Psychology as a First Principle? Self-Love and the Will to Power in La Rochefoucauld and Nietzsche

Abstract

ABSTRACT Both Nietzsche and La Rochefoucauld rejected metaphysical principles, such as the Kantian moral imperatives, and adopted psychology as their first philosophy. In this article I explore their views of self-love and of the will to power as the first principles of human motivation. Although both thinkers reduce actions to egoistic motives, they define the human drives and passions differently. While Nietzsche criticizes La Rochefoucauld’s view of a self-love-oriented intention as the principal cause of deeds, his interpretation is reductionist seeing that La Rochefoucauld also gives a quasi-expressivist account of deeds based on multiple drives. Unlike La Rochefoucauld, Nietzsche claims that there is no preexisting intention before or behind deeds, but rather that the doer expresses herself in and through her deeds. He laments that La Rochefoucauld’s concept of self-love is overshadowed by Christianity and criticizes him for condemning secular virtues as postlapsarian vices in disguise. Egoism, for Nietzsche, is a drive that is ingrained in the psyche for self-elevation. By comparing and contrasting their views, I conclude that self-love for La Rochefoucauld is pure self-affirmation at the expense of other drives or other agents, while Nietzsche’s notion of the will to power is a master-drive’s organization of other drives in service of the grander project of the self, which at the same time allows the subordinate drives to express themselves and fulfill the functions proper to their own nature. This interpretation sheds light on the key concept of egoism and the will to power in Nietzsche’s moral psychology, as well as on the first principles of human action in Nietzsche and La Rochefoucauld.