The Nietzschean Self: Moral Psychology, Agency, and the Unconscious by Paul Katsafanas (review)

In his new book, Paul Katsafanas aims to offer “a comprehensive account” of Nietzsche’s “analysis of the human self” in order to “uncover Nietzsche’s moral psychology” (6). The goal is admirable, and The Nietzschean Self has considerable merit. On the whole, it is well organized and clearly written, and some of the interpretive theses Katsafanas advocates present an intriguing countercurrent to some of the most popular views in contemporary Nietzsche scholarship. For example, Katsafanas argues that “Nietzsche does not deny the causal efficacy of the will,” and that “Nietzschean unity refers to a relation between drives and conscious thought: unity obtains when the agent’s attitude toward her own action is stable under the revelation of further information about the action’s etiology” (11–12).

Over the course of ten chapters, Katsafanas covers a lot of ground. His narrative considers many of the crucial elements of Nietzsche’s moral psychology, though I would like to have seen a better defense of the claim that Nietzsche privileges conscious thought and its efficacy to the degree Katsafanas claims he does. While the book proffers an interesting reading of Nietzsche’s moral psychology, it also has faults that considerably weaken the plausibility of its arguments.

The first is a cluster of omissions: the book lacks a clear articulation of its methodology, its approach to the textual evidence, and Katsafanas’s view on whether Nietzsche changes his mind throughout his works, and, if so, on what topics and to what degree this change occurs. In places Katsafanas references “early and middle-period works” (138) and “later works” (162) without providing a clear delineation of which works, exactly, he sees as falling into which periods of Nietzsche’s oeuvre. While chapter 6, for example, explicitly considers whether Nietzsche changed his mind about the causal efficacy of the will throughout his works, other chapters provide no such consideration, freely citing material from any period of Nietzsche’s oeuvre to support Katsafanas’s favoured interpretive thesis. For instance, while examining Nietzsche’s view of Wagner, Katsafanas cites a short passage from Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1876, but mistakenly identified as coming from Schopenhauer as Educator, 1874), along with a few lines from The Case of Wagner (1888), without mentioning the dramatic shift in Nietzsche’s relationship with, and assessment of, Wagner over the intervening years, and what effect that shift may have on the evidence (178). Nietzsche’s published and unpublished materials are cited with little attention to their potentially differing degrees of authority, and Katsafanas offers no clue as to his own view on this contentious matter.

Moreover, the evidence Katsafanas cites to corroborate his claims is too thin. Nietzsche is notoriously difficult to interpret because of the seeming inconsistencies in his works, yet Katsafanas apparently proceeds by attributing to Nietzsche the philosophical positions he himself takes to be most plausible—even when there is little supportive evidence in Nietzsche’s texts. Katsafanas’s handling of the arguments tends to move too hastily to be convincing to a reader whose philosophical sympathies differ from his own. For instance, Katsafanas rejects the popular view amongst Nietzsche interpreters that unity entails having one drive dominate an agent’s other drives. He rejects this view on philosophical grounds, using the example of an alcoholic who gives in to the desire to drink. Katsafanas holds that “it would be perverse to say that when the agent acts on that craving [for alcohol], he manifests agential control. On the contrary, the voice of the agent seems to reside in the weak, overpowered element of resistance” (177). It is not clear why attributing agential control to the alcoholic who decides to drink is perverse, unless we adhere to certain normative commitments, such as that our conscious (rational) thought expresses our true or authentic selves in a way that our other desires do not. It is not clear why such a view should be accepted, and it is doubtful that...