The majority of Nietzsche’s readers and commentators agree that he rejects certain conceptions of free will or agent causation which claim either that, at least sometimes, we are the complete causes of certain events we cause to happen, such that these events happen without causal input from any spatiotemporal entities outside the boundaries of our empirical selves (BGE 21), or alternatively that everything among the antecedent and surrounding conditions of an agent’s act of will (a volition, a decision to act) could have been exactly as it was, and she might still have decided to act differently (GM I 13). Irrespective of whether Nietzsche’s own reasons for being dismissive of ‘free will’ in either of these senses are sound, many contemporary writers on the subject would concur with his conclusion. If we accept it, as I think we should, it follows that social practices which presuppose such conceptions of free will are rationally indefensible. Nietzsche himself believes that these practices include all forms of morality and of retributive justice which involve the idea that individuals deserve favourable or unfavourable treatment for the acts they commit (HA 105; GM I 13).1
Yet, there are many places in the later writings where he writes in praise of the ‘free spirit’ (GS 347; BGE 188), of the ‘autonomous’ or ‘sovereign’ individual (GM II 2), and of the ‘creator of values’ who has, in some sense, a ‘free will’ (GS 347; BGE 213; GM II 2; TI V 3; TI IX 38). Nietzsche has Zarathustra say, for example: ‘Creation—that is the great redemption from suffering, and life’s easement. But that the creator may exist, that itself requires much suffering and much transformation. […] my willing always comes to me as my liberator and bringer of joy. Willing liberates: that is the true doctrine of will and freedom’ (Z, ‘Of the Blissful Islands’).2
In order to get a proper perspective on what this ‘true doctrine of will and freedom’ might be it is important first to clarify what role it is designed to play in Nietzsche’s philosophy. His formulations in fact suggest two quite distinct such roles. First, there is the thought that freedom, properly understood, is constitutive of being a fully individuated self, a person in the proper sense. This is suggested by his remark that ‘we, however, want to become those we are—human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves’ (GS 335). Being a ‘unique’ human being, rather than merely an instance of a certain type of conscious organism, is here explicitly linked with ‘self-creation’, and this in turn with giving laws to oneself that one holds oneself to. Elsewhere he speaks of individuals capable of such self-legislation, having an ‘independent, protracted will and the right to make promises’, and possessing their own ‘measure of value’, as ‘autonomous’ ‘master[s] of a free will’ (GM II 2). It is plausible to think of Nietzsche as concerned here with what might be called a transcendental question: the constitutive conditions of full-fledged, autonomous rather than heteronomous, selfhood.3
In other passages, what ‘freedom’ and being a ‘free spirit’ gesture towards seems more appropriately described, not as a condition of being a self in the proper sense, but as a substantive ideal. This is arguably what is at stake in many of those remarks where Nietzsche expresses admiration for people who, as he sees them, have succeeded in integrating an unusually great multiplicity of ‘drives’ and evaluative commitments into a long-lasting, coherent whole: ‘a philosopher … would be compelled to see the greatness of man, the concept “greatness”, precisely in his spaciousness and multiplicity, in his wholeness in diversity: he would even determine value and rank according to how much and how many things one could endure and take upon oneself. … He shall be the greatest who can be … the master of his virtues, the superabundant of will; this shall be called greatness: the ability to be as manifold as whole, as vast as full’ (BGE 212; cf. GS 290; TI IX 49). This conception of greatness as a certain kind of ‘mastery’ and ‘superabundant will’ is one of the most recurrent themes in the later Nietzsche’s multifarious attempts to determine an order of ‘value and rank’. And the ideal of ‘unity in maximal diversity’ is complemented and further specified by others which also employ the vocabulary of freedom, creation, and mastery. Let me mention, without claims to exhaustiveness, a few of these.4 Sometimes Nietzsche is drawn to the view that the most valuable kind of ‘freedom’ would be one that is expressed by way of a constant and successful struggle and ‘effort’ against strong internal resistances: ‘One would have to seek the highest type of free man where the greatest resistance is constantly being overcome’ (TI IX 38, my emphasis; cf. Z, ‘Of Self-Overcoming’). Elsewhere, he stresses the free spirit’s lack of need for certainties (GS 347), or for explicit rules and imperatives, insisting ‘that every action that has ever been done was done in an altogether unique and irretrievable way, and this will be equally true of every future action; that all regulations about actions relate only to their coarse exterior (even the most inward and subtle regulations of all moralities so far); that these regulations may lead to some semblance of sameness, but really only to some semblance’ (GS 335). According to these passages, the free spirit is an ethical particularist, realizing that the features potentially relevant for evaluative appraisal of an action are so manifold, fine-grained, and mutually modifying that no substantive generalizations, capturing all these features and yet also being equally applicable across different actual contexts, are to be had.5
The criteria of adequacy for Nietzsche’s construal of freedom will clearly be different depending on whether what is at stake is an evaluative ideal or the conditions of the possibility of fully individualized—‘unique’—selfhood (although the satisfaction of these very conditions may of course also be part of or presupposed by a normative ideal). One of my claims in this essay will be that formal features of comportments, preference systems, or motivations—important though they are—are not by themselves sufficient on either score. For example, if we take Nietzsche to be primarily concerned with an evaluative ideal, we might be tempted to combine some of the formal characteristics I have listed above—say, a long-lasting, ‘protracted’ unity among a maximal diversity of ‘drives’, freedom from the need for certainties and from explicit moral rules—and identify Nietzsche’s ideal with this combination of features. Yet it seems clear that a person might exemplify all these characteristics and yet appeal neither to us—even the most incontestably free-spirited among us—nor to Nietzsche. Such a person might have shaped, perhaps by way of continued reflection, self-criticism, and against various inner resistances, a remarkable unity out of a great diversity of his actual drives or desires, individuated by their contents—desires which might include, as it happens, the desire to watch Reality TV shows, the desire to download jingles from the internet, the desire to avoid conversations other than small talk, and so forth in a similar vein—and he may act in each situation in a thoroughly particularist manner without relying on pre-formed rules. One only needs to give brief attention to this frivolous instance of unity-indiversity to concur that, when interpreting Nietzsche’s remarks on these issues, we implicitly credit him with being concerned mostly with significant, deep, or, in his language, ‘higher’, desires and motives. But once this is conceded, it becomes evident that, necessary as the formal characteristics delineated so far may be for Nietzschean freedom, an independent specification of what makes a motive significant or ‘higher’ is required to supplement them. As Alexander Nehamas has remarked, with similar points in mind: ‘The existence of character may not be quite as independent of the quality of the actions of which it constitutes the pattern’.6 In what follows I shall argue that Nietzsche considers two kinds of non-formal, ‘qualitative’ or substantive commitments to be necessary—albeit not by themselves or even jointly sufficient—for freedom understood, respectively, as a condition of full personhood and as a normative ideal. I shall first, in Section 2, turn to the ‘transcendental’ question of freedom and personhood, and discuss one central component of his evaluative ideal of being a ‘free spirit’ in Section 3.
For Nietzsche, the experience—and not merely the thought7—of effective agency plays a constitutive role for potentially self-conscious subjectivity:
The degree to which we feel life and power … gives us our measure of ‘being’, ‘reality’, not-appearance. The subject: this is the term for our belief in a unity underlying all the different impulses of the highest feeling of reality. (WP 485; cf. WP 488).
This experience of self-efficacy requires ‘resistances’ or ‘obstructions’ (WP 689, 693, 702) and the notion of objective reality is derived, in part, from this experience of resistance to volitional agency. The concept of agency is linked to that of desire, while desire, in the sense relevant here, as a personal-level wanting to maintain or to change some experiential content, depends on what Nietzsche calls ‘affects’ (more on which below). The upshot of this Nietzschean line of thought is condensed in the famous passage on perspectivism in GM III 12, where he claims explicitly that the concept of objective reality is dependent on affectivity: ‘the more affects we allow to have their say on a matter … the more comprehensive will be our “concept” of the thing, our “objectivity”’. So, according to Nietzsche, subjectivity, in the sense of a subject’s having a conceptual grasp of the distinction between self and world, requires the experience of agency, and the latter presupposes affectivity. But the concept of agency here is rather thin. It is plausible to ascribe experienced agency, and the corresponding level of subjectivity, even to very young children or to adults suffering from compulsive syndromes or strong addictions—individuals who, in Nietzsche’s terms, are ‘slaves of momentary affect and desire’ (GM II 3).
Mostly, Nietzsche seems to be concerned with agency and subjectivity in a more substantial sense. He is interested, like Kant, not just in minimal agency, but in autonomous or free agency in a sense which it would be inappropriate to ascribe to a compulsive subject, or to an addict or acratic person—a slave of momentary affect and desire—or to a very young child. Some of the best-known places where Nietzsche extols autonomy or free agency are his reflections on the ‘sovereign individual’ in GM II 2, and on self-knowledge, self-creation, and the free spirit in GS 335 and GS 347. What emerges from these passages is that autonomy or freedom in the relevant sense is a matter of ‘having a protracted will’ and ‘mastery over oneself’ under the aegis of a ‘conscience’ (GM II 2). The autonomous individual experiences her effective desires and her actions as originating from and expressing her self : ‘We, however, want to become those we are—human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves’ (GS 335). It seems clear that such a capacity for self-creation requires a minimal reflective capacity, an ability to detach oneself from one’s impulses, so scrutinize, modify and revise them in the light of rational considerations. Without these abilities, there could be no self-imposed laws as envisaged in this passage. For Nietzsche understands the self as creating itself, as coming into being, through giving rules or laws to itself which it holds itself to by a ‘protracted will’ (GM II 2). We should not think of these ‘laws’ as explicit, symbolically represented rules, and Nietzsche’s remark about the uniqueness of every action and the coarseness of every explicit rule suggests that he does not think about them in this way. But what is essential to someone’s giving a law to herself is her ability to recognize what constitutes acting in accordance with it and what constitutes violating it. Hence, she must be able to appreciate certain states of affairs as reasons for behaving in one way or another. Indeed, giving oneself a law is virtually synonymous with acting in the light of, and not merely in accordance with, reasons. An organism that is not capable of appreciating reasons from a first-personal perspective may exemplify behaviour that is lawful (as well as being necessarily unified in various ways), but the laws it obeys cannot be self-given; and since self-creation requires this self-imposition, such organisms cannot be selves at all.8 The appreciation of something as a reason for acting one way rather than another implies at least the minimal reflective capacities alluded to above: the ability to recognize reasons-pro and reasons-con, and to distinguish, with awareness, one possible course of action from another. It therefore implies self-consciousness.9 The claim that laws can only be self-given if an agent has an ability to reflect on reasons guiding her actions should be distinguished from two other, superficially similar theses, which Nietzsche is not committed to. It is clearly not Nietzsche’s view that the free agent acquires most of her self-constitutive motives, desires or beliefs in a reflective or deliberative way. On the contrary, he tends to emphasize the role of social constraints, ‘custom’, and hereditary factors in the aeteology of freedom (e.g. GM II 2; BGE 213). Nor is Nietzsche claiming that the free agent is especially prone to reflecting on her commitments or questioning them. What is essential is only this: that the agent be capable of consciously distinguishing between actual or possible motives, courses of action, etc., she takes as expressive of her self and others that she does, or would, not take to be so.10
But what makes a motive suited to be expressive of who I am, to be an instance of ‘self-creation’ in Nietzsche’s sense? His polemics against the Kantian concept of autonomy in GS 335 and elsewhere make it clear that the relevant feature cannot be the universalizability of the motive’s content in a Kantian sense. In the same passage, Nietzsche gives us a clue to an answer when he says that ‘our opinions, valuations, and tables of the good certainly belong among the most powerful levers in the mechanism of our actions. … Let us therefore limit ourselves to the purification of our opinions and valuations and to the creation of our own new tables of what is good’ (GS 335; my emphases). Nietzsche’s accentuation here of a subject’s commitment to ‘tables of the good’, to evaluations and their purification recalls contemporary compatibilist accounts of freedom which tend to contrast mere desire with evaluation.11 But what is it to value, as opposed to merely desire something? The contrast here clearly cannot be merely one between first-order desires and higher-order desires to be motivated by certain first-order desires, for such hierarchical accounts cannot by themselves explain what we need an explanation of, namely what makes a particular second- (or higher-) order desire mine.12 Now, Nietzsche does have a theory of evaluation and its grounds, but it is a theory which at first sight seems to undercut the very distinction between evaluation and mere desire. For according to him, our basic mode of acquaintance with value is through ‘affects’ (Affekte). Thinking of things in evaluative terms rationally requires thinking of them as having a bearing on an actual or possible affectivity:
Every ideal presupposes love and hatred, admiration and contempt. Either the positive emotion is the primum mobile or the negative emotion. For example, in all ressentiment ideals hatred and contempt are the primum mobile. (KGW VIII.2.10.[9])
. . . moralities too are only a sign-language of the affects. (BGE 187)
How are we to interpret Nietzsche’s talk of affects as conditions of the possibility of moral and other evaluative ‘ideals’ in passages like these? Examples of affects in his sense are hatred, envy and greed (BGE 23), as well as courage, shame, and anger (KGW VII.1.7[87]). All of these states would normally be classified as emotions, and Nietzsche’s examples indicate that this is the central meaning of ‘affect’ operative in his account, although the inclusion of a ‘desire to dominate’ (BGE 23) among his illustrations suggests that he also uses the term more broadly to refer to any kind of mental state with a distinctive phenomenology of favouring or disfavouring, of attraction or ‘repulsion’ (ibid.).13 His general thought, then, seems to be that our most fundamental acquaintance with values is through affective states, and in particular through emotions. Such an approach accords well with the familiar observation, traditionally stressed by ethical expressivists, that sincere categorical value judgements necessarily express a commitment of the subject making the judgement. However, this view, which has strong independent philosophical credentials, prima facie conflicts with another claim of equally strong standing: that the contents of such judgements, and perhaps also of evaluative experiences themselves, have a kind of objectivity. The idea of objectivity alluded to here is very general and minimal; it is simply the notion of a constraint upon impulses which makes these intelligible to the subject herself and to others as preferences. As has often been noted, the very idea of a choice among possible alternatives of action is tied to that of constraint in just this sense: there must be criteria available to the choosing subject—although these need not be explicit—which make it appear to her that one course of action is better than another. In the absence of such criteria we cannot speak of choice at all.14 But once the idea of criteria for action is in play, then so is the notion of error. A subject that is capable of making choices in the light of criteria is also, in principle, liable to failure in responding to the presence of these criteria, for example by failing to notice features of a situation that she would herself regard as relevant. As we saw above, Nietzsche himself is very much alive to this normative element of minimal objectivity presupposed by free agency when he speaks of ‘laws’ which can guide an individual’s actions and which therefore also allow for the possibility of actions recognizable by the agent as contravening them.
How are we to understand this element of minimal objectivity or normativity required by free agency? Given that Nietzsche rules out a Kantian understanding of the laws that guide the free person’s actions (GS 335; BGE 187; GM II 6), and given that all evaluation is considered by him as grounded in ‘affects’, it would seem that the affects themselves are seen by him as capable of providing normative constraints. Indeed, it is tempting to read his repeated references to ‘taste’ as pointing precisely to a structured pattern of conscious affectivity which itself embodies and expresses such normative constraints. Nietzsche says: ‘I have a “taste” …, but no reasons, no logic, no imperative for this taste’15—that is, ‘taste’ constitutes the most basic level of reasons for action.
The idea that affects, ‘taste’ or ‘sentiments’ can ground evaluations which allow for a minimal objectivity of the utterances expressing these evaluations, and thus make possible bona fide evaluative judgements, is of course not unique to Nietzsche. In recent years, this idea has been associated especially with the metaethical approach Simon Blackburn calls ‘quasi-realism’. Blackburn agrees with Kant that what is foundational for the component of objectivity in ethical judgement is the experience of obligation.16 But, pace Kant, it is not the awareness of a categorical prescription or imperative that gives rise to this, but those ‘sentiments’ (affects, in Nietzsche’s language), which happen to be most deeply entrenched in the psychology of the subject who feels herself under an obligation. Owing to a particular social conditioning, a person may have strong feelings, interpreted by her, say, as feelings of filial affection and loyalty, which in certain circumstances (e.g. a parent being ill and in need of care) produces a second-order, reflective psychological constraint—a feeling of obligation—counteracting and capable of overriding conflicting first-order desires (e.g. the desire to leave home and strike out on her own). In this way, sentiments themselves may give rise to normative constraints and guide action. Yet, in Blackburn’s quasi-realist picture, those sentiments most deeply lodged in an individual’s psychology, which give rise to the sense of obligation in relevant circumstances and provide the normative discipline, are Humean, logically distinct, effects of the ‘object’ (the parent) or of the subject’s relation to the object. The sentiments are not intrinsically about the object and can thus be described in their phenomenal character without referring to any properties of the object. Thus, on this account, sentiments with typeidentical intrinsic phenomenal characters could be experienced in relation to distinct objects, persons, or states of affairs that are not represented by the subject as having any properties in common, other than their causing the same sentiment.
In his middle-period writings Nietzsche occasionally makes remarks which evince a similar psychology of the affects, but on closer reading his position even at that time is more ambivalent on the matter of the ‘subjectivity’ and putative world-independence of the intrinsic character of conscious affects:
One loves neither father and mother, nor wife and child, but the pleasant sensations they produce in us. . . .
If the representation of God is removed, then so is the emotion of ‘sin’ as an offence against divine precepts. … Probably what remains then is the sort of displeasure which is fused with, and related to, the fear of being punished by wordly justice and of being disrespected by people. (HA 133)
While the first sentence may suggest something like the Humean picture of the sentiments, the remainder of this passage clearly gestures towards a different construal of emotions as co-constituted in their phenomenal, experienced character by representations of the world or aspects of it. As we shall see below, this view is more unequivocally developed in later writings.
The Humean, and quasi-realist, account of conscious affects as merely causally, extrinsically, related to the world faces serious problems, which it has never been able to address satisfactorily. Most importantly, it is phenomenologically inadequate as a description of what actually goes on in much ordinary affective-evaluative experience. Symptomatic of this descriptive inadequacy are its difficulties in accounting for the differences between such everyday experiences and those of subjects whom we might want to call self-alienated—who experience their most firmly entrenched affective responses as irrepressible conditioned reflexes or as quasi-compulsive. The problem here is not resolved by insisting that the normal subject identifies with her firmest affects, such that her self-image or self-respect is somehow bound up with them, while the self-alienated subject does not or cannot do this, for this is no more than a redescription of the problem. What is at issue is precisely how it is possible for a subject to identify herself with some of her affects if, on reflection, she is rationally constrained to regard them as not potentially disclosing any features of the world, but as non-representational, sociologically fortuitous conditioned reflexes. It will obviously not do to respond to this that the subject may identify with some of her affects by having learned to infer that they are reliable indicators of what she values—for this would require that what she values is disclosed to her independently of them, which is what both Nietzsche and the quasi-realist Humean deny.
No doubt an individual may be entirely untroubled by, and even satisfied with, what in his more reflective, theoretical moments he recognizes to be an adventitious, conditioned, non-representational response-pattern he happens to have had inculcated into him—just as it is perfectly possible to be untroubled by and satisfied with some quirky behavioural trait one happens to have acquired. This kind of self-relation is just what self-conscious, and genuine, ‘excentricity’ consists in. What is characteristic of such excentricity is not necessarily individual idiosyncrasy—there may be communities of people who are excentric in quite similar ways—but rather a subject’s awareness that her comportments or preferences reflect and express fortuitously acquired subjective dispositions not objectively ‘appropriate’ or answerable to anything in the world. This kind of self-relation—which characteristically tends to involve a heightened, self-objectifying, form of self-consciousness—is clearly different from the relation philosophers have in mind when they speak of a subject’s identifying herself with (some of) her feelings, desires, or actions. If such excentricity extends to a subject’s central or deepest commitments and orientations it comes to resemble those instances of putative identification with some bizarre set of desires that can be produced by conditioning or ‘brainwashing’, sometimes illustrated in contemporary discussions by fictional cases like Brave New World or Clockwork Orange (see Watson, 2004: 170–3). Our intuition is that subjects who have been brainwashed into ‘identifying’ with some excentric range of desires lack freedom. Gary Watson suggests that what explains this intuition is the fact that such subjects are ‘incapable of effectively envisaging or seeing the significance of certain alternatives, or reflecting on themselves and on the origins of their motivations, of comprehending or responding to relevant theoretical or evaluational criteria’ (ibid: 172). But we want to say that in such cases of evaluative conditioning, the subjects are unfree even if their observational and inferential capacities in respect of non-evaluative features of the world around them are unimpaired, and if they are quite aware of the causes of their motivations.17 And to suggest that they do not respond appropriately to relevant evaluational criteria simply raises once more the question of what warrant we have—not just as immersed, non-reflective agents, but also in the light of theoretical reflection—for regarding the brainwashed subject’s evaluational responses as deficient, if all evaluations are based on affects, and if all affects are on a par in having causes while not constitutively involving representational reasons.18 Nor is the difficulty resolved by suggesting that the normal subject’s most deeply entrenched attitudes are such that she cannot even envisage what an improvement of these attitudes might consist in; for such inability is quite typical of any successful deep conditioning.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that non-representational accounts of conscious affects do not have the resources to explain convincingly why we consider the evaluative ‘identifications’ of brainwashed subjects to be expressive of unfreedom—of a lack of autonomy. In his later writings Nietzsche suggests a different way of understanding the normative component of affectivity. A recurrent idea in these later texts is that what underwrites the talk about the objectivity of at least some values is not, or at least not fundamentally, the second-order mental state experienced as a sense of obligation, but rather the nature of some of our first-order affects themselves. What is characteristic of the emotions we are inclined to describe as love, admiration, or contempt, is that they are normally experienced not merely as caused by their objects, but as merited by them. In undergoing such emotions, a subject experiences an affective attraction or repulsion which seems to be exercised upon her by the object itself in virtue of some property the object has, such that the essential nature of the emotion could not be adequately specified without reference to this (apparent) property of the object. In other words, the affective response is itself experienced as an appropriate response to some feature of the object, as a picking up on some value-aspect pertaining to the object. As we shall see, Nietzsche warns against misconstruing this type of affective experience of apparent objective evaluative properties of an object—say, of a painting’s beauty as presented in the experience of aesthetic admiration, or of meanness of character as presented in the experience of contempt—as having any metaphysical significance. Affective experience itself does not commit us to any view about whether or not what is presented in it has the right metaphysical credentials. But, Nietzsche suggests, it does commit us to ascribing at least phenomenal objectivity to those features which it appears to the subject to be a registering of.
The much-cited analogy of the experience of colours is illuminating in this particular respect, although not in others. When I perceive a lemon’s being yellow, I seem to be perceiving a property of an object, and my normal colour experience, and indeed my visual experience of physical objects, could not be described or even rendered intelligible without construing it in this way. To say that, when perceiving the lemon’s being yellow I am perceiving a property of an object, does not necessarily carry metaphysical implications; perhaps colours as we perceive them are not features of the world as it is in itself. Yet, my experience here is incontestably of a phenomenally objective property. An item is objective, rather than subjective, in this sense, just in case it is not identical with any one experience of it, or with any part or aspect of an experience. Rather, it is presented as being available for many numerically distinct experiences of it by oneself and by others.19 It is objectivity in this modest sense that is essentially implicated in the ordinary, everyday concept of perception. Now, Nietzsche proposes that many ‘affects’ and the evaluations they involve should be construed quite literally as perceptions of phenomenally objective features of the objects they are directed at:
Master morality affirms just as instinctively as Christian morality denies. … These contrasting forms of the optics of value are both necessary: they are ways of seeing which are unaffected by reasons and refutations. One does not refute Christianity, just as one does not refute a defect of the eyes. (CW, ‘Epilogue’)
In The Gay Science he makes the same point, with some additions:
[The higher human being] is always haunted by a delusion: He fancies that he is a spectator and listener, confronted by the great visual and acoustic spectacle of life; he calls his own nature contemplative and overlooks that he is also the real poet who keeps creating life. … We, the thinking-feeling beings [die Denkend-Empfindenden], are the ones who really continually make something that was not there before: the entire ever growing world of valuations, colours, accents, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and denials. … But precisely this knowledge we lack … (GS 301)
The complex point emerging from both passages, taken together with his more general claim about the affect-dependence of evaluations, including those systematized in ‘moralities’, is this. The affects that lie at the basis of evaluations (in the sense in which these contrast with the mere ‘momentary … desire’ of GM II 3) are representations; in fact they are, phenomenologically, perceptions in the everyday, metaphysically undemanding sense outlined earlier. And it is precisely the fact that they are experienced as perceptual by their subjects that explains the ‘delusion’, to which even the ‘higher human being’ is prone, that the values represented through them are there in the world anyway, quite independently of any such affective states. The latter point is of course just what Nietzsche denies: ‘Valuations, colours, accents’ are ‘created’ by our conscious engagement with the world; they do not exist absolutely, entirely independently of this engagement. Yet, while values are thus, in one sense, created by us, they are, in another sense, discovered in our affective encounter with the phenomenal world, which is the world of our everyday lives.
At this point, it may be helpful to retrace some of the steps of Nietzsche’s argument so far. His account of freedom starts with a distinction between self-given ‘laws’ (GM II 2) and ‘valuation’ (GS 335) on the one hand, and ‘momentary affect and desire’ (GM II 3) on the other. This raised the question of how such a distinction can be sustained if valuations themselves, as Nietzsche argues, are based on affects. While it is clearly a strength of this kind of ‘emotivist’ approach to valuation that it can easily account for the necessarily commitment-involving character of sincere categorical value-judgement, it finds it more difficult to make room for the element of minimal objectivity (normativity) essential to valuation. I mentioned one familiar proposal in this context, according to which the element of normativity might be provided for if we can make sense of an individual’s being in a position to understand some, but not all, of her possible affects, as her own and, in this sense, to identify with and thus potentially to ‘appropriate’ them. Yet, the traditionally dominant accounts of the affects (emotions) as non-representational effects of external or endogenous stimulation seem to make such identification, in any sense which would be relevant to an individual’s autonomy, impossible.
The alternative idea that emerges from Nietzsche’s later construal of (at least some) emotions as perceptual is this: if we can rightly understand some affects as representational states, we can both make sense of the normativity of evaluation and of the idea of identifying with one’s affects, of experiencing them as one’s own, rather than as brute impulsions, whether innate or conditioned. Affects experienced as one’s own, as expressing what one is, would on this construal be those one understands, often pre-reflectively, as being appropriate, as answerable to and thus as actively relating oneself to, the world. Precisely in being representational, affects would be, in Kant’s terminology, functions of spontaneity (activity), rather than merely passive effects, and thus valuation would engage, even at the most basic level, self-activity (just as sense-perception does). By contrast, if all valuation-generating conscious affects were themselves merely passive effects, no higher-level reflective ordering or disciplining them would be capable of making them express or ‘create’ one’s self—freedom would not go ‘all the way down’.
Yet, the idea of (some) emotions as perceptual states is obviously not without problems. The relevant everyday concept of perception—which, to repeat, is metaphysically neutral—includes the following essential features: (i) perceptions have representational objects, they are about something; (ii) while thus having intentional content, they are neither judgements nor dispositions to judge; (iii) they are epistemically direct representations; (iv) they systematically appear caused by the objects/features they represent; (v) they represent phenomenal properties of their objects; (vi) their conditions of success include veridicality. Space does not allow me to examine here whether and how emotions might exhibit all these characteristics. Concerning (i) to (v), I can merely assert here that they do not, in my view, present insuperable obstacles to a perceptual account of some emotions.20
Arguably the most problematic aspect of the perceptual account of affectivity suggested by Nietzsche is feature (vi) above—the potential veridicality or truth-aptness of perceptual contents. Can emotions, like sense perceptions, intelligibly be said to be, on occasion, veridical? The idea that emotions are normatively assessable as appropriate or inappropriate is of course a standard theme in contemporary philosophy of the emotions.21 There is also widespread agreement that conscious emotions essentially are or include evaluative appraisals of their objects.22 But is it permissible to construe the appropriateness of an emotion as the veridicality of its evaluative content? This is precisely what seems to be implied by Nietzsche’s talk of the affects underlying Christian morality as involving, metaphorically, a ‘defect of the eyes’ prior to any reflectively considered or inferential ‘reasons’ (CW, ‘Epilogue’)—that is, a cognitive deficiency at the most basic level of encountering value.
I want to develop this point by considering some of the affects expressed in Nietzsche’s own texts as examples. Nietzsche’s own evaluative practice typically consists in, or includes prominently, the expression of such affective responses—this is one peculiarity, which makes his texts so different in style and content from more standard philosophical writings. Most frequently, the emotional responses whose expression is recorded in his writings are directed at other conscious affective states of himself or of other (actual or fictional) people. A central case in point here is his revulsion at, and contempt for, ressentiment, recorded in Essay 1 of the Genealogy (see esp. GM I 10–14). Nietzsche makes it clear that affective valuations such as this are not, or should not be, primarily directed at one’s own or others’ behavioural dispositions or actions, but at the affective structures motivating actions (BGE 268, 287). Human value is indeed largely identified by him with those structures—with a person’s ‘taste’ or ‘character’ (BGE 260, 287). This does not mean, of course, that someone’s actions are or should be simply irrelevant to our evaluative attitudes towards her. For there are compelling reasons for thinking—although Nietzsche himself does not stress this point—that the relation between a person’s affective structure and her actions is not merely causal. ‘Affects’ such as the emotions of admiration or contempt in appropriate circumstances motivate actions which therefore can be said to express them, rather than being merely caused by them.23 However, the question which concerns us here is whether Nietzsche’s own affective evaluations of another’s taste or character can be understood as having evaluative content which might be veridical. Can emotions like contempt veridically represent the value of ressentiment?
In trying to attain clarity on this issue, we need to bear in mind that the relevant concept of perception concerns the phenomenal features of the represented object—analogous to the colours as represented in sensory perception. Since emotions (purport to) represent value features of their objects, their representational content, on the perceptual model, would have to include the phenomenally intrinsic (dis)value of their object—in the present example, of ressentiment. The proper analysis of a conscious affective state such as Nietzsche’s contempt for ressentiment therefore needs to exhibit a quite complex structure, since what that state is about is another intentional state, which can only be specified with reference to its objects. Now what I have called the phenomenally intrinsic disvalue of ressentiment, regarded as a conscious mental state, just is its experienced unattractiveness from the point of view of the subject who is in that state if the latter is adequately and transparently presented to the subject. Ressentiment being itself an intentional state, the subject’s first-personal, transparent, and adequate awareness of it would of course have to include an explicit awareness of the relevant features of its intentional objects and of the aspects under which they are represented in it. What are these aspects? On Nietzsche’s account, ressentiment is essentially a form of negative affect (hatred) towards its target, a hatred which the subject however does not avow as such, but rather interprets as moral disapproval (see esp. GM I 10). This reinterpretation of negative affect as moral righteousness typically involves, furthermore, a motivated distortion of the object’s character (through selective attention, purposeful ignoring of countervailing evidence, etc.). An adequate, transparent awareness of ressentiment by the subject herself would therefore require explicit consciousness of all these essential constituents. It is plausible to claim that, if ressentiment were thus adequately presented to the subject herself, she could not fail to be aware of its intrinsic phenomenal disvalue or unattractiveness. The reason why she is normally not explicitly aware of the latter, and thus can unproblematically remain in that state, is precisely that the emotion is not presented adequately to her—that she is in a state of ‘self-deception’ (Selbstbetrügerei; GM I 13).24Ressentiment is only stable as an emotion to the extent that it involves such self-deception—a motivatedly erroneous self-awareness.
There may be thought to be a tension between the characterization of phenomenal objectivity offered earlier and the concept of intrinsic phenomenal value. Isn’t such value a paradigmatic example of a subjective property? No, for while it clearly is not independent of subjectivity (just as phenomenal colours aren’t) it is not purely subjective either. In so far as it is based on a reference to intentional objects, it is not simply identical with any one experience or with a part or aspect of such an experience.25 It is therefore experientially accessible to the subject by way of numerically distinct representations of these objects. Moreover, it is also accessible to others if a certain view of our ‘knowledge of other minds’ can be vindicated, according to which we can, in favourable circumstances, directly perceive (rather than infer) others’ psychological states, such as ressentiment, through their expressive behaviour and actions. On this view, which is familiar from classical phenomenology and from some interpretations of the later Wittgenstein, the relation between a mental state and possible behavioural expressions of it is constitutive rather than merely causal.26 If this sort of approach is right, then others’ conscious mental states are, and perhaps must be, non-inferentially accessible not only to themselves but also to others. But it may still be doubted whether the intrinsic phenomenal value features of such states are also intersubjectively experientially accessible. One response to this doubt would be to say that the perception of another’s mental state can non-inferentially motivate a reproduction of its evaluatively relevant aspects in a suitably sensitive observer. Thus, the phenomenal objectivity of these features would attach to them not qua particular instances but qua types that are multiply exemplifiable by virtue of perceptions of the same particular mental state by different observers. Another, in my view more attractive, solution would be to insist that the perception of the phenomenal value features of another’s conscious mental state does not necessarily require a prior, temporally contiguous, reproduction or simulation of that state in oneself at all. Rather, affective responses such as revulsion or contempt sometimes just are third-personal perceptions of those value features, non-inferentially based on perceptions of verbal and other actions and behaviours expressing the state.
We can now see in what sense Nietzsche’s contempt for ressentiment might be a veridical representation of that state. To the extent that ressentiment is transparently presented to the subject herself, it cannot fail to exhibit an intrinsic phenomenal disvalue, and the latter is just what is captured by revulsion at it. Appreciating this point also may help us see what qualifies Nietzsche’s discussion of ressentiment as a criticism of it. His basic charge—not his only one, to be sure—is that ressentiment is an intrinsically unattractive state to be in, if seen in the open. No one who accepts Nietzsche’s account of it can either desire to be in it or wish to remain in it, except for instrumental reasons (although it is hard to see why ressentiment should be indispensably instrumental for any projects whose aims do not include it).27 The example therefore also illustrates one sense in which Nietzsche’s own ethical commitments are, as has often been noted, quite close to certain kinds of aesthetic evaluations. Both are appraisals of intrinsic phenomenal features of their objects.
But to accept that emotions are ‘ways of seeing’, that they are or include potentially veridical perceptions of value in the sense sketched above, also entails that they have conditions of success, which fail to be met when they are non-veridical. Nietzsche himself acknowledges this point in criticising ressentiment, in part, for misrepresenting both itself and its targets (GM I 10; GM III 14). His criticism implies, therefore, that if his own contempt for ressentiment misrepresented that condition’s intrinsic phenomenal (dis)value, it would be inappropriate and in need of revision (or ‘purification’; cf. GS 335). It has often been said, by critics and admirers alike, that the ethos Nietzsche seems to be attracted to is ultimately a solitary one and that there is no role, or at least no positive role, for intersubjectivity in it. If my argument so far is along the right lines, this is true only with significant qualifications. For if I am right, the ethos of the sovereign individual necessarily includes affective responses to the subjective states of others which aim at veridical access to those states—at a kind of Verstehen. Nietzsche privileges, to be sure, a cultivated attentional bias towards ‘affirmation’, in other words, towards the positive values instantiated in some of those subjective states. Hence he extols, for instance, ‘that enthusiastic impulsiveness in anger, love reverence, gratitude, and revenge by which noble souls have at all times recognized one another’ (GM I 10).
But while certain aspects of the value-disclosing disposition that Nietzsche calls ‘noble’ may constitute (part of) his substantive ideal, does this have any relevance for the ‘transcendental’ question concerning full personhood and free agency? Cannot ressentiment-subjects in principle also be free agents, for all that has been said here? In so far as they understand their affective-evaluative life as essentially aiming at the truth (about themselves or others), even if in fact they fail in this, they would seem to meet the substantive constraint on Nietzschean freedom I have outlined. On the other hand, to the extent that ressentiment is a form of self-deception requiring a pre-reflective, yet motivated distortion of the subjectivity of another, it disavows the aim of veridicality at the pre-reflective level. It is partly for this reason that the ressentiment-subject cannot identify with her pre-reflective (distorting, slandering, etc.) motives and has to avoid acknowledging them, if she is to remain in that state. And to the extent that she cannot identify with the affects that actually dominate in her and determine her actions, she is unfree. This example might also suggest a more concrete understanding of the formal condition of ‘wholeness’ or unity-in-diversity that is necessary for Nietzschean freedom. As we saw in Section 1, not every kind of unity will meet Nietzsche’s requirements. Any vertebrate organism is a highly unified system of diverse functions, but it is not autonomous by dint of that. Nor is a brainwashed individual with a complex system of bizarre preferences, however protracted they may be and however content he may be with all of them as a result of electrodes having been applied to the right areas of his brain. The account canvassed above suggests a possible solution to the problem of what constitutes the right kind of unity-in-diversity. The relevant diversity (‘multiplicity of drives’) might consist in a maximal openness to the phenomenal value features actually or potentially exemplified in the life-world. And the unity in question is perhaps most fruitfully understood as the ability to enact an orientation in one’s life that reflects the internal ordering or ‘rank’ among these features. An orientation that systematically and for non-instrumental reasons preferred ressentiment to some of the character traits Nietzsche classifies as ‘noble’ (generosity, honesty towards oneself, etc.) would be an example of the wrong kind of unity.28
Besides its role in the constitution of full-fledged, ‘autonomous’ personhood, freedom also figures as a substantive evaluative ideal in Nietzsche’s later philosophy. In this concluding section, I want to focus on one component of his talk of freedom in this latter context that has received relatively little attention in the literature. We encounter it in passages like these:
All these pale atheists, anti-Christians, immoralists, nihilists; . . .—they certainly believe that they are as completely liberated from the ascetic ideal as possible, these ‘free, very free spirits’; and yet, to disclose to them what they themselves cannot see—for they are too close to it themselves: this ideal is precisely their ideal, too . . .—if I have guessed any riddles, I wish that this proposition might show it!—They are far from being free spirits: for they still have faith in truth. (GM III 24)
I do not think that we do full justice to Nietzsche’s point here, and to the revolutionary significance he associates with it, if we take him to be saying merely that there may be more important things than either purely theoretical or scientific enquiry—after all, many (probably most) people who are not professional philosophers or scientists would be willing to agree to that. I submit that in order really to take seriously the radicality Nietzsche himself sees in his position, we should take him to be proposing a quite novel way of interpreting the relation between our practical, necessarily evaluating, ‘life’, and our theoretical, and in particular our metaphysical, beliefs. One traditional way of interpreting this relation is unambiguously rejected by him, although this rejection is hardly original. As the passage from GS 301 cited earlier indicates, the phenomenal objectivity of many values often gives rise to the delusion that values are metaphysically objective: that they are existentially and/or conceptually independent not just of any particular affective experience, but of such experiences altogether. The temptation is to think of affective experiences as discovering value properties exemplifiable without them, rather than as coconstituting value. Nietzsche emphatically denies that values are metaphysically objective properties:
Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature—nature is always valueless—but has been given value at some time, as a gift; and we were the givers and bestowers! Only we have created the world that concerns human beings! (GS 301)
Truly, human beings have given themselves all their good and evil. Truly, they did not take it, they did not find it, it did not descend to them as a voice from heaven. Humans first placed values in things. … Only through valuating is there value. (Z, ‘Of the Thousand and One Goals’)
According to Nietzsche, value existentially depends on the existence of affective experiences and is actualized only in or through them. This is what he means when he says that value is not ‘found’ but ‘created’ by ‘evaluating’ (GS 301), that morality is only a sign-language of the affects (BGE 187), and that ‘every ideal presupposes love and hatred, admiration and contempt’ (KGW VIII.2.10.[9]). And many of his formulations (e.g. Z, ‘Of the Way of the Creator’) suggest that achieved freedom in his sense essentially involves the acknowledgement of this truth.
It is worth reflecting briefly on the prospects of a radical revision of the ordinary concept of value which would construe ‘value’ as independent of affective phenomenal properties, analogously to revisions of our ‘folk’ concepts of the colours, say, as disjunctions of non-dispositional microphysical properties or as light dispositions. While it is at least conceivable that primary-quality concepts of the colours might largely—but not entirely—replace the phenomenal folk concepts of them, although such a replacement would be enormously impractical in many contexts, it is simply not credible to suppose that the proposal of an analogous revision of the everyday generic concept of value might hold out any prospect of success. For in order to be successful, humans would need to be persuaded that what should guide their actions should be completely independent of their (affective) experience of value.29 But what should possibly persuade them of that? For conceptual revisions to hold any attractions for us, the latter must themselves by recognizable by us. But, Nietzsche contends, we are not only attached to the specific goods we value or desire, but more fundamentally to valuing and desiring, as we currently understand these modes of engagement with the world, themselves. This is the crux of Zarathustra’s dictum that ‘valuating is itself the value and jewel of all valued things’ (Z, ‘Of a Thousand and One Goals’), and of Nietzsche’s remark in his own voice that what matters most deeply to us is not what is desired in any given instance, but the desiring itself (KGW VII.1.20.[4]; p. 661). It is because we have a non-negotiable interest in how things consciously matter to ourselves and others—because we profoundly value the idea of intelligibility as consciously authenticable significance—that the affective phenomenal properties figuring in many ordinary psychological explanations have a central and irreplaceable role in our cognitive lives.30 Even the ascetic ideal, for all its deficiencies, offers a kind of significance. Wanting to do away with ‘sense’, or conscious significance, altogether, would amount to wanting to abolish humanity:
. . . the ascetic ideal offered man meaning!. … man was saved thereby, he possessed a meaning, he was no longer like a sheaf in the wind, a plaything of nonsense—the ‘sense-less’—he could now will something; no matter a first to what end, why, with what he willed; the will itself was saved. (GM III 28)
Nietzsche’s position as I have explicated it so far conjoins a phenomenal objectivism about value (or about many values) with a metaphysical anti-objectivism. Even if an absolute conception of the world made sense, values would not figure in it. This view about the relation between the world as it shows up for us in our practical engagement with it—our life-world—and the world as it is in itself, assuming the latter conception to have content, is unusual, although it is not unique to Nietzsche. In fact, however, his actual position on the relation between evaluative practice and metaphysical belief is more complex and radical. This becomes evident in the light of statements like the following: ‘The falseness of a judgement is to us not necessarily an objection to a judgement: it is here that our new language perhaps sounds strangest. The question is to what extent it is life-advancing . . .’ (BGE 4). Elsewhere he adds: ‘It is of cardinal importance that one should abolish the real world. It is the great inspirer of doubt and devaluator in respect of the world we are’ (WP 583; cf. BGE 34; TI V). I take it that by ‘abolishing the real world’ Nietzsche means: ceasing to grant the conception of a metaphysically real world which in principle might be quite different from our life-world in terms of its essential properties any fundamental or overriding importance in our cognitive and evaluative economy.31 The idea of such a metaphysically real world could of course only inspire doubt and devalue the ‘world we are’ if it could potentially produce a conflict between what we are committed to at the level of practical ‘life’ and our metaphysical beliefs. If the contents of our practical commitments were simply insulated from the answers to metaphysical questions, then no such answers could ‘inspire doubt’ about ‘the world we are’ in the first place, and the need for ‘abolishing the real world’ would hardly be pressing. It is therefore clear that Nietzsche envisages at least the possibility of a theoretical conflict between the level of evaluative practice and the level of metaphysical belief.32 What might such a conflict look like? Well, it might turn out that an adequate analysis of our aesthetic practices would show them to involve the belief that phenomenal value properties of objects—the beauty of a painting, say—have causal powers: that they genuinely affect us. Or various ethical practices might cease to be intelligible to ourselves unless we continued to think that certain phenomenal, and essentially value-involving, psychological properties—such as an experience’s painfulness—themselves caused (as well as justified) us to act in certain ways. The point is not that these beliefs, for all we currently know, are essential to the relevant practices, but that they might turn out to be so. And if they do, then there will be a theoretical conflict between those practices and certain metaphysical propositions we might also have good reasons to subscribe to—such as the idea that neither experienced pain nor aesthetic beauty really have causal powers.
Nietzsche’s claim, in BGE 4, that ‘the falseness of a judgement is to us not necessarily an objection to the judgement’, is most plausibly interpreted as the enjoinder that, if such a theoretical conflict between practice and metaphysical belief were to arise, we should affirm the former over the latter, provided that we have strong independent reasons to value the practice (e.g. on account of its being ‘life-enhancing’): ‘Why could the world which is of any concern to us—not be a fiction?’ (BGE 34). This seems to me to be the very heart of the ‘critique’ of the ‘will to truth’ that Nietzsche calls for in his later writings (GM III 24). And the attitude that has just been described is one of the most central aspects of his own evaluative ideal of genuine ‘freedom of spirit’ (ibid.).
It is important to recognize that this attitude is not a form of irrationalism. The free spirit who is unbeholden to the will to truth in Nietzsche’s sense certainly recognizes truth-based reasons for judgement and action. It is only a certain kind of metaphysical truth—call it purely theoretical truth—which, assuming it to be accessible to human enquiry, the free individual envisaged by Nietzsche would disregard in practical contexts wherever such truth conflicted with beliefs implicated in his deep practical commitments. To get a grip on what such purely theoretical truths might be, it helps to approach them by way of a contrast with truths which are not purely theoretical, such as scientific truths. The reason why the experimental laws and theories of science are not purely theoretical is that they have predictive consequences. If a physical theory about a certain domain of phenomena is true, then it will be suited to yield, in conjunction with appropriate statements of initial conditions, correct predictions about phenomena within that domain. In so far as scientific theories predict the future course of an appropriately placed attentive observer’s experience, they evidently have, or are essentially apt to have, practical relevance. But neither the results nor the methodology of the natural sciences are necessarily in conflict with any practical commitments which could plausibly be claimed to be fundamental to our human evaluative—ethical or aesthetic—practices, even if (as I mooted earlier) these commitments should include the belief that our conscious responses to the world can be affected by value-involving phenomenal properties like a friend’s pain or a sculpture’s beauty. Now, it may be protested that this belief, and hence any practice which implies it, is incompatible with the methodological principles of a properly scientific psychology, according to which human behaviour is to be explained with recourse to the properties and entities recognized by the natural sciences (broadly conceived), which of course do not include phenomenal properties like values. But this objection rests on a misunderstanding. What is constitutive for a scientific psychology is the following assumption: the properties recognized by the physical sciences (call them physical properties) are sufficient to account nomologically for psychological properties and human behaviours, which can all be considered as elements of the physical world; and apparent phenomenal properties such as values have no autonomous causal powers, that is, powers which could vary independently of physical states, or causally affect physical states, or both. The physical, including the behaviour of the human organism, is in this sense a closed causal system. But this assumption, which is all that is required for naturalistic psychology as a prediction-generating science (rather than as non-predictive metaphysical theory), is entirely compatible with accepting both the indispensability and the truth of the phenomenological explanations essentially pertaining to everyday evaluative practices—explanations such as ‘he chose to buy a recording of Strauss’s Four Last Songs because he was moved by their beauty when he heard them on the radio’. The methodological principles of scientific psychology and the commitments involved in everyday practices and explanations square with each other just in case (a) the latter give us information, including rough generalizations sustaining true counterfactuals—‘he wouldn’t have bought the recording if he hadn’t been moved by the beauty of the music’—information which is itself prized by us and which is not made available by naturalistic types of explanation; 33 and (b) the phenomenal properties referred to are strongly supervenient on (co-variant with) physical properties simultaneously exemplified.34
What is needed for the project of a scientific psychology is thus no more than the strong supervenience of phenomenal psychological properties on physical properties. But supervenience, it is often said, stands itself in need of explanation. Why do phenomenal and physical properties co-vary nomologically, if they do?35 This demand for a further ‘explanation’, once the basic level of co-variation is reached, is not itself internal to science, since no predictions could possibly be relevant to settling the issue. It is, rather, a metaphysical demand. And it is only once this demand is conceded, and certain explanatory answers are in the offing, that there may emerge an inconsistency between these proposed extra-scientific, metaphysical explanations of nomological co-variance and beliefs essentially implicated in any evaluative practice we can make sense of.36
So, when Nietzsche urges a ‘critique’ of the will to truth, and refusing to be agitated about the prospect that the practical ‘world which is of any concern to us’ might be a ‘fiction’, is he suggesting that deep practical commitments should simply override any true metaphysical beliefs that might, if granted importance, undermine them? That this cannot be quite the right account of the matter becomes clear once we recall that Nietzsche’s own attitude towards metaphysics is not simply globally indifferent or quietist. On the contrary, he spends considerable effort on criticizing certain kinds of metaphysics, above all Christian metaphysics, for their theoretical errors, which therefore are presumably seen by him as potentially mattering (see e.g. A 15). The reason why he considers it important not simply to ignore, but to reject such metaphysics, is that they do not only comprise purely theoretical propositions in the sense defined earlier—propositions that have no predictive consequences. Christian metaphysics certainly does have such consequences. If it is true, then we will all have a conscious life after this present earthly life which is consciously continuous with the present life. We will be aware of our former earthly lives in that future life and will think of ourselves as numerically the same person who lived that earthly life. And according to the mainstream versions of Christianity, our present choices and actions will very much affect the nature of that future life and we will then be in a position to recognize this. The question whether Christian metaphysics is true therefore has an evident practical, experiential relevance for us irrespective of whether we are interested in knowing the truth for its own sake. It is this practical dimension which gives Christian metaphysics its soteriological significance, dramatized in Pascal’s Wager. Pascal’s point is precisely that, for practical reasons, we cannot be simply indifferent with respect to the question whether Christianity is true.
While certain metaphysical theories thus have an evident and incontestable practical dimension, there are others that do not. Among these purely theoretical claims are many that historical and contemporary metaphysicians have been, and continue to be, preoccupied by. They include the following familiar staples: that the real spatial world consists of absolute, non-perspectival objects (Descartes, Locke); that there are no non-perspectival spatial objects (Berkeley, Kant, sometimes Nietzsche); that the world does not include phenomenal consciousness among its ultimate realities (physicalism); that the real world consists only of consciousness and its objects (idealism); or that being is at the fundamental level in principle non-representable (Heidegger, sometimes Nietzsche). They also include the various metaphysical explanations of the apparent supervenience of phenomenal upon physical properties. One such explanation might be that phenomenal properties are higher-order properties of sets of physical properties and that phenomenal objects are token-identical with sets of physical items. More outlandish alternative explanations might invoke a metaphysical parallelism of the Spinozist type, or some form of occasionalism or idealism. Yet another instance of purely theoretical questions, famously bypassed by Newton and the physical sciences he inaugurated, concerns the intrinsic qualitative nature of actualizations of those real forces whose numerical indices figure in the equations of physics.
What makes all these questions and theories purely theoretical is that none of them constitutively generate predictive consequences and their only possible warrant is therefore a priori37—unless they are supplemented by more substantive doctrines, for example about the existence or non-existence of immortal persons, or of divine providential plans, or the possibility or impossibility of an afterlife, and so forth. Without such supplements, it makes no experiential difference whether the token-identity theory or metaphysical parallelism, physicalism or idealism, panentheism or the conclusion of the cosmological proof, is true or even known to be true. Or rather, such knowledge can only be of experiential significance for us if we happen to have autonomously belief-dependent interests; if, that is, our well-being can be affected by knowledge or belief about an empirically, and hence practically, inaccessible truth. (A person with such autonomously belief-dependent interests—the ‘will to truth’ castigated by Nietzsche—might, for example be depressed or buoyed up by the belief that being is ‘in itself’ in principle unrepresentable.)
But can’t purely theoretical metaphysical beliefs rationally affect certain practical interests at least negatively? If someone lives in the hope of an Elysian afterlife for her immortal soul, then this hope would seem to be dashed by her acceptance of an a priori argument to the effect that really there are only material particles in motion, or fields of non-conscious energy. The response suggested by Nietzsche’s remarks in BGE 4 is that, if she had good practical reasons to regard her commitments as ‘life-enhancing’, then she should only be troubled by such a priori counter-arguments if the latter could also show that the actual world is in fact unable to sustain or produce a post-mortal, beatific, personal consciousness (however metaphysically ‘fictional’ its contents might be—remember BGE 34). But how could the metaphysical theory by itself show that? The work of disenchantment here is not done by the physicalist metaphysics, which is in fact quite otiose, but by its supplementation with certain empirical beliefs quite independent of it, and shared by many, about consciousness and the limitations it may be subject to, given what we think we know about its actual supervenience base.
In the light of these reflections, I think it is possible to circumscribe more precisely in what sense the Nietzschean free spirit is not subject to the will to truth. The really new and ‘strangest’ point suggested by his remark that ‘the falseness of a judgement is to us not necessarily an objection to a judgement’ (BGE 4), and by his rhetorical question why the ‘world which is of any concern to us’ should not be a ‘fiction’ (BGE 34), is this. The free spirit who represents Nietzsche’s evaluative ideal has no significant autonomously belief-dependent interests or values. As a consequence, even if beliefs about the phenomenal world implied by her deepest practical commitments were logically incompatible with purely theoretical metaphysical truths, provable on a priori grounds (and on such grounds alone), she would refuse to revise her practical commitments on the basis of those grounds. She would have ‘abolished’ the real world in accepting no other grounds for her orientation to the world than experientially accessible, in the last resort affectively authenticated, reasons neither in need of metaphysical underpinning, nor subject to metaphysical refutation. Nietzsche’s ‘free spirits par excellence’ (GM III 24) are indifferent as to whether the life-world which engages their practical concerns might turn out be ‘fictional’ in the light of purely theoretical truths established by a priori metaphysical enquiry.38 The latter do not constrain the free spirit’s practice, and it is this fact which is expressed rhetorically by Nietzsche in citing the slogan ‘nothing is true, everything is permitted’ (ibid.).
What I hope to have shown in this paper is that Nietzsche’s account of freedom and the free person cannot be detached from the question of an individual’s relation to truth. As we have seen, his analysis of this relation and its relevance to freedom is complex and nuanced. I have suggested that an affective orientation towards phenomenally objective value is, according to him, a necessary constituent of full, ‘autonomous’ personhood. Yet, indifference towards the question of the metaphysical reality of what is thus valued is a central component of the kind of freedom that figures as an essential part of Nietzsche’s substantive ideal.39
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