What are these “fundamental problems” that psychology helps us to answer? How exactly does psychology bear on philosophy? In this conference paper, I provide a partial answer to these questions by focusing upon the way in which psychology informs Nietzsche’s account of value. Near the beginning of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes that “psychology is once again the path to the fundamental problems” (BGE 23). It not only brings out the problems in her approach to the problem of action, but draws attention to the ways in which normativity applies to reflective agents in the context of particular actions and across actions.

I argue that the success of Nietzsche’s account is a direct challenge to Korsgaard’s picture. An agent, on Nietzsche’s view, can have a unified structure of her drives based on the norms they find in their environment, and on the drives they find themselves with, and yet nevertheless I show that they do in fact solve the problem of action.

In this paper, I outline how Nietzsche provides a story of how agents can develop a normative structuring of their drives that is sufficient for unifying an agential perspective without appealing to Korsgaard’s Kantian standards. Korsgaard claims that as reflective agents, we are committed to choosing a structure for our drives that unifies us in a way that would remain stable in the face of changes both to the our drives and circumstances in the world because we are committed to being the efficacious source of our action.

The Nietzschean Self by Paul Katsafanas