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The time is perhaps close at hand when it will once again be understood what has actually sufficed for the basis for such imposing and absolute philosophical edifices as the dogmatists have hitherto reared: perhaps some popular superstition … [or] a deception on the part of grammar.The philosophies of Bertrand Russell and Friedrich Nietzsche might appear to have very little in common, indeed to be antithetical. Although Russell praised Nietzsche’s literary style, he had little positive to say about Nietzsche’s thought. He focused almost exclusively on Nietzsche’s ethical/political views, which he characterized as proto-fascist, and on his critique of religion, and rejected out of hand his ontology and epistemology.2 And I suspect that Nietzsche in turn would have dismissed Russell as an English “blockhead” in the broadly liberal, empiricist tradition of John Stuart Mill, on whom Nietzsche famously bestowed that epithet.3 But in fact these two philosophers expressed some remarkably similar views about knowledge, language, and mind – so similar as to raise the possibility that Russell was significantly influenced by Nietzsche on these matters. The connection between Nietzsche’s thought and 20th century analytic philosophy has not gone entirely unnoticed by Nietzsche commentators, especially Walter Kaufmann and Arthur C. Danto.4 But it remains a neglected topic, and the relation between Nietzsche and Russell even more so, and I hope to make a start on remedying that situation. Arguably the most striking overlap between Russell and Nietzsche lies in their treatment of Descartes’ famous elemental certainty cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). Each of them argued, and in much the same way, that ‘I think’ goes beyond the data of immediate experience in positing a mental substance or enduring self. And more significantly, both Russell and Nietzsche criticized ordinary language for embodying metaphysical errors, especially an unwarranted commitment to substance by the grammatical subject of a sentence. In his classic 1912 work The Problems of Philosophy, Russell accepted – though as only probably true – the Cartesian view that each person is directly aware of her own self as the thinker of her own thoughts: as the I of ‘I think.’5 But by 1913 he had given up somewhat cautiously on direct self-acquaintance,6 and by the 1920s he reached the firm conclusion that the ‘I think’ of Descartes’ cogito ergo sum goes beyond what one is entitled by experience to assert. Here are Russell’s own words in An Outline of Philosophy (1927): What, from [Descartes’] own point of view, he should profess to know is not ‘I think,’ but ‘there is thinking’.... I think we ought to admit that Descartes was justified in feeling sure that there was a certain occurrence, concerning which doubt was impossible; but he was not justified in bringing in the word ‘I’ in describing this occurrence.And later, in A History of Western Philosophy (1945): ‘I think’ is [Descartes’] ultimate premiss. Here the word ‘I’ is really illegitimate; He ought to state his ultimate premises in the form ‘there are thoughts’. The word ‘I’ is grammatically convenient, but does not describe a datum.7Russell denied that thinking, or thoughts, entail a thinker, and he explained the temptation of inferring a thinker from the occurrence of thoughts by appealing to what he regarded as the questionable metaphysical commitments of ordinary language. Again in his own words: Descartes believed in “substance,” both in the mental and in the material world. He thought that there could not be motion unless something moved, nor thinking unless someone thought. No doubt most people would still hold this view; but in fact it springs from a notion – usually unconscious – that the categories of grammar are the categories of reality.8The broader theme that ordinary language, and especially subject/predicate grammar, are laden with metaphysical errors concerning substance and the ego was a constant in Russell’s philosophy from the 1920s until his final years. For example, in his 1945 History of Western Philosophy, he was concerned to argue that the concept of substance, though grammatically useful, “is a metaphysical mistake, due to the transference to the world-structure of the structure of sentences composed of a subject and a predicate.”9 And he was surely aware of the theological significance of this point: that we have no knowledge of the existence of the soul.10 In An Outline of Philosophy the argument against substance goes like this: The notion of substance, at any rate in any sense involving permanence, must be shut out from our thoughts if we are to achieve a philosophy in any way adequate either to modern physics or modern psychology. Modern physics, both in the theory of relativity and in the Heisenberg-Schrodinger [quantum-physical] theories of atomic structure, has reduced “matter” to a system of [very brief] events…. And in psychology, equally, the “ego” has disappeared as an ultimate conception, and the unity of a personality has become a peculiar causal nexus. In this respect, grammar and ordinary language have been shown to be bad guides to metaphysics…. And it must be understood that the same reasons which lead to the rejection of substance lead also to the rejection of “things” and “persons” as ultimately valid concepts.11Note that Russell’s grammatical case against substance was linked to his defense of an event ontology – a point to which I shall return in section 2. Late in his career, somewhat embittered by the dismissal of his work by the then dominant ordinary-language school of analytic philosophy, Russell made some withering comments about that school, which he labeled “the cult of common usage.” Not only did he criticize its anti-science tendencies, but he also said that “it makes almost inevitable the perpetuation among philosophers of the muddle-headedness they have taken over from common sense,” and that it “seems to concern itself, not with the world and our relation to it, but only with the different ways in which silly people can say silly things.”12 Although Russell did not quite live long enough to witness the displacement of ordinary-language philosophy by a broadly Quinean naturalism as the dominant version of analytic philosophy, he would certainly have been heartened by the strong naturalist commitment to the philosophical importance of scientific knowledge and the limitations of common speech. In the late 1880s, the final years of Nietzsche’s career, he wrote two of his most important works: Beyond Good and Evil and The Will to Power, the latter incomplete and published only posthumously. Each of these works contains not only striking passages on the cogito that are in some respects reminiscent of Russell’s views but also other passages that go beyond them. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche offered some interesting reflections on ‘I think.’ He began by denying in Section 16 that it is known with direct certainty: There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are “immediate certainties”: for example, ‘I think’…. But that “immediate certainty” … involves a contradictio in adjecto, I shall repeat a hundred times; we really ought to free ourselves from the seduction of words!… The philosopher must say to himself: When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence “I think,” I find a whole series of daring assertions that would be difficult, perhaps impossible to prove: for example, that it is I who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an “ego,” and, finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking…. In short, the assertion ‘I think’ assumes that I compare my state at the present moment with other states of myself which I know, in order to determine what it is; [thus] … it has … no immediate certainty for me.He went on in section 17 to add that ‘It thinks’ is the most that one is entitled to claim possesses immediate certainty: With regard to the superstition of the logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small terse fact … namely, that a thought comes when “it” wishes, not when “I” wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “thinks.” It thinks; but that this “it” is precisely the famous old “ego” is … only a supposition,… and assuredly not an “immediate certainty.” After all, one has even gone too far with this “it thinks” – even the “it” contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. One infers here according to the grammatical habit: “Thinking is an activity; every activity requires an agent; consequently”…. Perhaps some day we shall accustom ourselves, including the logicians, to get along without the little “it” (which is all that is left of the honest little old ego).Finally, in section 54 he linked belief in a referent for the grammatical subject of ‘I think’ to belief in the soul: Formerly, one believed in the “soul” as one believed in grammar and the the grammatical subject: one said, “I” is the condition, “think” is the predicate and conditioned – and thinking is an activity to which thought must apply a subject as cause…. The possibility of a merely apparent existence of the subject, “the soul” in other words, may not always have remained strange to [Immanuel Kant] – that thought which as Vedanta philosophy existed before on this earth and exercised tremendous power.13Clearly Nietzsche shared Russell’s doubts about the immediate certainty of ‘I think,’ the validity of inferring a thinker from thoughts, and the reality of the ego or enduring self. The passages also suggest a grammatical diagnosis of the errors of the cogito. Although Nietzsche went beyond Russell in explicitly connecting the problems of the cogito with belief in the soul, Russell was certainly aware of the connection (as noted earlier), and they both clearly agreed on the faultiness of this belief.14 But in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche stopped short of dispensing altogether with a substantive subject for ‘thinks’ and settled – albeit provisionally – for ‘it thinks’ rather than ‘there is thinking.’ Nor did he clearly blame the concept of substance for the difficulties with ‘I think’. Finally, in rejecting all immediate certainties Nietzsche was more radical than Russell, who was too much of a traditional empiricist to give up on direct certainty concerning first-person, conscious thought and experience. Indeed, a few years earlier in The Gay Science Nietzsche referred to “that impetuous demand for certainty that today discharges itself among large numbers of people in a scientific-positivistic form.” (288) The differences between the two philosophers’ analyses of the cogito narrow considerably, however, in The Will to Power. In section 484 Nietzsche abandoned a grammatical subject for ‘thinks’ in just the way Russell did: “‘There is thinking: therefore there is something that thinks’: this is the upshot of all Descartes’ argumentation.” And in the very next sentence he also connected the flaws in ‘I think’ with the concept of substance: But that means positing as “true a priori” our belief in the concept of substance – that when there is thought there has to be something “that thinks” is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact but a logical-metaphysical postulate – Along the lines followed by Descartes one does not come upon something absolutely certain but only upon the fact of a strong belief.Finally, Nietzsche gave a grammatical diagnosis of the metaphysical problem of substance: The concept of substance is a consequence of the concept of subject: not the reverse! If we relinquish the soul, “the subject,” the precondition for substance in general disappears.In these passages it is clear that in The Will to Power Nietzsche not only continued to reject the ego, enduring self, or soul, but also acknowledged the role of the concept of substance in ‘I think’ and used it to develop further the suggestion that a false metaphysics is built into language and grammar. And the following passage from section 715 not only makes this last point but asserts the priority of becoming over stable being in a way reminiscent of the event ontology that Russell embraced in repudiating mental and physical substance: Linguistic means of expressions are useless for expressing “becoming”; it accords with our inevitable need to preserve ourselves to posit a crude world of stability, of ‘things’, etc. Russell was certainly well-acquainted with Beyond Good and Evil, for he discussed it at length in A History of Western Philosophy. (762-6) Yet despite the striking similarities between his and Nietzsche’s critiques of the cogito, we have seen that he dismissed the latter’s contributions to ontology and epistemology. What are we to make of this? Russell was a proudly progressive individual who was understandably repulsed by much of Nietzsche’s ethical and political thought, as the following passage from A History of Western Philosophy makes clear: I dislike Nietzsche because he likes the contemplation of pain, because he erects conceit into a duty, because the men he most admires are conquerors, whose glory is cleverness in causing men to die…. Nietzsche despises universal love; I feel it is the motive power to all that I desire as regards the world. His followers have had their innings, but we may hope that it is rapidly coming to an end. (772-3)It is tempting to suppose that Russell was in fact influenced at least by Beyond Good and Evil and that he consciously or subconsciously refused to admit it. But I think that there are good reasons for regarding this explanatory hypothesis as unjustified, though not necessarily false. They lie, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the radical empiricist thought of David Hume, and also, unexpectedly, in the work of the 18th century German thinker Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Hume is famous for his doctrine that we lack any direct awareness of the self and any good reason to believe in mental substance16 – a doctrine in obvious agreement with Russell and Nietzsche’s claim that ‘I think’ goes beyond the evidence of immediate experience. And as is well-known, Russell came to accept Hume’s doctrine.17 There is also little doubt that Nietzsche – perhaps from Immanuel Kant or Arthur Schopenhauer – was acquainted with Hume’s philosophy.18 So at least this much of Russell and Nietzsche’s common doubts about ‘I think’ could be due at least in part to Hume’s influence on both. And even if Nietzsche were unacquainted with Hume’s views on the self, the effect of those views on Russell would still undermine the explanatory hypothesis that Nietzsche influenced Russell. For in that case there would be an adequate historical account of Russell’s doubts about ‘I think’ that made no mention of Nietzsche’s similar doubts. As for Lichtenberg, he is best known for the often philosophically interesting aphorisms – which were admired by some eminent thinkers – in his lengthy notebooks.19 Here is his aphorism on the cogito: “We should say, ‘It thinks,’ just as we say, ‘It thunders.’ Even to say cogito is too much if we translate it with ‘I think.’ To assume the ‘I,’ to postulate it, is [merely?] a practical need.”20 Shades of Nietzsche – who indeed was one of the eminent admirers of Lichtenberg’s work!21 Another such admirer was Ludwig Wittgenstein.22 And according to Roger Kimball, Wittgenstein “made Lichtenberg one of his causes … and pressed copies of his work on friends, including Bertrand Russell.”23 Let me be clear about this: I am not implying that Lichtenberg definitely influenced Nietzsche’s and Russell’s critiques of the cogito. We don’t even know whether Russell actually read Lichtenberg, much less whether he was acquainted with the latter’s aphorism on the cogito. But such a chain of influence, with Lichtenberg as “common cause,” is certainly a possible explanation of the similarity between those critiques. And it seems to me that this possibility – along with the high probability of Humean influence on Russell and the possibility of Humean influence on Nietzsche – is serious enough to render unjustified the hypothesis that a direct influence of Nietzsche on Russell best accounts for the similarity. It might be objected that there is more to the overlap I have documented between Nietzsche and Russell than their common rejection of ‘I think.’ What about their claims that a false metaphysics of substance is built into ordinary language? But once again Hume’s radical empiricism, with its repudiation of mental as well as physical substance, could well be a common source of influence on Nietzsche and Russell. I conclude that at least at the present time, it is doubtful—albeit possible—that Russell was influenced by Nietzsche. There remains the interesting question of why Russell, despite having read Beyond Good and Evil, failed to acknowledge (or even notice?) the striking similarities between their views on the cogito. I have suggested that the answer lies in the substantial differences in their ethical and political perspectives. But that is a different issue altogether.
* Thanks to Richard Findler and Andrew Colvin for responses to an earlier version of this paper.
Danto, Arthur, Nietzsche as Philosopher (Macmillan, 1965). Farber, Marvin, “Introduction,” Human, All Too Human, Friedrich Nietzsche (Penguin, 1994). Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40). Kaufmann, Walter, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ (Vintage, 1968). ––––––, “Introduction,” The Portable Nietzsche (Viking, 1968). ––––––, Existentialism, Religion, and Death (Meridian, 1976). Kimball, Roger, “G. C. Lichtenberg: A ‘Spy on Humanity,’” in Lives of the Mind (Ivan R. Dee, 2002). Magnus, Bernd, Nietzsche’s Existential Imperative (Indiana University Press, 1979). Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil (Vintage, 1966). ––––––, The Will to Power (Vintage, 1968). ––––––, The Anti-Christ, in The Portable Nietzsche (Viking, 1968). ––––––, On the Genealogy of Morals (Vintage, 1969). ––––––, The Gay Science (Vintage, 1974). Russell, Bertrand, Problems of Philosophy (Williams and Norgate, 1912). ––––––, “On Propositions,” Aristotelian Society Supplement 2 (1919), 1-43. ––––––, The Analysis of Mind (Allen and Unwin, 1921). ––––––, An Outline of Philosophy (Allen and Unwin, 1927). ––––––, The Analysis of Matter (Kegan Paul, 1927). ––––––, Religion and Science (Thornton Butterworth, 1935). ––––––, A History of Western Philosophy (Simon & Schuster, 1945). ––––––, Human Knowledge (Allen and Unwin, 1948). ––––––, My Philosophical Development (Allen and Unwin, 1959). ––––––, Theory of Knowledge (Allen and Unwin, 1984). Stern, J.P., Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions (Indiana University Press, 1959). Waismann, Friedrich, “How I See Philosophy,” in Logical Positivism, ed. A.J. Ayer (Free Press, 1959).
Department of Philosophy |