50 to the human being, and much of you is still worm You were once apes, and the

human is even now more of an ape than some apes’ (KSA 4 p. 14).

Nietzsche's particular scorn is reserved for the idea of free will, derived from the ascetic ideal. Free will must be an a priori possibility of the ethical subject,

yet as Nietzsche demonstrates the will may not be a primary force, but rather a sec- ;|

ondary quality which arises from the interpretation of a specific situation ‘so that

I

volition can arise one must have a representation of desire and repulsion. Secondly: that a powerful stimulus can be felt as a desire or repulsion , that is a matter of the interpreting intellect, which works for the most part unbeknownst to us’ (KSA 3 p. 483). The intellect, as a secondary function of organic life, is inextricably linked to those organic functions of the body; seen in this light, the mind - body dualism of Descartes appears to be hopelessly naive . This is not to reduce the mind to the status of an organ, for such a crude reductionist materialism would be just as

culpable as the ascetic ideal of severing the intellect from the life forces which give f

it its vitality. However we are forced to reassess the relationship between mind and 4

body, in a manner which perhaps suspends the traditional opposition itself.

Even in his earliest notes Nietzsche stresses the impossibility of neatly de­ lineating between mental and bodily functions. In an unpublished note from 1871 Nietzsche writes ‘What we call feelings are . . . already permeated and saturated with conscious and unconscious ideas’ (KSA 7 12[1] p. 364). Mental acts cannot be reduced to mere neuro-physiological activity, to the cathexis of so much energy; the mind cannot be seen as a bundle of nerve endings and nothing besides. For just as mental functions can be seen to originate in physiological impulses, so too neural

stimuli have to be interpreted by an intellect in order to be recognised as such. It is

moreover only the interpretative act that can give these stimuli the quality of mental

processes. Perception of the colour green can be seen, within the vocabulary of be­ havioural psychology and physics as a reception of light waves of a particular fre­ quency, and this account does explain the physical, biological and neurological me­ chanics of vision. However, we do not ‘see’ light waves, we see green objects, and it is this peculiar quality of greenness that the scientific account cannot explain. Yet at the same time, one cannot neatly distinguish between the physiological and the phenomenological aspects of seeing green objects, as if an autonomous inner self could ‘choose’ to interpret external stimuli in a certain way. On these grounds

alone Nietzsche finds Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason risible, as if one could

isolate the workings of some pure rational essence, as if one could abstract the mental fi-om the material aspects of existence. This realisation is also proclaimed by Zarathustra, that ‘Behind your thoughts and feelings stands . . . an unknown sage -

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he is called Self. He lives in your body, he is your body’, adding that ‘There is more reason in your body than in your greatest wisdom’ (KSA 4 p. 40).

In addition to the impracticality of the Delphic command to know oneself, the ideal of ethical autonomy is further undermined by the facticity of the human

existential condition. No individual has control over the environment in which they r:

find themselves, indeed they find a world which is always-already there, which has shaped the way they are, to such an extent that the notions of guilt and responsibil­

ity so central to Christian ethics and concepts of the soul seem to be irrelevant and J

misplaced. ‘Nobody is responsible for the fact that they are even there’ states Niet- zsche (KSA 6 p. 96), adding that the peculiar characteristics of one's existence owe

more to contingency than to any sense of necessary order, denoting the complete .-j

absence of any foundational or external telos which might give a purpose to an in- |

dividual human existence. On the basis of an overview of Nietzsche's œuvre, we #

see the general target of his discourse to be not subjectivity per se, which I shall |

henceforth term Selfhood, but the ascetic transcendent Subject of knowledge which 5|

underlies the Socratic ethical ideal, the metaphysical tradition and Christian j

morality. With this understanding of Nietzsche in hand, the task is now to produce an account of his reconstruction of the self.

Reconstruction

The first aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy of the self to take into account is that he

regards the self, or consciousness as a given. This might seem a somewhat startling f

claim, given my previous emphasis on Nietzsche’s critique of the ‘ideology’ of the

given. What I mean by this, however, is merely that one has to distinguish between if

the process whereby consciousness was constituted and its present status. Quite 0

clearly, consciousness is not something which was ‘discovered’; Nietzsche’s account of its genesis by the primal violence at the root of social morality makes this clear. Yet at the same time the consequences of that act have left a permanent trace, and one cannot simply reverse the process which has led to the present. It is this view which makes possible the ideal of the Übermensch, who represents an authentic self-relation, and it is this view which marks Nietzsche off from the writings of Foucault.

Such an interpretation of Nietzsche might seem additionally surprising since much scholarship would tend towards a more Foucauldian position. Michel Haar, for example, though not being as vigorously anti-subjectivist as Foucault neverthe­ less interprets Nietzsche as seeing the individual self as a fiction, in that the self finds its meaning, its identity, in the social group, which gives it roles to play,

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