Nietzsche on the Education of the Emotions

A educação das emoções em Nietzsche

Abstract

This article develops the hypothesis that Daybreak, especially aphorism 103 of Book II, contains a robust conception of the education of emotions within Nietzsche’s philosophy. Drawing on the articulation between genealogical and self-genealogical praxis, as well as on what I characterize as primary affectivity, I argue that Nietzsche understands thinking and feeling as recursive, embodied, and situated processes whose modulation depends on dynamic couplings between organism and world. The analysis of the formal and semantic structure of aphorism 103 shows that the theoretical formulation in its final sentence - “We have to relearn to think differently (umzudenken) - in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to relearn to feel differently (umzufühlen)” - expresses the possibility of reorienting and transforming our emotional experience. The article structures part of its argumentation through an enactivist framework of affectivity, reconstructing the notion of primary affectivity in close alignment with the enactivist approach to emotions. Finally, it is argued that the education of the emotions in Nietzsche implies a dynamic and reflective reorganization of the ways we evaluate and feel, in constant interaction with the world and with others.

Keywords
Nietzsche; Education; Emotions; Affectivity; Enactivism.

Resumo

Este artigo desenvolve a hipótese de que Aurora, especialmente o aforismo 103 do Livro II, contém uma concepção robusta de educação das emoções no interior da filosofia de Nietzsche. A partir da articulação entre práxis genealógica e autogenealógica, bem como uma concepção do que caracterizo como afetividade primária, argumento que Nietzsche compreende o pensar e o sentir como processos recursivos, corporificados e situados, cuja modulação depende de acoplamentos dinâmicos entre organismo e ambiente. A análise da estrutura formal e semântica do aforismo 103 revela que a formulação teórica da última frase - “Temos de reaprender a pensar […] e talvez mais tarde reaprender a sentir” - expressa uma possibilidade de reorientação e transformação das nossas experiências emocionais. O artigo estrutura parte da argumentação por meio do registro enativista de afetividade, reconstruindo a noção de afetividade primária em estreita sintonia com a abordagem enativista das emoções. Por fim, defende-se que a educação das emoções, em Nietzsche, implica uma reorganização dinâmica e reflexiva das formas de avaliar e sentir, em constante interação com o ambiente e com os outros.

Palavras-chave:
Nietzsche; Educação; Emoções; Afetividade; Enativismo.

Introduction

The purpose of this article¹ is to put forward a hypothesis concerning the education of the emotions in Nietzsche’s thought. It does not offer an analysis centered on his writings from the Basel period, nor a systematic examination of the courses he taught there. The intention is different: to assess the extent to which Nietzsche continues to teach us - and how he still exercises a distinctly philosophical pedagogical function - insofar as thinking with Nietzsche remains advantageous due to his theoretical insights, which express a philosophical dimension that is continuously relevant, for example, in contemporary debates within the philosophy of emotion.

The hypothesis is developed on the basis of aphorism 103 of Daybreak, whose final formulation presents two decisive verbs: umlernen and umfühlen: “We have to relearn to think differently (umzudenken) - in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to relearn to feel differently (umzufühlen).” This sentence not only anticipates what will later take clearer shape as genealogical and self-genealogical critique, but also articulates a dense phenomenological analysis of our “inner world.” What is fundamental here is the claim that thinking and feeling are recursive and interdependent processes, embodied, situated, and modulated through dynamic organism-world couplings.

To clarify the final sentence of the aphorism, I bring Nietzsche into dialogue with contemporary enactivist debates, especially within the philosophy of emotion. Accordingly, I begin by proposing an enactivist interpretation of what I call primary affectivity in Nietzsche: a dynamic, embodied system of affective dispositions that precedes conscious rationalization, continuously modulated by the interaction between agent and world. This primary affectivity is responsible for normatively orienting our evaluations², playing a structuring role in sense-making and in the plasticity of emotional experience. At the basis of this conception lies Nietzsche’s notion of an embodied and situated intellect, according to which thinking is not separable from corporeality or from the context in which the subject is embedded, but emerges from recursive and dynamic processes of coupling between body and world. Nietzsche’s enactivist register, as I interpret it, is fruitful for analyzing the programmatic philosophemes of an education of the emotions, subsumed under the two central verbs of aphorism 103, namely, the praxis of genealogical and self-genealogical critique (umlernen) and the affective reorientation of our emotional economy (umfühlen). The education of the emotions, in this framework, does not presuppose an intellect detached from its situation and merely capable of constructing representations; on the contrary, from this perspective, we do not even require representations, since our evaluations emerge from dynamic and embodied processes in ongoing interaction with the world. What is at stake is a dynamic reorganization of how we evaluate and feel, in continuous dynamic coupling with the world and with others.

This article is structured in three main movements. In the first movement, I present aphorism 103 of Daybreak as the methodological core of the education of the emotions, highlighting the role of umlernen and umfühlen in the critical reorientation of thinking and feeling, as well as their articulating function in the overall architecture of Book II of Daybreak. The second movement deepens the analysis of the aphorism’s formal and semantic structure, explicating Nietzsche’s conception of primary affectivity and its articulation with emotions in the enactivist theoretical register. Finally, the third movement details the conditions and possibilities of the education of the emotions, showing how Nietzsche proposes that the relearning of thinking is a condition for making possible the relearning of feeling, relying on the radical plasticity of emotions as the basis for the transformation and reorientation of our affective economy. In the relation between thinking and feeling, the interaction is dynamic and mutually reinforcing.

First Movement: the Context of Book II and Aphorism 103 of Daybreak

Aphorism 103 is strategically situated within the context of the second part or second chapter of Daybreak, titled by Nietzsche simply as “Book II,” which I take to be readable - alongside Book I - as a kind of treatise on human development, beyond the original theses he already advances in these two books, such as the pathologization of Christian morality and the initial projects of genealogical and self-genealogical critique. In Book II, Nietzsche develops a series of hypotheses that that articulate critique, genealogy, and affectivity, laying the groundwork for a perspective that will permeate all his later work. Given the particular relevance of Book II, a brief consideration of its internal architecture is warranted; the second chapter of Daybreak consists of 51 aphorisms, numbered from 97 to 148. Aphorism 103, placed right at the beginning, performs a structuring methodological role: it delineates the critical strategy Nietzsche develops throughout the chapter. One may say that 103 anticipates, in germinal form, both the orientation of genealogical critique and a robust affective hypothesis that is progressively unfolded in the remainder of the book and which I interpret within the enactivist register of contemporary debate.

Nietzsche’s positions in the context of this chapter unfold across two major sections. The first, spanning from aphorism 103 to 129, corresponds to the presentation of the central theses: the critique of moral motives - understood both as a denunciation of their falsity and as a questioning of the belief in their grounding - and the formulation of the hypothesis of primary affectivity, according to which our actions, judgments, and moral values are shaped by affective dynamics that precede conscious rationalization. Aphorism 129, titled “Alleged Struggle of Motives,” marks a conceptual and structural turning point in the chapter. In it, Nietzsche articulates more systematically the relationship between genealogy and affectivity, expanding the diagnosis that our judgments and actions are the outcome of motivational conflicts whose internal affective functioning entirely escapes us (in the sense that we have no privileged access to the inner world of motives and to our emotional economy), yet whose effects are fully operative upon us and stabilize in moral forms. It is here that the second major section of the book begins, extending until aphorism 147, and which may be read as an application of the general hypothesis to the specific case of Christian morality.

In this final block, Nietzsche undertakes a pre-genealogical critique of the fundamental affects that sustain Christian morality, especially the concepts of compassion, altruism, egoism, guilt, and sin. Empathy also appears in this trajectory, associated with the formation of the subject and the idea of moral interiority, although its role here is more lateral and less directly connected to a metaphysical critique. Beyond the traditional critique of the subject, what is at stake, as I interpret it, is a genealogical critique (whose background is the sentimentalist thesis of the moral tradition), directed above all against the French moralists. Thus, what we find between aphorisms 129 and 147 is the concrete demonstration of the initial hypothesis: Nietzsche analyzes how historically rooted moral values are the product of determinate affective formations that have become naturalized over time. Genealogy operates here as a critical exercise in denaturalization: it destabilizes the affective bonds that ground our morality by revealing their historical, constructed, and therefore transformable character.

Book II concludes with aphorism 148, which takes up, conclusively, the terms introduced in 103. The final sentence of 148, “When a human being no longer considers themselves evil, they cease to be so!”, condenses the formative hypothesis of the chapter: as soon as we displace our evaluations through the interrelational dynamics established over time, and with them the plasticity of the affective dispositions that sustain these evaluations, we likewise alter our moral performances and the positions we endorse in everyday life, through a relearning of ways of feeling. In this sense, 148 does not merely dialogue with 103; it reconfirms it as the methodological axis of Nietzsche’s argumentation throughout the chapter.

Book II of Daybreak may thus be understood as an argumentative construction in three movements: the formulation of a critical hypothesis in aphorism 103; the exposition and conceptual articulation of this hypothesis up to aphorism 129; and its applied demonstration, in the confrontation with Christian morality, from aphorism 130 to 148. This internal structure reveals the density of the chapter, which may be read as one of Nietzsche’s most incisive elaborations on the origin, function, and conditions of transformation of our moral dispositions. It is at this point that my hypothesis concerning the education of the emotions becomes most significant: not as external molding, but as a dynamic system of critical and affective reorganization of our very ways of evaluating and feeling, retroactively.

Aphorism 103, for its part, performs a methodological and structuring function within Book II, beyond the strong thesis Nietzsche advances at its conclusion and which will be the principal object of analysis. The aphorism reads as follows:

There are two kinds of deniers of morality. - “To deny morality” - that can mean, first: to deny that the moral motives which people claim have really been what impelled them to act; - it is thus the assertion that morality consists of words and is among the coarser or more subtle deceptions (especially self-deceptions) among people, and is perhaps so especially in precisely the case of those most famed for virtue. Then it can mean: to deny that moral judgments are based on truths. Here it is admitted that they really are motives of action, but that in this way it is errors which, as the basis of all moral judgment, impel people to their moral actions. This is my point of view: though I should be the last to fail to recognize that in very many cases there is some ground for suspicion that the other point of view - that is to say, the point of view of La Rochefoucauld and others who think like him - may also be justified and in any event of great general application. - I deny morality, therefore, as I deny alchemy, that is, I deny their premises: but I do not deny that there have been alchemists who believed in these premises and acted in accordance with them. - I also deny immorality: not that countless people feel themselves to be immoral, but there is any true reason so to feel. It goes without saying that I do not deny - unless I am a fool - that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged -, but I think: the one as well as the other for different reasons than hitherto. We have to relearn to think differently (umzudenken) - in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to relearn to feel differently (umzufühlen). (D/M 103. http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/M-103)³

Aphorism 103 thus structures Book II and is divided into three parts: first, the critique directed at the French moralists through Nietzsche’s genealogical praxis; second, Nietzsche’s counterargument, in which he presents his own position regarding the types of deniers of morality; and finally, his conclusion with the dense thesis that is central for understanding the possibilities and conditions of the education of the emotions, namely: “We have to relearn to think differently (umzudenken) - in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to relearn to feel differently (umzufühlen).” The exegesis of aphorism 103 is fundamental for understanding the intricate relation between relearning to think and, thereafter, relearning to feel. The aim of the next section is to expand the interpretation of aphorism 103 of Daybreak.

Second Movement: The Formal and Semantic Structure of Aphorism 103 of Daybreak

Within the context of the second book, we can extract two important levels of explanation from aphorism 103: a formal structure and a semantic structure which, as I interpret it, justify the conditions for an education of the emotions. Thus, on the one hand, Nietzsche already sketches in aphorism 103 - and in the context of Daybreak as a whole - a genealogical and self-genealogical critical praxis of questioning the affective commitments of morality: this is the formal structure of the argument; on the other hand, I develop a conception of primary affectivity in Nietzsche, in an enactivist register, as the semantic structure of the argument. Both structures express the theoretical background for the meaning of relearning to think and relearning to feel. Moreover, the relation between these two theoretical structures of thinking and feeling is that they are recursive and interdependent processes, embodied and situated, modulated by dynamic couplings between organism and world.

The Formal Structure of Aphorism 103: Genealogical and Self-genealogical Praxis

Nietzsche begins by claiming that to deny morality may mean, first of all, to reject the moral motives people claim to have impelled them to their actions. In other words, it is the claim that morality ultimately consists in words - words that serve the coarse frauds of humankind, such as self-deception. The indication here is that, while the ordinary vocabulary of folk psychology has numerous advantages for handling emotional and normative situations within our interrelational dynamics, it also becomes an obstacle further clarification - both regarding the use of this folk psychological vocabulary (self-deception as a coarse fraud) and the critical exercise concerning this very vocabulary (when words are so deeply rooted in us, and we are so accustomed to them to solve our everyday problems, that we no longer notice precisely the falsities we express when we employ this vocabulary, whether in emotional terms or in terms of moral performances). It should be emphasized that what is at stake initially is not a devaluation of the vocabulary of folk psychology, but rather the difficulties brought by this vocabulary when we undertake a critical and genealogical examination of our moral motives, if we aim to advance a genuine critique of our emotional economy, that is, of our motivations in the domain of moral psychology.⁴

Accordingly, Nietzsche immediately refers to La Rochefoucauld, author of the Reflections or Sentences and Moral Maxims, whose spirit critically permeates this aphorism. He is the main interlocutor in aphorism 103 and, in this case, functioning as a magnifying lens through which Nietzsche develops a critical strategy in order ultimately to move beyond him. In any case, the background of this aphorism is what we may generally call a critique of moral hypocrisy. The illustration on the cover of the original edition of La Rochefoucauld’s book is particularly suggestive: the image of an angel - possibly Eros - removing Seneca’s mask. The scene works as a visual allegory of the critical operation to which Nietzsche appeals in the wake of the French moralists, such as La Rochefoucauld: unmasking morality, not as the mere exposure of specific falsehoods, but by interpreting and dismantling the layers of moral justification that conceal the real impulses and motivations underlying action. The implicit reference is clear: our moral performances are socially structured and mask the true motives that impel us to act, especially under the seductive influence of the vocabulary of ordinary language. In this register, moral critique in the style of La Rochefoucauld would consist in removing these masks in order to access the effective reasons behind our everyday moral performances. In light of the French moralists, then, denying morality is to unmask the moral hypocrisy of our performances, concealed by the seduction of ordinary emotional language that would hide our real motivations; that is, insofar as our everyday moral performances are concealed by masks that hide our actual motivations, to criticize morality would be to unmask such performances in the register of hypocrisy. This is the first way of denying morality, in the spirit of La Rochefoucauld.

However, and this is the point worth emphasizing, Nietzsche continues the aphorism by radicalizing this critical procedure. What La Rochefoucauld and the French moralists undertook was only a partial critique. Although they unveiled aspects of the mechanics of moral illusion, they themselves remained under the spell of the very morality they intended to criticize - as if they were under the enchantment of a moral Circe that prevented them from seeing beyond the traditional forms of judgment. Nietzsche, for his part, begins - albeit if still in germinal form - what will later consolidate as his genealogical project: a more radical critique that seeks not only to unmask the hidden motives of morality, but to question the very presuppositions from which morality asserts itself as truth. This marks the fundamental difference: whereas La Rochefoucauld questions the apparent motives of morality, Nietzsche calls into question the very epistemic and affective ground upon which moral judgments are structured. He not only endorses the argument through the critical exercise of removing masks; he interrogates, above all, the necessity of the mask, the affects that sustain it and the justificatory devices that make it operative.⁵

La Rochefoucauld’s critique, though sharp, remains partial. He denounces moral motives only insofar as he recognizes them as constructions masked by social structures, sedimented in the vocabulary of folk psychology. We do in fact live in a socially structured context in which declared motivations do not coincide with the real affective economy that drives our social performances. Within this theoretical register, unmasking morality means exposing the layers of representation that conceal our effective moral motivations. We all present ourselves under masks, perform roles, sustain characters. La Rochefoucauld operates within this framework: his moral skepticism is effective insofar as he can perceive the play of appearances structuring our conduct. Nietzsche’s position, however, aims to show the limit of this theoretical stance: “A moralist is the counterpoint of a moral preacher - that is, a thinker who takes morality as something questionable, worthy of interrogation, in short, as a problem. I regret having to add that the moralist, precisely for this reason, belongs himself among the questionable beings.” (eKGWB/NF 1885, 35[1]; http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/NF-1885,35).⁶

The fundamental limitation of La Rochefoucauld’s critique lies in the fact that the very presuppositions that drive La Rochefoucauld and the French moralists remain unquestioned, so that Nietzsche articulates his own position starting from the perspective of the French moralists in order to surpass it: what is at stake is a critique of the presuppositions of critique itself, requiring a more radical gesture. It is a matter of calling into question the commitments that sustain the very act of moral unmasking, which implies a genealogy not only of conduct but of the critical instance itself.⁷

The first type of denier of morality, therefore, is the one who, like La Rochefoucauld, denounces apparent moral motives without realizing that his own critique rests on commitments that have not yet been problematized. Hence the need for Nietzsche to undertake a deeper critique that reaches the epistemic and affective commitments of morality.

In aphorism 103, Nietzsche also explains a second form of denial: denying that moral judgments rest upon truths. By asserting that moral judgments do not rest upon any truth, Nietzsche clearly positions himself against any form of moral cognitivism, that is, against the idea that our judgments would express something true or false in the traditional correspondence sense. If such judgments do not rest upon truth, this means they must be understood as effects of errors - errors that ground our moral evaluations and, precisely for this reason, impel our actions. It is at this point that Nietzsche states: “This is my point of view” - indicating the core of his critical position, namely, that our judgments are informed by “errors” that are not only pre-reflective but also emotionally embodied (in the next section, we shall see more precisely what this “error” means).

The “error” here is not merely logical or conceptual: it is affective, somatic, embodied. Nevertheless, Nietzsche acknowledges that in many cases La-Rochefoucauld-style skepticism is fully justifiable and even socially useful⁸: he validates this kind of critique, though he considers it to have a limited reach. This is why he says: “I deny morality, therefore, as I deny alchemy”. That is, he does not deny the fact that there were alchemists who acted according to the presuppositions of alchemy, but rather the procedure of non-distancing from one’s own presuppositions which that critique enacts. Likewise, Nietzsche continues, it is a matter of denying the commitments of morality without thereby denying that countless people have acted (and still act) in accordance with such beliefs. Nietzsche’s critique therefore reaches the theoretical-affective structure of moral judgments, and not merely their performative efficacy. To this he adds: “I also deny immorality.” In this case, what is denied is not the fact that many people feel themselves to be immoral, but that there exists a sufficient reason justifying such a feeling.

The argumentative structure that distinguishes two types of deniers of morality expresses the position Nietzsche occupies in his critical procedure in aphorism 103 (as someone who also exercises critique): a position between external and internal (or immanent) critique. In any case, this methodological distinction between external and internal critique is decisive. The argumentative structure of the thesis Nietzsche sets out in aphorism 103 is a genealogical praxis that combines these two dimensions and is fully realized only when it goes beyond both in the direction of a third, fundamental movement: when critique also assumes a transformative function. The structure of this argumentative procedure can be called self-genealogical critique: it not only separates and distances, but also systematizes and reconstructs internally the commitments that sustain the morality under critique, with a view to overcoming it (Viesenteiner, 2020, 171-174). In this sense, it is a feedback movement between exteriority and immanence, operating on a double register: distancing and critical reconstruction.

Nietzschean genealogical praxis, therefore, articulates three movements: (1) external critique, which creates distance and diagnoses; (2) internal critique, which systematizes the links between the object criticized and its presuppositions; and (3) the transformative dimension, which aims not only to interpret but to affectively reconfigure the agent. In this latter case, critique takes on a character of self-formation: an education of emotional dispositions through the reworking of modes of thinking, feeling, and, finally, transvaluing.

It is this triple operation that gives aphorism 103 its conceptual density. What is at stake is the possibility of a critique which, by destabilizing the presuppositions of traditional morality, calls upon us to relearn to feel (umfühlen) by way of a relearning to think (umlernen). It is a critique that, while unveiling, also educates - and that, in educating, transforms. This is, as I interpret it, the deepest meaning of the Nietzschean genealogical project as it already announces itself in Daybreak, and at the same time the expression of a fundamental argumentative structure that serves as a basis for understanding the final proposition of the aphorism: “We have to relearn to think differently (umzudenken) - in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to relearn to feel differently (umzufühlen).”

The Semantic Structure of Aphorism 103: Primary Affectivity and Emotions in the Enactivist register

Given this formal argumentative structure of the genealogical and self-genealogical praxis articulated in aphorism 103, I now turn to what is at stake, in semantic and conceptual terms, in Nietzsche’s critique of the presuppositions and commitments of the critical enterprise, especially with respect to what he calls “his” point of view. This clarification allows us to understand more precisely the extent to which our motivations rest upon “errors” that impel us to act, particularly when we delude ourselves into thinking that such motivations correspond to truths. The theoretical orientation here is to outline a conception of primary affectivity that is decisive for grasping the possibilities of an education of the emotions.

My hypothesis is that Nietzsche advances a distinctive conception of affectivity - one that can be extracted from various texts, including the Book II of Daybreak - which brings him into proximity not only with the sentimentalist tradition of modern philosophy but also with certain enactive conceptions in contemporary philosophy of emotion. This conception, as I interpret it, presupposes that beneath each of us there operates a primary or fundamental affectivity active in every event. Although we have no privileged access to the totality of this affective economy - much less through introspective self-knowledge - it nonetheless operates continuously and decisively upon us. The understanding of this primary affectivity can be sketched through several characterizations: (a) our evaluations, moral perspectives, epistemic and aesthetic judgments, and so forth are embodied expressions of this affective totality; (b) they are constructed through structural couplings - that is, evaluative judgments built by the recurrence or habituation of moral performances, perceptions, and experiences of all kinds, always bound to the concrete situations in which we are embedded and with which we interact dynamically in light of the saliences that affect us there, as well as modulated over time by the plasticity of this affective economy; and (c) they are normatively oriented from the outset, insofar as they enact (bring forth) a sense-making that enables us to deal with everyday problems and demands. In this regard, I endorse an enactivist conception of affectivity in Nietzsche. Given the relevance that this hypothesis assumes in the context of Book II of Daybreak, and its explanatory force for the possibility of educating the emotions, it is worth developing it in greater detail.

(a) Especially from Daybreak onward, the phenomenological notion of a primary affectivity acquires increasingly defined contours. In aphorism 119, Nietzsche refers to the “image of the totality of drives that constitute [our] being,” that is, an affective economy that acts incessantly upon us, even though the laws of its nutriment remain unknown to us - namely, “their number and strength, their ebb and flood, their play and counterplay among one another.”⁹ Nietzsche also refers, in aphorism 129, to an “alleged conflict of motives” in which we believe we decide upon an action, although, in fact, we can know only the action itself as it appears to us, whereas the conflict within our affective economy remains entirely concealed from us (D/M 129). The very act of knowing - and likewise “thinking” (BGE/JGB 36) - is nothing but a “relation of drives to one another” that occurs pre-reflectively; only the final scenes of the reconciliation of these drives reach our consciousness (GS/FW 333), since, as we know, consciousness is the last and frailest phase in the development of the "organic" (GS/FW 11; cf. also GS/FW 354). The most developed version of this conception, of course, is what Nietzsche calls the “fundamental form of the will” or the “most primitive form of the world of affects,” which takes shape under the concept of “will to power” (BGE/JGB 36), operative in all becoming.¹⁰ What Nietzsche elaborates, therefore, is a “phenomenalism of the inner world” (eKGWB/NF-1888,15[90]), which, although inaccessible to epistemic inspection in its internal dynamics, is nonetheless embodied in the different modalities of evaluations that we enact.¹¹

(b) Moreover, our evaluative judgments are embodied because they are constructed through structural couplings. This concerns the Nietzschean notion of habituation, which originates from the recurrence of distinct perceptions and lived experiences we undergo in concrete situations - perceptions and experiences that not only express the conditions for the formation of memory but are also modulated by the vocabulary of folk psychology and by the temporality involving the long-term recurrence of our experiences and perceptions within a world. The long work of culture upon us (D/M 9, 14, and 16) presupposes a continuous and situated activity in which each of us regulates ourselves amid a dynamic flux, shaping and being shaped by our own conditions of viability, until habit eventually becomes a dominant instinct. This dynamic interaction with the situation constructs affective dispositions that, as Nietzsche writes, eventually become “nature,” insofar as they have long been simulated and embodied through this ongoing interaction (D/M 248). One may thus forget, as Nietzsche adds, that precisely “the habits of our senses have woven us into lies and deception of sensation” (D/M 117; see also D/M 30, 104), or that our supposed objective evaluations reveal only that they are “child of discipline and habit” (D/M 111).

This hypothesis concerning the recurrence of our perceptions and experiences - that is, the habituation we construct in dynamic interaction with the situation, including what is problematic in such structural coupling - runs throughout Nietzsche’s texts and serves as a relevant theoretical presupposition for his critique of the errors and illusions permeating our moral evaluations.¹² In the alleged “conflict of motives” wherein we believe we “know” our motivations, Nietzsche problematizes this recurrent process of habituation insofar as we also become habituated to disregard the phenomenology of the inner world: “We are probably accustomed to paying no attention to all these unconscious processes and to reflect on the preparation of an action only insofar as it is conscious; and thus we confuse the ‘conflict of motives’ with the comparison of the possible consequences of different actions - one of the most consequential and, for the development of morality, most fateful confusions!” (D/M 129).

What is pernicious in this process is, among other things, the inversion of cause and effect whenever we attempt to interpret a physiological state. What rises to consciousness is precisely what we attribute as the supposed “motivation” for what we do or feel - something that is, at bottom, merely a “reason for feeling ourselves in this or that way” (TI/GD, The Four Great Errors, 4). This is a process in which, faced with vague bodily sensations such as tensions, pressures, or inhibitions, we are automatically led to find a cause for our general affective state. We do not tolerate simply feeling something; we feel compelled to explain what we feel. Thus we become conscious of an affective state only once we have linked it to some motive. The problem is that this “explanation” does not arise from real knowledge of causes as we intuitively imagine; it stems instead from an automatic mechanism of memory and an inversion of cause and consequence. The construction of structural couplings, emerging from dynamic interaction between individual and situation, entails recurrent experiences and perceptions. In such cases, similar past situations are reactivated, together with the causal interpretations previously attributed to them. It is not the true cause that returns, but the old interpretation, repeated so often that it becomes fixed as habit. Over time, recurrence consolidates an interpretive habituation: we become accustomed to explaining our inner states in the same way. This creates a deeply entrenched belief that the representations rising to consciousness and subsequently theorized are the causes of our affects, when in fact they are merely belated responses - post hoc projections following the bodily event, expressions of our primary affectivity. As a result, interpretive habit becomes an obstacle: it not only hinders critical examination of our affective commitments, but turns into a problematic blind spot, installing a durable error of inverted cause and effect. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche writes:

Most of our general sensations - every kind of inhibition, pressure, tension, explosion in the interplay and counterplay of the organs, and especially the state of the nervus sympathicus - excite our instinct for causality: we want to have a reason for feeling this way or that way, for feeling bad or feeling well. We are never satisfied with simply registering the fact that we feel one way or another: we admit such a fact - become conscious of it - only after we have given it some kind of motivation. Memory, which here comes into play without our knowing, brings to light earlier states of the same kind and the causal interpretations associated with them - but not their causality. Yet the belief that representations, the accompanying processes of consciousness, were the causes, is also evoked by memory. Thus a habit arises of a particular causal interpretation, which in truth hinders and even excludes the investigation of the cause. (TI/GD, The Four Great Errors, 4. http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/GD-Irrthuemer-4)

Obviously, that there are advantages for human beings in proceeding this way in practical life, as we learn and become habituated to identifying saliences that are advantageous or unpleasant; that is, structural couplings make it possible to identify relevant features in a situation. The interpretation of physiological states (even when erroneous) is inseparable from the world in which the agent is situated. Every attempt to identify the cause of bodily discomfort, for example, is drawn directly from the circle of unpleasant experiences and fears that compose the individual’s practical horizon. This dynamic reveals a structural inseparability between our primary affectivity and the world: physiological conditions acquire intelligibility only when articulated in relation to the resources and pressures of the surrounding situation, always mediated by recurrent perceptions and lived experiences. In an important article, Fowles describes this process “affective interpretation,” insofar as each of us draws upon a “stock of etiologies stored in memory” - a repertoire of etiologies consolidated through repetition and prior experience - which, once habituated, these etiologies operate immediately: they are reapplied in new situations, supplying the intentional object of affect and modulating subsequent reactions and behaviors (Fowles, 2020, p. 126)¹³. Thus, recurrent affects and the construction of an affective memory operate conjointly, so that similar situations evoke once again the association between somatic state and situational interpretation, always under the prism of pleasure/unpleasure evaluations or everyday utility - that is, through the prism of the degree of valence affecting the individual in that situation.

In aphorism 119 of Daybreak, Nietzsche exemplifies the phenomenology of the inner world regarding our primary affectivity through a trivial situation: someone laughs at us as we cross the marketplace. His aim is to show that the same event acquires radically different meanings depending on which drive happens to be dominant in each individual at that moment - that is, according to the identification of what is salient or relevant to the agent in that world. It is hardly surprising, then, that we interpret or enact different meanings depending on how we structure our relation to the world. Thus, Nietzsche explains, for one person the laughter is as indifferent as a raindrop; for another, it is an insult that provokes irritation; for yet another, a stimulus to examine one’s clothing; for another still, an occasion for moral reflection, and so forth. Each drive “seizes upon” the event as its prey, precisely because it was already there, hungry for expression. The situation does not determine its meaning in itself; it merely offers the resources through which an already operative drive can interpret and satisfy itself through interpretation. Only later, in Twilight of the Idols, does Nietzsche frame more explicitly the psychological explanation of this evaluative procedure: “To trace something unknown back to something known brings relief, soothes, pacifies […]: any explanation is better than none.” (TI/GD, The Four Great Errors, 5). And one must add: every explanation and every interpretation is drawn from the affective identification of what is relevant to the agent in that situation (again: even if it is a mistaken interpretation).

(c) Let us further emphasize the notion of the identification of saliences and relevances that the agent performs in a situation through the valence of pain or pleasure experienced in that world. This feature of structural coupling expresses yet another important correlate: our primary affectivity is normatively oriented. In a posthumous note from 1883 entitled “the belief in ‘affects’,” Nietzsche writes:

All our general bodily feelings, which we do not understand, are interpreted intellectually, that is, a motive is sought for feeling this way or that, in people, events, etc.; thus, something harmful, dangerous, or strange is postulated as if it were the cause of our bad mood: when, in reality, it is sought only afterward, added to the bad mood, in order to make our state thinkable. - Frequent rushes of blood to the brain, accompanied by a feeling of suffocation, are interpreted as anger: the persons and things that provoke our anger are taken to be triggers of the physiological state. - Later, after long habituation, certain general bodily processes and feelings become so regularly associated that the mere sight of certain events produces that state of general feeling and, in particular, precisely such blood congestion, seminal excitement, etc.; that is, through contiguity: “the affect was aroused,” we then say. In “pleasure” and “displeasure” evaluations are already contained: stimuli are distinguished according to whether they enhance or diminish the feeling of power. (eKGWB/NF-1883,24[20]; http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/NF-1883,24[20])

This posthumous note not only reinforces the thesis of primary affectivity - characterized by embodied judgments emerging from the structural coupling between agent and situation, whose affective interpretation involves our capacity to identify relevant saliences in accordance with the physio-psychological valence of our emotional economy - but also clarifies in what sense our primary affectivity is normatively oriented from the outset. Recurrent perceptions and lived experiences modulate our evaluative judgments over time, given the plasticity that characterizes primary affectivity. This means that primary affectivity is not a merely non-cognitive mental state, but a dynamically embodied process that constitutes sense-making through its ongoing relation to the world, in which each agent regulates themself within a dynamic flow, shaping and being shaped by their conditions of viability and permanence in practical life. From this perspective, cognition by no means belongs to a mental apparatus detached of our affective economy; on the contrary, cognition is equally embodied in the rigorous sense that our affects are themselves constitutive of sense-making, precisely because evaluative judgments already accompany sensations of pleasure or displeasure from the outset: “In ‘pleasure’ and ‘displeasure,’” Nietzsche writes, “evaluations are already contained: stimuli are distinguished according to whether they enhance or diminish the feeling of power.”¹⁴

The most significant consequence of the claim that evaluations are always already contained within primary affectivity is that our emotional economy is normatively oriented. In Nietzsche, cognition and affectivity maintain a co-constitutive relation: they do not form binary and distinct spheres, but rather processes that emerge together and modulate each other recursively in a circular feedback loop. In Book II of Daybreak, after presenting six prosaic methods of controlling a drive, Nietzsche describes the inglorious task of supposedly “controlling” an impulse: “Our intellect,” he continues, “in this entire procedure is plainly only the blind instrument of another drive, which is a rival of the one tormenting us with its vehemence: whether it be the drive to restfulness, or the fear of shame and other evil consequences, or love.” (D/M 109). Thinking, interpreting, indeed every conscious activity, is recursively co-constitutive of our primary affectivity (BGE/JGB 3 and 36), insofar as interpretation itself “has existence” as a “process, a becoming, as an affect.” (eKGWB/NF-1885,2[151]). In every feeling of pleasure or displeasure, in every affective disposition of inclination or aversion, in every emotional episode we undergo, we are normatively oriented from the outset by virtue of our dynamic relation to the concrete situation that modulates our primary affectivity. What is at stake here is not the deliberate decision or judgment of something as good, as though such deliberation could occur independently of the phenomenology of our inner world or of primary affectivity. On the contrary: it is precisely because we are always already affectively informed - because we want and desire something, even pre-reflectively - that we strive to decide upon something.¹⁵

In this sense, for Nietzsche the intellect is an entirely embodied and situated function, always operating within regimes of structural coupling with the world. This implies that our judgments do not emerge from a neutral subject observing the world from outside, but rather from processes normatively oriented from the outset by the primary affective economy that constitutes us. Thus, we do not need to consider thought as a representation of an independent state of affairs, but as a moment in the process of sense-making: a situated hermeneutic activity in which the organism, affectively informed, brings forth meanings to deal with the pressures, demands, and saliences of the surroundings. In other words, each interpretation is a dynamic updating of the organism-world relation: a bodily mediated way of enacting plausible sense in a situation - not a contemplative mirror of reality, but an embodied response that enables us to navigate and transform the field of our moral performances. In aphorism 301 of The Gay Science, entitled “the delusion of the contemplatives,” we find a particularly illuminating articulation of this idea of sense-making immanent to the situation, drawing upon the enactivist resource of an embodied intellect. Nietzsche begins by explaining that “higher human beings” do not distinguish themselves by some superior essence, but because they see and hear more - and they do so by thinking. As one ascends in the “height of humanity,” the world becomes richer and more complex, not because it changes externally, but because one’s capacities to interpret and to feel become more refined. Even so, Nietzsche continues, they fall prey to what he calls “the delusion of the contemplatives”: they imagine themselves merely spectators of life, as if standing before a spectacle they do not themselves help to compose. They fail to perceive that, in interpreting, they themselves create and recreate the world, possessing a vis creativa that accompanies contemplation. For our purposes, after problematizing the delusion of the contemplatives, Nietzsche presents his counter-argument in a novel expression: Denkend-Empfindenden (thinking-feeling beings), an expression that does not dissociate thinking and feeling, and at the same time endorses the thesis that the Denkend-Empfindenden are those who produce and bestow sense upon the world relative to something “of interest to the human being” (GS/FW 301).

Ultimately, what we seek to emphasize through the notion of primary affectivity is the enactive insight already present in Nietzsche: cognition consists in the enactment of normatively structured sense-making in our dynamic relation to the world - that is, an embodied, situated, and intrinsically affective activity. Nietzsche thus elaborates, avant la lettre, a conception of cognition that is inseparable from corporeality and from our emotional economy, anticipating and, in some respects, radicalizing several contemporary formulations of enactivism in the philosophy of emotion, such as those developed by Giovanna Colombetti.¹⁶ Without attempting to reconstruct exhaustively the parallels between Nietzsche and Colombetti - though such a project would be highly promising - we proceed from the argument developed above: the existence of a primary affectivity that co-constitutes the very dynamics of evaluation and interpretation. This conception of affective, embodied, and situated cognition makes intelligible what it means to educate the emotions.

Just as our primary affectivity is a dynamic affective, cognitive, and situated relationship-in a circular and simultaneous feedback loop - we can speak of our emotions in the same way. When we experience emotions central to Nietzsche’s philosophy - such as guilt, bad conscience, ressentiment, hatred, compassion, and so forth - we remain within the same theoretical register of a dynamic system that is equally affective and cognitive, and that cannot be meaningfully conceived apart from its situated, embodied, and temporal dimension. Although primary affectivity may be characterized as a broader and more global affective field constitutive of every human being, whereas emotions designate a more episodic and socially situated dimension of practical life, both can be understood within the same enactivist framework developed above. Emotions, in this sense, are not merely somatic states constitutive of our phenomenology of the inner world; they are normatively oriented from the outset. This is so both because we are structurally coupled to a world in which recurrent perceptions, experiences, and emotions take place, and because emotions themselves enact sense-making through the identification of relevant saliences among the resources available in the world, relative to the degree of valence we experience in relation to what matters to us. As a dynamic system, our emotions shape and are dynamically shaped through the transactionality (Griffiths; Scarantino 2008) of our engagements in a situation. They are not one-way street; rather, they are always dynamically selfand co-regulated in a bidirectional exchange between our emotional economy and the world.

This means that different emotions may be named and even experienced in distinct ways, depending on the transactional dynamics that characterize our engagement with the world. This situated character of emotions also implies, according to Nietzsche, that emotions possess a radical plasticity: they can be shaped, reshaped, and reconfigured according to the transactional dynamics we construct over time within a given context. In aphorism 38 of Daybreak, entitled “Drives transformed by moral judgments,” Nietzsche analyzes several emotions - such as cowardice, humility, envy, hope, and anger - referring precisely to the plasticity of our affective economy in relation to structural coupling: the same drive may be named and experienced differently depending on the interrelational dynamics we build over time in a world. “The same drive,” he writes, “develops into the painful feeling of cowardice, under the impress of the reproach custom has imposed upon this drive; or into the pleasant feeling of humility, if a custom - like the Christian one - has taken it to heart and approved it. This means: it is bound either to a good conscience or to a bad conscience!” (D/M 38; http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/M-38. See also GS/FW 14). As soon as the conditions and resources of a situation change, our affective economy is accordingly reshaped - and, conversely, it reshapes its surroundings.¹⁷ Each emotional episode unfolds temporally as a particular mode of engagement with the world, in a simultaneous process in which we modify the world but are also transformed by it. It is a continuous process of mutual adjustment through the transactionality of our affective exchanges (Griffiths; Scarantino, 2008).

The situated character of emotions - within the dynamic register outlined above - is thus a fundamental condition for understanding their plasticity and transformative potential. It is also a crucial presupposition for articulating the possibility of educating the emotions. However, this possibility of educating emotions - a process of modeling, remodeling, or transformation - is not self-evident. The subtitle of Daybreak is “Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality.” Here, Nietzsche intensifies the difficulties of a program for the education of the emotions; while this enactive version of cognition and emotions successfully describes the dynamics of both our primary affectivity and the emotions we experience, we cannot ignore the fact that the recurrence of perceptions and experiences in an environment also turns into a blind spot - evaluative estimates that sediment and crystallize to the point of becoming “prejudices.” It is precisely for this reason that the second type of denier of morality in aphorism 103 corresponds to Nietzsche’s own position: moral judgments may indeed function as motivations for our moral performances, yet they are by no means grounded in truths; rather, they are grounded in “errors.” As errors, these motivations express the operation of an affective economy that, within the transactional dynamics we construct in a situation, crystallizes and sediments to the point of becoming blind spots or prejudices. The whole point of criticizing our commitments is precisely to call such errors or prejudices into question as a problem.

The same occurs with our emotions, especially when the vocabulary of our folk psychology introduces further difficulties into the critical examination of our emotional economy. In aphorism 103, Nietzsche in no way denies that moral judgments can motivate our actions. As argued above, each agent identifies saliences within the transactional dynamics of the world and enacts meanings regarding how to act or avoid certain conduct in specific circumstances. The decisive point, however, is not to describe how our moral performances function, but to show that we deceive ourselves regarding our real motivations - and for this reason they must not be taken as truths, but as errors which, as such, drive our action. Nietzsche wishes to emphasize that it is perfectly understandable - and even sincere - for someone to feel motivated to act in a certain way because they feel guilty about something committed. Guilt may indeed impel evaluation and choice. The problem, however, is that the vocabulary of folk psychology, while useful for navigating practical demands, simultaneously conceals the sedimented errors, illusions, and prejudices that it crystallizes as affective blind spots or as presuppositions embedded within the very vocabulary we employ. Our ordinary emotional language articulates only the most extreme and superlative affective states - precisely that which has become conscious (GS/FW 354) - while disregarding the nuances of our affective economy and thereby bypassing the phenomenology of our inner world. Our vocabulary, in this sense, is an abbreviation and vulgarization of our affective states, never their most complete articulation. Accordingly, Nietzsche writes in aphorism 115 that our:

[…] language and the prejudices upon which language is built, often hinder us in the investigation of internal processes and drives, for example, because there are words only for the superlative degrees of these processes and drives. […] Anger, hatred, love, compassion, desire, knowledge, joy, pain - all are names for extreme states; the milder, middle degrees, not to speak of the lower degrees which are continually in play, elude us, and yet it is they which weave the web of our character and our destiny. (D/M 115)

Our emotional vocabulary is only the tip of the iceberg, the abbreviation of an affective economy that has crystallized into a language which, as such, carries blind spots and prejudices. Once again: even though this vocabulary is advantageous in our transactional dynamics of practical life, the ordinary language of folk psychology is simultaneously another obstacle to critical praxis. It is far from obvious that we know what we are talking about when we speak of love - to recall Raymond Carver’s well-known question. Love is merely an extreme and superlative state crystallized in the vocabulary of our folk psychology, allowing us to understand each other quickly, yet failing to capture the milder, middle degrees, and lower states that nevertheless weave us as human beings. Thus, when we believe it to be “true” that love or guilt motivated us to act, Nietzsche’s position is not to doubt the sincerity of the motivation, but to warn us that it is a mistake, an “error” that we no longer perceive: “Those extreme manifestations […] very frequently tear through this web and then appear as violent exceptions, usually as consequences of internal accumulations; and as such they are capable of misleading the observer! Not less than they mislead the agent himself.” (D/M 115).

We may now better understand what is at stake when Nietzsche refers, in aphorism 103, to the “error” of motivations that impel us to act. On the one hand, the vocabulary of folk psychology modulates our affective economy, crystallizing moral prejudices which, although useful for practical demands, we can no longer recognize as prejudices precisely because this vocabulary has become sedimented. Folk psychology, by naming only superlative states, also confuses effects with causes, treating as a motive what is in fact only a result. On the other hand, we no longer problematize our prejudices because a peculiar conception of primary affectivity operates within us, in which the transactional dynamics of our relations in a situation also carry blind spots sedimented as personal preferences. Indeed, as Nietzsche writes in aphorism 117 of the Book II, it is as if this “error” were a “prison”: “The habits of our senses have entangled us into lies and deception of sensation; these in turn are the basis of all our judgments and ‘knowledge’ - there is absolutely no escape […]. We sit within our net, we spiders, and whatever we may catch in it, we can capture nothing at all except that which allows itself to be caught in precisely our net.” (D/M 117)

The challenge now is to connect this genealogical and self-genealogical argumentative structure with the enactivist conception of primary affectivity and emotions developed above, in order to clarify the conditions under which an education of the emotions becomes possible.

Third Movement: The Education of the Emotions

The final sentence of aphorism 103 - “We have to relearn to think differently (umzudenken) - in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to relearn to feel differently (umzufühlen)” - presupposes the two preceding movements: the formal and the semantic structures of the aphorism’s argument.

Let us summarize the problem: the first type of denier of morality unmasks as illusory - and therefore as moral hypocrisy - the fact that the usual motivations people declare as justification for their actions could truly have impelled them to act. To unmask this moral hypocrisy is the task of critique in La Rochefoucauld’s sense. The second type of denier of morality, the one Nietzsche endorses as “his” own standpoint, consists in radicalizing this critique by exposing not only affective moral commitments but also the emotional vocabulary employed by the very critic who believes himself merely to be unmasking morality. Nietzsche’s radicalization consists in showing the extent to which critique in the style of La Rochefoucauld remains equally committed to the very presuppositions it seeks to dismantle - reintroducing, through the back door, what it had intended to remove through the front. In this sense, the critic who adopts La Rochefoucauld’s stance remains, whether he acknowledges it or not, implicated in the same emotional economy he aims to denounce. His critique presupposes an external and immune standpoint that he in fact does not occupy. The argumentative core of aphorism 103 thus expresses not only the formal structure of a pre-genealogical project, but also a self-genealogical praxis: critique must turn back upon its own affective and epistemic commitments.

Nietzsche’s endorsed perspective as his own also includes an important complement in the aphorism: the denial of immorality in the sense that there are true reasons why people ought to feel immoral: “I also deny immorality: not that countless people feel themselves to be immoral, but there is any true reason so to feel.” Once again, Nietzsche does not question the sincerity of someone who feels guilty or immoral about something; rather, he interrogates the moral and emotional commitments that constrain someone to feel that way. He even shares the general intuition regarding the advantages of avoiding actions considered immoral and promoting those recognized as moral. Here again, however, the background of Nietzsche’s inquiry is not the sincerity or good will of agents in everyday interactions, but the moral and affective commitments that function as blind spots or prejudices motivating their action: insofar as we construct reasons (even if they are errors) for feeling a certain way, we indeed feel guilty. The argumentative core thus expresses the semantic structure of primary affectivity and of the emotional episodes we undergo, within the enactivist framework outlined above.

The possibility of an education of the emotions in Nietzsche must therefore confront this difficulty: in the critique of morality, there is no external position to be occupied that is immune to affective commitments, such that we must ask whether we ourselves are not also seduced by the very commitments we seek to criticize. As explained previously, internal and external critique in Nietzsche feed into each other, as they are eminently relational: critique is carried out neither solely from the outside nor solely from the within, but in the intertwining of both positions. For this reason, Nietzsche’s critique is at once epistemological and affective; it unmasks not only our moral performances but also the modes of their psycho-emotional constitution. The one who critiques, however, does not intend merely to diagnose and distinguish, nor merely to systematically internalize the premises of the critiqued object: they also intend to surpass their object with a view toward its overcoming through critique - that is, they intend transformation.

The final sentence of the aphorism - at once simple and dense - mobilizes two decisive verbs: umlernen and umfühlen. Both share the prefix um-, the same that structures fundamental concepts in Nietzsche’s philosophy, such as Umwertung. This prefix does not express mere negation or binary inversion, but a movement of reorientation, of surpassing, of shifting one’s standpoint. It is, therefore, an active gesture of transformation. In the context of the aphorism's final sentence, this gesture implies reorienting and relearning the very act of thinking (umdenken), in order then to go beyond the habitual mode of feeling, reorienting and relearning to feel in another way (umfühlen). It is a dual movement that is recursively co-constituted: both cognitive and affective. By highlighting these two verbs, Nietzsche points to a structure of interdependence between thought and affective economy. To think differently is not merely an isolated cognitive act; it is a formative gesture capable of reshaping emotional dispositions. The possibility of educating or transforming the emotions, in this sense, does not occur through a merely deliberative process, but through a reflexive praxis that simultaneously involves critique and affective restructuring - and vice versa. The verbs lernen and fühlen, with the prefix um-, carry precisely this dynamism: relearning, re-signifying, reformulating - cognitively and affectively - in a recursive interplay. The same theoretical background invoked above to define primary affectivity in an enactivist register is equally valid for understanding the dynamic relationship between relearning to think and relearning to feel: our intellect is embodied and situated insofar as it is shaped by the structural coupling we establish with the world over time, a dynamic relationship - mutually and recursively modulating one another - through which we construct plausible meanings to deal with our everyday life. This conception is equally valid for understanding emotions within the enactivist framework: emotions are cognitive and situated. Relearning to think and relearning to feel, therefore, express a dynamic feedback relationship that self-regulates in ongoing interaction with the world.

The formal structure of the genealogical and self-genealogical argument - especially in the register that alludes to the tripartite structure of critical praxis: the recursive relationship between external critique, internal critique, and the transformative dimension - is far from being merely descriptive or methodological. It expresses a robust notion of temporality in our interrelations with the world, subsumed under the complementary notions of self-referentiality and perspectivity.

In the first place, Nietzsche’s critical praxis consists of an operation of distinguishing and diagnosing which, while focusing on an external object to understand it, must simultaneously turn back upon itself - acting parasitically toward the external object - insofar as the critical agent finds themselves implicated in the very conditions they criticize. This dynamic, present throughout Nietzsche’s writings - as in his ambivalent relation to Wagner¹⁸ - precludes any claim to a transcendental standpoint supposedly immune to critique. Critical praxis is, for this very reason, also self-critique; that is, the genealogical exercise is also self-genealogical in a self-referential movement, to the extent that we do not merely diagnose and know the object of critique, but through it, we also come to know ourselves as implicated in the moral and affective commitments we denounce.

In the second place, the critical procedure carries a strong temporal dimension and, unsurprisingly, a dynamic and self-regulating relation with the world. Any critical praxis - which is always also evaluative - takes place in open situations under the pressure of temporality, in which each of us selects what is salient in uncertain and contingent circumstances, shaping and being shaped by ongoing changes in the world, in ourselves, and in others, with a view toward stabilizing expectations as soon as we dynamically self-regulate within the world itself. Critical praxis, in this sense, does not presuppose a static intellectual apparatus independent of the situation, as if knowing the object of critique were simply a matter of representing it and keeping it under control. On the contrary, as previously argued, the intellect is also embodied in Nietzsche’s view, such that our intellectual apparatus is mutually and recursively constrained by the body and the world over time and under the pressure of temporality. It is only in this way that we can alternate between positions and points of view - and we do so cumulatively. This is the notion of “perspectivity”: the process of alternating standpoints (perspectives) that characterizes the self-genealogical movement itself, and which can only occur in light of a strong notion of temporality, as an embodied reflective process dynamically coupled to the world.

In our extended and recurrent interactions over time, we encounter specific institutions, distinct cultures, complex social relations, and individuals with their idiosyncrasies, always within determinate situations in which we are continuously evaluating. In this transactional dynamic, patterns of moral relations and performances are not fixed or instantaneously emergent features of the world; rather, they arise from continuous and recursive interactions between ourselves and the world. It is plausible to recognize that in these dynamic interactions we come to know institutions, cultures, complex social relations, and individuals of various kinds, and that we are affected in a particular way in each of these confrontations. But it is equally plausible to recognize that in these interactions we can be affected in such a way that we know the object external to us, yet through it, we also know our own idiosyncrasies - recognizing proximities and similarities as well as relevant differences regarding the external object with which we engage. Institutions, cultures, complex social relations, and individuals thus function as mirrors for us, in which we evaluate, are evaluated, and also self-evaluate. This is an interactional dynamic in which the continuous evaluations we perform are precisely a process of sense-making for each of us, emerging immanently within a given situation and laden with meanings and reasonability for everyday life. Perspectivity, as I interpret it, is also an en-action, insofar as our evaluations are co-constitutive and mutually constrained by our emotions and by the world - at times forcing us to recognize even the worst within ourselves.

The perspectivity of critical praxis can produce meanings that we often struggle to accept. This is precisely what occurred in the relation between Nietzsche and Wagner: in diagnosing Wagner as decadent and as a summary of modernity, Nietzsche cannot avoid recognizing that, as a thoroughgoing Wagnerian, he too is a decadent (CW/WA, Prologue. http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/WA-Vorwort). The theoretical advantage of perspectivity, however, is the acquisition of a fundamental epistemic virtue: intellectual probity (Redlichkeit), whose function is to illuminate one’s own affectively crystallized commitments with a view to their reorganization, reorientation, and even transformation. It is important to emphasize that this epistemic virtue is not independent of the world or of our emotional economy; it is likewise embodied and emerges immanently from dynamic and extended interactions with the world, as well as from the reciprocal influence and interaction between our evaluations, our body, and the situation. It is therefore plausible to acknowledge that we produce meanings immanently within worldly dynamics, including self-critical diagnoses that may at first seem undesirable - such as in Nietzsche’s relation to Wagner. In other words, it is reasonable to acknowledge that we can identify certain blind spots that generally remain crystallized and invisible in our everyday moral performance (GS/FW 345). Nietzsche’s praise of Redlichkeit appears at the end of aphorism 335 of The Gay Science, where the clarification of perspectival dynamics is driven precisely by this epistemic virtue, even to the point of becoming “creators” (GS/FW 335) - a Nietzschean concept linked to the enactive notion of sense-making: it designates the capacity to reorganize, reorient, and transform oneself and one’s relations. In the case of the relationship with Wagner, while Nietzsche recognizes himself as decadent through the diagnosis of Wagner’s decadence (again: out of a intellectual honesty, that is, due to the epistemic virtue of Redlichkeit), he also complements this with the possibilities of transformation: “What does a philosopher demand of himself, first and last? To overcome his time within himself, to become ‘untimely.’ With what, then, does he wage his hardest struggle? Precisely with that in which he is a child of his time. Well then! I am as much a child of this time as Wagner is - that is, a decadent; only with the difference that I have understood this and have resisted it. The philosopher in me resisted it.” (CW/WA, Prologue). Not coincidentally, the term Nietzsche employs for this argumentative movement is precisely “self-overcoming” (Selbstüberwindung).

Nietzsche not only operates with a critique and diagnosis of modernity and of Wagner, but also carries out a self-critique precisely through Wagner, insofar as he recognizes himself as decadent in the very sense in which Wagner’s decadence is diagnosed and distinguished. In this argumentation, we find an external critical procedure (Nietzsche has before him an object he distinguishes and distances), an internal critical procedure (Nietzsche must recognize himself as embedded in the same process he confronts out of intellectual honesty), and also a critical procedure oriented toward transformation: “The philosopher in me resisted it.” Relearning to think or going beyond habitual modes of thinking (umlernen) can be understood, with some success, through this explanation. In the case of aphorism 103, we can, at the very least, recognize the “errors” that impel us to act simply as mere “errors.” If the sincerity of someone who says they feel guilty about something - so as to feel physiologically exhausted in a given situation - is not in question, relearning to think may compel us at least to invert the variables of the issue: instead of saying “every sick person is guilty,” Nietzsche asks, “should we not be able to say: every ‘guilty’ person is sick?” (D/M 202). Nietzsche recognizes that some actions ought to be avoided and fought against and that others ought even to be promoted, among them those socially justified by what he calls “higher feelings” and that belong to the “moral significance of existence” (D/M 100) - for example, emotions such as guilt, sin, and bad conscience. But should we not relearn to think, and likewise ask, with Nietzsche, where the “new physicians of the soul” are who “will take seriously the antidotes against sufferings” that, “under the most sublime names, humanity has grown accustomed to treating as its spiritual diseases” (D/M 52), in order precisely to remodel and even purify these so-called “higher feelings”? (D/M 33; see also GS/FW 326).

In the midst of our interactions in which we relearn to think - inasmuch as we recognize errors as mere “intellectual errors,” such as the inversion of cause and effect - what, ultimately, might occur within our affective economy? The answer to this question presupposes taking seriously the radical plasticity of our emotions, as explained above. Our emotions express a mode of engagement with the world in which we simultaneously transform the context and are transformed by it, through an ongoing process of mutual adjustment and affective exchange. In this case, the standpoint that Nietzsche identifies as “his own” in aphorism 103 also consists in warning that there are no reasons for people to “feel” immoral (guilty, sinful) - that is, while he endorses the sincerity with which people feel guilty, “his” point of view is that there is no justification for actually having to feel this way. Relearning to think therefore also constrains us to feel differently (umfühlen) in our interactions with others and with the world. In aphorism 563 of Daybreak, entitled “The delusion of a moral world-order,” Nietzsche writes: “It is not things, but opinions about things that do not even exist have disturbed human beings so profoundly!” (D/M 563). We reshape the way we feel through the structural coupling we maintain with the world and the dynamic interactions we establish within it. The genealogical critical exercise of aphorism 103 does not intend to claim that all people should feel the same way. Nietzsche endorses people's sincerity. Rather, the task is to interrogate the value of our crystallized commitments, exposing the errors or illusions that sustain our manner of feeling - specifically, the belief that there is a true reason, as Nietzsche writes, for people to feel in a particular way, for example guilty or sinful. Genealogical and self-genealogical critical praxis expresses the exercise of relearning to think differently - and Nietzsche clearly intends his hypothesis, namely that we should call into question the “errors” that justify our actions, to be the more advantageous one - in order to open the possibility of feeling differently. If our emotions are plastic, the Nietzschean wager is that relearning to think has some success in remodeling how we experience our emotions. For that reason, there is nothing problematic in sincerely feeling a certain way; the more fundamental question is whether there are reasons that genuinely justify our emotional experiences. The errors and illusions that underlie our affective commitments have made human beings “suffering creatures” (D/M 425), and have given them “opinions” they have endorsed with far greater value than they actually possess. Questioning the value of these errors and opinions proves to be advantageous or intuitively plausible for, henceforth, relearning to feel differently.

In referring to a “new education of humankind,” Nietzsche expresses concerns precisely regarding our affective and moral commitments, for “madness has reached the point of making one feel existence itself as punishment” (D/M 13, emphasis mine). It is therefore no accident that his praxis must turn against the errors that have affectively informed our moral performances, delineating the very conditions for an education of the emotions. Relearning to feel involves a form of learning that certainly cannot take place through an intellect detached from situations or from the emotional embodiments we carry within our moral interactions; rather, it occurs amid the confrontations of our interpersonal relations and the evaluations that emerge immanently from the world in which we are embedded. Aphorism 148 of Daybreak concludes Book II and must be understood in light of the thesis launched in aphorism 103. Entitled “Distant prospect,” it resumes the pre-genealogical exercise developed in the preceding aphorisms - especially the analysis of key emotions - reiterating the thesis of errors and affective-epistemic commitments embedded in our moral performances. The final aphorism of the second book elaborates precisely the dynamics of interaction between relearning to think in order to relearn to feel. Pre-genealogical praxis, insofar as it also becomes self-genealogical, must steal away the “bad conscience” deposited in things in order to remove “their bad appearance.” Insofar as we relearn to think, the final sentence is decisive: “When the human being ceases to consider himself evil, he ceases to be so!” (D/M 148; see also D/M 76).

Relearning to feel is crucial for Nietzsche because the plasticity of our emotions implies the possibility of transforming - or educating - them. Genealogical and self-genealogical exercise does not end in mere unmasking or mere deconstruction; it also operates as a possibility of reorienting our emotional experience. His critical praxis is not confined to critiquing the contents of morality but is intrinsically tied to the way we feel morally. And in this gesture, his proposition is to relearn to think so that, perhaps one day, we might be capable of feeling otherwise.

Let me recall, finally, that Daybreak is a book that ends with a question mark. It is significant that at the end of the work - not only of Book II but of the book as a whole - Nietzsche concludes with an interrogation. In the German original, the last sentence ends with “oder?”, that is, “or not?”, in a provocative tone. This is that peculiar form of question which, even when answered with assent or refusal, always demands a positioning from Nietzsche's interlocutor. Even if the reader says “no,” they have already engaged in the game of the question; they have entered the reflexive arena that Nietzsche stages: the question has already performed its work. This matters because it underscores the materiality and performative force of Nietzsche’s language. When Nietzsche ends Daybreak with a question mark, he does not simply leave some matter open; he forces the reader to implicate themselves in the argumentative dynamic he presents, even as the argument functions as a mirror to the interlocutor.

It is precisely this final gesture that exemplarily connects the project of educating the emotions with Nietzsche’s broader proposal. When we are compelled to respond to the book’s final question, the task is not merely to understand the content of a critique, but to insert ourselves into the dynamic of interrelation in which we too may relearn to think so that perhaps, later on, we may relearn an altogether different way of experiencing our emotions. The genealogical exercise, in the end, is a simultaneous gesture of sense-making and of reorienting our emotional economy: a praxis in which we not only relearn to think differently but also relearn to feel differently.

• How to cite:
  VIESENTEINER, Jorge L. Nietzsche on the Education of the Emotions. Revista de Filosofia Aurora, Curitiba: Editora PUCPRESS, v. 38, e202633851, 2026. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1590/2965-1557.036.e202633851
• 1
  This article is part of a post-doctoral research project, and portions of it were developed in dialogue with the research group coordinated by Prof. Dr. Lúcia S. Hardt (UFSC) and her respective line of research. I would like to thank the professor and the members of the group for the intense and fruitful debate that contributed to the maturation of the ideas presented here.
• 2
  In this article, I deliberately use the term evaluation rather than appraisal to characterize Nietzsche’s account of affective and normative orientation. While appraisal - as commonly employed in contemporary philosophy of emotion and affective science - typically refers to processes of context-sensitive assessment of stimuli (often associated with cognitive or quasi-cognitive interpretations of situational relevance), Nietzsche’s notion of valuation (Werthschätzung, Bewertung) operates at a more fundamental level. According to him, evaluations are not secondary interpretations of bodily or perceptual states, but are already embodied in primary affectivity itself, preceding any clear distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive processes. They express the dynamic, embodied, and historically sedimented organization of drives, through which sense is enacted and action is oriented. For this reason, evaluation better captures the constitutive and generative role of affectivity in Nietzsche, whereas appraisal risks suggesting a derivative or representational layer imposed upon more basic affective processes. It should be noted, however, that contemporary interpretations within the philosophy of emotion have also sought to reconceptualize appraisal within an enactive framework, as in Colombetti (2007).
• 3
  To reference Nietzsche’s texts, I use the Digitale Kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke und Briefe, edited by Paolo D’Iorio, Paris, Nietzsche Source, 2009 -, www.nietzschesource.org/eKGWB. The works are cited by their abbreviation in English followed by the German one, then by the aphorism number, and, when necessary, by the direct hyperlink to the aphorism on Nietzsche Source. In the case of Daybreak, I abbreviate Daybreak (D)/ Morgenröthe (M), aphorism 103, and the link if necessary (D/M 103) http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/M-103). For further clarification on the reasons for this method of citing Nietzsche, see P. D’Iorio, 2024. Translations from the German are my own, though cross-referenced with English editions, especially the one edited by M. Clark and B. Leiter (Cambridge).
• 4
  It is worth emphasizing that I employ the expression “folk psychology” not in a pejorative or vulgar sense, but rather as a designation for the emotional terms and categories of common sense: those expressions we mobilize in everyday life to make sense of our affective experience. When someone says, for example, that they are afraid or in love, they are appealing to these general categories through which we are able to understand one another quickly about something.
• 5
  The exercise of “critique” that appears here in an embryonic form later unfolds into a consistent and robust genealogical project. Obviously, it is not within the scope of this article to reconstruct this development, but two seminal aphorisms clarify the genealogical exercise as "critique": GS/FW 345, in which morality is questioned as a “problem” once we recognize that it may have arisen from an error (an illusion): “A morality could even have grown out of an error: even with this insight, the problem of its value would not even have been touched. - No one, therefore, has until now tested the value of that most celebrated of all medicines called morality: for which it is required, first of all, that it be - called into question. Well then! This is precisely our work. -”Alongside this aphorism, we should also recall GM/GM Preface 6, where Nietzsche announces the thesis of his genealogical project: “Let us state this new demand: we need a critique of moral values; the value of these values must itself first be called into question - and for that there is required a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances from which they grew, under which they developed and were transformed (morality as consequence, as symptom, as mask, as tartufferie, as illness, as misunderstanding; but also morality as cause, as remedy, as stimulant, as inhibition, as poison), a knowledge of a kind that has neither existed nor even been desired until now. The value of these ‘values’ has been taken as given, as factual, as positioned beyond all questioning.”
• 6
  In a posthumous note from 1876/1877, Nietzsche was already articulating his distance from La Rochefoucauld. Cf. eKGWB/NF-1876, 23[152]; http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/NF-1876,23[152]).
• 7
  It is worth recalling that, in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche reflects retrospectively on Daybreak, recognizing it as the point of departure for the broader genealogical project. At that stage it is not yet a systematic critique of morality, but rather its consideration in a new light - something that, as we have seen above, would be fully developed in Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality.
• 8
  From an exegetical standpoint, it is essential to understand Daybreak as foreshadowing a decisive turning point. As Nietzsche himself writes in Ecce Homo, the book occupies a transitional position, orbiting between an endorsement of the moralist framework of La Rochefoucauld and the emerging project of a critique of the moral commitments underlying the moralists’ own critique (Sommer, 2015, p. 183).
• 9
  As is well known, the conception of an affective economy acting upon us was a relatively widespread topic of debate in Nietzsche’s time. In his case, it was significantly influenced by his reading of Johann Julius Baumann’s Handbuch der Moral (1879), whose physiological psychology served as a point of departure for an anti-idealist conception of morality. On this matter, see Sommer (2015, p. 199).
• 10
  This primary or fundamental affectivity in Nietzsche also entails somatic alterations. From this perspective, Nietzsche endorses a hydraulic model of the emotions, in which bodily changes (temperature, circulation, secretions, muscular tension) directly express the ongoing affective state (eKGWB/NF-1888, 14[170]; GM III 15). Emotions such as fear, anger, shame, or ressentiment appear as internal movements accompanied by measurable physiological markers. Even thinking - never purely rational or independent of the body - is described as a bodily sign of a broader affective state, inscribed in the nervus sympathicus, in the intestines, and throughout the organism’s “sensory commune” (eKGWB/NF-1884, 26[92]).
• 11
  Nietzsche’s close affiliation with Spinoza is undeniable here (albeit reluctantly), specifically regarding the cherished notion of conatus (Ethics III, 6-7). Nietzsche’s conception of primary or fundamental affectivity bears strong similarities to Spinoza’s idea of the striving of being to persevere, while also maintaining that cognition itself is equally embodied. As we know, Spinoza also considers “mind and body” to be one and the same thing, and that our decisions are always already embodied in our appetites, even though we remain unaware of the mechanisms through which these affects operate - much like Nietzsche’s notion of the phenomenalism of the inner world. In his Ethics, Spinoza writes: “So experience itself, no less clearly than reason, teaches that men believe themselves free because they are conscious of their own actions, and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined, that the decisions of the mind are nothing but the appetites themselves, which therefore vary as the disposition of the body varies.” (Ethics III, 2)
• 12
  While our dynamic interactions with the environment can be problematic, they are also the object of advantages that culture makes available in its work upon the individual. In this case, we must remember that the immense work of culture, in On the Genealogy of Morality, also gives rise to the framework of “responsibility,” in which the “sovereign individual” becomes the ripe fruit of this process: the “autonomous and supramoral individual,” the sign of a culture whose task is to create an animal capable of promising. Thus, the immense cultural labor, Nietzsche writes, culminates in “the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, of this power over oneself and over destiny - all this has sunk into his deepest depths and become instinct, dominant instinct. What will he call this dominant instinct, supposing he requires a word for it? There is no doubt: this sovereign human being calls it their moral conscience…” (GM II 2).
• 13
  Fowles’s expression “affective interpretation” bears a close relation to what M. Lewis calls “emotional interpretation,” developed within a psychological model aimed at explaining the inseparability between appraisal and emotion, insofar as, according to Lewis, “appraisal and emotion cannot be mapped onto separate brain systems” (Lewis, 2005, p. 182). The development of an “emotion-appraisal state” or “emotional interpretation,” articulated in terms of this psychological model, proceeds as follows: “The sequence begins with a trigger event, defined by a change in the dynamics of the psychological system. From this event, an initial phase of self-amplification represents the growth phase of an EI. This gives way to a phase of self-stabilization, in which global coherence is established and higher levels of complexity emerge. Finally, coherent states that persist over time give rise to learning, extending the influence of the present appraisal to future episodes.” (Lewis, 2005, p. 175) This means that emotional events consolidate patterns of response in which feeling and evaluating become inseparable. The outcome of this developmental process is what Lewis calls an “emotion-appraisal amalgam,” in which the organism interprets the relevance of the environment through embodied sensitivity, rather than through a subsequent intellectual judgment.
• 14
  In a posthumous note from 1887, Nietzsche returns to the same notion: “All feelings of pleasure and unpleasure already presuppose an evaluation according to total usefulness or total harmfulness; therefore, a sphere in which the willing of an end (a state) and the choice of means for it occur. Pleasure and unpleasure are never ‘original facts.’ / Feelings of pleasure and unpleasure are reactions of the will (affects), in which the intellectual center fixes the value of certain alterations that have occurred in relation to the total-value and, at the same time, introduces them as the beginning of counter-actions.” (eKGWB/NF-1887,11[71]. http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/NF-1887,11[71])
• 15
  Nietzsche’s close relationship with the sentimentalist tradition of modern philosophy is undeniable. In Spinoza’s case, our mind is likewise always conscious of its striving to persevere in being (conatus), and thus he writes, with regard to this notion of an embodied mind: “So desire can be defined as Appetite together with consciousness of the appetite. From all this, then, it is clear that we neither strive for, nor will, neither want, nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary, we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it.” (Ethics III, 9)
• 16
  In The Feeling Body (2014), Colombetti characterizes living systems as sense-making systems and maintains that cognition, understood as an activity of sense-making, is simultaneously also an affective activity: “Note that this claim is tantamount to saying that living systems are sense-making systems. Cognition, in other words, is the activity of sense making. […] For present purposes, what I want to emphasize now is that the enactive characterization of cognition as sense making entails that cognition is simultaneously also affective.” (Colombetti, 2014, p. 18)
• 17
  On the plasticity of our emotions as a function of the transactional character of the dynamics of our relations, see PIAZZESI, C. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Emotion. Nietzsche’s Critique of Moral Language as the Shaping of a New Ethical Paradigm.” In: CONSTÂNCIO, J.; BRANCO, Maria J., As the Spider Spins. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2012.
• 18
  A clear example of Nietzsche’s self-referential movement is his analysis of Wagner in the “Prologue” to The Case of Wagner. In typologizing Wagner as an expression of modern decadence - a symptom of the disintegration of cultural totality - Nietzsche not only diagnoses the artist and modernity but simultaneously turns this diagnosis back upon himself. The perspective observed thus becomes a mirror: in understanding Wagner as decadent, Nietzsche is compelled, out of intellectual honesty, to acknowledge his own participation in the very conditions he criticizes. This is a circular procedure in which the typology constructed reverberates upon the typologist himself, exemplifying the self-genealogical dynamic of self-referentiality. Cf. Rupschus, 2013.

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References

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• D’IORIO, P. Nietzsche Source: Buscar, verificar, citar. Cadernos Nietzsche, Rio de Janeiro/Recife/Santo André, v. 45, n. 3, p. 1-52, 2024.
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  » www.nietzschesource.org/eKGWB
• PIAZZESI, C. What we talk about when we talk about emotion. Nietzsche’s critique of moral language as the shaping of a new ethical paradigm. CONSTÂNCIO, J.; BRANCO, Maria J. As the Spider Spins Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2012. 129-158.
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• Editors-in-chief:
  Léo Peruzzo Júnior and Jelson Oliveira.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  12 June 2026
• Date of issue
  2026

History

• Received
  24 Nov 2025
• Accepted
  04 Feb 2026