John Stewart Mill used his reason to examine every little thing in his life. If you look at the development of the man from the outside you only get to see that reason plays a huge part into what he believed. However, if you actually get to know the person and look at him from his point of view it is clear that he actually was the opposite of Nietzsche’s theory. It becomes easier to see that everything Mill worked toward through his whole life was to affirm his life by trying to overcome his need for everything to be reasonable.
Instincts for Nietzsche are one of the most important things that one should possess in order to stay true to who we are as humans. If we are to use reason every day in order to get things done than we are not being ourselves, we are fake. He states that the brain is the latest and shallowest development in our evolutionary time period that we humans have tracked through. If we go deeper into where we used to be before our brain, before our reason was established, all we have are our instincts. That’s how we got to where we are today. Every animal has their own set of instincts.
Instincts are not taught to you, they are known from the time you are born. If you follow them then you will live. Instincts are basic survival knowhow’s of your species. If you were an animal and you didn’t follow your instincts, you would be eaten, get lost, eat something poisonous, or do something that would put your life in danger. If you were to observe an animal that wasn’t using it’s instincts you would observe them as being dumb or sick. They would be out of place among their peers, straying from the pack and most likely dying sooner than they should.
If you stick to your instincts than you will be fine, if we stray from our instincts we stray from whom we are and therefore, put ourselves in danger. Nietzsche mentions how philosophers have lost their instinctive part of themselves and I feel that he would group Mill into this category of philosophers that have lost their way. When Nietzsche progresses to the topic of Socrates in his book Beyond Good and Evil, he explains how Socrates uses his reason to overpower his instincts. Nietzsche says: “But why, he exhorted himself, should one therefore abandon the instincts!One must help both them and reason to receive their due - one must follow the instincts, but persuade reason to aid them with good arguments.
This was the actual falsity of that great ironist…” (114) He used reason to help his instincts guide him; this is a terrible way to use reason. If you influence one with the other, they are just getting in the way with one another and then neither one will be true anymore. Mill, who is a great philosopher, appears to contradict Nietzsche’s theory of a great philosopher by using reason every single day of his life.Since he was a young child, his father had been trying to give John a life that he never had.
He tried to create a super genius that could make a better life for him. He had been reading difficult texts since he was five years old. He was almost programmed to the point where he had to analyze everything to make sure that it made sense. This is the exact model of Nietzsche’s theory that he would say is a bad philosopher.
And this turned out to be his downfall. He basically went crazy and his dad realized how stupid that was to put so much pressure on a young child. However, there’s more to it than just that.You have to go back to when John Stewart Mill was a reformer. His ideals were fairly simple and they all had one real goal behind it.
John believed that we should make work easier, women should be less oppressed, and he wanted fewer unwanted kids. All of these small goals were to ease pain. Mill was scared of pain. He worked his whole life to get rid of it.
Ever since he was a child and he was separated from all of his peers, there was an inner pain that he held. A pain that almost seemed to eat at him, he tried to fight this pain by making things right for future children (his unwanted hildren plan), but it didn’t work. When he had his mental breakdown he lets all of his deepest pains go. Everything that he had worked so hard to suppress came out and he was in depression for a long time. I think that he knew he would eventually break down, he just didn’t know when it was going to happen, and when it did he didn’t know that it was going to be that bad. That where Nietzsche would say ‘that’s why you are a bad philosopher, you’ve lost touch with all of your instincts and look at you now…” However, this is quirky thing to tell a super genius.
If you were to tell Mill that the only way that he could be a good philosopher would be if he forgot everything that he knew about everything, and told him to basically guess using only the knowledge provided to you from your birth and your life leading up to that point that you have learned from experience, he would tell you that you are crazy. He would think that you were stupid and you were just being ignorant because you didn’t want to learn. However, this is what Nietzsche says you should do.In Ecce Homo: “To you, the bold searchers, researchers, and whoever embarks on cunning sails on terrible seas—to you, drunk with riddles, glad of the twilight, whose soul flutes lure astray to every whirlpool, because you do not want to grope along a thread with cowardly hand; and where you can guess, you hate to deduce. ” (264) He is saying that wherever you can use your instincts to guess and hopefully be right, you hate to actually use reason and come up with the right answer by looking into it.
For John Stewart Mill, his drive to overcome his rational is his true accomplishment. He wants to overcome his need for reason and rationality so much so that I think he pulls it off. I believe that after all he had been through, his childhood problems, him as a reformer, his breakdown, his wife’s death, just everything that he lived through, at the end of his life he actually overcame his reason and said screw it. He realized that what his dad had done, hi efforts to try and make his life better, was all for not and he messed John up more than John messed himself up.
In Liberty: “Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develope itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing. ” (60) He realized that he was programmed and he is a human being and they should be programmed they should be able to live. He lets go of reason and is finally like “screw it”. He was just through with it and that’s when his instincts came out and he became true.For Nietzsche, he would think that before Mill died, if he got a good look at his life, he would say “yea, he gets it now. ” And be ok with how Mill was at the beginning of his career.
His wanting to get to the truth behind everything was too much for him, you can't always find the truth and you have to go with what you know- that is what Nietzsche means when he talks about your instincts. If you are always in search of the right answer you will miss things that are important to the question. And there is always one question that doesn’t have an answer to it so why waste your time when you could guess and if wrong, now you know.
