Nietzsche, the Self, and the Disunity of Philosophical Reason

Nous avons psychologisé comme les fous, qui augmentent leur folie en s'efforçant de la comprendre. This paper falls into thee parts. The first section is concerned with Nietzsche's treatment of the self. Here the main point I want to make is that there is a striking lack of fit between the (non-realist or fictionalist) conception of the self that emerges from Nietzsche's theoretical discussion of the self, and the (realist, or at any rate non-fictionalist) conception of the self that is presupposed by his practical philosophy. The problem thereby created gives reason to consider Nietzsche's more general view of the relation of the practical and the theoretical, to which the second section of the paper is devoted. Here again we find, I argue, a disunity in Nietzsche, this time between, on the one hand, a view of the relation of theoretical to practical reason which belongs to modern naturalism, and, on the other, a view of the unity of reason which Nietzsche locates in the Presocratics, but which in modern philosophical terms is recognisably Kantian or post-Kantian. This clash of naturalistic and transcendental conceptions, I propose in the third section, should be regarded as reflecting Nietzsche's view of the limits of (our) philosophical reflection, and in order to clarify and develop this suggestion, I offer a reading of the Third Essay of The Genealogy of Morals which, I claim, allows us to