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The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Volume 47, Issue 1, Spring 2016,

pp. 101-118 (Article)

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 Julius Bahnsen’s Influence on Nietzsche’s Wills-Theory

Anthony K. Jensen

Abstract: This article traces the development of Nietzsche’s early adoption

and later rejection of Schopenhauer’s theory of Will. I argue that Nietzsche’s
break with Schopenhauer was coextensive with his acceptance of explanatory
naturalism about both external and internal activities. I argue further that a
major source for four of his specific arguments against the Schopenhauerian
primacy of the one Will was the little-known neo-Schopenhauerian thinker Julius
Bahnsen. Using Bahnsen, Nietzsche argues (1) that there is no empirical evi-
dence of a transcendent Will; (2) that explanations of behavior do not require a
transcendent Will; (3) that what explains behavior is not a “thing” at all, but a
fluid dynamic of strivings; and (4) that these strivings are “guided” even absent
a distinct guiding principle.

Keywords: Julius Bahnsen, Will, Schopenhauer, self-knowledge, agency

N ietzsche’s break from Schopenhauer is usually regarded as coextensive

with his movement toward ontological naturalism, the view that all there
is is limited by the scope of what is naturally observable. Moral norms like good
and evil are accordingly ruled out as “things,” but naturalized as human, all-
too-human constructions, just as much as are God and the soul, just as much as
would Schopenhauer’s non–naturally observable one world Will. While I think
that basic picture is correct, I also think that scholars have regarded the problem
with insufficient attention to the historical context of that transition, especially
when it comes to naturalistic explanations of choice and agency. The move away
from a Schopenhauerian explanatory framework as to how a person selects his
or her courses of action involves a naturalistic view of agency that runs directly
through the “neo-Schopenhauerian” school.1 A relatively little-known group of
thinkers, especially in Anglophone circles, Julius Frauenstädt, Eugen Dühring,
Eduard von Hartmann, Philipp Mainländer, and Julius Bahnsen, each carried
Schopenhauer’s work in fascinating directions, each of whom Nietzsche knew
intimately and engaged with philosophically. Nietzsche’s attitude toward each of
these figures is critical to varying degrees and especially in the cases of Hartmann
and Dühring is quite hostile. But as is often the case with Nietzsche, the hostil-
ity he shows an author often masks a deeper influence. Nietzsche’s rejection of

JOURNAL OF NIETZSCHE STUDIES, Vol. 47, No. 1, 2016

Copyright © 2016 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

101
102   Anthony K. Jensen

Schopenhauer’s transcendent Will and postulation of naturalistic power-drives

to explain norm-motivated behavior was, I will show, highly indebted specifi-
cally to Julius Bahnsen’s Zum Verhaltniss zwischen Wille und Motiv (1870).
Bahnsen’s work, I contend, is a crucial intermediary between Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche when it comes to explaining the manner by which the competition
of power-drives within an agent leads to the expression of certain behaviors.
To begin, let us dispense with a common sense view of norm selection, in
other words, the view everyone involved in this article—Schopenhauer, the
neo-Schopenhauerians, and Nietzsche—is arguing against. This view holds that
there is an “I” that stands apart from the electrical-chemical operations in the
physical brain. And it holds that this “I” is presented with a decision among
representational norms whose intellectual content competes in terms of their
respective commendability. The “I” enacts that norm once it decides which
course of action was the preferable one. Now, the belief in a freely-willed delib-
erative “I” that listens attentively to competing arguments and chooses one on the
basis of an allegedly rational decision, to each of these philosophers, is deeply
flawed. Not only does this commonsense view of agency rely upon a supra-
naturalistic attribution of a thing known as an “I,” its explanatory power rests
on the belief in the supra-naturalistic connection between ideational content and
physical activities. Thus, the view being argued against by Schopenhauer, the
neo-Schopenhauerians, and Nietzsche is both ontologically supra-naturalistic
and explanatorily supra-naturalistic.
Schopenhauer’s dual-aspect theory was to have revealed the mind-body prob-
lem as a philosophical misunderstanding, specifically, as an attempt to misapply
the category of causation to a supposed interaction between a phenomenal body
whose conceptualization is inextricable from the principle of sufficient reason
and the Will, which for Schopenhauer transcends conceptualization entirely.
The elections of norms are the means to satisfy the Will’s striving for life. That
striving is individuated into particular motives by means of the Will’s objecti-
fication into diverse satisfactions. Although all organisms seek what satisfies
the Will, within rational organisms, the objectification of the Will into a spe-
cifically intellectual principle allows it to demand a much more complicated
range of satisfactions –ideational as well as bodily satisfactions— as it becomes
increasingly individuated into a multiplicity of intellectual motives. However,
for Schopenhauer, which norms are elected as guides for action is not the effect
or result of the Will electing those norms. Although motives are ultimately
derivative from the one Will to Life, they are not ontologically derivative in the
sense of being the effect of the Will, but in the sense of being another means to
observe and thus another way to explain why an individual acts. Because for
Schopenhauer the Will and embodied motives are not two separate entities and
because there is thus no causal relation that can be predicated between them,
 Bahnsen’s Influence on Nietzsche’s Wills-Theory   103

the familiar problem of how the Will causes the embodied motives to seek
­certain actions is not solved, exactly, but avoided. Holding the dual-aspect theory
means that there is one substance, but two perspectives by which two explana-
tions of an action can be constructed: one noumenal as the ultimate explanation
of everything, and one phenomenal that regards the particular explanation of
this particular, spatiotemporally specific, behavior. Both are correct, from two
divergent perspectives. The first correct explanation would posit one world Will,
the noumenal thing-in-itself, as the ultimate essence of everything including
the activities of all and any organic beings. That explanation is not a product
of the understanding per se. The apprehension of the one world Will rests upon
the mystically felt connection of the Will as simultaneously the essence of the
self and of all things. The second, phenomenal explanation proceeds from the
discursive understanding, running through the cognitive forms of space, time,
and causality to present the experience of the self, as everything else, as a tem-
poral series of individuated sensations. Thus, while Schopenhauer collapses
the Will-Body ontology into a single, pan-enthetic thing, he maintains a dual-
ist epistemology insofar as there remains for any explanation of action both a
phenomenal-experientiable ground and a transcendent-mystical ground. The
former is the domain in which the natural sciences operate, the latter the arena
in which artists, saints, and genius philosophers, no doubt like Schopenhauer
himself, each operates.
Different “neo-Schopenhauerians” came to terms with Schopenhauer’s
supra-naturalistic Will in different ways. Eugen Dühring recast Schopenhauer’s
­pessimism—the view that the world Will is best characterized by a ceaseless
and unsatisfiable striving—in a more fatalistic and indeed political fashion.2 For
Eduard von Hartmann, Schopenhauer’s ahistoricity needed to be remedied by a
synthesis with Hegel’s historical phenomenology, such that the Schopenhauerian
unconscious Will would do for history what the ruling Idea did for Hegel.3 For
Philipp Mainländer, Schopenhauer’s transcendent unified Will was collapsed
into an immanent multiplicity of individuated wills.4 Julius Bahnsen, closer to
Mainländer than any of the others, sought a way to transform Schopenhauer’s
transcendent explanation into a naturalistic one that explains sufficiently why
agents behave as they do. To that end, he aimed to demonstrate that (1) there is
no evidence of a transcendent Will; (2) explanations of behavior do not require
a transcendent Will; (3) that what explains behavior is not a “thing” at all, but
a fluid dynamic of strivings; and (4) that these strivings are “guided” even
absent a distinct guiding principle. With these four steps Bahnsen sought to
naturalize Schopenhauer’s dual-aspect theory of explanation. My argument in
what follows is that not only did Nietzsche know Bahnsen’s four arguments, he
incorporated them into his own effort to naturalize Schopenhauer for the sake
of explaining agency.
104   Anthony K. Jensen

Bahnsen and Nietzsche

Since Julius Bahnsen is mostly unknown, and not just by specialists of Nietzsche,
it is helpful to introduce him in the context of his relationship to Nietzsche.5
First off, there are a number of curious points of biographical contact between
the pair. Bahnsen wrote an autobiography whose hyperbolic self-loathing stands
as an antipode to Nietzsche’s hyperbolic self-praise in Ecce homo. The title of
Bahnsen’s autobiography, Wie ich wurde, was ich ward (ed. 1905), is a mirror
image of Nietzsche’s subtitle, Wie man wird, was man ist.6 Like Nietzsche,
Bahnsen was trained in philology, at the same university, in fact, that would
become Erwin Rohde’s home: Kiel. Like Nietzsche, too, a long, happy profes-
sorship was not in the cards. Bahnsen eked out a lonely existence in Pomerania,
and was lucky just to have fairly steady employment as a gymnasium teacher.
For Bahnsen the reason was not poor health, but a combination of his militant
defense of Schopenhauer and his personality’s vacillation between manic hos-
tility and lugubrious depression.7 With respect to the latter, even the careful
reader must take pains to avoid a too-easy psychologizing, as many still do
with Nietzsche, between Bahnsen’s personal melancholy and his philosophical
engagement with pessimism.8
Bahnsen visited Schopenhauer twice during the 1850s. As it was for
Mainländer and Frauenstädt, and one might well add Wagner, the encounter with
Schopenhauer was remarkably transformative. Bahnsen left feeling more like an
apostle than a philosophical colleague: “from then on I regarded and honored him
as my master.”9 Like Nietzsche, his initial reading of Schopenhauer produced
great enthusiasm, but also, later, a sort of retrospective embarrassment at having
been carried away into the ether of mystical speculation. Toward the end of his
life, Bahnsen “felt he had to say that it was not only inappropriate, but factually
incorrect, to consider myself just a mere disciple of Schopenhauer. One could
well call me his student, but not a mere apostle, even when I was younger; but
it’d be more congenial still [to call me] a Fortführer und Vollender.”10 Bahnsen
proved to be much more than a “continuer” and “completer”; indeed, as we are
about to see, some of his positions move in different and indeed in contrary
directions to his former master.
Bahnsen and Nietzsche had a loose but documented acquaintanceship –
philosophically and personally—for more than eleven years. In 1867, Nietzsche
enthusiastically refers Bahnsen’s Beiträge zur Charakterologie (1867) to his
friend Gersdorff, on account of its “viel Liebe zum ‘Meister,’” and “wirklich
viel gute Gedanken und Beobachtungen [. . .]” (Nietzsche to Carl von Gersdorff,
November 24, 1867, and December 1, 1867, no. 554; KSB 2, 239).11 One year
later, Nietzsche tells Gersdorff that they should have a get together of all “unsre
philosophischen Freunde” (Nietzsche to Carl von Gersdorff, February 16, 1868,
no. 562; KSB 2, 258). Bahnsen is named alongside Dühring and Frauenstädt as
 Bahnsen’s Influence on Nietzsche’s Wills-Theory   105

people they simply must invite. The most interesting letter comes on February 22,
1878, precisely during Nietzsche’s last months at Basel and the start of his
composition of Human, All Too Human (KGB II 6/2, 803–5). Bahnsen wrote
to Nietzsche to express his enthusiastic agreement with Nietzsche’s works to
date, specifically Birth of Tragedy, and the first two Untimely Meditations, on
each of which he claims to have been lecturing. (If Bahnsen is being honest
here, I believe this makes him the earliest professional lecturer on Nietzsche’s
thought—nearly a decade before the more noted Georg Brandes.) He commends
Nietzsche’s emphasis on two underappreciated aspects of their common master:
Schopenhauer’s view of health and his resistance to statist “culture.” Bahnsen,
however, found the Wagnerian overtones hard to stomach and found Nietzsche’s
appropriation of the dual-aspect theory for the dual forces whose intermingling
allegedly produces Greek tragedy to be both a stretch of Ancient history and a
misappropriation of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics. Apart from those critiques,
which are sound enough, the letter was uncommonly congenial for Bahnsen,
who even offers to form a “Waffenbruederschaft” on the ninetieth birthday of
Schopenhauer in the spirit of their “gemeinsamen Strebens”—a phrase that,
given their mutual thoughts about “Streben” or “striving,” was probably at least
partly tongue-in-cheek. Nietzsche never answered Bahnsen. His sister Elizabeth
wrote to Bahnsen instead on September 3, 1878:
My poor brother, Professor Dr. Nietzsche, was so troubled by headaches
and eye problems this winter that all writing and reading was forbidden
to him. He regrets for that reason continually that he could not answer
your kind and endearing letter. He hopes very much, however, to soon
be able to have a personal meeting with you. [. . .] My brother belongs
among the most serious and joyful readers of your Charakterologie, but
because of his suffering he is prevented from becoming better acquainted
in the area of contemporary German philosophy than he would wish. . . .12
Bahnsen died in 1881 (with the self-chosen epitaph: “Vita mea irritus labor”13)
and thus did not live to see Nietzsche’s mature writing and whatever new direc-
tions it may have taken. But considering Nietzsche never wrote to Bahnsen in
the three years between Bahnsen’s letter and his death, it is unlikely that he
remained nearly so enthusiastic about Bahnsen as Elizabeth suggests. Nietzsche
rarely speaks well of any of the neo-Schopenhauerians after the 1880s, and his
vitriol against the life-denying pessimists generally would have precluded any
friendship with Bahnsen personally. On the other hand, a waning enthusiasm for
Bahnsen personally does not mean Nietzsche was indifferent to his thought. After
all, Nietzsche bought or borrowed Bahnsen’s works faithfully soon after they
were published: the two volumes of his Charakterologie in November, 1867,
Bahnsen’s Zur Philosophie der Geschichte in 1872, and his posthumous Der
Widerspruch im Wissen und Wesen der Welt in 1882, at a time when, of course,
106   Anthony K. Jensen

any strong allegiance to Schopenhauerianism would have already been purged.14

It is better to say that Nietzsche’s attitude toward the neo-Schopenhauerians,
and Bahnsen especially, is highly ambivalent, something reflected in a lengthy
reference in the Gay Science:
But let me ask you: should we perhaps consider that old clap-trap Bahnsen
a credit to the Germans, seeing how decadently he lived his whole life in
a Realdialektik of misery and his “personal bad luck”? Perhaps precisely
this is German? (I herewith recommend his writings for the purpose for
which I have used them myself: as an anti-pessimistic diet, especially
with respect to their elegantiae psychologicae; I think they should be
effective even for the most constipated bowels and minds.) [. . .] Neither
Bahnsen nor Mainländer, not to mention Eduard von Hartmann, gives us
any clear evidence regarding the question whether Schopenhauer’s pes-
simism, his horrified look into a de-deified world that had become blind,
mad, and questionable, his honest horror, was not merely an exceptional
case among the Germans but a German event. (GS 357)

Bahnsen’s On the Relation between Will and Motive

Bahnsen’s most elegant and focused formulation of a naturalized theory of

choice and agency comes in his short pamphlet Zum Verhältniss zwischen Wille
und Motiv (1870).15 Here, Bahnsen begins his account by attacking the neo-
Schopenhauerian direction taken by Eduard von Hartmann, Nietzsche’s own
mid-1870s foe.16 A largely unsuccessful attempt to syncretize Schopenhauer’s
metaphysical Will with Hegel’s philosophy of history, Hartmann’s system holds
that a singular metaphysical Unconscious guides the several unconsciousnesses
of individual human rational agents to accomplish what ends the metaphysical
Unconscious seeks. The ends sought by the one world Unconscious in fact
obviate the individual’s need to will by himself or herself, since what it wills
is irresistible by individual human conscious wills. Accordingly, all traces of
individual character are accidents and all clashes of will—interpersonally and
intrapersonally—are mere surfaces that are to be “aufgehoben” along the path
of the Metaphysical Unconscious’ march through history.17 Not only is history
a night in which all cows are black, those cows trudge single file off a cliff into
the abyss of “Willenslosigkeit.”
Hartmann is obviously the furthest thing from a naturalist, as he thinks that
the source of all norm-selections is ultimately transcendent. Any explanation
that involves the immanent, individuated motives of a spatiotemporally specific
action are regarded as a mere illusion masking the one true world-mover, the
metaphysical unconscious which transcends the limits of natural explanation
by definition.
 Bahnsen’s Influence on Nietzsche’s Wills-Theory   107

Bahnsen’s arguments against Hartmann do not here concern his pessimism or

historiography,18 but the coherence of his account of a transcendent will, or in
Hartmann’s terms, the “metaphysische Unbewusstsein.” There are three distinct
arguments Bahnsen employs against Hartmann’s metaphysics.

1. Argument from Experience: We are only warranted to explain phenom-

ena that can be observed within normal spatiotemporal experience. Via
introspection, which Bahnsen, in contrast to Schopenhauer, considers
just such an experience, we never actually feel a single-minded striv-
ing, and certainly no thing called “Will”; but we do feel a push toward
certain ends and a pull away from others. Thus all we are warranted to
posit to explain behaviors are pushes and pulls.19
2. Argument from Simplicity: Descriptive typological psychology
(Charakterologie) and contemporary cognitive science both demon-
strate that no two types of character respond to stimuli in identical
ways.20 If we hold a single common metaphysical Will for all types of
character, it becomes unnecessarily difficult to explain how an incred-
ibly diverse system of responses arose to those similar stimuli. It is
simpler to suppose that instead of one common Will, a person’s char-
acter is unique insofar as they have a unique expression of pushes and
pulls to those similar stimuli.21
3. Argument from Definition: Will is allegedly the thing that posits and
effectuates motives. But because Will is unconscious and because
motives require representations about the desirability or undesirabil-
ity of which ends are sought, we are left with the nonsense of positing
something unconscious that somehow holds representations.22

Out of his critique of Hartmann, Bahnsen develops his positive view of the con-
nections between will and motive. Empirically, our awareness of the push-pull
of our wills, if considered more reflectively, will usually yield a complex and
multifaceted dynamic of motivations. A single unitary cause of those motiva-
tions is not felt (following Hume); but neither is it logically necessary (contrary
to Kant), nor will it even prove useful for explaining the connection between
consciousness and bodily motion. It would be truer to experience to label what
we actually do experience in self-reflection as a dynamic of multifaceted activi-
ties—and leave it at that.
Since the alleged connection between a hypothetical Will and activities is
unexperientiable, a naturalistic explanation that in no way sacrifices explanatory
scope would involve treating the activities we do experience—that dynamic of
willing—as the only justifiable explanatory factors. Rather than hypostatize a
transcendent motivator to select particular motives, one might simply individu-
ate those strivings by the “that” for which they strive.23 With words Nietzsche
108   Anthony K. Jensen

seems to have cribbed quite closely, Bahnsen writes: “Wie es ein Missbrauch
der Sprache ist, hinter ihr die Gedanken zu verstecken, so des Handelns, wenn
sich [. . .] ‘der Wille hinter der That verbirgt’—Beides geht ‘wider die Natur’”
[“Just as it is a misappropriation for language to hide thoughts behind it, so it
is with doings when one . . . ‘conceals will behind the deed’—both are ‘con-
trary to nature’”].24 Compare Nietzsche’s phrasing at GM I:13: “nur unter
der Verführung der Sprache [. . .], welche alles Wirken als bedingt durch ein
Wirkendes, durch ein ‘Subjekt’ versteht und missversteht, kann es anders ers-
cheinen” [“Only under the seduction of language . . . , which understands and
misunderstands all acts as conditioned by an acting-thing, by a ‘subject,’ can
it appear otherwise”]. It is, Bahnsen thinks, a misappropriation of linguistic
custom for ontology to claim there must be a subject for every verb, a doer
behind every deed. And when the doing is done, no fixed effect or product can
be adduced either: there can only be, in Bahnsen’s words, a “Wirken ohne ein
Gewirktes” [“doing without a deed”].25 And even the nominalized form ‘wills’
is misleading (if convenient); better would it be if we could talk in terms of “das
Erregende” [“the stimulating”], “ein Hervorbringendes” [“a bringing forth”], or
“Producirendes” [“producing”].26 Note the participial form of each term. What
we experience are doings, not things. And if all we experience are doings of
various sorts, the leap immediately to a doer is unwarranted without first con-
sidering the possibility that the multifaceted doings are sufficient to explain all
that can be observed to occur.
In place of Schopenhauer’s explanatory motive-act dualism, which would
require an explanation of their interaction and an account of the “aims” of the
motive, Bahnsen thinks that the strivings themselves are, in their very charac-
ter, motivational. Accordingly, the action of a person cannot be considered a
decision by a deciding thing, but an expression of the outcome of the dynamic
agonism among those motives themselves without any mediating party.27 This
agonism between drives Bahnsen labels, in intentional juxtaposition with Hegel,
individualistische Realdialektik.28 His theory counters Hegel in two ways: first,
rather than competing ideas or modes of thinking, for Bahnsen the elements of
the dynamic are themselves Real, natural, immanent entities. These strivings,
or as he sometimes calls them, “Henaden,” operate more like force-points than
mini-ontological substances, always active and always inherently directional.29
Second, in place of Hegel’s Aufhebung, the competition of those natural entities
remains forever unresolved in perpetual “Dialektik.” But lacking the synthetic
moment, the “Henaden” remain engaged in a constant war of all against all.
Everything natural is therefore best characterized by unresolvable contrari-
ety, from the directing forces of subjectivity to the forces of both animate and
inanimate material nature.30 And thus human behavior, just as rife with inner
contrariety, hesitation, and contradiction, is ontologically consistent with the
whole of nature. Accordingly, a naturalistic explanation of agency suffices as
 Bahnsen’s Influence on Nietzsche’s Wills-Theory   109

a complete explanation insofar as there is no transcendent ground available for

possible appeal.31
On the whole, Bahnsen’s argument against Eduard von Hartmann works to
undermine a much larger target, namely, Schopenhauer’s hypostatization of
a transcendent principle to explain human action. Given Bahnsen’s naturalist
ontology and his naturalistic theory of explanation, what is normally termed
a “decision” cannot be the result of a deliberative “I” that freely selects norms
as a conscious, intellectual representation. He excises representational motives
along with their alleged author, the “I” or the “Mind” or the one unified sin-
gular “Will,” all as a foray into the metaphysical that is neither warranted
nor necessary. In the enactment of norms no deliberation is required and
therefore the teleology of things is prohibited.32 Gone too is the possibility of
either freedom or determinism, since both presume there is decision maker
or actor independent of the actions: free will presumes the agent can control
those actions, whereas determinism presumes the agent cannot. A decision
is nothing more and nothing less than the expressed outcome of the dynamic
competition among the various willings-for-something. If one willing carries
more force over its contrary, if it possesses what Bahnsen names a “größere
Entschiedenheit,” the organism whose willing it is expresses that action.
Bahnsen’s individual wills simply express what it is their nature to express
without question of whether they could, would, or should have done otherwise.
When an agent claims retrospectively that their behavior was “norm-driven,”
when that means the intentional selection of an end whose preferability is
housed in conscious representation, it is not that they explain according to one
aspect of a dual-aspect theory, per Schopenhauer, but that they are appealing to
something which does not and never did exist. Such a claim, Bahnsen thinks,
is an unnecessary, inexpedient, and useless explanation for what he thinks his
individuated-willings theory can explain naturalistically. Explanatory natural-
ism is sufficient, more expedient, and more useful.

Nietzsche’s Adoption of Bahnsen

Imputing influences on Nietzsche carries two difficulties that few other phi-
losophers bear. First, he is notoriously circumspect and occasionally dishonest
about what he read. Even in what should have been the clearest expression of
his opinion of the neo-Schopenhauerian philosophers—Gay Science 99: “On
the Followers of Schopenhauer”—he never mentions by name the genuine
philosophical followers of Schopenhauer—Frauenstädt, Dühring, Hartmann,
Mainländer, or Bahnsen, though he knew each of their work intimately—opting
instead to wage yet another diatribe against the Wagnerians. Second, Nietzsche
rarely “shows his work” in terms of arguments whose lineage can be fruitfully
110   Anthony K. Jensen

compared or contrasted with the arguments of other authors who held similar
conclusions. More often than we would like, his bombastic conclusions are so
rhetorically stylized that it becomes especially difficult to distinguish what is
a Nietzschean rephrasing of an argument and what is genuinely a Nietzschean
argument. In the present case we have unquestionable evidence that Nietzsche
read Bahnsen often and over the course of his life, that he endorsed him enthusi-
astically at the same time he was developing his own theory of willing, and, what
is more, the extremely close phrasing in regarding motive-act dualism as a misap-
plication of language. To prove conclusively that Nietzsche did adopt Bahnsen’s
particular formulation of will-pluralism as a means of solving Schopenhauer’s
dual-aspect theory is not possible without further biographical evidence than we
possess. But to suggest Bahnsen’s will theory, as I believe no one has ever done,
as a major influence on the formation of Nietzsche’s own views, I want now to
revisit the steps of that movement, provide evidence that Nietzsche did utilize
arguments with similar terminology and intent, and offer those as evidence for
the conclusion that Bahnsen was a crucial intermediary between Schopenhauer’s
and Nietzsche’s theories of will.
Remember the four key points in Bahnsen’s correction of the Schopenhauerian/
Hartmannian interpretation of a single ontological Will:

1. there is no empirical evidence of a transcendent Will;

2. explanations of behavior do not require a transcendent Will;
3. that what explains behavior is not a “thing” at all, but a fluid dynamic
of strivings; and
4. that these strivings are “guided” even absent a distinct guiding principle.

First, it is well known that Nietzsche rejects the view of a single rational mind
that controls behavior, a view that had been dominant from Plato through the
Enlightenment. (See among many other passages KSA 13:11[113].) There is
ample evidence, too, that Nietzsche also rejected a single unified transcendent
Will, too. Beyond Good and Evil 19 spells this out well enough. Willing appears
to Nietzsche, in a passage of declared opposition to Schopenhauer’s Ur-Eine,
“above all something complicated, something that is a unity only in word,” a
plurality of feelings toward which and away from which we are moved. The
reasons Nietzsche offers in rejecting the single Will are very similar to Bahnsen:
our direct introspective experience never grants us a glimpse at anything more
than the spatiotemporally individuated willing states.
There are still harmless self-observers who believe in the existence
of “immediate certainties” such as “I think” or the “I will” that was
Schopenhauer’s superstition: just as if knowledge had been given an
object here to seize, stark naked, as a “thing-in-itself,” and no falsification
 Bahnsen’s Influence on Nietzsche’s Wills-Theory   111

took place from either the side of the subject or the side of the object.
But I will say this a hundred times: “immediate certainty,” like “absolute
knowledge” and the “thing in itself” contains a contradictio in adjecto.
(BGE 16; see also GS 127)
The phrasing of the passage directs the reader to the question of the possibility of
knowledge and the Kantian thing-in-itself. While certainly important, it distracts
from the original target, namely, our presumed immediate certainty of things like
the “I” as a single, unified thing. What we really sense of our internal self are
individuated willing-states. Necessarily so, since those individuated states are
experienced through the only possible ways human beings can experience—in
Nietzsche’s idiom: “perspectives”—that constitute both feeling and thinking
generally. Those perspectives render the great effluvia of sensuous and reflective
experience into manageable units according to both psychophysiological needs
and socially accepted conventions. But insofar as those perspectives operate
for the sake of the organism’s further empowerment, they render the effluvia
oversimplified and superficial. Nietzsche’s denial that we perceive outside of
perspectives thereby renders impossible that what we perceive in any allegedly
direct experience is an experience of a single, unindividuated, nonspatial, non-
temporal Will in-itself, the very thing that Schopenhauer touted was not only
the genuine character of both self and world, but also the object of immediate,
if mystical, apprehension. This, however, is not to say that the notion of a Will
should be discarded entirely. The notion of Will should instead be considered a
“Unifying Conception of Psychology” a “meaningful clarification,”—but “is it
the ‘Will’ of which Schopenhauer spoke, would it be the ‘essence of things’?:
my proposition is this: that the Will of all previous psychology is an unjustified
generalization, that this will does not exist” (KSA 13:14[121]). That is, because
we only experience self-feelings as a sort of “social structure composed of many
‘souls’” (BGE 19) that perpetually conflict with and strive to overcome one
another, we are not entitled to say there is a single Will that stands underneath
those strivings. As he emphasizes in the Genealogy of Morals “Aber es giebt
kein solches Substrat; es giebt kein ‘Sein’ hinter dem Thun, Wirken, Werden;
‘der Thäter’ ist zum Thun bloss hinzugedichtet” [“But there is no such substrate;
there is no ‘being’ behind the doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is poetically
attached to the deed”] (GM I:13; KSA 5, p. 279). Nietzsche claims this repeatedly.
“There aren’t any ‘will’s’; that is only a simplified conception constructed by
reason” (KSA 10:24[34]). And again, “‘Will’: that is what our feeling imparts
as a result of a process—thus it is already a consequence [Wirkung], and not
the beginning and the cause” (KSA 10:7[25]). And yet again, “‘Willing,’ as it is
understood, means as little as ‘thinking’: it is a pure fiction” (KSA 13:11[114]).
Will, therefore, cannot possibly be considered the substrate of the world of
appearances or of the self. It is not simply a redirection of the Schopenhauerian
112   Anthony K. Jensen

Will to Life, but a symbolic designation to stand for the common character of a
variegated number of what can be observed, namely, individuated strivings.33
The second argument concerns the necessity of a single principle named Will
to explain agency and behaviors. Nietzsche agrees with Bahnsen that there is no
such necessity. “The ‘inner world’ is full of phantoms. . .: the will is one of them.
The will no longer moves anything, hence does not explain anything either—it
merely accompanies events; it can also be absent” (TI “Errors” 3). As with the
first argument by Bahnsen, Nietzsche uses not only the general conclusion, but
also the three supporting arguments Bahnsen utilized with respect to this second
point. That is, Nietzsche rejects that a transcendent entity is required to explain
actions on the grounds that it is not (2a) necessary, or (2b) expedient, or even (2c)
useful. With respect to necessity (2a), Nietzsche writes: “The assumption of one
single subject is perhaps unnecessary [nicht nothwendig]; perhaps it is just as
permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is
the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general? A kind of aristocracy
of ‘cells’ in which dominion resides?” (KSA 11:40[42]). Just as Bahnsen thought
the base-experience we could have were sufficient for explaining the pushes and
pulls we encounter in acts of willing, so Nietzsche thinks that it is unnecessary to
posit some one thing behind them. The argument, at least here, does not require
Nietzsche to either reject the one Will altogether (though he will elsewhere), nor
even to posit something suitable in its place. Like Bahnsen, all Nietzsche has to
do here is point out that choice and agency could well be explained without refer-
ence to a single thing. And indeed, he does: “Finally: why could ‘a purpose’ not
be an epiphenomenon in the series of changes in the activating forces that bring
about the purposive action—a pale image sketched in consciousness beforehand
that serves to orient us concerning events, even as a symptom of events, not as
their cause?—But with this we have criticized the will itself: is it not an illusion to
take for a cause that which rises to consciousness as a will-act?” (KSA 12:12[1]).
With respect to expediency (2b), consider again GM I:13: “Basically, the com-
mon people double a deed; when they see lightning, they make a doing-a-deed
out of it: they posit the same event, first as cause and then as its effect. Scientists
do no better when they say ‘force moves, force, causes,’ and such like [. . .].”
Nietzsche here echoes Bahnsen’s claim that the reflexive attitude which posits a
doer behind a deed is actually a roundabout sort of fiction. Notice that the fictional
character of the assertion is not the problem—scientists do no better with their
explanatory devices, though not because they claim something false. The problem
is not an untrue assertion, but an inexpedient one. And Nietzsche goes further than
Bahnsen into the psychological grounds why such inexpedient doubling becomes
normalized. “The reason the subject (or, as we more colloquially say, the soul)
has been, until now, the best doctrine on earth, is perhaps because it facilitated
that sublime self-deception whereby the majority of the dying, the weak and the
oppressed of every kind could construe weakness itself as freedom, and their
 Bahnsen’s Influence on Nietzsche’s Wills-Theory   113

particular mode of existence as an accomplishment” (GM I:13). So despite the

needless ­double-locution of speaking of causes for effects, we humans typically
speak that way, not for any epistemological reason, so much as for the sake of
being able to praise or blame someone for some doings. Nietzsche’s entire notion
of the “innocence of becoming,” and consequently a great deal of his affirmative
moral thinking, hinges on his claim here that the separation of agent and doing
is inexpedient.
Finally, with respect to the usefulness (2c) of a Will for explaining actions,
Nietzsche writes, “There exists neither ‘spirit,’ nor reason, nor thinking, nor con-
sciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth: all are fictions that are of no use” (KSA
13:14[22], pp. 301–2). Many illusions are useful for Nietzsche. In fact, some of
the illusions human beings have created are more necessary for our survival than
a perfect correspondential truth, were it possible, even could be. Elsewhere he
considers the supposition of a self to be quite useful and indeed, as we saw, he
himself endorses the “will to power” as a very useful designation to express the
common character of various will-acts: “a determinate name for this reality [the
reality ‘inside’ the person] would be: ‘will to power’” (KSA 11:40[53]). Here,
however, why he thinks such a designation is not useful has to do with the wider
context, mentioned above, about the moral consequences such a supposition of
agency provokes, an argument far outside the scope of Bahnsen’s own vision.
Rather than the inconvenience of explanation, here the target is the usefulness
of relying on transcendent principles, “will” among them, for a culture’s more
general health. Better would it be, Nietzsche thinks, to give up such delusions of
both speculative philosophy and theology, and in their place affirm the natural
life given to us. Naturalistic hypotheses of the kind Nietzsche envisions are thus
said to have a usefulness more conducive to the well-being of individuals and
cultures than does the reliance upon supra-naturalistic explanations which rely
upon souls, Wills, and the like. Therefore here as well, Nietzsche not only has a
similar point as Bahnsen. The three key arguments Bahnsen uses to support that
point—that a transcendent Will is unnecessary, inexpedient, and not useful—are
clearly repeated by Nietzsche.
Moving to the third point, remember that Bahnsen mused about renaming
his Wills “die Erregenden” since the participial form better characterizes the
activity of the subrational drives. Nietzsche more often than not uses nouns like
drives, instincts, impulses, affects, and many others to typify the character of
the inner world. However, he did so with the similar proviso that nominalizing
these forms is a linguistic convenience only and cannot be taken as a referential
description of some alleged substantial entities. “A quantum of force is just such
a quantum of drive, will, action, in fact it is nothing but this driving, willing,
and acting, and only the seduction of language (and the fundamental errors or
reason petrified within it), which construes and misconstrues all actions as con-
ditional upon an agency, a ‘subject,’ can make it appear otherwise” (GM I:13,
114   Anthony K. Jensen

my emphasis). The result of perspectivalizing introspection as well as outward

experience is that the stream of experience is individuated into spatiotempo-
rally discrete things that are supposed to stand in causal relationships with one
another.34 Although we cannot suspend that normal mode of judgment to see
the flow of becoming as it genuinely is, we can at least maintain an awareness
of how our perspectives affect our experience. A more conscientious manner of
referring to the flow of becoming, and thereby “better” at least than imbuing the
forces with substantiality, would be to refer to them participially, as Nietzsche
at least sometimes does.
Fourth, and finally, in place of Schopenhauer’s Will as the transcendent aspect
of the body’s phenomenal activities, Nietzsche and Bahnsen posit an agonis-
tic dynamic and Realdialektik of variegated strivings respectively as sufficient
to explain deliberative agency. In a note of 1885, Nietzsche writes, “Meine
Hypothese: das Subjekt als Vielheit” (KSA 11:40[42]). Those multiplicities to
which he refers are those same internal “strivings” of which Bahnsen spoke.
The strivings are all that is present in both ourselves (4a) and in organic nature
(4b). As to the former (4a), “We ourselves are, indeed, nothing but that which
at every moment we sense of this continued flowing [Fortströmen]” (AOM 223;
KSA 2, p. 477). The image of “flowing” here intimates the directedness of the
internal factors involved in behavior. But at the same time, it suggests that our
willing needs as little direction as the water in a river requires someone to push
it along, precisely as Bahnsen had outlined above. As to the latter (4b), “Life
would be defined as an enduring form of processes of force expressions, in which
the different contenders grow unequally” (KSA 11:36[22]). The precise details
of Nietzsche’s agonistic force-ontology have been discussed often and well in
the literature.35 The main point for our purpose is that from Nietzsche’s natural-
ized vision of ontology, the explanation of agency follows from this directly.
Any explanation of agency cannot depend upon a metaphysical notion of Will
or any other supra-naturalistic principle for that matter. And investigation as to
why someone did what they did must restrict its analysis to the naturalistically
experientiable power-drives involved. Therefore, for Nietzsche, as for Bahnsen,
it is not a question of Will, but “a question of a struggle between two elements
of unequal power: a new arrangement of forces is achieved according to the
measure of power of each of them. [. . .] [T]he essential thing is that the factions
in conflict emerge with different quanta of power” (KSA 13:14[195]).

Conclusion

Given these four strains of argument against the hypothesis of a will to explain
behaviors, I suggest again that Nietzsche drew from Julius Bahnsen the same
four key moves away from the transcendent side of Schopenhauer’s dual-aspect
 Bahnsen’s Influence on Nietzsche’s Wills-Theory   115

theory and toward a naturalistic theory meant to explain decisive actions. To

be sure there are many differences in their general philosophies. Bahnsen’s
pessimism is exhaustive, whereas Nietzsche strives to affirm life. Bahnsen is a
hard fatalist, whereas Nietzsche rightly views both freedom and determinism as
equal misunderstandings of the logical entailments of a naturalistic wills-theory.
Bahnsen sees the world and the self as a never-ending battle among self-contra-
dictory drives, whereas Nietzsche finds drives competitive and agonistic, but not
necessarily contradictory. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Bahnsen has
nothing like the historical dimension so essential in Nietzsche’s moral theory,
nothing like his insights about the movements of culture and morality. But the
transition away from Schopenhauer’s dual-aspect mode of explanation toward
both a naturalized ontology as well as a naturalized explanatory strategy of
agency is a key part of both Bahnsen’s and Nietzsche’s thought, and one, more-
over, that Nietzsche seems to have appropriated at least in part from Bahnsen.
Finally, the view Nietzsche inherited from Bahnsen should invite us to
reconsider what Nietzsche meant by philosophical naturalism. By naturalism,
Nietzsche simply cannot mean a reduction to a materialist view of nature. Such
had been done already by Moleschott, Büchner, and Czolbe; and it was little
more than ridiculed by any of the authors whom Nietzsche liked to read.36 Nor
can it mean an explanatory reductivism in the sense of limiting one’s explana-
tions to the proceduralism of contemporary natural science. No philosopher in
the nineteenth century, including the positivists, ever held such a view, even if
for no better reason than that there simply was no single scientific methodol-
ogy that philosophy even in principle could have attempted to emulate.37 What
Bahnsen saw himself as doing, and what, for that matter Helmholtz, Lange, Spir,
the neo-Kantians, and Mach all saw themselves as doing, was walking the line
between Schelling’s idealistic Naturphilosophie and Büchner’s materialism.
Schopenhauer took an important step in trying to naturalize agency by means
of an ontological identity between the natural world and a transcendent Will.
But when it came to behavior, he required a dual-aspect explanation. Bahnsen
and Nietzsche both, as I have shown, repeal the Schopenhauerian pan-enthetic
Will by positing “Henaden” or wills-to-power as sufficient fictions to explain
the diversity not only of human actions but of all organic matter. A naturalized
vision of agency means, then, the rejection of experience-transcending prin-
ciples as either necessary or expedient or useful for explaining why humans
do what they do. When it comes to explaining behavior, “[t]o posit a belief as
the cause of a mechanistic motion is to believe in miracles [Wunder-Glaube]”
(KSA 10:24[21]). On the other hand, we cannot imagine that our designations
of experience identify what experiences are really had due to the perspectival
character of thinking about those experiences. The best to which we can “get
down” is an awareness of the perspectival character—the abbreviated, simpli-
fied, and generalized character—of our internal experiences, which are then
116   Anthony K. Jensen

made available for explanations of agency. “Assuming that our world of desires
and passions is the only thing ‘given’ as real, that we cannot get down or up to
any ‘reality’ except the reality of our drives (since thinking is merely a relation
between these drives) [. . .] (BGE 36).” Naturalism, as Nietzsche understands
it, is therefore not simply or even principally a matter of either a materialist
ontology or proceduralist scientism, but an awareness that any designations
of experience, inner experience as well as outer experience, are bound by the
natural perspectival limitations of what can be claimed.38

Providence College
Anthony.Jensen@Providence.edu

Notes
1. The term “neo-Schopenhauerian” is, to my knowledge, a neologism. The superb efforts
of Winfried H. Müller-Seyfahrt have proven that this was a recognizable group whose thought
bears sufficient enough commonalities to loosely be termed a school. Among her recent editions
of a few of their works, see her highly informative collection Politik und Gesellschaft im Umkreis
Arthur Schopenhauers, ed. Winfried H. Müller-Seyfahrt and Thomas Koßler (Würzburg:
Königshausen & Neumann, 2008). Alas, hers has been a voice that deserves a better audience. All
translations from this and all other authors are my own.
2. The most comprehensive expression is Eugen Dühring, Der Wert des Lebens: Eine
philosophische Betrachtung (Breslau: Eduard Trewendt, 1865). A helpful account of Nietzsche’s
relation to pessimism in the context of Dühring is Tobias Dahlkvist, Nietzsche and the Philosophy
of Pessimism: A Study of Nietzsche’s Relation to the Pessimistic Tradition: Schopenhauer, Hartmann,
Leopardi (Uppsala: Uppsala Studies in the History of Ideas, 2007).
3. Such is the aim of Hartmann’s then wildly popular Philosophie des Unbewussten (Berlin:
Carl Duncker Verlag, 1869). For Hartmann’s relation to Schopenhauer and to Nietzsche, see my
“The Rogue of All Rogues: Nietzsche’s Presentation of Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophie des
Unbewussten and Hartmann’s Response to Nietzsche,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 32 (2006):
41–61.
4. Philipp Mainländer, Die Philosophie der Erlösung (Berlin: Theodor Hofmann, 1876).
5. While there is not much scholarship on the relationship between Nietzsche and Bahnsen,
a commendable study is Rüdiger Grimm, “Embracing Two Horses: Tragedy, Humor, and
Inwardness; or, Nietzsche, Vischer, and Julius Bahnsen,” Nietzsche-Studien 18 (1989): 203–20.
As the title makes clear, however, Grimm’s focus is quite far from my own.
6. Julius Bahnsen, Wie ich wurde, was ich ward, ed. Rudolf Louis (Leipzig: J.A. Barth,
1931). Although the text of Bahnsen’s autobiography was written in his hand, it was compiled
and published posthumously. The title, however, cannot be considered the major influence for
Nietzsche’s own subtitle. The famous phrase “become who you are,” from which Nietzsche’s
subtitle “how one becomes what one is” is derived, ultimately comes from Nietzsche’s earliest
reading of Pindar’s second Pythian Ode, as well as an early note of encouragement from his
teacher Friedrich Ritschl.
7. His subsection “Exil und preussische Dienst” offers ample detail of Bahnsen’s character.
See his Wie ich wurde, was ich ward, 49–67.
8. Indeed Harry Slochower suggests the two are inextricable: “Ideas possessed personal
values for him. However, the passion with which he fought for his persuasions involved him in
 Bahnsen’s Influence on Nietzsche’s Wills-Theory   117

constant controversies, carried on in a brilliant, yet extremely polemical manner. Everywhere

he takes the position of a fighter, now assailing with fast rapier-thrusts, now defending with
passionate counter-attacks, always disputatious. [. . .] His heated and militant tone has irritated
many critics and has doubtless been a strong factor contributing toward the inadequate
consideration that his system has received.” Harry Slochower, “Julius Bahnsen: Philosopher of
Heroic Despair, 1830–1881,” Philosophical Review 41.4 (1932): 368–84, 368.
9. Bahnsen, Wie ich wurde, was ich ward, 45.
10. Bahnsen, Wie ich wurde, was ich ward, 49.
11. Julius Bahnsen, Beiträge zur Charakterologie mit besonderer Berücksichtigung
pädagogischer Fragen, 2 vols. (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1867).
12. Preserved in Richard Frank Krummel, Nietzsche und der deutsche Geist, 3 vols. (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter Press, 1998), 1:45–46.
13. Cited in Slochower, “Julius Bahnsen,” 373.
14. For Nietzsche’s reading of Bahnsen, see Thomas H. Brobjer, Nietzsche’s Philosophical
Context: an Intellectual Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 48.
15. Julius Bahnsen, Zum Verhaltniss zwischen Wille und Motiv: Eine metaphysische
Voruntersuchung zur Charakterologie (Stolp und Lauenburg im Breisgau: Eschenhagen Verlag,
1870).
16. Bahnsen’s relationship with Hartmann is ambivalent, and like many of his personal
encounters, rather vehemently so. On the one hand, Bahnsen criticizes Hartmann in print as
derisively as Nietzsche ever does. On the other, Bahnsen worked as an editorial assistant for
Hartmann in 1872 and even named his third child Arthur Eduard Hartmann Bahnsen.
17. Bahnsen, Wie ich wurde, was ich ward, 12–13.
18. Both are addressed, however, in Bahnsen’s Zur Philosophie der Geschichte: Eine kritische
Besprechung des Hegel-Hartmannschen Evolutionismus aus Schopenhauerschen Principien
(Berlin: Carl Duncker, 1872). Nietzsche borrowed this work from the Basel University library
in 1872, and its central theses appear prominently in his own On the Uses and Disadvantages of
History for Life, which was composed in 1873.
19. Bahnsen, Zum Verhaltniss zwischen Wille und Motiv, 9.
20. Johannes Müller famously proved this with his doctrine of specific nerve energies in his
Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen (1833), which Nietzsche and Bahnsen both knew well.
That Bahnsen’s own Charakterologie could really prove the same using descriptive typology is
rather doubtful.
21. Bahnsen, Zum Verhaltniss zwischen Wille und Motiv, 18.
22. Bahnsen, Zum Verhaltniss zwischen Wille und Motiv, 28–29.
23. Bahnsen, Zum Verhaltniss zwischen Wille und Motiv, 29.
24. Bahnsen, Zum Verhaltniss zwischen Wille und Motiv.
25. Bahnsen, Zum Verhaltniss zwischen Wille und Motiv, 41.
26. Bahnsen, Zum Verhaltniss zwischen Wille und Motiv, 40.
27. Bahnsen, Zum Verhaltniss zwischen Wille und Motiv, 39.
28. Bahnsen, Wie ich wurde, was ich ward, 49.
29. Bahnsen, Beiträge zur Charakterologie, 2:102–3f.
30. Bahnsen, Beiträge zur Charakterologie, 2:452–53. Bahnsen stands in relationship
to a number of Nietzsche’s other influences on this point, especially Jean-Marie Guyau’s
Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction (1885), Maximilian Drossbach’s Ueber die
scheinbaren und wirklichen Ursachen des Geschehens (1884), and Wilhelm Roux’s Der Kampf
der Theile im Organismus (1881). Of them, it is worth noting, Bahnsen is the only distinctively
Schopenhauerian.
31. Bahnsen’s confidence here is misplaced. A naturalistic explanation would be complete
were there nothing beyond it that could possibly be appealed to as an explanation. This, however,
118   Anthony K. Jensen

does not mean that Bahnsen’s own naturalistic explanation would be the only possible naturalistic
explanation available.
32. Bahnsen, Zum Verhaltniss zwischen Wille und Motiv, 28.
33. I argue for this claim more thoroughly in my “Nietzsche and Schopenhauer: ‘For Me
What Mattered Was the Human Being,’” in Nietzsche and the Philosophers, ed. Mark Conard
(forthcoming).
34. For a similar formulation, see Steven D. Hales and Rex Welshon, Nietzsche’s Perspectivism
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 142: “Consciousness is, as Nietzsche remarks, a kind
of ‘language’ [. . .], a mediated and symbolic simplification and interpretative construction on
the psychological event that it models, itself already an interpretation.” On this point, see also
Patrick Wotling, “What Language Do Drives Speak?,” in Nietzsche on Instinct and Language, ed.
Constâncio/Branco (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), 74–78.
35. Among many, see Hubert Treiber, “Zur Genealogie einer ‘science positive de la morale en
Allemagne’: Die Geburt der ‘r(é)ealistischen Moralwissenschaft’ aus der Idee einer monistischen
Naturkonzeption,” Nietzsche-Studien 22 (1993): 165–221. For an account of the variety of
influences on Nietzsche’s naturalistic ontology, see Robin Small, Nietzsche in Context (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2001); Peter Poellner, Nietzsche and Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000); and esp. Christa Davis Acampora, Contesting Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2013).
36. As one example, consider what F.A. Lange once wrote about Czolbe. “[I]t must be seen
that Czolbe’s satisfaction-theory is built upon sand, and therefore, in the long run, can no more
attain its end than the popular dogmatism which, on the contrary, will not give up a beginning and
an end of things—the Creation and the Day of Judgment.” F.A. Lange, History of Materialism:
Criticism of Its Present Importance, 3 vols., trans. E.C. Thomas (1866; repr., London: Trübner &
Co., 1881).
37. For Nietzsche’s knowledge of the varieties of naturalism in its historical context, see above
all Christian J. Emden, Nietzsche’s Naturalism: Philosophy and the Life Sciences in the Nineteenth
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
38. A fuller account of Nietzsche’s perspectivism of inner experience cannot be elucidated
here. See my “Was heisst Denken? Orientierung und Perspektive,” Nietzscheforschung 22 (2015):
29–42; and “Helmholtz, Lange and the Unconscious Symbols of the Self,” in Nietzsche and the
Problem of Subjectivity, ed. João Constancio (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2015), 196–218.