Luca Lupo

Drives, Instincts, Language, and

Consciousness in Daybreak 119:
'Erleben und Erdichten' I

. In a few aphorisms from Book II of Daybreak, Nietzsche constructs a psychol

ogy that aims to reinforce and consolidate his critique of moral prejudices. The
hypotheses that he sketches in these aphorisms will remain unchanged till the
end of his theoretical activity, although he sometimes formulates and modu
lates them in a different way. Put very simply, those hypotheses can be stated
0 as follows. There is really no such thing as an 'T' or "ego". The "ego" is just
a construction and an abstract entity (D 105/M 105). If an ego exists at all,
its complexity escapes our understanding and it can hardly be expressed by
language. The "so-called 'ego'" is a multiplicity of processes and drives about
which we can have no more than a delusion of real knowledge (D 115/M 115). 1
The language and the sensorial organisation that constitute our consciousness
are rough "nets" or "webs" that imprison us and are unable to filter, at the
level of consciousness, the processes and drives that actually occur. Such proc
esses and drives are, therefore, unknowable (D 115/M 115, D 117/M 117).
The actions that are usually attributed to a "subject" are unknown and
unlmowable (D 116/M 116), and the motives that determine them are obscure.
We know that we act but we do not know the motives of our actions - motives
which are in constant conflict amongst themselves below the level of con
sciousness. This is tantamount to saying_ that we systematically act without
knowing why we are acting. But if we do not know the motives of our actions,
how can we be entirely responsible for them and say that we act intentionally
(D 129/M 129)? Such questions problematise the concepts of "will", "inten
tion", and "responsibility", which thereby become radically questionable. As
an alte.!n?:_tive to the Jhe_oretiqtl idols that re thus made to fall, Nietzsche
proposes the primacy of "chance" (Zufall) as the source of what happens at a
varity of levels (D 119/M 119, D 130/M 130).

1 For an extensive discussion of Nietzsche's conception of "drive" (Trieb), I allow myself to

refer the reader to my book, Lupo (2006), Le colonibe delia scettico, Chapter I. The text that
follows resumes what I have written in Chapters II and Ill of my book. I dedicate this article
to the memory of Sergio Franzese (1963-2010)

:'"
"1 ;
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 180 - Luca Lupo
The whole edifice of morality - conceived of as a science about the actions
of a subject of willing - becomes problematic if one asserts that (i) the "I"
does not exist except in the sense of a complex configuration of drives (D 115/
M 115, D 119/M 119); (ii) the will does not exist and should be substituted
by a pulsional determinism which is psychophysiological in nature; (iii) action
cannot be known because the net of pulsional motives that determine it are
imponderable and incommensurable, so that any efforts to domesticate our
drives are illusory (D 109/M 109).
Aph'!rism 119 is at the centre of this whole web of aphorisms. I shall try,
first, to give a brief account of its content, and then focus on a few of its most
important points.
The essence (Wesen) of the individual consists in a connected multiplicity
of drives. Due to its extreme complexity,this pulsional configuration can only
be known by approximation. Only the roughest, most extreme drives can be
C expressed by language. Already in D 115/M 115 Nietzsche had pointed out
how difficult it is to describe the drives in linguistic terms.
Nietzsche does not explain clearly what the drives are supposed to be,
although he makes some efforts to this effect in the notebooks. But here in D
119/M 119 he suddenly focuses on a property that characterises them. What
ever they really are, one can at least say that they are something that seeks
nutriment (Emiihrung). And they find nutriment in the experiences an individ
ual goes through (Le., in his or her "lived" experiences, in his or her Erleb
nisse) - an individual, let us not forget, whose essence consist precisely in
the whole miHtiplicity of those same drives. "Chance" is here presented as the
determining factor that gives nutriment to the drives. However, chance pro
motes an unequal development of the drives, so that some will effectively find
nutriment while others will languish. Nietzsche compares the pulsional config
uration resulting from chance processes of nutrition to a polyp. The drives'
nourishment is "a work of chance" (D 119/M 119): "every moment of our lives
sees some of the polyp-arms of our being grow and others of them wither" -
and "as a consequence of this chance nourishment of the parts, the whole,
fully grown polyp will be something just as accidental as its growth has been"
(D 119/M 119).
Nietzsche now puts forward the hypothesis that when the drives cannot
find nutriment they seek to satisfy their needs by meansf imaginary or virtual
i
'
I
I gratification. Toe drives now tend to imagine or invent (erdichten) a substitute
form of gratification. They invent the lived experience (Erlebniss) that they
!'jl
were unable to find in reality.
Hence'the compensating function of the oneiric activity that is carried out
,,I! by what Nietzsche calls our "inventive reason" (dichtend_Yemunft): the activ-
Drives, Instincts, Language, and Consciousness in Daybreak 119 - 181
ity whereby the drives "interpret" nervous stimuli and "posit their 'causes"',
always "according to their [own] needs" (D 119/M 119, translation modified).2
Nietzsche then ventures the hypothesis that such a tendency to fabricate or
construct imaginary causes in relation to particular nervous stimuli - a con
struction that aims at the virtual gratification of the drives - does not occur
only in dreams or during sleep, but also in our "waking life" (D 119/M 119).
And so he asks whether there is any "essential difference between waking and
dreaming?" (D 119/M 119). In both psychic states the main activity of the
drives seems indeed to be the fabrication, construction, or "poetical" invention
(Erdichtung) of experiences (Erlebnisse) that nourish them. Since the available
experiences or stimuli are a matter of chance and cannot satisfy the needs of
nourishment of all the drives, the latter cannot but interpret the stimuli so as
to make them offer gratification, reelaborating and adjusting them in ways
that go well beyond their original capacity or adequacy to respond to particular
needs and pulsional demands. If a drive does ot manage to make the stimu
lus/ experience able to satisfy its own need of nourishment, then that drive
interprets the incoming stimulus as if it were adequate to its needs. In other
words, the drive constructs, invents at will, an adequate stimulus.
From this follows the last, and most decisive, hypothesis about the nature
of consciousness - the hypothesis towards which the whole aphorism conver
ges. It is presented together with other hypotheses in the form of a question,
as the climax of a crescendo effect. The formulation of hypotheses in the form
of questions - I shall come back to this seems to be part of Nietzsche's
scepticism, an extreme expansion of the conjectural nature of his thought. It
expresses the intention to leave the philosophical research open to the possi
bility of finding new horizons of development, in accordance with Nietzsche's
conception of knowledge as a relentless activity of experimentation. He writes:
[...] but do I have to add that when we are awake our drives likewise do nothing but
interpret nervous stimuli and, according to their needs, posit their 'causes'? that there is
no essential difference between waking and dreaming? that when we compare very differ
ent stages of culture we even find that freedom of waking interpretation in the one is in
1
no way inferior to, the freedom exercised in the other while dreaming? that our moral
judgements and evaluations. too are only images and fantasies based on a physiological
process unknown to US, a kind of acquired language for designating certain nervous
stimuli? that all 'our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on
an unknown, prhaps unknowable, but felt text? (D 119/M 119, translation modified).
i
2 Cf. M 119: "[...] muss ich aber ausfiihren, dass unsere Triebe im Wachen ebenfalls nichts
Anderes thun, als die Nervenreize interpretiren und nach ihrem BedUrfnisse deren 'Ursachen'
ansetzen?".
 186 - Luca Lupo
grandmother of each and every concept" (TL 1, 147/WL 1). A little bit further
in the text, Nietzsche underlines the decisive fact that "the relation of a nerv
ous stimulus to the image produced thereby is inherently not a necessary rela
tionship" and the relation of the former to the latter is not "a relation of strict
causality" (TL 1, 149/WL 1). This confirms the semantic independence of the
interpretive activity from the stimulus which occasions it, as well as the pri
macy of a "drive to form metaphors" (TL 2, 150/WL 2). And this is highly
evocative of the inventive reason of D 119/M 119: "That drive to form meta
phors, that fundamental human drive which cannot be left out of consideration
for even a second without also leaving out human beings themselves, is in
truth not defeated, indeed hardly even tamed, by the process whereby a regular
and rigid new world is built from its own sublimated products - concepts - in
order to imprison it in a fortress" (TL 2, 150-151/WL 2).
, While in TL the conceptual world is the effect of a free interpretation of
o nervous stimuli carried out by the fundamental human drive to create meta
phors, in D 119/M 119 the whole reality perceived by consciousness both in
dreams an.d in waking life becomes a construction built by an inventive reason
which is driven by our pulsional life to produce causes on the basis of the
interpretation of nervous stimuli.
There is another aspect that confirms that this is not just a casual asso
c-:1.
I
nance between two texts written so far apart in time. In both texts Nietzsche
uses the term "nervous stimulus" (Nervenreiz), and this indicates that we
should in fact establish a more than hypothetical link between D. 119/M 119
and TL. 7 Moreover, a lexical research confirms that Nietzsche uses the term
Nervenreiz only in these two texts. 8
The question of the problematic relationship between sleep and vigil and
the question of consciousness are other themes common to D 119/M 119 and
TL/WL, and these correlations make clear that Nietzsche must have had the
text of TL/WL under his eyes when he wrote D 119/M 119.
In TL/WL, the metaphorical image of consciousness as a Bewusstseinszim
mer ("a chamber of consciousness") resting on "the pitiless, the greedy, the
insatiable, the murderous", of consciousness as a place where man is locked
in, "clinging in dreams, as it were, to the back of a tiger" (TL 1, 142-143/WL
1)9 - this metaphorical image expresses quite well the relationship, which is
"
7 This link becomes quite clear in Daybreak's critical apparatus: KGW V/3, p. 680.
8 Or, more precisely still, apart from its occurrence in these two texts, it only seems to
occur in Nietzsche's notes to his "Lectures on Ancient Rhetoric", cf. KGW 11/4, p. 426.
9 This imagery, with just a few variations, is in fact taken from one of the Five Prefaces to
Five Unwritten Books, cf. KSA 1, p. 760.
Drives, Instincts, Language, and Consciousness in Daybreak 119 - 187
more analytically described in D 119/M 119, between the illusoriness of the
world of consciousness (a world consisting of dreams that are created both
with closed and open eyes inside the "chamber of consciousness") and the
underlying life of the drives, upon which that world of consciousness is
dependent. The wild tiger of TL/WL becomes in D 119/M 119 the polyp at the
mercy of chance. And the metaphorical image of the "chamber of conscious
ness" in TL/WL recalls another aphorism from Book II of Daybreak, a fact
which confirms again that Nietzsche had his old unpublished text well in mind
while he was working on his new one. I am, of course, referring to D 117/M
117 and its claustrophobic description of man locked within the realm of his
own senses like in a prison. Towards the end of this aphorism another animal
is added to the Nietzschean bestiary, namely when Nietzsche compares the
situation of human beings - who are unable to free themselves from their own
sensorial apparatus - to that of spiders, which are prisoners (but also, let us
not forget, creators) of their own cobwebs: "tl],ere is absolutely no escape, no
backway or bypath into the real world! We sit within our net, we spiders, and
whatever we can catch in it, we can catch nothing at all except that which
allows itself to be caught in precisely our net" (D 117/M 117). While in D 117/
M 117 our senses are the threads of the nets that imprison us, in TL these
threads are our representations of space and time: "[... ] these we produce
within ourselves and from ourselves with the same necessity as a spider spins;
if we are forced to comprehend all things under these forms alone, then it is
no longer wonderful that what we comprehend in all these things is actually
nothing other than these very forms" (TL 1, 150/WL 1).
IV
Let us now go back to the concept of "inventive reason". It is no wonder that
Nietzsche will develop and progressively expand his reflection on this con
cept - and thus in his notebooks from the period 1884-1886 the "inventive
reason" appears as the "creative force" which is the fundamental trait of all
living things, hum!n and non-human. "The whole of the organic world is the
threading together of beings (die Aneinanderfiidelung von Wesen)" whose "fun
damental capacity" (Grundfiihigkeit) is "the capacity to create (fashion, fabri-
1
cate, invent)" (dfe Fiihigkeit zum Schaffen (Gestalten Erfinden Erdichten), NL
1885, KSA 11, 34[247] = WLN, 14-15). All organisms fabricate their own
w:orld around them. They create "little fabricated worlds" (erdichteten kleinen
Welten) because they project "their strength, their desires, their habits outside
themselves, as their external world" (NL 1885, KSA 11, 34[247] = WLN, 14-