Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy (review)

The first four chapters of Pippin's elegant volume on Nietzsche were originally delivered as a series of lectures at the Collège de France in 2004. In a certain respect, the context of these lectures defines the parameters of Pippin's reading of Nietzsche: he advocates an interpretation very close to Bernard Williams in emphasizing the psychological aspects and motifs of Nietzsche's thought over and against certain contemporary French appropriations (e.g. Deleuze, Derrida, and Kofman). In over-emphasizing the deconstructive capacity of Nietzsche's text, Pippin holds, these interpretations conclude that Nietzsche's thought provides no philosophical insight—that "Nietzsche's texts always seem to take away with one hand what they appear to have given with the other"(xv). In sharp contrast, Pippin claims that Nietzsche's thought is extremely relevant philosophically insofar as it deals with the genealogy (and possible legacies) of human desires and actions. Put differently, Nietzsche's philosophical teaching is first and foremost a psychology. For this reason, Pippin's book amounts to a sustained attempt to "present a comprehensive interpretation of what Nietzsche means by 'psychology,' what the relationship is … between psychology and traditional philosophy, and why he thinks such a psychology is … so important, why it is 'the path to fundamental problems'" (xi–xii).

But if Pippin is critical of contemporary French interpretations of Nietzsche, he does not for this reason alienate Nietzsche from France tout court. Another central claim of Pippin's commentary is that Nietzsche finds his most proper predecessors in the French "moralist" essayists—Pascal, Montaigne, and La Rochefoucauld: "Nietzsche is much better understood not as a great German metaphysician, or as the last metaphysician of the West, or as the destroyer or culminator of metaphysics, or as very interested in metaphysics or a new theory of nature at all, but as one of the great 'French moralists'" (9). This move allows Pippin to read Nietzsche as a psychologist with one foot in modernity (i.e. in the critique of modern conceptions of ethics) and the other in the Socratic project of self-knowing ignorance attuned to "the mysteries of human eros" (124). Hence, Nietzsche's "un-Pascalian" wager: "What would make possible a self-sustaining and affirmable … civilizational project, under current historical conditions? What would make some collective self-transcending aspiration possible over time, a way of life that would not degenerate, undermine itself, or … end in nihilism?" (20). Given that modernity, for Nietzsche, is not self-sustainable, the project (insofar as it points toward a possible future) is historical through and through.

Historical, yes; but not only historical. For Pippin's psychological reading, it is important that nature not simply be excluded from Nietzsche's account: if suffering is unavoidable (which, for Nietzsche, it certainly is), the problem amounts to how humans can be 'bred' to take on this suffering (in the form of self-transcending sacrifice); this is a "'task' that nature 'has set herself'" (60). That there is a "minimal" concern with nature in Nietzsche suggests that he does, despite apparent protests to the contrary, retain some distant relation to his Athenian "hero and enemy" (124). And, much like the Greek concern with physis, Nietzsche's concern with nature is indeed non-reductive. Concerning his conception of drives and will, Pippin holds that "Nietzsche is not suggesting an 'extrapsychological' drive theory but … wants to be considered as offering a more complex psychological explanation—more complex than what the agent would consciously avow, but still, to continue the image, 'inside' the psychologically explicable" (94). This puts Nietzsche clearly in proximity to Freud insofar as Nietzschean psychology "include[s] unconscious motives and ends and desires" (95).

Pippin does not spend much time discussing the twin figures of the Apollonian and Dionysian in Nietzsche's thought. This is, to a certain extent, explainable by the book's focusing on Nietzsche's "middle works" (especially Gay Science) where these figures are given a less schematic treatment. Still, given Pippin's continuous emphasis on...