Against the expressivist interpretation of Nietzsche’s lightning-flash analogy

Abstract

This article argues that Nietzsche’s rejection of the doer/deed distinction in the famous lightning-flash passage in On the Genealogy of Morality 1:13 is more radical than Robert Pippin’s influential expressivist interpretation allows. Nietzsche’s target is not merely the causal conception of agency, but a metaphysical picture according to which a bearer of a capacity subsequently actualizes it in action, and thus ultimately the ontological distinction between potentiality and actuality itself. The conventional distinction between strength and expression presupposes a bearer of a capacity that can remain unactualized; Nietzsche’s criticism of precisely this distinction, together with his identification of force with activity and his rejection of the capacity-bearing ‘substratum’, is also directed against the metaphysical structure required by the potentiality/actuality distinction itself.