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Nietzsche on free will, autonomy, and the sovereign individual
In Ken Gemes & Simon May,Nietzsche on freedom and autonomy. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 321-338 (2009)
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Health is a central concept in Nietzsche’s work. Yet in the most philosophically sophisticated secondary literature on Nietzsche, there has been fairly little sustained treatment of just what Nietzschean health consists in. In this paper, I aim to provide an account of some of the central marks of this health: resilience, discipline, vitality, a certain positive condition of the will to power, a certain tendency toward integration, and so on. This exposition and discussion will be the main task of the (...) paper. Then in the concluding section of the paper, I consider a line taken in some related secondary literature, which would suggest that health might ultimately be understood in formal or dynamic terms, relating to one’s will to power and/or the unity of one’s drives. I will present the beginnings of an argument against such an account of health. In focusing on the formal and dynamic side exclusively, it cannot get the full story. In particular, it seems to me to miss the substantive dimension that is essential if we are to understand health properly. As I shall suggest, the core concept of Nietzschean health is not fully explicable except by reference to normative terms. (shrink) | |
Abstract Nietzsche defends an ideal of freedom as the achievement of a ?higher human being?, whose value judgments are a product of a rigorous scrutiny of inherited values and an expression of how the answers to ultimate questions of value are ?settled in him?. I argue that Nietzsche's view is a recognizable descendent of ideas advanced by the ancient Stoics and Spinoza, for whom there is no contradiction between the realization of freedom and the affirmation of fate, and who restrict (...) this freedom to rare individuals, who escape the bondage of conventional mores and passive emotional states. Although Nietzsche rejects key assumptions made by both the Stoics and Spinoza, his outlook is an extension of their efforts to elaborate the notion of freedom as an ideal. (shrink) | |
There are passages in Nietzsche that can be read as contributions to the free will/determinism debate. When read in that way, they reveal a fairly amateurish metaphysician with little of real substance or novelty to contribute; and if these readings were apt or perspicuous, it seems to me, they would show that Nietzsche's thoughts about freedom were barely worth pausing over. They would simply confirm the impression—amply bolstered from other quarters—that Nietzsche was not at his best when addressing the staple (...) questions of philosophy. But these readings sell Nietzsche short. He had next to no systematic interest in metaphysics, and his concern with the question of freedom was not motivated by metaphysical considerations. Rather—and as with all of Nietzsche's concerns—his motivations were ethical. He was interested, not in the relation of the human will to the causal order of nature, but in the relation between freedom and the good life, between the will and exemplary human living. Read from this perspective, Nietzsche's remarks about freedom actually add up to something. And what they add up to is one aspect of his attempt to understand life after the model of art. Beauty, for Kant, was an image of the moral.1 For Nietzsche, by contrast—and the contrast can be hard to spell out—art was an image of the ethical.2 My hope here is to begin to explain why Nietzsche might have thought that the issue of freedom was relevant to that. In sections 1–3, I attempt to show why Nietzsche is not best read as a participant in the standard free will/determinism debate; in sections 4–6, I try to spell out the ethical conception of freedom that he develops instead. (shrink) | |
This paper interprets the relation between sovereignty and guilt in Nietzsche's Genealogy. I argue that, contrary to received opinion, Nietzsche was not opposed to the moral concept of guilt. I analyse Nietzsche's account of the emergence of the guilty conscience out of a pre-moral bad conscience. Drawing attention to Nietzsche's references to many different forms of conscience and analogizing to his account of punishment, I propose that we distinguish between the enduring and the fluid elements of a ‘conscience’, defining the (...) enduring element as the practice of forming self-conceptions. I show that for Nietzsche, the moralization of the bad conscience results from mixing it with the material concepts of guilt and duty, a process effected by prehistoric religious institutions by way of the concept of god. This moralization furnishes a new conception of oneself as a responsible agent and holds the promise of sovereignty by giving us a freedom unknown to other creatures, but at the price of our becoming subject to moral guilt. According to Nietzsche, however, the very forces that made it possible have spoiled this promise and, under the pressures of the ascetic ideal, a harmful notion of responsibility understood in terms of sin now dominates our lives. Thus, to fully realize our sovereignty, we must liberate ourselves from this sinful conscience. (shrink) | |
In this paper I offer an innovative interpretation of Nietzsche's metaethical theory of value which shows him to be a kind of constitutivist. For Nietzsche, I argue, valuing is a conative attitude which institutes values, rather than tracking what is independently of value. What is characteristic of those acts of willing which institute values is that they are owned or authored. Nietzsche makes this point using the vocabulary of self‐mastery. One crucial feature of those who have achieved this feat, and (...) have consequently become agents, is that they possess a diachronic or long will and are consequently capable of the rational governance of future behaviour. The possession of a will of this sort is crucial because it is a necessary condition for engaging in temporally unified activities which are a requisite of authorship. Nietzsche, I argue, makes these points in his doctrine of eternal recurrence which provides a test that acts of will must pass to count as laws. In the final section of the paper I argue for the superiority of this interpretation over some of its competitors. (shrink) | |
In this paper I investigate affinities between Nietzsche’s early philosophy and some aspects of Kant’s moral theory. In so doing, I develop further my reading of Nietzschean wholeness as an ideal that consists in the achievement of cultural—not psychic—integration by pursuing the ennoblement of humanity in oneself and in all. This cultural achievement is equivalent to the procreation of the genius or the perfection of nature. For Nietzsche, the process by means of which we come to realize the genius in (...) ourselves is one in which our true content comes to necessarily govern or guide the shaping of our outer form (or our outward activities). Since this true content turns out to be our autonomy or free agency, I argue that this Nietzschean idea of necessitation parallels in important ways Kant’s notion of normative necessity. In particular, I claim that for Nietzsche the agent’s form becomes necessitated by his content as a result of the agent’s recognition of the duties that befall those who aspire to belong to a genuine culture and his resolve to guide his actions in accordance to them. These duties spring from the idea of humanity, from the image we have of ourselves as endowed with the capacity to be the helmsmen of our lives or to be more than mere animals or automata. The person who takes up this ideal of humanity turns his life into a living unity of content and form by organizing it around an aspect of his being that belongs necessarily, hence more truthfully, to him. He also participates in a collective project (that of the ennoblement of the human being) that can lend a certain coherence and imperishability to his individual life and through which he becomes necessarily connected to everyone else for all eternity. (shrink) | |
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(Version 2.4) I have argued elsewhere for ascribing an error theory about all normative and evaluative judgements to Nietzsche. Such a nihilism brings with it a puzzle: how could we—or at least the select few of us being addressed by Nietzsche—continue in the face of this nihilism? This is a philosophical puzzle and so, defeasibly, an interpretive puzzle. If there is no theory it would make sense for Nietzsche to have about how the select few could go on, then this (...) is some evidence against the proposed interpretation of him as a nihilist. I defended the interpretation by arguing that Nietzsche’s declarations about creating values point to a practice of generating honest evaluative illusions. Such honest evaluative illusions are tricky things, though, and, precisely because they are honest, one might worry that they lack the motivational power of genuine evaluative belief. Can they truly play the role that evaluative beliefs play in our psychological economies? I suspect that Nietzsche does not want the honest illusions to play exactly the role that evaluative beliefs played. The cheerfulness, the playfulness, the lightness that Nietzsche hopes for are, I have suggested, a function of the shift from belief to pretence, from illusion to honest illusion. The question, nonetheless, is whether the resulting picture is too light. Can I go through life merely acting, as a critic might put it? My suggestion in this essay will be that the thought of eternal recurrence is meant to add weight to the lightness of acting—“acting”, obviously, in both the here relevant senses of the word. (shrink) | |
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The "sovereign individual" appears as a hapax in the Nietzschean corpus. However, many commentators have seen in it as a kind of compendium of Nietzschean philosophy as if, through this figure, Nietzsche were defending an extreme, autarkic and even ferocious individualism. In contrast to these reductionist interpretations, this article puts the notion of the sovereign individual into the long history of morals. Which means to rethinking individuality as the fruit of a long history, and to making subjectivity not a founding (...) but a derived instance. Finally, we outline some contemporary extensions of this Nietzschean approach to individuality in Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. (shrink) | |
Interpreting Nietzsche’s writings on agency and responsibility through the lens of non-sovereignty generates interpretive and political-theoretical contributions. More specifically, I advance three arguments. First, Nietzsche’s genealogical critique of moral responsibility denaturalizes modernity’s conception of individual sovereignty and responsibility, by providing a naturalistic account of agency. Agency and responsibility are neither Kantian presuppositions of practical reason nor pieces of folk psychology to be abolished, but are normative, social, and historical achievements, and thus non-sovereign. Second, this implies a theory of responsibility that (...) is simultaneously more and less demanding than moralistic accounts: while, because agents are not autonomous, they do not bear sole responsibility for their lives, they are called upon to be responsible to and for the world, by maintaining the conditions of possible agency and flourishing. Third, Nietzsche provides both generative resources and cautionary tales for political theories of non-sovereign agency. While non-sovereign responsibility holds emancipatory and potentially democratic implications, Nietzsche’s explicit political writings demonstrate the risk that, rather than tempering existential resentment, this account could generate and intensify a resentful anti-political authoritarianism. Just as non-sovereignty provides a useful framework for making sense of tensions within Nietzsche’s thought, Nietzsche’s post-moral theory of agency and responsibility brings forward tensions, provocations, and paradoxes that must be engaged by theorists of non-sovereignty. (shrink) | |
_The Nietzschean Self_, by KatsafanasPaul. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. 292. No categories | |
it is not unusual to interpret Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, or some of his claims, as a therapeutic thought nowadays.1 Nietzsche’s perspectivism, style, and controversial doctrines are supposed to do something, rather than merely teach or state a theoretical position. The legitimacy of this action and its actual goal are far from self-evident, however. This paper tackles the problem from the perspective of a fundamental tension, which is at work underneath Nietzsche’s project since The Birth of Tragedy: that is, the tension (...) between multiplicity and singularity, respectively personified, in that book, by the figures of Dionysus and Apollo. When it comes to ethics, this dimension of Nietzsche’s thought is... (shrink) | |
Summary: In this paper I investigate Nietzsche’s ideal of wholeness or unity. The consensus among commentators is that this ideal consists in the achievement of psychic integration in a person whereby the various parts of the agent’s mind are restructured into a harmonious whole. Against this prevalent reading, I argue that Nietzschean wholeness concerns cultural integration: a person becomes whole by pursuing the ideal of freedom and humanity in himself and in all, an ideal that transcends national boundaries and that (...) is universal in scope. For Nietzsche, the pursuit of this ideal makes a person into a piece of fate or primal law, that is, it makes him necessary for all that is and that is yet to come. In this way, the person who becomes whole finds redemption from the meaninglessness of existence. Instead of allowing his life to become a mindless act of chance, this person manages to project his energies into the future in the form of the very ideal he fought and aspired to realize while alive – an ideal that is being perpetually renewed and guaranteed for all within the suprapersonal community that is made up of those genuine fighters of culture who became whole. Resumen: En este trabajo investigo el ideal de Nietzsche de completud o de unidad. El consenso entre los analistas, es que este ideal consiste en el logro de una integración psíquica dentro de la persona a través de la cual las diversas partes que conforman la mente del agente son restructuradas de forma tal que se vuelvan un conjunto armonioso. En contra de esta usual lectura, sostengo que la completud Nietzscheana se refiere a la integración cultural: una persona alcanza la completud persiguiendo el ideal de la libertad y de la humanidad en sí mismo y en todos, un ideal que trasciende fronteras nacionales y que es de alcance universal. Para Nietzsche, la búsqueda de este ideal hace que una persona se convierta en un pedazo de fatalidad o de ley primaria, es decir, hace que se vuelva necesario para todo lo que es y está por venir. De esta forma, la persona que alcanza la completud logra redimirse del sinsentido de la existencia. En vez de permitir que su vida se convierta en un puro acto de azar carente de pensamiento, esta persona proyecta sus energías hacía el futuro en la forma del propio ideal por el cual luchó y que aspiró a realizar mientras estuvo vivo – un ideal que está siendo constantemente renovado y garantizado para todos dentro de la comunidad suprapersonal que componen los auténticos luchadores de la cultura que alcanzaron la completud. (shrink) | |
Resumo O artigo é uma tentativa de explorar a hipótese controversa de que possa haver uma profunda afinidade - até agora não identificada - entre a concepção de "luta por reconhecimento" [Kampf um Anerkennung] em Hegel e a concepção da dinâmica da "vontade de poder" [Wille zur Macht] em Nietzsche. Esta hipótese diz respeito ao modo como a luta e a dominação estão implícitas na noção hegeliana de reconhecimento, isto é: diz respeito à dinâmica intersubjetiva das formas falhadas de reconhecimento. (...) A luta e a dominação são conceitos fundamentais na concepção do reconhecimento em Hegel - mas, ainda assim, conceitos meramente operacionais na obra de Hegel, enquanto em Nietzsche se tornam temáticos, porque o conceito de "poder" se torna temático. O que o artigo procura mostrar é que a hipótese nietzschiana da "vontade de poder" é relevante no debate contemporâneo sobre "reconhecimento e poder" porque permite uma descrição adequada das dinâmicas intersubjetivas em que o reconhecimento recíproco não é alcançado e o que subsiste nelas são relações de luta e dominação, ou seja, vontade de poder qua vontade de dominação. Mas isso só é assim porque a hipótese nietzschiana da "vontade de poder" implica uma "doutrina dos afetos" e, por isso, uma concepção de "poder" [Macht] em termos de "ação à distância", i.e. de influência intersubjetiva mediada por percepções, interpretações e perspectivas. Esta concepção de "poder" implica atribuir ao desejo e à vontade humanas uma natureza "recognitiva", e está longe de implicar a dissolução das relações de poder em processos transsubjetivos de dominação. Daí a afinidade entre Hegel e Nietzsche que o artigo procura evidenciar.The article is an attempt to explore a controversial hypothesis, which can be stated like this: there is a deep affinity - hitherto largely unnoticed - between Hegel's conception of struggles for "recognition" [Anerkennung] and Nietzsche's conception of the dynamics of "will to power" [Wille zur Macht]. This hypothesis concerns the ways in which struggle and domination are implicitly involved in the Hegelian notion of recognition, that is: it concerns the intersubjective dynamics of failed-recognition. Struggle and domination are crucial concepts in Hegel's whole conception of recognition - but they are for him operative concepts, whereas in Nietzsche they become thematic, because the concept of "power" becomes thematic. What the article tries to show is that the Nietzschean hypothesis of "will to power" is relevant for the contemporary debate on "recognition and power" because it enables an adequate description of the intersubjective dynamics in which reciprocal recognition is not achieved and relationships of struggle and domination persist, i.e., what persists is "will to power" qua will to domination. However, this is only so because the Nietzschean hypothesis of "will to power" entails a "doctrine of the affects", and hence a conception of "power" [Macht] in terms of "action at a distance", i.e., in terms of intersubjective influence mediated by perceptions, interpretations, and perspectives. This conception of "power" entails a "recognitive" conception of human desire and human will, and, therefore, it would be wrong to claim that Nietzsche's "will to power" involves the dissolution of power-relations in trans-subjective processes of domination. Hence the affinity between Hegel and Nietzsche which the article tries to evince. (shrink) | |
There is an apparent disagreement between recent commentators who find in Nietzsche both a constructive philosophy and a compatibilist account of freedom, and Brian Leiter’s reading that rejects both. The reason for this disagreement, I argue, is that Leiter’s “illiberal” view is limited in scope to Nietzsche’s critical philosophy, while Nietzsche also has a constructive philosophy aimed at select readers. I read Nietzsche’s critical philosophy as targeting the metaphysical entities that underpin asceticism and herd values, not the mental states and (...) processes with which these entities are associated. The “no such entity” reading preserves the resources needed to read Nietzsche as offering a replacement for the ascetic ideal—and an alternative source for life’s meaning. Although few of his readers will have been born with the drives needed to throw off herd values and enjoy compatibilist freedom, these readers are the intended audience for Nietzsche’s constructive philosophy. (shrink) | |
This thesis discusses the potential consequences of applying the philosophy of Mark C. Taylor to the field of Human-Computer Interaction. The first part of the thesis comprises a study focusing on two discursive trends in contemporary HCI, materiality and the self, and how these discourses describe interaction. Through a qualitative, inductive content analysis of 171 HCI research articles, a number of themes are identified in the literature and, it is argued, construct a dominant perspective of materiality, the self, and interaction. (...) Examples that differ from the dominant discourse are also discussed as alternative perspectives for each of the three focal areas. The second part of the thesis comprises an analysis of Mark C. Taylor’s philosophical project which enables a number of philosophical positions on materiality, the self, and interaction to be identified. These positions are suggested to be variations and rereadings of themes found in Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy. These variations emerge as Taylor approaches Nietzsche through poststructuralism and complexity theory, and it is argued that the apparent heterogeneity of Taylor’s project can be understood as a more coherent position when interpreted in relation to Nietzsche’s philosophy. Based on the findings of the two literature studies, the thesis then discusses the possible consequences for HCI, if Taylor’s philosophy were to be applied as a theoretical framework. The thesis argues that Taylor’s philosophy describes the interaction between humans and computers as an existential process, which contrasts with the dominant HCI discourse; that this view can be related to and provide a theoretical foundation for the alternative discourses in HCI; and that it can contribute to developing HCI. (shrink) No categories | |
The aim of this thesis is to provide a systematic account of Nietzsche’s philosophy of value by examining his exemplars. It will be argued that these exemplars represent his favoured evaluative practices and therefore illustrate what I will call his evaluative ideals. The thesis will be structured in three chapters, each examining a different exemplar that emerges from a particular period of Nietzsche’s work. Proceeding in this way will allow me to examine what I take to be three strands of (...) his philosophy of value; the critical ideal through the exemplar of the Free Spirit, the ethical ideal through Zarathustra, and the meta-ethical ideal through the exemplar of the Future Philosopher. These standpoints, it will be claimed, reflect Nietzsche’s central insights about what we should value and the way in which we should value, and are in this sense his evaluative ideals. Moreover, in doing so I will also attempt to provide some key insights on Nietzsche’s reasons for his evaluative preferences, as given through these exemplars as evaluative ideals. (shrink) No categories |
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