Abstract

I examine the interrelation of three hypotheses which Nietzsche proposes, and which I contend serve as a thread of continuity throughout Nietzsche's later works. These three hypotheses are will to power, the revision of that "ancient and venerable soul-hypothesis", and the origin of the bad conscience. I bring these three together in the form of a spiritualized will to power and an intellectual conscience in order to reconstrue the relationship between soul and body, as now a field of activities of multiple conscious and unconscious dimensions, and to make possible the virtue of probity. I evaluate how hypotheses in general, and Nietzsche's own hypotheses, lend themselves to a new conception of ideals that permit experimentation and a new type of truthfulness. This experimentalism is an experientialism of different perspectives, and of different affects and consciences that characterize those perspectives, as suggested by Nietzsche's revised soul-hypothesis, as a "mortal soul", a "social structure of drives and affects", and a "subjective multiplicity". This multiple subjectivity extends to the pinnacle of the soul, as multiple spirits and consciences, which arise from spiritualizations of multiple affects. Nietzsche's experimentalism allows us to become more completely and more consciously what we already are, although the dynamism of our souls still depends upon the soul's unconscious depths. Hypotheses, as ideals embedded in practices of experimentation, permit us to be more truthful to who and what we are than have the ascetic ideals that have governed us thus far. However, Nietzsche does not abandon all ascetic practices, since such practices may strengthen, and even ennoble souls, through discipline, and the suffering of discipline. Lastly, I reconstruct an intersubjective dimension to Nietzsche's thought, based on the roles of friendship, of resistance, and of hypotheses, as shared ideals, disseminated by squandering "geniuses" rather than imposed by a dominating master class