1. Robert B. Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, & First Philosophy, The University of
Chicago Press, 2010, ISBN, pp. 139.
2. Summary
Pippin sets out to understand what Nietzsche means by 'psychology': why is it the path to the
fundamental problems and what is its relationship with traditional philosophy? If we
understand the phrasing of Psychology as ' the Queen of the Sciences' - the title of the first
chapter - traditionally, this would implicate that psychology must be understood as a
fundamental doctrine that is to encompass everything. (4) At first sight, the doctrine of will to
power, which has clearly psychological implications, seems to be the most valuable option for
such an understanding. However, this approach turns will to power into a metaphysical
imperative; everything in the organic world is driven by a basic overpowering drive. (6)
Contrary to this metaphysical (Heideggerian) claim, Pippin proposes the French moralists
model to understand Nietzsche’s meaning of ‘psychology’: "how we should understand what
happens when people appeal to normative considerations, or try to live well, how those norms
come to matter people, how even they could or could not come to matter". (8) The moralists
are psychologists who don't rely on a deeper philosophical theory of human nature, allowing
them to write honestly - cf. Pascal's l'homme honnète. Psychology replaces a first philosophy,
"because of the primacy of the 'psychological' question of some basic, always presupposed
'stance toward life' […]." (12) This stance or orientation, exemplified by Montaigne's cheerful
writing - his Heiterkeit -, can not be reached by argument, revelation or systematic
philosophy. (11-12) Support for this can be found in the beginning passages of Thus spoke
Zarathustra (Z), On the Genealogy of Morals (GM), and Beyond Good and Evil (JGB).
Pivotal in these passages is the Nietzschean description of philosophy in erotic terms, for
example, in the image of philosophers as clumsy lovers striving for knowledge. This erotic
striving or attachment to life implies the priority of psychology, because it helps us to
understand our attachments as conditions of life. We can not be argued or demonstrated into
desiring an ideal, such as the philosophical attachment to the ideal of truth, because what
matters most is what "inspires some great erotic striving". (14) The conventional approach of
Nietzsche's imagery between truth as a woman and philosophers as male clumsy lovers is,
therefore, incomplete. It is not merely a rhetorical device, but returns to Plato's
characterization of philosophy as a kind of love. What distinguishes philosophers is not their
method, but their distinct eros: "what provokes or inspires their desire, what grips them". (16)
By identifying Diotoma's assumption in Plato's Symposium - that nothing can find satisfaction
in any finite delight -, as a negative evaluation of life, Nietzsche accuses Plato of diverting
eros away from what can be enjoyed. (17-18) Original erotic attachment is, then, an
expression of perspective, and not the natural situation of man.
If we want to understand Nietzsche we need to address what Pippin identifies as the
Montaigne-problem. It concerns living by the ideal, which Nietzsche struggled to attain, but
failed to reach, of affirmative reconciliation of oneself with the weak and corrupt human
condition. (11, 23) This Montaigne-problem, however, is not the key to Nietzsche's
philosophy and goes back to a more general psychological issue, which Pippin refers to as the
primordiality problem. The primordiality problem has, above all, to do with value, since it is
concerned with understanding the source of our practical commitments to some accepted,
governing standard. (23-26) The authority of constraints and requirements I impose on myself
aren't just naturally imposed physical (im)possibilities, but are expressions of my intentions,
and, as such, are promises. "These sorts of commitments are thus basic or constitutive for the
very possibility of thought, belief, action, all intentionality." (25) A commitment is an erotic
attachment and always corporal. When something grips us passionately, we commit and
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identify with a desired end. (29) Nietzsche's use of 'depth' in 'depth psychology' could then be
understood as an attempt to grasp a passionate identification with a commitment. Psychology
is primary, because of the primordiality of orienting, normative, depth commitments. (32)
Nietzsche understands the psychological conditions of value as the possibility of an actionguiding depth commitment. Beliefs about commitments to norms, however, vary over
generations. Nietzsche, therefore, insists on the necessity of a historical dimension to the
psyche, something that clearly distinguishes him from French and Greek psychology. (2, 31)
Depth commitments aren't transcendent, but have taken root in us.
This historical dimension makes that Nietzsche's approach to the question of knowledge is not
to be understood in the traditional sense of Socrates or Kant. Contrary to those philosophers’
return to metaphysics to solve the fact that humans can only attain a limited amount of the
truth, Nietzsche focuses on how much knowledge we can embody or incorporate (das Wissen
sich einzuverleiben). (38-39) Einverleibung involves the enterprise of making oneself an
experiment of life. The process of incorporating knowledge into the body brings about a
tension between our intellectual conscience and our passionate desire. This tension can be
translated in the question of ‘what is fair or fit to want?’. "The 'tension' formulations certainly
indicate that the growth of our intellectual conscience means that our deepest (or 'depth')
commitments are not immune to the claims of reflection and justification, as if one could be
simply strong enough to legislate in defiance of the claims of reflection." (36) Nietzsche's
answer to this tension, in the spirit of Montaigne's cheerfulness (Heiterkeit), is a gay science addressed in chapter two What is a Gay Science?.
In chapter 3, titled Modernity as a Psychological problem, Pippin further elaborates what is
meant by "tension" in Nietzsche's writings. This tension is concerned with the way the soul
can pull against itself and matters self-consciousness itself. It is often depicted by the image
of the bow, as in Z 9 or JGB preface 4 and is to illustrate the self's negative relation to itself.
(37, 56) "Tension", or self-dissatisfaction, which is, also always a historical possibility, allows
for the possibility of some distance from oneself.
"Nietzsche's account of this tension or self-dissatisfaction is essentially historical. The
psyche amounts to a historically achieved and quite variable way of holding ourselves
and others to account. […] This historical narrative does, though, make a very minimal
assumption about the 'nature' out of which such historical development proceeds."
(59,60)
The human being is primarily understood by its distinctive activity of esteeming, valuing,
schätzen (cf. Z 43), allowing for an implicit, but hugely important, distinction between human
action and ordinary event. Although Nietzsche assumes little about human nature, it is clear
that consciousness is a reactive phenomenon that is more than a kind of second-order neutral
self-monitoring. The self-relation is a tension, because it is always evaluative and involves
self-dissatisfaction. "This tension, while it is perfectly consistent with a naturalism and
presumes no dualism, is hardly a matter of basic drives just being in conflict or tension." (59)
Similarly, the issue of nihilism can not be one of the presence or absence of urges, because we
are not committed to them. Nihilism is an erotic problem, concerned with the failure of desire.
Modern bourgeois Europeans have lost the capacity to feel self-contempt for their animal
status. (62)
In chapter 4, named "The Deed Is Everything [Das Tun ist alles]", Pippin further explains
why Nietzsche's conception of the agent - and its self-consciousness - leaves Christian
ontological dualism behind. Because of the primordiality of psychology normative
considerations are understood as a condition for the intelligibility of our assertions; amounting
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to the primordiality of esteeming (i.e. the ability to make and keep promises). However, these
normative considerations are themselves embedded in depth-commitments, which refer to a
"basic orientation of life in terms of eros and erotic attachment, prereflective and
prevolitional". (69) In GM Nietzsche aims at providing a historical and genealogical narrative
about the 'subject' and identifies the slave rebellion as the momentum of creation of ‘a subject
behind the deed’. (70-71) The slave achieves the accomplishment of performing a voluntary
deed by choosing to do it, or not, and, as such, the slave rebellion managed for the conception
of an unbiased subject with freedom of choice to become successful. When Nietzsche opposes
this view of the subject, by denying the possibility of an agent being individually responsible
for its actions, he immediately faces the problem of the disappearance of the subject's
intention. (68,72) How can a Nietzschean understanding of the subject solve the
commonsense psychological view that an agent can stand "both 'behind' and 'before' some
activity in order for the event to be distinguishes as a deed at all, as something done by
someone"? (72) The answer can be found in Nietzsche's distinction between an activity and
the mechanistic senselessness of the ordinary modern scientific worldview (GM II 12).
Nietzsche is not denying that there is a subject of the deed, he is just asserting that it is not
separate from the activity itself - is in the Christian dualistic understanding. The subject is 'in'
the deed. (75) Nietzsche's account of the subject, therefore, relies on the notion of expression
of power and not intentional causality. It is only when a subject can recognize itself in the
deed, that the deed can be said to "express" the subject. "This means that the act description
cannot be separated from this mutable intention, since, as the intention comes into a kind of
focus, what it is I take myself to be doing can also alter." (78) Only the deed can show who an
agent is or what he is committed to. Pippin's expressivist approach to Nietzsche, furthermore,
consists out of an inseperability thesis, in which the determinate meaning of an intention can
not be isolated - especially from social and historical factors -, and a nonisolability thesis,
where the recognition of an agent's intention as justifying an action depends on the agent's
character, life-history and the community or tradition wherein he lives. (77-78) The subject is
continually translated in the actuality of the deed and is conversely translated back into the
person he is. But how is the sorrow about an action one did to be understood? By denying the
subject a separate status from its deeds Nietzsche finds himself in a similar position to
Spinoza. Guilt is replaced by sadness at what was expressed in the deed; that I was not who I
thought I was. (83)
In Chapter 5, titled The Psychological Problem of Self-Deception, Pippin uncovers, through
his expressivist approach, the inherent weaknesses of contemporary naturalist interpretations
of Nietzsche's writings. Typically, the psychologist reductionist view understands human
conduct to be explained by "reference to basic human drives that determined behavior
independent of conscious assessments and motives, which were always ex post facto
rationalizations." (87) Contrary, Pippin claims, the expenditure of drives is never a pure
unconscious expression. A drive doesn't go unnoticed or is beyond conscious control, but is
always hidden. The agent hides the real motives. (87-89) Consequently, beside an esteemer
the subject can be characterized as a denier (Entsager); who is not just an ascetic, but also an
affirmer (Bejahender) (FW 27). Self-deceit, therefore, becomes Nietzsche’s greatest point of
interest in his mature works. Slavish behavior, for example, cannot be understood as an outer
expression of an inner unconscious drive, enabling the appearance of slavish types or slavish
conduct. At the heart of the slave revolt lays self-deceit, because in their morality of sympathy
and pity the slaves can hide the cruelty of their rebellion. "The slavish also became divided
against themselves; that is, they revolted, something both slavish and not slavish, a double
consciousness." (92) Nietzsche tries to approach these phenomena of self-deceit from the
perspective of intellectual honesty (Redlichkeit). Thusly, he tries to shame the ones who are
deceiving themselves, allowing for a transvaluation to occur. Interpretation, in the
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psychologist case, is not just finding what lies hidden, as if looking for a cause or symptom,
but is about paying attention to how something is hidden. "It matters that the conscious selfunderstanding is an attempted evasion of another and truer self-understanding, just as it
matters that the latter is being hidden." (93) To understand the subject’s 'hiding activity'
better, Pippin introduces Freud's notion of the unconscious, that understands actions not
merely as natural events or sufferings, but as psychologically motivated deeds that I am trying
to accomplish, as a second approach to Nietzsche's psychology. "[S]elf-knowledge is not
observational but interpretive and, let us say, always promissory, futural, as complexly
interpretive as the interpretive question of just what it is that is being done; action explanation
is not causal, and motives cannot be understood as fixed, datable mental items." (101) The
Nietzschean ideal of self-knowledge is not about being true to your own nature, but lies in the
practical fulfillment in your deeds; to become who you are (Du sollst der werden, der Du bist)
(FW 270).
In Chapter 6, named How to Overcome Oneself: On the Nietzschean Ideal, Pippin asserts that
Nietzsche’s impetus to overcome ourselves does not mean that one is really to overcome
himself, rather it is an encouragement to endure a fate in a certain way. The psychological
self-relation is, therefore, constitutive of the problem of freedom. (108) Understanding
freedom as a value or an aspiration to be attained shows Nietzsche, again, as upholding a
psychological model in the sense of the French moralists. The self-relation, or self-mastery,
consists out of sustaining a wholehearted commitment to an ideal. (113) The conditions for
such a self-relation, however, are partly social and historical, going often beyond what an
individual can achieve. (116, 120) "The conditions for the attainment of freedom - the proper
relation of attachment and detachment - seem, as they have several times before, largely
prevoluntary and extend in scope beyond what individuals can do." (116) To be capable of
self-overcoming or genuine freedom one must not only be able to bear the personal burden of
self-overcoming, but also be able to affirm it under its historical and social conditions. This
affirmation of one’s fate causes a state of tension, making the problem of freedom a
psychological problem.
"That is, Nietzsche clearly considers freedom to consist in some sort of affirmative
psychological relation to one's own deeds, a relation of identification, finding oneself
in one's deeds, experiencing them as genuinely one's own. He also considers this state
of being an achievement rather than the exercise of an inherent capacity. The achieved
state in question requires an unusual intentional self-relation, in particular an
intentional relation to one's own commitments." (119)
Nietzsche's understanding of freedom does not call to a simple strength of will, but for selfovercoming, and since self-overcoming is life or will to power, the realization of will to
power lies in self-overcoming. (117,120)
3. Characterization
The first four chapters were presentations held in October and November of 2004 at the
Collège de France in Paris and were published in book form under the title Nietzsche,
moraliste français: La conception nietzschéen d'une psychologie philosophique (2006). The
first versions of those chapters/lectures were formed at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin,
where the author stayed on a research leave. Chapters five and six also originated in the form
of lectures and were published as articles. As a whole the book is dedicated to the memory of
Bernard Williams.
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4. Critical Points
Pippin's Nietzsche, Psychology and First Philosophy argues for the primacy of psychology in
Nietzsche's mature works – Also Sprach Zarathustra (Z), Jenseits von Gut und Böse (JGB),
Zur Genealogie der Moral (GM) – in an enticing and innovative way. His gained insights into
what Nietzsche meant by 'psychology' urges us to reinterpret the psychological question of
nihilism as an erotic problem, wherein modern man succumbed to a failure of desire, and to
reformulate Nietzsche's naturalism into, what Pippin calls, an expressivism that primarily
understands the human being as an esteemer – as formulated in Z 43 and GM II 8.
Humans are fore and foremost orienting, esteeming or valuing creatures (schätzen) that have,
what Pippin calls, 'attachments' – or 'depth commitments' – as conditions of life. Psychology
is of central concern, because it helps to understand the subjects’ passionate identification
with a commitment or erotic attachment. (12, 14, 25, 32) "[P]sychology will be a sort of
replacement for first philosophy because of the primacy of the 'psychological' question of
some basic, always presupposed 'stance toward life' […]." (12) The gain of Pippin's approach
is the intriguing insight that Nietzsche's characterization of the philosopher is similar to
Plato's: the philosopher is driven by a distinct eros. The philosopher's love for philosophy is a
perfect illustration that a human's original erotic attachment is an expression of perspective; of
one's attachment to an ideal. The classical reading of the preface of JGB, where philosophers
are portrayed as clumsy lovers, is, therefore, incomplete. The image of male philosophers
chasing truth as a woman is not a mere rhetorical illustration of the natural situation of the
active masculine being that overpowers passive women. The image is explicitly concerned
with the philosopher's erotic striving or depth commitment as condition of life. Pippin asserts
that this particular approach to psychology makes Nietzsche one "of the great 'French
moralists'." (9) The French moralists considered a reliance on a deeper philosophical theory of
human nature a limitation to write honestly – cf. Pascal's homme honnête. The goal of
Nietzsche's appraisal of psychology over philosophy as "the path to the fundamental
problems" (JGB 23) is to provide insight into "how we should understand what happens when
people appeal to normative considerations, or try to live well, how those norms come to
matter people, how even they could or could not come to matter." (8) In considering these
commitments to norms to vary over generations, Nietzsche improves and extends the French
moralists model with a necessary historical dimension to the psyche. (3, 31) The best
illustration of this primordiality of psychology is GM where Nietzsche offers a historical and
genealogical narrative about the 'subject'. (70) To grasp how the 'subject' is to be
comprehended in Nietzsche's complex understanding of 'psychology', Pippin proposes a
second model: the Freudian notion of the unconscious. A subject's actions are not merely
natural events or sufferings, but are psychologically motivated deeds it is trying to
accomplish. From this Freudian perspective Pippin brings about the greatest contribution of
the book to recent Nietzsche studies: his expressivist reading of the subject-deed relation. His
fundamental claim is that human conduct cannot be completely understood by a mere
"reference to basic human drives that determined behavior independent of conscious
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assessments and motives, which were always ex post facto rationalizations." (87) Nietzsche's
psychology, understanding the subject as an esteemer or valuator, who upholds a certain
(hidden) attitude towards life, comprehends that our drives are not just physical expenditures
beyond our conscious control, but are hidden, because we hide them in our continuous
interpreting activities. Pippin's expressivism shows that in Nietzsche's philosophy the
recursiveness of the deed is pivotal. The deed is an expression of who I am, while it
constitutes me at the same time; a relation between subject and deed famously captured in
Nietzsche's phrasing of "the deed is everything" in GM I 13. By means of this rejection of a
subject behind the deed Nietzsche is, nevertheless, "not denying that there is a subject of the
deed. He is just asserting that it is not separate, distinct from the activity itself; it is 'in' the
deed." (75) A subject's determinate meaning of its intention cannot be isolated from social and
historical factors, and the recognition of a subject's intention as justifying its action depends
on the agent's character, life-history and the community or tradition wherein it lives. (77-78)
Pippin's expressivist view shows that the will to power, although agreeable with a form of
naturalism, casts a serious doubt on all kinds of one-sided readings – those in line with
Heidegger, and those reducing Nietzsche to a strictly biological paradigm. (7, 87)
Despite our positive considerations, Pippin's expressivist account poses some troublesome
problems. Firstly, it is unclear how this new approach is to be aligned with will to power.
Pippin's extensive analysis of GM II 12 in the third chapter, where Nietzsche opposes
'activity' to the 'mechanistic senselessness' of modern sciences, is considered to furnish proof
that the 'subject is in the deed'. Pippin's argumentation for this is quite adequate, but
incomplete since it is plain that Nietzsche is not only concerned with an agent's activity of
esteeming, but the activity of will to power. This indistinctness seems to suggest that a treatise
of Nietzsche's psychology must address what Nietzsche exactly means by a "physiopsychology" as "morphology and the doctrine of the development of the will to power" (JGB
23). How can the activity of the will to power be explained in a naturalistic vocabulary
without falling into a reductionism? We think Pippin's expressivist account forms a decent
and well thought-out first step towards a substantial understanding of this biologism,
however, in its present form it is too incomplete to accomplish anything like this. The
hesitation to specify will to power in Nietzsche's psychology, secondly, makes Pippin's
reading of 'will to power' as 'self-overcoming' unwillingly one-dimensional. 'Selfovercoming', being an achievement of some sort of affirmative psychological relation to one's
own deeds, is understood as the true expression of will to power. "[T]he true realization of the
will to power, genuine freedom, has rather to do with self-overcoming." (120) This
hypothetical identification of freedom, as a psychological self-relation (108) or one's
affirmative psychological relation to one's deeds, with the summum bonum of will to power
seems to be somewhat at odds with the earlier rejection of the doctrine of will to power as a
model for psychology in Nietzsche's works. (4) The exact function of will to power to
Nietzschean psychology and its understanding of the subject-deed relation remains enigmatic,
presenting a third problem: how are we to take hold of the role of 'fate' in Nietzsche's
psychology. While we can say that 'fate is expressed in the subject's deeds' (cf. WS 61) – to
recuperate Pippin's phrasing – Pippin refrains from framing the subject-deed relation in
Nietzsche's understanding of fate. Pippin hints at amor fati at the end of the first chapter and
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again near the end of the final chapter in considerations about freedom and necessity (116),
but never gives a systematic discussion of how his expressivism relates to Nietzsche's
understanding of fate. Notwithstanding the difficulties these three issues bring about, we do
not consider them to point to an inherent flaw of Pippin's expressivist approach. We think
they can rather be ascribed to the book's over-all unsystematic character. This book is still too
much a group of lectures, rather than a systematically written exposé and is still in need to
homogenize its fundamental claims.
The book's unsystematic nature, however, cannot account for the problematic tension between
both Pippin's major claims of expressivism and his model of the mind that assumes selfdeceit. His expressivist thesis shows that consciousness cannot be a second-order neutral selfmonitoring of interactions between urges, but is an interpreting activity, assuming very little
about human nature. Consciousness, however, is not only understood as an interpretive
dynamic, but as self-dissatisfaction.
"The self-relation in question is everywhere interpretive and evaluative, involves a
self-dissatisfaction (…). (…) Such second-order awareness is originally reactive and
negative." (59, 60)
Pippin founds his reading on the ground of the depiction of consciousness as a bow under
tension. In Z 9 and JGB preface 4 this image illustrates how the soul pulls against itself. (37,
56) We can certainly agree with a discussion of consciousness as tensional; understanding the
self-relation primarily as an interpretive dynamic. Therefore, in our sense, Pippin is correct in
his assertion that Nietzsche is primarily interested in phenomena of self-deceit. (90)
Understanding consciousness as a tensional dynamic whereby a subject's deeper drives or
commitments are hidden from himself, is, however, not a controversial or novel claim in
Nietzsche receptions. Patton (2008, 472-3) already showed – in reply to the (Deleuze 1977a,
95) – that the notion of ‘feeling of power’ does not only involve the will and how it affects
(human) behavior, but also the interpretation and comprehension of (voluntative) agency.
Identifying consciousness with self-dissatisfaction is, conversely, a general claim of a certain
model of the mind exterior to Nietzsche's philosophy and is a claim we found to be too
unsubstantiated to accept. First of all Pippin's account of consciousness in Nietzsche's
philosophy is far too incomplete to justify it as reactive. Pippin pays, for example, no
attention to Nietzsche's changing view on the impact of consciousness on the human
organism. Whereas Nietzsche took an overall positive stance towards consciousness until the
middle of the 1880s and even attributed the increasing, critical awareness of the inaccuracy of
consciousness to the effectiveness of consciousness itself (FW 11), he disposes of
consciousness in the fall of 1886 as a danger or an illness (FW 354). Secondly, although
accepting that this tension of consciousness requires a historical explanation –"Nietzsche's
account of this tension or self-dissatisfaction is essentially historical." (59) – the nature of
consciousness lies in its socially evolved structure between commander and servant and not in
reactivity.
"Assuming this observation is correct, I may go on to conjecture that […] at the outset,
consciousness was necessary, was useful, only between persons (particularly between
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those who commanded and those who obeyed); and that it has developed only in
proportion to that usefulness." (FW 354)
The incorporation of this originally social structure into the individual, shows, indeed as
Pippin claims, that consciousness is "interpretive and evaluative" (59):
“[T]hat consequently each of us, even with the best will in the world to understand
ourselves as individually as possible, ‹to know ourselves›, will always bring to
consciousness precisely that in ourselves which is ‹non-individual›, that which is
‹average›; that due to the nature of consciousness – to the ‹genius of the species›
governing it – our thoughts themselves are continually as it were outvoted and
translated back into the herd perspective.” FW 354 (See also GM II 16, Pippin (62))
Nietzsche accentuates that what is brought to a subject's consciousness is hidden and is hidden
by the subject itself "due to the nature of consciousness". Because a subject consists out of
socially, historically and organically formed structures, phenomena of self-deceit become rich
zones of activity to a psychologist in the Nietzschean sense. Nietzsche, however, does not
draw from this historical embeddedness of the subject and its self-relation the conclusion that
the self's relation to itself is negative or dominated by self-dissatisfaction, as Pippin does.
Pippin is correct in his refutation of Bittner's refusal to accept self-deceit as a viable issue in
the domain of psychology, however, he underestimates how much of Bittner's objection might
be attributed to Pippin's unfortunate choice of terminology, that distorts consciousness from a
historically shaped interpretive dynamic into a negative and reactive phenomenon.
On the more general point of Pippin's vocabulary, we are surprised, given his Hegelian
background, that he did not take the chance to start a constructive discussion between
Nietzsche's psychological project of philosophy and Merleau-Ponty's approach to
phenomenology as "genetic phenomenology" (2009, 145) or "depth-history"; "remaking the
path which has led from the natural world to this superstructure [of tradition]." (2002, 29)
Also, we consider Merleau-Ponty's terminological approach to the body and consciousness a
more suitable conceptual apparatus to grasp Nietzsche's philosophy, than Pippin's language of
'depth commitment’, 'erotic striving/attachment’, 'self-dissatisfaction', a.o. Even more
provocative – but maybe more truthful to Nietzsche's biological phrasings – would be to try to
accomplish this in the language of Dual Inheritance Theory, a recent Darwinian model that
tries to understand humans as primarily cultural or psychological beings, not held on a leash
by genes (Richerson & Boyd 2009). It is also quite puzzling why Pippin does not make use of
Hadot's well established terminology of 'spiritual exercises' to account for the issue of a
subject's stance toward life, or depth commitment. We do not claim Pippin should have gone
about his research in the tradition of Hadot, however, an elaboration of how a depth
commitment pertains to a spiritual exercise would be convenient.
Finally, Pippin's appealing dissection of the issue of nihilism as a collective failing of desire
rather than a simple physiologic degeneration that understands nihilism as an absence or
presence of urges (69), does not require his account of self-consciousness as selfdissatisfaction. He successfully shows that the psychological question of nihilism is
concerned with the identification of the human being's valuing activity. (52) Suffering, which
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is unavoidable in this world, "provokes human beings into a complex response"; which is
expressed in a reaction distinct for our species: "the burden of the question of the meaning of
suffering". (60) Humans do not live their lives prudently avoiding suffering like animals, but
need to consciously give account why a certain suffering befalls them. Individuality is,
therefore, not just an "original state of being", as with Darwinism, but a "fragile, unstable,
threatened, achievement". (61) Pippin stresses that humans, by their continuous valuating
activities, are psychologically committed to their attachments toward life. The problem of
nihilism is, therefore, not about knowledge or creativity, but about desire. (119) The meaning
of suffering, interpreted by morality to be the subject's own sinfulness, changed our selfrelation by disfiguring the dynamic with our drives or erotic striving. How is life to be,
correctly or healthily, valued in the face of the question of suffering? We are eager to follow
Pippin's analysis of nihilism as a problem of commitment or erotic attachment, explained by
his approach of expressivism. (54) However, the presumption about human nature as "a
dissatisfaction with its own nature" (61) is, according to us, an unnecessary complication at
this point. Discussing nihilism as an erotic problem is an important contribution to Nietzsche
studies, despite the lack of proof for Pippin's understanding of nihilism in bourgeois Europe
as the loss of the capacity to feel self-contempt at their animal status. (62)
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