Section 2
Section 2 of the Preface springs the first-person singular upon us with 'My thoughts on the origins of our moral prejudices [...]'. It is now no longer a case of 'we', but of 'I' and 'you' in confrontation—a most explicit example of what Nehamas has called Nietzsche's 'effort always to insinuate himself between his readers and the world'.8 (Nietzsche sustains this mode: every other section of the Preface uses the first-person singular in its opening sentence.) Nietzsche tells us that his polemical book will concern the origins of our moral prejudices (a wider 'we' thus providing the object of investigation), but he elucidates that idea no further yet, and concentrates this section on himself. The book now acquires a historical context, Nietzsche even indicating a date, a place, and a stretch of his life in which he produced his earlier polemic Human, All Too Human. The book is not going to be an impersonal enquiry, and is in some measure to be about Nietzsche himself. Nietzsche states that his ideas have not fundamentally changed in the ten years since Human, All Too Human. They may have ripened, he hopes, a thought picked up by the dominant simile of this section, that of a philosopher's products as fruits, the philosopher the tree on which they grow. What matters is that the philosopher's disparate thoughts are organically connected and grown from a single stock, not how they taste to anyone else.
Now Schopenhauer comes into view again. Schopenhauer holds that the central character of the human individual is unalterable, and writes that trying to reform someone's character by means of talk and moralizing 'is like trying through external influence to turn lead into gold, or by careful
cultivation to make an oak bear apricots'.9 It could be a coincidence that Nietzsche repeats this Schopenhauerian tree image, but it seems unlikely. For Schopenhauer the fundamental unifying character of the individual is what he calls the will, an explanatorily primary and enduring essence, with the 'I' or knowing subject, by contrast, being merely an 'apparent' entity.10 Nietzsche parallels this when he calls thoughts and values 'witnesses to one will' and emphatically describes his, the philosopher's, fundamental character as 'a common root [...] a basic will (Grundwille) of knowledge which commands from deep within'. These locutions make the allusion look deliberate.
The will for Schopenhauer is a metaphysical or trans-empirical essence, a self as it is in itself.We should not attribute this kind of view to Nietzsche, since by the time of writing the Genealogy he consistently opposes any transcendent metaphysics. (The recently written first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil and Fifth Book of The Gay Science are evidence of that.) Yet we might find in Nietzsche an analogous but different view of the self: that all human individuals have an unalterable core, constituted of certain organic states, which gives a unity to their character through the myriad acts and states of mind that are theirs. Think of his poetic words in the earlier Thus Spoke Zarathustra: 'You say ''I'' and are proud of this word. But greater than this [...] is your body and its great intelligence [...] Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, stands a mighty commander, an unknown sage—he is called Self. He lives in your body, he is your body' (Z I. 4). This Self, bodily grounded, could be an enduring, unchanging essence out of which Nietzsche's many thoughts grow organically, like fruit from a tree.11
Or might there be an altogether different way with this idea of unity in section 2? When Nietzsche explicates the image of tree and fruit, his remarks are limited to 'philosophers' of a kind to which he portrays himself as belonging. A philosopher's values, 'yes's and no's and if's and whether's' must have organic unity. And how are these values (or 'thoughts') manifested? In a series of texts. Nietzsche's fruits are the contents of Human, All Too Human, the Genealogy itself, and the several books in
9 Schopenhauer (1999: 46). 10 See Schopenhauer (1969: ii. 278).
11 Leiter (2002: 8 -10) presents a view broadly of this nature, stating that for Nietzsche each individual has 'a fixed, psycho-physical constitution', and invoking both the tree metaphor and Schopenhauer's use of it.
between. So what is the tree? Shall we opt for Friedrich Nietzsche, the human being causally responsible in the recognized way for the existence of these texts—in which case we must entertain the idea of some deep psychological unity over time, unqualified and unexplained as yet, residing in this human being? Or shall the tree be the authorial presence constructible from, or constituted by, the texts themselves? In apparent support of the latter reading, the Nietzsche text immediately prior to the Genealogy prefigures Barthes and Foucault with the thought that 'the ''work'', whether of the artist or of the philosopher, invents the person who has created it, who is supposed to have created it'.12 But to read section 2 of Nietzsche's Preface in this way is to disorient its central metaphor—unless a fruit can 'invent' the tree from which it has grown. And section 2 easily permits the less contrived biographical reading—the reading which locates the 'one will', the 'one health', and the 'one soil' in the psychological-physiological individual, in Nietzsche the human being, whose thinking and writing were historical events. If Nietzsche did not mean the 'fundamental will' to have some such psychological reality, how can it make sense for him to say that it spoke ever more definitely from 'deep within'? Deep within what, unless Nietzsche's psyche? It is not made clear here what the 'one will', 'one health', and so on literally consist in. But Nietzsche believes—or so I shall argue—that there are psychological truths about human individuals, and that his method of enquiry is a way to uncover such truths. He develops models of psychological reality, among them a conception of multiple drives standing in differing relations of competition, integration, and hierarchy, and he must have taken any such general model to apply to himself.
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