Mattia Riccardi - Nietzsches Philosophical Psychology

Nietzsches works are cited by using the conventional abbreviations listed below, followed by abbreviated title (if applicable) and section (Roman) and/or aphorism (Arabic) number (if applicable). Unpublished notes are quoted by indicating the notes year, its conventional number as established by the German critical edition, as well as the critical edition volume and the page number. When available, I use Kate Sturges translation in Writings from the Late Notebooks (Cambridge University Press, 2003), ed. by R. Bittner, thus adding references to that edition and to the relevant page number. In all other cases, the translation of Nietzsches unpublished notes is mine. For complete information about the other English translations I use, see the Bibliography. Translation changes are signalled in the text.

The Anti-Christ

Beyond Good and Evil

Birth of Tragedy

Daybreak

Ecce Homo

On the Genealogy of Morality

The Gay Science

Human, All Too Human

Kritische Studienausgabe

Writings from the Late Notebooks

Twilight of the Idols

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

In one of his notes, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg once wrote: Newton was able to separate the colours. Which name will the psychologist have who tells us what the causes of our actions are composed of? (Lichtenberg :51; see 1973 Heft C 303:213). We should not be surprised that Nietzsche felt drawn to these words, for the task of understanding how human agency works is a key part of his broader philosophical project centred on the critique of morality and on the revaluation of values. Among other things, Nietzsche surely saw himself as the philosopher saddled with the task of becoming the Newton of psychology envisaged by Lichtenberg.

In particular, Nietzsche shares with Lichtenberg the idea that psychology affords essential insights both into the working of the human mind and into the mechanisms of agency. At the end of BGE 23, which closes the theoretically dense Part of that book, he programmatically puts forward the demand that psychology again be recognized as queen of the sciences, and that the rest of the sciences exist to serve and prepare for it (BGE 23). As the very last sentence of that aphorism has it, from now on, psychology is again the path to the fundamental problems.

Another point that Nietzsche makes explicit in BGE 23 is the link between psychological inquiry and morality critique, as he affirms that making a certain psychological discoverythat the affects of hatred, envy, greed, and power-lust are elements that fundamentally and essentially need to be present in the total economy of lifealready means sailing straight over and away from morality. An even more straightforward link between psychology and morality is made in BGE 187, which concludes with Nietzsches famous claim to the effect that morality is just a sign language of the affectswhich I shall call the Semiotic Claim. At face value, at least, the view expressed by this claim amounts to a reduction of moral phenomena to psychological ones, for that of affect is a psychological notion. In fact, in another aphorism of the same work, Nietzsche explicitlyand somewhat surprisinglymakes a case in favour of rehabilitating the very notion of soul, which is of course what is traditionally conceived to be the proper object of psychology. There he writes:

there is absolutely no need to give up the soul itself, and relinquish one of the oldest and most venerable hypothesesas often happens with naturalists: given their clumsiness, they barely need to touch the soul to lose it. But the path lies open for new versions and sophistications of the soul hypothesisand concepts like the mortal soul and the soul as subject-multiplicity and the soul as a society constructed out of drives and affects want henceforth to have civil rights in the realm of science.(BGE 12)