Ontology in nietzsche

The Many and the One: The Ontological Multiplicity and Functional Unity of the Person in the Later Nietzsche
John F. Whitmire Jr.
The Pluralist, Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 2009, pp. 1-14 (Article)

Published by University of Illinois Press DOI: 10.1353/plu.0.0007

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The Many and the One: The Ontological Multiplicity and Functional Unity of the Person in the Later Nietzsche
john f. whitmire, jr.
Western Carolina University

in his massive study of Nietzsche’s psychological theory and anthropology, Graham Parkes argues that sufficient attention has not been paid to Nietzsche’s theory of the drives andaffects (444)—though he admits Pierre Klossowski, Richard Schacht, and John Richardson as notable exceptions. It is perhaps difficult to understand this claim, especially in light of the work on the “new Nietzsche,” but it might make more sense if considered in the context of a scholarly tradition in which Nietzsche’s comments on will to power are understood as voluntaristic, existential—evenpersonalistic?—statements of heroic human individuals forging their own identities or personal narratives in face of the tragic experience of the world, a common enough way of interpreting Nietzsche in the wake of Walter Kaufmann, Alexander Nehamas, and Richard Rorty. However, there are numerous other accounts of an antipersonalist Nietzsche that understand his emphasis on the drives as that which isof genuinely fundamental importance in his thought. Indeed, this sort of reading has perhaps been formative for the entire twentieth century psychoanalytic tradition, if David Allison is correct in arguing that Freud was far more familiar with Nietzsche’s writings than he would willingly admit. In any case, for Parkes, Leslie Paul Thiele, Andrea Rehberg, and others, it is clear that we must beginwith physiology, with our drives and affects, if we are to understand the phenomenon of the (apparent) unity of the human person or subject. Rehberg quotes The Will to Power to this effect: “The phenomenon of the body is the richer, more distinct, more graspable phenomenon: to be methodologically privileged without deciding anything about its ultimate significance” (41, quoting Will to Power par.489; my emphasis).1 The objective in this case is to expose the unitary “phenomenon” of the self as “an immense multiplicity . . . it is methodologically permitted to use the more easily studied, richer phenomenon [the body as multiplicity of drives]
the plur alist Volume 4, Number 1 Spring 2009 : pp. 1–17
©2009 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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as the guiding thread for the understanding of the poorer [the self as unity]” (Rehberg 41, citing Will to Power par. 518; emphasis Rehberg’s)2 without necessarily committing ourselves to a strong metaphysical position on the underlying reality of the drives. These sentiments are echoed in The Will to Power (without the proviso), where Nietzsche claims that
The body and physiology[are] the starting point: why?—We gain the correct idea of the nature of our subject-unity, namely as regents at the head of a communality (not as “souls” or “life forces”), also of the dependence of these regents upon the ruled and of an order of rank and division of labor as the conditions that make possible the whole and its parts. In the same way, how living unities continually arise and die andhow the “subject” is not eternal; in the same way, that the struggle expresses itself in obeying and commanding, and that a fluctuating assessment of the limits of power is part of life. (par. 492)

As Parkes notes, “it is a main trait of the genealogical method [viz., in On the Genealogy of Morals] to take what appears to be a unitary phenomenon and disclose its multiple origins, showing it...