Milk Way Ah 1932

Friedrich Nietzsche: You Are Not Your Personality

Modern TheoFredrich Nietzsche: You Aren’t Your Personality

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The ego, the subjective feeling of “I,” the personality, the thinker of thoughts, this value is best characterized as the inner voice: the second-guesser, the bickerer, the judger, the indignant, the excited, the thing that’s jealous. Presuming your inner-voice is you―what then? How confident is this presumption? You sit and concentrate on dull, necessary assignments — what happens? Disruptions arise of sexual fantasy, hunger, fear, anxiety, pleasure, name your impulse. If voluntary thought can be interrupted by involuntary, which is you? The interrupted or interrupter? The beginning question must be replaced by another. If your inner-voice isn’t you — what then?

“…a thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think.’” — Beyond Good and Evil

If it is “I” who thinks, what is “I” if not another thought? This would make the thinker the result of a thought! A complete reduction to the absurd! Nietzsche continues,

“It thinks; but that this ‘it’ is precisely the famous old ‘ego’ is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an ‘immediate certainty.’ After all, one has even gone too far with this ‘it thinks’ — even the ‘it’ contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself.” — Beyond Good and Evil

What is this raw, naked process? The answer to such a question begs at the thousand-times-refuted theory of free will.

In the Nietzchean view, you are merely the dwelling place where competitive impulses live. In a narrative sense, the individual wills are warring one-eyed giants that fix themselves on one aim to reconstruct your Being. Given these giants are compelled to an aim, they form a complex of sensation and thinking, “…just as sensations (and indeed many kinds of sensations) are to be recognized as ingredients of the will, so, secondly, should thinking also: in every act of the will there is a ruling thought…)” In other words, your impulses are consciously willing themselves to power. According to Nietzsche, the impulses declare, “I am free, ‘he’ must obey.” The “he” being you.

Free Will

The false appearance of being commander and executor of thoughts Nietzsche added, “…has translated itself into the feeling as if there were a necessity of effect.” In modern tongue, you naively find it necessary to be an experiencer alongside the experience, the thinker alongside the thought. You ignorantly assume you have a mind, rather than you are a mind.

“Suppose someone were thus to see through the boorish simplicity of this celebrated concept of ‘free will’ and put it out of his head altogether, I beg of him to carry his ‘enlightenment’ a step further, and also put out of his head the contrary of this monstrous conception of ‘free will’: I mean ‘unfree will.’” — Beyond Good and Evil

The concept of free will is a fundamentally plebeian, half-witted rape of logic. Likewise, unfree will is a misapprehension of the warring, autonomous one-eyed giants. Nietzsche noted, “In real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills.” Degrees of freedom are absent. The strange, uncomfortable truth of the inner-voice is that it devalued itself.

What You Say You Are vs What You Are

Your Being can be viewed in a hierarchical arrangement. The base encompasses billions of years of inherited birth and death followed by instilled cultural ideals. Drama and articulated knowledge occupy the peak. Therefore, you know yourself at one level of analysis — the peak of the hierarchy. If the ‘you’ you recognize is understood at a single level of analysis, how are you a dependable source of who you are? On what grounds can you claim ‘I would never indulge in malevolent urges,’ if you’re ignorant of your fundamental levels of Being? (more on malevolent urges in Your Capacity for Evil: Japan’s Human Experimentation Program)

Given you embody the entirety of your hierarchical arrangement, the only way to glimpse your Being is watching how you act. These actions are not your beliefs. Beliefs are the interpretation of your Being, and not your Being itself.

The inner-voice’s failure to represent the entirety of your Being bizarrely grants an awkward truth: you aren’t your personality.