It’s well known that Nietzsche expresses both positive and negative views about freedom. Both, indeed, turn important wheels in his philosophy. His denials of the possibility or coherence of free will in the traditional sense—as a first cause, an uncaused cause—are often-stressed arguments in his attack on morality, which he claims relies on the picture of us as free in this way. But my focus will be on his positive notion—on the different kind of freedom he asserts we can have. I think this positive idea of freedom is even more important in his thinking, since it is one main way he describes and justifies his ideal to us.1
Now these positive and negative views may be taken as inconsistent. It seems they must be, if these views are about ‘the same thing’.2 For Nietzsche often expresses his negative verdicts on freedom as unqualified denials: freedom or free will is impossible, the very idea is incoherent. These denials are generally not tempered as against freedom ‘in one sense’. Moreover Nietzsche similarly rejects as nonexistent or impossible many of the other things we closely associate with freedom, including self, will, and responsibility. So he seems to lay waste the whole ground around freedom, leaving nothing with which to build a positive account.
Nevertheless I think he has such an account, and that we only understand those denials by subordinating them to the positive notion. So every one, I will argue, of these assertions that ‘there is no X’—each outright denial of some usual term for agency and personhood—should be heard as a provocative and simplifying statement of a nuanced point about what X really is. In every case he wants to speak about Xs himself—to make claims that depend on there being such things. So in particular for freedom: he tells us what it’s not, as a step to the really important point, what it is.
Of course the things Nietzsche most commonly insists to be unreal or impossible are things (like freedom) that have always been valued. He singles out his targets with this eye for what we care about, so that his denials are cutting, not reassuring. He means to disturb us that we lack the freedom we’ve presumed and been proud of. He also tries to disturb this value another way, which is even more vital. For he has another kind of negative point in reserve behind those denials of existence: he concedes that these Xs can and do occur, but argues that they’re a bad thing. So this freedom we’ve presumed, insofar as we really can have it, is in fact nothing to be proud of, but something damaging and diminishing. The way we have been free is a shabby and narrowing thing.
And yet, even this deeper valuative attack is a part of a larger, positive view—in which Nietzsche takes up freedom, and being a self, and even responsibility, and makes them into a fresh ideal of his own. Far from freedom being either impossible or damaging, it’s the way he most calls us to be. Indeed I think even the casual reader takes Nietzsche as promoting and exemplifying a striking new freedom, even though there are few explicit announcements, and no extended developments of the point.
One conspicuous3 place he affirms and praises freedom this way is in GM II 2, where he speaks of ‘the sovereign individual [souveraine Individuum], who resembles only himself, who has come loose [losgekommene] again from the ethic of custom, autonomous [autonome] and supraethical [übersittliche] (for “autonomous” and “ethical” are mutually exclusive), in short, the human being with his own independent [unabhängigen] long will’, with ‘an authentic consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling of the completion of the human in general’ (GM II 2).4 We’ll see that there are difficulties in this passage, but it is a dramatic statement of his positive view.
So the challenge is to say what this freedom is, in the sense in which Nietzsche affirms and preaches it, and to distinguish this from the sense in which he denies and rejects it. In doing so we will need to situate freedom with respect to other key Nietzschean concepts in its vicinity. These include power, self, and responsibility. Let me say some first things about these connections, all three of which are evident in GM II 2.
Power is Nietzsche’s ur-value, so to understand why he values freedom we must see how it is related to power. That he closely connects these is evident in the quote from GM II 2 above, which attributes to the sovereign individual a consciousness of power and freedom; Nietzsche soon adds: ‘mastery over himself also necessarily gives in hand mastery over circumstances, over nature and all shorter-willed and more unreliable creatures’. More succinctly, WP 770: ‘freedom understood, that is, as positive power, as will to power’.5
Becoming free is also very intimately related to becoming a self or agent. Familiarly, Nietzsche thinks that a self is something that needs to be acquired, or rather created—this is one main reason for calling him an existentialist. Only a self can be free, and freedom may be no or little more than most fully being a self. These goals lie in the same direction, are points along the same axis for Nietzsche (as for other existentialists). We find their connection displayed in GM II 2’s hero-name ‘the sovereign individual’—his achievement is both to be free and to be an individual.6
Traditionally, one of freedom’s main roles has been to ground responsibility: we can only be responsible, insofar as we are free. We might expect Nietzsche to be a thorough critic of responsibility, as a kind of guiltiness, and so to mean to sever this tie, even if he retains and revalues freedom.7 But in fact he keeps even this connection. The freedom he advocates involves a magnified sense of responsibility, as we likewise see in GM II 2, which attributes to the sovereign individual ‘the proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, this power over oneself and fate’.
I will try to show how Nietzsche offers a new conception of freedom, which values it as a privileged kind of power, achieving a new kind of self, and assuming a new kind of responsibility. So, generally, his critique is of past or existing notions and versions of freedom, and his positive views are about what it can be. The former is his theory of freedom, meant naturalistically; the latter is a projective valuing of what freedom should (and can) be. So he carries out a ‘redesign’ of freedom and these allied notions. This redesign has, I think, two principal objectives.
Nietzsche wants in the first place to ‘naturalize’ freedom—to show it as a feature of a certain kind of organism, one variety of ‘life’.8 He traces the roots of freedom back to our animality; the latter is still operative in it. The freedom he rejects as impossible is the freedom of a metaphysical subject—somehow detached from that biological root, something ‘pure’. It is therefore crucial that freedom is something that has evolved, within a certain kind of animal, from abilities that were at first merely those of other animals—and that freedom is something that is evolving still.
This naturalizing story about freedom will also, necessarily, be about ‘freedom’, i.e. an idea or notion of freedom. As freedom has evolved in this (kind of) organism, it has done so in tandem with a conception this organism has had of itself as free. And Nietzsche is as much interested in this idea—and aim and value—of freedom as he is in freedom itself. This point greatly complicates the logic of his discussion.
Freedom, we’ll see, is a certain skill or capacity, a dunamis, passed on from organism to organism as an instinct or habit. This capacity has evolved, by biological and by social processes, through different forms in different historical settings. And in each case the skill is associated with a certain view of itself, an idea of what is being done, of what this freedom is it’s achieving. The skill itself involves a certain perspective, most importantly the perspective on itself, of what it is and is trying to be.9 Freedom is a skill aimed at an idea of freedom. We need to track the evolution of skill and idea in tandem. One crucial question will be to what extent the skill’s perspective on itself is true. As we practice freedom, do we conceive ourselves to be free in the very way we are?
So Nietzsche tells an historical story about freedom and its concept.10 We must therefore apply to them the general lesson he draws about historical phenomena, in the famous treatment of punishment in GM II 13. Freedom too is indefinable, because the concept and practice both bear the diverse meanings that have been layered into them by that design history. The word bears that complexity, in its many uses in different contexts, and the practice does too, in its diverse parts shaped and settled at different times (under different selective forces) in the past. Some of the difficulty in Nietzsche’s treatment of freedom is that he speaks readily within the many different senses thus built into the term.11
I said that these past meanings are ‘layered into’ later ones. This is a very important point for Nietzsche: the cumulative character of this history is the reason historical things are indefinable. And we’ll see that freedom, as an evolving ability, incorporates and builds on its earlier stages, so that the simpler kinds of freedom are components of the later ones. However it should also be emphasized that this preservation of the past is only partial.12 In the case of punishment, for example, there may well be past uses that have been so completely overwritten that no trace remains of them in our current practice and idea of punishment. Nietzsche’s hope is to overwrite and expunge some of what freedom has been.
On this view there is a sense in which freedom is ‘one thing’ after all—it is in fact an extended, historical thing, an evolving ability with an idea of itself. So Nietzsche is saved from self-contradiction, in his various remarks about freedom, not by speaking of different things (different kinds of freedom), but by talking about different parts of this one historical thing. The seeming contradictions are resolved when we see that he describes different temporal parts of this evolving thing, and treats sometimes its ability, sometimes its idea of itself. They are resolved when we view them with the ‘historical sense’ he laments philosophy has generally lacked (TI III 1).
It’s important that this development is still going on. Nietzsche in fact means to participate in it—to help us to carry out a further redesign, appropriate for us today. In his most favored and enthusiastic and whole-hearted uses of the term, he is not analyzing what freedom has been or is, but advocating what it should be, promoting his redesign. So we should distinguish his naturalistic analysis of the concept and practices so far, and his ‘revaluation’, by which he promotes a new phase in the evolution of freedom. (The new freedom will turn out to crucially include this process of genealogy and revaluation, itself.)
These last points have brought us to the second principal objective Nietzsche has in revising ‘freedom’: he wants crucially to de-moralize it. This is the main character of his ‘revaluation of values’. He revalues freedom not in the sense of changing a positive evaluation into a negative, but by redesigning it to serve different ends. He takes it out of service of moral ends, and adapts it to serve the new end—which he thinks is life’s old end—of power.
The point is to change what freedom is for, what outcomes it tends to bring about. So far, as we’ll see, this practice (-and-concept) has been designed to socialize us, to make us better herd animals. In recent millennia it has done so by making people moral (this connection is expressed revealingly in Kant). Nietzsche gives reasons for resisting and refusing this moral ideal. He promotes a personal and also a social project to his readers, to change the practice to serve ends he advocates in place of morality’s.
In ‘de-moralizing’ freedom Nietzsche’s point is not, then, to render it valuatively neutral. The aim isn’t to view freedom solely in a naturalistic or scientific spirit, to strip the practice or concept of all valuative implications whatsoever. Nietzsche still wants a practice of pursuing and desiring freedom, in which the concept counts as an ideal. Besides his naturalizing genealogy of freedom, which subjects freedom to cold and critical study, Nietzsche also speaks of the term as a value, modeling the new practice of freedom he promotes.
We might sum these points up with the slogan: freedom is not, it becomes. It must be studied as a long cultural process, within which we now discover ourselves to stand at a certain point. Freedom now means what its history has shaped it to mean—and the latter is what genealogy discovers. But freedom is still becoming, and we can participate in this, by carrying out a revaluation of it in the light of that genealogy.
In Nietzsche’s story how freedom becomes there are—I will argue—three principal phases or stages.13 Each of these is a certain capacity or skill, which involves, as we’ve seen, a certain idea of itself, of itself as ‘free’. These ideas vary, we shall see, in how true or accurate they are as to the skill itself. Each skill is a kind of power, each constitutes a kind of self and assumes a kind of responsibility. These skills arise and evolve under different selective forces, and are thereby designed to served different ends. But these kinds of freedom are not just stages, because earlier skills ‘accumulate’ within later ones. So these are also the three elements in the full conception of freedom Nietzsche promotes to us. Here we meet, in turn, Nietzsche’s notions of selfhood, agency, and (full, Nietzschean) freedom.
a) Unifying the drives. The first account of freedom is the most evident in Nietzsche’s texts. Its main feature is to locate freedom—and the associated notion of an I or self—at the level of the drives, in terms of the drives. This move ‘down’ to the level of the drives in explaining thought and action is characteristic of Nietzsche—although we’ll see (in b) that he also constitutes a kind of agency on top of this. This underlying psychology of drives has an almost chemical simplicity. Freedom of this first sort is a skill in and of these drives.
Here Nietzsche thinks of freedom as a capacity that reaches down into our animality, into our condition simply as (an instance of) ‘life’. I think he would be willing to attribute this first kind of freedom to organisms generally, though of course he is always focused on the human case.14 For each living thing is a collection of drives, drives that compete to control what the organism does. It’s when he treats freedom just in terms of these drives that he most obviously ‘naturalizes’ it (though really the rest of his story will be naturalistic as well).
When Nietzsche denies that there is any I or self or subject, what he usually puts in its place is that collection of drives. For example D 119 speaks of ‘the totality of drives that constitute [a man’s] being’. And KSA 10: 274: ‘As cell stands physiologically beside cell, so drive beside drive. The most general picture of our essence is an association of drives, with continual rivalries and alliances with one another.’ When I act, I think that I as subject or self have chosen to do what I’m doing. But—he often says—there’s no such I, and what really explains is some drive that just then had control of the organism. Throughout Nietzsche’s psychology, it is these drives that are his favorite and usual explainers. Nevertheless there is a kind of freedom that occurs even here—indeed he finds freedom here in several ways.
The first way Nietzsche interprets freedom in terms of drives is quite simple: freedom is a drive’s own feeling of power, while it commands another drive. It is the ‘affect of command’ that he so often mentions. Here freedom seems attributable to any single drive, at the moment it is able to command. Its opposite is the state and feeling of being hemmed in and constrained, prevented from venting or discharging. Consider some passages: KSA 11: 606 (WLN 36): ‘the will … is above all also an affect: that affect of command. What is called freedom of the will is essentially a feeling of superiority over the one who must obey: “I am free, he must obey”—this consciousness is present in every will . . .’. GS 347: ‘will, as the affect of command, is the decisive mark of self-mastery [Selbstherrlichkeit] and force’. And KSA 11: 505–6 (WLN 16): ‘Free: means “not pushed and shoved, without a feeling of compulsion”’; ‘it is the feeling of our preponderance of force that we call “freedom of the will”, the consciousness that our force compels in relation to a force which is compelled’.
This simplest capacity of freedom already has an idea of itself, and this idea is already partly false. For this commanding will looks only ahead, and doesn’t see its own constrainedness. So it has the beginnings of the metaphysical faith in ‘freedom of the will’. HAH I 18: ‘We are hungry, but originally do not think that the organism wills to sustain itself, but that feeling seems to make itself valid without cause or purpose, it isolates itself and considers itself voluntary [willkürlich]. Thus: belief in freedom of the will is an original error of everything organic’.
However Nietzsche isn’t content with this very simple idea of freedom. Elsewhere, more usually, he makes freedom a feature not of an individual drive, but of the organism as a collection of drives. He makes being-a-self and being-free consist in a certain unity or unification of the drives.15
What is it, first, that needs such unifying? I suggest that we picture the drives as a set of forces of various strengths, pushing for various goals. By the relation between their goals, they tend either to further or hinder one another. And by the relation between their strengths, they tend either to command or obey one another. So, we may say, by their vectors and strengths, they stand at any moment in a certain ‘power-structure’ with one another, a system of oppositions and alliances, forcings and compulsions. But further, we must imagine this structure as fluctuating rather drastically through time, as particular drives strengthen (perhaps stimulated by the situation) or weaken (perhaps when sated). Now what will unification be?
A preliminary kind of unity is already present in Nietzsche’s fuller analysis of that ‘affect of command’. For it turns out that this affect involves not just the feeling of command, but the simultaneous feeling of obeying. It requires that the organism be, and experience itself as, at once both commander and obeyer. Again KSA 11: 606 (WLN 36): ‘A man who wills—commands a something in himself which obeys, or which he believes will obey. … [I]n a given case we are simultaneously the commanders and the obeyers, and as obeyers know the feelings of resisting . . .’.16
So my drives are not isolated viewpoints, but intermesh, and combine into a single opening upon the world, whereby the world looks and feels as it does to them all, at once. It is this synthetic viewpoint that has them together before it, and experiences at once both the commanding and the obeying drive, that possesses the full affect of command, a kind of proto-freedom. As I constrain one drive in order to exercise another, I experience the latter’s command more completely, by feeling it too from the point of view of the part that obeys.
This first unity depends just on drives’ coalescing into an overall viewpoint in which they are all elements.17 And I think Nietzsche attributes this to organisms generally, inasmuch as all of them have multiple drives, simultaneously active, and their drives all involve perspectives. So every organism ‘views’ the world within various sets or projects towards it, and ‘feels’ their different prospects together. So it can experience itself as constraining one aim to suit another, as when a cat needs to eat in an uncomfortable posture, and is at once gratified and bothered.
But this is only a preliminary way Nietzsche thinks of drives as unified or united. He has something further in mind by the unity required for selfhood and freedom. For even a chaotic and akratic person could still ‘share’ drives’ perspectives this way—could, while acting from a momentarily dominant drive, simultaneously feel other drives sacrificed to it. How further must drives come together, for there to be a self? I think it’s hard to pin down Nietzsche’s position here—there are several candidates.
i) Nietzsche might define this unity in terms of functionality or effectiveness. That is, a set of drives would be synthesized or unified insofar as they mesh effectively together, so that the organism ‘as a whole’ can work effectively on its environment. I think Nietzsche does attribute this functional unity even to animals: when ‘healthy’, their drives are individually strong, but also synthesized, organized, and unified so as to maximize the organism’s overall success. So particular drives operate when and to the extent that best serves the organism. Nietzsche often associates unity with such effectiveness. However I doubt that he identifies them; success is instead a contingent result. Unity has some character of its own, that makes it effective.
ii) So instead, unity might lie in the drives’ coalescing into a stable power-structure—a persisting network of power-relations to one another. Each drive, that is, has a place in this structure, and is held to it. It doesn’t sometimes overpower the other interests and run the organism for a while, to the detriment of the rest. So the organism keeps a consistent view of its interests, and runs its behavior with a steady aim. We can see how this kind of consistency might produce the effectiveness on the environment cited in i).18
I think that Nietzsche often does have this kind of unity in mind. He thinks of health as the capacity to achieve and sustain such a stable synthesis, making the organism more effective in turn. This capacity does not belong to some preexisting self, but to the collection of drives itself. A healthy organism is simply a set of drives that is able to settle into such a stable structure; it has a self, only by achieving that synthesis. Such health is usual in other animals, but not in humans, and especially in modern humans: for us this synthesis no longer ‘comes naturally’. This is much of Nietzsche’s view of unity, however not all.
iii) Unity may lie in there being one ruler of this set of drives—a single dominant drive, or perhaps a ruling ‘committee’ of drives. Although Nietzsche often has ii) in mind, he usually supplements it with this stronger point.19 At least in the best case of unity, that synthesis of a stable power-system of drives is accomplished by a single drive taking control, and imposing its single command. WP 46: ‘Multiplicity and disaggregation of the impulses, lack of system among them, results as “weak will”; their coordination under the dominance of a single one results as “strong will”—in the first case it is oscillation and the lack of a centre of gravity; in the latter precision and clarity of direction’.20
Unity, of one or more of these kinds, constitutes a first layer of agency, selfhood, and freedom. Most fully, this first freedom is the capacity to sustain a life under the command of a ruling passion. This capacity is free in both the positive and negative ways. Positively, it is the freedom to use the other drives, and all the organism’s resources, and thereby also things around it. Negatively it is freedom-from being controlled by isolated passions or impulses (and thereby also freedom-from control by the external stimuli of these passions or impulses).
This synthesis of the drives, under single command, matters especially because it is power—power over the other drives, i.e. over the host of the organism’s capacities, and therefore power over nature. By unifying the drives it constitutes out of them a self. And this self is also responsible, in that it speaks for the organism, and can be relied on to direct the organism. The organism has its drives in control, and is as this synthetic whole responsible for its own behavior. As responsible, it is also reliable and (in this way) predictable to those around it.
The capacity for this unity belongs, we’ve seen, to our animality, but Nietzsche thinks this animal capacity has been damaged and suppressed. We face the challenge of re-attaining the ability to unify ourselves in this way. Individually, we need to hope that our system of drives has this capacity, and especially that we possess one drive that will become strong enough to rule.
In GM I Nietzsche presents a model for this kind of freedom in his ‘masters’. Perhaps the master’s key trait is precisely this capacity to organize himself. Slave morality’s decisive blow to the master is then to disrupt this self-unity, to divide him against himself. In GM II, however, it emerges that the assault on our natural unity began much earlier, with the prehistoric taming of humans for social life, which already broke down the natural unity of our animal drives.
Nietzsche tells this first story about power and freedom completely in terms of the drives, which gives it a striking simplicity.21 When he thinks along this line, he leaves little or no role for any conscious and deliberating self. Either there is no such thing, or it is an epiphenomenon (an aftereffect that affects nothing else), or it is simply a secondary tool or expression of the drives. And similarly, on this line, for our conscious values, articulated in our principles. These explain little, by contrast with a subconscious valuing that goes on in our drives.
b) The deliberative self. But this vocabulary of drives isn’t enough for the explanations Nietzsche wants to give of us—nor for the new values he wants to offer us. In the end he means not to dismiss consciousness and deliberation, but to naturalize and de-moralize them. It’s important to understand how we think and decide, and important to improve these, precisely because they are so important in how we live. Nietzsche criticizes the ways we are conscious and choose (the moral ways), and advocates different ways—neither of which would make sense if consciousness and choice were merely epiphenomenal. Moreover, it’s clear that Nietzsche’s works themselves appeal to these capacities in his readers—he wants us to reflect on his words, to deliberate in the light of them (even if perhaps he also means to affect us subliminally).22
So although, as I have said, drives are Nietzsche’s principal explainers, they are not his sole explainers. How we reflect and choose are effective as well.23 Indeed it’s often through these that the drives themselves operate: Nietzsche very commonly points out surprising ways our decisions express unrecognized or unacknowledged drives. So even the story he tells about the drives often depends on an account of agency. And so we must not take those outright rejections of any such thing as conclusive.
Nietzsche not only needs reflection and choice as explainers, he also needs them in his values—they are features of the human conditions he values most. They are a further kind of freedom, built on the animal, and an element in Nietzsche’s own. In a different way than the unity in the drives, reflection and choice involve the ‘affect of command’, and constitute kinds of power, self, and responsibility—kinds somewhat different from those we saw in a). This freedom also takes itself to be free, i.e. aims at an idea of its own agency or choice.
In naturalizing this ‘agency’ (I’ll use this term to sum up this broad topic) Nietzsche treats it, like the drives, as a certain capacity or ability of an individual organism. But whereas the capacity to unify the drives has roots back in our animal past, the capacity to decide was evolved in our human prehistory, and distinguishes us. The individual acquires this capacity not genetically but from the social matrix, where it has evolved through a long history, which Nietzsche offers various sketches of.
As a dispositional capacity, agency competes against the drives as other such dispositions. (Nietzsche thinks of them as competing to control the organism, by dictating its outlook and effort. Since the organism is really only the sum of its powers or dispositions, this competition is by each part to rule the whole, to organize the others into its whole.) Agency is reinforced or opposed by particular drives, as the latter are by one another. It is as it were ‘in the trenches’ with the drives, not something different in kind.
So agency is indeed a kind of drive itself, which I think is one reason Nietzsche sometimes denies that that there can be any self or agent. He thinks we make it essential to agency that it be something quite different in kind from the drives—and if this is essential, there can indeed be no agency. Moreover this conception of agency is not just an error of priests and philosophers. It belongs to the very ‘idea’ this capacity has of itself—what it takes itself to be trying to be. As we’ll see, the very act of reflecting and choosing involves a self-misconception: even as it refers to itself as ‘I’ and ‘self’ and ‘free’, it gets itself wrong. All of this influences Nietzsche’s denials of the I, self, and freedom.
Nietzsche offers various theories how this capacity for agency evolved—always along with that embedded idea of itself. He asks especially what forces shaped this skill, and to what purposes. He tries thereby to uncover what interests our capacity for agency expresses. I will focus on two of his discussions, on GS 354’s account of the evolution of consciousness and language, and on the second essay of the Genealogy, which tells an elaborate story how the ‘ability to promise’ has developed. I suggest that we put these together as Nietzsche’s account of the evolution of agency.
Let’s look first at GS 354, which tells a story how and why consciousness and language arise. These are two key parts, I suggest, of the deliberative capacity we want to understand. The ‘animal’ drives are unconscious and nonlinguistic. How did these capacities evolve, and what functions were they selected to play?
Let me quickly present GS 354’s story by quoting selectively from it. Nietzsche argues in this long paragraph that ‘the development of language and the development of consciousness … go hand in hand’, because both have the function to ‘facilitate communication’. In the primary case, one becomes conscious of something about oneself in order to put it into words, and to share it with others. The drives were already well able to think, and what distinguishes conscious thinking is that it ‘takes place in words’, hence is readied or prepared to be shared. So ‘[c]onsciousness is really just a binding-net [Verbindungsnetz] between person and person—only in this capacity did it have to develop; the solitary and predatory person would not have needed it.’24 This means that ‘consciousness actually belongs not to the individual-existence of a person, but rather to the community- and herd-nature in him’.25
Nietzsche infers (still in GS 354) that consciousness ‘is finely developed only in relation to its usefulness to community or herd’. It is designed to serve the interest of the community in binding us more tightly up in it. And this is the effect it still has in us, so that ‘each of us, even with the best will to understand himself as individually as possible, … will always bring to consciousness precisely the “not-individual” in him, his “averageness”—that through the character of consciousness … our thought itself is continually … translated back into the herd-perspective’.
Notice how Nietzsche’s story runs against what we might have supposed: that consciousness and language were developed as tools for the drives—neutral tools, generally available to the drives and serving them. (We might have thought that by serving the drives they served the organism’s interest in survival and, especially, power or growth.) On this model different drives at different times would take hold of these tools, so that it is now one drive that speaks and thinks, now another. But those tools—consciousness and language—would themselves be indifferent among them, since they evolved (on this supposal) to serve them generally.26
But Nietzsche here denies that language and consciousness are ‘neutral’ in this way—and that they indifferently serve the drives generally. These capacities themselves express interests, and so are analogous to drives themselves. Moreover the interests they serve are not the interests of the drives. They are those of society: these capacities are designed to serve a socializing function—to facilitate our ‘taming’ into good ‘herd animals’. Rather than neutral servants of the drives, consciousness and language compete with them on behalf of those social interests; they represent those interests against the drives.27 (Notice how strongly all of this counts against the idea of consciousness as a mere epiphenomenon. The problem here is that it’s all-too-effective—at herding us.)
Let’s turn now to GM II which describes the central capacity that consciousness and language both serve, the capacity central to our socialization. Nietzsche presents this as ‘the ability to promise’, but it is something more elaborate and farreaching than this makes it seem. It’s the broad phenomenon I’m calling agency.
Promising, first of all, is something complex: it depends on a number of interlocking sub-capacities. One of these is the capacity to remember what one has promised or committed to do. Another is the capacity to commit oneself (to remember in the future). This memory, further, is a ‘memory of the will’ (GM II 1), i.e. an effective memory that is able not just to retrieve commitments but to abide by them. That is, the capacity induces the whole organism to abide by them.
The promiser must be able to abide by commitments even or especially when strong drives incline it not to. So the capacity must include a strong inhibitive power, to refrain from acting immediately upon one’s drives. The promiser is able to ‘insert a pause’ in which to consult its commitments, and determine what these require in this circumstance. In its strong power to restrain the drives, this capacity is ‘ascetic’; here it draws, perhaps, on existing forces of restraint present independently in the drives. TI VIII 6: ‘This is the first preschooling for spirituality: not to react immediately to a stimulus, but instead to take in hand the inhibiting, excluding instincts.’
For what purpose does this capacity restrain the drives? For the sake of one’s commitments. GM II begins by talking about commitments to other individuals in relations of trade (see especially II 8), but Nietzsche soon shifts to what I think is really more important to him: commitments to society. This capacity (for agency) is above all designed to give humans the capacity to remember (and abide by) the social rules. ‘With the help of such images and processes [the horrific punishments inflicted on breakers] one finally retains in memory five, six “I will nots”, in connection with which one has given one’s promise in order to live within the advantages of society’ (GM II 3; cf. also II 9).
What one commits to then, are these social norms. Or more broadly one commits to be normal, to be like others. This capacity (for promising, for agency) serves the overall function of socializing and taming us—and this is perhaps Nietzsche’s most important lesson for us about it. This is the main interest this new capacity serves, and it serves it against the interests of the drives. It is the ability to refrain from acting upon drives, so as to refer to principles or rules (or to ‘what one does’), to which one then conforms one’s behavior. So although this new capacity works at the same level as the drives—we’ve seen that it is simply a dispositional capacity itself—it represents a kind of alien interest against them.28 It is thus deeply ‘ascetic’.
It’s because this new disposition is so foreign and so contrary to the drives, that such hard training has been needed in order to breed it into us. It has had to be inserted amongst our animal drives and enabled to compete with them, indeed to control them. To simplify, we might say that there are two main phases of this training, for Nietzsche. In the earlier and much longer ‘ethic of custom’, the training worked mainly via individuals’ fear—fear of the public torturing punishments. In the more recent phase, which Nietzsche calls ‘morality’, the training works more subtly by guilt, in which the individual’s own aggressive drives are enlisted as enforcers of the moral rules: they take pleasure in punishing the part of the individual that goes astray.
We’ve seen that consciousness and language evolved with the function to socialize us. They do so in their own right: in learning a language the individual acquires a generic or average structuring, which we’ve seen constrains our conscious thinking as well. But consciousness and language also socialize us by supporting that ability to promise, i.e. to ‘remember the rules’. Those rules are stated in language, and remembered as such. And the rules are applied in consciousness—they are made so as to work explicitly, by contrast with the purposes in the drives. (It’s by having these conscious rules that the organism has ‘values’ in our usual sense—though Nietzsche uses the term more liberally, insisting that we, and other animals, already value in the unconscious drives.) As some drive inclines me towards an inviting act, memory must jolt me into awareness of the rule that prohibits it.29
So Nietzsche’s naturalizing story attributes to us—human organisms—a certain package of abilities. We might sum it as the capacity, in an ‘action situation’, to restrain our drives in order to become aware of certain relevant rules, and to act in accordance with these—hence, sometimes, against the interests of those drives. There are organisms with this capacity, through that long social training. But now where is the ‘self’ or ‘I’ in this story, and where is ‘freedom’?
It is the organism that has this new dispositional ability, alongside the other abilities that are its drives. Yet there seems to us—doesn’t there?—to be a self or I that has this new ability, but experiences the drives as external to it. ‘I’ am the subject of consciousness, it seems, which weighs alternatives and determines goals. ‘I’ carry out my conscious thinking and deciding, and for ‘me’ the influences of these drives and affects need to be uncovered and questioned: these drives don’t speak for me, in the way that my deliberate choices do.30
On Nietzsche’s naturalistic story, this notion of an I is the idea the new ability has of itself. The ability to consciously think and choose includes or involves a certain idea of itself—an idea that of course is itself conscious and linguistic. The capacity takes a first-person point of view: it calls and thinks itself ‘I’. It also thinks various things about itself, many of which are false. For example it takes itself to be the essence or core of the organism, something different in kind from the drives, and so on.
It’s here at last that we come to the naturalistic site of the idea of freedom as free will, as first cause, which we noted at the start is Nietzsche’s principal target. This idea is a product of the second, moralizing phase of the long social taming of humans into agency. In GM I 13 Nietzsche depicts the slave as the particular vehicle of this innovation: the resentful slave needs the master to be free and responsible for his evil deeds, the better to punish him—or rather to imagine him punished. And on the other hand the slave wants to count his own weakness as really the result of his own choice to ‘turn the other cheek’. Since the negative judgment is more vital to the slave, free will is needed especially for the purpose of grounding and intensifying blame.
But agency’s idea of its own freedom and responsibility is not merely a product of this specific human type (the reactive slave). It has deeper roots, and a broader role. It is, ultimately, a further means to enhance social control of members, via their own agential control of their drives. Agency’s principal function (what social processes have mainly designed it for) is to ensure that members do what they must for the society to hang together and prosper. It does so by, in particular, making agents predictable to one another (able to promise), the better to mesh their activities (to trade). And it makes them predictable by making them able and willing to frustrate their drives, and—importantly—to bear up under the great suffering and physical depression Nietzsche thinks this caused.
Agency’s idea of itself serves this function. It takes itself as able (free) not only to restrain particular drives—which it often is—but to choose and will in complete independence from them all. This illusion both enspirits it in its struggle against drives, and prepares it to feel guilty wherever it fails.31 So the idea of free will is an ally of bad conscience, which is the distinctive moral form of social control through values. It harnesses the aggressive impulses against themselves: it sublimates them into a cruel blaming of the self, whenever it lets any of these impulses act outwardly. At the same time this idea of agency’s freedom conceals its own main function, to conform the individual to social rules and values. The agent prides himself on his autonomy, but is all the while choosing according to the social script.
So agency is a capacity, involving a certain idea of itself. This idea—of an I or self—is on the one hand self-referential, and picks out the capacity. But it also thinks of that capacity not as a capacity but as a (metaphysical) subject. In this situation there are, I think, two options: a) we can identify the I solely by its reflexive role, in which case the term refers to that capacity, or b) we can identify the I by the content the capacity attributes to itself, in which case there is no I.
Nietzsche generally takes the second line, which he expresses in outright denials that any I or self or will ever occurs. ‘What separates me most deeply from metaphysicians is: I don’t concede that the “I” is what thinks: rather I take the I itself as a construction of thinking …: so only as a regulative fiction with the help of which a kind of constancy and thus “knowability” is inserted into, invented into, a world of becoming’ (KSA 11: 526 (WLN 20–1)).32
And yet it would be just as legitimate to identify the self or I through the self-referential role, hence with the capacity that calls itself so.33 There really is something there, something important. Nor is its idea of itself completely false. Although it lacks the metaphysical status, and the primacy within the organism, that it claims for itself, it is still a significant power within the organism, the most distinctive power humans have. This capacity really is able, in some cases, to control the organism and its (other) drives. And it really does involve a special kind of power, and freedom.
I think that Nietzsche affirms the power and freedom in agency in his account of the sovereign individual in GM II 2. Here are some phrases that seem to apply to this agential control of the drives: ‘a true consciousness of power and freedom’; ‘this lord of the free will’; ‘this mastery over himself also necessarily brings with it mastery over circumstances, over nature and all shorter-willed and more unreliable creatures’; ‘[t]he “free” human being, the possessor of a long, unbreakable will’; ‘this power over oneself and fate’. So Nietzsche himself sees reasons to think that a distinctive new power is here, before and without which we were ‘slaves of momentary affect and desire’ [GM II 3].34
Nevertheless Nietzsche is also highly critical of this new capacity. He is critical, we’ve just seen, of the metaphysical self-conception embedded in our agency. But worse than this ontological mistake is this agency’s failure to see its own design, as by and for interests outside. This makes the claim to constitute the organism’s essential ‘self’ false in another way: agency expresses not my individual interests, but social and generic ones. So all its I-ing is a kind of sham, implanted in the interests of taming and herding me. In this respect my drives are the more ‘me’ than my conscious thinking and choosing. But agency has been designed as an enemy of these drives: it is pitted against the aggressive drives in particular, i.e. precisely those in which people once most enjoyed the ‘affect of command’, in which they felt themselves most masterly and free.35 So this agential freedom has been achieved only by a sacrifice of the original freedom in our drives (GM II 17). And to become an individual, the individual it is possible for me to be, I must let these drives give me content. I must align my agency with a unity that is achieved in my drives.
So Nietzsche rejects agency’s picture of itself as properly independent of the drives. He preaches to agents—his readers—to give credit to their drives, and to learn to dovetail their agency to them. We must hope that our drives have the power—freedom of the first type—to unify themselves, preferably under a single dominant passion. We need to watch for what distinguishes us in our drives and passions, and learn to subordinate our agency—freedom of the second type—to this. So our agency, and the will in our drives, will coincide.
Nietzsche depicts the masters as individuals in which this coincidence of drives and conscious will is achieved. That is, their values, expressed in the principles they affirm and decide by, dictate the same behaviors as their drives. Their values, and their deliberative will, simply express the package of drives they comprise. Nietzsche depicts this as happening naturally and almost effortlessly in them.
It is a puzzle, on my story, how this can be. Why don’t the master’s values and agency constrain his drives for social purposes, as we’ve seen agency was designed to do? Where is the asceticism and hostility to drives I’ve said characterizes agency for Nietzsche? (There is also this other puzzle about the masters: since surely they come after that long bloody history in which ‘promising’ was bred into us, why do they not suffer from the sickness and gloom Nietzsche says are its products?)
I think the answer must include at least these points. First, the masters belong to the earlier phase of the story GM II tells, the ethic of custom. Guilt—built into the attitude of agency—has not yet become sin before an ultimate God. So it hasn’t yet reached its most self-lacerating form, in which the agent views drives as evils in the body. Second the masters’ society has been organized to make their own lives possible, with other members constrained to supporting roles (into which their drives are severely forced). But the masters’ own role is for war, for which strong aggressive drives will best suit them. So the social interest makes values that favor these drives in them.
But the development and rise to dominance of slave morality—which Nietzsche often just calls ‘morality’—has made such masterly harmony between drives and agency much harder and perhaps impossible. Where this morality is strong, it makes agency (conscious thinking and choosing) an avowed enemy to the drives; agency has the task of repressing and indeed eliminating these drives. Of course it fails to notice many of them, and is often used by them unbeknownst to itself—and Nietzsche is constantly pointing out ways these are so. Yet moral agency really does constrain and oppose many of the drives effectively enough to injure them—and in particular the strong drives that would unify action on their own. Nietzsche thinks that we moderns have been drive-damaged by morality’s long rule. We have a far richer variety of drives and interests, but these are all—in most of us—weaker than the fewer simpler drives were in earlier ages.
However morality, author of this damage to the drives, is also now under attack, and from one of its own offshoots. Morality, which has shaped the current style of our agency, is very gradually dying the same death that God has. The will to truth that issued out of this morality turned back first against the faith in God, exposing it to the cold eye of scientific thought. This same scrutiny will eventually undermine faith in morality as well.36 It will pull away such metaphysical supports as those of a soul, surviving death into another world, in which it will find a due reward. And it will gradually make a mockery of the saintly ideal itself—the ideal of a selfless life spent mortifying the drives. This ascetic ideal will (very gradually) lose its power to spur and shape our agency, how we consciously aim and choose. People feel less and less reason to use their agency against their drives, or indeed to any end at all.
Morality’s decline will weaken agency’s grip on the drives, and its hostility to them. The way will lie easier, in this respect, to reachieve the healthy fit of agency and drives, which characterized the masters. (We see this in the expanding positive interest in the body and its health and pleasures, which seems an important tendency of the current age.) However there is a different problem. Agency and the drives may compete on a more even footing, but that is by both having sunk in strength. Our drives have been democratized: we have many more of them, a great richness of tastes and wants pulling us in different directions. But rarely is any of them strong enough to be a dominating passion that organizes the rest under it. And agency is also weaker: we feel no moral need to give ourselves a single rule.
Our first task, then, is to re-achieve that synthesis of the two kinds of freedom, freedom in the drives, freedom in agency. ‘The freest act is that in which our own strongest most finely practiced nature springs forth, and in such a way that at the same time our intellect shows its directing hand’ (KSA 10: 258). For this synthesis, the unifying impetus must come out of the drives, and as agents we must wait and watch for a dominating drive to gel. ‘The whole surface of consciousness—consciousness is a surface—has to be kept clean from all of the great imperatives. … In the mean time, the organizing, governing “idea” grows and grows in the depths—it starts commanding’ (EH II 9). Once this drive emerges, conscious agency should give itself over to it.
Goethe is Nietzsche’s exemplar of this unity, this double freedom. ‘What he willed was totality; he fought against the separation of reason, sensibility, feeling, will. … Goethe conceived of a strong, highly educated, self-respecting person, skilled in all things physical and able to keep himself in check, who could dare to allow himself the entire expanse and wealth of naturalness, who is strong enough for this freedom’ (TI IX 49). (Also WP 933: ‘the “great man” is great through the freedom of play of his desires and through the yet greater power that knows how to press these magnificent monsters into service.’)
We have, by now, a pretty complicated picture of freedom before us. Yet I think it’s still incomplete: there’s a third kind of freedom—or element in a comprehensive freedom—which Nietzsche thinks is his main innovation. Goethe achieved that double freedom, that confluence of drives and agency, better than anyone, and Nietzsche highly admired Goethe. But he also aspires, I think, to a kind of freedom that even Goethe didn’t have.
c) Self-genealogy. We have so far the idea of freedom as a joint fulfillment of the two kinds of unification we humans have evolved capacities for. The first freedom is drive-synthesis, in particular by the dominance of a single passion. The second freedom is what we call agency, in which conscious thinking and choosing set our course. Both, Nietzsche thinks, are weakening now in our modern age, so that despite our sense of ourselves as enjoying unparalleled freedom, we have less of either of the two capacities that freedom has so far been.
It’s at this point that Nietzsche has his idea of something further and new, his own prospective idea of what freedom can become. He thinks of this as his own contribution and achievement—as the distinctively Nietzschean freedom.37 It lies in a new kind of agency, an agency redesigning itself for a new purpose. This new agency is, in fact, a continuation and development of the genealogical inquiry we’ve been pursuing all along. This genealogy of our practices/ideas of freedom not only points the way to the synthesis of drive- and agency-freedom we’ve seen, it is itself the beginning of a new, third kind of freedom. Genealogy, by allowing agency to at last understand itself—and to redesign itself accordingly—gives us a new way to become a self, a self that feels a new power, and assumes a new responsibility.
Our agency has been trained to hostility against the drives: it fights them as forces foreign and alien to itself—from the ‘self’ it claims to be. But agency has failed to recognize the way it itself is an ‘agent for’ foreign forces; it executes a control of the organism by those forces. Its capacities for conscious thought and choice (along with its idea of itself) have been designed by long cultural processes to bind us to morality and social norms, the better to integrate and deploy us. Moreover it expresses the interests of various human types, in various ages, who have redesigned the practice of agency to give themselves what they need (this includes many different kinds of masters and slaves).
Foreign interests are built into our moral principles, built into even the structure of agency, in particular its linguistic structuring (its rules are stated in averaging words). The secret rule of those social interests has opposed what is in fact the basic and indispensable part of the organism, its drives. It’s only genealogy that brings these alien interests to light, and gives the agent a chance to oppose and correct for them, as they work in itself. Thus genealogy gives us a new way to be ‘free from’ control by external wills. It is a way for the organism to take a fuller control over itself, as well as a kind of control over those foreign interests it culls out of itself.
We are familiar with certain ways of being (or not being) free from control by outside forces: political freedom, economic freedom, religious freedom. We have largely overlooked, Nietzsche thinks, a deeper kind of control we are subject to, through our values. GS 335: ‘Your judgment “that is right” has a prehistory in your drives, inclinations, aversions, experiences, and what you have not experienced; you have to ask “how did it emerge there?” and then also, “what is really driving me to listen to it?”’ We need to uncover, that is, the interests that lie behind our values, the functions they have been designed to play in us.
Nietzsche especially stresses the release from traditional values (though not necessarily genealogy as the route to it) in his conception of the ‘free spirit’. Already in HAH I 225: ‘what characterizes the free spirit is … that he has liberated himself from tradition’; ‘he demands reasons, the rest demand faith’. GS 297: ‘the acquired good conscience accompanying hostility towards what is familiar, traditional, hallowed … constitutes what is really great, new, and amazing in our culture; it is the step of all steps of the freed spirit’. WP 789: ‘What a feeling of freedom it is to experience, as we freed spirits experience, that we are not harnessed up to a system of “ends”!’
We can’t begin to counter the control of these forces and interests unless we can notice them—unless we can see what our values really have been designed to do with us. It is genealogy that exposes these controlling forces. So it is indispensable for the kind of revaluation of these values that Nietzsche has in mind: a revaluation in awareness of the wills embedded in these values. GM P 6: ‘we need a critique of moral values, for once the value of these values is itself to be put in question—and for this we need a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances out of which they have grown, under which they have developed and shifted’.
This insight into the sources of our values begins to make us independent of them. GS 335: ‘The insight into how in general moral judgments ever arose would spoil these emotional words [“duty” and “conscience”] for you’. It begins to open the affective distance from these values, needed also for genuine revaluation of them.38
But how—it must be asked—are we to revalue values set so deeply in us? How can we escape them to find any independent ground from which to assess them? Nietzsche thinks we do have access to a standpoint separate from our agency, and more reliable than it; of course this is the standpoint of our drives. I am to judge my conscious values—and my agential way of living by these values—by how they help or harm the system of drives and passions that I find as my still deeper self. I work to discover the aspects of my agency that are most damaging to my instincts—for example its reliance on guilt—and try to redesign them out of myself. So I learn to remake myself in a way never possible before, a self with a new kind of responsibility for itself.39
The point is not, however, simply to stir up and set loose my drives and appetites. Nietzsche is often critical of what he calls ‘laisser aller’, letting go.40 So in TI IX 41: ‘“Freedom I do not mean—”—In times like these, giving over to one’s instincts is just one more disaster. The instincts contradict, disturb, and destroy one another; I even define modernity as physiological self-contradiction. A rational education would have paralyzed at least one of these instinct systems with iron pressure so that another could gain force, grow strong, become master.’41 Agency will still constrain drives, but now in their own interest: its roles are to discipline them, and to foster the emergence of a unifying passion.
There is another kind of limit to this new kind of freedom. It is also more aware than the earlier kinds were of what it does not and cannot overcome. So it has a more adequate idea of itself. It sees itself as enveloped within necessity and fate, and makes no claim to be a first and uncaused cause. The Nietzscheanly free individual recognizes the contingency in his constitution of drives—there are wills and values here that make him up, and that he can’t ‘rise above’ or ‘come before’. And this free one also recognizes his dependence on his moment in the historical drama.42
I have spoken of this diagnosis and revaluation of values and agency as something each ‘free spirit’ is to do for himself. But Nietzsche has in mind that these personal efforts will be cumulative, will together build a new practice and idea of freedom. So he sometimes speaks of this revaluation as carried out at the social- or even species-level. EH III D 2: ‘My task, preparing for humanity’s moment of highest self-reflection, a great noon when it will look back and look out, when it will escape from the mastery by chance and priests and for the first time pose the questions of why? and what for? as a whole’.43
So genealogy matters not just because it shows us a way to synthesize drive-and agency-freedom, but because it accomplishes this through a kind of agency that achieves a fuller power, selfhood, and responsibility. As I’ve said this is what distinguishes Nietzsche—or those he makes possible, his overmen—from Goethe, who did not make himself out of insight into his agency and drives. Goethe ‘revalues values’ by intuitively accepting from the Christian morality only those rules that would favor his drives. Nietzsche revalues values by turning his agency—his conscious and deliberating self—back upon itself so as to understand these values, and the interests they secretly express. By revaluing out of this understanding he controls achievement of that synthesis. He has a freedom—and, we might say, a kind of self—of a sort without precedent even in Goethe.44
I take Nietzsche to have this new freedom in mind in his great peroration in GM II 24: ‘this bell-stroke of noon and the great decision, that makes the will free again, that gives back to the earth its goal and to man his hope; this antichrist and antinihilist; this conqueror of God and of the nothing—he must one day come . . .’ By undertaking to step back and judge morality itself, this new individual takes on a new level of responsibility (see e.g. BGE 60 and 212).
This then, I suggest, is Nietzsche’s full conception of freedom. Most broadly, freedom is something historical: an ability—with a linked idea of itself—that has been built very gradually through human history, and in such a way that earlier stages are layered beneath more recent ones. To say what freedom ‘is’ we must tell this history, and also show how this history is now embodied in us, in a layered capacity that works in our drives, in our agency, and now also in our genealogical insight into that agency. Nietzsche argues that with this last step freedom really accomplishes much of what it had claimed to do in agential freedom—it makes one sovereign, and an individual, in senses not yet really true so long as our agency failed to diagnose how its own taming and moralizing design made it work in the interests of foreign forces. Only genealogy lets us understand the design of the values and powers we have taken for granted, opening the way to the new and more adequate freedom Nietzsche commends to us.45
Dennett, Daniel (1992). ‘The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity’, in F. Kessel, P. Cole, and D. Johnson (eds.), Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum).
—— (2003). Freedom Evolves (New York: Penguin).
Gemes, Ken (2009). ‘Nietzsche on Free Will, Autonomy, and the Sovereign Individual’, (this volume).
Janaway, Christopher (2007). Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Katsafanas, Paul (unpublished). ‘Practical Reason and the Structure of Reflective Agency’. Harvard PhD dissertation.
May, Simon (1999). Nietzsche’s Ethics and his War on ‘Morality’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Richardson, John (1996). Nietzsche’s System (New York: Oxford University Press).
—— (2004). Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (New York: Oxford University Press).
Velleman, J. David (2005). ‘The Self as Narrator’, in J. Anderson and J. Christman (eds.), Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).