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history and philosophy.<br />THE CONCEPT OF SELF IN THE CONTEXT OF THE “DESPISERS OF THE BODY” ALLUDED IN NIETZSCHE’S <br />THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA <br /> A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES OF MIDDLE EAST TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY<br />
Typology: Thesis
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Approval of the Graduate School of Social Sciences
Prof. Dr. Sencer AYATA Director
I certify that this thesis satisfies all the requirements as a thesis for the degree of Master of Arts.
Prof. Dr. Ahmet İNAM Head of Department
This is to certify that we have read this thesis and that in our opinion it is fully adequate, in scope and quality, as a thesis for the degree of Master of Arts.
Prof. Dr. Ahmet İnam Supervisor
Examining Committee Members
Prof. Dr. Ahmet İnam (METU, PHIL)
Doç. Dr. Ş. Halil Turan (METU, PHIL)
Yar. Doç. Dr. Ertuğrul R. Turan (A.Ü, DTCF)
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YAZICI, Irmak M.A., Department of Philosophy Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Ahmet İnam June 2008, 92 pages
This thesis analyses the concept of self with respect to Nietzsche’s (1844-
Keywords: Self, body, subject, Nietzsche
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YAZICI, Irmak Yüksek Lisans, Felsefe Bölümü Tez Yöneticisi: Prof. Dr. Ahmet İnam Haziran 2008, 92 sayfa
Bu çalışma, kendilik kavramını Nietzsche’nin (1844-1900) Böyle Söyledi Zerdü ş t ’ünde belirtilen “bedeni aşağılayanlar”a yüklediği anlamlar kapsamında incelemektedir. Bu tezin temel varsayımı, Nietzsche’nin kendiliği ne bedenin içinde, ne de bedenin dışında varolan değişken bir çoğulluk olarak ifade etmesidir. Bu amaçla, kendilik kavramının tarihteki gelişimi göz önünde bulundurularak, Nietzsche’nin kendilik kavramı incelenecektir. Nietzsche’nin kendiliğin sözde tezahürü olarak eleştirdiği ego (özne) kavramı ve kendiliğin tecessümü olarak değerlendirdiği beden kavramı tartışılacaktır.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Kendilik, beden, özne, Nietzsche
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I am grateful to my supervisor Prof. Dr. Ahmet İnam, for his guidance, advice, and his esteemed criticism during the development of this dissertation. I also tender my thanks to the members of examining committee, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ş. Halil Turan and Dr. Ertuğrul R. Turan, for their suggestions and comments.
I want to express my heartfelt gratitude for my mother Nihal Yazıcı and for my father Coşkun Yazıcı who have always stood by me and supported every decision I made during my entire life [and I know they always will], who have tolerated my pre-thesis depression, and who have always encouraged me for not only completing this dissertation but also for anything in this life. I also want to acknowledge the rest of my family: R. Selma, Hakkı, and Ege Görgülü for the sparkles they have introduced into my life during I was coping with my research; and my beloved M. Emre Görgülü without whom not only completing this dissertation but living the rest of my life would not be possible.
Finally, I should acknowledge my friend Pervin Yiğit for her extreme support and help, and my best friend Simge Ermiş for making me feel that she is always with me, even when we are miles away.
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PLAGIARISM...............................................................................................iii
ABSTRACT..................................................................................................iv
ÖZ...................................................................................................................v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS............................................................................vii
TABLE OF CONTENTS............................................................................viii
CHAPTERS....................................................................................................
This thesis analyses the concept of self with respect to Wilhelm Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1844-1900) implications on the “despisers of the body” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche’s exposition of the self as a varying multiplicity, neither totally within nor out of the body is the basic assumption of this dissertation. To this end, the dissertation will discuss “what constitutes one’s true self”^1 in connection with Nietzsche’s rejection of the claim that “the ‘true self’ is something purely ‘inward’ and private”^2 and with his assertion that it is not something independently existent out of the body as he mentions from the mouth of Zarathustra :
Behind thoughts and feelings, there is the mighty Lord, the unknown sage which is the self, and it dwells in your body; it is your body.^3
(^1) Nietzsche, F. Untimely Meditations , trans. R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. xvi. (^2) Ibid.
(^3) Nietzsche, F. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. and eds. Adrian Del Caro and R. B. Pippin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 23.
In the light of this expression which focuses on the self through its meaning considering the body and the bodily, Nietzsche’s consideration of the conception of the self which has evolved through philosophical traditions in history will be analysed and his own stance in the matter of the self will tried to be outlined. For this purpose, the questions of ‘how Nietzsche criticizes his predecessors,’ ‘how he criticizes the notions that have been used to mention self,’ and ‘what he brings about instead for the consideration of the self’ will tried to be answered.
The conception of self from Nietzsche’s point of view is decided to be discussed through this dissertation because Nietzsche’s implications are obviously the incentive factors in the development of the thoughts of his successors, and he has been influential not only in the area of philosophy but also in psychology and literature. The most important people for whose work Nietzsche’s thoughts have lighted the way are George Santayana (1863-1952), Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), Martin Heidegger (1889- 1976), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), Michel Foucault (1926-1984), Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), and Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) who were significant figures of the philosophical movement in twentieth century.^4
“Nietzsche speaks negatively of a certain subject, of the ego, but not of a certain being – the self.”^5 In this sense, there occurs an inevitable
(^4) See Wicks, R. (1998), “Friedrich Nietzsche”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta [Internet]. Available from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/ [Accessed March 28, 2008]. For further reading also see Deleuze, G. Nietzsche and Philosophy. trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, c2006); Derrida, J. Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles , trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979, c1978); Foucault, M. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews , trans. and ed. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 139-164; Heidegger, M. Nietzsche, trans. and ed. David F. Krell (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991); Jung, C. G. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939 , ed. James L. Jarrett. (Princeton; New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988); Santayana, G. The German Mind: A Philosophical Diagnosis (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968). (^5) Corngold, S. “The Fate of Self: German Writers and French Theory”, The German Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 2 (Spring, 1989), p.56.
have exercised them are only ‘pseudo problems’.”^11 This can be explained by the great share of language in the development of culture, thus in the development of the former philosophies, since language is the only medium to conduct thoughts to the followers. Nietzsche explains the importance of language for the development of culture as follows:
The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it.^12
And he adds that:
Indeed, humans gave themselves all of their good and evil. Indeed, they did not take it, they did not find it. It did not fall to them as a voice from heaven. Humans first placed values into things, in order to preserve themselves – they first created meaning for things, a human meaning!^13
Man’s desire to rule the world seems to have risen out of his belief that “in language we had knowledge of the world” according to Nietzsche.^14 Because, being able to name everything makes everything accessible to man’s knowledge, and man thinks this way he has the knowledge of ‘all.’ In his own words:
The sculptor of language was not so modest as to believe that he was only giving things designations, he conceived rather that with words he was expressing supreme knowledge of
(^11) Ibid.
(^12) Nietzsche, F. Human All Too Human , trans. R. J. Hollingdale, intro. Richard Schacht (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 16. (^13) Nietzsche, F. Thus Spoke Zarathustra , p. 43.
(^14) Nietzsche, F. Human All Too Human , p. 16.
things; language is, in fact, the first stage of occupation with science.^15
Nietzsche strongly seems to criticize this tendency of man to construct names and structures for the metaphysical or non-corporeal existences which are believed to be present within man himself while he speaks of the “despisers of the body.”^16 In Daybreak , Nietzsche explains this as man’s eagerness to make discoveries on his own existence in order to solve the problem of the duality of his thinking and corporeal being and in order to explain the meaning of this duality. Yet, as stated in the passage below, Nietzsche thinks that man only raises a more problematic understanding of himself by those discoveries:
Wherever primitive mankind set up a word, they believed they had made a discovery. How different the truth is! – they had touched on a problem, and by supposing they had solved it they had created a hindrance to its solution.^17
Danto states that Nietzsche aimed at cracking “the habitual grip on thought in which language holds us,” in order to make us realize how our minds are dominated by the concepts we cannot escape from, regarding the rules our language follows.^18 However, Nietzsche’s essential problem was not the constructive structure of language. His main criticism to the classical philosophy was its ivory tower, which is constructed out of imagination rather than the actuality of life, such as the names assigned to the so-called
(^15) Ibid.
(^16) See Nietzsche, F. Thus Spoke Zarathustra , p. 22.
(^17) Nietzsche, F. Daybreak , trans. R. J. Hollingdale, eds. Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter (Cambridge, U.K.; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 32. (^18) Danto, A. Nietzsche as Philosopher , p. 12.
sources of those actions.”^22 Because, they state that according to Nietzsche, the self is neither a thing, thus it is nor a conscious thing, and the views embracing the opposite idea are false.^23 Danto, in a likely manner, points out the problem of the conscious self, analysing man’s conception of consciousness due to its relationship with Nietzsche’s theories of language and considering his words in The Gay Science : 24
Consciousness is really just a net connecting one person with another – only in this capacity did it have to develop; the solitary and predatory person would not have needed it.^25
This is because for Nietzsche, consciousness is necessary in order for man to be able to determine what he is lacking and what he needs to survive, and he should give utterance to those needs by the mediation of language. As Nietzsche has mentioned:
[T]he development of language and the development of consciousness ( not of reason but strictly of the way in which we become conscious of reason) go hand in hand.^26
And
[o]nly as a social animal did man learn to become conscious of himself -....^27
(^22) Hales, S. D. & Welshon, R. Nietzsche’s Perspectivism (Urbana: University of Illunois Press, c2000), pp. 130-131. (^23) Ibid.
. 24 Danto, A. Nietzsche as Philosopher , p. 120. (^25) Nietzsche, F. The Gay Science , ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 212. (^26) Ibid. , p. 213.
(^27) Ibid.
Danto then questions the contradictory situation of consciousness, considering that on one hand “only what is conscious comes into language” which means that “the origins of consciousness reveal themselves in communication-signs;” as Nietzsche himself states as follows:
[M]an, like every living creature, is constantly thinking but does not know it; the thinking which becomes conscious is only the smallest part of it, let’s say the shallowest, worst part
On the other hand, Danto states that “paradoxically it will follow that allegedly private words – words which have reference to our inner states
Concepts , possible only when there are words – the collecting together of many images in something nonvisible but audible (word). The tiny amount of emotion to which the “word” gives rise, as we contemplate similar images for which one word exists – this weak emotion is the common element, the basis of the concept.^30
Thus, it can be inferred from this state [which seems to be a contradiction] that the existence of consciousness and that of the words or concepts which signify the alluded inner states of men are interdependent, none of the two having priority or superiority upon the other.
(^28) Ibid.
(^29) Danto, A. Nietzsche as Philosopher , p. 120.
(^30) Nietzsche, F. The Will to Power , p. 275.
besides what is thought, wanted, and done.^36 In this context, they mention that, for Nietzsche, there does not exist a “diachronically identical subject;” and instead, as having reference to Nietzschean consideration of the self, they point out Amelie Rorty’s definition of the self as “a loose configuration of habits, habits of thought and perception and motivation and action [i.e., character traits], acquired at different stages, in the service of different ends.”^37 Nietzsche himself explains his emphasize on physiology and on the role of body, and criticizes man’s being conditioned to ascribe a further meaning beyond the physical as follows:
The body and physiology the starting point: why?... We understand that the ruler and his subjects are of the same kind, all feeling, willing, thinking – and that, wherever we see or divine movement in body, we learn to conclude that there is a subjective, invisible life appertaining to it.^38
An interpretation of this passage asserts that, as Hales and Welshon have pointed out, the terms “mental” and “physical” refer to the same division of entity rather than referring to “distinct ontological realms,” and those same entities are namely “forces of willing, feeling, and thinking;” and since there is no distinction to be made between mental and the physical, there is no need to specify a relationship between them.^39 Thus, for Nietzsche, the terms mental and physical are referring to the same entity in terms of self; and there is no need to specify names seperately for the so-called divisions of the self - such as consciousness – like the diachronic explanation of self [or of subject as the two were considered to be the same] did so, as obvious in Nietzsche’s criticism below:
(^36) Ibid ., p. 159.
(^37) Ibid. Also see Amelie O. Rorty: “Self-deception, akrasia and irrationality” in The Multiple Self, ed. John Elster, p. 130. (^38) Nietzsche, F. The Will to Power , p. 271.
(^39) Hales, S. D. & Welshon, R. Nietzsche’s Perspectivism , p. 172.
Philosophers (1) have had from the first a wonderful capacity for the contradictio in adjecto ; (2) they have trusted in concepts as completely as they have mistrusted the senses: they have not stopped to consider that concepts and words are our inheritance from ages in which thinking was very modest and unclear.^40
Moreover, those terms, for Nietzsche, imply multivocity stemming from their obscurity which hardly enables one to define a coherent role or function to each term or concept, without appealing to the illusory explanation transcendentality ensures.
Likely, Fink explains that Nietzsche considers man’s unfaithfulness to earth as being the core reason of man’s being split “into a duality of sense and spirit, into an opposition of body and soul.”^41 And man’s despising of his body has emerged out of this distinction according to him since his soul appears to be chained to his body and always in a state of trying to escape.^42 This discontent was brought about by man’s feeling of his soul’s imprisonment, breaks the bonds between man and the world he lives in, thus he seeks for another world where his soul would be freed of its chains. Nietzsche mentions this in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, referring to the followers of Christian tradition as they banish man from the actual world due to the denaturing act of their moral commands as follows:
I beseech you my brothers, remain faithful to the earth and do not believe those who speak about transcendental hopes. They mix poison whether they realize this or not.^43
(^40) Nietzsche, F. The Will to Power , p. 220.
(^41) Fink, E. Nietzsche’s Philosophy, trans. Goetz Richter (London; New York: Continuum, c2003), p. 60. (^42) Ibid.
(^43) Nietzsche, F. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 6.
