The Soul’s Order

This chapter is concerned with Nietzsche’s conception of the soul (human psychology) as constituted by the hierarchical order or structure among drives and affects. After a demonstration that that conception raises the spectre of the homunculus fallacy, it is argued that the two major interpretations of the Nietzschean soul’s order—the vitalistic one proposed by P. Wotling and the normative one proposed by M. Clark and D. Dudrick—should be rejected because they commit Nietzsche to that fallacy. The author’s own dispositional reading frees Nietzsche’s psychology of drives from any charge of fallacious homuncularism. In the light of this reading, the chapter investigates how the interaction between drives and affects should be understood.