Nietzsche is well known for stating that there is ‘only a perspectival “knowing”’. What has been less remarked is the extent to which he thereby stands in radical opposition to a common philosophical position concerning the relationship between knowledge and the affects. On this issue we may let Schopenhauer speak for the philosophical mainstream of many centuries:
In order to see that a purely objective, and therefore correct, apprehension of things is possible only when we consider them without any personal participation in them, and thus under the complete silence of the will, let us picture to ourselves how much every affect [Affekt] or passion [Leidenschaft] obscures and falsifies knowledge, in fact how every inclination or aversion [Neigung oder Abneigung] twists, colours, and distorts not merely the judgement, but even the original perception of things.1
Yet this is exactly what Nietzsche rejects in On the Genealogy of Morality III 12, whose chief conclusions are delivered in the following statement:
There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about a matter, the more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on one and the same matter, that much more complete will our ‘concept’ of this matter, our ‘objectivity’ be.
A passage in the same section glosses Nietzsche’s new understanding of ‘objectivity’ as:
the capacity to have one’s pro and contra in one’s power, and to shift them in and out: so that one knows how to make precisely the difference in perspectives and affective interpretations useful for knowledge.
What is it that makes knowing necessarily perspectival? What is it about the condition of the knower that corresponds to the in-built constraints of specificity of place and function that make all seeing perspectival? Nietzsche actually says rather little about this in our passage. He mentions the ‘active and interpretive forces’, which presumably pertain not just to the ‘eye’ but to that which it is a metaphor for, i.e. the knowing human mind. Nietzsche perhaps trades on the post-Kantian platitude that knowledge of a world of objects has as a condition that the human mind actively contribute organizing structures to any data it receives, so that non-selective passive reception can be no model of knowledge at all. However, Nietzsche’s ‘active and interpretive forces’ are not very much like Kant’s synthesis of intuitions under concepts of the understanding and in some respects more akin to Schopenhauer’s notion that the intellect’s operations are in the service of the will. The heavy emphasis in our passage falls, not on purely cognitive Kant-style features of the mind, but on affects. It is the affects—the very mental states that for the philosophical orthodoxy ‘twist, colour, and distort’ judgement and perception—that Nietzsche portrays as enabling and expanding knowledge. These points are hammered home in the last half page of section 12: ‘To eliminate the will altogether, to disconnect the affects’ would be to disable knowledge; ‘To have one’s pro and contra in one’s power’ is to make one’s knowledge more ‘objective’; the plurality of affects, the greatest possible difference in affective interpretations, is ‘useful’ for knowledge and makes it more ‘complete’.
What is an affect? At times Nietzsche talks simply of ‘inclinations and aversions’, ‘pro and contra’, or ‘for and against’. It seems that all affects are at bottom inclinations or aversions of some kind. But their range is extensive. In the Genealogy and Beyond Good and Evil alone he explicitly uses the term for the following: anger, fear, love, hatred, hope, envy, revenge, lust, jealousy, irascibility, exuberance, calmness, self-satisfaction, self-humiliation, self-crucifixion, powerlust, greed, suspicion, malice, cruelty, contempt, despair, triumph, feeling of looking down on, feeling of a superior glance towards others, desire to justify oneself in the eyes of others, demand for respect, feelings of laziness, feeling of a command, and brooding over bad deeds.2 Affects are, at the very least, ways in which we feel. Many specific instances are what we would call emotions, some are perhaps moods, while affects of ‘commanding’ or of ‘looking down on’ someone are not obviously describable as either moods or emotions. The class of affects is likely to include further felt states such as an instinctual like or dislike for something, a sense of unease, a faint thrill at a certain thought, and so on until we reach states for which we have no terminology:
words really exist only for superlative degrees of these [inner] processes and drives. […] Anger, hatred, love, pity, desire, knowledge, joy, pain—all are names for extreme states: the milder, middle degrees, not to speak of the lower degrees which are continually in play, elude us, and yet it is they which weave the web of our character and destiny. (D 115)
Some affects are beneath accurate apprehension by ourselves, and some are unconscious.3 But all seem to be feelings of one sort or another. And if we respect the fact that Nietzsche gives such prominence to affects in his discussion of perspectival knowing, we shall have to surmise that for him the in-built constraint upon knowledge that makes it ‘only perspectival’ lies in the knowing subject’s affective nature.
What, then, can Nietzsche mean when he talks of the affects enabling and enhancing knowledge? I suggest that we begin not with a generalization about all knowing, but with a specific example extremely close to home: Nietzsche’s own interpretive task in the Genealogy, his search for knowledge about the various phenomena of morality. I have argued elsewhere4 that arousing the affects is central to Nietzsche’s aims as a writer, and that it deserves to be so because of the prominence of affects in his explanation of the genesis of our moral attitudes. For example, in order to further our understanding of the slave-revolt in morality Nietzsche encourages us to recognize our own ambivalent inclinations and aversions—our mixed feelings for or against compassion, aggression, humility, prowess, equality, nobility—and to reconstruct the history of attitudes to ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in imaginative engagement with the feelings of both the oppressed slave and the self-defining master. When he invites us to identify with the fears and resentment of a defenceless sheep and with the fond disdain of a natural predator, he provides a way of gaining insight into the origins of the modern notion of responsibility for action. Again, in convincing us of cruelty’s role in the genesis of guilt and punishment, he seduces us into acknowledging, beneath our more obvious feelings of anger and disgust, a streak of joyfulness in seeing and making suffer. All these seem good examples of ‘making the difference in perspectives and affective interpretations useful for knowledge’—knowledge of the nature of our own moral attitudes. An even more local example occurs in the first half of GMIII 12 itself, which invites us to feel the philosophical products of asceticism as a ‘triumph’, commenting that we should ‘not be ungrateful toward such resolute reversals of […] familiar perspectives and valuations’—in other words, to see things through the eyes and feelings of the ascetic is beneficial to our inquiry because it enables us to have a more complete insight into the ideal that, according to Nietzsche, dominates Christian and post-Christian culture.
A further small but significant point about Nietzsche’s vocabulary might assist in reorienting our expectations about the kind of knowledge or interpretation Nietzsche has most immediately in mind. He talks of completing our ‘objectivity’ and our ‘concept’ of something—but of what kind of thing? Some accounts of perspectivism foreground the issue of ‘knowing an object from a particular perspective’,5 which may carry the suggestion that Nietzsche’s main concern is the traditional epistemological problem of knowledge of individual bodies in the external world. But it is unnecessary to read Nietzsche as referring to an object in this specific manner.6 His word here is eine Sache, which may mean simply a matter or topic of discussion. Back in the Genealogy’s Second Treatise (section 4) he investigated a particular düstere Sache, a gloomy matter, namely ‘the consciousness of guilt, the entire “bad conscience”’ which turned out to be an immensely complex set of psychological and cultural phenomena. Another such düstere Sache, for him is ‘reason, seriousness, mastery over the affects, this entire gloomy matter called reflection’,7 and there are similar uses of the term in the Genealogy to denote a topic of discussion, an area of human life under investigation.
So Nietzsche’s practice in the Genealogy suggests the belief that our feeling shocked, embarrassed, disgusted, or attracted by some phenomenon tells us something about that phenomenon—that is, that feelings themselves have cognitive potency. Such a construal of perspectival ‘knowing’ has the advantage of fitting the manner of writing about morality that Nietzsche uses throughout the Genealogy. And the otherwise rather obscure notion of ‘shifting one’s pro and contra in and out’ seems an appropriate description of the activity Nietzsche expects of his own more alert and sensitive readers.
So we are faced with two strikingly controversial general claims: (1) That it is impossible for there to be any knowing that is free of all affects, and (2) That multiplying different affects always improves knowing. The second claim could stand even if it were to turn out that some forms of knowledge, such as scientific investigation, for instance, have to be construed as purged of all affects. For Nietzsche can hold that knowing something only scientifically gives us a poorer understanding of it than knowing it through a variety of psychological, imaginative, rhetorical means—affectarousing means—in addition to those of science. His own shift from philological Wissenschaft to the manner of writing displayed in the Genealogy bears out the intelligibility of such a claim for Nietzsche. It is beyond question that Nietzsche regards the Genealogy as providing greater knowledge about morality than any combination of the traditional Wissenschaften could have attained unaided.
Nietzsche’s other general claim—that there is no form of knowing that is not affective—looks harder to sustain. We are prompted to seek some theoretical ground for Nietzsche’s refusal in principle to allow affect-free knowledge. At this point it will help to consider who or what is the knower, the subject of knowledge, for Nietzsche. Faced with the questions Who knows? Who thinks? Who interprets? Nietzsche’s official position is that there is no such subject as ordinarily conceived. He repeatedly urges that we should be suspicious towards the concept of a subject or ‘I’. The I is ‘just an assumption or opinion, to put it mildly’, it has ‘become a fairy tale, a fiction, a play on words’, and enjoys ‘a merely apparent existence’. Instead we are to think of ‘soul as subject-multiplicity’, and view the self as a plurality of subpersonal elements in competitive interaction with one another, elements that are will-like in character (‘“under-wills” or under-souls’).8
Nietzsche commonly calls such elements ‘drives’. In the case of a philosopher, for example, who he is is equivalent to ‘what order of rank the innermost drives of his nature’ stand in, and thinking itself is ‘only a relation between these drives’ (BGE 6, 36). But it is evident that drives are closely related to affects, for he also says that the social construction that is the self is built out of ‘drives and affects’ (BGE 12), and talks elsewhere of ‘our drives and their for and against’.9 We may wonder whether drives and affects are even properly distinguishable kinds.10 It would be foolhardy to expect consistent terminological rigour here, but unless the recurrent expression ‘drives and affects’ is to be taken as merely pleonastic, we might hypothesize that a drive is a relatively stable tendency to active behaviour of some kind, while an affect, put very roughly, is what it feels like when a drive is active inside oneself. Affects, as we have seen, are glossed as inclinations and aversions or fors and againsts. An affect would then be a positive or negative feeling that occurs in response to the success or failure of a particular drive in its striving, or in response to the confluence of the activities of more than one drive within oneself. In Human, All Too Human Nietzsche already thought that ‘a drive to something or away from something divorced from a feeling one is desiring the beneficial or avoiding the harmful, a drive without some kind of knowing evaluation of the worth of its objective, does not exist in man’.11 And in a late notebook entry he asks ‘Can we assume a striving for power without a sensation of pleasure and unpleasure, i.e. without a feeling of the increase and diminution of power?’12
Given the claim that this plurality of will-like striving components held in tension is what I am, it makes sense prima facie to hold that if I am to know anything, it must be through some activity of the drives that compose me and the feelings essentially involved in their activity. There is, officially, nothing else available to do the knowing. Thus in further notebook entries Nietzsche writes: ‘It is our needs which interpret the world: our drives and their for and against. Every drive is a kind of lust for domination, each has its perspective’; and ‘Who interprets?—Our affects’.13 Out of the inner tension and competition among striving and feeling dispositions, constantly interpreting and seeking to become master over whatever they encounter, come thinking, meaning, and valuing. It would seem that, given Nietzsche’s view of the self, knowing would likewise have to be some aggregate of the multiple affective interpretations that occur within the one human being.
Construed in this manner, Nietzsche’s conception of perspectival knowledge still faces some hard questions. (1) What makes an aggregate of the activities of someone’s drives a case of knowing, as opposed to a case of something else? Can the activity of the multiple drives and affects give rise to interpretations that are capable of meeting even the minimum requirement for knowledge, that of being true? (2) If each of the subpersonal elements of the self (whatever they are called) wants mastery, strives, interprets, and grasps something of reality, is not each of them just a miniature subject? Far from abandoning the subject-conception inherited from the philosophical tradition, have we not simply denied it application at the level of the individual human being and smuggled it back into our description of the subpersonal community of drives? (3) How in Nietzsche’s conception can one be said ‘to have one’s pro and contra in one’s power, and to shift them in out’? How can we ‘make […] the difference in perspectives and affective interpretations useful for knowledge’? How can we ‘bring to bear’ our many affects on one and the same matter, and ‘allow [them] to speak’ about it? What, in short, must the self be, in order to perform such operations? And finally, (4) can Nietzsche, with his apparently eliminativist conception of the self, explain how the philosopher’s conception of the self-conscious subject or ‘I’, erroneous or not, could even have come about?
Here I shall address only the latter two issues. Our passage from GM III 12 suggests that for ‘knowing’ to occur, a mere multiplicity of affect-interpretations will indeed not suffice. There must also be those operations upon affects, or upon interpretations, which Nietzsche calls ‘having them in one’s power’, ‘shifting them in and out’, and so on. This then prompts our question (3): what must the self be for these operations to occur? Perhaps some kind of controlling subject? In similar passages in Beyond Good and Evil and Human, All Too Human Nietzsche speaks blatantly of free agency with respect to one’s affects:
To freely have or not have your affects, your pros and cons, to condescend to them for a few hours; to seat yourself on them as you would on a horse or often as you would on an ass:—since you need to know how to use their stupidity as well as you know how to use their fire.14
You shall become master over yourself […] You shall get control over your For and Against and learn how to display first one and then the other in accordance with your higher goal.15
It seems clear that there must be some kind of self-conscious unity for the notion of controlling affects and bringing them to bear on one and the same subject-matter to make sense. I have to be aware that affects A and B, each of which may ‘speak’ interchangeably about the same subject-matter, are both mine. I have to be that which feels both affects, regards itself as feeling them both, and takes some attitude towards its subject-matter in the light now of this affect, and now of that. It seems right to view Nietzsche’s suggestion of ‘having one’s affects within one’s control’ and manipulating them ‘in accordance with a higher goal’ as part of his overall revaluative project. In using the fullness of our affective responsiveness to the world, we come to occupy ourselves, as it were, in a more complete and healthy way, to fulfil our potential as cognizers. But if the way in which we are to reach this healthier cognitive state is by rethinking what we are and by conscious identification with as many of our affects as possible, we must arguably be unified self-conscious subjects, subjects of ‘I’-thoughts. So we cannot simply be a multiplicity of drives and affects, as Nietzsche’s official position proclaims.
An alternative, Kantian position would allow for self-conscious unity within experience without reawakening any of the metaphysical notions that Nietzsche repudiates—the self or ‘I’ as non-empirical, unchanging essence, as thinking substance, as something ontologically primary and irreducible, as cause of thinking. Kant makes the transcendental claim that it is a condition of there being experience at all that it is that of a self-conscious ‘I’. But, for Kant, no metaphysical conclusions can be drawn from the holding of this condition, hence his criticisms of rational psychology in the ‘Paralogisms of Pure Reason’: how this ‘I’ is realized ontologically is left entirely open by the transcendental claim.16If he espoused this Kantian position, Nietzsche could hold that at the level of physiological description there are drives and affects in various sorts of relations, and, compatibly with this, that for there to be the operations of ‘controlling’ and ‘shifting in and out’ in regard to the affects, there must be a subject that conceives itself as a single self-conscious ‘I’.17 His eliminativist treatment of the self could then be seen as directed primarily against traditional metaphysical conceptions, and his denial of any subject or ‘I’ regarded as a polemical over-statement.18
Given that he eschews this Kantian route, however, Nietzsche’s alternative approach towards explaining the (apparent) unity of self-consciousness is the solely naturalistic one of positing integration of the multiple drives under one dominant drive. An example of this can be found in Daybreak 109, where Nietzsche gives a penetrating account of ways in which one might ‘combat the vehemence of a drive’—Nietzsche gives no specific illustration, but we might imagine someone struggling with overpowering sexual urges or addictive cravings. The discussion concludes thus:
that one desires to combat the vehemence of a drive at all, however, does not stand within our own power […] in this entire procedure our intellect is only the blind instrument of another drive which is a rival of the desire whose vehemence is tormenting us […] while ‘we’ believe we are complaining about the vehemence of a drive, at bottom it is one drive which is complaining about another; that is to say: for us to become aware that we are suffering from the vehemence of a drive presupposes the existence of another equally vehement or even more vehement drive, and that a struggle is in prospect in which our intellect is going to have to take sides. (D 109)
A single drive can empower itself by subordinating many other drives to its own activity, and Nietzsche sees organization by a dominant drive as giving unity to one’s character and actions. That I will to resist my addictive cravings is not ‘up to me’, is not the resolve of an ‘I’ that is external to the complex of drives and affects, but is itself the activity of a strong drive within me. There is no controlling self that determines ex nihilo what my ends, purposes, and values are. Fair enough. But I have to be, in my own self-conception, a sufficiently unified self that I can ‘take sides’ between the various drives that (though I did not originally will them) I find within myself. Likewise, it is not just that each of the affects I find within myself has a goal of its own, but rather that I have a goal in pursuit of which I can flexibly use the affects I feel. When Nietzsche is thinking of his ideal, creatively evaluating, perspectivally knowing individual, he freely imbues this individual with the status of a unified, self-conscious, autonomous subject, in a way that fails to mesh comfortably with his eliminativist description of what the individual amounts to ‘in reality’.19
If it were just that Nietzsche’s ideal, value-creating, perspective-wielding ‘new philosopher’ presupposes the vocabulary of the unified self which his theoretical descriptions deny, the problem could be finessed by saying that Nietzsche sets us a daunting task: out of the base raw material of warring, organic strivings, which is all humanity has the right to assume itself to be, to create something whole, something with form, goal, and concentrated mastery—a recognizable Nietzschean task. The gap between the given and the goal would accord at least with the enormity and rarity of the achievement Nietzsche invokes. But our question (4) shows that this is not the end of the problem. For how could we come to think of ourselves erroneously in the manner of the philosophical tradition, as simple substances, self-transparent rational thinkers, pure subjects of knowledge, radically free, neutral subjects of choice, and so on? How did we get to regard ourselves as unitary selves at all, erroneously or not? As Sebastian Gardner succinctly puts it,
How, except in the perspective of an I, of something that takes itself to have unity of the self ’s sort, can a conception of unity sufficient to account for the fiction of the I be formed? (As it might be put: How can the ‘idea’ of the I occur to a unit of will to power or composite thereof—or to anything less than an I?)20
In other words, if we were not already unitary, self-conscious selves, how could we have imagined that we were? This raises the prospect that Nietzsche’s eliminativist picture of the self may be out of step not only with his project of re-evaluation and his conception of enhanced knowing, but also with his diagnosis of the origins of our metaphysical errors. If only a unified self can make these metaphysical errors, and only a unified self can have the goals and perspectival adaptability that lead to healthier knowing and valuing, then, though we can learn not to think of ourselves as pure metaphysical subjects, Nietzsche’s philosophy as a whole demands that we do not regard ourselves only as complex hierarchies of drives and affects.
In various ways, then, Nietzsche appears to require a unified self of a kind that his official position would deny. It is hard to find a resolution to this predicament. But some of Nietzsche’s remarks—that human beings are a combination of ‘creature’ and ‘creator’ in a way that is difficult to comprehend (BGE 225), and that there is no need to follow clumsy naturalists in abandoning the hypothesis of ‘the soul’ (BGE 12)—show him alive to a central tension in his view of the self, and even keen to cultivate our awareness of that tension. I would argue that his perspectivism is another case in point: in support of the view that our interpretations are saturated and constituted by a plurality of feelings he dissolves the self into a multiplicity of affects and drives. But his aims of improving our capacity for knowing and skilfully using our affects demand more of a self than that: he needs his enquirer to be an active and sufficiently unified self that can represent its subject-matter truly, that rides on top of the inner multiplicity, and that can self-consciously adopt attitudes towards it.
III
The vexed question of free will raises similar issues. Nietzsche talks of free will towards the end of the First Treatise of the Genealogy and towards the beginning of the Second, and may appear to contradict himself within the space of a few pages. He describes as nonsensical and false the belief in a ‘neutral “subject” with free choice’ standing behind an individual’s actions (GM I 13); yet he says there has existed or may exist a type of individual who ‘has become free’ and is a ‘lord of the free will’ (GM II 2).21 The text leaves us uncertain as to who this sovereign individual is, was, or might be. He or she is described as an end-product of the conformist ‘morality of custom’, a mode of evaluation prior to the Christian morality Nietzsche is out to re-evaluate in the Genealogy.22 But are ‘sovereign individuals’ supposed to have existed after the age of the morality of custom was over or during its later stages? And are they supposed to have existed once and then faded away into history, or are there sovereign individuals around today? Or have they never existed? The tone suggests that Nietzsche may be describing an ideal type, giving us what Aaron Ridley has called ‘a sort of foretaste of the (enlightened) conscience of the future’.23 Many such questions are left open. But whatever else the mysterious ‘sovereign individual’ is, he is not supposed to be a nonsense or a falsehood. Nietzsche must regard the sovereign individual’s achievement of freedom as something other than his becoming a neutral subject with free choice.
It has been claimed that being a sovereign individual is for Nietzsche constitutive of being truly human.24 But this is difficult to support. For although Nietzsche attributes to the sovereign individual a ‘feeling of the completion of man himself’ (GM II 2), he emphasizes the distinction and superiority of the sovereign individual over other types of human individuals who lack power, pride, and autonomy.25 In the sense of free will at issue here not every human being will have free will, or at least not to the same degree.26 Nietzsche here ignores the global, metaphysical question whether absence of necessity is possible in human agency, and poses a cultural and psychological question about qualities and conditions that mark out certain human beings as peculiarly admirable or valuable. Free will in this sense is a variably realizable condition, not a universal one. It is an achievement, or a blessing, of the few, and can occur only in some cultural circumstances with people of certain character types.
A further pointer in this direction appears right at the end of the Second Treatise, where Nietzsche envisages a different creative kind of spirit, a rare and exceptionally strong ‘human of the future’, a ‘bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision, that makes the will free again, that gives back to the earth its goal and to man his hope; this anti-Christ and anti-nihilist; this conqueror of God and of nothingness’ (GM II 24). Such talk of making the will free again suggests a fall and redemption pattern: at some time in the past, as a product of the harshly repressive ‘morality of custom’, there became possible sovereign individuals with the characteristic quality of having a free will. Since that time the post-Christian morality of selflessness has been victorious, positing the desirability of guilt and self-suppression and the conception of the non-self-suppressing individual as blameworthy for not making the supposedly available choice to be harmless. In some future we might cast off this conception of morality, and the will could be free again.
The individual with free will contrasts starkly with the morality of custom (die Sittlichkeit der Sitte) because, as Nietzsche provocatively puts it, ‘“autonomous” and “moral” are mutually exclusive’ (GM II 2). For there to be values at all, Nietzsche suggests, there had to be a long prehistory in which simple conformity to tradition determined what was good, departure from tradition what was bad and fit to be curbed. Civilization begins with the proposition ‘any custom is better than no custom’, and tradition is a ‘higher authority that one obeys […] because it commands’ (D 16, 9). Yet the end-product or ‘fruit’ of this whole constraining process is an individual ‘resembling only himself’, having the capacity to be ‘free again from the morality of custom’, to have an ‘independent […] will’ and be ‘autonomous’. Nietzsche says much in a short space here, perhaps grasping for a vocabulary that will capture his insights. The sovereign individual’s will is ‘free’, ‘his own’, ‘independent’, ‘long’, and ‘unbreakable’; and in virtue of this will the sovereign individual is permitted to promise, has ‘mastery over himself’, has his own standard of value, is permitted to say ‘yes’ to himself,27 and has a consciousness of his ‘superiority’ and ‘completion’. To be permitted to make promises, one must not only be minimally capable of promising but have the power to fulfil one’s promises and the integrity to promise only what one genuinely has the will to do. This suggests a kind of self-knowledge in which one is properly conscious of what it is that one wills, and confident of the consistency with which one’s will is going to maintain itself intact until the moment at which it can be delivered upon. The sovereign individual can count upon himself to act consistently, to be the same in the future when the time comes to produce what he promised in the past. Understanding oneself in this way, one will presumably attain a justified sense of satisfaction in one’s power and integrity, and value others, not according to their conformity to some general practice imposed from without, but according to their manifestation of the kind of power and integrity one recognizes in oneself.
This positive conception of free will, then, involves acting fully within one’s character, knowing its limits and capabilities and valuing oneself for what one is rather than for one’s conformity to an external standard or to what one ought to be. In the later Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche eulogizes Goethe as ‘a spirit become free [freigewordner]’, who ‘dares to allow himself the whole compass and wealth of naturalness, who is strong enough for this freedom’ and ‘stands in the midst of the universe with a joyful and trusting fatalism’.28 One becomes free in accepting and affirming oneself as a whole, and rather than seeing the necessity or fatedness of one’s character as an inhibition or obstacle to action, one sees it as the condition of and opportunity for true self-expression.
We might be able to conceive of something like the following as an approximation to Nietzsche’s sovereign individual: someone who is conscious of the strength and consistency of his or her own character over time; who creatively affirms and embraces him- or herself as valuable, and who values his or her actions because of the degree to which they are in character; who welcomes the limitation and discipline of internal and external nature as the true conditions of action and creation, but whose evaluations arise from a sense of who he or she is, rather than from conformity to some external or generic code of values. This is a glimpse of the sense in which free will might be attained, or regained for Nietzsche.
Free will, thus adumbrated, needs to be kept distinct from the notion of the ‘neutral “subject” with free choice’ conceived as underlying our actions, and from the notion of the self as causa sui, or uncaused cause of itself. In Beyond Good and Evil 21, Nietzsche unequivocally states that the notion of being self-caused is a contradiction. However, that passage contains no premiss that resembles ‘there can be free will only if there is a causa sui’.29 Here Nietzsche is not even pursuing the question whether there is or is not free will. Rather he is at his usual genealogical business: flushing out an underlying affective state—‘the longing for “freedom of the will” in the superlative metaphysical sense’—and hypothesizing an explanation for its genesis and persistence. How do we come to have a thirst for this extremity of metaphysics, a self that makes itself out of nothing, and why is this extreme view lodged so firmly in the modern consciousness? Nietzsche’s answer here is that we cannot stomach any sense that we are not wholly in control of ourselves. Nietzsche is not doing metaphysics, rather unearthing the valuations of ourselves that underlie our inclining to a certain metaphysical position.30
So far this is, admittedly, compatible with Nietzsche’s rejecting free will altogether. But Nietzsche next asks his reader ‘to rid his mind of the reversal of this misconceived concept of “free will”: I mean the “un-free will” […] The “un-free will” is mythology’. There is reason to believe, Nietzsche now argues, that in nature itself there is no ‘causal association’, ‘necessity’, or ‘psychological un-freedom’; we merely project such notions on to reality. When he asks why we make this projection, he is again seeking psychological explanations for some feelings that lie beneath our thoughts. But he is equally suspicious of the antithesis of this extreme metaphysical notion:
It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in a thinker when he senses some compulsion, need, having-to-follow, pressure, un-freedom in every ‘causal connection’ and ‘psychological necessity’. It is very telling to feel this way—the person tells on himself. And in general, if I have observed correctly, ‘un-freedom of the will’ is regarded as a problem by two completely opposed parties, but always in a profoundly personal manner. The one party would never dream of relinquishing their ‘responsibility’, a belief in themselves, a personal right to their own merit (the vain races belong to this group—). Those in the other party, on the contrary, do not want to be responsible for anything or to be guilty of anything; driven by an inner self-contempt, they long to be able to shift the blame for themselves to something else. (BGE 21)
In his earlier Human, All Too Human, while still influenced by Paul Rée’s straightforward determinism (and to come extent by Schopenhauer’s similar position),31 Nietzsche had consistently described the belief in free will as an error and referred to the unfreedom of the will as ‘total’ and ‘unconditional’.32 Human beings, he claimed, are no more free than animals (HAH I 102), or indeed than a waterfall in which we may ‘think we see […] capriciousness and freedom of will’ (HAH I 106). In contrast, when he approaches the neutral ‘subject’ and causa sui in the Genealogy and Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche’s interest is genealogical: he is concerned less with resolving the traditional metaphysical debate over the question whether one’s actions could have turned out otherwise under identical causal conditions, and more with diagnosing the affective origins of metaphysical beliefs at both extremes of the debate. Nietzsche the genealogist asks what affective psychological states explain the origination of these extreme metaphysical pictures of ourselves. Similarly in Genealogy I 13, he asks for the psychological origins of belief in the indifferent subject unconstrained by nature and circumstances, and finds the answer in ressentiment and its outgrowth, the felt need for a target for blame.
To gain a glimpse of the ‘free will’ that may pertain to the sovereign individual, then, we must step outside our learned moralistic preoccupation with blame and with the neutralizing of character differences in explaining action, and look beyond the dichotomy between the notion of causa sui or radical independence from nature and the ‘total unfreedom’ of Nietzsche’s earlier position: a dichotomy between two myths, as Nietzsche has warned us, myths that prevail because they are driven by differing affective impulses within us.
IV
Nietzsche is hoping for a revaluation of values: he wants some of us at least to change our allegiance away from the values of selflessness as he has diagnosed them, and to regard them as symptoms of sickness and decline, which we will do our best to distance ourselves from in future. But what is this change in allegiance, and how might it occur? An important aspect to revaluation is the claiming of values as one’s own. Rather than adhering to values which are received, traditional, generic, universal, one is to discover one’s own personal values. For example, Nietzsche says:
Let us […] limit ourselves to the purification of our opinions and value judgements and to the creation of tables of what is good that are new and all our own: let us stop brooding over the ‘moral value of our actions’! Yes, my friends, it is time to feel nauseous about some people’s moral chatter about others. Sitting in moral judgement should offend our taste. (GS 335)
The strictly genealogical project of discovering truths about the psychological origins of our evaluations does not as such revalue them, but, as Nietzsche says in a notebook entry,33 ‘for our feelings […] [it] reduces the value of the thing which originated that way, and prepares a critical mood and attitude towards it’. He also puts this by saying ‘Your insight into how such things as moral judgements could ever have come into existence would spoil these emotional words [such as “duty” and “conscience”] for you’ (GS 335). The effect, I take it, could also be described as a loss of one’s more or less automatic emotional alignment with received values, a suspension of the single-dimensional ‘pro and contra’ inherited from the Christian culture of Nietzsche’s most typical readers. This suspension allows a space for a new evaluation and a shift or reversal in values, which Nietzsche often describes in ways which seem to presuppose agency, judgement, and choice.
In Daybreak Nietzsche describes the change in valuation he seeks with the phrase ‘we have to learn to think differently’—i.e. outside the moral evaluative oppositions of good and evil, egoistic and selfless—‘in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently’ (D 103). Also in Daybreak Nietzsche adumbrates a kind of liberation of the individual’s thinking, not from feelings per se, which for him would be impossible and undesirable,34 but from feelings which are not original or appropriate to the individual. Instead of carrying around ‘valuations of things that originate in the passions and loves of former centuries’ (GS 57) and giving ‘obedience to one’s grandfather and grandmother and their grandparents’, one is to honour what he strikingly calls ‘the gods which are in us: our reason and our experience’ (D 35). Other passages suggest that a revaluation of values will be an act of placing trust in values that are authentically one’s own, an autonomous decision taken in the light of self-understanding.
It is selfish to consider one’s own judgement a universal law, and this selfishness is blind, petty, and simple because it shows that you haven’t yet discovered yourself or created for yourself an ideal of your very own [my emphasis] […] No one who judges, ‘in this case everyone would have to act like this’ has yet taken five steps towards self-knowledge. […] We, however, want to become who we are—human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves! To that end we must become the best students and discoverers of everything lawful and necessary in the world. (GS 335)
Nietzsche here predicates both self-knowledge and autonomy of those who would successfully follow him. Against this one may range many passages in which Nietzsche asserts that self and will are illusions, that there is no internal ‘helmsman’ controlling one’s actions, no unitary subject of thought or action known to oneself by privileged access, only a subterranean multiplicity of competing or hierarchically organized drives, of which one’s knowledge will always be incomplete.35 However, the fact that self-knowledge (likewise selfhood as such, as Gemes shows36) is hard, that most have very little of it, and even that no one ever attains it completely—none of this shows that self-knowledge is impossible: only that it is rare among human beings, that it is a task set for a few of us rather than a given, and that its achievement is a matter of degree.
A relevant example comes at the end of the Genealogy’s Second Treatise. Here Nietzsche takes himself to have shown that guilt came to be regarded as a good in the Christian worldview because the conception of our natural instinctual selves as an ultimate transgression against God allowed us the most powerful guarantee of being able to vent our in-built drive towards cruelty upon ourselves. Nietzsche evaluates this state of self-torture as ‘the most terrible sickness that has thus far raged in man’ (GM II 22). But then he offers us the healthy alternative, ‘a reverse attempt […] namely to wed to bad conscience the unnatural inclinations, all those aspirations to the beyond, to that which is contrary to the senses, contrary to the instincts, contrary to nature’ (GM II 24)—though he doubts that any but that most exceptional human being of the future, the redeeming, creative spirit of great health, will be able to accomplish this.
How to characterize the change of allegiance in values that Nietzsche here imagines someone undergoing? We start with the observation that people feel guilt and regard life lived with an enduring guilty conscience as having positive value. We offer to explain these phenomena in terms of historical psychological states: in brief, an instinctual drive to inflict cruelty, internalization of the instincts, and rationalization of self-cruelty by the invention of a theistic metaphysics.37 We judge this psychological complex a sickness, allowing ourselves, as Nietzsche says, to feel horrified and unnerved by the sadness of it (GM II 22). Although we are the inheritors of Christian attitudes of disapproval to what is labelled egoistic, we can take a step back from our accustomed valuations, and then—if strong enough—try to bring ourselves to feel negatively towards ourselves if we experience any continuing temptation to despise our natural instincts and inclinations, or to hope for a higher, otherworldly order of values. So the process of reversal Nietzsche envisages is cognitive at many stages. One comes to believe a certain explanation as true, one judges a set of psychological states as unhealthy, one tries to feel a new set of affects, and identifies oneself with specific critical second-order attitudes regarding certain of one’s feelings.
Nietzsche imagines that by examining our own deep-seated attitudes of inclination and aversion, by accepting hypotheses about their origin in past psychological configurations such as those of the ancient masters and slaves, by reflecting on which values we feel as most congenial to our characters, we may attach ourselves to a new set of values. The latter step of becoming free from the inherited values of morality requires, I argue, the conception of oneself as deciding, choosing, and trying as a genuine agent. Such genuine agency does not require that one be a neutral subject of free will that has unlimited possibility of action unconstrained by character and the causal order. In that sense there is no free will. But it does require, as Nietzsche says, that we rid ourselves of the other myth, that of the total unfreedom of the will. So it is wrong to think that Nietzsche wishes to exclude creative agency from his picture of humanity, because without it his proposed critique of moral values and his project of learning to think and feel in healthier ways would make little sense.
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