Nietzsche’s Panpsychism as the Equation of Mind and Matter

by Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen

Among the many and varied interpretive approaches taken to Nietzsche’s

work, one that is gaining in participation among scholars but that remains inadequately

explored in the intricacies and subtleties of the thought it reveals is the reading of

Nietzsche as an ontological thinker, as a philosopher of the nature of the real. Among the

continuing series of analyses in books and articles, Nietzsche is closely examined for his

formulations on the transvaluations of values, the psychology of resentiment, the

destructive influence of religious belief, and a range of specifically and solely human

concerns—issues that arise within the realm of human perception and thought. However,

relatively little is observed regarding his views on the nature of the universe as it is unto

itself, beyond the scope and interpretation of human conceptions, as the foundation of the

human as much as it is of all else rather than as the result of human thought—as it is

beyond the limits of direct and comprehendible experience. In short, Nietzsche continues

to be viewed rarely as an ontologist rather than a phenomenologist, addressing concerns

that bear no implications regarding how a human being ought to live.

It is the position of the authors of this paper that a significant portion of

Nietzsche’s thought is devoted to a proposition of the real that he evidently intended to

have the credibility and the principles of legitimacy of a scientific theory. From The Birth

of Tragedy, in which Nietzsche devotes much of his thinking to the nature of not just

human life but the world itself as it is, he thinks, accurately portrayed by Greek tragedy,
 2
to many of his late notes in the Nachlaß, which are dedicated to a developing theory of a

“processual” world, a world whose intrinsic constituency is that of process rather than

stabilized entities, a world essentially of Becoming rather than Being (a theory closely

aligned with the thinking in The Birth of Tragedy), Nietzsche demonstrates a continuing

interest in formulating an accurate idea of what the world is, an idea that is beyond the

range of normal human thought—a conception of a world that is inconceivable to the

ordinary human mind.

Nietzsche’s ontological conception is one that he formulated in a number

of specific theories—theories he framed primarily during his last functioning years and

that he never published in full but that can be reconstituted from his unpublished notes.

The theories can be considered to be conceptually synonymous—varying formulations

built out of and illustrating the same basic principles for the universe as Nietzsche

conceived it: the Will to Power, the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, Nietzsche’s

stipulation of time as composed of discrete components, which he labeled his “time-atom

theory,” and one further formulation.

For all the obscurity that continues to hang about Nietzsche’s ontological

speculations, one of his theoretical formulations has been more thoroughly overlooked

than the others: what the authors of this paper believe can justifiably be characterized as

his “panpsychism.”1 What we mean by panpsychism—or we might as readily use the

term “panexperientialism”—is Nietzsche’s attribution of psychical aspects to what he

1
A small number of other contemporary scholars have offered observations concerning this subject, as will
be noted farther down. All agree on the use of the term “panpsychism,” although Nietzsche never used the
word or any equivalent German term.
 3
calls in his Nachlass the “Wesen der Dinge”—the “essence of material things.”2 It is a

worldview that is distinct from traditional Idealism in several regards, particularly in that

the events of the world are not merely matters purely of experience—sensations in their

essence—but are, to a degree, capable of experiencing in themselves. They are, in short,

not just objects of experience but, to a limited degree, subjects of experience.

Chief among the psychical qualities possessed by the full circuit of reality

are “Empfindung,” or feeling, and “Gedächtis,” or memory—qualities that are not

attributable specifically to and not isolated among either individual human beings or

individual living entities. Rather, Empfindung is a quality that pervades the stuff of the

world and is present down to the most essential components of the real: “Der Stoss, das

Einwirken des einen Atoms auf das andre, setzt Empfindung voraus”3—“The push, the

impact of one atom upon another presupposes feeling.” “Der empfindungslose Zustand

dieser Substanz ist nur eine Hypothese! keine Erfahrung!—Empfindung also Eigenschaft

der Substanz: es giebt empfindende Substanzen.”4 “The condition [of substances] devoid

of feeling is only a hypothesis! Not based on experience!—Thus feeling is a property of

all substance: there are feeling substances.”

What Nietzsche is doing in this is to treat matter as not entirely apart from

psyche, mind or experience in their most generic or rudimentary meaning as Empfindung,

as feeling. Put differently, Nietzsche ignores the line between mind and mindless matter,

or between the organic and the inanimate, recognizing what he refers to as “Der Verband

2
KSA 7.470. (All quotations attributed to KSA are drawn from Nietzsche’s Nachlass and are translated by
the authors.)
3
KSA 7.469.
4
KSA 10.649.
 4
des Organischen und des Unorganischen,”5 “the binding together of the organic and the

inorganic.”

Nietzsche’s attribution of psychic qualities to all that exists should not be

surprising, given even just the rudiments of his idea of Will to Power, and in particular

the recognition that Will to Power does not create the material and eventualities of the

world but manifests itself as those eventualities and apparent objects—enacting them in

much the way that water enacts waves, which do not thereby exist as independent self-

sustaining objects. Nietzsche makes the matter all the clearer by also attributing a quality

of self-initiation—a quality of willing—to all entities, or more precisely to all events,

which for Nietzsche are the sole constituency of apparent entities. The stipulation of an

innate quality of willing, or self-initiation, is an element of his rejection of what may be

called classical cause-and-effect mechanics. Events do not arise out of and are not

compelled by preceding events, events that we ordinarily take as forcibly triggering the

events that appear to proceed from them. Rather, events are self-determining and self-

directing, or more precisely autogenerative—a quality that is one of the most

distinguishing and defining aspects of the Will to Power. The dominating principle in this

is one of autopoiesis: a self-organizing drive that is the nature of the world and all its

constituent events, whereby it and they create themselves out of themselves, subject to

and illustrative of no causal principles such as efficient cause or final cause. The world

and its component eventualities have neither outside initiating factors nor ultimate

purposes. They are driven by an internal quality comparable to a “will” that is a “pathos,”

an “agon” or “suffering.”

5
KSA 11.623.
 5
This will—the Will to Power—is the creative principle of the universe,

and it is what Nietzsche calls an “Urschmerz,” a “suffering, primal and eternal, the sole

ground of the world.”6 The suffering at the heart of the world, the pathos, is the essential

nature of the real, the essential nature of Will to Power. That pathos at the center of the

world is its “primordial contradiction and primordial pain,”7 the contradiction of things

struggling with their own opposites, their internal opposing tendencies or forces, that

causes the birth of new phenomena in unending creation, like an overflowing of an

excess of potential: “Excess revealed itself as truth.”8 The contradiction is an

“Ineinander,” an interpenetration, or chiasmic unity, of opposites that renders even the

primordial pain intricated with its opposite: “Das Ineinander von Leid und Lust im

Wesen der Welt,”9 “The interpenetration of suffering and pleasure at the heart of the

world.” As the outcome of the pain, the contradiction, at the core of all things realizing

itself as a world, the world is then like “a work of art that gives birth to itself without the

intercession of an artist,”10 or creator, or an external triggering factor.

Rejecting the dichotomy of the mental and the material, Nietzsche is

implicitly postulating an inconceivable third—the tertium between opposites, or rather

beside the classical oppositions, that is supposed to be the excluded middle, but is for

Nietzsche the essence of the real. In the case of his panpsychism, that third is what we

might term Nietzsche’s “psychical materialism,” for lack of a better alternative. In this

conception, he is clearly rejecting the standard Cartesian dualism between mind and

6
Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann. New
York: The Modern Library, 1968. § 4, p. 46.
7
Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy. § 5, p. 49.
8
Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy. § 4, p. 46.
9
KSA 7.213.
10
Nietzsche. The Will to Power. Walter Kaufmann, ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1968. 419.
 6
matter that is the substance of “common sense” conceptions. Put differently, mind and

matter are for him—to the degree it is meaningful to speak of them at all, given their

meaningfulness only as vague approximations—inextricably intricated in each other.

Rather than incompatibles that somehow coexist—the standard and we can say, for the

sake of the dualism they invoke, classical interpretation of the mind/body conundrum—

mind and matter are logically incommensurable concepts that point, from different

conceptual directions, toward a reality that in itself cannot be phrased and represented.

The matter can be put more simply—and all conceptual language in

comparison to an inconceivable it attempts to approach has the difficulty of a relative

structural simplicity—by referring to the language employed for a similar thought by

Charles Hartshorne, whose later position bears significant similarities to that of

Nietzsche. Hartshorne argues in his work The Zero Fallacy that there is no zero degree of

psyche in the universe—there are varying degrees or evidence of mentality present

throughout materiality, but at no point is a zero degree of mentality achieved. There are

qualities of mind present, to some degree, in all portions of evidently material reality:

“Atoms, particles, radiation waves, are not inert, and matter consists of them. They need

not be soulless, a zero of freedom or a zero of mind. The zero of activity cannot be

distinguished from the zero of actuality.”11

It should be noted that in his stipulation of qualities of mentality to all

components of reality, to the world itself, Nietzsche is not to be taken as asserting there is

specifically mind, or the capacity for thought and self-awareness, in everything.

Comparable to Hartshorne’s assertion that minimal degrees of mentality, at least, are to

11
Charles Hartshorne. The Zero Fallacy: and Other Essays in Neoclassical Philosophy. Peru, Illinois: Open
Court Publishing Company, 1997. 62.
 7
be found everywhere, Nietzsche is arguing for a universal minimal quality of mentality,

what can perhaps be more accurately referred to as sentience—a caliber of mentality that

is awareness, or responsiveness, without the suggestion of full consciousness, or certainly

self-awareness. This is an assertion of a capacity for responsiveness underlying all events

that ought to be seen as feeling based. Specifically, Nietzsche asserts that “Der Wille zur

Macht interpretiert,”12 “the Will to Power interprets.” It is the concept that makes sense of

his parallel assertions that the quality of feeling, or Empfindung, is universal and that the

ego structure, which may be taken as the model for self-aware thinking, is a fiction, not

even attributable as an actual quality to human beings. In arguing against the existence of

coherent unities in nature, he asserts that “We need ‘unities’ in order to be able to reckon:

that does not mean we must suppose that such unities exist. We have borrowed the

concept of unity from our ‘ego’ concept—our oldest article of faith.”13 The

responsiveness to eventuality of inanimate matter is distinguishable from our human

responses to events as a difference of degree rather than a difference in kind. Empfindung

underlies all events, for it is a capability, the directing capability, of all that exists.

What we are calling Nietzsche’s argument for panpsychism bears distinct

resonances of Schelling’s philosophy of nature, which is particularly significant in light

of Nietzsche’s familiarity with Schelling’s work. The clearly panpsychical temper of

Schelling’s thought is rooted in his vision of a dynamic and organic nature that is

animated by a “world soul,” which in his Von der Weltseele he describes as the

12
KSA 12.139.
13
Nietzsche. The Will to Power. 338.
 8
“organizing principle” of nature, a principle in which nature’s dualistic structure has its

origin: “Der Dualismus in der Natur führt auf ein organisierendes Prinzip = Weltseele.”14

In his work Freiheitsschrift (Of Human Freedom), Schelling refers to the

“world soul” as “Wille,” “will,” claiming it as “den höchsten Ausdruck” der

“Philosophie,” “the highest expression of philosophy,” as it constitutes the Being of

beings. Anticipating Nietzsche’s Will to Power to perhaps a greater degree than does

Schopenhauer’s Will, Schelling observes that “Wollen ist Urseyn,”15 “Will is primordial

Being.” And like Nietzsche’s Will to Power as pathos, as a primordial pain that is a

chiasmic unity, an interpenetration of opposing forces, Schelling’s will is described as a

Heraclitean unity of opposites, a dualism that at the same time admits of a unity.

The retrospective Nietzschean alignments continue as Schelling moves to

a principle of autopoiesis. As he expands on will as “primordial Being,” Schelling makes

clear that his conception of will is rooted in the sense of the word “wollen” as meaning to

want or to long for, as opposed to will as the intent to dominate. In what would later be

distinctively Nietzschean language, primordial will constitutes a “Sehnsucht, . . . sich

selbst zu gebären,” “longing . . . to give birth to itself.”16 In terms that the authors have

applied to Nietzsche’s primordial conception, Schelling describes the will as “Potenz”17

“potentiality,” as “reines Können,”18 a “pure capacity,” as a “ruhendes Wollen,”19 a

14
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Von der Weltseele, in Sämtliche Werke. K.F.A. Schelling, ed.
Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856-1861. 450. (All translations of Schelling are by the authors.)
15
Schelling. Schelling’s Werke, vol. 7. Manfred Schröter, ed. München: Beck, 1927. 350.
16
Schelling. Schelling’s Werke, vol. 7. 359.
17
Quoted in Thomas Buchheim. Eins von Allem—Die Selbstbescheidung des Idealismus in Schellings
Spätphilosophie. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1992. 149.
18
Thomas Buchheim. 149.
19
Thomas Buchheim. 149.
 9
“longing at rest,” that becomes Wollen in the sense of “Übergang a potentia ad actum,”20

“transition a potentia ad actum,” or self-actualization.

Although Nietzsche’s panpsychism has largely escaped the notice of many

Nietzsche scholars, as stated earlier, it has been recognized by a few. Günter Abel has

observed that, in Nietzsche’s work, all processes have an internal interpretive capacity,

all the way from the “realm of the inorganic to that of conscious thought,” so that one can

speak of an all-pervasive “Geistigkeit,”21 or “mentality” to the world.

In the volume Nietzsche on Time and History,22 Manuel Dries and R.

Kevin Hill in their essays both offer observations concerning Nietzsche’s panpsychism.

In his essay “Towards Adualism: Becoming and Nihilism in Nietzsche’s Philosophy,”

Dries notes that Nietzsche’s perspectivalism implies that Will to Power enacts

interpretive processes in life forms of various degrees of complexity. “Life is seen as

perspectival at all levels: a minimal intentionality or directedness is assumed to be

already at work in non-conscious organic life-forms such as ‘protoplasm’.”23 He goes on

to observe in a footnote, “Nietzsche insists that even the inorganic must be thought of as

having a minimal directedness. Recently, philosophy of mind has started to seriously

consider such a ‘panpsychist’ theory.”24

In his essay “From Kantian Temporality to Nietzschean Naturalism,” Hill

notes that Nietzsche conceived the universe in accord with the theories of the eighteenth-

century mathematician and physicist Roger Boscovich, who saw the universe as

20
Thomas Buchheim. 43.
21
Günter Abel. Nietzsche—Die Dynamik der Willen zur Macht und die ewige Wiederkehr. Berlin-New
York: Walter de Gruyter, 1998. 55.
22
Manuel Dries, ed. Nietzsche on Time and History. Berlin-New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008.
23
Dries. “Towards Adualism: Becoming and Nihilism in Nietzsche’s Philosophy,” in Dries, Nietzsche on
Time and History. 131.
24
Dries. “Towards Adualism.” 131.
 10
interacting fields of force, a proposition regarding Nietzsche with which the authors of

this paper agree. Hill adds that “Nietzsche also appears to have endorsed a form of

panpsychism regarding these fields of force . . . he thought the idea of force makes no

sense unless we understand forcing and being forced to be something undergone, felt,

something (in our sense of the word) mental. Thus every field of force will have its

corresponding ‘feel’ as it presses on other fields and is pressed upon in turn.”25 Hill

further notes that Nietzsche’s panpsychism permits Nietzsche to avoid the implications of

universal mind that necessarily arise in Idealism, in a sense naturalizing the stipulation of

universal mentality. “Panpsychism thus allows Nietzsche to escape from the most

untoward consequences of the esse est percipi principle. It allows Nietzsche to continue

to affirm the existence of a nature within which we are embedded. Though it is permeated

with mind, Nietzsche’s nature transcends us. Our knowledge of it may well be imperfect,

thus affirming a distinction between how things seem and what is so.”26

Nietzsche’s rejection of elements of human mentality as not applicable to

the world generally, and as illusory even in the case of human beings (the topic of

Nietzsche’s thought-through doubts regarding the value of and even the very possibility

of thought has yet to be properly explored), inoculates him from the charge of

anthropomorphism. Mentality becomes a natural quality in which we share rather than a

human quality that nature also demonstrates. Hartshorne confronted the same potential

charge and made a similar argument: “Those who say that, apart from the specifically

human forms, or the specifically mammalian or animal forms, nature is devoid of

psychical traits altogether are indeed celebrating the role of man or manlike creatures in
25
R. Kevin Hill. “From Kantian Temporality to Nietzschean Naturalism,” in Dries, Nietzsche on Time and
History. 83.
26
Hill. “From Kantian Temporality to Nietzschean Naturalism.” 83.
 11
the world. They are saying that our kind of creature introduces mind as such into nature.

Apart from us and our kind there is nothing with intrinsic life, feeling, value, or any sort

whatever. Is this not in a class with the idea that our planet is the center of the

universe?”27 Thus, to argue—against Nietzsche, and Hartshorne—that to attribute a non-

human mentality to nature is to attribute a human quality to nature is to engage in a

logical contradiction. And to believe otherwise as an article of faith—to hold the

unshakable belief that mentality is fundamentally human—is to engage in what we would

now call “human exceptionalism.” (And if Nietzsche can be said to have held any

position with consistency and vigorous force throughout his work, it is the rejection of

human exceptionalism.)

Hence, the foundation of Empfindung, of feeling or sentience, is not

located with or housed in individual minds, nor is it in individual entities of any kind.

Substantial, unambiguously present entities or “things” are forms of Being evident

merely to us and are rejected by Nietzsche as fictions we perceive—it would more

appropriate to say “imagine”—based on our error of believing in ourselves as egos, our

“oldest article of faith.” In short, they are fictions that come of the fiction we devise

concerning our own personal existences as discrete selves. Rather, for Nietzsche,

Empfindung is the essence of the ultimate constituents of reality, it is the quality of

Becoming, that which is transitory, in a constant condition of change so thorough and

essential that it is not even self-identical, not even sufficiently stabilized to be

momentarily the same as itself—“die thatsächlich vorhandene Ungleichheit,”28 “the non-

27
Hartshorne. “Physics and Psychics: The Place of Mind in Nature,” in J.B. Cobb/D.R. Griffin, Mind in
Nature: Essays on the Interface of Science and Philosophy. Washington, DC: University Press of America,
1977. 94.
28
KSA 10.274.
 12
identical/non-self-same given in reality”—and its site is in active, self-activating

components that Nietzsche characterizes as “singular,”29 instances of feeling, or pathos,

that are essentially discontinuous and too insignificant, taken one by one, to register

distinctly to our senses, or to be conceivable as individual entities.

Nietzsche’s theory of singulars, which can be thought of as discontinuous

pulses of Becoming, of the unending flux of unremitting change, aligns closely—

precisely—with his theory of time atoms, a component of his ontological thought that is

starting to be recognized only as quickly as his panpsychism30. And appropriately

perhaps, both ontological formulations, of singulars and time atoms, align precisely with

his panpsychism, all three theoretical formulations being philosophically synonymous.

As Nietzsche states in formulating his time-atom theory, in which time is

conceived as discontinuous points: “die Zeitatomistik fällt endlich zusammen mit einer

Emfindungslehre. Der dynamische Zeitpunkt ist identisch mit dem Empfindungspunkt,”31

“the atomistic time ultimately coincides with a theory of sensation. The dynamic time-

point is identical with the sensation-point.”32 The sites of Empfindung may be thought of

as “Willensatomen,”33 “atoms of will,” that are as indivisible as they are discrete,

unconnected but not unrelated to each other, and are the alternative to the paradigm of

Being as the one and intransitory reality behind the mere appearances of this world, as

well as the alternative to the paradigm of the real as a continuous field upon which the

29
KSA 1.879-880.
30
It should be noted that Nietzsche’s theory of time atoms has been elucidated also by Robin Small in his
book Time and Becoming in Nietzsche’s Thought (London: Continuum, 2010), and by Keith Ansell Pearson
in his article “Nietzsche’s Brave New World of Force,” The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, issue 20, fall
2000.
31
KSA 7.579.
32
Translated by Carol Diethe, with modifications by Keith Ansell Pearson. Published in The Journal of
Nietzsche Studies, issue 20, fall 2000.
33
KSA 7.215.
 13
drama of the world is played out, the stage upon which all actions of history occur—the

space and time within which the universe exists. For Nietzsche, the inherent geometry of

the universe, the structural principles of Will to Power as pathos,34 of Empfindung as the

compositional “material” of reality, is something entirely and radically different. His

panpsychism reveals itself in a pattern unlike that assumed as the backdrop of the real. It

is a pattern that is essentially non-visualizable, inconceivable as even a hypothetical

direct perception, and it is the pattern, the structural principle, that underlies every one of

the theories he formulated as expressions of his ontological “vision.”

Nietzsche’s ontology can be characterized as that of a punctiform

universe, a universe rooted in discontinuity. Taken at face value, there is a certain initial

difficulty in determining how a conception of the world as composed of discrete elements

that are self-existing, each existing in its own right rather than as a result of the causal

influence of preceding events or the purpose-driven influence of ultimate goals, and that

must, perforce, possess a principle of inter-relationship, differs from the standard vision

of the world as an extensive realm populated by individual, self-identical, enduring,

substantial entities that in their occurrences and eventualities interact with each other. It

would appear at first blush that this is the standard conception of reality poured into a

new bottle, with the innovation of Nietzsche’s ontological view amounting to a

distinction without a difference. To appreciate the radical nature of Nietzsche’s

discontinuous, atomized universe, one must comprehend the structural principles by

which it is organized.

34
Nietzsche. The Will to Power. 339.
 14
For Nietzsche, the events of Empfindung—of feeling, or pathos, or

Becoming, or the actions of Will to Power, formulations that become conceptually

synonymous as one works one’s way through his reasoning—are not the discrete,

foreground activities that constitute the activities of the real, the components of the world

and its story, its history, occurring in an extension, in a continuous space and over a

continuous time, in which they are suspended in the way we think of the entities and

events of normal (apparent) physical reality as suspended in the space that is the universe

at its most essential and the time that is its progressively transpiring presence. Instead, for

Nietzsche, the discontinuity is fundamental, not in the sense that it is a condition

“outside” or beyond the nature of the world and instigating that nature by means of a

causal influence, but rather in the sense that discontinuity is the root nature of things and

is responsible for all other aspects of reality by way of necessary, inescapable

implication, or simultaneous aspect—B is the case because A is the case, not by causal

influence but by definitional implication, or a relationship among aspects that is a priori

analytic rather than a priori synthetic. In other words, the discontinuity is the background

condition of Nietzsche’s universe—the eventualities of the processes are not played out

in a continuous space and time, but in spaces and at moments—each in its own space and

of its own moment—each its own space and moment. There is no overall stage upon

which the events of the world can be played out; there is no single encompassing space

and unfolding stream of time that consumes them all.

Hence, it is clear that a fundamental discontinuity is, in a phrase, an

absolute discontinuity—events occurring in their own spaces and moments, that are their

own spaces and moments of eventuality, are as if in parallel dimensions. They have no
 15
principle of proximity, for unlike foreground physical atoms, or sub-atomic particles, or

quarks, or what we ordinarily comprehend as moments in a flowing time, or individual

entities of any sort, they are not separated by measurable amounts of space, or, more to

the point here, time. They are not set apart by extension, by any unoccupied formulation

of the “material” of which they are constituted, spatially or temporally. They are neither

in contact nor separated by any interceding medium. They are simply discrete. It is as if

each event were a universe unto itself—an instance of Becoming, of process, that is

intrinsically and primarily temporal, for it is processual, it is durational, but that does not

occur over time, nor does it occur in time. It is not itself an extension of time, nor does it

occur in an overall extension of the world’s time. It simply occurs.

The reason that there is no principle of contiguity, that distinct,

discontinuous points, or “atoms,” are the structural principle for Nietzsche’s ontology in

all its theoretical formulations, is a function of a principle of organization that Nietzsche

makes clear. According to him, moments of Empfindung, or moments of time, if they

were to be in contact would blend together in a single, greater point of sensation or time:

“Aufeinanderfolgende Zeitpunkte würden in einander fallen,” “Successive time-points

would merge together.”35 For Nietzsche, contact equals merging, by which he observes a

well-recognized proposition: when two systems of identical organizational principles

interact freely, they are in essence the same system. It is a pure artificiality to denote

them as separate systems—exactly a distinction without a difference.

It is evident that, were points of time to be in contact, they would

constitute another, larger single point and the situation would be right back where it

35
KSA 7.575.
 16
began, with a single time or sensation point and the question of its relation to other

points. So too, were there to be a temporal medium between two otherwise discontinuous

time points, the same condition would apply, the entire system would merge together, and

again, be back where the question of relation began. What remains as the only possibility

is the fundamental discontinuity—sensation and time being manifested in distinct

moments that are not in direct contact and are not separated by an intervening

temporality, or sensation.

It is obvious that an examination of what we have been calling Nietzsche’s

panpsychism “blends into” an analysis of his theory of time atoms, for as has been made

clear, Empfindung is essentially temporal: “The dynamic time-point is identical with the

sensation-point,” just as both are conceptually indistinguishable from the singulars of

Becoming. As is the case with Empfindung, or feeling, time comes in distinct points that

are not mathematical points in the sense of possessing a measurement of zero (for there is

no zero degree of feeling or time, and time atoms are durational); they are not in direct

contact for then they would blend into a single larger moment that would either be,

ultimately, a single, frozen moment of all of time, thus returning us to unchanging Being

as the condition of the world and eradicating all change, or making all eventuality

changing but simultaneous, with no possibility of even perceived succession; and the

time atoms are not “suspended” in a continuum of time. The time atoms do not occur in

time—they are time, their structures of fundamentally separate time points that have no

time passing between them and keeping them separated at different times, so to speak, are

the only time there is. Hence, the discontinuity is fundamental in the sense described

above—time exists in packets, and the packets of time have no temporal relations
 17
between or among them, none of them is given as occurring before or after any of the

others, and they do not combine into a temporal continuum, into a flow: “Die Zeit ist aber

gar kein continuum, sondern es giebt nur totalverschiedene Zeitpunkte, keine Linie.”36

“But time is no continuum at all, there are only totally different time-points, no line.”37

Neither do they occur simultaneously—“Der dynamische Zeitpunkt ist identisch mit dem

Empfindungspunkt. Denn es giebt keine Gleichzeitigkeit der Empfindung,”38 “The

dynamic time-point is identical with the sensation-point. There is no simultaneity in

sensation.” The denial of “Gleichzeitigkeit” to “Empfindung,” and so to time atoms, is a

deeper, more radical stipulation than the mere denial that different feelings and different

time points can occur simultaneously. It is comparable to, for it is of a piece with,

Nietzsche’s assertion that his singulars of Becoming are “Ungleichheit,” that they are not

self-same, not identical with themselves. So, too, with time—every time atom, every

moment, is not the same as itself. In a sense, it is out of phase with itself.

Even so, it is just as obvious that there must be a principle of relation

between time atoms. Otherwise, every event, every moment, would exist, literally and

thoroughly, in a universe of its own, in the sense that every event could have no effect on

or presence in relation to any other event. Such an implication would not only be self-

evidently implausible, it would also be fully at odds with other key elements in

Nietzsche’s ontological philosophy. As he wrote in Also Sprach Zarathustra, “Alle Dinge

sind verkettet, verfädelt, verliebt,”39 “All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored.”40

36
KSA 7.579.
37
Translated by Carol Diethe, with modifications by Keith Ansell Pearson. Published in The Journal of
Nietzsche Studies, issue 20, fall 2000.
38
KSA 7.579
39
KSA 4.402.
 18
Furthermore, the principle of relation among time atoms is necessary to their individual

qualities, which is to say in that in their essential natures, these separated atoms of

sensation and eventuality, of Becoming, are relational. A time atom is the smallest

temporality of Becoming, thus of eventuality—it cannot be subdivided and maintain the

integrity of the event that is the time atom, the moment of Becoming, the feeling of the

event. Its scale is determined for Nietzsche by the time necessary for a discrete event.

However, what constitutes a discrete event is a matter of viewpoint—the discreteness of

the event is perspectival. Thus, without interaction, the concept of a time atom is

meaningless.

Nietzsche does address the issue of relation among time atoms, and calls

the principle of relation “actio in distans.”41 “Eine Wirkung von aufeinanderfolgenden

Zeitmomenten ist unmöglich : denn zwei solche Zeitpunkte würden in einander fallen.

Also ist jede Wirkung actio in distans, d.h. durch Springen. Wie eine Wirkung dieser Art

in distans möglich ist, wissen wir gar nicht.”42 “An effect of a sequence of time-moments

is impossible: for two such time-moments would coincide. Thus every effect is actio in

distans, i.e., through jumping. How an effect of this kind in distans is possible we do not

know at all.”43

There is a principle of “jumps,” an immediate and non-transpiring leap

from one time atom or moment to another, one may presume a transition that neither

takes time nor is instantaneous, in that there is no time, no quality of temporality, in the

40
Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Fourth Part, “The Drunken Song,” section 10. In The Portable
Nietzsche. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: The Viking Press, 1968. 435.
41
KSA 7.578.
42
KSA 7.578.
43
Translated by Carol Diethe, with modifications by Keith Ansell Pearson. Published in The Journal of
Nietzsche Studies, issue 20, fall 2000.
 19
relation between moments. Hence, either to assert time or to deny it to the event of the

“jump,” to claim that some time transpires or that no time transpires, is to commit an act

of category confusion. The term simply does not apply. It is neither that there is no time

nor that there is. To speak of time transpiring or failing to in the “jump” between time

atoms is comparable to speaking of the color of an aroma.

How that jump occurs, what its structural method is, is unknown to

Nietzsche, by his admission, and it can be taken to be, for obvious reasons, outside the

established laws of physics. Even so, it is evident that Nietzsche intends to maintain and

permit room for his proposition that all things are entangled, even in the face of an

apparently contradictory state of affairs, in which every moment and event is distinct and

unconnected to every other. Here, too, Nietzsche’s formulation of time, and Empfindung,

hence his panpsychism, must be considered as a “third”—as an impossible to fully

conceive alternative to the dichotomy and apparent contradiction of the standard

opposing alternatives of inter-relation and hermetic isolation. Thus, despite the complete

separation of every event in a moment of its own, disconnected from all other moments,

Nietzsche’s conception of the time atom as a singular is a rejection of Descartes’ concept

of something existing that “needs no other thing in order to exist.”44 The moments of

time, walled off from each other by non-existent, unbridgeable gulfs of non-time are

intimately involved in each other.

Quite evidently, Nietzsche’s time-atom theory was left incomplete and

presumably was intended—as presumably was his completed ontological theory—for a

book he did not live, or remain coherent long enough, to write. But much of it is present

44
Rene Descartes. Principles of Philosophy. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
1991. 23.
 20
largely in his unpublished notes, enough that the theory in its broad outlines can be

discerned and the specific theoretical formulations he did manage to compose—the

Eternal Recurrence of the Same, the Will to Power, and his panpsychism—can be given

readings informed by these essential ontological propositions of fundamental

discontinuity.

Despite this lack of completion, Nietzsche’s ontology can be seen to be

prescient of developments in science and philosophy that were to come shortly after its

formulation, in the first half of the twentieth century. In a paper of this brevity, only a few

of the instances can be cited and little analysis and depth of research offered. But a few of

the alignments are worth noting.45

The most obvious relation of Nietzsche’s ontological thought of

fundamental discontinuity with future science is, of course, with the development of

quantum theory in physics, which introduced the recognition of a basic punctiform nature

into the conception of energy, a discontinuity in what had been understood on the model

of a flowing stream, or a continuum. We now realize that energy comes in atomistic

bursts, or quanta, pellets rather jets, and it is interesting if not truly significant to note that

Max Planck’s theory of the quantum was published in 1900, the year of Nietzsche’s

death. There is, of course, a distinction between Nietzsche’s fundamental discontinuity of

space and time, on the one hand, and on the other, Planck’s division of energy into a

series of quanta (atoms of energy) that travel in a sequence, like bullets, with a

measurable expanse of space between each and its neighbor. However, recent

developments in physics come far closer to the ontological vision Nietzsche was working

45
The authors of this paper will be publishing more extensive material on this topic in the near future.
 21
toward: string theory with its additional dimensions curled up and forming closed

systems rather than joining together into a universal expanse, and more particularly, loop

quantum gravity, in which the structure of both space and time come in discrete

components, nodes with a minimum size, which are indivisible, and forming through a

method of connectivity yet to be fully worked out in theory a “spin network” that

accounts for the macro-structure of Einsteinian spacetime—a “fundamental formulation”

of gravity in which there is no “background spacetime.”46 In fact, the more closely one

examines Nietzsche’s time-atom theory, the more it resembles in the broad outlines

specifically loop quantum gravity, and it can be said that, regardless of the ultimate

estimation of the cogency and applicability of Nietzsche’s ontology, it seems clear

Nietzsche was moving forward, perhaps intuitively, toward a number of what are now the

most advanced theoretical developments in physical theory.

In twentieth-century philosophy, a few philosophers have adopted ideas

comparable to aspects of Nietzsche’s ontology of panpsychism, and even time atoms,

although without any evidence of direct influence. And yet, there appear to be none who

have reflected the heart of his conception, the discontinuity of the foundation of the real,

even though science has acquired the idea and is finding ways to put it to the test.

William James formulated a concept comparable in some regards to time

atoms. Specifically, he acquires from Bergson the idea that time is intrinsically

durational, that experience transpires, and thus any experience requires a passage of time

for it to be experiential. Experiential time cannot be brought down to, subdivided into,

non-durational points. It is not built of individual infinitesimal moments of “now”—the

46
Carlo Rovelli. “Loop Quantum Gravity.” Living Reviews in Relativity, 11, (2008), 5. 8.
 22
“now moment” cannot exist. Any experience requires time to transpire, requires a

temporal thickness, something more than a single moment. That is to say the conceptions

by which we comprehend and measure time do not reflect the inherent quality of time—

and that is to say that abstractions are not representations.

Thus, for James every experience requires a duration of time to be an

experience. Time is experienced in durations that do not come to us below certain

increments. Time achieves us in discrete segments that in their scale are specific to the

experience they carry, they are. Below their minimal scale, experience cannot be detected

and time cannot be had by us.

“All our sensible experiences, as we get them immediately, do thus change

by discrete pulses of perception, each of which keeps us saying ‘more, more, more,’ or

‘less, less, less,’ as the definite increments or diminutions make themselves felt. The

discreteness is still more obvious when, instead of old things changing, they cease, or

when altogether new things come. Fechner’s term of the ‘threshold,’ which has played

such a part in the psychology of perception, is only one way of naming the quantitative

discreteness in the change of all our sensible experiences. They come to us in drops.

Time itself comes in drops.

Our ideal decomposition of the drops which are all that we feel into still

finer fractions is but an incident in that great transformation of the perceptual order into a

conceptual order . . . All ‘felt’ times coexist and overlap or compenetrate each other thus

vaguely.”47

47
William James. A Pluralistic Universe, in Writings, 1902-1910. New York: The Library of America,
1987. 733-734.
 23
James matches Nietzsche’s conception of a minimal duration of time as

intrinsic to the inherent nature of time, and as well the idea that minimal duration is

determined by the quality and nature of the event that the duration of time plays out, and

not by an arbitrary, fixed scale of measure, not by the mechanical clock or the

metronome. The time James speaks about here is human perceptual time, time as it is

experienced by us—the subjective experience of time. There is no indication in these

observations that the mentality that experiences goes beyond the human mind, or that

these temporal qualities imply an ontological philosophy. James’s observations here are

psychological.

However, there are passages elsewhere in James’s work that suggest the

possibility of a panpsychism, one which, presumably, would carry the attributes of

perceived time to an ontological level, making them qualities of the essential

constituency of reality.

In The Principles of Psychology, James observes that the principle of

evolution, as the underlying dynamic in the development of the universe, requires some

degree of presence of consciousness from the very beginning of things, and thus, a

presence not dependent on human minds, or on brain structure of any kind.

“Consciousness, however small, is an illegitimate birth in any philosophy

that starts without it, and yet professes to explain all facts by continuous evolution. If

evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must have been present at the

very origin of things. Accordingly we find that the more clear-sighted evolutionary

philosophers are beginning to posit it there. Each atom of the nebula, they suppose, must

have had an aboriginal atom of consciousness linked with it; and, just as the material
 24
atoms have formed bodies and brains by massing themselves together, so the mental

atoms, by an analogous process of aggregation, have fused into those larger

consciousnesses which we know in ourselves and suppose to exist in our fellow-

animals.”48

Clearly, James is observing the principle Natura non facit saltus (Nature

does not jump), the Leibnizian, Newtonian—and Darwinian—principle that there can be

no abrupt appearances in nature, and any emergence of what was not there before in some

form, any movement from zero presence to positive presence, is abrupt, regardless of

how small the emergent property (“Consciousness, however small, is an illegitimate birth

in any philosophy that starts without it”). In short, anything that is there must always

have been there in some way.

James’s rejection of abrupt emergences constitutes, of course, a rejection

of discontinuity, as well as a rejection of Nietzsche’s leap among time atoms. Thus, it is

inherently at odds with Nietzsche’s core ontological proposition of background

discontinuity. Even so, in his conception of minimal durations of time and the

determination of time intervals strictly by the events they occur, James’s conception is

distinctly close to Nietzsche’s ideas.

A contemporary philosopher who has postulated panpsychism as an

overtly ontological philosophy—one of the few currently who propound the position

themselves—is Galen Strawson. In “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails

Panpsychism,” which is the lead essay in his book Consciousness and Its Place in

Nature, Strawson argues that the proposition that the universe is fundamentally physical

48
James. The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1. New York: Cosimo, 2007. 149.
 25
requires a proposition that some minimum degree of psychism must be present at its

fundamental level. The logic is comparable to that of James: the rejection of the

possibility of an emergent property, the claim that the capability of having experience

cannot arise at any point in a universe that previously did not contain it. “Real

physicalists must accept that at least some ultimates are intrinsically experience-

involving. They must at least embrace micropsychism.”49 Strawson admits that

“Micropsychism is not yet panpsychism,”50 but argues that panpsychism is necessarily

possible and, unless one is willing to allow the possibility of multiple types of ultimate

constituents to the universe, inevitable.

The core Nietzschean ontological concept of background discontinuity is

no more evident in Strawson than it is in James. The one philosopher of influence and

recognized significance following Nietzsche who reflects both Nietzsche’s panpsychism

and his essential discontinuity of time atoms and Empfindungspunkt is he who must be

considered the leading thinker in process philosophy: Alfred North Whitehead.

Whitehead’s philosophy agrees with Nietzsche’s in a surprising number of

particulars, beginning with the emphasis, of course, on an ontology of process.

Whitehead sees the basic constituents of reality as “actual entities,”51 which are acts of

Becoming As such, the “actual entities” are more precisely events, which through

succession and the compounding in perception contribute to the appearance of,

ultimately, enduring objects. Yet only the act of Becoming, only the occasion, can be

considered real: “ ‘Actual entities’—also termed ‘actual occasions’—are the final real

49
Galen Strawson. “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism,” in Strawson et al,
Consciousness and Its Place in Nature. Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic, 2006. 25.
50
Strawson. 25.
51
Alfred North Whitehead. Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press, 1979. 50.
 26
things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find

anything more real.”52 The only reality is the reality of process.

Whitehead’s process ontology engages a principle of panpsychism

according to a logic that makes the process by which occasions acquire the appearance of

normative entities—things—precise and substantive. There are for Whitehead two

primary characters to space and to time—the “separative,” by which “things” are

separated by space and by time, and the “prehensive,” by which “things” are held

together in space and in time.53 What might at first blush be taken as a physical process,

or a process of physics, is in fact a process of perception distinctly, or, potentially, a

process of what Nietzsche calls interpretation, in the sense that everything is a function of

the Will to Power and “the Will to Power interprets.” In essence, “prehension” involves

“apprehension.”

In postulating an alternative to Berkeley’s proposition that “the realisation

of natural entities is the being perceived within the unity of mind,”54 Whitehead offers a

thought that should be followed in some detail. “We can substitute the concept, that the

realisation is a gathering of things into the unity of a prehension; and that what is thereby

realised is the prehension, and not the things. This unity of the prehension defines itself

as a here and a now, and the things so gathered into the grasped unity have essential

reference to other places and other times. For Berkeley’s mind, I substitute a process of

prehensive unification . . . The things which are grasped into a realised unity, here and

now, are not the castle, the cloud, and the planet simply in themselves; but they are the

52
Whitehead. Process and Reality. 18.
53
Whitehead. Science and the Modern World. New York: The Free Press, 1967. New York: The Free
Press, 1967. 64.
54
Whitehead. Science and the Modern World. 69.
 27
castle, the cloud, and the planet from the standpoint, in space and time, of the prehensive

unification. In other words, it is the perspective of the castle over there from the

standpoint of the unification here. It is, therefore, aspects of the castle, the cloud, and the

planet which are grasped into unity here. You will remember that the idea of perspectives

is quite familiar in philosophy. It was introduced by Leibniz, in the notion of his monads

mirroring perspectives of the universe. I am using the same notion, only I am toning

down his monads into the unified events of time and space.”55

Arguably, it remains possible that there is a distinction here between the

world as it is and the way it is apprehended, and unified specifically and solely in the

apprehension. The bridge between that which is and that which is perceived—such that

Whitehead can be seen a proposing in his analysis of perception an ontological process, a

panpsychic process—is in the use of the term “prehension,” which is applied clearly as

both a natural process, presumably to that which is, and a perceptual process. Whitehead

strengthens his claims to a further degree: “Space and time exhibit the general scheme of

interlocked relations of these prehensions . . . A prehension is a process of unifying.

Accordingly, nature is a process of expansive development, necessarily transitional from

prehension to prehension.”56

In this formulation, one can observe numerous alignments with

Nietzsche’s ontology. Everything is process that is only interpreted as that which

possesses the greater stability and substantiality of more normative objects and coherent

events. Nietzsche’s perspectivalism is reflected, almost duplicated, in Whitehead’s

exclusion of any process of unification that is not perspectival—all qualities are functions

55
Whitehead. Science and the Modern World. 69-70.
56
Whitehead. Science and the Modern World. 72.
 28
of interactions (interpretations), which occur from the standpoints of a here and a now

that are elsewhere, somewhere other than that which is being reacted to. All interactions

are construed on the model of psychic awareness—an “apprehension”—and specifically

not on the model of the Berkeleyan “unity of mind,” hence, more akin to Nietzsche’s

minimal degree of psyche, more on the order of what we have called sentience. And it

should be noted that Whitehead’s substitution of the “unity of prehension” for Berkeley’s

“unity of mind” serves the same function for Whitehead that Hill argues Nietzsche’s

formulation of panpsychism served for him: avoiding the pitfalls of Idealism, permitting

nature to be psychic while at the same time permitting nature to transcend us, to be of

mentality and capable of experiencing while not being the product of our own minds—to

permit nature to give rise to us, as to all else, and thus to give rise to our own minds, to be

a world in which we are embedded.

A concept comparable to Nietzsche’s time atoms also arises in

Whitehead’s work. Along with the separative and the prehensive, Whitehead has a “third

character of space-time. Everything which is in space receives a definite limitation of

some sort . . . Analogously for time, a thing endures during a certain period, and through

no other period.”57 Elsewhere in his work, this quality of location takes on a durational

aspect—noting, like James, the influence of Bergson, Whitehead asserts that objects,

which we recognize for Whitehead are more precisely accumulations of occasions or

events, require minimum amounts of time to exist, the required time being specified by

the object, in other words, the constituent events. There is even a smallest possible

transpiring of time, as we discover in nature a smallest object: “It is possible therefore

57
Whitehead. Science and the Modern World. 64.
 29
that for the existence of certain sorts of objects, e.g. electrons, minimum quanta of time

are requisite.”58 Like Nietzsche’s time atoms, Whitehead’s “quanta of time” deny the

division of time below a certain scale, that limitation of scale being determined by the

shortest eventuality that is observed—or reacted to, in a panpsychical process—from the

standpoint from which it is observed.

What is not clear, finally, is whether Whitehead also reflects the ultimate

aspect of Nietzsche’s ontological formulations, and his most radical, if judged by the

degree to which those who have come after him have not acquired it: his fundamental

discontinuity, his essentially punctiform universe, his universe perforated by no time, no

space, by non-existence. This is because it is ambiguous whether Whitehead’s discrete

durations, the amount of time that each object and event requires to transpire, dispel the

idea of a universal time that is always transpiring, that is the background to all things, all

events, to the history of the universe. On one hand, Whitehead makes clear that his

discrete durations are not only perspectival but are capable of being sequenced, such that

they are capable of accumulating into the appearance, from a standpoint, of temporarily

enduring objects, presumably capable of compiling all of history, of compounding the

continuous story of the world. Yet there is secondary literature on Whitehead that

concludes, since the discrete durations are all the time that exists, there can be no

universal temporal background that serves as the stage of all of history, time as the house

of history. In essence, discreteness, if there is only discreteness, means discontinuity. For

one example, F. Bradford Wallack writes that, for Whitehead, “Time perishes with its

58
Whitehead. The Concept of Nature. Cambridge, UK: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge,
2000. 162.
 30
occasion. There is no continuously existing, actual time, absolute, reified,

substantialized.”59

If Whitehead can be taken as having achieved a proposition of background

discontinuity as the ontological precondition, as the precondition for existence of any

sort, then he is the single example of a significant philosopher who acquired the idea, if

not directly from Nietzsche, then in his immediate wake. And only Nietzsche, Whitehead,

and the physicists who are currently conducting tests to discover if space is broken up by

pockets of non-space, if empty space is perforated by what is not even empty, what is not

even spatial, are the only ones to have adopted, and surely among the few who can

comprehend, so radical a thought.

For it is one thing to observe a foreground discontinuity such as photons

streaming in a strangely vibratory line away from a light source, with measurable

distances of space separating the individual quanta of light, and it is another to note that

electrons of an atom shift in energy levels and move to different distances from the

nucleus without traversing the space between the two electron shells, moving by way of

the “quantum leap.” There, it is space itself that seems discontinuous, broken, partial in

its presence, and what exists between and keeps separate, or marks the separations of,

areas of space is, to date, inexplicable and incomprehensible. Whitehead may have

moved to these radical lengths. It is certainly clear that Nietzsche did, in a precedent for

the physicists who have discovered the possibility that, in essence, Nietzsche is right.

Thus, we can observe among no philosopher so clearly as Nietzsche an

ontology whose radical nature has yet to be fully analyzed and appreciated. Nietzsche’s

59
F. Bradford Wallack. The Epochal Nature of Process in Whitehead’s Metaphysics. Albany: SUNY Press,
1980. 173.
 31
panpsychism is one part, one aspect or facet of, that movement of extreme imagination. It

is a movement that participates in a more general development of thought that began

early in the nineteenth century with the geometry of Carl Friedrich Gauss and has been

accelerating in philosophy and science over the last 100 years, a movement away from

rooting comprehension in visualization. Increasingly, the inference and assertion of fact

does not depend on and eludes the limitations of visualization—not merely in the sense of

laboratory observation but in the sense of conception and comprehension that is not

compelled by the capabilities of the mind’s eye. To a growing degree, we understand the

real in terms that cannot be visually imagined. Thinkers of our time often speak of

transgressing logic, or dealing in contradictions, but what we are coming to is more the

unlocking of our logic from the intrinsic qualities of our internal optics, and as a result,

we find ourselves, as Nietzsche clearly found himself, capable of more expansive logics

than we have inherited from the long history of what we now can recognize as a visually

bound philosophical tradition. It is just this quality that constitutes the most radical,

innovative, revolutionary aspect of Nietzsche ontological “vision.”

(This is a pre-print copy of a paper slated for publication in Nietzsche on Consciousness and the
Embodied Mind, a volume of essays to be edited by Manuel Dries, Oxford University. The contents are
© 2009 Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen.)