The Will to Nothingness: An Essay on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality

In Bernard Reginster’s account of On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche’s genealogical exercise is ‘functional.’ Nietzsche aims, in his view, to expose the functional role of moral beliefs in serving particular emotional needs of agents. The focus on this theme is tight, to the exclusion of some traditional topics, including perspectivism or truthfulness, as Reginster himself notes. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 tackle essays 1, 2, and 3 of the Genealogy, but virtually the first half of the book is devoted to Reginster’s overarching argumentative frame, which I will briefly sketch. Reginster sees Nietzsche’s demand that the value of moral values be called into question as a call to understand the function of moral beliefs, by providing a naturalistic explanation of them. History plays no role in Reginster’s analysis. He concentrates on the internal dynamics of a more or less timeless, generic, individual human agent. If this is Nietzsche’s focus, Reginster argues, then it is legitimate for some of his genealogical accounts to be fictional, because the target is generic types of psychological condition and because in real life the explanatory emotional factors are concealed from agents themselves. Function is the key notion here: what psychological work do moral beliefs perform for the agent? For Reginster, Nietzsche is not principally out to challenge the epistemic reliability of the route by which we have acquired our moral beliefs; rather he uncovers how moral beliefs affect the agent’s ‘emotional economy,’ in particular how they impact the agent’s sense of self, otherwise described as the agent’s ‘standing in the world,’ or sense of being ‘somebody.’Some well-known phrases haunt the literature on Nietzsche. One is ‘Moralities are only a sign language of the affects.’ Reginster gives a convincing reading of this slogan. He distinguishes between expressive and functional readings of the relation between value judgements and affects. On an expressive (or sentimentalist) reading, ‘evaluative experience is constituted by affective experience: what it is to experience something as “good” or “bad” is (roughly) to feel “inclination” or “aversion” toward it’ (25). Here there is a noncontingent and transparent relation between the evaluation and the affect: necessarily, if you are finding something good, you have a positive affect towards that same thing. But Nietzsche’s conception of ‘sign language’ is different: the affects that do the explanatory work are often related neither constitutively nor transparently to the object of the surface evaluation. For example, one’s making the judgement that it is right to help the needy may be explained not by a positive affect towards the needy, but by disgust, or by a feeling of one’s own superiority. Reginster is right that Nietzsche’s characteristic explanations are typically of this nature (though this fact is compatible with Nietzsche’s possibly holding the expressive view.)In its overall form, Reginster’s ‘pragmatic’ account does not seem radically new. As he says, ‘In the Preface to Genealogy, Nietzsche makes it unequivocally clear that when he calls the “value” of moral values into question, he is referring to their functional value’ (41), and this prominent passage has surely not gone unnoticed by previous commentators. However, if we interpret ‘value’ merely as ‘function,’ we risk losing sight of another sense of ‘value.’ For Nietzsche is not just trying to explain how emotional needs get satisfied, but suggesting that a particular way in which that occurs is not good. When morality fulfills its affective functions for some human agents, the effect, Nietzsche thinks, is to make humanity worse. Reginster is less clear throughout the book on why Nietzsche makes this latter valuation. He prioritizes the notion of a ‘self-undermining functionality,’ and the overall arc of the book reveals how a way of bolstering up one’s sense of self (or power) can lead to one’s own sickness and impoverishment. But it is not obvious that identifying this kind of functionality exhausts the valuation of morality Nietzsche calls for.Reginster sees ressentiment as the affective state that unites all three essays of the Genealogy. The cause of ressentiment is a tendency ‘to construe suffering as demeaning or degrading, as a challenge to the agent’s standing in the world’ (50). But instead of lingering with this sense of being demeaned, the person of ressentiment finds a way to restore his or her inner sense of ‘standing’ by viewing the suffering as an offense traceable to some perpetrator. Commentaries traditionally explain ressentiment by way of its most obvious instance in the psychology of the first essay’s ‘slaves,’ with their vengefulness and hatred directed at more powerful individuals in their society. By contrast, Reginster takes the concept in a wider sense, from which it emerges that ressentiment need not be construed primarily as a ‘social sentiment’ directed at other agents. It is more concerned with an agent’s own sense of self, can be directed at the world more generally, and can reflexively light on oneself as the object of blame, as in Nietzsche’s version of Christianity in the third essay.Reginster’s account makes will to power the driving instinct that causes the reaction of ressentiment. Eschewing discussion of whether will to power is any kind of cosmological view, he reads ‘power’ as a ‘conformity of the world to the agent’s will which is the product of the agent’s exercise of effective agency’ (65). Thus, one’s feeling of power is always relative to whatever is the overriding goal of one’s will. Reginster succinctly explains another Nietzschean slogan, ‘Ressentiment itself becomes creative’: a revaluation of values alters the agent’s will and thus ‘alters what counts as bending the world to it, that is, what counts as power for him’ (82). This clarifies what Nietzsche means by ‘creative’ here and shows how an aspiration to refrain from aggression toward others can also be an expression of will to power. By the end of the discussion, it is obvious how in Christian morality ‘ascetic self-denial is now what counts as power’ (160). Yet the precise status of will to power remains somewhat unclear. Nietzsche calls psychology ‘the doctrine of the development of the will to power,’ but Reginster says that this may be read as a biological rather than a psychological claim, and that Nietzsche is possibly exhorting us to ‘reconsider human psychology from the perspective of the new conception of life’ (63). It is hard to grasp the point here. It seems to amount to, ‘Thinking about how all living organisms function may help you see how the human mind is set up to preserve its own sense of standing in the world.’ But one would like to hear more about what kind of explanation is then supposed to be taking place.Having established this psychological structure of will to power, standing in the world, and ressentiment, Reginster applies it to the three essays of the Genealogy. It is not possible here to engage with details, but the analyses are penetrating, nuanced, and insightful. The reader will gain much by following the intricacies of the account through the major topics of equality, freedom of the will, imaginary revenge, guilt, punishment, and asceticism. Like Nietzsche, Reginster leaves any mention of the ‘will to nothingness’ to the end of his book. But we are left to figure out why Nietzsche writes specifically of ‘nothingness’ here. ‘Not willing’ is characterized as a kind of nihilism or meaninglessness in which one lacks any goal, and ‘there is nothing to will’ (167), or at least nothing that is achievable. The ascetic ideal provides the escape from ‘not willing’, eliminates the agent’s feeling of impotence, and ‘gives him a new lease of life’ (169). Reginster suggests that interpreting suffering as punishment allows the sense of power to be restored: suffering can both be justified as having stemmed from one’s own agency, and relieved because accepting the punishment restores one’s worth as a person. All of this is a pathological manifestation of will to power because in devaluing natural human well-being, it ‘decreases the organism’s capacity for life’—again a case of ‘self-undermining functionality.’ But one would like to hear more on why this condition of a relative ‘depletion of energy’ (187) deserves the absolute description of willing nothingness. Perhaps more could be made of the aspiration literally to lose the sense of self, to be nothing, which Nietzsche finds in Schopenhauerian negation of the will to life or in Buddhism.In Reginster’s final analysis, morality is a way for the weak to deal with a ‘depression’ that is endemic in human existence: ‘Morality poses a danger when it is put to a particular use, because this use is self-defeating. It poses such a danger … when it is made to serve the ressentiment of those who feel “weak and impotent”, by promising to restore their “feeling of power”, and thus offering them a way out of “depression” and “suicidal nihilism”’ (188). This seems to leave it open that morality might be objectionable only ‘in the wrong hands’ and that there could be unobjectionable uses of it for those who are not ‘weak and impotent.’ But there is no evidence of such a view in Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s usual attitude to the weak seems to be roughly ‘If morality functions to help them to get by, let them get on with it.’ He is more preoccupied with morality as a threat to the ‘strong.’ Reginster’s account addresses this point by introducing, in the last few pages, the thought that the ‘depression’ to which morality is a seductive remedy ‘is a chronic consequence of essential features of the human condition, and thus affects all human beings’ (188). Morality is a danger to the ‘strong’ because they are also sometimes, to some degree, weak and impotent. This theme would benefit from further development.Reginster in effect sees Nietzsche as giving a cool, timeless analysis of the ways in which the human mind functions to preserve its sense of power in relation to the world. That analysis is without doubt there in Nietzsche’s text, and Reginster’s sustained exposition advances our understanding of it. For that reason, everyone interested in Nietzsche should pay serious attention to this book. But, having collapsed the notion of ‘value’ into that of ‘function,’ Reginster effectively ends up locating the alleged disvalue of morality principally in the fact that its function is self-undermining: it is a ‘danger’ because it is self-defeating. It is hard to see this feature of morality as what motivates the alarm and disgust in Nietzsche’s narrative voice in the Genealogy. He sees himself at a historical juncture in which art, science, politics, and great human achievement are under threat as a consequence of moral beliefs and practices. That the psychology of the generic moral agent is self-defeating may be true, but it is not obviously Nietzsche’s chief evaluative concern.