Part Two of three.
One fundamental problem with Nietzsche’s psychology is that while “higher” persons must discover and master their multiplicity of drives Nietzsche tells us in Daybreak (1881): “However far a man may go in self-knowledge, nothing however can be more incomplete than his image of the totality of drives which constitute his being. He can scarcely name even the cruder ones: their number and strength, their ebb and flow, their play and counterplay among one another…” (D 119)
How are we to master something we can’t ever fully know? Well, first of all, many drives do appear in consciousness, especially the most dominant ones which motivate our behavior. Katsafanas notes: “Drives are initially unconscious, but can be brought to consciousness – all that's required is pressing the drive into a conceptual structure. But there's no guarantee that the conceptualized expression will be an adequate or accurate expression...notice that they express themselves through the conceptual repertoire of the person. They manifest themselves by seeking a reflective articulation in conscious emotions and thoughts.” (page 133)
“Nietzsche allows that human beings are capable of self-conscious reflection upon their own drives and affects. Moreover, he thinks that reflective thought can have a causal impact on our motives and on our actions. Accordingly, an agent who reflects and decides to act in a certain way will, sometimes, thereby bring it about that she acts in that way. (page 162)
Self-observation is a significant part of Nietzsche's psychology. But, the key here is both “drives” and “affects.” Psychology uses the verb “affect” as a noun to indicate the expression or manifestation of behavior. The way you act in (and react to) the world is affecting and the actions are all affects (impressions, feelings, emotions) of conscious and unconscious psychological activity. In Nietzsche’s psychology affects are the direct result of drives. So, it is possible for a “higher” soul to understand a dominant unconscious drive by observing its affects, by how the otherwise unknowable drive expresses itself in human behavior.
Janaway (2007) explains and provides examples of Nietzsche’s affects: “It is the affects – the very mental states that for the philosophical orthodoxy ‘twist, color, and distort’ judgment and perception – that Nietzsche portrays as enabling and expanding knowledge. What is an affect? At times […] Nietzsche talks simply of ‘inclinations and aversions’, ‘pro and contra’, or ‘for and against’ – descriptions that parallel Schopenhauer’s vocabulary and his view that all affects are positive or negative stirrings of the will. It seems that for Nietzsche too all affects are at bottom inclinations or aversions of some kind. In the Genealogy and Beyond Good and Evil alone he explicitly uses the term for the following: anger, fear, love, hatred, hope, envy, revenge, lust, jealousy, irascibility, exuberance, calmness, self-satisfaction, self-humiliation, self-crucifixion, power-lust, greed, suspicion, malice, cruelty, contempt, despair, triumph, feeling of looking down on, feeling of a superior glance towards others, desire to justify oneself in the eyes of others, demand for respect, feelings of laziness, feeling of command, and brooding over bad deeds.’ Affects are, at the very least, ways in which we feel.” (pp. 205 – 206)
Katsafanas would agree that affects are how we feel and would broaden this perspective a bit. “…in other writings, Nietzsche mentions still more affects. For example, under the heading 'The Yes-saying affects.' Nietzsche lists pride, joy, health, the love of the sexes, enmity and war, reverence, beautiful gestures and manners and objects, strong will, the discipline of high intellectuality, will to power, and gratitude toward earth and life (KSA 13:14[11]/WLN 242). In another list, he mentions 'the affects of love, kindness, compassion, even of justice, magnanimity, heroism' (KSA 12:10[128]/WLN 196).” (page 103)
“Nietzsche seems to treat drives as typically occurring together with affects...So drives generate affects, which are inclinations and aversions that can be conscious or unconscious.” (page 104)
“...a Nietzschean drive is a disposition that induces an affective orientation. Drives manifest themselves by structuring the agent's perceptions, affects, and reflective thought. Drives have both an aim and an object; the aim is the relatively constant pattern of activity sought by the drive, whereas the object is a chance occasion for expression. Finally, drives do not simply arise in response to external stimuli; they actively seek opportunities for expression, sometimes distorting the agent's perception of the environment in order to incline the agent to get in ways that give the drives expression.” (page 106)
“Drives manifest themselves by structuring the agent's perceptions, affects, and reflective thought. They determine which features of the agent's environment will be salient; they determine the way in which the agent will conceptualize aspects of the environment; and they sometimes alter the course of the agent's reflective thought.” (page 110)
Nietzsche writes in Daybreak 326: “We can estimate our powers but not our power…One should regard oneself as a variable quantity whose capacity for achievement can under favorable circumstances perhaps equal the highest ever known: one should thus reflect on one’s circumstances and spare no effort in observing them.” Even though there is much (especially to begin with) that we will not know about our drives, and much that will be revealed only through time and experience with one’s soul, self-observation is a basic tenet of his psychology and, further, understanding and taking action based upon scrutiny of our drives and affects.
Conscious reflection and meditation upon your drives and, more particularly in the case of unconscious drives, their affects can lead to “higher” insights. Only in this way is it possible to become the “greatest artist” as Nietzsche put it. The number of drives that can be brought to the surface of consciousness is tiny compared to our total multiplicity of drives. It’s sort of like comparing the Earth with the Solar System. Although, more than likely, the drives that dominate (express themselves) your behavior most are the easiest to observe and act upon. But, often behavior occurs through subversive means.
Drives that cannot dominate may seek alternate expression. We have already seen where Nietzsche mentions how one drive can “complain” about another (causing us anguish, anxiety, whatever). It is important to understand that submissive drives can often be subversive as well, challenging the dominant drives and, failing that, undermining them, mostly at an unconscious level within you. This is how the constant state of flux is maintained within each multiplicity. Our political order of drives is dynamic. Even if we understand our drives, we must constantly strive to be cognizant of them, their changing interplay, and make adjustments accordingly.
Clark and Dudrick write: “…the drive dominated…will not cease to make its demands; as a result it will develop its own ‘instinct to freedom,’ searching for ways to again gain satisfaction. This dogged pursuit of its satisfaction in the face of suppression by other drives leads the dominated drive to become aggressive, directing itself against its oppressors and competitors; that is to say, it develops a will to power. This will to power leads it to seek a place in the newly formed order of dominance, a position from which it might both attain its object and subject other drives…If it accomplishes this, the hitherto subjected drive is in a position to both attain its object and to satisfy its will to power by subjecting other drives.
“This process continues until their will to power leads drives to form a coherent, ordered political structure – one analogous to that which the ‘blond beasts’ made out of nomads form their will to power. Just as he has a naturalistic account of the order of the state, Nietzsche has such an account as to how drives come to be a ‘ruling structure’ and, so, to form a soul.” (pp. 209 – 210)
Our souls are, mostly, drives and affects. Affects manifest in a multitude of ways and not always under the behavior or characteristic we might expect. Submissive drives that become subversive can latch on to almost anything in order to express themselves. Nietzsche’s psychology is fundamentally a turbulent one, a constant state of becoming. A well-ordered soul is rarely at rest. It must perpetually adapt the way the multiplicity is controlled because the multiplicity is in flux. But, in any case, such ordering of drives is always political and hierarchical.
“The goal is not merely order, but a specific order: the rule of the higher self or selves, an aristocracy…The politics of the soul is laudatory, not because it gives equal voice to every drive, but because all of one’s drives are exploited in a regime embodying beauty and order. The higher man, in short, is the man with an aristocratically ordered soul. […] To realize his potential, man must struggle such that his higher self may rule. One seeks, in other words, to extend the time one lives in a state of inspiration. […] Pluralism within the soul is to be maintained. The good of the whole through the rule of the best is the aim of aristocratic politics. To this end hierarchy provides the condition for harmony and the stimulus for struggle. Thus the soul remains both ordered and active.” (Thiele, pp. 66 – 67)
Katsafanas puts it this way: “The self is unified when one drive predominates, and exerts a coordinating influence on the other drives. Conflict amongst the drives does not have to be eliminated, it just has to be managed.” (page 177) A well-ordered soul is one where the “best” drives dominate the multiplicity. What is “best” will vary from person to person because each multiplicity is unique and each person has different dominant aspirations, perhaps requiring a different toolset of drives.
Disunity (and the resulting confusion and weakness in life) happens when you have no control at all over your drives or when your feelings and behavior may be motivated by drives other than your dominant one(s). For example, the drive for “control” in your life might be successfully checked by you, you can “take things as they come” and yet “control” will strive of manifest in other ways; say, the way you schedule your day and how regimented you make use of your time. There are innumerable such examples possible. This is the foundation for human behavior, according to Nietzsche.
There are two possibilities. Your multiplicity may run away with you according to your unique multiplicity of drives. The vast majority of humans have far less control over themselves and they (the herd) would like to believe. Or, you may become more aware of your drives and affects within consciousness. This requires a clear mind and an open mind free of cultural morality, feeling and thinking. By being aware of what your drives are, how they manifest and fluctuate, you can gain some measure of control over your life. “Higher” persons with a well-ordered soul are capable (or should be) of the highest aspirations of (revaluated) society. As we will see, this multiplicity becomes creative and life-affirming.
Another critical component of Nietzsche’s psychology is that drives that fail to dominate and fail to subvert other drives will redirect their energy inwardly toward the soul. This is a fundamental source of human confusion, apathy, uncertainty, guilt, depression, anxiety, neuroses and psychic illnesses of every kind. So discovering how this works is inherently important to achieving a well-ordered soul.
Nietzsche mentions this internalization in the On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). “All instincts which are not discharged outwardly turn inwards - this is what I call the internalization of man: with it there now evolves in man what will later be called his ‘soul.’ The whole inner world, originally stretched thinly as though between two layers of skin, was expanded and extended itself and gain depth, breadth and height in proportion to the degree that the external discharge of man’s instincts was obstructed.” (GM 2:16)
Parkes again finds a revealing quote from Nietzsche’s notebooks: “The interiority of the soul developed then from the retroflection of drives that were originally directed outward. This idea is amplified in a note from the Nachlass of [1887]: ‘Inwardness arises when powerful drives that have been denied outward discharge by the establishment of peace and society try to make themselves harmless by turning inward in concert with the imagination. The need for enmity, cruelty, revenge, violence turns back and retreats’; covetousness and domination become desire for knowledge; the power of dissimulation and lying is reflected in the artist; the drives are transformed into demons with whom one fights, and so on.’
“The last point is the crux: as drives are retroflected they are transformed through the medium of fantasy into persons – and in the case of so-called ‘negative’ drives into ‘demons,’ autonomous powers capable of standing opposite to the I.” (page 318)
Clark and Dudrick: “When their outward expression is blocked…they are able to find satisfaction by turning inward, taking other drives as their objects. But the only way that these aggressive drives could express an ‘instinct for freedom’ in seeking their own satisfaction by turning on other drives is by seeking to deny satisfaction to these drives.” (page 205)
One of the most common results of this turning inward of drives is that it can lead to "life-negating: affects like guilt or remorse. Katsafanas explains: “...the aggressive drives originally find expression in making others suffer. The social drives stifle this outward expression of the aggressive drives, and the resulting internal discord and refusal to let certain drives discharge generates profound suffering…The bad conscience is a medley of all of this: the pain engendered by the internalization of the aggressive drives, the feeling of being turned against a part of oneself, the feeling of internal discord, the feeling of being a threat to oneself, and the feeling of being a threat to society. Fundamentally, then, the bad conscience is a complex affect, engendered by the feeling of the drives' being at odds with one another.” (page 58)
“The conscious emotion of guilt presents itself as a unitary, distinct feeling. If Nietzsche's analysis is correct, though, guilt actually conceals a complex array of drives and affects: the frustrated feeling of repressed aggressive drives, the inchoate sense of indebtedness, a sense of personal failure, and a host of religiously inspired beliefs about redemption. So a conscious unity conceals an unconscious diversity.” (page 62)
This inward churning of drives within each of us varies in intensity. “The herd” is generally not very intense at all and the churning is mild, which, even so, is too much for many of them. One of the defining characteristics of a “higher” person is a greater intensity of the churning of the drives. The natural diversity of drives inherently means that to churn more intensely is to also develop the greatest variety of drives and affects, some in contradiction to each other. This diversity of drives, in turn, allows the individual to approach “greatness.”
According to Reginster (2006), Nietzsche suggests that what makes an individual great is not only what he or she achieves through mastery and behavior but also “…a distinctive condition of their soul: ‘Precisely this shall be called greatness: being capable of being as manifold as whole, as ample as full’ (BGE 212), In the soul of a great individual, many drives and points of view are unified and organized into a coherent whole. This is indeed that salient characteristic of all those individuals we have come to consider “great,” such as Shakespeare: ‘The highest man would have the greatest multiplicity of drives, in the relatively greatest strength that can be endured. Indeed, where the plant ‘man’ shows himself strongest one finds instincts that conflict powerfully (e.g., in Shakespeare), but controlled.” (WP 966; cf. 933; TI, IX 49).” (page 192)
Furthermore, his churning of the multiplicity is not isolated within you. Essentially for Nietzsche, we are “we’s” within a social and cultural context. There is a significant community component to Nietzsche’s psychology. The health (or disease) of the individual is tied to the health (or decline) of a community of souls. Also, the community of souls is the primary cause for many personal drives to turn inward due to religious rules or social expectations.
Thiele: “Nietzsche is careful to stress that it is the drives of 'hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction' which are internalized (GM II.16). But /other/ drives are not internalized: drives for social bonding, for food, for sex, and so on are not thwarted but are, at least in some respects, aided by the establishment of a community.” (page 57)
Katsafanas: “The sex drive, the knowledge drive, the drive to express domination and so on, all have their conditions set in part by the social context in which they operate. For what counts as pursuing sex, knowledge, domination, and so on, is in part determined by what the society recognizes as sex, knowledge, domination. And so on. Particular customs might inhabit these drives in particular contexts, but custom as such is a condition for them, rather than an obstacle to them.” (page 213) “...part of what he rejects is the idea of self as pure interiority, capable of being understood in isolation from its social and historical context.” (page 218)
So, we should not get carried away with the immense complexity of the multiplicity. Instead, we should acknowledge that this complexity takes place among a multitude of complexities that make up cultures and communities both present and past. For example, Nietzsche would claim that morality must be revaluated. But, he does this within a historical understanding of how that morality came to be so accepted among all the multiplicities in the first place.
Parkes writes: “…the human being, body and soul [is] a microcosmic configuration of drives (will to power) situated within the macrocosm of the world as an encompassing matrix of the will to power (drives) – nearing in mind that this interplay between inner and outer extends temporarily across many generations. The task of ordering the plays of drives within the individual thus involves understanding them within that larger matrix, in context of the greater field of interpretive will to power that is the world. If all existence is interpreting, then all phenomena are expressing their being: This is what it means to be, or become.” (pp. 316 – 317)
Let’s review. There are many layers or facets here, which is why only “higher” persons are capable of addressing their drives and creating a well-ordered soul. It’s a bit like learning to juggle. There is the multiplicity itself. Out of it we must learn, through meticulous observation, which drives dominate, which drives cooperate and when domination and cooperation should occur for maximum benefit. All this while remembering that many drives remain unconscious and can only be discovered and addressed indirectly via their affects.
Meanwhile, some drives will attempt to subvert your established order to either become dominant themselves or to undermine the dominance/cooperation of other drives. The more masterful you become with drives and affects, the more you recognize them and understand them, the more contradictory (diverse) your multiplicity will become. And, beyond all this, there is the fact that many of your drives are driven by “meta-personal” forces within human culture and biology. Even if you create a well-ordered soul you cannot completely escape neither the bonds of your society nor of evolution.
Having defined and discussed the nature and the mechanics of drives and affects we arrive at the question of what does a person capable of establishing a well-ordered soul actually do with this capability. So what? In Daybreak he wrote: “We have to learn to think differently - in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently.” (D 103) Nietzsche’s psychology is the foundation for his life’s work – the art of revaluing and becoming, of life-affirmation and style. For Nietzsche this is the highest possible expression of humanity in the modern world, the basis for a different kind of human and a different kind of human society.
One fundamental problem with Nietzsche’s psychology is that while “higher” persons must discover and master their multiplicity of drives Nietzsche tells us in Daybreak (1881): “However far a man may go in self-knowledge, nothing however can be more incomplete than his image of the totality of drives which constitute his being. He can scarcely name even the cruder ones: their number and strength, their ebb and flow, their play and counterplay among one another…” (D 119)
How are we to master something we can’t ever fully know? Well, first of all, many drives do appear in consciousness, especially the most dominant ones which motivate our behavior. Katsafanas notes: “Drives are initially unconscious, but can be brought to consciousness – all that's required is pressing the drive into a conceptual structure. But there's no guarantee that the conceptualized expression will be an adequate or accurate expression...notice that they express themselves through the conceptual repertoire of the person. They manifest themselves by seeking a reflective articulation in conscious emotions and thoughts.” (page 133)
“Nietzsche allows that human beings are capable of self-conscious reflection upon their own drives and affects. Moreover, he thinks that reflective thought can have a causal impact on our motives and on our actions. Accordingly, an agent who reflects and decides to act in a certain way will, sometimes, thereby bring it about that she acts in that way. (page 162)
Self-observation is a significant part of Nietzsche's psychology. But, the key here is both “drives” and “affects.” Psychology uses the verb “affect” as a noun to indicate the expression or manifestation of behavior. The way you act in (and react to) the world is affecting and the actions are all affects (impressions, feelings, emotions) of conscious and unconscious psychological activity. In Nietzsche’s psychology affects are the direct result of drives. So, it is possible for a “higher” soul to understand a dominant unconscious drive by observing its affects, by how the otherwise unknowable drive expresses itself in human behavior.
Janaway (2007) explains and provides examples of Nietzsche’s affects: “It is the affects – the very mental states that for the philosophical orthodoxy ‘twist, color, and distort’ judgment and perception – that Nietzsche portrays as enabling and expanding knowledge. What is an affect? At times […] Nietzsche talks simply of ‘inclinations and aversions’, ‘pro and contra’, or ‘for and against’ – descriptions that parallel Schopenhauer’s vocabulary and his view that all affects are positive or negative stirrings of the will. It seems that for Nietzsche too all affects are at bottom inclinations or aversions of some kind. In the Genealogy and Beyond Good and Evil alone he explicitly uses the term for the following: anger, fear, love, hatred, hope, envy, revenge, lust, jealousy, irascibility, exuberance, calmness, self-satisfaction, self-humiliation, self-crucifixion, power-lust, greed, suspicion, malice, cruelty, contempt, despair, triumph, feeling of looking down on, feeling of a superior glance towards others, desire to justify oneself in the eyes of others, demand for respect, feelings of laziness, feeling of command, and brooding over bad deeds.’ Affects are, at the very least, ways in which we feel.” (pp. 205 – 206)
Katsafanas would agree that affects are how we feel and would broaden this perspective a bit. “…in other writings, Nietzsche mentions still more affects. For example, under the heading 'The Yes-saying affects.' Nietzsche lists pride, joy, health, the love of the sexes, enmity and war, reverence, beautiful gestures and manners and objects, strong will, the discipline of high intellectuality, will to power, and gratitude toward earth and life (KSA 13:14[11]/WLN 242). In another list, he mentions 'the affects of love, kindness, compassion, even of justice, magnanimity, heroism' (KSA 12:10[128]/WLN 196).” (page 103)
“Nietzsche seems to treat drives as typically occurring together with affects...So drives generate affects, which are inclinations and aversions that can be conscious or unconscious.” (page 104)
“...a Nietzschean drive is a disposition that induces an affective orientation. Drives manifest themselves by structuring the agent's perceptions, affects, and reflective thought. Drives have both an aim and an object; the aim is the relatively constant pattern of activity sought by the drive, whereas the object is a chance occasion for expression. Finally, drives do not simply arise in response to external stimuli; they actively seek opportunities for expression, sometimes distorting the agent's perception of the environment in order to incline the agent to get in ways that give the drives expression.” (page 106)
“Drives manifest themselves by structuring the agent's perceptions, affects, and reflective thought. They determine which features of the agent's environment will be salient; they determine the way in which the agent will conceptualize aspects of the environment; and they sometimes alter the course of the agent's reflective thought.” (page 110)
Nietzsche writes in Daybreak 326: “We can estimate our powers but not our power…One should regard oneself as a variable quantity whose capacity for achievement can under favorable circumstances perhaps equal the highest ever known: one should thus reflect on one’s circumstances and spare no effort in observing them.” Even though there is much (especially to begin with) that we will not know about our drives, and much that will be revealed only through time and experience with one’s soul, self-observation is a basic tenet of his psychology and, further, understanding and taking action based upon scrutiny of our drives and affects.
Conscious reflection and meditation upon your drives and, more particularly in the case of unconscious drives, their affects can lead to “higher” insights. Only in this way is it possible to become the “greatest artist” as Nietzsche put it. The number of drives that can be brought to the surface of consciousness is tiny compared to our total multiplicity of drives. It’s sort of like comparing the Earth with the Solar System. Although, more than likely, the drives that dominate (express themselves) your behavior most are the easiest to observe and act upon. But, often behavior occurs through subversive means.
Drives that cannot dominate may seek alternate expression. We have already seen where Nietzsche mentions how one drive can “complain” about another (causing us anguish, anxiety, whatever). It is important to understand that submissive drives can often be subversive as well, challenging the dominant drives and, failing that, undermining them, mostly at an unconscious level within you. This is how the constant state of flux is maintained within each multiplicity. Our political order of drives is dynamic. Even if we understand our drives, we must constantly strive to be cognizant of them, their changing interplay, and make adjustments accordingly.
Clark and Dudrick write: “…the drive dominated…will not cease to make its demands; as a result it will develop its own ‘instinct to freedom,’ searching for ways to again gain satisfaction. This dogged pursuit of its satisfaction in the face of suppression by other drives leads the dominated drive to become aggressive, directing itself against its oppressors and competitors; that is to say, it develops a will to power. This will to power leads it to seek a place in the newly formed order of dominance, a position from which it might both attain its object and subject other drives…If it accomplishes this, the hitherto subjected drive is in a position to both attain its object and to satisfy its will to power by subjecting other drives.
“This process continues until their will to power leads drives to form a coherent, ordered political structure – one analogous to that which the ‘blond beasts’ made out of nomads form their will to power. Just as he has a naturalistic account of the order of the state, Nietzsche has such an account as to how drives come to be a ‘ruling structure’ and, so, to form a soul.” (pp. 209 – 210)
Our souls are, mostly, drives and affects. Affects manifest in a multitude of ways and not always under the behavior or characteristic we might expect. Submissive drives that become subversive can latch on to almost anything in order to express themselves. Nietzsche’s psychology is fundamentally a turbulent one, a constant state of becoming. A well-ordered soul is rarely at rest. It must perpetually adapt the way the multiplicity is controlled because the multiplicity is in flux. But, in any case, such ordering of drives is always political and hierarchical.
“The goal is not merely order, but a specific order: the rule of the higher self or selves, an aristocracy…The politics of the soul is laudatory, not because it gives equal voice to every drive, but because all of one’s drives are exploited in a regime embodying beauty and order. The higher man, in short, is the man with an aristocratically ordered soul. […] To realize his potential, man must struggle such that his higher self may rule. One seeks, in other words, to extend the time one lives in a state of inspiration. […] Pluralism within the soul is to be maintained. The good of the whole through the rule of the best is the aim of aristocratic politics. To this end hierarchy provides the condition for harmony and the stimulus for struggle. Thus the soul remains both ordered and active.” (Thiele, pp. 66 – 67)
Katsafanas puts it this way: “The self is unified when one drive predominates, and exerts a coordinating influence on the other drives. Conflict amongst the drives does not have to be eliminated, it just has to be managed.” (page 177) A well-ordered soul is one where the “best” drives dominate the multiplicity. What is “best” will vary from person to person because each multiplicity is unique and each person has different dominant aspirations, perhaps requiring a different toolset of drives.
Disunity (and the resulting confusion and weakness in life) happens when you have no control at all over your drives or when your feelings and behavior may be motivated by drives other than your dominant one(s). For example, the drive for “control” in your life might be successfully checked by you, you can “take things as they come” and yet “control” will strive of manifest in other ways; say, the way you schedule your day and how regimented you make use of your time. There are innumerable such examples possible. This is the foundation for human behavior, according to Nietzsche.
There are two possibilities. Your multiplicity may run away with you according to your unique multiplicity of drives. The vast majority of humans have far less control over themselves and they (the herd) would like to believe. Or, you may become more aware of your drives and affects within consciousness. This requires a clear mind and an open mind free of cultural morality, feeling and thinking. By being aware of what your drives are, how they manifest and fluctuate, you can gain some measure of control over your life. “Higher” persons with a well-ordered soul are capable (or should be) of the highest aspirations of (revaluated) society. As we will see, this multiplicity becomes creative and life-affirming.
Another critical component of Nietzsche’s psychology is that drives that fail to dominate and fail to subvert other drives will redirect their energy inwardly toward the soul. This is a fundamental source of human confusion, apathy, uncertainty, guilt, depression, anxiety, neuroses and psychic illnesses of every kind. So discovering how this works is inherently important to achieving a well-ordered soul.
Nietzsche mentions this internalization in the On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). “All instincts which are not discharged outwardly turn inwards - this is what I call the internalization of man: with it there now evolves in man what will later be called his ‘soul.’ The whole inner world, originally stretched thinly as though between two layers of skin, was expanded and extended itself and gain depth, breadth and height in proportion to the degree that the external discharge of man’s instincts was obstructed.” (GM 2:16)
Parkes again finds a revealing quote from Nietzsche’s notebooks: “The interiority of the soul developed then from the retroflection of drives that were originally directed outward. This idea is amplified in a note from the Nachlass of [1887]: ‘Inwardness arises when powerful drives that have been denied outward discharge by the establishment of peace and society try to make themselves harmless by turning inward in concert with the imagination. The need for enmity, cruelty, revenge, violence turns back and retreats’; covetousness and domination become desire for knowledge; the power of dissimulation and lying is reflected in the artist; the drives are transformed into demons with whom one fights, and so on.’
“The last point is the crux: as drives are retroflected they are transformed through the medium of fantasy into persons – and in the case of so-called ‘negative’ drives into ‘demons,’ autonomous powers capable of standing opposite to the I.” (page 318)
Clark and Dudrick: “When their outward expression is blocked…they are able to find satisfaction by turning inward, taking other drives as their objects. But the only way that these aggressive drives could express an ‘instinct for freedom’ in seeking their own satisfaction by turning on other drives is by seeking to deny satisfaction to these drives.” (page 205)
One of the most common results of this turning inward of drives is that it can lead to "life-negating: affects like guilt or remorse. Katsafanas explains: “...the aggressive drives originally find expression in making others suffer. The social drives stifle this outward expression of the aggressive drives, and the resulting internal discord and refusal to let certain drives discharge generates profound suffering…The bad conscience is a medley of all of this: the pain engendered by the internalization of the aggressive drives, the feeling of being turned against a part of oneself, the feeling of internal discord, the feeling of being a threat to oneself, and the feeling of being a threat to society. Fundamentally, then, the bad conscience is a complex affect, engendered by the feeling of the drives' being at odds with one another.” (page 58)
“The conscious emotion of guilt presents itself as a unitary, distinct feeling. If Nietzsche's analysis is correct, though, guilt actually conceals a complex array of drives and affects: the frustrated feeling of repressed aggressive drives, the inchoate sense of indebtedness, a sense of personal failure, and a host of religiously inspired beliefs about redemption. So a conscious unity conceals an unconscious diversity.” (page 62)
This inward churning of drives within each of us varies in intensity. “The herd” is generally not very intense at all and the churning is mild, which, even so, is too much for many of them. One of the defining characteristics of a “higher” person is a greater intensity of the churning of the drives. The natural diversity of drives inherently means that to churn more intensely is to also develop the greatest variety of drives and affects, some in contradiction to each other. This diversity of drives, in turn, allows the individual to approach “greatness.”
According to Reginster (2006), Nietzsche suggests that what makes an individual great is not only what he or she achieves through mastery and behavior but also “…a distinctive condition of their soul: ‘Precisely this shall be called greatness: being capable of being as manifold as whole, as ample as full’ (BGE 212), In the soul of a great individual, many drives and points of view are unified and organized into a coherent whole. This is indeed that salient characteristic of all those individuals we have come to consider “great,” such as Shakespeare: ‘The highest man would have the greatest multiplicity of drives, in the relatively greatest strength that can be endured. Indeed, where the plant ‘man’ shows himself strongest one finds instincts that conflict powerfully (e.g., in Shakespeare), but controlled.” (WP 966; cf. 933; TI, IX 49).” (page 192)
Furthermore, his churning of the multiplicity is not isolated within you. Essentially for Nietzsche, we are “we’s” within a social and cultural context. There is a significant community component to Nietzsche’s psychology. The health (or disease) of the individual is tied to the health (or decline) of a community of souls. Also, the community of souls is the primary cause for many personal drives to turn inward due to religious rules or social expectations.
Thiele: “Nietzsche is careful to stress that it is the drives of 'hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction' which are internalized (GM II.16). But /other/ drives are not internalized: drives for social bonding, for food, for sex, and so on are not thwarted but are, at least in some respects, aided by the establishment of a community.” (page 57)
Katsafanas: “The sex drive, the knowledge drive, the drive to express domination and so on, all have their conditions set in part by the social context in which they operate. For what counts as pursuing sex, knowledge, domination, and so on, is in part determined by what the society recognizes as sex, knowledge, domination. And so on. Particular customs might inhabit these drives in particular contexts, but custom as such is a condition for them, rather than an obstacle to them.” (page 213) “...part of what he rejects is the idea of self as pure interiority, capable of being understood in isolation from its social and historical context.” (page 218)
So, we should not get carried away with the immense complexity of the multiplicity. Instead, we should acknowledge that this complexity takes place among a multitude of complexities that make up cultures and communities both present and past. For example, Nietzsche would claim that morality must be revaluated. But, he does this within a historical understanding of how that morality came to be so accepted among all the multiplicities in the first place.
Parkes writes: “…the human being, body and soul [is] a microcosmic configuration of drives (will to power) situated within the macrocosm of the world as an encompassing matrix of the will to power (drives) – nearing in mind that this interplay between inner and outer extends temporarily across many generations. The task of ordering the plays of drives within the individual thus involves understanding them within that larger matrix, in context of the greater field of interpretive will to power that is the world. If all existence is interpreting, then all phenomena are expressing their being: This is what it means to be, or become.” (pp. 316 – 317)
Let’s review. There are many layers or facets here, which is why only “higher” persons are capable of addressing their drives and creating a well-ordered soul. It’s a bit like learning to juggle. There is the multiplicity itself. Out of it we must learn, through meticulous observation, which drives dominate, which drives cooperate and when domination and cooperation should occur for maximum benefit. All this while remembering that many drives remain unconscious and can only be discovered and addressed indirectly via their affects.
Meanwhile, some drives will attempt to subvert your established order to either become dominant themselves or to undermine the dominance/cooperation of other drives. The more masterful you become with drives and affects, the more you recognize them and understand them, the more contradictory (diverse) your multiplicity will become. And, beyond all this, there is the fact that many of your drives are driven by “meta-personal” forces within human culture and biology. Even if you create a well-ordered soul you cannot completely escape neither the bonds of your society nor of evolution.
Having defined and discussed the nature and the mechanics of drives and affects we arrive at the question of what does a person capable of establishing a well-ordered soul actually do with this capability. So what? In Daybreak he wrote: “We have to learn to think differently - in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently.” (D 103) Nietzsche’s psychology is the foundation for his life’s work – the art of revaluing and becoming, of life-affirmation and style. For Nietzsche this is the highest possible expression of humanity in the modern world, the basis for a different kind of human and a different kind of human society.
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