In this paper I claim that it is a necessary—but not a sufficient—condition for freedom in the sense in which Nietzsche valorizes it that one be a self in which a maximum number of drives of maximal power is organized into an evolving hierarchy—a hierarchy that enables one to ‘promise’ oneself with respect to one’s self-legislated values and that one can affirm with satisfaction.
There is, I suggest, another key condition for attaining Nietzschean freedom—oddly neglected by at least Anglo-Saxon scholarship—and one to which reflection and self-consciousness, especially of an historical nature, are central: such a self is also one whose life is a coming-to-grips with the challenge of overcoming nihilism in its full-blooded sense—that is, of overcoming Western history as the history of the ‘will to nothingness’.
Nihilism in its full-blooded sense is more fundamental than a nihilism of indifference towards or rejection of our hitherto highest values, or the conviction, whether despairing or defiant, that there are no stable values that fill life with meaning or at least none that can be attained. Full-blooded nihilism is to will—often passionately—what is nothing. This is the (far from necessarily indifferent or despairing) will that, as Nietzsche characterizes it, Platonism–late Judaism–Christianity and, in general, ‘slave morality’ manifest. They will ‘nothing’ because they are driven by an all-consuming will to escape a world of suffering, a will that, because it repudiates what is constitutive of living—the loss or elusiveness of what we most desire, such as loved ones, health, achievements, predictability, joy, and ultimately life itself—wills what is not human life, not the world of transience, chance, fate, and time in which we are actually situated. In refusing to affirm that life is structured by the possibility of loss they imagine an ideal order out of which this possibility has been conceptually airbrushed, an order that is clearly not the one into which humans are born.
By contrast to the nihilist, the Nietzschean ‘free spirit’ can master, and live joyously in, the world as it is, regardless of its suffering. He does not need to strive for a world cleansed of suffering, let alone to set this up as life’s supreme ideal. Indeed he regards this as a preposterous idea that diminishes human life, the flourishing of which demands hardship and suffering. But because he too is the inheritor of Judeo–Christian–Platonic morality, and to that extent its product, he cannot be free (of the need for ideals that promise to banish or redeem suffering) without mastering the history of that morality. This is not merely a cognitive challenge: the challenge of understanding what it is to lead a life structured by the ascetic ideal. It is also to take responsibility for that inheritance as one’s most intimate possession. For only in that way might one eventually liberate oneself from it and so win genuine freedom.
Let us return to the first condition, or complex of conditions, for freedom of the self in Nietzsche—that (a) a maximum number of drives, (b) each of them of maximal power, is (c) organized into an evolving hierarchy in which (d) one can take satisfaction. This condition proceeds from Nietzsche’s conception of the self or ‘soul’ as a ‘social structure of the drives and affects’.1 Each of these affects intrinsically values:2 there are goods it essentially seeks, as well as conditions it needs for successfully attaining those goods; and there are things it avoids or despises. These are its ‘yes’s and ‘no’s’—for itself and to the world. Cognitively, each of these major drives and the valuations it embodies also grasps the world from particular perspectives: the things it wants, the ways it values, condition how it sees the world. These concepts—of a drive, of a value, and of particular cognitive perspectives—cannot therefore be separated. A drive always values and cognizes; a value always expresses a drive (or drives); and cognition always occurs from the perspective of a value, a perspective which involves adopting or being receptive to a particular way of seeing the world.3
The more effectively the drives are ordered into a hierarchy—the more control the self has over itself and over the circumstances with which it is faced—the more it is autonomous. Hierarchy is a matter of commanding and obeying—of one’s drives becoming organized in such a way that one is able to commit oneself to projects that matter to one. It is the sort of command that, say, the concert pianist seeks through years of practice—not just the command that enables him to achieve speed, precision, evenness, and rich tonal variety, but also the command—at once over body, emotion, sensibility, and conception4—that enables his musical values, and the Weltanschauung that they in turn embody, to be expressed in his playing. There is clearly nothing inflexible about such hierarchy; on the contrary it is the indispensable prerequisite for freedom of expression: without years of striving for the most exhaustive control of oneself freedom in Nietzsche’s (or any real) sense5 is unattainable. Successful hierarchy is therefore not the result of something else called ‘free will’; it is free will.
And, far from being static, it evolves. It evolves not just because it takes a great deal of hard work to ‘promise oneself’ in respect of, or to stand surety for, the aims and valuations that one’s self embodies and legislates at any given time in one’s life, but because those aims and valuations themselves evolve or are discovered in the process of living life, especially a life of experiment and risk, in which danger is not shunned. Such a person gets to know what he wants and needs in order to flourish—and is conscious of possessing the strength and discipline to do what it takes to fulfil those needs and wants. Willing is then free.
It is also experienced as free. This experience does not involve beliefs such as those that ressentiment fosters when, for example, it imagines that ‘masterly’ types are free to be weak—beliefs in a metaphysical account of agency that assumes a doer behind deeds6 or our willing as causi sui.7 The experience of freedom of the will that for Nietzsche counts as genuine freedom has at least three distinguishing marks: one delights in seeing oneself as a commander;8 one delights in seeing one’s command as effective9—in other words in seeing one’s ‘protracted and unbreakable’ will in action, a delight that seems to involve intense awareness of one’s own capacity to commit oneself to action over long periods and of how one stands in relation to others’ capacities in this respect;10and (for the powerful priest, too, could experience such delights) one does not seek faith in a dogma that is given or collective (GS 347): one’s will does not crave external guidance. Between passages such as these (BGE 19; GM II 2; and GS 347) Nietzsche provides the bare bones of a phenomenology of freedom, one that makes reference to a substantially different sort of self-understanding to an apprehension of freedom that depends on the idea of will as first cause. And this self-understanding is advanced by Nietzsche not simply as his ‘take’ on what the free individual might, if he happens to reflect on his experience of freedom, believe it to consist in; such self-understanding is, rather, a condition of being a free self. To put it crudely: a zombie that could unflinchingly fulfil all its promises with ‘protracted and unbreakable’ continuity would not, by that token, be free.11
Though the evolution of hierarchy demands ceaseless practice—the practice of commanding and obeying within oneself, the constant search for freedom through discipline—the attainment of its overall direction cannot be forced. It will take its own time, and depends on the emergence of what Nietzsche variously calls our innate ‘organizing “idea”’ (EH II 9), ‘single taste’ (GS 290), and ‘personal providence’ (GS 277)—none of which have anything to do with a metaphysical ‘doer’ standing behind its ‘deed’. Hierarchy—and its organizing idea—might be there all along, as part of one’s inherited rank order of drives (A 57), or it might emerge as a victor from the on-going battles within the self (BGE 19). These battles are largely unconscious: for consciousness and concepts, though they have a vital role to play in understanding the life-denying functions of traditional ‘morality’ and so in a fostering of a ‘revaluation of values’, are also seen by Nietzsche as merely the spokesmen, or consequences, of the truces, victories, and defeats in the wars being fought subconsciously.
In any event, there is nothing more dangerous than to seek one’s organizing idea too soon. As I have argued elsewhere,12 premature attempts to discover and understand it would arrest the development of two crucial preparatory phases: first, the innocent, unimpeded experience that comes from forgetting, misunderstanding, and focusing oneself; and, second, the development of ‘single qualities and fitnesses’ free from the straightjacket of overall goals or meanings (EH II 9). The path to ‘becoming what one is’13 is usually not straight, and involves blunders and wrong turns, ‘wasted’ energy, protective misunderstandings, and, occasionally, self-narrowing. Hence, we must keep the ‘whole surface of consciousness … clear of all great imperatives’; be alert to the ‘many dangers that the instinct comes too soon to “understand itself”’; and ‘[b]eware even of every great word … [and] pose’ (EH II 9). It is for such reasons, I think, that Nietzsche approvingly cites Goethe’s opinion that ‘Truly high respect one can have only for those who do not seek themselves.’ (BGE 266); or: ‘To become what one is, one must not have the faintest notion what one is’ (EH II 9).14
A vitally important expression of one’s single taste, or organizing idea, is giving “‘style” to one’s character’ or, if one cannot do that, then otherwise achieving what Nietzsche says is the one ‘needful’ thing: to ‘attain satisfaction with [one]self’ (GS 290). To give style to oneself is to achieve a self-conception that is thoroughly satisfying, so that not merely our strengths but also our weaknesses appear to us as necessary to—as having a crucial role in—a complete self that we can wholeheartedly affirm.15 Nietzsche also expresses this point by calling on us to be ‘poets of our lives’, and emphasizes that this is first of all about giving artistry to ‘the smallest, most everyday matters’ (GS 299). That the whole self is pleasing to the individual helps to release her power and encourage her towards the actions for which she is predisposed and of which she is capable. ‘[D]elicate reverence’ for oneself belongs to a ‘noble soul’ (BGE 265; cf. BGE 263, 287); whereas someone who is dissatisfied with herself, even if she is otherwise a well-functioning individual, will be ‘continually ready for revenge’ (GS 290). And revenge, as we know from Nietzsche’s presentation of ressentiment in the first essay of GM, is a great obstacle to the attainment of freedom. In sum: this self-reverence or self-satisfaction is anything but smugly complacent; it is, on the contrary, the quiet confidence needed to risk, and promise oneself to, difficult tasks—the bright, daring mood that is the very opposite of those most dangerous spirits: the spirits of revenge and of gravity.
Finally there are two other key elements to free selfhood in Nietzsche’s thought: the number of drives that the self incorporates and their respective power. The second of these—power—is clear: the stronger each drive the potentially stronger, and so more sovereign over circumstances, is the whole—if the drives can be organized to work with, rather than against, each other.16 The first point is more interesting: the more drives one has, and the more diverse they are, the more valuations and perspectives one can bring to bear on one’s life, and so the richer are the ways in which one can see and create. A philosopher of the highest sort, Nietzsche says,
would be compelled to find the greatness of man, the concept of ‘greatness’, precisely in his range and multiplicity, in his wholeness of manifoldness. He would even determine value and rank in accordance with how much and how many things one could bear and take upon himself, how far one could extend his responsibility. (BGE 212)17
But this richness comes at a price—which can be high: for the greater the number and diversity of drives, the harder it is to organize them into a well functioning hierarchy, and the more numerous—and therefore, taken together, improbable—are the conditions the individual needs in order to thrive. For each drive, as we have said, has its own valuations, and so each drive has its own ‘physiological demands for the preservation of a certain type of life’ (BGE 3), which is perhaps Nietzsche’s most concise definition of a value.18 This might be why he so often stresses that the most richly endowed people—his ‘higher men’—can also be the most vulnerable; for they are dependent on the most numerous conditions for flourishing. Their ‘complicated conditions of life can be calculated only with great subtlety and difficulty’, so that ‘the higher the type of man that a man represents, the greater the improbability that he will turn out well’ (BGE 62; cf. BGE 274, 276).
Now let us say that this, roughly, is Nietzsche’s picture of the maximally free, autonomous self—the self he most values: such a self has the maximum number and diversity of drives, each of them maximally powerful and with its sustained yes’s and no’s, organized into a clear and aesthetically pleasing hierarchy by an organizing idea or single taste, which has the commanding strength to commit the individual to her chosen courses—i.e. to ‘promise herself’. Such a self is ‘free’; it can commit itself unflinchingly.
One of the most remarkable illustrations of such a free self and of its tortuous development that Nietzsche offers us is to be found in the third of his UntimelyMeditations: ‘Wagner in Bayreuth’. In fact, Nietzsche’s description of Wagner’s development from a seeming dilettante to someone who could seize his whole age and its rich but agonizing history with one commanding vision is doubly interesting because, as he says in Ecce Homo, ‘at bottom’ the conditions to which this essay bears witness ‘speak only of me’; ‘this essay is a vision of my future’.19 The following passage hints at how an ‘organizing idea’ emerges from the fiendish complexity of a great person’s nature, nurture, and life circumstances:
The dramatic element in Wagner’s development is quite unmistakable from the moment when his ruling passion became aware of itself and took his whole nature in its charge: from that time on there was an end to fumbling, straying, to the proliferation of secondary shoots, and within the most convoluted courses and often daring trajectories assumed by his artistic plans there rules a single law, a will, by which they can be explained. … But there was also a pre-dramatic era in Wagner’s life, that of his childhood and youth, and one cannot pass this era in review without encountering riddles. He himself does not yet seem to be present at all and that which, with hindsight, one might perhaps interpret as a sign of his presence appears at first as the simultaneous existence of qualities which must excite misgivings rather than hopeful anticipation: a spirit of restlessness, of irritability, a nervous hastiness in seizing hold upon a hundred different things … (UM IV 2).
As Wagner at length achieves ‘spiritual and moral maturity’, two powerful drives crystallize out from all the seeming chaos: the one a ‘vehement will’, ‘dark, intractable, tyrannical’—a will that would easily destroy someone with a ‘narrow spirit’; the other drive ‘creative, innocent, illuminated’. By good fortune, the two drives are ‘loyal’ to each other, despite their individual struggles for expression, and their frequent ‘hostility when they crossed one another’. ‘In the surrender of one to the other’, Nietzsche observes, ‘there lay the great necessity which had to be fulfilled if he was to be whole and wholly himself.’ Yet, ‘at the same time’, ‘it [this surrender] was the only act that did not lie in his own power, which he could only watch and endure’ (UM IV 3 passim). This discovery of one’s ‘necessity’ through surrender dovetails with Nietzsche’s insistence, to which I referred above, on the need for a certain passivity (not the same as ‘reactivity’) and patience in letting our ruling idea emerge—the need to keep the ‘whole surface of consciousness … clear of all great imperatives’ and ‘[b]eware even of every great word … [and] pose’ (EH II 9).
Through all this, Wagner applied what Nietzsche calls his extraordinary ‘talent for learning’ (UM IV 3) in order to ‘appropriate to himself all that is highest in culture’. Such a voracious capacity for learning is something that Nietzsche attributes to other geniuses, notably Goethe,20 and he clearly sees it as vital to the development of the sovereign individual.21 But such a mass of learning and of clear-seeing can crush, unless it is structured by thought (and/or counterbalanced by art).22 And Wagner had, in turn, to control this mass of experience and knowledge by an ever firmer ‘arch of thought’, so that it ‘did not stifle his will to action’ or ‘entice him aside’.
Despite its overwrought prose, Wagner in Bayreuth is a fascinating case study of the development of Nietzsche’s highest type of person; of their Auseinandersetzung, through constant trial and error, with their own many-sidedness; of how, step by step, they become sovereign over the competing elements within them as well as over external circumstances; of how such a life becomes ever more perilously complicated and must be brought under ever tighter organization, yet without stifling or side-tracking its further development; of how an individual’s ruling idea slowly and unpredictably appears; and so of how their personal fate becomes manifest. Nietzsche might have changed his mind about Wagner later in his life—though to the end he saw his ‘intimate relationship’ with the composer as ‘by far the most profound and cordial recreation’ of his life (EH II 5); yet, as a sustained illustration of how a great man struggles to find his voice, this essay is without peer in the Nietzschean corpus.
There is, however, one major problem with the picture of the free Nietzschean self that I have sketched so far, and also with its illustration in the early essay on Richard Wagner: it does not yet situate that self—indeed, situate it self-reflectively—in time, in history, in the thoroughgoing sense which the later Nietzsche believes to be essential. Abandoning a metaphysical worldview does not just mean abandoning absolute standards or sources of value, such as God, Reason, or The Good; it also means seeing life as inescapably in time, as structured by time, with no timeless realm to give it meaning. There is a sense in which time is the ultimate object of ressentiment, an even more fundamental object, perhaps, than the ‘masterly’ strength or flourishing of other people. As Zarathustra says in one of his more lucid utterances: ‘This, indeed this alone, is what revenge is: the will’s ill will against time and its “it was”’ (Z II 20 ‘On Redemption’). Even those with a strong will, it seems, those who might have liberated themselves from slavish ressentiment against the ‘masterly’ or the more fortunate, are not by that token alone free of the desire to take revenge against time:
Will—that is the name of the liberator and joy-bringer; thus I taught you, my friends. But now learn this too: the will itself is still a prisoner. Willing liberates; but what is it that puts even the liberator himself in fetters? ‘It was’—that is the name of the will’s gnashing of teeth and most secret melancholy. Powerless against what has been done … [t]he will cannot will backwards; and that he cannot break time and time’s covetousness, that is the will’s loneliest melancholy (ibid.).
A free self—a self that is not merely an effective hierarchy of drives but is also not structured by metaphysical notions, by the ascetic ideal—must, therefore, be a self that affirms itself as a product of its history, a history that is a brute given and that can never be undone or be otherwise. As Zarathustra again puts it: Redemption is ‘to re-create all “it was” into a “thus I willed it”. … All “it was” is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident—until the creative will says to it, “But thus I willed it … thus shall I will it”’ (ibid.).
In other words, if there is a place after the ‘death of God’ for the old religious word ‘redemption’, it is as release from resentment against time-boundedness. Where redemption used to be thought of as release from time-boundedness itself, it is now seen as willing temporality. Where redemption once involved justifying the evil of this temporal world in terms of a higher and timeless good to emerge from and vindicate suffering, redemption is now to be thought of as affirming transience and the suffering it might bring—to ‘achieve a reconciliation with time, and something higher than any reconciliation’ (ibid.). Since, Nietzsche holds, each of us is a being determined by our specific past, to affirm temporality entails affirming, without justifying, the ‘piece of fatefulness’ that we each are, its necessity and its beauty. And such affirmation of our fatefulness, such willing of the ‘necessity’23 of our own individual nature and deeming it beautiful, is, of course, precisely what Nietzsche takes ‘amor fati’ to be (GS 276).
A self that expresses ‘freedom of the will’—that is, mastery over itself and thus over its circumstances—is able to will its own necessity in this way, to recreate the whole history out of which it arises as a ‘thus I will it’. This is precisely the ‘trusting fatalism’ that Nietzsche attributes to Goethe (TI IX 49; cf. BGE 39), his paragon of a free individual. The central faith of this fatalism is ‘that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole [person]’ (ibid.)—a faith that denotes Nietzsche’s later conception of ‘Dionysian’.24
Yet there is a still more thoroughgoing affirmation of temporality—of a time-boundedness from which not even death finally releases us—than amor fati, namely to will the eternal recurrence of the same fate, to will infinite time for the specific ‘piece of fatefulness’ that one is (providing, I suggest, that this willing has ‘strong’ motives, which is not necessarily the case).25Amor fati is not as stringent a test as willing the Eternal Return because it is consistent with willing one lifetime and saying ‘that’s enough!’—an attitude that is still resigned, and which is still compatible with seeking an eventual exit from this world, from time, and from suffering. By contrast, affirming the Eternal Return is not consistent with welcoming any exit from time or suffering.
But what is the history—the ‘it was’—in which any contemporary self is situated and with which it must reckon if it is to achieve freedom? The answer, as I suggested at the beginning of this essay, is this: our history—the history of Platonic–late Jewish–Christian cultures—is the history of nihilism. Nihilism isn’t just one feature of Western history, let alone merely of an epoch in which men and women (1) ceased to believe in God and in traditional values and concepts associated with a dualistic moral world-order, and (2) could find no alternative, non-metaphysical ultimate meanings or purposes to believe in, or (3) experienced any such ultimate meanings or purposes that they did believe in as unachievable, or (4) positively believed that no such meanings or purposes exist or could exist. Nihilism is the character of Western history as a whole. The conclusion to GM presents the premisses for just this idea—which is explored in much more detail in the notes gathered in Book 1 of WP. In section 28 of the third essay of GM Nietzsche says: (1) ‘Apart from the ascetic ideal, man, the human animal, had no meaning so far …’. (2) ‘We can no longer conceal from ourselves what is expressed by all that willing which has taken its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more so of the animal, and more still of the material … this longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing … all this means—let us dare to grasp it—a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life …’. Therefore: (3) All meaning attributed to man, the human animal, so far, has taken its direction from the ‘will to nothingness’.
We should not underestimate the central position attributed by Nietzsche to this presentation in GM of ‘the will to nothingness’. Far from being advanced as part of ‘a beginning that is calculated to mislead’, with which he says in EH all the three essays of GM set out (EH on GM), it appears at the climax of the third essay, and so of the whole book. And when in EH he picks out the ‘new truth’ to emerge from the third essay, he repeats that this new truth is the insight that the ascetic ideal is so tremendously powerful because it was ‘the only ideal so far, because it had no rival’. And again he equates the ascetic ideal with willing ‘nothingness’ (EH on GM).
Now if the ‘will to nothingness’ is a fundamental feature of the history of which each of us scions of Platonism–Judeo–Christianity is a product, the task of willing our own necessity—and so of achieving individual freedom—must involve a profound reckoning with this pervasive will. Since revenge—the driving force of the ascetic ideal—is, according to Zarathustra anyway, ultimately directed against time itself, overcoming the will to nothingness, which takes its direction from the ascetic ideal, must ultimately involve overcoming revenge against time. And overcoming revenge against time, as I have just said, is most indubitably expressed by affirming the eternal return of one’s own fatedness. In short, my conclusion, so far, is that affirming the eternal return out of the right motives would signal that one has overcome the will to nothingness—and in that sense nihilism itself.
For much of its history the will to nothingness has had manifestations that have been far from indifferent towards their values: on the contrary they have enthusiastically affirmed a conception of the world, structured by the ascetic ideal, that promises their adherents escape from suffering and all its putative causes; and they have denigrated a world-order that they experience as a cause of their suffering. They have therefore regarded life as anything but pointless and lacking ultimate values: life’s meaning and highest ideal is to master and escape suffering—whether, as in religious conceptions, through a final transcendence or extinction of ‘this world’ or, as in secular conceptions, through a life devoted to the maximization of comfort and an ever more refined avoidance of hardship. They have, moreover, believed these values to be attainable, if only imperfectly, or by the few who are blessed with the necessary abilities, or in an afterlife free of the constraints of this world, or in a society in which technology and legislation can, between them, progressively eliminate suffering and the causes of suffering.
By contrast, it is only when such a conception of life as ultimately deliverable from suffering seems unattainable, absurd and worthless, that we encounter nihilism in further senses of the term: indifference towards, or repudiation of, hitherto dominant values—on epistemological grounds (these values seem to be conceptually incoherent, or to refer to states of affairs or conditions for their fulfilment that do not or could not exist, or otherwise to make false promises) and/or on grounds of taste (they jar with prevailing norms of what seems ‘decent’ to believe). This indifference or repudiation might be coupled with lack of belief in an alternative value-system, either because an alternative has not been discovered yet (though one believes that such a system is discoverable in principle) or because one now believes that there are, and can be, no stable values that fill life with meaning or at least none that can be attained.
These further senses of nihilism appear only in certain historical phases (one highpoint was in nineteenth-century Europe). They are consequences of the desire for ultimate deliverance from suffering and depend on loss of faith in the possibility of attaining that end. And this desire is what nihilism is most fundamentally about—what the ‘will to nothingness’ most fundamentally expresses.26
Very schematically, one might say that the will to nothingness has expressed itself in three historical phases:27
In its first phase the will to nothingness affirms the unconditioned—be it called the ‘God’ of monotheism, the ‘forms’ of Plato, unconditionally valuable values (especially unconditional ‘faith in truth’), or other such metaphysical categories. Affirming the unconditioned necessarily affirms another world because ‘this world’ is inescapably a realm of the conditioned in which all things are interconnected (e.g. WP 584). Since there is no (intelligible) realm of the unconditioned, to affirm it is quite literally to affirm what, for us, must be The Nothing.
Eventually, ‘faith in truth’ brings about the second phase of the will to nothingness: the discrediting, to greater (e.g. Hume) or lesser (e.g. Kant) degrees, of belief in God and in absolute external authority for moral values, for the social order, and for judgments of truth and beauty. This phase of nihilism is characterized by a strange mixture of demoralization and triumphalism. It is demoralizing because man’s progressive naturalization undermines his former respect for himself and his allegedly supreme position in the ‘order of creation’ that religious cosmologies had inculcated; he becomes increasingly sceptical about the possibility of any intrinsic meaning or moral order in the universe—seeing even the concept of such meaning as redolent of the old metaphysical order—and so ends up ‘slipping faster and faster … into nothingness’, into a ‘penetrating sense of his nothingness’ (GM III 25). But man’s release from external authority is also triumphalist because he now sees himself as the creator and arbiter of beauty, value, and even truth (GS 343, GS 344, GS 357, GM III 27)—as the legislator of everything that he formerly saw as given.
Despite the upheaval of the ‘death of God’, this phase is, ethically, remarkably conservative: man’s core values remain stubbornly fixed—above all the traditional moral values of equality, pity, and truth. Indeed, these three central values of the morality that Nietzsche calls into question not only continue to be treated in people’s practices and beliefs as if they were constitutive of the good; they are, if anything, espoused with even greater fervour than before the ‘death of God’.
With equality, what happens is that a value that was once parasitic upon a Christian conception of souls as equal before God (or, equivalently, in the quality-less subject which, by definition, is equal to all other such subjects) is now transposed to the earthly domain, to relations between human beings, where it replaces the hierarchical social structures that start disintegrating in this same historical period of the ‘death of God’. ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’ expresses this well, as do feminism and all the ideals of modern democracy and egalitarianism, which obviously take as their premiss and goal the deep equality of human beings, regardless of their differences in ability or social roles or gender or wealth or ethnicity or culture.
Pity, too, according to Nietzsche, continues to be regarded as constitutive of the good long after we cease to believe in God, mainly due to our immense fear of suffering—a fear that drives us to seek all possible means not to experience it ourselves or to witness it in others. Indeed, once the consolations of Christian explanations and justifications of suffering are no longer available, pity becomes, if anything, more intensely valued than ever—a point to which I will return.
As to truth (and truthfulness), this continues to be treated as unconditionally valuable even—or precisely—by those whose piety for truth has caused them to repudiate a metaphysical conception of truth or of the authority for values in general (GS 344). That faith in truth discredits theology or metaphysics in this sense, but not key values originally justified by it, cannot, I take Nietzsche to suggest, be an oversight, but must flow from the same fundamental will that takes ‘its direction from the ascetic ideal’, namely ‘a will to nothingness’ (GM III 28). This will is sustained despite the massive scepticism directed by modernity against all its metaphysical expressions and presuppositions—sustained simply because no alternative meaning for life to one structured by the ascetic ideal has yet been sought.
In the third phase we see the undermining of these and other highest values that had so far remained sacrosanct despite the loss of belief in metaphysical justifications for them. This can go all the way to regarding all prevailing values as worthless and to believing in nothing (or imagining that one believes in nothing). ‘One interpretation has collapsed’, Nietzsche says in his Nachlass; ‘but because it was considered the interpretation it now seems as if there were no meaning at all in existence, as if everything were in vain’ (WP 55).
Of all the phases of the will to nothingness this one engenders the most despair and confusion. There is here a whole continuum of suspicion that extends from radical mistrust of specific past values (and contempt for man for believing in them) to the conviction that no alternative ultimate values exist or can exist, even in principle, let alone in practice, and from there to doubt that anything can have stable value—that any value can resist sceptical inquiry.
Above all, the value that has powered the progress of nihilism until now—the value of truth and truthfulness—itself comes into question. This value has cast fatal doubt on the old metaphysically-structured order—on the existence of God and, more widely, on the attainability of a good that supposedly transcends and redeems an imperfect world—and has, in the process, made man seem increasingly insignificant by disposing of so many former buttresses to his self-respect that were rooted in a metaphysical world-order. Though the will to truth makes man’s self-contempt worse by exposing the astoundingly complex ramifications of our traditional metaphysical delusions, the full recognition and repudiation of which is the real meaning of the ‘death of God’, it nonetheless drives those ‘heroic spirits who constitute the honor of our age’ (GM III 24) and who cling to ‘faith in truth’ and to ‘intellectual cleanliness at any price’ (GM III 27; GS 357) to ask the key question—what is the meaning of the will to truth itself?—and to begin to draw the fatal inferences against this, their own highest, value.
Specifically, unconditional faith in truth calls into question its own value both by recognizing that truth is not always valuable (let alone that its value always trumps all other values) and by forcing us to see that the idea of the unconditioned is itself parasitic upon the unintelligible idea of timeless standards of value, and so is yet another expression of the will to nothingness. Once this happens—once the ‘will to truth gains self-consciousness’—‘morality will gradually perish … : the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe’ (GM III 27).
This drama of the perishing of morality is the end-point of what Nietzsche describes in his notebooks as the essence of nihilism: ‘the highest values devalue themselves’ (WP 2) under pressure of the will to truth. For these highest values, especially unconditional faith in truth, affirm an order of things which they also end up discrediting. The value of truth and truthfulness is, in this sense, the last of the highest values to be devalued.
There is, however, one small piece of unfinished business that remains, even after a hundred acts worth of drama: man’s contempt for himself. Until man has overcome this self-contempt he has not overcome the legacy of the will to nothingness. As a result he cannot be truly free.
The key to overcoming self-contempt is ‘to recreate all “it was” into a “thus I willed it”’, so achieving something like Goethe’s ‘trusting fatalism’. At first, this attitude seems at odds with Nietzsche’s project: after all to revalue all values, to oppose the entire history of morality, seems anything but willing the past.
But mouthing formulae, such as Zarathustra’s, isn’t of course the point. What is crucial is how we will our fatedness. We are still stuck in nihilism if we will it with a shrug or between gritted teeth, out of a reluctant recognition that we have no alternative but to inherit the history that we inherit. We are likewise stuck in nihilism if we perform a calculus of welfare or look for a theodicy that tells us that our fate is, on balance, for the good, even if it is not for the (theoretical) best. And we are embroiled in nihilism if we persist in judging the value of wholes over against which we putatively stand—wholes such as ‘the world’ or ‘existence’ (GS 346) or ‘time’ or ‘man, the human animal’ (GM III 28). For, phenomenologically, each of these wholes designates a realm over against which we claim a position—in terms of our experience of them—as extrinsic judgers, a position from which we make overall assessments of their nature and value. To do this, to succumb to this posture, is to avoid our situatedness in them, to avoid living them. It is yet another way of imagining that we can distance ourselves from—and somehow grasp, as either knowers or evaluators—those dimensions of life whose brute existence makes us feel most helpless and therefore gives rise to the most recalcitrant suffering.
To overcome nihilism is to cease judging the value of such wholes at all, and to cease structuring the world and value-systems by reference to them. It is to affirm fate without qualification, and without even being tempted by thoughts of its overall value. Perhaps only Nietzsche’s putative ‘free spirit’28 no longer buttresses his dignity by ascribing to himself a capacity for evaluating a whole that he finds wanting, no longer seeks the intoxication that comes from such panoptic judgements—including, perhaps, those judgements about the whole history of morality that Nietzsche’s philosophical project seeks to make.
But again we need to proceed carefully. To affirm fate, without qualification, is not simply an affective-cognitive state, however sincere and committed. It demands more action than that.
Let us recall that, at least for an inheritor of Platonic–Judeo–Christian morality, affirming fate specifically involves overcoming revenge against time. To affirm our fate—and our time-boundedness—means willing necessity not only backwards but also forwards. One wills backwards—one wills one’s heritage—by turning all ‘it was’ into a ‘thus I willed it’ (Z, II 10). And one wills forward by ‘promising oneself’ (GM II 2) in respect of the values with which this historical determination endows one—by being strong enough, in practice, to maintain one’s word ‘in the face of accidents, even “in the face of fate”’ (ibid.).
The capacity to promise oneself in the fullest sense—in other words in respect of one’s own sovereignly legislated values, those values that our fatedness has, as it were, built into us and whose necessity we will—is the mark of the truly free and sovereign individual (GM II 2), of ‘the man of the future who can redeem us from the ascetic ideal, the will to nothingness, nihilism’ (GM II 24). If we are not to live at the expense of the future (as Christianity did), we must develop the capacity to ‘stand security’ for it—‘which is what one who promises does’ (GM II 1). Nietzsche’s words are ‘für sich als Zukunft gut sagen zu koennen’—to be able to promise oneself as a future, or ‘as future’ (ibid.). In other words, to be able to promise, to be responsible, is to live fully in time—to be one’s future.
Morality—above all the ‘morality of pity’—stands in the way of such a future and of real self-responsibility. Why does Nietzsche single out pity over other values of morality as the danger of dangers to genuine individuality? He clearly does so in, for example, GM P 5: ‘it was precisely here’ [in the ‘instincts of pity, self-abnegation’ and the ‘un-egoistic’] he says, ‘that I saw the great danger to mankind, its sublimest enticement and seduction—but to what? to nothingness?.… I understood the ever spreading morality of pity … as the most sinister symptom of a European culture that had itself become sinister, perhaps as its by-pass … to a Buddhism for Europeans? to—nihilism?’. Elsewhere he says that pity ‘is the only religion preached now’ (BGE 222). The role of pity is therefore not ‘an isolated question mark’; to ponder it is to raise, in its acutest possible form, the question of the value of morality as a whole (GM P 6).
The reason for Nietzsche’s emphasis on the morality of pity is, I suggest, because it—perhaps more than any other traditional value—attacks the precondition of freedom: to will and take responsibility for who we are, for a fate that is inevitably full of suffering. The morality of pity is, as the will to truth gradually reveals, deeply untruthful about the pitied—about who they are and what they need. Because (moral) pity—the pity that is driven by a desire to eliminate, at all costs, suffering and the sight of suffering—strips away from others’ suffering whatever is distinctively personal, it in effect lies about who they are (GS 338). And by helping others indiscriminately to misinterpret or anesthetize their suffering, pity enables them to avoid the ‘only … discipline [that] has created all enhancements of man so far’ (BGE 225; cf. BGE 270; TI IX 38), the discipline required to breed ‘an animal with the right to make promises’.
In other words, if our morality bids us minimize suffering—and even bids us engage in the fantasy that suffering can be ‘abolished’ (BGE 225; cf. 202)—then that morality will not just obstruct, but will, in effect, prohibit us from achieving responsibility for our own nature and values and experiences, and so from attaining free selfhood.
And yet nothing is more tempting than to pity others, to lose oneself in eliminating their suffering, so as not to focus on mastering one’s own suffering and one’s own path. Nietzsche himself confesses to finding that temptation overwhelming (GS 338). ‘All such arousing of pity … is secretly seductive’, he says; ‘for our “own way” is too hard and demanding and too remote from the love and gratitude of others, and we do not really mind escaping from it … —to flee into the conscience of others’ (GS 338 passim).
This is why ‘a man who is by nature a master’ (BGE 293) has got a right to pity. Pity will not undermine either him or the pitied; it will be a call to self-responsibility, not a draining of it; so that ‘when such a man has pity … this pity has value’ (BGE 293).
My discussion of nihilism as the will to nothingness suggests that in order to understand Nietzsche’s conception of the free self we cannot picture it simply as a hierarchy of diverse and sometimes competing drives, which is forged by an ‘organizing idea’, guided by a ‘personal providence’, gilded by giving it ‘style’, and expressive of one’s own personal values. This would be altogether too static a picture of the self. Though such a self would be quite an accomplishment, it is no more than a necessary condition of freedom: a self structured by the ascetic ideal, or evincing a ‘will to the end’—a ‘priest’, for example—might be highly organized in just this way, but will not be genuinely free.
To be free one must also achieve a fundamental reckoning with, and overcoming of, the will to nothingness as the will that runs though Platonic–late Jewish–Christian history and that makes it the history of nihilism. And to do this one must no longer rage against time: one must be able to will one’s heritage and also to promise oneself in respect of one’s values and the goals they express—in other words in respect of ‘what one is’. Only thus has one prepared oneself to ‘become what one is’.
The English translations of Nietzsche’s works to which I have referred are listed below.
The Antichrist (1888), trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York, NY: Viking, 1954).
Beyond Good and Evil (1886), trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, NY: Vintage, 1966).
Ecce Homo (1888), trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, NY: Vintage, 1967).
The Gay Science (1882; Part 5: 1887), trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, NY: Vintage, 1974).
On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York, NY: Vintage, 1967).
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885), trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York, NY: Viking, 1954).
Twilight of the Idols (1889), trans. Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York, NY: Viking, 1954).
Untimely Meditations (1873–1876), trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York, NY: Vintage, 1968).
Gardner, Sebastian (2009). ‘Nietzsche, The Self, and the Disunity of Philosophical Reason’ (in this volume).
May, Simon (1999). Nietzsche’s Ethics and his War on ‘Morality’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Reginster, Bernard (2006). The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).