we construct the self via our attitude to our unconscious drives
Who or what is this ‘we’ doing the constructing? It might just be something else unconscious
we do something which falls in with our own idea of what we want, and we come to associate that with 'me' and 'conscious action'
Why do we want this?
we can see N as undermining conscious volition if we stick to the rigid notion that all actions must be conscious to be willed
we can realise that, actually, ALL actions are, in a sense unconscious in origin.
there are even some philosophers now who think that unconscious agency plays a role in conscious mental thought
We can retain the idea of agency, therefore, even if we relinquish the idea of conscious causation.
Keeping our heavily mustached anchor in sight: this is the result that N seems to go for – out with agency! For me it comes up first in BGE in the ‘thought comes when it wants’. Continuing on in the corpus, he is pretty scalding in GM 13, writing of the idea of the freely choosing subject:
“no wonder, then, if the entrenched, secretly smouldering emotions of revenge and hatred put this belief (in the subject) to their own use and, in fact, do not defend any belief more passionately than that the strong are free to be weak, and the birds of prey are free to be lambs: – in this way, they gain the right to make the birds of prey responsible for being birds of prey . . ."He is
striving to do away with the idea of conscious agency and so responsibility as negatively applied by ‘weaker’ types to the actions of ‘stronger’ ones, and positively to their own actions.
Unconscious agency is skeletal compared to the kind of muscular concept we have of self ‘creation’ and (as you put it) meaningful change. It might be like the unconscious processing that leads to conscious sensation. It just appears here the way it does. It's not that meaningful change isn't occuring, just that it doesn't come from where we think it is. Of course it might just be a 'superficial' change. There's a man in Bill Maher's Religulous (hilarious...must be seen), who Maher meets in a truck drivers church. He tells Bill that he used to be a Satanist priest. Now that is a pretty dramatic contrast. Admittedly i know nothing about this man, but it is quite possible that very little has really changed about him: the character and strength of his emotions, thinking, ambitions, capacity for effort, habits, friendships, etc., except that now they are excited or organized by (admittedly very!) different things.
N paints a nice picture of this when he writes (in BGE?) that thanks to sciences like physics we’ve had to rethink some of our basic ideas about the world – that table isn’t really solid, but is a cloud of atoms and mostly empty space. He suggests that the same is true of our ideas of our conscious selves too – we’ll have to re think a lot about what is going on behind the scenes here.
Now, however this works, it has been working all my life and for a very long time in human history. The question is what effect what I think about the process has on the process: is the direction one way, or is it looped. How do or can conscious thoughts and experiences effect unconscious drives and desires and patterns?
One of the tensions here in N is this, between the idea of the conscious ‘spectator’ view quoted above, and the active view: another extract from Daybreak (560):
What we are at liberty to do. – One can dispose of one’s drives like a gardener and, though few know it, cultivate the shoots of anger, pity, curiosity, vanity as productively and profitably as a beautiful fruit tree on a trellis; one can do it with the good taste of a gardener and, as it were, in the French or English or Dutch or Chinese fashion; one can also let nature rule and only attend to a little embellishment and tidying up here and there; one can, finally, without paying attention to them at all, let the plants grow up and fight their fight out among themselves – indeed, one can take delight in such a wilderness, and desire precisely this delight, though it gives one some trouble, too. All this we are at liberty to do, but how many know that we are at liberty to do it? Do not the majority not believe in themselves as in complete fully developed facts? Have the great philosophers not put their seal on this prejudice with the doctrine of the unchangeability of character?Somewhere else is advice on something like 5 or 6 ways to combat a drive where he gives some classical conditioning tips.
And there's the bit in BGE 200,about waging war with oneself. Yet, here he refers to Caeser and Alcibiades as ‘predestined ones’, and says that the weak and the strong type came from the ‘same causes’, which I take to mean as the same inherent causes.
the first possibility is that self-transformation does not involve a conventional notion of self.
I can see what you mean here. I can feel this kind of war in myself at times to: ‘i'm too lazy... no i work too much...argh! i should quit work and do something 'really meaningful' with my life...forget that, i need to find a way to become rich and stop working for other people...is there a decent movie on?...what is my wife doing?’ and so on.
For me to posit a seperate self for each of these attitudes is a bit too unconventional and probably useless. However, i do like the extended social metaphor, and i think this is a manageable way to think of it. I can observe and collate my tendencies towards certain similar behaviours and attitudes, and maybe restore a monarchy, etc.
The problem in N is trying to relax the rope from the two directions he's pulling it in. How much and of what kind of agency does he admit of. The other one is to ask and answer this of ourselves. How much of me is necessary, ‘predestined’, how much chosen? How can i answer it?
However, because that will is not conscious, does that mean that it is not a part of 'me'?
The other interesting tension is his attack on agency and responsibility, and the fact that the highest praise and the severest criticism of individuals occur frequently in his writings (you know, that 'English blockhead', J.S. Mill!). Solomon tries to resolve this by pointing out that he is not taking a stance on what people do, but deeper than this,
what they are. It's not that just because something is unconscious that it isn't part of me, it may be quite
meaningfully me. That lashing remark you mentioned might tell more about us than we know or want to admit. But whether or not it's me tells me nothing about whether or not i'm a freely choosing agent.
I think i'm rambling too much now. Time for a pro:
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200303/?read=interview_strawsonP.s. Just ignore the Nietzsche pic below (one of yours?). I tried to put it in the post beside his quoted stuff and obviously failed. Perhaps we can just get some moustached emoticons?
