How can Nietzsche's understanding of values inform psychotherapy?

 
Contents
Introduction    1
Popular values    2

Nietzsche's values    2

Summary of Nietzschean critique of values    2

Nietzsche's understanding of Values    3

Will to Power    3

Transmission of Values    4

Freewill    4

Good/Bad Men    5

Nietzsche's value in psychotherapy    5

Freewill    5

Non-Universability of values\morality    6

Will to Power    6

Good/Bad Men    7

Conclusion    7

Bibliography    7


 

Introduction

In this paper I will first attempt a description of the popular understanding of values by way of placing a context for an exploration of Nietzsche's understanding of human agency, will to power and values. I will then look at the application of these ideas in the therapeutic context.
It must be noted that when I talk about Nietzsche's position, this must be taken as a short hand to say one of Nietzsche's position. Nietzsche is the great anti-systematist and there is no such as thing as what Nietzsche thinks if you are looking for a unitary idea within his thought. Nietzsche sees that the whole of logic is built on a fundamental error, that of identity as it is nonsensical to think that a=a, the same is true for his philosophy the law of identity doesn't hold. As Nietzsche says in some lost outpost of his oeuvre it is the sign of a noble spirit the more contradiction they can maintain inside themselves!

Popular values

To say that value is the worth of something is tautological and presupposes what the word 'worth' is. However what this does show is that value can be applied to the worth of many things.
The value that I want to concentrate on in this essay is related to human values which either are shown by intention or action or both. So I might value generosity and this means that I intend under certain circumstances to be generous. If I am generous then I will feel a warm glow of happiness as I achieved my value, and contrariwise I may feel bad if I am not generous. The values that I have of working hard and being polite appear to me to be nothing but values that have been handed down to me from my parents and from society. Indeed to work hard can be seen to be part of the value of the Protestants. At this point there can the relation of your own values to others. Some values you have, say not to kill, may well be attributed to others, so if they kill you're unhappy and contrariwise you may be happy if they don't kill. Some other values such as enjoying foods of certain types, you may less want to foist this value on other people, where if they don't eat the same food as you, you don't feel unhappiness, merely a certain weariness at their slovenly diet.
Thus values seem to form a spectrum from on one side things that you mildly value to those that you greatly do and this is co-extensive with how much affect you get on them being performed or not and how much you would apply these values to the actions of others.
On a societal level the strong values at the moral end of the scale transform the feelings of happiness and unhappiness at their presence or absence into punishment and reward. The robber who steals is punished, the man who works hard is rewarded. Thus there is a strong relation with value with the notions of free will\responsibility\punishment and reward.

Nietzsche's values

 

Summary of Nietzschean critique of values

Nietzsche attacks the standard understanding of value and morality for the following reasons

1. Freewill
   1. He sees the notion of free will as being nonsensical
   2. He sees the notion of will to be a complex activity which includes the consciousness but isn't dominated by it
2. Universality of value/morality
   1. What's good for one depends on their spatio/temporal context and cannot be applied to another
   2. Values are passed on through the generation but all you get is the emotional feeling given, not the rational justification that is required to make use of it
3. Will to power
   1. Values that affirm life are those that accord to the will to power, those that are degenerate deny life.
   2. The will to power is perpetual becoming, perpetual overcoming, thus is unique and transitory
4. Good/Bad men
   1. He sees morality as being originally those things that produced useful consequences, this then turned into the things in themselves being good, then in turn the person that did them being good.

 

Nietzsche's understanding of Values

Nietzsche's views on values are that they "represent the experiences of men of earlier times as to what they supposed useful and harmful" [D P18]. In other words what a man finds useful he makes a positive value something to be achieved and what is harmful something to be avoided. This value then is passed down from father to son. This still begs the question of what is valuable, what is harmful or useful. "A table of values hangs over every people. Behold it is the table of its overcomings [...] the voice of its will to power" [Z p223]. Thus what is deemed useful is when the will to power overcomes something. So what then is the will to power?

Will to Power

To explain then the will to power: It is the desire to overcome resistance that enhances the feeling of power to enhance future resistances. "Whatever I created and however much I love it-soon I have to oppose it and my love: thus my will have it" [Z2 Of Self Overcoming]. In other words whatever you create, whatever ideas you have at some point you will tire of them and seek to replace them with better ones.

What must be pointed out is this Will, is not the unitary Will of people who believe in freewill, it is the energic thrust of all being. Within the human there are many competing drives, all of which have Will. Hunger, sexuality, creation, destruction are all drives within humans that can compete and these are just at a low level, at a higher level, you have desires such as love, hate that have Will. Likewise in rationality ideas have Will such that they form part of a discourse that seeks to overcome, master competing theories. Maybe the creationists and the big bang theorists might be good exemplars of this. Likewise in the world ice competes against hot water for dominance as wind competes against the leaves that hang onto a tree.

Nietzsche sees the will-to-truth as closely linked with the will to power, where the will to truth seeks to exert its dominance of interpretation by trying to reify this interpretation into a concrete fact. "The real philosophers are commanders and lawgivers. They say 'It shall be so!' [..] Their knowing is creating, is lawgiving, and their Will-to-Truth is Will-to-Power"[BGE 211]. Thus whilst we talk about fact, what we are saying is that someone\some group has deemed it so. As all facts, well most facts are overthrown, we can see that all we are left with is a perspectivism, and truth is defined by the winning perspective.

For Nietzsche then there is no transcendent world, there are no transcendent values thus we create the world of our truths, our values.

Thus values are co-extensive with a human's overcomings, as I value generosity, I have overcome my needs for abundance so I can be superabundant, within the act of giving, I am affirmed in my superiority over the person who needs my help.

The will to power is a dynamic theory any overcoming must itself be overcome. Thus the set of values that exist for one person cannot be transferred to another.

Transmission of Values

The problem with values is that they "are transmitted in this way: children observe in adult's inclinations for and aversions to certain actions and, as born apes, imitate these" [D p25].

So all values start life in a person as introjects from their parents, however what is introjected is the feeling not the rationale for it "thoughts are not hereditary, only feelings" [D P23], so what a person does is when they are full of these introjects at some point establishes a rationale for them, which is not the true rationale for the moralities origin, which was the original will-to-power of the person who use that morality to overcome resistance.

Thus what the noble spirit should do is to both re-evaluate their existing values to establish if they are still beneficial to them, and to create their own values that support their life.

                                

Freewill

It must also be noted some irony in the above dictates to the noble spirit. For Nietzsche the will as has been said is not the unitary ego of Freud's consciousness as there is a "ridiculous overestimation and misunderstanding of consciousness" [GS 11] , "By far the greatest part of our spirits activity, remains unconscious and unfelt"[GS 333] . Again taking the primacy away from consciousness Nietzsche would see the sense of human's freewill as also affected. Thus when I go into my kitchen to make tea it happens and I think I willed it, but on closer inspection that didn't happen, I didn't command my legs to move to the kitchen, nor did I command my hands to find the cup, nor did I have to recall the memory of how to make tea, rather it just happened, and my feeling of power that was manifested in its success I then called my agency.                    
For Nietzsche freewill is a nonsensical idea as it depends on the concept causa-sui, i.e. self-caused, something which started life originally as a description of god! However if you think this idea through just a little it falls apart as it seeks to pull itself up by its bootstraps.
So I have freewill as I choose to drink this cup of coffee. I am self-caused, nothing caused me to want coffee, thus I had the idea, but did I choose to have that idea, then did I choose to have that choice, which goes on ad-nauseum. As Nietzsche has said a thought appears when it wants to not when we will it.
Nietzsche argues [BGE 19] that the will is a complex event, it is the sensation of going from one condition to another, it is the sense of commanding and being victorious over something else, and indeed it is only used when the outcome of the victory is certain, it also presuppose the synthetic unity of the I, which again is a fabrication.
For Nietzsche "Everything is necessity[..]Everything innocence and knowledge is the path to insight into this innocence" [HA 107]. As freewill is torn apart then the only other option is necessity, the same necessity that we see as the lighting strikes. His determinism is slightly more complex than standard determinism which would deem human agency, human will determined, as he has seen that Will is not a unitary thing, but rather the outcomes of human agency are determined by the inter play of the drives that constitute humans.

 

Good/Bad Men

"First of all, one calls individual actions good or bad [...] solely on account of their useful [...] consequences. Soon, however, one [...] believes that the quality [...] is inherent in the action [...] Then one consigns the being of good [...] to the motives [...]One goes further and accords the predicate [..] to the whole nature of man" [HA 39]
For Nietzsche the scope of value and morality has moved from where it should be. It started off as an indicator for actions which produce useful outcomes, then it fell back on the actions being good irrespective of their outcomes, then it became people who were good or bad.

 

Nietzsche's value in psychotherapy

Nietzsche's contribution to psychotherapy from ideas that are raised in this paper can be summarised as

Freewill

For Nietzsche there is no freewill rather the battle of different aspects of the will to power. In this manner consciousness is reduced in importance, where it is usually held as the locus of freewill.
In this manner then when working with clients then this can help with meta-emotions. By meta-emotions then I mean emotions about emotions, such that I am unhappy, then I become angry that I'm unhappy and then maybe depressed because I am unhappy and angry. Now I wouldn't want to go so far as to say that there is a primary emotion but rather that there certainly is a layering of emotions.
If we take consciousness as one factor amongst many that decide action and indeed some of these other factors are to in our consciousness then this will reduce the amount of meta-emotions. Whilst it is impossible to have a blanket statement about the cause of meta-emotions certainly one aspect is that they are the outcome of ego pain. The ego, the consciousness, the identity, the locus of freewill call it what you will is displaying a gap between how it should be and how it is. Thus if the first emotion was unhappiness as I didn't get the promotion at work, then I become depressed because I really want that promotion, I'm the sort of person that works as a manager rather than a nobody. There is a lot of hurt that is caused between the discrepancy between how you see yourself and how you are.
With the Nietzschean model things change. The 'I' is a synthetic totality that is actually the arena where a variety of drives, of which consciousness is one compete to result in action. Thus the therapist's job can become two fold, firstly to help the client to be more aware of the non-conscious aspects of an action and the therapist can also help the client meet themselves through their action.
Therapy then becomes something more of a clearing of conscious obstacles to the development of the will to power that emerges through the individual conscious. Therapy becomes something of a process of introducing the client to themselves and reducing maybe the sense that the conscious I will, is the sole determinant in action, but rather is a part of the process.
Whilst the weakening of the freewill will move towards it, the ultimate goal for the client\therapist relationship would be for the client to believe in determinism. To take this position would bring on a new found innocence in their world. If they were wronged, they would react to it with the standard sullen disdain they do when they get caught in the rain. I didn't like it, but its not my fault it rained, I don't feel bad about myself. Of course on the other side they may lose the feelings of pride when they win the race, or the promotion, but then they would get the same pleasure as when it was a sunny day.
I realise that to get a client to the position of determinism may well be a jump too far, but I think it is worth including here as a worthwhile goal of weakening notions of freewill.

Non-Universability of values\morality

For Nietzsche values are specific to an individual and represent their bookmark to themselves of their overcomings. We are given values through introjecting them from our parents whereby we introject the moral feeling, the guilt the pride and the like but not the rationale for them, nor can we as they aren't ours. Later we pull in our own justification for them.
So one of the techniques here for the therapeutic relationship is to make sure that the clients values work for them and to make them explicit. So when a client says, "well you know, that's what you should do ", the should holds a value for them, and indeed a hidden person who is saying it, so again there is work to be done in terms of opening up the clients value, and to try to cache them out in terms of do living by these values give you the good feeling you want, the life you want.

Will to Power

Nietzsche's will to power, is an un-owned, constitutive power that will see its development in Foucault's theory of power. As mentioned above in the section on freewill, then part of the therapeutic work in this space is clearing the way for the development of the will to power, moving the conscious obstacles and brakes out of the way.
In this way there is the sense of expanding the client's consciousness of who they are. This understanding can come from 'internal' and 'external splits' (apostrophes due to this is a false dichotomy). Internally then it's a question of taking more awareness of your bodies desires, the emotions and intelligence that are stored within their, to take in to fuller awareness your desires for your actions. Thus my client is beaming full of pride as he has just helped an old lady to her feet who had fallen down he revels in his altruism and big heart, thus useful interventions here would be to get him to open up his feelings as he stood their seeing the old lady lying in front of him, one of the less acceptable aspects of this may well come out that part of him feels entirely superior to this old woman, and his helping her is a way of showing this.
For 'external' things, then again it's a question of seeing the 'I' as the clearing where the battles rage, between the gym manufacturers and the doughnut manufacturers, between the capitalists and the communists, between the early birds and the night owls. Here client work can look to open up their inclusion in groups, their influence by various parties and to look at the calls upon them these are making and the other conflicting calls that are made on them. Often clients understand these 'external' battles as part of themselves again to locate these outside of themselves can free up their meta-emotions and also look at it from a different angle. So in my case, on one hand I have highly well-developed doughnut gluttony and a desire to get super fit down at the gym. Whilst this war rages inside me, this is part of a battle that exists at a simplistic level between the doughnut manufacturers and the gym manufacturers.
Within the will to power, there is a challenge to the sense of a transcendent world. There is no world to be found, rather there is only a world to be created. The desire for truth is rather to demarcate the world in a way that suits you. As such then the call here is to create the world that suits you, there are effectively no requirements on you by notions of truth to conform to the world in any way that displeases you, indeed the notion of truth is just the call of the other to behave in a certain way. This then leads onto to an encouragement to the client to whenever they are ready to re-evaluate their values, to continually see if they work for them. Values are unique and temporary aspects that should only be held if they support the client in their life.

Good/Bad Men

Many clients think badly of themselves, I'm useless, I'm a failure. Taking Nietzsche's ideas this would be a fundamental error as they have morphed the outcome of an action onto themselves. Whilst its classic CBT the approach here would be to move from the rigid phrase I'm a failure as I've just failed an exam, to sometimes I can succeed sometimes I can fail but neither of these defines me.

Conclusion

Bibliography

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Quotes needed

1. The I is an untenable synthesis