16. Nietzsche’s proof you have no soul - and why that's a good thing

What if your precious soul was just superstition? 

What if your thoughts, feelings, and identity weren’t the whispers of a divine spirit, but the murmurs of your gut, your glands, your genes? 

In this episode of Will to Joy, we dissect Nietzsche’s radical physio-psychology—his claim that you are your body and nothing more, period. Join me for a guided meditation exercise as we vivisect the soul, dissolve the illusion of mind-body dualism, and expose the raw, physiological mechanics behind your so-called “free will.” No gods, no ghosts—just flesh, force, and instinct. 

If you think you’re in control, think again. Nietzsche’s scalpel is sharp, and by the end of this episode, you may find there’s nothing left of “you” at all.

This week's music choice: Moving by Supergrass

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Transcript

Welcome folks to the newly rebranded Will to Joy podcast. The same great taste but with a fresh look. Actually, the same look just a different name. Hopefully you caught my news flash earlier this week and I give my reasons for the change there, so I shan’t repeat those. Suffice to say that it’s about increasing the reach of the project as well as an aesthetic choice on my part.

This week we are continuing our exploration of the body in Nietzsche’s philosophy and we’ve got a humdinger of a show for you today, because I’ll be taking you through a deeply profound exercise in self-awareness. Nietzsche dismissed the idea of a soul residing within the human body but it’s one thing to say it and it’s another to prove it. Well today, we’re going to prove it. 

It’s remarkable how many people I know who profess to be materialists, rationalists, and atheists who still seem to demonstrate unquestioned faith in some kind of supernatural soul. Nietzsche calls it the soul a superstition and even describes it as the “soul fiction”. He believed that it was a delusion and one that we would do well to discard.

For us, in trying to achieve some kind of psychological integration to facilitate personal growth, the better you understand your own, real constitution, the more effective you’ll be in your endeavours. So today we’re going to chase down this mysterious entity and find out whether to has any substance to it, or whether its just a spook.

Ready? Let’s do it.

‘Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, stands a mighty commander, an unknown sage – he is called Self. He lives in your body, he is your body.’⁠1

The idea that the body is subordinate to the thinking-feeling-perceiving self-consciousness has a long history. Back in the fourth century AD, Saint Augustine claimed that the soul, a divinely-created spiritual entity, is the ‘ruler’ of the body. This soul is the essence of the human individual, in his view. It inhabits a mortal flesh and blood body only temporarily and it has the ability to exercise unconstrained free will over the body’s actions in the world. For Augustine, it is this free will that makes the human a morally responsible creature. 

Human free will is an easily accepted intuition because you feel like your mind is in charge, right? It seems to direct your body where to go and commands what it will do, even if the body can be uncooperative at times. This feeling of control over the body further affirms your mind as your true self. Your mind sets the agenda; it decides what is and isn’t worth pursuing. Sure, you know about the theory of the unconscious mind—vast and inscrutable, the greater bulk of the iceberg submerged beneath the waterline of your awareness in the popular metaphor—but the conscious mind is the locus of your lived experience. It is this part of the mind, the part that is aware both of its surroundings and itself, that we are discussing here. Your conscious mind seems to be, not the tip of the iceberg, but the captain of your ship, stationed at the wheel on the bridge, charting courses towards explicitly selected destinations. Your body is the ship itself then, and your body’s unconscious processes, involuntary reflexes and the cycles of its autonomic system (heartbeat, respiration, digestion and so on) are body too. They are like the incessant, rumbling machinery in the ship’s engine room. But it’s your conscious mind calling the shots, right? Will you spring out of bed when the alarm goes off in the morning or hit the snooze button? Will you have pudding or pie for dessert? Will you be a selfish piece of shit or will you do the right thing? Your everyday experience of your conscious mind is that it deliberates over options, evaluating the potential outcomes, risks and trade-offs of each alternative, weighing up the pros and the cons before making a choice. 

To the contrary, argues Nietzsche, your mind only seems to be in control; it is your body, along with the facts of the environment in which it is situated, that determines your choices. At the most basic level, consider that it is when your body needs rest that you start to feel sleepy, it is when your body feels hunger that you look for food, and if your body experiences some malfunction or injury or intoxication, you feel depressed, distressed or euphoric. In many cases, it is easy to see how your bodily states and your bodily needs can determine your thoughts and feelings and these thoughts and feelings can determine your behaviour, your ‘choices’, but oftentimes, the link between your body and the choices you make is not so obvious—it can be more complicated than appearances may at first suggest. However, it is still there to be discovered if you look carefully enough. An illustration: your body needs sustenance, shelter from the elements and the security that comes with social status, so you choose to study and get a diploma so you can get a well-paid job; or your body desires sex, so you choose to learn to play the electric guitar and join a rock band. 

Nietzsche writes: ‘Your Self laughs at your Ego and its proud leaving’s. ‘What are these leapings and flights of thought to me?’ it says to itself. ‘A by-way to my goal. I am the Ego’s leading-string and I prompt its conceptions’’.⁠2 Here Nietzsche’s ‘Self’ is the body and the ‘ego’ is the conscious mind; and it is the body that leads with the conscious mind following along obediently, even as it labours under the misapprehension that it is really the one in charge! 

Your body has a plethora of needs, all of which influence your thoughts and feelings, but it should be apparent at this point that your choices and actions seem to be traceable back to bodily states and bodily needs, at least in principal. You were invited to explore this for yourself in earlier episodes, and in episode 11, we explored an alternative hierarchy of needs to replace that of Maslow. There we saw that all your desires reduce to physiological needs and if you trace them further, reduce to will to power. In Nietzsche’s assessment, even the most culturally sophisticated human activities including art, philosophy, justice, and morality spring from the most fundamental physiological needs; they are all a consequence of those instincts which, among other things, ‘teach us to search for food and to avoid our enemies.’⁠3

Now, I said that it is your body and the environment in which it is situated that determines your choices; you cannot satisfy your body’s craving for pudding and pie if the cupboard is bare and the bakery is closed. Your body exists out there in the material world. It is a part of the material world. It is an object among other objects. As such, it is affected by the facts of the physical environment. Its senses are the main means for ascertaining these facts. The raw data of your sensory experience (sights, sounds, smells etc.) are drawn by physical organs (eyes, ears, nose etc.) from the world around you and interpreted by your body, thereby generating impressions, sensations, valuations, feelings, and thoughts which result in your choices. 

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche calls his theory of human behaviour ‘physio-psychology’.⁠4 Physio-psychology is a naturalised approach to understanding human behaviour. By ‘naturalised’, we mean that everything is explained by natural facts without resorting to supernatural conjectures—a case in point, the soul. The body’s anatomy with its anatomical structures and their functions, its innate characteristics, and its acquired characteristics, contextualised within its environment, provides a complete naturalistic explanation for what human beings are and what they do. 

If we set aside any kind of soul hypothesis, it’s clear that even your innate and acquired characteristics are entirely grounded in your physical body. Your innate characteristics are encoded in your genes at conception and made flesh in all of your bodily structures as they develop in the womb. 

Your acquired characteristics are changes in the physical structure and functioning of the body and the brain which are the result of your accumulated experience of the world. This would include ‘learning’ in the broadest sense, both conscious and unconscious, so that’s everything from the knowledge of advanced algebra you acquired at school via formal education, through to your conditioned aversion to putting your hand into a fire—because that hurts, right? You learnt that one PDQ. Your acquired characteristics also includes the things that happen to your body in the course of your life experience—whether it be accidental or deliberate e.g. scars, sunburn, piercings, physical training, amputation, environmental poisoning, nourishment etc. etc.

Note also that innate characteristics, those you are born with, include both the most ancient instincts, such as the reproductive drive and the drive to obtain food, and your much less ancient behavioural characteristics inherited from your particular familial gene pool—for example: you might be genetically predisposed to aggressive behaviour or you might have your father’s big nose or you might have inherited a physiological susceptibility to depression. 

All human activity and identity is encompassed in this concept of physio-psychology then. Just as body and mind are not really separate, neither are physiology and psychology. This is because human psychology is just human physiology in expression—form fulfilling its function within a given set of environmental conditions. So again this is a refutation of the dualism of Descartes which we discussed in the last show—episode 14. 

Let’s try an illustration: when you engage in a behaviour like picking an apple from a tree, this is your body's sensory apparatus detecting a desirable edible nearby. This triggers or reinforces a physiological sensation of hunger which expresses itself as a psychological motivation to take action. The capacity for action itself has its physical manifestation in various bodily structures and their functions such as your eyes, fingers, teeth, and digestive processes.

Another example: imagine you are trying to think up something clever to say in front of a person you are attracted to. This is your body’s physiological drive to reproduce expressing itself psychologically through your feelings of attraction and the urge to use your social skills and creative problem-solving abilities to charm the object of your ardour—all of which have their physical manifestation in your reproductive organs, your hormones, and your lecherous little brain etc.

In this scheme your body is what it does and everything it does is grounded in what it is—form is function. There is no need for mysterious souls to explain what is going on with humans. In principle, all human activity is entirely intelligible and explicable in mechanistic terms: cause produces effect; stimulus produces response. However, Nietzsche does not like mechanistic metaphors as they imply that causes and their effects can easily be identified and isolated—like parts in a machine. This woefully under-represents the immense complexity of the processes underlying human behaviour (and all existence itself, for that matter). Can causes really be neatly distinguished from their effects? Isn’t every effect a cause, and every cause an effect? Cause and effect: Nietzsche thinks that in the real world ‘such a duality probably never exists’.⁠5 Instead everything just flows indivisibly so that ‘actually, what we have here is a continuum out of which we have isolated a few pieces’. On what basis do we divide the world up into discrete links in a causal chain? For any particular event, Nietzsche suggests that there is ‘an infinite multiplicity of processes in that second of suddenness which escape us’. Mechanistic metaphors are clearly inadequate and merely reflect our psychological need to break the world up into intelligible chunks to which word labels can be affixed. His preferred metaphor is chemistry⁠6 which better reflects the infinite incalculability of the multitudinous causal relationships at work.

But let’s get back to physio-psychology.

To summarise: the prevailing, but false, mind-body dualism is cancelled in Nietzsche’s concept of physio-psychology. Physio-psychology does not substantially separate the mental from the physical, as mind-body dualism does; the living body and mind (physiology and psychology) are instead inextricably bound together. However, for the purposes of comprehension, we are going to continue to use my interpretation of physio-psychology with its division into three constituent parts: 

1. Anatomy - your physical body
2. Innate characteristics - everything you are born with
3. Acquired characteristics - all the characteristics you pick up, whether physical or behavioural, during your lifetime.

Oh no, we have gotten rid of dualism only to end up with a tripartism! Indeed—but this is merely a matter of convenience for the purposes of comprehension. Rest assured, soon you will learn that there is something rough and arbitrary about this tripartite division too, but at this point the threefold taxonomy will help us to best understand the human constitution as Nietzsche understands it. However, we do well to remember that the map is not the territory. A map is only ever a more or less useful, completely artificial, oversimplification.

Let us see this physio-psychology in action. Imagine one fine morning you are taking a brisk hike to stretch your legs and get a little air. You stride along, deep in your thoughts, but happen to stub your toe on a sharp rock. Clumsy! You experience a flash of pain. You emit a plaintive yelp. You have a tendency to explosive anger, a family trait which you have inherited from your father, and so you are overcome with fury. In your anger, you snatch up the offending rock and hurl it away. It happens to be the case that this is just the latest unfortunate incident in a recent run of bad luck (let’s say that yesterday you lost your job and you got a bill from the taxman in the morning post) and so you limp along cursing this world that always seems to make life harder than it needs to be. At that moment an acquaintance strolls by who chirps a breezy ‘good day’ to you. Still smarting from the pain and feeling aggrieved at the sheer, bloody injustice of everything, you bark at them to go screw themselves. Oh dear.

In this scenario, let’s say your brisk hike was an expression of the need to exercise (innate characteristic). Your toe (anatomy) connecting with a regrettably situated piece of matter (a fact of the environment) was the cause of painful sensory data which, mediated through your inherited, genetic predisposition to lose your shit (innate characteristic) and your negative frame of mind from your recent experiences of having been unlucky (an acquired characteristic), ultimately resulted in your state of mind, your choice of fruity language, and your unwarranted rudeness. Perhaps having learned a lesson, you will eschew hiking in open-toed sandals in future (a new acquired characteristic). 

In this simplified example we can see how physiology (the body) and psychology (the mind) are inextricably entwined and interdependent and, in fact, all psychology actually springs from physiology and its interactions with its environment. In other words, all your mental and emotional activity is just the data processing that occurs as a result of your body’s interactions with its environment while expressing its physio-psychological characteristics. But surely this is obvious: if there is no environment and no body, how could there be a mind? Yet, as we know, humans routinely and doggedly privilege the mind over the body and bestow on it, or at least a part of it, primacy, autonomy, and even immortality. 

That’s the soul. The bit of you that is supposed to be transcendent, not of this world, separable from your body and the real and true you.

Well, let’s undertake an auto-vivisection to isolate this real and true you. 

But first, music: Nietzsche is the philosopher of music, of dancing, of art, of the aesthetic, of feeling, and so I recommend a track every week that reflects the moods and emotions of this will to joy project—at least as I experience them.  

I invite you to have your own feeling experience, framed within the project we are exploring, while listening to Moving by Supergrass. This track is almost a perfect pop song to me. It starts with a yearning existential lament which flips into a striding, bouyant, affirmative chorus, musically at least, because . To me, the guitars licks in the chorus feel just so glad to see you. It’s a track that manages to combine introspection and some quite bleak lyrics with a really positive, can do, get up and go vibe—it’s what my girlfriend calls a happy-sad song. See what you think. For me, it really resonates with the work we are doing here. 

Links, as always, in the show’s description. 

Do share your thoughts on how this track made you feel—I’d be genuinely interested in hearing about your impressions. You can message me right from the link in the show’s description. 

Let’s try a thought experiment—indeed a kind of guided meditation: let us remove all three aspects of the body, as my interpretation of Nietzschean physio-psychology has it, piece by piece, along with all data from the environment, to ascertain what remains, psychologically speaking. Let’s do it for you, wherever you are, right now. Maybe you are reading this lying on the sofa at home? Maybe you are on a flight at 35,000 feet? Perhaps you are on a lunch-break at work eating a sandwich? It really doesn’t matter. That’s the beauty of a thought experiment. 

Sir back, relax, take a few deep breaths and centre yourself, right where you are.

1. Let’s begin by taking away the whole of your environment. Imagine that. We experience the environment through our senses, so it’s going to feel like a kind of sensory deprivation. All sensory data, whether it be sight, sound, touch, taste or smell, is now gone. Kiss the sandwich goodbye and take a big bite of non-entity. The environment also effects us in ways that we don’t sense, such as when radiation passes through us or when a virus intrudes into the body. Those things are gone too. There is no environment now - no material universe. You float, totally alone, in silent darkness.
2. Now let’s take away your acquired characteristics. All your experience and everything you have learnt through a lifetime of interactions with the tangible world—it all just evaporates. Every one of your memories is erased. All of your language is lost too, because language is acquired during childhood. You do not even have a name anymore.
3. Now let’s take away your unique set of innate characteristics, the set that was compiled at conception when your father’s sperm met your mother’s egg. Sure, these are all actually embedded in your body, in its form and its genes, and it’s a nonsense to have a body in the absence of innate characteristics, but we will let that little detail slide for a moment in the spirit of seeing what we can learn from this thought experiment. So there goes your biological drives, your animal instincts, the reproductive impulse, all the drives towards survival and flourishing, and your inborn social needs: the desire to belong to a social group, to nurture children, to enjoy physical and emotional intimacy. Additionally, say bye to your inherited familial characteristics too e.g. temperamental predispositions, immunities, susceptibilities to certain diseases, physical characteristics etc.
4. Finally, let’s take away the matter of the body itself. Gone are your bones, muscles, blood, lymph, connective tissue, organs, central nervous system, skin, every nail, every hair, and every single cell. All of it gone, including the capacity for all physical sensation—pain and pleasure. What use is the body to you now anyway? You dwell in a vacuum; where would you go? What could you do? Who could you talk to? What use are those arms and legs and vocal chords? Let them go along with every atom of matter of which you are comprised.

Now I ask you—what is left?

Once we subtract your acquired characteristics, your innate characteristics, your physical anatomy, and even the environment itself, what remains? A mind? But for Nietzsche, all the mind is is the data processing activities being generated by the interactions of anatomy, innate characteristics, and acquired characteristics with the conditions of the environment and, as we’ve said, this makes mind an emergent property, an epiphenomenon, a side-effect, not an entity in its own right. Once all these elements are taken away, there can no interactions generating mental processes and therefore there can be no emergent mind. Can there be thinking in the utter absence of anything to think about? Can there be a mind in the absence of thinking?

Now, infected with our modern secular-humanistic prejudices, as you must be because we all are, it is possible you reject this admittedly austere account along with its Nietzschean physio-psychological premises. Perhaps, in your view, you feel something of you clearly would remain over in our experiment, even if there’s nothing for it to actually think about; no small beer neither, but that wondrous and fabled thing which is oft lauded as the most exceptional attribute of the human being: consciousness. 

Consciousness!? Consciousness of what? There is nothing here to be conscious of. Consciousness without content is unconsciousness; more—it is non-consciousness! I imagine a possible answer: ‘conscious of myself’. 

(Ah, and here we might spy the shadow of the god of Plato? A divine mind forever contemplating only itself; contemplating itself contemplating itself in a never-ending recursive loop.) 

Well, gods are one thing but can you imagine your disembodied ‘self’ reflecting only on itself? Consciousness in such circumstances doesn’t sound like a semi-divine human faculty, it sounds like a nightmare. To be suspended in non-entity, without any sensory data, with no corporeal form, with no possibility of any interaction with anything at all ever, with no innate drives compelling you to activity, and with no history of experiences acquired from interactions within the environment over your lifetime. 

What ‘self’ is there here for you to be conscious of? What does it mean to call something a ‘self’ that has no substance, no awareness, no desire, no knowledge, no memory, no identity, no language, that receives no data nor any stimulus? For one thing, just ask yourself what thinking could be in the absence of language. 

We are describing a consciousness that is conscious of nothing except its own capacity for consciousness. Even if this idea made sense (which, in my opinion, it so clearly doesn’t) who could possibly desire an immortal soul that entailed the possibility of such a state? To be a nothingness, suspended in nothingness, conscious of nothing except the state of being conscious itself. What a special kind of Hell. 

For Nietzsche this idea of consciousness, detached and floating free of the mortal body, is precisely what has been praised and garlanded as the soul hitherto—what he here calls ‘pure spirit’: 

‘People used to see consciousness, ‘spirit’, as proof that humanity is descended from something higher, that humanity is divine; people were advised to become perfect by acting like turtles and pulling their senses inside themselves, cutting off contact with worldly things and shedding their mortal shrouds: after this, the essential element would remain, the ‘pure spirit’’ [he goes on] ‘‘Pure spirit’ is a pure stupidity: when we discount the nervous system and the senses, the ‘mortal shroud’, we miscount – nothing more!’⁠7

For the sake of argument: let’s say your immortal soul does exist and it persists after your body dies, its link to the material world broken. And let’s say it retains its memories including its ability to think using language. In some ways, isn’t this worse?—to be condemned to an eternity of sensory deprivation and solitary confinement with only your memories for distraction. As the aeons roll by, how tiny and insignificant your three-score plus ten years walking the earth in a flesh and blood body would quickly seem. What happens to the memories, to the mind, of an immortal consciousness after a trillion-trillion years? How is utter insanity avoided? 

For those who insist upon believing in such things as immortal souls, the belief in a benevolent god also becomes psychologically necessary—a god who is there to gather these souls up once they become detached from their corporeal existence (and do with them… what?). The alternative is the prospect of a horrendous purgatory; the worst kind of prison imaginable—a kind of existential locked-in syndrome without even the promise of death to put it at an end. Clearly Hell needs no furnaces. 

One might counter that all the disembodied souls commune together after death, loved ones reconciled with loved ones, and so loneliness is not necessarily a problem. Ah, so now we have a place; the environment has made a return—let’s call it Heaven. This, purportedly, is a perfect place where no one needs anything so nothing need ever be striven for. Unfortunately, this means it is a place of absolute stasis and, consequently, infinite tedium. Does anyone really relish this prospect? These communing souls—what is the nature of their interactions with each other? Nothing ever happens in Heaven so all they have to discuss, presumably, is their former corporeal lives. But it seems perverse that in a perfect Heaven, all one has to distract one’s self are the reminiscences of a less than perfect world. And at what point does this conversation dry up? What about after a trillion-trillion years? Even then an infinity would still stretch before these souls. This Heaven is another special kind of Hell.

Enough. I’ve been overindulging myself here, granted—ah, just having a little fun. It will be argued by the faithful that the human, all too human, needs I allude to—companionship, conversation, stimulation, goals—these things will be of no concern in the afterlife. In their account, souls dwell in bliss before the throne of god: a realm of timelessness and unity with the deity. Needless to say, this is something none of us can possibly conceive of, but it’s going to be awesome, you bet! Fine, though this only makes the attractions of an existence beyond death even more incoherent.

Having said so much, strictly speaking, all of the above does not add up to conclusive proof that the soul does not exist, but it highlights the lack of any reasonable evidence that it does. As an analogy, we might consider that the absence of evidence that fairies do not exist does not compel us to believe that they must be real, or even possible. Let’s ask ourselves: if physio-psychology and the facts of the environment are sufficient to explain everything a person is and does, at least in principle, what role or function does the soul-concept fulfil? What is it for? What is there left for it do? The answer, apparently, is nothing. It is entirely inert, impotent, redundant, and surplus to requirements. It does no work and there is no work for it to do. With physio-psychology, we have no gap that a soul concept is needed to fill. There is nothing that cannot be explained in its absence. It actually raises questions rather than dispelling them. 

If a world without souls is indistinguishable from a world with souls, where is the evidence that leads us to believe in souls? If the answer is ‘religious teaching’ (and I were to take this proposition seriously) I would point out that such dogma merely evidences the belief in souls, not the existence of souls. In the absence of any compelling evidence for their existence, the real question for us must be: why do we believe in souls, or perhaps more pertinently, why do we need to believe in souls? I ask this because it’s just possible that there is one critical psychological function that the soul concept fulfils: it annuls death.

Except that it doesn’t, of course. Comforting illusions are just that: illusions. As psychologist, Nietzsche is always interested in the motivations behind beliefs. He too asks what does this belief in eternal repose for the immortal soul do for the believer and comes up with an even more damning diagnosis. He conjectures that the desire for such an eternal, hedonic anaesthesia in the next world reeks of nihilism, the nihilism of those too weak, too unfit, to accept this world, the real world, as it is. For him it smacks of an unconscious yearning ‘for non-existence’.⁠8 

Incidentally, if the thought of being exiled from the world into some unending, tedious void disconcerts you, I would say this is a sign of very good psychological health. For Nietzsche, this world you experience around you, the earth beneath your feet, the vaulting skies above you, the sun and rain on your face—this is your world and you are as essential to it as it is to you. Some might even feel consoled by the thought that we are all eternally inseparable from it, even after death. We are always at home here, in a sense, even if it sometimes feels like a cruel, hard place with pointy stones and tax bills. The reality for Nietzsche is that the human is constituted just like any other natural animal. The concept of an immortal, metaphysical soul inhering in each of us is, for him, a preposterous extravagance. He writes that ‘souls are as mortal as bodies⁠9’, meaning here by the word ‘soul’, the you-ness that is listening to these words right now. Your you-ness dies with the body and, really, after mulling on the implications of disembodied immortality outlined above, there can be some comfort in that. 

For now, let us say that there is peace for everyone in the end because death is a variety of redemption that is guaranteed to all of us. 

Next time on the will to joy podcast: we continue our examination of the body through the filter of Nietzsche’s philosophy, by tracing the history of asceticism, self-flagellation, and denigration of the flesh. In doing so we move beyond this contempt for the body towards a new understanding of the self: one which Nietzsche calls the great health. Join me then.

Until then, as ever, like the man, said, live dangerously.

1 Z.Despisers of the Body

2 Z.Despisers of the Body

3 D.26

4 BGE.23

5 JS.112

6 HH.1,1

7 A.14

8 BT.Attempt at Self Criticism,4

9 Z.3.2