Fragmenta Philosophica

Nietzsche as Psychologist

Nietzsche is assuredly in the pantheon of the superlatively great.

His writing rouses like the most powerful works of art – on returning to it, one sees things, notices connections, divines relationships that had eluded one heretofore; there always seems to be another layer of meaning and literary artistry awaiting the committed, resourceful reader, no matter how many others have already been peeled away. Or one more deeply feels the vehemence which animates the work, and is – to borrow a metaphor from Zarathustra – set afire by lightning-bolts of insight, seeing with Nietzsche, a bit, into the now-illumined depths.

It seems that, of late, with every third or fourth book I return to Nietzsche. Especially as I grow older – and am more conscious of the finite number of books that I will read and perhaps 'master' in my life – I feel driven to place myself at the feet of a few sages again and again, and hopefully come to terms with them. Engaging this small group – in which I also would include, among a few others, Plato, Aristotle, and possibly Hegel – one is repaid by neither loving uncritically nor criticizing un-lovingly.

In recent readings I've really been struck by Nietzsche's psychological insights; I find “confirmation” for many of his claims in my own experience, and reflection on my motivations. In particular, it seems that something like the “will to power” is indeed a central force in human agency and development. In the lamentable “post-Modern” intellectual climate, where, thanks to Nietzsche's expropriators, there are always dark associations with any talk of “power” (e.g., “patriarchal relations of power” and so on), perhaps Nietzsche can be rescued from the new orthodoxy by noting that his locution could be alternatively rendered as “will to efficacy, capacity, mastery” - the drive to expand, grow, strengthen, “widen.” Hence it's no coincidence that he adverts again and again to artistry and creativity as essential to being human – and that in Zarathustra the spirit's “third metamorphosis” is “the child.” The artist, flowing with his work, and the healthy child, in whom play and learning are fused, are paradigmatic cases of self-stoking efficacy. Healthy development is nothing if not “self-overcoming.”

To the extent that we appreciate the psychological role and effects of self-confidence vs. self-doubt/insecurity, in ourselves and others, we get a glimpse of the foundational part played by a person's "sense of self-efficacy"/will-to-power (note too how this provides the psychological nexus to appreciate Nietzsche's distinction of "good vs. evil" vs. "good vs. bad" - someone whose morality/temperament is 'slavish' isn't any less motivated by will-to-power than a more 'noble' sort, but the quality or character of their respective 'mastery' is of course radically different).

More “confirmation” of Nietzsche's psychological perspicuity comes from some of the more envelope-pushing and inspiring figures in Modern Psychology. One of my favorites is Abraham Maslow, whose excellent book, Towards a Psychology of Being, I have been revisiting over the last few days. Illustrating his classic distinction between motivation according to "deficiency needs" vs. according to "growth needs," Maslow writes,

"Every human being has both sets of forces within him. One set clings to safety and defensiveness out of fear, tending to regress backward, hanging on to the past, afraid to grow away from the primitive communication with the mother's uterus and breast, afraid to take chances, afraid to jeopardize what he already has, afraid of independence, freedom and separateness. The other set of forces impels him toward full functioning of all his capacities, toward confidence in the face of the external world at the same time that he can accept his deepest, real, unconscious Self ... Therefore we can consider the process of healthy growth to be a never ending series of free choice situations, confronting each individual at every point throughout his life, in which he must choose between the delights of safety and growth, dependence and independence, regression and progression, immaturity and maturity."
(pp. 46-47)[emphasis in original]

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes,

"Not the height but the precipice is terrible. That precipice where the glance plunges down and the hand reaches up. There the heart becomes giddy confronted with its double will. Alas, friends, can you guess what is my heart's double will?

"This, this is my precipice and my danger, that my glance plunges into the height and that my hand would grasp and hold on to the depth. My will clings to man; with fetters I bind myself to man because I am swept up toward the overman; for that way my other will wants to go. And therefore I live blind among me as if I did not know them, that my hand might not wholly lose its faith in what is firm." [emphasis in original]
(Zarathustra, trans. by Walter Kaufmann, Second Part, #21, "On Human Prudence," p. 142)

In perhaps my favorite of Nietzsche's works, Daybreak, the literal terror associated with individuation/individuality - especially in the "long pre-history" of man, the dynamics of which Nietzsche delights in limning, especially in regards to the relationship of "morality" and mores -- is brought out most vividly:

"In comparison with the mode of life of whole millenia of mankind we present-day men live in a very immoral age: the power of custom is astonishingly enfeebled and the moral sense so rarefied and lofty it may be described as havine more or less evaporated ...[In the ages when the power of custom was strong] Every individual action, every individual mode of thought arouses dread; it is impossible to compute what precisely the rarer, choicer, more original spirits in the whole course of history have had to suffer through being felt as evil and dangerous, indeed through feeling themselves to be so. Under the dominion of the morality of custom, originality of every kind has acquired a bad conscience; the sky above the best men is for this reason to this very moment gloomier than it need be." [emphasis in original]
(Daybreak, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Bk. I, 9, "Concept of Morality of Custom", pp. 10-12).

Before shifting to a rather long sequence of observations on Christianity in Book I of Daybreak (with Christianity presumably meant as the morality of custom for the Occident), Nietzsche speculates as to two interrelated "vehicles" for the halting individuality of the distant past: madness and self-directed cruelty. Madness was an expedient because the custom-breaker needed somehow to believe in himself - and provide otherwordly witness to others - in his deviation from "established usages" (customs); only presumed possession by divinity could vouchsafe such brazenness. Self-cruelty, Nietzsche thinks, was an attempt to propitiate divinity for the seemingly reckless (and possibly impious) steps the iconoclast made bold to hazard.

It is typically Nietzschean to believe that we present-day men are vessels of our ancestors' passions/sufferings, inclinations, drives, etc. Here the - fascinating - point at issue is:

"Let us not be too quick to think that we have by now freed ourselves completely from such logic of feeling! Let the most heroic souls question themselves on this point. Every smallest step in the field of free thought, of a life shaped personally, has always had to be fought for with spiritual and bodily tortures; not only the step forward, no! the step itself, movement, change of any kind has needed its innumerable martyrs through all the long path-seeking and foundation-laying millenia ..."
(ibid., 18, "The morality of voluntary suffering", p. 17).

The personal quality here is undeniable - surely he writes from experience - and the point is striking. Throughout this piece I have put the word "confirmation" in scare-quotes, because it's not clear to me what constitutes proof or verification for psychological claims, and I've only hinted at "confirmation" in any event. But surely resonance with personal experience is a necessary (even if not sufficient) condition. So, one could do worse than begin by asking oneself, "do these claims comport with my experience?" I have suggested that they seem more than plausible, in light of my own reflections on myself and my life. Et tu?

Sunday Thought

It's high time for a new Decalogue.

Back to Reality

The UK Telegraph contains some insightful editorials in light of President Bush's imminent arrival in Britain. As an anglophile, and husband to an English lady, I will follow the President's reception with interest and, I'm sure, annoyance - though not with surprise. I've had enough debates with English friends, family, and acquaintances during the recent past to expect our president to get a real drubbing - he appears to many Brits to apotheosize the worst stereotypes of what it means to be American.

Mark Steyn's piece in the Telegraph (simple login required) reminds us that, just as we are wont to think of the U.S. as a "melting pot" for diverse nationalities, so - for its critics and enemies - it has become a cauldron in which almost every conceivable diabolical ingredient has been admixed, a stew of malignity. As he ruefully notes,

"The fanatical Muslims despise America because it's all lapdancing and gay porn; the secular Europeans despise America because it's all born-again Christians hung up on abortion; the anti-Semites despise America because it's controlled by Jews. Too Jewish, too Christian, too Godless, America is also too isolationist, except when it's too imperialist. And even its imperialism is too vulgar and arriviste to appeal to real imperialists: let's face it, the ghastly Yanks never stick it to the fuzzy-wuzzy with the dash and élan of the Bengal Lancers, which appears to be the principal complaint of Sir Max Hastings and his ilk."

Like a person, judge a nation by its friends - and its enemies.

(Fatuous) Intermezzo

Ode to Cleanliness
Content in a tub
My mind ranged back through the ages
Fingered its way through history's sullied pages
Now, a custom past puzzles me: it's the matter of the nose
For who can deny that man has always distinguised between ordure and rose?
Picture the scene: a knave in bed with his wench
-- the reek from each orifice would cause a God-awful stench
A french-kiss from her could cause a night of insomnia
filled with desperate prayers for chronic anosmia!
... so as I wash off the grime, become ever more fragrant
I give thanks to the tub which rids the scent of the vagrant.

Fragmenta Sophistica

I cannot resist: For those inclined to credit the reasoning and reportage of "journalist" Robert Fisk - widely admired by luminaries such as Richard Dawkins and Sting - this assessment is required reading (thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the link).

Rethinking Iraq, Pt. IV

“We see now that there were no WMD; therefore the war, predicated on their existence, was/is fraudulent.”

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. As usual, to recast the point at issue into more precise language puts the matter in a rather different light: to date no stockpiles of WMD have been found. Such a state of affairs is compatible with any number of scenarios:

1.There never were – say, since '97/'98 – any stockpiled WMD.
2.Such stocks recently existed, but
a. were moved out of country before the war
b. were destroyed before/during the war
c. have been well hidden in country.

I will countenance the matter of “fraudulence” below.

“But surely it's reasonable to lean towards the supposition that there never were any – especially because if Saddam had them, he had nothing to lose in using them during the war.”

However puzzling, their non-use during the war is logically compatible both with their non-existence and points 2a-2c above.

What would motivate moving, hiding, or destroying the weapons, instead of putting them to murderous effect on the battlefield? Perhaps to foil the inspections yet again, thereby averting war altogether and finally winning the relief of sanctions. Or as a matter of strategy it may have been expected that, if war should come, a negotiated settlement (as Tariq Aziz recently claimed that Saddam had envisioned) would be the more likely – and more advantageous to the Ba'athists - without the blatantly provocative act of using WMD (or at least such weapons being located en masse). Finally, there was likely a burning desire to humiliate the United States, and “vindicate” the claims of the Iraqi regime, even in defeat.

To judge the war's legitimacy with respect to the question of WMD, it's necessary to consider the notion of a WMD “program.” Whereas WMD stockpiles are comprised of actual weaponized, ready-to-use agents, a “program” connotes the infrastructure to develop, preserve, or extend a WMD capability – espec. the “knowledge base.” The terminus of a program is obviously a stock of weapons, but a program can exist and pose a “threat” without currently being in an active mode of production. The danger pertains both to the ability to “ramp up” production of weapons quickly, as well as the oft-ignored capacity not simply to pass along weapons, but to share expertise and knowledge of procurement networks.

Now, David Kay's report – despite the hype about what hasn't been found – did mention a number of ommissions and actions which show that Iraq clearly (12 years on) was in violation of UN resolution 687 (cp. paragraph 8); in context, to “disarm” can only mean to cease and desist from any WMD-related activity. In other words, Iraq had no intention to relieve itself of, at the least, its WMD program (system of activities) – which means, ultimately, of the weapons themselves, whether potential or extant. Hence the administration was correct in its broad claims that Iraq had indeed not “disarmed,” that it had no intention of doing so, and that anemic UN “inspections” would never do the trick.

Still, the administration could have done a better job of clearly distinguishing between the weapons themselves, and the infrastructure which supported their development, stressing how both, in complementary ways, posed a "grave and gathering" danger. Yet perhaps they can be forgiven for not splitting such fine hairs too often, in light of the difficulty many seemed to have following far coarser distinctions.

Let's assume that we can somehow now know for a certainty that there were not any stockpiles of WMD at any recent time. The crucial question is: “on the available pre-war evidence, was it reasonable to conclude that the stocks existed?”; alternatively: “was it reasonable to err on the assumption that they probably existed?”

If it was, then - despite their non-existence - we would be in the domain of forgivable error; no person, no organization, is infallible. Parallels readily spring to mind: a conscientious jury might reasonably find an actually innocent defendant to be guilty, based on the evidence that was available; In the field of medicine, a testicular lump will be taken as a potential sign of great danger, warranting the removal of the entire testicle for biopsy; the growth might turn out to be benign, but the cost/benefit casuistry would have been rational.

Many critics of the war, keen to convict the Bush administration of special pleading, seem to have forgotten that other persons and organizations had reached essentially the same conclusion as to the status of WMD in Iraq (though of course there would be differences over the details - viz., the extent of Iraq's malfeasance). Notably,

* UN resolutions post-687 through 1441 were predicated on the judgment that Iraq had not met its “disarmament obligations”
* President Bill Clinton strongly warned of the danger Iraq's WMD posed
* Former heads of UNSCOM Richard Butler and Rolf Ekeus had no doubt about Iraq's intentions and capacities.
* In December 1998, Anti-war favorite Scott Ritter penned an incredibly damning article – both for Iraq, and his subsequent, “deconstructed” self – as to the state of Iraq's disarmament at that time. This riposte to the “new” Ritter, by journalist David Rose, effectively critiques the view that Iraq could have had WMD in '98, yet suddenly elected to give then up after UNSCOM inspections ceased.

Add to this a point that no one can deny: If, from 1991 to 2003, the Iraqis had nothing to hide, they sure went to a lot of trouble to hide it.

In light of the preponderance of informed opinion which before the war held that Iraq had not disarmed (entailing both infrastructure and extant weapons), and in light of the fact that infrastructural elements are now coming to light, it seems to me that it is still eminently reasonable to assume that Iraq did indeed have stockpiles of WMD which have so far eluded us – either through being hidden/moved, or destroyed. In any event, nothing yet has emerged – by a longshot – to establish that the war was/is fraudulent on its own terms.

(Functional) Intermezzo

"There are many good inventions on earth, some useful, some pleasing; for their sake, the earth is to be loved. And there is such a variety of well-invented things that the earth is like the breasts of a woman: useful as well as pleasing."

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Third Part, "On Old and New Tablets" (12, section 17)

Rethinking Iraq, Pt. III

NB: In order to post more regularly, and as an interesting exercise in its own right, I've decided to tackle frequent and (at times) credible objections to the invasion of Iraq. In the course of doing so over the next weeks, I will indeed redeem the promissory notes I've issued (for fuller elaboration/justification of certain points) in parts I & II, and hopefully be able to do so within more manageable proportions.

"There never was a consistent rationale for war; the 'case' kept changing."

This is trivially true: different reasons were emphasized at different times. Yet that's a far cry from saying that the case was incoherent - which seems to be what the critic is really driving at. The point is: something which is not "consistent" is not thereby "inconsistent" in the sense of being self-contradictory.

Surely there are few cases in life where a person - or a 'corporate person'/persona ficta, such as a club, a family, an organization, a government administration - has one, and only one, reason for a course of action.

E.g.,

Why did you go to that particular college?
Why did you marry such-and-such?
Why/how did you alight on the career you now have?
Why were your assets invested in that particular manner?
Etc.

In the case of the first, one might say:

* My application was accepted
* The tuition was affordable
* The campus was near/far from home
* The institution has a good reputation
* The department I studied under offered a program catering to my interests
* Professor such-and-such offered an ongoing seminar I was dying to attend
* I knew I would have the chance to write for the department's periodical
etc.

What were the reasons adduced, at different times, for invading Iraq?

* Prevent or disrupt the confluence of terrorism and WMD: well and truly verify that Iraq had disarmed, and disarm it if it hadn't.
* Attempt to establish a beachead for political moderation in the Muslim Middle East
* End the reign of a wicked tyrant, thereby liberating his oppressed subjects
* Show U.S. - and Western-International[!] - resolve against despots.
* Move forward more constructively towards some kind of resolution on the question of Palestine

Reasons which weren't stated explicitly, but were hinted at, or might have been adduced:

* Prevent Iraq from ultimately gaining the deterrent effect of N. Korea.
* End a long-standing conflict/stalemate which not only had seen diminishing returns, but was
making much trouble for the U.S. vis a vis the wider 'war against terrorism'
* De-couple the U.S. and Saudi Arabia (including moving the troops out of the Arabian Peninsula),in order politically to be able to lean on and isolate the house of Saud for its duplicitousness
* Frighten other "rogue" states into thinking twice or thrice about developing WMD and colluding with terrorists
* Protect the Oil supplies of Iraq and the Gulf from any future deviltry of Saddam's.
* Harm OPEC

It hardly takes an extended analysis to show that these various reasons - whether one credits any/every one of them, or not - form a kind of "family" or system of justifcations. In fact they nearly all appear, or are implied, in the National Security Strategy document of Sept. 2002. Hence some of the more charitable detractors of the invasion credit the case as representing an "Intellectual's War."

The essential quality of a system is that its constituents condition and mutually entail one another, resulting in a whole which transcends a mere summation of the parts. It's fairly clear how the Bush administration's various reasons relate to, and "shade" one another; e.g., Saddam Hussein is/was a paradigmatic "Stalinist" tyrant, the overthrowing of whom would be absolutely crucial to (a)make room for political moderation in Iraq and, by example, region-wide and (b)diffuse the appeal of Islamism, which is a reaction to the Scylla and Charybdis of modern Middle Eastern politics; heretofore the alternative has mainly been some variant of secular tyranny of the Ba'athist type or kingly-theocratic kleptocracy and corruption (Saudi).

If, in the case of the invasion of Iraq, one wants an over-arching goal that comprehends the more specific ends listed, then one has to advert to vague, inclusive ends like "security" or "serving vital, national interests," and so on. Of course the crucial question for political deliberation is, at this particular point in time, vis a vis Iraq, in what does serving our vital, national interests consist? The set of motives given - for which invasion was claimed to be the only effective means, however risky and drastic - form the Bush administration's answer (just as if, in the case of college attendance, my aim was "to get the best possible education under the circumstances," with the specific reasons given justifying how my choice of college served that aim).

As a matter of rhetoric and presentation of the case, clearly different facets of the overall "strategy" were disclosed piecemeal, or rarely all at once. That's hardly surprising in politics, where ends are constrained according to the "art of the possible," where the machinations of political opponents, and the interests and capacities of one's audience, always somehow have to be factored into the mix. Clearly President Bush lacks the gift of oratory, and surely he could have presented his case better. Even still, an examination of the record shows quite consistent fidelity to recurring themes.