Willing and not being able: Nietzsche on akratic action

ABSTRACT

Nietzsche claims that weakness of will is a pervasive feature of modernity: ‘Nothing is as timely [zeitgemass] as weakness of will’ (BGE 212). In this paper I explore a textual puzzle regarding the phenomenon traditionally identified with weakness of will, akrasia. Specifically, I draw attention to an apparent inconsistency between Nietzsche’s views regarding the origins of action and evaluative judgment, on the one hand, and his commitment to the possibility of akratic action, on the other. Nietzsche appears to account for both action and ‘conscience’ – which functions like what philosophers today would call ‘better judgment’—by appealing to the strength of the drives. Thus, it is not immediately clear how action could ever diverge from conscience in the manner required for akratic action. As I argue, however, Nietzsche’s theoretical commitments regarding action and conscience are ultimately consistent with the possibility of akratic action. After motivating the interpretive tension, I offer a closer examination of Nietzsche’s remarks regarding the sources of action and conscience, respectively. I then demonstrate, drawing on his description of the relations between drives and his distinction between conscious and unconscious thought, that Nietzsche conceives of akratic action as a kind of ‘willing and not being able.’

KEYWORDS:

• Nietzsche
• akrasia
• weakness of will
• action
• conscience

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This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2022.2178740)

Notes

1 I employ the following abbreviations to reference Nietzsche’s writings: A (The Antichrist), BGE (Beyond Good and Evil), D (Daybreak), GM (On the Genealogy of Morality), GS (The Gay Science), NF (Nachgelassene Fragmente), TI (Twilight of the Idols), WS (The Wanderer and His Shadow).

2 Anderson (2006) concurs on this point, even writing, ‘I am ready to propose the hypothesis that, at least in semi-technical philosophical contexts, Nietzsche never means strength and weakness any other way’ (103).

3 Though note Anderson (2006) and Strong (2008).

4 I provide a definition of akratic action in Section 1.

5 See also Nehamas (1985, 182), Clark and Dudrick (2012, 242), Richardson (2020, 67), and Riccardi (2021, 210). Strong (2008) is a notable exception on this point.

6 While he apparently operates with the same assumption in later work—see, e.g., Anderson (2012, 229)—more recently Anderson has adopted a new stance: ‘I think Nietzsche deploys an even broader conception of ethico-psychological weakness of will, covering all kinds of psychological dissociation that interfere with wholehearted valuation and action’ (Anderson 2022, 15).

7 ‘I need much altruism for the sake of my ego and to have its pleasure … akrasia !!’ [Viel Altruismus habe ich nöthig, um meines ego willen und seine Lust zu haben …  ἀκρασία !!] (NF 1883 17[37]). While the meaning of this note is not immediately clear, it is possible that Nietzsche means to convey that he is tempted toward altruistic behavior despite his considered judgment that pity is harmful. In published work from the same period, for example, Nietzsche writes, ‘Where are your greatest dangers?—In pity’ (GS 271; see also GS 338).

8 This fact is plausibly what informs Leiter’s (2011, 111n) remark that ‘I do not see any textual evidence that Nietzsche is interested … in the problem of akrasia.’ Of course, the ‘problem of akrasia’ could be taken to refer to one of two things. First, it could refer to a puzzle in the philosophy of action about how to account for the possibility of akratic action. Second, it could refer to the ethical or practical problem posed by agents’ susceptibility to act akratically. Whether or not a philosopher explicitly articulates a solution to the former problem, anyone who acknowledges the reality of akrasia should at least—on pain of inconsistency—have the theoretical resources to account for it. Insofar as Nietzsche does acknowledge akrasia, then, his theory of action ought to be compatible with the phenomenon of akratic action. As I argue below, Nietzsche not only acknowledges the possibility—indeed, the ubiquity—of akratic action but in fact offers explicit remarks about how it occurs, even if he does not refer to the phenomenon by name.

9 Examples of notions that Nietzsche ‘replaces’ in this manner include the soul (BGE 12) and objectivity (GM III.12).

10 I make the case that for conscience to ‘bow’ to the strongest drive is for the former to be determined by the latter in Section 3.

11 I demonstrate that Nietzsche associates conscience with unconditional evaluative judgment in Section 3.

12 For example, acting contrary to conscience is precisely how Twain depicts Huck Finn when he lies about Jim’s race to the slave hunters in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The literature on this case beginning with Bennett (1974) treats Huck’s action as akratic.

13 Here I take inspiration from Wiggins (1979), who memorably writes, ‘I do venture to say that he who values his pet theory above the phenomenon, and wants to hold that weakness of will as I have described it is simply an illusion, will need to command some formidable conceptual-cum-explanatory leverage in the philosophy of value and mind—and an Archimedean fulcrum of otherwise inexplicable facts of human conduct’ (251). Admittedly, my position here may be a matter of taste. I direct those who don’t share my taste only to the textual problem.

14 This is the conclusion drawn in Strong (2008), to my knowledge the most extended scholarly treatment of Nietzsche on weakness of will.

15 Nietzsche also appears to describe the phenomenon elsewhere, as, for example, when he writes of ‘’willing and not being able’’ [Wollen-und-nicht-können] (NF 1881, 11[131]). I discuss this passage in Section 4.

16 Anderson identifies Leiter (2002, 2009), Leiter and Knobe (2007), and Risse (2007) as examples of this strain of interpretation.

17 Here Anderson seems to operate on the assumption that Nietzsche identifies weakness with akrasia.

18 For more on the nature of Nietzschean drives, see Anderson (2012), Clark and Dudrick (2012), Katsafanas (2016), Riccardi (2018, 2021), and Richardson (2020).

19 Richardson cites NF 1885, 40[37] as another example of this tendency. He also points out that at NF 1881, 11[73], Nietzsche ‘passes back and forth between Trieb and Affekt in making [his] points’ (Richardson 2020, 117n5).

20 Janaway and Richardson do ultimately agree. See also Anderson (2012) on this point. For more on affects in Nietzsche, see Fowles (2020), Richardson (2020), and Riccardi (2021).

21 Admittedly, both D 109 and BGE 117 describe instances of the will to overcome a drive or affect, which we might consider a special instance of action. However, it is difficult to see why the picture wouldn’t generalize to cover all actions. If what we do in cases of conscious, internal conflict is a function of the strongest affect(s) involved in that conflict, why wouldn’t the strongest affect(s) also motivate in instances where no such conflict exists? There would simply be less resistance to overcome. Besides, Nietzsche indicates that every action involves internal conflict insofar as each impulse to act faces, minimally, internal resistance in the form of a ‘pleasure of the calm of idleness’ [die Lust der Ruhe der Trägheit] ‘which must be overridden’ [muß aufgehoben werden] (NF 1881, 11[131]).

22 See, for example, Davidson (1980).

23 There are competing accounts of the nature of the ‘order of rank' of drives. Clark and Dudrick (2012) advance a normative interpretation, according to which the order is a function of subordinate drives recognizing the normative authority of commanding drives. Katsafanas (2016) and Riccardi (2018) argue that this reading commits Nietzsche to the homunculus fallacy. A second interpretation, defended by Riccardi (2018, 2021) reads the order of the drives as a function of drives’ causal strength.

24 While Nietzsche offers a list of factors that shape evaluative belief, his claim boils down to the same point made in BGE 6. After all, Nietzsche also takes our ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’ to be a product of our drives (NF 1881, 11[164]). And a passage from Daybreak neatly expresses his position regarding the relationship between drives and experience:

This nutriment [of the drives] is therefore a work of chance: our daily experiences throw some prey in the way of now this, now that drive, and the drive seizes it eagerly; but the coming and going of these events as a whole stands in no rational relationship to the nutritional requirements of the totality of the drives: so that the outcome will always be twofold—the starvation and stunting of some and the overfeeding of others. Every moment of our lives sees some of the polyp-arms of our being grow and others of them wither, all according to the nutriment which the moment does or does not bear with it. Our experiences are, as already said, all in this sense means of nourishment, but the nourishment is scattered indiscriminately without distinguishing between the hungry and those already possessing a superfluity. And as a consequence of this chance nourishment of the parts, the whole, fully grown polyp will be something just as accidental as its growth has been. (D 119)

Our experiences ‘nourish’ our drives in the sense that they provide opportunities for expression (and strengthening) of individual drives. The strength of each drive—and thus, the ‘order of rank’ determining a person’s ‘morality’—is therefore, at least in part, a product of environmental factors. Of course, this picture is perfectly compatible with Nietzsche’s claim in BGE 6 that the ‘order of rank’ of the drives determines one’s ‘morality.’ While the causal history of the ‘rank ordering’ involves environmental influence, Nietzsche’s view is that one’s evaluative convictions at a given point in time are a function of their drives at that same time.