Nietzsche on the value of power and pleasure

ABSTRACT

Nietzsche seems to hold that ‘higher types’, or examples of great power, are the only things good as an end. I consider and reject three reconstructions of Nietzsche’s argument for this: that it follows from understanding evolution, or from the will to power understood as a descriptive thesis, or from our admiration for such types. I suggest that Nietzsche’s strategy is to take for granted our shared admiration for higher types and then attack our admiration for other goods such as virtue, knowledge, and pleasure. I argue that his arguments against pleasure fail.

KEYWORDS:

• Nietzsche
• power
• pleasure
• higher types

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For the same view, see Leiter 2015, 104, 105–106: ‘what seems to have intrinsic value for Nietzsche is human excellence or human greatness … . [T]he cultivation of human excellence … is the only thing, on Nietzsche’s view, that warrants admiration’.

2 This is more precise than what Nietzsche says, but it seems close to some reconstructions of his view. See the discussion of Katsafanas below.

3 The same holds for those who think Nietzsche’s main criticism is that morality expresses objectionable values, rather than has bad effects on what is of value (Huddleston 2015). In either case, Nietzsche needs an argument for what he values. By ‘morality’, here and throughout, I mean what Leiter calls ‘Morality in the Perjorative Sense’ (Leiter 2015, 103–104). For a similar account of morality, see Huddleston 2015, 283–287.

4 Nietzsche may take some instances of pleasure or happiness as good as an end, depending on how it is attained, just as he may take some sorts of suffering – ‘meaningless’ suffering, animal suffering – as bad. For my example, take the pleasure in question to be the sort of passive, comfortable pleasure Nietzsche clearly does not value (see V below).

5 By ‘virtue’, here and throughout, I mean those traits seen as virtues by ‘Morality in the Perjorative Sense’.

6 A 2 does not claim that the feeling of power is good – what is good is what heightens this feeling. Perhaps Nietzsche takes the feeling to be a sign of power (Schacht 1983, 366). Oddly, in the course of arguing that Nietzsche objects to morality because it links feelings of increased power with actual decreases in power, Katsafanas quotes A 2 as evidence that Nietzsche distinguishes feelings of power from power (2011, 181n10). If, as A 2 suggests, whatever heightens the feeling of power is good, morality is good.

7 For the will to power as an alternative descriptive thesis to psychological hedonism, see, for example, GM III.7, WP 434, 688, 702, 704, 930. ‘All events that result from intention are reducible to the intention to increase power’ (WP 663). For the will to power as an alternative descriptive thesis to a desire for self-preservation, see, for example, GS 349, BGE 13, TI Skirmishes 14, WP 488, 634, 650, 651, 688, 689, 692, 774.

8 For discussions of the distinction between power and the feeling of power in the Genealogy, see Owen 2014, 34–36; Janaway 2007, 145–146; and Katsafanas 2011, 181–187. For a very different view, which understands the will to power as the will to feel power, see Soll 2012; 124–125 and Dill 2017, 199–201. Soll argues that we do not value power without the feeling of power. This is controversial: one lesson of the experience machine is that some people value things other than mental states. It also does not show that the feeling of power is valuable on its own. Perhaps it is valuable only when added to power. Soll may agree: ‘the true goal of our desires [is] not simply the state of being powerful … but the experience of enjoying it’ (2012, 125, italics added).

9 See Lenoir 1982; Moore 2002, ch. 2; Janaway 2007, 159–161. Nietzsche rejects Spencer’s view that ‘life itself [is] a more and more efficient inner adaptation to external conditions’, on the ground that ‘the essence of life, its will to power, is ignored; one overlooks the essential priority of the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces that give new interpretations and directions, although ‘adaptation” follows only after this; the dominant role of the highest functionaries within the organism itself in which the will to life appears active and form-giving is denied’ (GM II.12; see also, e.g., WP 647, 681).

10 Although Nietzsche gave up the appeal to evolution of U III, he continued to appeal to various ‘laws’ as having some normative force. For example, he argues that ‘pity crosses the law of development, which is the law of selection. It preserves what is ripe for destruction’ (A 7). Against Kant, he argues that the ‘fundamental laws of self-preservation and growth demand … that everyone invent his own  … categorical imperative’ (A 11).

11 For discussion, see Leiter 2015, 114–115; 2019, 56–57; Reginster 2006, 156; Hussain 2011, 149–157, 163. See, for example, BGE 198, GM III.15, III.18, TI Ancients 3.

12 Richardson notes differences between the will to power and the desire for pleasure (or at least pleasure on some understandings), but the worry about handling counter-examples remains (1996, 20–23).

13 Nor does the text seem to support any particular precisification of the claim, such as Silk’s constructivism. When Silk argues for his constructivist interpretation against other ‘subjective realist’ interpretations, there is no mention of Nietzsche. The argument consists of reasons for thinking constructivism is a better theory (2015, 271). Reginster attributes to Nietzsche the internalist view that ‘something cannot be valuable for an agent unless the agent is capable of … desiring it’, citing BGE 2 (2006, 155, 157). BGE 2 claims that ‘what constitutes the value’ of selflessness may be ‘precisely that [it] is insidiously related to’ selfishness. That might be read as supporting the strategy Foot and Reginster pursue (see below), but seems irrelevant to internalism in the sense described. (Reginster also faces the worry that, on his own view, we are capable of desiring things other than power.) Leiter 2019, 55–56 notes a related absence of argument in Nietzsche. Huddleston 2017, 191–192 argues that talk of ‘creating’ value might concern ‘values’ in the sense of things people value, and be silent about what is really valuable. If so, it would be unclear how Nietzsche moves (if he does) from descriptive to normative claims.

14 For this as a worry for perfectionists, see Dorsey 2010.

15 For further discussion of the argument from ‘life’, see Hussain 2011 and Richardson 2013. On occasion, Nietzsche uses the will to power, not to support his positive view, but to attack opposing views. ‘Hurt no one; rather, help as much as you can’ is ‘insipidly false and sentimental … in a world whose essence is will to power’ (BGE 186).

16 Hussain himself finds this false. He thinks that Nietzsche is wrongly tempted to draw conclusions from what he finds ‘natural’ or ‘inescapable’ to what one should value.

17 I imitate Sidgwick’s objection to inferring rational egoism from maximising psychological egoism (Sidgwick [1907] 1981, 41). Nietzsche himself asks ‘Why make a principle of what you yourselves are and must be?’ (BGE 9). For criticism of some different attempts to argue for the value of power, see Leiter 2019, 50–62.

18 Katsafanas sets his Nietzsche in opposition to utilitarianism (2013, 172), but consider Sidgwick: ‘the pleasures afforded by the consciousness of eager activity … constitute a considerable item in the total enjoyment of life. It is almost a commonplace to say that … the pleasures of Pursuit … are more important than the pleasures of Attainment’. In games, what one initially ‘desires … is the pleasant excitement of the struggle’ ([1907] 1981, 46–47).

19 At one point, Katsafanas claims that acting involves effecting a change in the world, and that requires overcoming resistance (2013, 181). He could say this without any reference to drives or lasting satisfaction. It does not, however, show that in acting I aim to encounter resistance.

20 For other worries about Katsafanas, see Silk 2013; Poellner 2015; and Huddleston 2016.

21 Nietzsche notes Vikings and Homeric heroes as examples of nobles at GM I.11. For ‘moraline-free’, see A 2, 6.

22 In CW, Nietzsche has just associated saying yes with the nobles and masters, and saying no with Christians.

23 After conceding that ‘higher men may still be admirable in the eyes of the base and low’, Leiter adds that it is false that ‘[a] Nietzsche’s evaluative perspective – that it is an objection to [morality] that it thwarts the high – could enjoy a privilege in virtue of this shared admiration. [b] On the Calliclean picture, there is a fundamental hostility between the high and low’ (2015, 118). (a) is correct. Nietzsche’s perspective is not privileged by noting that we admire the high. But the reason is not (b), but rather just that we also admire other things.

24 Nietzsche continues by asking ‘What are our evaluations and moral tables really worth? … Answer: for life. But what is life? … My formula for it is: Life is will to power’ (WP 254). I take the diminution of value point to be separate from the appeal to power. One could feel diminution without thinking about any effects on power. Once one feels diminution, power appears as a superior value. I follow Leiter in citing WP 254, though Leiter cites it in the course of arguing that genealogy is relevant in virtue of showing the current causal powers of morality, and in particular that it thwarts higher types (Leiter 2015, 142–144; also Reginster 2006, 199). Read this way, the argument from genealogy depends on having already established the superior value of higher types.

25 Revealingly, when Katsafanas reconstructs the ‘justification for giving will to power a privileged normative status’ – in a paper presenting The Antichrist as an especially good place to find Nietzsche’s positive view – he makes no mention of The Antichrist, and instead cites mainly Nachlass passages to the effect that we aim only at power (2018, 95–96).

26 For the same view, see Leiter 2015, 105: for Nietzsche, ‘happiness is not an intrinsically valuable end’. Nietzsche often seems to identify happiness and pleasure: ‘Pleasure [lust] appears where there is the feeling of power. Happiness [glück]: in the triumphant consciousness of power and victory’ (WP 1023; also 428).

27 For discussions, see Bett 2005, 48–52; Reginster 2005; 2006, 195–196; Katsafanas 2015, sec. 4.

28 For Nietzsche and Spencer, see Moore 2002, 62–72. For the association with the English, see, for example, BGE 228, TI Skirmishes 38, TI Maxims 12.

29 For recent discussion, see, for example, Leiter 2015, 106–107; Janaway 2017; Delon 2022; Hassan 2022.

30 Reginster 2005, 161–163 notes these arguments, but does not evaluate them. This is surprising, since they are arguments against the ‘new hedonism’ he thinks Nietzsche endorses.

31 The colon between ‘epiphenomena’ and ‘one must desire both to achieve anything’ is curious. Nietzsche repeats in many places that one must desire both (e.g., GS 12, 301, 302, 338), but that seems unconnected to being epiphenomenal. The German has a comma rather than a colon, which perhaps makes the connection looser (‘es sind Begleit-Zustände, man muß Beides wollen, wenn man etwas erriechen will’).

32 At WP 291, eKGWB/1888, 14 [185], Nietzsche considers ‘the value of an action’. One suggestion is ‘its epiphenomena [Begleiterscheinungen] in consciousness, the Yes and the No that follow its performance: does the value of an action lie in its subjective epiphenomena ( – that would be like assessing the value of the music according to the pleasure or displeasure it gives …). [I]s it permitted to measure its value according to epiphenomena, such as pleasure and displeasure … ’. Nietzsche concludes ‘[i]f therefore an action can be evaluated neither by its origin, nor by its consequences, nor by its epiphenomena’, implying that he rejects measuring value by epiphenomena, but he does not explain why.

33 Neither Begleitzuständen nor Begleiterscheinungen seem best translated by ‘epiphenomena’. The German claims that pleasure is an accompanying state, fitting Nietzsche’s usual point that pleasure is a result of aiming at something else. That does not imply that pleasure, once felt, cannot cause other things. But WP 478 does deny that pleasure ‘cause[s] anything at all’, and WP 669 claims that ‘pleasure and displeasure are always terminal phenomena, not ‘causes”’ – so perhaps Nietzsche’s view is that pleasure is epiphenomenal, even if Begleitzuständen and Begleiterscheinungen do not imply this.

34 As Reginster notes, it is also unclear whether what goes for reflex action goes for all action (2005, 187n1). It is also unclear whether Nietzsche is right: those who suffer from Congenital Insensitivity to Pain are not saved by their reflexes. Finally, Nietzsche’s overall point in WP 699 is that pain ‘is something different from pleasure – I mean that it is not its opposite’. The ‘essence of pain’ is not ‘a diminution of the feeling of power’. If so, what goes for pain may not go for pleasure.

35 Elsewhere, after noting that we believed that ‘all the antecedents of an act, its causes, were to be sought in consciousness’, Nietzsche comments that ‘we have thought better of it. Today we no longer believe a word of all this. The “inner world” is full and phantoms and will-o’-the-wisps … .There are no mental causes at all. The whole of the allegedly empirical evidence for that has gone to the devil’ (TI Errors 3; also TI Reason 5). Nietzsche again presents himself not as offering a novel philosophical argument (of the sort Leiter reconstructs at Leiter 2015, 74), but rather as reporting what he takes science to support. For a much clearer and earlier statement, including evidence, see Huxley [1874] 1893, 222–225, 240: frogs with cut spinal columns kick their legs in the ordinary way to swim; frogs with the front parts of their brains removed do so as well; frogs (and humans) exhibit blindsight.

36 I follow Riccardi 2017 (though he does not discuss pleasure). See also Leiter 2015, 72–74; 2019, 138–139.

37 In the next argument, Nietzsche clearly thinks of pleasure as conscious. Similarly, the ‘will to grow is of the essence of pleasure: that power increases, that the difference enters consciousness’ (WP 695). Either Nietzsche does not always think of consciousness as self-consciousness, or pleasure, unlike some other feelings, must be the object of a higher-order thought.

38 Soll suggests that the correct view might admit ‘more than one irreducible motivation’, going ‘beyond both pleasure and power considered as singly sufficient and exclusive alternatives’ (1994, 187). This, however, wrecks the argument for the exclusive goodness of power he ascribes to Nietzsche.

39 ‘When the English actually believe that they know “intuitively” what is good and evil … we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment’ (TI Skirmishes 5). Perhaps Nietzsche could extend his pudenda origo strategy to pleasure. Delon 2022 suggests a related strategy. He uses an evolutionary debunking argument to undercut the intuition that suffering is bad. One worry is that this argument also seems to undercut the intuition that power is good. Just as I would believe that pleasure is good whether it is good or not, so I would believe that power is good whether it is good or not. In both cases, my belief may be explained by the benefits of holding it.

40 Thanks to Joyce Jenkins, Simone Mahrenholz, an audience at Manitoba, members of my 2020 Nietzsche seminar, and two very helpful referees.