Analysis Of Daybreak By Nietzsche

“God is dead! And we have killed him” is a famous statement by a captivating and wise German philosopher by the name of Fredrick Nietzsche. His work is amongst the most influential and brilliant philosophical works of our time. It aims to get us to reevaluate our existing principles and conceptions. In his work Daybreak, Nietzsche challenges our understanding of what constitutes the self. Instead he offers a rather provocative understanding of what constitutes the self. For one to be able to understand Nietzsche’s view of the self, one has to interpret his concept of drives. So, what are drives? Properties attributed to drives show that they are unconscious entities that seek “nourishment” (to be explained below) to manifest themselves to

As previously stated, drives manifest themselves by seeking nourishment. What this entails is that they are able to alter, or influence, one’s perception of the world; thus affecting the way one experiences different situations. In other words, how one experiences different situations is all due to the covert workings of drives. Nietzsche provides an example in his text of one wandering around a marketplace one day and suddenly spotting someone laughing at him/her. According to Nietzsche, that “event will signify this or that to [one] according to whether this or that drive happens at that moment to be at its height [state]” (D 119). What the event in Nietzsche’s example will end up signifying can be either one of these following cases: ignoring it, shrugging it off, picking a fight, or attempting to understand the reason behind that stranger’s laughter. The course of action/response one ends up having is all determined by which drive is dominant at that particular instance and in each one of the preceding cases, a drive ends up gratified. Therefore, as illustrated, the result of the drive’s activation affects the way one experiences the world by getting the agent to participate in behavior that satisfies its

As concluded earlier, stimuli are interpreted according to drives’ self-satisfying nourishment to produce experiences that gratify them. Dreams as we all know are never the same, they are always different in some sense. Nietzsche explains that phenomena by saying that the differences in man’s dreams are caused by different drives. He rationalizes that by showing how nervous stimuli remain somewhat constant throughout the day. It is that same nervous stimuli, whether during waking life or dreams, that can give rise to different interpretations, or experiences. Hence, what accounts for these various dreams is the fact about which drives are most active, not the stimuli. What differs between the waking life and dreams is the mere fact that in dreaming there is a minimal connection between the sensory stimuli and the experience. Also, that there is a bigger possibility for creative interpretation by drives in the case of dreams. Thus, one has to recognize that “affects and drives are internally related: affects depend on and are expressive of an agent’s drives, thereby providing the qualitative structuring of an agent’s world”