Introduction.

The purpose of this essay is to compare the philosophical thinking of William James and Friedrich Nietzsche. While I have been personally inspired by a vast array of different thinkers, what I admire and draw upon most in the work of James and Nietzsche is their affirmation of the complexity of existence and the need for creativity in being.

The discussion has four areas of concern:

1. Their criticism of language, logic, and conceptual thought.
2. Their affirmation of lived existence in its depth and intensity.
3. James’ pragmatic theory of truth.
4. Their respective approaches to philosophical methodology.

William James and Friedrich Nietzsche on Language.

Writing in Pragamtism, William James makes the following assertion:

Our rights, wrongs, prohibitions, penalties, words, forms, idioms, beliefs, are so many new creations that add themselves as fast as history proceeds. Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results. (P, p106).

For him, the notion that philosophy or science can happen upon foundational or absolute truths is erroneous as they are “man-made products” derived from the phenomenological structure of human perception, which is discriminatory in its attention to meaning, significance, and patterns. As such, “Human motives sharpen all our questions, human satisfactions lurk in all our answers, all our formulas have a human twist” (Ibid). The results we receive from reality “depends on the perspective into which we throw it… Both the sensational and the relational parts of reality are dumb: they say absolutely nothing about themselves. We it is who have to speak for them” (P, p108).

Rather than objective truth, it is subjective human volition which breaks “the flux of sensible reality into things” (P, p111), parsing an aboriginal totality of experience into subjects and predicates according to individual feeling and temperament. It is this observation which prompts James to ask “What shall we call a THING anyhow? It seems quite arbitrary, for we carve out everything, just as we carve out constellations, to suit our human purposes” (Ibid). He then supplements this the statement that:

Our nouns and adjectives are all humanized heirlooms, and in the theories we build them into, the inner order and arrangement is wholly dictated by human considerations, intellectual consistency being one of them. Mathematics and logic themselves are fermenting with human rearrangements; physics, astronomy and biology follow massive cues of preference. (P, p111-112)

To summarise James’ position, it can be said that in comprehending the cosmos “we humanly make an addition to some sensible reality, and that reality tolerates the addition. All the additions ‘agree’ with the reality; they fit it, while they build it out. No one of them is false. Which may be treated as the more true, depends altogether on the human use of it” (P,p111).

Nietzsche opens Human, All Too Human with the assertion that “But everything has evolved; there are no eternal facts, as there are likewise no absolute truths” (HAH, p12, his emphasis). Claiming language is an alleged science, Nietzsche proceeds to add that through the spoken word humanity has “set up a world of their own beside the other one…in the concepts for and names of things as if they were aeterna veritas” (HAH, p16). It its enthrallment with language, the human species has become a slave of its on vanity and ignorance.

Turning to Twilight of the Idols and his confrontation with reason in contemporary philosophy, Nietzsche states that:

Formerly, people regarded change and evolution in general as the proof of appearance, as a sign of the fact that something must be there that leads us astray. Today, on the other hand, we realise that precisely as far as the rational bias forces us to postulate unity, identity, permanence, substance, cause, materiality, and being, we are a measure involved in error; however certain we may feel, as the result of a strict examination of the matter, that the error lies here. (TI, p19).

This prompts the lamentation: “I fear we shall never be rid of God, so long as we still believe in grammar” (TI, p20).

By endorsing the explanatory efficacy of language and dwelling in the realm of representation, Nietzsche believes in Will to Power that humanity is sundered from “coarse sensualistic prejudice that sensations teach us about things” (WP, p280). As he explains in The Gay Science, “the nature of animal consciousness, involves the notion that the world of which we can become conscious is only a superficial and symbolic world, a generalised and vulgarised world” (GS, P168).

William James and Friedrich Nietzsche and the Affirmation of Lived Existence.

Writing in Pragmatism, William James asserts that philosophy is “at once the most sublime and the most trivial of pursuits” (P, p8). Furthermore, it is less “a technical matter” and more an “individual was of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos” (P, p7). Thus, the history philosophy is essentially a “clash of temperaments” (P, p8). He parses thinkers into two primary groups:

1. Tender-minded rational intellectuals.
2. Tough-minded empirical materialists.

The former is motived by principles and the latter by facts.

As James explains elsewhere in his essay, The Sentiment of Rationality, thinking goes awry when it desires a “strong feeling of ease, peace, rest” through a “passion for simplification” (WTB, p26-27). By valorising absolutes, abstractions, concepts, and linguistic gymnastics, the “cold literary exercises” (P, p17) of tender-minded thinkers perform “a monstrous abridgement of life” and provide a “most miserable and inadequate substitute for the fulness of the truth” (WTB, p28). By favouring intellectual refinement which renders more palatable the manifoldness and chaos of lived experience, they offer only abstract outlines and closed systems of a universe that is “a thing wide open” (P, p17). By considering “the world’s history as a redistribution of matter and motion solely” (P, p15), tough-minded thinkers commit the same crime but from a different angle, reducing the world to stable entities subject to unchanging laws. Whether tender-minded rationalist or tough-minded empiricist, space should always be left for future considerations and discoveries.

To counter the absolutist and totalising mindset of the arm-chair philosopher, James prefers a consciousness which receptive to “go on experiencing and thinking over our experience” (WB, p9) and unafraid that their opinions could become “reinterpretable or corrigible” (Ibid). In The Principles of Psychology, James seeks an individual with the volition to state: “Yes, I will even have it so!” (PPV2, p578, his emphasis) when confronted with “dark abysses” (Ibid). This hero will “hold himself erect and keep his heart unshaken…in the game of human life” (PPV2, p578-579). Rather than an “ostrich-like forgetfulness”, he demands “masters and lords of life” ready to fulfil “human destiny” (PPV2, p579). That is, an individual purposively orientated towards the future who refuses to be encumbered by the accumulated weigh of memory and is courageous when confronted with inequality, variability, and suffering.

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche identifies a spirit which “wants to dominate itself and its surroundings, and to feel its domination: it wills simplicity out of multiplicity, it is a binding, subduing, domineering, and truly masterful will…The power of spirit to appropriate foreign elements manifests itself in a strong tendency to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold, to disregard or push aside utter inconsistencies” (BGE, p121). Furthermore, this spirit is defined by an “emerging resolution in favour of ignorance and arbitrary termination, a closing of its windows, an inner nay-saying to something or other, a come-no-closer, a type of defensive state against many knowable things, a contentment with darkness, with closing horizons, a yea-saying and approval of ignorance” (BGE, p122).

The spirit in question is a lure of feeling towards a will to truth (BGE, p5). This is to say, a mode of thinking that aspires to subsume the real within the ideal. While this could be a “piece of quixotism, a small, enthusiastic folly; it could, however, also be something much worse, namely a destructive principle hostile to life…that could be a hidden will to death” (GM, p159). As such, the will to truth is an attitude which vitiates all intensity, spontaneity, and dynamism from both life and thought. As an ascetic ideal, the will to truth “springs from the protective and healing instincts of a degenerating life, which uses every means to maintain itself and struggles for its existence” (GM, p88, his emphasis). That is, by positing comforting but ultimately false doctrines of transcendental truth, the ascetic priest is merely attempting obfuscate and evade the brutal actuality of finite existence and mortality. In short, it is a metaphysical placebo.

While both James and Nietzsche recognise that human beings are motived by needs, aspirations, and desires in their lived existence, the latter is scathing of those values which provoke a “hatred of the human, and even more of the animalistic, even more of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from appearance, transience, growth, death, wishing, longing itself – all that means, let us dare to grasp it, a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental prerequisites of life” (GM, p120, his emphasis).

Rather than seeking “ideas only between books”, Nietzsche identifies good habits in thinking “outdoors, walking, jumping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or right by the sea where even the paths become thoughtful” (GS, p230). He pours scorn of philosophers who reject the embodied sensuality and relationality of existence in favour of the “cold kingdom of ‘ideas’” (GS, p237). Like Odysseus, they staunch their ears with wax so as not to be lured by the siren-song of lived existence. Thus, they are tone-deaf to the “music of life” (Ibid).

As far as James and Nietzsche are concerned, if philosophy is a matter of temperament, then it must emphasise and encourage adventure, playfulness, creativity, spontaneity, and experimentation in thinking. As Nietzsche states in Human, All too Human, what is required is metanoia: a change of mind, and the cultivation of “a secure, mild, and basically cheerful soul; such a disposition would not need to be on guard from tricks and sudden explosions, and its expressions would have neither growling tones or sullenness” (HAH, p33). Only then can one “live among men and with oneself as in nature, without praise, reproaches, overzealousness, delighting in many things as in a spectacle that one formerly had only to fear” (Ibid, his emphasis). This is a mindset attuned to the flux of becoming, readied for adventure, and receptive to the possibility.

William James and the Pragmatic Rejection of Absolute Truth.

In Pragmatism, James dismissed the idea of “the Truth” as “a perfect idol of the rationalistic mind” (P, p105). For all the comfort and reassurance absolutes provide, they fail to account for the concrete givenness of reality. Opposed to the asphyxiating totalised systems of the mind, James would much rather breath the “open air and possibilities of nature.” (P, p27). Endorsing a move “towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power,” he advocates a “turn away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins…artificiality and the pretence of finality in truth” (Ibid). Furthermore, pragmatism as a philosophy “does not stand for any special results. It is a method only” (Ibid), referring to “an attitude of orientation” (P, p29). That is, an “an attitude of looking away from first thing, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts” (Ibid, his emphasis).

For the pragmatist, there is always a concern that extant facts can be superseded by future truths. And while there is no singular true and absolute way of perceiving the world, there are better and worse ways of relating to the cosmos. This is to say, that give concepts are useful to “plunge forward with into the stream of our experience” (P, p116), they are only “become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience” (P, p30, his emphasis). For a relation to be satisfactory, it must have some explanatory value which can incorporate multiple experiences without falling into contradiction, as well as being amenable in its accommodation of possible future truths. As such, the pragmatist pursuit of truth is a process of attunement to the cosmos and is akin to the disposition of Sorge Martin Heidegger described in Being and Time  with its approach in having “to do with something, to produce, order and take care of something, to use something, to give something up and let it get lost, to undertake, to accomplish, to find out, to ask about, to observe, to speak about, to determine…” (BT, p57).

Given the raw actuality of sensations, which are “are forced upon us, coming we know not whence…they are neither true nor false; they simply are” (P, p107), they can only be attended to in accordance with the discriminating interest of consciousness. Depending on the focus and attention given to spatial and temporal object, different facts are derived from different encounters. However, sensations and experiences have an uncanny facility for guiding consciousness towards truth through a process of repetition over time, with trial and error being the ultimate determinants of veracity. For James, truths are not discovered but produced, being “something essentially bound up with the way in which one moment our experience may lead us towards other moments which it will be worth while to have been led to” (P, p90). Rather than conjured upon high from the abstract universal ideals of disembodied thought, human understanding of the universe must be built upward from an attentiveness to the particularities of sensation and experience.

While at first blush it appears that James equates truth with crude utilitarianism and subjective relativism, this is a fatal misreading. For him, the value of a truth is the means by which it can assist the individual in relating to lived experience. As such, what is true is that which enhances engagement with reality, cultivates the interconnectivity of experiences, and adds to the common treasury of knowledge. This is the root of the statement that “Human efforts are daily unifying the world more and more in definite systematic ways” (P, p62). In short, truth is what is useful to the positive development of humanity. Thus, “the absolute truth will have to be made, made as a relation incidental to the growth of a mass of verification-experience, to which the half-true ideas are all along contributing their quota” (P, p98, his emphasis).

Provided that “our knowledge grows in spots. The spots may be large or small, but the knowledge never grows all over: some old knowledge always remains what it was” (P, p75, his emphasis), different varieties of creative, practical, and intellectual activity disclose reality to consciousness in diverse manners, each with its own “thought-level” (P, p86). The “only test of probable truth” (P, p40) for James, “is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience’s demands” (Ibid). To this extent, common sense will forever remain the arbiter by which “we make our plans and plot together, and connect all the remoter parts of experience with what lies before our eyes. Our later and more critical philosophies are mere fads and fancies compared with this natural mother-tongue of thought.” (P 81).

William James and Friedrich Nietzsche on Philosophical Methodology.

In Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, Nietzsche declared that essential truths are a form of historically and culturally furnished “linguistic legislation” (PN, p44). He then proceeds to ask:

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. (PN, p46-47)

Indeed, Nietzsche’s metaphorical style of writing owes much to his acknowledgement that the metaphysical reach of philosophy is limited by the conceptual constructs of language. As he explains in The Gay Science, “consciousness generally has only been developed under the pressure of the necessity for communication” (GS, p167, his emphasis). As a social species, human beings invented language to communicate experience and knowledge, but this renders the world “superficial and symbolic.” where “everything which becomes conscious becomes shallow, meagre, relatively stupid…characteristic of the herd” (GS, p168, his emphasis). Through his experiments in style, Nietzsche sought to challenge the traditional ways of doing philosophy and test the limits of language by mobilising aphorism, metaphor, and contradiction.

While Nietzsche accepted that philosophy was similar to science in its reliance on trial and error, he considered the latter mired in the realm of matter and sensation. Opposed to “a bed of ease,” Nietzsche sought “a world of dangers and victories” where one can “live joyfully and laugh joyfully!” (GS, p141, his emphasis). For him, living is a process of experimentation. Like James, who rejected the consolation of rationalistic absolutism, Nietzsche called the familiar the “Error of errors!” (GS, p169). What he desired was the strange, distant, and pure outsideness in opposition to the agreeable.

Genuine philosophy, for Nietzsche, was not a pleasurable armchair exercise but a severe and profound experience. Viewing deeply held convictions as prisons of the mind, great spirits were those who, through their own strength, bravery, and freedom, refuse to lie their way out of existence by position the ideal higher than the real. This leads to his conclusion in The Antichrist that:

Man has had to fight for every atom of the truth, and has had to pay for it almost everything that the heart, that human love, that human trust cling to. Greatness of soul is needed for this business: the service of truth is the hardest of all services.—What, then, is the meaning of integrity in things intellectual? It means that a man must be severe with his own heart, that he must scorn “beautiful feelings,” and that he makes every Yea and Nay a matter of conscience! (A, p143, his emphasis)

Opposed to effete and enervated dogmatists and their narrow horizons, Nietzsche exults a powerful will that accepts the burden and temptations of diverse and competing experiences generated in lived experience. Returning to The Gay Science, he welcomes “a more manly and warlike age” which will bring “heroism again in to honour!” (GS, p123). The “brave pioneers” of this coming age will be people of “cheerfulness, patience, simplicity, and contempt for great vanities” (Ibid). In a magnetic passage, he then continues:

For believe me! – the secret of realising the greatest productivity and the greatest enjoyment of existence is to live dangerously! Build your cities in the slope of Vesuvius! Send you ships into unexplored seas! Live in war with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and spoilers, ye knowing ones, as long as ye cannot be rulers and possessors! The time will soon pass when you can be satisfied to live like timorous deer concealed in the forests. Knowledge will finally stretch out her hand for that which belongs to her: – she means to rule and possess, and you with her! (Ibid, his emphasis)

Where James and Nietzsche differ is that the former is more willing to accept truths on the utilitarian basis that they contribute to furthering and explaining lived existence. While James is prepared to accept the trite and mawkish if they facilitate social reproduction, Nietzsche rails against the “monstrous impertinence” of “man as the standard of value of things” (GS, p160). For him, there is always the concern that communicability entails simplification.

The pressing questions in life are not about truth or falsehood, but, as he asserts in Beyond Good and Evil, what are “life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing” (BGE, p3). While not in contradiction with James’ view, Nietzsche valorises intuition over common sense, denigrating the latter as merely a manner of regulating life so that it neat, comprehensible, and transmissible. Instead, he deems intuition to be more visceral, organic, and even redemptive for it necessitates a conviction of self-reliance and pursuit of an aboriginal grounding for being.

In stating that the “falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it” (Ibid), Nietzsche observes that “without recognition of logical fictions, with a comparison of reality the purely counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live” (Ibid). It is here that he moves beyond good and evil, true and false, by recognising “untruth as a condition of life” (Ibid, his emphasis).The known influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson over Nietzsche is clear in such sentiments, with the invocation that life is process of learning and forgetting, trial and error, and of experimentation, emancipated from the fetters of reason and logic.

Writing in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche pours scorn on “the idiotic unwariness and blind confidence of “modern ideas,” and still more under the whole of Christo-European morality” (BGE, p70). This is type of thinking which values “the universal, green-meadow happiness of the herd, together with security, safety, comfort, and alleviation of life for every one” (BGE, p31). However, this morality of welfare and equality fails to account for natural inequality and variability. As an alternative, Nietzsche proposes a “morality of method” (BGE, p27) which recognises the active force of “Will to Power” (BGE, p28, his emphasis) in the world and posses the fortitude and originality to revaluate existing values.

Likewise, in The Will to Believe, William James asserts that “that there is no such thing possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance,” contending that “we all help to determine the content of ethical philosophy so far as we contribute to the race’s moral life” (WTB, p65). In contrast to those who “imagine an abstract moral order in which the objective truth resides” (WTB, p68), he prefers the “chaos forever than an order based on any closet-philosopher’s rule, even though he were the most enlightened possible member of his tribe” (WTB, p72). Furthermore, he deplores “the wholesale loss of opportunity under our regime of so-called equality and industrialism” (WTB, p72). However, “just “as our present laws and customs have fought and conquered other past ones, so they will in their turn be overthrown” (Ibid). As such, the philosopher stands “as a militant, fighting free-handed that the goods to which he is sensible may not be submerged and lost from out of life” (BTW, p71).

James and Nietzsche are united by their commendation that the philosopher must challenge and revaluate the morals of their times. But to be a creator, one must also be a destroyer. James draws and analogy between the Protestant Reformation and the emerge of pragmatism as a philosophy. In both cases, these movements are vilified by the established authorities and threatening to existing constellations of thought. They are also sceptical towards the traditional conception of free-will, with James regarding volition as being construed in a “rationalistic fashion” as “a positive faculty or virtue added to man, by which his dignity is enigmatically augmented” (P, p54). In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche deems free will the “most egregious theological trick” (TI, p34), designed to induce guilt and dependence. Akin to the egoist Max Striner, they view freedom not as right to be given and received, but as something to be wanted, claimed, and conquered. As such, from Nietzsche’s perspective, free will is aligned with the will to power.

What energises the will is trials and tribulations. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche poses the following rhetorical question:

The tension of soul in misfortune which communicates to it its energy, its shuddering in view of rack and ruin, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting, and exploiting misfortune, and whatever depth, mystery, disguise, spirit, artifice, or greatness has been bestowed upon the soul—has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? (BGE, p93-94)

Meanwhile, in The Will to believe, James asserts that:

(C)ruelty to the lesser claims, so far from being a deterrent element, does but add to the stern joy with which it leaps to answer to the greater…The capacity of the strenuous mood lies so deep down among our natural human possibilities that even if there were no metaphysical or traditional grounds for believing in a God, men would postulate one simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest. (WTP, p74)

The slight difference between James and Nietzsche here, is that while the former sees suffering as a catalyst for inspiration, that latter regards it desirable discipline. Opposed to James who views negative experience as an accidental spur for creativity, Nietzsche deems it necessary, encouraging the free spirit to seek out hardship: the more harrowing the suffering, the profounder the insight.

Given that James and Nietzsche were both plagued by various maladies throughout their lives, it becomes evident why suffering plays an important role in their thinking. Yet, in emphasising the place of suffering and evil in life, James is a believer in amelioration and overcoming evil. Such an “escape from evil” should not be sublimated (aufgehoben) in a Hegelian sense, but “by dropping it out altogether, throwing it overboard and getting beyond it, helping to make a universe that shall forget its very place and name” (P, p130, his emphasis).

Conversely, in upholding a pre-Socratic doctrine, in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche believes that the absurdity of existence must be solaced through art and music, where it is recognised that “life at bottom is indestructibly powerful and joyful” (BT, p39). This is why, as he explains in Ecce Homo, that Zarathrustra “feels himself the highest of all living things” (TI, p238, his emphasis). For, as “the brightest and most transcendental of spirits,” he “has the hardest and most terrible grasp of reality” (Ibid). In short, pain and suffering must be overcome not merely to endure life, but to affirm it.

By contrast, James asserts that “the course of history is nothing but the story of men’s struggles from generation to generation to find the more and more inclusive order” (WTB, p72). His quest is for a universal and common morality which, despite the plurality of competing ethical codes, aims “to satisfy at all times as many demands as we can” (Ibid, his emphasis). Thus, “there is but one unconditional commandment, which is that should seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see” (WTB, p73). A crucial caveat here, is that while humanity must always be in pursuit of a higher and greater good with its “voluminous and luminous” ethical treatises, “they can never be final” (WTB, p73-74). This is to say that truth is not eternally postulated or given in advance, but most must be constantly and consistently created and recreated to meet ethical demands as they evolve over time.

Without subscribing to any particular faith, James endorses the belief in a deity of the grounds of futurity and transcendence. This is because “the capacity for the strenuous mood probably lies slumbering in every man” (WTB, p74). Therefore, “in a merely human world without a God, the appeal to our moral energy falls short of its maximal stimulating power,” while “every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life’s evils, is set free in those who have religious faith” (Ibid). According to James, “our attitude towards concrete evils is entirely different in a world where we believe there are none but finite demanders, from what it is in one where we joyously face tragedy for an infinite demander’s sake” (Ibid). The contention here is that in a world where salvation and redemption are possible, pain and suffering can be confronted and affirmed with a view to their overcoming. Short of this, feeble fatalism and unnatural indifference take hold, neither of which are conducive to a healthy constitution.

Like the Christian existentialist Nicholas Berdyaev, who viewed the call-and-response dynamic between God and humanity as necessary for creativity, James upholds a belief in an absolute deity as significant in motivating the individual to act. A such, “religion offers itself as a momentous option” (WTB, p13, his emphasis). Referencing Pascal’ wager, James deems it a fruitful to hedge one’s bets on a belief in God as offers hope in a better future by widening the perspective of possibility. The use-value and relevance of religion for James, provokes action, stimulates cooperation, and pools risk in creating a better world.

Opposed to James favourable views on religion, Nietzsche deems such a mindset as an “attitude of appalling levity towards all things in life which deserve to be treated seriously, i.e, the questions of nutrition and habitation, of intellectual diet, the treatment of the sick, cleanliness, and weather” (TI, p260). Religion, for him, is a need and therefore a weakness.

Conclusion.

Having evaluated their respective approaches to philosophy, both James and Nietzsche affirm its place within lived existence. Yet they differ to the extent that the former emphasises meliorism and communality in making the world a kinder and more comprehensible place through tolerance and compromise. Meanwhile, for Nietzsche, the pursuit of knowledge and truth is a solitary mission undertaken despite society and the greater good. He ideal thinker is a creature of suppleness, cunning, and caution, independently struggling to discover their own truths. Put simply, having escaped Plato’s cave, we can imagine James willing to share his discovery, while Nietzsche would head for the hills.

Sources and References.

~(P) Pragmatism and Other Writings (Penguin Classics, 2000) by William James.

~(HAH) Human, all too Human / Beyond Good and Evil (Wordsworth Classics, 2008) by Friedrich Nietzsche.

~(TI) Twilight of the Idols with The Antichrist and Ecce Homo (Wordsworth Classics, 2007) by Friedrich Nietzsche.

~(WP) Will to Power (Vintage Giant, 1968) by Friedrich Nietzsche.

~(GS) The Gay Science (Dover, 2006) by Friedrich Nietzsche.

~(WTB) The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (CreateSpace, 2014) by William James.

~(PPV2) The Principles of Psychology: Volume Two (Dover, 2000) by William James.

~(BGE) Beyond Good and Evil (CUP, 2002) by Friedrich Nietzsche.

~(BT) Being and Time (SUNY, 2010) by Martin Heidegger.

~ (PN) The Portable Nietzsche (Penguin Classics, 1994) by Friedrich Nietzsche.

~ (A) The Antichrist (Borzoi Pocket Books, 1924) by Friedrich Nietzsche.

~ (BGE) Beyond Good and Evil (Dover, 1997) by Friedrich Nietzsche.

~ (WTB) The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (CreateSpace, 2014) by William James.

~ (BT) The Birth of Tragedy (Penguin Classics, 2003) by Friedrich Nietzsche.