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Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche's Psychology
Nietzsche wrote in Ecce Homo (1888), "That a psychologist without equal speaks from my writings—this is perhaps the first insight gained by a good reader. . . . Who among the philosophers before me was in any way a psychologist? Before me there simply was no psychology."
Composing the Soul is the first study to pay sustained attention to this pronouncement and to examine the contours of Nietzsche's psychology in the context of his life and psychological makeup. Beginning with essays from Nietzsche's youth, Graham Parkes shows the influence of such figures as Goethe, Byron, and Emerson on Nietzsche's formidable and multiple talents. Parkes goes on to chart the development of Nietzsche's psychological ideas in terms of the imagery, drawn from the dialogues of Plato as well as from Nietzsche's own quasi-mystical experiences of nature, in which he spoke of the soul. Finally, Parkes analyzes Nietzsche's most revolutionary idea—that the soul is composed of multiple "drives," or "persons," within the psyche. The task for Nietzsche's psychology, then, was to identify and order these multiple persons within the individual—to compose the soul.
Featuring all new translations of quotations from Nietzsche's writings, Composing the Soul reveals the profundity of Nietzsche's lifelong personal and intellectual struggles to come to grips with the soul. Extremely well-written, this landmark work makes Nietzsche's life and ideas accessible to any reader interested in this much misunderstood thinker.
Composing the Soul is the first study to pay sustained attention to this pronouncement and to examine the contours of Nietzsche's psychology in the context of his life and psychological makeup. Beginning with essays from Nietzsche's youth, Graham Parkes shows the influence of such figures as Goethe, Byron, and Emerson on Nietzsche's formidable and multiple talents. Parkes goes on to chart the development of Nietzsche's psychological ideas in terms of the imagery, drawn from the dialogues of Plato as well as from Nietzsche's own quasi-mystical experiences of nature, in which he spoke of the soul. Finally, Parkes analyzes Nietzsche's most revolutionary idea—that the soul is composed of multiple "drives," or "persons," within the psyche. The task for Nietzsche's psychology, then, was to identify and order these multiple persons within the individual—to compose the soul.
Featuring all new translations of quotations from Nietzsche's writings, Composing the Soul reveals the profundity of Nietzsche's lifelong personal and intellectual struggles to come to grips with the soul. Extremely well-written, this landmark work makes Nietzsche's life and ideas accessible to any reader interested in this much misunderstood thinker.
- GenresPhilosophyPsychology
496 pages, Hardcover
First published December 15, 1994
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May 24, 2020
This work is essential reading for any interested in Nietzsche's complex thoughts on the (de)constitutional figurations of the drives, and the phantasmic metaphoricity or expression of character that they inscribe under the experimental moniker of experience and the real.
Parkes traces the development of these often underanalyzed elements of Nietzsche's thought and writings through the earliest biographical writings, through the major texts and the Nachlass, and unto the precipitous collapse into the abyss. His tracing of the figures in which the drives (under the mask of the psyche) express themselves and are expressed in the writings is evocative and well researched, and the examinations of Zarathustra are often of the highest interpretive quality. In addition, Parkes carefully relates and distinguishes the developments in Nietzsche's unfolding conception of the soul in relation to Plato, in a manner that does service to both thinkers, and does not submit to the too easy denunciation of Plato in Nietzsche's inversion of the former's metaphysics. The relation is complex - not a single self against an other, but a multiplicitous and intricated conflict or contestation - and Parkes' endeavor traces these dynamic fluctuations and alterations with great care.
There are but a few shortcomings to the text, from the perspective(s) in which it was read and this was written, at least. The first of these is Parkes' continual relation, in the notes, of Nietzsche's thought to that of Eastern thinking. Not that such a connection doesn't exist, but, just as it is done at times with Heidegger (by Parkes and others), it comes off as the mark of a hobbyist intent on noting their interest to others, and lacks the intimate relation which makes the connection appear as though it arose from out of the thought itself. Here it seems as though it is grafted on in hopes of renewed life for something which, it would seem, would be rejected by the life in the would-be host.
The other point is Parkes' fixation on the figure of the soul. While he is most often careful to denote the transfiguration of this concept as a phantasmic presentation of a multiplicity of drives without any singular, unifying principle, at times his insistence on this figure appears to get the better of him, and he appears to lapse (momentarily, at least) into past metaphysical conceptions of the soul. Perhaps such a concept, an archeconcept of the metaphysical and Christian tradition, cannot so easily be unbound, ungrounded, and translated, even by the ungrounding movement of interpretation that the drives enact. Perhaps it remains too bound up with bad consciousness.
Perhaps, then, composing the soul entails more than a decomposing and then recomposing, no matter how careful. Perhaps the power to be, if "we" are to be at all - that is to say, to become - then we must efface the phantasm of the soul, forget the tainted spiritus so as to breathe fresh air once more, perhaps for the first time? But who remains, after the last breath of the soul has been exhaled? Perhaps the answer, paradoxically, obscurely, figures itself in the very question. Who remains? Who. Or, perhaps better, "Who?" Perhaps. Peut-être. The power to be, perhaps, bound up and disseminated as power, as potential, in the mark of the question. Who?
Parkes traces the development of these often underanalyzed elements of Nietzsche's thought and writings through the earliest biographical writings, through the major texts and the Nachlass, and unto the precipitous collapse into the abyss. His tracing of the figures in which the drives (under the mask of the psyche) express themselves and are expressed in the writings is evocative and well researched, and the examinations of Zarathustra are often of the highest interpretive quality. In addition, Parkes carefully relates and distinguishes the developments in Nietzsche's unfolding conception of the soul in relation to Plato, in a manner that does service to both thinkers, and does not submit to the too easy denunciation of Plato in Nietzsche's inversion of the former's metaphysics. The relation is complex - not a single self against an other, but a multiplicitous and intricated conflict or contestation - and Parkes' endeavor traces these dynamic fluctuations and alterations with great care.
There are but a few shortcomings to the text, from the perspective(s) in which it was read and this was written, at least. The first of these is Parkes' continual relation, in the notes, of Nietzsche's thought to that of Eastern thinking. Not that such a connection doesn't exist, but, just as it is done at times with Heidegger (by Parkes and others), it comes off as the mark of a hobbyist intent on noting their interest to others, and lacks the intimate relation which makes the connection appear as though it arose from out of the thought itself. Here it seems as though it is grafted on in hopes of renewed life for something which, it would seem, would be rejected by the life in the would-be host.
The other point is Parkes' fixation on the figure of the soul. While he is most often careful to denote the transfiguration of this concept as a phantasmic presentation of a multiplicity of drives without any singular, unifying principle, at times his insistence on this figure appears to get the better of him, and he appears to lapse (momentarily, at least) into past metaphysical conceptions of the soul. Perhaps such a concept, an archeconcept of the metaphysical and Christian tradition, cannot so easily be unbound, ungrounded, and translated, even by the ungrounding movement of interpretation that the drives enact. Perhaps it remains too bound up with bad consciousness.
Perhaps, then, composing the soul entails more than a decomposing and then recomposing, no matter how careful. Perhaps the power to be, if "we" are to be at all - that is to say, to become - then we must efface the phantasm of the soul, forget the tainted spiritus so as to breathe fresh air once more, perhaps for the first time? But who remains, after the last breath of the soul has been exhaled? Perhaps the answer, paradoxically, obscurely, figures itself in the very question. Who remains? Who. Or, perhaps better, "Who?" Perhaps. Peut-être. The power to be, perhaps, bound up and disseminated as power, as potential, in the mark of the question. Who?
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