties of the matter. These properties, when clearly seen, are in their
turn only forms combining themselves into higher forms. The form, too, is
the true logical core of force, when we once clear this idea of the false bye-
idea of a compelling anthropomorphic violence. We only see form as we
only feel force. If we regard the form of a thing, it is unity; if we disregard
the form, it is multeity or matter ... 62

For Nietzsche and for Lange the jump which takes place between perceiving
an individual out of multiplicity by means of a form and then its translation
into substance arising out of the properties of matter, poses a problem. For
Nietzsche these forms are only concepts which join together a sum of
appearing characteristics, which, however cannot correspond directly to the
thing. Therein belong such forms as force, matter, individual, law, organism,
atom, final causes. Nietzsche writes: "Whatever is supposed to be the 'cause
as idea of the effect,' cannot be 'life,' but only the form. That means the
appearance of things is thought as preexisting and as real." 63 Nietzsche, in
the use of his key term, form, is also taking a cue from Schopenhauer who
writes in On the Will in Nature:
The real essence of every animal form, is an act of the will outside repre-
sentation, ... But when our cerebral perception comprehends that form, ...
it has to present itself in conformity with the laws and forms of knowledge.
... The understanding, in thus apprehending these things, now perceives
the original unity reestablishing itself out of a multiplicity which its own
form of knowledge had first brought about, and involuntarily taking for

61
Ibid., 250.
62
Lange, HM 3: 39, G D M 2: 251.
63
Nietzsche, Z T 250.
124 VIII. "On Teleology"

granted that its own way of perceiving this is the way in which this animal
form comes into being, it is now struck with admiration for the profound
wisdom with which those parts are arranged, those functions combined.
This is the meaning of Kant's great doctrine, that Teleology is brought into
Nature by our own understanding, which accordingly wonders at a miracle
of its own creation. 64

In the last few pages of his notes on teleology Nietzsche emphasizes the
complete dominion of the form. It is impossible to know life, but only the
form of life. We are constrained by the nature of our organization only to
understand forms.
Final cause means: the idea of the whole is identified as cause, that means
a form of appearance is called real and preexisting. The concept of the whole
refers only to the form, not to "life."
I. Not "a "life" is to be generated, therefore, forms must be searched for"
II. rather "under the following form a "life" should appear." It is impossible
to grasp the concept of life: therefore, it does not belong to "the idea of
the whole." 6 5

Thus, the place of the problem of teleology is only to be found in human

conceptualization of forms, in appearance. This will never lead to knowledge
of a real possible end of nature though one may be suspected. From Lange
and Nietzsche's perspective, even if such an end existed, an organization such
as the human could never know it. Nietzsche essentially accuses Kant of
rejecting a search for a solution to these problems. Kant believed that his
forms of ends and final causes were "preexisting and real," he still wanted
to say something about the world in itself.
Nietzsche's overall critique of Kant is that of all people, he who under-
stood the limits of the human intellect and its conceptuality with regard to
its ability to know the thing in itself, is most at fault in failing to pursue the
question of teleology farther and more stringently. Kant favors a critical
approach to both the mechanical and teleological points of view, however,
just as he does with regard to a pure understanding, to thinking devoid of
sensory confirmation in The Critique of Pure Reason, in The Critique of Judgement,
Kant brings in the deus ex machina of the reflective judgement and supports
a natural teleology of ends and final causes in spite of the limitations of the
discursive intellect. Though this may have merit for ethical or moral purposes,
teleology must still, given the limits of our organization, remain for Nietzsche
a purely aesthetic product. "Treasuring of teleology in its valuation for the
human world of ideas. Teleology is like optimism an aesthetic product." 66

64 Schopenhauer, W N 279, S W 4: 5 6 - 5 7 .
65 Nietzsche, Z T 251.
66 Ibid., 241.
 Nietzsche: "On Teleology" 125

Nietzsche remains steadfast at the doors of appearance, of forms. If he

does favor the idea that there may be a purpose in unconscious nature, he is
firm in his position, along with Lange, that it remains unknown to human
consciousness. Nietzsche attempts, I maintain, to do what he claims is the
most difficult: "to unite the teleological and unteleological worlds," 67 where
expedience is one case among many inexpediencies, where mechanism is
joined with causality. Where a place is left for the intuitive, where the "strong
necessity in human intelligence of cause and effect which shuts out the goal
in unconscious nature" is relaxed, but always in the consciousness of the
limitation of the forms and concepts of our organization, where there could
be in nature "a power which unconsciously creates the expedient." Here we
have Nietzsche's point of view stemming first from Empedocles, but primarily
from that of natural science. If we connect this "unconscious purpose creating
power" with Nietzsche's last heading in his outline in "On Teleology," "Life-
force — what do we find Nietzsche intending with this concept? And can
we draw a connection between them?

Life force =

Are we to read this uncompleted equation as a sign that Nietzsche had

yet to work out an idea of just what this life force is, or is it ment to indicate
that this is ultimately unknowable? I maintain that elements of both are
intended. After his reading of Lange, Nietzsche is very occupied with ideas
of the relations of force as we have seen. In the teleological notes, relying
upon Fischer who supports Lange, Nietzsche writes:
"Order and disorder are not to be found in nature" "We assign effects to
chance, whose knotting together with causes we do not see" "Mechanism
is the "effect of moving force". "The idea of effect (...) is the concept of
the whole." In organisms "the active principle (...) the idea of intended
effect".68
Nietzsche believes that behind the organic and inorganic effective forces are
at work, but not, as we saw, blindly effective forces. He uses " = " because
he has not answered the "why" of these effective forces, for as we saw above,
the question "why" something is belongs in external teleology and lies
completely out of our scope of knowledge. In Nietzsche's mature thinking
this life force becomes the will to power. Let us recall that Stack very astutely
links Nietzsche's acquaintance with Hartmann's unconscious with the voli-

67 Ibid., 240.
68 Ibid., 241, 242, 244.
126 VIII. "On Teleology"

tional aspect of the will to power. Thus, here with the concept of a "Lebens-
kraft" which can be drawn into connection with an "unconsciously yet
expediently creating power," we have the beginning movement toward the
concept of the will to power. Even in his fully developed concept of the will
to power, Nietzsche does not significantly change any of the thoughts of the
Lebenskraft which we see here in these early notes on teleology. For example,
in 1885 Nietzsche writes:
The victorious concept "force", by means of which our physicists have
created G o d and the world, still needs to be completed: an inner will must
be ascribed to it, which I designate as "will to power", i.e., as an insatiable
desire to manifest power; or as the employment and exercise of power, as a
creative drive, etc. Physicists cannot eradicate "action at a distance" from
their principles; nor can they eradicate a repellent force (or an attracting
one). There is nothing for it: one is obliged to understand all motion, all
"appearances", all "laws", only as symptoms of an inner event and to employ
man as an analogy to this end. In the case of an animal, it is possible to
trace all its drives to the will to power; likewise all the functions of organic
life to this one source. 65

It is important to emphasize, however, that it is the "concept" of the will to

power, itself only an interpretation of forms. In his thinking about force and
effects in these notes on teleology and in his reading of Lange, we understand
that for Nietzsche force, matter, effect, still remain in the last analysis forms,
only human concepts.
Form is all, of "life" that appears visible on the surface. Reflection on final
causes is also examination of forms. ... In other words: teleological reflection
and examination of organisms are not identical, but teleological reflection
and examination of forms. Ends and forms are identical in nature." 70

Nietzsche's mature concept of the will to power as described above still

incorporates many of the ideas which he explores in "On Teleology" such
ideas as: 1) physicists only create a world out of mechanistic form, i.e., force;
2) after the model of Lange's idea, that to mechanism an idealistic component
must be added, Nietzsche proposes that an inner will or unconscious expe-
dience "be ascribed to force"; 3) and because we cannot get beyond the
picturability, the appearance of the effects of force, of action and reaction,
or action at a distance, we can only take this inner event and ascribe
anthropomorphic forms to it, never believing that they reveal a truth.
Remember in "Origins" Nietzsche wrote that the real problem of philos-
ophy is the unending expediency of organisms and the unconsciousness in
their coming to be. Nietzsche's question in "On Teleology," which asks why

69 Nietzsche, W M 3 3 2 - 3 3 , K S A 11: 563.

70 Nietzsche, Z T 250.
 Nietzsche: "On Teleology" 127

there might not be a power which unconsciously creates the expedient, after
the model of instinct, offers the beginning of an answer to this "problem."
In this first framing of an answer to his own question Nietzsche already
incorporates a sort of unconscious will which creates the expedient in the
manner of instincts. He incorporates power (eine unbewusst das Zweckmass
schaffende Macht). And he speaks not only of life but of the force of life
(Lebenskraft), and effects of that force.
How can we reconcile Nietzsche's criticisms of teleology with such a
purpose creating power? In 1885 Nietzsche writes of the will to power that
it "is without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will,
unless a ring feels good will toward itself ..." 7 I Here Nietzsche has accom-
plished what he considers a goal in "On Teleology," he unites the teleological
with the unteleological world. That is, from the necessarily anthromorphic
world of forms or appearance the will to power wills, and wills toward a
goal, that of more power. However, since we cannot ask the "why" of the
will to power in actuality, it remains willess and goalless. It is an instance or
event rather than a substance; it is the force behind all forms. As Lingis
states it in his article "The Will to Power," "will to power can function
neither as the reason that accounts for the order of essences, nor as the
foundation that sustains them in being." 72 The will to power is the groundless
chaos beneath all grounds, yet it is the will that always wills more power,
that which enables multiplicity out of oneness, a goalless becoming and
passing away out of which appearance springs.

71 Nietzsche, WM 550, KSA 11: 611.

72 Alfonso Lingis, "The Will to Power," The New Nietzsche, Ed. D. B. Allison, New York:
Dell Publishing Co., 1977. WP 38. Stack also attributes the genesis of will in will to power
to Nietzsche's reading of Lange (LNS 289—301), as well as a first possibility of the idea
that power is what drives forces. What Stack claims is certainly supportable, but once again
he jumps almost directly from Lange to the mature concept of the will to power. There can
be no doubt that Nietzsche first met with these constituents of the will to power in Lange,
but I maintain they are gradually built upon over the ensuing years with Nietzsche's taking
supporting aspects from many places. My study shows how heavily Nietzsche is indebted
to Hartmann as one of these influences. His study of Boscovich, Zöllner, and Helmholtz in
1872—74, which Stack discusses very briefly, but which needs to be researched in much
greater detail, is another. Ideally the slow progress of this idea, its additions, substitutions,
transformations, its genealogy, still needs to be discovered in much more detail. One would
need to go about it, in Nietzsche's words, "no less carefully than a fly."
 Chapter Nine
Nietzsche and Hartmann: Unconscious Nature of Language

Thus, the groundwork of Nietzsche's own emerging theory of language

is laid. First, he accepts the Kantian distinction between phenomena and the
thing in itself in a most responsible way. After having read Lange's History
of Materialism, and after having thought through, in matters teleological and
metaphysical, the complete necessity that we can never get beyond our
interpretations of things according to our organization, Nietzsche is firmly
convinced that there is only appearance, and things in themselves must remain
of no essential consequence to us as interpreting beings, excepting in their
function of stimulating our world of appearance through the senses.
Secondly, Nietsche adopts Schopenhauer's position that thinking which
resides purely in the abstract concepts and understands a world according to
them is a poor witness of representation, rather, an understanding of concepts
as representations having their ground in perceptual representation provides
a more accurate grounding for understanding human beings' experience in
the world, although even perceptual representation is not completely con-
gruent with the world which stimulates it. This adoption of the Schopen-
hauerian insistence on perceptual experience, which is reinforced in Lange,
opens the door for Nietzsche's pursuit of more exact knowledge of perception
as it relates to the production of language in the physical and natural sciences,
and explains in some part why Lange had such a great influence upon him.
Thirdly, Nietzsche finds in Kant and Schopenhauer hints of unconscious
operations, which not only contribute to conscious operations, but may even
ground them, though both Kant and Schopenhauer are not willing ultimately
to go over to that point of view. Nietzsche comes to study the nature of
such an unconscious perceptual working not in the Schopenhauerian will,
which he comes to criticize as purely metaphysical, rather, in the natural
sciences. Before his reading of Hartmann, although Nietzsche presupposes
these aspects of both the Kantian and Schopenhauerian points of view, he
also begins to diverge fundamentally from them, as we have seen, and to
take an even more radical position away from the privileging of abstract
thought than that advanced by Schopenhauer, by supposing that much
perceptual knowledge of representation takes place outside of consciousness
and reason. That it takes place in unconscious sensation, in a language of the
 IX. Nietzsche and Hartmann: Unconscious Nature of Language 129

senses which affect us, in instinctual activity, all of which, however, remain
ungraspable by consciousness of either Schopenhauer's perceptual under-
standing or of Kant's abstract a priori knowledge. Nietzsche agrees with
Schopenhauer's assertion that only perceptual knowledge offers significant
understanding of sensory experience as far as it goes. But Nietzsche goes
further, and calls this instinctive unconscious, in both its expedient and
inexpedient aspects, one with the will, and, in contradistinction to Schopen-
hauer, part of the principium individuationis as well. Hartmann becomes impor-
tant for Nietzsche because, he too, understands an unconscious instinctive
operation as the necessary precondition for consciousness in humans. It is
true that Hartmann also finds the unconscious to be a metaphysical principle
similar to Schopenhauer's will, but his interest for Nietzsche lies in having
indicated between the spheres of will and conceptual thinking another sphere,
both metaphysical and scientific at the same time, that of the individual
unconscious.
If we look again at "On the Origins of Language," we find Nietzsche,
not only stating that language is the product of unconscious instinct in the
organization of human beings, but he emphasizes this point, by asserting that
conscious thinking is actually detrimental to language.
The development of conscious thinking is detrimental to language. Decline
as a result of further development of culture. The formal part, in which
precisely philosophical worth lies, suffers. One thinks of the French lan-
guage: no more declensions, no neuter, no passive, all end syllables worn
off, the root syllables unrecognizably undone. A higher cultural development
is not able to protect the already established decline.1

Here, Nietzsche carries over only a part of a lengthy discussion, which

Hartmann devotes to the question as to whether or not language improves
with the progress of civilkation in his chapter "The Unconscious in the
Origins of Language." Remember that Nietzsche does not understand instinct
to have been active only in the origination of some perfect state of language
as do Schopenhauer and Rousseau, rather, unconscious instinctual activity is
continually at the basis of the development and use of language. Language
is neither the conscious work of individuals, it is too complicated, nor of a
majority, it is too unified, rather, it is a complete organism. 2 Language, which
has become less differentiated through the forms of conscious thinking has
still done so as a result of basically unconscious processes. Ultimately,
Nietzsche views the production of language and the resulting world of
representation as a product of the unending expediency of the organism

1 Nietzsche, US 222.
2 Ibid.
130 IX. Nietzsche and Hartmann: Unconscious Nature of Language

language and the unconsciousness of its c o m i n g to be. In this sense language

must still be coming about and growing instinctively.
What does Nietzsche mean, then, by writing that the " f o r m a l p a r t " of
language "in which precisely philosophical worth lies" suffers through con-
scious thinking? Here, Nietzsche means "philosophical w o r t h " in the context
of our discussion that "the deepest philosophical worth lies already prepared
in language," that is, the forms and g r o w t h of language are determined
atavistically, as the result of unconscious psychological characteristics, pri-
marily grammatical in nature, arising out of the particular nature of human
organization. Following Hartmann, Nietzsche divides language into two
parts: conscious language, and the unconscious formal aspects of language.
In answer to the question does language continue to improve with yet higher
culture, Hartmann writes:

not only must this question be answered in the negative, but its contrary
must be affirmed. Certainly with progressive culture new objects make their
appearance, consequently new conceptions and relations, therefore also new
words. There results from this a material enrichment of language. This,
however, does not contain anything philosophical ...The formal part of
language, however, wherein consists its properly philosophical value, under-
goes a process of decomposition and of levelling pari passu with the progress
of civilization.3

After offering the example of changes in the French language, which

Nietzsche takes over in " O r i g i n s , " Hartmann continues:
language needs no higher development of culture for its formation, such
development is rather injurious to it, in that it is never able to preserve
from corruption that which the past has elaborated, not even when it devotes
a conscious and careful effort to its preservation and improvement. The
linguistic development is carried on not only on the large scale and as a
whole, but also in detail with the calm necessity of a natural product, and
the forms of language, even at the present day, go on growing, deriding all
the efforts of consciousness, as if they were independent creations of which
the conscious mind only serves as a medium of their proper life. Both this
result and also the speculative depth and grandeur of language, as well as,
in fine, its marvellous organic unity, which far exceeds, the unity of a
methodical systematic construction, should preserve us from regarding
language as a product of conscious acute reflection.4

The formal part, then, in which philosophical worth lies, consists in the large
scale necessity of language which as an unconscious natural product goes on
growing in its organic unity. Further, it seems o b v i o u s that, given the
examples of changing grammatical forms, the formal part of language is

3 Hartmann, PU 1: 296, PUG 229.

4 Ibid., PU 1: 297, P U G 2 3 0 - 3 1 .
 IX. Nietzsche and Hartmann: Unconscious Nature of Language 131

primarily the grammatical, for example, the forms of subject and object which
we have discussed, which, according to Hartmann and Nietzsche, first allow
philosophical thought and especially philosophical thought of the type and
concerning the categories of reflection which are natural to human beings.
Hartmann writes:
the development of language is, in the main, so similar on all the different
theatres of human culture, and with the most diverse national character,
that the agreement of the fundamental forms and structure of the sentence
in all stages of development is only explicable by a common instinct of
humanity for forming language, by an all-pervading spirit which everywhere
guides the development of language according to the same laws of bloom
•and decay.5

Thus, while language is not the product of conscious reflection, conscious

use of language can, to some extent cause decay in the formal part of language.
Conscious language is fixing, economy, analogy, while the formal part is
possibility. This leads us back to Lange's law of development wherein
actualization of one form according to expediency obscures the many possible
forms from which it arose. Schopenhauer's view of language also emphasizes
that in the process of the conscious fixing of language in abstraction "much
that is inessential and therefore merely confusing, in real things is omitted,"
but that this allows us to "operate with few but essential determinations
conceived in the abstract." Schopenhauer, of course, is referring to the
relationship of abstract thought to perceptual understanding. My point is
that, for Nietzsche and Hartmann, the same process of fixing and abstraction
for the uses of economy and expediency operate in conscious use of gram-
matical possibilities, therefore obscuring the wealth of possible unconscious
forms. In conformity with this interpretation, Hartmann also expresses the
idea that this unconscious formal part of language will continue to create
forms completely independently of conscious effort and with relationship to
which conscious language only serves as a sort of medium of expression.
After stating in "Origins" the position that language is an instinctual
product, and after Hartmann, that it is thus an organism whose fundamental
development and decay operates independently of consciousness, Nietzsche
goes on to reject all hypotheses concerning the origins of language which
are based on conscious decision.
Thus, all earlier naive viewpoints are rejected. With the Greeks, whether
language is δέσει or φύσει: that is whether through arbitrary formation,
through agreement and arrangement, or whether sounds are necessitated by
conceptual content. But also later teachers used these catchwords: ...agreement
as basis. First, a situation without language, with gestures and tonal cries.

5 Ibid., P U 1: 298, P U G 231.

132 IX. Nietzsche and Hartmann: Unconscious Nature of Language

To that man attached conventional gestures and tonal cries. These means
could have become perfected in a pantomime cry- and song-language. But
that would have been a precarious beginning. Correct intonation: fine
hearing may not have been everyone's thing. Then man came upon the idea
of finding a new means of expression. With tongue and lips, man was able
to produce a multitude of articulations. The advantage of the new language
was felt and it was retained.6

Although Nietzsche rejects "agreement as basis" as a possible origin of

language, it remains one of the fundamentals of the development of his
language theory in the functioning of conscious language in general. It lies
at the basis of his recognition that conscious use of language always presup-
poses agreement among a community of people and comes to the fore in his
essays "The Pathos of Truth" (1872) and "Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral
Sense" (1873).
Nietzsche also rejects the idea that language arises as a result of the
process of interjection as suggested by Herder. Interjection is simply another
form of conscious origins of language. Nietzsche understands consciousness
as "the wonderful pensive organism;" "such an ingenious thinking completely
impossible with a merely animalistic sound-language." 7 Nietzsche writes of
Herder:
One hundred years ago the Berlin Academy posed a prize question "About
the Origins of Language." In 1770 Herder's essay won the prize. Man was
born to language. "The genesis of language is an inner urge, as is the urge
of the embryo to birth when it is ripe." But he shared with his forerunners
the view that language internalized itself out of outward sounds. Interjection
as the mother of language: while it is really the negation of language. 8

In "On Language and Words," Schopenhauer takes over Herder's idea of

interjection and makes it his own. With the origin of human speech, it is
quite certain that interjections were the first things to express not concepts
but, like the noises of animals, feelings or movements of the will. Their
different forms appeared at once and from their variety there occurred the
transition to substantives, verbs, personal pronouns, and so on. 9
Let us take a moment to survey Herder's idea of interjection, in order to
see how essentially it differs from Nietzsche's ideas on the origin of language.
Above all, for Herder, "Nature sounds." Nature gave the law to all: "Feel
not for yourself alone. But rather: your feeling resound!" "These sighs
(screams, inarticulate sounds), these sounds are language." 1 0 However, for

6 Nietzsche, U S 223.
7 Ibid., U S 222.
8 Ibid., U S 224.
5 Schopenhauer, PP 565, S W 6: 599.
10 Johann Gottfried Herder, "Essay on the Origin of Language," E O L 87 — 88.
 IX. Nietzsche and Hartmann: Unconscious Nature of Language 133

Herder, while instincts continue to direct the animals, man is a creature of

reflection:
man has powers of conception which are not confined to the construction
of a honey cell or of a cobweb... If instinct must thus fall by the wayside in
so far as it followed exclusively from the organization of these senses and
the confines of conceptions and was not determined blindly, precisely on
account of this man achieves greater light."

Herder proposes a sort of gradual coming to consciousness and reason away

from instinct in a manner very similar to Schopenhauer's ideas of the coming
about of intellect out of past lower grades of objectification of the will.
If man was not to be an instinctual animal, he had to be — by virtue of the
more freely working positive power of his soul — a creature of reflection...if
reason is not a separate and singly acting power but an orientation of all
powers and as such a thing peculiar to his species, then man must have it
in the first state in which he is man...Why does thinking reasonably right
away signify thinking with fully developed reason? 12

Thus, Herder proposes that even in his origins as animal the human being
has "a potentiality of reason." From this state of reflection which is peculiar
to them, Herder asserts that humans invented language. "Invention of lan-
guage is therefore as natural to man as it is to him that he is man." 13 The
first vocabulary was collected from the sounds of the world. The human soul
takes these sounds and impresses an image upon them as a distinguishing
mark. These sounding interjections came first.
What was this first language of ours other than a collection of elements of
poetry? Imitation it was of sounding, acting, stirring nature! Taken from
the interjections of all beings and animated by the interjections of human
emotion! The natural language of all beings fashioned by reason into sounds,
into images of action, passion, and living impact! 14

Nietzsche finds it contradictory that Herder could assert, after these arguments
that humans are born to language, that the genesis of language is an inner
urge similar to the urge of the embryo to birth when it is ripe. If language
is an inner urge, which of course, Nietzsche is assuming, how can it look to
outward phenomena for its origins, to the interjection of sounds? The answer
is that Herder confounds this inner urge with reflection and reason. They
run side by side from the beginning. The inner urge, or instinct is left behind
in the human being and it is essentially reason taking the materials of the
objective world, which forms a conscious language. This is the opposite of

" Ibid., EOL 109.

12 Ibid., EOL 112.
13 Ibid., EOL 115.
14 Ibid., EOL 135.
134 IX. Nietzsche and Hartmann: Unconscious Nature of Language

w h a t Nietzsche, f o l l o w i n g H a r t m a n n , is asserting. F o r t h e m , reflection,

consciousness, reason, can o n l y c o m e a b o u t after the fact o f l a n g u a g e . In this
sense i n t e r j e c t i o n is the n e g a t i o n o f language. T h e c o n t r a d i c t i o n lies in an
a p p a r e n t c o n f u s i o n o f inner and outer, in the p r o b l e m o f c o n s i d e r i n g that
s o u n d s are external t o us, w h i c h can t h e n b e internalized. H e r d e r still b e l i e v e d
in t h i n g s o u t there, in subject and object, w h e r e a s N i e t z s c h e o n l y b e l i e v e s in
r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s o f t h i n g s a r r i v e d at a c c o r d i n g to o u r o r g a n i z a t i o n . Thus,
s o u n d s necessarily already arise i n t e r n a l l y and i n s t i n c t i v e l y . 1 5 In Nietzsche's
later t h e o r y o f l a n g u a g e s o u n d — m u s i c — p r o v i d e s and coincides w i t h t h e
d r i v e t o w a r d language, first in the u n c o n s c i o u s sense, a n d t h e n e v e n in
c o n s c i o u s l a n g u a g e , h o w e v e r , this is n o t a m a j o r e l e m e n t o f his t h i n k i n g
a b o u t l a n g u a g e at this p o i n t . 1 6
It appears, then, thus far in o u r discussion, that f o r Nietzsche, a l o n g s i d e
o f l a n g u a g e n o r m a l l y u n d e r s t o o d as a p r o d u c t o f consciousness, t h e r e exists
a l a n g u a g e w h o s e n a t u r e is that o f an u n c o n s c i o u s o r g a n i c b e c o m i n g char-
acterized as a p r o d u c t i o n o f the reality o f instinct. Instinct as o n e w i t h t h e
i n n e r m o s t kernel o f being, as the m o s t p a r t i c u l a r a c h i e v e m e n t o f i n d i v i d u a l s
o r o f a m a j o r i t y . O n l y in this sense, in t h e sense o f Nietzsche's c o n c e p t o f

13 In "Origins" Nietzsche specifically rejects four other hypotheses as to the origins of language:
1. that language grows out of the human power of spirit or as a direct gift of God;
2. that language grows out of the nature of things. This is refuted upon comparison of
languages, and their arbitrary nature;
3. that it is a purely human phenomenon, that the choice of sounds depend on the nature
of things. He points specifically to von de Brosses (1709 — 1777). However, Nietzsche adds
that the application of words to things is far from the origin of language. The mistake is
that "we have become accustomed to imagining that in the sounds something of the things
lie."
4. Nietzsche's last disagreement with an idea concerning the origin of language is that
language is a reflexive spirituality of man, made more than once by many wise men as Lord
Monboddo asserted.
16 In his book, Nietzsche, Wagner, and the Philosophy of Pessimism (London: George Allen and
Unwin, Ltd., 1982), Roger Hollingrake notes on pages 16, 211, and 270 that on November
14, 1869 Nietzsche and Wagner discussed the origins of language. This was the period in
which Nietzsche was writing "On the Origins of Language." Hollingrake points to Herder's
influence upon Wagner and the origins of language wherein he felt his art to "revert to a
stage when language was almost entirely free from the didactic element and was still poetry,
imagery, and feeling." This idea, will become central to Nietzsche's work with music and
language. It appears as if it was just about this time and his new friendship with Wagner
and Wagner's appreciation of Schopenhauer's musical aesthetics that Nietzsche begins to
connect music and language, a connection which forms the basis of most of The Birth of
Tragedy. I have intentionally left aside any references to music and language in this work,
because the relationship of music and language in Nietzsche's theory of language is a whole
study in itself and needs to be built upon my discussion of the beginnings of his theory of
language. See especially "On Music and Words," (1871) ("Über Musik und Wort"), "The
Dionysian Worldview," (1870) ("Die dionysische Weltanschauung"), and "Greek Music-
drama," (1870) ("Das griechische Musikdrama"). The relationship of music to language and
language to music is a theme which continues throughout Nietzsche's thinking.
 IX. Nietzsche and Hartmann: Unconscious Nature of Language 135

an unconscious origin and continuing bloom and decay of language, does

the deepest knowledge of philosophy lie already prepared in language.
Nietzsche's view of language, as an organic production of the reality of the
instincts, has as its fundamental essence that it exists independently of and
before conceptuality in conscious language, which gives it conscious form
and often a form detrimental to its unconscious formal aspects. Unconcious
language offers the multiplicity of possible forms, conscious language ac-
tualizes a particular form at a given moment and in a given cultural setting. 17
These thoughts return us to the binarity set up on page one, that language
first makes conscious thinking possible, but that something can be expedient
without consciousness. Now we may add to this: there exists a separate
language for this expedient unconsciousness which produces or enables
consciousness and conceptuality. In a note written in 1872, Nietzsche writes
that concepts are first arrived at through the identification of things which
are not the same, thus following up on his indication in "Origins" that
consciousness represents non-differentiation, and that conceptuality means
the making similar of things which are different: "Then afterwards we behave
as if the concept, e. g., the concept 'man,' were something factual, whereas
it is surely only something which we have constructed through a process of

17
This distinction cannot but remind us of de Saussure's distinction of langue and parole. Langue
is language minus parole. It is both a social institution and a system of values. Parole is the
individual act of selection and actualization. Thus langue provides the possible forms and
parole chooses the actual form. I maintain however that at this point in his theory of language
Nietzsche is privileging something akin to the systematic nature of language where language
consists of a certain number of elements "each one of which is at the same time the equivalent
of a given quantity of things and a term of a larger function, in which are found, in a
differential order, other correlative values..." (Barthes, Elements of Semiology, 14). This could
be corresponded to the idea of sensory synthesis and unconscious inferences which are
created unconsciously as a system of values in so far as our organization dictates what is of
value to us. Later in his theory of language, Nietzsche will concentrate on the institutional
aspects of language. A major difference between Nietzsche and this division of langue on de
Saussure's part into language and parole appears to be, however, that Nietzsche understands
his unconscious language, what we have contrasted to de Saussure's systematic aspect of
langue, as separate from, though of course, fundamental to, the institutional aspect of langue
and specific acts of speech (parole) which he classifies together over against the unconscious
elements of language. It appears as if Nietzsche finds a sort of triple piramid at work.
Unconscious forms of language
Conscious institutional and social language
Specific speech
The understanding being that specific speech arises only out of the possibility of conscious
and institutional language, but that the latter only arises out of the possibilities provided by
the unconscious forms of language. In Saussurian theory langue and parole have a dialectical
relationship wherein each is dependent upon the other. In Nietzsche's scheme above,
conscious language and specific speech acts will come to function in a similar way. But it is
the underlying forms of unconscious language which preserve and facilitate the basic forms
and formation of language.
136 IX. Nietzsche and Hartmann: Unconscious Nature of Language

ignoring all individual features."18 As we saw above, this process of simpli-

fication and loss of differentiation in abstract thinking is something which
Nietzsche gets from Schopenhauer and Lange, and this is the major reason
that Schopenhauer insists that conceptuality be based in perceptual experience.
However, as Nietzsche reads Lange, he begins to understand that actual
perception of sensory experience operates along the same lines of simplifi-
cation and non-differentiation, reducing the multiplicity of sensory experience
to a synthesis of forms through unconscious inference.
The obvious problem in Nietzsche's juxtapositioning in "Origins" of his
statement and Kant's 19 is that whereas for Kant, language and conceptuality
first allow humans and their world to be thought, and to be thought about,
for Nietzsche the human being is already language. This radical idea is later
confirmed in his short 1873 essay "Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" and
remains central to Nietzsche's theory of language. "The drive toward the
formation of metaphors (Metapherbildung) [the equating of the unequal] is
the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense
with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself." 20
Language is unconscious instinct in human beings. Instinct is one with the
innermost kernel of a being. Language is the human being's most fundamental
drive "as with bees — the anthill, etc." The a priori "concepts which are
already to be found in human beings themselves" are not found in humans
themselves but have been transferred, abstracted from the multiplicity of
experience by means of language and then taken as something factual.
Concepts are not found in human beings, rather the unsconscious workings
of language, which then enable the forms of conceptuality, are found in the
human being. Nietzsche's initial originality, then lies in making a leap outside
of consciousness in positing the expedience of an unconscious language and
its effects.
That Nietzsche retains these basic ideas about the origin and progress of
language for some time after his reading of Lange and Hartmann is evinced
by a passage in Beyond Good and Evil in which he repeats the ideas we have
just discussed and expands upon them.
That individual philosophical concepts are not anything capricious or au-
tonomously evolving, but grow up in connection and relationship with each
other; that, however suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the
history of thought, they nevertheless belong just as much to a system as all

18 Nietzsche, Ρ 51.
19 Nietzsche: "the deepest philosophical knowledge lies already prepared in language." Kant:
"a great perhaps the greatest portion of what our reason finds to do consists in the analysis
of concepts which human beings already find in themselves."
20 Nietzsche, W L 8 8 - 8 9 , K S A 1: 887.
 IX. Nietzsche and Hartmann: Unconscious Nature of Language 137

the members of the fauna of a continent — is betrayed in the end also by

the fact that the most diverse philosophers keep filling in a definite funda-
mental scheme of possible philosophies. Under an invisible spell, they always
revolve once more in the same orbit; however independent of each other
they may feel themselves with their critical or systematic wills, something
within them leads them, something impels them in a definite order, one
after the other — to wit, the innate systematic structure and relationship of
their concepts. Their thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a recog-
nition, a remembering, a return and a homecoming to a remote, primordial,
and inclusive household of the soul, out of which those concepts grew
originally: philosophizing is to this extent a kind of atavism of the highest
order.
The strange family resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and German philoso-
phizing is explained easily enough. Where there is affinity of languages, it
cannot fail, owing to the common philosophy of grammar — I mean, owing
to the unconscious domination and guidance by similar grammatical func-
tions — that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development
and sequence of philosophical systems...the spell of certain grammatical
functions is ultimately also the spell of physiological valuations and racial
conditions.21

Stack makes the argument that Nietzsche's thinking about language in this
passage goes beyond Lange's and Hartmann's notion of an inherent mode of
thinking based upon psychological dispositions into a prefiguration of struc-
turalism in that Nietzsche links languages, cultural forms of life and patterns
of belief and behavior. 22 We have seen to what extent Nietzsche's reading of
Hartmann contributes to this trend in his thinking about language. The
relationship of Nietzsche's theory of language to structuralism is an area of
study which is not addressed in the present work, whose purpose is to
demonstrate the slow coming together of the ideas which Nietzsche later
expresses so succinctly in "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" and in
later writings such as this passage from Beyond Good and Evil.
Thus, Nietzsche begins his investigations of language in "Origins" by
offering a third alternative to those offered by Kant and Schopenhauer. Kant's
a priori forms and Schopenhauer's understanding, which both operate in
largely unconscious ways and could, on the surface compare with what I
have designated as Nietzsche's unconscious language, yet differ in the essential
respect that Schopenhauer and Kant still characterize these as conscious
operations to be encompassed under the category of reason. Nietzsche clearly
posits the possibility of two distinct languages: 1) a language which can be
characterized as unconscious (or preconscious), a language which is a product
of the instincts, of the innermost kernel of a being, and which consists in

21 Nietzsche, J G B 2 7 - 2 8 , K S A 5: 34.
22 Stack, L N S 189.
138 IX. Nietzsche and Hartmann: Unconscious Nature of Language

operations of unconscious sensory synthesis and inference; and 2) the language

of conscious thinking, which actually serves to impoverish language of the
first type through its process of simplification and fixing. The difference is
that for Nietzsche, language, as conceptuality, does not provide the only
reliable means of determining objects, in Kant's sense; language does not,
even in the more refined Schopenhauerian sense, belong purely to the
abstracta, but with an essential and necessary grounding in the concreta. Rather,
although Nietzsche is in agreement that human beings possess such a language
of consciousness and reason, maintains also a language with operations
completely outside of the systems of conscious reason, which prompts to
language through instinctual unconscious stimuli. Nietzsche's thinking about
such an unconscious language of the nerves and its translation into perception
and ultimately into a conscious language of concept and word leads him to
write a few years later in Daybreak 119: "all our so-called 'consciousness' is
a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown and perhaps unknowable,
though felt, text." 23
Nietzsche will soon begin to explore not only what operations are at
work in such a 'non-rational, preconscious language, but also what forms it
could take. For a while he comes to study it in terms of music, rapture, and
the Dionysian, a perspective which he never abandons, but refines throughout
his thinking. 24 Nietzsche also attempts to describe in some detail how this
unconscious instinctual grammar and its operations, the formal part of lan-
guage, works. He claims in his notes of 1872—73 and his notes for a course
on "Rhetoric" that the figural tropology of rhetoric functions not merely as
an embellishment of conscious language, but that it offers a key to a possible
model of the unconscious operations which have created and continually act
to inform our conscious use of language. 25

23 Nietzsche, Μ 120, K S A 3: 113.

24 See note 16 above.
25 See my chapter 2, note 38 and my chapter 14.
 Chapter Ten
Hartmann's Worldview of the Unconscious

During the Summer 1870, Nietzsche was drafting ideas for a projected
work, some of which became part of The Birth of Tragedy, and some of which
were never made use of in published work. A few months later, during the
winter and spring of 1870/71, Nietzsche was again making notes for a work
to be called "Tragedy and the Free Spirit." It is extremely interesting to
follow Nietzsche during this time, as he both retains certain of the Schopen-
hauerian formulas, rewoks some of them completely, adding his own thinking,
in large part adapted from Hartmann, as we shall see, in his search for an
understanding of the human being's relationship to knowledge of the world
and the part which language plays in that knowledge.
The worldview in Anschauung which Nietzsche develops during this period
is also heavily indebted to major elements in Lange's philosophy as we have
discussed them. Lange offered Nietzsche the broad outlines and freedom of
imagination for this worldview, while Hartmann offered some of the more
specific forms enabling its growth. The impetus which Lange provides lies
in his attempt to mediate between materialism and idealism. In the Anschauung
notes Nietzsche is neither materialist nor idealist, but both.
Hartmann comes in to aid Nietzsche in the creation of his worldview in
Anschauung with the concept of the unconscious. Stack refers to a common
theme which Lange reiterates throughout his book:
That we again come upon a limit to materialism insofar as the subjective,
experiential phenomena of sensations are, considered objectively "nerve
processes" that do not indicate the nature of the subjective, qualitative states
experienced. There is a relationship between physiological processes and the
subjectiven Empfindungsvorganges even though this relation cannot be entirely
explained materialistically and even though the subjective experiences or
sensations have qualitative characteristics that cannot be reduced to observed
or observable material or physical states.1

Hartmann's unconscious and the world it structures offers an answer to the

questioning into such unknown non-conscious, yet physiological processes,

1 Stack, LNS 9 9 - 1 0 0 .
140 X . Hartmann's W o r l d v i e w of the Unconscious

which was taking place in Nietzsche's thinking as well as in the work of the
natural and physical sciences of the day. Hartmann's philosophy of the
unconscious becomes a model with which Nietzsche works in the creation
of the Ur-Eine in the Anschauung notes, and which offers basic forms to what
will become, later in his thinking, the will to power.
In the notes of 1870/71 Nietzsche continues his concern with the instincts
and their relationship to conscious and unconscious language and thinking.
Because of his interest in the relationship between physiological processes
and the "subjectiven Empfindungsvorganges," Nietzsche begins to explore the
mechanisms which allow a language of the unconscious and its translation
into a conscious language. He is also interested, as he was in "Origins," in
the relationship of these languages to the will. Thus, in order to accurately
assess Nietzsche's language theory at this point, it will be useful and necessary
to place it in the context of his overall thinking as it begins to break further
away from the work of Schopenhauer.
In the formulation of his worldview in the 1870/71 Anschauung notes,
Nietzsche finds solutions to some of his criticisms of Schopenhauer. Let us
recall that one of Nietzsche's major criticisms in "On Schopenhauer" was
that, for Schopenhauer, the intellect, having arisen out of the ever higher
objectifications of the will, operates as the tool of the world of representation,
the principium individuationis. The conclusions which Nietzsche drew, after
following Schopenhauer's reasoning, concerning the place of intellect were,
once again, the following: either the intellect must be seen as a new predicate
of the thing in itself or there can be no intellect because there is no provision
for its having arisen. However, since the intellect exists: "it follows that it
could not be a tool of the world of appearance, as Schopenhauer would have
it, but rather thing in itself, that is will." Nietzsche then makes the next
logical step: if will and the intellect are one, then the thing in itself must be
understood simultaneously as the principium individuationis and as the basis of
necessitation, "in other words: the present world." We also saw Nietzsche
suggesting that intellect arose out of multiplicity which placed the individual
"in a situation of isolation from all else, and out of that arose the necessity
of knowledge." These are Nietzsche's conclusions in 1867.
In his 1870/71 notes Nietzsche writes: "The conscious intellect a weak
thing, really only the tool of the will. But the intellect itself and the will are
one."2 Nietzsche is still working on this problem, but it has been refined.
There is the conscious intellect. However, it is weak when compared to the
intellect itself which, we must surmise, is some sort of unconscious intellect.

2 Nietzsche, A N 271, K S A 7: 128.

 X . Hartmann's Worldview of the Unconscious 141

And this unconscious intellect is one with the will. If we were, at this point,
to go directly into Nietzsche's notes for an explanation of this statement, we
would find it difficult to understand why Nietzsche has split the intellect into
two parts in this manner: dividing the conscious intellect from an intellect
in itself which is one with the will.
Let us remember that in the Fall of 1869 Nietzsche writes Rohde that he
reads Hartmann much, and that Nietzsche's fragment "Origins" written 1869/
70 is, as I have shown, documentably influenced by Hartmann. The notes I
am about to discuss are written during the summer, fall, and winter of 1870/
71. It is my contention that the new worldview which Nietzsche develops in
these notes is also heavily influenced by his reading of Hartmann.
In the early part of 1870 Nietzsche is still reading Hartmann as witnessed
by the following note from that time. Nietzsche quotes Hartmann, and then
comments:
"Only in so far as feelings can be translated into thoughts, are they com-
municable, if we disregard the always extremely scanty instinctive language
of gesture; for only in so far as feelings and thoughts are capable of being
translated can they be rendered into words."
Really!
Gesture and tone!
Communicated pleasure is art.
What does gestural language mean: it is language by means of commonly
understood symbols, forms of reflexive movement. The eye understands
immediately the situation which has produced the gestures.
It is the same with the instinctive tones. The ear understands immediately.
These tones are symbols.3

Not only is this note offered in evidence that Nietzsche is still reading
Hartmann, but also to show to what extent language and instinct are at the
basis of Nietzsche's interest, and that he is again finding food for thought in
Hartmann for these interests. The thoughts expressed by Nietzsche in this
note become central ideas in "Die dionysische Weltanschauung" ("The Dion-
ysian Worldview"), written in 1870, an essay in which he separates out three
specific languages: those of thoughts (and words), gestures, and tones, and
relates them to the feelings of pleasure and displeasure, the languages of
gesture and tone being emphasized as unconscious and instinctive languages.
By reading Hartmann's chapter, "Das Unbewusste im Gefühle" ("The Un-
conscious in Feeling"), a majority of the ideas presented in "The Dionysian

3 Nietzsche, K S A 7: 65.
142 X . Hartmann's W o r l d v i e w of the Unconscious

Worldview" can be found, and once again, this essay of Nietzsche's can be
understood in terms of Hartmann's use of key terms. 4
If we turn to a letter written in December of 1870 by Nietzsche to
Gersdorff in which he speaks, among other things, of the growing Schopen-
hauer reception, we read:
Really polemical articles are no longer needed. The fact that Hartmann's
Philosophy of the Unconscious — a book which in any case poses the
problems in a Schopenhauerian sense — has already had a second printing,
is itself a gain for the revolution to be conducted. G i v e me only a couple
of years, then you will detect also in me a new influence upon the study of
antiquity and bound with it hopefully also a new spirit in the scholarly and
ethical education of our nation. 5

Here, we find Nietzsche championing Hartmann and aligning himself with

him in the common cause of promoting fundamentally Schopenhauerian
principles. The reference to Hartmann and the direct follow up of Nietzsche's
intentions can only be read as significant. We will find that during the next
couple of years Nietzsche is working on notes and sketches for The Birth of
Tragedy which can be seen as at least a partial realization of these hopes along
with sections of the Untimely Meditations. Hartmann's influence becomes
evident in much of this work and Nietzsche's having sent a copy of The Birth
of Tragedy to Hartmann appears to further confirm an indebtedness. 6 Thus,
it is possible to document Nietzsche's reading of Hartmann during the same
period of time as he is writing the Anschauung notes, which I am considering.

Unconscious Will-Acts

I find it useful, therefore, to look at passages from Hartmann's Philosophy

of the Unconscious, which could have been significant for Nietzsche before
proceeding to Nietzsche's own notes. The purpose in this is twofold. First,
Hartmann's discussions help us understand Nietzsche's more elaborate scheme
by providing a stage upon which to set it, and secondly, I will be able to
sort out more easily what Nietzsche himself adds to the suggestions of

4 The preparation of an article tying Hartmann's influence to "The Dionysian W o r l d v i e w "

and the three distinct languages Nietzsche posits there is in preparation.
5 Nietzsche, K S B 3: 162.
6 See Nietzsche's letters to Fritzsch, April 1 8 7 2 and to G e r s d o r f f , May 1 8 7 2 in K S B 3: 3 1 0
and 316.
 Unconscious Will-Acts 143

Schopenhauer and Hartmann in the worldview which is developed in these

notes.
Hartmann writes: "Whoever has not felt the need and the difficulty of
comprehending individuation from the point of view of monism may securely
pass over the first half of this chapter; he would find no interest in it." 7 In
a later edition, which Nietzsche could not have read, but which is useful for
our discussion, Hartmann makes his position even clearer by adding:
For him, on the other hand, w h o hitherto has kept aloof f r o m Monism
precisely on account of this more or less distinctly conscious difficulty, and
has put up with the pluralism o f the real phenomenal w o r l d as an ultimate,
f o r him lies in this chapter, taken in conjunction with Chapter Seven, the
center of gravity o f the present book. 8

In his chapter "Die All-Einheit des Unbewussten" ("The All-Oneness of

the Unconscious"), Hartmann defines what he means by monism. It is to
"apprehend the world as an indivisible Being, to feel ourselves part of this
Being, but a part which, at the same time, indwells the whole, and penetrated
by this contrast to indulge the religious feeling of the sublimity of this vast
Being and the sense of the ego's participation therein." 9 Hartmann includes
Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schopenhauer under monism, as well as most of
the "original philosophical or religious systems of the first rank" and he calls
monism "the tendency of all modern philosophies of the present epoch."
Hartmann's philosophy of the unconscious attempts to reconcile monism and
pluralistic individualism by giving each a sphere, metaphysical or physical-
real, of its own and then by joining them under the unitary idea of the
unconscious.
The question which Hartmann considers in the two chapters which he
refers to as the "center of gravity" of his work is one which Nietzsche himself
asks in the 1870/71 Anschauung notes, and which is the point upon which we
saw him criticizing Schopenhauer: "How is appearance possible next to
being?". 10 "How does engendering of multiplicity take place out of one-
ness?"11 That is, how does individuation arise out of the unity of the will?
What Hartmann does with regard to this question: "Why is there individua-
tion? How is it possible on monistic principles?" is in his own words, to replace
the "one-sidedness of abstract idealism" with a "real plurality." He writes:

7 Hartmann, PU 2: 334, PUG 507.

8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., PU 2: 234, PUG 456.
10 Nietzsche, AN 274, K S A 7: 2 0 3 - 0 4 .

" See ZS section IV.

144 X. Hartmann's Worldview of the Unconscious

Stated in general terms the answer to these difficulties runs: "individuals

are objectively posited phenomena; i. e., they are willed thoughts of the
Unconscious or particular will-acts of the same; the unity of the essence
remains unaffected by the plurality of individuals, which are only activities
(or combinations of certain activities) of the one Essential Being." 12

Hartmann attempts to explain the activities of the one Essential Being

according to atomistic and dynamic theories, primarily those of Herbart.
Nietzsche, as we saw in my chapter on Lange's book, was exposed to the
atomistic theories of his time, including Herbart, finding them very interesting
and stimulating. We can surmise that he must have found Hartmann's
explanations, following Herbart, of interest. And Nietzsche does, to some
extent, adopt the atomistic viewpoint offered by Hartmann in his 1870/71
notes, as we shall see. Thus it is relevant to present Hartmann's argument in
full.

Here, according to the present state of the scientific hypotheses, only two
different kinds of individuals, repulsive and attractive forces, are to be
distinguished; within each of these groups there obtains perfect resemblance
between individuals, with the sole exception of their place. Only because the
atomic forces A and Β act differently on the same atoms are they different,
and because the lines of action of A and the lines of action of Β have distinct
foci, this difference is shortly expressed as A and Β occupy different places,
whilst in strictness force occupies no place at all, but only its effects are
locally discriminated. But if one imagined two equal atoms united in a
mathematical point, they would not only cease to be distinguishable, but even
to be different, for they would cease to be two forces, and would be one force
with double strength. 13

From this atomistic and dynamic reasoning Hartmann offers the following
answer to the question, how does multiplicity arise out of oneness: the
unconscious has at the same time different will-acts, which are distinguished
by their content so far as the space relations of their effects are differently
represented. "But when the will realizes its content, these many will-acts enter
into objective reality as so many force-individuals; they are the first primitive
manifestation of Essential Being." 14 Hartmann then goes on to discuss the
manner in which the will is able to realize or distinguish its content, or will-
acts.

Since every effect of atomic force is represented by the Unconscious as

different from every other atomic force, its realization is of course different

12 Hartmann, PU 2: 337, PUG 507.

13 Ibid., PU 2: 337, PUG 5 0 7 - 0 8 .
14 Ibid., PU 2: 3 3 7 - 3 8 , PUG 508.
 Hartmann's Criticism of Schopenhauer's Principium Individuationis 145

from that of every other atomic force, thus likewise single, without prejudice
to the circumstance that it is in its nature indistinguishable; the intuitive
imagination of the Unconscious distinguishes it, however, without thought
in its space relations ...' 5
Thus, the way in which the Unconscious forms representations is through
an unconscious operation. Let us follow Hartmann further: "The concept is
a result of a process of separation or abstraction, but the Unconscious always
apprehends the totality of its matter of representation without condescending
to a separation of parts within the same."16 For Hartmann the unconscious
apprehends the totality of its matter, and thus thinks intuitively, somewhat
in the manner of the hypothesized intuitive thought, brought about through
reflective judgement, which Kant proposed earlier in our discussion. Hart-
mann opposes to this intuitive thinking that of discursive thinking which
separates and abstracts.
The unconscious thinks concepts only so far as they are contained in intuition
as integral and undifferentiated elements, consequently it cannot be surpris-
ing if among the intuitions of the Unconscious there are such from which,
even for discursive thinking, no concepts can be abstracted; as i. e., the
perception that the actions of the atomic force A must be so directed that
their lines of direction should intersect in this point here, those of the atom
Β in that point there. Consequently, in the case of atoms, the difference and
singleness of the individuals is, in fact, reduced in the most direct manner
to the difference and singleness of the ideas which form the content of the
acts of will of which the individuals consist, in such wise that to each
individual there corresponds a single act of will. 17

Hartmann's Criticism of Schopenhauer's Principium Individuationis

The major move which Hartmann has made away from Schopenhauer is
that he has divided the "One Essential Being," the Unconscious, into idea
and will. The idea allows the origin of "the ideal difference and singleness of
the atoms," thus creating matter. The will is the setting in motion, through
opposition, of the will acts or activity of the Unconscious. Both the origins
in the idea and the activity in the will of the Unconscious operate independently
of individual consciousness of it.
From this perspective, how does Hartmann specifically criticize Schopen-
hauer's principium individuationis? This criticism would have held high interest
for Nietzsche who also finds a problem here.

15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., PU 2: 338, PUG 5 0 8 - 0 9 .
146 X . Hartmann's Worldview of the Unconscious

If we dwell a moment more upon the atomic forces of matter, and inquire
respecting the medium whereby individuation in this sphere becomes pos-
sible, respecting the so-called "principium individuationis," undoubtedly the
combination of space and time can alone be so characterized; for we saw
that the atomic forces A and B, equal in thought, are only distinguished by
the different space relations of their effects, improperly and briefly expressed
by their places and only omitted at the time to add to "their effects:" "at the
same point of time." This addendum is, however, necessary, for complete-
ness' sake, because indeed with the time the place of an atom may change.
The phrase principium individuationis is not well chosen. It should be medium
individuationis; for the authorship or origin of individuation, just as that of
space and time, belong solely to the Unconscious, namely, the ideal difference
and singleness of the atoms to the idea, their reality however to the will. 1 8

Thus Hartmann emphasizes that his characterizations of time and space and
the production of individuation out of the Unconscious should not be
mistaken as similar to Schopenhauer's notion of the principium individuationis.
The fundamental difference is that for Schopenhauer space and time are only
forms of "subjective cerebral perception" with which the transcendent reality of
the will has nothing to do, and thus, all individuation is merely subjective
appearance to which nothing real corresponds. Hartmann continues:
According to my conception, on the other hand, space and time are just as
much forms of outward reality as of the subjective cerebral perception;
certainly not forms of the (metaphysical) transcendent Substantial Being, but
only of its activity, so that individuation has not merely an apparent reality
for consciousness, but a reality apart from all consciousness, without thereby
curtailing plurality of substance. 19

We shall see, in Nietzsche's notes, that this is also his conception of time in
counter-distinction to that of Schopenhauer's.
Hartmann summarizes in three specific explanations his departure from
Schopenhauer concerning the arising of individuation or multiplicity out of
oneness. First, Hartmann suggests that if Schopenhauer had not leant as
much on Kant, he would have come to the true view, whereas, instead, he
persisted in the statement that "the whole diversity of the world only acquires
existence through the first animal consciousness and in its perception."20

18 Ibid., PU 2: 339, P U G 509.

" Ibid., P U 2: 340, P U G 510.
20 Ibid. It is interesting to note Hartmann's specific arguments against Schopenhauer's claim

that "the whole diversity of the world only acquires existence through the first animal
consciousness and in perceptions" which are given in a later edition of Philosophy of the
Unconscious. They are interesting because they parallel Nietzsche's o w n criticisms of Scho-
penhauer's individuation offered in "On Schopenhauer." Hartmann writes: "Only thus much
truth lies in this, that objective manifestation also, in order to be real, i. e., to emerge from
the unconsciously ideal composure into external reality, needed an opposition between d i f f e r e n t
acts of will; error creeps in only when the union of one of the affected will-acts with a
 Hartmann's Criticism of Schopenhauer's Principium Individuationis 147

Hartmann's second point of departure from Schopenhauer is that Scho-

penhauer knows no atoms at all, thus, "he cannot think anything by 'indi-
viduation of matter,' because he cannot say what individuals of mere inorganic
matter are."21 This is so, Schopenhauer resorts to metaphysical qualities like
character, direct knowledge of the will, objectification of ideas, etc., to get
at the individual, though he does use data from the natural sciences to attempt
to support them. Although there is no doubt that Nietzsche found Hartmann's
atomistic explanations attractive, it is significant to remember that from
Nietzsche's perspective, gleaned from Lange, although explanations of phys-
ical reality using atoms and force is useful, they too are ultimately only
fictions. This will be a significant departure which Nietzsche makes from
Hartmann. Hartmann believes in atoms and their effects while Nietzsche
believes in them only as appearance, thus as artistic projections.
Hartmann's third objection to Schopenhauer concerning the nature of
individuation is allied with the second just discussed. "Schopenhauer naively
regards organic individuals as just as much direct objectifications of the will
as I the atomic forces, whilst, I, following physical science, suppose the same
to arise by the composition of atomic individuals."22 What Hartmann means
by this is that there is the material world of atomic forces working in space
and time to produce matter. Once matter has arisen in the idea of the
Unconscious, will enters to set the atomic forces into action. It is only at this
point, that the inception and growth of organic individuals or principium

conscious subject is required as condition. If we eliminate this unwarranted requirement, the

simple truth remains that the objective phenomenon which rests on the individuation of the
one into the many, is also only possible in this plurality without self-contradiction. Moreover,
there lies in Schopenhauer's assertion that the world of individuation comes into existence
only with the first conscious subject perceiving it an incorrect assumption, as if the subjective
appearance which the intellect spontaneously constructs out of the material processes in the
objective appearance of its brain were the immediate and true appearance of the Essential
Being, whilst it is, in fact, very unlike, nay, in many points perfectly heterogeneous to, the
objective phenomenon (i. e., the sum of natural individuals as they are, independently of
being perceived). Only the objective phenomenon is the true and direct manifestation of the
Essential Being; the subjective phenomenon, however, is a subjectively coloured and distorted
copy of the objective phenomenon. To gain an adequate thought-picture of the objective
appearance by eliminating that which merely appertains to subjectivity, and by the scientific
investigation of the objective causes of the particular given affection of the subject, is the
endeavour and problem of Natural Science (Physics in the widest sense), whilst Metaphysics
endeavors to cognize the Essential Being according to its attributes and its mode of revelation,
which underlies the objective appearance (natural things). Thus, e. g., matter as subjective
phenomenon is matter with its palpable sense-qualities; as objective phenomenon, a definitely
extended complex of punctual atoms; an essence, which underlies this phenomenon, the All-
one Unconscious with the attributes will and idea. The first is the sensuous, the second the
physical, the third the metaphysical definition of matter" (PU 2: 341—42).
21 Ibid., PU 2: 342, PUG 510.
22 Ibid.
148 X. Hartmann's Worldview of the Unconscious

individuationis becomes possible. Hartmann agrees with Schopenhauer that

they rise to higher orders, but only as a result of combinations of lower
order matter (or combinations of atoms) — that is, "the lower order individ-
uals turn out to be medium individuationis for the higher." 23 For Schopenhauer,
on the other hand, space and time result in the direct manifestation or
objectification of all grades of the principium individuationis. Here, again, we
will see Nietzsche adopting a view of organic individuals sympathetic with
Hartmann's. This view would have been of particular interest to Nietzsche
on two counts, in light of his thinking in "On Teleology" and his acquaintance
with Lange's Darwinism. First, it offers an unconscious coming to be of
organisms. Second, it is in essential agreement with the actualization of
certain forms out of the multiplicity of possible forms, with nothing being
possible that was not already contained in previous forms.
Thus, for Hartmann, all plurality belongs only to the phenomenon, not
to the essence which posits the former, and this essence is the "One Absolute
Individual, the single existence, which is All." The world is bare phenomenon,
"not subjectively posited phenomenon as in Kant, Fichte, and Schopenhauer,
but objectively posited phenomenon." 24

Philosophy of the Unconscious and Human Consciousness

Hartmann posits matter (atomic idea forces), organic formation with its
instinct (will-acts of the Unconscious), and consciousness (another group of
will-acts of the Unconscious), as the three modes of action or modes of
appearance of the Unconscious. Let us look further at how Hartmann
describes the activities and characteristics of the Unconscious, as it operates
in these various modes of appearance, noting especially the place of the ego
or consciousness in the series of will-acts of the Unconscious:
The world consists only of a sum of activities or will-acts of the Unconscious,
and the ego consists of another sum of activities or will-acts of the Uncon-
scious. Only so far as the former activities intersect the latter does the world
become sensible to me; only so far as the latter intersect the former do I become
sensible to myself. ... In the sphere of the mental representation of pure
Idea, the ideally opposed peacefully exist side by side, ... when, however, a
will seizes these ideal opposites and make them its content, then the will-
acts filled with opposite content enter into opposition; they pass into real
conflict, in which they mutually resist and threaten to destroy one another.

23 Ibid., PU 2: 343 PUG 512.

24 Ibid., PU 2: 240, PUG 461.
 Philosophy of the Unconscious and Human Consciousness 149

... Only in this conflict, the mutually o f f e r e d resistance o f the individually

parted will-acts o f the A l l - O n e , arises and consists that which w e call reality.25

W h e n L a n g e r e m a r k s that the natural sciences f i n d a s u r e g r o u n d o n l y in t h e

relations o f t h i n g s to o n e a n o t h e r and n o t in specific p r e d i c a t i o n s o f m a t t e r
a n d f o r c e , atoms, etc., he o b v i o u s l y p r o v i d e s the b a c k g r o u n d o f N i e t z s c h e ' s
conception of a relations-world comprised of dynamic actions, reactions and
i n t e r a c t i o n s . H o w e v e r , t h e v a l u e f o r N i e t z s c h e i n H a r t m a n n is t o see s u c h
d y n a m i c s a n d r e l a t i o n s o f a c t i o n a n d r e a c t i o n at w o r k i n a p a r t i c u l a r w o r l d -
v i e w , a n d in c o n n e c t i o n w i t h w i l l - a c t s w h i c h b e c o m e c e n t r a l t o h i s own
w o r l d v i e w in Anschauung.
H a r t m a n n elaborates f u r t h e r o n the relationship o f consciousness to the
s t r u c t u r e o f his p h i l o s o p h y o f t h e u n c o n s c i o u s .

O n l y w h e n one has come to see that consciousness does n o t belong t o the

essence, but to the phenomenon, that thus the plurality o f consciousness is o n l y
a plurality of the appearance of the One, only then will it be possible t o
emancipate oneself f r o m the p o w e r o f the practical instinct, w h i c h a l w a y s
cries "I, I," and to comprehend the essential unity o f all corporeal and
spiritual phenomenal individuals . . . 2 6

25 Ibid., PU 2: 242, PUG 462. Here, I offer a diagram of the structure of Hartmann's worldview
constructed upon the basis of his philosophy of the unconscious and this description.
_ I Idea = peaceful co-existence of opposition (atoms/mat-
< ter: essence or being)
I World = will seizes ideas and creates a set of will-acts of
the unconscious (objective phenomena: organic
formation out of combinations of atoms)

Unsconscious < — —

Ego = another set of will-acts of the unconscious (sub-

jective phenomena: consciousness out of com-
binations of atoms)
sensibility of sensibility of
world myself
Hartmann also expresses the same structure in more atomistic terms, a description which
sounds like a primitive echo of Nietzsche's will to power: "What appears to us as matter 'is
the mere expression of an equilibrium of opposite activities' (Schelling's Werke I. 3, 400),
what appears to us as consciousness is likewise a mere expression of a conflict of opposite
activities. That piece of matter yonder is a conglomerate of atomic forces, i. e., of fiats of
the Unconscious, to attract from this point of space in this intensity, to repel from that point
in that intensity...Here the prodigy of the creation of the material world is lost in the
everyday marvel of its preservation renewed every moment, which is a continuous creation. T h e
world is only a continuous series of sums of peculiarly combined will-acts of the Unconscious,
for it is only so long as it is continuously posited; let the Unconscious cease to will the w o r l d ,
and this play of intersecting activities of the unconscious ceases to be" (PU 2: 242, P U G
461).
26 Ibid., PU 2: 226, PUG 453.
150 X . Hartmann's W o r l d v i e w of the Unconscious

How does Hartmann reconcile the apparent contradiction between the all-
unity of the Unconscious and that of individual self feeling? Individual self-
feeling, begins as instinct and is elaborated to an ever more heightened and
sharpened consciousness which aims at "pure-self-consciousness."
Thus the appearance, indestructible for conscious thought, of the individual
egoity only emerges the more distinctly, the keener conscious thought
becomes this, I say, is no contradiction to the Monism of the Unconscious,
for all conscious thought remains indeed entangled in the conditions of
consciousness, and can by its nature never be elevated above them in direct
fashion, must rather be the more wrapt round by the deceptive veil of Maja,
the more it displays its proper nature. 27

Note, that consciousness strives for heightened self-consciousness, but also,

the more it displays its "proper nature," that is, to increase in consciousness,
the more wrapt round by the veil of maja it becomes. He adds, "the unity
of the Unconscious may very well exist at the same time, of that namely,
which never can come into consciousness, because it lies behind it, as the
mirror can never mirror itself (at the most its own image in a second
mirror)." 28 This metaphor of images, and the mirroring of images becomes,
for Nietzsche, the metaphor of Anschauung. Nietzsche adopts exactly this view
of consciousness and its aim, and we can begin to understand his statement
"the conscious intellect a weak thing, really only the tool of the will. But the
intellect itself (in objective appearance where an intellect is first individualized
in actuality through the will-acts of the unconscious) and the will are one."
This view of consciousness reduces the importance of the subject, the "I,"
to a completely provisional position:
Let the Unconscious change the combination of activities or acts of will
which constitute me, and I have become another; let the Unconscious intermit
these activities, and I have ceased to be. ... I am born of the coincidence of
relations, become another in every second because these relations are dis-
solved. 29

For Hartmann, and for Nietzsche, as we shall see, the sole occupation
left to the weak conscious intellect is to make the ends of the unconscious
those of consciousness, to "heighten consciousness" to a pure self-conscious-
ness of the fact that it can never be free of the veil of appearances. Remember
that Nietzsche subscribed to Hartmann's definition of instinct in "Origins"
as "purposive action without consciousness of the purpose" and "conscious
willing of the means to an unconsciously willed end." In early 1870 Nietzsche
writes: "World destruction through knowledge! Renewal through strength-

27 Ibid., PU 2: 227, P U G 454.

28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., PU 2: 243, P U G 462.
 Interlude 151

ening of the unconscious! The 'Dumb Siegfried' and the knowing Gods!
Pessimism as absolute longing after nothingness impossible: only as being
better!" 30 Clearly here, being better is synonymous with strengthening of the
unconscious. Again, this will be a strain repeated in Nietzsche's Anschauung
notes: "All growth in our knowledge arises out of the making conscious of
the unconscious." 31

Interlude

Here, however, we must be careful. I must finally address a rather thorny

and enigmatic problem which I began to broach in note 12 of chapter 1: the
completely ambiguous, yet devotedly irrational attachment which Nietzsche
had to Hartmann. The crux of Nietzsche's ambiguity with regard to Hartmann
lies in the idea with which I closed the last paragraph, the idea of making
the ends of the unconscious those of consciousness.
Nietzsche was clearly impressed with Hartmann's unconscious, though
not uncritical of it as we shall see. However he found Hartmann's chapters
entitled "Die Unvernunft des Wollens und das Elend des Daseins" ("The
Irrationality of Volition and the Misery of Existence") and "Das Ziel des
Weltprocesses und die Bedeutung des Bewusstseins (Übergang zur practischen
Philosophie)" ("The Goal of Evolution and the Significance of Consciousness
(Transition to Practical Philosophy)") to be the ultimate joke of a supreme
philosophical ironist. It is in these chapters that Hartmann advocates making
the ends of the unconscious ends of our own consciousness. The position
which Nietzsche held with respect to these chapters of Hartmann's philosophy
is documented in Section 9 of "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History
for Life" (1874). Before I turn to these pages, I would like to preface my
discussion with an introduction to the ideas presented in the chapters in
question.
Hartmann presents what he calls the stages of illusion of the world
process, which humans have created to deal with their situation. The first
stage is that "Happiness is considered as having been actually attained at the
present stage of the world's development, accordingly attainable by the
individual of today in his earthly life." 32 This is the age of the ancient world,
the childhood of humankind. The second stage of the illusion is that "Hap-
piness is conceived attainable by the individual in a transcendent life after

30 Nietzsche, K S A 7: 7 5 - 7 6 .
31 Nietzsche, AN 270, K S A 7: 116.
32 Hartmann, PU 3: 12, PUG 540.
152 X. Hartmann's Worldview of the Unconscious

death." 33 This is the middle age, the age of Christianity, the youth of
humankind. And the third stage of the illusion is that "Happiness is relegated
to the future world process." 34 This is modern times, the manhood of
humankind. And Hartmann prophesies a conclusion to the world process,
which will be the old age and conclusion of humankind. Each stage of the
illusion was superceded by another after the truth of each illusion was
discovered. The truth of the first stage of illusion was "despair of existence
here;" the truth of the second stage of the illusion was "despair also of the
hereafter;" the truth of the third stage of the illusion was "the absolute
resignation of positive happiness." 35
All of these points of view or illusions about the world have been negative.
Now, in contradistinction to these negative views, Hartmann suggests that a
"practical philosophy of life" is necessary. This would consist in "the complete
devotion of the personality to the world process for the sake of its goal, the general
world-redemption. "36 World redemption, for Hartmann, means redemption from
the misery of volition. The conclusion or end of the world process is a given
for Hartmann, the question is how it will end.
We have in conclusion still to deal with the question, in what manner the end
of the world process, the relegation of all volition to absolute non-volition,
with which, as we know, all so called existence ... disappears and ceases, is
to be conceived.37
He spells out three conditions: First, because "by far the largest part of the
Unconscious spirit manifesting itself in the present world is to be found in
humanity," 38 only this largest part of the unconscious spirit, it is implied, has
the force to annihilate the volition of the world. Secondly, the "consciousness
of mankind must be penetrated by the folly of volition and the misery of all
existence, that it have conceived so deep a yearning for the peace and the
painlessness of nonbeing." 39 And thirdly, a "sufficient communication be-
tween people of the earth to allow of a simultaneous common resolve,"40 a resolve
to attain conscious and universal negation of the will. Thus, Hartmann
suggests that humanity as a whole come to a point of consciously willing its
annihilation. But let me quote the most significant passage from Hartmann,
one which Nietzsche quotes almost entirely in his discussion of Hartmann in
"On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life."

33 Ibid., PU 3: 79, PUG 600.

34 Ibid., PU 3: 94, PUG 610.
35 Ibid., PU 3: 133, PUG 638.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., PU 3: 135, PUG 6 3 8 - 3 9 .
38 Ibid.
3 ' Ibid., PU 3: 137, PUG 640.
40 Ibid., PU 3: 139, PUG 641.
 Interlude 153

Otherwise expressed, the principle of practical philosophy consists in this,

TO MAKE THE ENDS OF THE UNCONSCIOUS ENDS OF OUR
OWN CONSCIOUSNESS, which follows immediately from the two prem-
ises, that, in the first place, consciousness has made the goal of the world-
redemption from the misery of volition its own goal; and secondly, that it
has the persuasion of the all-wisdom of the unconscious, in consequence of
which it recognizes all the means made use of by the Unconscious as the
most suitable possible. ... From this standpoint, instinct will be restored to its
rights far more powerfully than in the third stage of the illusion by the mere
suppression of egoism, and THE AFFIRMATION OF THE WILL TO
LIVE PROCLAIMED PROVISIONALLY ALONE TRUE; for only in
complete devotion to l i f e and its pains, not in cowardly renunciation and withdrawal,
is anything to be ACHIEVED for the world-process. The reflecting reader
will, also, without further suggestion, understand how a practical philosophy
erected on these principles should be shaped, and that such an one cannot contain
DISUNION but only the full RECONCILIATION with life,4'

With this information, we are in a position to turn to Nietzsche's section

on Hartmann. Nietzsche's attack in "On the Uses and Disadvantages of
History for Life," as a result of Hartmann's suggestion that what is necessary
is "the complete devotion of the personality to the world-process," is uncom-
promising. He finds this idea to be the paradigm of his times and he is
alarmed at the wide acceptance of Hartmann's proposition, that it is taken
completely seriously. Speaking of the cultured German of his times, the
"historically educated fanatic of the world-process", Nietzsche writes:
How the historically educated fanactic of the world-process has hitherto
lived is recorded for us in giant monumental characters on that celebrated

41 Ibid., PU 3: 1 3 3 - 3 4 , PUG 638. These chapters of Hartmann's cannot be read without

thinking of Nietzsche's "How the 'Real World' at last Became a Myth" in Twilight of the
Idols. Nietzsche's characterizations of the real world in propositions one through four bear
direct resemblance to Hartmann's stages of illusion as I have outlined them. However,
Nietzsche, rather than succumbing to pessimism and resignation chooses to regard, in
proposition five and six, the 'real world' as an idea no longer of any use. He "abolishes"
the real world and along with it the "apparent world as well." The world which remains is
Zarathustra's world, the Dionysian world of affirmation. Nietzsche writes: "To divide the
world into a 'real' and an 'apparent' world, whether in the manner of Christianity or in the
manner of Kant (which is, after all, that of a cunning Christian —) is only a suggestion of
decadence — a symptom of declining life. ... That the artist places a higher value on appearance
than on reality constitutes no objection to this proposition. For 'appearance' here signifies
reality once more, only selected, strengthened, corrected. ... The tragic artist is not a pessimist
— it is precisely he who affirms all that is questionable and terrible in existence, he is
Dionysian" (GD 39, KSA 6: 79).
I maintain that the effects of Hartmann's chapters "The Irrationality of Volition and the
Misery of Existence" and "The Goal of Evolution and the Significance of Consciousness
(Transition to Practical Philosophy)" were deep, and that the above is Nietzsche's own
version of an answer to Hartmann. But one must not fail to detect the irony which
accompanies Nietzsche's "History of an Error." It is an irony similar to that which he
ascribed to Hartmann's own distinction of the stages of illusion.
154 X. Hartmann's Worldview of the Unconscious

page which has sent the whole contemporary cultured rabble into ecstacies
because they see in them their o w n justification blazing f o r t h in apocalyptic
light. 4 2

Nietzsche refers to the quote from Hartmann just given above and goes on
to quote and emphasize lines which were of particular interest to his argument:
"the full surrender of the personality to the world-process;" the assertion of
the will to live as the first step, for only in the full surrender to life and its
sorrows, and not in a retreat from it, can anything be achieved for the world-
process;" and the striving after "the fullest reconciliation with life."
However, Nietzsche's attack is not aimed at Hartmann! Nietzsche is
convinced that what Hartmann proposes is presented as a supreme joke,
whose effect is all the stronger as a result of the "singular earnestness of his
presentation." Nietzsche is "cheered" by looking in "the glittering magic
mirror of a philosophical parodist in whose head the age has come to an ironical
awareness of itself." Nietzsche reads Hartmann as having written a "philo-
sophical piece of rogery." Nietzsche writes:
The beginning and goal of the w o r l d process, f r o m the first stab of
consciousness to its being hurled back into nothingness, together with an
exact description of the task o f o u r generation within this w o r l d process,
all presented direct f r o m that cleverly discovered well o f inspiration, the
unconscious, and gleaming with apocalyptic light, all so deceptively mim-
icking straight-faced earnestness as t h o u g h it w e r e a genuine serious philos-
ophy and not only a joke philosophy — 43

In other words Nietzsche chooses to interpret Hartmann as having invented

the most ludicrous of pessimistic systems, which ends in the agreement of
humankind to self extinction in order to show up such systems as having
had their day. In this manner Hartmann's world process is a "medicine."
"For what medicine could be more efficacious against excess of historical
culture than Hartmann's parody of world history?" 44 Hartmann's Philosophy
of the Unconscious is a philosophy of "unconscious irony." 45 It is not completely
certain whether Nietzsche really meant that Hartmann was capable of creating
his philosophy as a conscious commentary and criticism of the pessimism of
his day, or whether Nietzsche saw Hartmann as a sort of tool of unconscious
processes in that such a philosophy could be expressed at all seriously. I tend
to think Nietzsche's opinion was actually more the former than the latter, or
if it was not, he chose to express it as if it were.

42 Nietzsche, HL 110, KSA 1: 3 1 5 - 1 6 .

43 Ibd., HL 1 0 8 - 0 9 , KSA 1: 314.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid., HL 108, KSA 1: 3 1 3 - 1 4 .
 Interlude 155

Nietzsche suggests that one place Hartmann's unconscious in one scale

and his 'world-process' in the other and claims that:
There are people w h o believe they will weigh exactly the same: for in each
of them there would lie an equally bad expression and an equally good joke.
Once Hartmann's joke has been understood, Hartmann's expression 'world
process' will be of no use except as a joke. 46

Nietzsche obviously makes a distinction here albeit a far from obvious one.
This is a key passage in an attempt to evaluate Nietzsche's critical attitude
toward Hartmann's unconscious. Clearly, as we have seen, Nietzsche adopted
much of Hartmann's ideas of the unconscious, however, if I were to venture
a guess at what, for Nietzsche, the bad expression and the good joke in
Hartmann's unconscious was, it would run in the following manner. The bad
expression would consist in a criticism of the metaphysical excesses of
Hartmann's conception of the unconscious. The good joke of the unconscious
for Nietzsche, I suspect, lay in the same area as his great amusement with
Hartmann's ability in the "world-process" to set the sheep to follow along
the most ludicrous of paths. In other words, Hartmann provided a conscious
justification for a largely unconscious and ineffective way of being. The good
joke in the other scale of the world process was to show that when human
beings think that they "know," have the ability to consciously will something
for themselves, a history perhaps, the joke is that ultimately it is the uncon-
scious instinct, drive, will, which wills it.
When Nietzsche writes that there are people who believe the unconscious
and the world process will weigh exactly the same, he indicates, in my
interpretation, on the contrary, that the worth of the unconscious can be
calculated whereas Hartmann's "world-process" ending in a conscious ex-
tinction of humanity is the most ludicrous of pessimistic pursuits conceivable
and can only make a joke of pessimism in general.
By now it is obvious that Hartmann's effect upon Nietzsche was strong.
We have seen Nietzsche working with him from the period of "Origins"
(1868/69) up until his provoking evaluation of Hartmann's world process in
1874. And this influence is, perhaps, all the more effective because of its
double edge. That Nietzsche was already committed to the idea of an
unconscious in the sensuous and physical aspects of life, I have adequately
presented. That Nietzsche was also convinced that the instincts play a pow-
erful and continuing role in human endeavor and language, is also evident
from my discussion. If we look again at the key passage from Hartmann
which made so strong an impression on Nietzsche and read it from another
perspective, perhaps we can understand Nietzsche's need to characterize

46 Ibid. HL 112, KSA 1: 318.

156 X. Hartmann's Worldview of the Unconscious

Hartmann in the strange manner that he does in "On The Uses and Disad-
vantages of History for Life."
Nietzsche himself stresses how easily Hartmann can be misunderstood.
"The thinking reader will understand, and one could misunderstand Hert-
mann? And how unspeakably amusing it is that he should be misunder-
stood!" 47 How might Hartmann's passage be otherwise read? How might
Nietzsche read a philosophy which suggests that instinct should be restored
to its rights "more powerfully" than before, a philosophy that suggests that
not only should consciousness recognize an unconscious, but make the ends
of the unconscious those of its own, and both of these, not in order to flee
from the suffering of life, but to reconcile with it? Nietzsche reads it not, of
course, in the sense of the resignation of humankind to a world process
leading to extinction, but in the sense of the joyousness of life, in the
acceptance of suffering not in order to resign to it, but as something to strive
with and against toward a higher goal of individual consciousness. To make
the unconscious goals the goals of consciousness, not in the sense of inevitable
determinism and pessimism, but in order to grow stronger in knowledge of
the unconscious in order to use it with consciousness toward an unhistorical
goal of the individual and affirmation of the world. Hartmann's "famous
page with its large typed sentences" was a palimpsested text for Nietzsche.
It said one thing to the masses: "resign your personality to the world-
process;" it said many other things to Nietzsche.
In 1863 Nietzsche writes: "Nothing lures us like the living." In "On
Teleology" (1867) we recall that the real puzzle for Nietzsche was "Life,"
that his outline ends with the enigmatic "Life force = ." It is my contention
that Hartmann sparked Nietzsche in the direction of attempting to frame a
practical philosophy which rejected the ultimate denial of the will on the
individual basis of Schopenhauer, or the resignation of humanity as a whole
to the redemption of non-volition as Hartmann would have it, in favor of
one which focuses on coming to terms with life as it is, that is, as only a
form or appearance of life, and which eschews the negativism of pessimism
while promoting a goal of positive living. Such will be Nietzsche's worldview
in Anschauung.48

47 Ibid., HL 110, KSA 1: 316.

48 One wonders at Niet2sche's continued devotion to Hartmann, which takes the form of
misrecognizing him in order to preserve him untouched. Remember that in chapter 1, note
12 I have already indicated Nietzsche's ambiguous relationship to Hartmann. In The Gay
Science (1882) Nietzsche is still mixing his feelings with regard to Hartmann: "This is not by
any means an allusion to Eduard von Hartmann. On the contrary, to this day I have not
shaken off my old suspicion that he is too apt for us. I mean that he may have been a wicked
rogue from the start who perhaps made fun not only of German pessimism — but in the
end he might even "bequeath" to the Germans in his will how far it was possible even in
 Interlude 157

the age of foundations to make fools of them" (FW 308, KSA 3: 601). When Kaufmann
adds in a footnote to this passage: "Nietzsche's contempt for Eduard Hartmann is evident
in all his references to him," I can only disagree most strongly. In two notes from the Will
to Power as late as 1885 — 86 Nietzsche still remains uncertain about Hartmann. In a note
from 1885 "On German Pessimism," Nietzsche writes: "And this is really the case, and I
bewared in time, with some sort of regret, of the German and Christian narrowness and
inconsequence of pessimism a la Schopenhauer or, worse, Leopardi, and sought out the
most quintessential forms (Asia)" (WM 91, KSA 11: 571). To this Kaufmann notes: According
to 1911, p. 499, the manuscript continued at this point: "Among those thinkers who developed
pessimism further I do not include Eduard von Hartmann whom I'd far sooner lump with
'agreeable literature'." Again, in 1885 — 86 Nietzsche writes: "that pessimism, the pessimism
of Herr von Hartmann, who claims to put the pleasure and displeasure of existence itself on
the scales, with his arbitrary incarceration in the pre-Copernican prison and field of vision,
would be something retarded and regressive unless it is merely a bad joke of a Berliner"
(WM 789, KSA 12: 168).
 Chapter Eleven
Nietzsche's Worldview in Anschauung

Nietzsche appears to repeat the duality of the Schopenhauerian premis,

that we are in one sense representation, and in another sense, the will itself,
when he writes: "We are in one sense pure Anschauung (that means projected
images of a completely enraptured being, which has the highest repose in
this viewing), on the other hand we are the one being itself.'" Let us note,
first, Nietzsche's own specific definition of "pure Anschauung." It means the
projected images of a purely enraptured being, which has the highest repose
in this viewing. However, this pure Anschauung, is reserved for the viewing
of the will. Human beings also find rapture in their viewing and projection
of images, in their Anschauung, however, theirs is separate from that of the
will. In what follows, we will find that Nietzsche is not following Schopen-
hauer and that he has rejected the abstract idealism of the will and its
objectifications in the world of representation as purely subjective phenomena
in favor of a viewpoint which, to use Hartmann's words, "asserts the right
of plurality and individuality to reach just as far as the reality of existence in
general." That is, Nietzsche diverges from the subjective phenomenality of
Schopenhauer to assert an objective phenomenality more in line with Hart-
mann's philosophy of the unconscious.

The Term Anschauung

Nietzsche appropriates the key term Anschauung from Schopenhauer.

Anschauung is a term which Kant had used to designate both our direct
awareness of individual entities (a process which, for us, is always by means
of passive sensibility) and the percepts of which we are thereby aware. 2 In
his translator's introdution to Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Represen-
tation, Jayne defines Schopenhauer's use of the term Anschauung: "it is used
by Schopenhauer to describe what occurs when the eye perceives an external
object as the cause of the sensation on the retina." In his translation of this

' Nietzsche, A N 278, K S A 7: 214.

2 Nietzsche, Ρ 41 η.
 The Term Anschauung 159

term, Jayne selects "perception" as the nearest English equivalent. He notes

that it may also be translated as "intuition" in the sense of an immediate
apprehension." 3 Breazeale, in his Philosophy as Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's
Notebooks of the Early 1870's writes of the term Anschauung:
4

This term is often translated into English as "intuition," but such a trans-
lation gives an inappropriate air of mystery to what is, after all, the utterly
ordinary experience of perceiving something through the senses (with the
emphasis upon the reception, rather than the recognition of the percept). I
have usually translated it "perception." 5

Breazeale's characterization of a translation of Anschauung into intuition as

being unnecessarily mystifying, and the assertion that the experience of
perceiving is an "utterly ordinary" one, are statements entirely unjustified in
light of the notes from 1872/73, which Breazeale is translating, notes in which
Nietzsche is examining the complexity of these very operations. In both the
1870/71 and 1872/73 notes, the word Anschauung could appropriately be
translated as a combination of these definitions as "intuitive-perception," that
is, perception operating in the sense of intuitive or unconscious inferences
from the senses, before discursive thinking in language offers the percept,
the concept of what has been perceived.
Nietzsche takes over the term Anschauung in all of the above meanings,
with which he was thoroughly familiar, and then greatly expands on its
semantic implications following Schopenhauer, who, according to Jayne,
privileges the eye and the image produced by the sensation on the retina.
While using it in the sense of what I have called "intuitive perception,"
Nietzsche relies heavily on its more obvious definition as a viewing, or mode
of viewing or observing. This comes also from an understanding of exactly
how Schopenhauer uses the word Vorstellung, whose primary meaning is that
of "placing before." Schopenhauer uses Vorstellung to express what he de-
scribes as "a very complicated physiological occurrence in an animal's brain,
whose result is the consciousness of a picture or image at that very spot." 6
Although Schopenhauer privileges the eye as the major sensory organ, he
does not develop what we may call, in Nietzsche's case, a theoretics of the
eye and imagery. Thus, Anschauung is not only intuitive-perception meant in

3 Schopenhauer, WWR 1: viii.

4 Breazeale's translations span the years 1872—1876 and do not include the notes which I
indicate as the Anschauung notes.
s Nietzsche Ρ 41n. Breazeale then adds, "According to Anders (VAP 125) the theory that
perception is based upon unconscious inference, i. e., acts of thought, was defended by
Zöllner and Helmholtz." Breazeale adds this sentence because his note, from which I am
quoting in an attempt to define Anschauung, refers to a note written in 1872 by Nietzsche
which links unconscious inferences with Anschauung.
6 Schopenhauer, WWR 2: 191.
160 XI. Nietzsche's Worldview in Anschauung

a passive sense, rather it assumes that the act of perception is, in the senses
referred to by Lange, an active process of synthesization which results in a
unitary psychical image. In 1872 Nietzsche writes:
Unconscious inferences set me to thinking: it is no doubt a process of passing
from image to image. The image which is last attained then operates as a
stimulus and motive. Unconscious thinking must take place apart from
concepts: it must therefore occur in perceptions (Anschauungen) J
Here, we see Nietzsche still attempting to come to closer grips with the
unconscious process of perception and abstraction through the use of images.
And we find that Nietzsche intends the word Anschauung in the sense of
intuitive perceptions, but even more in the sense of the act of imaging.
In a note written as early as 1863, when Nietzsche was 19 years old,
before his acquaintance with Schopenhauer, Lange, or Hartmann, he is already
connecting the senses of sight and sound with the creation of a "form" or
"image," and he is already attempting to take apart the complexity of the
perceptual act, one which he connects, at this early date, with the spirit,
perhaps intuition? The idea of mental images or pictures of objects, Nietzsche
would have met with in his study of the ancients, most notably Epicurus,
who claims that objects are not the things in themselves, but the mental
images of them. These are the only real starting-point. Epicurus also recog-
nized the formation of memory-images, which arise from repeated perception.
For Epicurus the original image, then the constantly modified memory image,
which becomes the universal image, can eventually, through the science of
atomism, lead to the thing in itself. Nietzsche, of course, believes that the
thing in itself cannot be known. In 1863, then, Nietzsche writes:
We cannot know things in themselves and for themselves, but only their
images in the mirror of our soul. Our soul is nothing other than the eye,
the ear, etc. spiritualized. Color and sound do not belong to things in a
proper sense, but to the eye and the ear. All of the abstracta, all the properties
which we attribute to a thing, form it in our spirit. Nothing lures us like
the living. All that draws us to life, has at first received life in our spirit.
The eye receives an impression of a region as a flat image. Habit differentiates
the spatial to some extent. The unfocussed outlines remain. Already this
external image does not express the reality; with that it is no work of art,
it is however already spiritualized. Now the spirit searches for a unity in
the fullness and binds them quick as lightning. (There is) enjoyment in this
ordering even though only an apparent one, because order rests in the spirit.8

This active enjoyment in ordering, in creating images in appearance out of

the impressions of the eye (and ear), I maintain, prefigures Nietzsche's sense

7 Nietzsche, Ρ 41.
8 Nietzsche, UN 2 9 1 - 9 2 , BAW 2: 2 5 5 - 5 6 .
 The Term Anschauung 161

of the term Anschauung. Anschauung could well replace the word Anordnung in
the above. The sentence "Already this external image does not express the
reality; with that it is no work of art, it is however already spiritualized"
expresses Anschauung, unconscious intuitive-image perception. It is the mo-
ment at which reality is no longer grasped, but a point before the human
creation of the work of art, of poetry in concepts: "in art we have imitated
nature and place art in nature." Here, human beings form, through concep-
tuality and language, poetry, music, as well as philosophical worldviews. But
Anschauung is that unconscious in-between, the point at which the image is
"spiritualized," transformed in order that it may become art. And as we shall
see, it is art which provides the means toward greater Anschauung.
Anschauung, in the 1870/71 notes, is not only meant as the unconscious
imaging process of perception or intuition based on the eye and viewing, it
is also the overarching metaphor for the process and worldview which
Nietzsche presents. "Enjoyment in this ordering," enjoyment in Anschauung
is a transforming activity. Anschauung is the activity of the will toward ever
greater levels of Anschauung. Because of the complexity of the term, I retain
the German word.
In constructing his worldview in Anschauung, Nietzsche is expressing ideas
influenced by Hartmänn's philosophy of the unconscious, however, Nietzsche
does not use the word unconscious, rather, adheres to the Schopenhauerian
terms will and representation. However, Nietzsche uses the word will in
conjunction with the word being, as the two aspects of the more compre-
hensive term Ur-Eine. The will is the activity of the Ur-Eine, while being, is
the eternal, unchanging aspect of the Ur-Eine.9 Nietzsche uses the term
representation in two ways in the Anschauung-Notes; once as the representation
(mechanism) which belongs to the activity of the will in its activity of
projection of images, and in a second sense similar to Schopenhauer's rep-
resentation, as the conscious projection of images of human intelligence. And
Nietzsche inserts a dimension between will and representation which he calls
appearance (Erscheinung). The structure which Nietzsche builds, while retain-
ing Schopenhauerian terms is analogous to Hartmann's structure.

Hartmann Nietzsche
Idea and Will Being and Will
World Appearance
Ur-Eine <
I Ego Representation

' It must be noted, however, that Nietzsche sometimes does appear to use the word will
almost synonymously with the Ur-Eine in both of its aspects as being and as activity.
162 XI. Nietzsche's Worldview in Anschauung

Nietzsche sets up a very complex model of Anschauung.10 Let us proceed

to separate the elements in this worldview in order to discuss them in more
detail for a clearer understanding of the progress and procedures leading
from the simultaneous nature of the Ur-Eine as being and will to individual
conscious thinking. This path inevitably leads Nietzsche to the question of
language and forces him to further clarify his ideas about its place in this
process of transition.

The Ur-Eine and Anschauung

There is what Nietzsche calls the Ur-Eine whose essence is pain and
contradiction. It is contradiction in that it is at the same time being: eternal
rest, pure being (Self-Anschauung), and will: eternal movement and striving
of being through illusion (Anschauung of world). "When the will views itself,
it must always see the same...as being eternally unchanged. The will is only
eternal rest, pure being." 11 However, simultaneously, "In the will is multi-
plicity, movement only through representation: an eternal being first becomes
through the representation [mechanism] to will, that means that becoming,
the will itself as agent is an appearance." 12 The Ur-Eine flees from pain in
the pleasure of the viewing of illusion. The engendering of illusion by the
world will, or the will's Anschauung of world, takes place through a Willens-
regung, an excitement produced by the will. This Willensregung comes about
through what Nietzsche calls the representation mechanism (Vorstellungsap-

10
Here I offer a diagram of Nietzsche's worldview in Anschauung. Compare this with my
diagram of Hartmann's worldview based upon his philosophy of the unconscious in my
note 25, chapter 10.
r views itself as eternal rest, pure being (Se\{-Anschauung)
views itself as world which offers the illusion (Anschauung
of world)
1. the means of illusion is the representation mechanism
which offers representation
Ur-Eine < 2. the means of representation is multiplicity which offers
becoming
3. becoming is multiplicity as appearance
Appearance = eternal allstriving of being as continuing
symbolization of will

Representation: conscious intellect: rumination of experienced in con-

scious thinking, simply symbol (this is the Anschauung of
humans, the viewing of representation)
u" Nietzsche, AN 270, 274, KSA 7: 2 0 3 - 0 4 .
12
Ibid., A N 269 - 70, KSA 7: 1 1 3 - 1 4 .
 The Ur-Eine and Anschauung 163

parat). We first met with this term in Nietzsche's "On Schopenhauer" where,
as we recall, he offered as the grounding sentence of the Schopenhauerian
philosophy the following: "The groundless, unknowing will reveals itself,
through a representation mechanism as world." As far as I can ascertain, it
is a term which does not come from Schopenhauer or Hartmann, but rather
a term which Nietzsche coins, but nowhere adequately defines. One can only
piece together a possibility of its meaning for Nietzsche. It does not appear
to have any affinity with the three ways which Schopenhauer offers for the
will's going over into objectification: "Individual manifestations of the will
are set in motion by motives in beings gifted with an intellect, but no less by
stimuli in the organic life of animals and of plants, and finally in all inorganic
nature, by causes in the narrowest sense of the word." 13 All of these presuppose
a sensible connection of one degree or another. However, as we proceed we
will find that the Vorstellungsapparat which Nietzsche has in mind operates
independently of consciousness of sensible being. It is a precondition of it.
"Representation mechanism is not to be confused in sensible being." 14 It is
a mechanism, an activity of the will, something on the order of a combination
of matter and force — it is set in motion by a Willensregung, a stimulus or
force acting upon atoms — offering movement and something upon which
to base movement. It operates, as far as I can determine, along the lines of
Hartmann's will-acts described in chapter 10. The representation mechanism
also does not belong to being in itself, "Representation proves itself as a
mechanism of deception which we do not need to presuppose in the essence
of the thing." It is an activity of the will aspect of the Ur-Eine which the
will itself sets in motion. "As soon as the will wants to appear, this mechanism
begins." 15 In these notes, it is essential to keep the representation mechanism,
which belongs completely to the will, separate from representation itself
which only arises as a result of appearance and conscious intellect. In the
latter sense it is similar to Schopenhauer's representation. Nietzsche charac-
terizes representation in this sense as "the smallest of all powers; it is as agent
only deception." In the former sense it is Nietzsche's own use of the
representation mechanism as a term for the activity of the will, "because only
the will acts.16

13 Schopenhauer, WN 217, SW 4: 3.
14 Nietzsche, AN 270, KSA 7: 113.
15 Ibid., AN 269, KSA 7: 1 1 3 - 1 4 .
16 Ibid., AN 268, KSA 7: 111.
164 XI. Nietzsche's Worldview in Anschauung

Space, Time, and Causality

The means of the representation mechanism to representation is multi-

plicity. Multiplicity as appearance is becoming. The becoming of appearance
is only possible through the bonds of space, time and causality. However,
Nietzsche writes:
I hesitate to trace space, time and causality from the pitiful human con-
sciousness; they belong to the will. They are the condition for all symbolics
of appearance: man himself is such a symbol, as is the state, the earth. This
symbolism is not unconditionally there for the individual man alone.17

This is in direct contradiction to Schopenhauer who places space, time, and

causality in human consciousness, in the principium individuationis, as a precon-
dition for the appearance of representation. Nietzsche is here in complete
agreement with Hartmann. However it is important to stress that space, time,
and causality do not belong to the being of will in itself, but rather to the
activity of the will, the mechanism of representation which is the presuppo-
sition for all symbolics of appearance. Human consciousness, which makes
use of the categories of space, time, and causality, has them only in so far as
they exist already before or beyond human consciousness. "The individual
projection of the will...comes only as projection [of Anschauung to feeling
of its nature as will in the bonds of space, time, and causality." 18 Projection
or Anschauung is synonymous, for Nietzsche, with space, time, and causality.
This projection of the will in time and space is only an image of itself. Human
representation is only appearance of the will which it itself projects. "This
continuing symbolization of the will is appearance." 19 Time and space, then,
operate as wholly unconscious operations which are presupposed in all
symbolics of appearance.
Nietzsche goes on to characterize the manner in which time allows the
engendering of appearance out of will. Again, we see the similarity to
Hartmann.
This the Ur-process: the one world-will is simultaneously sett-Anschauung:
and it sees itself as world: as illusion. Timeless: in each tiniest point of time
Anschauung of world: if time was real, there would be no succession. If space
was real, also no succession. Irreality of space and time. No becoming. Or:
becoming is appearance. How is the appearance of becoming possible? That
means how is appearance possible next to being? When the will views itself,
it must always see the same. That means that appearance must be, as being
eternally unchanged. ... Thus there is only an unending multiplicity of wills:

17Ibid., AN 270, K S A 7: 1 1 4 - 1 5 .
18Ibid., AN 278, K S A 7: 215.
" Ibid., AN 270, K S A 7: 1 1 3 - 1 4 .
 Space, Time, Causality 165

each projects itself in every moment and remains eternally the same. So that
there is for each will a different time. There is no emptiness, the whole world
is appearance, through and through atom for atom without gaps. Only the
one will can perceive the world completely as appearance. It is thus not only
suffering, but engendering: it engenders appearance in every smallest moment: as the
not-real, the not-one, the not-being, but as becoming,20

Nietzsche describes the result of the representation mechanism as the pro-

duction of unending wills, which the will engenders in every smallest moment.
And each of these wills is different and remains eternally the same. We can
see the strong resemblance to Hartmann's idea of the will-acts. However, in
his attempt to reconcile being and becoming, Nietzsche posits the eternity of
each will, something Hartmann does not do. Let us follow his argument
closely. The will is simultaneously sc\i-Anschauung and Anschauung of world,
and since the will (as being) knows to time, it is "Timeless." Yet the will (as
activity) is "in each tiniest point of time still Anschauung of world." "If time
was real" — that is, did belong to the will in itself as being — "there would
be no succession" because the will is "eternal rest, pure being." Therefore
space and time are not real ("irreality of space and time"), so there can be
"no becoming." However, there is becoming, therefore it must be an ap-
pearance ("Becoming is appearance"). Then Nietzsche asks: "But how is
appearance possible next to being?" "Appearance must be, as being eternally
unchanged." This can only happen if the will "projects itself in every moment
(as a will) and remains eternally the same." "So that there is for each will a
different time. There is no emptiness, the whole world is appearance, through and
through atom for atom without gaps." "Thus there is only an unending
multiplicity of wills."
We are will and at the same time completely entangled in the world of
appearance. Life as a progressing, appearance projecting (Anschauung), and
this with pleasure producing convulsion (Krampf). The atom as point,
contentless, pure appearance, in each smallest moment becoming, never being.
So the whole will has become appearance and views itself.21

We find here, that the terms of the discussion which Lange introduces, in
chapter 6 as to whether the projection of images is outside the subject or
merely within his consciousness, has been greatly expanded upon by
Nietzsche. Long before human consciousness projects images of a world, the
will projects appearance, that is, creates a phenomenal world. The will's
projection of Anschauung is a convulsive act of atoms in time, but only a
point in each smallest moment of time, only becoming, never to be charac-
terized as being an image, only the pure appearance of such. However, each

20 Ibid., A N 2 7 3 - 7 4 , K S A 7: 2 0 3 - 0 4 .
21 Ibid., A N 279, K S A 7: 2 1 6 .
166 XI. Nietzsche's Worldview in Anschauung

will has a different time, a time which is eternal and remains the same. This
eternal atomism of each moment allows the will as being to eternally view
itself as the same. What Nietzsche attempts to do here is to reconcile the
simultaneity of being and the becoming of will without recourse to conscious
intellect.22 His answer is appearance. Here, Nietzsche inserts an objective
phenomenality after the manner of Hartmann.

Conscious Intellect and Anschauung

How do human beings come to view this objective appearance? Through

representation. And how do humans come to view representation? Human
beings are first of all the "vision forms" of the Anschauung of the will, and
their relationship with representation is also one of Anschauung. Appearance
makes possible empirical thinking: however, "that is not true being."

22 This thought, which we find here, is perhaps Nietzsche's first written expression of an idea,
and method of thinking which comes to underlie the major aspects of his philosophy, the
will to power and the thought of the eternal return. Nietzsche's idea of time moments and
their relation to atoms and the timelessness of being, expressed here for the first time, may,
as I have suggested, been influenced by Hartmann's adoption of Herbartian atomism.
However, Nietzsche would also have been familiar with the general state of dynamic theories
and their relation to time and space through Lange. In 1873 Nietzsche is again working on
the problem of points of time in some notes which have come to be called his "Zeitatomlehre,"
in which he is using ideas of Boscovich, Spir and Zöllner. For a specific commentary on
this see VAP 140—53. Perhaps, Deleuze, among current Nietzsche critics captures the problem
most succinctly, when he characterizes Nietzsche's idea of pure becoming: "That the present
moment is not a moment of being or of present 'in the strict sense', that it is the passing
moment, forces us to think of becoming, but to think of it precisely as what could not have
started, and cannot finish becoming. What is the being of that which becomes, of that which
neither starts nor finishes becoming? Returning is the being of that which becomes" {Nietzsche and
Philosophy, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983, 48). The
idea of repetition arises first in the "Zeitatomlehre" where Nietzsche argues against time
understood as a continuum, rather "there are only totally different timepoints." Coexistence
of timepoints is only possible if there is "a reproducing being, which holds earlier time
moments alongside present ones." "Multiplicity would come about then only if there were
representing beings, who could repeatedly think this point [the reality of the world in the
'Zeitatomlehre' notes exists as one persistent and unchanging point] in the smallest moments:
beings who take the point in different timepoints as not being identical and take these points
simultaneously." (KSA 7: 577) These ideas, again, point to Nietzsche's attempt to reconcile
being and becoming as he does in the Anschauung notes, and as he does in the idea of the
eternal recurrence of the same. In a note published in the Will to Power (1883 — 85) Nietzsche
writes: "To impose upon becoming the character of being — that is the supreme will to
power. That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of
being: — high point of the meditation" (WM 617, KSA 12: 312). Clearly these studies in his
1870/71 Anschauung notes are prefigurations of Nietzsche's eventual idea of the eternal
recurrence of the same.
 Conscious Intellect and Anschauung 167

Our thinking is only an image of the Ur-intellect, a thinking arising through

the Anschauung of the one will, which envisions a vision by thinking. We
view thinking as we view the body — because we are will. ... It appears,
however, that our Anschauung is only the image of the one Anschauung, that
means, nothing but a vision begotten in every moment of the one represen-
tation. The unity between the intellect and the empirical world is the pre-
stabilized harmony, they are born in each moment and coincide with each
other completely down to the smallest atom. There is nothing internal, to
which something external does not correspond. For each atom there is a
corresponding soul. All that is present is doubly a representation: once as image,
then as image of the image. Life is this incessant generation of this doubled
representation: only the will is and lives. The empirical world only appears,
and becomes,23

The image projecting activity of consciousness is the same as that of the

will's, born in each moment, in each atom, "there is nothing internal to which
something external does not correspond." However, conscious Anschauung,
human Anschauung, remains eternally separated from that of the will's An-
schauung, it remains always only an image of the image.
Human Anschauung is rooted in perception. For Nietzsche, the substantial
is perception, and the body, the material (that is, the image projected as a
result of perception) is appearance. This coincides with Nietzsche's reading
in Lange and his presentation of Ueberweg's camera obscura. "Perception is
not the result of the cells, rather the cells are the result of perception, that
means an artistic projection, an image." 24 The being of the object is the being
of Anschauung-sein. Nietzsche also posits a necessary relationship between
Anschauung and pain. The representation in feeling produced by the Willens-
regung and projected in Anschauung "has with respect to the actual stirring of
the will only the meaning of a symbol. ... This symbol is the illusory image
through which a common drive exerts a subjective individual stimulation." 25
Nietzsche adds that feeling arises with will and unconscious representation.
The "common drive which exerts a subjective individual stimulation" comes
about as a result of the will's goal. "The continuing symbolization serves the
purposes of the will." 26 Thus, for Nietzsche there is, on the level of the will,
the Willensregung which prompts the will to Anschauung. On the level of
representation and conscious thinking, it is the instinct or driving force which
prompts Anschauung. However, even our Anschauung still has a will's goal.
"We are only conscious of the vision, not of our essence." 27 The statement,

23 Ibid., AN 276, KSA 7: 208.

24 Ibid., AN 273, KSA 7: 203.
25 Ibid., AN 269, KSA 7: 112-13.
26 Ibid., AN 270, KSA 7: 114.
27 Ibid., AN 279, KSA 7: 216-17.
168 XI. Nietzsche's Worldview in Anschauung

that our Anschauung has a will's goal is very important. The reason for
Anschauung for both the will and for human beings is to create pleasure, to
aid the Ur-Eine to escape from pain, which as we recall, along with contra-
diction is its essence.
As that represented, don't we feel pain(?) Man, for example as a sum of
innumerable small atoms of pain and will. Atoms, whose pain only the one
will suffers, whose multiplicity is again the result of the rapture of the one
will. We are thus incapable of suffering the real suffering of the will, but
suffer it only in representation and the particular in representation. Thus:
the individual projection of the will (in rapture) is in reality nothing but
the one will: it comes only as projection to feeling of its nature as will, that
means, in the bonds of space, time, causality, and thus, cannot carry the
suffering and the pleasure of the one will. The projection comes to con-
sciousness only as appearance, it feels itself through and through only as
appearance, its suffering is only mediated through the representation and
ended by it. The will and its Urgrund, suffering, cannot be directly grasped,
but only through the objectification.28

Language and Anschauung

Now we are in a position to answer the question: How does language fit
into the worldview in Anschauung?
What is the becoming conscious of a movement of the will? Symbolizing
that becomes clearer and clearer. Language, the word, nothing but symbol.
Thinking, that means conscious representing, it is nothing but the making
conscious, the combining of language symbols. The Ur-intellect is something
completely different: it is essentially representation of purpose, thinking is
recalling of symbols.2'
On the level of reality, there is the will, and the activity of the will, the Ur-
intellect. On the level of representation there is conscious intellect, which
uses the symbol of language. The activity of the will is the first viewing, the
first image, the creation of the multiplicity of appearance through the rep-
resentation mechanism. The viewing of human conscious intellect of that
deceptive representation is the second image. Therefore, the will viewing
representation, that is, creating through projection, is the first image. And
our viewing is always only a viewing of this first image and constitutes an
image of the image. Language provides thinking with images of images,
symbols of symbols. Thinking must always remain as representations of
illusion because it always remains a reproduction, an analogy after the

28 Ibid., AN 278, KSA 7: 2 1 4 - 1 5 .

29 Ibid., AN 269, KSA 7: 1 1 2 - 1 3 .
 Language and Anschauung 169

experience. Only the will acts. We never get beyond thinking, beyond illusion.
"The separation of will and representation is really a result of the necessity
in thinking." 30 And the relationship of thinking to lived reality is only "a
partial rumination."
[The will's] organ of perception and that of man are not identical: this belief
is naive anthropomorphism. The organs of perception with animals, plants,
and men are only the organs of conscious perception. The enormous wisdom
of its' growth is already the activity of an intellect. The individual is in any
case not the work of conscious knowing, rather the work of the Ur-intellect.
The Kantian-Schopenhauerian Idealists did not recognize this. Our intellect
never carries us further than to conscious knowledge: insofar as we are
however, also intellectual instinct, we can venture to say something about
the Ur-intellect. No arrow reaches beyond this.31

Here, we have a very interesting and significant point. Nietzsche repeats

Lange's dictum and his own that we can never come to know the thing in
itself: "the organ of perception of the will and that of man are not identical:
this belief is a naive anthropomorphism." However, Nietzsche adds a dimen-
sion which Lange does not. And he is enabled to do this with the aid of his
work with Hartmann's unconscious. "Our intellect never carries us further
than to conscious knowledge: insofar as we are intellectual instinct, we can
venture to say something about the Ur-intellect." The solution to this
statement lies in another statement of Nietzsche's already referred to above:
"All growth in our knowledge arises out of the making conscious of the
unconscious." In other words, if our "knowledge" remains chained to con-
scious intellect and its second order symbol and image language, even granted
that ultimate knowledge of the will is impossible, within the separate realm
of human conscious intellect nothing can be achieved. If, however, the
dimension of unconscious symbol and image, thus unconscious language,
belonging to the objective world of the Ur-intellect which is equally a part
of us, evinced only through our unconscious instincts, be made a conscious
"knowing," then something more may be accomplished for human under-
standing. "Suppose there is an inseparable connection between the intellect
which produces concepts and representations and the perceptual world!" 32
But this is what Nietzsche is proposing. The human being is appearance,
"pure Anschauung of the activity of the will, but is also one with the being
of the Ur-Eine, "one with reality itself." And human beings are eternally
servered from knowledge of these aspects of self by intellect and its repre-

30 Ibid.
31 Ibid., A N 268, K S A 7: 111.
52 Ibid., A N 271, K S A 7: 120.
170 XI. Nietzsche's Worldview in Anschauung

sentation. Making the unconscious conscious, coming to know our intellec-

tueller Instinkt may allow us to overcome the limitations of conscious repre-
sentation in a merging with our nature as appearance.

Will and Action

If feeling is will and unconscious representation as response to a Willens-

regung, do will and conscious thinking constitute the actions of human beings?
Nietzsche answers no.
Where does the act begin? Could "act" also be an indefinable representation?
A movement of the will — becoming visible. But visible? This visibility is
something accidental and external. ... The conscious will does not characterize
action: because we can consciously strive for a feeling, which we would not
really call an action.33

Where, then, do humans get the idea that they consciously will their actions?
The world of representations is the means to keep us in the world of action
and to force us to actions in the service of the instincts. The representation
is motive for action: does not touch the essence of the action. The instinct
which drives us to act and the representation which comes into consciousness
as motive are separated. The will's freedom is the world of this inserted
representation, the belief that motive and action necessarily condition one
another.34

However, intelligence is always tied to expediency, "intelligence proves itself

in expediency." "Intelligence can only be talked about in a sphere, where
mistakes can be made, where error has a place — in the sphere of conscious-
ness." How does Nietzsche describe the error which consciousness makes,
and how is it related to the willing of action? "When the purpose is nothing
but a rumination of experiences, the true agent hides, so we may not place
purposeful action onto the nature of things, that means we do not at all need
an intelligence producing representation." 35 If only will acts, and our thinking
is only a rumination of, a symbol for this acting of the will, yet because we
are limited to conscious intellect, which is only this rumination, this ever
clearer symbolizing, our actions, and the motives upon which they are
supposedly based, could be dispensed with, and our actions would still be
those of the will's expediency. I have already touched on this idea. The true
agent of action is "a common drive [brought about by a Willensregung\ which
exerts a subjective individual stimulation." However, the goal, which our

33 Ibid., AN 269, K S A 7: 112.

34 Ibid., AN 268, K S A 7: 110.
35 Ibid., AN 270, K S A 7: 115.
 Loss of Identity 171

conscious understanding sweeps before our eyes is nothing but a reproduced

past in the form of word symbols and combinations of word symbols, and
remains eternally separated from the true agent of action. "The goal [thus
presented] is not the motive, the agent of action: although this appears to be
the case." 36
It is naive to believe, that w e can ever come out of this sea of illusion. T h i s
insight is completely impractical. ... A n individual should be of service to
the total purpose: without being aware of it. E v e r y animal, every plant does
this. W i t h man, in conscious thought, an illusory purpose is inserted: the
single individual believes he is doing something for himself. 3 7

Thus, again, we see Niet2sche suggesting that it is the unconscious process

of expediency which causes our actions, and our conscious intellect only
superimposes upon these its own weakened symbols and motivations made
possible through language.

Loss of Identity

With this kind of thinking, Nietzsche, again, departs radically from

Schopenhauer, and devalues the importance of the subjective individual in a
manner similar to Hartmann. Nietzsche finds it necessary to disolve the
"symbol" man, that is the symbol of conscious mind. In Hartmann Nietzsche
only finds a continuation or confirmation of ideas he already found in Lange.
As already discussed in Nietzsche's "On Teleology," the idea of unity is only
constituted in the concept and not in actuality. Stack writes of Lange that he
believes the "assumption of absolute unities is fallacious because there are no
Einheiten in the natural world. Unity is a relative concept that is useful for
thought, but does not represent the actuality of complex organic multiplici-
ties." 38 Lange points to Goethe's Morphologie in which he suggests the
organism is a multiplicity. Nietzsche, too, in "On Teleology" refers specifically
to this passage. Nietzsche takes these ideas over, finds confirmation and
expansion of them in Hartmann and then develops them even further in his
Anschauung notes. Nietzsche rejects, at this early point in his thinking, the
identity of the subject, of conscious individuality. Rather, the human being
consists in a multiplicity of representations, different in each moment, and as
a part of a huge self engendering and self maintaining organism which is the
world. The very concept of individuality can only have arisen in represen-

36
Ibid., A N 269, K S A 7: 113.
37
Ibid., A N 267, K S A 7: 102.
38
Stack, L N S , 167.
172 XI. Nietzsche's Worldview in Anschauung

tation because of the individual moments of the will's acting. "From the
standpoint of conscious thinking the world appears as an immense number
of interpenetrated individuals: which actually cancels the concept of the
individual." However,
The world as a huge self engendering and self maintaining organism:
multiplicity lies in things because intellect is in them. Multiplicity and unity
the same — an unthinkable thought. It is important to see that individuation
is not the birth o f conscious mind. F o r that reason we can talk o f illusory
representations under the presupposition o f the reality of individuation. 3 9

Now, the intellect in things which allows multiplicity, to which Nietzsche

refers, here, is not conscious intellect, rather the Ur-intellect, the activity of
the will in the Anschauung of the world of appearance. Here is real indivi-
duation taking place in illusory representations, one of which is conscious
mind. Although human intellect thinks it is the source of individuation, as
exemplified in Schopenhauer's principium individuationis, it is not. The individ-
ualism of conscious mind is only the image in representation of the real
individualism of the will's activity in each moment which is appearance.
Therefore, human beings are "different in each moment. ... man is a repre-
sentation born in each moment." 40 There is no real identity of the human
being or of the individual.

Teleology and the Goal of Anschauung

If we are one with the will and yet we are not able to know the will,
what is the most we, as conscious representation, can hope for?
We are the will; we are vision f o r m s : where lies the binding element? What
is activity o f the nerves, brain, thinking, perception? — We are simultane-
ously the viewing ones — there is nothing but the viewing o f the vision —
we are the ones viewed, only a s o m e t h i n g to be seen — we are those in
which the whole process starts anew. 4 1

The only goal left in this situation is, as far as Nietzsche can see, to ascend
in viewing, to ascend in Anschauung. "It is the nature of every man to ascend
in Anschauung as high as he can. ... That man can ascend, this means that he
is different in each moment." 42 It is this very non-identity of "man" which,
according to Nietzsche, allows him to ascend in Anschauung.

39 Nietzsche, AN 269, KSA 7: 112.

40 Ibid., AN 275, KSA 7: 208.
41 Ibid., AN 278, KSA 7: 216.
42 Ibid., AN 275, KSA 7: 208.
 Teleology and the Goal of Anschauung 173

What does it mean to ascend in Anschauung, and how does conscious

intellect contribute to this process if it always operates in illusion? If in the
area of nature, of necessity, expedience is a nonsensical presupposition, "why
do we need then to presuppose an intellect in things?" "Consciousness, on
the other hand, is only a means of existence for the continued existence of
individuals. Suspension or weakening of consciousness is thus = individua-
tion. Here is the solution: to see the intellect as means is the demand of the
illusion." 43 How are we to take these statements? Again, Nietzsche is talking
on two levels. First, we presuppose an intellect in things, this refers to the
Ur-intellect: it is the aim of the Ur-intellect, set in motion through the
representation mechanism, to ascend in the viewing of Anschauung of the
world. Consciousness with regard to the aim of the will exists only as an
Existen^mittel for the furthering of individuals in this viewing of Anschauung.
However, Nietzsche suggests that "growth in knowledge arises out of the
making conscious of the unconscious." The degree to which one strives after
consciousness of the unity, between the Ur-Eine and representation, or after
consciousness of breaking of this unity, those who find representation itself
to be true, determines rank or elevation of the individual. The highest use
for our limited intellect, then, would be to "see the intellect as means, as the
demand of illusion." The highest level of individuation in Anschauung for a
human being is to use intellect to see illusion as illusion. To see appearance
only as appearance. "Life in appearance as goal." This level of Anschauung is
left for the genius. The genius, for Nietzsche is the artist. "The genius is that
represented as having the ability of pure seeing: what does the genius see? The veil
of appearances, purely as appearances. The man who is not genius, views the
appearances as reality or is represented as such,"44
To ascend in Anschauung is to ascend in artistic projection. Just as "The
projection of appearance is the artistic Ur-Process,"45 for the genius, the artistic
projection of appearance, while recognizing it as nothing but appearance, is
the highest goal in Anschauung. In the genius as artist, "we begin the whole
process anew."
How does appearance as goal offer a salvation from the illusion beyond
which we cannot get?
Our life is a represented life. We come no step farther. Freedom of the will,
every activity is only representation. Even the work of the genius is
representation. These mirrorings in the genius are mirrorings of appearance, no
longer those of the Ur-Eine: as images of the image they are the purest moment
of inertia of being. The truly not being — the work of art. The other

43 Ibid., A N 271, KSA 7: 163.

44 Ibid., A N 275, KSA 7: 2 0 5 - 0 6 .
45 Ibid., A N 273, KSA 7: 203.
174 XI. Nietzsche's Worldview in Anschauung

mirrorings are only the surface of the Ur-Eine. Being satisfies itself in perfect
appearance,46
In the artist, the Ur-power rules through images, it is that power which
creates. It is these moments that are the object of creation: now there is an
image of the image, of the image? (?) The will needs the artist, the Ur-
process is repeated in him. In the artist the will attains the rapture of
Anschauung. Here for the first time the Ur-pain is completely overwhelmed
by the pleasure of Anschauens,47

The work of art is the truly not being. The work of art represents the pure
moment of inertia of being, that is, a release from the Ur-pain. The rapture
of the Anschauung of the will consists in the viewing of an image of an image
which is not its own, but which is its own process started anew; thus it is
released from its being as pain and contradiction: "Being satisfies itself in
perfect appearance." Thus, the goal of the will is pleasure in self-Anschauung,
through the eyes of the genius who has ascended in Anschauung to the point
where appearance appears only as appearance, where the images created out
of appearance are mirrorings no longer of the Ur-Eine, but of the genius.
There is only one life: where it appears it appears as pain and contradiction.
Pleasure only possible in appearance and Anschauung. Pure immersion in
appearance — the highest purpose of existence: there where pain and
contradiction do not appear present. 48

However, Nietzsche emphasizes that the artist only appears occasionally. And,
here, we find a fascinating convergence between Nietzsche's idea of teleolog-
ical processes and the Anschauung of the will. In addition, to the fact that any
teleological purpose, for human beings, operates completely unconsciously
as the purpose of Anschauung of the will, which coincides with Nietzsche's
idea, in his notes on teleology, that there may be an unconsciously creating
power in nature, he also characterizes the Anschauung of the will as a joining
of mechanism and chance. " I believe in the lack of sound judgement of the
will. The projections are capable of life after infinite trouble and countless
failed experiments. The artist is only occasionally achieved."49 The will activity
of the Ur-Eine does not project a world of appearance according to an
intelligent design, but, as in his notes on teleology, it projects according to
a viewing mechanism, which apparently is regulated by chance survival of
its visions. The pain and contradiction of the Ur-Eine is only ended now and
then.

44
Ibid., AN 272, KSA 7: 199-200.
47
Ibid., AN 276, KSA 7: 208.
48
Ibid., AN 275, KSA 7: 205.
49
Ibid., AN 276, KSA 7: 208-09.
 Teleology and the Goal of Anschauung 175

How does the artist create from the image, from pure representation? By
the "complete concealing of self (Sichdecken) of all that is out and all that is
in in every moment." This Sichdecken is the "lifting up (Aufheben) of character
(which is the typical representation of the Ur-Eine) in the pleasure of art."
What kind of a capacity is it, to be able to improvise out of a foreign character?
One cannot speak of an imitation: because reflection is not the origin of such
improvisations. What is really to be asked: how is an entering into a strange
individuality possible? It is first a freeing from one's own individuality, and
an immersion in a representation. Here w e see how the representation is
capable of differentiating between manifestations of the will: how all char-
acter is an inner representation. 50

This assumption of a foreign individuality is also pleasure in art, expressions

of the will are changed by an ever deepening conception, that is, they are
differentiated and finally silenced. "All good arises from the occasional immersion
in representation, that means out of the becoming one with appearance."51
Certainly, Nietzsche first came by such ideas of the release from pain and
contradiction through the contemplation of art in Schopenhauer in his
consideration of aesthetics.52 Some of what Nietzsche writes sounds similar,
but the result and aim are very different. Schopenhauer seeks to flee pain in
aesthetic contemplation, through the silencing of will and reason, to come
to a pure knowledge of the ideas themselves. Nietzsche, on the other hand
seeks a resolution of pain and pleasure, for there is no release from illusion
except in the knowledge that appearance is appearance. This deeper birth in
Anschauung does not have as its aim knowledge of the Ur-Eine, an impossi-
bility, nor its negation, rather its aim is the enjoyment and affirmation of
pure delight in appearance, and the projection of new appearance. Artistic
release is not achieved in contemplation, but in the activity of the Anschauung
of the genius. There is no universal and absolute idea to know for Nietzsche,

50 Ibid., AN 276, MusA 3: 336.

51 Ibid., AN 277, MusA 3: 337.
52 Schopenhauer summarizes his position as follows: "In the aesthetic method of consideration
we found two inseparable constituent parts: namely, knowledge of the object not as individual
thing, but as Platonic Idea, in other words, as persistent form of this whole species of things:
and the self-consciousness of the knower, not as individual, but as pure, will-less subject of
knowledge. The condition under which the two constituent parts appear always united was
the abandonment of the method of knowledge that is bound to the principle of sufficient
reason" (WWR 1: 1 9 5 - 9 6 , SW2: 230). To this Schopenhauer adds: "But this is just the state
that I described above as necessary for knowledge of the Idea, as pure contemplation,
absorption in perception, being lost in the object, forgetting all individuality, abolishing the
kind of knowledge which follows the principle of sufficient reason, and comprehends only
relations. It is the state where, simultaneously and inseparably, the preceived individual thing
is raised to the Idea of its species, and the knowing individual to the pure subject of will-
less knowing, and now the two, as such, no longer stand in the stream of time and of all
other relations" (WWR 1: 1 9 6 - 9 7 , SW2: 2 3 1 - 3 2 ) .
176 XI. Nietzsche's Worldview in Anschauung

only the continuing, changing in each moment projection of Anschauung of

the Ur-Eine. Rather than abolition of will and consciousness, greater con-
sciousness, which makes the purpose of the will its own purpose, allows
insight into the nature of appearance and our unity with it. Here is Nietzsche's
affirmative answer to Hartmann.
Thus, "the purpose of knowledge is an aesthetic one." 5 3 In fact Nietzsche
defines knowledge itself as a "transcendental aesthetic." The means of knowl-
edge is intellect, the illusory image. Nietzsche asks: what sign language do
we have for the making conscious of the unconscious. He does not answer
this question here. However, he does indicate the method.
The purpose of the world is painless Anschauen pure aesthetic pleasure: this
world of appearance stands in opposition to the world of pain and contra-
diction. The deeper our knowledge goes into the Ur-Sein — which we are
— the more pure Anschauen of the Ur-Eine engenders itself in us. The
apollinian instinct and the dionysian in perpetual movement, one always
advancing beyond the other, leads necessarily to a deeper birth in pure
Anschauung. This is the development of mankind and should be understood
as the purpose of education.54
In light of our discussion of Hartmann's influence upon Nietzsche, this can
be translated as the perpetual movement of consciousness, intellect as means,
and of the unconscious, where conscious intellect has no place, working
toward the deeper birth in Anschauung. Again, this deeper birth in Anschauung
does not have as its purpose knowledge of the Ur-Eine, an impossibility,
rather pure delight in appearance, the creation of new images in appearance,
in the doing of which the Ur-Eine is released from its pain and contradiction.
"Because we recognize in illusory representations the purpose of the Will, so
representation is the birth of the will, so multiplicity is already in will, so
appearance is an aid of the will for itself." 5 5 Nietzsche summarizes these parts
and processes of Anschauung, which I have discussed in some detail, very
briefly in the following:
In mankind, the Ur-Eine looks back upon itself by means of appearance:
appearance reveals the essence. That means: the Ur-Eine views mankind,
rather, the appearance viewing mankind, mankind which sees through the
appearance. There is no way to the Ur-Eine for mankind. He is completely
appearance.
a. reality of pain versus pleasure
b. illusion as the means of pleasure
c. representation [mechanism] as means of illusion
d. becoming, multiplicity as means of representation [mechanism]

53 Nietzsche, A N 275, K S A 7: 207.

54 Ibid.
55 Ibid., A N 270, K S A 7: 114.
 Teleology and the Goal of Anschauung 177

e. becoming, the multiplicity as appearance — pleasure.

f. true being — pain, contradiction
g. the will — already appearance, m o s t universal f o r m .
h. o u r pain — the b r o k e n Urschmerz.
i. o u r pleasure — the complete Ur-pleasure. 5 6

Figure 1, which follows, offers a graphic display of the various aspects

of Anschauung which are separated and related to the various corresponding
aspects of Nietzsche's theory of language as they have been discussed up to
this point. The origins of language would rest in instinct, the innermost
kernel of a being, which resides in the twofold nature of the Ur-Eine. The
unconscious language of the instincts, which exists as a necessary precondition
of conscious language, represents the possibility of a first symbolization of
the appearances of the will of the Ur-Eine, through perception and instinctual
activity. This unconscious instinctual activity produces the formal part of
language as discussed in chapter 9. Conscious language, then, allows a second
image, a partial rumination, the creation of an impersonal world of abstraction,
based completely upon the first image of the unconscious language of the
instincts. If what this conscious language represents is taken as real, the pain
of the Ur-Eine remains. However, if a third language, which consists in a
conscious alternation or reconciliation of conscious language with the un-
conscious formal aspects of language could arise, as it does in the genius, the
pain and contradiction of the Ur-Eine is abolished in the joyful recognition
that appearance is appearance. The supreme recognition of appearance as
appearance allows the "occasional immersion in representation," the loss of
individuality, the becoming one with appearance, which is the will of the Ur-
Eine. I have taken the Dionysian Dithyramb as Nietzsche describes it in The
Birth of Tragedy, as the possible prototype of this third language. 57

5ύ Ibid., A N 274, K S A 7: 205.

57 I venture to suggest that one could correspond the Dionysian intoxication as represented in
The Birth of Tragedy, with the first three columns of Figure 1, which include the two aspects
of the Ur-Eine as well as unconscious representation; the Apollinian dreams (if dream is
taken not as unconscious imaging, but rather, as I maintain Nietzsche means it, as conscious
images which however are dreams or illusions because they bear no relation to reality) with
conscious representation, and the tragic with the reconcilation of these two in the Genius,
in the language of the Dithyramb.
178 XI. Nietzsche's W o r l d v i e w in Anschauung

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 Chapter Twelve
Nietzsche and Schopenhauer

A comparison of the major points of Nietzsche's worldview in Anschauung

as I have just reviewed it with those of the Schopenhauerian philosophy
serves to demonstrate that the basic principles underlying each thinking are
significantly different at the time Nietzsche begins work on The Birth of
Tragedy. My study offers the perspective that Nietzsche's skepticism concern-
ing metaphysics is complete a year after he reads Lange and at least three
years before the publication of The Birth of Tragedy. It is impossible to assert
that, in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche is plying a naive metaphysics after a
Schopenhauerian model.

Space, Time, Causality

The first point to consider is that Schopenhauer, and Kant before him,
consider themselves "transcendental idealists" and that Nietzsche specifically
denies any relationship with such idealism:
The individuatio is in any case not the work of conscious knowing, rather
the work of the Ur-intellect. The Kantian-Schopenhauerian idealists did not
recognize this. Our intellect never carries us further than to conscious
knowledge: insofar as we are however also intellectual instinct, we can
venture to say something about the Ur-intellect.1
Here we see the split which has already become familiar to us. In Nietzsche's
language: we have conscious knowledge but we are intellectual instinct (that is
we are unconscious will). In Schopenhauer's language: we are representation
(objects for the knowing subject) and we are will (the thing in itself).
Schopenhauer's argument is, in effect, that since all consciousness of the
world relies on the operations of the brain as its condition, it must thereby
be a product of that brain functioning. In saying this I do not mean that
Schopenhauer is either a philosopher of dogmatism or skepticism, but I do
mean to emphasize that Schopenhauer begins with representation, that which
is "given" for us to understand on the basis of time and space, through

1 Nietzsche, AN 268, K S A 7: 111.

180 XII. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer

causality. In order to obtain this basic of representation, Schopenhauer has

to posit certain representations as empirical reality. These are exactly those
of space and time, which together proclaim themselves as causality, and which
constitute the subject and his understanding. The whole world of objects
remains as representation. This conditioning of objects by the subject is
transcendental ideality. The argument uses the empirical reality of certain
representations to show the transcendental ideality of all representations.
Kant's a priori categories function in the same manner. But because Scho-
penhauer recognizes and cannot accept that consciousness of representations
could be a meaningless dream, he adds, as metaphysical justification for this,
the will; the will which lies outside of time and space and is fundamentally
other than representation. Time and space do not take place in direct impres-
sion of the will, but only in subsequent perception of it. Thus, Schopenhauer
adds this deus ex machina, that human beings understand and think only
according to the categories of space, time and causality, but simultaneously
and paradoxically, humans have direct impressions of the will which lie
outside of conscious understanding.
Nietzsche counteracts the transcendental idealist position, not by begin-
ning from representation, but by starting from the will acts of the will which
are the Anschauung of the world of the Ur-Eine, and by attributing time, space
and causality not to human intellect, but as we have seen, space, time and
causality belong to the will. They belong to, are a unity with, the will in its
aspect as Anschauung of the world; they are the condition for all symbolics of
appearance. However, when the will views itself in Self-Anschauung, the
categories of time and space are absent, it is pure being. This thinking allows
the concurrence of pure being with pure becoming. Through this maneuver,
Nietzsche avoids the gambit which we saw above in Schopenhauer of attrib-
uting to some representations an empirical reality, and can assert uncondi-
tionally that all representations are appearence. Even the will, which creates
appearance, is itself only known as appearance, and can never be directly
experienced in Schopenhauer's sense. The major difference is that Nietzsche
accords the process of Anschauung, thus time, and space to unconscious
processes, to the Ur-intellect of the will. Human consciousness then already
uses the existent categories of time, space, and causality for its Anschauung of
the world. For Schopenhauer time, space and causality are conscious activities
of the understanding.
 Identity of the Knowing Subject 181

Identity of the Knowing Subject

The differences between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on what I call a

hierarchy between will and representation and on the position of space and
time with regard to them naturally carry over into a difference with regard
to the nature of subject and object. For Schopenhauer, the basic presuppo-
sition is the identity of the subject, an identity which is secured for it through
the understanding which is grounded in the principle of sufficient reason.
Because the subject has this identity it is able to condition the relationship
of objects to it; because of this identity, it is able to first conceive of an
object as something separate from itself. Because time and space, thus caus-
ality, belong to the knowing subject for Schopenhauer, it conditions objects
according to causality. And, when Schopenhauer needs to posit the will,
timeless and extensionless, as directly knowable to the subject, the paradox
in unavoidable. Schopenhauer overcomes this paradox by suggesting that
that which provides the identity of the subject is really the identity of the
will.
The will, alone is unalterable and absolutely identical, and has brought forth
consciousness for its own ends. It is therefore the will that gives it unity
and holds all its representations and ideas together, accompanying them, as
it were like a continous ground-bass.2

However, for Nietzsche, as we have seen, time and space belong to the
will, are presuppositions for all representations in appearance. We are subjects,
there are objects because time and space belong to the will. Subject is not
necessarily privileged over object. Viewed in this way, the concept "subject"
is fundamentally undone. Remember that "There is only an unending mul-
tiplicity of wills: each projects itself in every moment and remains eternally
the same." "Man is a representation born in each moment." Thus, although
Nietzsche, too, finds that it is the will which grounds identity of character
in an individual, "What is firmness of character? An activity of the viewing
will," 3 this grounding is very different from Schopenhauer's grounding of
identity in the will. For Schopenhauer, the will is an absolute, is the thing in
itself, which serves as the ground upon which representation and in whose
service representation arises. However, for Nietzsche, the will, which is only
the activity of the real, the being of the Ur-Eine, is no absolute. It is a
changing, viewing of multiplicity in illusion which comes about after infinite
trouble and countless failed attempts. It is here, in this activity of the will
that not identity, but consistency of character is found. Whereas for Scho-

2 Schopenhauer, W W R 2: 140, SW 3: 152.

3 Nietzsche, AN 275, K S A 7: 208.
182 XII. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer

penhauer the will is the true, and representation is merely objectification of

the will, for Nietzsche:
The unity between the intellect and the empirical world is the prestabilized
harmony, they are born in each moment and coincide with each other
completely, down to the smallest atom. There is nothing internal, to which
something external does not correspond. For each atom there is a corre-
sponding soul...only the will is and lives. The empirical world only appears,
and becomes,4
In Nietzsche the paradox is resolved. Identity of the subject is lost.

Will: Unitary or Multiple

The major difference which the loss of the identity of the subject points
to, and which is alluded to above, is the positing of the will as unitary or as
multiple. For Schopenhauer, the will is absolutely unitary. Whereas Kant
spoke of things in themselves and was willing to think of plurality not only
in the phenomenal but also in the noumenal, Schopenhauer is not. Schopen-
hauer holds that nothing which pertains to the phenomenal can apply to the
noumenal. He takes it to follow from this that there are not a plurality of
wills; there is just will. Hamlyn, in his book on Schopenhauer, states the
problem in the following manner:
The problem is this. The will, being thing in itself, and thus not subject to
the conditions of space and time, has nothing to do with plurality, and is
in that sense one; it is one, however, only in the sense, as something to
which the notion of plurality is foreign. Hence there is an indivisible will
on the one hand, and on the other a plurality of things in space and time
which constitute its objectification. That plurality can have nothing to do
with the will, and in its objectification it is not divided among them. The
will reveals itself just as completely and just as much in one oak as in
millions even if at a particular grade.5
In order to allow an interaction between two such fundamentally different
spheres as will and representation or plurality Schopenhauer posits his Platonic
Ideas. The individual objectifications are always becoming, and never are,
while the grades of the will's objectification fixed in what Schopenhauer calls
the "archetype" of each grade, the Idea, is fixed and cannot be subject to
change.
For Nietzsche, of course, there is no objection to conceiving of the will
as plurality. Life is an incessant begetting of a doubled representation: once

4 Ibid.
5 D. W. Hamlyn, Schopenhauer, Boston: Routledge & Kegan, Paul, 1980. S 105. Hamlyn's book
was very useful in providing some perspectives on Schopenhauer in this chapter.
 Will and Action 183

as will which "alone is and lives," and once as becoming of the appearance
of the empirical world in multiplicity. For Nietzsche, these are not two
distinct operations separated by an unbridgeable gulf, rather they are the
unitary movement of the will, whose activity is already in multiplicity. There
are only unending wills: each will projects itself in every moment and remains
eternally the same. This difference between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche also,
of course, comes about in the way they choose to view time and space. For
Schopenhauer the will knows nothing of time and space, and thus can know
no multiplicity. For Nietzsche, however, time and space already belong to
the activity of the will and are the very aspect of it which allows multiplicity
to appear.

Will and Action

Another distinction which it seems important to make between Schopen-

hauer and Nietzsche concerns their view of action. It follows from their
opposed ways of viewing the subject, time, and space, and the nature of the
will, that they should view action differently. Nietzsche is in direct disagree-
ment with Schopenhauer on the issue of cause and motive of the actions of
the phenomena of will. For Schopenhauer there are no causes of action except
those which appear in representation as motives; in its context causality and
consciousness are essentially intertwined. What Schopenhauer wrote on action
and its motives is not entirely clear nor problem free, and I discussed much
of this in chapter 5. For Schopenhauer "causes function as motives in
connection with human beings and the conscious part of animal life, i. e., in
connection with knowers. Thus for something to be subject to motives it
must be a knower also.'" 5 As we saw in chapter 5 and as Hamlyn summarizes,
Schopenhauer seems to set up a correspondence of the following order: the
principle of causality furnishes us with an understanding of the external side
of representation while motives are "causes seen from within:"
What we are aware of in each case is the same, and the governing principles
are the same; such differences as there are (between cause and motivation)
arise simply from differences in the part played by intellect in the two cases,
in relation to the will.7
In general, then, causality presupposes the will and human intellect is given
insight into the workings of the will through motivation. "It is in the area
of our own action alone that we have direct or at any rate relatively direct

6 Ibid., S 35.
7 Ibid, S 98.
184 XII. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer

access to the will itself." 8 Thus, Schopenhauer always links motivation and
understanding of motivation to a knowing subject.
For Nietzsche, action is not characterized by conscious will. What we
make of an action is accidental and external; we attach to it a reproduced
past, a goal. The original motivation, the agent of action is in the unconscious.
For Schopenhauer the bringing to bear of conscious intellect upon the direct
experience of the will in action yields direct information and understanding
of the will and its motives. For Nietzsche, the direct movement of the will,
the instinct which drives the individual to act is the only agent of action.
Any motive arrived at through an attempt at conscious understanding of the
action always remains at best a partial rumination or as a goal created out of
understanding acquired through past actions and their effects, but always
mediated through language which remains insufficient to them. Thus, for
Nietzsche consciousness of actions or conscious willing of actions do not
characterize the relationship between the will and the individual subject,
whereas for Schopenhauer, there are no causes of action which are not
connected with causality and arrived at through consciousness.

Language

At this point we are in a position to make some careful distinctions

between Nietzsche's theory of language and that of Schopenhauer's. The
most efficient approach to this is to look at differences in terminology. When
Nietzsche writes that language is a symbol of a symbol, or an image of an
image, these are meant in a very different sense than Schopenhauer's concept
of a representation of a representation. We must understand that when
Schopenhauer says concepts are representations of representations, the second
term in this statement is not the same as the first though they are the same
word Vorstellung. The first representations to which Schopenhauer refers are
the representations of perception. In this case his use of the word Vorstellung
follows what we might call the dictionary meaning closely, as a presentation
or mental image. Through the positioning in the understanding of an object
by applying to it the categories of space and time, thus causality, an image
or representation of it is made. But when Schopenhauer writes that concepts
are representations of representations, he tells us exactly what he means by
this: "representation in concepts is to make a copy or repetition in a heter-
ogeneous material." 9 In this case the word representation is meant literally

8 Ibid.
9 Schopenhauer, W W R 1: 40, S W 2: 48.
 Language 185

as a re-presentation in a completely different sphere. This idea of concepts

as a copy in a heterogeneous material is again emphasized when Schopenhauer
emphasizes that in abstractions from perception, concepts do not furnish new
knowledge, but merely change the form of the knowledge already gained
through perception.
Although Nietzsche uses Vorstellung frequently in the notes we are con-
sidering, he makes a very fine distinction between Vorstellung and what he
more frequently calls appearance (Erscheinung or Schein). Both of these terms
are used as parts in the making of becoming: "illusion as means of pleasure,"
"representation as means of illusion," "becoming, multiplicity as means of
representation," and "becoming, the multiplicity as appearance — pleasure."
Nietzsche considers representation out of multiplicity to be the means through
which appearance is engendered, i. e., becoming, as appearance through
representation by means of multiplicity. As I was careful to distinguish earlier,
Nietzsche takes over the Schopenhauerian term representation, but makes of
it two different things. In the above set of propositions, Nietzsche makes of
representation a "representation mechanism" which is a necessary step in the
process: illusion, representation [mechanism], multiplicity, appearance; a proc-
ess which understands the world not as representation, but rather as appear-
ance. This aspect of representation belongs only to the Ur-Eine and the
activities of its will which end in appearance. Appearance, which is for
Nietzsche, the goal of life is characterized further: "appearance is the contin-
uing symbolization of the will." Continuing, not only means perpetual as in
becoming, but also means the further differentiation of the will. When human
consciousness, which only enters at this point, "reads" or "perceives" ap-
pearance, Nietzsche again uses representation, and this time in the purely
subjective perceptual sense in which Schopenhauer, too, uses it. Thus, ap-
pearance, for Nietzsche, stands between the representation mechanism of the
Ur-Eine in its aspect as will and the representations of the perceiving human
intellect. Nietzsche equates human representing with the process of symbol-
ization.

If representation is simply symbol, then the eternal movement, allstriving

of being is only appearance. Then there is something which represents: this
cannot be being itself. Then another completely passive power stands next
to the eternal being, that of appearance — mysterion!10

Nietzsche's characterization of appearance as a passive power is directly

opposed to Schopenhauer's conditioning of representations by the subject:
the latter presupposes a directing intellect, the former does not. Representation

10 Nietzsche, AN 270, K S A 7: 114.

186 XII. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer

in Schopenhauer's sense implies an active, but essentially non-differentiating,

re-presenting or copying.
Let us take a moment, here, to look at the standard dictionary definition
of symbol. It is a token, pledge, sign by which one infers a thing. It is
something that stands for or represents another thing. Thus, symbolization
implies recognition that active re-presenting being an impossibility, the closest
stand-in (this makes room for or incorporates differentiation) has the most
worth. The specific definition of symbol which Nietzsche offers in "The
Dionysian World View" (1870) is: "a completely incomplete partial image, a
hinted at sign, about whose understanding one must come into agreement." 11
The continuing symbolization of the will is inferred through hinted at signs
which act as a kind of token or pledge of something yet to be determined.
Appearing is a completely incomplete symbolization of the will or a partial
image of the Ur-Eine. The word, for Nietzsche, is a symbol of a symbol.
Conscious language ultimately symbolizes a further differentiation, an ever
clearer symbolization, which, for Nietzsche, means a weakened or inadequate
expression of the original symbol. This is an important point. When Nietzsche
writes that language is "symbolizing which becomes clearer and clearer" what
becomes clearer, more differentiated is the symbol itself, the conscious rep-
resentation in language. However, while conscious thinking becomes clearer
the relationship of that thinking to the original symbol produced in appearance
becomes less and less distinct, farther and farther from a re-presentation of
it in the Schopenhauerian sense. However, for Nietzsche, although the
relationship of the word symbol to appearance is weak, it is in itself a new
creation, and as such contains a power of its own.
Language, a sum of concepts.
The concept, in the first moment of being, an artistic phenomenon: the
symbolization of a whole abundance of appearances, originally a picture, a
hieroglyph. Thus, a picture in the place of a thing. ... Thus man begins
with these image projections and symbols. ... Our world of appearance is a
symbol of the instinct. ... What is the relationship of the concept to the world
of appearance? It is the prototype of many appearances. The distinguishing
mark of the same instinct.
Suppose the intellect is a pure mirror? But concepts are more...' 2
Though conscious language has a specific reference to the original symbol,
its nature as symbol of a symbol, and the nature of symbols generally, that
they only stand in place of, results in its being a weaker witness of the world,
but at the same time, something more by virtue of its artistic nature. Nietzsche
believes in an unconscious language of the first image, the first symbol,

" Nietzsche, K S A 1: 572.

12 Ibid., K S A 7: 2 3 8 - 3 9 .
 Language 187

which is a more direct symbolization of the will, because it is one with it.
Nietzsche points to the action of lips (gesture) and tongue (tone) which, just
as all other actions, are motivated first of all by unconscious instincts, which
are a more direct witness of the feeling from which the first symbol arises.
Because of the nature of symbol as a standing in for or putting in place of
another thing, Nietzsche's idea of language as symbol gains a power of
appearance which Schopenhauer's representation as mere repetition or copy
does not have. For Schopenhauer the concept derives all of its effectiveness
from its relationship not to the will, but to other representations in words,
which have gained authority through their conditioning by the subject of
knowledge and the principle of sufficient reason. Whereas for Nietzsche,
there exist two languages, one which is a more accurate witness of the
becoming of the will, the first symbol, and one which is essentially only a
combining of second-order symbols. But because the choosing and using of
symbols is necessarily a creative process and not a reductive and abstracting
process as is Schopenhauer's conceptuality, for Nietzsche, language in either
aspect, but principally the first, is creation, is the tool of the will itself in its
continuing symbolization toward the goal of pleasure.
Thus, at the same time as Nietzsche devalues conscious intellect and the
language which corresponds to it, he recognizes its inevitable power.
That the world of representations is more real than reality is a belief, which
Plato theoretically posited, as artistic nature. Practically speaking, it is the
belief of all productive geniuses: this belief is the view point of the will.
These representations as offspring of the instinct are in any case just as real
as things; from that springs their unheard of power.13

In this case Nietzsche is speaking of representations arising as a result of

conscious language, but even conscious language is a representation arising
from the activity of the will. Concept representations are believed to be as
real as object representations, thus their power. Remember that the origins
of language lie in unconscious instinct as one with the innermost kernel of
a being. Remember that Nietzsche, following Hartmann, differentiates the
formal part of language which "as a natural product goes on growing in its
organic unity" from conscious language which serves as the proper medium
of instinctual language. We could say that for Nietzsche, language as the
offspring of an instinct is as real as our representations of things which also
arise out of an instinctual action stimulated by the movement of the will acts
of the Ur-Eine. Language is unique in that it is an appearance among all
other appearances and yet is privileged as the form of appearance of the

13 Nietzsche, A N 268, K S A 7: 1 1 0 .
188 XII. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer

human intellect in which all others and itself is thought. Therein lies its
unheard of power.
The further, and very significant thought which Nietzsche adds is that
these representations in language which have equal power with object rep-
resentations are the product of the artist nature.
How does instinct evince itself in the form of conscious mind? In illusory
representations. However, knowledge about their being does not negate
their effectiveness. This knowledge does, however, produce a painful situ-
ation: its only relief in the appearance of art. [Art is] the play with these
instincts.14

The reference to Plato's ideas above, of course, draws in the use made
of these in Schopenhauer's philosophy. The highest moment in Schopen-
hauer's philosophy is when the ideas themselves become the object of knowl-
edge. This can happen only by abolishing individuality in the knowing
subject. This is accomplished in fundamentally the same way Nietzsche
describes the Sichdecken of the artist. The subject of knowledge becomes so
involved with a particular objectification that consciousness of individuality
is lost, and the subject becomes what Schopenhauer calls "the pure subject
of knowing." He no longer knows only particular things, but knows only
the pure ideas themselves.
Though the method is somewhat similar in both philosophies, Nietzsche's
goal is very different. The artist lodges in the individuality of another
appearance, but not in order to know its grounding in the idea, but rather
to know it only as appearance, as an image of an image or symbol of a
symbol from which to create further images or symbols. Nietzsche states at
this early point: "My philosophy is Platonism turned on its head: the farther off
from the truly being, the more pure, beautiful, better it is. Life in appearance
as purpose."15 The emphasis in Schopenhauer on the power of conscious
intellect and language which can only be an imitation or representation of
the will, and the devaluation of conceptuality in Nietzsche, with, however,
the emphasis on its active creative power, and the difference in their appre-
hension of the nature of the will itself, lead each philosopher to posit goals
for their philosophies in conformity with them.

Teleology of the Will

For Schopenhauer the will is a blind striving which it is desirable to

overcome through intellect. For Nietzsche will is an ever sharper viewing,
and this goal of the will is desirable. Schopenhauer's favorite image of the

14 Ibid., AN 267, K S A 7: 98.

15 Ibid., AN 272, K S A 7: 199.
 Teleology of the Will 189

relation between will and the intellect is that of the will as a strong, blind
man carrying the intellect as a sighted but lame man on his shoulders. The
will is efficacious, but blind and unknowing; the intellect is impotent, but
knowing. The functioning of the will without the intellect is blind and
irrational, but it is hard to speak of functioning at all in the case of an intellect
apart from the will. In his book on Schopenhauer Hamlyn sums this up:
As we have seen the will is blind. Hence while any individual act of a
person or conscious animal has a purpose or end, willing as such has no
purpose or end, willing as such has no purpose; for it can have that only
in conjunction with the intellect. The intellect however is the tool of the
will and in some sense its creation, in that the representations that are the
intellect's concern must in the end be due to the underlying reality which
is the will. Hence when Schopenhauer says that willing in general has no
end in view he can also say that the only self-knowledge of the will is
representation as a whole, the whole of perception; it is "its objectivity, its
manifestation, its mirror". What it expresses is simply the will to live, the
continuation of existence. That will to live is the only true expression of
the world's innermost nature, and that too is simply our own innermost
being. 16

As I indicated in chapter 5, this relationship between the will and intellect in

Schopenhauer is not always consistent, and, of course, this was one of
Nietzsche's objections to it. The intellect is only the tool of the will, yet it
is the intellect which is enabled to overthrow the will. Teleological thinking
remains primarily in the representations of intellect, yet the will's striving is
not completely purposeless in its aim of creating ever higher representations
in objectiflcation, in its drive toward the continuance of the world and its
beings. Thus, ironically, the ultimate goal of Schopenhauer's philosophy is
the denial of the will by intellect. Conscious human intellect raised to a
completely teleological end. Schopenhauer writes:

If, therefore, we have recognized the inner nature of the world as will, and
have seen in all its phenomena only the objectivity of the will; and if we
have followed these from the unconscious impulse of obscure natural forces
up to the most conscious actions of man, we shall by no means evade the
consequence that, with the free denial, the surrender, of the will, all those
phenomena also are now abolished. That constant pressure and effort,
without aim and without rest, at all grades of objectivity in which and
through which the world exists; the multifarious forms succeeding one
another in gradation; the whole phenomenon of the will; finally, the universal
forms of this phenomenon, time and space, and also the last fundamental
form of these, subject and object; all these are abolished with the will. No
will: no representation, no world. ... To those in whom the will has turned

16 Hamlyn, S 9 8 - 9 9 .
190 XII. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer

and denied itself, this very real w o r l d o f ours with all its suns and galaxies,
is—nothing. 1 7

In 1886, in his "Attempt at a Self Criticism" of The Birth of Tragedy,

Nietzsche writes of Schopenhauer:
"That which bestows on everything tragic its peculiar elevating force" —
he says in The World as Will and Representation II, p. 495 —" is the discovery
that the world, that life, can n e v e r give real satisfaction and hence is not
worthy o f our affection: this constitutes the tragic spirit — it leads to
resignation,"18
To this Nietzsche writes: "How far removed I was from all this resignation-
ism!" For Nietzsche two goals are given. The will has a goal. Intellect, if it
has a goal is limited to representation in conscious thinking. Nietzsche, after
having criticized Schopenhauer's inconsistencies regarding the principium in-
dividuationis or conscious intellect and its relationship to will, solves these
problems as we have seen by separating conscious intellect irrevocably from
will, from the Ur-intellect. However, this is only true of the intellect coming
to know the will. From the will's point of view, conscious intellect is only
one part of itself and its aims. Thus, although intellect is, in one sense,
completely independent of will, it is in another, one with it. Nietzsche asks:
"If the will contains multiplicity and becoming in itself is there a purpose?"
He answers:
The intellect, the representation must be independent from becoming and wanting;
continuing symbolization serves the purpose o f the will. Representation is
not necessary to the will itself, therefore, it also has n o purpose: which is
nothing but a reproduction, a rumination o f the experienced in conscious
thinking. Appearance is a continuing symbolization o f the will. ... O n e must
be in a position, to trace out the limits and then say: these necessary
consequences of thought are the purpose o f the w i l l . 1 9

Here we find Nietzsche attempting to make the unconscious conscious, to

harmonize the unteleological with teleology by suggesting that "One must
be in a position to trace out the limits and then say: these necessary conse-
quences of thought are the purpose of the will." How has Nietzsche's world
of Anschauung accomplished this? Contrary to Schopenhauer's elevation of
conscious intellect to a position capable of denying the will, in Nietzsche's
case, the intellect never holds a position independent of that of the will. What
conscious intellect there is, rumination of the experienced in conscious think-
ing, has only the purpose of the will as it own and that purpose, as we have
seen, is to ascend in Anschauung. Not resignation in nothingness, but rebirth

17Schopenhauer, WWR 1: 4 1 0 - 1 2 , SW 2: 4 8 6 - 8 7 .
18Nietzsche, GT 24, KSA 1: 1 9 - 2 0 .
" Nietzsche, AN 270, KSA 7: 1 1 3 - 1 4 .
 Teleology of the Will 191

in the recognition that appearance is all, that even the will itself must remain
an appearance among appearances for conscious intellect. Nietzsche sums up
his affirmative position in opposition to the Schopenhauerian resignationism
in the following:
Solution of the Schopenhauerian problem: the longing after nothingness. That
is: the individual is only appearance: when it is genius it is the will's purpose
of pleasure. That means that the Ur-Eine, eternally suffering, watches
without pain. Our reality is after all that of the Ur-Eine, suffering: on the
other hand reality as representation of the Ur-Eine — That self Aufhebung
of the will, rebirth and so forth is thus possible, because the will is nothing
but appearance itself, and the Ur-Eine only has an appearance in it. 20

Nietzsche's position, with regard to teleological considerations is, of course,

antipodal to that of Schopenhauer's. For Nietzsche, appearance itself is goal,
for the genius, w h o unites the unconscious and the conscious, as the will's
purpose of pleasure. For Schopenhauer, denial of the will through conscious
intellect leads to the goal of nothingness.
In a letter to Rohde from August 4, 1871 Nietzsche writes about drafts
for The Birth of Tragedy·.
The study of Schopenhauer you will have noticed, even in style: but a
curious metaphysics of art which comprises the background is pretty much
my own property, that is my real estate, but not yet movable, exchangeable,
coined property. 21

In a note written in 1885 about The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche reiterates this
difference in artist's metaphysics between Schopenhauer and himself.
The antagonism between these two experiences (Apollinian and Dionysian)
and the desires which are at their bases: the first wants appearance eternally.
Men become still, desireless, a smooth sea, healed, at one with themselves
and all existence. The second desire presses for becoming, for the volup-
tuousness of becoming-creating, i. e., creating and destroying. Becoming,
experienced and expressed from within, would be the continuing creation
of an unsatisfied, overrich, infinitely-strained and infinitely driven one, a
God, who overcomes the agony of being only through constant transfor-
mation and change: — appearance as his temporary, redemption realized in
each moment, the world as the result of godly visions and redemptions in
appearance. — This artist's metaphysic is set against Schopenhauer's one
sided way of thinking which understands and only gives worth to art, not
from the point of view of the artist, but from that of the receiver: because
it brings with it freedom and redemption in the enjoyment of the not-real,
in opposition to reality (the experience of a sufferer and doubter who suffers
and doubts himself and his reality) — Redemption in the form and its
eternity. ... Against these is posited the second fact, art as the experience of

20 Ibid., A N 275, K S A 7: 207.

21 Nietzsche, Κ SB 3: 216.
192 XII. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer

artists, before all that of the musician: the torture of the necessity of creation,
as dionysian instinct. Tragic art, rich in both experiences, is seen as the
reconciliation of Apollo and Dionysus: appearance is given the deepest
significance through Dionysus: and this appearance is still denied and denied
with pleasure. This is opposed to Schopenhauer's teaching of resignation as
tragic world view. 2 2

Although Nietzsche still relies to a large extent on Schopenhauer in his work

for Birth of Tragedy, there is no doubt that he freely alters Schopenhauer's
ideas and opposes them with an affirmative worldview based heavily upon
structures found in Hartmann's philosophy of the unconscious, a "new
property" singularly his own. 23

22 Nietzsche, KSA 12: 1 1 5 - 1 6 .

23 The structure of Anschauung can be superimposed upon the structure of the will to power
very profitably.
Being Is
Will acts create phenomenal Will acts for more power
world of appearance
Ur-Eine < Will to <
Human beings view the Power Human beings and what
above through conscious- they perceive through intel-
ness and are one with it lect are will to power
In order to draw this comparison out a bit more, I quote my article "Nietzsche's Mnemo-
technics, the Theory of Ressentiment, and Freud's Topographies of the Psychical Apparatus"
in Nietzsche-Studien 14, 1985. "Quality is not only what allows consciousness, but what
constitutes it. Quality is sensory or conscious interpretation of quantity. However, when
Nietzsche asks the question: 'who interprets?', he answers that it is the will to power which
interprets (WM 643, KSA 12: 139). Nietzsche makes a crucial distinction between the force
which posits, invents, thinks, which is the Will to power, and all individual positing,
inventing and thinking. 'Consciousness' is our relations with the 'outer world' that evolved
it, 'also our effect upon the outer world. It is not the directing agency, but an organ of the
directing agent'" (WM 524, KSA 13: 6 7 - 6 8 ) (NM 2 8 4 - 8 5 ) . Also, "for Nietzsche the
essence of force lies in its affect upon other forces, and that force is inseparable from its
capacity for being affected by other forces. Nietzsche does not mean affect merely in the
sense of bringing about a change in forces, but he also means it in the emotive sense. The
Will to power is 'the primitive form of affect,' it is that from which all other feelings are
derived. Thus, all sensibility is a becoming of forces. Will to power as affectivity, sensibility,
and sensation encompasses and directs individual affects and their becoming of force.
Sensation of affects,...or qualitative interpretation of quantity is what constitutes our con-
sciousness. ...This process is...a process which runs parallel with and has only a provisional
effect on what is the greater play of forces of the Will to power" (NM 285—86). The
workings of the will acts of Anschauung in creating a world of illusion with the. goal of
relieving the pain and contradiction through the increase in Anschauung or pleasure of the
Ur-Eine is comparable to the will to power which creates wills toward the goal of ever
increasing power. And in both cases, human beings who are limited to representation, as a
result of their conscious organization, which eternally separates them from direct knowledge
of the will to power or its goal, are still always in the service of the goals of the will to
power or the Ur-Eine. Human representing, whether in Anschauung or will to power, is
always only a second image of the will.
 Chapter Thirteen
Reconciliation of Materialism and Idealism

How must we respond to Nietzsche's positing of the worldview in

Anschauung, which clearly has both metaphysical and teleological aspects to
it, after my careful discussion of Nietzsche's criticisms of metaphysics and
teleology? Is his worldview in Anschauung not as metaphysical as Schopen-
hauer's? Is not his proposed aim of the will even more teleological than that
of Schopenhauer's will? While the obvious answer appears to be yes, my
answer will be no, they are not.
In order to support this claim, I would like to turn to one last area of
influence which Lange exerted upon Nietzsche. The last section of Lange's
History of Materialism is concerned with ethical materialism and religion. Here
Lange extends his point of view that metaphysical, scientific, teleological
thinking, in fact, the dealing in concepts of language, in any human endeavor,
must ultimately be poetry, cannot refer to truth, but must be understood as
figurative postulations. We find in this last section of Lange's book that he
does not champion a strict materialism, rather, the reconciliation of materi-
alism and idealism.
In the relations of science we have fragments of truth, which continually
increase but continually remain fragments; in the ideas of philosophy and
religion we have an image of truth, which it places in one piece before our
eyes, but which remains nevertheless an image, varying its form with the
point of view of our interpretation.'

Because materialism in itself or idealism by itself present only a part of what

can be known, Lange emphasizes the necessity of their reconciliation.
To be sure, all the products of poetry and revelation carry the character of
the absolute for our consciousness, of the incommunicable in that the
conditions out of which these images of the imagination ( Vorstellungsgebilde)
arise, do not reach our consciousness; to be sure on the other hand all
poetry and revelations are simply false, as soon as one examines their material
content with the measuring stick of exact knowledge: that absolute only has
worth as image, as symbol of the transcendental absolute, which we can never

' Lange, GDM 541.

194 XIII. Reconciliation of Materialism and Idealism

know, and these errors or deliberate deviations f r o m the actual only do

harm, when one allows them to count as material knowledge. 2

Lange emphasizes two things which are decisive for Nietzsche. The idea that
artistic images and symbols are perfectly legitimate and necessary but only
"if the imperishable nature of all poetry, art, religion and philosophy is
recognized, and when on the basis of this recognition the opposition between
research and poetry is reconciled forever." 3 Here, we have expressed what
Stack calls Lange's materio-idealism. To this I would add ethical materio-
idealism. Lange emphasizes, as his second point, the ethical consequences
involved in the combination of materialism and idealism, a point which
Nietzsche takes very seriously:
1 am concerned whether in nature I see predominantly the incomplete or
the complete, whether I carry my idea of the beautiful into nature and then
receive it back thousandfold, or whether I c o n f r o n t everywhere the traces
of decay, stunted g r o w t h , or the struggle of extermination. W h e n I see the
alternation of life and death, of swelling abundance and abrupt decline in
nature, I have arrived at the origin of the Dionysus-cult and with one glance
toward the contrast between the highest ideal and all living I fall into the
middle of the necessity of redemption. 4

I maintain that in the worldview in Anschauung Nietzsche is practicing what

Lange suggests in full awareness that metaphysics or poetry offer a standpoint
of the ideal 5 which enhances and joins with materialism as a system which
keeps closest to reality and which is in a position to offer, not truth, but an
ethic for living. This is the only effective position for both Nietzsche and
Lange who operate and create with the following idea foremost: the ideal
effort of the human spirit acquires fresh strength through the knowledge,
that our reality also is no absolute reality, but appearance. During the period
of the Anschauung notes, Nietzsche writes: "The question is only posited for
idealistic natures: conquest of the world through positive action: first through
science, as the destroyeress of illusion, secondly through art, as the only
remaining form of existence." 6 Nietzsche is not practicing metaphysics or
teleology in the usual sense, rather, along with Lange, he agrees that the
unknown factor with which we must work will remain absolutely inconceiv-
able, "but at the same time must be assumed." The worldview in Anschauung

2 Ibid., GDM 539.

3 Ibid., GDM 556.
4 Ibid., GDM 544.
5 In the second revised edition of Lange's History of Materialism, which appeared in 1875, he
gives the name of the "standpoint of the ideal" to what I am here calling his ethical materio-
idealism. For a thorough discussion see Jörg Salaquarda, "Der Standpunkt des Ideals bei
Lange und Nietzsche," Studi Tedeschi XXII , 1, 1979 and Stack, LNS 3 0 3 - 3 3 3 .
6 Nietzsche, KSA 7: 7 5 - 7 6 .
 XIII. Reconciliation of Materialism and Idealism 195

is offered in complete knowledge that it is no more than a poetic and ethical

possibility.
In Philosophy of the Unconscious that Hartmann carefully divides the sensuous
from the physical, and especially from the metaphysical aspects of his philos-
ophy must have struck Nietzsche very forcefully. Certainly Schopenhauer's
philosophy contained an awareness of these divisions, but not in such well
defined separateness. Nietzsche's criticisms of Schopenhauer stemmed pre-
cisely from the ways in which Schopenhauer allowed boundaries to run over
into one another. For example, his criticism of Schopenhauer's predication
of the will: his taking of predicates from the physical world and applying
them to the metaphysical and transcendent one, or, Schopenhauer's positing
of the conscious intellect, the principium individuationis as having arisen out of
an "otherworldly" world, one devoid of consciousness. Nietzsche cannot
accept this crossing of boundaries. In other words, in terms of Hartmann's
distinctions, a physical object, intellect, cannot suddenly appear out of a
metaphysical sphere. In the Anschauung notes, Nietzsche solves this problem
for himself by clearly separating the metaphysical Ur-intellect from the
physical conscious intellect. Why do I stress the separation of these aspects
of thinking? Because, while Schopenhauer felt that his world of will and
representation actually described the true nature of the world Nietzsche, after
reading Lange, does not believe in the actuality of metaphysical solutions.
He clearly regards them as artistic endeavor and even calls Schopenhauer a
supreme artist. From a materialistic point of view, the only aspects of
philosophy which Nietzsche thought might offer some information about the
world were the sensuous and the physical. However, from the perspective of
Lange's reconciliation of material proofs with idealism, although Nietzsche
allows himself the creation of a worldview which posits the metaphysical
sphere of the Ur-Eine and objective phenomena, his allegiance is always and
only to the world of appearance, that is, what we can know of the actual
physical world and what occurs unconsciously within us on a sensuous level.
Ultimately the Ur-Eine and its will remain only as two appearances among
appearance in general. Nietzsche attaches no truth value to his metaphysical
artistry. Here Nietzsche gives form to the basic insight gained from his
reading of Lange, that "philosophy is art," however, that as such it should
not be considered an illegitimate activity, rather as an essential human need
in the striving after ideal realms.
In the realm of teleology Nietzsche again draws a sharp line between
what we can know as teleology and what we can allow ourselves, as artists,
to create. As we recall, Nietzsche's considerations of teleology revolved
around three major points: 1.) teleological consideration is consideration of
forms, concepts, intellect. These forms cannot ultimately say anything about
196 XIII. Reconciliation of Materialism and Idealism

what there may be besides. 2.) Nietzsche posits what he calls "life force" or
"life" which is to us purely sensuous. "Life, is the sensation growing exist-
ence." To ask the why or how of it is useless, because we must always ask
these questions within the limits of the forms of life and not in terms of life
itself. 3.) The forms of life arise purely as the result of our human organization,
in the sensuous and physical spheres. Thus, for Nietzsche, knowledge of a
real purpose in nature is impossible, even, as Lange emphasizes, should there
actually be one. Yet, in his worldview in Anschauung, Nietzsche clearly states
a teleological position.
I contend that by the time of the Anschauung notes Nietzsche has come
to see metaphysical and teleological thinking as one and the same operation.
When either oversteps the bounds of what is sensuous or physical they
become purely artistic creations. But as we recall, for Nietzsche, art is the
"play of the instincts," is the highest recourse to which we can turn. "The
purpose of knowledge is an aesthetic one. The means of insight, the illusory
image. The world of appearance as the world of art, of becoming, of
multiplicity — ." 7
Again, I am drawn back to Nietzsche's palimpsested reading of Hartmann
and his call for a practical philosophy of life which "needs a positive standpoint"
and a full "reconciliation with life." Nietzsche's worldview in Anschauung is
an artistic creation, is itself not a work of philosophy in the usual sense, one
which claims truth and validity for itself, rather it is, ironically, itself the
ultimate example of what it itself proposes as the highest possible goal and
metaphysic of the Ur-Eine.
In the artist, the Ur-power rules through images, it is that power which
creates. It is these moments that are the object of creation: now there is an
image of the image of the image.(?) The will needs the artist, the Ur-process
is repeated in him. In the artist the will attains the rapture of Anschauung.
Here for the first time the Ur-pain is completely overwhelmed by the pleasure
of Anschauens.8
The highest goal, not in "knowledge" of a metaphysical or teleological world,
but rather in the "artistic projection" or Anschauung of such worlds so that
the world as we do know it, according to the limits and forms of our
organization, becomes livable, that is, the world of existence is brought into
connection with the world of values. "Our existence is itself a continuing
artistic act."9 Such is the practical goal of philosophy which is always and
ultimately aesthetic. Art offers a possibility of living in what must remain a
world of appearance. "Knowledge," for Nietzsche, and thus philosophy which

7 Nietzsche, A N 275, K S A 7: 207.

8 Ibid., A N 276, K S A 7: 2 0 8 - 0 9 .
5 Ibid., A N 277, K S A 7: 2 1 3 .
 Language: Instinkt, Wahn, Kunst! 197

claims truth, is in one of his most beautiful and succinct phrases, a "tran-
scendental aesthetic." 10 Thus that which we thought we "knew" becomes
metaphysical and that which we formerly held as metaphysical, "if it works,"
if it is practical toward life, comes to have more value as philosophy.

Language: Instinkt, Wahn, Kunst!

If we refer again to Figure 1, Anschauung and Language, we find Nietzsche

suggesting that language is at the basis of all aspects of our relationships
with the world. This was one of the first things I asserted in this work:
language first makes conscious thinking possible. Instinkt offers the locus of
origination of language out of the innermost kernel of a being. Instinct, for
Nietzsche, continues to produce an unconscious language which is a first
image for or symbol of our unconscious, instinctual life of the senses and
feeling. Something can be expedient without consciousness.
The Wahn, or illusion comes into the realm of language and of our
understanding of the world, with consciousness. Here, the language of the
unconscious is translated into an impersonal world of abstraction. Here,
language is only an image of an image, a symbol of a symbol; it is only a
partial rumination of the unconscious language of the instincts. This is the
language of logic, grammar, truth, a language wherein illusion is taken for
reality, a language which forgets its foundations in instinct and the uncon-
scious.
The only way which language offers out of illusion is Kunst, is the
figurative use of language. The genius, as the one who understands that the
language of conscious representation is only appearance seeks a language
more in accord with his reality — that all is appearance and that all is based
upon the sensuous character of the first image in instinct and feeling. "Our
world of appearance is a symbol of our instincts."H Remember that Nietzsche,
although finding the concept to be a weak second order symbol, still claims
for it more. It is something more by virtue of its artistic nature. "The concept,
in the first moment of being, an artistic phenomenon." In The Birth of Tragedy
Nietzsche will offer a third language. I call it the language of the genius; it
is the Dionysian dithyramb:
In the Dionysian dithyramb man is incited to the greatest exaltation of all
his symbolic faculties; something never before experienced struggles for
utterance — the annihilation of the veil of maya, oneness as the soul of the

10
Ibid.
" Nietzsche, KSA 7: 2 3 8 - 3 9 .
198 XIII. Reconciliation of Materialism and Idealism

race and of nature itself. The essence of nature is now to be expressed

symbolically; we need a new world of symbols; and the entire symbolism
of the body is called into play, not the mere symbolism of the lips, face,
and speech but the whole pantomime of dancing, forcing every member
into rhythmic movement. Then the other symbolic powers suddenly press
forward, particularly those of music, in rhythmics, dynamics, and harmony.
To grasp this collective release of all the symbolic powers, man must have
already attained that height of self-abnegation which seeks to express itself
symbolically through all these powers — , 1 2

In this third language we see Nietzsche incorporating all aspects of language,

not only the conscious symbol language of lips, face and speech, but those
of the instinctual and bodily gesture-languages of dance and pantomime. And
these two languages are grounded in the primal unconscious language of the
tone, of music in rhythmics, dynamics and harmony. 13 In the third language
of the Dionysian dithyramb, the human being experiences a "collective release
of all the symbolic powers." In the Dionysian dithyramb Nietzsche collects
together into one the languages of Instinkt, Wahn, and Kunst.

12 Nietzsche, G T 4 0 - 4 1 , K S A 1: 3 3 - 3 4 .
13 See chapter 9, note 16.
 Chapter Fourteen
Nietzsche's Notes for his Course on "Rhetoric" and "On
Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense"

I would like to deal with the question of the

worth of knowledge like a cold angel, who sees
through the whole rascality. Without being
malicious, yet without congeneality. 1

In his recent article, "Gustav Gerber und Friedrich Nietzsche," Anthonie

Meijers suggests that Nietzsche's notes for his course on "Rhetoric" be
redated to 1872 rather than 1874 based upon the evidence which he and
Martin Stingelin in another article, "Nietzsche's Wortspiel als Reflexion auf
poet(olog)ische Verfahren" ("Nietzsche's Wordplay as a Reflection of Poet-
and Phil-ological Method"), present. 2 Both articles document and offer a
concordance which demonstrates that many of the ideas and examples which
Nietzsche uses in his notes for his course on "Rhetoric" come directly, in
many cases, word for word, from Gustav Gerber's Sprache als Kunst (Language
as Art). Meijers further suggests that based upon the similar ideational
content which the notes for Nietzsche's course on "Rhetoric" share with his
1873 essay "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," that "the major source
for the philosophy of language of the young Nietzsche must have been
Gustav Gerber's Language as Art."1
Meijers recognizes that the Nietzsche literature has demonstrated Scho-
penhauer's World as Will and Representation and Lange's History of Materialism
as pivotal texts which prepare some epistemological themes in Nietzsche's

' Nietzsche, KSA 7: 493.

2 Anthonie Meijers, "Gustav Gerbet und Friedrich Nietzsche," GF, and Martin Stingelin,
"Nietzsche's Wortspiel als Reflexion auf poet(olog)ische Verfahren," NWRV, Nietzsche Studien
17, 1988. See Meijers' article for the evidence concerning the redating of "Rhetoric" from
1874 to 1872. Also, see Carole Blair's English translation of the lecture notes on "Rhetoric"
in Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 16, No. 2, 1983. The importance of the redating of the notes
on "Rhetoric" is, as Meijers points out, that the 1872 date puts them before Nietzsche's
writing of "On Truth and Lies," and cotemporal with his reading of Gerber's Language as
Art which Nietzsche borrowed from the Basel Library in the Winter semester of 1872.
3 Meijers, GF 389. Gustav Gerber, Die Sprache als Kunst, 2 Bde., Bromberg: Mittler'sche

Buchhandlung, 1 8 7 1 - 1 8 7 4 . 2. Auflage, Berlin: R. Gartner's Verlag 1885.

200 XIV. Nietzsche's Notes for his Course on "Rhetoric"

early thinking which would have made Gerber's arguments for his specific
theory of language attractive to Nietzsche. However, Meijer's contention is
that whereas the influences of Schopenhauer and Lange offered broad epis-
temological positions, it is only in Gerber's work that Nietzsche finds similar
positions embedded in or supported by a specific theory of language. Al-
though both Meijers and Stingelin's articles are of great significance for
Nietzsche research their general implications for Nietzsche's early theory of
language are far from complete.
Both Meijers and Stingelin write that Nietzsche simply appropriated
Gerber's ideas: "Nietzsche simply took over the main points of Gerber's
philosophy of language," 4 and:
On the basis of the textual comparison it may be said that Language as Art
was the major source of the third section of Nietzsche's notes on "Rhetoric,"
and that Nietzsche simply transfered to those notes the most important
positions of Gerber's philosophy of language.5

Meijers further writes, after a comparison of some similarities and differences

between Nietzsche's essay of 1873 "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense"
and Gerber's ideas, which Nietzsche used in his notes for the course on
"Rhetoric," that: "it follows that Language as Art is the most important
historical source for the views concerning the philosophy of language held
by Nietzsche in 'On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense'." 6 In contradis-
tinction to this contention, my last chapter, which summarizes Nietzsche's
position with regard to language in 1871 and its relationship to epistemology,
metaphysics, and teleology, demonstrates that the major points Nietzsche
offers in his essay "On Truth and Lies" are firmly in place: that our reality
is no absolute reality but only appearance; that Nietzsche understands meta-
physics and teleology as poetic possibilities and not as truth; and that art is
the only remaining form of existence. We further find that these insights are
gained through Nietzsche's understanding of the origins of language as arising
out of the limits of our organization and its two step nature which yields: a
first image produced by unconscious instinct, and a second conscious illusory
image where logic, grammar, truth, the language of agreed upon convention
are taken as real. And I demonstrated that Nietzsche posits the possibility of
yet a third artistic image of the image of the image, the language of the
genius, who becomes the intuitive man at the end of "On Truth and Lies."
In his Anschauung notes Nietzsche summarizes these positions: "the purpose

4 Ibid., 389.
5 Ibid., 383.
6 Ibid., 386.
 XIV. Nietzsche's Notes for his Course on "Rhetoric" 201

of knowledge is an aesthetic one. The means of insight, the illusory image.

The world of appearance as the world of art." 7
Meijers' and Stingelin's articles on Nietzsche and Gerber offer an oppor-
tunity to summarize on a point by point basis, with the inclusion of the
knowledge of Gerber's influence, the steps in the formation of Nietzsche's
early theory of language which does not begin with his notes for a course on
"Rhetoric" or with his essay "On Truth and Lies," and their indebtedness to
Gerber. These texts stand, rather, as a significant mid-point in Nietzsche's
thinking about language. 8
Meijers reiterates Nietzsche's positions in "On Truth and Lies" that truth
consists of a changing host of metaphors, metonomies, and anthropomorph-
isms and that the thing in itself remains completely ungraspable for the
creator of language who must take as a means the most daring metaphors.
In order to make these statements clear, Meijers writes that Nietzsche analyzes
an essentially three step birth or origin (Genese) of language. First, the human
being is the artistically creating subject, who creates from an essential instinct
for metaphor building, and this artistic instinct takes effect in the creation of
words and concepts. Second, is the fixing of the meaning of words according
to social conventions, and third, is the forgetting of the role which the instinct
for metaphor building played in the origin of language. This forgetting allows
what Nietzsche calls the instinct for truth and the belief that humans can
actually describe reality. Meijers then writes:
Nietzsche's view of the origins of language in "On Truth and Lies" stands
in opposition to his earlier views in a PMo/og/Va-Fragment with the title,
"On the Origins of Language." In this fragment Nietzsche advocated a
point of view widely disseminated at that time, that language is neither the
conscious work of individuals nor of a majority, rather that it is a product
of instinct. This instinct is unconscious but works expediently. The fragment
does not concern itself with the role which social convention plays in the
origination of language; it does not refer to art and the art instinct, nor is
any particular importance attributed to forgetting. In this fragment Nietzsche
still finds himself within the interpretations of his study of 1868 concerning
Kant's teleology. 9

7 Nietzsche, AN 275, KSA 7: 206.

8 I strongly agree with Stingelin when he writes, in contradistinction to Lacoue-Labarthe, "Le
Detour," in Le sujet de la philosopbie, Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1979 and Paul de Man in
Allegories of Reading, Yale Univ. Press, 1979, that Nietzsche's work with rhetoric continues
throughout his writing and does not go by the wayside after "On Truth and Lies."
' When Meijers writes that in "On the Origins of Language" Nietzsche is advocating a widely
disseminated point of view concerning the origin of language, he quotes only one source,
K. W. L. Heyse, System der Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin 1856, 62: "Neither the physical organi-
zation of human beings, nor the subjective spirit is the creating principle of language, rather
the production of language occurs with necessity, without rational intention and clear
consciousness, out of an inner instinct of the spirit." This does not serve as an analogous
example of the view point which Nietzsche takes, following Hartmann in "Origins." See
my chapter 4.
202 XIV. Nietzsche's Notes f o r his Course on "Rhetoric"

Now, the problem in this seeming "contradiction" between Nietzsche's idea

of the origins of language in "On the Origins of Language" (1869/70) and
"On Truth and Lies" (1873) is resolved when we bring to bear the distinction
which I have been careful to make in following Nietzsche's beginning theory
of language: that, following Hartmann, Nietzsche conceives of two separate
languages, 1) an unconscious formal language arising as the product of the
instincts and 2) the translation of this unconscious language into the conscious
language of fixity according to convention. Nietzsche clearly demonstrates
that he still holds this distinction between two languages in his notes for his
course on "Rhetoric":
It is not difficult to prove that what is called "rhetorical," as a means of
conscious art, had been acdve as a means of unconscious art in language
and its development, indeed, that the rhetorical is a further development,
guided by the clear light of the understanding, of the artistic means which
are already found in language. 10

Thus, conscious language does not represent a culmination or perfecting of

basically unconscious and inferior processes, rather, the possibility, the "phil-
osophical worth" which resides in the formal and unconscious operations of
language are what is originary and valuable. 11 In "On the Origins of Lan-
guage" Nietzsche is concerned with the origins of language, whereas in "On
Truth and Lies," what Meijers characterizes as Nietzsche's three-step genesis
of language confounds two very separate categories. In "On Truth and Lies,"
Nietzsche reiterates the origins of language as arising in the individual
artistically creating subject whose essential characteristic is the drive or instinct
toward metaphor building. When he goes on to suggest that the metaphors,
having originated in this way, become fixed according to convention, enabled
by the very forgetting of the original unconscious process of their formation,
he is no longer talking about the origins of language, but about its further
conscious development.

Gerber's Language as Art

In order to lay a groundwork for my discussion, it will be helpful to set

out the main ideas which Gerber presents in Language as Art which seem
relevant to Nietzsche's thinking, as summarized in Meijers' article. Gerber,
as does Nietzsche, divides language into two broad parts. For Gerber, lexicon
and syntax are justifiable abstractions for the science of language in its

10 Blair, R 106, MusA 5: 2 9 7 - 9 8 .

11 See my chapter 9.
 Gerber's Language as Art 203

descriptions of conscious linguistic activity, but they are useless for the
description of what Gerber calls "living (lebendigen) language." For that one
requires a mode of description which understands language as a form of art.
This living language, Gerber suggest, as does Nietzsche, is an unconscious
creation, an unconscious art, which results from the so called Kunsttrieb or
art instinct.
Gerber reconstructs the genesis of language. In the course of the devel-
opment of language a reciprocal action takes place between language and the
human spirit. Language and spirit are developed simultaneously. Gerber
presents a step by step process in the development of language. First the
thing in itself presumably prompts a nerve stimulus (Nervenreiz), which
produces in the human being a sensation (Empfindung). The sensation, quite
spontaneously produces a sound (Laut). This sound is a purely natural
reaction to stimulus, whether a cry, a scream, or any other sound, it is
primarily an action which reduces the tension created by the perception of
the stimulus. Already in this first phase of its development, the language
sound produced by the sensation does not directly represent the original
perception. The movement between sensation and sound is arbitrary and here
the art instinct becomes active. The sound is only an image of the original
sensation for two reasons: 1) sound re-presents sensation in another material,
and 2) the sound image does not re-present the individual in the perception,
rather only represents a more general mark or characteristic of the perception.
Here Gerber's connection with tropes and figures as the essential nature of
language comes to the fore. The sound image which only acts as a mark for
the individual in perception operates like synecdoche and only takes a part
for the whole.
It is these marks or characteristics (sound images) which are grouped
together to produce the next phase in Gerber's genesis of language, the
representation (Vorstellung). Again, this transformation from sound to a
representation is an arbitrary step, artistic. The image of the representation
changes the character of the sound which now becomes the symbol of the
representation rather than a reaction to perception and produces the so called
root (Wurzel). The metaphorical operation or transposition of going from
original sound to conscious symbolization by means of a fixed root word
Gerber characterizes as a second imaging process. Thus, for Gerber, words
and concepts present only images of images and no direct expression of the
original perception. Even though words are used in the conventional con-
scious sense, Gerber writes: "Whoever understands a sentence only as a
combination of words and concepts instead of an image does not have the
living language in mind, but only a skeleton." 12 With words and concepts,

12 Meijers, GF 378.
204 XIV. Nietzsche's Notes for his Course on "Rhetoric"

humans become conscious of their activity and believe that they use language
as signs for things in themselves. Thus, language originates in the individual,
but develops into the language of a species through the fixing of the meaning
of words and the forgetting of their origins in artistic and rhetorical activity.
Two major consequences arise from this metaphorical process of language
formation for Gerber. He asserts that in the language of the rhetors tropes
and figures are consciously used in order to persuade, but that they only
represent an outward expression of what is always and unconsciously there
in language. This is meant in two senses. First, the artistic operations of the
unconscious language are essentially rhetorical: the synecdoche which only
takes a part for the whole of the perception to produce a sound image and
metaphor which transfers a sound image into a representation. Second, Gerber
asserts that words once developed, only take on meaning in the context of
the sentence in which they are used and that words have no real meaning in
themselves. They cannot be used metaphorically in certain cases, but because
of the changeable character and the meaning by analogy which they take on
in a given sentence they are metaphorical or tropic all the time. Thus, in a
double sense, all words are tropes, all sentences figures.
The second major consequence of Gerber's language theory shows itself
in his criticism of philosophy. "Pure thinking is as much a sort of phantom
as a pure language would be which it has occurred to no one to assert." 13
Gerber calls Kant's pure reason, impure reason, because he emphasizes the
conditionality of knowledge upon language after he has shown that language
is a purely artistic operation resting equally upon sensation and intellect.
Nietzsche's theory of language, as I have developed it, shares some very
basic similarities with Gerber's theories just outlined. First, the artistic un-
conscious or living language to which Gerber points as active in the origi-
nation of language, which is the precondition of conscious language and
provides the more primal tropological paradigm, finds its correlary in
Nietzsche who makes a very similar division, following Hartmann, between
conscious language and the unconscious formal language which instinctively
produces it. Second, Gerber and Nietzsche agree that language originates in
instinct. For Nietzsche, instinct arises out of the innermost kernel of the
individual in the form of a mental mechanism unconsciously willed and
imagined by the individual and the choice of means suitable to its satisfaction
unconsciously made in each case. This is in complete accord with Gerber's
emphasis on the individual and spiritual nature of the artistic and arbitrary
activity of tropological work in the genesis of language. Third, both Nietzsche
and Gerber agree that the development of conscious language out of uncon-

13 Ibid., 380.
 Gerber's Language as Art 205

scious instinctual artistry is a continuing process, not something left behind

as conscious language takes its place. This, in contradistinction to the point
of view expressed by Herder, Rousseau, and Schopenhauer that instinct was
only present in the origins of language and that the development of grammar
and intellect have superseded it. Gerber writes:
Language arose at first, as the first root, work of the creative art of human
beings, which represented the first ripe articulation of an act of soul; — but
it always arises so, and this continual arising should be understood if we
want to understand the essence of language.14

Fourth, Nietzsche and Gerber agree that the unconscious or living language
serves as a medium in images and, as a result, that the conscious language
which fixes and agrees upon certain images of images exists as a necessary
but impoverished form of the possibility and philosophical worth of formal
or living language because new perceptions are figured in terms of previously
established conscious forms. Gerber writes:
Language wants to express the spirit and works continually to achieve this
through the succession of the movements of thought and their analogous
representation in sound moments. Language wants to be efficacious and is
thus an always renewed artistic creation, which receives its instinct for further
development out of the consciously perceived harrier that it always remains image and
analogy.15

Thus, Nietzsche and Gerber share similar insights into the nature of the
origins of language and its development, but none of these need lead Nietzsche
to adopt Gerber's tropological model. In order to understand why Nietzsche
is so taken with Gerber's tropological model, which, I maintain, is the only
new element that Nietzsche adopts from Gerber, I will address the following
points which Nietzsche discusses in the third section of his notes for a course
on "Rhetoric," "The Relation of the Rhetorical to Language" and in "On
Truth and Lies:" 1) language as a kind of unconscious art, 2) the step-wise
genesis of language through images, 3) the idea that all words are from the
beginning tropes, and therefore, 4) the impossibility of language to describe
the essence of things. I will discuss each of these in turn in an effort to
demonstrate, that based upon my study of Nietzsche's beginning theory of
language, all of these ideas, with the exception of the tropological framework,
are ideas completely familiar to Nietzsche and already documentably adopted
by him as a result of the earlier influences of Kant, Schopenhauer, Hartmann,
as well as Nietzsche's own intuitions about language.

14 Gerber, SK 118.
15 Ibid., 288-89.
206 XIV. Nietzsche's Notes for his Course on "Rhetoric"

Language as Unconscious Art

Did Nietzsche conceive of the unconscious processes of language as

artistic processes before his reading of Gerber's Language as Art. The answer
is a resounding yes. Schopenhauer, who emphasized aesthetics to such a great
extent may have been an important impusle in this direction, however, it is
in Lange that Nietzsche is most forcefully reminded that all language is
ultimately poetry or art. As Meijers points out, Lange's and Gerber's epis-
temological positions were similar. Both agree that the world is always a
world for us. Our organization is, for both Lange and Gerber, the point of
departure for all language development and thus all knowledge. The major
difference, which Meijers finds, is that Gerber uses language to make these
points, while Lange does not. On the contrary, in his letter to Gersdorff of
August, 1866 Nietzsche frames his understanding of Lange precisely in terms
of Lange's position with regard to conceptually:
The world of the senses is a product of our organization. ... The true
essence of things, the thing in itself, is not only unknown to us, but the
concept of it itself is no more and no less than the last outgrowth of an
opposition conditioned by our organization, of which we do not know,
whether it has any beaming at all outside of our experience. ... Art is free,
also in the area of concepts. 16
Lange is completely aware of the part language and conceptuality plays as a
symbolic or figurative expression of imagined relations with sensory percep-
tion. He quotes Du Bois-Reymond: "Force is nothing but a...tendency to
personification...a rhetorical artifice, as it were, of our brain, which snatches
at figurative terms, because it is destitute of any conception clear enough to
be literally expressed." 17 Lange uses Du Bois-Reymond's argument to support
his contention that all language, including scientific language, is ultimately
art, pictures of the imagination. Lange's most specific instance of the use of
language to demonstrate his idea that philosophy, metaphysics, as well a
science, are ultimately poesy is his discussion of the role of the grammatics
categories of subject and predicate. These grammatical categories arise as ^
basic process of our organization which leads us to distinguish individua
marks in things, and to lay them down in succession in propositions wit?'
subject and predicate. "Thus, the great truth, 'No matter without force, n'~
force without matter,' reveals itself as a mere consequence of the principle"'
'No subject without predicate, no predicate without subject'.'" 8 Lange em
phasizes that the "thing" is only a resting place demanded by our though;

" Nietzsche, KSB 2: 160. See my chapter 6, 68.

17 Lange, HM 2: 378, GDM 3 7 2 - 7 3 . See my chapter 6, 8 6 - 8 7 .
18 Ibid., HM 2: 3 7 9 - 8 0 , GDM 3 7 3 - 7 4 . See my chapter 6, 90.
 Gerber's Language as Art 207

We only know properties and their coming together around an unknown

something. The assumption of this unknown something is a "figment of our
mind" ("eine Dichtung unseres Gemüthes") made necessary by our organization.
Thus, after reading Lange and his specific understanding of language,
Nietzsche moves away from a belief in the grammatical categories of subject
and predicate as categories of substance (something he had previously met
with in Schopenhauer) toward an understanding of them as relational nom-
inatives necessitated by the nature of human perception and thinking. After
his study of Lange Nietzsche is left with a moving world of dynamic effects
and relations with no sure ground in substance or in a stable notion of the
ego but, rather, with a strongly developed sense that to speak or write about
these things must remain essentially an artistic activity. 19
The most conclusive demonstration of the point to which Nietzsche
conceived of the world and language as primarily an artistic process is, of
course, his worldview in Anschauung where Anschauung of the world by the
will acts of the Ur-Eine and the Anschauung of human representation are all
conceptualized as an artistic viewing of images. And my Figure 1, developed
upon the basis of the worldview in Anschauung, sets out the spheres Nietzsche
refers to in "On Truth and Lies:" first metaphor, unconscious representation
in sensation, second metaphor, conscious representation in conventional
conscious language of word and concept. And a third language which seeks
to make the unconscious conscious before Nietzsche's acquaintance with
Gerber who also holds as his task the bringing of "the forgotten, primitive
character of language as artwork, as trope, as figure, back into memory." 20
But extremely interesting in this context is Nietzsche's 1863 note in which
I find a completely intuitive prefiguration of the definition of Anschauung
which Nietzsche develops in 1870/71. It is worth repeating:
We cannot know things in themselves and for themselves, but only their
images in the mirror of our soul. Our soul is nothing other than the eye,
the ear, etc. spiritualized. Color and sound do not belong to things in a
proper sense, but to the eye and the ear. All of the abstracta, all the properties
which we attribute to a thing form it in our spirit. ... The eye receives an
impression of a region as a flat image. Habit differentiates the spatial to
some extent. The unfocused outlines remain. Already this external image
does not express the reality: with that it is no work of art, it is however
already spiritualized. Now the spirit searches for a unity in the fullness and
binds them quick as lightning.21

19 Refer to my chapter 6, 84 where I quote Stack as concurring that in Lange Nietzsche met
with virtually all of the ingredients brought together in "On Truth and Lies."
20 Meijers, GF 379.
21 Nietzsche, UN 2 9 1 - 9 2 , BAW 2: 2 5 5 - 5 6 .
208 XIV. Nietzsche's Notes for his Course on "Rhetoric"

Here we already have the statement that we cannot know things in themselves,
but only our perceptual images. That the spirit creates and transforms these
images, "Already this external image does not express the reality: ... it is
however already spiritualized." Now the artistic impulse "searches for a unity
in the fullness and binds them quick as lightning." The implication is that
art arises out of a fixing in poetry, music, or language of the "spiritualized"
images of perception. All of this before Nietzsche reads Schopenhauer, Lange,
Kant, Hartmann, or Gerber. By the time of the Anschauung notes art has
moved over to the initial creation of images out of sensation. However,
Nietzsche is still using the word "symbol" to express the transference of
artistic imaging from one sphere to another.

The concept, in the first moment of being, an artistic phenomenon: the

symbolization of a whole abundance of appearances, originally a picture, a
hieroglyph. Thus, a picture in the place of a thing. ... Our whole world of
appearance is a symbol of our instincts. ... What is the relationship of the
concept to the world of appearance? It is the pototype of many appearances.
The distinguishing mark of the same instinct. 22

A symbol is a token, a sign by which one infers a thing. It is something that

stands in for another thing. Nietzsche defines symbol as "a completely
incomplete partial image, a hinted at sign about whose understanding one
must come into agreement." 23 The concept in the first moment of being, an
artistic phenomenon. The concept, however, already symbol of an original
picture in place of a thing. Nietzsche considers language and conceptuality
to be an artistic play with the instincts. This is an unconscious art which
consists in the symbolization of our instincts, a symbolization about which
agreement must be reached. How much closer can one get to the idea of
metaphorical or tropological transference and the idea of fixing those trans-
ferences?

Genesis of Language

When Meijers compares Gerber's genesis of language to Nietzsche's, he

makes a crucial distinction which I would like to emphasize. Gerber's process
is: (thing in itself) — nerve stimulus — sensation — sound (first image) —
representation — root (second image) — word — concept. Nietzsche's process
in "On Truth and Lies" is: (thing in itself) — nerve stimulus (first image) —

22 Ibid., K S A 7: 2 3 8 - 3 9 . See my chapter 12, 186.

23 Ibid., K S A 1: 572. See my chapter 12, 186.
 Gerber's Language as Art 209

sound/word (second image) 24 — concept (third image) 25 Gerber's first artistic

image arises between sensation and sound and his second between represen-
tation and the root. He does not problematize the initial perceptual process,
but rather the replacing of it with a sound. Nietzsche, however, places the
first image at the point between (thing in itself) and nerve stimulus, thus at
the first moment of perception, or sensory synthesis. This is very significant,
because while Gerber speaks of tropological processes, they remain operative
at a level of language production which is more advanced. By placing the
first metaphor at the initial perceptual point of language Nietzsche decisively
severs the thing in itself from the very origination of language and can claim
an even more fundamental assertion that all language is in its inception and
essence rhetorical.
Meijers asks "Where did Nietzsche come to the view that language arises
exclusively from metaphors and that it is not able to describe a reality of
things in themselves?" 26 This question needs to be broken down into two
parts. Where did Nietzsche come to the opinion that language is not able to
describe a reality of things in themselves? And where did Nietzsche come to
the view that language arises exclusively from metaphors? The obvious
answers to the first question are Kant, Schopenhauer, Lange, and as my study
shows, Hartmann. But the not so obvious correlary to this is that the eternal
separation between language and things in themselves is examined by
Nietzsche in these authors in terms of their investigations of the nature of
language. The first basic division Nietzsche meets with in Schopenhauer is
his adherence to the Kantian division between representation and things in
themselves. In Schopenhauer, Nietzsche finds a detailed inquiry into how
knowledge of perception differs from abstraction. The seven points about
language, with which I summarize my chapter on Schopenhauer's theory of
language, already outline the major forms of Nietzsche's genesis of language.
First, the idea that perceptual knowledge comes in the form of an image

24 Gerber and Nietzsche agree on the completely internal source of sounds in the production
of language. Just as Nietzsche opposed Herder's idea of the interjection of external sounds
with the assertion that sounds arise out of the instinctual activity of the individual character,
Gerber also understands the first sounds as instinctive and physiological reactions to stimuli.
"The voice throws the stimulation out (nach aussen) and in so doing brings the disturbed
unity of the organism back to rest," and "the sounds of animals are specifically different
f r o m the sounds of human beings." S K 143 and 117.
25 Alan Schrift in his outstanding article, "Language, Metaphor, Rhetoric: Nietzsche's Decon-
struction o f Epistemology "Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 24, No. 1, 1986, adds to this series the
concept as yet a third metaphor. Thus, nerve stimulus — image — sound/word — concept.
His source f o r this is K S A 7: 4 4 1 , "The w o r d comprises an image out of which comes the
concept" (Das W o r t enthält nur ein Bild, daraus der Begriff.) Nietzsche's discussion of the
formation of concepts in "On Truth and Lies" can also lead to this idea.
26 Meijers, G F 370.
210 XIV. Nietzsche's Notes for his Course on "Rhetoric"

which is the result of a physiological abstraction from the senses, and the
emphasis that even this perceptual knowledge does not correspond to the
actual object of representation. Second, Schopenhauer's emphasis on the
arbitrary nature of words and conceptuality as a second order representation,
which again, cannot accurately represent the perceptual knowledge because
words are built out of a heterogenous material. It is Schopenhauer who then
offers the basic idea of "On Truth and Lies" that abstract thought is inadequate
to express the world and can never have to do with truth, precisely because
of this step by step imaging process. As I have demonstrated, Schopenhauer
works these ideas out in the context of specific discussions of perception,
words, conceptuality, and language. When Stingelin suggests that Nietzsche
"took over from Gerber the idea that a word is an image of a nerve stimulus
in sounds," 27 we find that this is a premature assertion.
In Lange Nietzsche is quite taken with the idea of sensory synthesis, the
idea that according to our organization we experience stimuli, but that this
experience consists in a sort of abstraction which offers us some important
effect, an effect which does not even exist in the object itself. Lange:
From the chaos of vibrations and motions of every kind with which we
must suppose the media that surrounds us to be filled, certain forms of a
motion...are singled out, relatively strengthened, and thus made object of
percepdon, while all other forms of motion pass by without making any
impression whatever upon our sensibility.28

Lange emphasizes that the actual mechanisms of such selection and syntheseis
remains a riddle. The next idea which intrigues Nietzsche in Lange is his
idea of unconscious inferences which Hartmann, Helmholtz, Wundt, and
Zöllner also introduce as a possibility of explaining the further transition
from sensory stimulus to abstract thinking. The idea of unconscious inferences
is made by analogy with inferences of thought. Lange: "The eye makes...a
probable inference: an inference from experience, an imperfect induc-
tion... seeing is itself an inferring and the inference perfects itself in the form
of a visual idea" 29 or image. Nietzsche also pursues this in Hartmann who
argues that unconscious processes are necessary if a transition from sense
perception to abstract thought is to take place. Hartmann: "we cannot doubt
that in intuition the same logical links are present in the unconscious [as are
present in discursive thinking], only what follows serially in conscious logic
is compressed into a point of time [in unconscious movement]." 30 Hartmann
suggests that while a conscious inference must stop at a point of rest, a

27 Stingelin, NWRV 347.

28 Lange, HM 3: 217, GDM 491. See my chapter 6, 71.
29 Ibid., HM 3: 221, GDM 493. See my chapter 6, 75.
30 Hartmann, PU 1: 3 1 6 - 1 7 , PUG 246 - 47. See my chapter 4, 48.
 Gerber's Language as Art 211

station, consisting of cerebral vibrations which produce a conscious idea,

unconscious processes occur outside time with only the last term coming
into consciousness. Thus, the idea of passing in a step-wise fashion from one
image to another which Nietzsche finds in Schopenhauer, or from an uncon-
scious process which produces its last image as a conscious term in Hartmann,
or from one picture of imaginability or unconscious inference to another as
in Lange, all form a similar concern with the jumping from one sphere into
another: perceptual, unconscious (intuitive), and conscious (discursive). I
maintain that the direct line, sensory synthesis, unconscious inference, to an
adoption of Gerber's tropological model, traces one of the major trajectories
of the young Nietzsche's work with language.
Thus when Nietzsche writes in "On Truth and Lies," "A nerve stimulus
is transfered into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in
a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of
one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one," 31 the
only new element is metaphor. The concern with understanding this process
is absolutely central to Nietzsche's thinking about language and is not at all
new with Gerber. When Nietzsche gets ahold of Gerber's Language as Art in
the Fall of 1872 he is still trying, as I will show presently, to find that elusive
mechanism of unconscious sensory synthesis and inference which would give
form to or explain how the transition from stimuli and unconscious processes
can be transfered to conscious and linguistic words, concepts, and abstrac-
tions. The tropological or rhetorical model of transferences which Gerber
suggests must have seemed extremely interesting to Nietzsche. Here was a
framework which was very useful in giving a possible form to these elusive
processes. Furthermore, it was a framework which seemed to work on the
level of unconscious language formation and to be evident as an operation
at the conscious level as well. It was also an artistic solution.

All Words are from the Beginning Tropes

Now let us turn to the second part of Meijers' question: "How does
Nietzsche come to the idea that language arises exclusively out of metaphors"?
I think I have demonstrated that Nietzsche did not simply take over Gerber's
ideas from Language as Art, but that because of discussions contemporary
with the two thinkers, in the natural and physical sciences and in philosophical
and linguistic areas, the notion of a two or three step, partly or wholly
unconscious, imaging process, which is anthropomorphically based upon

31 Nietzsche, WL 82, KSA 1: 879.

212 XIV. Nietzsche's Notes for his Course on "Rhetoric"

physiological perception and thus remains separated from direct knowledge

of a thing in itself, was very easily arrived at independently by Nietzsche and
Gerber. However, the specifics of exactly what Nietzsche did find useful in
Gerber — the metaphorical framework — can be documented in a most
fascinating way if one examines Nietzsche's notes from summer 1872 through
the beginning of 1873, which encompass the period before Nietzsche reads
Gerber, his reading of Gerber in the winter semester 1872/73, his writing of
the notes for his course on "Rhetoric" (if one accepts its redating to 1872),
and beginning work on "On Truth and Lies." 32 If one looks for the moment,
in these notes, where the tropological framework enters, it is not difficult to
see when Nietzsche starts using it as a result of his reading of Gerber. The
first mention of metaphor comes fifty-five pages into the notes: "In the
philosopher activities are continued through metaphor." 33 A second mention
comes on the next page: "Two goals necessary for two different purposes —
truthfulness — and metaphor have produced the inclination for truth." 34 Five
pages later and for the next twenty pages of the notes Nietzsche takes on the
tropological framework in full force. 35 For the last twenty-two pages of the
notes there is no further mention of metaphor. Now, what is fascinating
about these notes and what makes them conclusive evidence for my conten-
tions above that Nietzsche already anticipated all of what he found in Gerber
with the exception of the tropological model, is that a sizeable portion of
notes leading up to the first mention of metaphor are concerned with issues
of cognition, knowing as mirroring of sensations, imaging, and the relation-
ship of language to art and truth in the light of these. And Nietzsche is still
searching for the operations, those elusive descriptions, of just what the
unconscious processes of perception and its translation into language might
be:

Owing to the superficiality of our intellect we indeed live in an ongoing

illusion, i. e., at every instant we need art in order to live. Our eyes detain
us ,at the forms.36
Our understanding is a surface power; it is superficial. ... What can be the
purpose of such a surface power? To the concept there corresponds, in the
first place, the image. Images are primitive thoughts, i. e., the surfaces of

32 K S A 7: 419—520. See Nietzsche, P. During this period Nietzsche also polished a short essay,
"On the Pathos of Truth" which he presented to Cosima Wagner for Christmas, 1872. This
essay contains some of the ideas presented in "On Truth and Lies," and is also offered in
Breazeale's translation of these early notes.
33 KSA 7: 473.
34 K S A 7: 474.
35 K S A 7: 4 7 9 - 4 9 8 .
36 Nietzsche, Ρ 18, K S A 7: 435.
 Gerber's Language as Art 213

things combined in the mirror of the eye. ... Art depends upon the
inexactitude of sight.31
There exists within us a power which permits the major features of the
mirror image to be perceived with greater intensity, and again there is a
power which emphasizes rhythmic similarity beyond the actual inexactitude.
This must be an artistic power, because it is creative. Its chief creative means
are omitting, overlooking, and ignoring. ... The word contains nothing but an
image; from this comes the concept. Thinking thus calculates with artistic
magnitudes. All categorization is an attempt to arrive at images. We relate
superficially to every true being; we speak the language of symbol and
image. 38
[The] production of forms, by means of which the memory of something
occurs, is something artistic. It throws this form into relief and strengthens it
thereby. ... There are many more sets of images in the brain than are
consumed in thinking. The intellect rapidly selects similar images; the image
chosen gives rise, in turn, to a profusion of images; but again, the intellect
quickly selects one among them, etc.
Conscious thinking is nothing but a process of selecting representations. It
is a long way from this to abstraction. (1) the power which produces the
profusion of images; (2) the power which selects and emphasizes what is
similar. 39
There is a twofold artistic power here: that which produces images and that
which chooses among them. ... When one considers this power more closely,
it is obvious that here too there is no totally free artistic inventing. ...
Instead, these images are the finest emanations of nervous activity as it is
viewed on a surface. ... The most delicate oscillation and vibration! Consid-
ered physiologically, the artistic process is absolutely determined and nec-
essary. On the surface all thinking appears to us to be voluntary and within
our control. We do not notice the infinite activity. 40

We see Nietzsche again using his terms "form" and "symbol" in relationship
to the imaging process. Just as Nietzsche is still using the term symbol in
the Anschauung notes to describe these processes, he returns, in the notes
above, to the term "form" which was so central to his notes "On Teleology"
where there are two things: "life, the sensation growing existence" and forms.
Form seems to be a general term which covers images as well as conceptuality.
Forms are only concepts which join together a sum of appearing character-
istics (themselves, forms), which however, cannot correspond directly to the
thing. And we find that Nietzsche has refined the already familiar two step
process: the initial creation of a profusion of images which only emphasizes
the major features of what is perceived, and the second process of selection

37 Ibid., Ρ 1 9 - 2 0 , K S A 7: 440.
38 Ibid., Ρ 20, K S A 7: 440 - 4 1 .
35 Ibid., Ρ 2 3 - 2 4 , K S A 7: 445.
40 Ibid., Ρ 24, K S A 7: 4 4 5 - 4 6 .
214 XIV. Nietzsche's Notes f o r his Course on "Rhetoric"

according to the criteria of similarity. It is evident that the twofold imaging

process is understood by Nietzsche to be an artistic power.
Now Nietzsche sets out to explore various hypotheses to explain these
activities. One of the possibilities is that they operate according to sensations
of pleasure and displeasure upon the nerves.
The real mystery concerns that surface upon which forms are sketched by
the activity of the nerves in pleasure and pain: sensation immediately projects
forms, which in turn produce new sensations. ... The sensing of the image
arises from the fact that these appropriate motions in turn bring about
sensations in other nerves. 41

In these notes, Nietzsche also attempts to think these operations in terms of

quantity and quality, with the larger nervous stimulation dominating over
the smaller.

The impact, the influence of one atom upon another is likewise something
which presupposes sensation. ... What is difficult is not awakening sensation,
but awakening consciousness in the world. ... If everything is sensate then
there is a pell mell confusion of the smallest, the larger, and the largest
centers of sensation. ... We free ourselves from qualities [in favor of quan-
tities] only with difficulty. 42

Nietzsche then tries to explain these operations in terms of unconscious

inferences:
Is there such a thing as an unconscious inference? Does matter infer? It has
feelings and it strives for its individual being. "Will" is first manifest in
change, i. e., there is a kind of free will which modifies a thing's essence on
the basis of pleasure and the flight from displeasure. Matter has a number
of Protean qualities which are, according to the nature of the attack, accented,
reinforced, and instituted for the whole. 43
The so-called unconscious inferences can be traced back to the all-preserving
memory, which presents us with experiences of a parallel sort and thus is
acquainted in advance with the consequences of an action. It is not an
anticipation of the effects; it is rather the feeling "similar causes, similar
effects," which is generated by a remembered image. 44
Unconscious inferences set me to thinking: it is no doubt a process of passing
from image to image. The image which is last attained then operates as a
stimulus and motive. Unconscious thinking must thake place apart from
concepts: it must therefore occur in perceptions (Anschauungen).

41 Ibid., Ρ 26, K S A 7: 448. Other notes, translated in P, which deal with the pleasure/displeasure
explanation are No.s 67, 69, 70, 98, 110, 155.
42 Ibid., Ρ 35—36, K S A 7: 469. Other notes, translated in P, which deal with the quality/
quantity explanation are No.s 54, 65, 101, 121, 122, 133.
43 Ibid., Ρ 35, K S A 7: 4 7 0 - 7 1 .
44 Ibid., Ρ 1 1 5 , K S A 7: 4 6 5 - 6 6 .
 Gerber's Language as Art 215

But this is the way in which contemplative philosophers and artists infer.
They do the same thing that everyone does regarding their personal psy-
chological impulses, but transferred (übertragen) into an impersonal world.
This kind of picture thinking is from the start not strictly logical, but still
it is more or less logical. The philosopher then tries to replace this picture
thinking with conceptual thinking. Instincts likewise appear to be a variety
of picture thinking, which finally become a stimulus and motive. 45

T h u s , we find Nietzsche trying o n various hypothetical explanations for the

mystery that puzzles him. Suddenly, in the notes, w e see a new direction
emerge and it is at this point that Nietzsche has apparently c o m e across
Gerber and his rhetorical and tropological explanation o f the genesis of
language. Nietzsche writes:
Our sense perceptions are based, not upon unconscious inferences, but upon
tropes. The primal procedure is to seek out some likeness between one
thing and another, to identify like with like. Memory lives by means of this
activity and practices it continually. Confusion [of one thing with another] is
the primal phenomenon. 4 6
Nietzsche is working with the same concerns, the procedure w h i c h gives rise
to images as opposed to the primal confusion o f stimuli, and the identifying
o f like with like in the further unconscious perceptual situation, but n o w
Nietzsche attempts to explain it in terms o f Gerber's tropological model.
Our senses imitate nature by copying it more and more. Imitation presup-
poses first the reception of an image and then a continuous translation of
the received image into a thousand metaphors, all of which are efficacious. 47
What power forces us to engage in imitation? The appropriation of an
unfamililar impression by means of metaphors. Stimulus and recollected
image bound together by means of metaphor (analogical inference)...
Here, Nietzsche actually calls metaphor an inference by analogy in the same
sense in which he spoke unconscious inferences.
Stimulus perceived; now repeated in many metaphors, in the course of which
related images from a variety of categories flock together. Every perception
produces a manifold imitation of the stimulus, but transferred into different
territories. A stimulus is felt, transmitted to related nerves; and there, in
translation, repeated, etc. 48
All rhetoricalfigures (i. e. the essence of language) are logically invalid inferences.
This is the way that reason begins. 49
There is no "real" expression and no real knowing apart from metaphor.50

45
Ibid., Ρ 41, KSA 7: 454.
44
Ibid., Ρ 4 8 - 4 9 , KSA 7: 487
47
Ibid., Ρ 50, KSA 7: 490.
48
Ibid., Ρ 50, KSA 7: 490.
49
Ibid., Ρ 48, KSA 7: 486.
50
Ibid., Ρ 50, KSA 7: 491.
216 XIV. Nietzsche's Notes for his Course on "Rhetoric"

Nietzsche discusses the tropological nature of these processes in more detail

in these notes and relates metonymy to categorization. 51 And if one combines
Nietzsche's statement in his notes on "Rhetoric," that in synecdoche "A
partial perception takes the place of the entire and complete intuition," 52 we
can understand that the initial creation of images out of the confusion of
stimuli is conceived of as a synecdochization of stimuli by Nietzsche.
But what has Nietzsche really gained by taking on the framework of
Gerber's metaphorical model of cognition in place of or in combination with
a more scientific explanation? Only a new figure, a new trope of a more
idealistic type perhaps than the tropology of nerves, sensations, pleasure/
pain, or quantity/quality. Metaphor becomes yet another form or symbol
which must equally as well lead to the ultimate skepticism which lies behind
Nietzsche's view of the relationship between language and the hope of
explaining a world outside of it. Perhaps this is why he eventually abandons
the tropological framework, but not his struggle with the perceptual/linguistic
puzzle. 53 Thus, while Nietzsche clearly takes over Gerber's rhetorical frame-
work, it is evident that it was prepared for and extended by Nietzsche in
light of his earlier thinking.

The Impossibility of Language to Describe the Essence of Things

Meijers states:
If one reads "On Truth and Lies" from the perspective of Lange's History
of Materialism, then it seems reasonable to understand Nietzsche as having
taken a partly fictive point of view. It is unlikely that Nietzsche was
defending the real difference between thing in itself and appearance or a
biologism of the human intellect. "On Truth and Lies" would be, then, an
immanent critique of the correspondence theory of truth, wherein for
methodological reasons Nietzsche proceeded from the reality of the thing
in itself.54

51 See Ibid., Ρ 1 5 0 - 1 5 2 .
52 Nietzsche, R 107, MusA 5: 299.
53 Alan Schrift points out that the process of shifting f r o m one experiential sphere to another
in the production of language is a paradigm which Nietzsche is still using late in his thinking.
For example, Nietzsche writes in 1884: "First images — to explain h o w images arise in the
spirit. Then words, applied to images. Finally concepts, possible only where there are words
— the collecting together of many images in something nonvisible but audible (words)"
( W M 506 K S A 1 1 : 58). Schrift writes: "While Nietzsche no longer refers explicitly to these
"translations" as "metaphorical" transferences, this series continues to inform his thinking."
This is significant in the sense that what was of interest to Nietzsche in the beginnings of
his w o r k with language in Schopenhauer, Lange, and Hartmann, and which took on Gerber's
rhetorical model for a time, still remains of interest to Nietzsche long after the particular
framework of tropology is discarded.
54 Meijers, G F 388.
 Gerber's Language as Art 217

Because I disagree with this statement I would like to review the stages along
the way of Nietzsche's thinking of the difference between thing in itself and
appearance which is at work in his beginning theory of language and is
reflected in "On Truth and Lies." In Schopenhauer Nietzsche finds that the
thing in itself cannot be known through representation, but can be known
through the will. However, in "On Schopenhauer" we find Nietzsche writing
that even in direct experience of the will the thing in itself cannot be known.
He comes to this position based upon Lange's assertion that there may be
things in themselves (this is no longer something to be taken as evident) but
even if there are, we can never know them because we are caught within the
bonds of our sensory organization. This position is reflected clearly in "On
Teleology" were Nietzsche contends that there may be an unconscious ex-
pedience in nature, but that we can only know the forms of it and never the
teleological principle itself. Now, with Hartmann, Nietzsche refines his think-
ing about the relationship between human consciousness and the thing in
itself. In contradistinction to the idealism of Kant and Schopenhauer, and
facilitated by Lange's complete division between possible things in themselves
and human organization, Nietzsche finds in Hartmnn a new possibility which
allows a combination of his previous views on the thing in itself. Hartmann
posits three realms: not only the thing in itself and human consciousness,
but also an intermediate, but essential realm created through the will-acts of
the unconscious, a realm which results in the existence of a phenomenal real
world. Hartmann's worldview offers the possibility of resolving the problem
with which Nietzsche questioned Schopenhauer: how can an intellect have
arisen out of a transcendental sphere? Hartmann's conception allows that the
will-acts of the unconscious (transactions between matter and force) include
among their phenomenal real appearances, human beings as organisms having
consciousness. However, Nietzsche's adoption of a phenomenal real world
in his Anschauung notes does not change his consistent position that human
consciousness remains a product of its organization and can, therefore, never
know the thing in itself as some sort of essence of appearances including its
own organization.
In a note Meijers writes that many authors have expressed the opinion
that "On Truth and Lies" is a deeply skeptical text because it is believed that
at the time he writes it Nietzsche still holds fast to the ideal of a correspond-
ence with a world of things. As an example, Meijers quotes Breazeale:
To the extent that Nietzsche subscribed to the correspondence ideal he held
that the world has a 'true nature' which is unknowable. However critical
he may later have become of the distinction between 'reality' and 'appearance'
[...] it is presupposed in his earlier writings, including Die Geburt der Tragödie
and the notes translated in this volume [including "On Truth and Lies"]55

55 Meijers, GF 388n.
218 X I V . Nietzsche's Notes for his Course on "Rhetoric"

My research shows that this simply is not the case. In "On Truth and Lies"
Nietzsche is not beginning to take a skeptical position, nor is he taking a
fictive position for methodological reasons, he is expressing a well developed
and consistently held position. Nietzsche had clearly worked out a relationship
for himself of the difference between thing in itself and appearance. Nietzsche
creates the split nature of the Ur-Eine as being (thing in itself) and will (will-
acts which create the phenomenal real world of appearances) in order to
demonstrate the position that what is real is not the thing in itself, which is
no concern of ours, but that reality consists of appearance. Nietzsche is not
repeating the Langian position that there must be things in themselves, but
that they must remain unknown to us. Nietzsche has dispensed with things
in themselves in favor of the reality of appearance. He states this in "On
Truth and Lies:"
The "thing in itself' (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart form any
of its consequences would be) is something quite incomprehensible to the
creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. ... It is not
true that the essence of things "appears" in the empirical world, (my
emphasis)56

It is the reality of appearance which serves as the basis for human being and
imaging or Anschauung beyond which we cannot reach. In recognition of this,
Nietzsche collapses his worldview in Anschauung all back into language and
human conceptuality. The Ur-Eine is itself only one appearance among
appearances. The genius "views the veil of appearances purely as appearance,
the man who is not genius, views the appearance as reality," that is, as
reflecting the essence of things. 57 In the preface of Human All too Human
Part II Nietzsche writes:
I was, so far as my own development was concerned, already deep in the
midst of moral skepticism and destructive analysis, that is to say in the critique
and likewise the intensifying of pessimism as understood hitherto, and already
'believed in nothing anymore', as the people put it, not even in Schopen-
hauer: just at that time I produced an essay I have refrained from publishing,
O n Truth and Falsehood in an Extra-Moral Sense.'58

Nietzsche intensifies pessimism by demonstrating that, because of the nature

of human perception and conceptuality, appearance is all there is, but his
critique of pessimism lies in the "teleological" goal of the worldview in
Anschauung which finds complete pleasure in the affirmation of appearance as
appearance. In 1872 Nietzsche writes: "For the tragic philosopher the ap-

56 Nietzsche W L 82, K S A 1: 879.

57 Nietzsche, A N 275, K S A 7: 2 0 5 - 0 6 .
58 Nietzsche, M A 2: 2, K S A 2: 370.
 Nietzsche's Working Methods 219

pearance of the metaphysical as merely anthropomorphic completes the picture

of existence. He is not a skeptic"59
Why does Nietzsche not just say all is appearance? Why even create the
Anschauung of the Ur-Eine in its two-fold nature as being and the will-acts
which lead to appearance? Precisely to dispense with the thing in itself as a
form of reality. And, here, the question of values enters in. Remember I
suggested that Nietzsche is plying an artistic ethical materio-idealism which
desires to impel human beings, from a strictly language philosophical stand-
point, toward an attempt to push beyond the limits of conscious language
and "knowledge," and by making the unconscious conscious, or as Gerber
suggests, by attempting to remember the metaphorical primal activity of art,
of living language, to question the worth of knowledge for life in the light
of the more effective realm of art. Thus, when Meijers points to the three
ways in which truth is used in "On Truth and Lies,'" 50 we are in a position
to understand Nietzsche's relationship to each of them. To the correspondence
theory of truth with a world in itself, truth in a nonmoral sense, Nietzsche
says no. To the truth which arises out of the social or conventional agreement
upon the designation of words to things, the moral sense, Nietzsche says no.
To the only idea of truth left for Nietzsche, that which affirms appearance
as appearance and its overcoming of pessimism, Nietzsche says yes!

Nietzsche's Working Methods

It is significant to remember that all of the texts by Nietzsche discussed

in my work, including notes for the course on "Rhetoric," a course which
may never have been presented, 61 and "On Truth and Lies," secretly withheld
by Nietzsche, are fragments and notes that he never intended for publication.
We have learned something of Nietzsche's method of working by the close
examination of these texts and Meijer's and Stingelin's discussion of Gerber's
influence. It is not infrequent that Nietzsche directly transcribes the ideas of
others into his notes, and often word for word, i. e., Hartmann in "On The
Origins of Language," Fischer, Kant, Schopenhauer, Lange, and others in
"On Teleology," as well as Gerber in notes for "Rhetoric" and "On Truth
and Lies." But I think it is also amply discernable that Nietzsche often uses
this information not so much as new material which is simply to be taken

55 Nietzsche, Ρ 12. See also, Ρ No.s 38, 39, 4 1 , 44, and 47. This is also exactly the position
Nietzsche holds in his Fourth Proposition for the History of an Error, G D 484, K S A 6: 79.
60 Meijers, G F 390n.
61 See Blair, R and Meijers GF.
220 XIV. Nietzsche's Notes for his Course on "Rhetoric"

over, but rather, that it provides a thinking form for ideas already developed
by him or as a forum against which to develop his own thinking further. I
think the cautionary note recently sounded by Magnus needs to be kept very
much in mind when researching Nietzsche's work.
I wish to focus on a distinction between those w h o treat Nietzsche's Nachlass,
his literary estate, as if such materials w e r e unproblematic philologically,
those w h o treat the Nachlass as on at least a par with his published writings,
and those w h o do not. I shall call ... commentators "lumpers" w h o regard
the use of Nietzsche's Nachlass as unproblematic. The fact that and the
reasons w h y Nietzsche elected neither to publish nor to polish most o f the
Nachlass seldom if ever becomes an issue f o r a lumper. He o r she assumes
... that "these unpublished writings...contain much m o r e o f his expressed
thinking on certain important matters than do his finished w o r k " . 6 2

Magnus calls commentators "splitters" who tend to distinguish sharply be-

tween published and unpublished writings in Nietzsche's case. Magnus feels
that the methodological difference between lumpers and splitters can often
become substantive. I would like to fall somewhere in between the lumper
and splitter position. Certainly Nietzsche's theory of language would be
severly impoverished without the understanding gained from a close reading
of the unpublished essays, fragments, and notes of this early or later periods,
yet they should not be held up to the same accountability as published work.
They are instructive from two perspectives, not only for what they contain,
but equally as interesting is the manner in which they reveal a development
of thinking and a method of reading and writing. In my introduction I
emphasized that I was setting out to pursue a discourse object, a regulated
transformation, at work in Nietzsche's texts on language. The emphasis was
not on the originality or truth of Nietzsche's thought but upon the geneal-
ogical transformations of that thought as it arises from the influences of
others. This process, by attempting to discover convergences, repetitions,
and transformations leads to the discovery of what Foucault calls "a plastic
continuity, the movement of a meaning that is [itself] embodied in various
representations, images, and metaphors." 63 This is entirely in accord with
what we have learned about Nietzsche's development of a beginning theory
of language and supports his own statement that the evolution of a "thing"
is to be understood as a "continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations
and adaptations" whose "form is fluid, but whose 'meaning' is even more

62 Bernd Magnus, "Nietzsche's Philosophy in 1888: The Will to Power and the Übermensch,"
journal for the History of Philosophy, 24: 1, January 1986, 81, 83.
63 Foucault, A 150.
64 Nietzsche, GM 7 7 - 7 8 , KSA 5: 3 1 4 - 1 5 .
 Appendix A

Notes on Translation

1. "On the Origins of Language"/"Vom Ursprung der Sprache" (1869/70)

MusA 5: 467-70.
2. "On Schopenhauer"/"Zu Schopenhauer" (1867-68) BAW 3: 352-61.
3. "On Teleology"/"Zur Teleologie" (1867-68) BAW 3: 371-94.
4. Selected notes from 1870/71 which I have entitled the "Anschauung Notes."
These notes can be found in the following: KSA 7: 198 — 217 (end
1870 —April 1871) and KSA 7: 93-136 (Sept. 1870-Jan. 1871); and in
MusA 3: 3 1 8 - 3 8 and MusA 3: 232-59.
5. Two and one half pages of untitled notes written in July 1863, BAW 2:
255-57.

In "On Schopenhauer," where Nietzsche quotes Schopenhauer, I have

used E. F. J. Payne's translations. For specific textual commentary on "Zu
Schopenhauer" see the "Nachbericht zu den Philosophischen Notizen" in
BAW 3: 452-53.
In "On Teleology" where Nietzsche is referring to Kant's use of the word
Zweck I have chosen to translate it as "end" after the J. C. Meredith translation
of The Critique of Judgement. Where Nietzsche uses Zweck out of the Kantian
context, I translate it as purpose or goal. I have indicated in parentheses the
influence of particular authors on Nietzsche's notes, however, for specific
textual commentary and pagination see BAW 3: 459 — 64.
In the "Anschauung Notes" I have included two pages from the Musarion
edition of Nietzsche's works which I could not find in KSA, although they
clearly belong to the content of the worldview in Anschauung. My choice of
translation of specific words in these notes was made for two specific reasons:
to differentiate some of the terminology from that of Kant and Schopenhauer
and in an attempt to have the language conform to translations of Nietzsche's
later works. Anschauung is left untranslated. When Nietzsche uses the verb
anschauen or adverb anschauend, I have translated them as seeing or viewing,
but with all of the connotations of Anschauung in the senses in which it is
used in these notes.
222 Appendix A

Ur-Eine is left untranslated because no translation seemed adequate. It

has the sense of source or origin (Ur) and the sense of einheit (ein) as in
unity or oneness. Thus, the original unity or the source of oneness. But it
also has the connotation of person in the pronomial use of ein, for the Ur-
Eine is both oneness in its sense of being, but it acts, views, wills in an
almost anthropomorphic sense in its aspect as will. Other words carrying the
prefix Ur such as Urintellekt, Urvisionen, Urprocess I have translated as Ur-
intellect, Ur-vision, Ur-process in order to give the idea that these are aspects
of the Ur-Eine in both of the senses above.
Erscheinung I have translated as appearance and also variations of this
word i. e., Schein.
Willensregung I have translated differently, according to the context, as
excitation of the will or movement (of the will).

1. On the Origins of Language

Old puzzle: with the Indians, Greeks, up to the present. To say with
certainty how the origin of language is not to be contemplated.
Language is neither the conscious work of individuals nor of a majority. 1. Every
conscious thinking first possible with the help of language. Such an ingenious
thinking completely impossible with a merely animalistic sound-language: the
wonderful pensive organism. The deepest philosophical knowledge lies al-
ready prepared in language. Kant said: "a great, perhaps the greatest portion
of what our reason finds to do consists in the analysis of concepts which
human beings already find in themselves." One thinks of subject and object,
the idea of judgement is abstracted from grammatical sentences. Out of
subject and predicate came the categories of substance and accident. 1 (Schop,
W. a. W. u. V. I 566 ff. (608 f. Gr.).) 2. The development of conscious thinking
is detrimental to language. Decline as a result of further development of
culture. The formal part, in which precisely philosophical worth lies, suffers.
One thinks of the French language: no more declensions, no neuter, no
passive, all end syllables worn off, the root syllables unrecognizably undone.
A higher cultural development is not able to protect the already established
from decline. 3) For the work of an individual it is too complicated, for the
masses much too unified, a complete organism.
It remains only to consider language as a product of instinct, as with
bees — the anthill, etc.

1 WWR 1: 458, SW 2: 543.

 1. On the Origins o f Language 223

Instinct is not, however, the result of conscious reflection, not merely the
consequence of bodily organization, not the result of a mechanism which lies
in the brain, not the effect of a mechanism coming to the spirit from outside,
which is foreign to it, but the most particular achievement of individuals or
of the masses, springing from character. Instinct is one with the innermost
kernel of a being. This is the real problem of philosophy, the unending
expediency of organisms and the unconsciousness in their coming to be.
Thus, all earlier naive viewpoints are rejected. With the Greeks, whether
language is θέσει or φύσει: that is whether through arbitrary formation,
through agreement and arrangement, or whether sounds are necessitated by
conceptual content. But also later scholars used these catchwords, for example
the mathematician Maupertuis (1697 — 1759): agreement as basis. First, a situa-
tion without language, with gestures and tonal cries. To that man attached
conventional gestures and tonal cries. These means could have become
perfected in a pantomime cry- and song-language. But that would have been
a precarious beginning. Correct intonation: fine hearing may not have been
everyone's thing. Then man came upon the idea of finding a new means of
expression. With tongue and lips, man was able to produce a multitude of
articulations. The advantage of the new language was felt and it was retained.
In the meantime the other question came into the foreground, whether
language arose out of a purely human power of spirit or, whether it is a
direct gift of God. The Old Testament is the only religious document which
has a myth about the origin of language or anything similar. Two main
points: God and man speak the same language, not as with the Greeks. God
and man give things names, which express the relationship of things to men.
The problem of giving animals names etc. was also the problem of myth:
language itself was presupposed. — Peoples are quiet about the origin of
language: they cannot think of a world, god or men without language.
This question is justified in light of the small amount of historical and
physiological insight. For once, it was clear, through comparison of language,
that its origin out of the Nature of Things was not provable. The arbitrary
giving of names already through Plato's Cratylus: this point of view presup-
poses a language before language.
Jean Jacques Rousseau believed it impossible that languages could have
arisen out of purely human means.
Important to the opposing view is the work of von de Brosses
(1709 — 1777), who did hold to the purely human origin of language, although
with inadequate means. The choice of sounds depend on the nature of things,
for example, rough and soft, and asks: "Is not one thing rough and the other
sweet?" Such words are far from the origin of language: we have become
224 Appendix A

accustomed to them and imagine that in their sounds something of the thing
itself lies.
Shortly thereafter Lord Monboddo becomes important. He postulates a
reflexive activity of the mind: an invention of men, made more than once.
For this he needed no primitive language. He wrote about it for 21 years:
the difficulties became ever greater. He ascribes the origin of language to the
wisest of men. Yet, he needs something of a supernatural helper: the Egyptian
demon-kings.
One hundred years ago the Berlin Academy posed a prize question "About
the Origins of Language." In 1770 Herder's essay won the prize. Man was
born to language. "The genesis of language is an inner urge, as is the urge
of the embryo to birth when it is ripe". But he shared with his forerunners
the view that language internalized itself out of outward sounds. Interjection
as the mother of language: while it is really the negation of language.
The right insight has currency only since Kant, who in The Critique of
Judgement recognizes teleology in Nature as something actual, but on the
other hand, emphasizes the wonderful antinomy that something expedient
can be without consciousness. This the reality of instinct.
A closing word from Schelling: "Since without language there could be
nothing philosophical, and in general no human consciousness is thinkable,
the foundation of language cannot lie in consciousness. Yet, the deeper we
look into it, the more surely it is discovered, that its depth far exceeds that
of the most conscious productions. It is with language as it is with organic
beings; we think we see them come blindly into existence and at the same
time, cannot deny the unfathomable intentionality of their formation even in
the smallest detail."

Vom U r s p r u n g der S p r a c h e .
(1869/70.)

Althes Räthsel: bei Indern, Griechen, bis auf die neueste Zeit. Bestimmt zu sagen,
wie der Ursprung der Sprache nicht zu denken ist.
Die Sprache ist weder das bewusste Werk einzelner noch einer Mehrheit. 1. Jedes bewusste
Denken erst mit Hülfe der Sprache möglich. Ganz unmöglich ein so scharfsinniges
Denken etwa mit einer blos thierischen Lautsprache: der wunderbare tiefsinnige
Organismus. Die tiefsten philosophischen Erkenntnisse liegen schon vorbereitet in
der Sprache. Kant sagt: „Ein grosser Theil, vielleicht der grösste Theil von dem
Geschäfte der Vernunft besteht in Zergliederungen der Begriffe, die er [der Mensch]
schon in sich vorfindet." Man denke an Subjekt und Objekt; der Begriff des Urtheils
ist vom grammatischen Satze abstrahirt. Aus Subjekt und Prädikat wurden die
Kategorien von Substanz und Accidenz. 1 2. Die Entwicklung des bewussten Denkens

1 [Schopenhauer, W. a. W. u. V. I 566 ff. (608 f. Gr.).]

 1. On the Origins of Language 225

ist der Sprache schädlich. Verfall bei weiterer Kultur. Der formelle Theil, in dem
gerade der philosophische Werth liegt, leidet. Man denke an die französische Sprache:
keine Deklination mehr, kein Neutrum, kein Passivum, alle Endsilben abgeschliffen,
die Stammsilben unkennbar verunstaltet. Eine höhere Kulturentwicklung ist nicht
einmal im Stande, das fertig Ueberkommene vor Verfall zu bewahren. 3. Für die
Arbeit eines Einzelnen ist sie viel zu complizirt, für die der Masse viel zu einheitlich,
ein ganzer Organismus.
Es bleibt also nur übrig, die Sprache als Erzeugniss des Instinktes zu betrachten,
.wie bei den Bienen — dem Ameisenhaufen u. s. w.
Instinkt aber ist nicht Resultat bewusster Ueberlegung, nicht blosse Folge der
körperlichen Organisation, nicht Resultat eines Mechanismus, der in das Gehirn gelegt
ist, nicht Wirkung eines dem Geiste von aussen kommenden, seinem Wesen fremden
Mechanismus, sondern eigenste Leistung des Individuums oder einer Masse, dem
Charakter entspringend. Der Instinkt ist sogar eins mit dem innersten Kern eines
Wesens. Dies ist das eigentliche Problem der Philosophie, die unendliche Zweckmäs-
sigkeit der Organismen und die Bewusstlosigkeit bei ihrem Entstehn.
Abgelehnt sind also damit alle früheren naiven Standpunkte. Bei den Griechen,
ob die Sprache θέσει oder φύσει sei: also ob durch willkürliche Gestaltung, durch
Vertrag und Verabredung, oder ob der Lautkörper durch den begrifflichen Inhalt
bedingt sei. Aber auch neuere Gelehrte brauchten diese Schlagwörtei; ζ. B. der
Mathematiker M a u p e r t u i s (1697—1759): Uebereinkunft als Grundlage. Zuerst ein
Zustand, ohne Sprache, mit Gesten und Schreitönen Dazu habe man conventionelle
Gesten und Schreitöne gefügt. Diese Mittel hätten vervollkommnet werden können
zu einer pantomimischen Schrei- und Gesangsprache. Aber das wäre misslich gewesen.
Richtige Intonation: feines Gehör sei nicht jedermanns Sache. Da wäre man darauf
gekommen, eine neue Ausdrucksweise zu finden. Durch Zunge und Lippen habe man
eine Menge von Artikulationen herstellen können. Man fühlte den Vortheil der neuen
Sprache, und man sei dabei stehen geblieben.
Inzwischen war die andre Frage in den Vordergrund getreten, ob die Sprache
durch blosse menschliche Geisteskraft habe entstehen können oder ob sie eine un-
mittelbare Gabe Gottes sein. Das Alte Testament ist die einzige Religionsurkunde,
die einen Mythus über den Ursprung der Sprache hat oder etwas Aehnliches. Zwei
Hauptpunkte: Gott und Mensch reden dieselbe Sprache, nicht wie bei den Griechen.
Gott und Mensch geben den Dingen Namen, die das Verhältnis des Dinges zu dem
Menschen ausdrücken. Also die Namengebung der Thiere u. s. w. war das Problem
des Mythus: die Sprache selbst wird vorausgesetzt. — Die Völker schweigen über
den Ursprung der Sprache: sie können sich Welt, Götter und Menschen nicht ohne
dieselbe denken.
Jene Frage bei der geringen historischen und physiologischen Einsicht berechtigt.
Einmal war durch Vergleichung der Sprache klar, dass die Entstehung aus der Natur
der Dinge nicht zu erweisen sei. Die willkürliche Namengebung schon durch Plato's
Cratylus: dieser Standpunkt setzt nämlich eine Sprache vor der Sprache voraus.
Jean Jaques R o u s s e a u glaubte, es sei unmöglich, dass Sprachen durch rein
menschliche Mittel entstehen könnten.
Bedeutend in der Gegenansicht das Werk von de B r o s s e s (1709—1777), der an
der rein menschlichen Entstehung festhält, doch mit unzureichenden Mitteln. Die
Wahl der Laute hänge von der Natur der Dinge ab, ζ. B. rude und doux, und fragt:
„Ist nicht das eine roh und das andre süss?" Solche Worte liegen aber unendlich von
226 Appendix A

der Entstehung der Sprache ab: wir haben uns gewöhnt und eingebildet, dass in den
Klängen etwas von dem Dinge läge.
Demnächst Lord M o n b o d d o bedeutend. Er nimmt eine reflexive Geistesthätig-
keit an: eine Erfindung der Menschen, und zwar öfter gemacht. Darum braucht er
keine primitive Sprache. Einundzwanzig Jahre schrieb er daran: die Schwierigkeiten
werden immer grösser. Den allerweisesten Männern schiebt er die Entstehung zu.
Etwas übermenschliche Hülfe braucht er doch: die ägyptischen Dämonen-Könige.
In Deutschland hatte die Berliner Akademie — vor hundert Jahren — eine
Preisfrage „Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache" gestellt. 1770 erhielt H e r d e r ' s Schrift
den Vorzug. Der Mensch sei zur Sprache geboren. „So ist die Genesis der Sprache
ein so inneres Drängniss, wie der Drang des Embryos zur Geburt beim Moment
seiner Reife." Aber mit seinen Vorgängern theilt er die Anschauung, wie die Sprache
aus sich äussernden Lauten sich verinnerlicht. Die Interjektion die Mutter der Sprache:
während sie doch eigentlich die Negation ist.
Die richtige Erkenntniss ist erst seit K a n t geläufig, der in der Kritik der Ur-
theilskraft die Teleologie in der Natur zugleich als etwas Thatsächliches erkannte,
andrerseits die wunderbare Antinomie hervorhob, dass etwas zweckmässig sei ohne
ein Bewusstsein. Dies das Wesen des Instinktes.
Zum Schluss Worte von Schelling (Abth. II, Bd. I, S. 52): „Da sich ohne Sprache
nicht nur kein philosophisches, sondern überhaupt kein menschliches Bewusstsein
denken lässt, so konnte der Grund der Sprache nicht mit Bewusstsein gelegt werden;
und dennoch, je tiefer wir in sie eindringen, desto bstimmter entdeckt sich, dass ihre
Tiefe die des bewusstvollsten Erzeugnisses noch bei weitem übertrifft. Es ist mit der
Sprache wie mit den organischen Wesen; wir glauben diese blindlings entstehen zu
sehen und können die unergründliche Absichtlichkeit ihrer Bildung bis ins Einzelnste
nicht in Abrede ziehen."

2. Ort Schopenhauer

An attempt to explain the world by an accepted factor.

The thing in itself becomes one of its possible forms.
The attempt fails.
Schopenhauer did not consider it an attempt.
His thing in itself was opened up by him.
That he did not see this failure can be explained, in that he did not want
to feel the dark contradictoriness in the region where individuality ceases to
be.
He did not trust his judgment.
Places.
The dark drive brought about through a representation mechanism reveals
itself as world. This drive is not included under the principium individuationis.
 2. On Schopenhauer 227

The title page of The World as Will and Representation already discloses to
us what Schopenhauer claims to have performed for mankind through this
work.
The most longed after question of all metaphysicians as Goethe said it,
the "if not" — was daringly answered by him with Yes: and so that the new
knowledge be noticed far and wide like a temple inscription, he wrote the
redeeming formula for the oldest and most important riddle of the world as
a title on the brow of his book, The World as Will and Representation.
The so-called solution then:
In order to comfortably get ahold of in what the redeeming and explan-
atory elements of this formula are to be found, it is recommended that they
be transposed partly into images:
The groundless, unknowing will reveals itself, through a representation
mechanism, as world.
When we subtract from this sentence, what passed to Schopenhauer as
the legacy of the great Kant, a legacy which he always, in his grand manner,
regarded with the most proper respect: there remains the one word "will"
along with its predicates. It is a clumsily coined, very encompassing word,
when with it such an important thought, going well beyond Kant, is to be
labelled differently. A thought so important that its discoverer could say of
it that he considered it to be that "which has been sought for a very long
time under the name of philosophy, and that whose discovery is for this very
reason regarded by those versed in history as just as impossible as the
discovery of the philosophers' stone."
In light of this, we remember that to Kant as well, a no less questionable
discovery appeared as a great, as the greatest, most fruitful deed of his life,
achieved by means of the old-fashioned table of categories, even though with
the important difference that with the conclusion of "the most difficult thing
that could be undertaken on behalf of metaphysics", Kant admired himself
as a force of nature powerfully bursting forth and received consecration to
appear "as reformer of philosophy", in contrast to which Schopenhauer at
all times thanks the inspired thoughtfulness and power of clarity of his
intellect for his supposed find.
The errors of great men are worth honoring because they are more fruitful
than the truths of small men.
If we now turn to the above quoted sentence, to dissect and probe the
essence of the Schopenhauerian system, no thought remains farther from us
than to attack Schopenhauer himself, to triumphantly parade before his eyes
228 Appendix A

the individual pieces of his proofs and, at the end, to raise the question how
in the world a man can reach such a level of pretention with a system so full
of holes.

II

In fact it is not to be denied, that the clause which we offered above as

the essence of the Schopenhauerian system, can be attacked very successfully
from four sides.
1. The first, and most general — aimed at Schopenhauer only in so far
as he did not here, where it was necessary, go beyond Kant — aims at the
concept of the thing in itself and sees in it, to speak with Ueberweg, "only
a hidden category".
2. Although one should give Schopenhauer the right to follow that
dangerous Kantian path, yet that which he puts in place of the Kantian x,
the will, is only born with the help of a poetic intuition, while the attempted
logical proofs cannot satisfy either Schopenhauer or us. (See Die Welt als
Wille und Vorstellung) p. 125. 131.
3. Thirdly, we are compelled to guard against the predicates which
Schopenhauer ascribes to his will, which for something simply unthinkable
sound much too certain and all stem from the contradiction to the world of
representation: while between the thing in itself and its appearance not even
the concept of this opposition has any meaning.
4. Nevertheless one could posit, to the credit of Schopenhauer, against
all three objections a possibility of threefold power: There may be a thing in
itself, however, only in the sense that in the subject area of transcendence all
is possible which at sometime was hatched in a philosopher's brain. This
possible thing in itself can be the will: a possibility, which because it arises
out of the joining of two possibilities, is nothing more than the negative
power of the first possibility, in other words, already a good step toward the
other pole, which signifies impossibility. We heighten this concept of an
always decreasing possibility once again, in that we admit the predicates of
the will, which Schopenhauer took to belong to it: just because an opposition
is unprovable between thing in itself and appearance but can still be thought.
Against such a knot of possibilities every ethical thought could explain itself:
but even against this ethical pretext one could still object that the thinker
who stands before the riddle of the world, has no other means than to guess
in the hope that a moment of heightened awareness will place the word upon
his lips. A word which offers the key to that text lying before all eyes still
unread, which we call world. Whether this world is will? — Here is the point
 2. On Schopenhauer 229

at which we must make our fourth attack. The Schopenhauerian warp and
weft gets tangled in his hands: in the smallest part as a result of a certain
tactical clumsiness of its author, but mostly because the world does not let
itself be so easily fastened into the system as Schopenhauer had hoped in the
first inspiration of discovery. In his old age he complained that the most
difficult problem of philosophy had not been solved in his own. He meant
the question concerning the borders of individuation.

3.

Further, a certain species of that contradiction with which the Schopen-

hauerian system is perforated, will occupy us on occasion; a species of
extremely important and hardly avoidable contradictions, which to a certain
extent while still resting under their mother's heart arm themselves and,
scarcely born, do their first deed by killing her. They concern themselves
collectively with the borders of individuation and have their πεώτον φ(εΰδος)
in the point considered under 3. above. "The will as thing in itself' said
Schopenhauer (W als (Wille und) V.I p. 134, "is quite different from its
phenomenon, and is entirely free from all the forms of the phenomenon into
which it first passes when it appears, and which therefore concern only its
objectivity, and are foreign to the will itself. Even the most universal form
of all representation, that of object for subject, does not concern it, still less
the forms that are subordinate to this and collectively have their common
expression in the principle of sufficient reason. As we know, time and space
belong to this principle, and consequently plurality as well, which exists and
has become possible only through them. In this last respect I shall call time
and space the principium individuationis, an expression borrowed from the old
scholasticism" (WWR 1: 112). In this description, which we meet in countless
variations in Schopenhauer's writings, what surprises is its dictatorial tone,
which asserts a number of negative characteristics of the thing in itself which
lies completely outside the sphere of knowledge, and which does not remain
in accord with the assertion that it is not subject to the most universal form
of knowledge, namely, to be object for a subject. Schopenhauer expresses
this himself: W al(s) W (I) p. 131 "this thing in itself (...), which as such is
never object, since all object is its mere appearance or phenomenon, and not
it itself, is to be thought of objectively, then we must borrow its name and concept
from an object, from something in some way objectively given, and therefore
from one of its phenomena" (WWR 1: 110). Schopenhauer demands that
something, which can never be an object, nevertheless should be thought of
objectively: a path which can only lead to an apparent objectivity, in so far
230 Appendix A

as a completely dark and ungraspable χ is draped with predicates, as with

colorful clothes, which are taken from the world o f phenomena, a world
foreign to it. T h e demand follows, that we take the draped clothes, namely
the predicates for the thing in itself: for that is what the sentence means: " i f
it is to be thought objectively, it must borrow its name and concept from an
object." The concept "the thing in itself' is then removed, "because it should
be so", and another is secretly pressed into our hands.
The borrowed name and concept is the will, "because it is the clearest
and most developed appearance o f the thing in itself, which is most directly
illuminated by knowledge." But that does not concern us here: more impor-
tant for us is that all the predicates o f the will are also borrowed from the
world o f appearance. True, Schopenhauer makes here and there the attempt
to describe the sense o f these predicates as completely ungraspable and
transcendent, for example, W al(s) W. (und Vorstellung) II p. 368 " T h e unity
of that will...in which we have recognized the inner being o f the phenomenal
world, is a metaphysical unity. Consequently, knowledge o f it is transcendent;
that is to say, it does not rest on the functions o f our intellect, and is therefore
not to be really grasped with them." ( W W R 2: 323) Compare W W R p. 134,
132. On the basis o f the whole Schopenhauerian system, in particular because
of the first description of it in the first book o f der W. als W. (und Vorstellung)
we persuade ourselves, however, that where he wishes, he allows himself the
human and completely non-transcendental use of unity of the will, and really
only then goes back to that transcendence where the holes in the system
present themselves as obvious to him. It is then with this "unity" as it is
with the "will", they are predicates o f things in themselves taken from the
world of appearance under which the actual essence, that transcendental
evaporates. What is valid even o f the three predicates of unity, eternity (that
means timelessness), freedom (that means causelessness), is valid for the thing
in itself: they are all indivisibly knotted together with our organization, so
that it is completely doubtful whether they have any meaning outside o f the
human sphere of knowledge. That they should belong to the thing in itself,
while their opposites dominate the world of appearances, that neither Kant
nor Schopenhauer will prove for us, yes, not even make plausible for us, the
latter because his thing in itself, the will, with those three predicates, cannot
get along and manage, rather it is continually required to borrow from the
world of appearance, that is, to transfer the concepts o f multiplicity, tempor-
ality, and causality to itself.
In contrast he is fully correct when he (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung)
I p. 118 says that "from outside one can never come close to the essence of
things: no matter how one searches one wins only images and names."
 2. On Schopenhauer 231

4.

The will appears; how could it appear? Or to ask it another way: where
does the representation mechanism come from through which the will ap-
pears? Schopenhauer answers with a curious turn of expression, in that he
indicates the intellect as the μηχαυή of the will: (Die Welt als Wille und
Vorstellung) II. 315 "The growth of the development of the brain has come
about by the ever increasing and more complicated need of the corresponding
appearances of the will." "Knowledge and the conscious ego are at basis
tertiary, in that they presuppose the organism, but the organism presupposes
the will." (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) II. 314 Schopenhauer posits
then a hierarchical progression of representations of the will with ever
increasing needs of existence: in order to satisfy these, nature uses a matching
progression of tools among which the intellect, from its first dawning feelings
to its extreme clarity, has a place. From such a point of view a world of
appearance is placed before the world of appearance: if we wish to hold fast
to the Schopenhauerian termini concerning the thing in itself. Even before
the appearance of intellect we see the principium individuationis, the law of
causality in full effect. The will grasps life in haste and searches everywhere
for ways to appear; it begins modestly with the lowest steps and rises to a
certain extent from the ranks. In this region of the Schopenhauerian system
everything is already dissolved in words and images: from the primal deter-
mination of things in themselves, almost all, except the memory is lost. And
where memory takes root, it serves only to place the completed contradiction
in full light of day. Par. II. p. 150 "That all life on earth did not exist in any
consciousness at all, either in their own because they had none or in the
consciousness of another because no such consciousness existed...that is, they
did not exist at all; but then what does their having existed signify? At
bottom, it is merely hypothetical, namely, if a consciousness had existed in
those primeval times, then such events would have appeared in it; thus far
does the regressus of phenomena lead us. And so it lay in the very nature of
the thing in itself to manifest itself in such events." (PP 2: 140) They are, as
Schopenhauer says on the same page, only "translations into the language of
our observing intellect."
But, if we ask after these prudent considerations, how was it once possible
that the intellect arose? The existence of the last step before the appearance
of the intellect is certainly as hypothetical as that of earlier ones, that means
it was not in existence because consciousness was not in existence. With the
next step, consciousness is supposed to appear, that means out of a non-
existing world the flower of knowledge is to suddenly and directly break
forth. This is also to have happened in a sphere of timelessness and space-
232 Appendix A

lessness without the mediation of causality: what stems out of such an

otherworldly world, however, must itself — after Schopenhauer's reasoning
— be thing in itself: either the intellect must rest as a new predicate eternally
joined with the thing in itself; or there can be no intellect because at no time
could an intellect have become.
But one exists: it follows that it could not be a tool of the world of
appearance, as Schopenhauer would have it, but rather thing in itself, that
is, will.
The Schopenhauerian thing in itself would therefore become simultane-
ously the principium individuationis and basis of necessitation: in other words:
the present world. Schopenhauer wanted to find an equation for the x: and
it revealed itself out of his calculation that it — x, that means that he did not
find it.
5. Ideas
6. Character
7. Teleology and its opposite
8.

One should take note with what caution Schopenhauer avoided the
question of the origin of intellect: as soon as we come into the region of this
question and secretly hope, that it will now come, he hides himself to some
extent behind clouds: although it is apparent that the intellect in the Scho-
penhauerian sense already presupposes a world caught in the principium
individuationis and the laws of causality. Once, as far as I can see, this admission
lay upon his tongue: but he swallows it again in such a curious manner, that
we need to look at it closer. W. al(s) W. (und Vorstellung) II 310. "Now if
in the objective comprehension of the intellect we go back as far as we can,
we shall find that the necessity or need of knowledge in general arises from the
plurality and separate existence of beings, from individuation. For let us
imagine that there exists only a single being, then such a being needs no
knowledge, because there would not then exist anything different from that
being itself, — anything whose existence such a being would therefore have
to take up into itself only indirectly through knowledge, in other words,
nothing foreign that could be apprehended as object. On the other hand,
with the plurality of beings, every individual finds itself in a state of isolation
from all the rest, and from this arises the necessity for knowledge. The
nervous system, by means of which the animal individual first of all becomes
conscious of itself, is bounded by a skin; yet in the brain raised to intellect,
it crosses this boundary by means of its form of knowledge, causality, and
in this way perception arises for it as a consciousness of other things, as a
picture or image of beings in space and time, which change in accordance
with causality." (WWR 2: 274).
 2. On Schopenhauer 233

Zu Schopenhauer.

Ein Versuch, die Welt zu erklären unter einem angenommenen Faktor.

Das Ding an sich bekommt eine seiner möglichen Gestalten.
Der Versuch ist mißlungen.
Schopenhauer hielt es für keinen Versuch.
Sein Ding an sich war von ihm erschlossen.
Daß er selbst das Mißlingen nicht sah, ist daraus zu erklären daß er das Dunkle
Widersprechende in der Region nicht fühlen wollte wo die Individ, aufhört.
Er mißtraute seinem Urtheil.
Stellen.
Der dunkle Triebe unter ein<en) Vorstellungsapparat gebracht offenbart sich als
Welt. Dieser Trieb ist nicht unter das prtncip indiv. eingegangen.

Das Titelblatt der Welt als W und V. enthüllt uns bereits, was Schopenhauer durch
dieses Werk der Menschheit g(e)leistet zu haben beansprucht.
Die sehnsüchtige Frage aller Metaphysiker wie sie das Goethische Wort ausspricht
„Ob nicht" — wird von ihm kühnlich mit Ja beantwortet: und damit die neue
Erkenntniß wie eine Tempelinschrift weit und breit in die Augen falle, so hat er die
erlösende Formel für das al[l]te und wichtigste Räthsel der Welt seinem Buche als
Titel an die Stirn geschrieben die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.
jene angebliche Lösung also:
Um bequem aufzufassen, worin das Lösende und Aufklärende dieser Formel zu
suchen sei, empfiehlt es sich sie in eine halb bildliche Form umzusetzen
Der grundlose erkenntnißlose Wille offenbart sich, unter einen Vorstellungsapparat
gebracht, als Welt.
Wenn wir von diesem Satze das subtrahieren, was als das Vermächtniß des
g r ö ß t e n ) Kant auf Schopenhauer übergegangen ist, und was dieser jeder Zeit in
seiner großartigen Manier mit dem gebührendsten Respekt betrachtet hat: so bleibt
das eine Wort „Wille" sammt seinen Prädikaten zurück, somit ein schwergemünztes,
viel umschließendes Wort, wenn anders mit ihm ein so bedeutender über Kant
hinausschreitender Gedanke bezeichnet sein soll, daß sein Entdecker von ihm sagen
konnte er halte ihn für dasjenige, „was man unter dem Namen der Philosophie sehr
lange gesucht habe und dessen Auffindung eben daher von den historisch Gebildeten
für so unmöglich gehalten werde wie die des Steins der Weisen."
Dabei fallt uns zur rechten Zeit ein, daß auch Kant eine nicht minder fragwürdige
Entdeckung, durch die altmodisch schnörkelhafte Kategorientafel (unleserlich) als eine
große als die größte ergebnißreichste That seines Lebens erschien obwohl mit dem
charakt. Unterschied, daß nach Beend. „des Schwersten das jemals z. B e h ( u f ) d.
Met<( aphysik) unternommen werden konnte" Kant sich selbst wie eine gewaltsam
hervorbrechende Naturkraft anstaunte und die Weihe empfieng, „als R e f o r m a t o r )
der Philos. aufzutreten", wogegen Schopenhauer allezeit ( f ü r ) sein<en) angeblichen
Fund der genialen Besonnenheit und anschaulichen Kraft seines Intellekts Dank weiß
Die Irrthümer großer Männer sind verehrungswürdig weil sie fruchtbarer sind als
die Wahrheiten der kleinen.
234 Appendix A

Wenn wir also gegenwärtig darangehen jenen vorhin aufgestellten Satz, den
Inbegriff des Schopenhauer<(s)ch. Systems prüfend zu zerlegen, so steht kein Gedanke
uns ferner als mit einer solchen Kritik Schopenhauer selbst auf den Leib zu rücken,
ihm triumphirend die einzelnen Stücke seiner Beweise vorzuhalten und am Schluß
mit hochgezognen Augenbrauen die Frage aufzuwerfen, wie in aller Welt ein Mensch
mit einem so durchlöcherten System zu solchen Prätensionen k o m m ( c . )

II.

In der That darf nicht geleugnet werden, daß auf jenen Satz, den wir als den
Inbegriff des Sch. S y s t e m s ) vorangestellt haben, von vier Seiten aus erfolgreiche
Angriffe gemacht werden k ö n n t e n ) .
1. Der erste, und der allgemeinste, gegen Schopenhauer nur insofern gerichtet als
er hier nicht, wo es nöthig war über Kant hinaus gieng, hat den Begriff eines Dings
an sich im Auge und sieht in demselben um mit Überweg zu reden „nur eine versteckte
Kategorie."
2. Selbst aber Schopenhauer Berechtigung zuzugeben, auf jenen gefährlichen Pfad
Kant zu folgen, so ist dasjenige was er an Stelle des Kantischen X setzt der Wille,
nur mit Hülfe einer poetischen Intuition erzeugt, während die versuchten logischen
Beweise weder Schopenhauer noch uns genügen können, vgl. <Die Welt als Wille
und Vorstellung) I p. 125. 131.
Zudritt sind wir gezwungen uns gegen die Prädikate zu verwahrten) die Scho-
penhauer seinem Willen beilegt, welche für etwas Schlechthin-Undenkbares viel zu
bestimmt lauten und durchweg aus dem Gegensatze zur Vorstellungswelt gewonnen
sind: während zwischen dem Ding an sich und der Erscheinung nicht einmal der
Begriff des Gegensatzes eine Bedeutung hat
4. Immerhin könnte man zu G u n s t ( e n ) S c h o p e n h a u e r s ) gegen alle diese 3
Instanzen eine dreifache potenzirte Möglichkeit geltend machen:
es kann ein Ding an sich geben, allerdings in keinem andern Sinn als auf dem
Gebiete der Transscendenz eben alles möglich ist, was jemals in eines Philosophen
Hirn ausgebrütet ist. Dies mögliche Ding an sich kann der Wille sein: eine Möglichkeit,
die weil sie aus der Verbindung zweier Möglichkeiten entstanden ist, bloß noch die
negative Potenz der ersten Möglichkeit ist, mit andern Worten schon einen starken
Schritt nach dem andren Pol zu, der Unmöglichkeit bedeutet. Wir steigern diesen
Begriff einer immer abnehm<en)den Möglichkeit noch einmal, indem wir zugeben,
daß selbst die Prädikate des Willens, die Schopenhauer annahm ihm zukommen
können: eben weil zwischen Ding an sich und Erscheinung ein Gegensatz zwar
unerweislich ist, aber doch gedacht werden kann. Gegen einen solchen Knäuel von
Möglichkeiten würde sich nun zwar jedes sittliche Denken erklären: aber selbst auf
diesen ethischen Einwand könnte man noch entgegnen, daß der Denker vor dem
Räthsel der Welt stehend eben kein anderes Mittel hat als zu rathen dh. in der
Hoffnung, daß ein genialer Moment ihm das Wort auf die Lippen legt, das den
Schlüssel zu jener vor all(er) Augen liegenden und doch ungelesnen Schrift bietet,
die wir Welt nennen. Ob dies das Wort Wille ist? — Hier ist die Stelle, wo wir unsern
vierten Angriff machen müssen. Das Schopenhauersche Grundgewebe verstrickt sich
in sein<en) Händen: zum kleinsten Theil in Folge einer gewissen taktischen Unge-
schicklichkeit seines Urhebers zumeist aber weil die Welt sich nicht so bequem in das
 2. On Schopenhauer 235

System einspannten) läßt als Schopenhauer in der ersten Finderbegeister<ung> ge-

hofft hatte. In sein<em> Alter klagte er daß das schwerste Problem der Phil, auch
durch seine Philosophie nicht gelöst sei. Er meinte damit die Frage nach den Grenzen
der I n d i v i d u a t i o n . )

Fürderhin wird uns eine bestimmte Gattung jener Widersprüche, von denen das
Sch. System durchlöchert ist, angelegentlich beschäftigen; eine Gattung von äußerst
wichtigen und kaum vermeidlichen Widersprüchen, die gewissermaßen noch unter
dem Herzen der Mutter ruhend sich schon zum Kriege gegen sie rüsten und die kaum
geboren ihre erste That thun, indem sie die Mutter tödten. Sie beziehn sich sämmtl.
auf die Grenzen der Individuation und haben ihr πρώτον ψ<εΰδος> in dem unter
Nummer 3 berührten Punkte.
„Der Wille als Ding an sich", sagt Schopenh. W. als <Wille u n d ) V. I p. 134, „ist
von seiner Erscheinung gänzlich verschieden und völlig frei von allen Formen
derselben, in welche er eben erst eingeht, indem er erscheint, die daher nur seine
Objektität betreffen, ihm selbst fremd sind. Schon die allgemeinste Form (aller
Vorstellung), die des Objekts für ein Subjekt, trifft ihn nicht; noch weniger die dieser
untergeordneten, [als] welche insgesammt ihren gemeinschaftlichen Ausdruck im Satz
vom Grunde haben, wohin bekanntlich auch Raum und Zeit gehören und folglich
auch die durch diese allein bestehende und möglich gewordn^e) Vielheit. In dieser
letztern Hinsicht werde ich, mit einem aus der alten eigentlichen Scholastik entlehnten
Ausdruck Zeit und Raum das principium individuationis nennen," In dieser Darstellung,
der wir in zahllosen Variationen in Schopenh. Schriften begegnen, überrascht der
diktatorische Ton, der von jenem durchaus außerhalb der Erkenntnißsphaere liegenden
Dinge an sich eine Anzahl n e g a t i v e r Eigenschaften aussagt und somit nicht im
Einklang mit der Behauptung bleibt, daß es von der allgemeinsten Form der Erkennt-
niß Objekt zu sein für ein Subjekt nicht getroffen werde. Dies drückt Schopen selbst
W al^s) W < I ) P· 131 so aus „dieses Ding an sich <(...), welches als solches
nimmermehr Objekt ist, eben weil alles Objekt schon wieder seine bloße Erscheinung,
nicht mehr es selbst ist, mußte, w e n n es d e n n o c h o b j e k t i v g e d a c h t w e r d e n
s o l l t e , N a m e n u n d B e g r i f f von einem Objekt borgen, von etwas irgendwie
objektiv Gegegebenem, folglich von einer seiner Erscheinungen." Schopenhauer
verlangt also, daß etwas, was nie Objekt sein kann, dennoch objektiv gedacht werden
soll: auf welchem Wege wir aber nur zu einer scheinbaren Objektivität gelangen
können, insofern ein durchaus dunkles unfaßbares χ mit Prädikaten wie mit bunten
Kleidern behängt wird, die einer ihm selbst fremden Welt, der Erscheinungswelt
entnommen sind. Die Forderung ist nachher, daß wir die umgehängten Kleider nämlich
die Prädikate für das Ding an sich ansehn sollen: denn das bedeutet der Satz „wenn
es dennoch objektiv gedacht werden soll, muß es Namen und Begriff von einem
Objekte borgen." Der Begriff „Ding an sich" wird also „weil es so sein soll" heimlich
bei Seite geschafft und uns dafür ein anderer in die Hände gedrückt.
Der geborgte Name und Begriff ist eben der Wille, „weil er die deutlichste am
meisten entfaltete vom Erkennen unmittelbar b e l e u c h t e t e ) Erscheinung des Dings
an sich ist." Doch das geht uns hier nichts an: wichtiger ist für uns, daß auch die
sämmtlichen Prädikate des Willens von der Erscheinungswelt geborgt sind. Freilich
236 Appendix A

macht Sch. hier und da den Versuch den Sinn dieser Prädikate als gänzlich unfaßbar
und transscendent da(r)zustellen ζ. B. W a l ( s ) W. ( u n d Vorstellung) II. p. 368 „Die
— Einheit jenes Willens in welchem wir das Wesen an sich der Erscheinungswelt
erkannt hab(en), ist eine metaphysische, mithin die Erkenntniß derselben transscen-
dent dh. nicht auf den Funktionen unsres Intellekts beruhend und daher mit diesen
nicht eigentlich zu erfassen" vgl. dazu W. als W. (und Vorstellung) I. ρ 134. 132 Wir
überzeugen uns aber aus dem ganzen System Sch, insbes. allerdings aus der ersten
Darstell, d e s s e l b e n ) im I B. der W. als W. (und Vorstellung) daß er, wo es ihm
irgend paßt, den menschlichen und durchaus nicht transscenden(ten) Gebrauch der
Einheit im Willen sich erlaubt und im Grunde nur dann auf jene Transscend. rekurriert,
wo die Lücken des Systems sich ihm zu faßlich da(r)stellen. Es ist also mit dieser
„Einheit" wie mit dem „Willen" es sind aus der Erscheinungswelt genommene
Prädikate des Dings an sich, unter denken) der eigentliche Kern eben das Transscen-
dentale sich verflüchtigt. Es gilt eben von den drei Prädikaten der Einheit, Ewigkeit
(dh. Zeitlosigkeit) Freiheit (dh. Grundlosigkeit, was von dem Ding an sich gilt: sie
alle sind sammt und sonders unzertrennlich mit unsrer Organisation verknüpft, so
daß es völlig zweifelhaft ist, ob sie außerhalb der menschlichen Erkenntnißsphaere
überhaupt eine Bedeutung haben. Daß sie aber dem Ding an sich z u k o m ( m ) e n sollen,
weil ihre Gegensätze in der Erscheinungswelt dominiren das wird uns weder K ( a n t )
noch Sch. beweisen, ja nicht einmal wahrscheinlich machen können, letzterer vor
allem deshalb nicht, weil sein Ding an sich, der Wille mit jenen drei Prädikaten nicht
auskommen und haushalten kann, sondern f o r t w ä h r e n d ) genöthigt ist, ein Anlehen
bei der Erscheinungswelt zu machen dh. den Begriff der Vielheit Zeitlichkeit und der
Causalität auf sich zu übertragen
Dagegen behält seine volle Richtigkeit wenn er (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstel-
l u n g ) I ρ 118 sagt „daß von Außen dem Wesen der Dinge nimmermehr beizukommen
ist: wie immer man auch forschen mag so gewinnt man nichts als Bilder und Namen."

4.

Der Wille erscheint; wie konnte er erscheinen? Oder anders gefragt: woher der
Vorstellungsapparat, in dem der Wille erscheint? Schopenhauer antwortet mit einer
ihm eigenthümlichen Wendung, indem er den Intellekt als die μηχανή des Willens
bezeichnet: (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) II. 315 «Die Steigerung aber der
Gehirnentwicklung werde durch das sich immer mehr erhöhende und complicirende
Bedürfniß der entsprechenden Erscheinungen des Willens herbeigeführt.» «Das er-
kennende und bewußte Ich sei somit im Grunde tertiär, indem es den Organismus
voraussetzt, dieser aber den Willen.» (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) II. 314
Sch. denkt sich somit eine Stufenfolge von Willenserscheinungen mit fortwährend
sich steigernden Existenzbedürfnissen: um diese zu befriedigen, bediene sich die Natur
einer entsprechenden Stufenfolge von Hülfsmitteln, unter denen auch der Intellekt
vom kaum dämmernden Empfinden an bis zu seiner äußersten Klarheit seine Stelle
habe. Bei einer derartigen Anschauung wird eine Erscheinungswelt vor die Erschei-
nungswelt gesetzt: wenn wir nämlich die Schopenhauerschen termini über das Ding
an sich festhalten wollen. Auch schon vor der Erscheinung des Intellekts sehen wir
das principium individ., das Gesetz der Causalität in voller Wirksamkeit. Der Wille
ergreift das Leben in voller Hast und sucht auf alle Weise in die Erscheinung zu
 2. On Schopenhauer 237

treten; er beginnt bescheidener Weise mit den untersten Stufen und dient gewisser-
maßen von der Pike auf. In dieser Gegend des Schopenhauersch<(en) System<(s) ist
schon alles in Worte und Bilder aufgelöst: von den uranfänglichen Bestimmungen des
Dings an sich ist alles, fast bis auf die Erinnerung verloren gegangen. Und wo diese
einmal dazwischen tritt, da dient sie nur dazu, den vollendeten Widerspruch in volle
Tagesbeleuchtung zu stellen. Par. II. 150 „die allem Leben auf der Erde vorher
g e g a n g e n e n ) geologischen Vorgänge sind in gar keinem Bewußtsein dagewesen:
nicht im eigenen, weil sie keines haben; nicht in einem fremden: weil keines da war.
Also ( . . . ) sie waren überhaupt nicht; oder was bedeutet denn noch ihr Dagewesensein?
— Es ist im Grunde ein bloß h y p o t h e t i s c h e s ; nämlich w e n n zu jenen Urzeiten
ein Bewußtsein dagewesen wäre, so würden in demselben solche Vorgänge sich
dargestellt haben, dahin leitet uns der regressus der Erscheinungen also lag es im Wesen
des Dinges an sich sich in solchen Vorgängen da(r)zustellen." Sie sind wie Sch. auf
derselben Seite sagt, nur „Ubersetzungen in die Sprache unsres anschauenden Intel-
lekts."
Aber, fragen wir nach diesen besonnenen Ausführungen, wie war dann jemals die
Entstehung des Intellekts möglich? Das Dasein der letzten Stufe vor Erscheinung des
Intellekts ist doch gewiß ebenso hypothetisch als das jeder früheren dh. sie war nicht
vorhanden, weil kein Bewußtsein vorhanden war. Auf der nächsten soll nun der
Intellekt erscheinen dh. aus einer nicht existierenden Welt soll plötzlich und unver-
mittelt die Blume der Erkenntniß hervorbrechen. Dies s o l l zugleich in einer Sphaere
der Zeitlosigkeit und Raumlosigkeit geschehen sein, ohne Vermittlung der Causalität:
was aber aus einer solchen entweltlichten Welt stammt, muß selbst — nach den
Schopenhauerschen Sätzen — Ding an sich sein: entweder ruht nun der Intellekt als
ein neues Prädikat ewig zusammengeschlossen mit dem Ding an sich; oder es kann
keinen Intellekt geben weil niemals ein Intellekt werden konnte.
Aber es existiert einer: folglich würde er nicht ein Werkzeug der Erscheinungswelt,
wie Schopenhauer will, sein können, sondern Ding an sich sein dh. Wille
Das Schopenh. Ding an sich würde also zugleich princip. indiv. sein und Grund der
Necessitation sein: mit andern Worten: die vorhandene Welt. Sch. wollte das χ einer
Gleichung finden: und es ergiebt sich aus seiner Rechnung daß es = χ ist dh. daß er
es nicht gefunden hat.
5. Ideen.
6. Charakter.
7. Teleologie und Gegensatz
8.

Es ist zu beachten mit welcher Behutsamkeit Schopenh. der Frage nach dem
Ursprung des Intellekts aus dem Wege geht: sobald wir in die Region dieser Frage
kommen und im Stillen hoffen, daß es jetzt kommen werde, da verbirgt er sich
gewisserm. hinter Wolken: obwohl es ganz ersichtlich ist, daß der Intellekt im Sch.
Sinn schon eine im pr(jncipiöy in^dividuationis) und den Gesetzen der Causal, befangne
Welt voraussetzt. Einmal so weit ich sehe liegt ihm dies Bekenntniß auf der Zunge:
aber er würgt es auf eine so seltsame Weise hinunter, daß wir hierauf näher eingehen
müssen. W. al<s) W. <und Vorstellung) II 310. „Gehen wir nun in der objektiven
Auffassung des Intellekts so weit wir irgend können zurück; so werden wir finden,
daß die Nothwendigkeit oder das Bedürfniß der E r k e n n t n i ß ü b e r h a u p t entsteht
aus d.er Vielheit, und dem g e t r e n n t e n Dasein der Wesen, also aus der Individuation.
Denn denkt man sich, es sei nur ein e i n z i g e s Wesen vorhanden; so bedarf ein solches
238 Appendix A

keiner Erkenntniß: weil nichts da ist, was von ihm selbst verschieden wäre und dessen
Dasein es daher erst mittelbar, durch Erkenntniß dh. Bild und Begriff in sich aufzu-
nehmen hätte. Es wäre eben selbst schon alles in allem, mithin bliebe ihm nichts zu
erkennen dh. nichts Fremdes, das als Gegenstand, Objekt aufgefaßt werden könnte
übrig. Bei der Vielheit der Wesen hingegen befindet jedes Individuum sich in einem
Zustande der Isolation von allen übrigen, und daraus entsteht die Nothwendigk. der
Erkenntniß. Das Nervensystem, mittelst dessen das thierische Individuum zunächst,
sich seiner selbst bewußt wird, ist durch seine Haut begrenzt: jedoch im Gehirn bis
zum Intellekt gesteigert, überschreitet es diese Grenze, mittelst seiner Erkenntnißform
der Causalität und so entsteht ihm die Anschauung als ein Bewußtsein a n d r e r Dinge,
als ein Bild von Wesen in Raum und Zeit die sich verändern, gemäß der Causalität."

3. On Teleology

T r e n d e l e n b u r g log. Untersuch. 2 Aufl. Leip. 1862. II. S. 65f.

Gustav Schneider de causa finali Aristotelea. Berol. 1865.
Hume Dialogues concerning natural religion deutsch von Schreiter
Leipz.. 1781.
Kant - Krit. d. r. V.
— Krit. d. Urtheilskr
Rosenkranz Gesch. der Kant. Philos.
Kuno Fischer Kant etc.

On Teleology

Kant tries to prove "that a necessity exists that we think organisms as

premeditated, that is, to think of them in terms of concepts of expedience."
(Schop) I can only agree that this is one way to explain teleology to oneself.
The analogy of human experience places next to this, in addition, the
accidental, that means the non-mediated beginning of expedience, i. e., in the
happy joining together of talent and fate, lottery tickets, (unreadable)
Thus: in the unending fullness of real cases there must also be the favorable
or expedient. The necessity of which Kant speaks no longer exists in our time:
remember, however, "that even Voltaire held teleological proof for uncon-
vincing." (Schop.)
Optimism and teleology go hand in hand: both are concerned with
disputing that the inexpedient is really something inexpedient.
Against teleology in general one has the weapon: proof of inexpedience.
With that one only proves, that the highest reason has only worked
sporadically, that there is also a terrain for lesser reasons. There is no uniform
teleological world: but there is a creating intelligence.
 3. On Teleology 239

The acceptance of such an intelligence is made after human analogy: why

cannot there be a power which unconsciously creates the expedient, i. e.,
Nature: one thinks of the instinct of animals. This is the standpoint of natural
philosophy. (Schop.)
One no longer posits the knowing outside of the world.
But we remain stuck in metaphysics and must call on the thing in itself
for assistance.
Finally a resolution can be possible from a purely human standpoint: the
Empedoclean, where expedience appears only as an instance among many
inexpediencies.
Two metaphysical solutions are attempted:
the one, coarsely anthropological, places an ideal humanity outside the world,
the other, still metaphysical, flees into an intelligible world, in which the
expedience of things is immanent.
Expedience is the exception
Expedience is chance
This reveals complete non-rationality.
One must sever every theological interest from the question.

Teleology since Kant

Natural Philosophy
The simple idea is shattered in the multiplicity of parts and conditions of
the organism, but remains intact in the necessary joining of parts and
functions. This is accomplished by the intellect.
"The expedience of the organic, the regularity of the inorganic are brought
into nature through our understanding" (Schop.)
This idea, expanded upon, gives the explanation of external expedience.
The thing in itself must "show its unity in the agreement of all appearances."
(Schop.) "All the parts of nature come to meet each other, because there is
one will." (Schop.)
But the opposite to the whole theory arises in that terrible struggle of
individuals (which likewise manifest themselves as idea) and the species.
(Schop.) The explanation presupposes an overarching teleology: which does
not exist.
The most difficult is the uniting of teleology and the unteleological world.
The positing of the problem
Kant's rejection of the attempt at a solution
240 Appendix A

Solutions of the natural philosophers

Critique of Kant's view.
The question has similarity with that of searching after freedom of the
human will, in that one looks for a solution in the area of something
intelligible, because one has overlooked a coordinating possibility. (Schop.
Also Fischer)
There is no question, which necessarily can be solved only through the
acceptance of an intelligible world.
Teleology:
inner expedience. We see a complicated machine, which maintains itself and
cannot devise another structure which could construct it more simply, that
means only:
the machine maintains itself, thus it is expedient. A judgement about
"highest expedience" is not ours to make. We can at best decide upon a
reason, but have no right to indicate it as higher or lower.
External expedience is a deception.
But we are acquainted with the method of nature, how such an "expe-
dient" body arises, a senseless method. Accordingly, expedience demonstrates
itself only as ability to live, that is, as cond. sine qua non. Chance can find the
most beautiful melody.
Secondly we know the method of nature which would maintain such an
expedient body. With senseless frivolity.
Teleology however raises a multitude of questions which are insoluble,
or have been until now.
World organism, origin of evil do not belong here.
However, for example, the origins of the intellect.
Is it necessary to oppose teleology with an explained world?
It is only necessary to establish another reality on a demarcated realm.
Opposition positions: logical laws that reveal themselves can be higher
on a higher level. But we may not speak of logical laws.

Expedient

We see a method for reaching the goal, or more exactly: we see existence
and its means and decide, that these means are expedient. The recognition of
a high, certainly not of a highest grade of reason still does not lie therein.
(Schop.)
 3. On Teleology 241

We are astonished then at the complicated and conjecture (after human

analogy) a special wisdom in it.
What is wonderful for us is really organic living: and all means to maintain
this we call expedient. Why do we suspend the concept of expedience in the
inorganic world? Because we have here only unities, not correlated parts
working with one another. (Schop.)
The casting aside of teleology has a practical worth. It is only a matter
of declining the concept of a higher reason: thus we are already satisfied.
Treasuring of teleology in its valuation for the human world of ideas.
Teleology is like optimism an aesthetic product.
The strong necessity of cause and effect shuts out the goal in unconscious
nature. Because representations of human conceptions of goals are not en-
gendered in nature, they must be observed as motives lying outside causality
inserted here and there, through which even the strong necessity is contin-
uously broken. Existence is perforated with miracles. (Schop.)
Teleology as expedience and the result of conscious intelligence pushes
farther and farther. One asks after the purpose of this isolated interference
and stands in this before pure arbitrariness.
"Order and disorder are not to be found in nature."
"We assign effects to chance, whose knotting together with causes we do
not see." (Schop. Also Lange)
Much comic in Brockes
s. Strauss Small Writings
in the Stoics, v. Zeller Β. 4.
Things exist, so they must be able to exist, that means they must have
the conditions for existence.
When man makes something, that means makes it capable of existence,
he thinks about the conditions under which it can take place. He calls the
conditions for the existence of the finished work expedient after the fact.
Therefore, he also calls the conditions of existence of things expedient·.
that means only with the presupposition that they arose in the same manner
as human works.
When a man draws a lot out of an urn and it is not death: it is neither
inexpedient nor expedient, but, as man says, chance, that means without
preceding thought. However, the conditions of his further existence are
given.
Is it true, that Democritus maintained the origin of language out of conven-
ience?
242 Appendix A

"The organization of nature has nothing analogical with any causality

which we know." (that means organism) said Kant in The Critique ofJudgement
(p. 258)
"An organism is that, in which everything is interchangeably both end
and means." (p. 260)
"Every living thing" says Goethe, "is not a singularity, but a plurality:
even though it appears to us as individual, it remains a collection of living,
independent beings." Goethe Β 36 p. 7, etc. (Lange)
Very important Goethe Β 40 p. 425 about the origin of his natural
philosophy out of a Kantian sentence. (Lange)
"What reason knows of nature through its concepts is nothing other than
the effect of moving force, that is mechanism." (Fischer) "What cannot be
known from a merely mechanical point of view, does not belong to natural
science." (Fischer)
"Mechanically to explain means to explain from external causes."
"The specification {of nature) cannot be explained through external causes."
"Nothing however, without cause." (Fischer) Thus, inner causes, that means
ends, that means, representations.
"A point of view is not yet knowledge."
"The principle of such a necessary point of view must be a concept of
reason."
"The only principle of this kind is natural expediency." (Fischer)
"Through the concept of mechanical lawfulness the architecture of the world
can be explained, but no organism can be explained with it." (Fischer)
"It is impossible to represent natural expedience as being inherent in
matter." "Matter is only external appearance." (Fischer)
"The expedience of things can always be valid only with respect to an
intelligence, with whose intention the thing agrees." (Fischer) And further,
"either our own or a foreign intelligence, which lies at the basis of things
themselves. (Fischer) In the last case, the intention which reveals itself in
appearance is the existence of things." In other cases only our conception of
the thing is judged purely as expedience. This latter kind of expediency has
to do only with the form, ("in the simple observation of the object imagination
and intelligence are harmonized") (Fischer)
"only the mechanical origination of things is open to knowing".
A class of things is not knowable. (Fischer)
We understand only a mechanism.
The mechanical origin of things is discernable, but we cannot know
whether there is a totally different origin.
 3. On Teleology 243

Because of our organization we only understand a mechanical origin of

things.
There is also given (s. Kant) in our organization a force, which makes
us believe in organisms, (compare Fischer)
From the standpoint of human nature:
we know only mechanism (compare Fischer)
we do not know the organism.
But even mechanism as well as organism do not belong to the thing in
itself.
The organism is a form. If we look away from the form, it is a multiplicity.
I. Organism as product of our organization
II. Only the mathematical is discernable
III.
The organic body is material, whose parts are joined together through
expedience.
For that reason we demand causes which can tie together the parts of a
material expediently — Kant said that.
organizing causes, which must be thought as effective towards ends —
(Fischer)
Therein lies however a leap. It is only necessary to prove a coordinated
possibility, in order to remove the compelling in the Kantian representation.
Mechanism joined with causality gives this possibility. (Fischer)
That which Kant claimed, he claimed after a bad analogy: that according
to his idea, there is nothing similar to the relationship of expedience of the
organisms.
Expedience arose as a special case of the possible: countless forms arise,
that means, mechanical assembly: among these countless there could also be
some capable of life. (Lange)
The presupposition is, that the living can arise out of the mechanical.
Kant denied that.
In truth one thing is certain, that we only know the mechanical. What is
beyond our concepts, is completely unknowable. The origin of the organic
is thus a hypothetical one: that we imagine a human understanding was
present. Now the concept of the organic is also only human: one must point
out the analogy: that which is capable of life arises from among a multitude
of those possibilities incapable of life. With that we come closer to the
solution of the organism.
we see that much that is capable of life arises and is maintained and we
see the method.
244 Appendix A

Supposed that the force, which works to make life capable of existence,
brings it to be, and maintains it is the same: this is very irrational.
This is, however, the presupposition of teleology.
" T h e idea of effect (...) is the concept of the whole"
In organisms "the active principle (...) is the idea of intended effect."
(Fischer)
T h e concept of the whole however is our work. Here lies the source of
the representation of ends. T h e concept of the whole does not lie in things,
but in us.
These unities which we call organisms, are however again multiplicities.
There are in reality no individuals, rather individuals and organisms are
nothing but abstractions.
Into these unities, made by us, we later transfer the idea of end. (Lange.
Also Fischer)
We believe that the force which brings about organisms of a certain kind
is a unitary one.
Then the method of this force, h o w it creates and maintains the organisms
is to be observed.
Here it is demonstrated that we only call expedient, that which shows
itself to be capable of life.
T h e secret is only "life"
whether this is also only an idea conditioned by our organization? (Schop.)
"the frantic wastefulness astonishes us" II, p. 375 W u W (und Vorstel-
lung), Schopenhauer said: "the work costs nature n o trouble" therefore
destruction is for it indifferent (unreadable). (Lange)
Schopenhauer believes that there was an analogy to the organ II W als
(Wille und Vorstellung) p. 378. " T h e will the m o v i n g one, what moves it
the motive (causa finalis)."

Goethe's attempt

metamorphosis belongs to the explanations of the organic out of the

effective cause.
Every effective cause finally rests on something impenetrable (that even
proves, that this is the right human way)
For that reason one does not ask after final causes in inorganic nature
because here forces and not individuals are evident.
 3. On Teleology 245

that is, because we can solve everything mechanically, we no longer

believe in ends.
"For we have complete insight only into what we can make and accom-
plish according to our conceptions." (Kant § 3 (64))

A False Antithesis

If only mechanical forces rule in nature, so the expedient appearances are

also only appearances, their expedience is our idea.
The blind forces act without aim, thus they can effect nothing expedient.
That capable of life is formed as a result of an unending chain of failed
and half successful attempts.
Life, the organism proves no higher intelligence: in general no pervading
degree of intelligence.
The existence of the organism shows only blindly working forces.
1. Setting aside of expanded representations of teleology
2. Limits of the concept. The expedient in nature.
3. Expedient same as able to exist
4. Organisms as multiplicities and unities
"the representation of the whole thought as cause is the end." (Kant p. 64)
(Fischer)
However, the "whole" is itself only a representation.
Kant:
"Possible, that organisms originated purely mechanically, impossible that
we trace them back mechanically." (Kant, Fischer)
Why not?
The understanding is discursive not intuitive.
"it can grasp the whole only in its parts and put them together"
In the organism, however, the "parts are conditioned by the whole."
"Now the understanding tries to proceed from the whole, which is not
given in the perception, but only in representation. The representation of the
whole conditions the parts: "the representation of the whole as cause," that
is, end."

"When grasping the whole out of the parts, understanding proceeds

mechanically, when grasping the given parts from the whole, it can only trace
them back to the concept of the whole." (Kant, Fischer)
Thus, intuition is lacking.
246 Appendix A

Polemic According to Nature

It is first denied that the whole in organisms is something real, that is,
the concept of unity is examined and then ascribed to the human organism.
Therefrom, then we may not proceed.
In the organism parts are not only conditioned by the whole but also the
whole by the parts. (Fischer, Kant)
Thus, if organisms originated mechanically, under other circumstances,
they must also be traceable.
Given, that we can only hold one side in view.
Now the parts are next observed and broken down into their parts: in
this way comes (unreadable), as example, to the cell.
Under the presupposition that the organisms originated mechanically. If
however a concept of an end was active as well, in spite of that, the creation
happened mechanically, (as Kant suggests)
There must then be a mechanism which can be traced.
The generat(io) aequivoca unproven (Fischer, Lange)
Final causes as well as mechanisms are human ways of perceiving. Only
mathematics is known purely.
Law (in the inorganic nature) is as law something analogous to the final
cause.
"What in nature is not constituted in a purely mechanical manner (...),
is no object for understanding." (Fischer)
Only the purely mathematical in nature can be explained.
"To mechanically explain means to explain out of external causes"/ this
definition was introduced, in order afterwards to set the inner (causes) against
it.
Mechanically explaining means much more.
"For we have complete insight only into what we can make and accom-
plish according to our concepts."
One can only comprehend the mathematical completely (that is the formal
view). In all else man stands before the unknown. In order to overcome this
man invents concepts, which only gather together a sum of appearing
characteristics, which however, do not get ahold of the thing.
Therein belong force, matter, individual, law, organism, atom, final cause.
These are not parts but only reflected judgements.
By mechanism Kant understands the world without final causes: the
world of causality.
We cannot picture crystallization without the idea of effect.
 3. On Teleology 247

The origin and maintenance of organic beings — to what degree do they

belong to the final cause?
Ends of nature: in generation, maintenance of the individual and its kind.
Compare Kant Kritik d. Urtheilskr. Hrsg. v. K. Rosenkranz, Lpz. 1838, §62.
Then Kant substitutes the concept of a thing (see § 63) and loses sight of
the general forms of expedience.
The fortuitousness of his form in relationship with reason (this is also
found in the crystal)
"A thing exists as an end of nature, when it is...cause and effect by itself."
(Kant) This sentence is not traced back. A single case is taken.
The derivative, that organisms are the only end of nature has not succeeded.
In nature a machine would also lead to underlying final causes.
Concept of expedience: only the ability of existence. Nothing is said with
that about the degree of reason which is manifested therein.
"It is something different" said Kant "to consider a thing according to
its inner form as expedient and to regard the existence of this thing as an
end of nature" — Therefore there is no conflict between the inexpedient
method of maintenance and reproduction of an organism with its own
expedience.
On the other hand it is the same thing to say that this organism is
expedient and that it is capable of life. Not: the existence of this thing is an
end of nature: rather: what we call expedient is nothing other than that we
find a thing capable of life and as a result of that we find the conditions to
be expedient.
Whoever describes nature's method of maintenance as inexpedient, regards
even the existence of a thing as an end of nature.
The concept of an end of nature used only with the organism
"But" said Kant, "this concept leads necessarily to the idea of all of nature
as a system based on the rule of ends." "through the example, that nature
gives in its organic productions, one is justified (...) in expecting from her
and her laws nothing but what is expedient in the whole."
This reflection comes about in that one
1) does not consider the subjective in the concept of ends
2) understands nature as a unity
3) also credits it with a unity of means
Kant, Kritik d. Urteilskr., hrsg. v. K. Rosenkranz p. 267
"When one brings the concept of God into the natural sciences and their
context, in order to explain the expedient in nature, and thereafter again uses
248 Appendix A

this expedience to prove, that there is a god, then in neither science is there
inner certainty, and a deceiving diallele brings each into incertitude, because
they have allowed their borders to run into one another."

To grasp the origins o f organisms in general from the method o f nature

with regard to maintenance, etc.: this is not the Empedoclean point o f view.
But rather the Epicurean. It presupposes, however, that chance can assemble
organic beings: while here lies exactly the disputable point. Out o f letters a
tragedy can be thrown together (Cicero), out o f meteor pieces an earth: the
question is, what "life" is, whether it is a simple ordering and forming
principle (as with tragedy) or something completely different: against that it
is admissable that the same principle exists within organic nature in the
relationship o f organisms to one another as in inorganic nature. T h e method
o f nature in the handling o f things is indifferent, she is an impartial mother,
equally hard with inorganic and organic children.
Chance rules unconditionally, that means the opposite o f expedience in
nature. The storm which throws things about is chance. That is knowable.
Here one asks, whether the force which makes the things is the same as
that which maintains them?

In the organic being the parts are expedient to its existence, that means
it would not live, if the parts were inexpedient. With that nothing is decided
about the single part. T h e part is a form o f expedience: but it cannot be
discerned, that it is the only possible form. T h e whole does not condition
the parts, while the parts necessarily condition the whole. Whoever maintains
the first, maintains the highest expedience, that is, among the diversity of
possible forms of expedience of parts those are maintained which have the
highest expedience: whereby he presupposes that there must be a hierarchy
of expediences.
Which is now the idea o f effect? Life under the necessary conditions for
it? Is that an idea o f effect common to all organisms?
Life in one form under the conditions necessarily belonging to it? But
the form and the conditions coincide here, that is, if a form is supposed as
cause, then the degree o f expedience would be made part o f the cause. Because
life in a form is an organism. What is an organism other than form, formed
life?
When we say o f the parts o f the organism, that they are not necessary,
we say, the form o f the organism is not necessary: we place, in other words,
the organic somewhere other than in the form. But outside that it is simply
life. Thus our principle is: for life there are different forms, that means
expediences.
Life is possible under an astonishing number o f forms.
 3. On Teleology 249

Each of these forms is expedient: and because countless forms exist, so

there are also countless expedient forms.
In human life we make hierarchies of expedience: we find it "reasonable"
only when the choice is narrowed. When in a complicated situation man
finds the one expedient path, we say he acts reasonably. If, however, one
wants to travel in the world and chooses any of several ways, he acts
expediently but not reasonably.
Reason, then, is not revealed in the "expedient" organism.
That which is "the cause as idea of the effect" is only the form of life.
(Fischer) Life cannot be thought as an end in itself because it is presupposed
in order that there can be actions according to ends.
When we talk of concepts of ends and final causes: we mean: a form is
intentioned by a living and thinking being, in which life wants to appear.
In other words, we do not advance through the final cause to the
explanation of life, but only of the form.
We grasp about a living thing nothing but forms. The eternally becoming
is life; through the nature of our intellect we grasp forms: our intellect is too
dull to recognize continuing change: what is knowable to it it calls form. In
truth there can be no form, because in each point sits infinity. Every thought
unity (point) describes a line.
A concept similar to form is the concept of the individual. Organisms
are called unities, goal-centers. But unities only exist for our intellect. Each
individual has an infinity of living individuals within itself. It is only a coarse
perception, perhaps taken from the human body.
All "forms" can be thrown out, but life!
"The idea of the whole as cause" (Fischer): with that is said that the
whole conditions the parts: no more than that: for that the parts make the
whole is self evident.
When one speaks of final causes one only means, that the form of the
whole is before us in the forming of the parts, so that a form cannot
mechanically arise.
Life, like generation, is not included under final causes. The "itself
organizing" is derived arbitrarily by Kant.
Does one need final causes to explain that something lives? No, only to
explain how it lives.
Do we need final causes to explain the life of a thing?
No, "life" is something completely dark for us, which we therefore cannot
illuminate even with final causes.
We seek only to make the forms of life clear to ourselves.
250 Appendix A

When we say "the dog lives" and then ask "why does the dog live?" that
does not belong here. Because here we have made "life" equal to "existence."
The question "why is something" belongs to external teleology and lies
completely out of our area, (childishly anthropomorphic. Examples also in
Kant).
We cannot explain the dog mechanically, that means, he is a living being.
Form is all of "life" that appears visible on the surface.
Reflection on final causes is also examination of forms.
In fact, we are also required to ask after final causes in a forming crystal.
In other words: teleological reflection and examination of organisms are
not identical
but
teleological reflection and examination of forms.
Ends and forms are identical in nature.
When then the natural scientists believe, an organism could arise through
"chance," that is, not according to final causes, this is to be conceded as a
matter of form. One needs only to ask, what "life" is.
What right do we have to think of the appearance of a thing i. e., a dog,
as previously existing? The form means something for us. If we think the
form as cause, we give to the appearance the worth of a thing in itself.
"Expedient" is only said with regard to "life"
Not with regard to the forms of life
Thus the concept of expedience does not lie in the recognition of reason-
ableness.
Whatever is supposed to be "the cause as idea of the effect," cannot be
"life," but only the form. That means the appearance of things is thought as
preexisting and as real.
A thing lives — thus its parts are expedient: the life of things is the
purpose of the parts.
But there are countless different ways to live, that means forms, that
means parts.
Expedience is no absolute, rather a very relative expedience: seen from
other sides, often inexpedience.
Final cause means:
the idea of the whole is identified as cause
that means a form of appearance is called real and preexisting. The concept
of the whole refers only to the form, not to "life."
I. Not "a "life" is to be generated, therefore, forms must be searched
for"
 3. On Teleology 251

II. rather "under the following form a "life" should appear"

It is impossible to grasp the concept of life: therefore, it does not belong
to "the idea of the whole." (Fischer)
Concerning the possibility of the origin of organisms out of "chance"
"inexpedience" (mechanism)
Kant allows this possibility, but denies the possibility of knowing it.
The method of nature is the same in organic and inorganic spheres.
If then the possibility of mechanism is present, then the possibility of
knowing should also be there.
However, "our understanding is discursive." But that suffices also when
mechanism is explained.
The individual is an insufficient concept.
What we see of life is form; how we see them, as individuals. What lies
behind that is unknowable.
Procreation is not included under final causes: for it asks: toward what
end should an organism become? This belongs in the external teleology, that
is, in a system of ends of nature.
A system of ends of nature has the following principles against it:
1) the subjective of the concept of end in organisms is
taken as objective
2) nature is taken as a unity
3) and credited with a unity of means

Is a thing, therefore, inexpedient because it has arisen mechanically?

Kant says so. Why cannot chance bring about something expedient?
He was right: expedience lies only in our idea.
"Life" occurs with the sensations: we consider the sensations as condition
for the "organic."
"To live" is to exist consciously, that is, human-like. The question after
the organism is: wherefrom the humanly analogous in nature?
Through lack of selfconsciousness?
We cannot conceive of "life," that is, sensate, growing existence, other
than as analogous to the human. Man recognizes things which both coincide
with and differ from human analogy and asks after the explanation.
I have also observed, that one often thinks continuously while sleeping:
a chance awakening tells us that shreds of past thoughts hang in our head.
Do we understand the unconscious working together of individual parts
into a whole?
252 Appendix A

In inorganic nature, i.e., in the architecture of the universe lawfulness

and expedience are very probably to be thought as the result of mechanisms.
"Kant saw in that a necessity of plan, the opposite of chance" K. Fischer
(Immanuel Kant I) p. 130 etc.
Highly remarkable place (ibid. p. 132) "I think one can say in a certain
sense without boldness: give me material, and I will show you, how a world
can arise out of it —" etc.
What Hamann said of Kant's optimism (Attempt at a Few Thoughts
about Optimism), is true in general of optimism "his insights are the blind
litter of a rash bitch — He appeals to the whole in order to judge the world.
To that however belongs a knowledge that is no longer piecemeal. To infer
from the whole to the fragments is the same as to go from the unknown to
the known." (Fischer)
Hamanns Sehr. Th. I. S. 491
It was very difficult for Kant to place himself into a strange philosopheme:
Something which is very characteristic of an original thinker.
Beautiful words against the theological standpoint on the occasion of
teleology.
"it is something very absurd to expect enlightenment from reason and
then to prescribe beforehand on which side it must necessarily fall"
Kr der rein Vern II Absch S. 62
Cap. I. concept of expedience (ability of existence)
organism (the undetermined life concept/the undetermined indi-
II. vidual concept
the alleged impossibility of explaining an organism mechanically
III. (what does mechanically mean?)
the recognized inexpedience in nature in contradiction to expedi-
IV. ence
Cap. I. teleological reflection is examination of forms
II. forms (individuals) belong to and are derived from human orga-
nization.
III. life force =
Kant, Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels 1755
The one possible basis of proof for a demonstration of the existence of
God.
Holbach System de la nature
Hettner II.
Moleschotte Kr(eislauf) d. Leb(ens)
 3. On Teleology 253

Read the following

Schopenhauer, Über den Willen in der Natur.

Treviranus (Über) die Erscheinungen und Gesetze des organischen Lebens
1832
Czolbe neue Darstellung des Sensualismus Leipz. 1855.
die Grenzen und der Ursprung der menschl. Erkenntniss Jena und Leipz.
1865
Moleschott Kreislauf des Lebens 1862.
die Einheit des Lebens Gies(s)en 1864.
Virchow 4 Reden Über Leben und Kranksein Berlin 1862.
gesamm. Abhandl. zur wissen. Med. Frankf. 1856.
Trendelenburg Logische Untersuchungen Leipz. 1862.
Ueberweg System der Logik
Helmholtz Über die Erhaltung der Kraft Berlin 1847.
Über die Wechselwirkung der Naturkrafte 1854.
Wundt (Vorlesungen) Über die Menschen- und Thierseele
Lotze Streitschriften Leipz. 1857.
Medicin. Psychologie 1852
Trendelenburg Monatsber. der Berl. Acad. Nov. 1854 Febr. 1856.
historische Beiträge zur Philosophie 1855.
Herbart analyt. Beleuchtung des Naturrechts und der Moral.
Schelling Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur
Herder Ideen zur Philos. der Gesch. der Menschheit.
Read Biacht (Recherches physiologiques) sur la vie et la mort.
Joh. Müller/Über das organ. Leben.
Über die Physiologie der Sinne.
Kant Kr. d. Urteilskraft) 1790.
Fries mathem. Naturphilos. Heidelberg 1822.
Schleiden Über den Materialism, in der (neueren) Naturwissensch. Leipz.
1863 (in Schleiden mechanical explanations of organisms)
C. Rosenkranz, Schelling Vöries. Danzig 1843.
Sal. Maimon 1790 (Berl. Journal f. Aufklärung von A. Reim Bd. VIII St. 1.)
Schelling System des trans(s)cendent. Idealismus.
Oken die Zeugung 1805.
Lehrb. der Naturphilosophie 1809 II Aufl. 1843
Carus Grundzüge der vergl. Anatomie und Physiologie 1825.
254 Appendix A

Zur Teleologie.

Trendelenburg log. Untersuch. 2 Aufl. Leipz. 1862. II. S. 65 f.

Gustav Schneider de causa finali Aristotelea. Berol. 1865.
Hume Dialogues concerning natural religion deutsch von Schreiter Leipz. 1781.
Kant - Krit. d. r. V.
— Krit. d. Urtheilskr
Rosenkranz Gesch. der Kant. Philos.
Kuno Fischer Kant etc

Z<(ur> T<(eleologie>

Kant sucht zu erweisen, „daß eine N ö t h i g u n g existiere, uns die Naturkörper als
prämeditirt dh. nach Zweckbegriffen zu denken." Ich kann nur zugeben, daß dies
eine Art ist, sich die Teleologie zu erklären.
Die Analogie der menschlichen Erfahrung stellt daneben noch die zufällige dh.
die nicht meditirte Entstehung des Zweckmäßigen ζ. B. in dem glücklichen Zusam-
mentreffen von Talent und Schicksal, Lotterienlosen, (unleserlich)
Also: in der unendlichen Fülle von wirklichen Fällen müssen auch die günstigen
oder zweckmäßigen sein.
Die N ö t h i g u n g , von der Kant spricht, existiert für unsre Zeit kaum mehr: man
denke aber daran, „daß selbst Voltäre den teleolog. Beweis für unbezwinglich hielt."
Optimismus und Teleologie gehn Hand in Hand: beiden liegt daran das Unzweck-
mäßige zu bestreiten als etwas wirklich Unzweckmäßiges.
Gegen Teleologie im Allgemeinen ist die Waffe: Nachweis des Unzweckmäßigen.
Dadurch wird nur erwiesen, daß die höchste Vernunft nur sporadisch gewirkt hat,
daß es auch ein Terrain für geringere Vernünfte giebt. Es giebt also keine einheitliche
teleolog. Welt: doch eine schaffende Intellegenz.
Die Annahme einer solchen wird nach menschlicher Analogie gemacht: warum
kann es nicht eine unbewußt das Zweckmäß. schaffende Macht dh. Natur geben: Man
denke an den Instinkt der Thiere. Dies der Standpunkt der Naturphilosophie.
Man legt also das Erkennende nicht mehr [nicht mehr] außerh. der Welt.
Aber wir bleiben in der Metaphysik stecken und müssen ein Ding an sich
heranziehn.
Schließlich kann auf streng menschlichem Standpunkt eine Lösung möglich sein:
die empedokleische, wo das Zweckmäßige nur als ein Fall unter vielem Unzweck-
mäßigen erscheint.
Zwei metaphysische Lösungen sind versucht
die eine, grob anthropologisch stellt einen idealen Menschen außerhalb der
Welt
die andre, metaphysi<s>che ebenfalls, flüchtet in eine intellegible Welt, in der
der Zweck den Dingen immanent ist.
Das Zweckmäßige ist der Ausnahmefall
Das Zweckmäßige ist zufällig
Es offenbart sich darin völlige Unvernunft.
Man muß jedes theologische Interesse aus der Frage sondern.
 3. On Teleology 255

Die Teleologie seit Kant.

Naturphilosophisch.

Die einfache Idee tritt in Vielheit der Theile und Zustände des Organismus
auseinander, aber sie bleibt als Einheit in der nothwendigen Verknüpfung der Theile
und Funktionen. Dies macht der Intellekt.
„Die Zweckmäßigkeit des Organischen, die Gesetzmäßigkeit des Unorganischen
ist von unserm Verstände in die Natur hineingebracht."
Dieselbe Idee, erweitert, giebt die Erklärung der äußern Zweckmäßigkeit. Das
Ding an sich muß seine „Einheit zeigen in der Ubereinstimmung aller Erscheinungen."
„Alle Theile der Natur k o m m ( e n ) einander entgegen, weil ein Wille es ist."
Aber den Gegensatz zur ganzen Theorie bildet jener schreckliche Kampf der
Individuen (die doch auch eine Idee manifestieren) und der Gattungen. Die Erklärung
setzt also eine durchgehende Teleologie voraus: die nicht existiert.
Das Schwierige ist eben die Vereinigung der Teleolog. und der unteleolog. Welt.
Die Stellung des Problems.
Kants Zurückweisung von Lösungsversuchen.
Lösungen der Naturphilosophen.
Kritik von Kants Ansicht.
Die Frage hat darin Ähnlichkeit mit der nach der Freiheit d. m e n s c h l i c h e n )
W(illens), daß man ihre Lösungen im Gebiete einer intellegibeln suchte, weil man
eine coordinirte Möglichkeit übersah.
Es giebt keine Frage, die nothwendig nur durch die Annahme einer intelieg<(iblen)
Welt gelöst wird.
Teleologie:
innre Zweckmäßigkeit. Wir sehen eine complicirte Maschine, die sich erhält und
können nicht einen andern Bau aussinnen wie sie einfacher zu construiren sei. dh.
aber nur:
die Maschine erhält sich, also ist sie zweckmäßig. Ein Urtheil über „höchste
Zweckmäßigkeit" steht uns nicht zu. Wir könnten also höchstens auf eine Vernunft
schließen, haben aber kein Recht sie als ein<e> höhere oder niedre zu bezeichnen.
eine äußere Zweckmäßigkeit ist eine Täuschung.
Dagegen ist uns die Methode der Natur bekannt, wie ein solch „zweckmäß."
Körper entsteht, eine sinnlose Methode. Demnach erweist sich die Zweckmäßigkeit
nur als Lebensfähigkeit dh. als cond. sine qua non. Der Zufall kann die schönste Melodie
finden.
Zweitens kennen wir die Methode der Natur, wie solch ein zweckmäß. K<(örper)
erhalten wird. Mit sinnlosem Leich<t>sinn.
Die Teleologie wirft aber eine Menge Fragen auf die unlösbar sind, oder bis jetzt
nicht gelöst sind.
Der Weltorganismus, Ursprung des Bösen, gehört nicht hierher.
Aber zB. die Entstehung des Intellektes.
Ist es nöthig der Teleologie eine e r k l ä r t e Welt entgegenzustellen?
Es ist nur eine andre Wirklichkeit auf einem abgegrenzten Gebiete nachzuweisen.
Gegenannahme: die sich offenbarenden logischen Gesetze k ö n n t e n ) auf höheren
Stufen höhere sein. Aber wir dürfen gar nicht von log. Ges. reden.
256 Appendix A

Zweckmäßig.

Wir sehen eine Methode zur Erreichung des Zweckes oder richtiger: wir sehen
die E x i s t e n z und ihre Mittel und schließen, daß diese Mittel zweckmäßig sind. Darin
liegt noch nicht die Anerkennung eines hohen, gar eines höchsten Vernunftgrades.
Wir staunen sodann das C o m p l i c i r t e an und muthmaßen (nach menschlicher
Analogie) darin eine besondre Weisheit.
Das Wunderbare ist uns eigentlich das organische Leben: und alle Mittel dies zu
erhalten nen<n)en wir zweckmäßig. Weshalb hört in der Unorgan. Welt der Begriff
des Zweckmäßigen auf? Weil wir hier lauter Einheiten haben, nicht aber zusammen-
gehörige ineinanderarbeitende Theile.
Die Beseitigung der Teleologie hat einen praktischen Werth. Es kommt nur darauf
an den Begriff einer h ö h e r e n V e r n u n f t abzulehnen: so sind wir schon zufrieden.
Schätzung der Teleologie in ihrer Würdigung für die menschliche Ideenwelt.
Die Teleologie ist wie der Optimismus ein aesthetisches Produkt.
Die strenge Nothwendigkeit von Ursache und Folge schließt die Zwecke in der
unbewußten Natur aus. Denn da die Zweckvorstellungen nicht in der Natur erzeugt
sind, müssen sie als außerhalb der Causalität liegende hier und da eingeschobn^e)
Motive betrachtet werden; wodurch eben die strenge Nothwendigkeit fortwährend
unterbrochen wird. Das Dasein ist mit Wundern durchlöchert.
Die Teleologie als Zweckmäßigkeit und Folge bewußter Intellegenz treibt immer
weiter. Man fragt nach dem Zwecke dieses vereinzelten Eingreifens und steht hier
vor der reinen Willkür.
„Ordnung und Unordnung giebt es nicht in der Natur."
„Wir schreiben dem Zufall die Wirkungen zu, deren Verknüpfung mit den Ursa-
chen wir nicht sehen"
Viel K o m i s c h e s bei Brockes
s. Strauß Kl<eine> Schr<iften>
bei den Stoikern, v. Zeller B. 4.
Die Dinge existieren, also müssen sie existieren k ö n n e n dh. sie müssen die
Bedingungen zur Existenz haben.
Wenn der Mensch etwas verfertigt d. h. existenzfähig machen will, so überlegt er,
unter welchen Bedingungen dies geschehn könne. Er nennt die Bedingungen zur
Existenz am verfertigten Werk nachher z w e c k m ä ß i g .
Deshalb nennt er auch die Existenzbedingungen der Dinge z w e c k m ä ß i g : dh.
nur unter der Annahme, sie seien wie menschliche Werke entstanden.
Wenn ein Mensch aus einer Urne ein Loos zieht und dies nicht das Todesloos ist:
so ist dies weder unzweckmäßig noch zweckmäßig, sondern, wie der Mensch sagt,
z u f ä l l i g dh. ohne vorhergegangne Überlegung. Aber es giebt die Bedingung sein<(er)>
Fortexistenz an
Ist es w a h r , daß D e m o k r i t die E n t s t e h u n g der S p r a c h e aus Convenienz
behauptet habe?
„Die Organisation der Natur hat nichts Analogisches mit irgendeiner Causalität,
die wir kennen." (d. h. der Organismus) sagt Kant Kr<itik> der tel^eleologischen)
Urth<eilskraft> p. 258.
 3. On Teleology 257

„Ein Organismus ist das, in welchem alles Zweck und wechselseitig auch Mittel
ist." p. 260.
„Jedes Lebendige," sagt Goethe, „ist kein Einzelnes, sondern e i n ( e ) Mehrheit:
selbst insofern es uns als Individuum erscheint, bleibt es doch eine Versammlung von
lebendig, selbständigen Wesen." Goethe. B. 36 p. 7. etc.
Sehr wichtig Goethe B. 40 p. 425 zum Ursprung seiner Naturphilos. aus einem
kantischen Satze.
„Was der Verstand durch seine Begriffe von der Natur erkennt, ist nichts (anderes)
als Wirkung bewegender Kraft dh. Mechanismus" „Was nicht bloß mechanisch erkannt
wird, das ist keine exakte Naturwissenschaftl. Einsicht."
„Mechanisch erklären heißt aus äußeren Ursachen erklären."
„Die Spezifikation ( d e r N a t u r ) ist aus äußeren Ursachen nicht zu erklären."
„Nichts aber ohne Ursache." Also innere Ursachen dh. Zwecke, dh. Vorstellungen.
„Eine Betrachtungsweise ist noch keine Erkenntniß."
„Das Princip einer solchen nothwendigen Betrachtungsweise muß ein Vernunft-
begriff sein."
„Das einzige Princip dieser Art ist die natürliche Zweckmäßigkeit."
„Durch die Begriffe der mechanischen Gesetzmäßigkeit kann der W e l t b a u , aber
kein Organismus erklärt werden."
„Es ist unmöglich, die natürliche Zweckmäßigkeit vorzustellen als der Materie
inwohnend."
„Materie ist nur äußere Erscheinung!"

„Die Zweckmäßigkeit des Dinges kann immer nur in Rücksicht auf eine Intellegenz
gelten, mit deren Absicht das Ding übereinstimmt." Und zwar „entweder unsre e i g n e
oder eine f r e m d e , die dem Dinge selbst zu Grunde liegt. Im letzten Falle ( i s t ) die
Absicht, die sich in der Erscheinung offenbart, das D a s e i n des Dings" Im andern
Falle wird nur unsre Vorstellung von dem Dinge rein als zweckmäßig beurtheilt.
Diese letztere Art von Zweckmäßigkeit bezieht sich nur auf die Form, („in der bloßen
Betrachtung des Objekts harmonieren Einbildungskraft und Intellegenz")

„nur die mechanische Entstehungsart der Dinge [ist] erkennbar"

eine Klasse von Dingen ist nicht erkennbar
Wir verstehen nur einen Mechanismus.
Die mechanische Entstehung der Dinge ist erkennbar aber wir können nicht
wissen, ob es nicht eine total verschiedne giebt.
Es ist in unsrer Organis(ation) bedingt nur eine mechanische Entstehung der
Dinge zu verstehen.
Nun giebt es auch (s. Kant) in unsrer Organis, einen Zwang, der uns an Orga-
nismen glauben macht.
Vom Standp. der menschl. Nat.:
wir erkennen nur den Mechanismus
wir erkenn(en) nicht den Organismus.
Nun aber ist Mechanismus wie Organismus nichts dem Ding an sich zukommendes.
Der Organismus ist eine Form. Sehen wir von der Form ab, ist es eine Vielheit.
I. Organismus als Produkt unsrer Organisation.
258 Appendix A

II. Das Mathemat. allein erkennbar.

III.
Der organische Körper ist eine Materie, deren Theile mit einander zweckmäßig
verknüpft sind.
Darum verlangen wir Ursachen die im Stande sind die Theile einer Materie
zweckmäßig zu verknüpfen
dh. sagt Kant

organisirende Ursachen, die gedacht werden müssen als wirksam nach

Zwecken —
Darin liegt aber ein Sprung. Es ist nur nöthig eine coordinirte Möglichkeit
aufzuweisen, um das Z w i n g e n d e der Vorstellung Kants zu beseitigen.
Der Mechanismus verbunden mit dem Casualismus giebt diese Möglichkeit.
Das was Kan[n]t fordert, fordert er nach einer schlechten Analogie: da es nämlich
nach seinem Bekenntniß nichts dem Zweckmäßigkeitsverhältniß der Organism Ähn-
liches giebt.
Das Zweckmäßige entstanden als ein Spezialfall des Möglichen: eine Unzahl
Formen entstehn dh. mechanische Zusamm<(en)setzungen: unter diesen zahllosen
können auch lebensfähige sein.
Die Voraussetzung ist, daß das Lebendige aus Mechanism entstehn könne. Das
L e u g n e t Kant.
In Wahrheit steht eins fest, daß wir nur das Mechanische erkennen. Was jenseits
unsrer Begriffe ist, ist völlig unerkennbar. Die Entstehung des Organischen ist insofern
eine Hypothetische: als wir uns vorsstellen es sei ein Menschl. Verstand zugegen
gewesen. Nun ist aber auch der Begriff des Organischen nur menschlich.: hinzuweisen
ist auf das Analoge: das Lebensfähige entsteht unter einer Unmenge von Lebensun-
fähigem. Damit nähern wir uns der Lösung des Organism.
wir sehen, daß vieles Leben<s>fähige entsteht und erhalten wird und sehen die
Methode.
Gesetzt die Kraft, die im Lebensfähigen und in dem Hervorbringenden und
Erhaltenden wirkt sei dieselbe: so ist diese sehr unvernünftig.
Dies ist aber die A n n a h m ( e ) der Teleologie.
„Die Idee der W i r k u n g ist < · · · ) der B e g r i f f des G a n z e n "
Im Organism „ist das wirkende Princip die <(...) Idee der zu erzeugenden Wir-
kung."

Der Begriff des Ganzen ist aber unser Werk. Hier liegt die Quelle der Vorstellung
des Zwecks. Der Begriff des Ganzen liegt nicht in den D i n g e r n ) , sondern in uns.
Diese Einheiten, die wir Organismen nennen, sind aber wieder Vielheiten.
Es giebt in Wirklichkeit kein<(e) Individuen, vielmehr sind Individuen und
Organism nichts als Abstraktionen.
In die von uns gemachten Einheiten tragen wir nachher die Zweckidee.
Wir nehmen an, daß die Kraft die Organism einer Art hervorbringt, eine einheit-
liche sei.
Dann ist die Methode dieser Kraft wie sie die Organismen schafft, erhält, zu
beachten.
Hier erweist, daß wir zweckmäßig nur nennen, was sich lebensfähig erweist.
Das Geheimniß ist nur „das Leben"
 3. On Teleology 259

ob auch dies nur eine in der Organisation bedingte Idee ist?

„die rasende Verschwendung setzt uns in Erstaunen." Schopenh. II p. 375 W a

W {und Vorstellung) sagt: „der Natur kosten die Werke keine Mühe;" darum ist die
Zerstörung gleichgültig (unleserlich).
Schopenh. meint daß es eine Analogie zu dem Organ gebe II W als {Wille und
Vorstellung) p. 378. „Der Wille das Bewegende, was i h n bewegt das Motiv (causa
finalis.)"

Goethes Versuche:

die Metamorphose gehört zu den Erklärungen des Organischen aus der w i r k e n d e n

Ursache.
Jede w i r k e n d e Ursache beruht schließl. auf einem Unerforschlichen
(das eben beweist, daß dies der richtige menschl. Weg ist)
Deshalb verlangt man nicht bei der unorganischen Natur nach den Endursachen,
weil hier nicht Individuen, sondern Kräfte zu bemerken sind.
dh. weil wir alles mechanisch auflösen können und in Folge davon nicht mehr an
Zwecke glauben.
„Nur so viel sieht man vollständig ein, als man nach Begriffen selbst machen und
zu Stande bringen kann."

Ein falscher Gegensatz

Wenn in der Natur nur mechanische Kräfte walten, so sind auch die zweckmäßigen
E r s c h e i n u n g e n ) nur scheinbare, ihre Zweckmäßigkeit ist unsre Idee,
Die blinden Kräfte handeln absichtslos, also können sie nichts Zweckmäßiges
bewirken.
Das Lebensfähige ist nach einer unendlichen Kette mißlungen(er) und halbge-
lungene<r> Versuche gebildet.
Das Leben, der Organism beweist keine höhere Intellegenz: überhaupt keinen
du{r)chgehenden Grad von Intellegenz.
Das Dasein der Organism zeigt nur blindwirkende Kräfte.
1. Beseitigung der erweiterten Vorstell, von Teleologie.
2. Grenzen des Begriffs. Das Zweckmäßige in der Natur.
3. Zweckmäßig gleich existenzfähig.
4. Organismen als Vielheiten und Einheiten.
„die V o r s t e l l u n g des G a n z e n als Ursache gedacht ist der Zweck."
NB Das „Ganze" ist aber selbst nur eine Vorstellung.
Kant:
„Möglich, daß Organism rein mechanisch entstanden sind
Unmöglich, daß wir sie mechanisch ableiten können"
Weshalb?
260 Appendix A

Der Verstand ist diskursiv, nicht intuitiv.

„er kann das Ganze nur aus den Theilen begreifen und zusammensetzen"
Im Organism aber sind „die Theile durch das Ganze bedingt."
„Nun sucht der Verstand vom Ganzen auszugehen, das ihm nicht in der
Anschauung, sonderen) nur in der Vorstellung gegeben ist. Die Vorstellung
des Ganzen soll also die Theile bedingen: „die Vorstellung des Ganzen als
Ursache" dh. Zweck"
„Soll der Verstand das Ganze aus den Theilen begreifen, so verfährt er mechanisch,
soll er die g e g e b e n e n ) Theile aus dem Ganzen begreifen, so kann er sie nur aus
dem B e g r i f f e des Ganzen ableiten."
Kurz, es fehlt an Intuition.

Naturgemäße P o l e m i k .

Es wird zuerst geleugnet, daß das Ganze im Organism ein wirkliches ist dh. der
Begriff der Einheit wird geprüft und auf die menschl. Organis, zurückgeschoben.
Davon dürfen wir also nicht ausgehen.
Im Organismus sind nicht nur die Theile durch das Ganze bedingt, sondern das
Ganze auch durch die Theile.
Also, wenn anders die Organis, mechan. entstanden sind, so müssen sie auch
ableitbar sein.
Zugegeben, daß wir bloß eine Seite im Auge behalten.
Nun werden die Theile zunächst betrachtet und in ihre Theile zerlegt: so kommt
(,unleserlich) zB zur Zelle.
Unter der Voraussetzung, daß die Organism mechanisch entstanden sind. Wenn
aber auch ein Zweckbegriff mit thätig war, so geschah trotzdem die Schöpfung durch
Mechanismus, (wie Kant zugiebt)
Es muß sich also ein Mechanismus nachweisen lassen.
Die generat(Joy aequivoca unerwiesen.
Zweckursachen ebenso wie Mechanismus sind menschl. Anschauungsweise(n).
Rein erkannt wird nur das Mathematische.
Das Gesetz (in der unorganisch<(en) Natur) ist als Gesetz etwas den Zweckursa-
chen Analoges.
„Was in der Natur nicht blos mechanisch verfaßt ist <(...), das ist kein Verstan-
desobjekt."
Es läßt sich nur das streng Mathemat. in der Natur erklären.
„Mechanisch erklären heißt aus äußeren Ursachen erklären" / diese Definition
wird eingeführt, um nachher die inneren entgegenzustellen.
Mechanisch erklären heißt viel mehr
„Nur soviel sieht man vollständig ein als man nach Begriffen selbst machen und
zu Stande bringen kann."
Also kann man nur das Mathematische vollständig einsehen, (also formale Einsicht)
Im Übrigen steht man vor dem Unbekannten. Dies zu bewältigen erfindet der Mensch
Begriffe, die aber nur eine Summe erscheinender Eigenschaften zusamm<en>fassen,
dem Ding aber nicht auf den Leib rücken.
 3. On Teleology 261

Dahin gehören Kraft Stoff Individuum Gesetz Organismus Atom. Zweckursache.

Dies sind keine constituten sondern nur reflektirende Urtheile.
Unter Mechanismus versteht Kant die Welt ohne Zweckursachen: die Welt der
Causalität.
Die Krystallisation können wir auch nicht ohne die Idee der Wirkung uns
vorstellen.

Die Entstehung und Erhaltung organischer Wesen — inwiefern gehört sie zu den
ZweckursachenP
Zwecke der Natur: in Zeugung, Erhaltung des Individ, und der Art. damit vgl.
(Kant, Kritik d. Urtheilskr., hrsg. v. K. Rosenkranz, Lpz. 1838) §. 62.
Dann schiebt Kant den Begriff eines D i n g s unter ( e b d . ) §. 63. und verliert die
allgemeinen Formen der Zweckmäßigkeit aus dem Auge.
Die Zufälligkeit seiner Form in Beziehung auf die Vernunft (diese findet sich auch
bei dem Krystall)
„Ein Ding existirt als Naturzweck, wenn es von sich selbst ( . . . ) Ursache und
Wirkung ist." Dieser Satz ist nicht abgeleitet. Ein einzelner Fall ist genommen
Die Ableitung, daß Organism die e i n z i g e n Naturzwecke sind ist nicht gelungen.

In der Natur würde doch auch schon eine Maschine auf Zweckursachen führen.
Begriff der Zweckmäßigkeit: nur der Existenzfahigkeit, Nichts ist damit ausgesagt
über den Grad der darin offenbarten Vernunft.
„ E s ist etwas verschiednes," sagt Kant, „ein Ding seiner innern Form nach als
zweckmäßig zu erachten und die Existenz dieses Dinges für Zweck der Natur halten"
— Deshalb streitet die unzweckmäßige Methode der Erhaltung und Fortpfl. eines
Organism durchaus nicht mit der Zweckmäßigkeit seiner selbst.
Dagegen ist es dasselbe zu sagen dieser Organismus ist zweckmäßig und dieser
Org. ist lebensfähig. Also nicht: die Existenz diese(s) Dings ist Zweck der Natur:
sondern: was wir zweckmäßig nennen ist nichts andres als daß wir ein Ding lebensfähig
finden und in Folge davon die Bedingungen als zweckmäßig
Wer die Methode der Natur zur Erhaltung als unzweckmäßig schilt, der betrachtet
eben die Existenz eines Dings als Zweck der Natur.
Der Begriff eines Naturzwecks haftet nur am Organismus
„Aber, sagt Kant, dieser Begriff führt nun nothwendig auf die Idee der gesammten
Natur als eines Systems nach der Regel der Zwecke."
„durch das Beispiel, das die Natur in ihren organischen Produkten giebt, ist man
berechtigt, ( . . . ) von ihr und ihren Gesetzen nichts, als was im Ganzen zweckmäßig
ist, zu erwarten."
diese Reflexion kommt nur zustande, indem man
1) das Subjektive des Zweckbegriffs außer Acht läßt
2) die Natur als eine Einheit faßt
3) ihr[e] auch eine Einheit der Mittel zutraut
(Kant, Kritik d. Urteilskr., hrsg. v. K . Rosenkranz) p. 267
„Wenn man also für die Naturwissenschaft und in ihren Context den Begriff von
Gott hereinbringt, um sich die Zweckmäßigkeit in der Natur erklärlich zu machen,
und hernach diese Zweckmäßigkeit wiederum braucht um zu beweisen, daß ein Gott
262 Appendix A

sei: so ist in keiner von beiden Wissenschaften innerer Bestand, und eine täuschende
Diallele bringt jede in Unsicherheit, dadurch daß sie ihre Grenzen ineinander laufen
lassen."
Aus der Methode der Natur bei Erhaltung etc. der Organism auf die Entstehung
der Organism überhaupt zu schließen: ist die empedokleische Ansicht nicht. Aber
wohl die Epikurische. Sie setzt aber voraus, daß der Zufall organische Wesen zusam-
menwürfeln könne; während hier gerade der streitige Punkt liegt. Aus Buchstaben
kann sich eine Tragödie zusammenwürfeln (gegen Cicero), aus Meteorstücken eine
Erde: aber es fragt sich eben, was das „Leben" ist, ob es eben ein bloßes Ordnungs-
und Formprincip (wie bei der Tragödie) ist oder etwas ganz diverses: Dagegen ist
zuzugeben daß innerhalb der organischen Natur im Verhalten der Organism zu
einander kein andres Princip existirt als in der unorganischen Natur. Die Methode
der Natur in der Behandlung der Dinge ist gleich, sie ist eine u n p a r t e i i s c h e Mutter,
gegen unorgan. und organ. Kinder gleichmäßig hart.
Es herrscht unbedingt der Zufall dh. der Gegensatz der Zweckmäßigkeit in der
Natur. Der Sturm der die Dinge heru{m)>treibt ist der Zufall. Das ist e r k e n n b a r .
Hier kommt die Frage, ob die Kraft, die die Dinge macht dieselbe ist die sie
erhält? etc.
Im organischen Wesen sind die Theile zweckmäßig zu seiner Existenz dh. es
würde nicht leben, wenn die Theile unzweckmäßig wären. Damit ist aber für den
e i n z e l n e n ) Theil noch nichts ausgemacht. E r ist eine Form der Zweckmäßigkeit:
aber es ist nicht auszumachen, daß er die einzig mögliche Form ist. Das Ganze bedingt
mithin die Theile nicht nothwendig, während die Theile nothwendig das Ganze
bedingen. Wer das erste auch behauptet, behauptet die höchste Zweckmäßigkeit dh.
die unter den verschiedn<(en> möglichen Formen der Zweckmäßigkeit der Theile
ausgesuchte höchste Zweckmäßigkeit: wobei er annimmt, daß es eine Stufenfolge der
Zweckmäßigkeit giebt.
Welches ist nun die Idee der Wirkung? Das Leben unter den dazu nöthigen
Bedingungen? Das ist eine allen Organismen gemeinsame Idee der Wirkung?
Das Leben in einer Form unter den dazu nöthigen Bedingungen? Aber die Form
und die Bedingungen fallen hier zusammen, dh. wenn eine Form als Ursache gesetzt
wird, so wird auch der Grad der Zweckmäßigkeit gleich mit in die Ursache hinein-
gedacht. Denn Leben in einer Form ist eben Organismus. Was ist Organismus anders
als Form, geformtes Leben?
Wenn wir aber von den Theilen des Organism sagen, sie wären nicht nothwendig,
so sagen wir, die Form des Organism ist nicht nothwendig: wir setzen mit andern
Worten das Organische wo anders hin als in die Form. Aber außerdem ist es bloß
noch Leben. Also unser Satz heißt: zum Leben giebt es verschiedne Formen dh.
Zweckmäßigkeiten.
Das Leben ist unter einer erstaunlichen Masse von Formen möglich.
Jede dieser Formen ist zweckmäßig: weil aber eine Unzahl von Formen existirt,
so giebt es auch eine Unzahl zweckmäßiger Formen.
Im menschl. Leben machen wir Stufenfolgen im Zweckmäßigen: wir setzen es
gleich „vernünftig" erst dann, wenn eine ganz enge Wahl stattfindet. Wenn in einer
complicirten Lage der Mensch den einzigen zweckmäßigen Weg findet so sagen wir
er handelt vernünftig. Wenn einer aber in die Welt reisen will und einen beliebigen
Weg einschlägt, so handelt er zweckmäßig aber noch nicht vernünftig.
Eine Vernunft offenbart sich also in den „zweckmäßigen" Organismen nicht.
 3. On Teleology 263

Dasjenige „was also als Idee der Wirkung Ursache ist", ist nur die Form des
Lebens. Das Leben selbst kann nicht als Zweck gedacht sein weil es vorausgesetzt
wird, um nach Zwecken zu handeln.
Wenn wir also von Zweckbegriffen und -Ursachen reden: so meinen wir: von
einem lebenden und denkenden Wesen wird eine Form intentionirt, in der es erscheinen
will.
Wir rücken mit andern Worten durch die Endursache gar nicht heran an die
Erklärung des L e b e n s , sondern nur der F o r m .
Nun erfassen wir an einem Lebenden überhaupt nichts als F o r m e n . Das ewig
Werdende ist das Leben; durch die Natur unsres Intellekts erfassen wir Formen: unser
I n t e l l e k t ) ist zu stumpf, um die fortwährende Verwandlung wahrzunehmen: das ihm
Erkennbare nennt er Form. In Wahrheit kann es keine Form geben, weil in jedem
Punkte eine Unendlichkeit sitzt. Jede gedachte Einheit (Punkt) beschreibt eine Linie
Ein ähnlicher Begriff wie die Form ist der Begriff I n d i v i d u u m . Man nennt
Organismen so als Einheiten, als Zweckcentren. Aber es giebt nur Einheiten für
unsern Intellekt. Jedes Individuum hat eine Unendlichkeit lebendiger Individ, in sich.
Es ist nur eine grobe Anschauung, v i e l l e i c h t ) von dem Körper des Menschen zuerst
entnommen.
Alle „Formen" können ausgewürfelt werden, aber das Leben!
„Die Idee des Ganzen als Ursache": dadurch ist gesagt, daß das Ganze die Theile
bedinge: nichts weiter: denn daß die Theile das Ganze machen versteht sich von
selbst.
Wenn man von Zweckursachen redet, meint man nur, daß die Form des Ganzen
beim Bilden der Theile vorschwebte, daß eine Form nicht mechanisch entstanden sein
konnte.

Das Leben sammt Zeugung ist das nicht unter die Zweckursachen Eingeschlossne.
Das „sich selbst Organisiren" ist bei Kant willkürlich abgeleitet.

Braucht man die Zweckursachen um zu erklären, daß etwas lebt? Nein, nur um
zu erklären, wie es lebt.
Brauchen wir die Zweckursachen um das Leben eines Dinges zu erklären?
Nein, das „Leben" ist uns etwas völlig dunkles, dem wir daher auch durch
Zweckursachen kein Licht geben können.
Nur die Formen des Lebens suchen wir uns deutlich zu machen.
Wenn wir sagen „der Hund lebt" und jetzt fragen „warum lebt der Hund?" so
gehört das nicht hierher. Denn hier haben wir „leben" gleich „dasein" genommen.
Die Frage „warum ist etwas" gehört in die äußere Teleologie und liegt ganz aus
unserm Bereiche. (Kindische anthromorph. Beispiele auch bei Kant).
Wir können den Hund nicht mechanisch erklären; das macht, er ist ein lebendes
Wesen.
Die Form ist alles, was vom „Leben" an der Oberfläche sichtbar erscheint.
Die Betrachtung nach Zweckursachen ist also eine Betrachtung nach Formen.
In der That sind wir auch genöthigt im aufschieß. Krystall nach Zweckursachen
zu fragen.
Mit andern Worten: teleologische Betrachtung und Betrachtung der Organismen
fällt nicht zusammen
sondern
264 Appendix A

teleologische Betrachtung und Betrachtung nach Formen.

Zwecke und Formen sind in der Natur identisch.

Wenn also die Naturforscher m e i n t e n ) , ein Organismus könne aus „Zufall"

entstehen dh. nicht nach Zweckursachen, so ist dies der Form nach zuzugeben. Es
fragt sich nur, was das „Leben" ist.
Welches Recht haben wir die Erscheinungsweise eines Dinges zB. eines Hundes
als vorexistirend zu fassen? Die Form ist für uns etwas. Denken wir sie also Ursache,
so verleihen wir einer Erscheinung den Werth eines Dings an sich.
„Zweckmäßig" ist nur gesagt in Bezug auf das „Leben"
Nicht also in Bezug auf die Formen des Lebens.
Also liegt im Begriff der Zweckmäßigkeit nicht die Anerkennung der Vernünftig-
keit.
Was als „Idee der Wirkung Ursache" sein soll, kann nicht das „Leben" sondern
nur die Form sein.
dh. eine Erscheinungsweise eines Dings wird als präexistirend gedacht und als
real.
Ein Ding lebt — also sind seine Theile zweckmäßig: das Leben des Dinges ist
der Zweck der Theile.
Um aber zu leben giebt es unendlich verschiedne Weisen dh. Formen dh. Theile.
Die Zweckmäßigk. ist keine absolute, sondern eine sehr relative: von andren Seiten
gesehn, oft Unzweckmäßigkeit.

Zweckursache heißt:
die Idee des Ganzen wird als Ursache bezeichnet
dh. eine Erscheinungsform wird als real und präexistirend bezeichnet.
Der Begriff des Ganzen bezieht sich nur auf die Form, nicht auf das „Leben".
I. Nicht „ein „Leben" soll erzeugt werden, also müssen Formen gesucht werden"
II sondern „unter folgender Form soll ein „Leben" erscheinen"
Es ist unmöglich den Begriff des Lebens zu fassen: also gehört er nicht in „die
Idee des Ganzen".

Über die Möglichkeit einer Entstehung der Organism aus „Zufall" „Zwecklosig-
keit. (Mechanism)
Kant giebt die Möglichk. zu, leugnet aber die Möglichkeit einer Erkenntniß.
Die Methode der Natur ist im organischen wie unorganischen Reiche gleich.
Wenn also die Möglichkeit des Mechanismus da ist, so sollte doch auch die
Möglichkeit der Erkenntniß da sein.
Aber „unser Verstand ist diskursiv". Aber das reicht auch aus, wenn der Mechanism
erklärt ist.
Individuum ist ein unzureichender Begriff.
Was wir vom Leben sehn ist Form; wie wir sie sehn, Individuum. Was dahinter
liegt ist unerkennbar.

Die Zeugung ist nicht unter die Zweckursachen eingeschlossen: denn sie fragt: zu
welchem Zwecke soll ein Wesen werden? Dies gehört in die äußere Teleologie dh. in
ein System von Naturzwecken.
 3. On Teleology 265

ein System von Naturzwecken hat folgende Sätze gegen sich:

1) das Subjektive des Zweckbegriffs in den Organism ist objektiv genommen )
2) die Natur ist als ein<e> Einheit gefaßt
3) und ihr eine Einheit der Mittel zugetraut
Ist ein Ding deshalb nicht zweckmäßig, weil es mechanisch entstanden ist?
Kant behauptet dies. Warum kann der Zufall nichts Zweckmäßiges hervorbringen?
Er hat Recht: das Zweckmäßige liegt dann nur in unsrer Idee.

Das „Leben" tritt auf mit dem Empfinden: also als Bedingung für das „Organische"
betrachten wir das Empfinden.
„Leben" ist „bewußt dh menschenähnlich zu existieren. Die Frage nach dem
Organismus ist die: woher das Menschenähnliche in der Natur?
Beim Mangel eines Selbstbewußtsein<s>?

Wir können uns das „Leben" dh. die empfindende, wachsende Existenz nicht
anders (vorstellen als analog dem menschlichen. Der Mensch erkennt einiges Men-
schenähnliche und Menschenfremde in der Natur und fragt nach der Erklärung.
Ich habe beobachtet, daß man öfter auch im Schlafe anhaltend denkt: ein zufäll.
Erwachen belehrt darüber, indem noch Fetzen des eben Gedachten im Kopfe hängen.
Verstehn wir das bewußtlose Zusamm(en>arbeiten einzelner Theile zu einem
Ganzen?
In der unorganischen Natur ZB. in dem Bau des Weltalls ist Gesetzmäßigkeit und
Zweckmäßigkeit sehr wohl zu denken als Folge des Mechanismus
„Kant sah darin eine P l a n m ä ß i g e N o t h w e n d i g k e i t , das Gegentheil des Zu-
falls"
Κ Fischer (Immanuel Kant I ) p. 130 etc
Höchst bemerkenswerthe Stelle ( e b d . ) p. 132 „Mich dünkt man kann in gewissem
Sinne ohne Vermessenheit sagen: gebt mir Materie, ich will euch zeigen, wie eine
Welt daraus entstehn soll — etc.
Was Hamann von Kants Optimismus (Versuch einiger Betrachtungen über den
Optimismus) sagt, gilt überhaupt von dem Optimismus „seine Einfalle sind blinde
Jungen, die eine eilfertige Hündin geworfen — Er beruft sich aufs Ganze, um von
der Welt zu urtheilen. Dazu gehört aber ein Wissen, das kein Stückwerk mehr ist.
Vom Ganzen also auf die Fragmente zu schließen ist ebenso als von dem Unbekannten
auf das Bekannte"

Hamanns Sehr. Th. I. S. 491

Es fällt Kant sehr schwer sich in fremde Philosophem(e) zu versetzen.: was für
einen originellen Denker sehr charakteristisch ist.

Schöne Worte gegen den theolog. Standpunkt bei Geleg<(en>h. der Teleologie.
„denn es ist sehr was Ungereimtes, von der Vernunft Aufklärung zu erwarten und
ihr doch vorher vorzuschreiben, auf welche Seite sie nothwendig ausfallen müsse"
Kr. der rein Vern
II Absch S. 62
Cap. I. Begriff der Zweckmäßigkeit, (als Existenzfähigkeit)
II. Organismus (der unbestimmte Lebensbegriff, der unbestim(m>te Indivi-
duumsbegriff.
266 Appendix A

III. die angebl. Unmöglichkeit einen Organismus mechanisch zu erklären (was

heißt mechanisch?)
IV. die erkannte Zwecklosigkeit in der Natur im W i d e r s p r u c h ) mit der
Zweckmäßigkeit
Cap. I. Teleologische Betrachtung ist Betrachtung nach Formen
II. Formen (Individuen) sind der menschl. O r g a n i s a t i o n ) zugehörig und
enthörig.
III. Lebenskraft. =
Kant, Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels 1755.
Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes.
H o l b a c h Systeme de la nature.
Hettner II.
Moleschott K r e i s l a u f ) d. Lehdens)
Zu lesen sind
Schopenhauer, Über den Willen in der Natur.
Treviranus [Über] die Erscheinungen und Gesetze des organischen Lebens 1832
Czolbe neue Darstellung des Sensualismus Leipz. 1855
die Grenzen und der Ursprung der menschl. Erkenntniß Jena und Leipz. 1865.
Moleschott Kreislauf des Lebens 1862.
die Einheit des lebens Gies<(s)en 1864.
Virchow 4 Reden über Leben und Kranksein Berlin 1862.
gesamm. Abhandl. zur wissen. Med. Frankf. 1856.
Trendelenburg Logische Untersuchungen Leipz. 1862.
Überweg System der Logik
Helmhol<t)z über die Erhaltung der Kraft Berlin 1847.
über die Wechselwirkung der Naturkräfte 1854.
Wundt (Vorlesungen) über die Menschen- und Thierseele
Lotze Streitschriften Leipz 1857
Medicin. Psychologie 1852
Trendelenburg Monatsber. der Berl. Acad. Nov. 1854
Febr. 1856.
historische Beiträge zur Philosophie 1855
Herbart analyt. Beleuchtung des Naturrechts und der Moral.
Schelling Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur
Herder Ideen zur Philos. der Gesch. der Menschheit.
Bichat <Recherches phjsiologiques) sur la vie et la mort zu lesen.
Joh. Müller / über das organ. Leben.
über die Physiologie der Sinne.
Kant Kr. d. Ur<theilskraft> 1790.
Fries mathem. Naturphilos. Heidelberg 1822.
Schleiden über den Materialis. in der (neueren) Naturwissensch. Leipz . 1863. (bei
Schleiden mechan. Erklärbark, der Organismen)
C. Rosenkranz, Schelling Vöries. Danzig 1843.
Sal. Maimon 1790 (Berl. Journal f. Aufklärung von A. Riem Bd. VIII St . 1 . )
Schelling System des trans(s)cendent. Idealismus
Oken die Zeugung 1805
Lehrb. der Naturphilosophie 1809 II Aufl. 1843
Carus Grundzüge der vergl. Anatomie und Physiologie 1825.
 4. Anschauung Notes 267

4. Anschauung Notes

How does instinct evince itself in the form of conscious mind?

In illusory representations.
However, knowledge about their being does not negate their effectiveness.
This knowledge does, however, produce a painful situation: its only relief in
the appearance of art.
[Art is] the play with these instincts.
Beauty is the form, in which a thing appears as an illusory representation,
for example the beloved, etc.
Art is the form in which the world appears (as the) illusory representation
of its necessity.
It is a seductive representation of the will, which inserts itself between
knowledge.
The "Ideal" is such an illusory representation. (KSA 7: 98, 5 [25])
It is naive to believe, that we can ever come out of this sea of illusion.
This insight is completely impractical. (KSA 7: 102, 5[35])
Cap. I Explanation of the mechanism of deception in the will.
An individual should be of service to the total purpose: without being
aware of it. Every animal, every plant does this. With man, in conscious
thought, an illusory purpose is inserted: the single individual believes he is
doing something for himself.
We protect ourselves against instinct as something animalistic. In that an
instinct is already operative. Natural man feels a deep chasm between himself
and the animal; in the conceptual process of making clear to himself of what
the gulf consists, he lapses into dumb distinctions. Science teaches man to
view himself as an animal. He would never act according to that. The Indians
have the most correct insight, intuitive, and act on it. (KSA 7: 102, 5[36])
"Man" means "thinker:" therein lies the madness. (KSA 7: 102, 5[37])
The highest sign of the will:
the belief in illusion and theoretical pessimism bites its own tail. (KSA 7:
108, 5[68])
Part I
Instinct illusion and art
Part II
The musical drama
Part III
Socrates and the free spirits (KSA 7: 110, 5 [75])
The will as one
268 Appendix A

The conscious intellect. (KSA 7: 110, 5[76])

The world of representations is the means to keep us in the world of
action and to force us to actions in the service of the instincts. The represen-
tation is motive for action: does not touch the essence of the action. The
instinct which drives us to act, and the representation which comes into
consciousness as motive are separated. The will's freedom is the world of this
inserted representation, the belief, that motive and action necessarily condition
one another. (KSA 7: 110, 5 [77])
That the world of representations is more real than reality, is a belief,
which Plato theoretically posited, as artistic nature. Practically speaking it is
the belief of all productive geniuses: this belief is the viewpoint of the will.
These representations as offspring of the instinct are in any case just as real
as things; from that springs their unheard of power. (KSA 7: 110, 5[78])
Representation is the smallest of all powers; it is as agent only deception;
because only the will acts. Now, however, the individuatio rests upon repre-
sentation: if this is only deception, if it only appears in order to help the will
to action — the will acts — in unheard of multiplicity for the unity. Its (the
will's) organ of perception and that of man are not identical: this belief is a
naive anthropomorphism. The organs of perception with animals, plants and
men are only the organs of conscious perception. The enormous wisdom of its
growth is already the activity of an intellect. The individuatio is in any case
not the work of conscious knowing, rather the work of the Ur-intellect. The
Kantian-Schopenhauerian idealists did not recognize this. Our intellect never
carries us further than to conscious knowledge: insofar as we are however
also intellectual instinct, we can venture to say something about the Ur-
intellect. No arrow reaches beyond this.
In the great organisms like state and church the human instincts come to
have value, even more in a people, in society, in humanity; much greater
instincts in the history of a star:
in state and church, etc., there are innumerable representations, inserted
illusion, while here the aggregate instinct already creates.
From the standpoint of conscious thinking the world appears as an
immense number of interpenetrating individuals: which actually cancels the
concept of the individual. The world as a huge self engendering and self
maintaining organism: multiplicity lies in things because intellect is in them.
Multiplicity and unity the same — an unthinkable thought.
It is important to see that individuation is not the birth of conscious mind.
For that reason we can talk of illusory representations under the presuppo-
sition of the reality of individuation. (KSA 7: 111-12, 5[79])
 4. Anschauung Notes 269

The representation in feeling has with respect to the actual stirring of the
will only the meaning of a symbol. This symbol is the illusory image through
which a common drive exerts a subjective individual stimulation.
The feeling: with will and unconscious representation
the act·, with will and conscious representation.
Where does the act begin? Could "act" also be an indefinable represen-
tation? A movement of the will — becoming visible. But visible? This visibility
is something accidental and external. The moving of the colon is also a
movement of the will which would be visible if we could see it.
The conscious will does not characterize actions: because we can consciously
strive for a feeling, which we would not really call an action.
What is the becoming conscious of a movement of the will? Symbolizing
that becomes clearer and clearer. Language, the word, nothing but symbol.
Thinking, that means conscious representing, it is nothing but the making
conscious, the combining of language symbols. The Ur-intellect is something
completely different: it is essentially representation of purpose, thinking is
recalling of symbols. As the play of the organ of vision when the eyes are
closed reproduces lived reality in a confusion of colorful change, just so is
the relationship of thinking to lived reality: it is a partial rumination.
The separation of will and representation is really a result of the necessity
in thinking: it is a reproduction, an analogy after the experience, so that
when we want something, the goal is before our eyes. This goal however is
nothing but a reproduced past: in this manner the stirring of the will makes
itself understandable. But the goal is not the motive, the agent of action:
although this appears to be the case.
It is nonsense to maintain the necessary connection of will and represen-
tation: representation proves itself as a mechanism of deception, which we
do not need to presuppose in the essence of the thing. As soon as the will
wants to appear, this mechanism begins.
In will is multiplicity, movement only through the representation: an
eternal being first becomes through the representation, to will, that means
becoming, the will itself as agent is an appearance. There is only eternal rest,
pure being. But wherefrom, then, representation? This is the riddle. Naturally
from the beginning; it could never have been created. Not to be confused is
the representation mechanism in sensible being.
But if representation is simply symbol, then the eternal movement, all
striving of being is only appearance. Then there is something which represents:
this cannot be being itself.
Then another completely passive power stands next to the eternal being,
that of appearance — mysterion!
270 Appendix A

If, on the other hand, the will contains multiplicity and becoming in
itself, is there a purpose? The intellect, the representation must be independent of
becoming and wanting, continuing symbolization serves the purposes of the will.
Representation is not necessary to the will itself, therefore it also has no
purpose·, which is nothing but a reproduction, a rumination of the experienced
in conscious thinking. Appearance is a continuing symbolization of the will.
Because we recognize in illusory representations the purpose of the will,
so representation is the birth of the will, so multiplicity is already in will, so
appearance is an aid of the will for itself.
One must be in a position to trace out the limits and then say: these
necessary consequences of thought are the purpose of the will. (KSA 7:
112-114, 5[80])
I hesitate to trace space, time and causality from the pitiful human
consciousness; they belong to the will. They are the condition for all symbolics
of appearance: man himself is such a symbol, as is the state, the earth. This
symbolism is not unconditionally there for the individual man alone — (KSA
7: 1 1 4 - 1 5 , 5[81])
Intelligence proves itself in expediency. When the purpose is nothing but
a rumination of experiences, the true agent hides, so we may not place
purposeful action onto the nature of things, that means we do not at all need
an intelligence producing representation. Intelligence can only be talked about
in a sphere, where mistakes can be made, where error has a place — in the
sphere of consciousness.
In the sphere of nature, of necessity, expedience is a senseless presuppo-
sition. What is necessary is the only possibility. But why do we need to
suppose an intellect in things?
— Will, if a representation must be tied to it, is also no expression for
the essence of nature. (KSA 7: 115, 5[83])
All growth in our knowledge arises out of the making conscious of the
unconscious. Now it is to be asked, what sign language we have for this.
Some insights are there only for a few and others can only be known in the
most favorably prepared conditions. (KSA 7: 116, 5[89])
When one takes apart illusory representation in this manner, the will —
if it wants our continued existence to be different — must create a new illusion.
Education is a continuing change of illusory representations toward the more
noble, that means, our "motives" in thinking become ever more spiritual,
belonging to a larger generality. The purpose of "humanity" is the most that
the will can offer us as phantom. Fundamentally, nothing changes. The will
acts its necessity and representation tries to reach the universally sought after
 4. Anschauung Notes 271

essence of the will. Education lies in considering the well being of organisms
greater than the individual. (KSA 7: 117, 5[91])
Thinking and being are in no way the same. Thinking must be incapable
of approaching being and grasping it. (KSA 7: 117, 5[92])
Suppose there is an inseparable connection between the intellect which
produces concepts and representations and the perceptual world! (KSA 7:
120, 5[99])
The metaphysical meaning of the world as refining-process? — it is the
will, which lacerates itself, the pain lies in will, the intellect is deceived by
phantoms — why? The will must fear the intellect. These phantoms cannot
be put aside: because we must act. Consciousness is powerless against it.
Suffering and illusion, which hides the suffering — an impenetrable con-
sciousness.
Here art steps in, here we get an instinctive knowledge of the character
of that suffering and illusion. (KSA 7: 120, 5[100])
The conscious intellect a weak thing, really only the tool of the will. But
the intellect itself and the will are one. (KSA 7: 128 [123]
I have the suspicion, that things and thinking are not adequate to one
another. In logic, for example, the principle of contradiction rules, which
perhaps is not valid with things, which are different, opposites. (KSA 7: 163,
7[110])
In the highest forms of consciousness unity is achieved again: in the lower
forms of consciousness this unity breaks apart. Suspension or weakening of
consciousness is thus = individuation. — Consciousness, on the other hand,
is only a means of existence for the continued existence of individuals. Here
is the solution: to see the intellect as means is the demand of illusion. (KSA
7: 163, 7[111])
Is pain something represented?
There is only one life, one feeling, one pain, one pleasure. We feel through
and as a result of representations. We do not know, however, pain, pleasure,
life in itself. The will is something metaphysical, the movement of the Ur-
visions which we have imagined ourselves. (KSA 7: 197, 7[148])
How does art arise? As healing medium of knowledge.
Life only possible through artistic illusory images.
Empirical being conditioned through representation.
For whom is the artistic representation necessary?
If the Ur-Eine needs appearance, then its essence is contradiction.
Appearance, becoming, pleasure. (KSA 7: 198, 7[152])
272 Appendix A

"The essence of nature, the truly being, being in itself, true anonymity, the
aggregate of eternal being, the unapproachable one and eternal, an abyss of
true being." (KSA 7: 198, 7[153])
Hon> does art arise? The pleasure of appearance, the pain of appearance —
Apollonian and the Dionysian, which always excite each other to existence.
(KSA 7: 199, 7[154])
My philosophy (is) Platonism turned on its head·, the farther off from the
truly being, the more pure, beautiful, better it is. Life in appearance as
purpose. (KSA 7: 199, 7[156])
The visions of the Ur-Eine can be the only adequate mirrorings of being. In
so far as contradiction is the essence of the Ur-Eine, it can be both highest
pain and highest pleasure: the immersion in appearance is highest pleasure,
when the will becomes completely surface. This is attained in the genius. In
each moment the will is highest rapture and highest pain: think of the ideality
of dreams in the brain of a drowning person — unending time compressed
into one second. Appearance as the becoming one. The Ur-Eine views the
genius, who sees appearance purely as appearance: that is the most rapturous
peak of the world. In so far, however, as the genius is himself only appearance
he must become·, in so far as he must perceive, the multiplicity of appearance
must be present. In so far as he is an adequate mirroring of the Ur-Eine, he
is the image of contradiction and the image of pain. Every appearance is also
the Ur-Eine itself: all suffering, sensation is Ur-suffering, only seen through
appearance, localized, in the net of time. Our pain is a represented one·, our
representation always remains hanging in the representation. Our life is a
represented life. We come no step farther. Freedom of the will, every activity
is only representation. Even the work of the genius is representation. These
mirrorings in the genius are mirrorings of appearance no longer those of the Ur-
Eine·. as images of the image they are the purest moment of inertia of being.
The truly not being — the work of art. The other mirrorings are only the
surf ace of the Ur-Eine. Being satisfies itself in perfect appearance. (KSA 7: 199—200,
7[157])
The individual, the intelligible character is only a representation of the Ur-
Eine. Character is no reality, but only a representation: it is pulled into the
realm of becoming and has therefore a surface, the empirical man. (KSA 7:
201, 7[161])
Sensation as appearance, that is the will. (KSA 7: 202, 7[164])
Dissonance and consonance in music — we can say that a chord suffers
from a false note.
 4. Anschauung Notes 273

In becoming the secret of pain must also be contained. If every world of

the moment is a new one, where does sensation and pain come from?
There is nothing in us which could be traced back to the Ur-Eine.
The will is the universal form of appearance: that means the alternation
of pain and pleasure: presupposition of the world as the perpetual healing of
pain through the pleasure of pure Anschauens. The All-one s u f f e r s and projects
the will for its healing, which works to reach pure Anschauung. Suffering,
longing, want as the primary source of things. The truly being cannot suffer?
Pain is the truly being, that means sensation of self.
Pain, contradiction is the truly being. Pleasure, harmony is appearance. (KSA 7:
202, 7[165])
The projection of appearance is the artistic Urprocess.
All that lives, lives by appearance.
The will belongs to appearance.
Are we at the same time the one Ur-being? At least we have no way to
it. But we must be it: and completely, as it must be indivisible. —
Logic fits only the world of appearance exactly: in this sense it must be
identical with the essence of art. The will already form of appearance·, therefore
music is definitely still art of appearance.
Pain as appearance — tough problem! The only means of the theodicy.
Outrage as becoming.
The genius is the highest, the enjoyment of the Ur-Sein: appearance
compels to the becoming of genius, that means to world. Every born world
has somewhere its peak: in every moment a world is born, a world of
appearance with its self-enjoyment in genius. The following one another of
these worlds is called causality. (KSA 7: 203, 7[167])
Perception is not the result of the cells, rather the cells are the result of
perception, that means an artistic projection, an image. The substantial is
perception, the appearance the body, the material. Anschauung is rooted in
perception. Necessary relationship between pain and Anschauung, feeling is not
possible without an object; being an object is being of Anschauung. This the
Urprocess: the one world-will is simultaneously self Anschauung, and it sees
itself as world: as illusion. Timeless: in each tiniest point of time Anschauung
of the world: if time was real, there would be no succession. If space was
real, also no succession. Irreality of space and time. No becoming. Or:
becoming is appearance. How is the appearance of becoming possible? That
means how is appearance possible next to being? When the will views itself,
it must always see the same. That means that appearance must be, as being
eternally unchanged. Of a purpose we cannot then speak, even less of a
274 Appendix A

failure to reach a purpose. Thus there is only an unending multiplicity of

wills: each projects itself in every moment and remains eternally the same.
So that there is for each will a different time. There is no emptiness, the whole
world is appearance, through and through, atom for atom without gaps. Only
the one will can perceive the world completely as appearance. It is thus not only
suffering, but engendering: it engenders appearance in every smallest moment: as the
not-real, the not-one, the not-being, but as becoming. (KSA 7: 203 — 04, 7[168])
If contradiction is the true being, and pleasure appearance, if becoming
belongs to appearance — then understanding the world in its depth means
understanding the contradiction. Then we are the being — and must beget
appearance out of ourselves. The tragic knowledge as mother of art.
1. All arises out of pleasure; whose means is illusion. Appearance makes
possible empirical being. Appearance as father of empirical being: which is
not true being.
2. True are only pain and contradiction.
3. Our pain and contradiction is the Ur-pain and Ur-contradiction, broken
by representation (which begets pleasure).
4. The vast artistic power of the world has its analogy in the vast Ur-
pain. (KSA 7: 2 0 4 - 0 5 , 7[169])
In mankind, the Ur-Eine looks back upon itself by means of appearance:
appearance reveals the essence. That means: the Ur-Eine views mankind,
rather, the appearance viewing mankind, mankind which sees through the
appearance. There is no way to the Ur-Eine for mankind. He is completely
appearance. (KSA 7: 205, 7[170])
a. reality of pain versus pleasure
b. illusion as the means of pleasure
c. representation as means of illusion
d. becoming, multiplicity as means of representation
e. becoming, multiplicity as appearance — pleasure.
f. true being — pain, contradiction
g. the will — already appearance, most universal form.
h. our pain — the broken Ur-pain.
i. our pleasure — the complete Ur-pleasure.
(KSA 7: 205, 7[171])
The individual empirically examined, a step toward genius. There is only
one life·, where it appears, it appears as pain and contradiction. Pleasure only
possible in appearance and Anschauung. Pure immersion in appearance — the
highest purpose of existence: there where pain and contradiction do not
appear present. — We recognize the Ur-will only through appearance, that
 4. Anschauung Notes 275

means our knowledge itself is a represented one, similar to a reflection in a mirror.

The genius is that represented as having the ability of pure seeing, what does the
genius see? The veil of appearances, purely as appearances. The man, who is
not genius, views the appearance as reality or is represented as such: the
represented reality — as the being that is represented — has a similar power
as absolute being: pain and contradiction. (KSA 7: 205—06, 7[172])
The purpose of knowledge is an aesthetic one. The means of insight, the
illusory image. The world of appearance as the world of art, of becoming,
of multiplicity — an opposition to the world of the Ur-Eine\ which is similar
to pain and contradicition.
The purpose of the world is painless Anschauen, pure aesthetic pleasure:
this world of appearance stands in opposition to the world of pain and
contradiction. The deeper our knowledge goes into the Ur-Sein — which we
are — the more pure Anschauen of the Ur-Eine engenders itself in us. The
apollonian instinct and the dionysian in perpetual movement, one always
advancing beyond the other, leads necessarily to a deeper birth in pure
Anschauung. This is the development of mankind and should be understood
as the purpose of education. (KSA 7: 207, 7[174])
Solution of the Schopenhauerian problem: the longing after nothingness.
That is: the individual is only appearance: when it is genius it is the will's
purpose of pleasure. That means that the Ur-Eine, eternally suffering, watches
without pain. Our reality is after all that of the Ur-Eine, suffering: on the
other hand reality as representation of the Ur-Eine. — That self Aufhebung
of the will, rebirth and so forth is thus possible, because the will is nothing
but appearance itself, and the Ur-Eine only has an appearance in it. (KSA 7:
207, 7[174])
It is the nature of every man to ascend in Anschauung as high as he can.
This development is tied to the representation of freedom: as if he could do
otherwise!
That man can ascend, this means that he is different in each moment, as
is his body, which is also a becoming. There is alone the one will: man is a
representation born in each moment. What is firmness of character? An
activity of the viewing will, as much as the potential of a character for
education.
Thus, our thinking is only an image of the Ur-intellect, a thinking arising
through the Anschauung of the one will, which envisions a vision by thinking.
We view thinking as we view the body — because we are will.
The things which we touch in our dreams are also firm and hard. So our
body and the complete empirical world is for the viewing will firm and hard.
Thus we are this one will and this viewing one.
276 Appendix A

It appears, however, that our Anschauung is only the image of the one
Anschauung, that means, nothing but a vision begotten in every moment of
the one representation.
The unity between the intellect and the empirical world is the prestabilized
harmony, they are born in each moment and coincide with each other
completely down to the smallest atom. There is nothing internal, to which
something external does not correspond.
For each atom there is a corresponding soul. All that is present is doubly
a representation·, once as image, then as image of the image.
h i f e is this incessant generation of this doubled representation: only the
will is and lives. The empirical world only appears and becomes.
This complete congruity of the inner and the outer in each moment is
artistic.
In the artist the Ur-power rules through images, it is that power which
creates. It is these moments that are the object of creation: now there is an
image of the image of the image? (?) The will needs the artist, the Ur-process
is repeated in him.
In the artist the will attains the rapture of Anschauung. Here for the first
time the Ur-pain is completely overwhelmed by the pleasure of Anschauens.
I believe in the lack of sound judgement of the will. The projections are
capable of life after infinite trouble and countless failed experiments. The
artist is only occasionally achieved. (KSA 7: 208—09, 7[175])

Inserted from Musarion edition:

What kind of a capacity is it, to be able to improvise out of a foreign character?
One cannot speak of an imitation: because reflection is not the origin of such
improvisations. What is really to be asked: how is an entering into a strange
individuality possible?
It is first a freeing from one's own individuality, and an immersion into
a representation. Here we see how the representation is capable of differen-
tiating between manifestations of the will: how all character is an inner
representation. This inner representation is apparently not identical with our
conscious thinking about ourselves.
This assumption of a foreign individuality is also pleasure in art, that is,
expressions of the will are changed by an ever deepening conception, that is,
they are differentiated and finally silenced.
Representation in the service of egoism also shows the power of represen-
tation to differentiate the manifestations of the will.
Character appears to be, then, a representation poured over our instinctual
life, under which all manifestations of that instinctual life come to light. This
 4. Anschauung Notes 277

representation is appearance and the other one truth: one the eternal, ap-
pearance the transcient. The will the universal, representation the differen-
tiating. Character is a typical representation of the Ur-Eirte, which we, on the
other hand, only come to know as multiplicity of externalizations.
The Ur-representation, which makes up the character, is also the mother
of all moral phenomena. And that occasional Aufhebung of character (in artistic
pleasure, in improvisation) is a transformation of the moral character. It is
with representation, the world of the best knotted together with appearance,
out of which moral phenomena arise. The appearance world of representation
takes aim at world redemption and world completion. This world completion
would consist of the annihilation of the Ur-pain and Ur-contradiction, that
means the annihilation of the essence of things and in the all pervasive
appearance — that is in non-existence. All good arises from the occasional
immersion in representation, that means out of the becoming one with appear-
ance. (MusA 3: 336-37, [156])
Rigid constancy of the representation of the Ur-Eine, which however as
appearance must carry out a process. The intelligible character completely
fixed: only the representations are free and changeable? How we act, how
we think — all only process and necessary. (KSA 7: 213, 7[194])
The interpenetration of suffering and pleasure in the essence of the world
is that from which we live. We are only shells around that eternal essence.
To the extent that the Ur-pain is ended by representation, our existence is
itself a continuing artistic act. The creation of the artist is thus imitation of
nature in the deepest sense.
Thus: science
the beautiful
knowledge, transcendental aesthetic (KSA 7: 213, 7[196])
To tear oneself to pieces because of pain — that is the evil which always
fights against the pure rapture in Anschauung. The one will creates here also
an illusory representation and with it breaks the power of evil, in that, as
pain in the world of appearance is infinitely small, it also appears infinitely
small in the world of appearance. It seems that appearance turns against
appearance, in truth it is the will turning against itself. But the tremendous
purpose of the ultimate struggle is not reached: the will is protected in a cloak
of invisibility by appearance. (KSA 7: 214, 7[200])
We are in one sense pure Anschauung (that means projected images of a
completely enraptured being, which has the highest repose in this viewing),
on the other hand we are the one being itself. We are completely real only
in suffering, willing, and pain: as representations we have no reality, although
278 Appendix A

we do have another kind of reality. When we feel ourselves as the one reality,
we are immediately raised to the sphere of pure Anschauung, which is com-
pletely painless: although we are simultaneously the pure will, pure suffering.
As long as we are merely "represented" (to ourselves), we have no part in
that painlessness: while the representing one enjoys it purely.
In art we become "the one representing:" thus the rapture.
As that represented, don't we feel the pain(?) Man, for example, as a sum
of innumerable small atoms of pain and will. Atoms, whose pain only the
one will suffers, whose multiplicity is again the result of the rapture of the
one will. We are thus incapable of suffering the real suffering of the will, but
suffer it only in representation and the particular in representation. Thus:
the individual projection of the will (in rapture) is in reality nothing but
the one will: it comes only as projection to feeling of its nature as will, that
means, in the bonds of space, time, causality, and thus cannot carry the
suffering and the pleasure of the one will. The projection comes to conscious-
ness only as appearance, it feels itself through and through only as appearance,
its suffering is only mediated through the representation and ended by it.
The will and its Urgrund, suffering, cannot be directly grasped, but only
through objectification.
Let us envision the form of the tortured saint: we are it: how does the
vision suffer again and how does it come to understanding its being? The pain
and suffering must be carried into the vision out of the representation of the
martyred one: now he feels his vision images, as the one looking, not as
suffering.
He sees tortured forms and terrible daemons: they are only images, and
that is our reality. But with this the feeling and suffering of these vision
forms remains a riddle.
The artist also takes harmony and disharmony into his representation.
We are the will; we are vision forms: where lies the binding element?
What is activity of the nerves, brain, thinking, perception? — We are
simultaneously the viewing ones — there is nothing but the viewing of the
vision — we are the ones viewed, only a something to be seen — we are
those in which the whole process starts anew. But does the will still suffer
in that it views? Yes, for if it stopped suffering, it would stop viewing. But
the pleasurable feeling is in excess.
What is pleasure if only suffering is positive? (KSA 7: 214—16, 7[201])
To describe l i f e as an unbelievable suffering, which produces in every moment
a strong sensation of pleasure, through which we as sensing beings reach a
certain equanimity, yes, often an excess of pleasure. Is this physiologically
grounded? (KSA 7: 216, 7[202])
 4. Anschauung Notes 279

In becoming, the representational nature of things is shown, nothing is

given, nothing is, everything becomes, that means: is representation. (KSA 7:
216, 7[203])
1. Proof, why the world can only be a representation.
2. This representation is an enraptured world which a suffering being
projects. Analogy-proof: we are will and at the same time completely entan-
gled in the world of appearance. Life as a progressing, appearance projecting
and this with pleasure producing convulsion. The atom as point, contentless,
pure appearance, in each smallest moment becoming, never being. So the whole
will has become appearance and views itself.
That each representation, begotten out of the torment, turns itself toward
the vision. It naturally has no self-consciousness.
So we are also only conscious of the vision, not of our essence.
Do we suffer now as one will?
How could we suffer, if we were purely representation? We suffer as one will,
but our understanding cannot concern itself with the will, we see ourselves
only as appearances. We do not know what we s u f f e r , as one will. But we suffer
only as represented sufferers. Only that we are not that, which represents us at
first as sufferers. How can a vision envisioned as suffering really suffer?
Nothing can pass, because nothing is really there — what really suffers then?
Isn't suffering as inexplicable as pleasure? If two cortical fibres knock against
each other, why do they suffer?
The actual process of knocking is also only a representation and the
knocking fibres also? So we can say that the pain of the smallest atom is at
the same time the pain of the one will: and that all pain is one and the same:
it is through representation that we perceive it as temporally and spatially
true, in the case of non-representation we do not perceive it. Representation
is the rapture of pain, through which it is ended. In this sense the most severe
pain is a broken, represented pain, compared to the Ur-pain of the one will.
Illusory representations as raptures, in order to end pain. (KSA 7: 216 — 17
7 [204])

5 [25]
Wie offenbart sich der Instinkt in der Form des bewußten Geistes?
In Wahnvorstellungen.
Selbst die Erkenntniß über ihr Wesen vernichtet nicht ihre Wirksamkeit. Wohl
aber bringt die Erkenntniß einen qualvollen Zustand hervor: dagegen nur Heilung in
dem Schein der Kunst.
Das Spiel mit diesen Instinkten.
Die Schönheit ist die Form, in der ein Ding unter einer Wahnvorstellung erscheint
ζ. B. die Geliebte etc.
280 Appendix A

Die Kunst ist die Form, in der die Welt unter der Wahnvorstellung ihrer N o t -
wendigkeit erscheint.
Sie ist eine verführerische Darstellung des Willens, die sich zwischen die Erkennt-
niß schiebt.
Das „Ideal" eine solche Wahnvorstellung.

5 [35]
Es ist naiv zu glauben, daß wir je aus diesem Meer der Illusion herauskommen
könnten. Die Erkenntniß ist völlig unpraktisch.

5 [36]
Cap. I. Darlegung des Trugmechanismus in dem Willen.
Ein Individuum soll dienstbar dem Gesammtzweck sein: ohne ihn zu erkennen.
Dies thut jedes Thier, jede Pflanze. Beim Menschen kommt nun, im bewußten Denken,
ein Scheinzweck hinzu, ein vorgeschobner Wahn: der Einzelne glaubt etwas für sich
zu erreichen.
Wir wehren uns gegen den Instinkt, als etwas Thierisches. Darin liegt selbst ein
Instinkt. Der natürliche Mensch empfindet eine starke Kluft zwischen sich und dem
Thier; im Begriff es sich deutlich zu machen, worin die Kluft bestehe, verfällt er auf
dumme Unterscheidungen. Die Wissenschaft lehrt den Menschen, sich als Thier zu
betrachten. Er wird nie darnach handeln. Die Inder haben die richtigste Einsicht,
intuitiv, und handeln darnach.

5 [37]

„Mensch" bedeutet „Denker": da steckt die Verrücktheit.

5 [68]
Das h ö c h s t e Z e i c h e n d e s W i l l e n s :
der Glaube an die Illusion und der theoretische Pessimismus beißt sich selbst in
den Schwanz.
5 [75]
Theil I.
Instinkt Wahn und Kunst.
Theil II.
Das musikalische Drama.
Theil III.
Sokrates und die Freigeister.

5 [76]
Der Wille als einer
der bewußte Intellekt.

5 [77]
Die Welt der Vorstellungen ist das Mittel, uns in der Welt der That festzuhalten
und uns zu Handlungen im Dienste des Instinkts zu zwingen. Die Vorstellung ist
Motiv zur That: während sie das Wesen der Handlung gar nicht berührt. Der Instinkt
 4. Anschauung Notes 281

der uns zur That nöthigt und die Vorstellung die uns als Motiv ins Bewußtsein tritt
liegen auseinander. Die W i l l e n s f r e i h e i t ist die Welt dieser dazwischen geschobenen
Vorstellungen, der Glaube daß Motiv und Handlung nothwendig einander bedingen.

5 [78]
Daß die Welt der Vorstellungen realer ist als die Wirklichkeit, ist ein Glaube, den
Plato theoretisch aufgestellt hat, als K ü n s t l e r n a t u r . Praktisch ist es der Glaube aller
produktiven Genien: das ist die Ansicht des Willens, dieser Glaube. Diese Vorstellun-
gen als Geburten des Instinkts sind jedenfalls ebenso real als die Dinge; daher ihre
unerhörte Macht.

5 [79]
Die Vorstellung ist von allen Mächten die geringste: sie ist als A g e n s nur Trug,
denn es h a n d e l t nur der Wille. Nun aber beruht die individuatio auf der Vorstellung:
wenn diese nun Trug ist, wenn sie nur scheinbar ist, um dem Willen zum Thun zu
verhelfen — der Wille handelt — in unerhörter Vielheit für die Einheit. Sein Er-
kenntnißorgan und das menschliche fallen keineswegs zusammen: dieser Glaube ist
ein naiver Anthropomorphismus. Erkenntnißorgane bei Thieren Pflanzen und Men-
schen sind nur die Organe des b e w u ß t e n Erkennens. Die ungeheure Weisheit seiner
Bildung ist bereits die Thätigkeit eines Intellekts. Die individuatio ist nun jedenfalls
nicht das Werk des bewußten Erkennens, sondern jenes Urintellekts. Dies haben die
kantisch-schopenhauerischen Idealisten nicht erkannt. Unser Intellekt führt uns nie
weiter als bis zum bewußten Erkennen: insofern wir aber noch intellektueller Instinkt
sind, können wir noch etwas über den Urintellekt zu sagen wagen. Über diesen trägt
kein Pfeil hinaus.
In den großen Organismen wie Staat Kirche kommen die menschlichen Instinkte
zur Geltung, noch mehr im Volk, in der Gesellschaft, in der Menschheit; viel größere
Instinkte in der Geschichte eines Gestirns:
in Staat Kirche usw. giebt es eine Unzahl Vorstellungen, vorgeschobenen Wahn,
während hier schon der Gesammtinstinkt schafft.
Vom Standpunkte des bewußten Denkens erscheint die Welt wie eine Unsumme
ineinander geschachtelter Individuen: womit eigentlich der Begriff des Individuums
aufgehoben ist. Die Welt ein ungeheurer sich selbst gebärender und erhaltender
Organismus: die Vielheit liegt in den Dingen, weil der Intellekt in ihnen ist. Vielheit
und Einheit dasselbe — ein undenkbarer Gedanke.
Vor allem wichtig einzusehn, daß die Individuation nicht die Geburt des bewußten
Geistes ist. Darum dürfen wir von Wahnvorstellungen reden, unter der Voraussetzung
der Realität der Individuation.

5 [80]
Die V o r s t e l l u n g im G e f ü h l hat zu der eigentlichen Willensregung nur die
Bedeutung des S y m b o l s . Dies Symbol ist das Wahnbild, durch das ein allgemeiner
Trieb eine subjektive individuelle Reizung ausübt.
Das Gefühl — mit Willen und unbewußter Vorstellung
die That — mit Willen und bewußter Vorteilung.

Wo fängt die That an? Sollte „That" nicht auch eine Vorstellung etwas Undefinir-
bares sein? Eine s i c h t b a r werdende W i l l e n s r e g u n g ? Aber sichtbar? Diese Sicht-
282 Appendix A

barkeit ist etwas Zufälliges und Äußerliches. Die Bewegung des Mastdarms ist auch
eine Willensregung, die sichtbar wäre, wenn wir dorthin Augen bringen könnten.
Der b e w u ß t e W i l l e charakterisirt auch n i c h t die That; denn wir können auch
eine Empfindung bewußt erstreben, die wir doch eben nicht That nennen würden.
Was ist das Bewußtwerden einer Willensregung? Ein immer deutlicher werdendes
Symbolisiren. Die Sprache, das Wort nichts als Symbol. Denken d. h. bewußtes
Vorstellen ist nichts als die Vergegenwärtigung Verknüpfung von den Sprachsymbolen.
Der Urintellekt ist darin etwas ganz Verschiednes: er ist wesentlich Zweckvorstellung,
das Denken ist Symbolerinnerung. Wie die Spiele des Sehorgans bei geschlossenen
Augen, die auch die erlebte Wirklichkeit im bunten Wechsel durcheinander reprodu-
ziren, so verhält sich das Denken zur erlebten Wirklichkeit: es ist ein stückweises
Wiederkäuen.
Die Trennung von Wille und Vorstellung ist ganz eigentlich eine Frucht der
Nothwendigkeit im Denken: es ist eine Reproduktion, eine Analogie nach dem
Erlebniß, daß wenn wir etwas wollen, uns das Ziel vor Augen schwebt. Dies Ziel
aber ist nichts als eine reproduzirte Vergangenheit: in dieser Art macht sich die
Willensregung verständlich. Aber das Ziel ist nicht das Motiv, das Agens der Hand-
lung: obwohl dies der Fall zu sein s c h e i n t .
Es ist Unsinn, die nothwendige Verbindung von Wille und Vorstellung zu be-
haupten: die Vorstellung erweist sich als ein Trugmechanismus, den wir nicht im
Wesen der Dinge vorauszusetzen brauchen. Sobald der Wille Erscheinung werden
soll, beginnt dieser Mechanismus.
Im Willen giebt es Vielheit, Bewegung nur durch die Vorstellung: ein ewiges Sein
wird erst durch die Vorstellung zum Werden, zum Willen, d. h. das Werden, der Wille
selbst als Wirkender ist ein Schein. Es giebt nur ewige Ruhe, reines Sein. Aber woher
die Vorstellung? Dies ist das Räthsel. Natürlich ebenfalls von Anbeginn, es kann ja
niemals entstanden sein. Nicht zu verwechseln ist der Vorstellungsmechanismus im
sensiblen Wesen.
Wenn aber Vorstellung bloß Symbol ist, so ist die ewige Bewegung, alles Streben
des Seins nur S c h e i n . Dann giebt es ein Vorstellendes: dies kann nicht das Sein selbst
sein.
Dann steht neben dem ewigen Sein eine andre ganz passive Macht, die des Scheins
— Mysterion!
Wenn dagegen der Wille die Vielheit, das Werden in sich enthält, so giebt es ein
Ziel? D e r I n t e l l e k t , d i e V o r s t e l l u n g m u ß u n a b h ä n g i g v o m W e r d e n u n d
W o l l e n s e i n ; das fortwährende Symbolisiren hat reine Willenszwecke. Der Wille
selbst aber hat keine Vorstellungen nöthig, dann hat er auch keinen Z w e c k : der
nichts als eine Reproduktion, ein Wiederkäuen des Erlebten im bewußten Denken ist.
Die E r s c h e i n u n g ist ein fortwährendes Symbolisiren des Willens.
Weil wir bei den Wahnvorstellungen die Absicht des Willens erkennen, so ist die
Vorstellung Geburt des Willens, so ist Vielheit bereits im Willen, so ist die Erscheinung
eine μηχανή des Willens für sich.
Man muß im Stande sein, die G r e n z e n zu umzeichnen und dann sagen: diese
nothwendigen Denkconsequenzen sind die Absicht des Willens.

5 [81]
Ich scheue mich, Raum Zeit und Kausalität aus dem erbärmlichen menschlichen
Bewußtsein abzuleiten: sie sind dem Willen zu eigen. Es sind die Voraussetzungen
für alle Symbolik der Erscheinungen: nun ist der Mensch selbst eine solche Symbolik,
 4. Anschauung Notes 283

der Staat wiederum, die Erde auch. Nun ist diese Symbolik unbedingt nicht für den
Einzelmenschen allein da —

5 [83]
Die Intelligenz bewährt sich in der Zweckmäßigkeit. Wenn nun der Zweck nichts
als ein Wiederkäuen von Erfahrungen ist, das eigentliche agens sich verbirgt, so
dürfen wir das Handeln nach Zweckvorstellungen durchaus nicht auf die Natur der
Dinge übertragen, d. h. wir brauchen eine Vorstellung habende Intelligenz gar nicht.
Von Intelligenz kann nur in einem Reiche die Rede sein, wo etwas verfehlt werden
kann, wo der Irrthum stattfindet — im Reiche des Bewußtseins.
Im Reiche der Natur, der Nothwendigkeit ist Zweckmäßigkeit eine unsinnige
Voraussetzung. Was nothwendig ist, ist das einzig Mögliche. Aber was brauchen wir
dann noch einen Intellekt in den Dingen vorauszusetzen? — Wille, wenn damit eine
Vorstellung verbunden sein muß, ist auch kein Ausdruck für den Kern der Natur.

5 [89]
Alle Erweiterung unsrer Erkenntniß entsteht aus dem Bewußtmachen des Unbe-
wußten. Nun fragt es sich, welche Zeichensprache wir dazu haben. Manche Erkennt-
nisse sind nur für Einige da und Anderes will in der günstigsten vorbereiteten
Stimmung erkannt sein.

5 [91]
Wenn man die Wahnvorstellung sich als solche auflöst, so muß der Wille — w e n n
a n d e r s er unser Fortbestehen will — eine n e u e schaffen. B i l d u n g ist ein fortwäh-
rendes Wechseln von Wahnvorstellungen zu den edleren hin, d. h. unsre „Motive" im
Denken werden immer geistigere, einer größeren Allgemeinheit angehörige. Das Ziel
der „Menschheit" ist das Äußerste, was uns der Wille als Phantom bieten kann. Im
Grunde ändert sich nichts. Der Wille thut seine Nothwendigkeit und die Vorstellung
sucht das universell besorgte Wesen des Willens zu erreichen. In dem Denken an das
Wohl größerer Organismen, als das Individum ist, liegt die Bildung.

5 [92]
Denken und Sein sind keinesfalls dasselbe. Das Denken muß unfähig sein, dem
Sein zu nahen und es zu packen.

5 [99]
Wenn nun zwischen dem Begriffe und Vorstellungen erzeugenden Intellekt und
der anschaulichen Welt ein untrennbares Band ist!

5 [100]
Die metaphysische Bedeutung der Welt als ein Läuterungsprozeß? — es ist doch
der Wille, der sich selbst zerfleischt, der Schmerz liegt doch im Willen, der Intellekt
wird durch Phantome getäuscht — warum wohl? Der Wille muß doch den Intellekt
fürchten. Diese Phantome sind nicht zu verdrängen: weil wir h a n d e l n sollen. Das
Bewußtsein ist schwach dagegen. Leiden und Wahn, der das Leid verhüllt — ein nicht
durchdringendes Bewußtsein.
Hier tritt die K u n s t ein, hier bekommen wir instinktive Erkenntniß vom Wesen
jenes Leidens und Wahns.
284 Appendix A

7 [110]
Ich habe den Verdacht, daß die Dinge und das Denken mit einander nicht adäquat
sind. In der Logik nämlich herrscht der Satz des Widerspruchs, der v i e l l e i c h t nicht
bei den Dingen gilt, die Verschiedenes, Entgegengesetztes sind.

7 [111]
In den höchsten Formen des Bewußtseins wird die Einheit wiederhergestellt: in
den niedern zerbröckelt sie immermehr. Aufhebung oder Schwächung des Bewußtseins
ist somit = Individuation. — Das Bewußtsein ist aber andernseits nur ein Existenz-
m i t t e l für die Fortexistenz von Individuen. Hier ist die Lösung diese: als Mittel den
Intellekt anzusehen gebietet der Wahn.

7 [148]
Ist der Schmerz etwas Vorgestelltes?
Es giebt nur ein Leben, ein Empfinden, e i n e n Schmerz, e i n e Lust. Wir
empfinden durch und unter Vermittlung von Vorstellungen. Wir kennen also den
Schmerz, die Lust, das Leben nicht an sich. Der Wille ist etwas metaphysisches, das
von uns vorgestellte Sichbewegen der Urvisionen.

7 [152]
Wie e n t s t e h t die K u n s t ? Als Heilmittel der Erkenntniß.
Das Leben nur möglich durch künstlerische W a h n b i l d e r .
Das empirische Dasein durch die Vorstellung bedingt.
Für wen ist diese künstlerische Vorstellung nöthig?
Wenn das Ureine den Schein braucht, so ist sein Wesen der Widerspruch.
Der Schein, das Werden, die Lust.

7 [153]
„Der Kern der Natur, das wahrhaft Seiende, das Sein an sich, das wahrhaft
Anonyme, der Ball des ewigen Seins, das unnahbare Eine und Ewige, ein Abgrund
des wahren Seins."

7 [154]
Wie e n t s t e h t die K u n s t ? Die Lust der Erscheinung, der Schmerz der Erschei-
nung — das A p o l l i n i s c h e und das D i o n y s i s c h e , die sich immer gegenseitig zur
Existenz reizen.

7 [156]
Meine Philosophie u m g e d r e h t e r P i a t o n i s m u s : je weiter ab vom wahrhaft
Seienden, um so reiner schöner besser ist es. Das Leben im Schein als Ziel.

7 [157]
Die V i s i o n e n d e s U r e i n e n können ja nur a d ä q u a t e Spiegelungen des S e i n s
sein. Insofern der Widerspruch das Wesen des Ureinen ist, kann es auch zugleich
höchster Schmerz und höchste Lust sein: das Versenken in die Erscheinung ist höchste
Lust: wenn der Wille ganz Außenseite wird. Dies erreicht er im Genius. In jedem
Moment ist der Wille zugleich höchste Verzückung und höchster Schmerz: zu denken
 4. Anschauung Notes 285

an die Idealität von Träumen im Hirn des Ertrinkenden — eine unendliche Zeit und
in eine Sekunde zusammengedrängt. Die Erscheinung als w e r d e n d e . Das U r e i n e
schaut den Genius an, der die Erscheinung rein als Erscheinung sieht: dies ist die
Verzückungsspitze der Welt. Insofern aber der Genius selbst nur Erscheinung ist,
muß er w e r d e n : insofern er anschauen soll, muß die Vielheit der Erscheinungen
vorhanden sein. Insofern er eine adäquate Spiegelung des Ureinen ist, ist er das Bild
des Widerspruchs und das Bild des Schmerzes. Jede Erscheinung ist nun zugleich das
Ureine selbst: alles Leiden Empfinden ist U r l e i d e n , nur durch die Erscheinung
gesehen, lokalisirt, im Netz der Zeit. U n s e r S c h m e r z ist ein v o r g e s t e l l t e r :
unsre Vorstellung bleibt immer bei der Vorstellung hängen. Unser Leben ist ein
v o r g e s t e l l t e s Leben. Wir kommen keinen Schritt weiter. Freiheit des Willens, jede
Aktivität ist nur Vorstellung. Also ist auch das Schaffen des Genius Vorstellung.
D i e s e S p i e g e l u n g e n im G e n i u s sind S p i e g e l u n g e n der E r s c h e i n u n g , nicht
mehr des Ureinen: als A b b i l d e r des A b b i l d e s sind es die reinsten Ruhemomente
des Seins. Das wahrhaft Nichtseiende — das Kunstwerk. Die anderen Spiegelungen
sind nur die A u ß e n s e i t e des U r e i n e n . Das Sein b e f r i e d i g t s i c h im v o l l -
kommenen Schein.

7 [161]
Das Individuum, der i n t e l l e g i b l e C h a r a k t e r ist nur eine V o r s t e l l u n g des
U r - E i n e n . Charakter ist keine Realität, sondern nur eine Vorstellung: sie ist ins
Bereich des Werdens gezogen und hat deshalb eine Außenseite, den empirischen
Menschen.

7 [164]

Die Empfindung als Erscheinung, d. h. der Wille.

7[165]
Dissonanz und Konsonanz in der Musik — wir können davon sprechen, daß ein
Akkord durch einen falschen Ton leidet.
Im W e r d e n muß auch das Geheimniß des S c h m e r z e s ruhen. Wenn jede Welt
des Moments eine neue ist, woher da die Empfindung und der Schmerz?
Es giebt nichts in uns, was auf das Ureine zurückzuführen wäre.
Der Wille ist die allgemeinste Erscheinungsform: d. h. der Wechsel von Schmerz
und Lust: Voraussetzung der Welt, als der fortwährenden Heilung vom Schmerz durch
die Lust des reinen Anschauens. Das A l l e i n e l e i d e t und projicirt zur Heilung den
Willen, zur Erreichung der reinen Anschauung. Das Leid, die Sehnsucht, der Mangel
als Urquell der Dinge. Das wahrhaft Seiende kann nicht leiden? Der Schmerz ist das
wahrhafte Sein d. h. Selbstempfindung.
Der S c h m e r z , der W i d e r s p r u c h ist das w a h r h a f t e S e i n . Die L u s t , die
H a r m o n i e i s t der S c h e i n .
7 [167]
Das P r o j i c i e r e n d e s S c h e i n s ist d e r k ü n s t l e r i s c h e U r p r o z e ß .
Alles was lebt, lebt am Scheine.
Der Wille gehört zum Schein.
Sind wir zugleich das eine Urwesen? Mindestens haben wir keinen Weg zu ihm.
Aber wir müssen es sein: und ganz, da es untheilbar sein muß.
286 Appendix A

Die L o g i k ist genau nur auf die Welt der Erscheinung angepaßt: in diesem Sinne
muß sie sich mit dem W e s e n d e r K u n s t decken. Der W i l l e bereits E r s c h e i -
n u n g s f o r m : darum ist die M u s i k doch noch K u n s t des S c h e i n e s .
Der Schmerz als Erscheinung — schweres Problem! Das einzige Mittel der
Theodicee. Der F r e v e l als das W e r d e n .
Der Genius ist die Spitze, der Genuß des einen Urseins: der Schein zwingt zum
W e r d e n des Genius d. h. zur Welt. Jede geborne Welt hat irgendwo ihre Spitze: in
jedem Moment wird eine Welt geboren, eine Welt des Scheins mit ihrem Selbstgenuß
im Genius. Die Aufeinanderfolge dieser Welten heißt Causalität.

7 [168]
Die Empfindung ist nicht Resultat der Zelle, sondern die Zelle ist Resultat der
Empfindung d. h. eine künstlerische Projektion, ein Bild. Das Substantielle ist die
Empfindung, das Scheinbare der Leib, die Materie. Anschauung wurzelt auf Empfin-
dung. N o t h w e n d i g e s V e r h ä l t n i ß z w i s c h e n S c h m e r z u n d A n s c h a u u n g : das
Fühlen ist nicht ohne Objekt möglich, das Objekt-Sein ist Anschauung-Sein. Dies der
Urprozeß: der eine Weltwille ist zugleich Selbstanschauung: und er schaut sich als
Welt: als Erscheinung. Zeitlos: in jedem k l e i n s t e n Zeitpunkt Anschauung der Welt:
wäre die Zeit wirklich, so gäbe es keine Folge. Wäre der Raum wirklich, so keine
Folge. Unwirklichkeit des Raums und der Zeit. Kein Werden. Oder: das Werden ist
Schein. Wie ist aber der Schein des Werdens möglich? d. h. wie ist der Schein möglich
neben dem Sein? Wenn der Wille sich anschaut, muß er immer dasselbe sehen, d. h.
der Schein muß ebenso sein, wie das S e i n , unverändert ewig. Von einem Ziele
könnte also nicht die Rede sein, noch weniger von einem Nichterreichen des Zieles.
Somit giebt es also unendliche Willen: jeder projicirt sich in jedem Momente und
bleibt sich ewig gleich. Somit giebt es für jeden Willen eine verschiedene Zeit. Es
giebt keine L e e r e , die g a n z e W e l t i s t E r s c h e i n u n g , durch und durch, Atom an
Atom, ohne Zwischenraum. Voll als Erscheinung wahrnehmbar ist die Welt nur für
den e i n e n W i l l e n . E r i s t a l s o n i c h t n u r l e i d e n d , s o n d e r n g e b ä r e n d : er
g e b i e r t den S c h e i n in j e d e m k l e i n s t e n M o m e n t : d e r als das N i c h t r e a l e
a u c h d e r N i c h t e i n e , d e r N i c h t s e i e n d e , s o n d e r n W e r d e n d e ist.

7 [169]
Wenn der Widerspruch das wahrhafte Sein, die Lust der Schein ist, wenn das
Werden zum Schein gehört — so heißt die Welt in ihrer Tiefe verstehen den Wider-
spruch verstehen. Dann sind wir das Sein — und müssen aus uns den Schein erzeugen.
Die tragische Erkenntniß als Mutter der Kunst.
1. Alles besteht durch die Lust; deren Mittel ist die Illusion. Der Schein ermöglicht
die empirische Existenz. Der Schein als Vater des empirischen Seins: das also nicht
das wahre Sein ist.
2. Wahrhaft seiend ist nur der Schmerz und der Widerspruch.
3. Unser Schmerz und unser Widerspruch ist der Urschmerz und der Urwider-
spruch, gebrochen durch die Vorstellung (welche Lust erzeugt).
4. Das ungeheure künstlerische Vermögen der Welt hat sein Analogon in dem
ungeheuren Urschmerz.

7 [170]
Im Menschen schaut das Ureine durch die Erscheinung auf sich selbst zurück: die
 4. Anschauung Notes 287

Erscheinung offenbart das Wesen. D. h. das Ureine schaut den Menschen und zwar
den die Erscheinung schauenden Menschen, den durch die Erscheinung hindurch
schauenden Menschen. Es giebt k e i n e n W e g z u m U r e i n e n für den Menschen. Er
ist ganz Erscheinung.

7 [171]
a. Realität des Schmerzes gegenüber der Lust.
b. Die Illusion als das Mittel der Lust.
c. Die Vorstellung als das Mittel der Illusion.
d. Das Werden, die Vielheit als Mittel der Vorstellung.
e. Das Werden, die Vielheit als Schein — die Lust.
f. Das wahre Sein — der Schmerz, der Widerspruch.
g. Der Wille — bereits Erscheinung, allgemeinste Form.
h. Unser Schmerz — der gebrochene Urschmerz.
i. Unsre Lust — die g a n z e Urlust.

7 [172]
Das Individuum, empirisch betrachtet, ein Schritt zum Genius. Es giebt nur ein
L e b e n : w o dieses erscheint, erscheint es als Schmerz und Widerspruch. Die Lust
allein in der Erscheinung und Anschauung möglich. Die reine Versenkung in den
Schein — das höchste Daseinsziel: dorthin, wo der Schmerz und der Widerspruch
nicht vorhanden erscheint. — W i r erkennen den Urwillen nur durch die Erscheinung
durch, d. h. u n s r e E r k e n n t n i ß s e l b s t i s t e i n e v o r g e s t e l l t e , gleichsam ein
Spiegel des Spiegels. Der Genius ist d a s a l s r e i n a n s c h a u e n d V o r g e s t e l l t e : was
schaut der Genius an? Die Wand der Erscheinungen, rein als Erscheinungen. Der
Mensch, der Nicht-Genius, schaut die Erscheinung als Realität an oder w i r d so
v o r g e s t e l l t : die vorgestellte Realität — als das vorgestellte Seiende — übt eine
ähnliche Kraft wie das absolute Sein: Schmerz und Widerspruch.

7 [174]
Zweck des Erkennens somit ein aesthetischer. Mittel des Erkennens die Wahn-
gebilde. Die Welt des Scheins als die Welt der Kunst, des Werdens, der Vielheit —
ein Gegensatz zur Welt des Ureinen: das gleich dem Schmerz und dem Widerspruch
ist.
Zweck der Welt ist das schmerzlose Anschauen, der reine aesthetische Genuß:
diese Welt des Scheins steht im Gegensatz zur Welt des Schmerzes und des Wider-
spruchs. Je tiefer unsre Erkenntniß in das Ursein geht — das wir s i n d — um so
mehr erzeugt sich auch das reine Anschauen des Ureinen in uns. Der apollinische
Trieb und der dionysische in fortwährendem Fortschreiten, der eine nimmt immer die
Stufe des Andern ein und nöthigt zu einer tieferen Geburt der reinen Anschauung.
Dies ist die Entwicklung des Menschen und so als Erziehungsziel zu fassen.
Lösung des Schopenhauerischen Problems: die Sehnsucht in's N i c h t s . Nämlich
— das Individuum ist nur Schein: wenn es Genius wird, so ist es Lustziel des Willens.
D. h. das Ureine, ewig leidend, schaut ohne Schmerz an. Unsre Realität ist einmal die
des Ureinen, Leidenden: andrerseits die Realität als Vorstellung jenes Ureinen. — Jene
Selbstaufhebung des Willens, Wiedergeburt usw. ist deshalb möglich, weil der Wille
nichts als Schein selbst ist und das Ureine nur in ihm eine Erscheinung hat.
288 Appendix A

7 [175]
Es ist die Natur jedes Menschen, soweit in der Anschauung zu s t e i g e n als er
kann. Diese Entwicklung ist mit der Vorstellung der Freiheit verknüpft: als ob er
auch anders könnte!
Daß der Mensch aber s t e i g e n kann, dies ergiebt daß er in keinem Moment
derselbe ist, wie auch sein Leib ein Werden ist. Es i s t allein der e i n e Wille: der
Mensch ist eine in jedem Moment geborne Vorstellung. Was ist Festigkeit des
Charakters? Eine Thätigkeit des anschauenden Willens, ebenso sehr wie Bildungsfä-
higkeit eines Charakters.
Und so ist unser Denken nur ein B i l d des Urintellekts, ein Denken durch die
Anschauung des e i n e n Willens entstanden, der sich seine Visionsgestalt denkend
denkt. Wir schauen das Denken an wie den Leib — weil wir Wille sind.
Die Dinge, die wir im Traum anrühren, sind auch f e s t und h a r t . So ist unser
Leib, und die ganze empirische Welt, für den anschauenden Willen fest und hart.
Somit sind wir dieser eine Wille und dieses eine Anschauende.
Es scheint aber, daß unsre Anschauung nur die Abbildung der einen Anschauung
ist, d. h. nichts als eine in jedem Moment erzeugte Vision der e i n e n Vorstellung.
Die Einheit zwischen dem Intellekt und der empirischen Welt ist die prästabilirte
Harmonie, in jedem Moment geboren und sich völlig im kleinsten Atome deckend.
Es giebt nichts Innerliches, dem kein Äußerliches entspräche.
Somit entspricht jedem Atom seine Seele. D. h. alles Vorhandene ist in d o p p e l t e r
Weise V o r s t e l l u n g : einmal als B i l d , dann als B i l d des B i l d e s .
L e b e n is jenes unablässige Erzeugen dieser doppelten Vorstellungen: der Wille
i s t und l e b t allein. Die empirische Welt e r s c h e i n t nur, und w i r d .

K ü n s t l e r i s c h ist dies vollkommene Sichdecken von Innerem und Äußerem in

jedem Moment.

Im K ü n s t l e r waltet die Urkaft durch die Bilder hindurch, sie ist es, die da schafft.
Auf diese Momente ist es bei der Weltschöpfung abgesehen: jetzt giebt es ein Bild
des Bildes des Bildes? (?) Der Wille braucht den Künstler, in ihm wiederholt sich der
Urprozeß.
Im Künstler kommt der Wille zur Entzückung der Anschauung. Hier ist erst der
Urschmerz völlig von der Lust des Anschauens überwogen.
Ich glaube an die Unverständigkeit des Willens. Die Projektionen sind lebensfähig
nach unendlicher Mühe und zahllosen mißlungenen Experimenten. Der Künstler wird
nur hier und da erreicht.

156
Was ist das für eine Fähigkeit, die zu improvisiren aus einem fremden Charakter heraus?
Von einem Nachahmen ist doch nicht die Rede: denn nicht die Ueberlegung ist der
Ursprung solcher Improvisationen. Wirklich ist zu fragen: wie ist eine Einkehr in
fremde Individualität möglich?
Dies ist zunächst Befreiung von der eignen Individualität, also Sichversenken in
eine Vorstellung. Hier sehen wir, wie die Vorstellung im Stande ist, die Willensäus-
serungen zu differenziren: wie aller Charakter eine innerliche Vorstellung ist. Diese
innerliche Vorstellung ist offenbar nicht identisch mit unserm bewussten Denken über
uns.
 4. Anschauung Notes 289

Diese Einkehr in fremde Individualität ist nun Kunstgenuss ebenfalls, d. h. die

Willensäusserungen werden durch eine immer sich vertiefende Vorstellung endlich andere,
das heisst differenzirt und schliesslich zum Schweigen gebracht.
Die Vorstellung, im Dienste des Egoismus, zeigt ja auch die Macht der Vorstellung,
die Willensäusserungen zu differenziren.
Der Charakter scheint also eine über unser Triebleben ausgegossene Vorstellung
zu sein, unter der alle Aeusserungen jenes Trieblebens an's Licht treten. Diese
Vorstellung ist der Schein und jenes die Wahrheit: jenes das Ewige, der Schein das
Vergängliche. Der Wille das Allgemeine, die Vorstellung das Differenzirende. Der
Charakter ist eine typische Vorstellung des Ur-Einen, die wir dagegen nur als Vielheit
von Aeusserungen kennen lernen.
Jene Urvorstellung, die den Charakter ausmacht, ist nun auch die Mutter aller
moralischen Phänomene. Und jede zeitweilige Aufhebung des Charakters (im Kunst-
genuss, in der Improvisation) ist eine Veränderung des moralischen Charakters. Es ist
die mit der Vorstellung, dem Scheine verknüpfte Welt des Besten, aus der das moralische
Phänomen entsteht. Die Scheinwelt der Vorstellung geht ja auf Welterlösung und
Weltvollendung hinaus. Diese Weltvollendung würde liegen in der Vernichtung des
Urschmerzes und Urwiderspruchs, das heisst der Vernichtung des Wesens der Dinge
und in dem alleinigen Scheine — also im Nichtsein.
Alles Gute entsteht aus zeitweiligem Versenktsein in die Vorstellung, das heisst aus
dem Einswerden mit dem Scheine.

7 [194]
Starre Unveränderlichkeit der Vorstellung des Ureinen, das aber als Schein einen
Prozeß vollführen muß. Der intellegible Charakter völlig fest: nur die Vorstellungen
sind frei und wandelbar? Wie wir handeln, wie wir denken — alles nur Prozeß und
nothwendiger.

7 [196]
Das Ineinander von Leid und Lust im Wesen der Welt ist es, von dem wir leben.
Wir sind nur Hülsen um jenen unsterblichen Kern.
Insofern durch Vorstellung der Urschmerz gebrochen wird, ist u n s e r Dasein
selbst ein fortwährender k ü n s t l e r i s c h e r A k t . Das Schaffen des Künstlers ist somit
N a c h a h m u n g der N a t u r im tiefsten Sinne.
Also: Wissenschaft
das Schöne
Erkenntniß, transscend<entale> Aesthetik.

7 [200]
Vor Schmerz sich selbst zerfleischen — das ist das Böse, das immer der reinen
Verzückung in der Anschauung entgegenkämpft. Der eine Wille schafft auch hierzu
eine Wahnvorstellung und bricht hierdurch die Macht des Bösen, das, wie der Schmerz
in der Erscheinungswelt ein unendlich kleiner ist, auch in der Erscheinungswelt nur
unendlich klein erscheint. Scheinbar wendet sich Erscheinung gegen Erscheinung, in
Wahrheit Wille gegen sich selbst. Aber das ungeheure Ziel des letzten Strebens wird
nicht erreicht: der Wille ist wie in einer Tarnkappe durch die Erscheinung geschützt.
290 Appendix A

7 [201]
Wir sind einerseits r e i n e A n s c h a u u n g (d. h. projicirte Bilder eines rein ent-
zückten Wesens, das in diesem Anschaun höchste Ruhe hat), andernseits sind wir das
eine Wesen selbst. Also ganz real sind wir nur das Leiden, das Wollen, der Schmerz:
als Vorstellungen haben wir keine Realität, obwohl doch eine andre Art von Realität.
Wenn wir uns als das eine Wesen fühlen, so werden wir sofort in die Sphäre der
reinen Anschauung gehoben, die ganz schmerzlos ist: obwohl wir dann zugleich der
reine Wille, das reine Leiden sind. Solange wir aber selbst nur „Vorgestelltes" sind,
haben wir keinen Antheil an jener Schmerzlosigkeit: während das Vorstellende sie
rein genießt.
In der Kunst dagegen werden wir „Vorstellendes": daher die Verzückung.
Als Vorgestelltes fühlen wir den Schmerz nicht (?). Der Mensch ζ. B. als eine
Summe von unzähligen kleinen Schmerz- und Willensatomen, deren Leid nur der
eine Wille leidet, deren Vielheit wiederum die Folge der Verzückung des e i n e n
Willens ist. Wir sind somit unfähig, das eigentliche Leid des Willens zu leiden, sondern
leiden es nur unter der Vorstellung und der Vereinzelung in der Vorstellung. Also:
die einzelne Projektion des Willens (in der Verzückung) ist ja real nichts als der
eine Wille: kommt aber nur als Projektion zum Gefühl seiner Willensnatur d. h. in
den Banden von Raum Zeit Causalität, und kann somit nicht das Leid und die Lust
des e i n e n Willens tragen. Die Projektion kommt zum Bewußtsein nur als Erschei-
nung, sie fühlt sich durch und durch nur als Erscheinung, ihr Leiden wird nur durch
die Vorstellung vermittelt, und dadurch gebrochen. Der Wille und dessen Urgrund,
das Leid, ist nicht direkt zu erfassen, sondern durch die Objektivation hindurch.
Denken wir uns die Visionsgestalt des gefolterten Heiligen: diese sind wir: wie
nun l e i d e t wieder die Visionsgestalt und wie kommt sie zur Einsicht in ihr Wesen?
Der S c h m e r z und d a s L e i d muß mit in d i e V i s i o n Ü b e r g e h n , aus der
Vorstellung des Gemarterten: nun empfindet er ihre Visionsbilder, als Anschauender,
nicht als Leid.
Er s i e h t gequälte Gestalten und schreckliche Dämonen: diese sind nur Bilder,
und das ist unsre Realität. Aber dabei bleibt immer das Fühlen und Leiden dieser
Visionsgestalten ein R ä t h s e l .
Auch der Künstler nimmt Harmonien und Disharmonien in seine Vorstellung.
Wir sind der Wille, wir sind Visionsgestalten: worin aber liegt das Band? Und
was ist Nervenleben, Gehirn, Denken, Empfinden? — Wir .sind zugleich die Anschau-
enden — es giebt nichts als die Vision anzuschauen — wir sind die Angeschauten,
nur ein Angeschautes — wir sind die, in denen der ganze Prozeß von neuem entsteht.
Aber leidet der Wille noch, indem er anschaut? Ja, denn hörte er auf, so hörte die
Anschauung auf. Aber das Lustgefühl ist im Überschuß.
Was ist L u s t , wenn nur das Leiden positiv ist?
7 [202]
Das L e b e n darzustellen als ein u n e r h ö r t e s L e i d e n , das immer in jedem
Momente eine starke Lustempfindung produzirt, wodurch wir als Empfindende ein
gewisses Gleichmaß, ja oft einen Überschuss der Lust erreichen. Ist dies physiologisch
gegründet?

7 [203]
Im Werden zeigt sich die Vorstellungsnatur der Dinge: es g i e b t nichts, es i s t
nichts, alles wird, d. h. ist Vorstellung.
 5. Untitled Notes 291

7 [204]
1. Nachweis, warum die Welt nur eine Vorstellung sein kann.
2. Diese Vorstellung ist eine verzückte Welt, die ein leidendes Wesen projicirt.
Analogie-Beweis: wir sind zugleich Wille, aber ganz in die Erscheinungswelt verstrickt.
Das Leben als ein fortwährender, Erscheinungen projicirender und dies mit Lust
thuender Krampf. Das Atom als Punkt, inhaltslos, rein Erscheinung, in jedem kleinsten
Momente werdend, n i e s e i e n d . So ist der ganze Wille Erscheinung geworden und
schaut sich selbst an.
jene aus der Qual erzeugte Vorstellung wendet sich einzig der Vision zu. Sie hat
natürlich kein Selbstbewußtsein.
So sind auch wir nur der Vision, nicht des Wesens uns bewußt.
L e i d e n wir denn nun als e i n e r W i l l e ?
Wie k ö n n t e n wir leiden, wenn wir rein V o r s t e l l u n g w ä r e n ? Wir leiden als
e i n e r W i l l e , aber unsre Erkenntniß richtet sich nicht gegen den Willen, wir sehen
uns nur als Erscheinungen. W i r w i s s e n g a r n i c h t , w a s w i r l e i d e n , als einer
Wille. Sondern wir leiden nur als v o r g e s t e l l t e L e i d e n d e . Nur daß wir es nicht
sind, die uns als Leidende z u e r s t vorstellen. Wie kann aber eine leidend gedachte
Visionsgestalt wirklich l e i d e n ? Es kann ja nichts vergehen, weil nichts wirklich da
ist — was leidet denn eigentlich? Ist nicht das Leiden eben so unerklärbar wie die
Lust? Wenn zwei Corti'sche Fasern sich gegeneinander schlagen, warum l e i d e n sie?
Der eigentliche Prozeß des Schlagens ist ja doch nur eine Vorstellung und die sich
schlagenden Fasern ebenfalls? Somit können wir sagen, daß der Schmerz des kleinsten
Atoms zugleich der Schmerz des einen' Willens ist: und daß aller Schmerz ein und
derselbe ist: die Vorstellung ist es, durch die wir ihn als zeitlich und räumlich
wahrnehmen, bei Nichtvorstellung nehmen wir ihn gar nicht wahr. Die Vorstellung
ist die Verzückung des Schmerzes, durch die er gebrochen wird. In diesem Sinne ist
der ä r g s t e S c h m e r z doch noch ein gebrochener, vorgestellter Schmerz, gegenüber
dem Urschmerz des e i n e n Willens.
Die Wahnvorstellungen als Verzückungen, um den Schmerz zu brechen.

5. Untitled Notes

The sources of the enjoyment of nature are to be found partly in us and

partly in nature. All that falls into the spiritual eye of the soul, spiritualizes
it and is given an individual colouring. We cannot know things in themselves
and for themselves, but only their images in the mirror of our soul. Our soul
is nothing other than the eye, the ear, etc. spiritualized. Color and sound do
not belong to things in a proper sense, but to the eye and the ear. All of the
abstracta, all the properties which we attribute to a thing, form it in our
spirit. Nothing lures us like the living. All that attracts us to life, has at first
received life in our spirit. Everything dead is unworthy of the spirit.
We place in nature our own soul or a part of it, a mood. What attracts
us in nature are our own noble feelings, which we see embodied as an image
before us. These are usually indeterminate. Most frequently the feeling of
292 Appendix A

proud independence of soul, which overcomes us in looking at distance. This

the feeling of the open space in contrast to confinement.
In a work of art nothing beautiful arises except the feeling of freedom of
soul, which awakens it.
The organic, naturalness of a region is the most alluring. The region
appears to the spirit as something created, not artificial.
The historical, the lived experience of a region is the most exciting. The
region appears as a free being, which itself builds its history or empathizes
with foreign ones.
The beautiful or the overflowing of contours attracts us. Nature appears
as an artwork of the spirit of mankind.
Nature appears thus as
1. an artwork, that means the artistic re-creation of an idea
2. as a living, organic being
3. as a free, story having being.
These are in ascending order the effects of nature. The common element
is: that man spiritualizes it.
I. The most common and most diffused. Lets start from the senses. The
eye receives an impression of a region as a flat image. Habit differentiates
the spatial to some extent. The unfocussed outlines remain. Already this
external image does not express the reality; with that it is no work of art, it
is, however, already spiritualized. Now the spirit searches for a unity in the
fullness and binds them quick as lightning. (There is) enjoyment in this
ordering, even though only an apparent one, because the order rests in the
spirit. We believe we recognize a plan in colors, shading, etc. In art we have
imitated nature and place art in nature. We spiritualize the individual, do not
see the many trees, but the forest, do not hear the rustling of the leaves,
rather a totality of leaves, do not hear a single bell of the multitude of the
bells sounded by the herd, rather their sounding together. We bind together
the whole with the single. We do not recognize anything (as) chance. With the
bell sounding, the radiant light of the sky, the mood of Sunday. The blue
sky not without the cheerfulness of the complete work of art.
II. As living, organic. But not man himself, also not the work of art.
Opposition is the manufactured. As that created, the uniformity since creation,
and grandeur in that. Nothing by chance, rather unwavering progress of a
law of nature. The effect upon man as a free being. Especially upon his spirit.

1. The naive, as opposed to human education and guilt. 2. The constant as

opposed to change of the human souls. In this also the nonstriving and
 5. Untitled Notes 293

goalless, to itself sufficient, the eternal oneness with itself. Nature is for us
an ideal and source of sentimental enjoyments. This is a moral pleasure in
nature, because it is mediated through an idea. The first type is something
aesthetic. "This feeling for Nature is similar to that of the sick for health."
(Schiller)
III. As a free being having history. Highest intensification.
1. First as one empathising. This is especially the poetic side. As such nature
has experienced the world history and stands sad or happy as a pillar upon it.
It experiences the history of the individual (man). Empathy is expressed in its
movements ambiguously.
2. a being capable of feeling itself and of desiring. Out of this arises the
pantheon of the pagans. This origin is indicated by their history. Spiritualized
processes of nature are personified, these are then brought together with
analogous emotional and spiritual processes. As feeling of presentiment, of
magic, of the uncanny these still arise in common life. In that lies the
characteristic attraction of nature.

Die Quellen des N a t u r g e n u s s e s sind theils in uns, theils in der Natur zu suchen.
Alles, was in die geistigen Augen der Seele fällt, durchgeistigt sie und giebt ihm einen
individuellen Anstrich. Wir kennen die Dinge nicht an und für sich, sondern nur ihre
Abbilder auf dem Spiegel unsrer Seele. Unsre Seele ist nichts als das vergeistigte Auge
Ohr usw. Farbe und Klang ist nicht den Dingen, sondern Auge und Ohr eigen. Alle
Abstrakta, Eigenschaften, die wir einem Dinge beilegen, bilden sich in unserm Geiste
zusammen. Nichts zieht uns an als das Lebendige. Alles was uns anzieht, hat vorher
Leben in unsrem Geiste empfangen. A l l e ( s ) Todte ist des Geistes unwürdig.
In die Natur legen wir also unsre Seele oder einen Theil derselben, eine Stimmung.
Was uns in der Natur anzieht, sind uns eigne edele Gefühle, die wir wie in einem
Bild vor uns verkörpert sehn. Diese sind gewöhnlich unbestimmt. Am häufigsten das
Gefühl der stolzen Seelenunabhängigkeit, das uns bei dem Anblick einer Weite
überkömmt. Dies die E m p f i n d u n g des F r e i e r n ) im Gegensatz zur Enge.
An einem Kunstwerk nie etwas schön außer die Empfindung von Seelenweite,
die es erregt.
Das O r g a n i s c h e , Naturwüchsige einer Gegend ist das Anziehende. Die Gegend
erscheint dem Geiste als ein Geschaffenes, nicht Gekünsteltes.
Das h i s t o r i s c h e , E r l e b t e einer Gegend ist das Anregende. Die Gegend er-
scheint als ein freies Wesen, das selbst seine Geschichte bildet oder fremde mit
empfindet.
Das S c h ö n e oder das Ueberfließende der Umrisse zieht uns an. Die Natur
erscheint als ein Kunstwerk dem Geiste der Menschen.
Die Natur erscheint also [als]
1. als ein K u n s t w e r k d. h. die künstlerische) Nachschaffung einer Idee.
2. <als> ein l e b e n d i g e s , o r g a n i s c h e s ) W e s e n .
3. als ein f r e i e s , g e s c h i c h t e h a b e n d e s Wesen
Dies sind aufsteigend die Wirkungen der Natur. Das Gemeinsame ist: daß der
Mensch sie vergeistigt.
294 Appendix A

I. Die gewöhnlichste und verbreitetste. Gehn wir von den Sinnen aus. Das Auge
empfängt den Eindruck einer Gegend als flaches Bild. Gewöhnung unterscheidet die
räumlichen Unterschiede zum Theil. Die verschwimmend{en) und einfassenden Um-
risse bleiben. Schon dieses äußere Bild entspricht also nicht der Wirklichkeit; damit
ist es noch kein Kunstwerk, es ist aber schon vergeistigt. Jetzt sucht der Geist eine
Einheit in der Fülle und verbindet untereinander blitzschnell. Genuß in dieser A n -
o r d n u n g , zwar eine scheinbare[r], denn sie beruht im Geiste. Wir glauben einen
P l a n zu erkennen in Farben, Schattirung^en) u. a. In der Kunst haben wir die Natur
nachgeahmt und legen in die Natur die Kunst hinein. Wir vergeistigen das E i n z e l n e ,
sehn nicht viele Bäume<e) sondern den Wald, hören nicht das Rauschern) der Blätter,
sondern einer Gesammtheit der Blätter, hören nicht die einzeln(en) Glocke<n) des
Herdengeläutes, sondern ihren Zusammenklang. Wir verbinden das G a n z e mit dem
E i n z e l < n ) e n . Nichts Zufälliges erkenne<n) wir an. Mit dem Glockenläuten, dem
Glanz des Himmels die Sonntagsstimmung. Der blaue Himmel nicht ohne des
ganz<en) Kunstwerks Heiterkeit.
II. Als lebendig, organisch. Aber nicht Mensch selbst, auch nicht Kunstwerk.
Gegensatz ist das Gemachte. Als Geschaffenes die G l e i c h f ö r m i g k e i t seit der Er-
schaffung und darin Großartigkeit. Nichts zufälliges, sondern sicheres Fortschreiten
eines Naturgesetzes. Die Wirkung auf den Menschen als freies Wesen. Besonders auf
sein Gemüth. 1. Das N a i v e , der m e n s c h l i c h e n ) Bildung gegenüber, auch der Schuld
gegenüber. 2. Das G l e i c h b l e i b e n d e , m e n s c h l i c h e m ) Seelenwechsel gegenüber.
Hierin auch das Streben- und Ziellose, sich selbst Genügende, die ewige Einheit mit
sich selbst. Die Natur so für uns ein Ideal und Quelle sentimentalische<n) Genusses.
Dies ein m o r a l i s c h e s ) Wohlgefallen an der Natur, weil durch eine Idee vermittelt.
Die erste Art eine aesthetisch<e). „Dies Gefühl für Nat<ur) gleichet) dem des
Kranken für die Gesundheit. (Schüller))
III. Als ein freies, Geschichte habendes Wesen. Höchste Steigerung.
1. Zunächst als ein m i t e m p f i n d e n d e s . Dies besonders die dichterische Seite. Als
solches hat die Natur die Weltgeschichte miterlebt und steht trauernd oder freudig
wie eine Säule auf ihr. Sie erlebt die Geschichte des e i n z e l n e n ) Menschern) mit.
Mitempfinde^n) äußert sich in ihren B e w e g u n g e n , vieldeutig.
2. ein s e l b s t e m p f i n d e n d e < ( s ) und w o l l e n d e s Wesen. Daraus entsteht die Göt-
terwelt der Heiden. Deren Ursprung ihre Geschichte andeutet. Vergeistigte Natur-
vorgänge werden personifizirt, diese dann mit analogen Gemüts und Geistesvorgängen
zusamme(n) gebracht. Als Gefühl des Ahnens, des Zaubers des Spukens besteht dies
noch im g e w ö h n l i c h e n ) Leben. Darin e i g e n t ü m l i c h e r ) Reiz der Natur.
 Appendix Β

1. Genealogical Nodes

1. Sensory perception of sight as it participates in the creation of images and the

projection of images. Nietzsche meets with this node in Schopenhauer, Lange,
and Hartmann. It is a node which gives the metaphor of Anschauung to his
worldview in Anschauung, which is a worldview concerned with a theoretics
of viewing, imaging, and projection of images.

2. The subject predicate relationship as grammatical assumption is questioned by

Nietzsche for the first time in his beginning theory of language. He meets
with the problem in Schopenhauer's criticism of Kant's having confused
subject and predicate with the categories of substance and accident. Nietzsche
further finds in Lange and Hartmann that the grammatical categories of
subject and predicate may be primitive and natural consequences of the very
formation of language, according to the nature of human organization.
Nietzsche eventually, in the Anschauung Notes uses the subject predicate node
to ground the the non-identity of the subject and the purely representational
nature of any predicates attributed to such a non-identity.

3. The major role which the unconscious and the instincts play in the creation of language
is another major node. Nietzsche meets with hints of an unconscious in Kant
and Schopenhauer, but never with regard to the actual formation of language.
In Hartmann Nietzsche finds that unconscious instinct is the mother of
language and he adopts this point of view. The existence of an unconscious
language which makes possible the conscious language of word and concept
is further supported by studies in the natural sciences and the idea of
unconscious inferences which Nietzsche meets with first in Lange. In his
discussion of the worldview in Anschauung, this unconscious language comes
to ground the very possibility of conceptual language.

4. Once Nietzsche has accepted the Kantian division between phenomena

and thing in itself, or Schopenhauer's representation and will, he is very
concerned with the nature of representation and the relationship of representation
to perception and language. Again, this node operates continuously throughout
296 Appendix Β

the period I am discussing. Lange's idea that our perception is a consequence

of the limits of our organization is central to this node. By the time of the
Anschauung Notes, Nietzsche has come to form his own idea of the relationship
between representation and what he calls appearance, and their relationship
to language.

5. A major node which leads Nietzsche to his criticism of Schopenhauer and

the formation of his worldview in Anschauung, based upon Hartmann's
influence, is his questioning of the relationship between Schopenhauer's will and
individuation or the principium individuationis, and the manner in which this
questioning is carried out primarily as a question of language. Based upon
hints in Lange concerning the non-identity of the individual and Hartmann's
clear expression of this idea, Nietzsche places individuation not as separate
from will, but as one with it, a basic idea contributing to the shape of his
worldview in Anschauung. The individual does not think, will, and act with
knowledge of motivation, but the individual is a collection of will activities
which act according to the goal of the will.

6. Another major node, which is connected to the last, is Nietzsche's rejection

of the subjective idealism of Schopenhauer and Kant and his move, using hange and
especially Hartman, to a worldview based in objective phenomenality, or what
Nietzsche calls in the Anschauung Notes, appearance. Whereas for Schopen-
hauer and Kant, space, time, and causality are a function of perceptual
understanding or a priori concepts, both ultimately grounded in conscious
rationality, Nietzsche, along with Hartmann, places space, time, and causality
with the will and its appearance. Consciousness comes only afterwards and
remains separate in its effort to comprehend and name appearance.

7. A very significant node which is met with and developed throughout my

discussion concerns Nietzsche's developing theory of knowledge as opposed
to the value of art. The first kind of knowledge which Nietzsche is critical
of, after his readings in Schopenhauer, Lange, and Hartmann, is abstract,
rational knowledge. Since the thing in itself is not directly knowable, the
language of logic and rational description cannot be true. Even scientific
language must be understood as ultimately figurative. Therefore, primarily
upon the prompting of Lange, Nietzsche turns to figurative language as a more
adequate or effective use of language. The goal of the worldview in Anschauung is
the creation of new worlds of appearance through art, through figurative
and symbolic language.

8. Nietzsche's criticisms of Schopenhauer's metaphysics and Kant's teleology are based

on the "formal" nature of conceptually; we have only to do with language, with
 1. Genealogical Nodes 297

the forms of life and not with life itself. Teleological thinking remains
embedded within conceptuality and cannot, or can only with great difficulty
be united with an unteleological world. Metaphysics, too, is embedded in
language and conceptuality. As a result metaphysical and teleological thinking
are ultimately poetry. However, if one realizes their nature as edifying fictions,
they lose worth as true knowledge of a world, but gain more value as practical
moral possibilities. Thus, Nietzsche's worldview in Anschauung is offered as
a metaphysical and teleological fiction, which however holds great worth in
its ethical and idealistic affirmation.

9. The node which centers around Lange's idea that natural law provides a multitude
of possible forms out of which actual forms are chosen becomes very important.
This stems from Lange's discussion of Darwin and teleology and is an idea
which Nietzsche had already met with in his studies of Empedocles. It is the
idea that many, many possible forms are given, but that only some are
actualized. Nietzsche incorporates this idea directly into his teleological con-
siderations. He meets with a similar idea in Hartmann, which is in opposition
to Schopenhauer's principium individuationis. Hartmann posits, rather the medium
individuationis, which allows the growth of new organic forms out of previous
forms, whereas for Schopenhauer individuals are the direct manifestation of
the will at every stage of development. In the Anschauung Notes, this idea
can be seen as a paradigm for the operations of the unconscious formation
of language itself.

10. The node which centers around the differentiation of the terms instinct, character,
and will in Schopenhauer, Hartmann, and Nietzsche is central to my discussion.
For Schopenhauer instinct operates as an impulse of the metaphysical will
toward the realization of empirical character already predetermined in the
form of the transcendent intelligible character. For Hartmann and Nietzsche
instinct is a function of the individual unconscious which is constituted out
of the phenomenal-real order of nature.

11. Another node centers around Nietzsche's interest in and beginning work
with the concepts of atomism, force, matter, and dynamism. He meets with them in
Lange and Hartmann, and they become integral to his worldview in An-
schauung.

12. The node of affirmation versus pessimism. Nietzsche rejects the pessimism of
Schopenhauer and Hartmann, and creates the worldview in Anschauung as an
affirmative possibility, largely as a result of Lange's ethical materio-idealism
and the prompting received from his symptomatic misreading of Hartmann.
298 Appendix Β

2. Chronology

1863 Nietzsche's "Untitled Notes," are written.

1865 Nietzsche begins study of Schopenhauer.
1866 — 1868 Nietzsche studies Lange's History of Materialism.
1867 — 1868 Nietzsche writes "On Schopenhauer" and "On Teleology."
1868 — 1870 Nietzsche studies Hartmann.
1869 — 1870 Nietzsche writes "On the Origins of Language."
1871 Nietzsche again studies Hartmann.
1870—1871 Nietzsche writes the Anschauung Notes.
1872 Nietzsche reads Gerber's Language as Art.
1872 (74?) Nietzsche writes his notes for a course on "Rhetoric."
1873 Nietzsche writes "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense."
1874 Nietzsche again studies Hartmann and writes "On the Uses
and Disadvantages of History for Life."

3. Index of Scientific and Philosophical Names

Roger foseph Boscovich (1711 — 1787). Jesuit scientist who was a natural philos-
opher, mathematician, physicist, astronomer, geodesist, engineer, and poet.
Boscovich's masterpiece is Philosophiae Naturalist Theoria Redacta ad Unicam
Legem Virium in Natura Existentium (A Theory of Natural Philosophy Re-
duced to a Single Law of the Actions Existing in Nature). In this work
Boscovich presented an atomic theory which sought to encorporate and go
beyond the work of Newton and Leibniz. Boscovich developed the idea that
all phenomena arise from the spatial patterns of identical point particles
interacting in pairs according to an oscillatory law which determines their
relative acceleration. He posited material permanence without spatial exten-
sion: quasi-material point-centers of action are substituted for the rigid finite
units of matter of earlier atomists. With this, Boscovich helped emancipate
physics from naive atomism's uncritical assumption that the ultimate units of
matter are small, individual, rigid pieces possessing shape, size, weight, and
other properties. The alternative point atomism assumes that the ultimate
units are persistent quasi-material points, all identical, which form stable
patterns or interact to produce changes of pattern and relative motion.
Boscovich's law of oscillatory change from attraction to repulsion enabled
him to posit points of stable equilibrium at finite distances and thus to
account for the finite extension of gross matter. The complexity of the world,
according to Boscovich, arises from two factors: the varied arrangment of
 3. Index of Scientific and Philosophical Names 299

different numbers of particles, and the parameters determining the law of

oscillation.
Boscovich's work was pioneering in leading to the dynamic views of
physics which so interested Nietzsche and which Lange discusses in his book.
Nietzsche studied Boscovich very closely during 1872—73, and his ideas
contribute a large share to Nietzsche's Zeitatomlehre referred to in note 22 of
my chapter 11. See VAP 127 — 140 for a discussion of Nietzsche's interest in
Boscovich.

Ludwig Büchner (1824—1900). German physician, philosopher, and popularizer

of science. He wrote Kraft und Stoff (Force and Matter) in 1855. Force was
defined by Büchner as an activity or motion of matter or of the smallest
particles of matter, or, "more precisely, as an expression for the reason of a
possible or actual movement — differences which in reality alter nothing in the
matter itself." Force cannot exist independently of matter. He regarded motion
as a necessary condition, and an eternal and inseparable property, of matter.
Motion "is the very essence" of force.
Büchner's views on mind were carefully elaborated. All intellectual activity
stems from sensations and the responses to sensations. The words "mind,"
"spirit," "thought," "sensibility," "volition," and "life" do not designate any
entities; rather, they designate properties, capacities, or actions of living
substances. Consciousness is an activity of certain parts of the brain, but it
is not known exactly how matter brings forth consciousness. Büchner felt
that the detailed explanation of consciousness had to wait until more was
discovered about matter.

Carl Gustav Carus (1789 — 1869). German physician, biologist, and philoso-
pher. Carus was teaching comparative anatomy and history of development
at Leipzig while Nietzsche was a student there. Lange mentions Carus in his
work and Nietzsche included Carus' book Grundlage der vergl. Anatomie und
Physiologie, 1875, on his list of readings for "On Teleology."
Carus' metaphysics, and his important contribution to psychology, is a
theory of movement from unconsciousness to consciousness and back again.
Whatever understanding we can have of life and the human spirit hinges
upon observation of how universal unconsciousness, the unknown Divine,
becomes conscious. Universal unconsciousness is not teleological in itself, it
achieves purpose only as it becomes conscious through conscious individuals
like men. Consciousness is not more permanent than things, it is a moment
between past and future. As a moment, it can maintain itself only through
sleep or a return to the unknown.
300 Appendix Β

Hartmann refers to Carus' works Psyche (1846) and Phjsis (1851) in which
he maintains the idea of the unconscious is purely presented. (PU 1: 29 — 30,
PUG 19)

Du Bois-Rejmond (1818 — 1896) German physiologist and philosopher of

science. Du Bois-Reymond's point of view was a relativistic positivism
founded on natural science. He regarded knowledge of the transcendental,
or supersensible, as impossible and metaphysical problems as insoluble. In
particular, with respect to seven such mystifying questions that are raised
again and again and yet are never answered in a generally convincing way,
he took the skeptical and agnostic position indicated in his widely quoted
words ignoramus et ignorabimum ("we do not know and we shall never know").
Three questions he held to be transcendental and therefore in principle
insoluble, these relate to the nature of matter and force (which for him were
nothing more than abstractions), the origin of motion, and the origin of
sensation and consciousness. Three other problems he termed very difficult
but in principle solvable, those having to do with the origin of life, the
adaptiveness of organisms, and the development of reason and language.
With regard to the seventh and final "riddle of the universe" the problem of
freedom of the will, he was undecided. As a natural philosopher Du Bois-
Reymond forcefully raised the demand that the whole of nature be interpreted
in an exclusively mechanistic fashion in the sense of Laplace's "ideal spirit."
He held that the mechanistic, quantitative explanation of nature, despite its
deficiencies and difficulties (which he conceded), was the only possible and
fruitful one. On the other hand, he rejected as worthless such metaphysical
concepts as "vital force." At the same time he was quite clear about the
insuperable limits of the mechanistic approach. While he uncompromisingly
stressed the necessity of an approach to nature that conceives of the world
as describable by means of a single mathematical formula determining all that
happens, he explicitly admitted that mental phenomena cannot be derived
from and understood in terms of the physical and physiological processes in
the brain and nervous system. As to what mental phenomena are, Du Bois-
Reymond held, we remain in doubt. As far as I can determine, Nietzsche had
no special interest in Du Bois-Reymond, except where his ideas supported
or confirmed those of Lange or himself.

Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801—1887). German philosopher, founder of psy-

chophysics and pioneer in experimental psychology. Again, Nietzsche finds
frequent reference to Fechner in Lange's book. Nietzsche will have met with
Fechner's ideas more than once beginning in 1867 and following years.
 3. Index of Scientific and Philosophical Names 301

During the period 1872 — 74 Nietzsche is again involved with Fechner's

Atomenlehre. (See VAP 128)
Fechner's psychological studies were meant to confirm his theory of what
he called panpsychism. He maintained that the whole universe is spiritual in
character, the phenomenal world of physics being merely the external mani-
festation of this spiritual reality. That which to itself is psychical is to others
physical. In his Atomenlehre he argued that physics requires us to regard
atoms only as centers of force or energy, it is not necessary to suppose them
to be material or extended. These atoms are only the simplest elements in a
spiritual hierarchy leading up to God. Each level of this hierarchy includes
all those levels beneath it, so that God contains the totality of spirits.
Consciousness is an essential feature of all that exists, but this assertion does
not mean, that every physical entity or phenomenon has its own soul. Only
certain systems, namely, organic wholes, give evidence of possessing souls,
and those bodies which do not are only the constituents of besouled bodies,
etc.
Hartmann's interest in Fechner again centers around a similar point to
that of his interest in Herbart. Fechner posits a threshold of stimulation upon
which intensities of stimuli act. Intensities above the threshold keep con-
sciousness constant, however, if the intensity becomes less than the threshold-
value of the stimulus, a negative quality occurs. These Fechner calls "uncon-
scious sensations."

Eduard von Hartmann (1842—1906). German pessimistic philosopher. Al-

though the unorthodox nature and clear forcefulness of von Hartmann's
thought drew a popular following, much critical comment was directed at
his paradoxical theory of the unconscious, his criticism of religion, and the
incompatability between his pessimism and his idealistic ethics and philosophy
of religion. Hartmann rejected both the irrational intuitivism of Schopenhauer
and the mechanistic and materialistic assumptions of much of the science of
his day. His is a basically teleological view — instincts are unconsciously
purposive, and unconscious ideation in nerve endings explains the slightest
voluntary bodily movements.
Except for a brief attempt to revive interest in von Hartmann's work
during the years after his death, it has been largely neglected. He has been
hailed as the last of the great speculative idealists, as a philosopher of science
who opposed the mechanistic materialism of his time and anticipated the
vitalism of the twentieth century, and as a psychologist who introduced the
unconscious as a decisive mental factor. His criticism of the human predica-
ment, along with Schopenhauer's prepared the way for more complete,
intensified forms of pessimism and nihilism in the twentieth century.
302 Appendix Β

Hermann Ludwig von Helmholt£ (1821 — 1894). German physiologist and phy-
sicist. Nietzsche was very interested in Helmholtz, who, once again, was
probably introduced to him through Lange's book. Nietzsche includes two
of Helmholtz's works on his list of readings for "On Teleology," Über die
Erhaltung der Kraft, 1847, and Uber die Wechselwirkung der Naturkräfte, 1854.
Nietzsche occupied himself with Die Lehre von dem Tonempfindung, 1873 at the
time he was writing drafts of The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche was also using
Helmholtz in 1873 in thinking about time. (See VAP 140 — 153)
Although Helmholtz' position was basically Kantian, it was markedly
different from Kant's on certain important points because of Helmholtz'
study of physiological optics, physiological acoustics, and ngn-euclidean
geometry. His answer to the question "In what ways do our ideas correspond
to reality?" was based upon certain discoveries in the physiology of sensation
and, in particular, upon the principle of specific nerve energies. Fundamental
to this view is the theory that all we know about the external world is
brought to consciousness as the result of certain changes produced in our
sense organs by external causes. These changes are transmitted by the nerves
to the brain, where they first become conscious sensations. In the brain they
are interpreted and combined to produce our perceptions of external objects
by mental processes that Helmholtz called unconscious inferences — processes
he considered to be the same as those that are operative when a child learns
his native language. Thus, in the case of vision, excitations of the nerves of
the retina are transmitted by the optic nerve to the brain, where they are
experienced as sensations and where they are unconsciously interpreted and
combined to form visual perceptions of objects and their properties.
According to the principle of specific nerve energies, there is no one-to-
one correspondence between a sensation experienced and a specific property
of the object causing that sensation. It is perfectly possible for similar or
identical sensations to be the effects of diverse causes or for a single cause,
because it affects more than one kind of nerve, to result in qualitatively
distinct sensations. As a result, the most that can be claimed is that sensations
are caused by external objects, that they are the subjective signs of those
objects and their properties but are in no way images of them. The relation
is one of sign to object signified, and even so, as such it is not an invariant
relation. The only exception — an important one — is the correspondence
in temporal sequence between external events and subjective sensations.
Indeed, it is this correspondence that enables the scientist to determine the
order of external events — that is, to determine the invariant laws of nature.
Because, with the notable exception of temporal sequences, there are no
invariants, but only fairly uniform, relations between the sensations we
experience and the objective world, Helmholtz felt that we can speak of our
 3. Index of Scientific and Philosophical Names 303

ideas as true only in a practical sense. Sensations are signs that we learn to
use in order to regulate our movements and actions. When we have learned
to interpret these signs, we are able to control our actions and are able to
bring about results we desire or to avoid dangers.
In the edition of The Philosophy of the Unconscious which Nietzsche read
Hartmann only mentions Helmholtz's name as a supporter of Wundt's idea
of unconscious inferences.

Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776—1841). German philosopher, psychologist, and

educational theorist. Nietzsche was first introduced to Herbart by Lange in
his History of Materialism. Here Lange finds that Herbart's ideas are instru-
mental in the creation of what he calls a "scientific psychology," which was
beginning painfully to struggle free of metaphysics. Nietzsche includes Her-
bart on his list of readings for "On Teleology." Nietzsche is particularly
interested in looking at Herbart's "analytical illumination of natural law and
morality." It is fair to assume that Nietzsche had a good grasp of Herbart's
ideas beginning in 1867 and continuing at least through his reading of
Hartmann from 1868 through 1871. During the years 1872 — 74 Nietzsche
was again very much concerned with the physical and natural sciences and it
is reasonable to assume that Herbart is again taken into consideration during
this period.
Herbart's major contribution in the area of psychology was to form what
he calls a statics and mechanics of the mind based upon the interplay of
presentations. (Herbart's concept of presentation is roughly comparable to
perception.) According to his theory presentations of a different sort do not
oppose each other, but presentations of the same sort do. In the latter case
what remains after arrest is an equilibrium, a weakening or obscuring of the
original presentations. A presentation which has not undergone arrest, is
present in consciousness. Sinking under arrest it may be forced below the
threshold of consciousness. Yet a presentation below the threshold of con-
sciousness is subject to recall by the appearance of a new presentation similar
to it, and the speed of this rising depends on the degree of similarity between
the two presentations. The feelings, desires, and the will have their origin in
presentations and the interplay of presentations. Concepts also operate in a
similar fashion.
What interests Hartmann about Herbart is his idea that certain presen-
tations fall into a region below the threshold of consciousness, 'non-conscious
ideas' such "as are in consciousness without our being aware of them" (PU1:
23, PUG 19). Hartmann's philosophy of the unconscious also relies heavily
upon Herbart's ontology which reconciles the plurality of beings with the
unity of being.
304 Appendix Β

Johannes Müller (1801 — 1858). German physiologist, anatomist. Founder of

modern physiology; research in anatomy, mechanisms of speech, voice, hear-
ing; chemical and physical properties of lymph, chyle and blood; discoverd
Müllerian duct in females; chondrin of cartilage; studied hermaphroditism,
embryology, metamorphoses of echinoderms; stated principle that sensation
following stimulation of sensory nerve depends on nature of sense organ
rather than stimulation (law of specific nerve energies or law of specific
irritability). Wrote Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen (1833 — 40) and other
books. The former being the book to which Lange is referring in his use of
Müller. Nietzsche includes two books by Müller on his list of reading for
"On Teleology: "Über das organischen Leben and Über die Physiologie der Sinne.

Friedrich Ueberweg (1826 — 1870). German Philosopher and scholar. His book
Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, in three parts, was first published in
Berlin, 1862 to 1866 and became the most used history of philosophy of this
period. Besides this work, Ueberweg authored the System der Logik, which
Nietzsche included on his list of readings for "On Teleology."

Wilhelm Wundt (1832—1920). German philosopher and psychologist who

founded the first psychological laboratory and won world fame as a teacher
and scholar. Again, Nietzsche is introduced to Wundt in Lange's book, and
he includes Wundt's Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und Tierseele on his reading
list for "On Teleology."
Wundt designated a basic mental function which he called "apperception."
It is a unifying function which is understood as an activity of the will. In
the edition of History of Materialism which Nietzsche read, Lange refers to
Wundt's Grund\üge der physiologischen Psychologie only once with reference to
the physiological bases of intelligence.
In the edition of Philosophy of the Unconscious which Nietzsche read,
Hartmann only offers a brief reference to Wundt's "Beiträge %ur Theorie der
Sinneswahrnehmung" where he "admits the necessity of referring the origin of
sensuous perception back to unconscious processes of the mind, i. e., uncon-
scious inferences" (PUG 19). In a later edition Hartmann quotes at more
length from Wundt's "Beiträge %ur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung:" where
Wundt admits the necessity of referring the origin of sensuous perception
and of consciousness in general to unconscious logical processes, "since the
processes of perception are of an unconscious nature, and only their results
are wont to appear in consciousness." "The suggestion of the logical character
of the processes of perception is a hypothesis of no lower order than any
other assumption which we make in reference to the ground of natural
phenomena; it posseses the essential requirement of every well-grounded
 3. Index of Scientific and Philosophical Names 305

theory, that it be at once the simplest and most appropriate expression under
which the facts of observation can be subsumed. If the first act of apprehen-
sion, which yet belongs to the sphere of the unconscious life, is already a
process of inference, the law of logical development is thereby shown to
hold even for this unconscious life; it is proved that there is not merely a
conscious, but also an unconscious thinking. We believe we have hereby
completely proved that the assumption of Helmholtz' unconscious logical
processes is not merely competent to explain results of the process of percep-
tion, but that it in fact also correctly declares the real nature of these processes,
although the processes themselves are not accessible to immediate observa-
tion" (PU 1: 39).

Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner (1834—1882). German astrophysicist. After study-

ing physics and other sciences at the University of Berlin, Zöllner invented
the astrophotometer. Using this instrument, he investigated fundamental
problems of photometry and as a result wrote a classic work in astrophysics.
He also invented the reversion spectroscope. In addition to his scientific
work with such instruments, Zöllner made an intensive study of theoretical
questions, including solar theory, sunspots, and solar rotation. Also of far-
reaching significance was Zöllner's theory of comets, in which he correctly
assumed that elements of the nucleus of a comet gradually vaporize as it
nears the sun. His book Natur der Kometen, which Nietzsche studied so closely
during 1872 — 74 contains a wealth of penetrating remarks on the subject
announced in the subtitle, Beiträge %ur Geschichte und Theorie der Erkenntnis.
(See VAP 122-127)
In a later edition of Philosophy of the Unconscious Hartmann included Zöllner
as one who "independently (of Helmholtz) also found himself driven to the
assumption of unconscious inferences for an explanation of those pseudo-
scopic phenomena which defy a merely physiological explanation." Nietzsche,
in his study of Zöllner in 1872 — 74 undoubtedly worked with Zöllner's
concept of unconscious inferences.

Much of the information above is indebted to The Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Ed. Paul Edwards. New York: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1972.
 Index of Subjects
Abhandlung über die Erhaltung der Kraft 86 Beyond Good and Evil 89, 1 3 6 - 1 3 7
abstracta 25, 30, 3 2 - 3 3 , 138 Birth of Tragedy, The XII, XIV, 1 2 - 1 6 , 80,
abstract conceptions 26, 28—29, 32 139, 142, 177, 179, 190-192, 197
accident 22, 3 1 - 3 4 , 36, 89
action 20, 23, 1 8 3 - 1 8 4
camera obscura 72, 167
and reaction 126, 149
Case of Wagner, The X I - X I I
at a distance 85, 126
causality 2 4 - 2 5 , 32, 36, 40, 43, 52, 1 0 1 - 1 0 3 ,
willed 23, 1 8 3 - 1 8 4
affirmation 156, 1 7 5 - 1 7 6 , 191, 219 116, 1 6 4 - 1 6 6 , 1 7 9 - 1 8 1 , 1 8 3 - 1 8 4
analysis 3, 3n, 4—5 cause, causes 6, 56, 82, 116, 163
cause and effect 24, 27 - 28, 32, 52, 73, 82,
Anschauung 158-162, 164, 166-169,
114, 120
1 7 2 - 1 7 8 , 180, 190, 207, 2 1 8 - 2 1 9
ascend in viewing of 172—174, 190 character 4 6 - 4 7 , 51, 5 8 - 5 9 , 6 1 - 6 4 , 147, 175,
pure 158, 169 181
worldview in XI, XI η, XII, 8 - 9 , 16, 49, empirical 47, 60—64
63,89, 103,139, 1 4 9 - 1 5 0 , 1 5 6 , 1 5 8 - 1 7 9 , individual 47, 60, 64
163n, 1 9 3 - 1 9 4 , 196, 207, 218 intelligible 47, 60, 6 2 - 6 4
"Anschauung Notes" 15, 80, 139-140, Colli-Montinari critical edition of Nietzsche's
1 4 2 - 1 4 3 , 151, 171, 1 9 4 - 1 9 6 , 200 - 201, works 6
208, 213, 217 concept, concepts I X - X I I , X I V - X V I , 5, 22,
Anthropology 39 24, 2 8 - 2 9 , 3 1 - 3 2 , 41, 69, 83, 9 8 - 9 9 ,
antinomy 43 108-109, 113, 121-123, 125-126,
appearance X I - X I I , 9, 11, 62 - 64, 70, 82, 84, 1 3 5 - 1 3 8 , 1 4 5 , 1 8 4 - 1 8 7 , 1 9 3 , 1 9 5 , 203, 206,
97-102, 108-109, 124-125, 127-128, 2 0 8 - 2 0 9 , 211, 213
148,156,161,163-170,172,175-176,180, a priori 78
185-188, 190, 1 9 4 - 1 9 5 , 197, 200, of expedience 110, 120
216-219 of objects 3 7 - 3 9 , 42, 138
as appearance 1 7 3 - 1 7 5 , 177, 188, 191, pure 3 0 - 3 1 , 39
218-219 conceptual spheres 32—34
archaeology 2 conceptual transformations 7
art 12, 68, 74, 80, 8 2 - 8 4 , 97, 161, 1 7 3 - 1 7 5 , conceptuality
196, 200, 208, 213 limits of 106, 108, 110, 114, 119-121, 124,
artist 174, 188, 196
188, 1 9 6 - 1 9 7
artistic Χ, XIV, 2, 9, 62, 83, 147, 175, 187,
forms of 109, 196
196, 211, 214, 219
concreta 25, 138
artistic projection 167, 173, 196
artist's metaphysics 191 — 192, 195 conscious, consciousness 4n, 5, 17, 25 — 26,
atoms 83, 88, 110, 123, 145, 147, 165, 168 28, 36, 3 9 - 4 0 , 4 6 - 4 8 , 5 2 - 59, 61, 6 3 - 6 4 ,
atomic movement 71, 73 71, 7 3 - 7 4 , 76, 79, 1 0 0 - 1 0 2 , 125, 128, 132,
atomism 74, 160, 166 138, 145, 170, 173, 183, 197
atomistic theories 69, 85, 87, 145, 147 abstract 24, 53
"Attempt at a Self Criticism" XII, XIV, 13, immediate 53
190 individuality 171
inferences 75, 81, 210
attraction and repulsion 85 intellect, ego 1 0 0 - 1 0 3 , 150, 163, 1 6 6 - 1 6 9 ,
1 7 1 - 1 7 3 , 185, 187, 1 8 9 - 1 9 1 , 195
becoming XIV, 62
 Index of Subjects
thinking 17, 19, 62, 64, 75, 108, 1 2 9 - 1 3 0 ,
135, 138, 150, 167, 170, 186
willing 49, 61, 170, 184
Course on "Rhetoric" IX, 16, 78, 138,
1 9 9 - 2 0 0 , 202, 205, 212, 215, 219
"Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy" 22, 106
Critique of Judgement, The 43, 67,106, 1 1 0 - 1 1 1 ,
113, 124
Critique of Pure Reason, The 30, 3 7 - 3 8 , 124
culture, cultural X I I I - X V , 1 1 - 1 2
Darwin, Darwinism 50, 6 8 - 6 9 , 80, 9 1 - 9 3 ,
1 1 8 - 1 1 9 , 123, 148
Daybreak 138
"Der junge Nietzsche und Schopenhauer" 96
" D e r Standpunkt des Ideals bei Lange und
Nietzsche" 103
Dionysian XV, 138
Dionysian dithyramb XII, XVI, 177, 1 9 7 - 1 9 8
"Dionysian Worldview, T h e " XI, 141, 186
"Dionysus Dithyrambs" XII
discourse 2, 6—8, 10
discourse-object 2, 10, 220
drive, drives 4 n , 10, 96, 100, 136, 155, 167,
170
dynamic theories 69, 8 7 - 8 9 , 145, 149
Ecce Homo XII, XV
effects 8 7 - 8 8 , 91, 1 2 6 - 1 2 7
effect of moving force 115
Empedodean standpoint 118, 125
empiricism 23
ends in nature 107, 1 0 9 - 1 1 5 , 1 1 9 - 1 2 0 , 124,
126
epistemology XVI, 2 2 - 2 3 , 96, 106, 1 9 9 - 2 0 0 ,
206
"Essay on the Origin of Language" 41, 44
ethical materialism 193
ethical materio-idealism 194, 219
evolution 6
exegesis 4—5, 7
expedience 17, 43, 64, 93, 1 0 9 - 1 1 3 , 1 1 7 - 1 2 0 ,
1 2 5 - 1 2 6 , 129, 170
fiction XIV, 11
final causes 43, 1 0 7 - 1 1 2 , 1 2 0 - 1 2 4
force, forces X I I - X V , 5 - 6 , 5 2 - 5 3 , 69,
8 5 - 9 1 , 101, 110, 112, 116, 120, 1 2 2 - 1 2 3 ,
1 2 5 - 1 2 7 , 1 4 6 - 1 4 7 , 149, 163
and matter as abstractions 85 — 86, 89
points 8 7 - 8 9
unconscious 110
form, forms X I I I - X I V , 7, 19, 35, 38, 5 2 - 5 3 ,
81, 109, 115, 1 1 8 - 1 2 7 , 138, 160, 191,
1 9 5 - 1 9 6 , 2 1 2 - 2 1 3 , 216
307
actual 92, 9 2 n , 93, 116, 118, 131, 135, 148
a priori 38, 82, 114, 137
possible 92, 9 2 n , 93, 111, 116, 118,131,135,
148
Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason,
The 25
free association 3—5
Friedrieb Nietzsche: the Hidden Beginnings of his
Philosophising 11
The Gay Science X
genealogical analysis 13
genealogical nodal method 7—9, 14
genealogist 4
genealogy IX, XIII, XV, 5, 8, 11
genius 1 7 3 - 1 7 5 , 177, 187, 191, 197, 200, 218
gesture, gestures X I - X I I , XVI, 141, 198
goal 1 7 0 - 1 7 7 , 188
grammatical, grammar XIII —XIV, 5, 33 — 38,
4 1 - 4 2 , 44, 91, 130, 1 3 7 - 1 3 8 , 197, 200,
205-207
forms 9, 19, 34, 41, 89 - 90, 99
sentences 22, 31, 33 — 34
"Greek Musicdrama" XI
Greeks 12, 13 η
"Gustav Gerber und Friedrich Nietzsche" 199
Handbook of Physiological Optics 78
Handbook of Physiology, The 71
Hartmann's unconscious 15, 20, 39, 42,
4 8 - 4 9 , 58, 6 4 - 6 5 , 125, 1 3 9 - 1 5 7 , 149n,
158, 161, 169
Hartmann's unconscious will 57 n, 58, 65—66
Hartmann's worldview 139—151, 192, 217
History of Materialism 12, 15, 49, 6 6 - 6 9 , 75,
87, 103, 105, 128, 193, 199, 216
"Homer and Classical Philology" 50
Human all too Human 218
human organism 114
human (our) organization 42, 49, 68 — 70,
7 2 - 7 4 , 7 9 - 8 0 , 82, 84, 86, 8 9 - 9 0 , 9 2 - 9 3 ,
96, 99, 112, 1 1 4 - 1 1 5 , 121, 1 2 3 - 1 2 5 ,
1 2 8 - 1 3 0 , 134, 196, 200, 206, 217
Idea 56, 56 n, 57, 79, 175, 182, 188
idea of effective cause 116, 123, 125
idealism, ideal XVI, 23, 73, 8 2 - 8 3 , 8 5 - 8 6 ,
139, 179, 193, 195, 217
objective 57
subjective 28, 36, 57
transcendental or abstract 24, 64, 143, 158,
179-180
illusion 12, 1 6 2 , 1 6 8 - 1 6 9 , 1 7 1 , 173, 1 7 5 - 1 7 6 ,
185, 197
308 Index of Subjects
illusory representations 172
image, images I X - Χ , XII, 5, 8, 23, 27, 29,
36, 49, 7 2 - 7 4 , 79, 85, 100-101, 103, 150,
159-160, 167-168, 174-175, 193,
196-197, 207-215
image of the image, second image 167 — 168,
174, 177, 184, 188, 197, 200, 203, 205
image of the image of the image, third image
174, 177, 196, 200
of objects 71, 73
of perception 28, 71, 208
projection of 8, 63, 7 2 - 7 4 , 158, 161,
1 6 4 - 1 6 5 , 1 6 7 - 1 6 8 , 174-176, 186
thinking 2 7 - 2 8
Immanuel Kant und Seine Lehre 106
individual XIII, 110, 121, 123, 150
individuation 36, 98, 103, 143, 1 4 6 - 1 4 7 ,
172-173
inexpedience 109-110, 1 1 6 - 1 2 0 , 125
inferences of thought 75
innermost kernel of a being 46, 51, 62, 64,
134, 1 3 6 - 1 3 7 , 177, 187, 197
inorganic beings 115—116, 125
instinct, instinctual Χ —XI, 4n, 9, 19, 19n,
42-44, 46-47,49-51, 55,57-62, 64-65,
108,114,117-118,127,129,133-134,137,
1 4 0 - 1 4 1 , 148, 150, 152, 156, 167, 170, 184,
1 8 6 - 1 8 7 , 1 9 6 - 1 9 7 , 208, 215
apollinian 176, 191
dionysian 176, 191
Hartmann's definition of 46—47
intellectual 19 n, 1 6 9 - 1 7 0 , 179
pure 48
intellect 59—61
interjection 132—134
intuition X - X I , XVI, 2 5 - 2 6 , 28, 30, 38, 49,
113, 159
empirical 38, 42
pure 38, 40, 42, 81, 113, 114
intuitive perception 159 — 161, 210
intuitive thinking 48, 145
judgement 22, 3 1 - 3 4 , 83, 99
reflective 107, 1 0 9 - 1 1 1 , 124, 145
Kantian philosophy 22, 23
knowledge XIV, XVI, 1, 3,10, 30, 33, 8 3 - 8 5 ,
99, 103, 140, 169, 219
abstract rational 2 4 - 2 5 , 29, 32, 40, 96, 129,
185, 209
a priori 39, 129
conscious relativity of 105 — 106
drive 4 η
intuitive 29, 31
limits of 106, 109, 1 2 1 - 1 2 2
metaphysical 93, 196
of perception 2 4 - 2 7 , 30, 3 2 - 3 3 , 36, 39,
52, 114, 1 2 8 - 1 2 9 , 184, 2 0 9 - 2 1 2
philosophical 22, 35, 37, 41 - 4 2 , 44, 91
reflected 31
scientific 8 3 - 8 4 , 93
theory of 1, 11
Kunst trieb, art instinct 203
Lange and Nietzsche 99
Lange's skepticism 79 — 80, 82 — 83
Lange's transcendental order of things 79, 82,
93
language
and Anschauung 168 — 170
artistic X - X I , 68, 78, 80, 1 8 6 - 1 8 8 , 195,
197, 2 0 1 - 2 0 7 , 212
as animal vocal language 19, 132 — 133
as appearance 187
as communication XII, XVI, 44
as organism 19, 4 5 - 4 6 , 6 4 - 6 5 , 1 2 9 - 1 3 0 ,
187
as system of signs XIV, XVI, 11, 26, 44,
187, 204
conscious X - X I , XIII, X V - X V 1 , 1, 19,
1 3 0 - 1 3 5 , 138, 140, 177, 1 8 6 - 1 8 7 , 202,
2 0 4 - 2 0 5 , 207
creative power of 1 8 6 - 1 8 8 , 197
figurative use of 8 4 - 8 9 , 138, 193, 197, 204
formal aspects of XIV, 90, 1 2 9 - 1 3 1 , 135,
138, 177, 187
herd, conventional, community IX —X,
202, 204, 207, 219
individual Χ, XIII, 13
limits and inadequacy of 17 — 18, 25, 29, 36,
8 4 - 8 5 , 106, 184,186, 205, 210, 2 1 6 - 2 1 9
of thoughts, gestures, and tones 141
philosophy of 9—10, 35
transgression, subversive XI, XV—XVI
unconscious X - X I , X I I I - X I V , XVI,
1 8 - 1 9 , 36, 40, 91, 134, 1 3 6 - 1 3 7 , 140,
169, 177, 197
unconscious forms of 38, 42, 89 — 91,
1 3 0 - 1 3 1 , 186
unconsciously preformed 34, 36, 90
language, origins Χ, XIII, 1, 1 7 - 1 9 , 43 - 44,
50, 61, 64, 90, 1 3 1 - 1 3 3 , 136, 2 0 1 - 2 0 3 ,
208-211
in instinct 4 4 - 4 5 , 131, 137, 177, 197,
2 0 1 - 2 0 2 , 204
in unconscious instinct 50, 91, 135 — 136,
138, 169, 177, 187, 205
in unconscious 20, 44, 90, 204
 Index of Subjects
Language as Art IX, 8, 16, 78, 199 - 200, 202,
206, 211
law of development 92 η
laws of nature 82, 9 2 - 9 3 , 111, 116
"life" 114, 119, 1 2 1 - 1 2 4 , 126, 156, 196, 213
life force 122, 125, 156, 196
linguistic XIII, XIII η, X I V - X V , 1 0 - 1 1 ,
4 1 - 4 2 , 99, 130, 211
living language 203 — 205, 219
logic, logical XIV, 3 - 4 , 6, 9 - 1 0 , 197, 200
looking at 2—5
loss of identity 171 — 172
making the unconscious conscious 150—151,
156, 1 6 9 - 1 7 0 , 173, 176, 190, 207, 219
materialism 75, 8 2 - 8 4 , 86, 139, 193
matter 38, 65, 69, 79, 8 5 - 9 1 , 101, 110, 123,
126, 1 4 6 - 1 4 9 , 163
mechanical 47, 70, 1 1 5 - 1 1 6 , 120
mechanical laws 43, 73
mechanism 4 6 - 4 7 , 93, 108, 115, 117, 126
mechanism joined with chance causality 111,
1 1 8 - 1 2 0 , 125, 174
mechanistic 74, 84, 106
mechanistic theory in Nietzsche's teleology 109
medium individuationis 146, 148
metaphysical comfort XIV
metaphysical thought X I I I - X I V , 35, 7 3 - 7 4 ,
83, 92, 101, 128, 143, 147, 155, 180, 193,
1 9 5 - 1 9 7 , 219
metaphysics 6 5 - 6 7 , 69, 82, 86, 88, 93, 96,101,
1 0 5 - 1 0 6 , 114, 179, 194, 200
metaphor, metaphorical I X - X I , X I V - X V I ,
5, 8, 78, 136, 201, 204, 207 - 209, 2 1 1 - 2 1 2 ,
215, 219
metaphorical framework 212, 216
mirror 150, 1 7 3 - 1 7 4 , 186
monism 63 — 64, 143, 150
moral, morality, morals X I I I - X I V , 1, 62, 83,
124
Morphologie 171
motive 4 6 - 4 7 , 49, 5 6 - 6 0 , 1 6 3 , 170, 1 8 3 - 1 8 4
motivation 58 — 61, 64, 184
multiplicity, multiple 1 1 2 - 1 1 3 , 1 2 0 - 1 2 1 , 123,
164, 172, 176, 1 8 2 - 1 8 3 , 185
music X I - X I I , XVI, 12, 138, 141, 198
"Music and Words" XI
natural science 12, 13 n, 15, 20, 23, 46, 50,
6 4 - 6 7 , 84, 86, 9 1 , 1 0 4 - 1 0 6 , 1 0 9 , 1 1 5 - 1 1 6 ,
125, 128, 140, 147, 149
negation or denial of the will 152, 156, 175,
189, 190
nerve stimulus I X - X , 203, 208 - 209, 211
309
Nietzsche als Naturphilosoph 19, 67
Nietzsche's ambiguous relationship to Hart-
mann 21 n, 151 — 156, 156 η
Nietzsche's will 1 4 0 - 1 4 1 , 143
"Nietzsche's Wortspiel als Reflexion auf
poet(olog)ische Verfahren" 199
non-correspondence theory IX, 11, 219
object, objects XIV, XVI, 10, 2 2 - 2 4 , 27, 31,
3 3 - 3 4 , 36, 38, 52, 57, 7 2 - 7 3 , 91, 98, 130,
134, 160, 167, 1 8 0 - 1 8 1 , 189, 206
objectification 53, 5 5 - 5 6 , 5 8 - 6 1 , 100, 133,
140, 1 4 7 - 1 4 8 , 158, 168, 182, 188
objective reality/phenomenality 158, 166, 195
"On Language and Words" 44, 132
"On Schopenhauer" 15, 52 n, 9 5 - 1 0 4 , 140,
163, 217
"On Teleology" or "Concerning the Concept
of the Organic since Kant" 12, 15, 43, 78,
80, 93, 1 0 5 - 1 0 6 , 108, 1 2 5 - 1 2 7 , 148, 171,
213, 217, 219
On the Genealogy of Morals XII, XIII η
"On the Origins of Language" 14—15,17—18,
22, 31, 33 - 34, 37, 43, 49 - 51, 62, 64, 66,
9 0 - 9 1 , 108, 126, 1 2 9 - 1 3 1 , 1 3 5 - 1 3 7 ,
1 4 0 - 1 4 1 , 150, 155, 2 0 1 - 2 0 2 , 219
"On the Pathos of Truth" 132
"On the Uses and Disadvantages of History
for Life" 1 5 1 - 1 5 3 , 156
ontology, ontological 1, 3, 35
"On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" IX,
XVI, 8 - 9, 11, 16, 78, 84, 132, 1 3 6 - 1 3 7 ,
199-202, 205, 207-208, 210-212,
216-219
optics of language 5, 71
organic beings 17, 1 0 5 - 1 0 6 , 1 4 7 - 1 4 8
organism, organic 43, 46, 61—62, 64 — 66, 91,
100, 107-108, 110-111, 114-116,
1 1 8 - 1 2 3 , 1 2 5 - 1 2 6 , 130, 1 7 1 - 1 7 2
origin of intellect 1 0 0 - 1 0 3 , 140
Parerga and Paralipomena 100
perception, perceptual Χ, XV, 24—31, 35 — 36,
40, 52, 138, 159, 167
perceptual intuition 29
pessimism 84, 151, 153n, 1 5 4 - 1 5 6 , 2 1 8 - 2 1 9
phenomenal-real order of nature 58, 61,
6 3 - 6 5 , 143, 217
philology 12, 13 n, 14
"Philosophers of the Tragic Age, The" 13
Philosophia Naturalis 88
philosophical worth 91, 1 2 9 - 1 3 0 , 202
philosophy, philosophical XV, 2—3, 9—10,
1 2 - 1 3 , 17
310 Index of Subjects

Philosophy as Truth 159 Schopenhauer's philosophy 22—23

philosophy is art 68, 74, 80, 82, 1 0 3 - 1 0 4 , 195 Schopenhauer's understanding 24, 27, 29, 40,
Philosophy of the Unconscious 9, 18, 34, 39, 76, 52, 73, 114, 129, 131, 137
89, 142, 154, 195 Schopenhauer's will 20, 24, 5 1 - 5 6 , 5 8 - 6 0 ,
physical science 12,13 n, 15,17, 20,23, 6 5 - 6 6 , 6 4 - 6 5 , 69, 7 3 - 7 4 , 78, 92, 9 6 - 1 0 1 , 108,
104, 106, 128, 140, 147 113, 122, 1 3 2 - 1 3 3 , 140, 146, 1 7 9 - 1 8 1 ,
physiological mechanisms 76, 79 1 8 8 - 1 8 9 , 193
physiology, physiological Χ, XIV, 27, 36, 61, sensations 38, 7 1 - 7 2 , 7 9 - 8 2 , 84, 203, 208,
70, 139, 212 212
pictures of an unknown situation 79, 84 sense(s), sensibility, sensuous 24, 30—31,
pictures of the imagination 27—30, 85 — 86 35 - 36, 38, 40, 44, 68, 70, 79, 81, 83, 86,
pleasure/displeasure 141, 214 129, 195, 196
pluralistic individualism 143, 158, 182 sense organs 70 — 71, 75, 81
poetry, poetic XIV, XVI, 8 2 - 8 3 , 85, 9 0 - 9 1 , sense perception 47—49, 75, 79, 83
97, 1 0 3 - 1 0 5 , 161, 1 9 3 - 1 9 4 , 206 sense-world 74
predicate(s) 9, 22, 3 1 - 3 4 , 36 - 37, 41, 89, 90, sensory experience, stimulation 40, 42, 73,
9 7 - 9 8 , 102, 2 0 6 - 2 0 7 7 5 - 7 6 , 81, 84
predication of the will 96, 1 0 2 - 1 0 3 , 140, 195 images 73
principium mdividuationis 24—25, 36, 64, 96, 98, inference 75, 79
1 0 0 - 1 0 3 , 1 2 9 , 1 4 0 , 1 4 5 - 1 4 6 , 1 4 8 , 164,172, synthesis 8, 7 0 - 7 1 , 7 3 - 7 4 , 7 8 , 82,136,138,
190, 195 209-211
properties 90, 123 sight, sensory perception of 8, 27—28, 71, 75,
Psychophjsik 76 129, 160, 206, 213
pure sensibility 30—31 sound 203, 2 0 8 - 2 0 9
pure understanding 30—31 space 24 - 25, 30, 36, 98, 101, 103, 114, 146,
purpose, purposeful 46—47, 55, 61, 65—66, 1 6 4 - 1 6 6 , 1 7 9 - 1 8 4 , 189
69, 92, 112, 125, 150, 1 7 0 - 1 7 1 , 176, 188, standpoint of the ideal XIV, 1 0 3 - 1 0 4 , 194
190, 196 structuralism 137
style X V - X V I
quantity and quality 214 subject X I I I - X I V , XVI, 9 - 1 0 , 2 2 - 2 4 ,
3 1 - 3 4 , 3 6 - 3 7 , 41, 52, 57, 7 2 - 7 4 , 85,
rational beings 20 89-91, 98-99, 130, 134, 180-181,
rational thinking X, 5, 10, 20 1 8 4 - 1 8 5 , 189, 2 0 6 - 2 0 7
reason 2 2 - 2 3 , 2 6 , 29, 3 7 - 3 9 , 41 - 4 2 , 4 4 , 1 3 3 , identity of 171
137 non-identity of 9, 172, 1 8 1 - 1 8 2
representation(s) X I - X I I , 5, 2 3 - 2 4 , 2 6 - 2 8 , of knowing 52, 1 8 1 - 1 8 2 , 188
3 5 - 3 6 , 38, 5 1 - 5 3 , 56, 58, 6 2 - 6 4 , 73, predicate relationship 9, 31, 34, 69, 9 0 - 9 1
9 7 - 1 0 0 , 115, 120, 122, 128, 134, 140, 145, substance XIII, 22, 31 - 3 4 , 36, 86, 89, 91, 123
158,161,163,167-170,175,179,181-182, symbol(s), symbolize, symbolic possibilities
185, 187, 203, 205, 209 X - X I I , XVI, 5, 141, 164, 1 6 7 - 1 7 1 , 184,
abstract 28, 32 1 8 6 - 1 8 8 , 193, 1 9 7 - 1 9 8 , 203, 206, 208,
empirical 25 2 1 2 - 2 1 3 , 216
images of 8, 103 "symbol" man 171
intuitive 29 — 30 symbolization 164, 167, 177, 1 8 5 - 1 8 7 , 190
objects of 25, 36
representations of 24, 184 teleology 12, 43, 55, 6 5 - 6 7 , 69, 80, 9 1 - 9 3 ,
unconscious 57, 170 105-128, 147, 172-177, 188-193,
representation mechanism 96 — 97, 100, 102, 1 9 5 - 1 9 6 , 200, 218
1 6 1 - 1 6 5 , 168, 173, 176, 185 teleology, an aesthetic product 124
representative of a conception 28—29 thinking
represented things 72 abstract 3 0 - 3 1 , 36, 4 8 - 4 9 , 7 4 - 7 5 , 131,
rhetoric, rhetorical I X - X , 9, 11, 78, 8 6 - 8 7 , 136, 210
89, 99, 138, 202, 204, 209, 215 discursive 4 8 - 4 9 , 145, 210
root 203, 208 empirical 31
 Index of Subjects
thing X I I I - X I V , 6, 26, 28, 30, 36, 90
thing in itself XIV, XVI, 2 2 - 2 5 , 3 5 - 3 6 , 51,
6 8 - 7 0 , 74, 83, 9 6 - 9 8 , 1 0 1 - 1 0 2 , 115, 122,
124, 128, 140, 160, 169, 179, 2 0 8 - 2 0 9 , 212,
216-218
things in themselves 8, 79, 208
time 2 4 - 2 5 , 30, 36, 64, 80, 98, 101, 103, 114,
146, 164-166, 166 n, 167, 1 7 9 - 1 8 4 , 189
time-points, point of time 48 — 49, 145 — 146,
164-166, 166 n, 167, 210
transformation, regulated transformation XI,
X I V - X V , 2 - 7 , 10, 62, 73, 220
tropological framework 16, 78, 138, 2 0 3 - 2 0 5 ,
2 0 8 - 2 0 9 , 211, 2 1 5 - 2 1 6
truth XIV, 2, 4 - 5 , 10, 36, 6 2 - 6 3 , 85,
105-106, 126, 193, 1 9 5 - 1 9 7 , 200, 212, 219
Twilight of the Idols X I V - X V , 42
unconscious 4 n, 8, 10, 1 9 - 2 0 , 2 7 - 2 8 , 37, 39,
43, 4 6 - 4 9 , 5 1 - 5 6 , 6 0 - 6 1 , 64, 7 8 - 7 9 ,
8 9 - 9 0 , 108, 1 1 7 - 1 1 8 , 125, 128, 184, 211
art 78
ends 47, 61, 151, 153
gestures XI, XVI, 141
Idea 47, 49, 57, 57 n, 58, 6 0 - 6 1 , 6 4 - 6 5 ,
143, 145, 147
inferences 4 8 - 4 9 , 7 5 - 7 9 , 136, 138,
210-211, 214-215
instinct 19, 63, 129, 155, 187, 200
intellect, intellect itself 18, 5 8 , 1 4 0 - 1 4 1 , 150
intuition 49, 114
mental mechanism 47, 49
presentations 76
representing 40, 167, 170
sensations 77, 128
symbol 169
thinking 49, 53, 55, 7 5 - 7 7 , 79
Will, volition 47, 49, 61, 89, 145, 147
willing 40, 50, 127
unconsciousness of coming to be of organisms
108, 126, 130, 148
311
unity, unitary 93, 103, 112-114, 120-121,
123, 1 7 1 - 1 7 2 , 1 8 2 - 1 8 3
Untimely Meditations, The 11 — 12, 142
Ur-Eine X I - X I I , 6 2 - 6 4 , 140, 161-163,
1 6 8 - 1 6 9 , 173-178, 180-181, 185-186,
191, 192n, 195-196, 207, 2 1 8 - 2 1 9
activity of 161, 163-164, 168-172, 181,
1 8 3 - 1 8 5 , 187, 218
being of 6 3 - 6 4 , 158, 161-166, 169, 174
goal of 167-168, 172-177, 187, 190, 196
will of 158, 161-168, 170, 176-177,
1 7 9 - 1 8 0 , 187, 218
Ur-intellect 1 6 7 - 1 6 9 , 172-173, 179-180,
190, 195
view, viewing 2, 8, 158-159, 161, 165-166,
168, 172, 174, 176, 188
viewing will 63, 167
vision, visions XIV, 7 2 - 7 3 , 75, 167, 170, 172,
191
whole, concept of 112-114, 120, 124
will XII, XIV, 8, 18, 20, 23, 47, 58, 6 2 - 6 3 ,
161, 183
activity of 63, 180
acts X I - X I I , 89, 142, 145, 148-150, 163,
165, 187, 217, 219
souls 89
to power X I I - X I V , XVI, 52n, 8 8 - 8 9 ,
1 2 5 - 1 2 7 , 140, 192n
"The Will in Nature" 123
"The Will to Power" 127
Willensregmg 1 6 2 - 1 6 3 , 167, 170
words IX, X - X I I I , XV, 26, 2 8 - 3 0 , 36,
8 6 - 8 7 , 101, 106, 115, 121, 168, 171,
1 8 6 - 1 8 7 , 201, 203 - 204, 208, 210 - 211
World as Will and Representation, The 26, 98,
106, 158, 190, 199
world process 151 — 156
Zarathustra Χ, XII, XV
 Index of Names
Altieri, Charles X I V - X V Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 35, 43 η
Anders, Anni 1 1 - 1 2 , 67, 78, 118 Lange, Friedrich Albert I X - X , XVI, 8 - 9 ,
Boscovich, Roger Joseph 87 — 89 12, 15, 49, 6 6 - 9 4 , 9 6 - 9 7 , 99, 103,
Breazeale, Daniel 6, 159, 217 105-106, 108-109, 111-112, 115-116,
Büchner, L u d w i g 87 118-119, 121, 123-126, 128, 132,
1 3 6 - 1 3 7 , 1 3 9 , 1 4 5 , 1 4 7 - 1 4 9 , 1 6 0 , 165, 169,
Carus, Carl Gustav 19 — 20 171, 179, 1 9 3 - 1 9 6 , 1 9 9 - 2 0 0 , 2 0 6 - 2 1 1 ,
Czolbe, Heinrich 93 η 2 1 6 - 2 1 7 , 219
Deussen, Paul 95, 97, 1 0 5 - 1 0 6 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 20, 88
Du Bois-Reymond, Emil 8 6 - 8 7 , 89, 206 Lingis, Alfonso 127
Empedocles 118, 125 Magnus, Bernd 3, 220
Epicurus 160 Meijers, Anthonie 199, 2 0 1 - 2 0 2 , 206,
Fechner, Gustav Theodor 20, 76, 78, 81, 87 2 0 8 - 2 0 9 , 211, 2 1 6 - 2 1 7 , 219
Fichte, Johann G. 20, 143, 148 Mittasch, Alwin 19, 67
Fischer, Kuno 106, 115, 125, 219 Müller, Johannes 71—72
Foucault, Michel 2, 4 - 5 , 10, 220 Mushacke, Hermann 67

Gerber, Gustav I X - X , X V I , 8, 16, 78, 199, Plato 1 8 7 - 1 8 8

200, 2 0 2 - 2 0 4 , 2 0 6 - 2 1 2 , 2 1 5 - 2 1 6 , 219
Gersdorff, Carl von 18, 68, 72, 74, 103, 142,
206
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 113, 116, 171
Hamlyn, D . W . 1 8 2 - 1 8 3 , 189
Hartmann, Eduard von I X - X I , X V I , 8 - 9 ,
1 4 - 1 5 , 1 7 - 2 0 , 23, 3 4 - 4 2 , 45, 4 7 - 5 1 ,
5 6 - 5 8 , 6 0 - 6 6 , 76, 78, 8 9 - 9 1 , 103, 125,
1 2 8 - 1 3 1 , 134, 1 3 6 - 1 3 7 , 1 3 9 - 1 5 6 , 158,
160-161, 163-165, 171, 176, 192,
1 9 5 - 1 9 6 , 202, 2 0 4 - 2 0 5 , 2 0 8 - 2 1 1 , 217,
219
Hegel, Georg W. F. 20, 81, 143
Helmholtz, Hermann 20, 75, 7 7 - 7 8 , 8 6 - 8 9 ,
210
Herbart, Johann Friedrich 20, 76, 78, 81, 145
Herder, Johann Gottfried 1 3 2 - 1 3 4 , 205
Hollingdale, R. J . 11
Hume, David 20
Jayne, E. F. J . 1 5 8 - 1 5 9
Redtenbacher 87
Rohde, Erwin 18, 58, 105, 141, 191
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 41—42, 44, 129, 205
Salaquarda, J ö r g 69 n, 103
Saussure, Ferdinand de XIII n, 135 η
Schlechta, Karl 1 1 - 1 2 , 67, 78, 96, 118
Schelling, Friedrich 1 7 - 2 0 , 4 4 - 4 5 , 91
Schopenhauer, Arthur I X - X , X V I , 8 - 9 ,
1 1 - 2 0 , 2 2 - 3 7 , 3 9 - 4 2 , 44, 49, 5 1 - 6 9 ,
7 3 - 7 4 , 77, 81, 84, 90, 92, 9 5 - 1 0 4 , 108,
112-114, 119, 123, 128-129, 132,
1 3 6 - 1 4 0 , 1 4 2 - 1 4 3 , 1 4 5 - 1 4 8 , 156, 158,
1 6 0 - 1 6 1 , 163, 1 7 1 - 1 7 2 , 175, 1 7 9 - 1 9 3 ,
1 9 5 , 1 9 9 - 2 0 0 , 2 0 5 - 2 0 7 , 209, 211, 217, 219
Spinoza, Baruch 23
Spir, Afrikan 87
Stack, George J . 69 n, 84, 8 8 - 9 0 , 99, 117,
125, 137, 139, 171, 194
Stingelin, Martin 199, 201, 210, 219

Kant, Immanuel IX, 8 - 9 , 1 2 - 1 5 , 1 8 - 2 0 , Ueberweg, Friedrich 72, 86, 167

22 - 23, 30 - 33, 35, 37 - 40, 42, 49, 51, Wagner, Richard XII, 1 1 - 1 2 , 14
6 5 - 6 7 , 7 3 - 7 4 , 7 7 - 7 8 , 8 0 - 8 2 , 84, 90, 97,
Wittgenstein, L u d w i g 41
99, 101, 1 0 5 - 1 1 7 , 1 1 9 - 1 2 2 , 124, 128,
Wundt, Wilhelm 20, 75, 77, 210
136-138, 143, 145-146, 148, 158,
1 7 9 - 1 8 0 , 182, 2 0 4 - 2 0 5 , 209, 217, 219 Zöllner, Johann K. F. 75, 78, 87, 89, 210
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